Orange is the New Black

CHAPTER 17. Diesel Therapy

Like much airline travel these days, flying Con Air involved a lot of stewing in your own juices. Exactly eleven months since I had first set foot in R &D, I was brought back there, and I waited. One by one guards brought other women in to wait with me. A skinny, dreamy-eyed white girl. A pair of Jamaican sisters. An unpleasant hick from the Camp whom I worked with in CMS, and who was headed back to western Pennsylvania for a court case. A big dykey-looking black woman with a wicked scar that began somewhere behind her ear, wound around her neck, and disappeared down below the collar of her T-shirt. There was little talking.

Finally a prison guard whom I knew from the Camp appeared. Ms. Welch was a food service officer and knew Pop very well. I felt some measure of relief that she would be involved in our departure-much better than the guard who had welcomed me to Danbury. She issued us all new uniforms, the same khaki hospital scrubs and wussy canvas shoes I had been clad in upon arrival. I was sad to give up my steel-toes, even though they already had cracks in the soles. One by one she began to shackle us-chain around the waist, handcuffs that were then chained to your waist, and ankle cuffs with a foot of chain between them. I had never been cuffed in my life outside my boudoir. I thought about the fact that I had absolutely no choice in the matter; I was going to be shackled whether I was cooperative, disgruntled, or prone with a knee in the small of my back or a boot on my chest.

I looked at Ms. Welch as she approached me. “How are you doing, Kerman?” she asked. She sounded genuinely concerned, and I flashed on the fact that we were “theirs,” being sent out into the great unknown. She knew what the next few hours held for me, but the rest was probably as much of a mystery to her as it was to me.

“Okay,” I answered in an uncharacteristically small voice. I was scared, but not of her.

She started to chain me up, chatting in a distracting way, almost like a dental hygienist who knows she is doing something that causes discomfort. “How is that-too tight?”

“A little too tight on this wrist, yes.” I hated the gratitude in my voice, but it was genuine.

We had all been packed out-all of our personal belongings had been gone through by a prison guard (in my case, the same sneering midget I had encountered on my first day) and stored. The only thing you were allowed to bring on the airlift with you was a single sheet of paper that listed your property. On the back I had written all my important information-my lawyer’s phone number and the addresses of my family and friends. Also scrawled on the paper in many handwritings was the contact information for my friends in the Camp-and if they were due to go home soon, a street address; if they were down for a long time, their inmate registration number. It hurt to look at the list. I wondered if I would ever see any of those women again. I kept the paper in the breast pocket of my scrubs vest with my ID.

We were lined up and started to shuffle, clinking, out of the building toward a big unmarked bus that was used for prisoner transport. When your legs are chained together, you are forced to adopt a short, tippy-toe cadence. As we were waiting in one of the chain-link-fence chambers between the prison and the bus, the town driver’s van came speeding up. Jae hopped out, with duffel bags.

The big black dyke perked up. “Cuz?”

Jae blinked in disbelief. “Slice? What the hell is going on??”

“Fuck if I know.”

We were all herded back into the FCI so they could pack Jae out and truss her up-she was joining our motley little crew, and I was really glad to have a friend along for the ride.

Finally, at gunpoint, we were loaded onto the bus and headed into the outside world. It was disorienting to see suburban Connecticut rushing by, eventually giving way to the highway. I had no idea where we were heading, though the odds were on Oklahoma City, the hub of the federal prison transport system. Jae caught up with Slice, her actual cousin, on the bus. Neither of them would cop to knowing why they were being transported, but they were probably codefendants, as the guard had been concerned that they should have extra restraints.

“Naw, naw, we cousins, we love each other!” they protested.

The guard had also indicated that they were headed to Florida, which was most worrisome. “Piper, I don’t know shit about Florida, I’m from the Bronx, I been to Milwaukee, and that’s it,” declared Jae. “No fucking reason I should be going to Florida unless they be taking us to Disney World.”

