The six weeks before my incarceration began were torture, though. I stopped eating. I barely slept. I spent the days with friends who did not leave my side. At home, my family and I were quiet, in collective shock. One day, my friend Horace and I got tattoos. I had a wedding ring inked on my ring finger because I knew I couldn’t wear my diamond ring or wedding band in jail.
For Greg and my daughter, the pain was visible. It hovered over them. It was a different kind of pain when I went to jail than when I was active in my addiction. It was fear, of course, but it seemed hopeful, too. I was staying sober through the worst of things. If jail was what it would take to get on with my life, then so be it. They watched me carefully and later with a kind of pride, how I carried the weight of those charges, both true and untrue. They saw that I rose every day while I waited for my compliance date and walked through my life, determined. These were parts of me they didn’t see when I was under the lock and key of my addiction.
“It was rolling chaos spreading out into all these directions,” Greg said one day early on after the run had ended. I remember I was standing in the kitchen, talking endlessly about how hard my life was. He looked at me. “Are you serious?” he said. “Do you have any idea what you did to us?”
I grew quiet.
“I don’t really want to hear about how much it hurts you,” he said.
He was right. I never spoke about what happened from that standpoint of extreme self-centeredness again.
My daughter was more blunt. “Sometimes I would look at you when you were drunk and wish you were dead.”
I remember very little from the sentencing. I was in shock. It took me almost a year to understand the gravity of what I had done because the perceived overprosecution removed me from myself and embittered me. I couldn’t see over that visor of anger and self-pity for a long time. I remember at the time the grief on my husband’s face, the woe and speechlessness as he held my hand on that hard bench outside Part 45 of the LA County criminal courts building.
“This is so messed up,” he said. “This is so wrong.” I could feel it through his skin, how sad and bewildered he was. His love for me, so steadfast and gorgeous, pained me. All I could think was how much I had hurt him, my family, and the friends who loved me.
During that six-week interval between sentencing and incarceration, I felt like I was not really alive. It was as if I were floating above the earth, but only by six inches so the harshness of my reality could be endured, but from a distance. I read the newspaper every day, and every day I found a preponderance of local crime and sentencing stories; the kind of stories that never really interested me before. I would read about other people who had done so much more mayhem than I had and received shorter sentences. They were all men. I remember once reading about a college kid from Glendale, California, who had sexually assaulted two women, an act that would forever alter the lives of his victims. He received the same sentence as I did. He was out before I surrendered; in thirty days—seven days less than I would serve even though I had not assaulted anyone with my hands. Only my words.
* * *
It took me a long time—a very long time—to forgive the cops who beat me up, those men with guns who towered over me, but eventually I was able to. It happened in a flash one day some two years later. Somehow, I fully comprehended their own fear, their exhaustion, and the lack of services they received to deal with crazy people like me. I saw their humanness. Forgetting their harms, I looked to where I was wrong, and contacted them both so that I could apologize for being in the center of that night. They never responded. At the time, I understood why and I forgave them again. But that was a long time coming. Now, as I stood in line waiting to be transferred to the next place in jail, I only wanted them dead. Fuckers, I thought. Facing me would be facing what they did to me. Their silence had only revealed their cowardice.
All of sudden, a deputy shouted, “Let’s go, ladies. Hurry up.”
Shondra and I exchanged glances.
The deputy knocked me on the shoulder. “Keep your eyes forward.”
That touch burned. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. To keep his disgusting hands off my body. That they all wore gloves, like we were feces, incensed me. I remembered—was it a day ago, two days now?—when Greg drove me to Lynwood, how bleak the city looked, the endless traffic on the freeway, the low-rises, the smokestacks burning toxins into the air, the Section 8 housing. I thought about the way the poor were shunted off into the wilderness of projects to live by freeways and chemical plants, next to prisons and jails. I remembered Greg kissing me good-bye, the heartbreak in his eyes. I knew that I must live under the counsel of a higher authority, something bigger, more divine and more principled than my drunk self, the cops and lawyers who put me there. On some level, I knew that peace would come only when I stopped doubting the justice of God’s ways. The problem was, that authority felt gone and wasted. Self-pity and bitterness had erased my faith.
