This is not about sex.
This is about gender, but I’ll try to squeeze in a little bit of sex to keep it interesting. When last I blogged about my memoirs, I told some of the ways in which I’ve changed through my experiences. Prison was a big transformative experience for me, and not in any sense even close to the sort of “rehabilitation” corrections wonks were talking about thirty some years ago. It did change my criminal activity, made me more selective and cautious about my crimes. But mostly it changed the way I relate to other women.
I had no sisters and no close female connections in infancy. My mother was in the hospital and my father cared for me with the help of a number of neighbors and family members. He was the only constant, my primary caregiver. When my mother came home, she was either in bed or in her rocking chair until I was three.
Even after she got on her feet, she’d be in the kitchen while I was either in the yard alone or with my father in his garage workshop. He collected small tools for me and modified a few others to fit my hands. Besides wrenches and screwdrivers, he taught me to use a lathe, drill press, and grinders for metal work, and saws, planes, and various power tools for wood work. I sat on his lap and learned to drive before I could walk.
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The woman who cared for me the most had two boys whose ages bracketed mine. Donald and Leroy were my first playmates. The crowd of six or seven kids always playing in the cul de sac in front of their house was all boys, except for me. I was the tomboy. I’ve mentioned some about the effect that label, “cute”, had on me. I suppose the tomboy label had a lot of effect, too. It’s hard to say, though, because I earned the label through natural inclination. For many reasons I resented being a girl.
There were some older females I admired and respected, but as I grew up I had little besides contempt for most of my peers. I made a few close girl friends, but none of them was a typical girl. Tomboys, sluts, cripples, redheads and all sorts of other weirdos and misfits were my friends, along with a lot of men and boys. Several cousins, uncles and friends of my father’s stepped in as father figures to me when he died.
Primary among them was Richard… Paul Richard Davis, my father’s aunt Goldie’s illegitimate son who grew up in an adoptive home then ran away and found his birth mother and lived with her the rest of his life. They were a couple of soulmates, my two favorite relatives, Aunt Goldie and cousin Richard, an incestuous pair. Then Richard died young and Goldie went on the road in her jeep, camping in Mexico, alone, taking pictures and keeping a journal. I’d love to find Goldie’s journals. I spent some great hours looking at pictures and listening to her stories.
Richard taught me to see, to “get” what I was looking at. One afternoon the spring after my father’s death in December, Richard took me up into the Sierra Madre of California. On a hillside overlooking a sawmill, a rambling, tall, old red slab board building straddling a stream at the bottom of the valley, he showed me how to observe. We started with flowers. He had me pick them, one at a time. He told me the name of each, and pointed out the unique features that marked each species: the golden petals of California poppies and the blue-violet hoods of Aconitum. Then he focused on the sawmill, and sketched it, teaching me perspective and some basic principles of spatial and physical science.
It wasn’t until I was ten or eleven that I spent any appreciable time in a kitchen with a woman or women, and then it was the kitchen attached to the beer joint where my mother sometimes went for dinner when she closed down the sundry/soda shop. While she unwound and played shuffleboard in the bar, I learned the fine art of short order cuisine in back with the owner/bartender’s wife, cooking Mama’s burger and my grilled cheese. At home, if I was in the kitchen, my mother was elsewhere, getting some other work done or resting.
Kids noticed my masculine attitudes and skills. They started calling me hermaphrodite in third grade, about the time they learned the word. Well, what they called me was, “morphodight”, but I knew what they meant. Being both Hermes and Aphrodite held some appeal for me, in a mythic sense, and I started coming back when they needled me, with, “Yes, I’m half male and half female. My father was a man and my mother was a woman.”
I had scant regard for womanly women who kept their aprons spotless, each hair in place and mind in neutral. My concept of what a manly man was came from Roy Rogers and Flash Gordon… and my father, of course. By the time my contemporaries were one by one convincing their parents to let them go out on dates, I’d been dating to movies since I was eleven and at thirteen would go out with my boyfriend to a movie and to park and neck until 10:00 on Saturday night.
After he took me home, I’d watch the late news with my mother. When she went to sleep, I’d sneak out and go on the Sunday morning paper run with three or four other boys. At plenty of biker parties later on, I’d end up in the garage with the guys, taking some engine apart or sculpting in Bondo while the women twittered and chattered and puttered and primped in the house. On trips to the various farms, ranches and orange groves in the family, I’d be out on a tractor or hosing down the hog sheds.