We finally arrived at what seemed like an abandoned industrial vacant lot. The bus stopped, and there we sat, for hours. If you think that it is impossible to sleep in shackles, I am here to prove you wrong. They gave us chicken sandwiches, and I had to help the Pennsylvania hick eat-the guard had not been as kind to her as to me and had chained her tightly and put her in an extra “black box” restraint that immobilized her thumbs-this to protect her codefendant, a woman with whom she was now excitedly gossiping. Finally the bus rumbled to life and pulled onto a huge tarmac. We had company-there were at least a half-dozen other transport vehicles, another bus, unmarked vans and sedans, all idling in the cold winter dusk. And then quite suddenly an enormous 747 landed, taxied briefly, and pulled up among the vehicles. In a moment I recognized that I was in the midst of the most clichéd action thriller, as jackbooted marshals with submachine guns and high-powered rifles swarmed the tarmac-and I was one of the villains.

First they unloaded about a dozen prisoners from the plane, men in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and attires. Some of them appeared to be wearing paper jumpsuits, not the best deal in the biting January wind. Disheveled and cold, they seemed pretty interested in our little group huddled next to the Danbury bus. Then the armed figures were shouting at us over the wind to line up, with plenty of room between each of us. We performed the tarmac jig that is done when one is trying to move as quickly as possible against restraints. After a rough pat-down, a female marshal checked my hair and my mouth for weapons, and the hop was on to the stairs up to the plane.

On board were more marshals, enormous beefy men and a handful of weathered-looking women in navy blue uniforms. As we clinked and clanked into the passenger seating area, we were greeted by a wave of testosterone. The plane was packed with prisoners, all of whom appeared to be male. Most of them were very, very happy to see us. Some were making a lot of noise, declaring what they would like to do to us, offering critiques as we shuffled up the aisle as directed by the marshals. “Don’t you look at them!” the marshals shouted at us. Clearly, they had calculated that it was much easier to focus control on the behavior of a dozen females than two hundred males.

“What are you scared of, Blondie? They can’t do anything to you!” shouted the male prisoners. “Over here, Blondie!” They were proven wrong in my mind later in the trip when a big man rose from his seat, loudly protesting that he needed a bathroom, and the marshals promptly tasered him. He flopped around like a fish.

Con Air is like a layer cake of the federal prison system. Every sort of prisoner is represented; sad-looking middle-aged upper-class white men, their wire-rim glasses sometimes askew or broken; proud cholos looking vaguely Mayan and covered in gang markings; white women with bleached-out hair and very bad orthodontia; skinhead types with swastika tattoos on their faces; young black men with their hair bushed out because they had been forced to undo their cornrows; a skinny white father-and-son pair, obvious because they were the spitting image of each other; a towering black man in extra-heavy restraints who might be the most imposing figure I have ever seen; and of course, me. When I was escorted for a bathroom break (difficult to manage when one’s wrists are chained to one’s waist), in addition to lascivious invitations and threatening catcalls, I was treated to more than one “Whatcha doin’ HERE, Blondie?”

I was feeling more positively about everyone’s shackles. I was so glad that Jae was next to me, craning her head to see everything too. Still, it was unnerving that she and her cousin didn’t know what legal proceeding they were headed toward. We all agreed that if, God forbid, they had “caught another case” (been charged with another crime), they should have been told. But maybe not. They didn’t have high-end representation like me.

Con Air does not fly direct. The jumbo airliners act more like puddle-jumpers, stopping hither and yon to pick up convicts being transported all over the country for all kinds of reasons-court appearances, facility transfers, postsentencing designation. Some prisoners appeared to be fresh off the street, still in civilian clothes. They brought on a Spanish guy with long black hair who would have resembled Jesus were his face not so hard; he was so good-looking, it was like a kick in the gut. At one stop more women got on. One of them paused in the aisle, waiting for a marshal to tell her where to sit. She was a scrawny little white woman, missing teeth, with a cloud of hair that was an indeterminate shade somewhere between gray and peroxide. She looked like a woebegone yard chicken, like she had led a hard life. As she stood there, some wiseass called out, “Crack kills!” and half the plane, which must have contained some crack dealers, busted out laughing. Her homely face fell. It was like the meanest thing you ever saw on the schoolyard.

