Queen

Ken Lamberton

The man wearing eyeliner sits on the toilet to pee.
        What are you doing? I think.
        “I don’t mind if you stay,” he says. “I’m used to it.”
    “I’ll leave,” I say.
    “You don’t have to. At Cimarron you wouldn’t have a choice. They kept us locked up twenty–three hours a day.”
    I go outside. On the run, men are coming back from work for the noon lockdown and count. It’s Tuesday, movement day, and there are unfamiliar faces. I hate losing a good roommate.
    The toilet flushes and I go back in. “I’m Ken,” I say.
    He says, “I’m Mark, but I like to be called Marra.”
    His hair is long and stringy. He’s balding. Like me, he wears a blue chambray shirt and denim jeans. Prison blues. “Hi, Mark,” I say.
    When the yard opens again after count, he starts having visitors. Men I’ve known for years who wouldn’t normally speak to me come sniffing around like dogs. Now we’re friends. Mark greets them all with a smooth barstool voice. “What’s your name?” he asks. He softens to strangers at the door and makes easy conversation that hints of availability, vulnerability. I’m embarrassed. I wonder if he knows what he’s doing. The men laugh at him. But they stay.
    Evening now. Lockdown. The run is quiet. A guard moves from cell to cell, looking into windows, making count. Mark unpacks boxes. He places his shirts on hangers, top button buttoned. On a shelf his pants lie folded. Next to them are his white boxer shorts and tube socks. From one box he pulls out a sweatshirt, which is navy blue and oversize, triple x.
    “I had to pay someone to get this for me,” he says.
    I look up from my book. “What for?”
    He slips it over his head and the sweatshirt hangs mid–thigh. “I like the way it looks on me,” he says, and rubs his hands down his front.
    I go back to reading my book. Terry Tempest Williams, An Unspoken Hunger: “Hands on the earth, I closed my eyes and remembered where the source of my power lies. My connection to the natural world is my connection to self—erotic, mysterious, and whole.”
    “I guess you know by now I’m gay,” Mark says. “Bisexual actually. I like women, too. I was married once.”
    I watch him twist his thin hair into a braid at the nape of his neck. He has delicate fingers.
    “It doesn’t bother you, does it? That I’m gay, I mean.”
    “No,” I lie. And then use a convict line: “As long as you respect me, I’ll respect you.”

THE NEXT DAY I stay away from my cell. I walk extra laps on the exercise track, watching for birds. I sit in the inmate park and write in my journal. My thirty–five–cents–an–hour job as a teacher’s aide in the afternoons becomes a retreat. But I’m bothered by thoughts of what might be going on back at my cell. My house. I have a reputation. I’m straight, moral, and I don’t want anyone thinking otherwise. Particularly in this place.
    After work another face I’ve never seen before peers into my cell. Mark’s not home. I open the door and a young black kid tells me he’s got something for Marra. He hands me a soft bundle wrapped in a brown paper sack and asks me to give it to her. Later, Mark pulls a white cotton bra from the sack and holds it up to me.
    “Can you believe it?” he says, excitedly.
    I can’t. Where did someone get women’s clothing in a man’s prison? I think he must have sewn it himself.
    Mark wants to know if his friend can get him panties as well. He can, for a price.
    Traffic increases through the late afternoon into the evening lockdown. On this block, there are ninety–six cells, two men to each one. Forty–eight men on our run alone. Some men want Mark to braid their hair. Others just want to talk. An older Mexican national who lives in a cell at the end of the run has been trying to hold Mark’s hand. Mark thinks it’s cute. “You sure can tell there’s a new queen on the yard,” he says, referring to himself.
    Before the yard closes for the night, Mark shaves his body in the shower. I know this because after he returns he tells me he loves the way a new razor makes his skin feel, his arms, legs, chest. While I read, he preens in our small mirror tacked above the sink and toilet and complains he can’t shave all of his back. He waits for me to respond. I say nothing. I concentrate on my book. Williams writes: “Our lack of intimacy with each other is in direct proportion to our lack of intimacy with the land. We have taken our love inside and abandoned the wild.”
    Mark carries the mirror, a lamp, and his hobby–craft box over and sits beside me at our desk. He uses a black China marker as an eyeliner, first heating its waxy tip with a Scripto lighter and then tracing the margins of both upper and lower eyelids. When he shows me the result, I think: Egyptian princess.
    “Do you paint?” I ask, after he lifts a set of watercolors from the box.
    “Not the way you think,” he says. He mixes a burgundy shade on a well– used part of the pallet and applies it to his lips with a fine brush. The color is too dark, unnatural. It accentuates the thinness of his mouth and his pasty skin. “What do you think?” he asks, looking straight at me. He has no expression, but I see tragedy in his eyes.
    “Too much,” I say.
    Mark wipes his lips and tries again. This time the color is grape Kool–Aid. “That’s better,” he says. “I’ll wear this tomorrow. Maybe the guards won’t notice.”

