When she wasn’t on meth, Rose was one of the cooler people I knew in jail. After I’d failed to take a shit for a week, she cheeked one of her prescribed laxatives and gave it to me at pill call. Laxatives were the crown jewel of jailhouse medication. And I could afford Rose some privileges, too. Just because you were in Dayroom didn’t mean you could shower and go out on the patio whenever you wanted, so we were programmed, too. When it was our turn to program, we usually did it with bottom tier, where Rose was housed. So when program began, I would sit by the phone and give it to Rose when her cell was popped open so she wouldn’t have to wait in line. She had a sick baby at home, and her man was locked up, too. She was stressed-out and needed that phone bad. Also, for being high on the world’s most effective appetite suppressant, Rose seemed to have a huge appetite for bread. Since I didn’t eat mine, whenever she asked, I slipped my daily allotment (six pieces) under the door of her cell. It was no skin off my back and it engendered an intimacy with her that I enjoyed.
Rose also came up with the idea of throwing the apple seeds from the soggy apples I was sure that the prison-industrial complex paid homeless people to exhume from dumpsters into a pill-call cup. She lined the pill-call cup with wet toilet paper that was really just one long roll of barely composted tree bark. This might explain why our asses burned like hell, but why the apple seeds sprouted.
Since her cell did not face east or west, she asked me if I could watch her sprouted apple trees. She wanted me to put them in the yard where I did yoga. I agreed, and watched as Rose’s apple sprouts thrived out there in the exhaust and tidbits of gloom straining through the mesh.
One day, a couple of women joined me in the yard, asking me to teach them some poses. Every day, my yoga “class” grew. As I helped the out-of-shape ladies move into poses (“Don’t strain, this isn’t the WWE! Don’t hold your breath! Listen to your body!” “Bitch, my body be screaming right now.”), I would watch the apple sprouts and swear they were growing faster than my time locked up was passing.
The sprouts were the only living green things in the entire place. You couldn’t count the turd-colored canned beans or even the mounds of rotted cabbage they served us at mealtime as alive or even green. So I fell in love with the apple sprouts the way one might with a newborn. I often found myself staring at them, thinking of my garden at home, the hibiscus tree with its large magenta blooms hanging over the meditation area, the fountain trickling, and the snow-capped San Gabriels looming on the horizon. I would only allow myself to think of these things for the five or six seconds it took for all thoughts of home to break my fucking heart.
LaRue and Rose’s affair with the Lord lasted exactly as long as Rose stayed high, approximately three days. When the kick hit, the shit hit. From then on, Rose did anything she could to get out of that cell. Which is why one day, as I was sitting around in Dayroom, I noticed a river of water pouring out of their cell, followed by every variation of “you motherfucking cunt” out of LaRue’s born-again mouth. Rose had clogged the toilet with her plastic meal bags and all that extra bread I’d been giving her. Now I understood her “appetite.”
When the deputy saw what had happened, he ordered both of them to “clean that shit up, you fucking idiots,” and then they were placed on twenty-four-hour lockdown in separate cells, which is exactly what Rose had hoped for—a chance to get away from nutjob LaRue and come down from the meth alone. By the time her detox ended a few days later, her apple tree sprouts were about two inches long, lush and beautiful and spring green. After her lockdown, she approached me during program.
“Do you have my trees?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, reaching for them under my bunk.
“Go get me that bitch’s pill-call cups,” she said, pointing to 18th Street’s pile of crap.
Rose was looking hale again. She was so pretty, even her elaborate La Virgen and gang tattoos appeared delicate and lovely. She was one of the few inmates who really made the blues look good. Her green cat eyes were always accented by her jailhouse “fake-up” mascara—a mix of coffee grounds, baby powder, and commissary lotion. And she was smart. She didn’t care much for politics, so she was friends with everyone equally.
I walked over to 18th Street and asked, “Can I have one of your Dixie cups?”
“Go ’head, güera.” She winked, then nodded to her pile of shit on the middle bunk. It was an act of uncommon trust that 18th Street allowed me to riffle through her bags for her collection of pill cups.
