The Mars Room(64)
* * *
Six weeks later, Doc’s counselor told him he was well enough for a medical yard on a Sensitive Needs block at a snitch prison in the high desert.
“I cannot fucking wait,” Doc said, with not the slightest trace of sarcasm.
22
I got a visitor one day. You don’t know beforehand who it is. They call your name and send you to visiting. I had been at Stanville three and a half years, and no one had ever come to see me. I didn’t even get mail. I had written to a few friends from San Francisco. None of them wrote back. People fall away quickly when you disappear into prison.
I couldn’t imagine who had made the trip.
When I got through strip-out I saw that it was Johnson’s lawyer.
“I don’t have news for you,” he said, in response to my look of hopeful surprise.
“I came to see how you are. The thing about retirement is you don’t retire from thinking. From here I’m going up to Corcoran to visit a guy who got five life sentences, and another who is life without. You look healthy.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m just tan.” I had been spending so much time on the unshaded yard that my arms and legs were the cake-brown color of unglazed donuts.
Teardrop was also in the visiting room. She was sitting with an old man. The guy was sweating profusely. He looked about ninety-five. I didn’t know people that old could sweat. Teardrop was six feet tall, strong, semi-masculine, angry, and beautiful, her hair pulled back tight, face like a weapon. This old man was stooped, and bald, and kept clutching his chest. It was obvious he was a runner she’d hustled through the mail. At a different table was Button Sanchez, also with an old man. He’d bought her an entire smorgasbord from the vending machines: microwave hamburger and french fries, ice cream sandwich, and two kinds of energy drink. She was smiling at him as he fondled her breasts with his eyes.
Teardrop and Button, and other women around me, all working their Keaths: it was not that different from the Mars Room, except here they were preening and selling their asses for prepackaged junk food. Or in Teardrop’s case, a bag of heroin.
I needed runners like the rest of them. I, too, now had a page on a pen pal site. But what could be gotten this way had no real value. It did not lead to peace of mind, to help for Jackson. It led to nothing but animal existence with mail order cologne, two choices, Tabu or Sand & Sable.
“Is there any way to contact my son?”
“That’s outside my area. If I could help you with that, I would, but I can’t.”
“I have to get out of this place.”
I watched the old man slip Teardrop a package, and Teardrop shove it, deftly, into her prison pants.
“You’ve got to help me.”
The lawyer opened his briefcase and took out a stack of papers.
“I’m getting rid of records and thought you might want your file. It’s the material from your case, depositions, notes, witness interviews, discovery.”
Seeing that stack of paper, the record of what happened, of what happened to me, I was overcome. I yelled at him to keep from crying. I said I’d been doing research and was pretty sure he’d given ineffective counsel.
“Oh dear,” he said, “that would be such a waste of your energies.”
“Why? Because it’ll make you look bad?”
“Because it doesn’t work. Even in these unbelievable cases, where the lawyer is totally out to lunch, they still side with him. One guy fell asleep during cross-examination of his client. Another was a felon himself, handling a murder case as community service, but had no experience as a trial lawyer. Think those guys were ‘ineffective’? Not according to the Supreme Court. You got a very tough deal. There’s no question, and I feel for you.”
“If only I could have afforded a lawyer.”
He shook his head. “Romy, the people who hire private lawyers, but can’t afford a good one, I mean an expensive one, oh boy is that painful. You should see the private attorneys people end up with. Guys who do DUIs, suddenly handling a capital case. It should be illegal. You were much better off with the public defender’s office.”
It was hard to imagine I could be any worse off and I said so. Tears ran down my neck. I wanted to unload on this man. And yet he was the only person who had ever come to see me.
Teardrop’s visitor collapsed on the table. The cops from the cop shop rushed over. The old man seemed to be having a heart attack. An alarm sounded. Medical technicians came rushing into the room.
“Visiting is over,” the intercoms boomed. “Visiting is over. Return to your units.”
* * *
Hauser had made it pretty obvious he liked me. Everyone in class knew. It became a joke, Conan humming “Here Comes the Bride” as I walked into the classroom trailer, sweaty and coated in woodshop dust.
Sammy went into overdrive about Hauser’s crush on me, speculating that maybe he’d adopt Jackson, when I told her I had given Hauser a number to call. Sammy was a walking historian of every person who had faced every adversity in prison and could produce examples of all the cases where staff, or even guards, had stepped in and raised the children of imprisoned women. She went on about it and meant well but it didn’t comfort me. I didn’t think she was reading things right, that any of her examples were relevant. I didn’t know how to explain it to her: this is a normal and nice college-educated boy who probably separates bottles and cans from the rest of his trash. He’s not going to adopt my kid. He’ll marry a nice girl like him who also recycles and they will have children together, their own.