“Well, kiddo, this is it. I have to leave you now for a little while. Please stay out of traffic and stay healthy. It’s going to be a long time until we can play again. Until then, be a good girl for Julie.”
“You love that cat more than you ever loved me.” Julie laughed. “You don’t hold a candle to Miss Kitty either.” Then she smugly tossed her bag over her shoulder. I was lucky to have found a friend like her. I hoped she was going to be okay. Somehow, though, I knew she and Miss Kitty would bounce back. She had promised to wait for me, and I wanted to believe it was possible. But I knew I was probably seeing her for the last time. I knew the same was true for Miss Kitty, even though it broke my heart to admit it.
When we arrived in Dublin, it was a little disorienting. I pictured FCI Dublin being out in a vast area of mountain-size rolling hills of gold, covered with windmills and with weird little trees dotting the hillsides. As we finally approached the area where the facility was, I could see the windmills in the distance and I realized it wasn’t the first time I had seen the place. When the marshals had dropped me at Santa Rita Jail seven years before, we had come from the opposite direction. We arrived at the entrance to a military base, where we had to show our IDs to a man in a booth before being allowed to pass.
We drove by a long fence that surrounded a big open field. The buildings there were like the military barracks or housing I had seen in the Presidio, but more dilapidated, and an area full of rusty old gym equipment sat out in the middle of the field. I spotted a couple of women in tan-colored jackets and blue uniforms, wearing work boots, and figured they were personnel or something. At the end of the fence, the road we were on intersected with where we had to turn to get to the facility.
Julie spotted the flag we had been given as a landmark. It was on the opposite side of the road as the dilapidated buildings we had passed. We turned up a long, windy driveway, which ended in a circle, and at the edge of the circle there was a trailer. It was the kind you see at a big construction site, the place where architects and planners hang out or where some fat guy watches a clock everyone punches in.
“Welcome to the Hotel California . . .” Natalie and Julie started singing this as we approached the trailer. I joined in, lit up my last cigarette, and took my last Vicodin. It wasn’t the last I had; I still had about sixty of them in a bottle. But I would have to turn those over when I checked in, and I didn’t know how long it would be before I got another one. I seriously doubted they would let me continue my ten-pills-a-day habit, but a girl could dream.
We still had about forty-five minutes to kill before I had to walk into the creepy trailer. I could see the fences surrounding the grounds of the place where I was headed. Two layers of fencing sat about twelve feet apart and each was topped with a big role of razor wire. I joined back in on the song. “. . . You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.” And Julie made the weird guitar riff that came after. I could see beyond the fence, but I couldn’t really get a view of any women inside. I asked Julie to turn around and told her I thought we could see inside if we pulled off to the right and went to the north side of the parking lot.
A white pickup truck pulled alongside her and the uniformed driver cautioned her against doing anything but dropping me at the trailer and leaving. I suppose attempting a little reconnaissance on the exterior of a federal prison was frowned upon. Having an open beer in your hand might also be pooh-poohed. Julie had the tendency to get a little bit belligerent when she drank and I realized I should send my friend on her way, before she was offered a room at the lovely hotel.
“Okay. That’s it. I’m going in.” I hopped out of the car. Julie hopped out and gave me a big hug and told me she would come see me as soon as she was allowed. Natalie gave me a big hug, then stepped away. I think she thought I would want to spend my last minutes with Julie. But I got out of there as fast as I could. I did not want to walk into the place bawling. “It’s not a place to cry,” Mom had said seven years ago.
A muscled man in a uniform came down a walkway and entered the trailer from the other side, the side inside the fence. He looked mean as hell and mad. I looked at my watch. It was 11:30.
“What?” He barked at me loudly from the trailer door like he had no idea why I was there. Surely, they knew I was coming.
“I am supposed to self-surrender here today by noon.”
15 Con Air
Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center
January 2005
What is it . . . not fast enough for you? . . . You think this is all my fault? What the hell are you up to? Why do you still look so fucking . . . ? I was thinking.
