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And that’s how we broke the ice. “Is Kentucky like this?” I asked Hester.
“Nope.”
“ Dublin?”
“Hell no. Where are you?”
“ Danbury. And it’s nothing like this freak show.”
The officer reappeared, with housing assignments. We were shown to our respective cells and locked down. My new roommate Virginia weighed 350 pounds and snored like nothing I had ever heard before. It was like there was a wild, rabid animal in the bunk below me. As I tossed and turned on the plastic mattress, trying to cover my head with the pillow, I realized that this was what Pop meant when she said “real prison,” as in “You girls don’t have any idea what real prison is like.” I remembered a college professor who had told me that lack of sleep, or sleep only in short intervals, will eventually bring on hallucinations.
Virginia was an amateur astrologer who rarely showered. She informed me that she was pla
I also gleaned that just about all of the women in Chicago were on pretrial status-their cases had not yet been resolved, but they did not or could not make bail. So they were captive here while the wheels of justice ground. A couple of them had been here for months without being charged with a crime. This made their lives uncertain on every level, and those who were not already crazy were acting pretty wacko, driven nuts by rage and instability. I had been dropped into a snake pit. Virginia warned me, “See Co
None of the accepted rules of prison behavior that I had learned seemed to apply here. There was no welcome wagon with shower shoes and a toothbrush; there was no understanding of inappropriate or verboten questions; there was no sense of solidarity or recognition of the sanity-saving value of personal routine or order or self-respect. Goddammit, you couldn’t even rely on the tribe system-the white women weren’t worth a damn. Most of them were drooling on meds to keep them from killing themselves (or their neighbors).
My de facto tribe was Nora and Hester (who was going by her given name of A
FINALLY WE met what passed for the Welcome Wagon-Crystal. Crystal was a tall, ski
“I’m sorry, sweetie, that’s all we got. You put ’em in the laundry that goes out tomorrow. They’ll probably come back.”
There were no pajamas for us, no shampoo, not even eating utensils. I was relieved to hear that we could shop commissary once a week, but of course my ability to do that was going to depend on someone in this building doing their job and completing my paperwork, which seemed like a fantasy.
I was thrilled to discover that there were two private showers, though I was disgusted when I saw them. Before surrendering I had been warned never, ever to go into the shower without shower shoes. My feet had not touched tile in almost a year, but I had no shoes. I was dying to bathe. I turned on the water and gingerly stepped out of my canvas slippers and into the gross shower stall, holding a little bar of motel soap. My skin crawled, and icy water stung my back as I tried to get clean.
NORA WAS cautious around me but was almost pathetically grateful that I wasn’t outright hostile. I certainly felt entitled to be nasty; when I was, she took it without resistance. Hester/A
Finally, I cut to the chase. “So why don’t you fill me in on everything that happened after we broke up in 1993?”
According to Nora, many months after my departure from her life, she did some soul-searching and tried to get out of the business with Alaji, who told her in no uncertain terms, no dice, and warned her of the consequences if she did walk. “I’ll always know where your sister is,” he threatened her. A while later, when a pair of drug couriers got arrested-separately in San Francisco and Chicago-things began to get messy and ugly, and of course the whole operation collapsed.
With her drug money Nora had built her dream home in Vermont -or at least it was her dream until a SWAT team of heavily armed federal agents arrived in jackboots to take her into custody. When the feds sat her down, she claimed, they already had detailed information about the whole enterprise. Someone-I thought probably her slimy business partner Jack-had been singing.
“Did they have my name?” I asked.
“Yes, they knew exactly who you were. But at first I told them you were just my girlfriend and you didn’t know anything.”
At this point it was hard to know what to believe. I had invested a lot of time and energy into hating Nora and elaborating fantasies of revenge. Her story was plausible, but it could easily be a lie. I believed that she felt terrible about the mistakes she had made, and when she looked across the table at her little sister, or talked about her elderly parents (who had not one but two children in prison), I felt bad for her in spite of myself. My brain and my guts were twisted, a snarled cat’s cradle that I would have to pick apart.
I was starting to understand what the Marlboro Man meant by “diesel therapy.”