We were all waiting for afternoon count—you have to sit on your bed until it’s completed—when Laura Lipp announced to our room that she had a surprise for us, not a good one. She lay back in her bunk and gave us her Juggalo grin, elated to be the bearer of bad news.
“Spit it out, psycho,” said Teardrop.
“I know you all love nicknames, but I don’t answer to Psycho.”
Teardrop grabbed Laura’s hair and yanked. “Say it and shut up.”
Laura cried in pain, her hair in Teardrop’s fist.
“There’s a man in this prison! There’s a man here and they want to put him on C yard!”
* * *
What outraged people most, as the campaign grew, was that this prisoner, Serenity Smith, had killed a woman, before he operated on himself and became one. A hysteria brewed that a dangerous man was being placed among us, and that we would be left to fend for ourselves. We might have to share a room with him. Undress in front of him. Shower next to him. And he was evil, evil, evil.
Because Laura spilled the beans, they delayed mainlining Serenity Smith, hoping the situation would calm down.
Factions formed. Conan, who had to endure the daily humiliation of “Miss” and “Ma’am,” who had to get a series of psychological evaluations and fill out endless paperwork and wait years for approval in order to simply wear boxer shorts instead of granny drawers, was on the side of acceptance. He and some of the other stud broads on C yard, our version of men, had a community and they decided, as a group, that it was important to support Ms. Smith, as Conan respectfully referred to her. To welcome her. Because cops were assholes about anyone who didn’t conform to narrow gender norms, and we, they, hated cops, and needed to stick together. I wasn’t excited to possibly room with a woman who had been a man who had cut his own dick and nuts off. But as the tension brewed, and I heard about the plans to jump this person, clobber her, I saw the face of a woman I had known at the Blue Lamp, on Geary. She sat at the bar dressed like a secretary, in a glossy auburn wig. She was petite and exceedingly feminine. Pretty, but strange. She had a scratchy voice like someone with permanent laryngitis. I guess she was biologically a man but no less female, and fragile, for that. She sat alone at the bar, sipping at the needle-thin straw of her gin and tonic. She pursed her pink painted lips and waited to be approached by men. I remember her leaving with one, and returning, later, with a black eye covered in makeup. Is that woman from the Blue Lamp with her pink lips and her auburn wig, her ritual lonely post at the bar, is she still alive? Maybe not. Just because Serenity Smith had previously been a man didn’t mean she wasn’t vulnerable.
* * *
They kept Ms. Smith in protective custody. When they moved her, it was like they were moving someone on death row, double escort, with sharpshooters trained on her from the gun towers. Women screamed obscenities. She was gassed with jars of urine.
The anti-Smith struggle was a hate campaign, complete with biblical passages and claims about morality and Christian values. Laura Lipp used the copy machine in the clerk’s office to make flyers. She wrote letters to the governor, the warden, congresspeople, whoever else. Her mother was campaigning outside. Laura flipped her shiny sheet of hair and claimed outrage that a killer would be housed among us.
* * *
I had started helping Button with her homework for Hauser’s class. I took more pleasure in it than I would have guessed. It was a big-sister thing. Sammy was my big sister and I was Button’s, and Conan was something like the dad. We had a family. It was not that comforting, but it was something, even if Button was a pain in the ass. Always angry, and ready to fight. But when Teardrop ate Button’s pet rabbit, I saw a different side to Button.
Teardrop had boiled the rabbit in a pot with her stinger while the rest of us were programming. When we came back for afternoon count, the room was infused with the heavy smell of cooked meat.
“What kind of spread is that?” Conan asked.
Brunswick stew, Teardrop said.
Afterward, Conan kept saying, “Didn’t even have no seasoning, I mean nothing,” as if that was the infraction, eating Button’s pet rabbit unseasoned. “Anyway, a proper Brunswick stew is squirrel, not rabbit.”
Button crawled into her bunk with her rabbit’s little shirt that she had sewn. She stayed that way for a day.
“Are you sick?” a unit cop shouted at her.
Button, face in her pillow, did not answer.
