by Greg Barth
N INETEEN
Selena
AT THREE A.M. a guard opened the door and called for me to come forward.
I grabbed one of Gabby’s cigarettes and lit it. I got out of bed and went straight to the toilet. I dropped my prison khakis and sat. I wasn’t about to take any chances. I sat there smoking and doing my business.
The guard waited impatiently. He was a short man with a well-maintained mustache. I concluded he was a prick from the way he stared at me while I sat on the toilet. I watched him watching me, took my time, smoked that cigarette down to the filter.
When finished on the toilet I went to the door.
“Come with me, Carson.” The guard grabbed me by the elbow.
I stepped out of the room and waited for him to close the door.
He came up behind me and said, “The next time a guard calls for you to come forward, you get your ass in gear. You hear me?” He shoved me hard from behind.
I wasn’t expecting the push. My feet hadn’t recovered from the aches and numbness from the previous day’s treatment. I lost balance and pitched forward from the shove. I brought my hands up to protect myself, but I couldn’t move fast enough and fell face first against the floor. My nose still sore from Chav’s punch, felt like it was broken. My upper front teeth banged the tile floor, splitting my lip.
I pushed myself up to my knees. I could see blood already pooling on the dirty floor, long strings of it dripped from my nose and mouth. I spit a few times. I probed at my teeth with my tongue. They felt okay.
“Ah, shit,” the guard said from above me. “That’ll get on the YouTube and everybody’s gonna start hating on cops again. Abuse of power. Police brutality. All that leftwing, crybaby bullshit. Oh, wait. There’s no cameras here.” He put his foot against my ass and pushed me hard back down to the floor.
I hated this bastard.
“Jesus, Carson. What is your fucking problem this morning, huh? Get the fuck up. You on drugs?”
I pushed myself up again and turned my head to the side. Through the large, steel mesh-reinforced Plexiglas door to the cell, I could see Gabby, awake and looking at me. I smiled at her through the blood and waved.
I got up to my feet. I didn’t say a word to the guard. I wanted to, but the deck was stacked in his favor.
Fucker.
He ushered me down to a shower room. I went inside, stripped, turned on the tepid water. It was the first time I’d been able to shower in relative privacy since I was arrested. He said I had exactly five minutes.
When I came out of the shower, a female guard met me and gave me a jumpsuit with the name of the county correctional center printed on the back.
“I’m a federal prisoner,” I said. “What about my khakis?”
“We don’t have any of those. You have to wear these.” She had a gruff, scotch and Marlboro’s voice. She was short and had red hair with gray roots showing. There were heavy bags under her eyes.
“This jumpsuit is red. Everyone else has orange.”
“We have plenty of red. We use those for pedophiles, rapists, child murderers. It helps us know who we’re dealing with.”
“Where am I going?”
“How the hell should I know? My advice is, if you have something they want, give it to them. Trust me on this, okay? They’re going to wear you down.”
“They can’t keep me in transport forever. I’ll eventually get where I’m going.”
“You think you’re going somewhere? They’ll take you all over this country, girl. I’ll count the laps as I see you come by here.”
I put the red jumpsuit on. Much too large for me.
I was taken to the bullpen, a large holding cell with wooden benches along each of its concrete walls. I felt like a clown in my giant suit. The wall facing out to the hallway was barred. The female guard opened the door and put me inside.
There were maybe twenty men inside the cell with me. From what I could tell, they were in three groups. One corner was occupied by the skinheads and rednecks. There was an older, professional looking gentleman in the group with them who looked scared shitless. Along the back wall, a large group of African American men. I made out Harry and Hornival. Hornival made eye contact with me and gave his head a slight shake. I got the message, choose the group you join carefully. Along the far wall there was a small group of Hispanic men.
I was the only woman in the room. I guess I made up the fourth group all by myself. I didn’t move away from the door, didn’t know where to go. I had two friends in the room, but I was afraid to join them.
Every eye in the room stared at me. I looked down at the floor.
I stood there like that for what felt like an hour. I looked up every now and then. Some of the men were just staring holes through me. I never felt more self-conscious in my life. I’ve stood on stage naked before—many times—demanding the attention of men. Here, in this setting, with these men, I could do without it.
I heard movement behind me. I turned around to look out through the gaps in the bars. Three male guards approached the bullpen. Two carried a wooden box. They walked up to the door and put the box down on the floor. They each reached into the box and I heard the sound of rustling chains as they sorted through the contents. Every few seconds they’d bring out a pair of handcuffs and drop them with a clank on the floor. In a matter of seconds a large pile of them formed. The guards sorted through the rest of the box and tossed leg-irons into one pile by the wall and waist-chains in another. The sound of the chains and shackles being tossed around was jarring.
My ankles already hurt, and I wasn’t even wearing leg-irons yet.
The third guard approached the door and called a name.
An older man in the back corner came forward. He had a long gray beard, looked like a biker to me.
“Excuse me, miss,” he said as he approached me.
I moved out of the way and watched. There was a long, narrow gap in the bars, and he put his hands through that gap. One of the guards put handcuffs on him and opened the door for him to step out. They applied leg-irons and a waist-chain. He was then moved down the hall, around a bend, and out of my view. I could hear his chains rustling against the floor as he walked farther down the unseen hallway.
