Interview With “Nefarious”

(Crazee Baldhead Mix)

What’s the Job Corps about?

The Job Corps started in the early 70s, maybe a little earlier. The program’s premise is helping individuals who need a little direction by providing vocational training. Nowadays, the Job Corps also offers the chance to go to college for two years while staying rent free. You have to be between 16 and 24 years old to get in.

How did you end up there? What was going on your life at the time?

Well, it’s a long story, a very rocky road. I did well in high school and got a scholarship to go to an upscale four- year university, a very prestigious school on the east coast. During that period, I never knew what I wanted to be in life; I was indecisive, more into being led than in being a leader, even though all through high school, people said I was a leader.

At the time, I tended to go with the flow – you could say I was a conformist. Yes, especially when drugs were involved (although for me, it was just weed). In college, I spent more time trying to placate my girl instead of focusing on my studies.

After one semester, I dropped out of school, chasing things I thought were advantageous to me, but which were detrimental in certain ways. Then, I went into the military, the Air Force specifically. I wanted to be a journalist and the military told me I could, but they totally lied to me. Based on my aptitude test, I got assigned to Civil Engineering. Civil Engineering sounded good at first – until I got there. I felt I was playing in a sand box with Tonka Trucks. I wasn’t interested in asphalt or brick laying or getting involved with dump trucks, grazers or dozers. None of that interested me in the least.

Instead, I ended up getting out of the military. Before basic training ended, I was granted what’s called an entry-level separation. At that point, I knew I didn’t want to be in the military any longer; it just wasn’t me and it felt very oppressive, with all the rules in place.

They say that the psychology of the military has been intact for so long that it just works automatically. But I disagree, because for me, it didn’t work at all. The military couldn’t suppress who I was or what I was about; it couldn’t stop me from reading what I wanted to read - or didn’t want to read. The armed forces always focuses on making a recruit “march here, left face there”; you’re never supposed to have any free thought. To the military, there is no individual; you are always marching in a line of their choosing. They tell you if a war’s going on and you stray from the prescribed path and act on your own individual thoughts, you could get everybody else killed. You can't think independently in the military.

But I didn’t see the situation that way. For example, when I enlisted, the military told me I couldn’t protest and I had used to protest when I was in college. “Spank the Bank” and all the anti-IMF/World Bank stuff. I wouldn’t go with the military’s flow. When I left, they stamped their seal of disapproval on me: I got a General Discharge.

I remember you telling me before that you went into the Job Corps because you were basically homeless?

Yes, I went into the Job Corps because when I left the military, my dad said I couldn’t come home. I needed a fresh start and I thought I’d find that new direction in the Job Corps.

What’s the difference between the Job Corps’ stated goals and the reality?

The Job Corps brochure is one of the many miracles coming out of a Kinko’s Copy Shop, just a lot of colorful bullshit, OK? The truth is that the Group Life department runs the place. You have co-ed dorms, with males and females separated like a prison. You always have roommates. They’re supposed to have special dorms with amenities for college students, but these benefits don’t really exist. If the program wants to kick you out for some small inconsistency or discrepancy, it can. And not just for behavioral issues either. The Job Corps has to put some people on hygiene contracts because they never take a damn bath.

Group Life provides sheets, beds, mattresses, all that stuff. Because the facility is so isolated, with no public transportation nearby, Group Life are the people you have to deal with every time you need a ride into the city to conduct business. You give them your schedule in advance and tell them, “I need to be taken such-and-such place and picked up afterwards.” But what they do is take it all away from you.

For instance, if you were a “normal” person and you were always four hours late for work, you’d be fired, wouldn’t you? But the Job Corps drivers just don’t seem to understand this. I’ve seen many people fired while they were staying at Job Corps simply because the drivers couldn’t get them to work on time. But isn’t working consistently one of the main points of the whole program? No matter how menial the job is, it is still a source of income that will help people leave earlier.

Another thing. The rules are always bent, making everyday life at the Job Corps a constant struggle. For example, we aren’t allowed to use microwaves at night. The store’s not open like it should be. The weight room is rarely open either – but the staff opens it for their benefit when THEY want to use it. Overall, the facility is locked down like a prison.

