Two decades and change into her beef, Carlotta Mercedes braced herself for audition number five with the New York State Board of Parole. She knew her many years in the SHU—23-7 with no TV, no radio, no books, and no good touch—would probably blow her case this time too. With so many box hits, she couldn’t finish any of the A&D programs the knuckleheads like to see. But solitary overkill wasn’t the worst of her shots Them sonofabitches said I had bad behavior, but they definition a bad behavior’s if you scream when a CO whupping yo ass like a Betty Crocker fudge cake. Why did she keep getting hit? Sometimes she thought her case grossed out the panel, other times she blamed her mini-beefs—the LOMs, the LOCs, the LORs, the LOVs. She knew the bosses were pretty much Klansmen, and at some point she always went apeshit.
“Those motherfuckers better let me out this time,” she told Frenzy, the new man she was riding with, out in the yard the day she heard. “Who is they to judge my ass?”
“Shut up, bitch,” he soothed. “You think you special? Don’t expect nothing. You got nothing coming.”
Her eyes rolled behind her lids and she whacked her arms closed. “I been had known not to spect nothing forever by this time. Fifty million motherfuckers already done told me how much nothin I got comin. So let’s see it! Where my nothin at? And who’s more of specials than I is?” Her tongue had slipped a little out of fear that he didn’t really have eyes for her, or big enough ones, anyway. She felt like some kind of monkey-mouth even before she’d shut her trap.
“If you want out, you better learn to talk right,” Frenzy said, flashing a dimple. “Folks be talking proper out there.”
“Oh yeah? Since when?” She gave him face and flipped her hair so it grazed his nose.
In 1993, Carlotta’s cousin Kafele had shot some old lady who sold little bottles of Thunderbird to the skels of Bed-Stuy and put her to sleep for a month. Carlotta was in attendance, showing off her talent for bad timing. The lady woke up again, but the bullet lowered her IQ to a chimpanzee’s and she could hardly brush her own teeth anymore. Kaffy landed in Attica, doing all day and a night. Mama must’ve stopped saving his supper. Carlotta turned state’s evidence and still got 12½ to 22. The public defender called that “getting off with a reduced sentence,” but to Carlotta that didn’t sound like getting off in any way, shape, or form. “The robbery or the aggravated assault with a deadly weapon could have gotten you twenty-five each!” the judge whined. “You’re lucky to be doing them concurrently” That’s luck, then fuck luck.
Sleeping Beauty’s daughter, Noreen Green, always dragged her bitter puss up to the hearings, and she made no exception for this sequel in the franchise. She dug harsh sentences—she thought that if you croaked before you killed your number, they wouldn’t dump your carcass off-site. When she shouted, “I want their bones to turn to dust in the prison cell!” she meant it literally. She had spat that oratory at the public defender, a pale mousy girl with big glasses who looked like a PhD candidate in macramé. Made the poor thing spaz and knock her coffee all over her papers Which show you how good the bitch had her shit together not at all.
Even before Carlotta’s time on the catwalk that day, they’d kept her in the SHU, and of course the COs tried to yank her out before her toilette. She hadn’t finished drying her sink-washed locks and massaging mess hall margarine into her scalp when they banged on the door, barking like Dobermans selling wolf tickets about an upcoming beatdown Ise like, Ho-hum, another? Cause I knew they wasn’t gon do nothing to me right before no damn parole hearing. Or maybe they was gonna but I din’t give a fuck. Part of her wanted to risk an ass-whupping, but the minute she clocked the reality—getting scalped with a bare hand, a Doc Marten jammed in her rib cage—animal fear took over. Her body cashed a check at her memory bank and she could feel the fists and boots of yesteryear colliding with tender body parts. One time a CO belted her in the face and she almost made a meal of her own tongue Ise talkin like Daffy Duck for two fuckin weeks. And of course they punished her for getting punished. Against her will, her mind snapped back to the worst of the worst, a scumbag called Dave, and something inside her gave way like a noose going slack after doing the Strange Fruit swing.
Carlotta pushed her paws through the bean slot and let the COs cuff her. But she hadn’t finished her face—she only had the blue pool-cue chalk (smuggled in from the juvie wing) on her left eyelid This gon look bad. It do look bad! If they got no kick from paroling what some of these jerk-offs called “he-she things” with painted faces, no way would they spring a freakazoid with just one blue eyelid. The minute she saw her chance, she leaned over and smudged her blinker with the one chalky finger she still had, trying to keep everything clear of her headlights, because that might juice her eyeball like a lemon Or maybe I should do like a fountain if that gon get them on my side.
