Chocolate Quake

by Nancy Fairbanks

  2

  Storming the Hall of Justice

  Carolyn

  What does one wear to visit a relative in jail? A suit? Jason’s mother wore suits. Hoping that the weather would stay cool, I paired a tailored, smoke-blue pants outfit with a white shell and set out for the San Francisco Hall of Justice. The cabby let me out at the corner, the best vantage point from which to examine the building. A hedge and grass ran down one side with a large modern pipe sculpture near the corner. Behind the hall, one could see the handsome, round, glass jail buildings. The front of the Hall of Justice, however, was long and featureless, its only decoration blank windows and a stair to the large entry doors.

  The interior was equally utilitarian, although it incorporated pinkish marble floors, walls, and columns. The most interesting features were the weapons-check desk on the left side, an espresso bar with an awning plopped down in the center of the lobby, a snack bar whose selection ran from exotic juice drinks to ordinary junk food, and a number of misleading directories and signs, all of which gave conflicting hours for jail visitation.

  Trusting that my mother-in-law’s message was accurate, I took an elevator to the sixth floor, where I joined a mob of casually-to-scruffily dressed men, women, and children of various races and ethnicities, largely black and Hispanic. They milled around a desk in front of a red double door manned by deputy sheriffs. The noise was horrendous.

  I knew immediately that by the time I made my way to the desk, all the visitation slots would be full. If she had retrieved Jason’s message, my mother-in-law would be very irritated when I didn’t show up. While I was pondering this new low in our relationship, a strange thing began to happen. People in the crowd noticed me and pushed me forward. Of course, I murmured, “Oh no, I couldn’t. . . . Thank you so much, but I couldn’t. . . .” and so forth, but I soon found myself standing in front of the deputies’ table.

  Then I discovered why I had been eased forward. The female officer, Deputy Kinesha Jones, a powerful young black woman whose biceps stretched her sleeves to bursting, said, “You must be new. This ain’t the lawyers’ entrance.”

  “I’m just here to visit my mother-in-law,” I replied. “Gwenivere Blue.”

  “Oh Jesus. The professor. Hear that, Nacho? Her mother-in-law’s the tight-ass, hundred-year-old slasher I was tellin’ you about.”

  Her Latino partner, Deputy Ignacio Molinar, looked up from his list and said to me, “OK, you’re the last of the 11:00 to 11:20 group. Name?”

  People behind me were grumbling to each other that I wasn’t a lawyer, after all. I suppose the suit had misled them. I was the only person in the crowd wearing one. “Carolyn Blue,” I said. “Spelled with an L-Y-N.”

  “I.D.”

  I produced my driver’s license.

  “Texas?” He squinted at me. “The old lady ain’t from Texas. I’m from Texas. She ain’t.”

  “No, she’s from Chicago, and my husband, her son, and I are here for a scientific conference. Well, I’m actually a food writer, so I’ll be visiting local restaurants and, of course, trying to help my mother-in-law.”

  “Best thing you can do for her,” said the female deputy, “is keep her away from them big knives an’ tell her to stop tryin’ to cause trouble in the women’s section.”

  My heart sank. What had she been up to? Trying to raise the feminist consciousness of her fellow prisoners? Organizing a hunger strike? That would be just like her. She has no interest in food so wouldn’t miss it, while her converts, getting hungrier by the day, would also be getting more dangerous.

  “Here’s your appointment card,” said Deputy Molinar. “Be here at eleven. You show up late, you miss your group an’ can’t see her ’til next Saturday.”

  I nodded cooperatively. “Could you recommend a restaurant in the area?”

  Deputy Jones laughed. Nacho shouted, “Next.”

  The woman behind the man who stepped up said to me, “Nothin’ open around here on Sunday ’cept McDon ald’s, honey.”

  McDonald’s? I couldn’t write a column about the McDonald’s near the San Francisco Jail. Or could I? I began to edge my way toward the elevator.