“If you are not sick, and not going to your assigned program, I’m writing you up, Sanchez.”
The way Button clutched the little shirt reminded me of how Jackson held his stuffed ducky when he slept. He had been sleeping with the ducky since he was a baby. He would grip it tight, all night long. The last time I saw the ducky was the night I was arrested. Jackson, crying, police all around him. Holding his ducky and screeching, Mommy! Mommy!
“You can get another rabbit,” I told Button. “You’re good with them.”
Eventually she did, and trained it, put the same clothes on it, gave it the same name.
Only once had Button talked to me about her own baby. She told me what happened. From prison they took her to a hospital, where they stored her in a room with an armed guard. The guy even followed her to the bathroom, where she tried, in cuffs, a waist chain, and ankle shackles, to clean herself, wash the blood and afterbirth from the insides of her legs, put on the postpartum underwear and giant maxi-pad they tossed her way.
“They had somebody on me the whole motherfucking time.”
I pictured a cop standing over the newborn, already half criminalized, the cop watching it to be sure of no sudden movements.
Button had been badly torn up by the birth, and could barely walk from the stitches a doctor had given her. “A woodpecker,” she said, “with a do-rag that had American flags all over it. Not one flag, but many flags, all different sizes. All I could see was that pattern on his head as he sewed me up. These fucking flags. I said, How many stitches am I getting? He goes, Try not to think of it like that.”
A nurse gave Button a squeezy bottle with stuff to squirt on her stitches so she would heal right. Button was shackled to the bed, but the nice nurse held the baby girl up to her. Button had forty-eight hours to find someone to claim her. Button wasn’t sure she knew anyone who had a working car and could get to Stanville to take a baby. She watched the baby breathe, in its hospital crib. Stared at the baby’s perfect little face as she slept, the closed violet eyelids, the little mouth. In her exhaustion, Button slept, too. Woke up and her baby was gone. The guards said to get dressed. She put on her prison clothes. They said she could not take the squeezy bottle for her stitches. She was shoved in a van cage, where she bled all over the hard plastic seat and was in so much pain from her torn-up crotch that she had to sit on one buttock for the entire ride back to prison.
* * *
Jackson had asked me where his ducky came from. “Your dad gave it to you,” I said. He looked at his ducky with love and wonder. Kissed it.
His dad never gave him anything. That kid Ajax from the Mars Room had stolen it for me in an airport gift shop, on his way back from visiting his family in Wisconsin. I’ll give it to my son, I’d said. He looked confused, like he’d forgotten I even had one, but I kept Ajax at a distance and he and Jackson had never met.
* * *
I told Hauser I read Jesus’ Son, and asked him why he chose that book. I was paranoid he thought I was a no-good ex-junkie like the characters in the stories.
He said he gave it to me because it was excellent. That it was one of his favorite books.
There was one story where two guys strip copper wire out of a house, and the main guy sees the other guy’s wife floating in the sky and thinks he’s entered the other guy’s dream and it all made sense to me, I told Hauser. I said I knew people who did that, stole copper. Some of them were like the guys in the book, drug fiends looking for quick money, but there were others who did it like it was a profession.
Hauser ke
pt getting me books, and after I read them, I passed them to Sammy, who read them, too. Sammy and I had both skipped seventh grade. We didn’t either of us turn out honors students, so it’s a strange coincidence. I’d gone to schools with Mexican girls, and we shared attitudes and a certain look: black chinos, Chinese shoes, the Maybelline eyeliner you heat with a lit match, and so I could reminisce with Sammy to pass time. On weekends I’d sometimes go to her housing unit and look at her photo collection. I’d get to see the visuals of all the stories she’d told me when we were locked up in ad seg together. Pictures of her when she was young, and of other people, friends of hers from over the years. Her at CIW, a women’s prison down south, which Sammy called CI Wonderful. “It was before mass incarceration,” she said, as if mass incarceration were some kind of natural disaster. Or a cataclysm, like 9/11, with a before and after. Before mass incarceration.