I brought the cup to Rose. She filled it with toilet paper and poured in about a teaspoon of water. Then she gave me half her apple sprouts.
“Thanks for keeping my trees alive,” she said, handing me the cup.
“Wow, thanks,” I said. I couldn’t believe she split her sprouts with me, but there they were in all their sapling gorgeousness. My love for them was immeasurable.
After four days, the “luxury” of Dayroom was stripped from me, when a mean, coldhearted dragon lady named Gutiérrez decided she didn’t like that her inmates had been replaced by Exit Dorm inmates in Dayroom while she’d been away on vacation. So she spent her first day back on the job moving us around. It took hours for this process to unfold. I was sent back to a cell again. At first, the dragon lady put me in with a butch lesbian who played Hitler in an EBI Dorm play about Fascism, an ironic note since it would appear I was the only Jew in jail.
I moved my mattress, the one-inch-thick plastic mat, and my “bedding” into Hitler’s cell and put my new apple sprouts on the shelf under the stainless-steel rectangle they called a mirror. I was not happy about moving in with Hitler. Though she had played the Fascist with much clowning hilarity and she was smart, I didn’t trust her. She treated me like I was beneath her, which always cracked me up. I mean, we were both in jail. Also, I didn’t like the way she lorded over her much younger girlfriend. The two of them would fool around with impunity, right in front of my yoga class. Every day. I was never sure why the lesbians never got in trouble. It was almost like the deputies turned a blind eye to the way they openly engaged in sex, while reprimanding others for stuff like dancing or laughing too loud. I didn’t really care what Hitler and her girlfriend did, I just wished they didn’t have to do it in front of us spastic blue-clad yogis sweating it out on the years-old, filthy, paper-thin yoga mats some soul had probably once managed to get permission to bring inside for the inmates.
After I secured my apple tree on the mirror ledge, I went out to retrieve the rest of my stuff—mainly my books and my “hygiene” (commissary-purchased lotion, baby oil, and shampoo, all pretty much perfumed water) when Beverly Hills Tiffany convinced Gutiérrez to move me in with her upstairs.
“Because we both like yoga,” Tiffany told her, with her oblivious pertness.
The deputy rolled her eyes and said, “Go ahead.”
I was surprised that Tiffany had made this arrangement, but I was glad. She was more of a known quantity to me than Hitler. I went back to get my stuff—my bedding and my beloved apple tree. But the apple sprouts were gone. Vanished.
“Hey, Hitler, where’s my tree?”
“What tree?”
“The tree. The little sprouts? I put them on this shelf.”
“Sprouts. What the hell are you talking about?”
“The plants in the Dixie cup?”
“There’s no plants in no Dixie cups.”
“But I . . .”
“Hurry up,” the deputy shouted. “Come on get your shit and get moving or I’ll change my mind. Hurry, upper tier, forty-six.”
“My plants,” I said.
Hitler shrugged. “No plants here.”
“You fucking liar.”
“Who you calling a liar?”
“You, you stupid bitch.”
I was about to cry.
“Hey,” the deputy shouted.
Beverly Hills Tiffany, with
her perky Jackie Kennedy hairdo and her yoga butt, said, “C’mon, Leslie, before she changes her mind. I don’t want to have to bunk with fucking Twynika again.”
I left Hitler’s cell an emotional wreck. The whole move from Exit Dorm had been chaotic and depressing, and now this. I was distracted, upended. Maybe I had left my sprouts somewhere else. Maybe Hitler had stolen them. I didn’t know. I only knew that I had loved and cared for my baby trees, and now the cupful of greens was gone. My heart broke.
In my new cell, I once again turned to Pema. She tells the story of a man who, before taking his formal vow of bodhisattva, contemplated what gift to give to his teacher. The giving of the gift is a focal point in the ceremony. Students are guided to give something that’s precious, that seems impossible to let go.
