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 Japan,” 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? Uh–oh—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 sex with the inmates.
One of the hardest things to take during my time at Coolis was the constant sexual harassment. It was verbal, it was physical, it was incessant. Many of the CO’s, not just Rohde, put their hands on your ass 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 breasts. 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 wrist–camera, but it was the language as much as the behavior that was demeaning. It was hard to accept the abuse passively, and it fueled both my rage and my fear.
Morrell brought me the wrist–camera 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 wristwatch 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 fifty–five 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 advertisement to clients.
At least the camera made me feel a modicum 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.
“Looking good, Cream,” CO Polsen said as I came into the rec room a few days later. “Like to see you in shorts. I bet that pussy of yours has seen plenty of action, so I’d fit right in.”
I moved past him without breaking stride or looking at him: Polsen had constituted himself an enemy, and right now the only defense I could come up with was to pretend he didn’t exist.
The problem had really begun over my fight in the shower: he’d been watching on the monitors and felt cheated by my taking out my assailants before anything serious got under way. But his hostility was exacerbated the night after I got my camera, when I was running a load of laundry. The laundry room lay beyond the rec room, so I was watching TV with some of the women while I waited on my clothes.
Polsen was one of the CO’s on duty. He abruptly called Dolores out of the room. The sudden slackness in her face and her dragging posture as she obeyed made me get up a few minutes later and follow after her into the laundry room.
Polsen was behind the door trying to pull down her jeans. Dolores was struggling to keep them up, hissing, “No, please don’t do this, please don’t do this, I’ll tell the lieutenant,” and he was laughing and saying she was dirt, no one believed her lies, but that if she did say something, he’d see she got into segregation so fast it would make her head spin. I had been practicing with my wristwatch and used it now, wishing I could tape him as well. Polsen looked up and I turned quickly and moved my clothes out of the washer. He let go of Dolores, who ran from the room back toward the prison wing. Polsen gave me a look that liquefied my hamstrings.
When I returned to the common room, the women in front of the television shrank from me: they all knew why Polsen had called Dolores away, and they had watched from the shadows the byplay that took place when I went into the laundry. None of them wanted Polsen to think they supported me.
Back in my cell I wrote down a verbatim account of Polsen’s language and what I’d seen, with the date and the time. I interleaved the pages with a copy of Cosmo, which I’d bought at the commissary as a cover for my notes. When Freeman’s intern came out the next day to tell me my trial date was set for the last week in September, I managed to slide the magazine to her in a flurry of exchanging documents. I asked her to take the magazine away with her and keep it for me. I wasn’t sure what use I’d make of my notes, but I didn’t want to leave them in my cell—we’d already been locked down twice for searches in my short time at Coolis.
Before she left, the intern asked if I was ready to post bail. It was hard to say no, but I wanted to get a look at the clothes shop. I said I’d give it one more week before throwing in the towel.
I was pretty sure at least one CO was going into rooms on our wing after lights out—it was the only explanation I could think of for the banging doors and cries that sometimes woke me in the night. But none of the women ever said anything. There were several pregnancies in the prison, I noticed, among women who had been inside for over a year—in one case six years.
When I asked about it during my letter–writing sessions, the women clammed up. One of them whispered to me in line at dinner later that someone named Cynthia spent a year in solitary for filing a report on a CO who raped her. The prison said she made up the charge to try to shorten her time. After that, people were more afraid than ever to complain. Usually, too, if they got you pregnant they gave you drugs. “They say, oh, your cycle out of balance, you take these. Then you sick for three days, a week, and you lose the baby.”
Chemically induced abortions, in a country that banned RU–486. How enterprising of the
Department of Corrections. I wondered who made the diagnosis and who dispensed the drugs, but we had gotten our trays and my informant scuttled across the floor to join her friends.
If Polsen decided to come into my cell after lights–out, what would I do? The thought made me lie tense in bed that night and for some nights after.
39 An Audience with Miss Ruby
At the start of my third week I was assigned to a kitchen shift, a miserable job, especially in summer. We lugged fifty–pound pots of food between stove and steam table, carried out mounds of refuse, slipped in grease on the filthy floor, got covered with burns from careless cooks flinging hot food around. The work paid sixty cents an hour. My coworkers were sullen and sloppy and made it harder to keep from getting injured.