There’s no money management classes offered and the library is antiquated too. No “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. No James Baldwin, no Black History – no history of any kind. The computers are closed off to us most of the time. There’s a real rift between the public image and the inside operations.

Does the staff undermine the students’ progress?

Yes, they sabotage you indirectly. You have to sign a paper up front saying you won’t sue the Job Corps so they can then do a lot of fucked up things to you.

People are there to take up a trade or get G.E.Ds. Some students don’t go to class because they don’t feel the classes are helping them . . . because the teacher isn’t teaching and everybody’s making noise. So rather than change the program, they’ll keep you from getting a weekend pass or otherwise restrict your freedom in some way.

Of course, you do have the option of saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” After all, it’s a voluntary sentence. Some staff members taunt us, saying shit like, “pack your bags and we’ll see you on the streets.” What kind of fucking reinforcing psychology is that, to tell that to someone you know doesn’t have anywhere else to go? Our lack of other options shouldn’t be held against us.

I’m not going to deride all the staff working there; you do have some good people. But frankly, most staff are just there for the paychecks. The people who really care get swayed eventually by what they see around them everyday. If you’ve seen the way the system really works so many times and it’s affected you mentally, do you really think you can have a positive effect on people? That positive effect diminishes over time, once you see people not becoming anything. But you let yourself be taken in by emotion because you don’t have the intelligence or experience to get over it.

And then many staff just don’t give a shit, who have a hard mentality toward the students, like a correctional officer has toward inmates.

I ain’t no Soledad Brother up at Job Corps or anything, but I expect and deserve respect. I don’t need some little security guard, just because they have a little authority, trying to impose it on me just because they can. Because you feel insecure is no excuse for trying to belittle someone trying to get what you already have.

What are the students like? How do people relate to each other?

Some students are there to get G.E.Ds because they messed up in school the first time around. Others had babies. Still more come from broken homes. And some just don’t give a fuck; they bring whatever hustle they had going on the street inside. Drugs, weed, booze, you name it, it’s all there.

Sadly, between students there’s no real unity - but lots of competition and rivalry. People you think are your friends will steal your drawers from the laundry, taking one piece at a time. Some want to chill with you and ask to come into your room. Don’t let them, because they’re just there to scope out your personal property and look for something to steal. My philosophy? Stay to yourself. Remain an isolationist.

Now sometimes, the RAs (Residential Assistants) have to be hard-assed to curb all that. But they shouldn’t stigmatize all of us. What if ten guys jump me and I punch one of them? The rules say I’m supposed to get terminated for “violence.” But what am I supposed to do? Get stepped on and stomped? Where’s the rationale?

There was one RA we called “Turtle-Turtle”, like the Dana Carvey character in “Master of Disguise”. You could just smell the fear in him. People like that who don’t have the backbone to act on the authority they’re trying to enforce on others get eaten up alive in here. Some people locked him in the bathroom all night and he quit soon afterwards.

Some kids just get drunk to stay alive. Yes, it’s against the rules. But I don’t blame them for trying to feel alive. Because there’s times when I have felt not alive, when I feel that the rules are chaffing my neck like I was being choked. Yet I know I have to stay in the Job Corps because at this moment, staying here is what I need to do to survive.

We know this place inside out; like I said before, it’s our little voluntary sentence. I’m sure the big heads of state and the managers running all these federal programs, with all their glamour and glitz, if they pulled back the iron curtain, they’d see it’s little more than a cirque de noire. A black circus.

But I don’t want to be at the bottom of the totem pole. I want to carve my way to the top. I want to have my life mean something and I don’t want to end up just another statistic, another number – there’s plenty of those around. I feel just because you come from the street doesn’t mean you have to remain there; you don’t have to have that mentality.

The Job Corps makes you fell like a little pigeon walking in concentric circles, waiting for someone to throw crumbs at you. We’re all scared of ending up like that man living on the street who lost his direction and none of us want to become like him. But we know it can happen.