Clinton, New Jersey

 

She’s really beautiful. Can you find some I Love You Cards and send them to her and just sign my name? I have a teddy bear being made and a matching ring earring and necklace set.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

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Seen from the air, the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women (EMCF) appears like a wheel-shaped medieval city, its modular units the beige color of the inmates’ uniforms surrounding the century-old Warden’s Hall. Instead of a moat guarding the fortified walls, double strands of razor wire coil between watchtowers to isolate the beings inside. The violent offenders.

 

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In Maximum Compound, the holiday that captures the barbed wire universe’s essence isn’t Thanksgiving or Christmas; those nostalgia holidays subtract you to zero. Turkey and yams that you bastardize in the microwave. When you bow your head and give thanks, it might be the microwave you’re most thankful for. Thanksgiving belongs to the free world, a leftover like the sweet potatoes saved from Mess Hall to be doctored with brown sugar and syrup. Voila, glazed yams. No Cubano sandwiches on Christmas morning, the meats piled so high between slabs of French bread that you need double mouths to take a bite. As for the wild party of New Years, noisemakers and drunken cheers are against the rules, so the inmates toast their off-brand vintage soda to that yardstick of time served.

 

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Valentine’s Day is the Maximum Compound’s signature holiday. The love day celebration that topples the walls made of rules: DO NOT TOUCH ANOTHER INMATE, DO NOT REACH FOR AN OFFICER, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR AREA, DO NOT SPEAK DURING COUNT. This day the flicker between eyes is celebrated, this day, girlfriends are made to feel special. This day, the inside expels the cold and rain an animal coming in from the wild shakes over a room. Girl love is celebrated, and even the officers can’t spoil it. Outside in the world, I know the space between people grows; we live in digital capsules, three-screen universes, and our lovers receive the least of us. The opposite is true in Maximum Compound among the murderers, the father killers, the kidnappers, and armed robbers.

 

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Valentine of Terni became installed in legend as the priest who bequeathed his name to the holiday of lovers. He is said to have performed baptisms and marriage ceremonies for Roman soldiers during the reign of Emperor Aurelian in 273. Medieval texts speak of his decapitation. Valentine of Rome, another priest swept up in the reign of persecutions, too was executed on February 14th. Hearsay has Saint Valentine cutting parchment hearts and giving them to soldiers. The Basilica of Saint Maria displays his ancient, flower-scented skull.

 

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I’m going to make Natacha a chocolate cake and dinner. I think you would really like her.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

KRYSTAL

Google Krystal Riordan and her name alone suffices, and news article after news article comes up. AT PROSTITUTE’S SENTENCING, MURDER VICTIM’S MOTHER READS STATEMENT DETAILING HORRIFIC CRIME. The reader learns that Krystal Riordan, age 20, a New York City prostitute witnessed Draymond Coleman, her pimp/boyfriend, rape and strangle Jennifer Moore, age 18, in their rent-by-the-week room. A kind of duel was played out in the shabby hotel between the 265 lb. rage-fueled attacker and a 100-pound soccer player, fighting to breathe. Krystal froze, fearing for her own life. Surrounding them–Weehawken’s geography, exits, and billboards, green signs sprouting up like trees in a lightning-struck forest. After four years in custody and facing the death penalty, Draymond accepted a plea bargain that required he implicate Krystal. The Internet twilights hold the 20-year-old Krystal, and the 24-year old Krystal, 5’9” and taller than her public defender. She’s gained 40 pounds in her four years in Hudson County jail, her tear-stained face delicate as a lilac in the rain as she, at last, speaks for herself. “I’m not a bad person,” she answers in what I imagine is a trembling voice. The judge has asked her if she has anything to say before he pronounces the sentence. He listens, then says, “There’s only one victim here.” He sentences her to the maximum. FORMER ORANGE WOMAN SENTENCED TO 30 YEARS.