Yet I knew intuitively that I should not take to heart the misguided belief of those in the system that it was they who held sway over me, that by virtue of their robes and suits they were somehow better than me. I didn’t think that. I still don’t. What I can remember now is that I had to hold onto Greg’s love, my daughter’s faith in me, and the friends who had pledged to stand by me forever. Their incredible love and devotion was the biggest god I could manage then. And this: I had to hold onto that something; the kernel within that told me—which I knew was the undeniably lawful and just truth—that I was good. That I was worthy. That I was not the measure of my addiction. I understood that this information, however softly spoken, came from within myself, and that if I was still and listened hard enough, maybe one day I could be restored and redeemed to myself, to the people who loved me and stood by me, and to the people of my community, whose lives I had risked by my mistakes. But I couldn’t put any kind of god in that equation. Not now in this place. I was finished with that bullshit.
CHAPTER TWO
Pregnant Module
The litter under the tree
Where the owl eats—shrapnel
Of rat bones, gull debris—
Sinks into the wet leaves
Where time sits with her slow spoon,
Where we becomes singular, and a quickening
From light-years away
Saves and maintains. O holy
Protein, o hallowed lime,
O precious clay!
Tossed under the tree
The cracked bones
Of the owl’s most recent feast
Lean like shipwreck, starting
The long fall back to the center—
The seepage, the flowing,
The equity: sooner or later
In the shimmering leaves
The rat will learn to fly, the owl
Will be devoured.
—Mary Oliver, “Bone Poem,” New and Selected Poems
I am eventually sent to permanent housing. “Permanent housing” is a euphemism. More essentially, it means you will be permanently moving. The term “permanent” simply distinguishes it from the temporary holding cells in processing and medical where you get your five-second “checkup” from nurses and doctors who despise their jobs and you.
I am housed in Pregnant Dorm. I do not know why. At fifty-three, I am closer to being dead than bringing someone to life. But of course, it makes me think of my daughter, the months I carried her in my belly, the day of her birth, the fact that other than the 414 days of my relapse from years of sobriety, my daughter had never seen me drunk or high.
“Really,” I say under my breath. “Pregnant Dorm?”
Having renounced the puny God I thought I once had, I still find myself turning to an idea of God. Only now it is an idea into which I pour all my hatred. So my arrival among incarcerated pregnant women seems meant as some kind of cosmic cruelty, a continuation of the brutalit
y that began with the ever-widening gyre of my addiction and its consequences. Pain upon pain. Endless, ceaseless pain.
I arrive in Pregnant Dorm at 3 a.m. This is the preferred time for movement so that the other inmates don’t get agitated watching new people being marched into the module. I am sent there with twelve others, including Shondra. Shondra was, like me, in a very small minority in that neither of us had been locked up before. Most people, I discovered, had served time at least once, but most often two, three, four times. Especially the prostitutes who were routinely picked up, thrown into jail, and released. An endless wheel of arrest, incarceration, arrest, incarceration. I began to think of them as the income generators for the prison industrial complex. More tax dollars.
I am assigned an upper-tier cell. Unknown to me, I am “restricted” to a bottom bunk. Because she’d asked, I told the cunty nurse in medical about a broken shoulder I’d suffered a year before while intoxicated. The cunty nurse did one thing for me that would ease my incarceration. She “restricted” me to a bottom bunk, which meant I would never have to fight for it again. I only learned about this when the deputy in Pregnant Dorm told me so.
