Walking the Dog (3 page)

TIKKUN OLAM

Before Clayton my prisons changed locations and descriptions. First came a nameless Federal House of Detention. I don't remember much except being shocked into a state of white blindness. Knowing percussion as I did, I pounded away my fear on the metal bars. A couple of the other women newly transferred from court slapped my shoulders to stop me. I've always been crazy about metal. Metal. The slam of the metal doors. The keys in the locks. Again and again. Door after door. The keys in the calloused hands of the cops. My hands drummed on the bars like they were rusty marimbas. One guard slammed my hand with a baton to get me to stop. I think she broke some fingers. I didn't feel pain but it became harder to hold brushes. I still can't quite bend my fingers the whole way. I have so many breaks and cuts that have healed in weird ways, Tim Burton would want to sculpt me for a pietà.

I was welcomed into the circus cage with other tigers yet to be tamed. I got kicked around by the guards pretty badly because there'd been cops hurt by my crimes. But there was an upside. The other newbies left me alone out of some perverse respect. All the women from the city corners to the psycho farmlands were testing each other out, choosing up territories, and making profitable but perilous relationships. I wasn't aware of these unspoken bargains.

But I miraculously encountered an ugly but lifesaving angel right at the top. She reached out with a “
Tikkun olam
,” meaning a gift of good for no reason. The fat-assed, pale redheaded lady at Federal admissions took an extra amount of time, for God knows why, going over my papers despite all the cursing and shoving. (Everyone was in such a nervous hurry to end up nowhere.) This lady gave me a once over. She was maybe thirty-six with small green eyes, a pug nose, and a goldfish mouth; she had chubby pink fingers and bitten nails.

“We're changing your name,” she growled between little yellow teeth.

I think I shook my head. My hair was dyed into white and gray and purple stripes, and fell past my waist. It was a wild animal shake, a crystal meth growl—the last remnants of a deluded terrorist. The pig was stealing my identity.

“Ester Rosenthal ain't gonna go down too well in these cells. They'll kill you within a day and a half for crucifying their Lord. Everyone goes for the Jews first. They think they smell hidden money. Jews are the devil. The whole tail and horns stuff. Save your ass. I'm changing your name. Carleen Kepper. Say it.”

“Carleen Kepper,” I repeated dumbly. Then, in a sweeping motion, she grabbed a pair of scissors and roughly cut my hair. I was scared of the blades so I didn't fight back. Nor did I fight when I heard the buzz of the shaver, and, yes, she shaved all of it off. I was bald with messy patches. The other women whistled and whooped. So my long hair and beatnik youth disappeared with my famous name. Maybe the spitting and pickpocketing I'd endured until now would cease. She snapped another picture of me.

“That's you from now on.” She handed me PJs, a toothbrush, an airline-sized toothpaste, and an ID card that read “Carleen Kepper #231-B” with that driver's license picture she'd taken. I
looked like a possessed character out of a Stephen King novel. Carleen Kepper—excommunicated from her tribe. Why had this gnome from
Peer Gynt
saved me? Maybe a Jew had done a mitzvah for her. Maybe she could see I was barely eighteen.

SERVING TIME

Time is not my friend. I've been bashed around so much my brain is a broken chandelier. I can't remember the year of processing or my trial, but maybe I will. In the meantime I stand here.

The name of my first “home” (maximum security prison) was Powell Federal Prison, and it was in Ohio. Even though my real name continued to dominate the papers, I no longer looked anything like what was being broadcast all over TV, and prison populations change frequently, so those who recognized me were mostly gone before they made a commotion. I'd also found a temporary life-saving vocation: drawing. I drew perfect caricatures of anyone who wanted them on the recreation room wall. Every night the guards made me wash off the ink from the Sharpies I stole from so-called art therapy. Every day I started again. My knuckles bled for weeks. But it was worth it when for some reason I was in focus again and my picture and real name showed up in
USA Today
and
Time
. Girlfriends had varying reactions to my fame. They shouted out names like “Kik van Kike” or “Jewcunt” or “Jewdy Doody.” Nothing too lethal.

