Sweet Hell on Fire (19 page)

My husband asked me to go out for lunch and then to Best Buy for some media shopping.

I wasn’t sure; I didn’t want to be banned for life from Best Buy, too. Whenever we were in the same room, we fought, and part of why I’d left him was because I didn’t have the energy to fight with him anymore. It had gotten to where I lost myself, and I’d been a pale shadow of the woman I used to be. His words had the power to slice me deeper than any blade—to dig into my marrow. He’s the only person who I really cared about what he thought of me.

So to avoid that pain, I’d stopped being me. I’d stopped fighting because I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Before we separated, there were days I’d wake up and count the minutes until I could go to sleep again because that meant I’d hashed another day off. I wondered when it would be over. After leaving him, the person I turned into was no better.

But I could never resist him. He’s the most charismatic person I’ve ever known, and the draw between us is like the tide. You can’t fight it; all you can do is go where it takes you. Even when you dig your feet in, it gnaws away at the ground beneath your feet until suddenly you’re waist deep when you’d only wanted to get your toes wet.

When we first separated, he’d come over one night to get the kids and he’d backed me up against the wall like a quarterback would a cheerleader under the bleachers and there were butterflies in my stomach just like when we’d first met. He kissed me then and I swear to God there was an orchestra.

Just like our first kiss.

They were both everything a romance novel kiss is supposed to be. I’d never experienced that before him, and I thought they didn’t happen. But they do. I could have drowned in him.

And my husband, for all of his talents, is a master manipulator. He could con the Devil into church. So it was on the tip of my tongue to say I didn’t want to go, but I found myself saying yes instead.

We had a leisurely lunch and we strolled around Best Buy, poking at this and that. One of my favorite things to do is browse appliances and dream about what my house is going to be like when I finally have one of my own.

Etta James’s “
At
Last
” came over the speakers and he motioned for me to come over to the CD section, so I did. He grabbed me around the waist and slow danced with me in the middle of Best Buy. Everyone was looking at us, but we didn’t care. It was only him and me.

When the song ended, he kissed my forehead and went back to browsing as if it had been an everyday occurrence.

I’ve already said that searching cells is something I like to do. Except in the Minimum unit. Those guys owned way too much stuff, and the area I had to search wasn’t cells per se. It was a dorm there, a large open space called a pod with twenty-plus beds to a pod, and four pods to a unit. Each inmate had a locker, and guys were always meandering around. It wasn’t safe to have your head buried in someone’s property all the time because you wouldn’t always be aware of your surroundings.

A favorite technique of one of the Sergeants I knew was to make an announcement throughout the dorm and say that the blacksuits were on their way up to shake down the house. If they had anything they wanted to get rid of, to do it and then he’d go behind the cell house, gather it all up, and it would be out of the dorm. Of course, sometimes, he’d actually have to get the blacksuits to show up once in a while or the threat lost its bite.

I was doing it the old-fashioned way and going through their lockers. I found a cup, which in and of itself wasn’t a big deal. They’re all allowed to have cups. It’s what was in it. The cup could hold approximately twenty-two ounces and it was packed to the rim with semen.

Yes.
Semen
.

Dirty motherfuckers.

Sweet fucking hell but I was glad I had on gloves. I called the clinic for a bio-waste bag. I guess I could have dumped it in the toilet, but then what? It was against regulations to keep bodily excretions. No, I’d rather just give it to people who deal with that kind of thing. Namely someone who wasn’t me.

And what the hell was he going to do with it? Throw it on someone? It looked like it had been there for a long time—the edges were crusty and there was some kind of crisp rag standing in it, saluting me.

Working the prison almost put me off men completely. Seeing all those dicks in my face every day, always being on my guard because someone always wanted something from me, seeing what kind of animals people could be…The inmates were always fond of saying if you treat a man like an animal and put him in a cage, he’ll become an animal. But I think that’s a cop-out. You choose your actions. You choose the words that come out of your mouth, and it’s messages from your brain that causes your muscles to move your hands, your feet, your body. You choose to be an animal.

