The Road Narrows As You Go (58 page)

Wendy listened to Dan Rather name off a half-dozen businesses, including Lupercal, Solus First National, and Shepherd Media … And now, after a cat-and-mouse game New York District Attorney Rudy Giuliani says the Securities and Exchange Commission has been playing with Fleecen for almost a decade, the lion of Wall Street, the man they call the junk bond king, is finally brought to justice. Frank Fleecen has pled guilty to multiple counts of racketeering, insider trading, money laundering, and securities fraud and will serve up to
ten
years in a state prison in what is being called the largest criminal bust in Wall Street history. Fleecen specialized in a very obscure type of tender-offer securities swap pioneered in the nineteenth century by financiers like Cowperwood and Yerkes, who hypothecated loans nothing like the scale of today's magnate. Fleecen topped the
Forbes
list as the most highly paid financier in the world, clearing more than two point two billion in income from commissions on deals in the last six years, while alleged to earn an undisclosed additional income from personal investments. Prosecutors say it was the cartoonist Wendy Ashbubble, creator of the daily comic strip
Strays
, who helped Frank Fleecen funnel these secret profits through her bank accounts into a series of offshore dummy corporations. Even after he's released, it is certain Frank Fleecen will be one of the richest men in the world.

Rick the guard chewed distractedly on two Twizzler ropes. Incarcerated women shuffled by him in single file. Rick did not notice Wendy hanging
back to hear Dan Rather ask an expert from the Securities and Exchange Commission, What effect is this whole scandal having on the rest of the savings and loans and the bond market?

The guest expert nodded and said, It's making lenders who were absolutely courageous in the boom, it's making them timid. In the boom, it was almost impossible
not
to get a loan. Now it's like pulling teeth.

Very difficult to get a loan, Dan Rather said. What does that say about where our economy is going?

Keep it movin', ladies
, said Rick the guard as he waved at Wendy in particular with one hand. She got back in the line with the other women shuffling out of their cells past him single file down the narrow undecorated hallway of steel I-beams and reinforced concrete.
Time for lunch.

… sweeping investigation that included the indictment of Fleecen and his top clients, including Quinn Kravis and the cartoonist Wendy Ashbubble, leading ABC to
cancel
her long-awaited
Strays
Christmas special set to air on July Fourth …

The prison was too big, a nightmare high school. The hallway's vanishing point was a bulletproof door far enough in the distance to be an indiscernible dot.

The messhall was a half mile from Wendy's cell, and the auditoriumsized eating area was too small to accommodate the whole prison body, so the cellblocks ate in half-hour shifts of two thousand inmates at a time. Collected your Melmac tray, waited to find out the bad news. Today the kitchen served brown gravy with lumps of unmixed powder poured over mucilaginous mashed potatoes and a kind of colourless, odourless, tasteless pea, and for a main course, ground beef, with ketchup packlets. Custard dessert. Homo milk to wash it all down.

After dinner Wendy sat in front of a television in one of the four corners of the rec room. It didn't matter where she sat, all the boxes were tuned to the Home Shopping Network. Hydrodouche, nineteen ninety-nine. Computerized golf coach, forty-nine ninety-nine. Fractional Reserve
Fiat System, twenty-nine ninety-nine, and if you order now, we'll throw in a second one
free
.

One woman sat by one of the television boxes with a flank of inmates acting as security guards, and no one was allowed to talk to her without a meeting. Her name was Carol.

You see anything you like? was the first thing Carol said to Wendy.

Yeah, I like the look of that blowtorch, Wendy said. The host on TV was selling a set of stainless steel mixing bowls for nine ninety-nine.

You're allowed a rice steamer in your cell. You should order one. You're that girl who draws for the comics, right? Everybody says like you're special. Are you special? Draw me something special, Carol said and gave Wendy a crayon pencil and opened to the blank last page of a paperback she was reading—
Tuf Voyaging
.

What do you want me to draw?

Anything.

Normally I get
paid
to draw. You going to pay me?

Really, huh? What do you want?

I'll draw you something
special
if we can change the channel.

What now, say that again? It looked like Carol's head was screwed on crooked, her neck pointed at Wendy.

Just for a change of pace. I want to get caught up. Pam woke up from a vivid dream spanning the entire previous season to find Bobby in the shower—
Good Morning
. Gotta see how that goes. Geraldo Rivera's got psychopaths.
Cosby Show
,
Family Ties
,
Golden Girls
. Lots of options out there.

