Free Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez Page B

was prison guard. How bad could it be? I thought.
    It was pretty bad.
    Actually, I didn’t mind it at first. I had two months of on-the-job training, and I got along well with both the other guards and the inmates. I told the inmates right away that I wasn’t there to punish them or make their lives harder—they’d already made their own lives hard enough. I told them that my job was to make them follow the rules. I treated them with respect, and I got respect back from them. I think they also appreciated the fact that I refused to butch up just because I was working in a prison. I wore my makeup and perfume, styled my hair with some nice long extensions, and had scarlet dragon-lady nails. One time, a fight broke out in one of the stairwells, and I called for assistance. All of us guards carried radios, not guns—since there were more inmates than guards, rioting inmates could easily use your own gun on you. As I waited for backup, I yelled at the brawling prisoners, “I’m not going to break a nail to stop this fight!” It turned into a major melee. Three guards got gashes in their heads, and a bunch of prisoners were sent to solitary. Later, one of the prisoners who had been involved winced when he heard I’d been there.
    “I didn’t know you were there, Miss Debbie,” he said. “You didn’t get hurt, did you?” I told him that I was fine but that I would have killed him if one of my nails had gotten broken.
    But after a few months, I was on compassion overload. I was just too much of a bleeding heart to work in the prison. I thought that lots of the inmates were really nice people—some of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life—and that some of the guards were just bullies who used their power to abuse. I didn’t want to become like them, but I could feel myself changing. I didn’t like the way my mouth was starting to sound. And I think other people could sense that I was changing, too. One day I walked past the cell of a lifer who had never spoken a word to anyone in the whole time I had been there. He usually just whistled all day, as beautifully as a song-bird. He put his face against the bars.
    “This is not a place for you, Miss Debbie,” he whispered. “You don’t want to turn out like the rest of them.”
    About a year after I started working at the prison, I was driving to work in the rain and dreading it. I was working second shift and weekends, never seeing my children, and I felt like I was selling my soul to the devil for health insurance and paid vacations. I walked into the warden’s office after roll call and quit. On my last day, the prisoners lined up to say good-bye. Some of them were crying. “Good luck, Miss Debbie,” they said. “You’re going to have a good life now.”
    But I didn’t know how to find that good life. I was working in my mother’s salon again but was often depressed and wondering why I wasn’t happy. I decided that I needed more fun. I’d gotten married and had children so early that I’d never done the high-energy dating and partying most of my friends had been through, so I decided to became the best party girl in Holland, Michigan. Whenever I do something, I do it to the extreme, so in a couple of months I knew every club in the area and every person on every barstool. Soon that wasn’t enough, and I bought a sailboat—even though I didn’t know how to sail and had no intention of learning—just so I could keep it docked at the bars on Lake Michigan, in Saugatuck. People from all over partied on my boat every weekend, and the good times were always wherever I was. When I was by myself, though, reality would sink in. I was out partying so much that I wasn’t being a good mom. Most of these people weren’t real friends anyway—they just liked my boat.
    So I thought about getting religion. I had never been an atheist to begin with, but I didn’t have much of a faith structure or community to deepen my spiritual life. So I went and found a