They tossed my cell, too. Was I hiding money? They searched every part of my body. But those clichés were accompanied
by others: Would I write love letters to their men? Cyrano de Rosenthal. Could I help them with their speeches for parole boards? What did I know about criminal law? And then it died down, and I didn't give a damn about what the Nazis said or did. I preferred setting up illegal profit-making schemes with the guards—dope, cigarettes, food—but sometimes I cheated them out of percentages just to feel the baton against my flesh or the crack of a Taser. When I was in the mood I started fistfights in the cafeteria so I could spend a few days in solitary. Once they put me there for three months for punching the penitentiary doctor when he said he thought he felt a lump in my perfectly smooth breast. In those first years my engine was driven by blind rage. I was positive the government had laid cruel and unusual punishment on me. I screamed my “legal right to speak out.” I hadn't been at the scene of my notorious crime. (Though I'd planned it and a bunch of others). I'd been around the corner. I wasn't holding a weapon. There was one on the seat next to me. I certainly hadn't hit the cop that broke his neck and made him a paraplegic for the rest of his life. And I had nothing,
nothing
to do with the killing of the others. I lived inside a tornado of accusations, self-righteous demands, and terrified madness. I was also probably wildly manic since serious bipolar illness runs in the family.

I think there's maybe ten prisons out of thousands and thousands that separate the mentally ill from the psychopaths or criminals. Powell wasn't one of them. The population was a mixture of bad chemistry and fully developed, devious, vengeful personalities.

DOORBELL

I sat on a green wooden bench under the giant cherry tree at the Mercer-Houston Dog Run (for which I have the key). Doorbell, one of the great loves of my life, lay protectively on my feet. I think Tina and Jerry Gilligan named him Doorbell out of some misguided notion that he would guard their door and let them know when the enemy was approaching. But Doorbell would instead gurgle and snort, and had the mellow disposition of a pothead. The dog felt it was his duty to greet all humankind with several slam-bams of his tail and a slurp from a tongue the size of a ham. A typical response to Doorbell would be to back up and say, “Yes, hello sweetheart. No, no kisses. Yes, I'm happy to see you, too. Don't jump on me or I'll fall on my ass, Doorbell.” But, undeterred, he'd slobber, lick, jump up, slam his bottom back and forth in a kind of tribal welcome ritual. I dreaded calling him from the opposite end of the dog run because I knew he'd gallop full speed toward me, only to screech to a stop by jamming his enormous head into my belly. What was it Bob Marley used to say?
Ja man. Could you be love?

Tina and Jerry were among my first clients, because Hubb, owner of PetPals, in his junkie wisdom, figured a big-boned woman ex-con would be strong enough to handle 170 pounds
of pure, ecstatic agitation. Or he imagined I'd quit on sight. Or get killed. Tina and Jerry were also among the first few who were willing to engage a woman with my record. Other potential clients would hide their jewelry. One client hid an antique butter knife in the pocket of his Adidas running shorts. You'd be surprised how many people want background checks for plumbers, carpenters, and other menial types these days. On the street I was always vigilant to pick up dog shit in a baggy lest a camera hidden in a lamppost catch the misdemeanor—therefore violating my parole.

Tina and Jerry were very upfront with me. They recognized me right away, and Jerry said, “Just don't use Doorbell as a hostage for any of your causes. We're just middle-class with a mediocre life. We can barely afford health insurance.”

“My cause right now,” I said, “is reentry.” Jen Lee taught us that the months after release would be dangerous, as if a con were an astronaut in a suit rocketing back and forth between weightlessness and the earth's gravity. She said it'd be the most dangerous time. Just like that space shuttle that slowly disintegrated after reentry, tumbling toward its final landing. There was a period for each con where old met new and prison life crashed into freedom. You could fall apart if you didn't balance the weights. It was like a war between past and present. Better to keep your head down and move real slow.

Lucinda and Hubb owned and ran the business, but they insisted that clients interview their individual walkers. When Tina and Jerry first interviewed me, Tina, who does PR work for a toy-store franchise, probed. “I don't get why you're doing this job,” she said. She was sleek and speedy like many thirtyish female executives. “Why don't you crunch out an outline and write a zillion-dollar book about your life. I know some agents, a few editors.”

