In The Slammer Ch. 03

"I don't believe it," I said.

"I saw it with my own eyes," said Dolores.

It was still an hour until lights out. It was a warm evening, and one of us could have gone up to the upper bunk. But we'd gotten kind of used to sharing the lower one. It would get colder later, anyway.

"Every falling star I ever saw just left a narrow streak. And it only lasted a second," I said.

"Those are shooting stars," she said. "Falling stars are really rare. This one zoomed down from outer space shooting off sparks and flames. I swear to God. It left a trail like a comet across the sky."

It was more than two weeks since I'd been admitted. I no longer held out much hope that I'd ever get transferred to the Men's Facility. According to Dolores, I was in the computer, and once you're in the computer there isn't much anyone can do.

"I never heard of such a thing," I said.

"It was in the paper. A lot of people saw it. A big ball of fire, just like I said."

"Really?"

"They even figured out where it landed. They went out to look for pieces."

"So how come I never heard of it?"

"So maybe you didn't read the paper that day."

"So how come I never heard that there was any difference between falling stars and shooting stars?"

"So maybe you don't know everything about astrology there is to know."

"Astronomy."

"Astronomy. And maybe you should believe people when they tell you what they've seen with their own eyes."

"Yeah, maybe I should."

"Yeah, maybe you should."

-

In the next Hygiene class, Mrs. Carlsen laid out in numbing detail all the arduous realities of childbirth: the morning sickness, the labor pains, the sleepless nights, the endless diapers. She had a little boy and girl of her own, and you could tell that she was crazy about them. But she was trying to get us to realize that having babies-and by implication making them-is serious business.

One of the things she mentioned was that she and her husband had decided not to have their son circumcised. They weren't particularly religious, and there's no real reason for it, hygiene-wise. She gave a little lesson on what every mother should know about caring for the uncircumcised penis.

In the showers that evening the girls all crowded around. They'd been seeing my cock every day now for the past three weeks, and it was no longer quite the potent, forbidding totem some of them had originally thought. They were curious to examine it more closely.

"Do you mind?" asked Helen. She was one of the fatties, but in a pretty, motherly kind of way. She took it and gingerly rolled it around with her fingers. Hank and Pank's eyes were as big as saucers. Even Dolores was looking on from the fringes. Helen traced a faint jagged line that ran around the shaft slightly beneath the head. "That must be the scar," she said. To tell the truth, I'd never really noticed it myself.

"Can you feel it?" they asked. "Does it hurt?" "Oh, poor Hector!" "Does it feel lonely?" "Does it get cold, all naked like that." My cock had never gotten so much attention.

"Does a guy who is feel different from a guy who isn't?" someone wondered. The question might have been intended for Dolores, but it was fielded by Black Betty.

"A dick's a dick," she said. "Never made much difference to me."

-

Mrs. Carlsen had stopped me again on my way out of class. She waited until all the girls had gone and then gave me a little packet of condoms. For some reason I felt compelled to tell her the truth-that I didn't really need them at the present time. I felt embarrassed to say it, like I wasn't living up to expectations. "Why don't you take them anyway," she said, "Just in case."

There was a little shelf in our cell for personal items. Dolores didn't have anything on it, and now I had this packet of condoms. We both knew that everybody thought we were doing it, but it was a subject we didn't talk about. The presence of the condoms didn't make the subject any easier to ignore.

The fact that everyone thought we were doing it had given Dolores a certain status among the girls. They envied and admired her. She was kind of a symbol that even in this dysfunctional mess of a women's prison it was still possible to be a real woman. It hadn't hurt my reputation either. And it diffused a lot of the tension. The fact that the other girls thought I was spoken for made it easier for them to treat me like just another guy, instead of feeling that they had to treat me like the last man on Earth. If they ever found out that Dolores and I weren't really doing it, they would probably have felt that we were letting them down.

But even if we weren't doing it the way they imagined, Dolores and I had developed a relationship of a sort. We shared a room. We shared a bed. We stretched out alongside each other and talked about things. We felt the comfort of each other's presence. We'd taken to lying face-to-face during reflection time. Sometimes we slept that way too. We'd gotten used to the touch of each other's skin. We were like a couple of kids who'd been forced to share a bedroom and had made the most of it.

Sort of. My cock wasn't quite as innocent a nudist as I tried to be. He was always sniffing around, trying to stir something up. Dolores didn't pay him much attention, but he never gave up hope.

It wasn't that she was gay. It wasn't that she had a boyfriend waiting on the outside. It wasn't so much anything about me in particular. As far as I could tell, it was just her sense of propriety. The Department of Corrections might tell her who she had to bunk with, but she'd be damned if she'd let them tell her who she had to sleep with. I can't say I blamed her.

She had her back to me. We hadn't talked about the condoms, or the fact that people thought we were doing it, or the fact that we weren't. Neither of us had said a word all evening. It was almost time for lights out. Maybe I was blowing things out of proportion. Maybe she wasn't really concerned at all. Maybe she was thinking about something else entirely.

But on the off chance that she was concerned, I put my hand on her shoulder and gave her the lightest possible hug. "Fuck 'em," I said. "It's none of their damn business." Then I turned toward the wall to give her her space.