They didn’t let her shower either. As she swung past the cells in the cinder-block alley, she could smell her funk through her prison grays; she hoped nobody else got a whiff Prolly can’t nobody smell nothing over the stench a this joint nohow. Let’s just say her look did not kill, but the peanut gallery whooped it up regardless, all piercing whistles, Hey, mamis, and Do-fries-go-with-that-shakes. Up at Ithaca, a lady din’t always had to bust her sparkle. These lusty hustlers weren’t faking the flattery either, no way, José. Some could take a mocking tone, but if she shook the tree, Carlotta knew she’d get a real nut Oh, honey, at this point they’d fuck a mop. She beamed at the guys and wiggled her fingers as she passed, letting the handcuffs and chains stand in for the rocks and bling she’d’ve preferred. She couldn’t call these suckers suckers, but why not gloat now, knowing the spotlight of parole would never beam down on such luckless gangstas, the same spider monkeys who’d bitten her like Rottweilers mauling a chew toy, passed her around like a spliff until the last tiny red ember in her soul almost winked out with a little puff of smoke Fuck these guys, they’d never even get a hearing, let alone five! My ass be the Susan Lucci a parole! If any of this crew did get parole or even release When hippos fly they’d probably leap back into their hustle toot sweet and boomerang into these same cells. Carlotta’s hellos took on the saccharine taste of scorn Goodbye, Beezus! Goodbye, poor little Stinkbug! Ciao bella, Glitch, you cold-blooded motherfucker! But who could tell if they’d finally boot her out of the joint? Carlotta knew what time it was, she wasn’t bumbling around in Pampers But a bitch gotta dream.
After the whole Get Smart routine with the halls and gates and checkpoints came to an end, the COs pushed open a green door Green like Frankenstein and there sat three poker faces from the NYSPB See Evil, Hear Evil, an Speak Evil fingers poised on padfolios stuffed with the details of every beef they’d give a shot that day Look at them smug-ass faces, think they some kinda gods sittin at a tribunal gon decide my fate, which I guess they kinda are, uh-oh, fuck me.
The second their prisoner made it in, the COs whipped the metal door back and locked it—clang! The clang rang out in the room like a pipe hitting a lamppost, but Carlotta had heard this noise so often that to her, it could’ve been a butterfly fart. In the back left of the room, a few yards from where the guards plopped Carlotta into a standard-issue government chair, Noreen Green sat squinting, crinkling her hand inside a plastic snack bag of—was it pretzels? Or popcorn? Popcorn? Like my suffering is fucking entertainment for your stupid ass? Unlike most victims, Noreen had some sort of special dispensation that allowed her to be in the room More like a cousin who a judge or some shit and had dragged her malfunctioning parent with her, this time in a wheelchair—maybe she thought some extra visual oomph would get Carlotta buried under the jail the way she wanted. The mom, Dorothy, sat silent, lolling her head side to side, grinding her teeth. In any case, she looked cranky. The lights were on in that noggin, but somebody had locked the door—Kaffy, specifically. She seemed worse off than last time, season 19, episode 4 Oh shit, she brung her again? This fucking sucks. Why do I even bother?
One of the panel’s poker faces, none of whom Carlotta recognized This must be a new crew, maybe they gonna see my beef different belonged to a white guy with a baldy bean, round and rough as a basketball. He had on a too-tight suit, probably from a discount outlet; his giant biceps puffed out the sleeves. So much for tailoring. Dead center sat a fiftyish white lady in a black blouse rocking frosted highlights and oversize bifocals; she could pass for a daytime talk-show host from the ’80s Maybe she’ll spring me in exchange for some style tips. The woman kept twisting her gold rings like Gollum or somebody. Off to the right, Carlotta felt judgment pouring from the stink eye of a Black woman with tiny rectangular glasses and a conservative hairdo in the shape of the Liberty Bell, wearing a suit the color of a grape Popsicle. She had a more mysterious look about her than the other two, and that sparked fear in Carlotta She don’t look like the type who gon give you no racial break, she look like the type who give you a hard time cause they think you gonna try some nigga trick they already know, bein a nigga theyself. Try to catch you out when you ain’t even frontin.
The tribunal got the ball rolling by stating their names: Demodocus Johnson Demodocus? He Black? He look too light to be a brotha, but you never know…Helen Alcinous, and Malea Thoon, but the names vanished from her head in no time Damn, I can’t never remember nobody’s name, not even when my life literally depend on it! COs musta knocked my memory clean out my head. Sometime I wish they had. The drab chair had a green seat with a rip down the middle, a hole that seemed, like every hole did now, like a good place to stow a shank or stash some molly. Moving her fingers between her legs, she probed the opening to see if someone else had gotten there first and left her a present. She almost forgot to react when Basketball Head piped up.
“Can you please state your name for the record?” he asked.
Carlotta had picked up a reflex for whenever a boss quizzed her. She knew she had to fake like mad, to knuckle under like a trained bear riding a unicycle and balancing a ball on its nose at some Ringling Brothers joint. You had to stuff your ego up your ass and kowtow to the COs and the other shitheads; you had to grind your attitude into a fine powder and try to look as tame as a Ring Ding, what with the mogwai raising hell in your skull all the time, making you so rowdy, so loco Sometime it just be them up in there too, my ass wasn’t nowhere near that brain. She knew she couldn’t tell him her name; an honest answer to even this Mickey Mouse question would bring down enough drama to keep her on ice until she hit the half-century mark. She jammed her frustration into her stomach and took a gander at Basketball Head again. He reminded her of one of those Chinese dogs with the smushy muzzles What they call that?
