Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

It was true that the clerks were all white. I tried to clerk, too, but you had to have a clean disciplinary record, and you had to be liked by the cops.

Sammy, Conan, and I all got assigned to the woodshop, which was hiring at twenty-two cents an hour: good money. Conan bragged that with his wages he was going to invest in a tattoo rig, start a side business and do some art on himself. We were sitting in the common area, waiting for the Friday night movie to begin. They were delayed because the film that was scheduled had profanity. They had to swap it for Driving Miss Daisy , which they’d shown us the Friday before.

“What tattoo do you want?” Sammy asked Conan.

“A big-ass portrait of Saddam Hussein,” Conan said. “Tacked up right here.” He bulged his bicep. “Just to piss off these dickwads.”

Two unit cops were trying to work the film projector.

“Support our troops!” Conan yelled.

“Shut the fuck up!” someone else yelled. The movie was starting.

Every one of my cellmates got jobs in the woodshop, except for Button Sanchez, who was too young to legally work. Her stomach was flat now. Her face showed no grief that I could see. Her baby was gone. She took classes and, after school, played with her pet rabbit, which she’d caught on main yard and trained. It had a little box under her lower bunk with shredded Kotex in it, as a litter thing. It knew where to poop. She took it to class with her, hidden in her state-issue brassiere. “I’m its mom,” she said. She sewed little clothes for it. Made a leash. Snuck the bunny on main yard so it could see its cousins. It bit her sometimes, and so did the fleas and mites that lived on it. Teardrop told her to get rid of it. Every room of eight had a Teardrop. The strongest woman in the room made the rules. Teardrop threatened to roll up Button, put her and her mattress and rabbit in the hall. Button and Teardrop had a knock-down drag-out. Button was tiny and Teardrop was huge, but youngsters have a dirty advantage. They’ll hit you over the head with a two-by-four if they get the chance. Button went all-out, fought Teardrop with a straightening iron. The rabbit got to stay.

“Fill up your schedule,” Sammy said to me. She had known lots of women in my position. Dire as it was, it comforted me to know I wasn’t alone. Others had found a way to survive it. I had been in Los Angeles county jail when the towers of the World Trade Center went down. That was right after I got arrested. We didn’t have access to news, but people were getting the details from their families over the phone. Everyone was freaking out, except for one girl who said it comforted her to know she wasn’t the only one whose life was wrecked. People got on her, but I knew what she meant.

“Were you guys close?” Sammy asked about my mother.

I said no.

Was she healthy?

No.

“You might’ve ended up needing a different guardian for the kid eventually. Things happen in the free world that you can’t control.”

I could take the money I’d earn working and buy stamps and start flooding state agencies with letters about Jackson, Sammy said. She would help me. The library had directories with agency addresses. “You have to start from where you’re at,” she said. It was her motto.

On our first day in woodshop, the prison industries supervisor told us we were going to get excellent on-the-job training skills, which would translate into employment upon our release.

“What about those of us who don’t got a release date?” Teardrop asked.

“Normally you can’t work in prison industries,” he said. “Normally, we can’t use you, because you don’t need the training, since you’re not getting out, and this is all about training people to work jobs. But we have a lot of orders to fill, so you’ve found yourself in a lucky position. You will learn to build furniture here and I can tell you ladies that a finish carpenter makes great money.”

Conan was impressed with the shop. “Dang, we get to use real wood? Table saws? Miter boxes? At Wasco the woodshop isn’t even real. The wood there is all compressed particleboard. You glue these pieces together. That’s your only tool: glue. You can’t even drive in a nail or that stuff will split and crumble. We weren’t learning anything. I told the supervisor, You keep talking about finish carpentry and we don’t make stuff that will teach us it. He goes, ‘That’s because you people are animals and if we give you tools you’ll kill each other.’ I ask him, What are we here to learn? And he says, ‘You’re here to learn how to work. To show up on time. To be workers.’ As if that’s a thing. We didn’t learn shit at the Wasco woodshop. We huffed glue all day. Then they came up with this huff-free glue. No Huff, it was called, that was its name, No Huff Glue. You can’t huff it. It doesn’t do anything. No power tools, no learning curve, no drug high. It was better than the other prison industries, though. The outfit down the hall, those dudes were making safety goggles for prison industries. And next to that building, they made boots for prison industries.”

I was assigned to a workbench.

“I’m one hundred percent Norse,” my new bench partner said.

The Norse was six feet tall, with long blond hair divided into several braids. The tattooed head of a bald eagle emerged from the top of her woodshop coveralls. The eagle on her chest had an American flag in its beak. It looked mad, even madder than eagles usually look.

The supervisor put Laura Lipp next to me and the Norse.

“Can I be moved?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Thank god,” the Norse said. “Whites.” She looked over at Conan, Teardrop, Reebok, the three black people I’d walked in with. “How do you feel about blacks?” she asked me and Laura Lipp.

Laura Lipp, eager for such rare acknowledgment, someone asking her a question, lunged to answer. “Oh, I try to be colorblind, but it’s not always. I mean, some people have had to come further than others in order to—”

“Do you let them eat your pussy is what I need to find out.”

Laura gasped. “Heavens no!”

“I run this bench and I need to know who is who,” the Norse said.

“Well, since you bring that up, I agree about sexual relations, as my husband was Hispanic and that was a disaster, ruined my life, but you might be interested to hear that I fainted one evening and the girls who came to my aid were black, and—”

The Norse ignored Laura Lipp and moved toward me.

“Do you like Iron Maiden?” she asked. “That’s what I play.”

“We have a radio?”

“I’m the radio in this part of the shop.”

That afternoon, the Norse hummed. “Run to the Hills” and “Iron Man” were on repeat. I was in high school all over again. But when she asked where I was from, nodded, and said, “Frisco, cool,” I was reminded that I was very far from where I was from. I didn’t ask her anything. I couldn’t have been less interested in knowing details about her Nazi Lowrider brothers and boyfriends in San Bernardino or wherever. That’s snobbery but there’s a cultural difference. The Sunset District was not exactly classy but we were adjacent to the Haight-Ashbury, and by that proximity to weirder cultures, not straight dirtheads, even if there were among us people who became full-on white supremacists, like Dean Conte, the sad kid from my junior high who was relentlessly made fun of. Dean Conte had experimented with various solutions to being maladjusted. Nerd, new waver, skateboarder, peace punk, hard-core punk, eventually skinhead, and finally, neo-Nazi in a suit and tie. When he was a skinhead, Dean and his friends ruined the Haight Street Fair. By six p.m., when the fair was ending and loading trucks were packing up the stage and the vendors’ tables, the air became ninety percent beer bottles, a forehead-height kill zone, thanks to the skinheads. Back when Dean had still been a nerd, he invited a bunch of kids who cut school to his father’s place on Hugo Street and we drank all his dad’s liquor and set the curtains on fire. I forgot about that day until I saw him all grown up on television. He was on a talk show as a spokesman for white supremacy. One of the skinheads on the show threw a chair at the host and broke his nose. Dean became famous. I still saw the kid, though, in the man. I’m not justifying his ideas. It’s just that he was someone I knew. He was in love with Eva and Eva was Filipino, but that had not deterred him. It’s always like that. I knew a guy in high school who later went to prison and joined the Aryan Brotherhood. The guy who joined the Aryan Brotherhood had a black girlfriend and mixed kids. Things are more complicated than some can admit. People are stupider and less demonic than some can admit.