They called other names and the process was repeated one at a time. The piles of chains grew smaller, and the bullpen was less crowded.
When they called my name, I approached the door and put my hands through the crack. I saw that my wrists were red and swollen. The guard fastened the cuffs tight around my wrists and opened the door. I stepped out and was fitted with leg-irons and waist-chain.
Another guard ushered me down the hall. It was difficult walking in the shackles both due to the pain and the restricted movement the devices allowed.
My mouth tasted like blood. My nose was clotted with it, couldn’t draw breath through either nostril.
I was told to line up along the wall with the men waiting there. I was told I wasn’t permitted to speak while in line.
I stood against the wall and waited while the others were processed. The hallway was long and narrow. The line started at a locked exit door and continued down the hall to the turn that led to the bullpen. Two guards were in the hall with us while the others processed the remaining men in the bullpen. Once one side of the hallway was full, they lined the men up on the other side.
Once everyone had been processed out, the doors were opened and we were taken one at a time to the bus. By the time I got on board, the bus was half full. The bus was “color coded,” the occupants assigned seats according to race.
I was hoping they would sit me with Harry or Hornival. They didn’t.
“You’re like a little Snow White,” one guy said as I passed. I didn’t look at him. “Yo, I gotcha seat right here, Snow White.”
I was taken to the very back of the bus and put in the back seat. They put no one in the seat next to me.
I was alone.
Before the bus pulled away, a guard ente
red carrying one of the black box stiffeners. He walked down the long aisle in the middle of the bus straight to me. He put the box on my cuffs, once again rendering my hands completely immobile.
None of the men on the bus were given this treatment. It was my very own, special Fuck You from somebody out there who had the power to do it.
T WENTY
Selena
I’VE BEEN THROUGH some rough patches in my thirty years of life, but the weeks that followed leaving the prison were some of the worst.
Every day was much the same. The rigid routine was repeated. The locations changed, the people changed, the vehicles changed, but the process was the same. They awoke me at three AM. If I was lucky, I got a quick shower. Then off to the bullpen to process out and prep for boarding. I spent anywhere from sixteen to twenty hours shackled in some sort of moving vehicle, a van or a bus. Sometimes I was alone in a separate passenger compartment in a van, other times I was with other prisoners. Occasionally I was in a van with only a mesh partition separating me from the transport team. More often than not, I was on a bus filled to maximum capacity.
But every day, they moved me.
What was it Hornival had called it? Diesel therapy.
I spent each night in a different county jail. I think they went out of their way to find the worst facilities they could. Dirty, overcrowded, administrated by sadists.
I might get to brush my teeth and shower. No hot meals, but I didn’t care. I perfected the art of fasting, eating primarily on the weekends when I might get to spend more than a few hours overnight in a cell. I was determined not to soil myself on the long drives. I drank enough to keep from being dehydrated but no more than that. I learned just what my body needed. I had the occasional accident, but so did everyone else being transported. I never got used to the smell on the buses.
On the rare day that they didn’t use the stiffener on my handcuffs, it felt like I won the lottery. The restraints were cruel. My feet suffered the most—they swelled up, my toes numb, the soles of my feet tingling and burning all the time, even hours after the leg-irons had been removed. My toenails turned black, and one by one they fell away. My ankles stayed raw and bloody. I wore the socks they issued me, but they were thin and offered little protection. Sitting all day with the leg-irons on was tough, but shuffling a few steps in them was even worse.
My hands suffered too. My wrists ached constantly and my fingers numbed. I developed large, hard knots on my wrists. I was unable to light cigarettes sometimes when I had them. And if I could get them lit, I had trouble holding onto them with my lifeless fingers.
I spent hours at a time during those long days on the bus with my eyes closed, willing my mind to be somewhere else.
Sometimes I’d get to sit next to someone on the road, and we could talk. More often than not I was one of the few women being transferred, and I was subjected to catcalls from the men as I was paraded down the aisle to my seat. Every step down the aisle of the bus was like a piece of me being torn away and taken forever. Every catcall, every jeer, every criticism of my body, every comment about how “drugs are bad—just look at her,” made me feel like a hated thing. A depressed, immovable, hated object. Defenseless.
It ate away at me little by little. The steady, cumulative effect was devastating.
Some nights in the county jails I slept on a bed, but most nights I slept on the floor. I spent one entire weekend in the hole, because there was nowhere else to put me. On another night I stayed in the drunk tank. I had no blanket that night and had to sleep on a cold concrete slab. The smell from the puke pipe in the center of the floor was horrid. I guess the drunk tank is bad no matter how you get there. I’d spent nights in them a few times when I was younger. Based on my experience, it’s far easier to be in the drunk tank if you’re actually drunk.’
Fights were common in the county jails. I was the subject of a few. One night, after I’d been on the road a couple of weeks, I was sitting on the edge of a bunk eating my stale dinner from a paper bag. One of the inmates approached me. She was tall and probably tipped the scales somewhere north of 300 pounds. She had dull red hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“What makes you think you get to sit on the bunk, huh?” she said to me.
