Part 24 (1/2)
I was eating the corn when I felt something on my leg. I looked down and saw a roach working its way toward my food. I smacked it off in revulsion, then saw that the floor and table were covered with them. I tried to stand, but a guard quickly came over and slapped me back down. Even though I hadn't eaten since the lunch Morrell bought me yesterday in Pilsen, I couldn't face the food. I kept flicking roaches, real and imagined, from my legs and arms until the guards were willing to escort us back to our cell blocks.
At nine I was locked in an eightbytwelve room with another woman, a black woman young enough to be my daughter, who told me she'd been arrested for possessing crack. We were given bunk beds, metal frames bolted deep into the wall with a thin mattress, a nylon sheet, and a blanket on each. A toilet and sink formed out of a single piece of stainless steel was buried in the concrete floor. There is no privacy in prison-I would have to learn to perform intimate functions in the open.
Like the shower, the sink was caked with hair and mold. I didn't know how to get soap or cleansers to make it palatable to brush my teeth-but then, I didn't have a toothbrush either.
My cellmate was angry and jumpy and smoking heavily, which made my head ache. If I had to live with it for more than a day I'd ask her to stop, but it was the kind of request that could escalate into a fight in here, and I didn't want to be fighting other prisoners. My quarrel was most a.s.suredly not with them.
I was exhausted, I was sick to my stomach, my shoulders were sore, but I couldn't sleep. It terrified me to be locked inside a room, subject to the whims of men-or women-in uniform. All night I lay rigid on a narrow mattress as prayers and shouts hurtled through the corridor. I am strong, and a skilled street fighter, but the misery and madness around me kept swooping toward mob hysteria. Like telephone poles dipping past a train, swooping down, veering away just as you were sure they would hit you. Every now and then I dozed off, but then a cell door would slam, a woman would scream or cry out, my neighbor would mutter in her sleep, and I would jerk awake again. I was almost happy when a corrections officer came around at five to rouse us all for breakfast and the day's first head count.
35.
A Little Game on a Small Court All day Sunday I tried signing up for phone privileges, but I wasn't able to get a time slot until Monday afternoon. All day Sunday I fumed uselessly about my incarceration. I was furious at being locked up-as were many of the people around me. The level of rage was so high that the building could have exploded at any time. Everywhere we went guards watched us behind doublethick gla.s.s, or behind TV monitors, tracking the furies and the fights before the corridors turned incandescent.
The calmest women were those who'd been in the jail wing for some months, waiting for trial. These were the people who either had been denied bail-or more commonly didn't have a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars to post it. For half a dozen or so women, this marked the second Independence Day they'd spent in jail. They had gotten used to the routine and were more or less at ease with it, although they worried about their children, their lovers, sick parents, whether they'd still have a place to live if they got off the charge that had brought them here in the first place.
A jail is a place where someone awaits trial. A prison is where you go if you've been convicted and sentenced. Coolis was the great experiment in combining the two places for costsaving reasons. And while the jail was technically separate from the prison, one of the ways Carnifice saved money was by combining as many functions as possible. We jailbirds ate with the prisoners and used the same common room for recreation.
On Sunday afternoon a guard took me down there for my hour of recreation. It was a multipurpose room, with an exercise area separated from the entertainment unit simply by a difference in floor-green linoleum for the common room, bare concrete for exercise. The entertainment side included a television set attached to the wall and a long deal table with cards, checkers, and some jigsaw puzzles.
A handful of women were watching some inane game show, turned to top volume, while three others yelled ribald insults at each other over a game of hearts.
I went to the exercise area to work the worst knots out of my shoulders and legs. The room didn't have much in the way of equipment, but it did have a basketball hoop and ball. I began shooting. At first my shoulders resisted and I had trouble making my hook shot, but after a while the muscles loosened up and I got into a rhythm. Shooting baskets is a narcotizing, private kind of routine.
Dribble, shoot, retrieve the ball, dribble, shoot, retrieve. I began to relax for the first time since Friday afternoon. The blare of the television and the shouted insults of the women playing cards receded.
