Sweet Hell on Fire (10 page)

My kids didn’t want to see me on the weekend. They both had other things they wanted to do. The oldest was doing something with my dad and the youngest said she was sick.

I went over and spent an hour or so with my mother. That was as long as she could stand up. We didn’t talk about anything. We sat together while she flipped back and forth between football, the home shopping channel, and CNN. I left when she went to bed. I could have waited for my older daughter, but if she didn’t think it was worth seeing me, then why should I bother?

I spent the rest of the day alone and I didn’t like it. Too much time with my own head again. I chatted with some people online. Tried to write, but I didn’t have anything to say. The stories that used to live in my head were gone.

In the end, the only thing I wanted to do was drink some more. I went over to a friend’s house, the same one who’d come over the night previous. We got shit-faced and played video games for hours. At three in the morning, he called his girlfriend, who was also an officer, to go get us Burger King.

If I’d been her, I would have told him to go fuck himself and have the bitch he was with go get him his damn Burger King. But this poor girl had no self-respect. None at all. She’d been asleep when he called and she got up out of bed to drive twenty minutes to Burger King, which was actually within walking distance of my friend’s house.

She even paid for our food.

And when she dropped it off, that’s all it was. He answered the door, took the bag from her, and said, “Thanks, babe.”
Then
he
closed
the
door
.

He didn’t even invite her inside.

I could see her through the window, still standing on the porch, confused. As if she almost wasn’t sure where she was or what was going on. She started crying, but she let him get away with it.

That disgusted me thoroughly. It almost put me off my food. Almost.

“That’s fucked up, man,” I said.

“I know, right?” he said, laughing.

“You’re an asshole.”

“And this is news how?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You treat her like a doormat.”

“She lets me.” He shrugged.

“I’m going to take her under my wing. Just you wait.” I took another bite of my burger. “But damn it’s nice to have Burger King delivery whenever I want it.”

“Ain’t it?” He smirked and shoved another beer at me.

I drank half in one gulp. “I don’t know. It makes me curious what else you could make her do.”

“Now you’re thinking. Come up with some ideas. I’ll try a few.”

I shouldn’t have laughed. I should have had more empathy for that poor, naïve girl, but I didn’t. I still thought it was all predator/prey and if she wanted to be prey, who was I to stop her?

He’d invited me to crash on the couch, but his sister had a friend crashing too and she’d taken the good couch. The cats had christened the other one, so I crept out at dawn when I was sober enough to drive.

I called her the next day and asked her why she put up with that shit and she said because she knew he really loved her, which only reinforced my predator/prey ideology because right after that, she asked me if I thought he was cheating on her.

Nothing ever happened between me and my friend, but you can bet your ass I wouldn’t put up with some female friend spending the night with my man. And I wouldn’t fetch and carry them anything but a Molotov cocktail.

The doctor’s office had called and confirmed that my mom had cancer, but she could have a hysterectomy and there was a high survival rate, so we had every reason in the world to be hopeful. She was supposed to go in for tests for her surgery, but she didn’t feel well enough to go and rescheduled.

I can’t count how many times she canceled those pre-hysterectomy tests because she’d get dizzy, or had a panic attack, or she’d just be in too much pain to function. I didn’t understand with her level of illness, her disabilities, why they didn’t admit her to the hospital to do the tests and keep her sedated until they could operate. She was in so much pain.

Unless all of her screaming was simply histrionics, but I didn’t think that was the case.

Looking at her lying in bed, a small, shriveled lump, crying and afraid, I realized my mom had gotten old. Not just in years, because mid-sixties wasn’t really old, but in her soul.

Speaking of histrionics…I know that’s kind of an overwrought description, but she seemed so weak and frail. So broken. Soul-weary.

There were times as a kid that I thought she really hated me and I thought I really hated her. I said I wasn’t going to bad-mouth her and I won’t—I will own all of the bad things I did too. I freely admit that I was a horrible teenager and I put my mother through so many things that I didn’t need to. I’d decided I was an adult at sixteen and that was that.

But I have to give some examples of her behavior here too, so you understand why our relationship was so strained.