She could not say Carlotta Mercedes, and she knew it. She pushed her fingers deeper between her legs, careful not to disturb Señora Problema, and tugged at the strings hanging off the sides of the break in the vinyl. Could be every con who ever sat in this chair had done a little fraying. Frenzy had flopped seven times to her four, and he had the knowledge. “The board ain’t gon axe you no questions they don’t got the answers to right there in that jacket,” he told her. “And don’t be altercatin with how they spin your beef, okay? Cause if you tell em they wrong, specially when they is wrong, they just gon give you the heave-ho and bum-rush yo ass right back to D Block.” It had slipped her mind to ask if her name change would rattle them, but now it seemed like, Duh. To call herself Carlotta right off the bat would be suicide. It would lead back to Dave—the thought hollowed her out.
She snarfed down a loogie, trying not to show off too much hate for her deadname, closed her eyes so she could roll them without the board seeing, and sucked in a big breath. “Dustin Chambers, sir,” she said. Then she yanked her hands from between her thighs, raised her wrists, cocked her head to one side, and tried to push her hair back with both cuffed hands. Not easy, so she did it slowly, fanning out her fingers as she went, trying to kill Dustin Chambers again and shout Carlotta Mercedes with body language alone.
“I’m sorry, can you repeat that?” said Basketball Head.
Carlotta froze, dropped her hands back in her lap, and locked her jaw I know I said that shit loud enough, an I know you heard me! Frenzy had coached her on this too. “They gon try to get your goat,” he’d said. “Provoke you to see if you gon freak out and fuck up, which make they job easier cause they get to send your ass right back to the joint. That shit you definitely gotta resist. Don’t give em nothing.”
Anger management, Carlotta thought. It was just a phrase, though—she had never had any real training Anger management. She squeezed her knees and counted down from ten in her head—she figured that was how people on TV kept from flipping out. In her mind, a song her mother used to sing along with in her Colombian accent took over—Think about what you going to do to me—but she gave no outward sign of inward singing. A little smile found its way onto her face, though—its fakeness felt like a layer of hot wax over her real face. She swallowed again and said the name again, at an almost mocking volume. She pretended he’d asked for her brother’s name. “Dustin Chambers.”
“Now, Mr. Chambers,” he kept on, “I have here that you’ve served twenty years of a 12½ to 22 sentence on an armed assault and robbery?”
Carlotta nodded Not countin the year in jail fore the sentencing, but I ain’t gonna split no hairs, and said, “That is correct” How I coulda did the whole twenty-one an then some is I’m a fuckin bruja.
Basketball Head softly wheezed, “Armed assault and robbery,” all the time scribbling some note with a ballpoint pen, probably the thing he’d just said.
Ms. Thoon took over, like a script she and Basketball Head had to follow I guess they kinda do got a script. Her voice had a surprisingly smoky, luscious quality. Frenzy had schooled her on how you didn’t need any real bona fides to get on a parole board, and that thought looped in her mind as she listened, trying to knock them off whatever pedestal they thought they were on Miss Lady Day here could use that voice to be singing standards on Saturdays down at the local motor lodge. But her voice also sounded serious, like a newscaster’s. “Mr. Chambers, can you give us a detailed picture of what took place on that night, the night of August 14, 1993?”
This I could do. She concentrated on talking proper. “Saturday night. It was about sundown, around 8:22 p.m., and I was on my way to my best friend’s birthday party. As I’m walking over there, I had the intention to hit the Sippy Sip liquor store, located at 726 Myrtle Avenue, corner of Walworth Street.” She paused. “Shoot. I mean buy something from there, not hit it like rob it. I was gonna grab a bottle of André or something and then stop in at Gloria’s Thrift Gifts, which is a shop just up the street, so I can get a present for my friend. They closed at nine cause Gloria didn’t usually even show up till around three on Saturdays. She from Trinidad. And, lo and behold, I see my cousin Kaffy crossing Myrtle, and I’m like, ‘Hey,’ and like, ‘Oh, are you also going to Doodle’s party?’ Her name is Deirdre but everybody calls her Doodle. He’s like, ‘No, I’m going to Sippy Sip,’ and he points to it cause we’re only a block away, on Spencer, and I said, ‘So am I!’” She had rehearsed this saga maybe three hundred times, and her lawyer had coached her to curb her potty mouth and include small details like exact times and the names of streets and establishments to boost her cred. Nowadays it came more or less naturally, but she could rattle it off like something she had memorized Like shit that happened to somebody else ass.
Ms. Thoon rifled through the papers on her clipboard and stared at something written there. “Mr. Chambers, I believe the record states that at that moment, you were carrying a loaded weapon, were you not?”
“That is true, yes” Were you not. What the fuck, all this stupid language! Why they gotta talk like they in a Shakespeare play all the fucking time? Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou’s ass in the hole?