WHEN I GET HOME from work the following day, two guards are searching my cell. They want my colored pencils. Mark gives them his China markers instead. “I can get more,” he tells me later.
    I’m upset about the shakedown. Mark draws attention from guards as well as inmates. It makes me nervous. I’m a private person, and I enjoy what little solitude I can get in this place. “I’m gone most of the day,” I explain to him, finally. “In the evenings I’d like a little peace. No visitors. No underwear salesmen.” I don’t say more, but I am hoping Mark will move out soon.
    After dinner we have fewer guests, mostly men who live on our run. One is especially persistent—young, maybe twenty–five, and has a lankness that’s developed into poor posture. His accent is corn–fed Midwestern; my stepfather would call him a hayseed. The kid’s presence in the cell, a space only seven by twelve, makes my follicles squirm. He’s playing the prison game, trying to earn acceptance from the white racists—the recent, half–finished tattoos that march up his skinny arms give it away. Political ink. He massages Mark’s shoulders and back, desperate for the status he will have for owning a fern. He has offered to be Mark’s man.
    “I’m not interested in another relationship,” Mark volunteers later that evening after the kid is gone. “I just had a man at Cimarron, and I’m not ready for that yet. My people here will see that I’m protected.”
    Cimarron is the Tucson complex’s high security unit. A lockdown facility, where the men spend all day in their cells except for meals and one hour of recreation. Gang violence is a way of life there, a place, Mark tells me, where there are only two kinds of inmates: predators and prey. I wonder what it has cost him for protection. Gangs sometimes brand the buttocks of people they own, a warning to rival groups of property rights. Human property rights. Homosexuals. Sex slaves.
    Mark has what he calls brands, but his are self–inflicted, narrow bracelet and anklet burns he made with a heated, straightened paperclip. “1 don’t scar easily,” he says, and points out places on his arms and shoulders where other white blazes have begun to fade.
    “Why do you do that to yourself?” I ask. Yesterday, Mark showed me an angry infection where he had pierced the flesh of his navel. He claimed it didn’t hurt and, over my objections, proved his immunity to pain by pushing the entire length of a straight pin under the skin of his forearm. He had already punched a new hole in his earlobe with a green push pin.
    But the brands and scars have nothing to do with ornamental ear and navel rings. “Why?” he says. “Because I know how to get what I want. It’s in my file. The cops know if they mess with me [‘11 cut myself.”
    Mark looks at me, fish–eyed and emotionless. The real he is hiding in the back of his mind somewhere. I remember his concern that I might wake up in the night to his screams.
    I say nothing.
    “See these,” he says, touching a string of white puckers like the beads of a rosary draped across his arm. “They are my atonements.”
    “I know of a better atonement.” It’s the only thing I can think of to say.
    “I know what you’re going to say. I know you’re a Christian. It won’t work for me. There’s no forgiveness for what I’ve done.”
    Mark had told me already that he had killed his wife, that he was doing ten years for manslaughter. He didn’t offer any other details, and I didn’t ask. In prison, it’s disrespectful to ask about another man’s crime; if he wants you to know, he’ll tell you about it. Real convicts don’t pry into another man’s affairs. At least, that’s the way it used to be.
    Now he says, “That night we had been drinking and doing drugs. There was a noise outside; the dog was barking. I guess I was paranoid from the cocaine and was thinking someone was trying to break in. I thought it might be the cops. I kept a Chinese SKS assault rifle and had a Barretta 9 mm next to the bed. I grabbed the rifle and headed for the door. She tried to stop me. The gun went off.”
    Mark’s eyes glaze again, and he’s expressionless. But I know there is pain behind the blankness. “You got ten years for an accident?” I say, cautiously.
    “They thought I murdered my wife. They said I fled the scene. I don’t remember everything that happened afterwards.” Mark pauses. “Parts are missing, but I tried to call the police from a pay phone, then drove across the border into Nevada and turned myself in. I was soaked with her blood.”
    Mark slides a box out from under the shelves. “I have pictures,” he says. “They wouldn’t let me keep them all, the gruesome ones, but I have these.” He lifts a large stack of color prints held together with a fat rubber band.
    “You don’t have to show me,” I say. “I’m not sure I want to see them.”
    He says, “They’re not bad,” and sets them one at a time in front of me. “1 got them from the investigation. I’m appealing my case.”
    The photographs are dark, glossy. Many show bloodstains—smears on a door, footprints and track marks on the floor, spatters on the ceiling. There are several of the weapon, empty beer cans, the inside of a stainless steel sink.
    “Those are pieces of bone in the sink,” Mark says, pointing out several white polygons that look like pieces of eggshell. “The top of her head was blown off. The autopsy report said the bullet entered just above the left eye and exited the upper back of her skull. She died instantly. I have a copy of the autopsy. Do you want to read it?”
    I’m shocked by his clinical objectivity. “Mark, how do you deal with this?” I have trouble imagining the horrible mistake, its horrible consequences. There’s more than one victim here.