Once, she got angry at me and threw the toothbrush holder I made in ceramics class so it shattered on the floor, then made me clean it up. It was ugly, this sick swirl of green and yellow paint smears, but I’d made it for her. I cried and I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I remember thinking that she seemed glad to have hurt me. I decided then that I would never show her how anything she did caused me pain. No matter what she did, I wouldn’t care.

For a long time, I didn’t. Even when she told me she wanted to kill herself—that she should just go jump off the bridge. I told her I’d drive her so she didn’t leave the car and to either do it or shut the fuck up about it.

When I was sixteen, she was trying to teach me how to drive. She told me to parallel park in a space I wasn’t comfortable with, I told her I didn’t want to try it and she started screaming at me. So I screamed back. She slapped me across the face so hard my head hit the glass while the car was moving. I hauled off and slapped her right back. She threatened to call the police, and I didn’t give a shit one way or another. I told her that was fine, but if she laid hands on me again she’d get more of the same.

There were a few times when that got me kicked out of the house. Some were deserved, others weren’t. I’d decided I was going to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, and there was nothing anyone could say or do to stop me. I lived on my own for a while when I was sixteen. I actually went to class and did my homework when I was only accountable to myself.

Once, I even told her that I wished she’d never adopted me and she said she did too because I had bad genes and I’d never be anything. We were good at hurting each other.

But this was still the woman who’d waited seven years for a baby. For me. They’d gotten the call for a baby before me and they hadn’t taken her. My mother said she didn’t feel right for them, but when she met me, she and my dad both knew I was the one. I was theirs.

This was still the woman who taught me my phonics in the bath, kissed my cuts, and always made sure I had every piece of clothing I ever wanted, every toy I coveted, had the best birthday parties and made my birthday practically a national holiday while she went without. I had two cars before I was eighteen and my mother never had one that she could say was only hers.

When I told her I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, I was nineteen and jobless, living with my parents. She didn’t get angry like I thought she would, given that when she found a condom in my purse in high school, she called me all manner of nasty names.

Pregnant was different somehow, maybe because I was supposed to be an adult. She was comforting and helpful, even when I told her I might put the baby up for adoption. A mom? Shit. How could I be a mom at nineteen? I couldn’t handle my own life, let alone anyone else’s. This whole other innocent little person…

My father walked the halls with me for nineteen hours while I was in hard labor. My mother was the one who went to Lamaze class with me and held my hand while I was in labor even though she’d been sick with the flu.

When my husband and I had separated, there was never any question that I would move in with my parents, and my mother had offered to watch the kids for me while I looked for a job. She’d come in and pet my hair and my back while I bawled; sobbed like I was dying when I heard my husband had slept with someone else after we separated. (I know, such a double standard. I hated that it hurt me, I didn’t want to feel anything else for him.)

Even as sick as she was now, she was still trying to keep up with my kids and taking care of them because I couldn’t.

Or wouldn’t.

Maybe I didn’t even know how to be a mom then.

All of this matters because it tangled like some rancid ribbon around what I felt for my mother. It was complicated.

Part of me wanted to hurt her back now that she was weak, and part of me wanted to curl up around her and beg her not to leave me alone in the world because I wasn’t ready. I was still just a little girl playing dress-up and house.

I lay down with her for a while and read a book. I didn’t say any of the things that were on the tip of my tongue. It was swollen from too much salt anyway.

The prison called me to see if I wanted overtime, so I went. I had to get ahead on my bills. I was renting furniture and spending way too much at the bar.

I should have stayed home.

I was happy they decided to put me in Seg. If I could have been down there five days a week instead of two, I would have been all over it. But the place was rocking and rolling and had been all day. A bunch of guys had just come in from the Medium for dumping boiling oil on another inmate’s face. They stole the oil from the kitchen and set it to boil in someone’s hot pot. Then they waited for their target. Someone told me that the inmate’s face had melted away with the oil, running down his neck with the hot grease. I didn’t quite believe it; I imagined it would have to blister first and I didn’t think the hot pot could get it quite that hot.

First thing I did when I got to Seg was walk around and ask who wanted showers. I was told if guys were asleep not to wake them up. They knew what time we took names for showers. It was their responsibility to make sure they washed their own asses. For the most part, I agreed with that. No one got me up to wash my ass, and my shirt said Department of Corrections not Concierge.

