Sixteen-year-old STEVE HARMON is sitting on the edge of a metal cot, head in hands. Camera stops and slowly turns toward a cell. Most of the voices are clearly Black or Hispanic. There are sounds of inmates yelling from cell to cell much of it is obscene. Camera goes slowly down grim, gray corridor. Monday, July 6th Monster!įADE IN: INTERIOR: Early morning in CELL BLOCK D, MANHATTAN DETENTION CENTER. I’ll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. I’ll write it down in the notebook they let me keep. I could block out the scenes like we did in school. I could write it out and play it in my head. I think to get used to this I will have to give up what I think is real and take up something else. It is about being alone when you are not really alone and about being scared all the time. This is not a movie about bars and locked doors. I have seen movies of prisons but never one like this. Sometimes the camera moves in so close that you can’t tell what is going on and you just listen to the sounds and guess.

The movie is in black and white, and grainy.

It is a strange movie with no plot and no beginning. Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. They’re strangers but they still find reasons to hurt each other. We sleep with strangers, wake up with strangers, and go to the bathroom in front of strangers. If your life outside was real, then everything in here is just the opposite. Every morning I wake up and I am surprised to be here. They say you get used to being in jail, but I don’t see how. When the gloves came, the guards put them on, handcuffed the guy, and then took him to the dispensary. The guy who was hit they made sit at the table while they waited for another guard to bring them rubber gloves. When the guards came over, they made us line up against the wall. Somebody said some little thing and somebody else got mad. This morning at breakfast a guy got hit in the face with a tray. I wonder if I will look like myself when the trial is over. I couldn’t have changed that much in a few months. When I look into the small rectangle, I see a face looking back at me but I don’t recognize it. It’s six inches high, and scratched with the names of some guys who were here before me. There is a mirror over the steel sink in my cell. If anybody knows that you are crying, they’ll start talking about it and soon it’ll be your turn to get beat up when the lights go out. That way even if you sniffle a little they won’t hear you. The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.

Monster walter dean myers prologue