There was a shared bathroom in the middle of the first and second floors. But these amenities were identical to those in the other units. But in C4 they were shared by twice as many women as in C1 and C2. This was not a peaceful space. But as soon as someone in permanent housing got released or tossed in the SHU, someone in C4 would take her place. That only took about one hundred and eighty sleepless nights.
The staff was funny at the camp. There were a bunch of camp residents who had started at the FCI. We had been sent from the FCI to the camp as a reward for good behavior, but the staff considered being sent to work at the camp for a quarter a hardship or a punishment. It was boring there, and for the first time, I actually had something obvious in common with the staff and officers. They had congratulated me for making it to camp, and we’d both had to try not to laugh. Either that or they would’ve had to simply welcome me to the slums.
At camp, being an A and O meant I could be sent anywhere to work, to do anything. More often than not, though, this meant I got garbage duty in the kitchen, or sweeping or raking leaves in the yard at the crack of dawn. Mr. Green was my boss the day Tatiana left. He was a nice guy, but he was not the only staff member I had to worry about, and the closer I got to camp, the easier it would be for the other staff to recognize me coming back from the FCI.
The first one to watch out for was the OIC. Our OIC that day was Ms. Presley, a truly psychotic bitch. She was supposedly working in the camp because she was not allowed to work inside the FCI for a period of time. She was allegedly being punished for some misdeed. Officers rotated all posts among the three facilities on a quarterly basis and the OIC post in the camp was the short straw. Most of them hated it; Ms. Presley did, and if she was miserable, so were we. We all prayed Ms. Presley would only be in the camp as our OIC for one quarter.
As I crossed the yellow line and back into the safe zone, Ms. Presley came busting out of the door of C2, the building that held the officers’ station, an itty-bitty air-conditioned room with a glass partition. I started sweeping and did not look up, but I could hear her big clodhopper boots and jangling keys and chain coming toward me. Then she passed right by me and hopped into a perimeter truck that had pulled up, which had also worried me, and rode away.
I took a deep breath, relieved I was not the focus of Ms. Presley’s attention. I walked over and sat down on the stairs of the porch in front of C4, my new home. Mission accomplished.
Theresa, a fellow lesbian who had transferred from the FCI months earlier and was still pining for the lover she had left inside the FCI, was walking out of C4, carrying a ladder. “Did you get to see her?”
“I did. Tatiana’s on her way, and I got to see her. Thanks.”
“You okay?”
“I am.” I tried to make a big smile, but I think I was actually making the same face you do when you have really bad gas.
“Yeah, great. I can tell.” Theresa was being sarcastic and she laughed as she walked away with her ladder. She was all too familiar with how I felt at the moment—sort of anyway. “One door closes, another opens!” She yelled over her shoulder as Kara, an absolutely scrumptious girl, walked by, too young for either of us. Theresa probably didn’t realize how tactless she’d sounded. Everyone dealt with expiration/release dates differently, and while I had gone almost directly from Sissy to Tatiana, it had not been my intention. I wondered if Sissy would write me back if I tried to write her again. Getting letters out of the camp that I didn’t want read by the mail monitors was much easier than it had been from inside the FCI.
When Theresa disappeared into C5, the CMS building, it got very quiet. I listened to the leaves rustle in the big trees overhead and it reminded me of home. Not Vermont or Northampton; the sound made me think of my parents’ house in the woods outside Cincinnati, where I grew up. I used to sit on the porch in the backyard there, on this huge stump of a tree that had been cut down years earlier, or lie for hours on a big rock up on our hill with my cat, just listening to the birds and the leaves rustle, when I wanted to be alone. I had been one of those teenagers who want a lot of alone time. As I sat there in front of C4, I realized it had been years since I had been alone like this, sitting in the quiet outdoors.
Lunchtime would roll around soon though, and that would be the end of my temporary solace. But for the moment, I had no place else to be and no real work assignment. As far as I could tell, there was nothing other than work to keep me busy at the camp.
