Walking the Dog (5 page)

A LETTER TO BATYA SHULAMIT

Dear Batya Shulamit,

You probably will never see this because Leonard will be censoring your mail. He'll take a glimpse at my handwriting and know right away. I don't own a computer yet, but even if I did, no one would let me have your email. Since I was an artist I still like the feel of pen on paper. It's almost like eating spaghetti, swimming, or pulling long fingernails through sand. I know I sound stupid. My letters from prison were much less ootchy-kootchy than this, but they always came back unopened. If I was the daughter of a convict I'd be curious about her life and I'd search for the letters full of apologies and sorrow.

I'm writing to tell you I looked up your names in the dictionary, and they are well thought out choices. It was brave for the Pharaoh's daughter to rescue a Jewish baby from the river. Is your second name connected to the Queen of Sheba? That beautiful black woman who shows up in the Song of Songs? You know all the answers but you can't reach me. When I was involved in my research Batya appeared to me in a kind of brick red and Shulamit in Caribbean blue. I have a condition where I see numbers and letters in colors. Not that you'd give a shit. I'm
just trying to do what psychologists call “relate.” I wish Leonard would let you read this so we could begin to take down the monster image of me just a little. Our lunch turned into two dinosaurs ripping each other to shreds over a pat of strawberry butter. But disasters can be fun. Sometimes they are amusing. I'm including a sketch of a horse flying through an open field. It represents your name in the abstract. Ask Leonard to explain it some time. It's my dream of freedom. For me. For you. For all of us tied up in our bodies even a little. (It's probably worth a fortune, this drawing. Sell it if you don't want it and put the cash toward Smith or whatever those tight-asses have in mind for you.) That's all for now, I'm scared to say.

Carleen

THE HELL OF POWELL

I learned just as much at Powell in Ohio than I did at the somewhat more “liberal” Clayton Correctional in upstate New York. When you're basically an upper middle class white woman from the Upper West Side, no matter what you do you can't fathom what continual physical violence, even the threat of it, can do to your senses. In every cell I was placed in the “sisters” tested me constantly. I didn't fall into an easy category. I hadn't murdered anyone directly one-on-one, but I was notorious for organizing a lighthearted event in which three people were shot dead. Two of them cops. So, was I a featherweight or ripe convict-leader material? The Royals (I liked to think of them as the Amazon Queens of the prison) made absolutely sure I got the initiation that was coming to me. These women at the top reminded me of the prints of judges seated at a table in their wavy pure white wigs that you see in Hogarth lithographs. (Look up Hogarth. He's nasty.) The Royals of Powell were so pierced and tattooed you couldn't tell them apart—aside from black, white, and Latina—and they were often stabbing each other as much as the “newbies,” as a new con is called for at least two years. The Royals were fifteen or so women who achieved their status either through time, black market prowess, or fighting ability. In some ways the hierarchy seemed
arbitrary, but they ruled with unquestioned tyranny. Their initiations were ruthless and planned out with detail and expertise. A newbie was often the recipient of four or five beatings a day, was awakened with kicking and screaming every hour, was slowly starved or poisoned, and—this was mandatory—newbies were sent to solitary, escorted by the most corrupt guards. These guards at Powell were encouraged to rape newbies. Some got gifts for originality or cruelty. The only way to avoid initiations was to find an appropriate protector-husband-wife. This was a person who'd earned the respect or fear of the Royals by outdoing them in their own sadism and schemes.