They’d had a swimming pool at CI Wonderful. There were bathing suits, state-issue, but you had to wear your underwear inside them because they were shared. I reveled in these details of prison the old way, before now. I’m sure it was lousy but according to Sammy some people had goldfish in tanks. They didn’t have huge towers with gunners and miles of electric fence. It wasn’t concrete living. The rooms had wood shelves, and wood cabinets. They had green grass. Their canteen was stocked with makeup you could buy, and everyone’s favorite was a lipstick called purple flame. There was a golf course next to the prison grounds, she said, and someone’s boyfriend had dragged a batting machine onto the golf course and batted balls stuffed with heroin and jewelry into the prison’s main yard. When I felt low, Sammy would tell me stories about CI Wonderful. It was paradise before the fall.
Sammy’s whole collection of pictures was prison photos. One was of a sad, beautiful girl named Sleepy who was life without parole. It was Sleepy’s only photo of herself, Sammy said. Sleepy gave it to her when Sammy was released to Keath. This girl Sleepy had no one. She gave the picture of herself to Sammy because she wanted to be sure someone free remembered her, thought of her from time to time. I never met Sleepy. She was transferred north before I arrived. But I knew why Sleepy gave that photo to Sammy, what she wanted from her. There was something about Sammy that came from, and stayed in, the world—the old one, the free one. Poor Sleepy had probably thought that if she could live in Sammy’s heart, she could live. It made me so depressed I wanted to tear up the photo when Sammy wasn’t looking.
* * *
There was nothing to celebrate but sometimes we had parties. It was Conan’s passion to plan them in our room. He had been getting everyone to set aside psych meds. What you do is buy peanut butter from canteen, or, if, like me, you have no money for canteen, you share Conan’s peanut butter. Put a dab of it on the roof of your mouth before you go to pill call. When you open your mouth like a horse to show them you properly swallowed your meds, you’re cleared, but the pill is in the peanut butter, unswallowed. Those with dentures hide the pill under them. Some people just cheek it really well. People from all over unit 510 had contributed. Conan unveiled the stash of pills after evening count. He mashed them with the bottom of a shampoo bottle and made “punch,” which is pills dissolved in a container of iced tea. It’s a short island iced tea. Sammy snuck over to our unit and came to the room during unlock, when the big hand on the clock was in the imbecile’s red wedge.
“I’m feeling streaky,” Conan said, and mixed the punch.
I wasn’t myself feeling exactly happy as I gulped my share. Sammy refused her cup. She was staying clean, she said. I knew I could stay clean and still drink punch. We aren’t all the same. It was a Sunday night. Conan put on the radio to Art Laboe’s request and dedication show, which was everyone’s weekly favorite.
“This one is from Tiny, up at Pelican Bay, for Lulu, aka Bonita Blue Eyes. Tiny wants to tell Lulu he loves you more than anything, and his heart will always be yours. He’s there for you through and through, and he is never going anywhere.”
“That’s ’cause the motherfucker doing life,” Conan said.
An oldies song came on. The trills and dollops of the singer’s voice pelted me with unwanted sensations of longing. I drank another cup of punch.
At the next unlock, people crowded into the room. Laura Lipp put her pillow over her head and tried to ignore us. Conan played booty music and Button danced for us.
Later I danced for us, too, but I didn’t have a clear memory of it. Just Conan telling me, after, “Sometimes you see something and got to have it.”
Conan was strong, and muscular—he had that name for a reason—and he made me laugh. I stopped laughing when I ended up in his bunk that night, and the soft army of his tongue went to work. Jesus Christ, I kept whispering. Instead of his usual comic retort, he went deeper. We were still at it when I heard an incredible bang. The noise shocked the hell out of Conan, who reared up and gashed his head on the upper bunk. It was Officer Garcia, who was on night watch in our unit, banging on the window with his billy club.
The mood was ruined, so Conan and I cut out the unexpected bunk session. I wrapped his wound, which was bleeding, and we drank more punch. Everyone crowded into the bathroom, which the cops can’t see into from the observation glass.
