I was alone now. Another lady on ad seg claimed they’d moved Romy to suicide watch. I didn’t believe her. Ad seg is a big rumor mill of people locked away and shouting through their door. Big Daddy would not do me any favors. I couldn’t even get any books to read. He was just, “No passing, Fernandez. Nuh uh.” Probably he was trying to get promoted.
One year I read eight Danielle Steel novels in ad seg. She did a prison novel that is straight-up killer. Everybody was reading it. We tore the book into sections for passing under cell doors, and it was all people talked about. It blew through the prison like a forest fire. It never occurred to me it was odd women in prison would want to read about other women in prison. You want to read about a world you know, not just ones you don’t know.
I had nothing to do, and no one to talk to. I was tired of Betty LaFrance shouting up the vent. I was eighteen years old when I met her, and she’d impressed the hell out of me. She was rich and called everyone “darling.” Taught manners to women at the county jail. But that was decades ago and you get sick of people. I’ll always love Betty because she’s part of my history, and she’s just too trippy and weird not to like. But sometimes you want her to quiet down.
She kept yelling up through the air vent about her latest plans. She said she was finally going to get back at the rat-faced cop. I told her to hush. But she can’t. That’s Betty. She started rambling about the Bible. When I was young and stupid, Betty had me convinced the Book of Daniel is really about aliens coming to Earth. She spooked the hell out of me. This time, her ramble was all about Judges. “Hey, Sammy. What’s sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion?” She kept asking me that through the vent pipe. “Sweeter than honey, and stronger than a lion?”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. She’s better when it’s just about money, or her legs that are insured for millions.
“The lion is killed by Samson,” she said. “He opens the lion’s body and there’s a beehive inside. Bees make honey, see?” She said “honey” like it was the key to her riddle, and now I was supposed to understand everything. Like honey was some kind of code.
“There’s honey in the carcass. Sweet honey,” she said. “But you don’t get it unless you kill the lion. First, you have to kill the lion. I put a hit on him. I got him cornered.”
She started talking about the war, but I had tuned her out.
“Are you even aware we are at war?” she asked, after I’d stopped responding.
“I know about it,” I said. But I didn’t know much. In county lockup there’s no news on the TV. Too dangerous or something. They give us reruns of Friends. Everyone in jail loves Friends. The characters are practically our bunkies.
“There are American soldiers over in Iraq,” Betty shouted, “protecting your freedom.”
“They can have my freedom,” I yelled back. “It sucks.”
When I was in county, someone on my tier heard from her family that we’d invaded Iraq. I went around asking people if they knew where that is, and not one lady knew. Even the educated people in jail didn’t know. It’s like these places don’t exist until we bomb them.
Betty started bothering the guard downstairs. I could hear her through the vent, asking him to pray with her for the troops.
Talking to Romy got me thinking about the past. I dreamed one night about the Snooty Fox. I was walking along the balcony outside the rooms. It was daytime and I could hear the traffic on Figueroa. I kept passing rooms with the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob, the curtains closed. I came to a room with an open door. The room was vacant and clean and I went in and shut the door and lay down on the bedspread and fell asleep. I think prison makes you so tired that in the very best dreams you have, you’re actually sleeping. That’s what we dream about. Sleep. When I woke up, I felt like I had gotten much better rest than usual. After Big Daddy put my breakfast through the flap, I shouted to Conan on the end of the tier, told him about my dream. I said I feel like I got double sleep, since I was sleeping in my dream at the Snooty Fox.
Betty LaFrance shouted up the pipe, “The Snooty Fox? The Snooty Fox? How do I know that name? What is it?”
“It’s a motel,” I said.
“I think Doc used to go there,” she said.
Typical Betty. Everything always has to be about her.
The Snooty Fox was my spot. The nicer rooms had a red velvety covering on the bed, and the bed was a massager. You put in coins and it comes to life underneath you. The showers had two nozzles, one in the usual place up high and another at the level of the privates. A john of mine, an old man who worked downtown at the courthouse, told me a famous president, Lyndon B. Johnson, had a shower like that, with a crotch nozzle. Lyndon B. Johnson, with a shower to wash his balls just like at the Snooty Fox.
The less fancy rooms were ten dollars an hour. I would negotiate with a john and tell him the room was twenty an hour, or thirty, and take that profit on top of what he paid me. But we were only in the room together for maybe twenty minutes. I had people coming in one after another, sometimes five customers in a single hour.
One night the Korean lady from the front office comes and bangs on the door while I was with a customer. She was yelling, “TOO MANY UNCLES! TOO MANY UNCLES!”
What’s she saying? the guy asked me; he had no idea what was going on. I was laughing so hard.
Eventually I switched to the Hub Motel on Long Beach Boulevard in Compton, where they didn’t bother with how many uncles I brought to the room. Long Beach Boulevard was where I met Rodney, right there in the Hub. Not the motel. The Hub was also Compton.
I was with Green Eyes and we’d both just done customers and wanted to buy a rock, but my dealer wasn’t around. Green Eyes said she knew someone so we went to an apartment where this dealer lived. We walked in, and the dealer was Rodney. I thought he was the ugliest person I’d ever seen. He goes to Green Eyes, “Who’s that?” pointing at me, and Green Eyes is like, that’s Sammy. And he says to me in a blunt, gruff way, “You like fruit?”
I was looking at Green Eyes for a sign, like how am I meant to answer this, because we were trying to score and you can’t anticipate about people until you’ve dealt with them a few times. I was hoping to get a signal from Green Eyes, like what do I answer? Do I like fruit? And Green Eyes whispers, “Say yes, stupid.”
See, he was asking me a personal question. It caught me off guard. What did this guy care what I liked?
He says, “You want a orange or an apple?”
I told him I only like strawberries and watermelon, that those were my favorite fruits. We left with our rock, me and Green Eyes. Later I was sitting at the bus stop working and a car pulls up and I negotiate but the guy didn’t have enough money, so I let him go. Another car pulls up all slow. The window goes down and it’s Rodney. He says I could get hurt on the street and should be careful. I didn’t have a customer, so I agreed to go with him to the store. He bought me some strawberries and we took them to his house. I stayed there all night, smoking rock, talking, eating the strawberries, and that was how it started. Now he has my name tattooed in twenty-six different places on his body.
Rodney was from Gonzales, Louisiana. He was in Angola from age seventeen to twenty-two. He wears a mustache to cover the scar they gave him with the switch they used for whipping the horses. He had to work planting okra. His feet are ruined from standing in water without rubber boots. When he got out of Angola they banned him from the state. He took the Louisiana with him out to Compton. He was country and superstitious. No cooking when you’re on your menstrual. And his idea of clean was obsessive. It was a lot like how some people act in here, me included. I like it clean. It’s a way to have some control, probably. I can laugh at it, though. It’s funny that most of us were doing tricks to maintain a crack addiction, living in tents and shitting in buckets on skid row, but in here, as shot-callers, we make the other women shower three times a day and bleach the bathroom after they brush their teeth. We run the room like it’s the army, with rules and inspections and yelling and abuse and I’m the one dishing it. I’ll come down on you hard if there’s a single drop of water in the sink basin.