I had my share of abuse. When they found out I was a painter, they first made me draw. But then they burned my drawings and broke both my hands—all the fingers on my hand one-by-one, like the Pinochet soldiers did to the famous singer-guitarist Victor Jara during the Chilean coup d'état. It took weeks to heal, but I did excruciating exercises all the time to regain the nimbleness that would allow me to paint. This had some effect on the Royals, but not much. Punishments were doled out for any breaking of the Royals' rules, and they made up their rules as they went along. Women got beaten for chewing gum without asking. Royals raped women with bottles and batons. It was worse begging for help from the hapless guards. Most guards reported to the Royals, and any fool who took the side of the newbies found herself like a blues song, “Broken and Bruised.” I tried to be cool. I knew not to complain, but it didn't help much. Nonetheless, I held up. I've always had a wall-like resistance to anyone who abuses power. I wish I could say it was moral. But it seems instinctive—animal. So whatever the Royals laid on me, I took. And I came back. And took it again. This resilience had a twofold effect. A clique within the powerful dynasty began to put
together an elaborate hit on me. But I also managed to earn the respect of the strangest and most demented prisoner in maximum security. Her name was Fits, a six-foot-three Viking who wore undershirts and sweatpants, and had fists the size of bowling balls. Plus, she was epileptic, or psychotic, and once every couple of months she'd have a seizure where she shook and struck out like a cartoon creature zapped by an electric wire (thus, her nickname). It would take three or four male guards to hold her down. I think they had to shoot her with a quart of Thorazine to keep her from becoming the Hulk. She was slow, but far from stupid. She simply had impulse-control problems and the strength of a grizzly bear. She'd been in solitary so many times she had permanent red stripes—like a zebra—from crashing into the bars. She had scars on her head from trying to butt the metal doors. Her arms were misshapen from how many times she'd broken them. But she stood tall.

She was in for four or five life sentences. The story went that on the outside a couple street boys made fun of her on a basketball court in her suburban town as she kept missing baskets. The more they mocked Fits the more she kept missing baskets. I will never know the true details (few of us ever do on the inside), but my impression is that Fits went into some kind of standing, abominable snowman seizure. They found half of a pickup game with their necks broken and Fits sound asleep on the gravel. She didn't resist. She took on a kind of blankness that people interpreted as retardation. I think it was more likely her chemistry or wiring. She came from a poor farm family where the mother had run off, so no one had ever cared enough to try to get her medicated. They just called what she had the “devil twitches.” The defense claimed that the boys attacked Fits, even though she couldn't remember.

I was going through a nonstop Ferris wheel of hell at Powell's—everything from getting beat up, to finding shit in my bed, to getting stabbed with needles, razors, and tacks. My broken fingers made it hard to fight back. That's probably a good thing, because if I had blown up in my usual way I'd be dead. Every now and then I think it might be useful to be alive. But back then, given that everyone on the outside had completely disowned me, I was prime for just doing a cannonball off the top tier of cells and ending up like a jellyfish on the filthy plywood floor. I was ready. But then Fits, in her quiet bear, spaceman manner, took on the job of becoming my husband.

PRISON WIFE

One nameless day Fits ducked into my cell (she was taller than the gate) and sat on the bed next to me. I thought, This is it, and a shiver of simultaneous terror and relief went through me. I waited to be murdered at Powell like I waited for Fits's seizures. My unconscious knew an attack was inevitable. I knew she'd crumble me like soft rock. But she kept her huge hands in fists on her lap.

“You have a mark on you,” she grunted. “They want to wear you down. I saw some of the boys back home do it to a dog. They like to watch you go slow. You've got that mark. They'll bring you back to life and start all over again. It's nothing personal. Just an activity. But you haven't done anything to deserve it. And you don't complain and you don't fight back and that pisses off the Royals. They see you as conceited. And everybody gossips, says you're rich. Is that the truth?”

“ . . . Yes, from my art . . . ,” I answered. I was still shaking in fear.

“And it got all famous when you got busted.”

“Yeah, it did,” I admitted; no need to explain that my work had been selling since I was a kid. “But I'm here like everyone else.”

“Here's the thing. I'm not some big lug with a heart of gold.
I don't believe in justice, neither. I don't kill just for fun like the Royals, but I'm not leaving, so there's no reason to behave. You have something I want. That's how we work here. Barter.”

The idea of having sex with Fits nauseated me despite how many times I had been raped. I decided to take apart my bed and find a sharp edge and dig away at my wrists until I bled to death. I was beyond pain.

“I like art,” Fits was saying. “I'm crazy about it. Loved those paintings of the kids with huge eyes. I had a picture of Elvis painted on black velvet in my room at home. Whenever I could lift a book of paintings from a street fair or whatnot I did that too. Lifted myself a book of Picasso. Weighed a ton. Thought for sure I'd get busted.”

