We were all on our way to Chicago because Henry was actually taking his case to trial. We all might not have understood this ten years earlier, but we all knew better by now. There’s no fighting the feds; once you are on their radar, you are dinner. Period. Fighting it is pointless, expensive, and increases the time they give you. It also puts more people in jeopardy. Remember, while you are fighting the feds, you are contagious. I had met my share of the family members of people like Henry in prison. Parents and siblings who had paid the price for their own Henry and his or her stubborn refusal to take responsibility for his or her own shit.
One of my roommates in Dublin got six years in prison for money laundering. She had made the mistake of using her son’s cash to retain a lawyer for him when he was arrested. They then arrested her for handling his dirty money. This created the leverage they hoped would push her stubborn son into a confession and toward testifying against those that they really wanted. If he did that, the charges against his mom would be dropped. She was so proud of her son for not crumbling. Unfortunately, this sweet little old lady was not an anomaly. There were other innocent mothers, sisters, and girlfriends in prison with me. My mother would have disowned me for letting her go to jail, not applauded it. But, then again, if as many Irish Catholic bodies littered the borders and freeways near Mexico as the poor souls caught in Mexican cartel disputes, she might applaud my silence too, even if it did land her in jail. Henry was either still afraid, even after all those years, or he was the bravest person I’ll ever know and thought he might win at trial. Whatever the cause was, Henry’s trial is what we were on our way to Chicago for.
I kept singing my own rendition of a song stuck in my head—Fools to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you—over and over, hoping my sister would pick the tune up telepathically and join in. God knows we couldn’t actually sing it out loud; we’d probably get shot. But it had become our theme song at some point, many moons ago, and it always made her laugh to sing it. I couldn’t remember the lines in the song past I’m so scared. So I stopped singing in my head and gave up on my telepathic sing-along.
I realized the last time I had been sitting next to Piper on a plane we had been headed from Bali to Paris, Paris to New York, or was it Chicago? I think we’d had first-class seats. We’d had champagne for certain.
“Not exactly like the last time we traveled together?” I asked in my crackly voice. It crackled again when I tried to giggle; not because I was broken up or nervous about speaking, just because my throat was dry and scratchy.
“Hmm” was all she replied, devoid of any indication in her intonation as to the meaning of “hmm.”
Three marshals were talking among themselves over the head of a mammoth bald man, who probably would have been forced to buy two seats if he were flying commercially. I couldn’t see the poor little fellow they had put between the big man and the window—he’d probably been squashed under the guys elbow—but I could see the guy’s ass, who had been seated on his other side, hanging out into the aisle. The grumpy older marshal kept roughly jabbing his butt and barking in his ear to clear the aisle. Were it not for his incessant barking, I might have drifted off to sleep. But then a rare thing, a female marshal, spat back at the grumpy old marshal, “Shut the fuck up! Where you want him, up his ass?” Finally giving words to what I’m sure a few shackled folk wanted to say but couldn’t. The marshals laughed at themselves. The guy whose ass was hanging off the edge of his seat grumbled under his breath, and the lady marshal gave him a frozen glare with her bloodshot eyes that shut him down.
I could smell stale alcohol and something like barbecue sauce lingering in her wake when she passed by. I had once heard an expression used to describe someone a little rough around the edges: “rode hard and put away wet.” It described this lady well. She had wrinkles in the wrinkles of her orange-tinted leathery skin, dark circles under her eyes, and dead hair teased, sprayed, and locked into something unnatural. The hair was big and stiff; it looked like a helmet when she moved and it didn’t. She must’ve found her look in Texas in the eighties. It’s a funny thing when people become a look instead of just wearing it.
I looked over at my sister; her head was tilted forward. She was asleep or praying. Piper still sat perfectly rigid next to me, staring forward. She was a lousy travel companion, but life could be much worse. I imagined how uncomfortable my comrades, stuffed in their seats next to Big Foot, would be after about twelve more hours in their positions. There was no telling how long we might be on one of these flights. They flew all over the country, stopping in weird airfields, picking up and dropping off prisoners. From what I had learned on my first trip with Con Air and what I had been able to glean from the women I’d traveled with and stayed with in the Oklahoma facility, there were at least three big planes like this one and three general routes they took into and out of Oklahoma City, one going north, one east, and one west. I had now been on each. We were on the plane for however long it took them to land wherever we were being dropped off.
There was a logo still painted on the plane’s cabin partition wall: TRAVEL PLANET. We were flying on a decommissioned old 747 from a defunct charter airline company. The seats were worn and dingy, but there were still little signs of the life the plane once had. Sharp edges around a dug-out hole were all that remained of the ashtray that used to be embedded in my seat’s armrest; frayed stitches lined where there had once been the magazine and barf bag pocket in the seatbacks; and now doorless luggage bins gaped empty overhead.
I couldn’t sit up and turn my head to look at all my other travel companions or to imagine the former inhabitants of this plane, not without getting a black box. Nobody wanted that, so they used the threat of wearing one to keep all two hundred or so convicts docile. That’s the weird little metal contraption left over from the Spanish Inquisition I got to wear once. So far, no one on this flight was wearing one.
I didn’t want to be the first, so I sat still, closed my eyes, and tried to slip off to sleep. One benefit to having such a rich life was that when I dreamed, I had a lot of material to work with. It would be kind of weird to have a dream about the Piper I used to know while sitting next to the ice princess she had become. I was amusing the hell out of myself. I thought about all the stuff that had happened after she and I had gone our separate ways in Brussels, looked at the statue sitting next to me, and remembered the last thing she had said to me in Brussels about hurrying home. Sorry, I got held up.