“Are you the sort of person who carries a loaded weapon to a birthday party?”
What kinda condescending bullshit question is that? Who gon be fool enough to say yes to that? Like, Yes, ma’am, I’m so crazy I’d bring a flamethrower to a baby shower. As a gift! Now parole me or I’ma bite off your titty. What? But Frenzy had given her hell about telling them exactly what they wanted to hear “at every possible fucking moment you could.” She thought about his full, wet lips talking, how the sneaky soul patch under them wiggled like a caterpillar, then the eyes in her mind found their way around his body to a tattoo of a phoenix spanning his entire back. “At the time, the record states that I was, ma’am, but since I’ve been inside I have done a great deal of work to change who I am. I have been a part of the recovery program even though I did not have a substance-abuse problem, I gained permission to do laundry duty through my years of good behavior, and I even briefly worked in the law liberry. I guess in Bed-Stuy in them days, there almost wasn’t really no other type of person but one who was holding. Cause the other type was called dead.” Carlotta widened her eyes. She saw the left side of the Black lady’s cheek twist upward slightly Also, I spent bout six a them years in solitary cause a how much I got raped an beat up, an I quit them substances cold turkey, but fuck it, they don’t wanna hear none a that. Plus that shit din’t even help. It helped Dave. She heard the scenes in her mind again and the blood rushed out of her head Rape! Leave me alone, you son of a bitch! Somebody help!
“I’m concerned that you’re making light of this situation, Mr. Chambers,” Basketball Head barked, bouncing his ballpoint clicker on the desk. Noreen grunted from the peanut gallery.
She shook herself out of the starry-eyed dizziness for a second. “Oh, it ain’t no light, don’t worry bout that.” Carlotta felt she had lost Basketball Head already, and since the vote had to be unanimous, the ladies would need to struggle hard against him if they wanted to grant her parole That din’t look too likely. Nother day, nother hit. I only got a year an a half left anyways, so I mean, fuck it, maybe I should just kill my number an kick it with my man. Her hand went back to fiddling with the rip in the chair. Basketball Head sure had a brick wall for a body Hmm, do that cop attitude make him sexier or not sexy? Maybe sexy at some other bitch’s parole hearing. Suddenly he pushed all the papers off the table, grabbed her by the shoulders, fucked her ass pussy silly, and granted her parole when he came Nah, he ain’t really did that, that’s just my li’l fantasy.
“I’m not, sir. I just felt at the time that I needed to be ready for pretty much anything?” I also adore guns. Damn, it’s too fuckin easy to fuck this up. But I can’t give up—maybe the women gon be on my side. My sistas. Sorta? The white lady with the frosted hair didn’t ever say anything, but she smiled—not a big smile, but a steady one. Like the Virgin Mary. “So Cousin Kaffy and I walk in the store together. I start looking for the discount liquors—Doodle ain’t that picky—and before I know what’s happening, Kaffy had pulled a gun on the lady behind the counter. There was a bulletproof cage thing for the cashier, but Kaffy always been cute, he don’t look threatening, even though he actually a real dangerous dude. He pretended to have a question about a bottle of Malibu rum or something—like, he deliberately chose a sweet type of liquor so she wouldn’t get suspicious—and he got Mrs. Green to come out the cage. And that’s when he pulled out the piece—the gun. She tried to go back in, but he yanked her out.” Everyone heard Noreen sniffle and then blow her nose, making a sound like a broken trumpet. People turned for a second to look at her and her mother until the image got too sad.
“And what did you do?” Ms. Thoon asked, tugging down a purple sleeve.
She know what I did! She seened the damn videotape! This complete bullshit. I’ma tell her what I said instead. “I said, ‘Kaffy what the—what the F are you doing? We not about to rob this joint. If you need money, I will lend you money, we will find you money somewheres, but don’t do this, and don’t drag me into it neither!’ I said, ‘Ain’t you apposed a be getting a GED? Din’t you wanna be a engineer?’ But he didn’t pay me no mind. Later I heard he was doing it for a promotion in his gang. I was like, Gang? What gang he could join at his age? The Little Rascals? He knew I was holding, so he yelled at me to cover him while he went into the little room and jacked the register.”
“Did you cover him?”
“No, ma’am, I did not. But that’s part of what caused the problem. See, Kaffy pulled Mrs. Green into the room by the neck and made her take the money out the register. But somehow she got away and start to stumble out the little room. That’s when Kaffy shot her. For the life of me, I do not know what possessed him to aim at her head. He had a very difficult upbringing. We all did.”
“You guys have had a rough time,” the Virgin chimed in. “He’s serving a life sentence.”
“Yes, that’s correct” An prolly won’t never get no parole, given what happening to me.
“It should be longer!” Noreen yelled at nobody with stabbing anger.
Longer than life? Like they gon put a jail cell round his grave? Honest to God, honey, he ain’t going nowheres.