I FIND MYSELF paying more attention to the queens. The Santa Rita Unit has four separate cell blocks, and on ours alone there are at least five of them— ferns. Three whites, a Mexican, a black. The other prison yards have them, too. Mark knows some of them from Cimarron Unit and other facilities. They hang out together like birds, walk the yard in coveys of four or five, flirt with passersby. Now I see them everywhere.
    Stacy, a six–foot–two, black queen once asked me about my hair. His own hair was ever–changing, Dennis Rodman style, but my curls amused him. He was polite, genuinely curious. “It’s natural,” I told him and wondered if he was disappointed in not discovering a new method for getting a perm in prison.
    Nikki is a special case, and not only because Stacy is the only other queen that he—well, she—will associate with. Mark knows Nikki from another yard and hates her for some reason he won’t elaborate on, but I believe it is because Nikki has a special edge on all her competition.
    The first time I saw her, I sensed some radical incongruity. Looking closer, I noticed her unusually feminine hair, long and blonde, tied up high at the back of her head. But that wasn’t it. I noticed her unusual clothes; like all of us, queens wear blue, the state–issued chambray shirt and denim jeans. But the shirt was knotted at her waist and emphasized her chest, her.. . breasts. She had breasts. And hips: I noticed how her jeans had been altered to hug her hips, tightly, perfectly.
    At some time in her past, Nikki had had a sex change. After her arrest she was sent to a women’s prison, but she sued the State for placement in a men’s facility. She wanted it both ways, and she got it. I have also heard the State supplies her with hormones.

