Hard Luck

by Pascal Scott

  “What we’re doing here at Omega is a social experiment,” he began, for the benefit of a new admit—a pale, young white boy with disheveled hair who looked like he wouldn’t last five minutes in prison but had just been paroled out of a two-year sentence for possession of MDMA. Billy spoke with a rural Southern drawl that made him sound as if he had a mouthful of marbles.

  “We’re bringing together the outcasts of society. In this room, you’ll find the Aryan Brotherhood sitting next to the Black Panthers. The Mexican Mafia is here, and so are the Crips and the Bloods. In this room, there are cross-dressers and homosexuals, parolees from our state prison system, and inmates from Diablo who are re-entering society through our center. Everybody is here at Omega.”

  Billy looked around the circle.

  “You see, most of you came from families that didn’t want you. You were rejected. By the time I got you, you were like a sponge that absorbs everything around it. You had what people with fancy degrees call ‘spongy personal boundaries.’ Now we know that a person with spongy personal boundaries is a person who needs someone to tell him what to do. That’s my responsibility. My job is to teach you how to set your boundaries so they’re strong as steel. And the only way I can do that is by insisting that you follow my rules.

  “And the first rule is this: You will accept your new family. You are part of a new family now, a family that loves you just the way you are. Omega is your new family, the family you never had. Look around you. These are your brothers and sisters now.”

  Only the new admit did as he was told. He looked around the room. Everyone else looked at the floor or at their shoes.

  “All right then. It’s time for The Game. Who wants to start?”

  The question was met with silence. Billy let it ride. When no one said anything, he continued.

  “Well then, I’ll start. You, new boy.”

  The boy, whose gaze had moved downward in imitation of the others, looked up quickly. “Yes, sir.”

  “No ‘sir’ here, boy. You can call me Billy. What’s your name, son?”

  “David.”

  “David. How do you feel about being here at Omega?”

  “Ahh.” David hesitated. “I’m a little apprehensive.”

  “A little apprehensive?”

  David’s face blotched red and white. “Okay, I’m a little scared.”

  “A little?”

  Now he looked angry. “Fine. I’m scared shitless,” he asserted in a tone that was part sarcasm and part truth.

  “Scared shitless. Do you have a girlfriend, David?”

  “No.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Oh, fuck me. I see. You like the older gentlemen.”

  A few of the men in the circle chuckled.

  “Fuck you. I don’t like men at all.”

  Billy sat forward in his director’s chair. It was the only one that had been personalized. William D. Brandt, it announced in white letters on black canvas.

  “What happened to your girlfriend? You said you don’t like men, so I take it you like girls. You’re an attractive young man. You must have had a girl. What happened to her?”

  David’s knee bounced up and down in his loose jeans. “We broke up. I didn’t love her anymore.”

  “You didn’t love her anymore. Which leads me to conclude that you did love her once. Is that right, David?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wrong! How can you love someone when you don’t love yourself? Answer me that.”

  David stared at Billy wordlessly.

  “David? Cat got your tongue? Answer my question.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know. Well, that’s going to change. I checked your jacket, and it informed me that you’re in for twelve months with us. Now some of these good folks in this circle came to Omega voluntarily, and they can leave any time they want. But you are one of our parolees. If you try to leave, you’ll violate the terms of your parole, and you’ll go right back to prison. So, David, here’s what’s ahead for you at Omega. During the next twelve months, you are going to learn all about yourself and your miserable life, and the next time I ask you a question, you’ll be able to answer me. I don’t ever want to hear the words ‘I don’t know’ coming out of that pretty-boy mouth of yours again. Do I make myself clear?”

  David gave Billy a long glacial look before he answered. “Crystal.”

  “Now let’s start again. How can you love someone when you don’t love yourself? Answer me, David.”

  David was silent for a few minutes, looking around the circle. No one met his gaze.

  “I guess I can’t.”