“How do you account for the fact that, on the surveillance-camera video, you can clearly be seen drawing your own weapon, Mr. Chambers?” said the Virgin, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose for the ninth time to rest in the kidney-shaped divots there. She had upped her angle, Carlotta suspected, because her previous comments had seemed soft You two-faceded ho! Y’all got my goat, m’kay? Y’all done curried my motherfucking goat!
“Around that same moment, I aimed my weapon at Kaffy, trying to get him not to shoot the woman, but it was too late. If you could hear sound on that video, you’d hear me shouting, ‘Kaffy, don’t shoot! Put the gun down!’ I didn’t never fire my gun neither.”
Basketball Head came in for the kill. “You’re aware, though, that it appears that you are aiming directly at the cashier?”
Here we go again. “Yes, sir, I am aware of that, sir. Mrs. Green was between the two of us, and that makes it difficult to tell. But y’all has seened the footage and y’all know that the ‘cinematography’ or whatever? It ain’t that good.” It was an old line. The women smiled, but not Basketball Head. “The ballistic evidence also had shown that I didn’t fire no gun. Any gun” I’m a fucking dead duck. Like a Peking duck hanging in the window a the skankiest greasy-spoon joint in Chinatown.
Malea Thoon took over, her voice mellow and motherly, almost tender now. Perhaps Carlotta had misjudged her. “Do you have any regrets about your part in this crime?”
“Oh, gosh,” she said, jumping at the chance to show remorse I got this. “Regrets. Talk about regrets. If you drilled a hole in my heart, right here,” Carlotta said, jabbing her rib cage with her thumb, jangling the cuffs, “or anywhere, really, y’all would see all the regret draining out of me like Ise a aquarium tank and the water was regret. Then once all the regret had spilt out, my whole body would flop down like a empty garbage bag, because there wouldna been hardly nothing inside me but regret. I eat, sleep, and dream bout regret ever since this happened. My life became a path with a fork in it when all that happened, an there’s nothing I wish I could do more than go back an take that other road, the one that din’t lead to no twenty years in prison, to none a this” Cept getting with Frenzy. “I wish I didn’t have a cousin Kaffy, and I almost wish I ain’t had a best friend Doodle, especially one who had a birthday party that night. I wish I didn’t have a gun on me” More like I wish I had left it at home, that shit was my favorite gun, a absolutely gorgeous Llama Micromax with a mother-of-pearl inlay, cost me fifteen hundred dollars I saved for two years, never gon see that shit again. “I ain’t got nothing but regret.” Frenzy had instructed her to play it up when they asked about guilty feelings. She wondered if she’d overdone it, but she had to admit that she actually felt about 80 percent of what she’d said. Just saying the words made her eyes fill with tears. Like the actress she’d named herself for, she whipped up the memory of her fucked-up past into a meringue of mostly real emotion.
“Boo-hoo-hoo!” Noreen shouted from the other side of the room.
“Uh,” said Basketball Head, drawing out the vowel in Noreen’s direction, careful not to ruin the flow of the meeting. “So at this time, we can open the hearing up to comments. Ms. Green, it sounds as if you have something to say.”
Carlotta closed her eyes and braced herself I hope I could keep from punching out her fuckin pea brain. Guess these cuffs is good for that. I understand what it feel like for someone you love to get hurt bad, but what the fuck happened to mercy?
Noreen got up, whisked off her glasses, and chucked her handbag into the empty seat. She practically did a pirouette as she spun around to face the panel. She had no notes. Against all stereotypes, taking off the specs made her look like the smartest person in the room, and talking without notes let them all know she meant every damn word. Her eyes narrowed and she squared her shoulders. She planted her feet and folded her arms. She started talking almost in a whisper, which took nearly everyone aback. “It is my considered opinion that this individual as well as his cousin are very dangerous violent criminals, and neither should receive parole at this time—or ever. This crime was shocking, it was senseless, and it was incredibly brutal. The two perpetrators—I am not making a distinction, and neither should you—showed no regard for human life, certainly not the life of my mother, Mrs. Dorothy Green, who sits before you today in an extremely diminished state.” For a second, she turned to nod at her mother, then pointed at Carlotta. She revved up the megaphone. “You, Mr. Chambers”—she emphasized the name probably because she figured it got up Carlotta’s nose—“you deserve nothing even approaching clemency for destroying my mother’s business, which she took over from my father after his death, God rest his soul, for destroying her quality of life, and for ruining my own life as well, as I have depleted nearly all of my own resources in caring for my mother without health insurance or financial support of any kind outside my administrative-assistant salary. Twelve to twenty-two years!” she scoffed, her eyes back on the panel. “For shame! Twenty-two thousand years wouldn’t be enough time for Mr. Chambers to repent and contemplate the heinous nature of his horrible crime, and I think that from the bad attitude he has displayed here today, the panel can tell that he is still not at all ready to reenter society and still needs a very long time to pay his debt to society. Much longer” Damn, Meryl Streep, if I wasn’t me, I’d almost buy what you sellin! Yeah, gimme twenty-two thousand years a all the shit been done to me that you don’t even know the half of! I’on’t think so, ho!
