I was late again, slipping into a chair at the back of the room just as she began sobbing up in front. A few of the Bail Fund members surrounded her and tried to help her into her chair, but she pushed them away and stood apart from them, trembling.
“Is this why you didn’t want to keep on taking bail out to the Women’s House?” she shouted, and pointed across the room at me. I rose to my feet and heads cranked around.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Vicky,” I said. “What happened to you?”
“What happened?” she repeated, her voice choked and mocking. “What happened? I’ll tell you what happened! Unlike you, I waited for one of the women I bailed out to come out.”
She launched into a long digressive accusatory narrative about how she’d had a terrible time on the bus. She’d been forced to ride with pimps some of the way and two of them called out to her and threatened her and then she had had to wait an hour before finally being allowed to post the bails. All of the corrections officers were horrible to her and most would not answer her questions. She could handle all of this, Vicky said. What she couldn’t handle was, after paying the bail and deciding to wait at the Reception Center to see who came out first—she was attacked! A woman appeared after five hours, dressed in hastily donned street clothes, staring wildly about. Vicky approached her and she did turn out to be one of the “names” she’d bailed out, but the woman was “deeply disturbed,” Vicky said.
“When I introduced myself and attempted to provide information for her about the Bail Fund and our commitment to Mao and Marxism, she began screaming at me. She yelled that she didn’t even know who I was, and kept shouting, why the fuck had I bailed her out? She thought I was from some church group taking her to a ministry, or a Phoenix House counselor dragging her to a halfway house. She kept screaming about how her same old pimp would be out there, coming after her for money she’d held out way back when—plus her ‘wife’ was left Inside. She kept yelling, why didn’t I leave her alone? Then she said, since I’d bailed her out without asking her, she was going to find a way for me to get her back Inside.”
Then Vicky described how the “deranged chick” punched her in the nose, knocking her glasses off and landing her on the floor. Vicky said that she put up her hands to cover her face and her wrists were battered. Eventually, two corrections officers came running over and the crazy woman was taken back to the Women’s House. Awash in blood and tears, Vicky Renslauer had agreed to charge the person she’d just bailed out with assault.
“I may drop the charges,” she added. “But at the time, I was in shock—I just wanted her to stop beating me!”
Corinna appeared beside Vicky, staring accusingly at me.
“So this is typical? Is this why you never waited?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t wait because I never had time to hang around that long. Anyway, how do we know who we’re bailing out? There are a lot of people out there who don’t necessarily think the way we think.”
“I know this sounds reactionary,” cried Vicky. “I want you all to know that I probably won’t press charges. But I never want to be mauled again by some raging six-foot bull-dyke.”
“You’re upset, Vicky,” growled Corinna, still staring darkly at me. “But please don’t speak of comrades Inside in that crypto-male-chauvinist manner. Even if you are emotionally distraught, Vicky. I mean it. Get control of yourself.”
No one uttered a sound except Vicky, sniffling and blowing her nose loudly.
I nearly spoke up again to remind them that a revolution was not a dinner party, but I decided to keep that observation to myself. I was sorry about what had happened to Vicky. I wondered if I could have predicted it after all.
Vicky seemed to be calming down a little. I went into the kitchen to get her a glass of water, and while I was standing at the sink, Corinna and Martine entered.
“It’s the same kind of rip-off mentality,” Martine was saying. “Just like what happened with your apartment.”
I turned around, the glass of water in my hand.
“What? What apartment?”
They froze in place, staring at me, and then Martine, who was quite pretty, with long lanky strands of black ironed hair like Joan Baez’s, spoke up pleasantly.
“I guess this was before your time here, but Corinna’s parents gave us some money and we used it to rent an apartment to be used as a transitional place to live for women we’d bailed out. There was a woman named Ronnie Bloom—she doesn’t come to meetings anymore—she was the one who always went to Rikers to post bail. She would leave notes for the women, inviting them to crash in the apartment till they got going again. But that’s not how it worked out.”
