Out of Orange: A Memoir

by Cleary Wolters

  Tatiana enrolled in one of the classes I taught and I discovered she was also intelligent, really intelligent, and that was it for me. For a while, I turned beet red and stammered whenever she simply asked a question in the class. The other students thought it was funny, except one. Sara Jane Moore, the failed assassin of Gerald Ford, didn’t think my distraction was funny at all. She lodged a formal complaint against me for being a lousy tutor and paying too much attention to Tatiana. I had to defend my behavior to the computer lab boss, with Tatiana present. He was only following the required protocol for the complaint. It was his intention to resolve the problem informally, not to embarrass me or sanction me for my crush on Tatiana.

  His informal resolution was that I convincingly apologize to Sara Jane Moore and give her more focused attention for a little while. In my defense, I told my boss how smart Tatiana was and that she would be a great tutor in the lab. That was why I was so invested in her success. When Tatiana and Sara Jane Moore left his office, he sarcastically agreed with my assessment of her potential as a tutor in the computer lab.

  Tatiana was pulled from one of the grunt crews to work in the lab shortly after that. The “institutional need” she fulfilled probably had more to do with her appearance than her background. She was hired right after one of the underskilled clerks, who looked a lot like Tatiana, went home. Tatiana and I became quick friends after all that and my crush on her became a topic she teased me with. I didn’t deny my attraction to her but told her not to worry about it, no one could ever replace Sissy, who had gone home to Seattle. At the time, I thought I was going to move to Seattle and live happily ever after with Sissy when I got out.

  Tatiana and I started playing tennis together regularly, then going to lunch, then dinner. I got to know one of her relatives, who was also a resident in FCI Dublin. I learned of the horrific details of her family’s long tragedy and how they eventually had been granted asylum in the United States. But they’d ended up in a nonsensical drama that had resulted in much of her family being sent to federal prison for a conspiracy to help illegal aliens get to and stay in the United States.

  I started hanging out with Tatiana’s friends, a group of eastern Slavic women from various countries once part of the Soviet Union. They were referred to as the KGB by others. Tatiana taught me to speak and write their common language, Russian—well, tried anyway. One day we were having a heated debate on whether or not homosexuality was an abomination, a perversion, and completely unnatural, as she believed, or a natural and genetically assigned tendency, as I believed. Somehow we got on the topic of what this abnormal sex was like.

  “What do lesbians do?” she asked.

  “Oh my God! Tatiana, use your imagination.” She had made herself blush by asking the question and that amused me. But not enough to give her a Joy of Sex introduction to lesbian positions. Her curiosity grew and then focused on me.

  This was a particularly tricky relationship to conduct. Not only did we have to keep it secret and hidden from the prison staff. Sex in federal prison is a 200-series infraction, a 205 specifically, which is of the same severity as rioting or assault. Getting caught would result in going to the SHU, losing the great computer lab jobs, getting sent back to an A and O room (that is “arrival and orientation”), and an A and O job in the kitchen and in the garbage. But we also had to worry about the KGB. Tatiana did not want anyone to find out what we were doing.

  As Tatiana’s release date approached, the status of her asylum was in jeopardy because of her possible status as a convicted felon. Her five-year sentence was nearly completed, but due to a series of continuances, her family’s appeal for wrongful conviction was still stalled in the Appellate Court. After the fruits of prosecutorial misconduct were removed from a potential new trial, if a new and fair trial were granted, she said there would be no case or conviction for her or her family members. Her husband would be released from prison the same day as Tatiana.

  Tatiana and I were together for only a year by then and I was still in that madly in love phase when we had to split up. We had spent all of our time playing tennis, teaching in the computer lab, working on special projects for the facility, or doing inventory in the storage closet in the lab. While it’s not as easy to do as fictional fantasies about women and sex in prison suggest, it is possible to have a lover. The one thing you cannot do is determine when and how your relationship will end. It comes with an expiration date; someone gets to go home first.