The only job action available to Coolis workers was refusal to work. This led to a ticket, and enough tickets sent you to solitary confinement, but usually after your stint in segregation you got a new work assignment. Turnover was high in the kitchen, but I couldn’t afford time in segregation, so I grimly kept at my post.
“This isn’t a vacation resort,” the CO in charge would say if a woman complained of a burn or a sore back. “You should have thought of that before you thought a life of crime was fun. You’re not here for your health, but to learn a lesson.”
I had already learned that such medical care as existed was hard to come by. When a woman had hot grease spilled down her arm, the CO in charge of the kitchen upbraided her for crying over nothing. The next day she didn’t come in to work; I learned from the comments of the other women that her arm had become a mass of pustules in the night. She had been treated by the in–house “doctor,” a CO who had studied prenursing for a year at the local junior college before getting into Coolis.
The stench of the overboiled food and the sight of roaches and mouse droppings took away most of my appetite; if it hadn’t been for the fruit my clients brought me I don’t think I would have eaten. After a week in the kitchen I was so exhausted it was hard to remember why I’d decided to stay in jail instead of posting bail. I was lying on my bunk Friday night, trying to make up my mind whether to call Freeman and ask him to bail me out on Monday, when Solina came in to say that Miss Ruby had sent word over that she wanted to see me.
On my first day at Coolis, Cornish had sent me back to my cell with a reprimand because jail inmates were supposed to use recreation facilities at a different time than the prisoners, but I’d learned early that was a regulation the CO’s enforced only if they wanted an excuse to write you a ticket.
The main reason I hadn’t seen Miss Ruby in the rec room since Independence Day was her work schedule. She had one of the cushy jobs, the phone reservation desk for the Passport chain of motels and rental cars. While most prison jobs ran from nine to three, the reservation lines had to be staffed twenty–four hours a day. She’d been on the noon–to–six shift, and I hadn’t known to look in the rec room for her in the mornings.
A day earlier I’d written a letter to Rapelec Electronics for a woman, explaining why she was not able to take part in her job–training program and requesting that an opening be kept for her in September. The woman paid me with a box of six local tomatoes, the best food I’d eaten since my arrest. I took two of them as an offering and went with the woman who’d brought the message from Miss Ruby; Jorjette had grown up with one of her granddaughters.
It took some doing to get the guards to let Jorjette and me into the rec room in the morning. CO Cornish, on duty that morning, worked closer to the rules than Rohde or Polsen did on the afternoon shift. Jail inmates didn’t have recreation privileges until 3:00 P.M.
“Vic going to show me her basketball shot,” Jorjette whined. “You know everyone say she the best, she beat Angie. And we got kitchen duty in one hour; we gotta go now if we’re going at all.”
“We could do it another time,” I said. “Although another time I probably won’t have any tomatoes. Do you grow them yourself, Cornish?”
I held one out for him to look at. He admitted that gardening was his hobby but that his tomatoes hadn’t ripened yet.
“You have one hour down there, girls,” he finally said, accepting the tomato as he signaled to the man behind the bulletproof glass to release the lock on the jail–wing door.
When we got to the rec room, a woman CO I didn’t know was on duty. She was watching Oprah with a handful of women on the couch. Miss Ruby sat in the middle of the group, her iron–gray hair freshly cut and curled, shell earrings three or four times regulation size in her ears.
Her eyes flicked at Jorjette and me when we came in and pulled up chairs nearby, but she gave no sign of noticing us until Jorjette approached her during a commercial break and asked nervously how Miss Ruby was doing today.
Miss Ruby inclined her head, said as well as anyone could in this heat, too hot to go outside, but she longed for a breath of fresh air. Jorjette said, well, it was pretty hard on everyone but she knew Miss Ruby’s joints suffered real bad in the heat. Maybe she’d like a nice fresh tomato, to remind her of the fresh outdoor air?
“Cream here brought it for you special.”
Miss Ruby accepted the tomato and jerked her head toward the far end of the deal table. The CO stayed on the couch watching Oprah, and the handful of other women left us alone: Miss Ruby wanted privacy, Miss Ruby got privacy.