“Right,” I said. “The place got kind of trashed?”
Corinna glared at me.
“Oh yeah, like you know everything about women in prison.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t. But I suppose that it might not have been wise to hand over your apartment to bailouts who might have to resort to living the way they used to. To survive, you know? I mean. Just a thought.”
Corinna made a face and said something under her breath.
I was experiencing a powerful insight, then confidence in that insight. I’d never felt so certain before at a Bail Fund gathering. I was sure that I was right about what I was going to say.
“Corinna,” I said, “maybe you haven’t offered to go out to the Women’s House with bail because you are afraid to go. Is that possible? And there are some comrades here who are afraid right along with you? Because of the apartment thing and now Vicky? I mean, you want to help—just not firsthand. You think these women are dangerous, right?”
Corinna laughed. “I told you twenty times—my FBI file makes it impossible for me to set foot out there.”
“Okay, Corinna,” I said. “I’m sure that’s it.”
As I started to walk out past them with Vicky’s glass of water, Martine put out a hand to stop me.
“The apartment had become a brothel, practically. There were pimps and johns”—she paused, a pained expression on her pretty face—“in the bedroom. There were a lot of drugs, buying and selling and shooting up in the bathrooms. We had to…”
She glanced at Corinna and her voice dropped: “…call the police.”
She looked back at me and straightened her shoulders, looking resolute.
“Anyway, we’re past all that. I think we should just move on and forget about what happened back there. Just forget it.”
It was Mark Twain, I thought suddenly, Polly Lyle’s reputed ancestor, who’d said that prison is where you put people you want to forget about—but I didn’t quote him. I didn’t quote anybody or anything. Instead I nodded at Martine and went back in to Vicky, handed her the glass of water, and sat through the rest of the meeting. I didn’t intend to come back, but it was a good thing that I didn’t sound off after all. I certainly couldn’t advise anyone on the difference between what was just and what was completely naïve. Still, I couldn’t help feeling just a smidgen vindicated vis-à-vis all the criticism/self-criticism. I thought of Corinna, forced to call law enforcement to throw the pimps out of her apartment, and felt a smile begin to spread across my face. I gave in to feeling amused—but if I’d consulted Polly Lyle at that moment, she might have been able to warn me: my own particular enlightenment was fast approaching.
The sun poured through the high windows of Kiehl’s Pharmacy on East Thirteenth Street as Benny Mathison and I sampled scents. Benny held a small brown glass vial under my nose.
“It’s called Rain,” she said. “They just invented it.”
I sniffed at the lip of the vial. An exalted smell of rose petals and wet pavement and silver mist wafted from the mouth of the bottle.
“They mix it up here in the pharmacy,” she said. “It’s one of their family secrets.”
She peered at the city of glass-stoppered bottles on display on the counter in the sunshine—there was a Bonfire scent and Lime
Bower and Baby Powder and Civet Cat and Fresh Apple Pie. It was intoxicating to nose through them, lift the glittering coated stoppers, inhale the brightness, and be transported via the olfactory to the Caribbean (Palm Thatch Rum) or Kentucky (River Blue Grass) or Africa (Safari Wind).
Benny was chunky, with short brown hair, glasses, and an embattled expression on her face like a young Bolshevik’s. She was finishing up at N.Y.U. Law School and she did pro bono work at the Women’s House. We’d befriended each other there and found that we shared frustrations and, to some degree, ideas about change. Benny was practical—I was not.
Today Benny was treating herself. She treated herself, she told me, before she went out to Rikers Island every week because she needed to store up strength.
“It’s impossible to gauge how hard it is on a person,” Benny noted, unscrewing the cap and dabbing a stopperful of the newly mixed scent of Rain behind her ears and on the insides of her wrists. “You need to take good care of yourself or it will get inside you. The whole situation.”