Carol shifted over next to Wendy and watched her draw. How old are you?

Twenty-nine, Wendy lied accurately.

I was twenty-nine when I was a producer for the Home Shopping Network, Carol told her. Wendy drew her an inmate breaking out of the Tony Robbins book through a rip in the last page. You know, it's true
what they say, every bad situation finds its scapegoat, Carol told her as she drew. Someone's got to take the blame. DA said their investigation found evidence I took bribes, embezzled merchandise, paid hush money, fired anyone I thought might snitch, and even washed money for the Hells Angels. But I'm just the damn scapegoat.

Bedtime, Rick the guard said. The guards were men to a fault, some were younger than Rick. Republicans, all Reagan's children. The guards unanimously praised the president, for he was the man who created their jobs. Until 1980 there was nine prisons for all of California, Rick the guard told Wendy. Thanks to Reagan, now there's eighteen. And they're packed, need more guards.

Wendy's lawyer told her the case was a matter of hysteria and would blow over. Her lawyer had not come from Frank's people—she didn't want Frank's lawyers involved at all—but her friends at the National Cartoonists Society recommended a good one. He lost the remand—she was deemed a flight risk, because prosecutors knew she was born in Canada—but he was prepared for the trial. His name was David Queensberry. He was a thin man in his mid-thirties with glasses, and he always brought her piping-hot coffee to drink.

He said, The country has temporarily lost its mind. Satanism is … I don't know, a distraction. All this Iran-Contra business needs a scapegoat. I've seen court transcripts of these satanic abuse cases and they're all going to be thrown out on appeal. There's no substance.

Does that help prove I'm innocent?

No, why would it?

Give me something that helps me, said Wendy.

I'm working on it, the lawyer said.

In group therapy Essa said, I'm scared to get out. I don't know what I'll do. Productive member of what society? Who wants me? I been in and
out of foster homes and youth centres and I'm done with the streets. I'm clean. I want to stay clean, pressed, pleated, tip-top, you know. I just want my life back.

Your whole life is ahead of you, Essa, the counsellor said, lots of time to prove yourself.

There were eleven women in group therapy and the counsellor sitting in a circle in green moulded plastic Eames chairs.

One lady said, Why'd they hide their bodies under my garage?

One young inmate, covered in self-administered tattoos, told the group she didn't want to talk and listed off on her fingers ten reasons why.

I'm the kind of addict who stole your TV and helped you go look for it, a nineteen-year-old named Rita Dominic told the group. But I got a headline for ya—prison ain't gone help cure a girl.

You can't trust anything with teeth, said an inmate who went by Virginia, recalling the disaster of her arrest. The doctor showed the toddlers from my preschool these anatomically correct dolls, and they would point to the genitals and ask the children,
Now tell us where Virginia touched you. Did Virginia touch you here? Or here? Did Virginia touch your bum?
Poor children. The children told the court they saw me flying around the room on a broomstick. They told the jury we hung them by their skin from the planter hooks in the ceiling. They said there was a torture chamber in a secret basement under the preschool where we filmed ourselves sodomizing them and burning their flesh with torches. Some of these children had never even attended our preschool, weren't registered. I'm not going to repent for a crime I didn't commit. How am I supposed to be rehabilitated for something imaginary? This punishment does one thing to me that I hate to even say aloud. It destroys my confidence in America.

We must all shoulder a lot of pain, said the counsellor.

I took a polygraph, Virginia said. I am innocent. I am innocent. Once they set my bail I'm out of here and never coming back.

Wendy, what about you? the prison counsellor asked. Do you think you'll ever accept
your
crime?

I'm innocent. Honestly? I still don't know what I'm going to trial for. I'm listening to Virginia and thinking the exact same thing. The charges sound so bizarre and unfamiliar to me and … I'm so afraid of years trapped in here.

Smirking and scrubbing her gloved hands together, the counsellor said she was used to hearing Wendy's kind of denial. Part of why we engage in group therapy is accepting what brought us here.

I should be retired right now, not in jail, said Virginia.

This place is a damage to my health, said Essa. I got a lot of diabetes.

Virginia looked at her across the circle, then returned to her knitting. She was knitting blue baby booties for her most recent grandchild. She told the counsellor, You don't understand me at all. I'm in here for two hundred and twenty-five years because a jury believed the prosecutor who said I'm a Satanist who molested children.