Maybe because she was young and small, Button was the most sideways. She started talking about God. She said it was God who was in the guard tower on the yard. Which tower, someone asked, Tower One or Tower Two? She said, “He’s got the high field on us. He sees us.”
Conan said, “That’s not God. That’s Sergeant Rintler, one more Elmer Fudd up there, taking naps, jerking off. Duck-hunting motherfuckers.”
Conan adopted a cowboy twang. “Ma’am, step back, ma’am. Don’t make me write you up, ma’am.”
Button started to cry. “But they control the whole sky. This is the world now. If He’s not in the towers, where is God? Where is He?”
Laura Lipp walked into the bathroom. We stopped talking and stared. She looked like the Exorcist. She’d snuck punch from us. She was loaded.
“I’m from Apple Valley,” she said.
“We know,” everyone shouted. Sammy stood to push Laura out of the bathroom.
“But I never knew. I didn’t listen. Didn’t hear. I never understood what that means. The valley of apples. It’s about temptation. Right? Sin. See? Poisoned fruit. Oh, it feels so good,” she said, “to have a place to put your anger, to punish someone like you’ve been hurt. That is the truth and every woman like me knows it. The one who hits her child with a hanger or a belt or who shook a baby, it’s all the same. You do it because it feels good. They won’t say. They won’t tell you how it is. They don’t have the courage. I’m telling you. The devil goes in us and we do it to feel good. I wish they had stopped me but no one did. God, He stopped the hand of Abraham. He intervened. But where was He when I needed him? He wasn’t there. No one helped me. No one.” She stumbled like a blind person, kneeled on the floor on her hands and knees, and sobbed.
* * *
I took the liberty of sleeping in Conan’s bunk that night. Things had gotten so weird that I needed the company of someone not-insane.
I dreamed I had just won on The Price Is Right. There was a crushing sound of applause, cheers, and whistles when my name was called. It was a deafening waterfall of clapping and screaming. I was trotting toward the stage in this pounding noise, the cheers of the studio audience, when I woke.
Conan was already up, dabbing wet toilet paper where he’d bled from his head wound. I adjusted his bandages.
“My head is killing me,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep because I kept being woken by this zrrrrp, zrrrrrp, like someone was trying to restart a car that was already idling.”
“I dreamed I won on The Price Is Right.”
“It’s . . . a new car! The thing about that show is the woman doesn’t come with the car. You don’t get her. Just the car.”
We all suffered pill hangovers at work that day. “I feel like Blacula,” Conan said. “Th
at final scene where the sun hits him, and he’s just greasy layers of smoke rising up from the clothes he had on.”
At lunchbreak in the woodshop, Conan gave me the “I’m not actually into snow bunnies” talk. I loved Conan, but not like that. It was play incest in my play family and we were just friends.
Officer Garcia passed by the shop. Conan yelled, “Yo!” He pointed at his own bandaged head and glared at Garcia.
I ran into Hauser while waiting to go through work exchange.
I have some news for you, he said.
He had been able to find out who Jackson’s case manager was. I started thanking him profusely and he said thanks were not appropriate.
But you went out of your way, I said.
“Your parental rights were terminated. I’m not sure if you were aware?”
“Terminated meaning what?”
“I was told they do this so a child can be fast-tracked for adoption. So that children can join new families. I wasn’t even supposed to be told this. The woman was doing me a favor by looking up the case. All she could say is that on account of the length of your sentence your rights were terminated and the child is in the system.”
“I’m in the system. Jackson is a little boy. He doesn’t belong in a system.”
“What I was told is that he is a ward of the state. I think that means he’s in foster care.”
“Where, do you know? Can I write to him?”
“I don’t think you understand,” he said. “And I didn’t either, until it was explained to me. But finding out where your kid is, inside the child welfare bureaucracy, it’s like trying to find out information about a complete stranger. Except the stranger, in this case, leaves no accessible records, on account of all the layers of privacy rules for minors.”
“But I’m his mother. They can’t tell me I’m not his mother. He needs a mother. Why are they doing this?”
The Mars Room Page 21