Sammy and I walked the track. We passed the 213 girls, who all waved to her. Main yard has area codes, just like the state.
Signs everywhere said NO RUNNING EXCEPT ON TRACK.
If you ran anywhere else they could shoot you.
“Who got her the wire cutters?”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Angel Marie Janicki.”
“Man, was she fine,” Sammy said. “She was the best-looking girl at Stanville.”
“Where did she get the wire cutters?”
“Free-world staff. Some guy. He was under the influence. I’m telling you, she was beautiful.”
Orders issued from the PA, clear and tight and loud.
“You by the bathrooms. I can see you smoking. Put that out right now.”
“Lozano, you’re out of bounds.”
A truck circled the perimeter of the prison, on a dirt road between the electrified fence and the outer, final fence.
“Copley, you left your dentures by the handball courts.” Audible laughter from the other guards near the microphone. “Copley, heh heh, come to the watch office to pick up your teeth.”
When it was hot, the guards mostly stayed in the air-conditioned watch office and observed us through binoculars. They did that when it was cold also. The yard is massive, and they are lazy.
“Which blind spot did she use?”
“Behind the gym. That’s why we have lockdowns now. There’s before Angel Marie Janicki and there’s after.”
“They can’t see the fence behind the gym?”
“Not from Tower One. But they don’t need to now. They have the electric fence.”
It took the perimeter truck at least ten minutes to circle the grounds. Maybe eleven.
How the guards know whose dentures: the inmate number is printed on the side, in the artificial gums.
We passed whale beach, just as the guards started breaking up their sunbathing party.
“Whale beach, no slingshots. Whale beach I said no slingshots. Everybody up and dressed.”
It’s not nice to say whale beach but that’s what it’s called, an area beyond the walking track where women grease up and fry. Slingshots are homemade undershirts. You were not supposed to bare flesh on main yard, but people did anyhow, slathered in cook oil or the fake butter they used in central kitchen, a brand called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! or, as Conan called it, I Can’t Fucking Believe This Shit’s Not Butter.
No one runs on the track, since this was women’s prison and we were not training to kill. No one except Conan, who jogged past me and Sammy.
“I just slaughtered ten thousand gnats with my open mouth!”
He turned around, running backward, facing us.
“Try closing your mouth,” Sammy said. “You won’t have that problem.”
A female cop hurried past. “No sitting on the tables!” she yelled. It was also illegal to sit under them, which was the only way to get shade on the yard. Only regulation sitting was allowed.
Conan regarded the cop angrily marching past. He nodded approval.
“Boy, was she a different lay.”
At Stanville you can assume it’s a lie if the person volunteers it. It’s also a lie if the person says it in answer to a question. Conan’s tales were as tall as Tower One and Tower Two, where armed Fudds tracked us and ate pork rinds.
“She says to me, don’t just use your tongue, I want you to hum into me, like I’m a kazoo. That’s what she said. Like I’m a kazoo.”
The landscaping crew was working along the edges of the track with spray bottles of Roundup. Their job was to keep the yard one seamless expanse of dirt. “We keep it real tidy,” said Laura Lipp, who was now on yard crew. A top layer of bare dirt lifted and blew around, from valley gusts, as a new cop named Garcia came toward us.
All new staff are marks for prisoners and cops alike, but there was something particularly vulnerable about Garcia; he seemed lost out there on main yard, which is three yards, B, C, and D: three thousand women with six Fudds.
Fudd is short for Elmer Fudd. It was Conan who had started that.
“Hey, Fuddrucker,” he called to Garcia, who halted, and looked to be trying to decide whether to pretend he had not heard Conan, or to deal with Conan as a problem.
“But what is Fuddruckers?” Conan said to no one in particular, his usual audience.
“The joke is that it almost makes you say fuck, right? But then what is a ruddfucker? They make this stuff up and we all pretend these places exist, like, in history. Like Fuddruckers is some kind of grand family tradition.”
“My family has always gone there,” Laura Lipp said in a corrective tone, as she sprayed with her Roundup bottle.
“We went to Hooters,” Conan said.
“With your family?” Laura shook her head.
“My girl and her kids,” Conan said. “They have a good children’s menu. But hey, you ever notice the o in Hooters is the same O like in IHOP? I was a cook at IHOP. To make the pancakes, you add water to a mix. It’s the International House of Just Add Water.”
I had been a waitress at an IHOP right after I graduated high school. It was one of the many things Conan and I bonded over. I was waitress 43, and the cooks would call, Forty-three! Your order is up! Which, as I only saw later, had been preparing me for here.
To work at IHOP, you first go to Walmart or a place like it to get work shoes. Where you see, if you didn’t already know, that most of the adult-sized shoes they sell are for working on construction sites or in hospitals, prisons, restaurants, and schools, and the children’s shoes are starter versions of the same. Waitress shoes and medical assistant shoes and work boots. Cheap factory knockoffs for people whose choices are to work these crap jobs or crack up and go to a much lower grade of low-grade shoe, made by prison industries.
This new cop pulled Sammy aside and started asking her questions. He was treading a familiar road: I want to get to know you. That is how cops here do things, they all say the same thing in the same way: I want to get to know you.