 

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Yet there is more than one victim here. Eva, Krystal’s birth mother, stares at the camera with anthracite eyes that glitter as if they could withstand a miner’s pick. Her black hair, too, gives off a costume gem’s gleam. A striking woman on whose olive-complexed face I recognize Krystal’s petal lips but little else. The birth mother, a short woman, appears chiseled from rock while her daughter seems soft in comparison, the cream-puff skin and sometimes blue and sometimes hazel eyes. The reasons for Eva’s neglect of her children, unknowable. She worked as a prostitute. Krystal holds onto few memories of her earliest years before she was taken and put into foster care—joining a children’s crusade of the blighted. How did she learn to speak? She remembers there weren’t any toys. Eva bequeathed to Krystal her old crack pipes, and her daughter played with them, pretending the pipe stems were bridges over the maroon rivers of spilled wine. When she crossed the river, she’d find herself in a forest. Birds whistled, and she understood their every word, no matter the pitch. She smelled the dreams of the leaves. Or she held Eva’s hand mirror under her nose and waded into the ceiling. As an adult, she searched for her birth mother, and saw her twice. “I looked for her and found her. I wish I hadn’t. She stole my money,” Krystal says. Disappointment settles between her shoulder blades and trickles down her back like a desecrated childhood.

 

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After her birth father’s arrest for selling drugs, Child Services removes Krystal and severs parental rights. After spending two years in foster care, she’s adopted. Who are these strangers prominent in Connecticut politics, the adoptive father, a founding partner in the accounting firm that bears his name? Who is the sharp-featured adoptive mother also an accountant and quick to criticize? In a dress with puffy sleeves and wide sashes, Krystal tries to smile at her first Easter, but there’s a bewildered look on her face. The night is dark for six-year-old Krystal. She hardly knows how to speak. Her adoptive father later will describe how she screams in her sleep. She will bear their surname Riordan.

 

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She grows tall and plays basketball, dribbling balls, and shooting baskets. Called a natural by her basketball coaches, she pleases her new parents, but upon reaching adolescence, she rebels. The adoptive parents become her persecutors. Staying out all night and running the streets, she tests them as someday Dray will her. Krystal is sent to Élan in Poland Springs, Maine, the now notorious and shuttered facility for troubled teens. “It was a lockdown, therapeutic boarding school. I was there for three years. If I’d never been sent there, I might have had a full basketball scholarship,” says Krystal. Tuition of $42,000 – $56,000 a year purchased a student to teacher ratio of 40 to 1. Therapy consists of a teen standing alone in a corner while hundreds of students yell, curse, and call him or her names.

 

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Her adoptive parents will pay for her to go to college, but after the regime she’s lived under, she wants her freedom. How can anyone graduate from years of Attack Therapy and be ready for college? Freedom is a suspect word. Krystal calls Keri-Ann, a girl she knows from Élan, who shares an apartment in Manhattan with her boyfriend/pimp. Yes, Krystal can stay with them under the condition she’ll work as a prostitute for the girl’s boyfriend, too. Krystal agrees, and in the beginning, it’s easy as beginnings often are. The sex work draws her. She and Keri-Ann from Élan, go shopping for clothes and purses and shoes. Real labels, not knockoff brands. She pierces her nose and loves the feel of money, and she’s generous to others and always buying gifts.  One of Keri-Ann’s friends stops over. Draymond Coleman, fifteen years older than Krystal, is tall, muscular, and seething with the righteous anger of an unwanted foster care child. Although Krystal perceives him as a gentle giant, funny and attentive, he’s violent. Dray’s eyes, like Eva’s, hold the resurrection of a mine shaft.

 

Dray was funny and liked to laugh. He was really attentive when it came to me. It was like I was brain-washed. I thought I couldn’t live without him.

— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

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At first, he showers her with attention. They talk outside the apartment where they go to smoke cigarettes. Her friend’s boyfriend decides to sell her to another pimp. “That’s when Dray stepped in,” Krystal says. “He fought for me.” They leave together, and she begins working to support them. “Dray was a pimp, and I was his moneymaker,” says Krystal. “He would bring girls over on a regular basis for threesomes. I always did what I was told by him.”  Her love for Draymond will lead to low-rent hotels with shared bathrooms where they will stay for the sex work. Her love will lead to shambles of sheets and stained mattresses, sagging drapes and chicken bones scattered under beds.

