Out of Orange: A Memoir

by Cleary Wolters

  I recalled one time when I was in New York City. I had refused to reach into my pocket for money because I was afraid I might accidentally pull out a big bill instead of a single and get mugged. I was younger and had never been in the Big Apple. I had been cursed by the old woman who had asked for my change with scripture: “There, but for the grace of God, go you.” I stopped in my tracks on Battery Street and laughed hard for a minute, wondering if I too had the power to curse people now, then continued on to Market Street. I looked over at my reflection, trudging past a storefront farther up Market, and almost tripped over someone sleeping on the sidewalk.

  My reflection horrified me. I looked like hell. My hair was standing straight up like those little troll dolls, and my outfit made me look like an Easter egg. No one would recognize me, and I was grateful for that. I imagined running into Piper right then, and running to her, then chasing her down the street, all happy and open armed. “Hey, honey! I finally made it to San Francisco!” This amused me. She would poop her fancy pants.

  I stopped short before stepping on a sleeping lump and realized there was a whole crew of young, dirty, tattooed, and pierced bodies lining the sidewalk. I asked a girl sitting among the odd youth of San Francisco, and smoking, for a cigarette. She pulled a pack of Rothmans out of her dingy, torn leather jacket, riddled with large silver spikes. She lit the cigarette for me, looked at the black lipstick she had left on the butt-end, handed it over, and announced she was STD-free. I wasn’t sure if there was more I should say, other than thank you, in response. It took me a few steps more to figure out that STD-free meant she had no sexually transmitted diseases and I shouldn’t worry that she had just had the cigarette in her mouth, not that the cigarettes were free.

  Then I entered an astonishingly bad neighborhood and found my new home. Each floor of the building served a different community. One floor was for drug rehab, another for state criminals. The top floor and all of the first floor except the entrance to the building were reserved for federally sponsored residents of one sort or another. This was made up of mostly men who had completed their sentences but were doing the last six months in the halfway house, a handful of pretrial detainees like myself, and one older woman who was serving her whole six-month sentence at the house. She was my roommate.

  Turk Street wasn’t as bad as being in a county jail the size of Santa Rita. If you thought I was a crybaby in the Chittenden County Jail, it was nothing compared to my crying binges and panic after just a couple of days in Santa Rita Jail. The women there would have drowned me in the toilet in no time. It was more like an overcrowded dog pound where they just tossed the pit bulls and Chihuahuas in together and served them all shitty food and ding biscuits (psych meds).

  I could not leave Turk Street for a while, but eventually, I was required to go out and find a job, work, and turn over 20 percent of my gross pay to my hosts. My stay at Turk Street was a condition of my release, but I could always go wait out my pretrial period in Santa Rita Jail if I didn’t want to comply with the facility’s rules.

  I got a job as a software tester at an Internet start-up in San Francisco. Larry and Melony eventually repurposed my home in Vermont. It became their art studio and they adopted my girls. I had to let them go, all of them, and everything I owned except for the clothes on my back I had left there with. I discovered something very interesting about myself. I only cared about losing the cats and the people, not the stuff. I didn’t have ten cents to buy a stamp for a while, but my sadness stemmed entirely from missing my cats and my people. Aside from that loss, I was happy, once I got used to my new digs and poverty.

  I knew Edith and Dum Dum were in loving hands and I had to accept the bittersweet truth: they would be happy too as soon as they forgot about me. Larry and Melony would also be safer if I simply cut ties with them. They had nothing to do with my sordid past, but I had learned a federal indictment of conspiracy is like a contagious disease. The federal government could pull innocent people into a conspiracy, seize property, and indict them on nothing more than a whisper.

  The panicked confession I had made in the post office was not admissible in court, but it certainly helped to build admissible cases against me and everyone I had named. It also confirmed what their lengthy investigation had already uncovered. I cannot take credit for the mountain of information they’d already had in Chicago and I don’t want to go so far as to say I was tricked, but the protection Opie had promised for everyone, if my inadmissible proffer had showed it was needed, was never dispatched. I guess they decided it was not necessary.