  Our relationship was originally scheduled to end on her release date. This is a traumatic time for lovers in prison. It’s one lover’s release day, the happy day you wait and pray for years you will make it to. But with a lover, it’s also the end of a love affair. Somebody has to leave somebody behind, which puts a bit of a damper on what would otherwise be an amazing day. Being left behind is excruciating; I had gone through that happy event once already with Sissy. But with Tatiana, it was all the more confusing because I didn’t know if she would be all right when she left. It all depended on whether she and her husband lost their asylum and had to find someplace else on the planet to run to for safety.

  Our goodbye was cut extremely short. About a week before her release date, I went back to my unit for the four P.M. count and she went to hers. I found out I was going to be transferred to the camp, and by dinner I was gone. I was only across the street, but it might as well have been in another universe, hundreds of light-years away. My unplanned departure was probably a heavenly intervention. Tatiana would also be leaving some of her family behind. God had wanted Tatiana and her family to spend that last week together, not us.

  I spent the first week at the camp bored out of my mind, sitting on a picnic table across the street and staring at the FCI entrance, hoping to get one more glimpse of Tatiana before she left my universe. I worried about her too. Because of the questionable state of her asylum, there was a good chance she would be picked up by Immigration and taken to a county jail being used for immigration holdovers when she walked out the front gates of the prison.

  I had prayed, done voodoo dances, and made chocolate cupcake offerings to the squirrel gods for the whole week prior to her release for her unimpeded passage to Los Angeles. Being over in the camp, I couldn’t find out how it all turned out until her release day. Her husband was getting out of his prison on the same day from a facility somewhere in Texas. If she came out of the FCI, got into a waiting car, and no Immigration van pulled up to intercept her, all was well. If not, I had mailed her contact information to my father and he promised to find out what had happened to her and her husband and make sure they had the legal representation they needed. Dad was my hero.

  If nothing went wrong, Tatiana and her husband would both be safely at home by nightfall. I had already gotten her sister’s phone number in Los Angeles added to my approved list, and so I could call there with my PAC (phone access code). We were only able to dial out to a preapproved list of telephone numbers on the phone systems in prison, and Tatiana and my calls would be monitored, so I would have to be careful about what we said when we spoke, if we spoke. I would also have to make sure her sister’s number made it onto my list in time.

  There is a form I had to fill out and hand in to my counselor to get a new number added to this list. The counselor would then type the number into another computer-based form if she approved it. The electronic addition is instant, but my counselor was not so quick to make the entry, unless I brought the form to her in person and urged her to add the number then and there.

  I hadn’t tried to expedite the process by personally delivering the form and sitting with my counselor until she added it, lest she get curious and figure out the number belonged to Tatiana’s sister and not a former coworker from the free world. But I found the number added to my list two days after I’d submitted it and in plenty of time for Tatiana’s release day. All that was left to happen, so that I could talk to my Tatiana at least one more time, was that she not be picked up by Immigration and booted out of
the country.

  My dad was sending a note to both Tatiana and her husband at the sister’s house in Los Angeles. He’d told me this was the best way he could think of to let her know I was happy for both of them, for her whole little family. He knew I had been her lover for a year and had told me he thought her husband would understand. He cautioned me, though, that if she never told him, to be her friend and keep her secret safe. She’d been through enough already.

  On Tatiana’s release day, I followed a bunch of campers who did landscaping work across the street to the front of the FCI and pretended to be sweeping the parking lot near the entrance while the rest of the group of campers spread out to do their real work, mowing, pruning, watering, and planting. The parking lot near the entrance to the FCI was way past the yellow line we were not to cross without permission, but a friend, a former FCI inhabitant and now camper, had gotten me added to her landscaping team to be a sweeper for the day. My plan, if I got caught out of bounds, was to play dumb, like I had not understood I was to sweep only the camp parking lot and not the neighboring area in front of the FCI.