Carlotta turned her shoulders to face Noreen. She didn’t say Bitch, you got no idea what a bad attitude look like from me, but she tried to make those words as clear as possible with side-eye alone.
Noreen took a pause and bent her knees to get her purse from the chair. She threw the strap over one shoulder, unzipped the bag, and rifled inside. “My mother can no longer speak for herself, as you can tell,” she continued, “and she has a great deal of difficulty writing, but I’d like to share something she wrote down when she found out that Mr. Chambers would be going up for parole yet again, and I urge you not to grant parole this time either.”
Holy shit, Carlotta thought. She pullin out all the stops. You can’t win gainst no cripple factor, let alone some white cripples. Fuck me. Am I gonna die up in here? Motherfucking death by bunga-bunga.
Noreen pulled out a weathered piece of yellow legal paper and uncrinkled it against her thigh. When she lifted it again, Carlotta could see that something had been written there in black Sharpie and the ink had bled through to the other side. Noreen took one side of the paper in each hand and inched up to the table. “You see what that says? Can you read that?”
Through the paper, Carlotta peered at the reverse image of the words, sloppily scrawled in block letters perpendicular to the faint blue lines. She had a hard time making out what the short phrase said. Just as she figured it out, Noreen explained it to the panel.
“It says,” she proclaimed, pointing to each of the three words as she read the inscription, “‘They shuld fry.’ She left out the o in the should. But that’s what it says. ‘They. Shuld. Fry.’” She drew out the word fry extra-long when she said it the second time. At that moment, Mrs. Green rocked violently in her wheelchair and grunted to let everyone know how well the note expressed her views.
“Thank you, Mrs. Green,” the Black woman said, her face suddenly glum. Noreen glared at Carlotta, moved her purse, and sat down, a look of satisfaction on her face.
Carlotta gave up, covering her eyes with her fingertips so that her handcuffs touched her chin I am toast. A burnt-up fucking piece a black toast.
Then, like sweet pruno pouring out of a Ziploc bag, she thought of how adoringly Frenzy would receive the bad news, that this setback would earn Carlotta more than a few hot bear hugs in those solid, veiny arms. But then terror carjacked her mind—she avoided certain areas of the pit where Dave lurked; she had sometimes fainted when she thought she heard him coming. She had a flight instinct to GTFO that made almost everything else shrink like a wool blanket in the prison laundry. Plus she had fantasized about getting parole for two decades, to the point where the ideas of heaven and leaving Ithaca had jumbled up in her mind, and she couldn’t dump that feeling in the Hudson River for anybody. Her pictures of certain family members had creased and torn, but sometimes late, late, she would pull them from the bottom of her stash and lay the pieces on her bed like a puzzle until she could look at their faces. If only she could put everything back together as easily. She still had Aretha’s jam buzzing in her head—“Freedom, oh, freedom!”
After all the brouhaha and a little hush-hush consultation, Basketball Head sounded like he was about to unleash Carlotta on the free world again Freedom indeed. Color me surprised! Carlotta smiled like a fool, trying to hide her iffiness and doubt In who fuckin mind did that go so good? Do they need the beds that bad? How come din’t some CO just gimme a ticket based on my gettin jumped before? Maybe that whole thing bout remorse got em. Frenzy always said that’s what they wanna hear, that you had some “insights” after thinkin bout shit in your cell, that you ain’t had nothin but regrets, even bout shit you ain’t done. I know the governor office gon smack this one down but quick. Fear of success had her shitting bricks.
From the look on his face, Basketball Head Demodocus didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass, but the ladies showed bighearted smiles. Noreen, though, blew a gasket. She turned red and leaped up to yell epithets She almost to the color they used to dye them pistachio nuts. She turned and grabbed her chair, ready to wing it at the commission, but the COs, used to far worse, blocked her before she could get the chair too high or gain any momentum. In a sudden verbal blitz, she promised Carlotta she would find a way to overturn everything, including the chair, and implied that she might commit a crime herself. In the end, the COs pulled Noreen out of the room, still railing and thrashing. A CO came back to collect Dorothy, who snarled at the commission as he wheeled her out.
The panel would take another look-see, Basketball Head said, and the official notice of action would come in a few anxious days.
Frenzy didn’t exactly whoop and holler when Carlotta told him three days later that she got sprung. He nodded his leonine head slowly and blinked those pretty eyes. For some reason, he wouldn’t look her in the face. Everybody played their cards close to their chests in the joint, and just because Frenzy never took anyone on a tour of his emotional landscape didn’t mean he didn’t have one. But it made her cranky that whenever she did get past the gates of his heart, the ticket booth for the monorail was always closed.
“Spread your wings and fly,” he said, like some kind of fucking oracle. He squeezed the back of his neck and squinted at the blank sky. Either he was fronting like mad or he truly didn’t give a fuck; both possibilities corked Carlotta so hard that she decided to whack his bars with her own honesty The fuck his problem?
