V.I. Warshawski: Hard Time Part 25

In the Big House The next four weeks were the hardest of my life. I hunkered down and tried to learn the ropes at Coolis-how to avoid being beaten up by my sisters in chains, how to b.u.t.ter up the CO's without having to have s.e.x with them, how to keep myself busy enough that the pervasive helplessness and boredom wouldn't drag me so far down I couldn't function.

I wanted to talk to Miss Ruby, to thank her for her help on Sunday, but mostly to find out what she could tell me about Nicola, and about getting work in the clothes shop. I let everyone I talked to know that I'd like to meet her, but except for a couple of times in the dining hall, where the CO's kept us firmly in place at the table, I didn't see her after that first day.

Freeman's visit did bring a material change in my physical comfort. True to his word, he sent his intern out with money for my account, along with my clothes allotment. The intern had a stack of legal doc.u.ments for me to read and sign. In the middle of them was a letter from Lotty. She begged me to post bail in lines of such loving concern I was hard put to stick to my resolve about staying, but in a postscript she added, I helped Freeman's secretary pack your clothes and mended various tears.

"She especially wanted you to know about a hole in the waistband to your shorts," the intern said primly.

Lotty was no seamstress. When I got back to my cell, I surrept.i.tiously picked apart an inch of the waistband seam. Tightly folded bills almost matched the khaki of the fabric. I pulled out a twenty before st.i.tching the seam shut again-it was the safest place to store money, and washing wouldn't hurt it any.

With my prison trust account set up, I was not only able to buy a toothbrush and soap at the commissary but also some cleanser to scrub out the sinktoilet unit in my cell. The cash I would keep for bribes, once I knew to whom and how to administer them.

Except for being able to buy overpriced, poorquality shampoo and soap, my first trip to the commissary was a disappointment. The women around me had talked about what they planned to do on their expeditions as if their weekly thirtyminute trip was an outing to Water Tower Place. I suppose the women found the trips exciting because they made a break in the routine. They were also our main contact with the outside world, which we could experience through magazines like Cosmo or Essence. Soap Opera Digest was also popular.

Besides magazines and toiletries, you could buy canned or packaged food, cigarettes, and artifacts made by inmates throughout the Illinois prison system.

A large number of male inmates seemed to like to embroider. We could get handkerchiefs, place mats, head scarves, even blouses with intricate designs of birds and flowers, brought in from Joliet and points south.

Also available were Mad Virgin Tshirts and jackets-the average age of the prison population was, after all, Lacey's target audience, and many of the inmates were fans. Curious, I inspected the labels. They read Made with Pride in the USA , so I didn't think Nicola Aguinaldo had bought the shirt she died in here. The commissary also stocked spinoffs from other Global favorites, including Captain Doberman and the s.p.a.ce Berets, which women liked to buy for their children.

On my first outing I bought cheap lined writing paper-the only paper the commissary carried-and a couple of ballpoint pens. When I asked the clerk if they had plain paper or rollerball pens, she snorted and told me to go to Marshall Field's if I didn't like the selection here.

When I got back to my cell, my roommate, Solina, apathetically watched me scrub the basin. She had been at Coolis only a week longer than me, and the fact that the sink was filthy when she got here meant it wasn't her job to clean it up.

"We'll take turns," I said, my voice bright with menace. "I'm getting it spickandspan, and that means tomorrow, when it's your turn, it will be easy for you to clean up."

She started to say she didn't have to obey orders from me, then remembered my prowess against Angie and said she'd think about it.

"We can control so few things in here," I said. "Keeping the place clean means at a minimum we can control the smell."

"Okay, okay, I already got the point." She stomped out of our cell down the hall to watch television on a small set belonging to an inmate who'd been awaiting her trial date for eleven months.

I had to laugh to myself, picturing the friends who've complained about my slovenly housekeeping over the years-they'd be astounded to find me laying down the law on hygiene to my roommate.

Besides making it possible for me to bathe, Freeman had also delivered my message to Morrell. On Thursday near the end of my first week, I got summoned to see him in the visitors' room.

