Out of Orange: A Memoir

by Cleary Wolters

  “I love you, Cleary.” I could tell my brother was crying by the way he pronounced his words so deliberately. I didn’t get to respond.

  The phone call was cut off and I turned away from the wall to find a rather large and angry woman staring me down as if I was on her phone, in her house, on her time. I was, but I didn’t know that yet. She picked the receiver up before I had even gotten clear of the stool in front of the phone, then slammed it against the plastic box on the wall. “No, you didn’t!” She held the receiver out to show me.

  There was evidence on the phone handle of the sweat I had broken out in while on the phone revealing the news to my parents that I was in jail. I had thoughtlessly failed to clean it off before this woman had picked it up. It was bad etiquette, and gross, like failing to wipe down a stationary bike in the gym. The angry woman starting going off, very loudly, about how nasty I was. I was a white trash bitch and a number of other not-so-niceties. I tried to wipe the receiver down with my shirt, but before I could make that mistake, a lady jumped from the line and handed me a wad of tissue.

  “She’s federal.” The tissue lady said this to the angry woman, who now had her arms crossed against her chest and was towering over me like a giant. She uncrossed her arms, stepped back, and apologized. It was the weirdest thing. The nice lady who had saved me with the tissues told me she would come by my bunk when she got off the phone and give me the lowdown on “this fucking romp-a-room.” She was referring to my temporary new home. “Don’t talk to these imbecile bitches.” She pointed her chin in the general direction of the TV room, a space shared by the inhabitants of a handful of rooms in our wing of the Chittenden County Jail where everyone sat, glued to an episode of Jerry Springer.

  There was a desk against the wall near the phone bank, home to an overly made-up woman in a uniform. She had a long chain attached to her belt that had so many keys on it, it passed for a gaudy accessory, rather than a functional collection of keys. From what I could tell, her job was the sitter at the desk and the keeper of fire. I had literally jumped for joy that morning when I’d arrived there after my brief engagement in the courthouse, feeling suicidal, homicidal, and overdressed and overheated in my multilayered travel outfit. When I first saw her go to a doorway separating the sitting room from a very small grassy triangle outside, where she lit the cigarette of either an astonishingly young girl or a dwarf, I had nearly cried I was so happy to get to smoke. I had learned that smoking cigarettes was permitted when that door was open. Lighters and matches, however, were forbidden. In order to smoke the permitted cigarettes, the guard had to light them for us.

  I asked the keeper of the fire where the chapel was located. She told me it was closed. I was not, by any means, a religious individual. But in much the same way chocolate pudding and mashed potatoes are comfort foods, I found that religious icons, churches, and priests could be soothing, just without all the calories. It probably had something to do with being raised by my father, the almost-priest, and my guilty Catholic mother, and then spending all that time in Catholic school with the nuns. Whatever the cause, Mom’s suggestion had given me something constructive to do the next day if I was still there.

  Two weeks later, when two marshals finally arrived to whisk me away to California, my bunkie inherited most of the commissary I had just received, my sneakers, and a couple of bits of precious comfortable clothing that a friend from Brattleboro had brought to me. Even though a lot of what my bunkie had counseled me about was useless bullshit, she’d also had a lot of commonsense advice for me that was priceless.

  She had already completed a five-year federal sentence but had screwed up on the last year of her federal probation. She blamed this on her being reassigned to a new officer for her supervision. She said this new officer turned out to be a nut job. He got her fired from her job by repeatedly harassing the people she worked with. He then followed her from that job to her next job and did much the same, by walking up to a table she was taking an order from at lunch rush and handing her a cup to go pee in. While she was in the bathroom filling the little portable specimen cup, he asked both her manager and the owner of the restaurant for their driver’s licenses. He told them he needed to run a background check on them because my bunkie could not associate with other felons. She lost that job too. She gave up and turned herself in to the probation office. She told them she was unable to comply with the employment requirement.

  I flipped my wig while listening to her tell the story. I asked why she had not gotten a lawyer involved, reported the guy to his superiors, anything other than what she had done. She had laughed at my inexperience with the system, which was about to swallow me whole. I prayed she was wrong. I prayed that her story was bullshit, that she and her hippie-looking husband, who I had seen with her in the visiting room, were addicts or something. Maybe she had fucked up and gotten high and didn’t want to admit to being so stupid. What she’d said couldn’t be true. Otherwise, I could not completely discredit the one piece of advice she’d repeated more than any: “Don’t cooperate with those motherfuckers. They’re evil.” I hadn’t told her that I was relying on them to protect my sister, my family, and all my friends.

  Two marshals—a man and a woman in their midfifties—picked me up that day. They drove a burgundy SUV unmarked by the presence of family life, like Opie’s vehicle had been. It seemed like they were an older married couple or they could have been longtime professional partners. The woman shackled me while the man handled the paperwork for their parcel, me. The woman was very apologetic about the shackles but assured me I would be happy that she was the one who put them on and not her partner. I told her about the bruises I had gotten from my last adventure in shackles. I shuffled into the backseat of their van and realized she hadn’t been any more generous with the room she’d left for my ankles in the cuffs than the previous guy had been. We started our drive.