“Hey! Step up!” the ugly grunt yelled at me and gave me a prod toward the podium in front of her. I stepped up and stood still while she snapped the ankle cuffs, attached my chain, then adjusted the long chain wrapped around my waist, so there wasn’t any excess hanging down between my feet. She gave me another prod, and the next fat grunt held on to my elbow while I carefully stepped down and got back in line. Hester had advanced a few spots in line in front of me. Her grunt had been much faster than mine, trussing her up.
We had both advanced past Piper in the line. She had been several people ahead, like she was in a race to get somewhere first. She was still on one of the podiums. The cuffs were too large for her wrists and they were trying to find a set that would work on her delicate frame. I had worried she was trying to beat us, be first, that she might try to object to one of these assholes about her being put on the same flight as Hester and me. If she did anything that caused Hester to get black-boxed, that would be it. I would lose my fucking mind and kill her.
For days Hester had been telling me to stop worrying about it, stop worrying about Piper, what she thought, or what she might be saying. But Hester was naïve; she hadn’t been here before. Stupid shit like that could get us booted off this flight. I had worried all week that we would get put in the hole or I would get my face smashed to smithereens by some psychotic bitch with a grudge. Almost everyone here had co-defendants they would like to see dead. But not everyone here was a happy camper. Some of these women were violent and would act on their crazy impulses in a heartbeat. Hester or I would make great substitutes to direct their rage at.
The marshals are not supposed to put co-defendants together for this reason and I knew Piper had been complaining to the women around her. One of them had given me a look that suggested whatever Piper had said about me had not been nice. I think they were in the same cell and she looked like a DC chick. I had heard the DC chicks were nuts. If Piper was stupid enough to make alliances with those crazy bitches, it was anyone’s guess what other stupid bullshit she might pull. They finished shackling her and she stepped down and into line, right behind me. Fucking lovely! Hester looked back at me and turned away. I thought she was actually about to crack up laughing. This took the prize on running into ex-lovers.
What a strange place the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center was. It was like a parody of O’Hare or LaGuardia, a hub for prisoners on the move. If you were able to cut open the entire American federal criminal justice system, peel its fatty tissue back to expose its guts, this facility is what you would be staring at. From what I could tell from inside its stomach, the building was an octagonal, five- or six-storied labyrinth of cells, elevators, ramps, and hallways. Most of its fourteen hundred inhabitants were stuck there, waiting their turn to be moved on to their next stop in the system. But every morning before dawn, hundreds of us were woken up, pulled out of our cells, and put back into the ebb and flow of this human traffic, as hundreds more arrived.
On the ground floor we were gathered in lines—mostly men, mostly black- and brown-skinned, all clad in khaki uniforms that looked like doctors’ scrubs, over white tees; everyone wore blue laceless canvas slip-ons over white jock socks. I imagined from some viewpoint we might have looked like a marching band or maybe an elite military corps, without our instruments or guns. We could have been too, except that we
were all in shackles and the exposed beer belly and butt crack here and there from poorly sized uniforms ruined the illusion. We stood in sleepy rows, row after row, waiting in lines to wait in line, until the lines ultimately converged in a large brightly lit white room, where a gate finally funneled us out onto the tarmac, one small group at a time, like the building was taking its daily dump.
The place was an architectural wonder. It was like the folks who had designed Disneyland to keep people from killing each other in line, the lady who’d done the documentary on the beef industry practices regarding cows on their way to slaughter, the Pinball Wizard, Franz Kafka, and George Orwell had all got together and created this place. This was their brainchild, the federal transfer center in Oklahoma City. There were only two things going on here. We were either in a holding pattern, locked up on any one of the floors full of stalled prisoners, or we were running the gamut of lines coming into or going out of the facility; getting fingerprinted, shackled or unshackled, poked and prodded, for hours before we either entered or exited the facility via the labyrinth. We were all moving across the country from one facility to another in the care of the U.S. Marshals Service and this was their LaGuardia.
