“That’s the elevator ride beatdown,” Duckie told me.
“Elevator ride?”
“They go for a ride in the elevator looking good; they come back later bloody.”
The outside world rarely hears about such abuses. And from my experience, most people don’t believe it happens. Yet, in 2016, the FBI’s probe into jailhouse abuse in LA County’s men’s central jail (they said they were probing the women’s jail, too, but that was just another lie) ended in the conviction of six deputies and two superiors, including LA County Sherriff’s top cop, Lee Baca. Each time another one of them was hauled away in handcuffs, I admit, I celebrated. Compared to mentally ill addicts and their petty crimes, the abuse of power and the violence by people wearing uniforms nauseated me.
While I saw what went on between deputies and inmates, it became clear it was not the inmates I needed to fear, but our guards. And I can’t say I was afraid they would hurt me—I was white, first of all, and had the resources to make trouble for them. I was more afraid of my response to them. They were not, as a rule, very bright, and it seemed to me when dumb people had the tacit approval to hurt others, the abuse was coarse and visible. They didn’t need to employ stealthy tactics: mob mentality, implicitly approved by the overseeing power, never has to hide its violence.
My biggest fear was that I would lose self-control. I worried that I would retaliate for their brutality and say what I thought about them to their faces as I had when I was arrested. To keep silent was one of the most labored experiences in my life. Anywhere else, I would have said something. But I had already made the mistake of calling police Nazi motherfuckers, and for that, being charged with battery. Though the arrest report, a defamatory mess of additions and deletions, rewritten and revised over several days, makes claims in an addendum that I bit an officer, there is no evidence that I bit or “battered” an officer. The truth, that I never touched him, matters not at all. It’s a waste of breath to attempt a defense. Drunk versus cop. Who do you think wins?
Nao, too, never flinched. She never fought back, either. She took it. Like we did. This is the advantage that bullies enjoy. Unmediated power. When not held accountable, that knife is a sharp and effective one to wield.
Nao’s difference made her invisible. Her voice had been taken by bullies and the parents who did not understand her. I remember when I read this how I had to put the book down to catch my breath. The anguish I experienced was acute, not just for my own sense of having been forgotten, of not being seen, but for everyone in lockup. Outside my cell lived the largely black and Latina population, the mentally ill, the addicted, the raped, the sexually abused, the uneducated, the poor, the beaten. Women whose silence is so deep, so profound, they shout, they break laws, they kill themselves, hoping someone will listen, and still, they are greeted by nothing. Disempowered. Invisibility is an epidemic in jail, as it is also the thing that lies beneath addiction, poverty, social exclusion, and being female.
Nao turns to her great-grandmother, the wise old Jiko, for help understanding her pain. It confuses her because, as I, too, learn, all good wisdom is hard to understand at first. Trying to make sense of the words old Jiko uses to characterize her experience, Nao writes in her journal: “I think it means that nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things—including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and even me and you—are just kind of flowing through for the time being.”
At Lynwood, then, I was flowing through for the time being. I was forced to face impermanence. Impermanence is a nice idea, but lockup seemed endless and abusive, like something I wore that was always too tight around the throat and belly. Ephemerality might be true, but you still have to live in your pain until it ends.
One day, Duckie asked, “Were you afraid when you saw me?”
“No,” I answered truthfully.
“Huh,” she said.
It was always difficult to understand Duckie, because she’d lost almost all her teeth to crystal meth. She was sentenced to a year for possession of six pounds of marijuana with intent to sell. Usually county jail took only misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes, but because the prisons, which house felons, were overcrowded, the legislature in California enacted a bill called AB 109. This made it possible for county jail to house nonviolent felons, slated for state prison, whose sentences were a year or less. Trading Band-Aid fixes for wisdom, the legislation perpetuated the overcrowding issue in California rather than addressing it. Because she was sentenced to a year, she had six months to serve on AB 109. She would be out a month after me, having served most of her time when I met her.
“My husband beat me and took my children,” Duckie said one day, weeping. She wept all the time. And when Duckie didn’t weep, she sang Mexican ballads in Spanish. She had a beautiful voice. She also ate hard-boiled eggs and pickles and the foulest of commissary foods she could get without fail in the jail cell. I hid my gagging in my bedding. At night, she snored like a sea lion. Never before or after have I heard anything like it—it was Olympic-class snoring, gold medal worthy.
“The first thing I’m going to do when I get out is get my teeth,” she said. “Praise Jesus.”
She said that she was locked up in the highest security unit of the jail, brought in on a 5150 psych hold from under the bridge downtown where she was living.
“Then God took pity on me and moved me here. To Pregnant Dorm.”
It was in Pregnant Dorm that she converted to Christianity and found Jesus. She repented breaking the law, including the prostitution she engaged in to pay for her habit. She had big plans for her release. In addition to getting her teeth fixed, she’d find housing, vocational training, a job. She’d been on the streets for so long, she didn’t know how to do much of anything. Abused, addicted, beaten by her husband, cast out by family, prostitution, selling drugs, doing time, losing time, spending time, avoiding time. That was her life.