But I would always bang on their cell door a couple of times. It made more work for us, but I didn’t want to smell these guys. If they didn’t make it to shower call, they usually didn’t bother to “birdbath” it either. (Meaning they would run water in their sink and bathe. Like a birdbath.)

One guy didn’t wake up. I could see he was breathing, so I went on about my safety check and shower call.

About halfway through the showers, the guy who’d slept through the call woke up pissed off. He asked if he could please get a shower. I said no. We had to treat them all the same. If I made an allowance for him, I’d have to make it for everyone. Part of prison is learning to follow rules and enduring the consequences when you don’t. We’re correcting (hence corrections) the idea that the rules don’t apply to these individuals, and we’re forcing them to function in a societal setting and to deal with consequences.

He was running off at the mouth and being a general pain in my ass. I couldn’t make it any clearer to him that I wasn’t his alarm clock and I wasn’t going to be. He said he was going to tie a string to his toe next time so I could pull it and wake him up.

What?

Then he said he wanted us to practice. He hadn’t heard all of my 534 versions of no, so I finally said that yes, on my next time around the tier we could practice.

So when I came back around, he’d positioned himself the other way on his bunk, facing the door. He had his blankets pulled up to his chin. (Remember, it was still like ninety to a hundred degrees inside.) A length of some nylon thread, like fishing line, hung out of his cell.

I just knew he’d tied it to his dick. I don’t know how I knew, but I did.

“Are you ready to practice?” he asked me with a big grin. “Just tug it a little.”

If I could have rolled my eyes any harder, they might have fallen out of my face. I decided to give him a chance not to be a dumbass. “I don’t think we need to practice because I’m not going to pull that string to wake you up for a shower. You’re a grown man.”

“No, we have to practice. You said you would.”

I had at that. I’d said we’d practice because I wanted him to shut the fuck up. I always did what I said I’d do. Always.

“It’s not too late to change your mind. I’m too busy to worry about gentle tugs.”

He laughed. “But, Sarge, you’re a woman. How hard could it be?”

“Okay, well, are you sure it’s tied to your toe?”

He nodded enthusiastically. So I gathered the length in my fist. “Are you ready?” He nodded some more.

I jerked that thing so hard it snapped. As I suspected, he’d tied the string to his dick.

I’ve never heard such a sound come out of a man before or since. Or seen someone fly the way he flew through the air. It was like his bunk was a toaster and he was a Pop-Tart for all of one second that seemed to last minutes.

Then he was on the floor naked and writhing.

“Was that good? Would that wake you up?” When he didn’t answer, I spoke again. “What’s wrong? Do you need to go to the clinic?”

“No, ma’am,” he choked out.

Asshole. Maybe he’d think twice about inflicting his dick and dumbassery on the next officer. I went about my business of searching cells.

I’d thought I already had my excitement for the day, but I wasn’t so lucky. I was flipping through an inmate’s address book when I found an address and a phone number I recognized. It belonged to the clinic secretary.

Now, I knew there were ways for anyone to get this information. The fact that he had it didn’t necessarily mean she’d given it to him, but it was something I had to report. If not for her safety, then for the rest of the staff.

I confiscated the address book as evidence.

I didn’t want to think she was dirty, but a gnawing hole in my gut said she was.

And I hadn’t been wrong yet.

This guy was a real piece of shit too. He had something like fourteen counts of child molestation and kidnapping. He’d been pimping girls under the age of fourteen. I believe he was an enforcer for the Bloods.

He later ended up convincing a female officer to have a relationship with him. She was in my training class and I can’t say I was surprised. I didn’t like her from day one. There was something false about her, this faux piety. Her kids went to school with mine and I had to tell them they couldn’t be friends with her son.

Not only because we’d ejected her from our world, but having a relationship with someone in your care like that is a sex crime. Of course, then there’s the part where she had gotten him a lawyer and was trying to get his sentence reduced and wanted him to come live with her and her children. If she’d wantonly and actively seek to bring that into her home, what else had her poor children been exposed to?

There was a little justice in the world though. This inmate had priapism, meaning he’d gotten an erection that didn’t go away. He refused to allow them to operate to relieve the condition. Bottom line? He ended up with gangrene and had to catheterize himself several times a day.