”You're pretty good.” One of the women in front of the television had turned around to watch me.
I grunted but didn't say anything. I play most Sat.u.r.days through the winter with a group of women who've been together for fifteen years. Some of the young ones were in tough collegiate programs-I've had to get better to keep in the game with them-but mostly I play for the pleasure of feeling my body move through s.p.a.ce.
”Play you oneonone,” she persisted. ”Dollar a point.”
”Play you oneonone for nothing,” I panted, not breaking stride. ”I don't have one thin dime in my possession.”
”No s.h.i.+t?” she demanded. ”Your family, they haven't sent you nothing for a prison account?”
”No s.h.i.+t. Anyway, I only got here yesterday.” I jumped up and pulled an errant shot off the backboard.
She got off the couch and came to stand next to me. Other women in the room urged us to a game: ”Come on, Angie, she can give you a real game for a change.”
”No way, my money's on Angie.” ”Not me, I been watching Cream there, I put five bucks on Cream.” I noticed my cellmate on the fringes of the crowd, s.h.i.+vering and rubbing her arms.
Angie s.n.a.t.c.hed the ball away from me and posted up. I jumped as she shot and batted the ball down. She elbowed me hard in the side and grabbed the ball back, shot, and scored. When I rebounded she came in low, trying to headb.u.t.t my stomach. I twisted away and shot over her head. The ball caromed around the rim, then went through. She grabbed the rebound, kicking me savagely on the s.h.i.+n as she pa.s.sed me under the basket. I went in below her guard as she was shooting and knocked her arms up in the air. She swore and gave me an undercut to the chin. I twisted away and grabbed the ball. We weren't playing for baskets but for dominance.
The calls from the sideline grew louder. Out of the corner of my eye I saw uniforms of the corrections officers on the fringes of the crowd, but I didn't dare take my eye off Angie or the court. My sore shoulders, my weak stomach, all that had to be put to one side. Shoot, grab, feint, duck, rebound, shoot again.
Sweat was blurring my eyes. Angie was a good athlete. She was strong, and she was some years younger than me, but she wasn't wellconditioned and she didn't have disciplined technique, either as a fighter or a player. I was keeping up with her and giving her back blow for blow. Moves I'd learned on the streets of South Chicago thirty years ago came to me as if I'd last been jumped on Commercial Avenue yesterday.
The crowd was beginning to roar every time I shot. That made Angie fight uglier but more wildly, and I had less trouble keeping the ball from her. I was driving to the basket when I saw light glint on metal in her hand. I dropped to the floor, rolled over onto my back, and scissorkicked Angie's feet out from under her. When I jumped up to kick away her weapon, Angie was lying under the basket.
A knife cut out of an aluminum can lay next to her.
The women in the crowd began a confused yelling, urging us on to fight. Some of them were Angie's followers, wanting a real brawl; others wanted me to put a stop to her once and for all: ”Stick the knife into her now while she's on the ground,” I heard one person call out. A guard stepped forward and picked up the knife, while another put a headlock on me. I knew how to break that hold, and with my adrenaline still high was about to, but remembered in time that I mustn't fight back. The guards carried stun guns on their belts; they had plenty of other weapons, not the least the power to keep me in Coolis longer than I wanted to stay.
”b.i.t.c.h planted that on me,” Angie muttered.
One of the CO's who'd been cheering loudest said he was writing us both up. If you're written up in jail it adds to the charge sheet when you finally get your court date. If you're already in prison it can send you into solitary and deducts from your ”good time” for early release.
As I stood motionless with my head under the CO's arm, facing Angie, who was similarly corralled, a woman spoke up from the middle of the crowd. Everyone in the room, CO's and inmates both, quieted down at once. The woman said that there hadn't been any fighting, just basketball, and where that knife came from she didn't know, but she could swear I hadn't pulled it.
”That's right,” several voices affirmed. ”You were there, Cornish, you saw. They was playing oneonone. Angie musta tripped in her own sweat.”