She bought a bottle of Rain and so did I, and she also bought Fresh Gingerbread and New-Mown Hay. I then accompanied her west on Thirteenth to Trois Petits Cochons, where she ordered a slice of pâté campagne, a ripple of triple-crème cheese, a small sliced baguette, and six cornichons. Plus a white china mug of café presse with cream. I ordered coffee too and a little bread and Brie, but I wasn’t very hungry. I felt as if Benny was eating for both of us.
Benny was on one of her favorite pissed-off subjects: Jerry Rivers, a guy who’d graduated a year ahead of her at N.Y.U. and had become Geraldo Rivera, famous TV news reporter.
“I can’t get over it,” she said. “This is Power to the People?”
“Why do you care?” I asked. “Why does it bother you whatever this guy calls himself?”
“Because.” She stared into her coffee as if she were reading tea leaves. “He is the first wave of a depressing future that I foresee. A future of Professional Ethnics.”
We sat there on the high stools in the window of Trois Petits Cochons, looking out at the sun shining on the hurrying passersby and the delivery trucks and taxis and the trees in their wrought-iron ankle bracelets. I noticed after a while that we were giving off a kind of tropical fog of scent. A man reading The Village Voice looked over, sniffed, and went back to his paper, then looked up and sniffed the air again. Rain? Why do I smell rain? Or is that fresh gingerbread? Or Caribbean tree toad musk?
I asked Benny to tell me what it meant when the women at Rikers talked about falling off the calendar.
Benny set her coffee down carefully, then pounded her chest just above her heart.
“Habeas corpus!” she cried. She pounded her heart again—with such force it frightened me.
“What they are doing out there is detaining those women illegally. They’re flying in the face of habeas corpus—the law says you have to be charged with a crime in order to hold the body for any extended period of time. They’re supposed to ‘produce the body’ before a judge! These women go to court for a hearing and sit in the bullpen all day because the system’s all backed up. Then they’re hauled back to Rikers, uncharged. It’s scandalous. Off the calendar, they can sit uncharged for two years! You know what the ratio of sentenced to detained women is at the Women’s House, right? It’s one big holding cell out there!”
I asked her if she planned to launch a class action suit.
She shook her head.
“I’m in way over my head as it is.”
She sat staring into space for a minute, her engines still running.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Speaking of someone very much on the calendar, do you think Akilah Malik will get off?”
She chuckled grimly.
“Akilah Malik? Never. Her companion, Rembala Mahmud, was killed in the shoot-out. She was in the car when the New Jersey state trooper was shot, but eyewitnesses—I mean the cops—say that she fired a gun from the passenger side, and they’ll have ballistics experts testifying at her trial to prove it.”
She spread some pâté on her baguette and took a bite. She swallowed, then started up again.
“Akilah Malik! It doesn’t matter if she turns state’s evidence or cops a plea—she’ll still be staring through bars the rest of her natural life.”
Aliganth caught me as I was hurrying down the hall to the Social Services office. It was noon, and I was deep into my AfterCare identity. I’d never seen Aliganth in the daytime before, she always pulled the night shift. Seeing her before dusk was shocking, like glimpsing a vampire at lunchtime. She was in the institution, she told me, to sit in on an officer review. She looked furious, as usual—because she was. Her eyes flashed and she showed her large teeth and her voice rose to falsetto as she began her rant.
“How dumb you lookin’ to be? Didn’t we go over that you never ask the ladies what they in for?”
“We did,” I admitted. I started to defend myself, but she cut in.
“Between Kohler and Keeley you got the threat of violence within the institution, and that half-sex hulk tossing her cookies all over my polish shoes. Not bad for one class meeting, Mattox. You thinkin’ of continuin’ teaching here?”
“I am,” I said. “And I’m sorry, I just didn’t think it would lead to…”
“You thinkin’,” growled Aliganth. “There’s your problem! We do the thinkin’ for you when it comes to the inmates. You got it through your head that you endangered every person in that room, including me and your own self?”
I nodded and felt an uncomfortable smile crossing my face and shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I didn’t know how else to respond. I knew that Aliganth had the power to get me kicked out of the Women’s House.