There are cops and staff who want the girlfriend experience with a prisoner. Sammy already had a getting-to-know thing with the head of maintenance, a civilian who took her around in his truck, brought her staff cafeteria hamburgers, and in exchange they went to a drainage ditch where he rummaged in her state-issue jeans. She had a male nurse at the skilled nursing facility (“Sniff” is how we say it) who checked her breasts weekly, and gave her tobacco. Conan had female guards who might have been lesbians or straight girls who found Conan convincingly male.
“You remind me of someone,” Garcia said to Sammy. “Back home in Philadelphia. Where you from?”
“Philadelphia, huh,” Conan cut in. “You ever notice something about that Liberty Bell? It has a crack in it. And no one cares. They display it like they’re proud and the thing is cracked.”
Garcia turned from Sammy to Conan. It was obvious what he wanted to say: get away while I work on this chick.
“Are those regulation clothes you’ve got on, ma’am? Because I see boxer shorts, which are not allowed here. I could write you up for that.”
* * *
I was exiting work exchange when I ran into the GED teacher, G. Hauser. I had gotten into a scuffle in work exchange, where they said I was setting off the metal detector and went through all my stuff. They even tore apart the bologna sandwich in the sack lunch they give us outside chow hall, to take to work. I had to strip out and endure a search in the little curtained area of work exchange, and I was boiling with anger as I left. But when I saw Hauser, something flipped in me, a switch. I called out a friendly hello. You don’t decide to intentionally alter your tone of voice. It happens automatically. Needs are the gearbox of the voice. Needs shift approach, adjust tone to something higher, more sympathetic. It wasn’t calculated, but everything had changed for me since I’d seen him last.
“Hey,” I said, “I was wondering if I’d run into you.”
I had
forgotten all about him. I had not thought of him once.
“I’m on C yard,” I said, “and I’ve been thinking about your offer to get me some reading material. That would be great.”
He was excited, like I was doing him a favor by asking for one myself. We chatted and in his growing excitement, he said, “Why don’t you take my class?”
“All they teach is GED prep here. Which is the education level of our guards.”
“Yeah.” He laughed quickly, covertly. “But since it’s the only thing offered, I structure it around reading. We read and talk about books. Try it out. I’d love to have you join us.” He told me how to sign up.
* * *
Sammy was right that having a job would keep me from falling apart. It did. It kept my mind off things. Instead, I concentrated, like everyone else, on what there was to be exploited.
Conan was crafting dildos in woodshop. He began working on them as soon as our shop supervisor commenced his marathon reading sessions at his desk. Every day the supervisor brought a novel to work, settled in, and read compulsively. The book covers featured lurid images with raised-letter titles, like Killed Twice. They were all water-damaged paperbacks you would find in a free box. The supervisor read at them for seven hours straight, day after day, while Conan used sanders and chamfering tools to taper his creations. He and Teardrop had a rivalry going over who could craft the better dildo. They both also had contacts at central kitchen for illicit sale of cucumbers. The unit kitchens get their cucumbers prequartered, to prevent nonintended and illegal use of provisions, i.e., as dildos. Prisoners who worked in central kitchen sold cucumbers uncut out the back door.
The Norse made wooden swastikas and pentagrams. My own innovation was the lunch meat. At meal breaks, I began toasting my bologna slice with the branding iron we used for all our products. It said CALPIA, California Prison Industry Authority, and I was in charge of it. I branded my lunch meat on both sides with the iron, and then my sandwich bread as well. The iron toasted the bread and the meat perfectly. I toasted other people’s sandwiches in exchange for baggies of instant coffee. I learned to hide the coffee for strip-out, after work. This was how it was going to be. Hustling for every little thing.
* * *
On Saturdays they let us go to the library. All they had for us to check out were Bibles. King James or International Version was the complete range of reading choices. Sammy and I went weekly to research who I could send letters to, about Jackson. Exiting one afternoon, I ran into Hauser again. I would be starting his class soon.
There isn’t anything to read here, I told him.
“I know. That’s why I ordered you some books. They haven’t arrived yet? I had to get them from Amazon, since we can’t give you books directly.”
I pictured Sammy’s hands, reeling in the line, cultivating a victim. Slowly, she’d said, you’ve got to do it slowly.
“I haven’t got them yet,” I told him, but things took a while. They had to sort the mail for three thousand women.
* * *
I continued to call Johnson’s lawyer because he was the only person I could contact, since he had Global Tel Link. He mostly avoided answering, but once, he picked up. He had news, he said. He was retiring, after thirty years as a public defender, and I would no longer be able to reach him at that office.
The way things were closing in on me: it was hard to accept that this was real life. No one but me cared about the fate of Jackson. I didn’t know where he was. I had no way to talk to him. I was trapped in a prison in the Central Valley, under the baked expanse of sunny sky, gazing into the warble above the razor wire, counting how long it took the perimeter truck to circle our big enclosure. Picturing tough and beautiful Angel Marie Janicki getting herself through the fence.