Wendy said, Denial of what?

The counsellor pushed on. To verbalize your guilt is the first step. To accept your trial and say to a group in public why you are here. Engaging with the system, to say aloud what brought you here. The counsellor cupped her hands together as if awaiting fresh water.

Wendy. Wake up. Wendy. She was buried alive in an underground crypt shaped like a panopticon, a womb. Wendy, wake up. Are you going to keep trying to fuck the one that got away? Wake up, girl.

No, no, no, I want Wendy with me, Essa screamed as guards lifted her onto a gurney.

Wendy woke to find her cell full of guards, more than just Rick, and her cellmate between contractions.

Rick the guard said, No way. Can't bring another inmate. Prohibited. Told you a million times. It's against the law.

All kinds of escape routes flew through her mind as she lay in her top bunk looking at the water tower. Then suddenly Rick the guard was in the door. Collect whatever of your belongings you want to keep, he said. You ain't staying here no more.

What do you mean? Where am I being taken?

As of this moment, you are officially a free woman.

Free, Wendy said. What about—?

You'll be the first I know of who wants to stay longer.

But how? My bail hasn't even been set yet.

Charges dropped, Rick said and shrugged. Collect whatever you need and follow me. Oh and by the way, your celly had a baby girl.

Wow. Well, she'll be out soon, too.

Not likely. She's still going to trial for murder.

Murder?
She told me she stole some Gap stuff.

Rick chuckled. Yeah, that's for sure, a hundred grand in merch, before she unloaded a pistol into her boyfriend
point-blank
.

Well shit. What happens to her baby?

Rick scratched his standard issue. State law is clear on this one. The mother gets forty-eight hours of quality time with her newborn.

And then what?

Then either the baby goes to family, foster care, or you know, orphanage or whatever, I guess.

40

STRAYS

After almost five years living at No Manors, those interior walls, those bicycles on the ceiling, the shelves of books and comics, the roomfuls of tools and toys, this world within a world became interchangeable with our imaginations. One memory, four people. We lived along a single thread. The four of us, day after night producing all those drawings at the longtable, painting cell after cell of animation, loading up the frame to shoot each one … the years it took us to make that animated cartoon no one ever saw, the people we met and things we saw, it left an indelible mark on our memory.

Twenty years later and we still slept on the couches in the No Manors of our memory. No matter how much time passed between us and then, that view from the longtable remained close at hand. The present moment is in a relentless conversation with our memory of the past. Constantly changing under our feet like a sand made of temporally indivisible particles of language, memory is the landscape on which our future's journey is charted. Memory of the past formed the mountains and plains that opened the horizons or shut us in. We relived that San Francisco, the city our memory transformed into a mother who gave birth to our new selves. The future depended on our most extreme impressions of the past. The truth was whatever remained outside the blind spots. No Manors was home even after we left and went separate ways. We spent so much formative time in those halls and rooms on the peak of Bernal Heights. We were night owls with no self-esteem, but what inspired us to keep drawing was the talents of our friends and that view out the bay window of the city asleep under a cosmic scream shimmering light-headedly with stars. Night was the mouth we kept feeding and feeding. There at the beginning of who we would become, a memory of the night air blowing in the open windows and the door buzzer letting someone in. Behind a circle of fogs, that unforgettable view of the sun at dawn streaking across the rolling hills of San Francisco. We could doodle that view from memory. So many nights awake to see the sunrise pierce through volumes of cloud, as if to signal the fingers of god were about to descend and pinch chosen ones off the ground to take to heaven, or if not a godhand, alien crafts beaming unwitting civilians up off the hills of Divisadero and Fillmore into the arms of telekinetic ectomorphs with long probes. Our San Francisco was touched with a trembling energy left over from the acid swamps of life's protean beginnings, a fault line through the memory of the place that sent quakes of memory that penetrated our skin at the fingertips and changed flesh, then soul. Twenty years later we can still see the whole peninsula out the window of No Manors as clear in memory as any day, foggy with
the spine-chills. Straight down the arrow of Valencia and Mission into the hills downtown, those steep lanes converging on the bridges, we draw on our mind's sketchpad. The present moment is defined by then. At No Manors we became the people we used to recognize only in the dreaming mirror of our inner eye—cartoonists, illustrators, freethinkers, artists, or—if not artists, doers.