 

The guys were mostly okay. There were a few jerks, but the police were the worst. I had a gun put to my head. A knife to my throat. They demanded free sex, usually weird stuff.

— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

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The police officer already has his zipper down, and a thumb hooked in her mouth. Work it. His pinkish meat threaded with blue veins like those movie rivers she’d always wanted to visit, like the Mekong, the Volga, the Seine. She pictures herself as one of the floating flower sellers. A long-haired girl, oaring her canoe carrying a white sea of orchids.

 

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And always doing what she was told by Draymond leads to tragedy and murder. The men blur—white, black, Hispanic. Most come to the room, and some rush, and others like to be coddled. “Baby, hey,” she whispers, “feeling any better?” She reaches over and cups the man-baby’s forehead. She runs her hand down his chest, offering him her mouth, her vagina, her ass, just as she offered all she had to the basketball court—her biceps and calves, especially the skin of her hands.

 

The baby wasn’t real to me until she was born. Being pregnant only meant my clothes’ size changed.

— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

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Krystal uses condoms with strangers but not with Draymond, so when she misses her period for the second month, she takes the pregnancy test. A positive. She tells him the news, and he’s happy, but he insists she keeps on working. Her belly incubating life means little to her except a change in her clothing size. She makes more money pregnant than not as her dates pay extra in tips. Some men find pregnant women irresistible. We don’t see Krystal, her hair a thicket, kneeling, blowing a man, another, and another. The clam chowder of semen growing a fishy mucous, sex filling her mind, the little nymphs swimming to her ample hips.

 

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She’s not a druggie, although she likes to smoke weed. Draymond keeps her on a short leash, which means he loves her. He must. He never loses his thirst for more women in the circles of midnight, in the hangover of morning turning to the afternoon. Her clothes chaff her pregnant belly like cardboard. Her dreams feel green, and things keep budding. Ants build humongous castles, and ferns grow fleshy and their heavy breathing disturbs her sleep-turn on your side. Inside, separated by a thicket of blood vessels, the old miracle takes place, sperm and egg meeting, carrying the double helix, the chromosomes for sex, eye color and skin, height, bone structure, potential, and possibility. The fetus absorbing its mother, the womb-trance.

 

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She gives birth to a healthy girl. The past doesn’t say hello or goodbye either; it expects you to do all the work of bringing it back. It requires curiosity. The baby becomes real when she leaves the hospital. How long before she’s working again? Is she still bleeding, still stitched up? She hardly has her baby long. One night she returns from work to find her daughter gone. Draymond has called Child Services, telling them to come for the ‘unwanted’ infant. There’s not enough strength in her to fight for her daughter. The nineteen-year-old is under Draymond’s control. Friends have questioned this story, telling me her signature would be required in a closed adoption case. Krystal was never mothered. What a sensation it is to hold a baby. When the newborn is your own child, can there be anything like it? But could Krystal feel the wonder? It will be years later when she asks me to look for her daughter on Facebook. The daughter of Krystal and Draymond is white, black, and Hispanic. A beauty. She’s inherited her mother’s long legs and expressive lips—lips like eyes. Her daughter is a teen now and distant from the baby Krystal gave birth to.  When Krystal thinks of Trinity it is as if her daughter has become a waking dream.

 

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Now Krystal is thirteen years into her sentence. Love’s an obstacle course that sometimes ends in blood. Girlfriends come and go, and relationships flame only to turn to cinder. In Maximum Compound when fights erupt, they are usually about the cheating of a girlfriend. Couples bond and then break apart, and yet love is celebrated on Valentine’s Day like no other.

 

I’m doing a redo Valentine’s Day because we were in Lock on February 14th.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

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Perhaps Krystal meets the beautiful Natacha in the dog cage. When you are in  Isolation the officers stop by each cell in the morning, asking who wants to go outside. Time outside lasts two hours. Many cells are occupied by women locked in solitary for 100 days, and most stay in. Isolation’s haunting of the mind works its evil. Handcuffed, inmates are marched to the enclosures. Four women fit inside each roofless cage where they’re uncuffed. If it rains, they must still sit for the scheduled two hours, no exceptions. No matter if rain clouds darken the sky to a stormy green. If not rain, the hours spent in the unshaded sun make your head beat.