At about eight P.M. we landed in Oklahoma City. I believe that the Federal Transfer Center sits at the edge of the airport there, but I can’t be completely sure, as I never saw the outside world-the planes taxi right up to the prison to unload their heavily tattooed cargo. By default and necessity, it is a maximum-security facility that houses many prisoners during the course of their airlift experiences. Until I reached Chicago, this would be my new quarters.

We arrived at our new unit hours later, approximately twenty exhausted women who were issued sheets, pajamas, and small packets of hygienic necessities and ushered into a triangular cavern lined with two tiers of cells. It was darkened and deserted, because its inhabitants were already in lockdown. The CO was a ferocious six-foot Native American woman who barked out our cell assignments. I had never been in an actual cell before, let alone locked in with a cellie. I crept into my assigned spot, about six by twelve feet with a bunk bed, a toilet, a sink, and a desk bolted to the wall. I could see in the dim fluorescent light that someone was asleep in the top bunk. She rolled over and gave me the eye, then rolled away and went back to sleep. I crawled in and dozed off, grateful to have running water and free range of movement.

Thudding, shouting, and my cellmate vaulting out of her bunk awakened me. “Breakfast!” she said over her shoulder, disappearing. I got up and stepped cautiously out of the cell, wearing the washed-out hospital-green pajamas I had been given the night before. Women were scurrying from the numbered cells to get into line on the other side of the unit. Not one of them was in her pajamas. I hurried to get back into yesterday’s nasty clothes and headed toward the line. After receiving a plastic box, I located Jae and Slice, who had claimed a table near my cell. Our boxes contained dry cereal, a packet of instant coffee, a packet of sugar, and a clear plastic bag of milk that struck me as one of the strangest things I had ever seen. But when you mixed the coffee powder with the milk and sugar in a green plastic mug and put it in the unit microwave (an ancient contraption that looked like it belonged on a Lost in Space episode), it tasted okay. I pretended that it was cappuccino. “We’re going to starve,” Slice declared. Jae and I feared she was right. We discussed our predicament, and Slice, who was a hungry woman of action, departed on a recon mission. Jae and I retreated to our respective cells.

I finally got a formal introduction to my new bunkie. “What’s your name?” she drawled. I introduced myself. She was LaKeesha, from Atlanta, and on her way to… Danbury! The minute she heard I was coming from Danbury, she had a million questions. Then she crawled back into her bed and went to sleep. I soon discovered that LaKeesha slept about twenty-two hours a day, getting up three times to eat and, mercifully, shower. She always looked disheveled, though, emerging from our cell with her twists sticking out in all directions. “Peeper, what’s wrong with your bunkie? She looks like Celie in The Color Purple!” cracked Slice.

I was totally wired on my first day in Oklahoma City -it was a brand-new scenario to get the hang of, with all new rituals and routines. Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing to do. There were three TV rooms without chairs, and one little rolling bookshelf filled with a bizarre assortment of volumes-Christian books, ancient copies of John D. MacDonald, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, a handful of romances, and two Dorothy L. Sayers novels. A weird structure in the middle of the unit looked like a reception desk and contained nothing but stubby little pencils and various forms of scrap paper. Next to three pay phones there was an outdoor room where smokers shivered, and you could see a slice of the sky over a partial wall topped with razor wire. The unit felt like a train or bus station, but without a newsstand or a coffee shop. I tried to use the pay phone to call Larry or my parents to tell them I was alive, but the phone would place only collect calls, and no one’s phone service would accept them, which intensified the feeling that I had been dropped into a plane of being that didn’t exist to the rest of the world.

Women came and went quietly. The place was subdued and spotlessly clean. The unit seemed to be at most half full, maybe sixty women in the breakfast line. At eleven A.M. the CO brought in large rolling carts, signaling that lunch was going to be served. I watched a woman emerge from a cell on the top tier and descend the stairs on the opposite side of the unit. That curly hair, that fireplug shape… glasses. Something stirred in my belly; I sat up very straight. What was Nora Jansen doing in here with me?

I had been certain that a “separation order” would be placed on my codefendants and me, but apparently I was wrong. I stared at her as she got in the chow line. “Come on, Peeper!” Slice nudged me to get my lunch. Despite her obvious misgivings about befriending skinny white girls, she was willing to accept me as Jae’s buddy, especially given that I didn’t eat much. I trailed behind my two companions, drawing a bead on the woman who I thought was Nora.

