The Mars Room(39)

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The joke about Linda and Richard was actually Doc’s own. His story. But when he told it, people always thought he was kidding. He was in high school when that happened. It was a single experience but his whole adolescence, the life of Richard Lyn Richards, aka Doc, could be summarized in that moment of humiliation by a girl named Linda at the soda fountain on Magnolia Street in Burbank. You could fit his life story on the head of a pin. I’m not Linda.



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Floyd and Lloyd were real people. Brothers who were married to Doc’s two great-aunts. One of Doc’s few recollections of those unfriendly old women and their brother-husbands was a joke he sometimes tried to tell. Floyd had a peach and took a bite. He turned to Lloyd and said, “This peach tastes like pussy. It’s incredible.” The juice rolled down Floyd’s chin. He handed the peach to Lloyd, who took a bite himself, but spit it in the grass. “Tastes like shit,” Lloyd said. Floyd told Lloyd he had to turn the peach around, that he’d bit the wrong side. Doc gets confused. The joke has to be told like a scene but it’s not a real scene that he witnessed as a boy. Floyd and Lloyd, his uncles by marriage, never spoke to each other. They were men of zero words to anyone, ever. They were men who lay watching TV, making women and children feel skittish and in trouble for existing. Plus, another thing, and everyone knows this, it is not about Doc’s tragic family, it is universal: peaches are delicious, truly delicious, and they do not, he repeats, do not taste like shit.





13


My cellie Romy got transferred but I didn’t know where. Big Daddy refused to tell me. “Mind your own business, Fernandez,” he kept saying.

I was alone now. Another lady on ad seg claimed they’d moved Romy to suicide watch. I didn’t believe her. Ad seg is a big rumor mill of people locked away and shouting through their door. Big Daddy would not do me any favors. I couldn’t even get any books to read. He was just, “No passing, Fernandez. Nuh uh.” Probably he was trying to get promoted.

One year I read eight Danielle Steel novels in ad seg. She did a prison novel that is straight-up killer. Everybody was reading it. We tore the book into sections for passing under cell doors, and it was all people talked about. It blew through the prison like a forest fire. It never occurred to me it was odd women in prison would want to read about other women in prison. You want to read about a world you know, not just ones you don’t know.

I had nothing to do, and no one to talk to. I was tired of Betty LaFrance shouting up the vent. I was eighteen years old when I met her, and she’d impressed the hell out of me. She was rich and called everyone “darling.” Taught manners to women at the county jail. But that was decades ago and you get sick of people. I’ll always love Betty because she’s part of my history, and she’s just too trippy and weird not to like. But sometimes you want her to quiet down.

She kept yelling up through the air vent about her latest plans. She said she was finally going to get back at the rat-faced cop. I told her to hush. But she can’t. That’s Betty. She started rambling about the Bible. When I was young and stupid, Betty had me convinced the Book of Daniel is really about aliens coming to Earth. She spooked the hell out of me. This time, her ramble was all about Judges. “Hey, Sammy. What’s sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion?” She kept asking me that through the vent pipe. “Sweeter than honey, and stronger than a lion?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. She’s better when it’s just about money, or her legs that are insured for millions.

“The lion is killed by Samson,” she said. “He opens the lion’s body and there’s a beehive inside. Bees make honey, see?” She said “honey” like it was the key to her riddle, and now I was supposed to understand everything. Like honey was some kind of code.

“There’s honey in the carcass. Sweet honey,” she said. “But you don’t get it unless you kill the lion. First, you have to kill the lion. I put a hit on him. I got him cornered.”

She started talking about the war, but I had tuned her out.

“Are you even aware we are at war?” she asked, after I’d stopped responding.

“I know about it,” I said. But I didn’t know much. In county lockup there’s no news on the TV. Too dangerous or something. They give us reruns of Friends. Everyone in jail loves Friends. The characters are practically our bunkies.

“There are American soldiers over in Iraq,” Betty shouted, “protecting your freedom.”

“They can have my freedom,” I yelled back. “It sucks.”

When I was in county, someone on my tier heard from her family that we’d invaded Iraq. I went around asking people if they knew where that is, and not one lady knew. Even the educated people in jail didn’t know. It’s like these places don’t exist until we bomb them.

Betty started bothering the guard downstairs. I could hear her through the vent, asking him to pray with her for the troops.



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Talking to Romy got me thinking about the past. I dreamed one night about the Snooty Fox. I was walking along the balcony outside the rooms. It was daytime and I could hear the traffic on Figueroa. I kept passing rooms with the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob, the curtains closed. I came to a room with an open door. The room was vacant and clean and I went in and shut the door and lay down on the bedspread and fell asleep. I think prison makes you so tired that in the very best dreams you have, you’re actually sleeping. That’s what we dream about. Sleep. When I woke up, I felt like I had gotten much better rest than usual. After Big Daddy put my breakfast through the flap, I shouted to Conan on the end of the tier, told him about my dream. I said I feel like I got double sleep, since I was sleeping in my dream at the Snooty Fox.