“I love my babies,” she said, speaking of her adult children. Weeping. “He took them from me. Kicked me out the door. I am so ashamed. I was nothing after that, nothing.”
There was one section of Ozeki’s book that changed my life so profoundly that, as I read it, I felt a physical shift sweep through my body. I have never experienced anything like it before, where quite literally I knew after having read it that I was a different person. It was like watching my old ideas fall from a bridge and splash into the water below.
It began with a section about the shame Nao’s dad felt after designing an interface for the gaming market that prompted the US military to inquire about using it for real warfare. Nao’s dad wanted to install a “conscience” into the software so it couldn’t be used for mass destruction. He recognizes his desire to change the interface as a good act, but one motivated by a weak impulse—shame. It was the very same sensibility that lurked behind his decision to put such destruction into the universe in the first place.
Nao’s dad explains how the “politicians” in Japan have tried changing history by erasing the horrors of Manchu from the history books to ease the “culture of shame” in which the Japanese exist. “By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame. This is why I think shame must be different from conscience. . . . Shame comes from the outside, but conscience must be a natural feeling that comes from a deep place inside an individual person.”
All of a sudden, sitting there in my cell, I comprehended what a stealthy foe shame is. All it really wanted was for me to die in a pool of self-pity. I saw with amazing clarity its ridiculousness as I realized how shame as a state of mind so readily stood in the way of a person’s ability to redeem their bad behavior.
On the inside cover of Ozeki’s book, I wrote a list of how I thought shame destroyed people. It read as follows:
Keeps us mired in the belief that we are the sum total of our deeds. We mope around in the past.
While living in it, we slip out of the reality of our present.
It’s not real. It comes from the outside. Like a prosecutor, keeping you in line, by impugning your spirit. Un-divine.
Shame blinds us to our goodness. And when the good in us is in the shadows of self-hatred, we are incapable of acknowledging or fixing our wrongs.
Shame wants us dead. It’s the impetus behind every suicide. Therefore it serves no evolutionary function. If shame is useless, then I can let it go.
Writing this, I realized that when in shame, we stuff our potential for reconciliation into the darkness of our disgrace. It’s different from guilt, because in shame, we believe we are bad, while in guilt we believe we did bad. But what Ozeki tells us is that conscience is where transcendence really lies. It was the thing Nao’s dad was after, that deep, whole place within that knows right from wrong, that teaches us to act—in the Buddhist sense—lawfully.
I put the book down and tallied my estimable acts, all the things I had done long before all of this jail nonsense. No one, not a single person, and certainly not a prosecutor or a jailer, had to tell me that I needed to make financial and personal amends. My conscience was my only voice. I tracked down the guy whose car I smashed while parking drunk and wrote him a check for repairs the week I returned from rehab. I gave him the money and told him I was sorry. I began the long hard work of family therapy, at first dragging my family into something that made them afraid. Later they began to appreciate the opportunity to talk about how much I’d hurt them, without fear of reprisal—they were third-party safe. And while that was in motion, I made a list of all my harms and began to seek out the people who deserved my amends. I even contacted LAPD. Two of the many officers I encountered were gracious, utterly forgiving, and to this day, they each check up on me, sending me emails, congratulating me every year I stay sober, wishing me well. The good of that helped mitigate the horror of my last arrest, and the arresting officers’ cowardly assault on me.
I remember it was night when I read that passage, and the jail was restless as usual. I placed Ozeki’s book under my bunk. I stood up and, while Duckie snored, looked out the tiny window. Rain was falling heavily and had made Christmas lights out of the flood lamps on the side of the building. It looked like jewels were falling to the ground, and for a moment the scene seemed so beautiful and tender. I knew that I had crossed some kind of long bridge to self-worth and merit. I said these words to myself: You are an amazing person. You are a good citizen. You are a loving wife and mother. You are a loyal friend.
No jail sentence could ever eclipse the goodness inside my heart, that place in the darkness that Ozeki’s book shined a light on.
For all her sorrow, Duckie cracked me up. She was so funny. Completely out of control, it seemed, of her physical body. I remember once, while she was showering, I heard her let out a hair-raising scream. She ran back toward our cell shrieking, clutching a skimpy, jail-issued towel around her flubbery, ample body. Her hair, already unruly, was practically electrified by terror, and she couldn’t seem to gain speed with her weight and fumbling feet clad in plastic shower shoes.
“There’s worms in the shower,” she bellowed. “You can’t do that shit to me, man. I’m schizophrenic.”
Even though I knew she was scared, I could not stop laughing. And there were worms, not worm hallucinations. They were small and undulating in large numbers at the drain. Later the janitors or jailers, I was not sure which, came in and sprayed the showers, and at Duckie’s insistence, the drain to our cell sink. The poison was so toxic that she came back from class to find me literally passed out from the fumes and dragged me out of the cell, screaming hysterically to the deputy on duty, a small man who seemed frightened of her, “You’ve just killed a writer. That’s not gonna look good for you, man.”
