The Mars Room(34)

Mortimer was supposedly a woman at Stanville who sued the prison. Because of her, they had to serve us exactly 1,400 calories a day, so that we could not sue them for our fatness like Mortimer did. The Mortimer portion is not enough food. But instead of blaming the prison, the staff tells us to blame Mortimer, who ruined things for the rest of us by filing a 602 inmate complaint that became a frivolous lawsuit. There were a lot of rules like that, with a prisoner’s name attached to them. To get medication, you stood in an Armstrong box. The Armstrong box is a red square painted on the floor around the pill counter. It’s for privacy. If you were not called to the window, if you were even just walking down the hall and your foot went over the red line of the box, you got a 115, thanks to a paranoid named Armstrong.

We hated the prisoners who ruined it for everybody else, but these people probably didn’t exist. Sammy told me where 602s actually went: into a paper shredder in the assistant litigator’s office. I doubted a prisoner could make history, get her name attached to a new rule, when it was impossible to even lodge a complaint in the first place.



* * *



People say holidays are depressing in prison. It’s true. It’s because you cannot help but think of the life you once had, or did not have. Holidays are an idea of how life should be.

My last free-world Thanksgiving I had squandered. I worked day shift at the Mars Room. Men don’t holiday from their addictions. Holidays are busy, because the men need to escape from their real lives into their really real lives with us, their fantasies.

No one forced me to spend Thanksgiving at the Mars Room. I didn’t need the money that badly, on that particular day. Why didn’t I do something with Jackson? I’d given him to my neighbor to watch. She and some friends made a meal. The kids had fun. I sat with Kurt Kennedy in a dark theater. At that point I’d eased myself into the hustle of having a regular. I was by instinct against it, but it had presented itself as a novel certainty. He would be there on my shift. He would choose me automatically. I would not scan the room and circle, waiting for someone who had decided on his lunch hour, in his dark fiefdom, the Mars Room, that I was the one he felt like paying, for company.

They get what they need or see something better, someone else, and tell you to go away. With a regular, that moment doesn’t come. I was someone’s choice before I even got to the theater, before he got there. Kennedy’s choice. He would hand me, over the course of a few hours, several hundred dollars. All he wanted was to pretend I was his girl.

You’re my girl, right? The rough, dry skin of his hands on my thighs. The gravelly voice. He did most of the talking. He’d been shot in the leg while doing his job, and that was why he limped. He said he was a detective or something, but later he said that wasn’t really true and talked for a long time about his actual job and I wasn’t listening and didn’t care what he did, nor if he lied or told the truth. He was on disability and had too much free time. He wanted to take me out on his boat. I hate boats, I didn’t say. Sure. That sounds like a lot of fun. You have no idea how much it costs to pay for a slip in that harbor. I sure don’t. It’s twenty thousand a year, he said, handing me another twenty. Uh-huh. Do you like to be spanked? I want to spank you. Passed me another twenty. Sometimes his bills were new, and had a crisp, smooth feel that made me want to check to be sure they were real. Money is money. The great neutralizer: that is work, and this is payment. I’d like to make your ass red. Oh god I mean bright fucking red. Slapping it lightly with his rough hand. The lightness of his slap: he was lost in thought. If you called that thought. There would not be any spanking sessions. There was no need. I was his virtual reality machine, as I pushed my ass into his clothed lap, to empty his wallet. When the wallet was empty either he would go to the bank machine in the lobby of the Mars Room and get more or he wouldn’t, but if he didn’t he would be back tomorrow.



* * *



A few days after Thanksgiving, Sergeant McKinnley said there was a message for me in the program office.

I walked, cuffed, with McKinnley and another cop behind me.

At the program office, I faced Lieutenant Jones.

“You have a deceased relation,” Jones said.

“Relation?”

“Your mother is what it says.”

There are three thousand women at Stanville. It happens all the time that you get the wrong information, you’re HIV positive, when you’re not. Or they give you someone else’s mail. I was sure Jones had something wrong. Or that she was tormenting me because it was her role, to torment.

I said I didn’t believe her.

“Gretchen Becker, it says here. Died in a car accident last Sunday, November thirtieth.”

“No,” I said. “No. That can’t be right.”

“She and a child were both admitted to San Francisco General Hospital,” Jones mechanically read. “Child sustained non-life-threatening injuries.”

“That’s my son,” I said. “He’s only seven. He doesn’t have anyone else. I need to get there.”

“You need to get there? You have two indeterminate state commitments, Hall. You aren’t going anywhere.”

“That’s my son. He’s in the hospital, I—”

“Hall, if you’d wanted to be someone’s mother, you should have thought of that before.”