Death Clinic, Heaven Valley State Facility for Women
Should you desire a personal mirror, you may purchase one from the commissary. When not in use, it should be set down in an appropriate place where you will not be distracted by looking at it.
—Inmate Information Handbook
There is never enough time, unless you’re serving it.
—Malcolm Forbes
I sent a kite to the warden, saying they should bring back burning at the stake. It would make great television, the flames raging out of Heaven, the eyes popping out of heads.
The warden thinks it’s because I crave the spotlight, but it’s not. I didn’t ask for the publicity I’ve been getting; it’s just that I keep insisting that if they’re going to kill me tomorrow, they might as well kill me right now. I would have been out of here long ago, feet first in a Styrofoam coffin, if the Women’s Empowerment Coalition hadn’t taken up my cause. Most men on death row who insist upon being executed are allowed to die, but we still don’t grant women the same right to self-determination. The group fighting on my behalf says that after everything that has happened to me, I am not capable of making the right decision. American law forbids the execution of a person who is insane, and any woman who wants to die is not sane enough for execution. If I won’t apply for clemency, they will keep doing it for me.
Pile, Jr. has a brilliant theory about why so many women are being executed: the state is correcting a previous gender imbalance. You don’t even have to commit murder these days to get the book thrown at you.
In one so-called civilized country, a kindergarten teacher was sentenced to death for the “counter-revolutionary” offence of possessing manuscripts critical of the government. I read that she’d been electrocuted with the organ-transplant doctor standing by.
The story got out because the woman had not died immediately. She was kept alive, in fact, by the doctor who later came forward with details. He couldn’t live with himself, he said, and described how he had removed both her kidneys while she was still living, and how her liver had been “too hot to handle.”
“Is demand influencing supply?” read the headline in the New York Times after the doctor made his disclosure. “Is the free world executing prisoners to feed a clandestine transplant trade?” The country had a thriving business that relied on prisoners’ organs for raw materials, but this business also fed an insatiable state killing machine that led to more and more executions every year.
Frenchy’s life, on the other hand, was saved by politics. The guards had been staging wildcat strikes for better working conditions, and when those who’d volunteered for the firing-squad were told they had to go ahead with the execution or replacements would be called in, they went to work but deliberately missed their target, and then refused to reload. It was the first time in the state’s penal history this had happened: each of the five guards put down her gun and walked off the job.
Rainy asked Frenchy what was the first thing she’d done after not dying. Frenchy said she’d sat down and scarfed that last piece of pie she’d been saving “for later.”
Rainy is always asking me, “Have you got a date yet?” It’s like being back at high school, having her around. She makes it sound like we’re all going to a dance. No, I don’t have a date. Yet. I’d like to say, on that particular night, I won’t be going out.
On her next date, Frenchy says, she’s going to dance. Rainy tries to persuade her to go on a diet: she’s heard that if you weigh less than 112 pounds, you won’t be heavy enough to hang. A life-saving last meal, for example, might be an undressed garden salad and a Diet Coke.
Rainy says she wants suckiyaki for her last supper. She waits for us to ask.
“It’s when you have a mouthful of chop suey and a guy sticks his dick in your mouth.”
After Frenchy stops laughing, Rainy says what she really wants is the regular fare served to all other death-house inmates, so she can tell herself she’s going to wake up in hell the next morning with the same indigestion as the rest of us stuck here in Heaven.
The Women’s Empowerment Coalition would be opposed to it, of course, the idea of women burning at the stake. They send me their literature on “Capital Punishment and Sex Discrimination.” Back in the fourteenth century, when they stopped boiling people alive, they substituted public hanging as a far more humane execution. “With one glaring exception,” the pamphlet read. “A woman convicted of a capital crime was not to be hanged, ‘as decency due to the fairer sex precludes the exposing and publicly mangling of their bodies,’ but to be bound to a stake, and there, fully clothed, to be burnt alive. In the name of decency women endured a far more painful death than did men.”
“I’ve got a joke for you,” says Officer Freedman. “There are three women, an African-American, a Mexican-American and a Canadian-American, lined up in a courtyard, waiting to be executed.” She paused, looking at me, as if the joke was on me because I had appealed my classification and lost. “As the guards raise their rifles, the African-American shouts out, ‘Earthquake!’ The guards drop their guns and run. The African-American escapes.
“Next morning, there’s just the Mexican-American and the Canadian-American. As the guards raise their rifles, the Mexican-American shouts out, ‘Flood!’ and, same as yesterday, the guards drop their guns and run away. The Mexican-American takes off too.
“On the third morning, the Canadian-American is there all alone. When the guards raise their guns, the Canadian-American shouts, ‘Fire!’ ”
I can see why it came to be called gallows humour. You laugh in the face of death, knowing death gets the last laugh every time. They can take everything away—they can make us beg and cry and puke—but when we still laugh at ourselves begging, crying and puking, they have to know theirs is a hollow victory.
My mother writes asking me to describe a typical day in Heaven. She’d like to think it’s a place full of angels eating angel food cake and playing harps on clouds. I don’t tell her we live on tinned spaghetti and mystery meat sandwiches. I make the meals served in Heaven sound just as tempting as the gourmet Meals-on-Wheels she’s been helping distribute to shut-ins. I don’t tell her how I am ordered to bend over every time I leave the chow hall, and that a trusty, another prisoner, examines me for contraband—it will remind her of her own holiday from hell.
“I’ll never go back,” she writes. “Everybody leaving that dreadful island was detained.” Before boarding a plane that would carry her back to “civilization,” my mother, who is in her late eighties, had been called into a little room, where she’d seen a policewoman pulling on a pair of white gloves. My mother convinced herself that the police were going to strangle her and steal her watch, and that the policewoman was putting on gloves so she wouldn’t leave fingerprints.