In the past eleven months I had occasional thoughts of Nora-bad thoughts. I wanted to be certain before I made a move. I had fantasized about confronting the woman I’d followed down the wrong path, the woman who had likely ratted me out. In my head I usually set the moment in a lesbian bar in San Francisco and imagined much smashing of bottles with pool cues and breaking of pug noses and general bloodletting. Now the real moment had arrived. What was I going to do?

The short, curly-headed, and decidedly middle-aged woman received her lunch box and turned to head to a table. It was the same woman I had followed to Indonesia, to Zurich, to the Congress Hotel. If I had never met her, I wouldn’t be sitting here now holding a bag of lukewarm milk and wearing government clothing. It was the same French bulldog face ten years later-ten apparently long, hard years. She looked like hell. She glanced at me as she passed, and I saw the shock of recognition cross those flattened features. I held my breath, my pulse pounding.

At the table with my companions, I hissed, “Jae! I think I see one of my codefendants!”

Jae looked at me, very serious. Almost all drug prisoners have codefendants, and that can have a host of meanings, but Jae knew immediately from my tone that this was not a good thing.

“What’s up?” asked Slice, catching that there was a problem.

“Piper thinks she got one of her codefendants here, and she’s surprised.”

“Where?”

I indicated without pointing.

They relaxed a little. “That old lady?” “Shee-it, Peeper, what kind of gangster is you anyway?”

I glared at them. “Jae, I think that bitch ratted me out.”

All levity ceased. Slice studied Nora. Jae thought for several moments, then spoke deliberately.

“Piper, you do what you need to do, knowhatmsayin’, but know this-you will be in the SHU the rest of the time here. If it sucks like this here, imagine what the SHU is like. And fuck knows what else is gonna happen to you. You about to go home, to your man who you know loves you, he got his ass up in the visiting room every damn week. Is that bitch worth it to catch another case? I’ma back you up to a point. I’m telling you f’real though, I am not going to the SHU, but I respect that you gotta do what you need to.”

Slice piped in, “I’m not going to the SHU either, not for some white girl I don’t even know. No offense, Peeper. But do your thing.”

I did nothing. Jae kept a worried eye on me. Slice procured a full deck of playing cards from another prisoner and began to shuffle them. I couldn’t stand it, though. I took a break and lay on my bunk and stared at the cinder-block wall. The woman who had landed me here was finally within my grasp, and I was paralyzed. Would I really do nothing?

I left my cell and stalked around the unit, which took about three minutes. Nora was nowhere to be found. Jae gestured me over. “C’mon, Piper, play with us.”

Jae and her cousin riffed back and forth as we played cards. Slice was full of very funny accounts about the life of a bulldagger on the make in the FCI back in Danbury, including the story of being caught in the act in the middle of the night by a guard we all knew. “I froze, man, he’s got his flashlight on us, and it wasn’t the kinda situation where you can deny, know what I mean? And he just said, ‘Let me watch.’ Sooooooo…” and she indicated getting back to business. It was the same guy who had bird-dogged me for giving Pop an innocent foot massage. Filthy pig.

By the time the dinner cart showed up after the four o’clock count, we were laughing our asses off. When we took the lid off the plastic trays, the stench made us slam them back on immediately. Jae spoke up, after a beat: “We’re gonna have to kill one of these bitches and eat her, or starve.”

I was crossing the unit to return my tray when I saw Nora headed toward me. I squared my shoulders and adopted my most arctic ice-queen stare. As we passed, she looked at me uncertainly.

“Hi,” she said, almost under her breath.

I stalked by her.

“What happened?” asked Jae, concerned.

“Tried to say hello to me.” I shook my head, and we started playing cards again. “You know, the thing I can’t figure out is why she’s here and her sister isn’t.”

“Her sister?”

“Yeah, her sister’s my codefendant too. She’s doing time in Kentucky.”

The next morning at breakfast, there was Hester. That was the way it was in Oklahoma -new people materialized in the middle of the night while you were locked down in the cells. They popped up at breakfast, a day-making novelty. I witnessed the sisters’ reunion from my turf-they hugged ecstatically and headed to a corner to confer.