My arrest had stunned him. He hadn't even known about it until he saw a paragraph in the Tribune on Sunday-Mr. Contreras, never fond of communicating with the men in my life, had been too rattled to call Morrell. Like Freeman, Morrell talked to me persuasively about all the reasons to leave Coolis, but unlike Freeman, he could see a point to my staying.

"Are you learning anything helpful?"

I grimaced. "Not about Nicola, so far. About the way people without power turn on each other because they feel too helpless to see who's really to blame for their daytoday misery-I'm learning way too much about that."

I leaned forward to talk more privately, but an alert CO made me back away the requisite arm's length-if we touched, Morrell might pa.s.s drugs to me. After five minutes of glaring scrutiny the CO decided I wasn't trying anything too heinous and turned her attention to another inmate. Only a handful of women got visitors on weekdays; it was hard to speak privately.

"There's a place called the Unblinking Eye where you can get a particular kind of watchcamera," I said in a prisonyard mumble as soon as the CO turned her attention away. "If you buy one for me and bring it on a Sat.u.r.day or Sunday when there's a mob here, we ought to be able to make a switch."

"Vic, I don't like it."

I smiled provocatively. "I don't think they'll do anything to you if they find you with it-except bar you from visiting me."

He gave an exasperated sigh. "I'm not worried about that but about you, you fool."

"Thanks, Morrell. But if I ever manage to get into the clothes shop, I may see something that I should doc.u.ment. And frankly, there's plenty else to record here between the inmates and the guards."

Morrell gave me another quizzical look and said he'd see what he could do. He switched the talk to neutral matters-my neighbor, who was so distraught at the idea of me behind bars that he wouldn't make the trip to see me. He gave me news of Lotty, of the dogs, of all the people whose welfare I cared about and couldn't attend to. He stayed an hour. I felt a wrenching desolation when he left. I went down to the rec room, where I shot baskets for an hour, until I was wet with sweat and too tired to feel sorry for myself.

When I went back upstairs to shower, the CO at the entrance, a man named Rohde, seemed to react oddly. He looked at me, then got on the phone. I had to wait five minutes before he let me in, and then it was only when two other CO's joined him. I wondered if they had somehow monitored my conversation with Morrell and were going to put me on report, but Rohde watched me go past the guard station without saying anything. Still, he seemed to have an air of suppressed excitement about him, and he was joined behind the doublegla.s.s walls by the other two men. The video cameras were trained on the shower rooms as well as all other common areas, but I had already figured out which shower head cut the camera angle so that it could only catch me if I stood directly under it. If he'd called his buddies for a peep show, I figured I knew how to avoid providing it.

I was jumped almost before I got into the shower room. Two women, one from the front, one from the rear. Rohde's manner had put me on guard, otherwise they might have destroyed me. I dropped my supplies and towel and kicked, all in one motion. I was lucky; my foot caught the woman in front square on the patella, and she grunted and backed away.

The one behind me had my left shoulder in a steel grip. She was pulling me toward her. I gasped-she had something sharp that sliced across my right shoulder. I hooked my feet around her ankles and used her own force to catapult her forward. The wet floor made it hard to get a purchase and I slipped and fell with her. I chopped across her right wrist before she could recover and forced her to let go of her weapon.

The one I'd kicked was closing in on me. I rolled over on the moldy floor and got up into a crouch. She flung herself at me before I could kick the weapon away. She had her hands around my neck. I held on to her shoulders for leverage and swung both knees into her stomach. She squawked in pain and let go of me.

The woman with the weapon was behind me again. I was winded; I'd already been working out for an hour and didn't know how much longer I could keep fighting.

When she lunged at me I ducked. It was the wet floor that did the rest. She lost her footing, scrabbled to gain it, and careened so hard against the concrete wall that she stunned herself. Her partner saw her fall and suddenly shouted for help.

The guards appeared so fast I knew they must have been on their way as soon as the woman knocked herself out.

"She jumped me! She jumped Celia, too, and knocked her out!"

