Work Text:
“I’m Bert and I’m an addict,” she says, for probably around the five hundredth time, give or take days when she’d been busy with lawyer shit – of which there was, even post-conviction, an egregious amount – or prison chores, or feeling under the weather, etc.
The grim little room where the prison AA-cum-NA meetings are held is as spare and depressing as all the other rooms in this place. It has a low ceiling and cinderblock walls and overhead lights that are always on the fritz. There are a number of chairs, arranged with flaccid aspirations to circularity. The women who fill them are a dour-faced, tight-lipped bunch. There are, of course, no windows.
There is also no bad coffee. This feels like a personal affront to Bert, who’d scammed her way into a handful of AA meetings pre-prison, in particularly lean times – that is, when she’d been on the outs with Sam, Miss Take, or both – and who had always enjoyed the coffee-and-donuts-and-chit-chat part. Addicts were often good at reading people, at least, when they weren’t high out of their minds, and the little con of belonging was good exercise.
In prison, the state employs a rotating slate of counselors to facilitate. Fresh-faced women, mostly, and the occasional man, full of the vim and vigor of their newly-minted credentials. They change with some regularity, as do the faces of the women in the group as some are released and others cycle in. So Bert makes up a new addiction periodically, to keep things fresh.
Alcohol, she’d say. The drink. Shaking her own head and pursing her lips at her youthful folly. Too fond of a good beer – or a bad one. Practically had a cocktail shaker for a rattle, she had. Practically born with a lemon wedge in her mouth. Alcoholism had the advantage of being widely relatable in the context of a women’s prison, and it was an easy story to stick to; Bert had surely been guilty of a drink or two in her time. Which made it barely a con at all. A good lie had a little truth in it, but this one had too much to be any real fun.
Heroin, she said, for some eight straight months circa year two. Head slung low, between her elbows, to really sell the shame. Smack. Riding the dragon every day. Senseless on a bare mattress, the whole lot, any chance I could get.
This garners her more sympathetic looks, as well as a small collection of hungry ones. She makes sure to note the women whose gazes sharpened a little too much. Information is currency in prison, just like it is everywhere. Who could be bought; what could be sold. It’s an easy calculus. Bert has been doing it all her life.
She copped to weed, a few times, but it was a boring drug; everyone did it. It didn’t take much in the way of imagination, nor did it offer much in the way of exploitable information.
Bert’s no saint, but she isn’t, strictly speaking, a drug addict either. There aren’t a lot of social opportunities in prison, is the thing, and Bert was, truly honestly, when it came down to brass tacks, a people person. So she liked to socialize – sue her. Liked to flex the ol’ charm muscles. And she was an addict, anyways. It’s the sort of thing Sam would never be able to admit, but Bert could be the bigger person. She could come clean, if only to her own cell wall. What was a con if not a full commitment to the moment? It brought the senses alive, brightening tastes and heightening her hearing until she could pick out every rasp of shoe leather or thready strain of club music. Faces became more beautiful. Voices richer. It was a high, and she was always chasing it. Bert had a love of life that only the con could sate.
The AA meetings were offered weekly, which was probably how often the great nation of Spain was willing to pay for it. You’d think AA wouldn’t be necessary in prison, but it had its uses. Some women were there for much shorter sentences; maybe they wanted to develop good habits before journeying back into the land of temptation. And besides, it wasn’t so hard to get the basics in prison: alcohol, weed, cigarettes. It’s all about who you know. And Bert, of course, knew everyone.
There were a few girls who’d been here back when she’d been a mere vanilla alcoholic, before she’d settled in for the long haul and got creative. But the problem with running AA in prison – besides the lack of coffee – was that everyone here was basically self-absorbed. Prison did that to you. If you didn’t go in that way, months of cooling your heels in court during the day and fending off the yard bullies the rest of the time meant that anyone smart kept their head firmly in the sand. Not your business, not your problem. If Bert was a heroin addict today and a crackhead tomorrow and an alcoholic again the day after that, no one here would blink.
Booze, horse, mary jane; she cycled made-up highs as fast as the prison cycled counselors. For the sake of realism, she steered clear of ice, at least until the nurse started slipping her expensive and nausea-inducing meds. Even years in prison hadn’t given Bert the gaunt look, the wrinkles, the bad teeth or the nerves. The women she knew on speed had a habit of rubbing at their hands or arms, and a chronic tremor. Any con knew to work with what they’d got – and Bert had got enough in the way of looks. And far too much in the way of confidence.
Since she was there, taking up a crooked pasteboard seat, Bert sometimes tried – honestly tried – to get something out of the whole charade. The first step: honesty. Admit you are powerless. Well that was a crock; even in prison Bert set to work arranging things to her liking. She made nice with the right guards. She hooked up with the woman in the kitchen who could get her contraband chocolate – dark, bitter baking chocolate which she savored, sucking on fragments, eyes on the blank bunk above. Powerlessness was for people who didn’t have Bert’s way with words.