When we were finally walked out into the icy cold morning in groups and told to stop when we got near the plane, the sun had come up but done nothing to warm the planet. We stayed in our groups of five and in single file, freezing our butts off, waiting our turn to get felt up for the last time by some jackbooted oaf, his M16 armed comrades at his back. All so we could board a Con Air plane. Piper was shivering. I was not. I think it pleased me in some absurd way. Piper had not spoken to me since she’d gotten to Oklahoma. It was clear she blamed me for her conviction, whatever she had ended up agreeing to.
I didn’t worry anymore about myself surviving this ordeal. I had been through much worse than this already. I’d been treated to diesel therapy before, which is what they called it when we were shipped from one prison to another across the United States by the marshals. I had not just come from a cozy little camp either. I’d come from a higher security federal correctional institution than Piper and my sister. FCIs are where the really bad girls go, not federal prison camps—FPCs—where you can romp and play outside all day and night if you choose, or so I had heard. It didn’t matter where we had come from though, not at this point. FCI or FPC, either way, diesel therapy made the place you were doing your time in seem like home, a home I yearned to return to. You know life is bad when you miss your prison.
Truth is, I hated seeing anyone I loved, or once loved, go through this shit—actually anyone, even if I don’t know you. This is not something anyone wants to see a person suffer through, so nobody really looks at each other. It’s humiliating and degrading, and hard enough to have strangers witness it. Watching my little sister being subjected to this nightmare made me sick to my stomach and I knew it didn’t give her a warm and fuzzy feeling watching me submit to my captors. But Piper was another story. She did her best to make this all worse. I hated what she was doing to herself with her stupid pride, guilt, misplaced anger, or whatever it was.
I knew why my sister would blame me but didn’t. I should have gotten out, closed the door, and never looked back on the drug-smuggling world, like she had, and long before I actually did. We might not have been in Oklahoma, waiting to get on Con Air together, if I had made different choices. Piper’s attitude was a little more confounding. I guess she would never have gotten into this predicament had she not gone slumming and befriended someone so far beneath her social ranking so many years ago. But she had. She’d wanted the same thing we all had. She’d wanted to travel. She’d wanted adventure. She’d wanted a shortcut.
I hated her pompous narcissism and firm belief that she was somehow better than any of us. Years ago it hadn’t been such a pronounced characteristic. She’d been a fresh Smith graduate back then and had believed it made her special. That hadn’t changed; it had gotten worse. She walked around now like she thought she might actually be royalty. Hester and I had already been down two years of our sentences. I can’t speak for my sister, but I know my own false belief that I was somehow better than everyone around me, an exception to the rule, a fish out of water, had withered and died. The arrogance in Piper’s mannerisms looked clown-like to me now. It was hard to believe that after two years down, she hadn’t let go of that fantasy. Of course, I was operating under the assumption she was doing the thirty-six-month sentence that had been listed in the sentencing report we’d seen in 2002.
Our class, color, or credit limit had no meaning here; we didn’t have social or economic classes in this hell we lived in. Piper’s stiff posture, refusal to acknowledge either me or my sister, and nose pointed at the sky bugged the shit out of me every time she passed by in Oklahoma. We had so much unfinished business and this made it so much worse.
I couldn’t tell what of the many options was the true source of her raw and naked hatred. Was it that I’d not come to San Francisco then, never ended our relationship properly? Was it that I hadn’t lied to the investigators and said she had nothing to do with us when they’d already known that was not true? Did she believe I should have saved her from this mess and sacrificed my life for hers? They had threatened me with thirty years in prison if my testimony was false. One small adjustment in the already arbitrary total weight of the drugs they had believed we were all responsible for importing and my sentencing guidelines would have gone from ten years to thirty. I knew she had gone through the same prosecutorial grinder that we all had; surely by now she knew I wouldn’t have had the option to exclude her from my plea agreement, any more than she could have done the same for me. It would have been pointless. Did she actually think they hadn’t already known who was sitting next to me on all those flights when they’d arrested me so many years ago, or that our co-defendants would’ve kept her out of this too and risked their plea agreements?