There was a camp cat named Patches that lived on the porch. When I had first come over to the camp, she sat on my lap while I had a good cry over Tatiana, and Miss Kitty, and Dum Dum, and Edith, and my sister, and everything under the sun. I had gotten my period the next day after my arrival. Apparently, my biological clock had reset itself to the cycle of the women at the camp in an instant. I briefly turn into an emotional basket case once a month for about ten minutes, usually over something totally innocuous, like a piece of paper on the floor or a bird eating a worm. I would have known my period was going to make a surprise visit a week early had I not had so many real issues on my plate at the time.
Patches was sweet and she reminded me of all my little black girls, for some reason, even though she was a calico and drooled when you pet her. I had thought my crying binge over everything was triggered by that or by my first realization that I would be bored out of my mind for the next three years, not by my pointless biological clock. Really, why do lesbians have to have periods anyway, and why do women’s monthly cycles get synchronized with other women and not by the presence of men?
I asked Patches the cat what she was up to, even though that was obvious. She was currently sleeping on the rail of the porch, looking as though she might be about to fall off it. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She seemed to be a little bit grumpy and unresponsive to my kissing noises. She twitched her ears each time I made the noise, like she was being bothered by a fly. She finally got up and gave me a look that said, Okay! I’m coming. Shut up already. But before she made her way down to me, one of my old bosses pulled up in front of the camp and honked his horn at me.
It took me a minute to register the horn honk was for me and that I knew the driver of the beat-up old car. I had never seen any of my computer lab bosses outside of the computer lab and in street clothes instead of his gray uniform. It was weird, all this semi-freedom. Mr. Wonka had been on a two-week vacation when my transfer happened, so he had missed it and missed Tatiana’s departure date too, though he’d known that was coming. He had been pissed, not at me, but for the fact that no one had given him or any of the computer lab supervisors a heads-up. With Tatiana’s release and my unexpected departure, he had been left pretty short-handed.
“Please get me transferred back!” As I said this, I wondered if that was what I really wanted.
“Man, I wish I could. Shit like that doesn’t look right though, Wolters.”
“What about institutional need?” I asked. Nobody would think I was sleeping with the computer lab boss. He knew that. I hoped he knew that. I knew the staff in education knew I was gay; it was just never openly discussed, since sex is prohibited. But the real prison staff in education didn’t care about my sexuality and a couple of them definitely turned a blind eye to Tatiana’s and my obsession with inventory in the storage room in the lab.
I think they were actually a little uncomfortable with the idea of punishing a gay person for being gay. Unlike some of the other guards and correctional officers, they had enough intellect to have an intellectual conflict. On the one hand, prison was for punishment and they couldn’t allow inmates to turn a prison stay into an orgiastic feast or all of the lonely gays in San Francisco would be lining up to rob banks. On the other hand, they all lived in the Bay Area, so persecuting homosexuality probably felt a little off.
I decided then to take advantage of my old boss’s short-handed situation to make my time at camp a little better. Mr. Wonka wasn’t really worried about not having tutors; they could be trained. There
were a few women working in the lab already who had gotten to be pretty effective tutors in the Microsoft Office products and had done well with the Total Training CDs for Adobe products. What he didn’t have was someone he could trust and who had already been proven trustworthy to the warden to do the warden’s pet projects. The camp really didn’t have a computer lab to speak of. It had a small room no bigger than a walk-in closet with a few clunky old computers that barely functioned and a set of self-paced instruction books. I wasn’t sure exactly what was at stake with the project that he had wanted me to work on, which I could not work on, because I had been transferred to the camp where there were no computers or programs up to the task. But six months after my arrival at the camp, he had a whole lab built with sixteen new workstations and new software, there were new classes for the women, and I had a new work assignment. I was also able to complete the project I had had to abandon when transferred from the FCI to the camp.