  “You guess?”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  David exhaled loudly. “I can’t love someone else when I don’t love myself.”

  Billy relaxed, slouching back against the canvas of his chair.

  “There now. That wasn’t so hard, was it? This is how we play The Game. You’ve spent your whole life bullshitting people, but that stops right now, right here. There’s no bullshit at Omega. We tell the truth here.”

  David looked as if he was thinking that maybe he should have stayed in prison.

  “All right, Omegans, who wants to give David a haircut?”

  Chapter Three

  A “haircut” was Omegan speak for a dressing-down, an all-out verbal assault by the group aimed at one participant in The Game. All new admits were given a haircut during their first week at the Point, an experience that lasted from one to seventy-two hours, depending on how much psychological resistance the newcomer offered. If there were no new arrivals in the circle, then it was anybody’s guess who would be the victim of the evening’s assault. It all depended on Billy, who always led the attack.

  Tonight, it had been David, whose haircut lasted only an hour. He was easy to break, but then he was just a kid, Elizabeth thought. His weakness had been an unacknowledged attraction to other boys. In prison, he had been forced to fellate his cellmate. Billy got him to admit he liked it.

  Elizabeth figured they were in the clear and that Billy would call the session. It was Saturday night, after all, and the clock on the walnut-paneled wall showed it was 11:35 p.m. Didn’t that count for something? But no, with David broken, Billy turned his focus on her.

  “Elizabeth,” he said. “How are you doing?”

  Elizabeth took a deep breath and thought about the sex slave training she had undergone when she was just a little younger than David. Like now, circumstances had thrown her together with a dominant, sadistic personality who enjoyed humiliating people into submission. It was classic mind control, Skinnerian behavior modification. Anyone with an IQ above a hundred could see through it if they tried, Elizabeth thought.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Prison had given her many empty hours to fill, and she had filled those with books. In the short stacks of the library, Elizabeth had found a copy of Sal Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. From Alinsky, she learned about power; from Watts, about detachment. “The real action is in the enemy’s reaction,” Alinsky instructed. Watts claimed to be able to experience each moment with equanimity, no matter what was happening, by “sitting and watching, with the mind completely at rest.” Elizabeth applied both principles now.

  “Elizabeth came to us from our friends at the Women’s Correctional Institution in Diablo,” Billy was saying when she returned her attention to him. “How long ago was that, Elizabeth?”

  “Nineteen weeks,” she answered calmly.

  “Nineteen weeks. You counted. Elizabeth is what we like to call a hard luck case. You see, Elizabeth was rejected by her druggie mama when she was just an itty bitty baby. She grew up in foster care in Los Angeles and was raped by her foster father when she was—how old were you, Elizabeth?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Fourteen. That’s an impressionable age, fourteen. You can just
imagine what that did to her sickie.” Elizabeth thought what? My what? And then she realized Billy meant psyche.

  Billy stared at her for a long minute. She stared back. She didn’t blink.

  “Elizabeth self-emancipated when she was seventeen and came to San Francisco. But as so often happens with troubled youth, she couldn’t leave her troubles behind. In San Francisco, she met a so-called mistress in our underground kink scene, and Elizabeth became that woman’s sex slave. As you might expect, that didn’t go too good for our Elizabeth because a life of sexual depravity never does. But that’s all behind her now. Elizabeth is going to be leaving us in the not-too-distant future. Isn’t that right, Elizabeth?”

  “Yes, Billy.” With time off for good behavior, the prison system had advanced her release date from the fall of 1996 to the spring.

  “Just this week, Elizabeth earned her WAP. Her Walking Around Privileges. Forty bucks and a day off, spent any way she likes. Maybe if we’re all nice to Elizabeth, she’ll tell us what she did on her day off. It was last Monday, wasn’t it, Elizabeth? Monday is your privilege day.”

  “Yes, Billy.”

