The Mars Room(17)

As he was putting papers in his book bag one night, she came to his empty classroom with a program pass. She was not a student in his class. She shut the door behind her. The room had a small observation window, but Gordon knew an officer would not walk past for another ten or fifteen minutes.

He would like to say that nothing happened. Especially because so little did, and he felt he was placed on the wrong end of justice. After she shut the door, she went close to him. Their lips touched. Yes, he kissed her and not only. His hand grazed the front of her shirt and then it grazed lightly between her legs, to see how she would respond, and the answer was in the correct manner, in the interested manner, and you might call that thinking, choosing, proceeding, but Gordon didn’t. It was not thinking. They were pressed together, nothing serious, fully clothed, for a minute, maybe less, and then it was night count and she had to get back to her unit.

She filed a 602 inmate grievance, claiming that he groped her. This beautiful woman had targeted him. She did it, he later understood, for some complicated reason that had to do with the woman’s girlfriend, who was his student. It was his word against hers. The Investigative Services Unit contacted him, conducted interviews, and found nothing damning, but deemed him at risk of overfamiliarity. They advised he be reassigned to a different facility. They kicked him down the Central Valley like a can down a hallway. Transferred him to Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, where no one but no one wanted to work.





5


You may decide to link my fate to the night I found Kurt Kennedy waiting for me, but I link it to the trial, the judge, the prosecutor, my public defender.

This is what I remember of the day I met my lawyer: Being put in an elevator that smelled of human sweat ionizing on stainless steel. The electric gloom of full-blast panel lighting. Courtroom room tone. Slippers that said LA County on the side of each shoe.

When it was time, the bailiffs directed me down a hall. They walked and I shuffled in leg irons to the long glass box in department thirty where in-custody defendants see the judge. I was brought into the arraignment box, which had an opening at face level so defendants could speak to their lawyers. I had a full view of the courtroom. My mother was there. I was her daughter and her daughter was innocent. Her presence gave me childish hope. When she saw me she waved unhappily. A bailiff approached her and said something. No waving, probably.

Signs in the courtroom said No lounging. No gum chewing. No sleeping. No eating. No cell phones. No children under ten unless state-subpoenaed as witnesses. In every courtroom where I had to sit as my case wound through the system, I tried not to read them. You have to project unbearable remorse every second that anyone might glance your way, a juror or victim’s relative, the judge. At every moment you have to look like you can’t live with yourself after what you have done. You can’t look bored or hungry or tired. You can only look relentlessly guilty, in order to seem possibly a little less guilty.

I scanned for whoever might be my lawyer among the lawyers in the well before the judge’s bench.

My case was after the defendant next to me, a person the court was calling Johnson, Johnson versus the People. I was anxious to meet my attorney, but since he or she had not appeared I watched as this Johnson tried to communicate with his lawyer, an old man with gray hair that flowed down his back.

“My mom’s a sheriff,” Johnson said in labored speech. His face was wired so that he could barely open his mouth. He made throaty sounds like someone being gagged.

“Mr. Johnson, your mother is a sheriff?” The old lawyer spoke in a fake-amazed tone. “Which division?”

“Not mine. My girlfriend’s. It’s bail bonds.”

“Your girlfriend works at a bail bonds business? Then perhaps she’s not a sheriff, Mr. Johnson?”

“It’s her ma that own it.”

“Your mother-in-law owns a bail bonds business? What’s it called?”

“Yolanda’s.”

“Located where, Mr. Johnson?”

“They have it all over.”

“So she works at a branch of it?”

“She own it. I told you. YO-LAN-DA.”

The prosecutor on Johnson’s case appeared before the judge. He gleamed like something pressure-washed.

From that day forward, on every occasion that I was forced to spend in court, the prosecutors were consistently the most competent-looking people in the courtroom. They were handsome and slick and tidy and organized, with tailored clothes and expensive leather briefcases. The public defenders, meanwhile, were recognizable on account of their bad posture, their ill-fitting suits and scuffed shoes. The women wore their hair in short, ugly, practical cuts. The men had various styles or non-styles of long hair, and every one of them was guilty of exceeding width limits on their ties. The buttons on their shirts dangled, ready to fall off. The prosecutors all looked like rich, well-rested Republicans, while the public defenders were overworked do-gooders who arrived out of breath, late to court, dropping loose papers that already had the waffle marks of shoe prints on them from having been dropped before. Me, Johnson, everyone here with state counsel, I felt like we were screwed, just absolutely screwed.

Johnson told the lawyer he needed his high blood pressure medication. He was without his psych meds. He needed painkillers. He had chronic aches from a gunshot wound. He lifted his jail shirt and showed the lawyer. I couldn’t see his chest. The lawyer reeled backward.