Things were a little more laid back at the camp. Not all the guards were maniacs like Ms. Presley, we had no razor wire, and there were no murderers, assassins, or terrorists. Fights were more of a seasonal event than a daily occurrence, but they still happened, and over stupid things like what television shows to watch, petty theft, cigarettes, and cutting in line for the microwave, phones, or showers.
The camp was made up of mostly recovering drug addicts, women related to the drug world by marriage or blood, and participants, like myself, in drug trafficking. The rest were white-collar criminals—people who had fudged bank papers, evaded taxes, and committed crimes that required a degree. My bunkies were people like Carol, the ex-mayor of a prestigious town in Connecticut; Lang, a diplomat from the U.S. embassy in South Korea; and Lisa, a deposed billionaire cosmetics queen. One of the tennis court royalty (a group of women who looked like they belonged in a country club and played tennis really well) from the FCI had been moved over to the camp too. The dark-haired goddess Elaine was at camp with me. Her claim to fame was that she was Heidi Fleiss’s ex-prison-lover. Elaine’s crime was drug related; she was a first-time drug offender who’d had the misfortune of being arrested at the height of the drug war hype. She was wrapping up a twenty-year sentence she had done more than sixteen years of. I had started to consider myself lucky for getting only ninety-four months. Drug sentences were so arbitrary. Some women got almost no time for doing much worse, others got more time for doing less. Elaine’s sentence made me feel very blessed.
Elaine and I spent a lot of time together, complaining about the decrepit state of our new home, searching for cigarettes to buy, and smoking them. Cigarettes were only forty dollars a pack in the camp; they were easier to get into the camp. Elaine was a hot shit with a brilliant, dry wit and was entertaining as hell. She had long brown hair and brown eyes, and she carried herself like she might really believe she was royalty. Being her friend was like a promotion to the clique of “cool” girls.
We tried to play tennis, and tried, and tried. The so-called tennis court fit the style and ambiance of the place perfectly. Instead of the well-lit, country club grade courts we had enjoyed inside the FCI, the camp called a crumpling bit of asphalt and a sagging net their tennis courts, more like the courts in public parks. Even in the rare event I could hit the balls to Elaine, as soon as they hit the ground, it was anyone’s guess where they would bounce. The rackets were questionably shaped, like they had been used as bats, and there was nothing but a sticky residue where the grips kept getting stolen. The balls looked as though a dog had donated them to Goodwill after they’d lost their chewiness. There was no fence around the court, so ball chasing took up most of our time. The ground sloped and the cracks made puckers in the smooth surface everywhere. Injury-free face-planting was a necessary skill neither of us had acquired, so we gave up on tennis before it got ugly.
Time slowed to a crawl at the camp in spite of my new job. I spent most of my time working in the computer lab in C2 or in the law library writing; I decided it was high time I finished a novel I had started writing in the FCI. If I was not in either of these two places, I was sitting on the C4 porch with Patches. We had been inseparable ever since the day we’d met. I guess you could say Patches was my new girlfriend.
She followed me everywhere, just like a dog might. When I walked the track, she walked with me, round and round, looking up at me occasionally with a quizzical little expression that said, What the hell are we doing? When I worked out, she would sit on the bench and watch, looking at me like I was crazy. When I was finally moved from the C4 zoo into a room in C1, Patches followed me. She moved from the C4 porch to the backside of C1, sleeping directly under my window or on the fire-escape stairs.
I woke one night to find her in my bunk. It was a warm night and the fire-escape door had been propped open to let the breeze through the hallway. She had come up the back stairs, found my room, my bed, and gotten in. I was on the upper bunk, so that was an impressive route for a cat to navigate. Carol, the former mayor, started grooming Patches regularly and even going so far as to brush her teeth daily. Carol was typical of the white-collar campers. She had been convicted in a scam to convert apartments to condominiums using forged documents of some kind to expedite the process.