  They had not arrested everyone that day either. To this day, I don’t know who else they picked up the day I was in the post office. But it did not include my sister or Piper. They were not indicted until 1998, and my grand jury testimony preceded their indictments but not everyone’s. Basically, the confession was the stupidest thing I had ever done in my life, and clearly, that bar was already set very high. Ironically, it was the right thing to do.

  Almost seven years after my arrest, I was finally sentenced in the same federal conspiracy that included Henry, Bradley, Hester, Phillip, Garrett, Edwin, Molly, Craig, Donald, Piper, and a few guys I didn’t know. Henry was the only one who dared to plead innocent, refuse to cooperate, and risk going to trial. Everyone else arrested accepted guilty pleas and an agreement with the court that mandated cooperation. Interestingly, the guy caught coming into San Francisco with a bag of heroin was not made part of our big conspiracy in Chicago. I think that guy was sentenced in San Francisco before he could be added, but I couldn’t find out for how long he was sentenced. The guy that was arrested coming into Chicago with a bag of heroin was included. In fact our conspiracy was named after him. He was the first arrest of all, the first on Opie’s metaphorical bus—the bus Opie tried to sell me a seat on. If my co-conspirators’ sentences were any indication, there was only one good seat on that bus and it was taken long before Opie got to me. That guy was sentenced to seven days. The only exception to all of this is Alajeh. He has still not been in an American court.

  Alajeh was arrested in London at the request of the U.S. authorities, but they were unsuccessful in actually extraditing him to face charges. Twice. He was released back to Nigeria and claimed it was a case of mistaken identity—that he was not the drug trafficker, that it was his dead brother. Nonetheless, his efforts to have the charges dismissed from abroad have also been unsuccessful and the United States still considers him a fugitive.

  Life went on without me in Vermont. My dream of being the CTO of a successful Internet start-up became the only casualty of my exile; Twelve-Twelve died almost immediately after my departure. Once in California, I was not permitted to leave. I learned I would be going to jail no matter what and that my confession had helped to ensure it would be for much longer than if I had followed my lawyer’s simple instructions and said nothing. In any case, I would be gone a bit longer than the two weeks I had imagined. This was not going to be a quick drama, not at all like an episode of Law and Order.

  I wasn’t allowed to leave the halfway house for anything but work, so I spent a little more time than usual at the office. It’s astonishing the advances you can make in your career when you have no personal life. I actually fit in very well with the whole technology start-up genre in San Francisco. I wasn’t the only one who lived at work; I was just the only one who got excited when we had to work into the night to make a release date.

  In December of 1997, I was released from the halfway house and moved into a crappy residential hotel near Union Square. The idea of putting down a security deposit and first and last months’ rent on a lease in San Francisco seemed crazy while I was checking in with my pretrial officer once a week and waiting to find out when I would be sentenced and go to jail. A year later, I moved into a really nice house at the corner of Mariposa and Arkansas with a friend, a gay stockbroker. He was the greatest roommate, so clean, so responsible, no drama, no drugs. He was a social butterfly too, so I finally made fri
ends with an interesting bunch of people—some through him, some through work, and some through a few feeble attempts to go out and play with the lesbians of San Francisco.

  I had to check in weekly with a pretrial officer, report my income and spending, submit to surprise drug tests, and stay out of trouble or go back to Santa Rita. There was no room for lessons. A mistake would not be something to learn from; it would be the end of me, especially since it was very clear a stay in Santa Rita would not be short. In my brief role as a prisoner, and by way of the extended exposure to people on their way out of the system in the halfway house, I learned one very important thing to avoid. The most potentially disastrous element in my predicament would be a bad lover. Since I wouldn’t typically discover I had saddled myself with a problem until long after I had fallen in love with someone, it was a bad idea for me to play with that fire.

