The Mars Room(44)

“What tattoo do you want?” Sammy asked Conan.

“A big-ass portrait of Saddam Hussein,” Conan said. “Tacked up right here.” He bulged his bicep. “Just to piss off these dickwads.”

Two unit cops were trying to work the film projector.

“Support our troops!” Conan yelled.

“Shut the fuck up!” someone else yelled. The movie was starting.

Every one of my cellmates got jobs in the woodshop, except for Button Sanchez, who was too young to legally work. Her stomach was flat now. Her face showed no grief that I could see. Her baby was gone. She took classes and, after school, played with her pet rabbit, which she’d caught on main yard and trained. It had a little box under her lower bunk with shredded Kotex in it, as a litter thing. It knew where to poop. She took it to class with her, hidden in her state-issue brassiere. “I’m its mom,” she said. She sewed little clothes for it. Made a leash. Snuck the bunny on main yard so it could see its cousins. It bit her sometimes, and so did the fleas and mites that lived on it. Teardrop told her to get rid of it. Every room of eight had a Teardrop. The strongest woman in the room made the rules. Teardrop threatened to roll up Button, put her and her mattress and rabbit in the hall. Button and Teardrop had a knock-down drag-out. Button was tiny and Teardrop was huge, but youngsters have a dirty advantage. They’ll hit you over the head with a two-by-four if they get the chance. Button went all-out, fought Teardrop with a straightening iron. The rabbit got to stay.

“Fill up your schedule,” Sammy said to me. She had known lots of women in my position. Dire as it was, it comforted me to know I wasn’t alone. Others had found a way to survive it. I had been in Los Angeles county jail when the towers of the World Trade Center went down. That was right after I got arrested. We didn’t have access to news, but people were getting the details from their families over the phone. Everyone was freaking out, except for one girl who said it comforted her to know she wasn’t the only one whose life was wrecked. People got on her, but I knew what she meant.

“Were you guys close?” Sammy asked about my mother.

I said no.

Was she healthy?

No.

“You might’ve ended up needing a different guardian for the kid eventually. Things happen in the free world that you can’t control.”

I could take the money I’d earn working and buy stamps and start flooding state agencies with letters about Jackson, Sammy said. She would help me. The library had directories with agency addresses. “You have to start from where you’re at,” she said. It was her motto.



* * *



On our first day in woodshop, the prison industries supervisor told us we were going to get excellent on-the-job training skills, which would translate into employment upon our release.

“What about those of us who don’t got a release date?” Teardrop asked.

“Normally you can’t work in prison industries,” he said. “Normally, we can’t use you, because you don’t need the training, since you’re not getting out, and this is all about training people to work jobs. But we have a lot of orders to fill, so you’ve found yourself in a lucky position. You will learn to build furniture here and I can tell you ladies that a finish carpenter makes great money.”

Conan was impressed with the shop. “Dang, we get to use real wood? Table saws? Miter boxes? At Wasco the woodshop isn’t even real. The wood there is all compressed particleboard. You glue these pieces together. That’s your only tool: glue. You can’t even drive in a nail or that stuff will split and crumble. We weren’t learning anything. I told the supervisor, You keep talking about finish carpentry and we don’t make stuff that will teach us it. He goes, ‘That’s because you people are animals and if we give you tools you’ll kill each other.’ I ask him, What are we here to learn? And he says, ‘You’re here to learn how to work. To show up on time. To be workers.’ As if that’s a thing. We didn’t learn shit at the Wasco woodshop. We huffed glue all day. Then they came up with this huff-free glue. No Huff, it was called, that was its name, No Huff Glue. You can’t huff it. It doesn’t do anything. No power tools, no learning curve, no drug high. It was better than the other prison industries, though. The outfit down the hall, those dudes were making safety goggles for prison industries. And next to that building, they made boots for prison industries.”

I was assigned to a workbench.

“I’m one hundred percent Norse,” my new bench partner said.

The Norse was six feet tall, with long blond hair divided into several braids. The tattooed head of a bald eagle emerged from the top of her woodshop coveralls. The eagle on her chest had an American flag in its beak. It looked mad, even madder than eagles usually look.

The supervisor put Laura Lipp next to me and the Norse.

“Can I be moved?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Thank god,” the Norse said. “Whites.” She looked over at Conan, Teardrop, Reebok, the three black people I’d walked in with. “How do you feel about blacks?” she asked me and Laura Lipp.

Laura Lipp, eager for such rare acknowledgment, someone asking her a question, lunged to answer. “Oh, I try to be colorblind, but it’s not always. I mean, some people have had to come further than others in order to—”