Cornish was another CO who'd been watching the game, if that's what you could call my outing with Angie. He asked the first speaker if she was sure, because if she was he wouldn't issue either of us a ticket on account of the holiday weekend.
”Uhhuh, I'm sure. Now I'm going to get me a pop. It's a hot day.” She was a tall woman, with skin the color of toffee and thick graying hair pulled back from her head in a knot. As she moved toward the vending machines in a corner of the room, the crowd parted, like the Red Sea.
The guard who'd been clutching me let me go. A couple of women came over to slap my palm and tell me they'd been with me from the start. Others, perhaps members of Angie's gang, gave me an evil eye and some pretty inventive insults.
CO Cornish grabbed my arm and told me I needed to get back to my cell to cool down. And what was my name? Warshawski? ”You're new, right, oh, in the jail wing. Then you shouldn't be down here for prisoners' recreation. Jailwing recreation is in the mornings.” I opened my mouth to say I'd been ordered down here at three, but shut it again. Don't trouble trouble, my mother always warned me, and trouble won't trouble you.
A woman CO, one of only two or three I'd seen since arriving, was appointed to escort me back to the jail wing. ”Lucky for you Miss Ruby spoke up when she did.
Otherwise you'd have found your bail request doubled for sure.”
”Miss Ruby? Who is she?”
The CO snorted. ”Miss Ruby thinks she's Queen of Coolis because she's been in prison a long time, at Dwight eight years before they opened this place. She cut her husband into little pieces and put him in different garbage cans around Chicago, claimed it was selfdefense if you can believe that, but the judge didn't buy it and gave her thirty years. Now she's a churchgoer, and the lieutenants and some of the CO's treat her like she's holy. And she has a lot of influence on the young girls, so it doesn't pay to go up against her.”
We had reached my wing. The CO signaled to the guard behind the control panel to let me through. She stood on one side of the airlock and watched it close around me. When the door on the other side opened to decant me onto my floor, she took off again.
The wing had a shower room in between the cell block and the guard station. I knew the guards had cameras trained on the showers, and they also could come in on unannounced inspection, but I needed to rinse off my sweat and blood: Angie had given me some pretty serious b.u.mps. When you're in the middle of a fight-or game, for that matter-you don't notice the cuts and blows. It's only later, when the adrenaline is wearing off, that you start to ache.
I didn't have any soap. I had learned this morning that even the most basic toilet items like toothbrushes and shampoo had to be purchased from the commissary and that I had to have money deposited in a trust account at the prison before I could buy anything. It was a nice little racket, like a company store for sharecroppers. You're there, you're a captive market, and they can charge you whatever they d.a.m.ned well want. Even if my five remaining dollars would have covered the cost of basic toiletries, I was told I couldn't open my trust account until after the holiday weekend.
I dried myself with the threadbare square of gray toweling I'd been issued when I arrived yesterday and put my pants back on. They smelled pretty unpleasant, but at least they fit.
At five we were all ordered into our cells for a head count and then escorted down to the dining hall. I hadn't realized yesterday that you had some control over what went on your tray and that salads were available on request. Tonight I asked for a salad and extra bread and rolled lettuce up into a sandwich, which I ate while walking to the table. I tried to eat some of the overcooked meat and beans on my tray but still couldn't deal with the roaches. I suppose if I had to stay here any length of time I'd learn to overlook them, but I was still too finicky in my ways.
Within five minutes of my sitting down I'd been identified as the woman who ”took out Angie.” A woman across from me told me I'd better look out, Angie was one of the West Side Iscariots and they were panting for revenge. Another one said she heard from her girlfriend that I used karate to wipe out Angie and could I teach her how to do it. One woman, with a dozen braids done up in colored ribbons, said Miss Ruby told a lie to save my hide, but three others spoke up hotly.
”Miss Ruby never told no lie. She spoke the truth, she say Cream here did not pull a knife, and she say Cream and Angie just playing basketball, not fighting, which is the gospel truth, right, Cream?”
”It was the most physical basketball game I ever played,” I said, which somehow satisfied her.