Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair by Susan Sheehan Read Free Book Online

worker asked, in reference to her arrest, “Crystal, you doing it again?” and put her on a week’s restriction—no use of the phone, no going out after school. Crystal handled the restriction in her fashion. She said she was going to school whether she did or didn’t go, stayed out until 5 or 6 P.M. , provided excuses for her tardiness (malfunctioning buses or subways, for instance), and made her phone calls before returning to the group home. “Stacey and Tiffany were probably getting preached at and punished,” she says. “I knew the rules. No one at St. Christopher’s could put a hand on me.”
    After the drug arrest, Crystal had been offered an opportunity to take advantage of the Queens District Attorney’s Second Chance Program for selected first-time youthful offenders who had committed nonviolent crimes. She had maintained her innocence and had declined. But even Crystal, regarded as an expert at innocence and denial by the staff of St. Christopher’s, could not deny her guilt on the shoplifting charge, so she now agreed to participate in Second Chance. Under the program, a guilty plea covered Crystal’s two offenses; her criminal record would be wiped clean if she did a prescribed amount of community-service work and didn’t get arrestedwhile she was in the program or for six months afterward. If she did get arrested, she would have to face sentencing for both offenses.
    Crystal was assigned to spend forty hours cleaning up Cunningham Park in Queens. She put in the hours in August of 1986, after flunking most of her courses at Flushing High. She was the only young person from Second Chance assigned to a Parks Department crew in Cunningham Park. The crew consisted of three husky men who were regular employees. Crystal, a petite, slender young woman, didn’t tell them about the shoplifting charge—only about the marijuana bust, an offense to which she assumed they would be sympathetic. With a “paper-snatcher” she picked up papers left on the grass by picnickers, but she didn’t care for emptying trash bins and putting new plastic bags in them. “The mens who drove the trucks could have made me work, but they were getting paid to do it, and they were nice and told me, ‘Relax, relax, we got this. We’ll meet you later at the basketball court,’ so I worked an hour, then went off and slept and smoked a joint,” she recalls. By then, Crystal was fed up with her job at the grocery store: the customers wanted their groceries packed a certain way; the fifteen-minute breaks were too short for consuming pizza. “That scene just wasn’t me,” she says.
    In September of 1987, about six months after Crystal’s arrest record was wiped clean and three months after she failed to complete tenth grade at Flushing High School for the second straight year, Crystal and her friend Tonia, from the grouphome, went shopping for school clothes at a mall on Long Island. Crystal had plenty of money, and spent over a hundred and fifty dollars at Macy’s on an acid-washed blouse, acid-washed jeans, two Guess denim skirts, and a pair of suede moccasins. She and Tonia saw some Bill Blass and Perry Ellis socks that cost between ten and twenty dollars a pair. She thought the socks were cute but overpriced (“Socks can catch holes after you wear them a couple of times”), so she and Tonia selected a number of pairs in assorted colors and put them in their Macy’s shopping bags. They didn’t think anyone would be watching the sock racks. In fact, store detectives had been watching them for a long time and stopped them. They produced receipts for their purchases but had none for the stolen socks. The store detectives notified the manager, who expressed his displeasure with young black shoplifters and called the police. The girls were handcuffed and were taken to jail for the night.
    Crystal’s first night in jail,