  “You’re not a lawyer?” asked a young woman with pink hair.

  “No,” I replied apologetically.

  “Maybe you are, but you won’t admit it.”

  “Really, I’m not.”

  “You know a good one? My sister’s in for possession again, an’ if she don’t get a real lawyer insteada one a them public defenders, she’s in deep shit.”

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. “I don’t know any lawyers.”

  “If you’re visitin’,” said a burly man, whose jeans were riding at a perilously low ebb, “you know a criminal, an’ if you know a criminal, you know a lawyer.”

  “Right,” said the woman beside him. Her hair was braided down her back, and she was wearing a cerise flowered muumuu.

  Are these people going to prevent me from leaving because I’m not a lawyer and don’t know one? I wondered desperately. It wasn’t my fault they’d pushed me forward. I’d tried to decline the kindness politely. A chocolate-colored child took her thumb out of her mouth and said, “My granny’s upstairs. She’s behind the red doors.”

  At that moment the elevators released another flood of visitors, and I wiggled through that crowd and boarded an elevator. It wasn’t going down, but I didn’t care. Eventually, I’d reach the first floor, which I did and got directions to McDonald’s from the woman at the espresso bar. Had it been the twenties or thirties, I’d have been only a block away from Manilatown, about which I’d read. There I could have eaten something interesting like chicken adobo. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have been welcome. Manilatown had been a bachelor enclave of Filipino migrant workers, small business owners, and gamblers.

  Well, there’s nothing like an Egg McMuffin in frightening company while you’re waiting to visit the women’s floor of the jail. My poor mother-in-law. She wasn’t even in one of the fancy, blue glass jails, which probably had much nicer facilities and views.

  3

  San Francisco Jail #2

  Carolyn

  The Latino deputy led the first group up the stairs at precisely eleven. Breathless, I reached the top and got my initial view of the visiting facilities, a long glass window with partitions and telephones on either side. No chairs. I sighed and moved down the line to the middle compartment behind whose portion of glass stood my mother-in-law. She wore a v-necked orange shirt, which displayed some of her thin, wrinkled chest and arms, and baggy pants at least a size too big. Nonetheless, she looked as formidable as ever when she picked up the phone and asked where Jason and Gwen were.

  “As Jason said, he has meetings all day,” I replied, trying to sound pleasant. “Gwen’s back in New York.”

  “You left the girl on her own in New York City?”

  “She’s staying, under protest, with Charlotte Heyde mann, the widow of a friend of Jason’s. Gwen’s managed to become part of an off-Broadway company for the summer and—”

  “I’d hoped the girl would have found some more sensible path in life during her first year at university,” interrupted my mother-in-law. “Now, Carolyn, about your accommodations. With me in jail, perhaps you’ll see the sense of staying at my sublet. Paying for that fancy hotel when you can stay free at the apartment is—”

  “Actually, Hodge, Brune & Byerson is paying.”

  “Please take down the address. You can get a key from Mr. Valetti, who lives on the second floor. You’ll have to call ahead because the outside door requires a key as well. Tell Jason—”

  “But Professor Blue, I don’t know if Jason will agree. The conference is in the hotel where we’re staying.”

  “Nonsense. And why are you calling me Professor Blue? You’ve been married to my son for God knows how many years. Isn’t it about time—”

  “You’ve never suggested that I call you anything else.” I was so embarrassed and irritated that I con
tinued, “What did you have in mind? Mother Blue?”

  She gave me a withering look and replied, “I’ll have to think about it. Although thinking is hard to do with competing televisions in the day rooms and dormitories, not to mention the hubbub of my fellow prisoners, most of whom are miserably uneducated. The situation of the guards, however, is pathetic. I’m hoping to organize them while I’m here, and of course, I’m telling the prisoners to take their problems to the center before they end up in jail. Many are drug addicts, and we do refer addicted women to clinics. More than you’d imagine are mothers, and we have services for mothers in all sorts of situations. This experience has motivated me to insist that a service for women coming out of jail be organized.”

