The Mars Room_A Novel Read online

  “Is that my Chicana child? Sammy?” she’d shouted to us through the air vent on the first night. Betty had her black babies and her Chicana children and Sammy was her favorite.

  Betty had been a leg model for Hanes Her Way pantyhose. “Her legs are insured for millions. Her foot has that curve under it like a Barbie doll, but it’s real.” Sammy said Betty had stiletto heels in her cell on death row. She paid a cop hundreds to smuggle them in, just so she could put them on now and again and admire her own legs.

  Hundreds. Millions. You can’t believe anything people say. But what they say is all you have.

  Leg model or not, Betty’s pruno, like all pruno, looked and smelled like vomit. The garbagy smell of pruno is so distinct that when people are brewing, they disperse baby powder in the air of their cell to mask the scent.

  “That’s the best hooch at Stanville but you got to double-decant it, honey,” Betty shouted to us up the air vent. “Don’t forget to decant. It’s got to breathe.”

  She made it the usual way, with juice boxes poured into a plastic bag and mixed with ketchup packets, as sugar. A sock stuffed with bread, the yeast, was placed in the bag for several days of fermentation.

  Betty sent up a wineglass next, the plastic kind with a screw-on base.

  “Where the hell did she get this glass?”

  “The regular way,” Sammy said. “The vault or canoe.”

  Women smuggled heroin, tobacco, and cell phones from visiting inside their vaginas and rectums. Betty was smuggling plastic stemware.

  Sammy and I passed the pruno back and forth, and she told me Betty had arranged her husband’s murder to get his life insurance. You don’t talk about people’s crimes. But Betty was different. Death row was different. They were the big celebrities of Stanville, and celebrity gossip has a role.

  The hit man who killed her husband was her lover, but while she was waiting for the money to come through, Betty worried he was turning on her, so she had her hit man killed by a dirty cop she met at a bar in Simi Valley. She was going to have the second hit man—the dirty cop who’d killed the first hit man—knocked off when they caught her. She was afraid he’d squeal, or threaten to, and blackmail her. They were in Las Vegas, partying on her life insurance money. She asked a security guard at the El Cortez casino if he would murder the cop for a payoff.

  “Honey, it was NOT the El Cortez,” Betty yelled up the vent. “It was Caesars Palace. And honestly, if you’re going to tell my story and you don’t know the difference between Caesars and the El Cortez, there is just so much else you can’t know. The El Cortez is for off-duty limousine drivers and Filipinos. Got nothing against them. Should have hired one to get rid of Doc while I had the chance.”

  Doc was the dirty cop, Sammy said.

  “He’s tried to take a bounty on me about five times. You’d think a woman on death row could get some peace. Be left alone.”

  Among the evidence that led to Betty’s conviction was a photo of her lying nude under a pile of money. The photo was taken by Doc, the dirty cop, just after she got her husband’s life insurance payout. Betty loved money, Sammy said, and had slept with a pillow stuffed with bills in county jail. She asked Sammy to guard her pillow when she went to court. Sammy said she felt like a queen, to think that a high-class person like Betty LaFrance trusted her with her pillow full of money.

  Betty and Doc had been arrested in Las Vegas. Sammy knew the stories but any new audience for Betty was worth a repeat. She told us through the vent about the Nevada jail where she was held before they extradited her back to California. She said the girls there—the gals there—all worked. Every female in the Las Vegas county jail had to count playing cards, put them in proper order to make decks for the casinos. They made her do it, she said, and her fingers got terribly chapped.

  We were buzzing by then from the hooch.

  “Did she ever show you that photo, of her with the money?” I wanted to see it.

  She had not, but Sammy said Betty had a whole file on herself down there, all the articles that had appeared in the newspapers, her trial transcript, everything. Her case was a big deal, big news, Sammy said. Betty hiring multiple hit men, the cop implicated in a lot of other cases, major scandal with the LAPD. Sammy shouted down to Betty and asked if we could look at the photo. All I wanted in my drunken state, my full set of hopes and wishes, was to see this picture of the person whose voice I heard through the vent, a woman covered in money. But really I wanted to see anything besides the concrete walls of our tiny cell.

  Betty refused to send the photo through the toilet. She was afraid it would get damaged. You can wrap things tightly enough in plastic that no water seeps in. We send ice cream sandwiches from canteen through the toilets, wrapped in Kotex as insulation, then plastic wrap. She was playing hard to get. Sammy asked McKinnley, the sergeant working ad seg that night, if he’d pass a book from Betty for her to read. Everyone called him Big Daddy. “I got to finish it, Big Daddy,” Sammy said. “I read every chapter but the final one, last time I was back here.” If he said yes, Betty could slip the photo into the pages.

  “I can’t do any passing, Fernandez. You get caught with property that ain’t yours, they’re gonna add time. You know that. I don’t like to see my little girls suffer back here. Just follow the rules, Fernandez, and you’ll be mainlined soon.”

  “Big Daddy,” Sammy said, “I wish you’d been my father. My whole life could have gone different.”

  “Now, Fernandez,” Sergeant McKinnley said, “I’m sure your own father did the best job he could.”