-

A couple days later it seemed like everybody's emotions were on edge. Everyone was snitty in the day room. Nobody said much in the shower. After the shower, they handed out sanitary pads. They were awkward things, more like diapers than anything else. I'd seen one or two of the girls wearing them before, but now it seemed like everybody had one on. Even Rachel Ramirez's pretty little pussy and pretty little bottom were covered up in blue cotton. I guess it's true what they say about women living together.

In line, Hank and Pank were ready to rip each other's throats out. Dolores was fuming too. When we got into the cell, she paced up and down in her silly diaper with her breasts flapping and her hands out to the side as if she had just touched something nasty.

"Come on to bed," I said.

"I'll sleep on the top bunk."

"I don't think it's contagious."

"Just shut up, OK?"

She finally did get in, but with her back to me. I tried to put my arm around her to warm her up but she shrugged it off. Mrs. Carlsen hadn't talked much about periods yet. I wasn't sure what to do.

"Can I ask you a question?"

No response.

"Can you tell me what's it like, having your period?"

She didn't say anything for the longest time. But finally she did.

"It's kind of like when you've got diarrhea. You feel like shit, and all you want to do is stay at home in bed. But you can't. You've got to get up and go to school or whatever. So you go around all day, feeling like shit and trying to keep your butt sucked up so that nothing drips out. But there's nothing you can do to stop it.

"And sometimes it doesn't just drip, it gushes. You can feel it rushing down. And so you've got to plug it up with a tampon. But they don't give out tampons, they only give out these crappy napkins that don't fit right and are always leaking. So you're always worried that it's leaking down your leg and staining your pants and everybody can see it.

"And it doesn't just happen when you're sick, it happens every month of your life until you're too old to know the difference. That's what having a period is like."

Not a whole lot I could say to that.

-

I was still jacking off every couple of days in order to avoid another nocturnal accident. I would stand at the toilet with my back to Dolores-about as much privacy as you can get in a prison cell. She never seemed to pay much attention. But one day, after I'd finished up, she asked shyly, "Was it nice?"

"What do you mean?"

"I thought that's why guys did it."

"It wasn't like that. It was just routine maintenance."

She was puzzled. "What's the difference?"

"With routine maintenance you just try to get it over with. If you want it to feel nice you have to take your time. You know, work up a fantasy, pay attention to how it feels. Isn't it the same for girls?"

"But why do you have to just get it over with? If you're going to do it, why not pay attention?"

"They're two completely different things. I was just releasing pressure. What you're talking about is fooling around. That isn't something you'd ever do in front of anybody."

She was studying my face, trying to understand.

"It wouldn't be polite." How to explain it? "It would be like eating a piece of chocolate cake in front of someone when you had one and they didn't."

She seriously considered this. "What if they didn't mind?"

"It just wouldn't be right." I didn't know how else to say it.

-

It turned out that there was a closet full of books at the back of Mrs. Carlsen's classroom. It was a little library that inmates were allowed to borrow from, although nobody ever did. I started checking out books, and Dolores and I would read them to each other during reflection time. As the days got longer, we could even read a little longer after lights out. Then we'd lay in bed and talk about what we'd read, trying to figure out who we liked and who we didn't, and why the characters did what they did, and whether we would have done the same.

Annie heard about this and got incredibly jealous. She wanted really badly to have someone read to her. Finally we worked it out. One evening, just as they were buzzing us in, Misha pretended to slip and fall down, and when the Bulldog went to check it out, I slipped across the hall into Annie's cell, and Black Betty slipped in with Dolores.

It was funny being in her cell. Everything was the same, but different. The bed and the toilet were on the opposite sides of the cell, the stains and chipped-off paint made different patterns on the wall. It was also strange to be alone and naked with somebody besides Dolores. I'd always felt a little spark between myself and Annie. I wouldn't say she was beautiful, but she was pretty enough, and I'd always thought that her brown skin was richer and more attractive than the pasty skin of most of the white girls. It was like she was wearing something even when she wasn't. Like a panther, you might say.

She had borrowed a book of fairy stories-knights and dragons and princesses and all that. We climbed up on the top bunk. I did my best to read with feeling and to use different voices for the different characters.

She was stretched out beside me staring off into space, lost in the world of make believe. I've never had such an appreciative audience. I found my eyes drifting over to her breasts, which were slowly rising and falling as she breathed. They were bigger than Dolores's, the nipples darker and puffier. It was another case of the same but different.

When it got too dark to see the words, she just lay there for the longest time. Still listening, I guess, to the fading echos. It had started to get a little chilly, so I pulled up the blanket. She turned toward me.

"Thanks for reading to me, Hector."

"It was a nice story." Now that the echos had faded it was just the two of us, alone in bed together, naked.

"I'm glad that you and Dolores found each other," she said. "It's funny the way things happen. Here she is the women's prison, and you just fall out of the sky right into her cell. If that isn't the hand of something, I don't know what is."

I had a bit of a hard on from being in bed with her. It was the first time I'd gotten hard in front of someone besides Dolores. I didn't think she'd noticed, but she reached across under the blankets and caressed me gently. Just for a second, then she let go.

"You know," she said, "sometimes it's hard to say which is worse: in here or out there. But I guess if you gotta be somewhere, it might as well be out there. There's a few things I really miss." She yawned, sleepily. "One of them is cuddling. Do you think it would be all right if we cuddled a little?"