  I behaved but lived vicariously through the exploits of Natalie, my new best friend. I had a mad crush on her the entire time I knew her, but the fact that she had no interest in me made her a perfect remedy for my problem. Unrequited love can be nearly as exciting as actually consummating a love. She was a gorgeous Amazon, way too tall for me though. That is why we were never going to happen; she only liked other tall girls. She was also dating an alcoholic jealous psychopath who liked to circle Natalie’s house with a shotgun each time they broke up. Natalie was professionally successful, and she rode a vintage BMW motorcycle and drove a Land Rover. Aside from alcohol, she was drug-free.

  Drug-free was important. I was paranoid about the drug tests. I couldn’t be around illegal drugs at all, only drugs that were legally prescribed to me. Fortunately, my job paid well and I had health insurance. By my fifth year in San Francisco, I started to think I was never going to go to jail, not after all the time that had passed, and I started dating a woman. I had also turned forty. My caution about getting involved with someone until my legal predicament was behind me was starting to make less sense. What was I thinking—I would wait till I was a senior citizen before dating again? I should have known not to tempt fate that way.

  January 2, 2003

  “Sit in this spot, one last time, and savor this . . . this fleeting shit!” I bellowed loudly, throwing my voice and an empty pack of cigarettes at the wall. I sounded like the schizophrenic downstairs on Jones Street, condemning everyone to hell, the whole city of San Francisco. It was a bit too much melodrama for my sleepy cat. She opened her eyes a slit, then closed them again, and I laughed.

  The computer screen, the keyboard, and the occasion reminded me of a similar death, almost seven years earlier. If I closed my eyes and tried, I could still see my big oak desk as if I were sitting there and the watery green halo of light on the floor. The light had come from the glass edges of my desk lamp, the one that had illuminated my keyboard in Vermont. I could see it as clearly as the glass desk I currently sat at and the code scrolling by on my screen. Tomorrow this too would have to live behind my lids. It was time to die again.

  Miss Kitty had no interest in my noisy musings or my dinner. But she still didn’t budge. She had been sleeping, curled up, between the monitor and my keyboard, or within petting distance of wherever I was, for the last twenty-four hours. I hadn’t been out of the house all day, and it was already over. Miss Kitty and I would be taking our last late-night walk together in a little while, and I think she knew that. I think she was trying to delay the inevitable, as if in sleeping longer, it wouldn’t have to happen. I remembered doing the same thing when I was a kid, and it was time for school.

  Miss Kitty had been my guardian angel, my little Dum Dum surrogate. I had both lived and worked in her neighborhood, the one I spotted her in when we first met, three years earlier. I chased her up De Haro Street in San Francisco, sure that she was Dum Dum and had made the miraculous journey across the continent to find me. I had a complete nervous breakdown at the top of De Haro, cried my eyeballs out, when she got away. A couple of weeks later, I found her sitting in my backyard. I lived one block over from De Haro. She clearly had a home, but she still came by to hang out with me every day after work. Eventually, she started spending the night with me. That’s when I got a collar for her and put a tiny note inside a little charm: “If you are wondering where your kitty has been, call me,” and I listed my number. Her daddy called a couple of days later and we had a good laugh about his kitty cheating on him with me. She didn’t get along with his dog, so he was fine with my adopting her when I moved away from Potrero Hill a couple of years later. I told him I would return her if anything happened to me.

  She was the coolest cat in the universe. She liked going for walks really late at night, when the city was quiet, and with me on her leash. She would drag me up Jones Street, an easy climb for a tiny black cat but not a hill an overweight smoker enjoys. The last few bits up the hill are so steep the sidewalk turns to stairs. We would go to the top of Jones, where Grace Cathedral looks out over the city. There is a fountain up there; she liked to walk around its edges. Then we would go back to our apartment building on Jones Street and head up to the roof one last time. Jones Street would be my last address in San Francisco.

