The sergeant took me to the station lockup, where half a dozen other women were waiting. One of them looked at me with shock that was half admiration. “What’d you do to Lemour, girl, refuse to pay him his shakedown? I seen him go insane more than once but never nothing like he did to you tonight.”
I tried to say something, but my mouth was too swollen for me to speak. She banged on the cage demanding water. By and by a matron brought a paper cup of tepid tap water. I swallowed as best I could and sat down, gingerly rubbing my sore head and shoulders. I tried to thank my benefactor, but only parodies of words came from my bruised mouth.
I spent a sleepless night. One woman was chain–smoking, the one next to me on the floor spewed curses as the ashes floated on her, while a third roommate moaned over the fate of her baby. Roaches paraded across us all night. We were transients; they owned this room.
In the morning a matron came into the cage, forcing all of us to our feet. The lights in the room were too bright, but when I shut my eyes the room around me spun in nauseating spirals. I held on to the wall for support and felt my stomach heave. I didn’t want to throw up, not on myself, not in public, but I couldn’t hold it in.
“Jesus Christ, you whores come in here with a load on and then foul up the cell. Come on, wash it off, put these on, let’s get going.”
I was cuffed to another woman who’d also been sick. We were taken to a tiny toilet where we cleaned ourselves as best we could. I put my head under the sink tap and let water run through my hair and mouth until the officer dragged me away.
“You there, Warshki, get moving.”
“I need a doctor.” I coughed hoarsely. “I have a concussion.”
“You need clothes. Put these on. You’re riding out to Coolis.”
“Coolis?” I couldn’t raise my voice above a whisper. “Not Coolis. Only arrested, not convicted.”
The policewoman pulled me away from the sink. “You have a bad fall or a rough john or what last night? Put this shirt on.”
The shirt was a bright yellow that made my eyes smart. On the back was stamped IDOC—Illinois Department of Corrections. “Your detective Lemour, he’s got to be the roughest john in Chicago. This was all his handiwork. I’m not going to Coolis. I’m waiting for my attorney. Post bond.”
“Look, Warshki, I don’t have time for games. I got four girls to get on a bus, including you, and you’re not in shape to do anything but say yes, ma’am. It’s a holiday today, no bond court; your lawyer if he calls will be told where you are. Coolis has the overflow jail for Cook and Du Page County, and we are filled to the brim with all you girls turning tricks up and down the city, so you get a bus ride in the fresh country air, which is more than I’m allowed on the nation’s birthday, let me tell you.”
I put the shirt on. I didn’t know what other choice I had. I had been so sure Freeman would be here this morning to post bail that I was too disappointed to react. Only four of us out of the cage were being sent to Coolis—did the others get a free pass, and if so, why?
The matron cuffed me back to my bathroom partner and marched us out to the street, where an old white bus painted with the Department of Corrections logo waited. Our escort exchanged a few jovial words with a guard as she handed us over to the state. I got my watch back and the six dollars I’d had in my jeans, but my keys were a potential weapon and were handed to the guard in a sealed envelope together with my paperwork.
Rogers Park was the last stop for the bus, which had picked up women from various lockups on the west and north ends of town. There were twenty–nine of us altogether. The guard pushed me into a seat, attached leg and hand shackles to me, connected them to a central pole, and signaled to the driver to take off.
As we lurched west to the expressway, the diesel smoke and the hard seats made my empty stomach heave again. A pregnant woman two seats in front and on my left begged the driver to stop, in halting accented English. No one paid any attention. She threw up, trying to cover her mouth with her manacled hands.
“Can you stop?” I called through my bruised lips. “There’s a sick woman in here.”
No response from the armed guard.
I shouted again. Several prisoners stamped their feet. A guard yelled through the loudspeaker that they would halt the bus and make us stand at attention on the side of the road for an hour if the noise continued. Everyone subsided, including me—I didn’t want to be the one who made this group of women stand in the midday sun.
