The Mars Room(24)

I was living out in the avenues then. When Jackson was three months old, the owner sold my apartment building. New management cleared the tenants to raise the rent. The city was changing. Rents were high. It was either live with my mother, who never offered that, probably because we fought and she was tired of me, or move to the Tenderloin, where you could still get an affordable studio, if you could tolerate the atmosphere in those buildings. I moved to Taylor Street. Eva-land, as I thought of it. I went back to the Mars Room and paid my new neighbor to watch Jackson. My neighbor had a three-year-old and was in a similar situation. No money, raising her daughter alone. She watched Jackson a lot, especially after I started dating Jimmy Darling.



* * *



We three hovered in our turkey cages while Jones bullied the other prisoners into sitting down for the rest of their orientation. Everyone was agitated. People were crying. Jones told them to shut up and reminded them that they had made choices, that Sanchez, as she called the girl who’d had the baby, had made really poor choices, and should have thought about her baby’s future before she broke the law.

Jones summoned porters, two gloomy white girls with cornrowed hair and abraded skin, to clean up from the birth. It was impossible to know if they were sad about the situation at hand, or in a general and permanent sort of way.

The gloomy porters squirted state cleaners and blasted hoses. Soapy runoff filled the drains.

The baby’s shriek stayed in my head as I sat in my cage, long after it and its mother were gone. They were in no hurry to deal with us. Incapacitated, in cages, we could be left to wait, to stare at the dirty pink walls while someone slowly, slowly filled out paperwork for our transfer from receiving to administrative segregation, which was even worse than regular prison.

Unfortunately for that baby, it was a girl.





8


PLEASE PROVIDE EMPLOYMENT HISTORY OVER LAST FIVE YEARS

PLEASE BE THOROUGH AND DETAILED

On the job experience section of the form, the suspect wrote that she had experience as an employee. The intake officer explained that this would not be sufficient.



* * *



On the transcript of the suspect’s interview with homicide detectives, when asked what kind of work he normally did, the suspect answered, “Recycling.”

Quality Control, she wrote for type of work.

I’m an employee, he’d told them, but seemed unable to specify what kind.



* * *



Recycler.

Maintenance crew.

Retail.

Wholesale.

Flyer distribution.

Warehouse distribution.

Dollar Store.

Dollar Tree.

Distribution warehouse.

Walmart.

He said he handed out flyers.

He had written recycler.

They both worked with a crew that handed out flyers.

He delivered free newspapers, but not regularly.

He worked at a distribution warehouse.

She wrote quality control.

He said he worked part-time helping a friend who cleaned dollar stores after hours.

Cashier.

Unemployed.

Not currently employed.

QC, which she explained meant quality control.

Truck unloader.

Package handler.

He unpacked crates, he told them, at a distribution warehouse.

When asked what she did for a living, the suspect said she worked.

Recycling, he’d written.

He brought recycling to a redemption center, he explained.

Recycler.

Recycler.

Recycler.

Recycler.

Redemptions, he told them.

Redeemer was what she wrote.



* * *



The suspect said she had mostly made her living by collecting bottles and cans.





9


When you google the town of Stanville, faces pop up: mug shots. After the mug shots, an article that cites Stanville as having the highest percentage of minimum-wage workers in the state. Stanville’s water is poisoned. The air there is bad. Most of the old businesses are boarded. There are dollar stores, gas stations that serve as liquor outlets, and coin op laundry. People without cars walk the main boulevard in the hottest part of the day, when it’s 113 degrees outside. They amble along in the gutter of the road, scooting empty shopping carts, piercing the dead zone of late afternoon with the carts’ loose metallic rattle. There are no sidewalks.

Stanville is synonymous with its prison. Like Corcoran is, and Chino, Delano and Chowchilla and Avenal, Susanville and San Quentin, scores of towns that house prisons and share a name, up and down the state.



* * *



Gordon Hauser found a place to rent sight unseen, a cabin up the mountain from Stanville proper, in the western Sierra foothills. The cabin was one room with a woodstove. It would be his Thoreau year, he wrote to his friend Alex, sending him the realty link.

Your Kaczynski year, Alex wrote back, after looking at the photos of the cabin.

True both lived in one-room huts, Gordon responded. But I don’t see much connection between them.

Reverence of nature, self-reliance. K was even a reader of Walden, Alex wrote. It’s on the list of books from his cabin. Also R.W.B. Lewis, your idol.

Aren’t you kind of oversimplifying?