 

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Or, the two met in Lock, not in the same cell but neighboring ones. Thirty cells side by side, two women in each, and the noise never subsides. You’re allowed your tablet and headphones, but you’ll need batteries, and they’re $4 a pack. Isolated inmates are permitted to spend only $12 on Commissary per month. The yelling from cell to cell, and the shouting to get the guards’ attention goes on around the clock. If your girlfriend’s also here, then you’re afraid she’s having sex with her cellmate. You’re on half-rations and irritable. Every third day you rise again from the stink of Isolation and are brought out in handcuffs and escorted by two officers to the shower. You’re carrying shampoo and soap and clean underwear. The rain you lift your face into cleanses body and soul.

 

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And so, for my inmate friend, Valentine’s Day is the awaited for day. Even if she must create it from her almost bare Commissary trunk and State pay, she’ll give her girlfriend a Valentine’s Day to treasure. Krystal tells me Natacha soothes her. Is her voice like smoking a cigarette when you’re lying in bed, and it’s a cool morning? Bare, peaceful, explaining things lips. Krystal marches to Mess Hall, and breakfast is a cup of grim coffee, two boiled eggs, three pieces of bread, a spoon of margarine. She’s spreading margarine on her second piece of bread when the Officers tell her to get moving. Maximum Compound is all about the undertow of love dragging your feet out from under you.

 

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Chaucer spoke of the mating season of birds, and men and women. Or Valentine’s Day could be pagan. Lupercalia, a Roman festival of fertility and coupling. A priest would cut the throats of a goat and dog near the sacred cave of the she-wolf.  The mythological she-wolf who nursed the abandoned twins, Romulus and Remus. The good lupus mother. The hide of the goat was then sliced into strips that were soaked in blood. Half-naked young men would dance through the streets of drunkenness, flicking pregnant women with blood to safeguard the mother and ensure the live birth of the child.

 

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Krystal wants desperately to care and be cared for by this woman, this Natacha arrested for attempted homicide. Like Krystal’s crime, Natacha’s homicide occurred on a hot July day. It involved a male friend who had been staying in Natacha’s apartment. The town is Tinton Falls; once called the Iron Plantation, where slaves were brought to labor in the ironworks. The ruins of the grist mill seem the town’s only tourist attraction. Natacha becomes angry at the man, shouting for him to leave. He packs and carries his gear out. On either side of the street, milkweed and red cedar grow from the silty-clay soil. She rummages in the drawers, finds two large butcher knives, and then chases him down the sidewalk. After throwing one knife, she stabs him in the chest with the other. Not far away, wild turkey and woodpeckers wander the marshlands. The police are called, and an ambulance rushes the bleeding man into the red dusk. And now, Natacha experiences the hunger of Krystal’s love.

 

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What drives Natacha to assault someone she invited into her apartment? There are her daughter and her dog Charlie, whose head likely breaks through the skin of canine sleep when he hears the knife clatter and shouting. Did Natacha’s ex beat the hell out of her? Did the idiot think she’d squirreled that money away in her stomach, and that’s why he kept hitting it? No boyfriend was going to go through her body drawer by drawer, swinging his fists.

 

NATACHA

When Krystal asks me to go to Facebook and print some photos of her new girlfriend, I already know the process of elimination. It won’t be Natacha from Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aries, not the news editor for the New York Yankees, not the IT consultant Natacha with a multi-national. It will be another Natacha whose on-line life stopped in 2015. Yet this Natacha is beautiful, and her apartment looks airy as if a flutter of ship’s sail has passed through it. In short black strapless club dress, she blows wasp-stung kisses. One of her admirers lingers in the social media bushes wowed by her legs. Natacha’s daughter and dog are shown sleeping in her bed. “Two babies,” she comments in her post. She exudes late night drives when the stars are bright as magnolia blossoms, and you want to reach up and pull them out of the sky and eat them. There are more photos of nightclubs, darkening places, padded leather doors, deep booths, smoke-polished maroon wood. Billie Holiday crooning through the murderous hip hop. Hoop earrings, gold-flake eyeshadow.