The deputy, in the usual detached and agonizingly slow pace, dispatches us to our cells one by one. I am second to last, after Shondra. I watch Shondra disappear around some bunks in what I learn is called the Dayroom—the main floor of the jail—and into a cell. I never see her again. But Greg, who met her when he dropped me off, sees her three days later when he returns to put money on my books. She has been released. He remembers her and gives her a ride home. It is from her that he first learns about the horrors of our experience. He tells me later it eats at him. He worries about me until we are able to speak. He worries about me until he can visit. Then he worries some more.
The deputy doesn’t look at me. She is busy looking at her desk, something very important there. In fact, these deputies, both men and women, are bored out of their skulls like we are, which is why they so often resort to cruelty and humiliation. It’s something to do.
“Cell 41,” she says.
I stand there. Where the fuck is Cell 41?
“Well, go on,” she says.
“Where do I go?”
For the first time she looks at me.
“Upper tier.”
“Okay. How do I get there?”
I have not had an opportunity to look around the module. I don’t know where the stairs are.
“You really don’t know? Have you never been here before?” she asks. Her voice is loud. The trustees to her right are staring at us. The condescension is something I will never get used to. It will keep me in a state of perpetual simmering rage.
“Well, uh, I’ve never been in jail before, for one,” I say, telling myself, Don’t get smart, this is why you’re here in the first place.
She looks at me in disbelief.
“Serious?”
Seriously, I think. Speak proper English, you bitch. To be talked down to by people who barely have a high school education is one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. And to think they are the ones carrying guns. No wonder, I think, so many innocent people are dead.
“This your first time?” She laughs. Like not going to county jail is something to be ashamed of, like there will inevitably and positively be a next time. This strange twist shocks me. How can I feel embarrassed that I’ve never been incarcerated before? And yet, somehow I do.
“Jones, take her up,” she says to one of the trustees. You can hear in her voice that I am Deputy’s burden today.
A beautiful older black woman with light blue eyes walks toward me. I notice the dark circles beneath her eyes. She exudes compassion. I breathe for the first time. I am safe.
“Come on, hon,” she says. “I’ll take you up, baby.”
She is someone’s mom, someone’s grandmother, someone’s auntie. She becomes my silent friend and the mom I need so desperately. I will find out later Jones is fighting her case. She has been ripping Nordstrom off, to the tune of thousands. They want her to do ten years. She is hoping with the time served in Lynwood—so far almost a year—she will get probation and restitution because of her clean record. From then on, she smiles at me, and when we become friendly she will hug me and then say, every single time, “I am so tired, Leslie. So tired.” Everyone calls her Miss Jones.
My bunkie is awake, waiting for me, casually eating a hard-boiled egg. She is an enormous, crazy-haired, toothless woman, with gang tats. Her name is Vanessa Rodriguez. She is El Eme, Mexican Mafia.
“Hey,” she says, smiling. She has no teeth. She is obese. Yet her eyes, there’s something there, a sweetness.
“Hi,” I say. I am exhausted, but wired.
“First time?” she says.
I nod.
She holds out some horrible food item that she’s fished out of a cup (it looks vaguely turd-like) and offers it to me.
“Oh, no thanks,” I say. “But thanks.”
“Here,” she says, putting her cup with the corpse of food within down on the desk. “Let me show you how to make a pillow.”
She does some crazy thing with my sheet and the two-inch plastic mattress so that there is a rolled-up pillow at the end. This move can only come from practice, I think. I will never figure out how to do it. Later, she will tell me she is called Duckie. Only I am allowed to call her that. And that is how I will remember her. Always. With insane love. Duckie.
* * *
Boredom. It’s physical. It visits you almost immediately in jail. It is like a spore and it takes over. You grow heavier and heavier from it. Very quickly every part of your body is suffused with its implacable hold over you. This boredom is mean. It tells you that you will always be there.
Before my date with Lynwood, I found out that I am allowed three books a week to be sent to me from Amazon. They must arrive unopened, with a shipping label. I am desperate for these books. My first week passes with nothing. Some days I am blank with depression, others terrified by the appetite of my yearning for what I don’t have. Each day that passes without them feels as if I have spent another day un-alive.