My companions took note. “You need to kill sis, too?” asked Slice.

“Nah, I never had any beef with Hester-she’s all right.”

Time had been kinder to Hester. She looked more or less the same, perhaps due to her old chicken bone charms: long reddish curly hair, a faraway but quizzical expression, and a witchy, mystical demeanor.

For the weeks that we spent in Oklahoma City, I refused to acknowledge the sisters’ presence. Max lockdown was torturous in its monotony and lack of stimulation; the hours and the days crawled by. Flights arrived and departed almost every day, but you never knew when you might be put on one. It was the perfect realization of limbo-departure from one realm of being, waiting to arrive at another. Oklahoma City made me homesick for the Danbury Camp, a surreal and disturbing feeling. I was accustomed to hours of strenuous activity every day, between working construction, running, and the gym. Here the only options were push-ups and yoga in my cell and “walking the tiers,” actually circling the tiers hundreds of times in my canvas slippers until my blisters bled. Back in Danbury Sister Platte had used the hall as a makeshift treadmill during inclement weather. I would sometimes fall into step next to her. She moved pretty fast for a sixty-nine-year-old, and her constant good spirits amazed me. “How are you holding up, dear?” the little nun would ask me.

I was lucky to have Jae by my side to share the stress and uncertainty and to blow off steam, and her cousin was funny as hell and a reassuring (if also menacing) presence. I asked Jae one day about her cousin’s scar.

“Guy jumped her, tried to rape her, and he cut her with a box cutter. Hundred stitches.” Pause. “He’s in jail now.” And the nickname? “It’s her favorite drink!”

It was easy to lose track of what day it was-there were no newspapers, no magazines, no mail, and since I avoided the TV rooms, no significant way to tell one day from the next. You can only play so many games of gin. I tried to count off which day was January 12, when Pop would be released from Danbury. I couldn’t talk to Larry on the pay phone, and there were no clear windows, so I couldn’t even watch the progression of the sun. I wasn’t remotely interested in messing with prison pussy, one of the only available distractions. I learned dominoes. And I learned to understand the true punishment of repetition without reward. How could anyone do significant amounts of time in a setting like this without losing their mind?

No one was all that inclined to be social with strangers, but some limited intrigue took place around cigarettes. In Danbury, the opportunities for hustle were many. But in Oklahoma City, the only things on the market were sex, other people’s psych meds, and, most important, nicotine. Prisoners who volunteered as orderlies got to “shop,” but all there was to buy were cigarettes. Once a week, when the cigarettes got doled out, there would be frenzy right below the surface, threatening to bust out. The orderlies were either companionable and split their cigs up into smaller “rollies,” to be shared out of the milk of human kindness, or were paid in psych meds, which would help you sleep away the days like LaKeesha. I found the whole deal completely stressful and was glad I didn’t smoke. My hair was turning into a rat’s nest absent conditioner-all we had were little packets of shampoo. Finally, I turned to scavenging packets of mayonnaise, which made my locks greasy, but at least I could get a prison-issue little black plastic comb through it.

Suddenly Jae and Slice got shipped out. At four A.M. Jae and I said goodbye through the thick glass rectangle in my door. “Stick next to Slice!” I said. “I’ll track you down after I get home!”

Jae fixed me with her huge liquid brown eyes, sweet and sad and scared. “Be careful, Piper!” she said. “And remember the Vaseline trick I told you!”

“I will!” I waved goodbye through the inches of glass. When they let us out for breakfast two hours later, I felt truly alone, left to navigate the seas myself. I missed my girls, and I glared across the unit in Nora’s direction. I knew that whatever my immediate future held, it included her.

A few days later my bunkie LaKeesha left for Danbury. I was jealous. As she was scrambling into her clothes, I instructed her, “When you get to the Camp, tell Toni, that’s the town driver, that you saw Piper in Oklahoma City and she’s okay, she says hello.”

“Okay, okay… wait, who is Piper?”

Why wasn’t I surprised? I sighed. “Just tell them you met a white girl who does yoga from Danbury and she’s all right!”

“That I can remember!”