 

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The she-wolf who exemplifies instinct and loyalty, the unselfish she-wolf mother who suckles abandoned children can become the she-wolf, devourer. Women who have been wounded horribly sometimes wound others. Lethally.

 

Me and Natacha broke up. Yesterday she told me the real reason is because she got a crush on someone else. The lady she’s got a crush on looks like Shrek. I don’t get it. She said everything she told me she meant and she really loves me. This is the reason I always feel like I’m not good enough and ugly.

–Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387

 

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The thirst of this place is going to drink Krystal into it. The imprisoned body is the chapel or the toilet to be adored or shat on. Imagine the joy with which Krystal told me of Natacha, then the crashing disappointment of seeing her girlfriend with hickeys on her neck. Krystal is sure those love bites are aimed at her heart. Idiot. She must be ugly; she must be unlovable. She pictures herself as a lizard. In actuality Krystal is beautiful.

 

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Krystal needs to talk to her Natacha. She needs to be comforted. They’ve moved Natacha to a different unit. It is 1 a.m. at the correctional facility when the fire alarm goes off, and all the Units march outside into the Yard where the inmates are supposed to stand in silent lines. The inmates are talking guessing who pulled the alarm or started a fire. Maybe the moon shines, and at midnight it’s a fat scoop ice cream you want to climb into the sky and lick. Everyone talks, someone yells Natacha! And Krystal is waving her arms, crazily. The moon is filling their bodies with love. The mermaids of after midnight are swimming. Natacha turns away.

 

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There are three counts a day at 8 a.m. – 8:30 a.m., 11 a.m. – 11:30 a.m., and 4 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Mid-afternoon, Krystal goes into the bathroom with her Bic razor filed away. What does she see in the mirror? The mucky walls, her time? A summer girl shrinking into winter, a 20-year-old when she was arrested, she’ll be 40 upon release. Where is the way out, the way away? She wants motion; she wants to flow. Madly heading somewhere. First the nick and then the trickling begins. If she’s brave, the shimmering red taillights of her veins will open. Have to do this. Have to struggle the blade in, no stopping. No creeping. Claustrophobic nearness of the walls. Her heart pulses where her bunkmate Lucy’s name is tattooed. They inked each other’s name on their left wrists, the arteries that run directly to the heart.

 

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She cuts her left wrist, deep, the deeper the cut, the better she feels. Nearness of music. Blood is streaking her hands and thighs. The cuts are forgiving her for the I Love You cards and the necklace set; the teddy bear. Krystal remembers touching the mole on Natacha’s back. Pressing her thumb into the mole’s blue softness. The last endorphin rush feels like a gentle, loving mother. An inmate finds her and runs to tell an officer to check on Krystal in the bathroom. She’s on the floor and lying in a pool of red running from her left wrist. An inmate stretcher crew arrives, and they carry Krystal to the Medical Unit. She receives both internal stitches to tendons, as well as numerous external stitches. Her history of cutting and depression go untreated.

 

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In the outside world, there is Valentine’s Day as well. Tepid, well-dressed couples get in and out of taxi’s and Uber cars, and they walk on the sidewalks lined with bursts of bergamot and jasmine. Restaurants fill with musk-fragrant suited men, and young women dressed in sheaths, the smooth silver of an ice shaker. Hair, heels, electricity. Credit cards. Couples with cheeks like glowing shots of amaretto. The inhabitants living on the continent of freedom celebrate romantic love.

 

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Inside Maximum Compound, Valentine’s Day celebrates love of the she-wolf. What the officers learn of the inmates is nothing compared to what the inmates have learned of each other. Strange things lie on the bottom of us all, things we are ashamed of, and yet most inmates believe that what love embodies reigns supreme even in the barbed-wire world.