“I know it,” I said, tears landing on the floor of my cell. I was on the ground, on all fours, with my face to the food flap in my cell door, which was the only way to communicate with people in the hallway.
I tried to think of what Sammy might do. She wouldn’t cry. It was hard not to. I vowed to quit.
I focused on getting out of the mental ward, and back to ad seg, and out of ad seg, and mainlined, so that I could try to make phone calls, find a lawyer, get information, do something.
I dreamed one night that I was in Jimmy Darling’s bed, at the ranch in Valencia. Jackson was asleep on a cot. Jimmy had just had a bad dream, he said, in which the police took me away. He held on to me, glad it wasn’t real. I was glad, too, but then I woke up, with caged white lights buzzing in the ceiling above me.
Jimmy didn’t love me like that. When the police in real life took me away, he moved me to the past. I’d known it when I heard his voice over the county jail phone.
* * *
You can’t remain on suicide watch forever, and you can’t stay in ad seg forever. They need the cells for other people they want to put in ad seg. Three months after my mother died, and four months after Chain Night, I was put in general population, on C yard, in unit 510.
A unit is 260 women, on two floors with an open common area and a guard station—a cop shop—in the center. The rooms were big, much bigger than an ad seg cell, and crammed with bunk beds. Each room was designed for four women but had eight.
I was happy to learn I was in Conan’s room and unhappy to learn it was also Laura Lipp’s room.
She approached as I was fitting a sheet to my mattress.
“Hi there, I’m Laura Lipp and I’m from Apple Valley.”
I kept making my bed.
“That’s in the Mojave Desert. It’s drier than any bone and there are no apples. Applebee’s, though.”
Laura Lipp didn’t remember our eight-hour bus ride together. I didn’t question it, wasn’t going to insist on familiarity.
I was putting my few possessions, the photos of Jackson, into my small locker, when another roommate came in. “Nuh uh!” she yelled, looking at me. “No hillbilly bitches in this room. Get the fuck out.” Her name was Teardrop. She was huge and would have destroyed me if I had to fight her, but Conan intervened on my behalf.
“She’s cool. I cosign her.” They went out to the hall to talk.
“Except I think the Applebee’s closed,” Laura went on like nothing had happened. “We’ve had a lot of changes. None of them for the better.”
I pulled a Fernandez and told her to shut the hell up.
“The town’s got history though,” she said, carefully moving away, out of fist-swinging range, just in case. “It was a fine place and it’s gone downhill. We used to be cowboy country. All the country and western people came because of Roy Rogers. He had a museum with a big display of all his fishing lures. He owned the Apple Valley Inn. My father took us there for Sunday dinners. It was a carefree time. There weren’t problems like now. You know what people were worried about? Static cling. That was the big fear on TV and in people’s hearts. Static cling.”
Conan and Teardrop returned. “Don’t leave nothing outside your locker!” Teardrop yelled at me, but in a slightly nicer tone, like she was resigned to letting me stay. “And nobody runs the fucking water, no tap and no flushing, until I get up in the morning.”
Button Sanchez, who had the baby in receiving, was also in our room. The other three roommates were what Sammy would call nondescrips. Women with short sentences, minding their own business and staying out of trouble.
How I was hillbilly and Laura wasn’t, I didn’t understand, until I figured out that Laura was paying Teardrop extorted rent money to stay in our room. As a baby killer, nobody wanted her, so it was possibly her only choice.
At dinner I saw Sammy in line at the chow hall and tried to talk to her. She looked at me and shook her head. A cop shined a light on me. “BUS YOUR TRAY,” his voice boomed over a microphone. They give you ten minutes to eat their shitty food and you have to do it in silence. Mostly it’s people who don’t have money who go to chow. Teardrop only ever ate in our room, from her personal supply of canteen food, ramen bowls that she added water to and heated with a stinger.
