The Mars Room(14)
The little shelter where I used to wait for the 44 on Laguna Honda had been fixed up. Gone was its piss stink and the pinkish-beige color of the retaining wall and shelter, which had been the same drab tone as the Youth Guidance Center beyond the bus stop, on top of the hill. YGC was called something else now, meant to seem kinder, more caring. The wall where the man had written with the heel of his shoe was painted over.
But what if that wall would not have been painted over, if by some miracle the numbers the man scratched on rough stucco were still there, bleeding through time, numbers he wrote with the shoeblack from his heel? Who would answer that phone line? And where is that man now? Where is the boy who was stirring at the stove on Masonic, the young Scummer, where is Leatherman, and where is Eva? Where is everyone, and what has happened to them?
3
No orange clothing
No clothing in any shade of blue No white clothing
No yellow clothing
No beige or khaki clothing No green clothing
No red clothing
No purple clothing
No denim of any kind or color No sweatpants or sweatshirts No underwire or metal parts on brassieres Ladies must wear brassieres No sheer or “see-through” clothing No “layering”
No exposed shoulders No tank tops or “cap-sleeved” tops No low-cut tops
No unnecessarily exposed body parts—no half shirts or “low-waisted” pants No logos or prints
No “capri” pants
No shorts
No skirts or dresses above the knee No pants that are actually “long shorts”
No shirts without collars All shirts must be tucked in No jewelry (one “tasteful” wedding band is acceptable and will be inventoried by corrections officers at check-in) No piercings
No bobby pins or metal clips in hair Hair must be tidy and pulled back No shower sandals
No flip-flops
No sunglasses
No jackets
No “over-shirts”
No “hoodies” nor any clothing with a hood No tight clothing
Clothing must not be excessively loose or “baggy”
Appearance, hair, and clothing must be professional and in good taste.
Those who arrive to a state facility in inappropriate attire will be turned away and their inmate visit canceled.
4
If his students could learn to think well, to enjoy reading books, some part of them would be uncaged. That was what Gordon Hauser told himself, and what he told them, too. But there were days, like when one woman walked into the prison classroom and slung boiling sugar water into the face of another woman, that he did not believe it. There were days when it seemed like the real meaning of this work he was doing was to destroy his own life by trying to teach people who wanted to burn each other’s face off. The guards made everything more difficult, with their hatred of the women, and their hostility toward free-world staff like Gordon. The guards had been forced to undergo sensitivity training and were furious about it. “It’s because you cunts cry and demand explanations,” they said. “Everything with you bitches is why, why, why.” They all reminisced about the better times when they had worked in men’s facilities, where they watched high-blood-volume stabbings on closed-circuit monitors from the safety of the watch office, and dealt with prisoners who lived strictly by self-enforced convict codes. Female prisoners argued with guards and complained, and the guards seemed to find the way the women bickered with them, contested everything, more treacherous than having to subdue riots. No guard wanted to work in a women’s prison. Gordon had not understood this until he got to NCWF, which he’d chosen because it was commutable from Oakland, and because working with women seemed to him less threatening than a prison classroom of men.
His first placement had been with juveniles in San Francisco. He did that for six months, but it was too depressing. Kids in cages telling him stories about their foster homes, about sexual abuse, all kinds of abuse. Most didn’t have parents, but some did. Gordon saw them in the court’s waiting area, before he passed through a sally port to get to his classroom: people with holes in their sweatpants, T-shirts advertising random logos, inadequate shoes, poor people with chaotic lives. Couldn’t the juvenile judges see from looking at the guardians that the kids didn’t stand any kind of fair chance? There were signs to pull up your pants, because to wear them low was disrespectful. Gordon had a student who was always getting in trouble for having his pants too low. A big white boy whose eyes were spaced tight together in the center of his face. “You talk like you’re black,” a black kid had said to the white boy with his tight-stamped eyes, “but you look like you’re retarded.” NO BARE FEET, a sign at the building entrance warned. As if someone would try to come into a detention center and court, a municipal building on a bleak and windy corner, not close to the beach, without shoes. Another sign, NO TANK TOPS. Under it, typically, an entire three-generation family, all in tank tops, flesh spilling. And what was it about shoulders? What was law enforcement’s fear of shoulders?
* * *
“To be in this place you got to be butt ugly, toothless, and fat as pull-apart buns,” the yard captain at NCWF had told Gordon his first week there. As the yard captain said it, there were beautiful women passing behind him, porters with mops and brooms pushing trash bins on wheels, some of them thin, and with all their teeth, young things smiling and winking at Gordon, as if the joke was on the yard captain, who was himself obese.