  “Don’t you think we should talk about why you’re here?” I interrupted.

  “You got a cigarette?” asked the man in the next area.

  “Sorry, but I don’t smoke,” I replied.

  “Tell him that smoking isn’t allowed, and that it’s bad for his health,” my mother-in-law said into her phone. “He should quit immediately and get a chest X ray. The city has free medical services for those who can’t afford them.”

  By then I’d got a second look at him and didn’t want to tell him anything. He had tattoos from shoulder to wrist on both arms, which were fully displayed because he was wearing a shirt whose sleeves had been torn off. However, Professor Blue insisted, so I told him. He responded by calling me a nasty name, after which Deputy Jones hauled him away, and the woman he had been visiting screamed at Professor Blue. “About the events that resulted in your arrest—” I began.

  “I suppose you could call me Vera,” she said, not sounding happy about it.

  I nodded reluctantly. “Well . . . ah . . . Vera, just what—”

  “Typical police inefficiency,” she snapped. “I didn’t kill Denise Faulk. I just found her. When I saw her lights on, I stopped at her office—with the idea of renewing our discussion on funding a library of feminist books for our clients. There she was on the floor, covered with blood and moaning, so I called down the hall for help and did what I could for her—trying to stop the bleeding, administering artificial respiration when she stopped breathing. Then other people came in and called 911, a detective arrived from the second floor, and the uniformed police and paramedics finally showed up, much too late, and then the detective who decided that I was the attacker since I was covered with blood. Now, does that make sense? If I’d wanted to kill the woman, I’d have done it and left instead of getting myself covered with blood trying to save her.”

  “And she died?” I asked, horrified.

  “Try to think logically, Carolyn. I wouldn’t be charged with murder, if she hadn’t.”

  All right. If my mother-in-law wanted logical thinking, I could provide that. “But she was alive when you got there? Did she say anything?”

  “She said books. With blood in her mouth, even that word was hard to understand. I certainly hope she didn’t have AIDS. I’m told San Francisco has a high infection rate.”

  “They’re mostly male,” I said. “There’s evidently a whole district inhabited by male homosexuals, and they call unprotected sex with each other ‘the gift of love.’ Jason read me an article about that. I must say that I was shocked and disheartened.”

  “I don’t know why you’d be shocked. Men, straight or gay, haven’t an ounce of sense when it comes to their penises,” said my mother-in-law sharply.

  Over the phone I could hear women on the other side of the glass commenting on Vera’s opinion of men. One said, “You got that right, Mama,” to which my mother-law-law replied, “I am not your mother, young woman.”

  “More like my gran’ma,” retorted the voice.

  “You see what I have to put up with,” Vera muttered. “Inane wit and abominable pronunciation and grammar.”

  “Up yours,” someone on the other side of the glass shouted.

  Oh dear, I thought. Bad enough to be in jail, but my mother-in-law seemed bent on making enemies of everyone in sight.

  4

  A Much-Interrupted Tale of Arrest

  Carolyn

  “I was telling you about Denise,” my mother-in-law continued. “She repeated the word books while I tried to stanch the bleeding with Kleenex. Not a successful en deavor, but that’s all I had at the time.”

  “What do you think she meant?” I asked.

  “I assume she was referring to the reason for my visit.”

  “But how could she know why you were visiting?”

  “Because that’s what we’d discussed the last time I saw her. Books.”

  “Did you hear anything before you went in or see anyone in the hall?”

  “Carolyn, I hope you’re not planning to investigate this yourself. I know you and Jason have had some strange experiences with criminals in your recent travels, but that does not make you a detective. I’d be quite embarrassed to think my daughter-in-law was bumbling around, asking questions about Denise’s death. The police will find out what really happened.”

  “But they’ve already arrested you. Obviously, they think you did it and they needn’t investigate further. Have you been arraigned?”