“Truth is,” she said, “I’on’t really wanna go no more.” It wasn’t the truth.
He turned and peered daggers at her If I ain’t know better, I’d think he got some mockatory attitude goin on. But maybe I don’t know better. “Yo, bitch, did you lost your fucking mind?” He could talk all kinds of smack, but in that velvety voice, everything sounded like an invitation to a hot-oil massage.
Carlotta sucked in her cheeks and passed her tongue over the front of her teeth with her mouth closed. She returned his stare You apposed to axe what changed my mind, an I’m apposed to say you. “No. Why you don’t axe what changed my mind?”
“Aw, hell, I already know. Y’all females is all the same.”
Carlotta thought of dressing him down for the sexist comment, but then she realized that he’d grouped her with women, and that made her happy enough that she decided not to confront him I’ma do feminism on him later.
Farther out in the yard, a hundred or so of their fellow inmates lumbered around in too-tight or too-loose prison garb. A few played double-deck pinochle at a metal picnic table cemented to the ground; others did pull-ups on the crude jungle gym. Frenzy threw his chin toward the 127-year-old prison and its 30-foot-high fence, decorated with razor wire like a psycho Christmas display. Slowly, he shook his head. “Look. If this shit was the fucking Disney Castle and Ise Prince Charming, like in your li’l fantasies and whatnot, I could see you wanting to stay. But for reals, I don’t gotta explain this shit to you. This ain’t no place to love nobody.”
“Love is love. The place don’t matter.”
“This place don’t matter. Don’t nobody matter up in this place. It’s like you dead in here. It’s like you could get killed while you in the hole and the world be like, Did I hear some shit? Naaah. I don’t gotta tell you that.” Seven months before, Carlotta happened to be in the shower area when an inmate they called Glitch raped and shanked a fish newly dubbed Brownsville. Yorkie was on lookout, but they didn’t realize Carlotta was in the stall. Glitch popped the shank into Brownsville’s right eye and blinded it. Somehow the COs pegged it on Glitch—for once they got it right. But rather than blaming Yorkie, the inmates all jumped to the conclusion that Carlotta was the snitch Hell, I done runned out the showers long before I seen somebody eyeball poked out. I scream when I gotta pull a hangnail, honey, I ain’t stickin round for no gouge-outs. But you never could argue the finer points with a bunch of convicts. One afternoon in the laundry room, while she folded pants, Glitch the goddamn guilty party, tryna cover up his sin Yorkie, and a couple of other guys kicked Carlotta in the head enough that she nearly lost her own right eye, and like some sick joke, they ironed the sole of her right foot. The COs knew the real culprit, but they backslid to apathy and didn’t back Carlotta up They be lyin and denyin, what else is fucking new. It looked like they would move her to solitary “for her own protection” again, but that kind of protection she didn’t want They protected my ass by puttin me on harm’s fuckin plate every time with that goddamn Dave. Ithaca didn’t have a separate facility for people like her—hell, they had no vocabulary for people like her—so they let whatever happened happen in gen pop. By that time, though, she had already considered asking Frenzy, who had just been moved out of maximum security to D Block, for protection; once the bruises subsided and she could walk again, she felt sexy for a moment and used the opportunity, if you could call it that, to let Frenzy know her intentions I still look damn good for my forties an ravaged by a pack a toothy-ass prison wolves. Blatina don’t crack, honey. Asides, Frenzy wasn’t no spring chicken hisself, but the dude still built like a bank vault.
She poked his shoulder to make him look at her. “Things are so different for me now. I’m not sure I want the challenge a goin back out there. Not while you’re in here, an I gotta leave you here, boo.” Motherfucker don’t you love me?
Frenzy crossed his arms tightly in front of him and looked away from Carlotta. “It ain’t been that long,” he said, shaking his head, pointing to the space between them, and then specified As if my ass coulda misunderstood “You and me.”
“Five months could feel more real than five years sometime.”
“That how long you was with your wife?”
“Jasmine? Oh, shut up! We wasn’t married, she was my girl friend. Two words. Or I was hers, I din’t ezzackly know. An din’t hardly nothin—oh, forget it, that shit’s not the point, Frenzy.” Tears of frustration climbed up her voice. “Why you had to bring that up? Them people don’t know nothin bout who I am.”
“I’m just saying, Cee, life in here and life out there is two different lives.”
“That’s why I ain’t so sure bout gettin out no more. Maybe they won’t let me out anyways. I don’t got but a year and a half on my beef. Parole is stupid.”
He raised a finger to the end of her nose like a switchblade. “Don’t even motherfucking think that shit. You got a son out there. Ibe.”
He’d said the password. Now her eyes gushed like Hurricane Sandy hitting the Rockaways. Carlotta folded herself in half. “I write him every week but ain’t heard from him since he turnt nine! I bet he’s out there waitin to hear from me. His mama keepin him from me.”
