6.
“IT’S IMPERATIVE THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THE NATURE of evil,” my mother said. We were driving north through the fog across the Golden Gate Bridge, on our way to visit my mother’s boyfriend on death row at San Quentin, Pink Floyd on the cassette player.
I was a teenager. I’d run away and come home a couple of times already.
The last time I ran away my mother was the prison art teacher. Now she was in love with one of the inmates and she cried, “I was fired for love! Blacklisted for love!”
So she wasn’t a prison employee anymore. Just a forty-something married woman dragging her teenage daughter to visit her boyfriend on death row at San Quentin and talking about all the things I needed to understand. Evil, for one.
I knew she wasn’t talking about the death row inmates when she talked about evil.
We parked in the visitor’s lot, ducked into a white building and signed in. We stepped through a metal detector, headed up an asphalt walkway, in through another door.
Wait for that door to close behind you before you open the next door.
The visiting room smelled of stale coffee and cigarette smoke.
And here was my mother’s boyfriend, hands folded in his lap and waiting for us.
Next to him was The Midnight Strangler, convicted of raping and murdering maybe a dozen women and children in Los Angeles.
And here was The Midnight Strangler’s new fiancée, Doreen. She wore a Gunne Sax dress and too much mascara.
And here was another one of my mother’s former students, The Suburban Psycho. He looked like Mr. Clean except he was black. He said he was framed by a prostitute for knifing some white land developer in the cul-de-sacs.
And here was a big white guy with gang tattoos on his neck and my mother pinched his cheeks and cooed at him and he snarled before he smiled.
San Quentin. It all seemed perfectly normal at the time, that we should sit down together at a big plastic table.
I lit a Camel no-filter.
The Suburban Psycho lit a Marlboro.
“Cigarettes are bad for you,” someone called from across the room.
“So is cyanide gas,” my mother’s boyfriend called back from our table.
And everyone laughed like that was the funniest thing.
I wanted to be back in the car with Pink Floyd. I didn’t think capital punishment helped anyone, but I wasn’t sure death was the worst fate.
My mother nudged me and whispered, “See that man?” She gestured with her chin toward a thirty-something guy with a handlebar mustache. “Do you see that man, Tiniest?”
He wore prison blues and cursed as he pushed vending machine buttons, trying to get a Snickers bar out of the thing.
“That’s Bobbie Harris,” my mother whispered. “He was literally beaten out of the womb.”
I nodded, kept my eye on the man.
“He murdered two teenage boys just to see what it felt like and then he finished their half-eaten hamburgers,” my mother whispered. “That’s cold-blooded murder. But you have to understand. Bobbie was beaten out of the womb. There’s no name for that like cold-blooded murder, is there? That’s how people get to be like that. Beaten out.”
I kept nodding like I understood, like I could understand.
My mother stared at me, wouldn’t stop staring.
I felt nervous, didn’t want to hold her gaze, so I turned away.
But now The Midnight Strangler was staring at my tits, wouldn’t stop staring. He had the darkest brown eyes.
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I offered the Midnight Strangler a Camel no-filter.
As he took the cigarette from me, he let his clean fingernails graze the back of my hand.
My throat felt tight.
The Midnight Strangler’s new fiancée, Doreen, gave me the stink eye – like I was some teenager moving in on her man.