In any case, two weeks in holding had not done the trick. She still wasn’t speaking. It had been over eleven years since we’d parted ways in Brussels. If I closed my eyes, I could still see her taxi pulling away.
January in Oklahoma City was cold and windy this early in the morning. It didn’t bother me as much as Piper, partly because, unlike her, I had actually aged since we’d last seen each other so many years ago. I had a little body fat helping me out and my skin was certainly a little thicker, whereas her still perfect and beautiful bones had no protection from the wind. Our pleasant tour guides didn’t give a shit about their livestock’s comfort, and Piper’s poor-me smile would get her nowhere with U.S. marshals. They wouldn’t even see it.
Nope, on this trip we would all freeze every time we landed somewhere and had to get out of the plane. She would shiver and I would fiendishly enjoy her discomfort a little, but try to ignore the same from my baby sister. I’m not a mean asshole, but her fucking bullshit was needlessly cruel. Considering our circumstances, it was unconscionable to actually want to make this worse for someone else. While we were all clad in nothing but our scrubs and T-shirts, with our little blue fairy shoes, which had no soles to speak of, our captors wore gloves and big puffy, warm coats, so they took their time boarding us onto the plane while we froze. They were, however, quick when patting us down since they had to remove their gloves for this.
Hester was in front of us. She lifted her long auburn hair so they could see she wasn’t hiding any machine guns in there, then she opened her mouth and stuck her tongue out to confirm she hadn’t cheeked a grenade. The lady patting her down had this look of utter disgust every time she had to touch one of us. I wondered if they trained that into them or if the job drew people like that to it. People who can hate strangers so completely without cause.
I almost laughed when Piper and I got seated together. We couldn’t object, though I saw Piper’s hesitation to step up next to me when prodded like a cow to do so. We finally got buckled in the plane and Piper stared straight ahead. Her hair was still blond—not the same blo
nd she had achieved in Bali. It hung down limply, not pulled back the way she’d always worn it, but that was compliance, not fashion. Rubber bands and hair ties were forbidden on Con Air. I’m not sure what deadly threat they thought could be made with a rubber band, but they weren’t having it, whatever it was.
Her forearms and hands were pale and still freckled. I dared not look right at her. I feared she might bite. Nonetheless, sitting this close to someone I’d once known so very well inspired my curiosity no end. I looked over at my sister and she was smiling a very nervous smile. It was going to be a long day for her, worrying about what explosion might occur between Piper and her sister.
But then the day got brighter. I saw my sister smiling from ear to ear, and I realized it was directed at an old friend of ours. A co-defendant and former member of our little old smuggling clique was boarding the plane. He smiled back and said, “See you in Chicago.” Bradley was shackled and doing the awkward shuffle to make his way down the aisle, followed by a long line of men doing the same funny dance, and he was looking no worse for the wear. The marshals barked at him to shut up. He smiled and passed by us. I wondered if we’d have more surprise reunions in store for us in Chicago, like Phillip. I wondered what he looked like now. I hadn’t seen him in nine years.
We sat there on the tarmac for what felt like an eternity. I was anxious to get going and fly to whatever was next for us. It was still possible that we were going to be miraculously set free in Chicago. Mom and Dad had hired a special attorney to meet us. Tom Dawson had cleaned them out, but it was money well spent if he could magically use this trial as a vehicle to get some time off our sentences. We had to testify, tell the court what they already knew—it was part of our plea agreements to do so. I had no choice in the matter; neither did Piper, Hester, Bradley, or the rest of our co-defendants. But to do so, we would be again in front of the same judge who had sentenced us. It certainly couldn’t hurt to have a lawyer like Tom Dawson, who specialized in post-conviction appeals and sentence reduction, there. Maybe this was our Hail Mary pass. We would miraculously be found innocent but stupid and sent home. Not likely.
Out of Orange: A Memoir Page 26