I looked up at her. I was exhausted. I could barely keep my eyes open. They felt puffy. I didn’t even have enough energy left to get myself worked up into a bitchy mood. “There’s room for you too,” I said.
“What if I want to stretch out?”
I chewed on my apple. “Seriously?” I said.
“Yes. Seriously. You don’t belong here nohow. These bunks are already taken by people that are supposed to be here. Get your ass on the floor.”
“This isn’t your bunk,” I said. “I can tell.”
“And just how do you know that?”
“Cause it’d be broken if you sat on it,” I said.
Laughter erupted in the cell.
Miss ponytail didn’t care for that. She grabbed me by my jumpsuit and ripped me from the bed. She pivoted and flung me across the room. I collided with the bars on the cell door and bounced back onto the floor.
I wanted to just lie there, I was so tired. I watched as a stream of blood spread across the nasty floor. I’d smashed my nose against the cell bars.
The brute came over and sat on me. “You don’t get to bleed on our floor, bitch.” She took me by the hair and pushed my face into the floor where the blood was. She ground my face back and forth in it. The grit scratched at my lips. “Lick it up. You lick it up or I’ll make you lick the whole floor clean. Then I’ll make you lick the toilet clean.”
She kept rubbing my face against the grimy floor until a couple of guards came in and pulled her off me. I got to spend that night in the hole too, and I didn’t get to finish my dinner.
In most jails I could get a cigarette, my sole comfort of the day. That and the thin army blanket they issued me and a few precious hours unshackled from the chains and cuffs.
Not all of the guards were dicks, but enough of them were. I suffered any and every indignity imaginable, from being pushed around and cursed at by guards, struck in the face by them, to male inmates masturbating while looking at me. I wasn’t much to look at anymore with my ratty, unwashed hair and gaunt face. I had dark circles under my eyes all the time. But there was always some guy leering at me, grabbing himself, or just full blown jerking off with abandon. It got to the point that I didn’t even look away. I was so tired and had seen so much, nothing mortified me anymore.
I began to look at my body differently. I spent more time going through strip searches and body cavity checks than I did on the toilet having normal functions. I began to think of my orifices as the guards did—nature’s pockets. I most definitely stopped thinking of my vagina as anything sexual. No orgasms were had at any point during my torture therapy.
This wasn’t something you could grow used to, or adapt to. Every day added to the sum total of suffering, making it worse and worse day by day. The mental toll was cumulative. Everybody has a breaking point. I grew closer to that breaking point with each passing day.
I grew depressed. I thought daily of suicide. My body screamed for alcohol. I wasn’t lost in the system, I was lost in the universe.
When they chained me up each morning for the hours of travel in the van, I wanted to cry. I wouldn’t, but I wanted to. Being forced to sit completely immobilized day after day is horrible. The smallest thing, like wanting to scratch your nose, or adjust your hair, could irritate you for hours.
I traveled to so many jails I lost track of them. When I hit a couple of them twice, any illusion I had that this would end at some fixed, finite point—a point in the future that grew closer with each passing tick of the clock—was erased. I would never arrive at a destination. The flimsiest hope that they were actually taking me SOMEWHERE ended the first time I spent a night in a jail I’d been in before.
Who could possibly hate me this much? What had I done that was this b
ad? What bit of information do they think I have? How could something this cruel be legal?
The sheer absurdity of it all weighed on me, and that weight grew heavier as time passed. The calendar worked against me, each day taking its toll. Time spent on the bus subtracted from my overall mental stability until there was nothing left. I would snap. It didn’t really matter how long it took. It was going to happen. They were never going to run out of days, but I was going to run out of mental competence. Even if you only subtract a small amount each day, given enough time, you’re going to get it all.
Every time I stepped onto a bus or into the back of a van, I asked myself, is this the day you snap?
At every jail, I asked for my lawyer. Sometimes I was told I could call her when I arrived at my final destination. Oh, I’ve heard that one a hundred times, but it always cracks me up. Hilarious. Other times I was told they’d tell her where I was. I tried to argue that I’d be gone by the time she arrived. That was generally met with a shrug. Nobody cared. Why would they?
I hated them all. Even the good ones.
I became sort of a legend in the jails. I would hear whispers of “that’s her” when I entered my cell for the night. Inmates went out of their way to make me comfortable, giving me cigarettes, the best bed, and offering to share anything they had with me.
Most of the time I had little to say to them. I was tired. I appreciated their comforts. I liked not having to lick my own blood off of the nasty floor. But the reality was, I was growing numb even to the best intentioned help.
I’ve always enjoyed getting high, but I preferred alcohol, marijuana, and coke—natural types of drugs. Things that were clean and not so complicated. Sometimes I liked pills. I had avoided things like meth and heroin for the most part.
When I was visiting the jails, though, near the end, I was taking anything and everything offered. I didn’t care what it was or what it was going to do to my body. I only wanted it for the medicinal effect of taking me someplace else mentally. I don’t know if this contributed to my overall mental breakdown or held it off longer.