  Tatiana came out of the FCI entrance dressed in black. I was shocked to see her in a different color than khaki, when that and gray sweats were the only colors I had ever seen her dressed in. Her hair had been styled, and she was all made up. She was absolutely stunning. She saw me milling about in the parking lot with a broom in hand, trying to pretend I was sweeping and not lurking around the entrance to the FCI. I was wearing my new colors. Camp residents wore light blue, not khaki. She waved and smiled at me and then waved at her friends in the waiting car and yelled something to them in her language. She couldn’t come to me, but I could tell how happy she was to see me, and how happy she was to be free after five years in prison. She yelled to me that it felt funny walking out of the prison and she kept looking up at the sky, like something might drop from it and crush her. I laughed loudly.

  I had never understood the weird reactions some women had on their release days, until I had walked out the front gate of the FCI myself after thirty months. Shit, one lady had even turned around and wanted to come back in. The phenomenon is strange, because you are not going from being locked indoors to suddenly seeing the sky above you for the first time in however long. You are just walking through a building; on one side you are free, on the other you are not. Even so, something subtle feels off, like when you get off a boat and it feels like the ground is fluid. I had gotten the odd sensation of being untethered when I had walked out a week earlier, and all I had been doing was walking across the street to the camp unescorted.

  “I don’t know what I am doing!” She laughed at herself and the strange reaction she had to walking out the front door of the FCI. “I love you!” She yelled this to me right in front of her friends in the car and it surprised me. Tatiana’s crew of Russian friends inside were big homophobes. “I will see you again in London!”

  “I love you too. Be safe!” We had made plans to meet in London when we could travel again, but we both knew it was fantasy. I stared right through the car with her in it for a moment, imagining what it must feel like to be sitting down in the air-conditioned car, about to drive away as she was, instead of standing in the hot sun, pushing a broom, with so much time left to do, as was my fate. Her friend jumped out of the car and put her bag into the trunk. He was tall and beefy and probably had no idea who I was or that he was driving away with my lover. He waved to me, almost dismissively, and got back into the car.

  I could see Tatiana, sitting in the passenger seat, light up a cigarette and she made sure I saw this. Smoking had been banned from federal facilities in January while I had been away in Chicago. We had paid twenty dollars in commissary for one cigarette when I’d gotten back, then we’d quit. But now she took a big puff of her pink Nat Sherman, the brand she’d smoked on the streets. We’d only had access to cheap generic brands when they had sold them legally inside, then stale tobacco rolled up in paper from tampon and toilet paper wrappers after smoking had been banned.

  I saw the taillights flash once and heard the Volvo’s engine, then it pulled forward and circled the same roundabout I had been dropped at thirty months earlier. As the Volvo made its way around the big circle, they came closer to where I was standing with my broom and slowed down a little. Tatiana smiled at me. She stretched her arms out wide, like a bird, and when the car accelerated, she flew away.

  18 Patches

  Federal Prison Camp, Dublin, California

  August 2005 to October 2008

  THE VOLVO TATIANA WAS IN disappeared around the corner of the perimeter fence at the end of Eighth Street and vanished. On the other side of that fence was the free world. It was so close all the time I was inside the FCI but invisible until now. Eighth Street was used only by cars and service vehicles entering and exiting there to go to either the federal prison camp (FPC) on the left, the federal correctional institution (FCI) for women, the federal detention center (FDC) for men on the right, or the warehouses and staff housing farther up the road. That road intersected with Eighth Street, about an eighth of a mile beyond where the FPC and FCI entrances faced each other.

  There was a yellow line at the edge of the parking lot in the camp. The line crossed the paved entryway, which was just past the last building in a row of five identical buildings that made up the camp. If you were not assigned to landscaping, to the warehouses, or to some duty that required you to cross that line, it was out-of-bounds. I was approximately fifty yards beyond that yellow line, out-of-bounds and trying to look busy, as if I had a reason to be there. The campers roamed all over the area I have just described, and we all wore blue uniforms; there were no special outfits for newcomers. So I knew I was as invisible as the ground squirrels to most of the staff passing by me, but there was always the chance someone like my old computer lab boss from the FCI might take notice that it was me in the blue they were accustomed to ignoring on their way into work.