I had a couple of days of total privacy in the cell. I cycled through my yoga poses repeatedly, gazing at the opaque window that let some daylight in; it was the full height of the room and about six inches wide. I would save my bag of milk at breakfast and put it at the bottom of the window, where it stayed cold for hours. The milk was the one guaranteed edible thing every day. I had also learned to sleep against the wall with my arm shielding my eyes from the fluorescent light that was on in the cell twenty-four hours a day. For the first time I had a bottom bunk, a strange novelty.

Then a new bunkie showed up, a young Spanish girl. She was from Texas, on her way to a prison in Florida. She had never been down before, was wide-eyed and full of questions. I played the role of seasoned prisoner and told her what I thought she could expect. She reminded me of Maria Carbon from Room 6 and the construction shop, which made me sad.

Finally, a week later there was a thud on my door at four A.M. “ Kerman, pack out!” I had no possessions to pack other than my now-crinkled paper from Danbury with its scribbled reminders of the people I knew there. I practically danced into my khaki uniform, at this point ready for anything that would get me out of there, Nora or no Nora. Per Jae’s instructions, I fished my precious contraband store of Vaseline out of its hiding place in a sock and tucked gobs of it into the curves of my ears. During the long hours of travel on the flight largely without water, I could dab it on my lips to keep them from cracking.

As I shuffled onto the airplane, shackled again, one of the feds who had also been on my previous flight stared at me. “What’s wrong, Blondie?”

I was stone-faced.

“You better improve your attitude, Blondie,” he advised sharply.

The marshals made me sit next to Nora on the plane. At this point I wasn’t even surprised at my bad fortune, though I was rigid with fury. Shackled, with Vaseline in my ears, and sitting next to the cow who got me into the whole mess, I refused to look at her. We maintained a wall of uncomfortable silence between us as the flight stopped in Terre Haute, Detroit, and other snow-covered midwestern wastelands. At least I had the window seat.

Descending into a sunny, wintry Chicago, I felt, despite my extreme agitation and acute physical discomfort, a quiet thrill. I retained a tiny shred of humor with which to appreciate the irony of the whole situation. Here was the city that was the hub of this whole mess, and it seemed somehow fitting that I should be here, with her next to me.

THE TARMAC in Chicago was lively and bitterly cold. I was freezing in my thin khakis. Convicts were hopping every which way in shackles under the direction of the marshals, and Nora and Hester grew excited at the sight of one floppy-haired white boy. “It’s George!” they exclaimed.

I looked closely, as he turned our way and cheerfully indicated greeting with his chin before being hustled onto a bus. If that was Hester’s old friend George Freud, he had lost some weight in ten years. It seemed that the whole gang was being recalled to Chi-town for the big event of Jonathan Bibby’s trial. We were loaded into a passenger van with a bunch of guys and whisked downtown through rush-hour traffic in a phalanx of unmarked and heavily secured white vehicles.

Hester was seated next to me, and she gazed into my eyes intently for a moment. “Are you doing all right?” she asked, very genuinely, in her flat midwestern tone. I muttered that I was okay, and looked out the window, unnerved by her kindness.

As we headed into the Loop, I tried to anticipate how best to handle myself at the Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center, aka federal jail, where people are typically held before their cases are resolved-unless, like Lil’ Kim, they do all their time there. Jae had been locked up in the Brooklyn MCC for two years before coming to Danbury and had described that situation as far better than what we experienced in Oklahoma City. “Two units in Brooklyn, about two hundred females, and you could have a job and everything, there was stuff to do. In Chicago MCC you’ll be able to fade back, hook up with someone normal, and just lay low, probably even get in a different unit or dorm than your codefendants.”

We were driven into the base of a tall, triangular fortress on a city block in the crowded Chicago Loop. Unloaded from the van, shuffled into an elevator, we were deposited in a filthy, decrepit, and disorganized R &D. The building was disorienting; the floor felt tiny and even more constricting because it was cluttered. It was lined with holding cells, populated by men in orange, most of them brown-skinned. We were quickly locked into an empty holding cell, also filthy.

During the next five hours I paced the cell and tried to ignore the sisters. They were polite and did not say much, seeming to give deference to my coiled, stymied rage. After several hours I was lying prone on a hard narrow bench, practicing nothingness, and Nora cleared her throat.

