“We could have ran this place,” Sammy said, meaning Latinas, “if most of us weren’t high.”
“Good idea, though, to trade up for a spare drumstick, mix it with corn and stuffing,” Conan said. “Maybe squeeze in some nacho cheese, add pickled jalapeños. They weren’t fucking around with that piece of meat. It was serious. That was no Mortimer portion.”
Mortimer was supposedly a woman at Stanville who sued the prison. Because of her, they had to serve us exactly 1,400 calories a day, so that we could not sue them for our fatness like Mortimer did. The Mortimer portion is not enough food. But instead of blaming the prison, the staff tells us to blame Mortimer, who ruined things for the rest of us by filing a 602 inmate complaint that became a frivolous lawsuit. There were a lot of rules like that, with a prisoner’s name attached to them. To get medication, you stood in an Armstrong box. The Armstrong box is a red square painted on the floor around the pill counter. It’s for privacy. If you were not called to the window, if you were even just walking down the hall and your foot went over the red line of the box, you got a 115, thanks to a paranoid named Armstrong.
We hated the prisoners who ruined it for everybody else, but these people probably didn’t exist. Sammy told me where 602s actually went: into a paper shredder in the assistant litigator’s office. I doubted a prisoner could make history, get her name attached to a new rule, when it was impossible to even lodge a complaint in the first place.
People say holidays are depressing in prison. It’s true. It’s because you cannot help but think of the life you once had, or did not have. Holidays are an idea of how life should be.
My last free-world Thanksgiving I had squandered. I worked day shift at the Mars Room. Men don’t holiday from their addictions. Holidays are busy, because the men need to escape from their real lives into their really real lives with us, their fantasies.
No one forced me to spend Thanksgiving at the Mars Room. I didn’t need the money that badly, on that particular day. Why didn’t I do something with Jackson? I’d given him to my neighbor to watch. She and some friends made a meal. The kids had fun. I sat with Kurt Kennedy in a dark theater. At that point I’d eased myself into the hustle of having a regular. I was by instinct against it, but it had presented itself as a novel certainty. He would be there on my shift. He would choose me automatically. I would not scan the room and circle, waiting for someone who had decided on his lunch hour, in his dark fiefdom, the Mars Room, that I was the one he felt like paying, for company.
They get what they need or see something better, someone else, and tell you to go away. With a regular, that moment doesn’t come. I was someone’s choice before I even got to the theater, before he got there. Kennedy’s choice. He would hand me, over the course of a few hours, several hundred dollars. All he wanted was to pretend I was his girl.
You’re my girl, right? The rough, dry skin of his hands on my thighs. The gravelly voice. He did most of the talking. He’d been shot in the leg while doing his job, and that was why he limped. He said he was a detective or something, but later he said that wasn’t really true and talked for a long time about his actual job and I wasn’t listening and didn’t care what he did, nor if he lied or told the truth. He was on disability and had too much free time. He wanted to take me out on his boat. I hate boats, I didn’t say. Sure. That sounds like a lot of fun. You have no idea how much it costs to pay for a slip in that harbor. I sure don’t. It’s twenty thousand a year, he said, handing me another twenty. Uh-huh. Do you like to be spanked? I want to spank you. Passed me another twenty. Sometimes his bills were new, and had a crisp, smooth feel that made me want to check to be sure they were real. Money is money. The great neutralizer: that is work, and this is payment. I’d like to make your ass red. Oh god I mean bright fucking red. Slapping it lightly with his rough hand. The lightness of his slap: he was lost in thought. If you called that thought. There would not be any spanking sessions. There was no need. I was his virtual reality machine, as I pushed my ass into his clothed lap, to empty his wallet. When the wallet was empty either he would go to the bank machine in the lobby of the Mars Room and get more or he wouldn’t, but if he didn’t he would be back tomorrow.
A few days after Thanksgiving, Sergeant McKinnley said there was a message for me in the program office.
I walked, cuffed, with McKinnley and another cop behind me.
At the program office, I faced Lieutenant Jones.
“You have a deceased relation,” Jones said.
“Relation?”
“Your mother is what it says.”
There are three thousand women at Stanville. It happens all the time that you get the wrong information, you’re HIV positive, when you’re not. Or they give you someone else’s mail. I was sure Jones had something wrong. Or that she was tormenting me because it was her role, to torment.
I said I didn’t believe her.
“Gretchen Becker, it says here. Died in a car accident last Sunday, November thirtieth.”
“No,” I said. “No. That can’t be right.”
“She and a child were both admitted to San Francisco General Hospital,” Jones mechanically read. “Child sustained non-life-threatening injuries.”
“That’s my son,” I said. “He’s only seven. He doesn’t have anyone else. I need to get there.”
“You need to get there? You have two indeterminate state commitments, Hall. You aren’t going anywhere.”
“That’s my son. He’s in the hospital, I—”
“Hall, if you’d wanted to be someone’s mother, you should have thought of that before.”
I lunged toward the paper in Jones’s hands. I had to see it.
McKinnley grabbed me. I tried to get away from him. I needed to see the paper.
McKinnley pushed me to the floor. I was restrained gently by his large boot pressing on my shoulder, holding me down. I knew McKinnley didn’t want to hurt me. I could feel it. But Jones was a lieutenant, his superior. His boot pressed into me. His boot said, Your mother is gone. My mother was gone. It was just me and this, this war.
“Let me see the paper,” I said. “Please.”
I was not calm, it’s true. When I said please, I screamed it. Please. Please. Give it to me. Give me the fucking paper.
“I used to feel sorry for you bitches,” Jones said. “But if you want to be a parent, you don’t end up in prison. Plain and simple. Plain and simple.”
I tried to get up. More cops were on me. I bit a hand, I didn’t know whose. They pushed my head into the floor. I wedged it sideways and spit. I spit at McKinnley, and got a baton in the back of the head. An alarm sounded. The noise of the alarm bleated in my ears, and all I could do was struggle. “That’s my family! It’s my son! It’s my son!”
I tried to lift my head, bucked upward, thrashed my feet until they were pinned, until every part of me was pinned.
II
12
Doc had been an early corruptor, among detectives at the Rampart Division of the LAPD. He was capering, as he thought of it, long before they got their bad reputation. For that, Doc thought of himself as ahead of his time. The time he was serving was life without, on the Sensitive Needs block at New Folsom.
The Sensitive unit had built-in concrete stepped seating and a broad stage on which the day room dramas took place before a set of automated doors, all blue, each with a small monitor window. Doc’s cell was eight by ten like everyone else’s, and like everyone else, he shared it. You don’t choose your roommate. And in Sensitive Needs at New Folsom, there is a one hundred percent likelihood your roommate is a child rapist, a snitch, or a transsexual, since that’s who Sensitive Needs was built to house. A transsexual cellmate—Doc would be fine with that. He didn’t mind men with titties. He’d had a few, not frontally or anything, mostly fondled and explored from behind; an experience that, like everything in life, made sense in its moment. The transsexuals on his unit played powder puff softball and Doc liked watching the games just as much as the next red-blooded male. They all liked it. Who wouldn’t, if you were a straight guy stuck in the joint for life with a bunch of other men? Suddenly, you’ve got these creatures with big asses and actual, real boobies bouncing around under their knit cotton state-issue jerseys as they run bases and jump up and down, cutely helpless at the batter’s plate, or run after, and never catch, a ball that came their way. They were fun and stupid and uncoordinated and smelled good, just like women, and like women, they had pea-brains and spoke in soft, squeaky voices.