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Sparkles and Lace

Chris Dietzel

    The first time I went to jail I was the one spending the night behind bars. The second time I was simply visiting a friend. While that first trip did a good job of making me act more like a grown-up, the second trip is the one that still keeps me awake at night, filled with the concerns of someone that is no longer a child.
    I was 18 when I was arrested, a dumb, little kid eager to graduate from high school, not a worry in the world. My carefree nature vanished when the cops handcuffed me for spray-painting one of the walls at my high school. Suddenly I had become a dumb, little kid that was scared shitless. The guy in the cell next to me stunk like vomit and piss. Unable to sleep, I had the entire night alone in my cell to think about what I had done and if I wanted to come back again. I didn’t. The night, although uneventful in terms of prison tales, was traumatic enough to ensure I never had another run-in with the law.
    I graduated from college, got a respectable job, and generally acted like a mature adult (I do still smile, however, when I see a nice piece of graffiti). I rented an apartment in the city and made new friends. A little while later I got a puppy, received a promotion, and started playing flag football on the weekends.
    One of my new friends was a guy named Juan. After accidently colliding during a flag football game, we spent the night in the emergency room getting stitches and talking. When the night was over, and like best friends should, we had matching scars. Juan turned into one of the most dependable and considerate friends I have ever had. When my kitchen sink started leaking, he brought his tools over. When I got a new apartment, Juan showed up the morning of my move, without being asked to help, and spent the day carrying boxes. I tried to return the favor as much as possible. Every time he had too much to drink I drove him home and let him sleep on my couch. And because he never had much money, when I got a new car I offered him my old one for a hundred dollars instead of the thousand it was worth.
    Whereas I had gone to college, Juan was content to get a job before graduating high school. While I worked in an office with other white-collar professionals, Juan was happy to do construction work, particularly roofing and drywall. And although it took Juan ten years to get his act straight instead of the one night it took me, he eventually settled down too.
    When the new flag football season started, I made sure Juan was on my team. And any time I went out of town Juan took care of my dog. The half empty box of treats let me know how often he spoiled Hurricane. Then one day I had a message on my answering machine from a voice I didn’t recognize, Juan’s brother, saying my friend was in jail and in trouble. I called back but no one answered. A week went by so I figured Juan paid the fine for his public drunkenness or whatever he had done. A second phone call let me know that wasn’t the case. The voice, Juan’s brother again, said Juan was in a lot of trouble and needed help.
    “Is he going to be okay?” I asked, still not understanding what, “a lot of trouble,” meant.
    “No! He’s in jail for a long time,” his brother said with an accent. “Very serious.” His brother went on to say that Juan was arrested on drug charges, the most serious of which was distribution to a minor.
    The minor ended up being the 15-year old daughter of Juan’s girlfriend. It would be a miracle if the daughter ever amounted to anything. She had already had two abortions, been arrested a hundred times for drug use, and run away from home just as many times. I wondered what it would take for her to get scared straight the same way a single night in jail scared me into being a better kid. Maybe nothing.
    “It’s got to be a misunderstanding,” I told Juan’s brother—the famous last words of every friend to someone accused of a serious crime.
    Each night, instead of sleeping, I found myself staring at my ceiling. The textured paint looked like fingerprints. The car horns outside my window sounded like cell doors slamming. When my eyes closed I imagined being surrounded by the faces of men I didn’t know or trust—the days of elementary school when everyone was bullied or doing the bullying, except with prison gangs and shanks.