“I'm not really allowed to,” I said. There were all kinds of legal footnotes about what one could and couldn't say. Anyway, I'm a mother with a kid. I'd rather not have her read about my past exploits.

I always got agitated from talking too much anyway. In prison you learned to keep details to yourself. I still hadn't learned the rhythms of civilian interaction.

“Some night we'll have you for dinner and you'll tell us everything,” Tina said.

“It'd make a great children's book,” Jerry said. “Tina can pitch it to the three-and-under crowd.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. They seemed to like each other. Jerry was tall and stocky, balding, with a clean-shaven, reddish face and long sideburns. He was a freelance art director for a variety of books, but restless with his work. Things were slow for him, and if Hubb wasn't counting every penny I brought in, I would've lowered Doorbell's rate. Hell, I would've walked him for free. Tina and Jerry were the only people who weren't the least bit nervous with me. And I took pleasure in the picture that Doorbell and I made. A scarred-up, tattooed woman strolling casually on West Broadway pulling a bull on a chain.

I used dried-chicken treats for bribery, and we walked at different speeds. I think Doorbell understood me. When we went to the Mercer-Houston Dog Run, he'd complete his mountain of business immediately so I could drag myself to one of the benches right away. He'd lay on my feet for the required fifty minutes. We'd just sit and share dreams. Chewing tennis balls and other dogs weren't in his repertoire. Love was his primary trick. I needed that kind of overpowering, inconvenient passion that had nothing to do with sex. Doorbell also kept me safe. There's a walk or a scent or some mysterious aura that comes along with having spent years in prison. Homeless guys
and blue-collar workers could smell it. Especially guys who'd done time themselves. I'm not particularly attractive these days, but I used to be, in an ethnic, curly-haired—what Leonard used to say was “biblical”—way.

“Hey chickie chickie chickie.”

“You got some stuff, woman?”

“I know where you come from. I know where you're headed.”

“You wanna rough me up, woman?”

“You're a lonely lady, bitch.”

Guys don't usually harass a woman in her forties with such abandon. I knew it was my past lingering around me like a cloud. Sometimes a construction worker would give me a little push, or a drunk hanging on a stoop would try and trip me. I kept the ever-present rage under control. No fights. No verbal altercations to draw attention. I couldn't blow parole. I couldn't blow parole. Life would be over. But when I was on the street with Doorbell, it was as quiet as a chapel. If a guy even sneered, showed a gold tooth, or made a gesture behind my back, a dangerous rumbling would circle around my whole body. Doorbell's massive belly moved like a geyser at Yellow-stone up through the folds of flesh in his throat and a kind of growl spit out from his floppy but impressive mouth. His brown eyes got a shade darker, and even I didn't want to mess with him.

“Just jokin', ma'am.”

“Hi, puppy.”

“That's a
big
animal.”

“Holy shit, keep that monster away.”

“What's that kind of dog called anyway?”

Silence or a radical change of tone. Doorbell wasn't so much my physical protector as guardian of whatever dignity I
had left. When we were in the chair at Tina and Jerry's, half his tongue would happily drop out and his massive tail did its flip-flop furry helicopter routine. Like,
I played that one good, didn't I, Carleen?
and I'd give him a treat. Once a really determined schizophrenic who was invoking presidents came straight at me with a metal pipe. Doorbell pulled back his lips, and for the first and only time he exposed his killer teeth. The guy found a car to pound instead of me, but in the process I noticed Doorbell's teeth were covered with plaque and his gums were irritated red. I had to talk to Jerry and Tina about taking him to the vet to get his teeth cleaned, even though they'd have to put him under and I hated that. When the plaque builds up like that he could get a gum infection, which could cause all kinds of ear and throat trouble. A clot could even appear in his neck. Huge dogs don't necessarily have great immune systems. Every part of their creature is working full steam to keep the fast, huge muscles and heart going. That's why they don't usually live as long as the middle or little ones. After that, I bought a large dog toothbrush and began an excavation process once a day, on my own.