* * *
I kept going over a scene, from when Jackson was five. It was autumn, and my mother came with us to Tilden Park, in the East Bay. There were trees above us that had turned a color I might have dyed my hair, a bright, rich magenta. There were trees with gold and scarlet leaves. You don’t see a lot of that in California. My mother and Jackson and I sat and watched the wind shake these bright-painted trees. Jackson was enchanted.
“All that beauty and for nothing,” my mother said. “They’ll fall off tomorrow.”
“But after they fall off,” Jackson said, “the tree will grow new leaves, Grandma, and then those will turn colors, like these ones.” It would keep happening over and over, Jackson said, through all the years. The leaves falling off meant new ones were coming. My mother looked at him like she wondered what planet he was from.
He was born an optimist, and he didn’t get it from her, or from me. When Jackson was three, he asked me how the Earth formed. “How did it get here?” I said no one knew for sure but maybe there was an explosion and they called it the Big Bang. “But where did they put everyone while the explosion was happening?” In his mind there were always people. People taking care of other people.
* * *
The lawyer had given me the phone number of child welfare, which he said might tell me the name of Jackson’s case manager, but I could only contact people with a Global Tel Link account. I wrote letters and tried not to go insane. I sent one to Eva’s old address, and one to her at her father’s address, but I had little faith that either would reach her. I called Jimmy Darling, but the call did not go through, since he didn’t have Global Tel Link. I told myself if I ever got out, I’d blow up Global Tel Link.
* * *
I got a package. Like one of the lucky women who have family, outside help, I, Hall, got called to receiving and release to pick up my package. Hauser had gotten me three books: My Ántonia, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and To Kill a Mockingbird.
“That’s what he got you?” Sammy said, stifling a laugh. “Even I read those already.” I felt sad and a little protective of the teacher for not knowing better. I planned on keeping them, even if I didn’t especially want to read them. They were a link to the outside world. But a woman in my unit offered me shampoo and conditioner in exchange for all three. The state gives us indigents only a gritty powdered soap for body and hair. Being able to properly wash and condition my hair made me feel happy, at least for an evening, in a way I had not experienced since before I was arrested, three years earlier.
* * *
I had been in Hauser’s class for a couple of weeks when he stopped me after and asked if I’d enjoyed the books.
“I enjoyed reading them,” I said, “when I was fourteen years old.”
I didn’t plan on saying that. It certainly wasn’t tactical for reeling in a Keath.
“God. I’m sorry. That’s embarrassing.”
“It’s okay. You just don’t know me.”
He asked me what I wanted to read and I said I didn’t know. I said I had a lot on my mind and it was hard to concentrate.
He got me more books. One, called Pick-Up, was about two drunks in San Francisco in the 1950s. I started reading it and could not stop. When I finished it, I read it again. Scenes came into view for me, even though the character in the book doesn’t name many locations except Civic Center, and Powell and Market, where the cable car turns around, which fascinated Jackson as it did all toddlers. I would take him down there to watch the street musicians. Some of them were friends of Jimmy Darling’s. Jimmy knew all sorts of people in a way I didn’t, and the night would go differently if by chance he and I ran into someone and they invited us to a concert or a party or a screening of a film.
When I was a kid there was a large Woolworth’s at Powell and Market, with a wig department in the center of the store. Eva and I would go in and pretend we were wig shopping. The old ladies who worked there helped us pin our hair up in special nets and fitted us with grand and curly hairdos. We laughed and played around in the mirrors, sneaked makeup and hair products into our purses, and took pictures in the photo booth that was inside the store. Sometimes we went to Zim’s on Van Ness afterward, ordered a lot of food
and left without paying. It was something different from dining and dashing at the more familiar Zim’s on Taraval. We felt sophisticated downtown. Sometimes we went into the museum, up Van Ness, to hide after booking from Zim’s. There was a painting inside that Eva liked. It was called The Girl with Green Eyes. Among the kids we knew, you weren’t supposed to be into going to museums, but Eva was into whatever she was into, this painted girl with a long neck that looked like it was squeezed into a napkin ring. She stared at us, and we stared back.
The whole long era of my childhood I had run around like a street urchin, no more rooted than the teenagers on the posters in the Greyhound station on Sixth Street. Tall figures in silhouette, like long shadows, and the words RUNAWAYS, CALL FOR HELP. A hotline number. My childhood was the era of the hotline. But we never called any, except as a prank, and I wasn’t a runaway. I even had a mother. I might have gotten to know her, but I had not, not really. By the time I was sixteen, it was too late for me and my mother. When I went to prison, it seemed really and finally too late. But I was wrong. It was only too late when she died.
* * *
I told Hauser I read Pick-Up. He asked what I thought.
“That it was good and bad at the same time.”
“I know what you mean. The end is a surprise, right? But it makes you want to reread the book, to see if there were earlier clues.”
I told him I’d done that. And that it was good to read a book about San Francisco, that I was from there.
“Oh, me too,” he said.
He didn’t seem like it to me, and I said so.
“I mean, near there. I’m from just across the Bay, Contra Costa County.” He named the town, but I hadn’t heard of it.
The Mars Room Page 15