And she was worried sick about me the whole time. “Are you getting enough sleep?” she asks. “In that article I read on the plane you had bags under your eyes.”
I don’t tell her how I have to sleep with some part of my anatomy showing, that when the guard on night shift comes by with her flashlight she must be able “to see flesh.” A 250-watt bulb, “extra-long life,” burns from the ceiling, so I never sleep deeply. It adds insult to injury to know there’s a good chance I’ll be outlived by a light bulb.
I don’t mention how much I miss doorknobs, or toilets with seats, or especially light switches. If I mention light switches, it will get my mother going again on her lamp, the one that works intermittently. She’s going to have to return it, but she’s been putting off going downtown because of the parking. She wonders if she is going to live long enough to get her money back, or if she’ll die knowing that Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamps owes her $49.75 plus tax.
As far as worrying about my appearance goes, I’m in no position to check to see if I have bags under my eyes, because my “personal mirror” was confiscated after I got caught looking in it instead of watching TV.
Rainy made a drawing of me with three eyes in my head. I’m weeping from the third eye, which is in the middle of my forehead.
I show it to Frenchy. “It’s a very flattering picture,” Frenchy says, “except for the three eyes in your head.”
After the article in Newsmakers, the same one my mother read, I got a fan letter. “Your visage is quite arresting, with crooked teeth interesting in the extreme,” wrote Helmut Bender, who had also seen me on one or two TV clips, “though I’d of still written to you even if you were plain.” Helmut turned out to be a prison guard engaged in writing his memoirs also, “tentatively titled We’re All Here ’Cause We’re Not All There: Memoirs of a Good Screw.” If I could fix him up with a publisher, he’d put me in touch with an orthodontist in Philadelphia.
I sent Helmut a note asking how much of his book he had completed. “Only the title, so far,” he replied. “The wife says I’ve already written too many words—you can tell a good book, she says, because there’s only one word in the title. She wants me to write that kind of book. The kind of book people can read.”
It’s a lonely life. And lonelier for all the people in it.
I’ve digressed again. I was about to describe a typical day in Heaven when I got sidetracked. Got to keep my train on its tracks.
I have seen what happens to most women in prison. They take drugs, then sleep their lives away, like Frenchy, or find God and drug themselves, like Rainy. Or they get themselves killed. I suppose that’s going to happen to all of us, sooner or later, but meanwhile, we can sleep, pray, get high or, like me, write about it.
One time I wrote to my mother that each morning I wake to a day already stale, controlled, a thin mattress, a pillow watermarked with tears. She wrote back, “There is only one thing to do when you are bored—learn something.” She would be pleased to know I’ve learned many new tricks.
I’ve learned to “front,” to hoard, to be distrustful, to “mask”—to cover up, put everything on the outside and cry on the inside. And how to confine all my letters to one double-spaced page. The guards monitor our mail, and as far as they are concerned, the shorter the sweeter.
To “front” means it doesn’t matter whether you’re rock hard or sullen soft, you’ve got to be about something and stand up for yourself and rip a girl’s arm off if you have to. When I was first in the general population, before I got sentenced and hardly knew anybody by name, this girl said to me, “I’d like to lick your clitoris.” Rainy took me aside and said I had two seconds to set up a confrontation with her or else I’d end up being walked all over by every dyke in the joint. I waited until there was a crowd in the shower room and then accused her of stealing my last tampon. She denied it, but I sucker-punched her full in the face, if not exactly breaking her nose, doing a little blood work in the area. I got put in a punishment cell for two weeks (I got an extra week tacked on for saying, “Aren’t all cells punishment cells?”), with a pissy mattress on the floor, one pair of baby-doll pyjamas made of a thick quilted material not unlike packing blankets, and one puke green blanket to serve as anything you’d want to use it for—a sheet, a pillow or just something to hide your face under, and nothing to read but improperly spelled graffiti: “Loopy is a necofilliac”; “Fuke the World.”
The hole was another not-so-happy learning experience, but when I got out I had one thing coming: respect. Frenchy, whose nose was still a bit swollen, never threatened to lay her tongue on me again, and we became friends.
Rainy’s the one who taught me to hoard. She used to work in the chow hall. Every night after she’d cleaned up, she emptied three quarters of each of the sugar containers down the front of her shirt, into her 42D bra (there are few things more humiliating for a woman than having to wear a bra that is way too big, though in Rainy’s case it came in handy), and smuggled the sugar back to her house. You never knew when you would need a sugar fix, she said, and you couldn’t exactly raid the kitchen here when you felt like stuffing your face at midnight. I couldn’t see hoarding bread and peanut butter—my kind of comfort food—down the front of my shirt, so I learned to do without, hoarding my own emptiness.
What else did I say I’d learned? Trust? There’s no such word in here, it’s all about distrust. Take any good word and in Heaven you learn to prefix it with dis. Disrespect. Disregard. Disengage. Disillusion. Disintegrate. Disappoint. Disallow. But especially distrust.
Rainy doesn’t even trust anyone to give her the time. Rainy, I say, that’s all we’ve got. She’ll ask me for the exact time, and I’ll tell her: 5:33 p.m. Then I’ll hear her getting a second opinion from Frenchy.
“Still half past nuttin’ last time I cared,” Frenchy will tell her. You can either do the time or the time will do you. Prison time is chicken bones. Something to be sucked clean.
“Do your own time.” “Don’t let anyone mess with your mind.” “Keep to yourself.” “Don’t let friends choose you. You do the choosing.” Prisoners learn to hide their true feelings, to create a mask. You may present yourself as a tough bitch or tell huge lies about your former life—you may act crazy so the prison pests will leave you alone. Eventually, though, switching between your mask and your true face gets more and more difficult.