One day, during those first dissociative days in Pregnant Dorm, I visit the so-called library during program. “Program” I learn is both a noun and a verb. The way jail is set up, inmates spend twenty-three hours a day locked in their cells. “Program” is the word they use for the one hour that the deputies let us out of our cages, but only if we’ve been good doggies. During program, you showered, made your calls, and if you felt like it, exercised in the fifty-square-foot patio. It wasn’t outdoors, but it was close. There was a twenty-foot wall and, on top of that, two feet of razor wire that blocked access to the outside. Once, I saw a flock of seagulls drift past. Mostly, you just heard the cars from the 105 Freeway. On the patio, you had the opportunity to breathe in smog instead of jailhouse funk.
In addition to being both a noun and a verb, I am struck by the word itself: “program.” Program is also a thing you do when you want to brainwash people, mold them into your lackeys or followers. Cult leaders program their recruits. Jailers program prisoners to feel worthless and forgotten. In Lynwood, they use program as a weapon. If one inmate does one thing they don’t like, they shut it down for everyone. We stay locked up for twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours. Whatever. They don’t care. Shift changes and the new deputy does what he or she wants. Whenever I hear the word “program,” which is often, I always bristle.
On this day, I head to the “library” during program. The “library” in Pregnant Dorm consists almost exclusively of a two-tiered metal cart of Bibles, study guides for the Bible, Bible excerpts, Bible journals, Bibles in español, and AA books. It is not a separate room. It’s just a pitiful shelving unit. Then, across the Dayroom, under the stairs to the upper tier, I see another metal shelving unit, an explosion of books all over the place on the floor. I’ve
hit the motherlode. Here there are torn paperbacks—mostly romance novels with booby women on the cover and men wearing tights with bulging penises. But I see some John Grisham. There’s Stephen King. I could stomach that, if I ran out of my own. Then I find Ethan Canin’s collection of short stories. What the . . . ? I put it in the ginormous pocket of my gargantuan prison blues. I feel like I am stealing something.
Next to me is a small, pregnant young woman. She’s African American. I try to make polite conversation with her.
“Wow, slim pickings, huh?”
She doesn’t look at me and she doesn’t answer. It is as if I am not there. I tell myself, You are not here, you are not here. Sort of like Dorothy’s “There’s no place like home.” Only I open my eyes and I’m still there, next to a woman who won’t acknowledge me because, I believe, I am white. She wanders off. I have the books to myself. It almost looks like someone donated a Santa’s bag of library rejects—some even have Los Angeles County Library stamped on the binding. So many are torn and ratty, but others look brand-new. I notice some have the booking numbers of other inmates and realize they’ve been left behind. I am giddy about this overflowing shelf of goodness because of the hidden gem of Ethan Canin. There must be more, I think, if I just go through it with patience. I feel like I am searching for buried treasure. It is the first time I feel joy since I waited outside to start my sentence.
All of a sudden the pregnant woman returns. She hands me a book.
“You might like this,” she says.
It’s called Esther and Ryzhy. It’s about two Jewish grandmothers who survived Stalin and the Nazis. I look up to thank the pregnant woman, but she is gone. How weird. The spooky thing about jail, I will find, are these small incidents that arise, as if out of smoke. Like a magic trick. She must have figured I was Jewish. I don’t know how, though I suppose most people’s Jewdar goes up when they look at me. Regardless, I chose to view her gift as the olive branch it was for the words she couldn’t say to me. The gesture of literature—one that she took the time to think would appeal to me—was marvelous. Kinetic almost. I felt the wizardry then of books: how they unite us, how they can fill the void when words can’t be spoken. I wanted to thank her, but I realized I had hardly looked at her myself. Was her unsolicitousness a reaction to my perceived rudeness? I had spent so little time looking at her that I really had no idea what she looked like. I gazed out toward the Dayroom, guilty.
The Lost Chapters Page 3