Step Two: faith. Faith had never been Bert’s problem. Bert had faith in spades. Bert had faith coming out her ears. Misplaced, perhaps, but that was something of a different problem. She put a check in that box and moved on.
Step Five, admitting wrong. What Sam would say about Step Five, she could only imagine. And imagine it she did, in Technicolor, at night in her cell. The blank chainlink of the bunk above was good as a green screen. How would Sam say it? She imagined a thousand ways: Sam, sobbing, head in Bert’s lap. Sam, furious, nose scrunched and voice tight. Sam in bed, the way they’d slept as teenagers, heads on the same pillow, whispering her secrets into Bert’s listening ear. It was all fantasy. Sam would never say it. Sam would throttle herself with her own hands before admitting the truth. Sam would battle Step Five to the death.
Behind closed eyelids, she watched Sam go through Step Nine, making amends, snotty with tears. Step Ten, blossoming self awareness.
Step Twelve: service. Sam and Bert in service to the con, ad infinitum, amen.
In AA, they aren’t supposed to talk about using. They can talk around it, about the late nights and stumbling home and waking up in strangers’ arms, all that jazz. They can talk about the lows all they want: the fights and the breakups, scratching up drink money stealing copper bits, scratching ‘till your arms bleed, vomit on the bedroom floor. They aren’t supposed to talk about the highs.
But the thing about the con is, there’s not a difference, really. In the moment of the fall, Bert is always soaring.
After, she’ll have to deal with the yelling and the bribing of security guards and the trip to A&E, maybe, if it’s gone really very wrong indeed. Before is the interminable planning, the knife’s edge of tension, the checkersquare plan laid out in black and white. But in the moment of the fall, when the wings have melted but the stomach hasn’t swooped... Bert lives for it. Lives for it, and for the look on Sam’s face.
Because Sam might be a good con but she’s also an open book. From Bert, she can’t hide the microexpressions in her face, the animate little twitches and wrinkles that she gets when she’s working. When there’s too many balls in the air, one is bound to drop. Failure is part of the game. You miss a pitch; a trick; a rendezvous. No plan survives contact with the enemy; they’re lucky if it survives contact with the street. It’s how you improvise that matters, when your toe catches a cobblestone. That’s what differentiates the hucksters and the petty crooks from the con men worth their salt.
She wonders how a lie looks on Sam’s face, ten years on. She stares at her own face in the mirror in the prison bathroom, the dinghy little bulbs flickering above. Other women’s voices off the tile and the mirror steamed up. She has to rub a hole in to see herself. Even then it’s through a fog. Her hands leave behind little curls of water, which deepen the lines on her face. She has crow’s feet coming in; she can feel them when she rubs her fingers across her temple. She has a hint of belly fat coming in, which she can feel when she skates her fingers across it at night. She stares at the bunk above, adds crow’s feet to Sam’s face and grey to her hair and width to her hips.
She looks the same, though. Sam always looks the fucking same.
It pisses Bert off, is what it does. Even in the blackbox privacy of her own head she can’t change Sam’s face. Even as the years pass and her own face changes: two years, then four, then seven. She makes plans, discards them, decides to serve her time. Catches her face in the mirror again, laugh lines coming in strong. Punches the mirror, sending cracks spiraling like a stone into water. Seven years of bad luck right there, but she’s already had it, hasn’t she?
Really, the thing that gets Bert is that she hadn’t seen the betrayal coming.
Which was, in retrospect, all kinds of stupid. Because Bert conned Sam all the fucking time. Anytime she wanted something from Sam – to borrow her jeans, or to call shotgun on a car ride – she flashed a smile and leaned in a little and Sam would roll her eyes but she wouldn’t lean back and Bert would get, most of the time, enough of the time, what she wanted. It got to be a game between them, like everything was: they traded grins and secrets and black eyes and drunken nights in the loo and they traded cons, too. It wasn’t like Bert didn’t know what Sam was doing when she rolled her shoulders and stuck her hands in her pockets. It wasn’t like either of them was innocent.
“I’m Bert and I’m an addict,” she says, for probably the five-hundredth time, minus the days she’d been in solitary for slugging a guard and the days she’d spent in the infirmary drawing out a minor illness; sweet-talking a nurse. She marvels at the magic of it. Those six little words conjure Sam up right in the middle of that dirty concrete floor; right dab in the center of the oblong arrangement of chairs. Sam leaned back on the hood of her car, chin turned, hair brushing her shoulders and Bert was thinking she’d look better if she cut it. Sam with a gun tucked into her waistband; couldn’t see the bulge for the sweater she had slung low around her hips. Sam in the chemical glow of the Spanish sun, tilting her face up, hair falling back, until Bert could just hear her say: “what if we stopped all this?”
And Bert would answer, the way she had that day, the way she always did these days, mouthing the words under her breath: “one more score.” Flashed a grin. “Then we can fuck off with all our money. You and me, kid.”
And Sam, who Bert had always been able to read like an open book, dropped her chin and looked Bert square in the eyes and said: “okay then. One more score.”