And the filth. Dear God, the filth. Pissing on their cells, themselves, throwing their own feces like monkeys in the zoo, and trying to cover everything that would stand still with semen. I’m supposed to have empathy for them? It’s a hard to thing to remember that the man trying to coat you in his shit is someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s universe. As officers, we’re faced with that choice too, the choice to be an animal or a decent human being. Officers get institutionalized too. Again, that’s why they say the first year you’re no good for The Job and after that you’re no good for anything else.

It’s also said that a society’s prison system is how best to measure their civilization. If that’s so, we’re fucked.

I went to a friend’s house for a brunch, and I was reminded why I don’t socialize with people outside of those I know from work. Sure, part of it isn’t intentional—that isolation—but some of it is. There are some opinions I have that are based on my life experience, not some idea or philosophy that blossoms from a do-gooder who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, regardless of the degrees on their wall.

Someone all of us knew was arrested for molesting four kids. Invariably, the conversation turned to pedophiles, their treatments, and how to “fix” them.

They can’t be fixed.

“Studies show…” I spaced out as soon as I heard this. Blah fucking blah. I work with them every day. I don’t want to hear a bunch of crap about what their professors told them in school or what they think they learned in practicals.

You want to call them fixed and let them out? Fine. Let them live in your neighborhood. Oh, what? No? You wouldn’t want a pedophile or a rapist for a neighbor? But haven’t they completed their programs? Aren’t they “fixed”?

So I was sitting there nursing a mimosa and thinking about how fast I could get out of there without offending my friend. The rest of the women I could give a shit about, but this woman had been my friend for a long time.

She saw on my face that I was uncomfortable, and she tried to steer the conversation to something else, but the rest of her guests were determined. I got up to take my plate and my drink to the kitchen and duck out.

I didn’t want to turn my friend’s nice brunch into a pissing match by talking shop. The whole point of getting out of the house and hanging with her was so I didn’t have to talk shop.

“Sara, you work with them. What do you think?” one of them asked.

Why? Why did she have to ask me? I just wanted to relax, and I didn’t want to discuss anything more serious than what kind of champagne was in the mimosa.

“I think treatment makes them more efficient predators.” It leapt out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

“How else are they going to get better?” This woman looked at me, shocked.

There was nothing for it now but to explain what I meant. I knew she would stop listening as soon as I got to a point she disagreed with. Her question was really to enforce what she said rather than an actual query.

“They’re not going to. Pedophiles and sex offenders can’t be fixed.”

She laughed and lifted her nose in the air. “Well, maybe we should save this discussion for when
you
have a degree, hmm?”

“Or when
you
work with them in a real-life setting instead of in your office where they kiss your ass because the court says they have to see you and they know what they tell you affects their probation and freedom? Right. Like I said before, you think you can fix them? Let them hang out with your kid. How much faith do you have in your fix?” I said.

“They just need someone to understand them. Most of them were molested as children themselves.”

I give not a fuck. Sure, I’m sorry for any child’s suffering, but that doesn’t excuse their actions. They make their own choices. “You know, you sound like those women who fangirl serial killers.
He
just
needs
a
woman
who
understands
him
. You think you can fix them too and you can’t. Some behaviors, once they’re hardwired, that’s it.” It’s more about managing the ideation and self-control rather than a fix.

“Well, that’s true but—”

“But what? I work with them while they’re getting these programs that are supposed to help them blend in to society. To fit with the rest of us. And that’s what they do, but it’s not fixing what’s inside them. The programs teach them the behaviors they need to slip among us unnoticed. They make them more effective predators.”

She looked horrified. “I never thought of it that way.”

I continued. “Just the other day I was searching a guy’s cell. He’d been through his mandated programs, and he had a picture he’d cut out of a Christian pamphlet about finding a family with God. It was a picture of a little girl and her mother. He’d taped it up by the head of his bunk. There was just something about it that struck me as off. Maybe you might have thought that he was using that as a focal point to get him through his dark times, that it was something to look forward to, a family. But I took it. I could have given it back if it was appropriate for him to have it, so I went to check to see if he was a sex offender. And you know what, he was.”