ONE AFTERNOON, a young Hispanic queen is sitting at the end of my bunk and visiting with my roommate. I read; they chat about hair and makeup, relationships, PMS. PMS? I’m reminded of Erica, the queen who thinks he is pregnant because he is missing his periods. It’s hard for me not to get drawn into their conversation, and I do at various points, but mostly I feel like excusing myself and leaving them to what Mark calls their “girl talk.”
    Lately, Mark has grown interested in someone. “I’m sure you two will make a nice couple,” says Patty, the Hispanic. I don’t know his real name. His hair is long and black and drawn into a ponytail in the feminine position.
    “I promised myself I wouldn’t get involved with anyone again, not right away at least. But I really like him,” says Mark.
    “I think it’s great,” says Patty.
    “We need to find someone for you. What about that cute Mexican chick who moved in upstairs?”
    I think Mark is making a joke, but I’m not sure. This conversation has cornered me. I want to leave but don’t want to embarrass myself by getting up now for no apparent reason. I pretend to ignore them.
    “God, Marra,” Patty says. “I’m not a lesbian.”
The statement surprises me: this man who thinks he’s a woman thinks he will be a lesbian if he’s attracted to another man who thinks he’s a woman.
THAT NIGHT we eat saltines and oysters, which Mark has bought from the commissary. He stacks the smoked mollusks, dripping with oil, on the square crackers and hands them to me one at a time.
    “This is becoming a habit,” I say, taking each offering from his deft fingers. “Oysters, sardines, kipper snacks, I’m eating all your food.”
    “I always take good care of my cellies,” he says.
    “You do. . .“ I say, and then stop, realizing the implications of his words. Mark often plays with innuendo as a way of testing the water. Roman bath water. To him, people are simple. You are either homosexual or homophobic.
    “My people want me to move down to yard three,” he says. “I told them I’d think about it. I’m happy here.”
    “Is that what you really want?” I ask.
    “I know you think they just want to use me. But they are my friends.”
    We’ve talked about this before. That time it concerned another queen who was beaten and chased into protective custody because she had betrayed these same friends. They said she did favors for non–whites. Dee Dee didn’t go to her punishment without sending several men to investigative lockdown, the hole. She had debts. She also had names. Now she’s a snitch, and that’s worse than being a race traitor.
    “They only want one thing,” I say.
    “Sex,” he says.
    I look at him. Neither of us says anything. I can smell his perfume— sickly sweet, omnipresent, and cheap—the kind ugly women wear to bars.
    “You know there are people here who will be your friend without that.” (I want to add “like me,” but the words don’t come. I’m hesitant about the commitment, still fearful of what people might think, or of something else:
    Mark interferes with my need to keep a low profile.)
    Mark doesn’t agree with what I said. “They are the same,” he says. “Sex and friendship. It’s what everyone wants. It’s what I want too. All my life every friendship has been sexual, since I was eight, when my older brother began abusing me. Every relationship I’ve ever had involved sex, lots of sex. My wife and I were swingers, did I tell you that? I’ve had dozens of women, and more men. Sex in prison is how I survive.”

THAT NIGHT I wait for sleep to come and think about Mark’s words. Above me, in his bunk, he snores softly, like a woman.
    I understand survival in this place, and it concerns me, too. I survive by finding distraction in books, by teaching and writing, by connecting with the nature I encounter here. I escape into barn swallows and Sonoran Desert toads, into pollen–spiced insects foraging in desert willow. This is my passion. It’s all I know how to do.
    Terry Tempest Williams: “If we ignore our connection to the land and disregard and deny our relationship to the Pansexual nature of earth, we will render ourselves impotent as a species. No passion—no hope of survival.”
    I also understand atonement. I, too, seek atonement for my past—only my seeking is a long string of repetitive, unanswered prayers. My own rosary in the flesh.
    A month after he moved in, Mark is gone. On Friday, when I return for the noon lockdown, I have another roommate. The change is so complete, so smooth and painless, that for a few minutes I don’t realize what’s happened. I’m used to visitors, unfamiliar faces in my house. Then, suddenly, I’m disappointed. Mark is with his people now, with the kind of friends that I was unwilling to be. His new roommate, I’m certain, will call him by his name, by her name.

Ken Lamberton has had essays published in American Nature Writing 1999, Green Mountains Review, Manoa, Puerto del Sol, and South Dakota Review. He is working on his MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. "Queen" is part of Wilderness and Razor Wire, a collection of essays about his experiences with nature in prison that will be published by Mercury House.

“Queen” appears in our Autumn 1999 issue.