Lucia Berlin: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

Police cars rolling back to back

They don’t care

’cause it’s black on black

and

Two wet sugars

for one cigarette

Big score.”

Karate and I laughed. “Go ahead on, motherfuckers, laugh. Dig this.”

Damned if he didn’t recite a sonnet by Shakespeare. Willie. His deep voice above the insanity of jail noise.

“‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate…’

“Teacher’s white, old. Old as my gramma, but she’s cool. Ferragamo boots. First day she came in wearing Coco perfume. She couldn’t believe I knew it. Now she wears different ones. I know them all. Opium, Ysatis, Joy. Only one I missed was Fleurs de Rocaille.”

Sounded like he said it perfectly. Karate and me laughed our heads off about him and his Fleurs de Rocaille.

Actually one sound you hear a lot in jail is laughter.

This is not your normal jail. I’ve been in normal jails, Santa Rita, Vacaville. A miracle I’m still alive. County #3 has been on 60 Minutes for how progressive it is. Computer training, mechanics, printing. A famous horticulture school. We supply the greens for Chez Panisse, Stars, other restaurants. This is where I got my G.E.D.

The head of the jail, Bingham, is something else. He’s an ex-con, for one thing. Murdered his father. Did serious time for it. When he got out he went to law school, decided to change the prison system. He understands jail.

Nowadays he’d have walked, got self-defense for being abused. Hell, I could get off Murder One easy, just tell a jury about my ma. Stories about my father, I could be the fuckin’ Zodiac.

They’re going to build a new jail, next to this one. Bingham says this jail is the same as the street. Same power structure, attitudes, brutality, drugs. The new jail will change all this. You won’t want to come back to it, he says. Face it, part of you likes to get back in here, get some rest.

Signed up for the class just to see CD. Mrs. Bevins said that CD had told her about me.

“That ol’ wino? Bet you heard plenty about me. I’m the Karate Kid. I’ll be makin’ you smile. Put some pep in your step. Glide in your stride.”

A writer called Jerome Washington wrote about this kind of Uncle Tomming. Talking jive to whites. Things like “I be’s so rich I had money in bof my shoes.” True, we love it. The teacher was laughing. “Just ignore him,” Dixie said. “He’s incorrigible.”

“No way, mama. Encourage me all you want.”

Mrs. Bevins had me and Karate fill out a questionnaire while they read their work out loud. I thought the questions would be about our education and police record, but they were things like “Describe your ideal room,” “You are a stump. Describe yourself as a stump.”

We were scribbling away, but I was listening to Marcus read a story. Marcus is a brutal guy, Indian, a serious felon. He wrote a good story, though, about a little kid watching his dad get beat up by some rednecks. It was called, “How I Became a Cherokee.”

“This is a fine story,” she said.

“The story is fucked. It was fucked when I first read it someplace. I never knew my father. I figured this was the kind of bullshit you want from us. Bet you come all over yourself how you help us unfortunate victims of society get in touch with our feelings.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about your feelings. I’m here to teach writing. Matter of fact you can lie and still tell the truth. This story is good, and it rings true, wherever it came from.”

She was backing to the door while she spoke. “I hate victims,” she said. “For sure I don’t want to be yours.” She opened the door, told the guards to take Marcus up to the tier.

“If this class goes right what we will be doing is trusting each other with our lives,” she said. She told me and Karate that the assignment had been to write about pain. “Read your story, please, CD.”

When he finished reading the story, Mrs. Bevins and I smiled at each other. CD smiled too. First time ever I saw him really smile, little white teeth. The story was about a young man and a girl looking in the window of a junk store in North Beach. They’re talking about the stuff, an old picture of a bride, some little shoes, an embroidered pillow.

The way he described the girl, her thin wrists, the blue vein on her forehead, her beauty and innocence, it broke your heart. Kim was crying. She’s a young Tenderloin whore, mean little bitch.

“Yeah, it’s cool, but it ain’t pain,” Willie said.

“I felt pain,” Kim said.

“Me too,” Dixie said. “l’d kill to have somebody see me that way.”

Everybody was arguing, saying it was about happiness, not pain.

“It’s about love,” Daron said.

“Love, no way. Dude doesn’t even touch her.”

Mrs. Bevins said to notice all the mementos of dead people. “The sunset is reflected in the glass. All the images are about the fragility of life and love. Those tiny wrists. The pain is in the awareness that the happiness won’t last.”

“Yeah,” Willie said, “except in this story he be engrafting her new.”

“Say wha’, nigger?”

“That’s from Shakespeare, blood. It’s what art does. It freezes his happiness. CD can have it back any old time, just reading that story.”

“Yeah, but he can’t be fuckin’ it.”

“You’ve got it perfectly, Willie. I swear this class understands better than any class I ever taught,” she said. On another day she said that there was little difference between the criminal mind and the mind of the poet. “It is a matter of improving upon reality, making our own truth. You have an eye for detail. Two minutes in a room you have everything and everybody scoped out. You all can smell a lie.”

The classes were four hours long. We talked while we wrote, in between reading our work, listening to things she read. Talked to ourselves, to her, to one another. Shabazz said it reminded him of Sunday school when he was a kid, coloring pictures of Jesus and talking away real soft just like here. Shabazz is a religious fanatic, in for beating his wife and kids. His poems were a cross between rap and Song of Solomon.

The writing class changed my friendship with Karate Kid. We wrote every night in our cell and read our stories to each other, took turns reading out loud. Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” Chekhov’s “Sleepy.”

I stopped being self-conscious after the first day, reading aloud “My Stump.” My stump was the only one left in a burned-out forest. It was black and dead and, when the wind blew, bits of charcoal crumbled and fell away.

“What have we got here?” she asked.

“Clinical depression,” Daron said.

“We got us one burnt-out hippy,” Willie said. Dixie laughed, “I see a very poor body image.” “The writing is good,” CD said. “I really felt how bleak and hopeless everything is.”

“True,” Mrs. Bevins said. “People are always saying ‘tell the truth’ when you write. Actually it is hard to lie. The assignment seems silly … a stump. But this is deeply felt. I see an alcoholic who is sick and tired. This stump is how I would have described myself before I stopped drinking.”

“How long were you sober before you felt different?” I asked her. She said it worked the other way around. First I had to think I wasn’t hopeless, then I could stop.

“Whoa,” Daron said, “if I want to hear this shit I’ll sign up for AA meetings.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Do me a favor, though. Don’t answer this out loud. Each of you. Ask yourself if the last time, or times, you were arrested, whatever it was for — were you high on drugs or alcohol at the time?” Silence. Busted. We all laughed. Dwight said, “You know that group MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers? We got our own group, DAM. Drunks Against Mothers.”