Frenzy gripped her by the shoulder as if to say Get a hold of yourself but didn’t throw any more words on the fire. Instead, he watched their fellow convicts in motion for a while, bench-pressing, doing push-ups, walking together, playing cards, shooting the shit. Eventually Carlotta composed herself and joined him. B-Money had a prison tattoo of barbed wire across his Neanderthal forehead; Miguel “Basura” Guerrera had sharpened canines. The Aryan brothers, Beezus and Luke Duke, were pale, double-dealing men with frowzy beards (they said they had them for bullshit religious reasons) and veins all over their noses. Big Deano loved to show everyone the scar from the operation he’d had after he got shot four times—it looked like a king crab crawling across his chest These motherfuckers, some of em’s as ugly as they crimes. Sweetums had a weird beef: armed assault and murder—he liked to admit, like it was funny, that he’d gotten so involved in the killing-people part that he forgot to rob the gas station. He kept saying into the zone—“I just got so into the zone that I forgot why I had went” Remind me to stay bout fifty miles out that zone. Then he would laugh extra loud. He was doing all day and a night—aka life. Stinkbug, a white dude, periodically blew up into rages without warning. He had tried to brain his wife with a golf club, then locked her in the garage with the Pathfinder idling, thinking the exhaust would choke her dead, but she lived, and he still kept trying to hire someone to snuff her from prison, as if the two of them lived on some cosmic plane outside morality, outside reality. Maybe outside mortality. “That’s some Road Runner cartoon shit,” Carlotta said when she first heard about Stinkbug.
She knew how she was supposed to feel about prison, and on a certain percentage of the days, say, 63 percent, her pain lined up with all the warnings she’d heard before and after she started doing time. But in that other 37 percent, the pigeon of perspective would shit on her temple, and the whole place would suddenly be…no, not a paradise, no one in their right mind could talk about it that way, but a kind of sanctuary where B-Money’s barbed-wire tattoo, Stinkbug’s pockmarked cheeks and forehead, and her own dorsal scars were all beautiful, where Frenzy’s chivalry and even jealousy meant more than a hill of beans, and the flow of adrenaline and testosterone Other people testosterone, keep that shit away from me got her high, keeping pace with the other drugs. The way the joint controlled your schedule, the way that the COs whacked the bars of your house to enforce lights-out, the way that other inmates spent hours scheming to slam your head against a concrete floor without getting caught, all of it meant that she was cared for Not cared about, mind you. But for Carlotta, life inside had started to mean that people knew she existed An that’s prolly the most dangerous part. Everyone had something to offer that cramped world, if only a cigarette, and even if she joined the ranks of the wildest, most uncontrollable problem children ever to get sent to the hole, someone would have to face her, someone would need to solve her somehow, by any method from tenderness to murder. Wasn’t this what the majority of men here had lacked all their lives? They needed to feel that they mattered to someone, that someone was required to give a shit. Usually a man—men were famous for not giving a fuck.
Frenzy kept a tight lid on his beef, but the rumors had come to Carlotta before she’d even met him that he was the notorious criminal dubbed the Cheerios Killer by the New York Daily News, the perp of the violent 1999 rape and murder of Yolanda Willis, a young Harlem woman. According to the police report, after the killing, the murderer had sat himself down in the victim’s kitchen and scarfed down a bowl of cereal, probably wearing gloves to keep his fingerprints off the utensils, the cereal box, and the milk carton. This grab bag of calculation and coldness sparked the public’s wrath almost more than the murder itself, if the tabloids got the story right. The police grilled everyone who had ever looked at Ms. Willis. They figured only a lover or a relative would have the cojones to lollygag in the kitchen with her corpse like that. Frenzy and Yolanda had been romantically involved, and his violent history—in and out of juvie, fists of fury, a king-sized rap sheet including two armed robberies—had spoken for itself. His beef, though, did not arise from that case, for which he did not stand, but from possession of an unlicensed weapon and a gram of pot. Like a lot of dudes at Ithaca, he had gotten kicked upstairs to a max prison after some frighteningly bad behavior and back downstairs after some good behavior. Over the course of fifteen years.
During a flirtation a couple of months before, he and Carlotta had bonded over their mixed heritage. He was Black and Italian—the last name Franzi and his attitude made some cell warrior call him Frenzy and it stuck. She was Black and Colombian. He’d let his guard down slightly and spilled the beans about his beef. “Maybe I do belong in lockdown,” he told her, “but I ain’t no damn Cheerios Killer.” He grimaced. “I hate Cheerios! I don’t never eat nothing but Frosted Flakes or Cinnamon Toast Crunch. You could ask my moms. But ain’t nobody heard that. And when they couldn’t get me on the Cheerios, they got me on the AK and possession. Like the two of them things was the same! But to these folks, don’t no logical sense matter.” The system needs blood, he explained. “You build a whole buncha high-tech prisons, hire a shitload of COs, and it’s like, can’t no brand-new, state-of-the-art jails be sitting round empty, right? It’s like Field of Motherfucking Dreams, yo. They built that shit, so somebody ass gotta come. And you and me know that’s gon be you and me. Lucky us” Well, fuck luck.