Then, I got locked up for about fifteen months with up to sixty-three other women at a time, probably totalling more than a hundred women over that time as they circulated in and out. The only time during those months that a man was close enough to smell, he was on the outside fixing some lights, and his scent blew in through the window. Mmmmm… but I digress.
I learned to speak their language. At first, it was somewhat of an anthropology experiment, a lot like learning to fit in with the bikers. And to be completely honest, I never did really learn to relate with the girliest of the girls. The femmes of the monogamous lesbian pairs tended to find me as alien as I found them to be. We just didn’t click. Some of them seemed to view me as a threat, a rival for their daddies’ attentions, because among the real friends I made in there were a few of the butches.
They had no cause for concern, though. Their butches were my buddies, but I would never have become a femme, nor a butch neither for that matter, no matter how long I was locked up. Just as on the streets, neither of the orthodox gender roles fit me. The nearest I got to the sex scene in OWCC was as a lookout for my buddy across the hall and her lady a few times.
I found a partner finally, shortly before my release. Suzy Creamcheez came in and we had enough time to get to know each other and agree that we turned each other on and would neither of us want to play mama or papa but would both just like to play house. We had a few conversations in the yard, under the eyes of some live matrons there, CC through video, and two of the guard towers of the men’s joint next door.
No physical contact was the rule. It was enforced by bullhorn from the guard towers usually. The male guards watched us a lot more closely than the matrons did. They schmoozed in their chairs by the sally port door while we recreated in the yard, but the guys next door kept an eye on us. When one of them spotted us touching each other, it was either lockdown or the hole, loss of privileges, and loss of good time.
Suzy and I had a few moments to touch in the chow line, lots of shared meals and croquet games and fun conversations and the breathless moments of unslaked passion, but as we lived at opposite ends of the building and had no allies in admin or the inmate ingroup, we never got together. *sigh* But that romantic interlude was mere weeks at the end of my time there. All my other friends in there were in the straight segment of the population.
When we got together to talk, the topic was often men. Men were always involved in our crime stories. We were often there as accomplices to our men’s crimes. Many of us were there because of betrayals by men who ended up getting away with the crimes we went to jail for. The consensus among my sisters inside was that this was precisely what happened to me.
The story can be twisted, spun that way. Until speed chemist Steve turned me on and wholesale dealer Hulk taught me how to hit up, I was a part-time pill popper. The raid on our house was primarily aiming to get Hulk, but he slipped the net. By paying a lawyer and leaving me to get a court-appointed attorney, he got off. He was out there on the streets and I was locked up. What a sleazy guy! I said it wasn’t like that. They said I was naive. In the way the institutional grapevine works, that conversation got around.
After a while, through one of the women, a butch with a femme in the little joint and a husband in the big house next door, the story started making the rounds in the men’s prison, too. Married inmates were allowed a face to face visit every Saturday morning. A small group of women would be escorted out the gate, around the base of the massive wall to the front door and through the visitor routine for an hour’s visit. The story that got passed into the men’s grapevine was that Hulk had let me take his fall for him, an offense only slightly less heinous than baby raping in that paradigm.
After I had been there about three months, Hulk got arrested again. This time it was for downers, a wholesale quantity of reds. He got ten years on that, and before long was on the other side of that big gray wall from me.
We got the paperwork through after a few weeks and were allowed our first visit. There was some tension in the little group of men as they walked into the visiting room where the women were waiting. Hulk asked me, with some intensity, how the story had gotten around that I’d taken his fall for him. I assured him that I had not told the story that way and would tell my friend the polyamorous bisexual blonde butch bitch to tell her husband the other bitch that that wasn’t the way it happened. I told her, she told him, and it took the pressure off of Hulk.
The rest of my time at OWCC had that added weekly bright spot, when I was actually outside the fence for a minute or two, and got to hug my honey briefly and sit down across a table with coffee and talk for an hour. Time flew, but even so, there were some interesting people and intense incidents. There are more stories to be told. Later.
In May, I blogged about the unwritten rules of the game in prison. If you missed it, or don’t remember, this would be a good time for review.
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