The Mars Room(23)

Jones began by deciphering for us loudly the signs in the day room, since we were all dyslexic or presumed illiterate. The signs all began the same way.

Ladies, report to staff if you have a staph infection.

Ladies, no whining.

Ladies, out of bounds results in an automatic 115.

The warning shots sign was more blunt. NO WARNING SHOTS IN THIS AREA.

The clock on the wall had a red wedge from five minutes to the hour until five minutes past the hour. This was for the women who could not tell time. Jones explained the red wedge. All you need to know, she said, is that when the big hand is on red, room doors are on unlock.

Everything in prison is addressed to the woman for whom the red wedge is painted on the clock face, the imbecile. I’ve never met her. Plenty I have met in prison cannot read, and some cannot tell time, but that doesn’t mean they are not shrewd and superior individuals who can outsmart any egghead. People in prison are clever as hell. The imbecile the rules and signs are meant to address is nowhere to be found.

Jones read the guide to the handbook, and then the handbook itself. There were rules about everything, appearance and thoughts and letters and language, food and attitude and scheduling, tools and implements and use. Many instructions on who not to touch (anyone) or where (nowhere), and certainly no fornication was allowed, as Jones emphasized, saying the word slowly like a horny preacher.

“What is fornication again,” Conan asked; “it’s just fucking, right?”

Women started dropping off to sleep; we’d been on an all-night ride and everyone was exhausted. Jones never looked up, didn’t cease her mechanical reciting. I nodded off, too, but was woken by screams.

The pregnant girl was clutching her stomach and crying out. Jones glanced at her and licked her thumb and turned a page of the handbook, continuing to read. She had to read the whole eighty-page guide and the guide to the guide every week on Fridays when the new busload arrived, and so she knew it well, could speed-read it in order to take a longer break. The pregnant girl interrupted Jones’s reading of the rules by going into labor.

I told you that women enjoy participating in the punishment of their fellow prisoners, but it’s not always true. Some of us helped that day in receiving. Jones told everyone to stay seated and wait for medical. Fernandez ignored Jones’s orders and went to help the girl, the same girl she’d been yelling at on the bus. So did I. It was my chance to break away from Laura Lipp. And I could not bear to watch this helpless kid suffer alone. She was screaming in agony. Fernandez and I each held a hand. Conan blocked Jones and the other receiving cops from getting near us. When they pepper-sprayed Conan, he only grew more irate. He shoved Jones to the ground. An alarm sounded. I kept on talking to the girl. I reminded her to breathe. She said “no” over and over, like she didn’t want to have a baby, like she could prevent the future from merging into the now. Cops poured into our unit. Four of them tackled Conan.

You’re going to be all right, I kept telling the girl. It wasn’t true, since she was in prison, but I comforted her as best I could, until more cops streamed in and yanked me away from her and put me in restraints. They were not attending to the girl in labor; she was alone and crying out in pain.

Fernandez, like Conan, was courageous. They sprayed her and she didn’t seem to notice. She kept resisting them until they Tasered her and put her in a cage.

I was put in a cage, too. The cages were not quite big enough and I had to keep my head low on my neck. I had become the turkey on the freeway. Conan was practically stuffed into the thing. Conan in a cage was even worse than Conan in a muumuu. He filled the cage, all glare and rippling muscle. We were all three going to administrative segregation.

My first day in prison, and I had already blown my parole board hearing, which was in thirty-seven years.



* * *



Medical had arrived but it was too late to move the girl; she was fully in labor. She had the baby in receiving. It let out a cry that echoed through the concrete room, a piercing shriek of existence.

A birth should be joyous. This was a lonely birth. The mother was in the hands of the state, and so was the baby, and they each only had that one tie, to bureaucracy. The correctional officers seemed to think it was funny to see a baby in receiving. There aren’t supposed to be any babies. The baby was contraband.

Jones was shaking her head, as if a birth here in her unit was one more example, further proof, of our inability to live in society. The medics put the girl on a stretcher. She asked to hold her baby but her request was ignored by the medics, one of whom held the little newborn away from his body like it was a sack of garbage that might leak.



* * *



Jackson was born at SF General, where they have to take you even without insurance. The nurse put him on my chest and he looked up at me, a wet wild creature who had crawled from a swamp, all eyes, eyes wide, and his cry was not hysterical, not a lament, but an earnest question: Are you here? Are you here for me?

I was crying, too, and I kept answering, I’m here, I’m right here. A nurse cleaned him up and put him in a clear plastic box and all night different nurses and orderlies came in and out, prodding and poking and bothering him. I was there, as I’d promised, but I was not his protector.

Jackson’s dad was a doorman at the Crazy Horse, a club down the street from the Mars Room where I also worked on occasion. He went out with his friends the night his own son was born, instead of hanging out with me in the miserable recovery room, which I shared with another woman who also had no companion and watched television all night. Every time Jackson’s dad came around to my apartment, in the days and weeks after Jackson was born, I yelled at him for being a deadbeat, which he was, so he stopped visiting. I didn’t want him around, but when I heard he died of an overdose, I could not look at poor little Jackson without feeling rotten. He’d lost his loser dad. He had only one person to rely on. He bobbled his head on his neck, his big wet blue eyes gazing at me in myopic wonder, his hair a crown of fuzz standing at attention, and he did not know he was fatherless. He knew only that I was the one. I was the one.