Rohde grabbed me and held my arms behind me. Polsen, the CO who'd joined him at the video monitor, stood nearby but didn't touch my a.s.sailant.

"Nonsense," I panted. "Celia is lying there with something in her hand that gave me this cut on my neck. And as for you, whoever you are, if you were waiting to take a shower, where the h.e.l.l is your towel or your soap? As you two CO's know, because you were watching all this on your monitor."

"You stole them from me."

"Those are my things on the floor there. Where are yours?" I demanded.

At that point CO Cornish appeared. He was the fairestminded of the CO's on our wing.

"You fighting again?" he asked me.

"The woman on the floor there cut me with something when I came into the shower room," I got my story in quickly. "She still has the razor or whatever she used in her right hand."

The woman was beginning to stir. Before Rohde or Polsen could move, Cornish bent over and pulled a strip of metal from her.

"She belongs on the prison wing. As does the other one. I'm putting all three of you on report. Warshawski, if I catch you in one more fight you're going into segregation. And you two, off you go to your own quarters. How did you get in here, anyway?"

Rohde was forced to let me go. He and Polsen escorted my a.s.sailants off the floor. Cornish looked at my neck and told me to go to the infirmary for a teta.n.u.s shot. It was the closest he was going to come to acknowledging that I'd been jumped, but it eased the injustice of the whole situation slightly.

"I'd like to wash off first," I said.

Cornish waited in the hall while I picked up my shampoo and towel from the filthy floor. I took off my shirt and bra and washed off under the shower most remote from the video monitor. Cornish took me in an elevator down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, which I'd never seen, and waited while I got my shot. The woman on duty put some antibiotic ointment on the wound in my neck. It hadn't gone deep enough to require st.i.tches, which was fortunate, since she didn't have the equipment to put me back together.

Cornish took me back to my cell and told me to be very careful where I walked at night. Everyone on my wing seemed to know about the attack. In fact, they seemed to have been warned away from the showers when I came up from my workout.

"You're in trouble now," Solina said, gloating. "Rohde's f.u.c.king one of the Iscariots. He got those two to jump you out of revenge for Angie. And he put money on them."

When we stood at attention for our predinner head count, Rohde handed me a ticket. He had written me up for instigating a fight that injured two other inmates. My hearing would come in a month, after the captain had reviewed the charge. Great. Now Captain Ruzich would realize I was one of his inmates. As I studied the ticket I got my one gleam of hope: Rohde had put my name down as Washki. Maybe the fact that none of the CO's could p.r.o.nounce my last name, let alone spell it, would save my b.u.t.t.

Miss Ruby stopped me after dinner and told me she was disappointed in me, that she didn't think fighting was the right way to solve my problems inside. "The women tell me you're old enough to be a mother to most of them. This isn't the way to look after the young ones or set them an example."

I pulled down my Tshirt to show her the oozing wound in my neck. "Should I have turned the other cheek until I was cut to ribbons?" I demanded. She gave a snort that was half a gasp but wouldn't stay to discuss the point.

After that I began to wonder if the attack in the shower would make it impossible for me to learn anything about Nicola. I even began to wonder if Baladine knew I was here, if he'd emailed the warden from France and told him to stage the attack. Only the realization during the next few days that none of the CO's treated me any better or worse than the rest of the inmates made me decide that was a paranoid fantasy.

The fight in the shower grew as it was told around the prison. I had moves like you saw in the kung fu movies. I had given the two Iscariots subtle blows that stunned them and then pulled a knife to finish them off when the guards intervened. Some of the women wanted to attach themselves to me as a protector, but others, especially the real g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers, thought they wanted to fight me. I managed to talk my way out of several confrontations, but it added to my tension to have to be on my guard during recreation time or in the dining room. Any time I saw signs that anger was about to spill over into combat, I'd leave the area and return to my cell.