“As soon as he thought of something, his attachment for it would become intense,” Pema wrote.
Every time he thought about losing one of his treasured belongings, he’d practically collapse. Later, Pema mentioned the situation to a visiting teacher.
He said perhaps it was the opportunity for that man to develop compassion for himself and for all others caught in the misery of craving—for all others who just can’t let go.
I didn’t know how to do this. I was angry that Hitler had taken my apple saplings, yet I couldn’t even be sure that she did. I had loved my trees so profoundly, and sitting in my new cell, I had to ask myself why I was so attached to them. Was it because they were green, alive, because they struggled in that Dixie cup and the jail-issued toilet paper and yet, still, they grew? They were both a part of the world outside and my world inside, where I was surviving the odious hardship of county jail. The tree reminded me that I could survive anything, that life thrives even under duress. Now that it was gone, I suffered. I did not understand what Pema meant by cultivating compassion for myself in light of my attachment to the tree. Why? How would that help? I craved to have it back. I tried to grow my own apple tree but nothing took root. I was devastated.
* * *
One day our locks were clicked open on our cell doors. I heard them all pop like a machine gun, one by one throughout the lower tier, then upper tier. I assumed it was time for a class for some group of people, but then after a few minutes, I noticed the women in my area walking out of their cells, slowly, cautiously, as if going out for the first time after a nuclear holocaust. One by one, women timidly headed toward Dayroom, then the phones, then the showers. Soon, people were smiling. Happy. Was this program? Why so early in the day? Normally only one tier at a time programmed, but all of us were allowed out together. Usually the TVs were turned off, but now, they were all running. What was going on? I had no idea. But I, too, left my cell and lined up for a shower.
There was a different deputy in charge, a friendly-looking man who didn’t say much. When it became clear he had let us all out to program together, on his own volition, I was flabbergasted. It was unheard of. One hour went by, then another, and another. In my entire time there, I’d never seen anything like it. The inmates were unusually kind to each other, too, and quiet. The deputy’s trust changed everyone’s normally belligerent attitudes. He treated us with respect and never said a word. He just sat quietly, his face open and kind. It was the strangest thing I had seen, and I realized it was the first time I had witnessed an act of kindness by anyone in power in jail. His trust told every one of us we weren’t the animals they believed us to be. In turn, we offered him our good humor and our respect.
But like anything that might be perceived as good in jail, it ended all too soon. A few hours in, a blond-haired three-striped sergeant and her lackeys showed up and told us to pack up. We in EBI Dorm were all being moved to the next dorm over. And the inmates in the next dorm over, which held the GED students, were being moved into our module. Obviously this was absurd and unnecessary. But it was how they kept us in a state of anxiety and fear. I’m sure if I Googled it, I’d find the manual on coercion and submission they used. Even idiots know that if you just keep people moving, you will mess with their minds.
“Don’t freak out,” she said. “Everyone will stay together. You will all keep your cellmates. Now get your items and be ready to move.”
She dismissed our new deputy, and any benevolence we might have been deluded enough to believe would come from her ended abruptly. She began screaming and ordering us around. No one was moving fast enough. We were all slow and stupid. This was my fifth move in twenty-three days. I tried to be strong, but I was on edge. Even in jail you get attached to things: the view from your cell window, the placement of the cell itself on the tier, the way you can depend on when you will get your breakfast and lunch based on where you are in the dorm, when you will program, when you are likely to be released in the lineup for your commissary, and what time you will be popped for dinner. Moving disrupted these small things we grew to depend on, and the worst of that disruption was the delay of my books and my mail.
Tiffany and I watched for hours while they moved everyone out of EBI into the dorm across the hall, and the GED students from across the hall into our dorm. It was a meaningless and chaotic enterprise and made me think of the Nazis and their “orderly” disbursement of human cargo. As the hours wore on, though, it became clear that Tiffany and I had been left behind, along with about four other cells of two inmates apiece. They’d run out of cell space across the hall, we figured. No one explained any of this to us of course—withholding information was one of their clever tricks to keep us in line.