  “Of course not. It just happened Thursday—or perhaps Friday morning. I’m not sure what the time was when they finally took me to the booking facility. My lawyer tells me that the District Attorney’s office has forty-eight hours, not counting the weekend, to decide whether they want to change the charge or drop it.”

  “They ain’t gonna drop no murder charge, ole lady,” shouted a woman from down the row.

  “Nonsense,” Vera replied, and to me, “No doubt by Tuesday—”

  “You’ve been in here since Thursday, and could still be here on Tuesday?”

  “Please don’t repeat everything I say, Carolyn. These visits are limited to twenty minutes.”

  “Are the accommodations . . . are they—”

  “Dreadful. A woman my age should not be expected to wear such revealing clothes—”

  “What you care, Chiquita?” called a Hispanic prisoner. “You ain’t got tits no more.”

  “Or share a barred dormitory cell with three other women, none of whom have any respect for age or education,” my mother-in-law continued, quite unfazed by the rude comments. “Nor should I be expected to jog around a rooftop three times a week. I have already lodged a number of protests and shall certainly lodge more. For one thing, I want to teach a class in the women’s section, Feminist Awareness in the Twenty-First Century. I’ve never encountered a group more in need of such training, —”

  “Fuck that,” a different voice echoed in the telephone.

  “But the jail authorities say that a prisoner can’t teach, no matter how woefully uninformed these poor inmates are about women’s rights and other matters that should be of concern to them. The jail offers them classes in creative writing—poetry, no less—and safe sex. Of course, the latter is useful, although you’d think people would know about safe sex. But poetry?”

  “Perhaps there’s a therapeutic value in learning self-expression,” I suggested. Actually, I found the creative writing class an interesting and promising idea.

  “Poppycock. And then there is the food, which is quite unacceptable, and you know that I am not fussy about food. To give you an idea of how bad it is, some Irishman held a press conference after being jailed here and said that it was worse than what the English served to imprisoned terrorists.”

  “What’s it like?” I asked. A recipe from the San Francisco jail. Now that would be an unusual addition to my column, “Have Fork, Will Travel.”

  “The food meets state regulations, I’m told, which, if true, must be very minimal. I’m not the only person in the women’s section who considers the meals tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment. Of course, many are complaining about not being served their racial or ethnic cuisines—soul food, tacos, that sort of thing—although it seems to me that we get too much of it. When I said so, m
y fellow inmates responded very in temperately. The female population is approximately 50 percent black and 30 percent Hispanic. The rest of us are white and Asian.”

  Heaven help us, I thought. She’s fomenting labor unrest among the guards and insulting members of the minority jail population. We have to get her out of here.

  “Don’t look so alarmed, Carolyn. I’m perfectly capable of adjusting to unusual situations, especially when I’m in a position to do underprivileged women some good. Few in the academic world have the opportunity to spend time in jail. But then I was telling you about my arrest: the homicide detectives took me to their enclave on the fourth floor and asked me the same questions repeatedly. As if they thought I’d tell them something different if they asked often enough. Then they walked me underground to the booking facility where deputy sheriffs searched me for weapons, took my fingerprints and photo, and left me for several more hours in a cell by myself. Evidently I got private facilities because I was considered dangerous.

  “I must say that I was happy to be alone. Too bad my quarters weren’t soundproofed. The holding cells were full of drunken, foul-mouthed persons, many of whom were throwing up and screaming at one another.”

  “But didn’t they let you have a lawyer?” Her description of the situation was horrifying.

  “Of course, I called Margaret Bryce Hanrahan, the center’s lawyer, but she wasn’t available until the next morning, and I really didn’t see the sense in asking for a public defender. If I weren’t donating my time to the clinic, I wouldn’t be in jail, would I? My feeling is that they owe me legal representation.”

  “But does this lady know anything about criminal law?”

  “If she doesn’t, someone in her husband’s firm will. She quit there because they weren’t making women partners. Now they have to do all sorts of pro bono work for the clinic to appease her.” My mother-in-law smiled tightly.