  About two hours into the drive, I asked them where we were going. My query triggered a conversation between the two of them, but not an answer. They were trying to decide where to stop and grab something to eat quickly. They chose a McDonald’s drive-thru. They placed their order and turned to me as an afterthought. “Do you want something?”

  “Yes, please. Thank you.”

  “Okay. Don’t tell on us.” She smiled, a weird, crooked, toothy grin, and her hairline jumped backward when she did so.

  “Okay,” I responded blankly.

  “Add a small Coke, cheeseburger, and fries to that!” She yelled into the drive-thru’s intercom without asking me what I wanted.

  “Do you have to use the little girls’ room?” She made the weird smile again, and again her hairline moved as if she were wearing a wig that moved when she smiled.

  “How much longer till we get to where we are going?” I didn’t really have to go, but I could make it happen if we were going to be driving for much longer.

  “Yes or no. Do you have to go?” She was short with me and didn’t turn to me to add her big scary smile and wiggle-wig head trick.

  “Yes.” I wondered why she wouldn’t tell me where we were going.

  “Okay, that wasn’t so hard. Let’s eat while it’s hot. You’re not going to pee yourself, are you?” She laughed, turned, and did the freaky smile again.

  “No.”

  The guy pulled the SUV over into a parking space. She handed me my food and my Coke. I had never had to negotiate something so simple with handcuffs on. I was wearing my layers again, a long thick knit skirt for court over my cutoff sweat-shorts for leisure time. This made it difficult to place the cup of Coke between my legs and apply the right pressure without popping the plastic lid off. One near miss was enough to convince me not to try. I held on to the cup with one hand and ate with the other. I finished my food quickly, not wanting to be the holdup. When the lady was done with her lunch, she hopped out of the front seat and opened the sliding door.

  “Lunch is over. Let’s go.” She took the Coke from me and tossed it on the ground. I
slid over on the seat, twisted my feet out in front of me, intending to step down on the running board and then to the ground. The woman made a twirling motion with her finger at about the same moment I realized I could not step down with the shackles on my ankles the way they were. I turned around and backed out of the SUV without doing a face-plant and she took hold of my elbow. It dawned on me that we were going inside McDonald’s to use the restroom.

  “I can wait.” I didn’t want to be paraded in front of the people in the restaurant.

  “Trust me. Take care of this now or you’ll regret it later.” She nudged me forward and I followed her lead, focusing only on the ground in front of me and not any of the people we passed.

  She followed me into the bathroom but thankfully not into the stall itself. Getting my skirt, shorts, and underwear down was no problem, but getting them back up after I finished my business was almost impossible with the handcuffs and the chain wrapped around my waist.

  “Hurry up in there!” the lady barked out, and I heard another customer in the restroom object and say she wasn’t in any hurry. My escort laughed and told her we were late for a flight.

  “I can’t get my skirt up in the back.”

  “Open up.” She knocked on the door when she said this. I opened the door. She reached around my back and roughly pulled my skirt back up and pulled the chain out of the way. I laughed nervously; it was like she was hugging me.

  We finally arrived someplace about an hour later. I have no idea where, but it was past the Connecticut state line, an airfield of some sort—not a commercial airport, but there was a runway. It was surrounded by a few enormous airplane hangars. There were also several other SUVs, each with a pair of drivers like I had and passengers of their own. Two drivers to every sad sack like myself. I found it oddly comforting that there were other human beings on my side of this strange situation. Apparently, I was not getting my own private jet to San Francisco, as I had imagined.

  Another hour passed while I sat in the back of the SUV. During that hour, a white bus pulled up to join our little line of vehicles. Four armed guards hopped out of the bus and started unloading. There were about fifteen men packed in the little bus, all dressed in khaki scrubs. They were struggling with their shackles, trying to shuffle down the aisle, negotiate down the stairs, and disembark. As if on cue, a huge plane was landing in our deserted airfield, much bigger than the group of people assembling on the tarmac would require.

  When it finished taxiing and stairs were secured to its open doorway, a few militaristic marshals came down the stairs. A couple of them quickly positioned themselves around the plane. They were armed with M16s, dressed in dark blue tactical uniforms, and ready for war or a photo shoot. The other marshals had come down the stairs a little slower, dressed similarly but armed with clipboards and paperwork. These marshals waved the group of shackled men forward. The prisoners were led by the bus driver and their guards over to the plane. They were each subjected to a strange ritual they all appeared to know—lifting hair, sticking their tongues out, getting patted down—then they were prodded up the stairs, where they were greeted by a gigantic black woman. She wasn’t fat though. She was big, as in football-player, don’t-mess-with-me big. She had the meanest mug I had ever seen on a woman, and, well, I’m a lesbian.

  When it was my turn in line, the guy who had driven me there walked me over and handed my paperwork to one of the marshals, who scanned his clipboard for my name. He found it, dismissed my escort with a nod, and waved me off to his side. “Wait right there.” I waited by his side for everyone else to board the plane. I was soon joined by one of the armed marshals and then three other passengers like myself. According to the computer printout on his clipboard, I was listed as a flight risk. I told him it was a mistake. He laughed and fitted me with a nice little metal black box. It closed down over the intersection of the two handcuffs in such a way that it locked my wrists into a fixed position. He tightened my wrist cuffs and locked the box with a click. Ouch.