  Billy narrowed his blue eyes. They reminded Elizabeth of crackled glass marbles. Billy had marbles in his mouth and marbles in his eyes. One eye was always more open than the other because of a Vietnam injury, and the right side of his face was still partially paralyzed, giving him an off-balanced look.

  “Elizabeth is one of our gay residents. A Sapphic. Elizabeth is a female homosexual. Maybe she used her day off to visit one of her lesbian lovers. Did I guess right, Elizabeth?”

  “No, Billy. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

  Everyone laughed except Billy, who looked irritated. She’d be damned if she was going to confess what she’d actually done on her first day of WAP. Forty-eight more days of good behavior and she’d be out of this hellhole forever and an ocean away from this fucked-up state. She just needed to stick to the plan and not act impulsively, to remember that the real action is in her enemy’s reaction. She needed to keep her cool and stay Zen.

  “Does anyone have anything to say to Elizabeth? What do we think about Elizabeth being a lesbian?”

  Billy looked from face to face until he found a likely critic. “Raul, what do you think?”

  Raul crossed his arms, lifted his buzzed head, and looked down his nose at Billy. Below one eye, a tattooed tear threatened to roll down his cheek but never fell. Each arm was covered by a sleeve of red and blue ink. The most obvious tat was an Aztec eagle. The Aztecs were a Mission District-based gang that had been indicted in drug trafficking, murder, rape, and hate crimes.

  “I think it’s a waste of good pussy,” Raul said.

  There was more low laughter.

  “Yeah, man,” someone else said.

  “That’s a lock that hasn’t met the right cocksmith,” said a third male voice.

  There were two other women in the circle, and even they joined in.

  “It’s disgusting is what I think.”

  “I’m with you, girl.”

  Elizabeth didn’t hear them. She had stopped listening because she knew what was coming. They would all follow Billy’s lead. They would bully and berate and project their own insecurities onto the victim of the hour. Right now, it was Elizabeth. Earlier, it had been David. The next time, it could be anyone. Anyone except Billy, of course. He never got a haircut.

  Elizabeth closed her eyes and began counting backward from one hundred. Ninety-nine, ninety-eight…She followed her breath, in and out. Ninety-seven, ninety-six…The group was yelling at her now, but she could barely hear them. They were only a small annoyance, as unimportant as a buzzing fly.

  “Are you listening to me, Lezzie?”

  Billy was in her face, his big, ugly misshapen features twisted in scorn.

  “Yes, Billy.”

  They would never break her. No one would ever break her.

  Chapter Four

  Where she had been on her first day of WAP was not to visit some lesbian lover, as Billy had fantasized. It was to the main branch of the public library, to the cubbyhole that housed the phonebooks. After she had found what she needed, Elizabeth had ridden the Muni Six Parnassus to a house in the Haight.

  “Fuck,” its occupant said when she opened the front door.

  “Nice to see you, too. May I come in?” Elizabeth asked.

  She stepped back to let Elizabeth inside. “Lizzie Bundy.”

  “Mickie Forrest.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Seventeen years, give or take a day or two.”

  “Ya wanna beer?” Mickie asked.

  It was a violation of her WAP, but urine testing was random and seemed to happen mostly to Omegans with known substance abuse histories. Luckily, Elizabeth wasn’t one of them.

  “Sure.”

  She followed Mickie down the worn carpeted hallway into the kitchen at the far end of her flat in the Lower Haight. The kitchen walls had been painted a gaudy yellow over the original avocado green. A little of the green had bled through, giving the room a sick pallor. Mickie pulled two Coors out of a beaten-up Maytag and handed one to Elizabeth. As the refrigerator door closed, Elizabeth noticed a photo held in place by small black magnets. It was a young woman sitting on the back of a Harley—a dark-rooted blonde with a headful of frizzy curls and a get-you-in-trouble look in her big brown eyes.

  “Pretty,” Elizabeth said. “What’s her name?”

  “Denise.”

  Elizabeth twisted off the top of her beer and sat at a thrift-store table in a wobbly wooden chair that didn’t match.