For the next several days, we were told we would be moved and to stay alert for our orders. In the meantime, I remained locked in the cell, unable to attend classes across the hall. Then one day, the ten of us who were left behind were popped out of our cells, told to line up, and escorted across the hall to the EBI Dorm. We were going to class. So I threw a bunch of candy in my blues pockets to help me through the next four hours, snuck a bottle of water in my tucked-in shirt, and headed across the hall.
Immediately, it was clear the new dorm was much stricter and, if possible, much more dreary. This new EBI regime ran on a high level of discipline that included seating charts and searches, and trustees (kapos) wandering around checking you. I wanted none of it. I was afraid, too, that they would figure out I was in EBI “illegally.” So when they passed out official enrollment cards, telling us they were going to check to see if we all qualified, I tucked it into the pocket on my blues shirt instead of filling it out, opting to stay under the radar. I knew, though, that without official enrollment, my days in EBI were numbered.
That said, I was fairly certain that since, incredibly, the LA County jail system was not digitized, and most of the recordkeeping was still on paper, they would have a hard time following up on most anything. With two weeks left to serve, I opted to stay as anonymous as possible. I wouldn’t push to gain access to the classes across the hall, but I would still take a typing class and an early-morning biology class in my dorm. When the doors were popped for those classes, I would sneak out of my cell and go down a set of stairs, away from the check-off point where the kapos scanned your wristbands. I would find a seat behind a giant support beam where I could not be easily spotted and read from handouts describing things like the human skeletal system or the conversion of sugars and starches to energy—information I’d learned in seventh grade.
That day ended up being one of the most interesting days of my incarceration. I was assigned a seat with some of my former dorm inmates, Hitler included. I knew that she had been forced to move because she was in EBI, but that her girlfriend stayed behind because she was in GED. Over the days that they had been separated, I had watched while Hitler’s girlfriend wept nonstop. She was inconsolable.
Served the bitches right, I thought, even though I still couldn’t be sure whether Hitler stole my tree or not. In any case, we sat there while the EBI teacher droned on endlessly about something meaningless—how to balance a checkbook or some lame thing
that no longer applied in the real world—and I shared my candy, and volunteered my test answers. At one point, Hitler asked me how her girlfriend was doing across the hall, where Tiffany and I still lived.
“She’s been crying nonstop.”
Hitler’s face fell. “Really?”
“Yep.” You thief, I thought.
“Is she . . . is she okay?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t talk to her.”
Hitler looked depressed. She put her head down on the table. Against my better judgment, my heart went out to her.
“I’ll kite her a message if you want,” I said.
One of the trustees walked by. “Keep it down, ladies.”
“Kapo,” I muttered under my breath.
Hitler looked at me hopefully and with surprise said, “You’d do that?”
“Why not? Just write a note. I’ll give it to her.”
Hitler smiled prodigiously. She got busy writing a note. Then she folded it up and told me what cell her girlfriend was in. I put the note in my pocket.
“I’ll be right back,” Hitler said.
She disappeared up the stairs to her cell. A few minutes passed and she returned to our table. She sat down, and out of her front pocket, she pulled the Dixie cup, smashed, but with the tree alive and well.
“Here,” she said. “Sorry.”
I started to cry. “My tree.”
Everyone looked at us. I began singing, “Reunited and it feels so good.” And the other women started snapping their fingers and singing along, until we were told to shut up.
“Thanks,” I said.
She nodded.
“I forgive you, bitch,” I said.
She nodded and smiled. “Thanks.”
Later that night, after I’d been marched back to the side of the floor where Tiffany and I (and Hitler’s girlfriend) were housed, I waited for program. When upper tier was let out, I went downstairs and kited the love letter Hitler wrote to her girlfriend. I didn’t read it, though part of me wanted to. I have not seen anyone happier in jail than that woman in that moment the letter landed. She pressed her lips against the glass on her locked cell door and kissed it, then mouthed the words, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
The Lost Chapters Page 12