    The facility was at the edge of the city. The building looked modern, even more so than the new baseball stadium, and I wondered if there really were that many prisoners in the world today, that many arrestable crimes and men willing to break them, that warranted a five-story expanse across four city blocks.
    There were three sets of double doors along the front side of the building. A procession of men in orange jumpsuits approached me. The men carried shovels and rakes and were followed by two armed guards.
    “Visitation is the left doors,” one of the inmates said.
    “Thanks.” I smiled, feeling like I could be friends with them if given the chance. I had become friends with Juan in an emergency room, what was stopping me from making a new friend during my visit to the prison?
    Then the same inmate said, “Have a good visit with your boyfriend,” and all of the other inmates laughed. Even the two security guards smirked. Betrayed, I put my head down and went toward the entrance.
    The lobby had a collection of plastic chairs across from a fiberglass window separating visitors and staff. The visitors were a hodge-podge collection that any sociologist would love to see gathered in one place. A middle-aged white lady, covered from shoulder to wrist in tattoos, kept shifting her weight. An old black woman fiddled with a pair of thin silk gloves. Two Hispanic men leaned toward each other, talking in whispers so no one else could hear. All of the faces stared at me until I took a seat and became one of them.
    The uniformed man on the other side of the glass raised both of his palms in the air as if I had said something about him. When I stayed in my seat he tapped on the microphone and said, “You have to sign in before you can visit someone.”
    Everyone turned and stared at me. Even after I got up and approached the glass I felt their eyes on my back. “I have an appointment for a noon visit.”
    “Name?”
    “My name or the person I’m visiting?”
    The man’s eyes narrowed. “Give me your driver’s license.”
    I slid it under the small gap of glass. The guard held it to the light to make sure it wasn’t a fake. I couldn’t imagine the size of the balls someone would need to use a fake ID at a jail. After typing my information into the computer, he slid my license back. Nobody in the eclectic gang bothered staring at me as I took my seat amongst them again. A couple seats away from me a young Asian girl with a small tattoo on her hand, maybe a spider or a series of intersecting lines, texted on her cell phone. A white guy, my age and size, except with a black eye, busted lip, and a line shaved through one eyebrow, stared at everyone like each was conspiring against him.
    A door on the far side of the room opened. One of the guards leaned his head out and announced, “Noon appointments only.” Everyone stood up except for an old woman in the corner. I waited until everyone else was going toward the door before following them so there was no chance I would do something else to show it was my first time. We walked through a series of twisting concrete corridors. There was only one open path to follow, but I only went that way because the tattooed neck in front of me was going that direction too. When it turned left, I turned left. When it turned right, I turned right. Then the corridor ended, opening into a big U-shaped room.
    Everything was completely white and sterile. Plexiglas divided the room in half. A series of plastic chairs lined both sides of the windows. The people ahead of me took seats around the room. I lowered myself into the nearest chair. A click sounded, followed by a buzz, and then a door on the other side of the glass began to open. Men in yellow jump suits began filtering in.
    There was a squeal and some clapping across the room. A little girl, accompanied by her mom, was cheering for the arrival of her father. I don’t know how I had missed them until then. The girl, maybe three or four years old, was wearing a powder blue dress covered in sparkles and lace. Every stitch was perfectly pressed. The dress glittered perfectly in the fluorescent light like water surrounding an island resort. The mother wore faded jeans littered with tiny holes. Her sweater had a stain that I could see all the way across the room.
    Juan was the last person through the door. When he saw me he laughed and walked toward me as though the window didn’t exist and he was going to give me a hug. That was when I noticed his two front teeth were gone, along with two others on the lower right side. I didn’t want him to see me any other way than happy to see him, so I reformed my smile bigger than before.
    “It’s really good to see you,” he said. “I didn’t know I was going to have a visitor until this morning.” I didn’t say anything, only smiled and nodded my head. He said, “My mom and brother came by to visit a couple weeks back. I guess once you’re in here it’s easy to be forgotten.”
    “Is there anything I can do for you?”
    “No.” He smiled. “It’s just good to see you.”
    I hadn’t given any thought to what we would talk about. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and have him go back to his cell feeling like no one cared what happened to him. “Is everyone treating you okay? Are their fights?”
