The Mars Room(77)

A coyote died on the fence, hung there for everyone to see.

Coyotes had lived in the alley behind the place I’d sublet in Los Angeles. They trotted along the sidewalk past our house in the middle of the day. At night Jackson and I could hear their cascade of yips. Jackson would act scared and clamp on to me but in a pretend way, because it was fun to be scared of wild animals that were outside if you were inside with your mom. I remembered Jackson telling me coyotes have a longer snout than a wolf, that this was the main difference, the shape of the face.

We were on lockdown while the guards turned off the fence in order to pull off the dead coyote. The time of Angel Marie Janicki was over. No one was getting out.



* * *



Sammy’s release was soon. She planned to parole to a halfway house, a strict reentry program where she could be trained for employment. She was seldom up for the yard now. Stayed in her room, out of the mix. When someone had a release date coming, enemies would try to draw that person into trouble, to ruin her chances.

A television crew came inside the prison to film Button and a handful of other people who had been convicted as juveniles. Button spent all her time preparing for the filming, as if it was a beauty contest. “You need to look sad,” I told her. “Young. Innocent.” But it was her big moment and she wanted to look fabulous. She tailored clothes in return for a hair treatment in the cosmetology training salon. She stole makeup from a woman in the room next to ours, a loner who was afraid of her. She slapped the woman doing her hair for curling her bangs incorrectly. She’d become a punk and we wanted her out of our room.

The crew filmed all day during visiting hours, Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday I was on the yard with the other lowlifes who had no visits, which was the majority of us. Some visited with church people, strangers who volunteered contact from the goodness of their hearts. The women I knew who met with them did it to have visitors, and to be able to graze the vending machines. I sat on the yard and made fun of the phonies who pretended to be indigenous so they could do sweat lodge ritual with the real indigenous women. There was no mistaking who was from a tribe, since they controlled the tobacco trade and shopped canteen with their tribal funds.

That Sunday night, Button would not shut up about the documentary film. Everyone was going to know her story.

“I should not even be in this place,” she said.

“What makes you so special?” I’d had enough of her.

“I was fourteen when my crime got committed. The brain is not fully developed at that age.”

Probably it was true, about a kid’s brain. Everything here is about choices, decisions, as if people are making them when they commit a crime. A fourteen-year-old is not making choices. She’s in the prison of the present tense. When I was that young, I could not imagine anything beyond that day, the next. But Button still pissed me off, separating herself from the rest of us like that.

There was a prisoner named Lindy Belsen who had been convicted as a juvenile and had her sentence commuted by the governor. She was famous at Stanville. A team of volunteer lawyers had gathered around her. They built up her case as a story of human trafficking. She’d shot her pimp in a motel room. He’d groomed her for prostitution from the age of twelve. It was a sad story, and maybe she deserved to go free, but the way her lawyers positioned her as an undisputed innocent was difficult for the rest of us. Lindy Belsen was an ideal face for free-world activists who wanted a model prisoner to fight for. She was pretty, and spoke like an educated person. But most important, she could be depicted, convincingly, as a victim, not a perpetrator. A lot of people in the prison resented Lindy Belsen, because what did her story, the story her lawyers told, say about the rest of us? Few were happy for her when she left.



* * *



They mainlined Serenity Smith to general population. They put her on B yard, but close custody. In a regular unit, but confined, with seven other close custody prisoners, unable to come and go from their room. Eventually they would lift her confinement, move her to a regular room. Conan and his transgender counseling group were committed to protecting Serenity. They had meetings about it. They were on her side. Other people were making weapons to fight them. Conan and his group planned to surround Serenity, a butch security force, to keep her safe from Teardrop and all the other dangerous people who wanted to hurt her.

Sammy said a prison riot was an awful thing. There had been one at CIW, north against south. It was a meat grinder, she said.

To prevent organized violence on the yard, the cops wouldn’t say when they were lifting Serenity’s close custody.

It wasn’t my issue. Life went back to normal. After Hauser left, our continuing education options were healing groups that met in the gym: Self-Esteem. Anger Management. Transitional Living (only for women with release dates), and Relationships 101. There were budget cuts and other changes. Woodshop was no longer available for level fours, like me. I started working in the cafeteria, where cops put their hands on me as I slopped Mortimer portions. The kitchen supervisor wore a big button that said DON’T EVEN TRY IT. Don’t even think of attempting to manipulate me with your sob stories and needs. That was how a lot of the staff was. Those who were open didn’t want to help us. They wanted to make cash for smuggling contraband.

I got a letter from Eva’s father. I’d written about ten letters to his address to try to locate Eva and this was the first news back, after five years in prison.