For an outdoor cat, Patches was becoming quite domesticated and spoiled. She was a smart little shit too. She knew she was not supposed to be inside the housing unit. When the guards came around to count us at night, she would either crawl under my blanket or jump down and hide behind the curtain in our window. This astounded me.
Patches had an old blue cat carrier she had apparently been delivered in nine years earlier, or so the myth went. We moved it over to C1 when she decided she wanted to live in our building. Everyone who liked her regularly scouted for new bed linens to make her little mobile home comfy. Patches had fewer places for shelter behind and under C1 than she did back at C4, but she insisted on staying near me. When the weather got bad—cold or rainy—I felt awful, since I was the reason she had moved and didn’t have as many places to seek shelter. I got garbage bags and carefully wrapped her carrier, so that the rain and wind could not get in, but there was no danger of her suffocating.
I had acquired a treasure at one point, a pack of Camel Wides. My plan was to go see my counselor, Ms. Hosen; I had paperwork I had to fill out with her and didn’t want to walk into her office after smoking. I didn’t want to make myself a target for locker tossing, which is exactly what would happen if Ms. Hosen smelled cigarette smoke on me. Instead, I would go to smoke after that was done, and I hid my treasure in Patches’s blue carrier. I would find a better hiding place later, after I finished my visit to the counselor’s office.
As I sat, filling out the paperwork with Ms. Hosen, I saw the two other counselors walking behind the buildings. This probably meant surprise inspections were under way. When I heard women running down the halls to their rooms in C2, then the counselors yelling “Inspection!” my suspicions were confirmed.
Failing an inspection for being messy or possessing contraband like chicken wings could cost an inmate her room. She would get put back into the C4 zoo and once again be placed on the first-come, first-served list for a real room. They did these inspections once a week. My room was always spotless, and I didn’t have any worthwhile contraband, so I wasn’t worried about losing my bed and getting popped back into C4 to live. But when they came back out of C2 and headed to C1, they paused at Patches’s carrier and my heart stopped. I saw one counselor, the lady I didn’t like from the FCI, hold up a pack of Camels, and the guy she was with, the nice counselor, grabbed Patches’s home and carried it back toward where I was with my counselor, in C3.
I heard the counselor I disliked, Ms. Bright, hoot and holler, all excited by her big bust. I could hear the noisy wooden stairs, hanging off the back of C3, creak and rumble as they made their way up to the second floor and in through the back door. Then the two counselors piled back into the office with Patches’s home and bedding still in their possession.
“Jesus, this cat’s got half of Laundry here.” Laundry Services is where we were issued our one sheet, one blanket, and one pillow slip allotment.
Mr. Dansler, the other counselor, looked over at me and blushed. He hadn’t realized that I was the inmate sitting in the office with Ms. Hosen. He and Ms. Bright knew Patches was my buddy.
“One of your friends just screwed your little cat, Wolters,” Ms. Bright commented, as though every woman in the camp was my friend. She took the pack of Camels and taped them to the air-conditioning unit behind her desk, but only after opening the pack’s lid up and pulling one cigarette slightly out of the pack. That way when she started her interrogations, which I figured she would be getting started with soon, whoever was seated where I was would be looking right at the delicious pack of cigarettes on display.
“You’re punishing Patches? I can tell you for certain she does not smoke! She doesn’t sell cigarettes either or she’d be as fat as her house. Christ! How much tuna that pack of cigarettes would buy.” I said this, not sure I understood how far Ms. Bright was willing to go with whatever she had up her evil sleeves, but I wanted to remind her that Patches was a cat being sheltered, not an inmate allegedly being punished. Since my arrival in Dublin, there had been rumors of the cats, all the cats, being removed from both facilities and put to sleep. It was a rumor perpetuated by a couple of officers who hated the cats. But I had a dear friend in San Francisco, Carol Mooreland, ready to come collect Patches if those rumors actually ever turned out to be true or if I thought another inmate posed a serious threat to her.
Out of Orange: A Memoir Page 30