Picasso is a misogynist pig crook, but I wasn't about to say it.

“He's a little bent in the head,” said Fits, “but it was okay, like cartoons.”

I was beginning to think the Royals had drugged my lunch. Then I thought, No, that's condescending. The con in me was curious about Frankenstein's monster as a cultural connoisseur.

“I can teach you about art,” I said meekly. Fits's knuckles went white. I winced.

“I don't want to know nothing from an art school,” Fits said. She pulled out a thick, sweaty, eight-by-ten-inch sketchbook she'd been sitting on. The pages were empty.

“Once a week you make me a book of pictures and I become your man. You don't have to fuck me. Just make me books.”

I felt the urge to scream with laughter. Like the orangutans in a cheap circus or chimps I'd seen on PBS. My fingers were barely healed. I didn't know if I could hold a brush. This hell called Powell had made me numb. I had no pictures, textures,
or sounds of color speaking in my brain. I was deaf. I was blind. I'd been murdered over and over again. How could I make books for this woman? She didn't understand that my artwork had been the only source of what had been good in my life, and I no longer had life. How could I do one page, much less a book a week? I began sweating as if the room were radiating bright red. Fits didn't notice.

“No one will touch you if I'm your man. I have the supreme juju here. Even if I'm in solitary no one acts against me. They think I'm only half human.” She grinned like a cartoon wolf.

I took the sketchbook. It was thick. A month's worth of sketches. It would take six to fill it with watercolors or pastels.

“One a week?” I asked.

“Both sides,” Fits answered. “I got connections. I can get colored pencils, charcoal, watercolors, acrylic oils, scissors, glue, oil paints, brushes—any shit you want. I've got connections for every kind of speed too. Otherwise I need you straight. I hate those phony hallucinogenic-type, rock-and-roll pictures.”

“What if you don't like the pictures?” I could barely ask.

“All I care is if it's real art. You make me all kinds. All styles. You got to really do it though. You can't fake me. You doodle or make fun of my bargain, I'll leave you cold. I'll set the Royals on you with a nod of the head.”

I clutched the pad.

“What if the Royals fuck with my stuff?”

“No one will. Everyone thinks I'm possessed. I carry the souls of demons people haven't even heard of.”

Fits stood up. She was so tall. She made me think of a giant in a Yiddish folktale. The Golem.

“Okay,” I gasped.

She had condemned me to death, second degree.

A LIFE OF LISTS

One hundred pages of a book to fill. My paintings were more primitive than in the years before because of the stiffness in my fingers, but they were real and displayed technical skill and a knowledge of styles. So maybe she won't set the wolves on me, I thought. I wasn't filling up white squares anymore. I was washing off splotches of blood with color, pictures, and satanic prayers.

  
1.
  
My stalker

  
2.
  
My intimate friend

  
3.
  
My boss

  
4.
  
My third world slave

  
5.
  
The mocking sneer

  
6.
  
The welcoming grin

  
7.
  
Arms out, palms reach

  
8.
  
A slap across the jaw

  
9.
  
The starter gun

10.
  
The old pillow

11.
  
The possibility

12.
  
The impossibilities

13.
  
Memories in sepia

14.
  
Plans in blue and white

15.
  
The threat

16.
  
The salvation

17.
  
The humiliation

18.
  
The redemption from

19.
  
Imaginary torture

20.
  
The silent rape

21.
  
The electric guitar solo

22.
  
The starter pistol

23.
  
The too-tall wall

24.
  
The stairs upward

25.
  
My enemy, my enemy

26.
  
My enemy, my enemy

27.
  
My angel

28.
  
The blank page as the brushes fall from swollen hands

As a newbie, I was assigned to the bathrooms and garbage disposals. I lifted heavy loads by day and painted in a secret space Fits set up for me at night. I heard weeping and cries of pain coming from all directions, as if I was in a sports stadium after a coup.

At 6:00 a.m. breakfast I saw the other newbies beat to shit, with swollen lips, black eyes, and slashes on their limbs. They could barely sit down. I didn't have any of that, but my fingers bent in weird directions and the lack of circulation turned them purple and blue.