    He chuckled at my silliness. Maybe he saw me eyeing his missing teeth. “Everyone is nice. I play cards with a couple guys all day. One guy tried to start with me, but I stood my ground and he backed off. He was just testing me.” His tongue poked the gap in his front teeth. “I had a couple cavities before I got here. Any time you go to the prison dentist and complain about teeth hurting he just yanks’em out so they don’t hurt anymore.”
    “Tell me what I can do to get you out of here.”
    “I’m not getting out for a long time.”
    My eyebrows arched at how sure he seemed. “How do you know?”
    “I pleaded guilty to everything. I go to sentencing in a week. My public defender says I’ll probably get ten to fifteen years.”
    If the glass wasn’t separating us I would have knocked out more of his teeth. “Why would you do that?”
    “I was guilty. I made a mistake, I have to pay for it.”
    “You did what they said?”
    He nodded his head. For the first time since seeing me he stopped smiling, his mouth curling into an apology. I sank in my chair, the wind knocked out of me the same way it would if I had been punched in the stomach.
    “I messed up,” he said again. He told me how he went five years without doing drugs, especially nothing serious like the cocaine he was arrested for. But at the same time, there was almost never a day when his girlfriend’s daughter wasn’t getting stoned as soon as her mom left for work. Every time she loaded up she tried to convince Juan to get high too. Month after month he said no. Then one night, a couple beers already in his belly, he shrugged and accepted. He still didn’t know why he finally gave in. He was passed out on the living room floor, the daughter passed out on the sofa, when his girlfriend came home. Yelling and smacks across his face jarred him awake. The rest was history.
    I asked why he hadn’t explained to the cops that the drugs were the girl’s, not his. He would still be arrested, but the charges would be less serious—he wouldn’t do as much time.
    He shrugged. “I messed up. There’s no difference between being here for two years or fifteen. I won’t be able to get a job when I get out. I’m getting deported no matter what. It doesn’t matter.”
    He went on to tell me about some of the other guys he was locked up with and how nice they were, but I found myself listening less to what he said and focusing more on the little girl in the blue dress on the other side of the room. Her mother was holding her up so she could touch the glass while her father did the same. I found myself wondering if that little girl would turn into another person like the girl Juan got arrested with, or if she would turn out okay.
    The girl was giggling. It had to be the father’s or daughter’s birthday. The blue dress was too nice for any other occasion. I thought about how happy the little girl was to see her father, how happy he was to see his little girl, how that was enough for them and for the mother too. No matter what else was going on in their lives they were each, in that moment, completely content. I thought about what it must be like for all of them after the visit was over. The woman would go home and be faced with a job that didn’t pay well. Bills would collect on the table. Her daughter, back in regular clothes, would begin missing her father again. The man would go back to playing cards, all the while trying not to worry how his family was getting on without him, and hoping that his daughter didn’t change too much by the time he saw her again.
    I thought about all of that while Juan laughed about some of the times we had shared. We talked a little bit longer, but the entire time I was thinking about the girl and her sparkling blue dress and how happy she seemed. The buzzer rang a second time. The inmates knew that was their signal to file out of the room.
    “Thanks for visiting,” Juan said. “Next time you come I’ll tell you the crazy story that one of the guys in here told me.”
    I said I couldn’t wait to hear it.



    When my friends asked how it went, I made sure to limit my story to the parts dealing with Juan and nothing else. I couldn’t bring myself to mention the little girl or her sparkly dress. That was why I never visited Juan again: I didn’t want to see that girl or anyone like her ever again. I don’t want Juan to think he was forgotten—he wasn’t—but I also can’t forget that girl.
    Flag football wasn’t fun without Juan, so I didn’t sign up the following season. And my friends don’t see me at the bars anymore. I’m in line for another promotion at work, but I might not get it because I’m not staying as late as I used to. My girlfriend thought I was joking when I told her I wanted to start tutoring elementary school kids whose parents couldn’t pick them up on time after school. I wonder if any of the kids I help has a parent they never get to see anymore. Now, on the nights I can’t sleep, I don’t see fingerprints in the paint or hear sirens outside. The only thing I can see is a girl with a baby blue dress with perfectly pressed lace that only understands happiness for ten minutes at a time while she and her father try to touch hands, and that’s enough for her.



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