The Mars Room(18)

“My goodness, Mr. Johnson. It’s amazing you’re even alive. And what’s the matter with your mouth?”

The old lawyer was yelling, as if Johnson was hard of hearing, while I looked on, tense and alert because I was next.

“It’s wired. My jaw broke. I’m a good citizen. I got a daughter.”

The lawyer asked when she was born.

“Nineteen eighty.”

“Mr. Johnson, I believe that’s when you were born.”

The defendant, this Johnson, was twenty-one years old. Gunshot wounds. High blood pressure. Chronic pain. He looked forty-eight. I watched as the facts of his life were exposed like pants pockets pulled inside out.

“Okay, okay,” Johnson said. “They got me drugged. I’m sorry. Wait—”

I watched as he lifted his leg and awkwardly rolled up his pants with his chained hands. The daughter’s birthday was tattooed on his calf. He read the date slowly as if trying to decipher a historic plaque.

“The judge does not like residential burglaries, Mr. Johnson.”

“Tell her I’m sorry,” Johnson slurred through his wired jaw.



* * *



In his own element, I wanted to think Johnson might be perfectly at home, a man on top of his game, whatever his game was. Life. On top of your game meant handling life. Doing it right. Being someone who inspired respect. Someone loved by women and feared by enemies, and now torn away from what made him shine. Either way, Johnson was fully a human being even if he could not remember when his daughter was born.

After my own immersion in this new world of Johnson’s, I knew why he had seemed so dim in the arraignment box: the assholes had given him an involuntary injection of liquid thorazine. When certain types of inmates were slated for court transport, an invol by corrections officers made their own job easier. Drooling and high on unpleasurable brain-dullers, these defendants did not present well before a judge, or before their own public defender, who talked to them like they were three-year-olds.

When his arraignment was over, the bailiffs put on their blue rubber gloves for handling Johnson. He struggled to walk in leg irons. When they brought him past, the bailiffs held him as far away from their bodies as possible. Take it slow, one told him. They leapt out of the way when Johnson tripped. He fell on his broken face right there in the tank. No one helped him. His jumpsuit was brown, which meant medical. A county wristband indicated open wounds. He might spread bacterial infection, or something worse. Defiance. Depression. Dyslexia. HIV. Mental degradation. Rotten luck.



* * *



I was next but nothing was happening. The judge left the bench. I sat for maybe twenty minutes, a bailiff behind me, no lawyer calling my name, feeling my mother’s sadness, unable to meet her gaze, because if I did, this would be even harder. I inspected the eagle on top of the courtroom flagpole. The eagle hovered on the wooden flagpole as if what it had caught was the American flag that was attached to the pole. I have seen enormous flags ripple, strung high on towering poles. Car dealerships have them. Sometimes McDonald’s have them, huge flags that fly for commerce and announce “America.” Here in this courtroom, the flags hung limp and still, collecting dust. A flag needs wind, I thought, just as the judge was announcing my name and case number, and then again, my name and case number.

I’d been told I would have my first contact with legal counsel at arraignment. I stood as the bailiff ordered me to, but no lawyer appeared.

Johnson’s lawyer, with the flowing gray hair, limped up to me. What does he want, I wondered.

“Miss Hall? Romy Hall? I’m your public defender.”



* * *



You can have sympathy for Johnson’s lawyer, if you must, but I don’t have to. He meant well. But he was an incompetent and overworked old man. Got me two life sentences and failed to make admissible the whole sordid history of Kurt Kennedy and his obsession with me.

Kennedy had fixated. He had made it his life’s work to be outside my apartment building. To be in the garage where I parked my car. To lurk in the cramped aisles of my corner market. To follow me on foot and on his motorcycle. When I heard the motor of that cycle, which made a high-pitched whine, I flinched. He had a habit of calling me thirty times in a row. I changed my number. He got the new number. He came to the Mars Room, or he was already there. I asked Dart to eighty-six him and he refused. He’s a good customer, Dart said. I was expendable. Men who spent money were not. Kennedy hunted me and didn’t let up. But the prosecutor convinced the judge that the victim’s behavior was irrelevant. It did not establish an imminent threat on the night in question, and so the jury never learned a thing about it, not a single detail. It was the judge who disallowed the evidence, but I blamed the lawyer. I blamed the lawyer because he was supposed to help me and I felt he did not.

“Why can’t I testify and explain?” I asked him. “Because you’ll get destroyed on cross-examination,” he replied. “I can’t let you do that to yourself. No competent lawyer would put you on the stand.”

When I asked again, he fired questions at me. About the work I did to make a living. About my relationship to Kennedy and other customers. About the decision I made to pick up a heavy instrument. About the fact—the fact, he reiterated—that I struck a man sitting in a chair, a man who could not walk without two canes. I tried to answer his questions. He tore my answers apart and made them into questions, and I tried to answer those but struggled. When he asked another question, I screamed at him to stop.