  “So, what brings you to my humble abode?” Mickie asked, sitting across from her.

  She thought Mickie had lost weight. She didn’t remember her cheekbones being so prominent and her face so thin. She had the same eyes, though, the same blue-gray as hers. It was ironic. Strangers who didn’t know better always said they could see the family resemblance.

  “Can’t a girl want to visit her long-lost foster sister for purely sentimental reasons?”

  “Cut the crap, Lizzie. You want something. I remember you. Even when we were in care together, you always were playing the angles.”

  “You’re right. I was. I am.”

  “So. What is it?”

  “Today is my first day of WAP.”

  “WAP?”

  “Walking Around Privileges. I’m in Omega, the halfway house for ex-cons.”

  Mickie nodded. She didn’t seem surprised.

  “I went to the library this morning and looked you up. That’s how I found your address. And I found out something else.”

  “And that is?”

  “You made it, Mickie. You know what the stats are on foster kids. So many of us end up hooking or hustling or in jail.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So, you didn’t. You left it behind you in LA. You’ve got a pretty girlfriend, and I know you’ve got a good job with Brink’s.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Somebody told me how you stopped a robbery attempt. I read all about it today.”

  “What do you want, Lizzie?”

  “Maybe I just want to be part of your life again. Would that be so hard to believe?”

  “Honestly, it would. I haven’t seen you since you made up that lie about our foster father—”

  “It wasn’t a lie—”

  “And they sent you to the group home. He couldn’t foster after that, and that meant I got kicked out of his home, too. Things didn’t go so good for me after that.”

  “I’m sorry, Mickie. I know you ended up on the street.”

  “I’m not even going to tell you all the crap I went through.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But I’ve got my act together now. And you’re right. I’ve got a girlfriend and a good job. I don’t need you screwing up my life again.”

  “I can appreciate that.”

  Elizabeth took another sip of beer and then st
ood. The bottle wasn’t even half empty. Mickie had already drained hers and was getting another out of the refrigerator.

  “Are you leaving? Already?” Mickie asked.

  “You don’t want to me to stay, so, yeah, I’m going.”

  Elizabeth started toward the door.

  “Sis.”

  It had been a long time since Mickie had called her that. Elizabeth stopped.

  “Wait. Come back. Finish your beer at least. Let’s talk.”

  Elizabeth walked back to the table and sat down.

  “Be honest with me, Lizzie. What do you really want?”

  Elizabeth hesitated for less than a moment. “Money.”

  Mickie leaned forward, resting her forearms on the stained red and white checkered tablecloth. Her black T-shirt slid up over her wiry biceps, revealing a half sleeve of black and blue tattoos on her ropy arms.

  “How much?”

  “That’s exactly what I want to talk to you about.”

  On the bus ride back to Omega that evening, Elizabeth had watched as the sight of the city’s painted ladies moved past her window, the iconic row of colorful Victorian houses that symbolized San Francisco. Prison life had been mind-numbingly bland, all grays and whites and vomit yellow. San Francisco’s painted ladies were still as psychedelic as the 1960s in their wild reds and yellows and blues. Was it a coincidence that both she and Mickie had ended up in the Bay Area? Given their history in Los Angeles, maybe it was inevitable. If you were a free spirit, where else would you go?

  The only difference between Mickie and Elizabeth now was their circumstances. Elizabeth believed that everyone had a criminal element in their psychological makeup; they just needed the right environment to release it. It was like flipping the breaker in a fuse box. All you had to do was find the correct toggle, and the lights would go on. It wasn’t until she had asked about her health that she found Mickie’s switch. Elizabeth had watched it happen, observing the way Mickie’s eyes clouded with self-doubt. That was her tell, the weakness Elizabeth could exploit. The big secret. Mickie had epilepsy. Because of that, as a foster child, she had been labeled hard to place and bounced from home to home before landing with the Bauers when she was ten.