Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

Smokey could hot-wire any vehicle. “She would steal a car, we’d party in it, wipe off the prints, and dump it.” Once they were in a fight and Sammy was trying to buy heroin at the hamburger stand in Compton. Smokey came revving up in this horribly loud cement truck, the mixer on the back revolving full tilt. Sammy yelled over the grinding noise for Smokey to shut it off. “I could not score with a cement mixer next to me, so I start walking away, to lose her and that noisy thing, and Smokey’s driving it the speed of my walking. No dealer was going to sell to me, creating a scene like that. I’m yelling turn it off, the what’s it called, the spinning thing, and she’s going, ‘I don’t know how.’ All she could do was put it in gear and drive it. We were yelling at each other and finally I got in so we could fight in private. We go driving around in this cement mixer, and we’re starting to get along. I’m not mad anymore. The driver had left his lunch box on the seat. I opened it thinking I’d drink his juice and eat his sandwich, whatever he had in there, and inside the lunch box is the dude’s wallet. Smokey and I got in a fight all over again. She had this crack idea that because she hot-wired the cement mixer, the wallet was hers. Nuh uh. Sorry. I took the cash and got out. Our relationship had a lot of drama to it like that. Different ideas on things.”

When the prison went on lockdown we got no yard time. Sometimes this was from fog. Other times, staff shortages. My third week, it was because a minimum-security prisoner walked off the almond orchard. You have to have sixty days remaining on your sentence to get a job in the orchard, which is outside the prison. The girl who made that decision was blowing everything. Betty learned about it on her television and shouted the news through the pipe. The girl was picked up at her mother’s house. She’d gone straight home. Sammy told me no one had ever successfully escaped from inside Stanville.

“A lifer named Angel Marie Janicki almost did. She got close. I mean this close.”

She had clothes stashed on the yard, a mechanic’s jumpsuit and baseball cap, to disguise herself as one of the contractors working on-site. Someone had gotten her a pair of wire cutters. On a day of milk-thick valley fog, she worked in a blind spot of the guard tower, along main yard. Cut a hole in the fence, passed through, took off walking. A guard leaving the prison saw a figure on the side of the road and was suspicious. The roads around the prison were not for human beings. They were for unmanned industrial agriculture and prison-bound vehicles. She was caught within minutes. Now Stanville had an electrified fence. Electrissified, as Sammy put it. “You’ll frizzle-fry if you touch it.”

“What about hiding in the lockbox of a work truck?” I asked.

“You don’t think they check those? They search every vehicle.”

“Underneath, then. Strap yourself to the undercarriage.”

“They have mirrors on rollers. They check under every vehicle. Unless you’ve got a lover with a helicopter who can shoot out the guard towers and land on the yard, you’re not getting out. Or maybe if you faked a serious medical emergency and got taken to the hospital in Stanville, and had an entire crew waiting there to bust you out with grenades and assault weapons and a helicopter, and they also had a new passport, cash, everything you’d need, ready and planned.”

Week five on the ad seg concrete yard, Conan told us about being classified male.

“I was at a station somewhere in the valley, where they put me with the homies and I knew to let them make their mistake. You never correct, because their wrong might be your right. You wait, see how it’s going to play, see if you are getting some angle from their fuck-up. After half a night there, they rode me downtown. There were so many people processing in when I got to IRC that if you weren’t a K-10 they were practically waving you through. I had a lighter and they didn’t even see it. Just flashed at my crack and said next. I got interviewed and they asked am I gay. I said yes: always be truthful when you can. They’re asking me what clubs do you go to, what’s upstairs, and I’m guessing, but answering correct. What’s the bouncer’s name, the cop goes. Rick, I say. Are you sure? he asks. Yeah, I say, but I had guessed wrong, and the cop says, Get the fuck out of here. Only real faggots get the gay dorm. No Zumba for you, buddy. The cops kept saying that to me. No Zumba for you. Like I got caught up so I could take a Zumba class in the LA Men’s Central Jail. I don’t even know what Zumba is. I was given the regular dark-blue counties instead of the baby-blue powder props, and put in general population. It turned out fine. I had a cool cellie, guy named Chester. I helped him scavenge a piece of ventilation grate from above the shower because I was the tallest person on that tier, and in exchange he had my back. Men’s jail is better in a lot of ways. Better food. Good gym equipment. Great library. More phones, stronger water pressure—”

“You showered and no one noticed you weren’t a guy?” I asked him.

“The men’s joint was jumping off,” Conan said. “People had to stay ready for fighting and riots. Everyone took showers in their boxers and work boots.

“Suge Knight was in when I was there. The guards said he had eighty thousand dollars on his prison books. That’s a lot of cup of noodle. A lot of deodorant.”

What did Chester want with the ventilation, I asked.

“He was making a spear,” Conan said. “That was the new thing down there, a spear with an extender bar you make out of rolled Bibles.”

What was he going to do with it? I asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not your job to wonder about other people’s business. Man, you would not last one minute in a men’s joint, asking fucked-up questions like that.”

From Men’s Central Jail, Conan was transferred to Wasco State Prison. At Wasco, going through work exchange stripout one day, they figured out he was biologically a woman. He was put back on the bus, reprocessed at women’s county, and taken to Stanville.

One morning McKinnley yelled through the door that my GED prep session was that afternoon.

“When staff come back here after lunch I want no monkey business, Hall.”

I had not signed up for the GED, which is the only continuing education offered at Stanville. I had graduated from high school. I was not a bad student when I made the effort. I thought of what Conan said. You don’t correct. Their wrong might be your right.

That afternoon, I was taken from the cell. It felt like freedom to be chained and hustled down a hallway after weeks of confinement. I was placed in a birdcage in the ad seg program office and left to wait, listening to the stutter and clank from the sewing machines on death row.

“You study real good, Hall. You prove everybody wrong. Show the world you ain’t all bad.”

McKinnley clomped down the hall in his huge boots.

If I’d understood how much guards hated civilian staff, I might have been nicer to G. Hauser, which was the name on the ID pinned to the GED instructor’s shirt. The guy sat down in a chair next to my birdcage with a stack of worksheets. He was about my age or a little older, with a non-ironic mustache and ugly running shoes.

“Let’s start with something simple.” He read the first question on the math worksheet. “Four plus three equals (a) eight, (b) seven, (c) none of the above.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Is that (a) eight, (b) seven, or (c) none of the above? It sometimes helps to use your fingers, if you need to count it out.”