“Fucking assholes,” the woman next to me muttered as the bus waited in line to get on the tollway. “Don’t let you go to the john, then bounce you around hard enough to make you pee over yourself.”
She wasn’t talking to me, and I didn’t answer. She’d kept up a stream of invective since the guard attached us. She was twitching, her eyes a telltale yellow. As the day wore on, flecks of spittle appeared around her mouth, but she couldn’t stop talking.
At noon we halted for a rest stop at the place where Mr. Contreras and I had our picnic with the dogs two weeks ago. We were unshackled two at a time, the bathroom closed to the public while we were escorted in. It was hard to walk past the people stopping for food or walking their dogs, their jaws gaping, trying not to show how avidly they were staring.
We were given fifteen minutes to relieve ourselves and buy something at the vending machines. I used one of my six dollars to buy a can of juice, which I had to drink in quick gulps under the intense glare of a guard: they would confiscate any metal we tried to sneak onto the bus.
While we waited for the driver, some of the women exchanged small talk with the guards. When we were finally loaded back on, the smart talkers got to move closer to the front, away from the diesel fumes. I got to move closer to the back. My reward for trying to speak up for the pregnant woman.
It was three when the bus pulled in through the main gates at Coolis. A heavily armed force supervised our unbuckling from the pole and emergence into the prison yard. I ended up behind the pregnant woman. She was small and dark, like Nicola Aguinaldo, and deeply ashamed of the vomit down her front. She tried timidly to ask for help but none of the guards responded. They were busy counting us and comparing lists. It was here that the sheep and the goats were separated—some bound for prison, some for jail.
“This woman needs help,” I said to one of the guards near me.
When he ignored me I repeated myself, but the woman next to me hissed and stepped on my left foot. “Shut up. They only start over from the beginning each time they’re interrupted, and I need to use the john.”
A smell of urine now came from the pregnant woman and she began to weep. The guards ignored her and began the count again. Finally, when the heat of the sun and the long wait made me wonder if she might faint, they started calling us forward. My traveling companions disappeared one by one into the building. Another half hour went by. I badly needed a toilet myself, but they were taking us in alphabetical order. There were three of us left when they called me.
“Warshki.”
I shuffled forward in my chains. “Warshawski, not Warshki.”
I should have kept quiet—speech was their license to kill. They sent me back to wait, took “White” and “Zarzuela” while I compressed my thighs as best I could for the chains. And finally was called again. Not “Warshki” this time but “Warshitski.”
At the door I was unlocked, printed again, sent under double escort to an interior room where I once again took off all my clothes, squatted, coughed, tried to remove myself from the burn of shame at my exposure, and the dribble of urine I couldn’t help releasing. A guard barked me into the shower, where hair and a whitish film of soap covered the floor and sides. I was given a clean IDOC uniform, the pants too short on my long legs and riding too tightly in the crotch, the shirt big enough for three of me. At least it covered my waist so I could leave the pants unzipped.
On this far side of the gates my shackles were finally removed. A guard took me through a series of locked corridors
to the jail wing. At five I joined the line to the refectory and had a Fourth of July special: hard–fried chicken, overboiled green beans, corn on the cob, and cooked apple slices on something that looked like cardboard. It was too tough to cut with the plastic utensils we were issued, so most of the women picked it up and ate it by hand.
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 eight–by–twelve 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 assuredly 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 double–thick glass, 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 cost–saving 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 Saturdays 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 space.
“Play you one–on–one,” she persisted. “Dollar a point.”
“Play you one–on–one for nothing,” I panted, not breaking stride. “I don’t have one thin dime in my possession.”
“No shit?” she demanded. “Your family, they haven’t sent you nothing for a prison account?”
“No shit. 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, shivering and rubbing her arms.
Angie snatched 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 head–butt 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 shin as she passed 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 well–conditioned 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 scissor–kicked 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.
“Bitch 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 one–on–one. 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.
“Uh–huh, 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.
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