“I can’t make up my mind about you, Cream,” she said when we were seated. “Are you a fighter or a Good Samaritan? First you beat up a couple of gangbangers, but now I hear you spend your spare time writing letters for the girls. Some of them think you’re an undercover cop.”
I blinked. Of course in a way that was the truth, but I didn’t know Miss Ruby and I couldn’t trust my secrets to a stranger, especially one who seemed to be plugged in to the gossip pipeline as thoroughly as Miss Ruby was.
“If I’d known my life history mattered here, I’d have written it up on the bathroom wall,” I said. “I was arrested same as everyone else.”
“And that would be for what crime, I wonder?”
“You know the sad old story about the man who leaves his wife for a cute young thing? And the first wife, who worked hard and put him through school and scrimped so he could build his business, she gets left with the shirt on her back and not much more? And he gets the kids, because how can she give the kids a decent home when she doesn’t have any money and she has to be out at work all day?”
“I heard a bunch of versions of that story in my time.” She kept her eyes straight ahead, talking in a prison mumble out of the corner of her mouth.
“My twist on it is I figure the guy for about the meanest bastard in Chicago. So I take the oldest child. A boy, who’s overweight and sensitive, and Daddy likes to beat on him, make him cry, then beat on him some more for crying like a girl. Daddy had me arrested for kidnapping.”
“Uh–hunh. And you couldn’t make bail. Everyone says you got a real lawyer, not a PD. Not to mention, of course, your fancy education that lets you write all those letters.”
“Guy’s got a lot of important friends. The judge set bail at a quarter of a million. If your friends ran a financial check on me they could tell you why I couldn’t pull together that much money overnight.”
“And how’d you learn to fight like you do, taking out two big women in the shower?” she demanded. “Not to mention Angie, which I watched you do.”
“Same way Angie did,” I said softly. “On the streets of Chicago. Ninety–first and Commercial to be exact. But I was lucky. My mother wanted me to have an education, and she made me study when the other girls on my street were getting pregnant or doing drugs.”
Miss Ruby thought this over. “I don’t know whether to believe you or not. But I hear you’ve been asking questions about a young woman who used to be here. I hear you’ve been saying you want to talk to me about her. And so here I am, talking to you, wondering how you know her and if that’s the real reason you’re at Coolis.”
I sidestepped
the comment. “I never met Nicola Aguinaldo. I know her mother. Señora Mercedes is grateful to you for looking after Nicola.”
“Hmm. She’s not very grateful in person.”
“She doesn’t have any money. And she doesn’t have a green card. She’s afraid to come out here in case they inspect her documents and report her to INS, and she can’t write in English. But Nicola’s last letter to Señora Mercedes brought her great comfort, because Nicola told her mother you were keeping an eye on her.”
Miss Ruby inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment. “And how did someone like you come to be friends with Nicola’s mother?”
I smiled. “I didn’t say we were friends, but that I know her. Before my own arrest I was trying to help Señora Mercedes find out what happened to Nicola. You know that she died?”
Miss Ruby gave another brief dip of her chin.
“All the women say you know everything that happens in this prison. I want to know what happened to Nicola. How did she get to the hospital?”
“If you’re not a cop yourself, they put you here to talk to me.” She spoke with finality but didn’t try to move away from me.
“Cops don’t give a rat’s toenail for who killed a poor little girl who didn’t even have a green card to her name.”
“So who did put you in here?”
“You know who Robert Baladine is?” When she shook her head no, I explained that he owned Coolis and that Nicola had worked for him before she was arrested. “He’s the man I was talking about, and he’s got way more power and money than I ever will. He likes the idea of me being locked up in his prison.”
She finally looked at me directly, thinking over my story, which had the unusual virtue of being mostly true—even if it might leave her thinking Baladine was my ex–husband. “Nobody knows what happened to Nicola. I heard a lot of different stories, and I don’t know which is true. The CO’s said she had female difficulties and went into the hospital, where she ran away. Someone else said she got tangled up in one of the big machines in the clothes shop and got killed and the guards were scared they’d be punished for not turning the machinery off in time, so they dumped her body in Chicago. And some girls are saying she beat up on a CO, which is silly, because she wasn’t much bigger than a minute, let alone those men.”
Hard Time Page 32