  Miss Kitty had two moms now, as Julie and I had moved in together shortly after starting dating. But it wasn’t one of those dates lesbians are famous for, where someone brings a U-Haul. There had been a fiasco involving a faulty sprinkler system where I used to live. Julie had let me and Miss Kitty move in with her. “What the fuck are you talking about?” she now responded to my burst of poetic grumbling. She was irritated, and who could blame her? I was horrible company. She probably couldn’t wait for the morning to come, so she could be rid of me.

  I pushed my pieces of sushi around on the plate and popped another Vicodin, chasing the pill down with my miso soup. We had ordered sushi and miso soup, a meal we usually shared with The Sopranos on Sunday nights, not Thursdays—I don’t mean Miss Kitty; I mean Julie. Miss Kitty didn’t like television or sushi.

  Julie and I couldn’t possibly have been more incompatible, but there were strange forces at work in my life. Forces probably managed by Miss Kitty. She loved my roommate.

  Living together was supposed to have been a temporary arrangement while I found a new apartment. But that was when I finally got the call from Chicago, the call I had convinced myself would never happen. It had been just over six years since my arrest in Brattleboro, Vermont.

  That was back in August. On September 22, 2002, I finally stood in front of a judge in Chicago. So much had passed to bring me standing there, in that spot, in front of the man about to tell me where I would be spending the next few years of my life. I had come to terms with that. I’d had years to come to terms with where I would be spending this time—probably in the federal correctional institution in Dublin, California. I realized, though, that I had neglected to come to terms with what would happen right there, right then, in that courtroom.

  My entire family and some friends from the neighborhood where I had grown up were there. The friends had traveled to Chicago from Cincinnati with my sister, my brother, and our parents to support them through this horrible day. Hester would be sentenced immediately following me, and a few other defendants were either before or after us. We knew this because we had seen their names posted on the schedule outside the door of the judge’s courtroom.

  We hadn’t actually laid eyes on any of them, which was a little disappointing. I would like to have seen what everyone looked like after almost seven years of this bullshit. Henry was fighting his charges; he was going to trial. He would get more time when that finally happened. I knew by then that they punished you by asking for much longer sentences if you went to trial. He sure as hell couldn’t win. Every one of us had accepted a plea agreement to avoid going away for an eternity. But part of that plea agreement was that we would testify against co-defendants if anyone decided to go to trial, the assumption being Alajeh was the only one who would do that.

  Henry was charged with conspiracy, like most
of us had been. Conspiracy law can be used to convict people with hearsay evidence alone. It’s a crime to conspire to do something illegal if you actually do any part of what you conspired with others to do, even if you don’t actually follow through. It was invented to get at the untouchables, I’m told, but has been used for much juicier goals than it was intended. Someone explained to me McCarthyism was made possible by conspiracy law, but its more common abuse was by questionably ethical prosecutors pressuring people to cooperate with the threat of an inevitable conviction. Normally, it requires actual hard evidence to convict someone of a crime, and hearsay is not admissible in court. But with conspiracy, hearsay is allowed in court, and all it takes is enough people saying something happened and it is accepted as having occurred.

  One other very important thing to know about conspiracy law: If you are convicted of conspiracy, you are held responsible for everything that everyone in the conspiracy did. We had been shown a list of the sentencing recommendations. For the time being, Phillip, Bradley, and I—I thought—were getting the longest sentences, which was to be expected. But at the time, Hester and I were the only two out of all the co-defendants who were in the courtroom.

  Our parents sat behind us, holding hands. They both were trying to look calm and collected, but it wasn’t working. They had more of an our-daughters-are-getting-beheaded look going on. The law would sweep both their girls out of their lives for a long time, period. Mom and Dad couldn’t come to terms with the length of our sentences. We had talked about this with them numerous times, but I don’t think they thought it was possible. Like I said, Mom had worked in the Hamilton County jail for years as an employee of the Cincinnati Public Schools, and she thought she knew better.