That evening I put my name on the sign-up sheet and waited in line for the phones in the common area. People were shouting into the phones because others were shouting next to them. The signs on the cinder-block walls were the same as in receiving, that cursive plea: Ladies, no whining Ladies, report to staff if you are experiencing signs of norovirus. Same dirty pink paint on the doors and railings, a color that was probably meant to relax us institutionalized knuckleheads. The line for the phones went fast because the people being called didn’t pick up. I dialed my mother. My mother had an account with Global Tel Link, the company that monopolized jail and prison calls. You can’t get through to a number that has no Global Tel Link account. I knew she was dead. Still, I had to try. I didn’t get through. The public defenders all have Global Tel Link, so I called Johnson’s lawyer but he didn’t answer.
For the next several days I signed up for phone calls and waited in line and dialed the lawyer. After my eighth try I finally reached him. I begged him to help me get information about Jackson.
He said he would try, and to give him a week at least. When I finally got through to him again, he said he’d been attempting to figure out who Jackson’s case manager was, but had been unable. This work, he said, was really for a dependency court lawyer.
Would the state provide one, I asked him, trying to control my tone, not sound angry and desperate.
“Oh, no,” he said, and in the gap where I might have pressed him, as if he were obliged to help me, he lunged into that silence before I could and said he was extraordinarily busy with his assigned caseload, and I was not on it, and that he had to get off the phone.
* * *
As soon as I was eligible, I tried to get a prison job. That was Sammy’s advice. Sammy wasn’t in my unit but she was on C yard, which meant we could hang out in our free time. “White girls get all the best jobs,” she said. “You can clerk, sit in air-conditioning and type letters, while us black and brown women pull used tampons from the septic tank screen for eight cents an hour. Take advantage.”
It was true that the clerks were all white. I tried to clerk, too, but you had to have a clean disciplinary record, and you had to be liked by the cops.
Sammy, Conan, and I all got assigned to the woodshop, which was hiring at twenty-two cents an hour: good money. Conan bragged that with his wages he was going to invest in a tattoo rig, start a side business and do some art on himself. We were sitting in the common area, waiting for the Friday night movie to begin. They were delayed because the film that was scheduled had profanity. They had to swap it for Driving Miss Daisy, which they’d shown us the Friday before.
“What tattoo do you want?” Sammy asked Conan.
“A big-ass portrait of Saddam Hussein,” Conan said. “Tacked up right here.” He bulged his bicep. “Just to piss off these dickwads.”
Two unit cops were trying to work the film projector.
“Support our troops!” Conan yelled.
“Shut the fuck up!” someone else yelled. The movie was starting.
Every one of my cellmates got jobs in the woodshop, except for Button Sanchez, who was too young to legally work. Her stomach was flat now. Her face showed no grief that I could see. Her baby was gone. She took classes and, after school, played with her pet rabbit, which she’d caught on main yard and trained. It had a little box under her lower bunk with shredded Kotex in it, as a litter thing. It knew where to poop. She took it to class with her, hidden in her state-issue brassiere. “I’m its mom,” she said. She sewed little clothes for it. Made a leash. Snuck the bunny on main yard so it could see its cousins. It bit her sometimes, and so did the fleas and mites that lived on it. Teardrop told her to get rid of it. Every room of eight had
a Teardrop. The strongest woman in the room made the rules. Teardrop threatened to roll up Button, put her and her mattress and rabbit in the hall. Button and Teardrop had a knock-down drag-out. Button was tiny and Teardrop was huge, but youngsters have a dirty advantage. They’ll hit you over the head with a two-by-four if they get the chance. Button went all-out, fought Teardrop with a straightening iron. The rabbit got to stay.
“Fill up your schedule,” Sammy said to me. She had known lots of women in my position. Dire as it was, it comforted me to know I wasn’t alone. Others had found a way to survive it. I had been in Los Angeles county jail when the towers of the World Trade Center went down. That was right after I got arrested. We didn’t have access to news, but people were getting the details from their families over the phone. Everyone was freaking out, except for one girl who said it comforted her to know she wasn’t the only one whose life was wrecked. People got on her, but I knew what she meant.
“Were you guys close?” Sammy asked about my mother.
I said no.