Fights were always breaking out, over things that might seem trivial to you if you'd never had this experience, the experience of being crammed behind bars with a thousand other people, without privacy, at the mercy of whatever whims the guards might feel that day. Someone stole someone else's body lotion, or pushed in front of her in line, or spoke disrespectfully of a relative, and fists and handmade weapons flashed out in an instant.

People also fought over clothes. You got a replacement bundle only every five years in prison, so a torn shirt or lost b.u.t.ton mattered terribly. Women paired off as lovers and had lovers' quarrels. Various street gangs besides the Iscariots marked territory and tried to control such things as the flow of drugs.

After my fight in the shower room, my roommate became more nervous around me than ever. At least fear made her cut down on her smoking and made her halfheartedly clean out our sink every few days, but I learned she had begged for a transfer, terrified that I would jump her in the night.

Her att.i.tude changed dramatically on my second Thursday, when I returned from my workout to find her bunched up in bed howling with misery.

"Caseworker is trying something with my children," she screamed when I asked what was wrong. "Moving them to foster care, saying I'm unfit; even if I get out of here I can't keep them. I love those children. No one can say they ever went to school without socks and shoes. And that caseworker, did she ever come watch me cooking dinner for them? They eat a hot meal every night of the week."

"You don't have a mother or sister who could take them in?"

"They're worse off than me. My mother, she's been high since the year I start first grade, and my sister, she's got eight children, she don't know where they're at from one end of the week to the next. My aunt down in Alabama, she'd take them if I send them, but the caseworker won't listen to me about my aunt.

And who will give me money for my children's bus fare if the caseworker's against me?"

I leaned against the wall-of course we didn't have a chair. "You could write again, showing that you have a proper home for them to go to and pledging your willingness to go into rehab as part of a plea bargain."

She looked at me suspiciously. "What do you know about plea bargains and rehab?

And how can someone like me who can't afford a lawyer, how can I get into a rehab program? You think they grow on trees for poor people? The only rehab for someone like me is doing time."

I sidestepped how I knew about things like plea bargains and concentrated on how she could find one of the few remaining publicly funded drug programs. The good programs have long waiting lists, of course. I wondered whether Solina was a serious addict who would promise reform to get out of prison time but not really try to quit: drugs were readily available in Coolis, as in many jails and prisons, and some of her more violent mood swings, with periods of agitated withdrawal, told me that Solina had found her way to an inhouse crack supplier.

But drafting a letter for her would give me something to do, besides shooting baskets and occasionally practicing my singing.

Solina was touchingly awed by the finished letter. We didn't have access to computers or typewriters, but I printed it carefully for her on the cheap lined paper available in the commissary. She read it over and over, then took it down the hall to the cell where she spent most of her day and showed it to the group around the television. A number of inmates studied law books in the library and filed complaints and appeals for themselves or their friends, but most came to Coolis with such minimal literacy that they couldn't put their learning into appropriate language.

The word of that letter and my special knowledge spread fast: over the weekend, women began visiting my cell with requests for letters-to the State's Attorney or their public defender, to different welfare agencies, the children's caseworkers, the employer, the husband or boyfriend. If I would write they would get me anything I wanted-cigarettes, reefer, c.o.ke, crack, I didn't do drugs?

Then alcohol, chocolate, or perfume.

If I didn't accept payment I'd look like a patsy or a phony. I said I'd write a letter in exchange for fresh fruit or vegetables-much harder to come by in Coolis than drugs.

It was my letterwriting that really saved my hide in Coolis. The women I helped began const.i.tuting themselves into an informal set of watchdogs, warning me when trouble was lurking.

My letters also began to make it possible for me to ask questions about Nicola and the clothes shop.

38.

Prisoners in Cell Block H Whether you were in jail or prison, if you were at Coolis for more than two weeks you had to work. A woman lieutenant named Dockery, who was strict but considered fair by most of the inmates, made up job rosters. The newest arrivals got kitchen or cleaning duty, the lowest paid and least popular. Kitchen duty, as far as I could make out, had to be the worst, working with grease and heat and heavy pots, but cleaning the showers and other common rooms would come a close second.

