Orders issued from the PA, clear and tight and loud.
“You by the bathrooms. I can see you smoking. Put that out right now.”
“Lozano, you’re out of bounds.”
A truck circled the perimeter of the prison, on a dirt road between the electrified fence and the outer, final fence.
“Copley, you left your dentures by the handball courts.” Audible laughter from the other guards near the microphone. “Copley, heh heh, come to the watch office to pick up your teeth.”
When it was hot, the guards mostly stayed in the air-conditioned watch office and observed us through binoculars. They did that when it was cold also. The yard is massive, and they are lazy.
“Which blind spot did she use?”
“Behind the gym. That’s why we have lockdowns now. There’s before Angel Marie Janicki and there’s after.”
“They can’t see the fence behind the gym?”
“Not from Tower One. But they don’t need to now. They have the electric fence.”
It took the perimeter truck at least ten minutes to circle the grounds. Maybe eleven.
How the guards know whose dentures: the inmate number is printed on the side, in the artificial gums.
We passed whale beach, just as the guards started breaking up their sunbathing party.
“Whale beach, no slingshots. Whale beach I said no slingshots. Everybody up and dressed.”
It’s not nice to say whale beach but that’s what it’s called, an area beyond the walking track where women grease up and fry. Slingshots are homemade undershirts. You were not supposed to bare flesh on main yard, but people did anyhow, slathered in cook oil or the fake butter they used in central kitchen, a brand called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! or, as Conan called it, I Can’t Fucking Believe This Shit’s Not Butter.
No one runs on the track, since this was women’s prison and we were not training to kill. No one except Conan, who jogged past me and Sammy.
“I just slaughtered ten thousand gnats with my open mouth!”
He turned around, running backward, facing us.
“Try closing your mouth,” Sammy said. “You won’t have that problem.”
A female cop hurried past. “No sitting on the tables!” she yelled. It was also illegal to sit under them, which was the only way to get shade on the yard. Only regulation sitting was allowed.
Conan regarded the cop angrily marching past. He nodded approval.
“Boy, was she a different lay.”
At Stanville you can assume it’s a lie if the person volunteers it. It’s also a lie if the person says it in answer to a question. Conan’s tales were as tall as Tower One and Tower Two, where armed Fudds tracked us and ate pork rinds.
“She says to me, don’t just use your tongue, I want you to hum into me, like I’m a kazoo. That’s what she said. Like I’m a kazoo.”
The landscaping crew was working along the edges of the track with spray bottles of Roundup. Their job was to keep the yard one seamless expanse of dirt. “We keep it real tidy,” said Laura Lipp, who was now on yard crew. A top layer of bare dirt lifted and blew around, from valley gusts, as a new cop named Garcia came toward us.
All new staff are marks for prisoners and cops alike, but there was something particularly vulnerable about Garcia; he seemed lost out there on main yard, which is three yards, B, C, and D: three thousand women with six Fudds.
Fudd is short for Elmer Fudd. It was Conan who had started that.
“Hey, Fuddrucker,” he called to Garcia, who halted, and looked to be trying to decide whether to pretend he had not heard Conan, or to deal with Conan as a problem.
“But what is Fuddruckers?” Conan said to no one in particular, his usual audience.
“The joke is that it almost makes you say fuck, right? But then what is a ruddfucker? They make this stuff up and we all pretend these places exist, like, in history. Like Fuddruckers is some kind of grand family tradition.”
“My family has always gone there,” Laura Lipp said in a corrective tone, as she sprayed with her Roundup bottle.
“We went to Hooters,” Conan said.
“With your family?” Laura shook her head.
“My girl and her kids,” Conan said. “They have a good children’s menu. But hey, you ever notice the o in Hooters is the same O like in IHOP? I was a cook at IHOP. To make the pancakes, you add water to a mix. It’s the International House of Just Add Water.”
I had been a waitress at an IHOP right after I graduated high school. It was one of the many things Conan and I bonded over. I was waitress 43, and the cooks would call, Forty-three! Your order is up! Which, as I only saw later, had been preparing me for here.
To work at IHOP, you first go to Walmart or a place like it to get work shoes. Where you see, if you didn’t already know, that most of the adult-sized shoes they sell are for working on construction sites or in hospitals, prisons, restaurants, and schools, and the children’s shoes are starter versions of the same. Waitress shoes and medical assistant shoes and work boots. Cheap factory knockoffs for people whose choices are to work these crap jobs or crack up and go to a much lower grade of low-grade shoe, made by prison industries.
This new cop pulled Sammy aside and started asking her questions. He was treading a familiar road: I want to get to know you. That is how cops here do things, they all say the same thing in the same way: I want to get to know you.
There are cops and staff who want the girlfriend experience with a prisoner. Sammy already had a getting-to-know thing with the head of maintenance, a civilian who took her around in his truck, brought her staff cafeteria hamburgers, and in exchange they went to a drainage ditch where he rummaged in her state-issue jeans. She had a male nurse at the skilled nursing facility (“Sniff” is how we say it) who checked her breasts weekly, and gave her tobacco. Conan had female guards who might have been lesbians or straight girls who found Conan convincingly male.
“You remind me of someone,” Garcia said to Sammy. “Back home in Philadelphia. Where you from?”
“Philadelphia, huh,” Conan cut in. “You ever notice something about that Liberty Bell? It has a crack in it. And no one cares. They display it like they’re proud and the thing is cracked.”
Garcia turned from Sammy to Conan. It was obvious what he wanted to say: get away while I work on this chick.
“Are those regulation clothes you’ve got on, ma’am? Because I see boxer shorts, which are not allowed here. I could write you up for that.”
I was exiting work exchange when I ran into the GED teacher, G. Hauser. I had gotten into a scuffle in work exchange, where they said I was setting off the metal detector and went through all my stuff. They even tore apart the bologna sandwich in the sack lunch they give us outside chow hall, to take to work. I had to strip out and endure a search in the little curtained area of work exchange, and I was boiling with anger as I left. But when I saw Hauser, something flipped in me, a switch. I called out a friendly hello. You don’t decide to intentionally alter your tone of voice. It happens automatically. Needs are the gearbox of the voice. Needs shift approach, adjust tone to something higher, more sympathetic. It wasn’t calculated, but everything had changed for me since I’d seen him last.
“Hey,” I said, “I was wondering if I’d run into you.”
I had forgotten all about him. I had not thought of him once.
“I’m on C yard,” I said, “and I’ve been thinking about your offer to get me some reading material. That would be great.”
He was excited, like I was doing him a favor by asking for one myself. We chatted and in his growing excitement, he said, “Why don’t you take my class?”