The psychiatrist put her hand over her eyes, as if that would block out whatever images had cropped up in her head. She knew what he’d been using that picture for. I did too. He’d been jerking off to it.

“He asked me later if I’d taken it. I said I had. Most inmates, when you take something from them, even if they’re not supposed to have it, raise hell. Instead, he asked me quietly if I’d taken it because it was inappropriate, or because it was
inappropriate
for
him
. He knew I knew. I didn’t even answer, I just looked at him and he said he understood.”

“Oh God!” One of the other guests just caught on to my meaning.

“There was another one—he’d completed his programs and was due for release in two weeks. When I was searching his cell, I found a cardboard tube taped underneath the drawer of his desk. It was decorated with glitter, happy faces, and hearts. On the inside was a newspaper clipping from one of the local schools and it had pictures of kids reading and playing. Each one was labeled meticulously with words like pussy-bearer and fuckhole.”

“Did he get out?” one of the other women asked.

“Well, yeah.” I shrugged. “He did his time. He completed his programs. He’s out now.”

Then they all looked at our psychiatrist friend like it was her fault he was out, not the judge who’d handed down his sentence. Then everyone wanted more stories from the prison.

“You should write this stuff down,” my friend said. “You obviously have an audience.”

Everyone who works corrections thinks at one time or another they should write it down.

I thought about it. At least then I wouldn’t have to repeat myself. Some of the stories are fun to tell and then others, like this one, these are the things I wish I could forget. Then again, sometimes I’m glad I can’t forget them because I know what to look for and I can better protect my family.

The old adage about not judging a book by its cover? Absolute crap, at least when it comes to people. None of us are perfect, but there are some flaws that are markers, big red warning signs to the rest of the herd that there’s a wolf under that wool.

In nature, it’s called aposematism. Loosely defined, it’s how nature marks creatures as poisonous. The violin on the brown recluse spider, the bright red of the poison frog, and the brightly colored coral snake—they all signify that these creatures are poisonous and deadly.

To me, it shows up in symmetry. None of us are perfect, so no one’s features are going to be perfectly symmetrical, but I noticed the most violent offenders are all asymmetrical. If you look at pictures of some of the more well-known serial killers, their features are misaligned, and the most common trait among them is large ears with one hanging obviously lower than the other. (Again, that’s not to say that just because one of your neighbor’s ears is longer than the other that he’s got his wife’s head in his freezer.) And to be clear, aposematism as it applies to people is just my observation and opinion; it hasn’t been studied scientifically. Although I think it would make an interesting study, and I plan to pursue it while working toward my degree in clinical psych.

In my experience, there are traits specific to every deviance. The most notable were the child molesters. It’s easy to believe that every white male over forty who is in a prison setting is a child molester, but that’s not the case. There is a certain softness about such sex offenders that’s evident around their eyes and their mouths, something that marks them for what they are, a faux innocence.

In fact, whatever their deviance, the eyes are the best marker. It’s not always something that shows up in pictures, but it can. There is a certain flat emptiness to the eyes of a sociopath, and no matter how congenial or how charming, that never changes. The best description is like looking into a mirror and getting the distinct impression that what’s looking back at you isn’t you, it’s nothing like you, but a monster pretending to wear your face.

I do judge people by how they look because my gut is rarely wrong. We used to play a game with the inmate database called Ugly Thug Ball. We’d email each other the pictures of some of the ugliest inmates we could find, but it morphed into something else. We’d try to guess an inmate’s crime just from his picture. I was right around 95 percent of the time.

A friend of mine had started dating through an online dating site, and she sent me pictures of her dates to get my opinion. One guy looked normal and healthy. Average. There was nothing exceptionally remarkable about him, but there was something about his eyes. I immediately asked her how much time he’d done. She said a couple of years. I asked her if it was for drugs and she said yes and laughed. She thought it was amazing that I just knew.