  I had to make a quick dash across the parking lot, Eighth Street, and back into the camp without getting an incident report for being out of bounds. Mr. Green, the boss at CMS, which I think stood for Contracting Maintenance Service, didn’t write me up when he’d caught me lurking near the FCI’s entrance earlier that week. I was still accustomed to the more militant posturing from the guards inside the razor wire at the FCI. So I had been certain I was in for a good dose of humiliation and a shot when Mr. Green caught me over there the first time, but nothing had happened. He had just laughed, asked me if I was lost, turned around, and buzzed away across the parking lot on his golf cart.

  It would have sucked to start out my stay at the camp with commissary or phone restriction for thirty days, especially since my parents were coming to visit me the following week. I had not seen them in over two years and changing their plans would have been impossible this late in the game. They were visiting me on their way to Hawaii. Besides, I didn’t want to do anything to cancel their annual visit. It meant so much to me and I couldn’t wait to see them. They would be so happy too, to visit me in the camp where we could sit at picnic tables in the beautiful green outdoors—so much nicer than their visit was inside FCI the year before.

  When I reached the edge of the FCI parking lot, I dashed back across Eighth Street and over to the smaller camp parking lot, stopping every so often to look busy, like I had actually been sent out there to work with the landscaping crew I had tagged along with. I swept random swaths of clean blacktop or sidewalk with such purpose you would have thought I was competing, except that I was all alone. Still being an A and O, though, sweeping and raking leaves was what I should have been doing all morning, just not across the street. That made me nervous, the closer I got to camp. Though I was an A and O again—which stands for “arrival and orientation” or “Please humiliate and torture me; I am new”—all the camp staff knew me already from the FCI. Therefore, with exception to my living arrangement, I was spared the normal routine abuses for newcomers, like being stalked around
the compound and harassed or belittled until you were humbled enough to willingly accept your newly acquired, subhuman stature. But this familiarity meant they would know I had no business being as far out as I had gone.

  The camp was made up of five long two-story buildings, like giant train cars set side by side. Between each of the buildings, there was a walkway and two or three entrances to the buildings on either side. The buildings were labeled C1, C2, C3, and C4. It had taken all of about five minutes to get the lay of the land there. C1 and C2 were permanent housing. The rooms were about twice the size of those in the FCI. I wasn’t yet fortunate enough to have one of these rooms, but I would soon. In these units, each prisoner shared a room with four others, but there was plenty of space to move around; they were like college dorm rooms.

  The dining room, kitchen, and a room big enough for two desks, which served as the law library, were on the first floor of C1. Education classrooms and the computer lab were on the first floor of C2. The administrative offices, commissary, medical services, and a rec room with a few stationary bikes and old funky gym equipment were in C3.

  Unlike the FCI, where a toilet and sink were inside each tiny cell, the toilets and sinks at the camp were in a bathroom where they belonged. The one and only guard or officer in charge (OIC), as they were called at the camp, was stationed on the first floor of C2. That was a big adjustment, not having an officer everywhere I looked. The OIC was different every shift, but the same three covered the camp for at least a quarter of the year before a new set were condemned to the camp from one of the other facilities.

  C4 was the zoo and where I lived. This is what they called “temporary housing.” It was where I was sent to live first or where I would be sent back to if I lost my nice permanent room as punishment for getting into trouble. There was no privacy, just big open areas filled with bunk bed after bunk bed, county jail style. Illusory room sections were created by the arrangement of beds and lockers, each section containing three or four bunk beds arranged around a tower of stacked lockers in the middle. These bed-and-locker configurations ran along the length of the unit on either side of an aisle the guards could walk down unimpeded.