to lose. My project, and my future, were secure.
So secure that close to a year later on the day of my first interview with Muffin Crandall, I had three jobs going at once. The first was the Crandall Case, and the second involved nothing more than picking up some data for analysis from a failing vegetarian restaurant in a mall where nothing else was failing but a shop specializing in silver gifts and tableware. I could have told the silver owner to give it up and move back east, if asked. No charge. Silver tableware just doesn’t work in Southern California, probably because the region lacks both an entrenched aristocracy and cold nights. If a sterling compote can’t point to seven generations who’ve lived in the manor, then it needs to reflect lots of candlelight. Even in winter, nights here are rarely cold enough to tolerate more than two tapers on a table for eight. And nobody knows which fork to use for the fish tacos, anyway.
My third job was the one I’d taken as backup in case more retail gigs failed to materialize. I also took it because I love teaching. Real teaching, where you get to see the lights go on as people start thinking. The third job is responsible for my Tuesday-Thursday wealth-mongering schedule. Those are the days in which I spend three hours, one to four, teaching a class called American Problems to girls at San Diego’s juvenile detention center. The curriculum is vague to nonexistent, so I can teach the kids pretty much what I want as long as they glean a few standard concepts along the way. Like, there are social problems in the United States.
And of course my choice of a juvenile prison as venue may be traced to my ongoing conflict over David. At the time I thought it was just an interesting population on which to test the conclusion of my dissertation. I had concluded that understanding our primate behavior patterns enables us to reject them in favor of better things before we wind up with six kids or in prison doing twenty-five to life.
I wasn’t going to talk high theory to the kids that Thursday less than three weeks ago, though. I wasn’t going to talk any theory. On that day I was going to listen, because something was going on at juvy. Something weird.
Like all institutions, juvenile detention centers generate folklore. The traditional adolescent tales of prosthetic arms clawing at car doors and virgins who die of shock after finding mummified penises in their lockers are repeated, with jailhouse twists.
People in stressful transitional states lean on folklore to clarify fears and address them. Adolescence is nothing if not transition, and being in jail is major stress. Juvy produces a wealth of folklore.
For the girls it was a legendary former detainee named Frankie. Nobody currently in juvy had ever seen Frankie Lopez, who according to the story had been there and gone years ago. But Frankie hadn’t just been released to her mother or the foster care system like everybody else. Frankie had (a) stabbed a guard and then starved to death while trying to complete a secret escape tunnel that was still there, complete with her bones, although nobody knew where; (b) romantically entranced a guard and been carried by him in a laundry bag to his car where she died of suffocation as he drove frantically toward the Mexican border and safety; or (c) been killed by a guard and buried late that night beneath the curbside flower bed of the gas station visible through the dorm windows facing the street.
And while the most obvious feature of the Frankie tales is conflict and confusion about authority figures as embodied in the guard, there is also the theme of death, which doesn’t necessarily mean death. It can mean inexplicable change. It can mean absence. It always means fear.
Something had happened to Frankie Lopez, if indeed there had ever been such a person, which created enough fear for the story to become folklore. On the day of my interview with Muffin Crandall I walked Brontë in Balboa Park, picked up the data from the veggie restaurant, and arrived early at juvy. The kids were already in the classroom, which is unheard of. I’d changed into the slacks I usually wear so I can perch cross-legged on the desk to lecture. They were ordinary khakis with a nice-enough silk blouse. I’d worn them twenty times before.
“Hey, Dr. McCarron, you look pretty good today,” one of them greeted me.
I insist on the use of honorifics in my classes, so the kids call me Dr. and I call them Ms. or in a few instances Mrs., which is unnerving when the person being addressed is fourteen.
“Yeah, pants are pretty cool, like that pretty top, too,” said another.
“Gonna get me some tan pants like that, look like I’m in college.”
“Yeah.”
Female primates pick insects from the body hair of others in a grooming ritual which creates bonds and defuses tensions. Human females do this grooming verbally with compliments. I knew the kids were feeling tension about something and wanted to bond.
“Thanks,” I said. “Who’s read today’s assignment, the chapter on patterns in marriage and divorce in the U.S. since World War II?”
Nobody had read it.
“I heard they found that tunnel Frankie Lopez dug,” one of the girls said as though I’d never mentioned an assignment. “Did you hear that?”
“No, but then I just walked in the door and haven’t talked to anybody.”
“Well, somebody said they found it.”
The room was silent but full of a twitchy energy even Brontë was picking up. She kept pricking her ears and looking around, puzzled. I knew nobody had discovered an escape tunnel because there had never been an escape tunnel. Nobody stays at juvy long enough to dig tunnels and there’s no point in any event. It’s easy enough just to climb out a window. The kids do it all the time and are almost always immediately recaptured at the 7-Eleven next to the gas station, stealing Coke Slurpees and cigarettes. But the discovered-tunnel story meant something had been discovered. Something had changed. If I handled it right, I might be enlightened.
“Wow,” I said with forced neutrality, “that’s interesting. Tell me about it.”
The silence grew heavy as twenty pairs of clear young eyes looked grave.
“They didn’t find Frankie’s bones in there,” somebody finally said.
“Weren’t no bones in that tunnel.”
“Nothin’ there but mud, I heard. Just a buncha mud.”
They all knew the other variants of the Frankie story, but were not mentioning them. It was as if everyone in the room had heard only the tunnel version, and had believed it. I knew this meant something, but what? It’s always safe to punt.
“So it looks like that story about a character who died in an escape tunnel didn’t exactly happen, huh?”
I used “character” in an attempt to set up a discussion about what’s real and what are the uses of stories. I might as well have begun an explanation of the chi-square statistical analysis. They ignored the ploy. They wanted to talk about Frankie.
“Frankie was not in that tunnel,” the oldest and brightest girl said with finality, nodding toward the north side of the building.
I vaguely remembered seeing some construction in that direction when I parked. It made no impression. There’s always construction on government property. Campaign donors and relatives of elected officials have to make a living.
“There’s a lot of mud over there because I heard they accidentally cut into a water pipe,” another girl said.
It