Was she healthy?
No.
“You might’ve ended up needing a different guardian for the kid eventually. Things happen in the free world that you can’t control.”
I could take the money I’d earn working and buy stamps and start flooding state agencies with letters about Jackson, Sammy said. She would help me. The library had directories with agency addresses. “You have to start from where you’re at,” she said. It was her motto.
* * *
On our first day in woodshop, the prison industries supervisor told us we were going to get excellent on-the-job training skills, which would translate into employment upon our release.
“What about those of us who don’t got a release date?” Teardrop asked.
“Normally you can’t work in prison industries,” he said. “Normally, we can’t use you, because you don’t need the training, since you’re not getting out, and this is all about training people to work jobs. But we have a lot of orders to fill, so you’ve found yourself in a lucky position. You will learn to build furniture here and I can tell you ladies that a finish carpenter makes great money.”
Conan was impressed with the shop. “Dang, we get to use real wood? Table saws? Miter boxes? At Wasco the woodshop isn’t even real. The wood there is all compressed particleboard. You glue these pieces together. That’s your only tool: glue. You can’t even drive in a nail or that stuff will split and crumble. We weren’t learning anything. I told the supervisor, You keep talking about finish carpentry and we don’t make stuff that will teach us it. He goes, ‘That’s because you people are animals and if we give you tools you’ll kill each other.’ I ask him, What are we here to learn? And he says, ‘You’re here to learn how to work. To show up on time. To be workers.’ As if that’s a thing. We didn’t learn shit at the Wasco woodshop. We huffed glue all day. Then they came up with this huff-free glue. No Huff, it was called, that was its name, No Huff Glue. You can’t huff it. It doesn’t do anything. No power tools, no learning curve, no drug high. It was better than the other prison industries, though. The outfit down the hall, those dudes were making safety goggles for prison industries. And next to that building, they made boots for prison industries.”
I was assigned to a workbench.
“I’m one hundred percent Norse,” my new bench partner said.
The Norse was six feet tall, with long blond hair divided into several braids. The tattooed head of a bald eagle emerged from the top of her woodshop coveralls. The eagle on her chest had an American flag in its beak. It looked mad, even madder than eagles usually look.
The supervisor put Laura Lipp next to me and the Norse.
“Can I be moved?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Thank god,” the Norse said. “Whites.” She looked over at Conan, Teardrop, Reebok, the three black people I’d walked in with. “How do you feel about blacks?” she asked me and Laura Lipp.
Laura Lipp, eager for such rare acknowledgment, someone asking her a question, lunged to answer. “Oh, I try to be colorblind, but it’s not always. I mean, some people have had to come further than others in order to—”
“Do you let them eat your pussy is what I need to find out.”
Laura gasped. “Heavens no!”
“I run this bench and I need to know who is who,” the Norse said.
“Well, since you bring that up, I agree about sexual relations, as my husband was Hispanic and that was a disaster, ruined my life, but you might be interested to hear that I fainted one evening and the girls who came to my aid were black, and—”
The Norse ignored Laura Lipp and moved toward me.
“Do you like Iron Maiden?” she asked. “That’s what I play.”
“We have a radio?”
“I’m the radio in this part of the shop.”