The most coveted jobs were in telemarketing and hotel reservations. The pay was the best and you didn't have to lift anything heavy. But that kind of work only went to prison inmates. In management's eyes, those of us in jail awaiting trial wouldn't be around long enough to go through the training-or, more to the point, for our names to move to the top of the long waiting list for the cushiest jobs.

Of course what I was most interested in was the clothes shop. When I was in line at the dining hall or working out in the rec room, or in my cell writing letters for women, I kept trying to find someone who worked there or who roomed with someone who worked there. Everyone had a different story about it, and no one wanted to work there.

"But I knew one woman, Nicola, she wrote her mom that the pay was really good,"

I said one day in the rec room when several women were watching me shoot baskets.

They didn't play themselves, but they were hoping someone who did play would show up-watching and betting on games was a popular pastime. One of the women asked who Nicola was.

"She was that girl from China who ran away," one woman said.

"She wasn't from China, it was some other place over there, like maybe j.a.pan," someone named Dolores chimed in.

"Philippines," I suggested, jumping up for the ball as it banged off the rim. "I know her mother, and she said Nicola wrote she was really happy to have a job in the clothes shop."

"Of course, if she wrote it in a letter home," Dolores snorted. "They don't let you say nothing bad about it, or it won't get past the censors. One woman, she worked there, she was crying all the time, they treat you too rough there."

The third woman said they only took foreign girls in the shop; they worked them to death and then brought in more foreign girls as replacements.

"Oh, don't be stupid," Dolores said. "They use foreign girls because they know foreigners won't complain in case their children get deported."

"Yes, but don't you remember Monique? She was from Haiti, and she said the back room was foreign girls on death row. They're all in segregation, and the CO's bring them over in the morning in a locked van to work and then take them back at night."

It was a startling notion, but I said I didn't think there was a death row at Coolis.

"Maybe not," the friend said stubbornly, "but still, there's something spooky over there. Maybe it's because they don't let Americans work there. It's all Mexicans and Chinese and-where did you say Nicola was from? Uhoh-Polsen's looking at us queer; better go to our cells for head count."

This last she muttered out of the corner of her mouth in the prison mumble everyone mastered in their first few days. CO Polsen was always looking at women "queer," when he wasn't outright touching or threatening to touch us.

Polsen was one of the CO's that I tried to avoid, but of course the guards had enormous power in our lives. If they took a dislike to you they wrote you up-gave you a ticket, which could result in anything from a loss of commissary privileges to a stint in segregation. Women they liked they brought gifts for, ranging from better cosmetics than you could get in the commissary to drugs. But the women they liked had to pay a price for that attention. Rohde, sleeping with one of the Iscariots, wasn't the only CO having s.e.x with the inmates.

One of the hardest things to take during my time at Coolis was the constant s.e.xual hara.s.sment. It was verbal, it was physical, it was incessant. Many of the CO's, not just Rohde, put their hands on your a.s.s when you were waiting in line for dinner. When they searched you after you had a visitor, they would linger a long time on your b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I had to learn to hold myself very still, very aloof, not act on the impulses of a lifetime to break an arm or separate a rib. If I saw something blatant I tried to photograph it with my wristcamera, but it was the language as much as the behavior that was demeaning. It was hard to accept the abuse pa.s.sively, and it fueled both my rage and my fear.

Morrell brought me the wristcamera from the Unblinking Eye on my second Sunday in Coolis. In the crowd of women and children in the visitors' room, we managed to exchange my wrist.w.a.tch for the camera model. I now had a watch that could take pictures, although I hated seeing mine go out the door with Morrell-my father's mother gave it to him when he graduated from the police academy fiftyfive years ago.

The tiny camera had cost over fourteen hundred dollars. Freeman was paying my bills while I was locked up, but I wondered how I'd ever pay him back-my prison time wasn't a good advertis.e.m.e.nt to clients.

At least the camera made me feel a modic.u.m of control over the crazy world I was inhabiting. I started taking pictures of some of the worst outrages I saw, but I would have needed the video model I took to Georgia to capture the verbal abuse.