“I got my eye on you, Mattox. One more slip like that and you’ll be peddlin’ your epics back on the bus outta here.”
“Right.” I held on to my tongue, amazingly, though my mouth was full of potential retorts.
“And another thing here. I don’t know if it’s wise that you got them writin’ about what they done to get Inside.”
“They’re writing about what they know.”
“Right. And what ‘they know they don’t know’ too?”
“C.O. Aliganth,” I said. “I do believe you’re picking up some writing tips. Maybe you’ll grace us all with a poem.”
Aliganth snorted loudly. “I got poetry in me you hope not to see.”
She started to turn away and I called to her.
“I know that I’m not supposed to ask about inmate charges, but since it’s just the two of us here, can you tell me anything at all about Polly Lyle Clement?”
Aliganth glanced at her watch and sighed.
“I will tell you next to nothin’, which is what I know. Well, only this: she headin’ upstate eventually to a psych residence. She come in last month, they fished her out the river. She was actually swimmin’ out there and talkin’ to herself. Nobody could follow her. Maybe she got a rap sheet—can’t recall. So they tranked her, but nothin’ stops that mouth. Like all the goddam rest of you. I’m tellin’ you this so that you be aware—and not make any more dumbass mistakes. Just let her talk—she can become agitated.”
“Right. But why does she say she’s speaking in Mark Twain’s voice?”
“You got a half man, half woman; you got a leader of a shoot-out gang; you got a drug runner and a pimp killer; and you ask me why this one talk funny?”
“Jesus, C.O. Aliganth. I thought we weren’t supposed to discuss charges.”
“You’re not supposed to,” she said. “But I’m a corrections officer. I know better than you. When you gonna get this through that thick skull, Mattox? I know better than you.”
Later, back in the AfterCare office, I pulled the piece of paper, worn and crumpled, from my pocket and dialed the number printed on it.
“Hi, my name is Holly Mattox. I work in the AfterCare program at the Women’s House of Detention? I’m calling on behalf of Darlene Denisky
—I’m trying to reach her children, or their guardian?”
The office was quiet, everyone else was at lunch—the social workers gathered to eat from their brown paper bags on the cement benches in front of the Women’s House: a little tuna salad on rye under the landing gear of a 727, droplets of jet fuel bubbling in one’s Dr Pepper.
The woman who had answered the phone had not sounded unfriendly when she picked up. Now her voice turned icy.
“She has no business asking you to call about her children. They’re in school now anyway.”
“Listen,” I said. “She has a right to—”
“She has no rights. None.”
“If you’d just listen to me for a second…. She just wants to know that they’re all healthy, okay? How they’re doing in school? Don’t you think you ought to be able to tell me that?”
“You can tell that monster that her children are alive—her husband sure ain’t!”
I started to ask another question and she cut me off.
“Tell her that her children still remember seeing their daddy on the kitchen floor after she shot him in the head. Lying there, dying in his own blood. Will you tell her that?”
There was a choking sound.
“My brother!” she cried. “She shot him from behind! Tell that cunt never to make contact again. Do you understand me?”
How dumb are you? How dumb you lookin’ to be?
Benny looked at her watch. She offered me a cornichon and I shook my head. I was on my third cup of coffee. She ate the pickle delicately, in two quick bites. Then she leaned forward.
“The thing to remember about women in prison is this. There are no ‘middle’ crimes with them. Women either are busted for the so-called victimless crimes, like prostitution, shoplifting, drugs, et cetera—or the charges leap up to big crimes of passion. No Burglary One, no Breaking and Entering, no Knocking Over the Gas Station or the Seven Eleven, no Armed Robbery. No middle crimes. But at the other end: women will kill. They’ll kill the husband, the pimp, the boyfriend, even the child. You know what I mean? It’s either stealing a goddam Twinkie, or Murder One.”
Channeling Mark Twain Page 8