Duckie was huge, and she ate unceasingly. But she was also modest. She would never take a shit if I was in the cell. I knew to give her that privacy during program. She also never showed her private parts when she changed her clothing. I knew it made her uncomfortable so I would suddenly have to read or look at a letter when she changed.
She also loved school and was so proud of her grades. Every A she received in the jail’s school, she made sure to show me. And, no surprise, she was also a hustler. She basically ran Pregnant Dorm.
While she was in school, other inmates—trustees—would come by.
Miss Jones: “Hello, Leslie. Good morning. May you be blessed today.”
One day, while Duckie was in school, Juana, a Duckie friend and trustee, came by. “Vanessa says you wanted to go to Catholic services, so we’ll pop your door when they start.”
I couldn’t remember telling her I wanted to go to Catholic services. I’m a Jew. But there were no services for Jews, and though I’d heard tell of a female rabbi—a notorious bitch who rubbed your face in your misdeeds—I’d never seen her. Once, reportedly, she took away an inmate’s medically ordered kosher meal because she wasn’t a Jew, she was African American. I requested to see her anyway, but she never showed up, which was probably a blessing. As a Jew, I felt completely alone inside.
But it was clear that Duckie, whose kindness and sensitivity was louder than her crass exterior, knew being locked up twenty-three hours a day was killing me, so she arranged for me to get out for all the Christian services, an hour every time outside my cell. Though I hated church, I was grateful to Duckie for making sure I could get out and move around. Going to church was a habit I repeated in every module, because it got me out of that cell. Still, listening to Jesus this and damnation that was excruciating—and I would spend that hour contemplating which was worse: lockup or church. Toss up.
Duckie also managed to procure virgin underwear for me, six pairs, size small, which I kept the entire time, washing them in the sink. For the duration of my sentence, I never had to wear underwear that had been visited by countless vaginas before mine. She also found thermals for me in my size. There were so few small sizes that nothing fit me. I never wore anything but XXL blues and I tripped over them incessantly. The few sets of blues, bras, socks, and thermals they had in smaller sizes were always taken by the kapos and sold to the chosen for commissary.
One day, after complaining about the unending sciatic nerve pain that I was afflicted with, Duckie stood up and went to the door. She was always screaming out orders in Spanish to the other inmates through the door.
She called out for one of the kapos, who came to our cell, took a note, and kited it (which means carried it, against rules, to another cell) to the door of an inmate in a cell across from our tier. In a few minutes, she returned with a handful of ibuprofens that she slipped under the door.
“Here you go,” Duckie said casually, handing them over. All in a day’s work. No big deal.
I was astonished, and grateful. “Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t mention it.”
She never asked for trade in kind. When my money came, I told Duckie to order whatever she wanted on my account. I entrusted her with my log-on. She could have taken advantage of me, but she didn’t. She only ordered envelopes, coffee, a Styrofoam cup, and fireball candy (for her coffee). Honor in jail existed. All of my bunkies observed a code of respect and honesty.
During program, while I wandered aimlessly, unsure what to do, who to talk to, when to shower, Duckie would stand off to the side and watch people, making sure no one bothered me. Imprisonment had been her way of life. She knew the inside of lockup the way I knew the subtleties of a teaching syllabus. If anyone even remotely looked at me crosswise, she intervened.
“You have a problem,” she said to me one day, “you just call Duckie, and I’ll take care of it.”
I cannot fathom why Duckie took me under her wing. Later, I saw a pattern in jail, of being utterly and completely cared for. It happened over and over again—the people I encountered showing me only love, kindness,
and respect—as long as they were inmates.
Often Duckie and I sat together during the countless, endless hours, biding time. Passing time, wasting time, killing time, squandering time. And yet I felt so present, so real, so painfully alive, that I could not imagine, like Nao could, that my physical body or my place in Lynwood was impermanent. I quickly learned that jail incarcerates time as well. But it incarcerates everything. I remember once, staring out my tiny window, alone in my cell, I saw a bird fluttering in the rafters. How it got there, I don’t know, but it was something I saw in every module I was moved to, and it always shocked me.
About eight days into my stay in Pregnant Dorm, the deputy called me. This one loved to use the loudspeaker, which meant you could never understand a word she said. It was just noise bouncing off the walls. So at first, I had no idea I was being called. Duckie says, “Go down there. They’re calling you.”
“You’ve got a visitor,” the deputy says. It’s my husband. I don’t want to go. I don’t want anyone ever to see me like this. I am too depressed to talk to anyone about anything. But I know that if I decline the visit Greg will be crushed. The visiting room is just outside the module, a cold narrow place with eight seats on two sides of the double-pained bulletproof plexiglass. I am set free—unaccompanied, that is—for one minute as I walk between the door of the module and the door of the visiting room. Ten steps of freedom. Except, of course, for the cameras and the guard in her bulletproof cube watching me.
The Lost Chapters Page 6