The Mars Room(60)

On New Year’s, he and Alex went to a party in Oakland, a typical situation of people jammed in a kitchen and asking pointless questions like, What do you do? And, Where are you from? The women paid extra attention to Gordon, not knowing already what the problem was with him, as they had already established with the other single men at that party, according to Alex. Some of them were former grad students who’d branched off from the English or Rhetoric or Comp Lit departments into psychoanalysis. Not just undergoing it but putting out a shingle. Alex said that he’d been labeled a male hysteric, which mostly meant the woman who blithely diagnosed him wanted to sleep with him but found him too wily and little-brotherish for an actual relationship.

When Gordon hesitantly mentioned what he did for work, after being asked several times, the women in the kitchen were on him like a plague of locusts.

“Really? A prison. That must be hard.”

“Prison guards. I wouldn’t be able to look at those people.”

“They don’t even wear their own clothes. Like cops, but even worse. What a fucked-up life.”

Much discussion among the women about the scum of the earth who worked as guards. He did not have the courage, or maybe it was the will, to ask if these women had ever known a prison guard. And why would he defend prison guards? He hated them himself. But if a person got outside their own bubble they would see that prison guards were poor people without reasonable options. One had just blown his head off in a guard tower at Salinas Valley. He could have told them this, engaged in corrective arguments with these women at the party. But wasn’t it obvious? Didn’t even wear their own clothes. The interaction brought back anxieties from grad school, the way his peers could casually criticize others they didn’t know anything about.

As the first and only member of his family to pursue so-called higher education, maybe Gordon was prone to hypersensitivity. He had encountered people in graduate school who were eager to declare working-class pedigree, and they maybe had one parent with less education, or the family had been “poor,” but college-educated. Either way, if someone was insisting loudly on their own authentic origin, this was generally taken by Gordon as evidence they weren’t actually working-class. If they were from a background like Gordon’s, they would know to hide it, the way Gordon did, because the fact of his pioneering status was itself proof of just how tenuous his escape was.

Some people he knew showed up at the party, friends from the department who had gotten post-docs and talked about their upcoming job interviews, the details of their academic book contracts, as if these were interesting subjects. The women were doing that grad school thing of air-quoting to install distance between themselves and the words they chose, these bookish women with an awkwardness he used to find cute. Gordon did not want to discuss his life with these people. He drank, as a temporary salve for his alienation.

He and Alex woke up with hangovers.

With Alex, at least, Gordon could express something of what it was like at Stanville. He had been describing his students, giving Alex the impression that Romy Hall was just one more student he helped, or tried to help, equal with the others, which made him inwardly aware that it wasn’t the case.

Alex started questioning him about his involvement with prisoners. Alex talked about Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott. Alex said he wondered whether Mailer was responsible for what happened after he got Jack Henry Abbott, his little pet project, out of prison.

He wasn’t a pet project, Gordon said.

“Yeah yeah,” Alex said. “He wasn’t. He was a person. But did Norman Mailer understand that?”



* * *



His first day back at work, the warden put the prison on lockdown because of fog. It wasn’t even real fog. It was haze from crop dusters that sprayed the almond fields surrounding the prison. Lockdown meant everyone confined to their cells. No work exchange, no classes, no movement. He would be paid to do nothing like everyone at the facility, but he felt a sense of regret. He would not see her, would not tell her he’d gone to her Vietnamese place on Sixth Street.

He went home and let impulse drive his actions. Called the number she had given him. Jackson Hall was the name of the kid, written on a pink piece of paper. I am just inquiring. She doesn’t even have to know I made this call. The person who answered told him to dial another number. At the new number he was put on hold for a very long time, and then passed to someone’s voice mail. After several days, someone called him back and left a message. Gordon was at work. He called the number the next morning, reached a voice mail and left another message. This went on for weeks, because Gordon wasn’t home much, since he worked down in the valley and lived up on the mountain.

What he eventually learned, when he spoke with a human being at San Francisco’s Family and Children Services, was exactly proof of why he should not have gotten involved.





20


A few years ago some fuckers built a vacation house just across Stemple Pass Road. Motorcycle and snowmobile fiends. They would buzz up and down the road past my cabin most weekends, summer and winter. Last summer they were worse than usual, sometimes made it a three-day-weekend. It was getting absolutely intolerable. My heart was going bad. Any emotional stress, anger above all, makes it beat irregularly. It got so that the constant cycle noise was choking me with anger, heart going wild. Risky to commit crimes so close to home, but I figured if I didn’t get these guys the anger would literally kill me. So one night in fall I sneaked over there, though they were home, and stole their chainsaw. Buried it in the swamp.