“Piper?”

“What?”

“Do you even know Jonathan Bibby?”

“NO.”

Several moments passed in silence. “You must be pissed.”

“YEAH.”

A female guard issued us ill-fitting orange men’s jumpsuits. Mine snapped up the front and had short sleeves and weirdly cropped legs, like convict clamdiggers. I had almost made it through the year without lapsing into total cliché but had now missed the mark. Finally, it seemed that they would escort us to our resting place for the night. I was so goddamned tired, I assumed anything would be an improvement over this filthy, uncomfortable cell, especially if it was far away from Nora.

The three of us rode in silence up in the elevator to the twelfth floor. We exited through clanging security gates, until the last gate slid open to reveal the women’s unit.

Psych ward. That was my overwhelming first impression. Dueling televisions blared at opposite sides of the small room. A cacophony of voices vibrated in the close, crowded space. Women, disheveled and stooped, blinked at us like moles. Although there was nothing playful about the place, it had an infantilized, nursery-school vibe. As we entered, everything seemed to stand still, and every eye turned to us. A guard in an ill-fitting uniform, who telegraphed “ineffectual,” approached us. He seemed utterly surprised by our arrival. I turned and looked at Nora and Hester, and then I started to laugh, a disbelieving and desperate laugh. In an instant, the iceberg between me and my codefendants melted. “Oh, hell, no!” And they laughed too, with relief and recognition, and I saw the same look of disbelief mixed with disgust and exhaustion in their eyes. They were in the same boat as me. And right here and now, all of a sudden I knew that they were all I had.

Most changes in perception are gradual: we grow to hate or love an idea, a person, or a place over a period of time. I had certainly nursed a hatred of Nora Jansen over many years, placing much of the blame for my situation on her. This was not one of those instances. Sometimes, rarely, the way we see something is subject to alchemy. My emotions changed so rapidly, and I felt so strongly all the things I had in common with these two women, there was no way not to take immediate notice and stock of what was happening. Our troubled history was suddenly matched by our more immediate shared experience as prisoners on an exhausting journey.

We huddled together for a moment while chaos reigned around us, and it occurred to me that they probably knew nothing at all about the last ten years of my life, including the very fact that I was incarcerated. They had both gone to prison before me.

And that’s how we broke the ice. “Is Kentucky like this?” I asked Hester.

“Nope.”

“ Dublin?”

“Hell no. Where are you?”

“ Danbury. And it’s nothing like this freak show.”

The officer reappeared, with housing assignments. We were shown to our respective cells and locked down. My new roommate Virginia weighed 350 pounds and snored like nothing I had ever heard before. It was like there was a wild, rabid animal in the bunk below me. As I tossed and turned on the plastic mattress, trying to cover my head with the pillow, I realized that this was what Pop meant when she said “real prison,” as in “You girls don’t have any idea what real prison is like.” I remembered a college professor who had told me that lack of sleep, or sleep only in short intervals, will eventually bring on hallucinations.

Virginia was an amateur astrologer who rarely showered. She informed me that she was planning on defending herself in court. When I refused to tell her my birth date so she could “do my chart,” she was deeply insulted. I thought of Miss Pat and Miss Philly, two of the more unstable women back in Danbury, and remembered to tread very lightly with crazy people. The next day my initial impression of the unit was confirmed when I realized that a significant percentage of its occupants were under court-ordered psychiatric observation. This was darkly humorous, as the prisoners in Chicago had little to no contact with prison staff or counselors of any stripe-the inmates really seemed to run this asylum.

I also gleaned that just about all of the women in Chicago were on pretrial status-their cases had not yet been resolved, but they did not or could not make bail. So they were captive here while the wheels of justice ground. A couple of them had been here for months without being charged with a crime. This made their lives uncertain on every level, and those who were not already crazy were acting pretty wacko, driven nuts by rage and instability. I had been dropped into a snake pit. Virginia warned me, “See Connie over there?” She indicated a catatonic-looking woman. “She’s gonna ask you for your razor. Promise me you won’t give it to her! She’s only dangerous to herself, don’t worry.” I promised.

