A Manual for Cleaning Women (46 page)

In front of the jail is a meadow where there is a herd of buffalo. About sixty buffalo. Already there were six new calves. For some reason all the sick buffalo in the U.S. get sent here. Veterinarians treat them and study them. You can tell when dudes on the bus are doing their first time because they all freak out. “Whoa! What the fuck! Do they feed us buffalo? Check them mothers out.”

The prison and the women’s jail, the auto shop and the greenhouses. No people, no other houses, so it seems as if you’re suddenly in an ancient prairie lit by sunbeams in the mist. The Bluebird bus always frightens the buffalo even though it comes once a week. They break into a gallop, stampede off toward the green hills. Like a tourist on safari I was hoping I’d get a view of the fields.

The bus unloaded us into the basement holding cell where we waited to get processed. A long wait and still another butt search. “Chaz, don’t be laughin’ now,” Karate Kid said. He told me CD was here, had been violated. Jail talk is like Spanish. The cup breaks itself. You don’t violate your parole. The police violate you.

Sunnyvale gang shot the Chink. I hadn’t heard that. I knew CD loved his brother Chink, a big-time dealer in the Mission. “Heavy,” I said.

“No shit. Everybody gone by the time the police come except CD be sittin’ there holding the Chink’s head. All they had on him was violation. Six months. He’ll do three maybe. Then he’ll get the motherfuckers.”

I lucked out and got the third tier (but no view), a cell with only two surly kids and Karate, who I know from the street. Only three other white guys on the tier, so I was glad Karate was with me. The cells were meant for two people. Usually there are six men in them; we’d get two more in a week. The Kid would spend his time lifting weights and practicing kicks and lunges, whatever he does.

When we got here Mac was the deputy in charge. He’s always laying AA rap on me. He knows I like to write though, brought me a yellow pad and a pen. Said he saw I was in for B and E and burglary, would be staying awhile. “Maybe this time you’ll do a fourth step, Chaz.” That’s when you admit all your wrongs.

“Better bring me about ten more tablets,” I told him.

Anything you can say about prison is a cliché. Humiliation. The waiting, the brutality, the stench, the food, the endlessness. No way to describe the incessant earsplitting noise.

*   *   *

For two days I had bad shakes. One night I must have had a seizure, or else fifty guys beat me up in my sleep. Split my lip, broke some teeth, black and blue all over. Tried to make sick bay but none of the guards would go for it.

“You don’t ever have to go through this again,” Mac said.

At least they let me stay on my bunk. CD was on another tier but during exercise I could see him down in the yard, smoking with other dudes, listening while they laughed. Most of the time he walked around alone.

Weird how some people have power. Meanest mothers out there deferred to him, just by how they stood back when he passed by. He’s not huge like his brother, but has the same strength and cool. They had a Chinese mother and black father. CD has one long pigtail down his back. He is an unworldly color, like an old sepia photograph, black tea with milk.

Sometimes he reminds me of a Masai warrior, other times a Buddha or a Mayan god. He’d stand there not moving, not blinking an eye, for half an hour. He has the calm indifference of a god. I probably sound like a nut or a fag. Anyway, he has this effect on everybody.

I met him in County when he’d just turned eighteen. It was our first time in jail. I turned CD on to books. The first time he fell in love with words was Stephen Crane’s
The Open Boat
. Every week the guy from the library would come and we’d give him back our books and get more. Latinos have an elaborate sign language they use in here. Me and CD started speaking in book.
Crime and Punishment
,
The Stranger
, Elmore Leonard. I was in one other time when he was and by then he was turning me on to different writers.

Out on the street I’d run into him sometimes. He’d always give me money, which was awkward, but I was out there panhandling, so I never said no. We’d sit on a bus stop bench and talk. CD’s read more than I have by now. He’s twenty-two. I’m thirty-two but people always figure I’m a lot older. I feel around sixteen. I’ve been drunk since then, so a lot has passed me by. I missed Watergate, thank God. I still talk like a hippy, say things like “groovy” and “what a trip.”

Willie Clampton woke me by banging on my bars when the tier got back from the yard. “Yo, Chaz, what’s happening? CD says welcome home.”

“Say, how you been, Willie?”

“Cool. Couple more
Soul Train
s I’m gone. You dudes got to sign up for writing class. They got righteous classes now. Music, pottery, drama, painting. They even let them over from the women’s jail. Say, Kid, Dixie’s in the class. Word.”

“No way. What’s Dixie doing in County?”

Karate Kid used to pimp Dixie. She ran her own feminist operation now, girls and coke to big-time lawyers, county supervisors. Whatever she was in for she’d be out soon. She was about forty but still looked fine. On the street you’d take her for a Neiman Marcus buyer. She never copped to knowing me but always gave me five or ten bucks and a big grin. “Now, young man, you use this to get a nice nourishing breakfast.”

“So what you write?”

“Stories, rap, poems. Check out my poem:

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.”

Willie left a couple of weeks after I got there. We were sorry to see him go. Two of the women got in a fight so there was only Dixie, Kim, and Casey left, and six guys. Seven when Vee de la Rangee took Willie’s place. Puny, pimply ugly transvestite with blond permanent, black roots. He wore a plastic bread fastener for a nose ring, about twenty along each ear. Daron and Dwight looked like they might kill him. He said he had written some poems. “Read us one.”

It was a lush violent fantasy about the drag-heroin world. After he read no one said anything. Finally CD said, “That’s some powerful shit. Let’s hear some more.” Like CD gave everybody permission to accept this guy. Vee took off from there and by the next class he was at home. You could see how much it meant to him, to be heard. Hell, I felt that way too. Once I even had the nerve to write about when my dog died. I didn’t even care if they laughed, but nobody laughed.

Kim didn’t write that much. A lot of remorse poems about the child that got taken away from her. Dixie wrote sardonic things to the theme of “Vice Is So Nice.” Casey was fantastic. She wrote about heroin addiction. Really got to me. Most of the guys in here sold crack but either didn’t use it that much or were too young to know what years and years of voluntarily returning to hell can do to you. Mrs. Bevins knew. She didn’t talk that much about it, but enough to make it seem pretty cool that she had stopped.