  We heard his boots moving down the hall.

  “I never knew my father!” Sammy called after him, through the food flap. “My mother didn’t know him, either! She’s not even sure who he was!”

  Betty heard us laughing and that was what did it. She was no longer the center of attention and agreed to flush up the photo.

  After we got the thirty layers of plastic wrap unpeeled, Sammy unfolded a newspaper article that featured the incriminating image. I had pictured a classic nude with a bikini of hundred-dollar bills, the long tan legs insured for millions.

  The image was of a woman lying on a bed stony as a corpse, with an enormous landslide of money crushing her, only her head emerging from the pile. She looked as if a gravel truck had backed up to the bed and slid its multi-ton load over her, entombing her in money.

  We didn’t either of us say a word. Sammy folded up the image, rewrapped it, and sent it down the pipes.

  * * *

  Our once weekly yard time was not a real yard, just the ad seg yard. A small concrete area wrapped in razor wire. But we got to see Conan out there, on his own adjacent razor-wire concrete patch. Conan did push-ups and talked to me about cars. It had started when Conan asked where I was from.

  “Frisco, huh,” he said, “where they were doing that extended-axle thing back in the nineties. Pokers. Man, you guys have something to answer to.”

  To say “Frisco” is as goofy and wrong as an extended axle, but Conan was right. It was as if one morning I’d woken to discover that every neighbor on my block had extended their axles, so that the wheels of the cars stuck out on both sides. Now it was a distant memory, something unfashionable. That was before I’d moved from the avenues downtown, when the city was invaded and I could no longer afford anything but a place in the Tenderloin. Extended axles were no less important than any other memory we made the subject of our talk: life as we had known it.

  Conan and I reminisced about big rims, floater rims, spinners. Neon undercar kits. Holley carbs and Hemis. Popular trucks and SUVs. The Chevrolet Intruder. The Dodge Rendition.

  The Intruder, Conan and I agreed, looked like something that was designed to be inserted in something else.

  “There’s a new Nissan coming out called The Cube,” Conan said. “You can only get it in Japan. But who wants a square car? The Cube. Now there’s an aerodynamic concept. Nissan makes these trucks you can hacksaw the catalytic converter
off in three minutes. I can’t walk past one without stealing the muffler. I should sue the manufacturer for forcing criminal behavior on me.”

  We laughed about the Smart car. Those looked to me like the cap on a furniture leg. A blunt vertical thing that scooted around.

  “What did you drive?” Conan asked me.

  “Sixty-three Impala,” I said.

  “Dang.”

  “Hell yeah,” Sammy said. “That’s my girl.”

  But the moment I said it, the fun cracked to pieces. I had no car anymore.

  “You know what I hate is when people put open headers on an Escalade,” Conan said, as I tried to steer my thoughts back, to listen, to not care about anything. “Fuck Escalades. Something about them is plastic, cheap. I’d take an El Dorado, though. The seventies is the end of good American cars. We used to make trucks in this country. Now we make truck nuts.”

  “Those ugly things dangling over the road at eighty miles an hour? I didn’t know they were called that.”

  The idea that men would want to display an artificial scrotum—the most fragile part of a man’s body—on the back of their trucks, I said it made no sense and Conan agreed.

  “Where is the pride in towing those from a bumper? If I was a dude, I’d tow a big-ass trailer with a Harley on it,” Conan said. “Or I’d just ride a Harley.”

  “I heard you bragging to McKinnley that you do ride a Harley,” I said.

  “That’s what I mean. If I was a dude I’d be like I am right now. ’Cept not locked up.”

  Sammy told us she’d owned a Trans Am at age fifteen. Her dealer and boyfriend Smokey had given it to her.

  “I know a Smokey,” Conan said.

  I did, too. Not personally. The Smokey I knew of was Smokey Yunick, the NASCAR builder. Smokey Yunick was someone Jimmy Darling and I had bonded over. Smokey Yunick cheated in all of his NASCAR innovations but everyone else did, too. Also, when he was a young stock car racer, he raced with one arm out the window, resting on the sill. Smokey Yunick had swagger. But Smokey Yunick was dead. I was in prison. Jimmy was wherever. With some other woman, no doubt, and whoever the other woman was reminded me of what I was not. Was no longer.

  Conan said, “It ain’t Smokey from Bell Gardens you’re talking about, is it?”

  It was, Sammy said.

  “Smokey was your boyfriend? I’m from Bell Gardens, and the Smokey I know is a she.”

  “I didn’t know that when I met him,” Sammy said. “This fine-ass guy wearing, what are they called, those little white shells around his neck, shows up and we’re partying—he’s got a bottle of PCP—and the next thing I know I’m in a motel in Whittier, and it’s two days later.”

  “Puka shells,” Sergeant McKinnley said over the PA. He was in the program office, behind one-way glass, listening to our conversation with long-range microphones.

  “I wake up with no memory of how I got there. I’m covered in hickeys, and this person Smokey is sleeping next to me. We’re both, like, we don’t have our clothes on. I peek under the sheet and he was the same as me down there. I was shocked. We were together for two years after that.”

  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.
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  “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.