That afternoon, the Norse hummed. “Run to the Hills” and “Iron Man” were on repeat. I was in high school all over again. But when she asked where I was from, nodded, and said, “Frisco, cool,” I was reminded that I was very far from where I was from. I didn’t ask her anything. I couldn’t have been less interested in knowing details about her Nazi Lowrider brothers and boyfriends in San Bernardino or wherever. That’s snobbery but there’s a cultural difference. The Sunset District was not exactly classy but we were adjacent to the Haight-Ashbury, and by that proximity to weirder cultures, not straight dirtheads, even if there were among us people who became full-on white supremacists, like Dean Conte, the sad kid from my junior high who was relentlessly made fun of. Dean Conte had experimented with various solutions to being maladjusted. Nerd, new waver, skateboarder, peace punk, hard-core punk, eventually skinhead, and finally, neo-Nazi in a suit and tie. When he was a skinhead, Dean and his friends ruined the Haight Street Fair. By six p.m., when the fair was ending and loading trucks were packing up the stage and the vendors’ tables, the air became ninety percent beer bottles, a forehead-height kill zone, thanks to the skinheads. Back when Dean had still been a nerd, he invited a bunch of kids who cut school to his father’s place on Hugo Street and we drank all his dad’s liquor and set the curtains on fire. I forgot about that day until I saw him all grown up on television. He was on a talk show as a spokesman for white supremacy. One of the skinheads on the show threw a chair at the host and broke his nose. Dean became famous. I still saw the kid, though, in the man. I’m not justifying his ideas. It’s just that he was someone I knew. He was in love with Eva and Eva was Filipino, but that had not deterred him. It’s always like that. I knew a guy in high school who later went to prison and joined the Aryan Brotherhood. The guy who joined the Aryan Brotherhood had a black girlfriend and mixed kids. Things are more complicated than some can admit. People are stupider and less demonic than some can admit.
Before lunch, Laura Lipp drilled her own hand with the drill press and was sent to the infirmary. That was it for her in woodshop. The Norse said it was her punishment for marrying a beaner. The Norse had been in prison so long she didn’t know that particular slur had gone out of style, was no longer used, and this made me unexpectedly sad for her.
* * *
I don’t know if it was right or wrong, but Jimmy Darling and I had shared the habit of sometimes feeling sorry for bigots.
Like the lonely woman tending an empty bar, whom we met while driving around Valencia, where Jimmy taught. The challenge of finding anything notable in that strip mall hell was something we both enjoyed. One night we passed a trailer park in Santa Clarita with a shabby sign that said ADULT LIVING. Man, Jimmy said. The things you can look forward to. We speculated that maybe they had glass shower stalls in those trailers. Waterbeds. It was a place for adults. Adults only. We found a tavern on an abandoned county road that was itself almost abandoned. The bartender said she was in the process of buying the place, but didn’t want a Mexican clientele.
“Mexicans’ll stab you first thing, minute you turn around,” she said. She asked us how we thought she
might bring in more white people.
“Offer sandwiches,” Jimmy said.
“Damn, that’s a good idea.”
She and Jimmy brainstormed about her deli. “Pickles,” Jimmy said. “Potato chips.” She didn’t know he wasn’t serious. He was and he wasn’t serious.
* * *
On the wall above us in the woodshop were brochures with pictures of the furniture proudly manufactured by inmates at Stanville prison industries woodworking facility.
This is what we made:
Judges’ benches. Jury box seating. Courtroom gates. Witness stands. Lecterns. Judges’ gavels. Paneling for judges’ quarters. Wooden courtroom cages for in-custody defendants. Wood frames for the state seal that goes in the judges’ chambers, and judges’ seats, which then went to upholstery, next door.
Not among the state merchandise we built, someone, some time, had crafted a child’s desk, like you see in schools, with a hinge so the top can open, to store supplies inside. It had a small matching chair. The desk and chair were at the entrance to the woodshop. “That little desk makes me sad,” Conan said. I trained myself not to look at it.
When thoughts moved in about my mother, dead, really and truly dead, I reminded myself that Jackson was not dead. She was, but he wasn’t. I confined myself to this very small form of relief.
* * *
On weekends, Sammy and I went out to main yard. The sight of thousands all dressed alike is really striking the first time you see it.
People clustered, catching up and hanging out, playing basketball or handball. Girls brought out guitars and strummed for small audiences (no gathering in groups larger than five). Some huddled and did drugs. Others had love affairs in the port-a-potties, or out in the open, with lookouts—pinners—watching for cops.
It was summer, and the hot wind rippled our loose clothing, which ranged from the palest blue, to navy, to the granite-speckle of denim—our fake jeans. The denim is not fake. The jeans part is. They are pants sewn crudely of denim, with an elastic waistband and a single lopsided, too-small pocket, and they are not jeans as I think of the term.
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