None of the accepted rules of prison behavior that I had learned seemed to apply here. There was no welcome wagon with shower shoes and a toothbrush; there was no understanding of inappropriate or verboten questions; there was no sense of solidarity or recognition of the sanity-saving value of personal routine or order or self-respect. Goddammit, you couldn’t even rely on the tribe system-the white women weren’t worth a damn. Most of them were drooling on meds to keep them from killing themselves (or their neighbors).

My de facto tribe was Nora and Hester (who was going by her given name of Anne these days). At least they understood the official and unofficial rules of incarceration. Warily I sat down with them and slowly began to feel out the situation, including what each of us knew about the upcoming trial and exactly why this place was so freaking miserable. They too were staggered by how awful the Chicago MCC was; we agreed that it was hard to believe it was a federal facility. There was enormous ground for the three of us to cover just on the prison front, but that wasn’t really what I was interested in. I wanted Nora to cop to ratting me out and to tell me why she did it.

FINALLY WE met what passed for the Welcome Wagon-Crystal. Crystal was a tall, skinny black woman in her fifties and the de facto mayor of the women’s unit. She appeared to be perfectly sane and was in charge of issuing uniforms and basics to new arrivals. She led us to a jumbled closet, where she began burrowing in boxes for more orange uniforms and some towels. They were short on underpants, and she handed me two pairs. I looked at them. “ Crystal, these are… not clean.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie, that’s all we got. You put ’em in the laundry that goes out tomorrow. They’ll probably come back.”

There were no pajamas for us, no shampoo, not even eating utensils. I was relieved to hear that we could shop commissary once a week, but of course my ability to do that was going to depend on someone in this building doing their job and completing my paperwork, which seemed like a fantasy.

I was thrilled to discover that there were two private showers, though I was disgusted when I saw them. Before surrendering I had been warned never, ever to go into the shower without shower shoes. My feet had not touched tile in almost a year, but I had no shoes. I was dying to bathe. I turned on the water and gingerly stepped out of my canvas slippers and into the gross shower stall, holding a little bar of motel soap. My skin crawled, and icy water stung my back as I tried to get clean.

NORA WAS cautious around me but was almost pathetically grateful that I wasn’t outright hostile. I certainly felt entitled to be nasty; when I was, she took it without resistance. Hester/Anne was bemused but didn’t interfere. I guess she figured her big sister could fend for herself, or that she had it coming. I learned that Nora had taught in a vocational program they had in Dublin; Hester/Anne was in the Puppy Program in Lexington. Before she’d been locked up, Hester/Anne had gotten sober, got married, and quietly embraced Jesus as her personal savior. Nora was just as I remembered her-funny, scheming, curious, and sometimes an insufferably egotistical pain in the ass in need of a takedown.

Finally, I cut to the chase. “So why don’t you fill me in on everything that happened after we broke up in 1993?”

According to Nora, many months after my departure from her life, she did some soul-searching and tried to get out of the business with Alaji, who told her in no uncertain terms, no dice, and warned her of the consequences if she did walk. “I’ll always know where your sister is,” he threatened her. A while later, when a pair of drug couriers got arrested-separately in San Francisco and Chicago-things began to get messy and ugly, and of course the whole operation collapsed.

With her drug money Nora had built her dream home in Vermont -or at least it was her dream until a SWAT team of heavily armed federal agents arrived in jackboots to take her into custody. When the feds sat her down, she claimed, they already had detailed information about the whole enterprise. Someone-I thought probably her slimy business partner Jack-had been singing.

“Did they have my name?” I asked.

“Yes, they knew exactly who you were. But at first I told them you were just my girlfriend and you didn’t know anything.”

At this point it was hard to know what to believe. I had invested a lot of time and energy into hating Nora and elaborating fantasies of revenge. Her story was plausible, but it could easily be a lie. I believed that she felt terrible about the mistakes she had made, and when she looked across the table at her little sister, or talked about her elderly parents (who had not one but two children in prison), I felt bad for her in spite of myself. My brain and my guts were twisted, a snarled cat’s cradle that I would have to pick apart.

I was starting to understand what the Marlboro Man meant by “diesel therapy.”