  I stepped onto the plane and took in the jet that the marshal who had arrested me had told me about, the jet he’d said the U.S. marshals were preparing for me. There had to be more than a hundred men, dressed in the same khaki scrubs the guys from the white bus had been wearing, already seated. There were a couple of women in the front seats and I was directed to sit next to an older woman having an exceptionally bad hair day. She was dressed in street clothes like me, black-boxed like me, but she looked far more ragged than I felt. She turned and looked at me curiously. “Where are we?”

  “Eyes forward, no talking, stay in your seat!” the big female marshal yelled as if she were trying to address a packed stadium, not the close quarters of our portable pokey.

  The lady next to me ignored the big girl and repeated her question a little impatiently this time. “Where are we?”

  “I’m not sure. I think we are in Connecticut.” I still didn’t know exactly where we were.

  She accepted my answer and let her head fall against the window, closing her eyes and I think falling asleep the minute her head settled.

  The guy in the seat behind me started pushing on the seatback. “Hey, why you got da box?”

  “No idea.” The big black marshal was walking back up the aisle, talking to one of her associates, so I ignored the persistent attempts of the guy behind me to get my attention and chat. He quit as soon as she passed by us and the plane started taxiing.

  The ragged lady next to me popped her head up without opening her eyes and said, “That’s right, baby. You don’t know nothing,” then slipped back into her nap.

  The cabin smelled like it was suddenly infused with dirty oil, and the plane shook as it picked up speed for the takeoff, until it vibrated like it might be about to fall apart just before we left the ground. The noisy vibration stopped and I could feel the wheels being mechanically retracted back into the plane’s belly with a squeal as something struggled to close. A little square plastic bag of water dropped onto my lap, then another onto the lap of my companion, as one of the marshals passed. I grabbed it before it slid off my lap and held on to it. I had never seen a bag of water before. The man sitting in the aisle seat across from me bit the bag, tearing it slightly with his teeth, and sucked the corner he had torn until the bag was empty. Then he made an awful face and dropped the bag on the floor between his knees. I decided the lady next to me had the right idea. I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep.

  14 Welcome to the Hotel California

  San Francisco to Dublin, California

  July 1996 to January 2003

  CLOCKS, WATCHES, AND CALENDARS are funny things. Every second is supposed to measure the exact same increment of time as every other second, right? Wrong. Some hours last days. At the same time, though, years can pass in a heartbeat, even if some of the days contained therein take forever. According to the calendar, almost seven years lapsed from the time I stepped onto that rickety jet full of convicts somewhere in Connecticut and the day I finally surrendered myself to the care of the Bureau of Prisons in Dublin, California. It took this much time for the wheels of justice to do what would normally have taken a few months. Two facts, in particular, best describe this long period: I was not living, nor was I doing my time. Time passed all the same. I turned forty, waiting.

  I was thirty-three when the marshals got me out to California after my arrest in Vermont; I was released from jail while the courts made up their mind about me, but not released from California or their clutches. I was ordered to stay in the very same halfway house in San Francisco that Bradley had been in two years earlier. The residents of my new home in the heart of the Tenderloin referred to the place as just “Turk Street.” That was not its real name, and its entrance was on Taylor Street. But it sits on the corner of Turk and Taylor Streets. It wasn’t obvious to me why the residents opted to call it this, since both streets were equally dismal.

  Turk Street was a far cry from my converted carriage house in the quiet, woodsy mounta
ins of Vermont with Edith and Dum Dum. The first and most notable adjustment I had to make was to sound. The soothing noise of chirping birds and crickets at night was replaced with blasting boom boxes, sirens, arguments, cars backfiring, and gunshots. The second adjustment was to smell. The corner of Turk and Taylor Streets reeked of urine-soaked sidewalks and desperate poverty.

  The day that I was released on my own recognizance, no bail, I was released directly from the courthouse and rode with Alan to his office, located in the financial district. When I left his office on foot, I had an hour left to get myself to the halfway house. Santa Rita, the county jail I had been deposited at for a few days, had lost my box of clothing, which should have followed me, so I had been sent to court wearing a pale yellow set of scrubs. The layered outfit that had made it with me all the way there was lost. I was released to my lawyer in the same yellow scrubs that I’d had to go to court in. Interestingly enough, nobody looked twice at my outfit as I walked down Battery Street and turned up Market.

  I had no money, not one thin dime. I was starving and hadn’t smoked in days. It had not occurred to me to ask my lawyer for a few dollars before making my walk to the halfway house. I had been too narrowly focused on getting from point A to point B in time, terrified I would screw up and get popped back into Santa Rita Jail. But the fresh air did a number on me, and I began to slow down and relax my frantic pace. I asked the few smokers I passed in the financial district if they could spare a cigarette, and they pretended as though they didn’t see me or flat-out said no. I laughed when one really well-dressed young man shook his hands in front of his face and scurried away. I couldn’t quite figure out the meaning of his gesture, but I knew what a beggar feels like for that second.