16 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), Chicago
March 2005
THE MCC IS SMACK DAB IN THE CENTER of downtown Chicago. It’s a triangle-shaped building, tall and thin. We approached it from the ninety-degree corner of the building and pulled up to a big garage door at its base, so we didn’t know about its odd shape until later. The marshals ran into a problem when we arrived and attempted to get the facility to open the big metal doors. They were late and the wizard on their walkie-talkies announced it was too close to the facility’s four o’clock count time to open the gates to Oz. There were frantic negotiations under way to try to get the facility to accept their delivery and not make the marshals sit with us for two hours before allowing us to enter.
There were only two white vans in our little caravan. One for the men and one for the women. Piper, Hester, and I were the only women, so we had plenty of room, but Bradley was in a van packed full of men. We could see him when the van pulled up alongside us. I couldn’t help but wonder if any of the men with him were here to testify for the same trial, and if they were, for which side. My quandary was answered when the marshals loudly complained to the wizard about the risks of making them sit on the street like sitting ducks with four witnesses in a big drug case. Poor dears. It hadn’t even occurred to me they might get a bullet intended for one of us.
I had forgotten completely about the potential hazards of Chicago and the multitudes of Alajeh’s associa
tes there. Since there were only three of us in our van, the guys would know at least one of them was a snitch. I felt sorry for Bradley being stuck in the van with all those guys. It is my understanding that male prisoners are much more violent and prone to acting out just for shits and grins, and the marshals had given them just cause. Fortunately, the wizard agreed with the marshals’ concerns for their safety and the massive doors lifted, permitting our entry.
This entry led to an underground garage and a heavy metal doorway, whose locks were also controlled by the wizard. This doorway led to an area surrounded by holding cells, with bulletproof glass half walls instead of bars. In the center, there was a command control room, also encased in bulletproof glass. The officers looked like they were operating in a dirty fishbowl and the wizard looked like a fat blowfish. Once we were locked inside one of the several holding cells, the men were all paraded in and unshackled. We could see Bradley had been placed in a cell on the opposite side of the fishbowl, but communicating with him was impossible.
Once they got us all squared away in the holding cells, all the officers except the blowfish wizard left the area, presumably to go count the inmates residing in the facility. We could rely on being in our holding cell for at least two hours. That was how long we would have been on the street waiting to enter had the wizard not been concerned with the safety of the marshals. How much longer than that would depend on whether they processed the men into the facility before us or we were first.
Hester was the one who finally broke the ice with Piper. I love my sister so much. She brokered our détente in two minutes. It was so fast I can’t even remember how she did it or what magic words ended the cold silence between all of us. But she did it.
It was so strange when we started talking again. I had not seen her since October of 1993 in Brussels, when she told me she was going back to California and wanted nothing to do with my smuggling activities. I realized that we had never even officially broken up. Our relationship had gone from steamy hot, about to be married, to no contact without a single discussion about our relationship. She had called me once, shortly after Phillip and Garrett had had a very ill-fated trip, and told me it was over and that she had told someone—a lawyer, I think—about us. Before that call, I had intended to go to San Francisco, explain away why I had been held up for so long, and hopefully start over with her. But after Phillip’s friend had been busted and everything else that had occurred after that, even without her call, I would never have made it to San Francisco until I was forced to go there on Con Air.
I knew she was aware of my testimony at the grand jury that had indicted her. What I hadn’t expected was that she held me singly accountable for her fate. I had read a prepared statement to the grand jury, a statement prepared almost two years after my arrest. It was a very accurate accounting of my role and everyone else’s roles in the conspiracy, but it was a much richer account than my proffer in the post office in Vermont had been. By then, I’d had no choice left but to read that statement, and my not doing so would have violated my plea agreement. When we first started talking, I had to take on a weird role in our little trio, Hester, Piper, and me. The tables had turned so completely from Hester being my baby sister to the wise creature she had become. I hadn’t seen Hester either in almost three years, but she had changed. At first, it was a very cordial conversation between the three of us. When we finally arrived at the women’s floor where we would be staying, it was clear we probably wouldn’t have much to talk about with the other women in the facility.
All the women looked in our direction, and when the door to our unit opened up, a hush fell over the room like aliens had landed. I’m only guessing about the hush; I couldn’t possibly hear it over the volume blasting from dueling television shows or the smoke alarm going off from popcorn someone had burned in the microwave. It was a small space for all the women they housed. My first impression of our new digs was “insane asylum.”
Piper and I had an opportunity to talk through much of what had caused her reaction to me in the transfer center in Oklahoma. The conversation started as sarcastic threats to drown me in the toilet for ratting her out blurted out in jest during a marathon game of Rummy 5000. There was nothing to do in the small quarters at the MCC but read, watch television, play cards, sleep, and eat. Access to the library, recreation, and fresh air required an escort for the women—a trip on the elevator to some other floor in the facility—and that did not happen frequently. Then one day we were taking our once-a-week hour of outdoor recreation on the roof of the MCC, adjusting to the sudden increase in oxygen and the frigid wind and looking out toward Lake Michigan, and I saw the sign for the Congress Plaza Hotel at the edge of the city.
“Is that the Congress Hotel?” Piper asked me, this with a hint of astonishment in her intonation, at the very same moment I was trying to focus my eyes on the same sign.
“It is.” I had stayed there for my sentencing, so I did not have the untainted memory of good times associated with the hotel anymore. I suppose she did.
“Is the Blackstone to the left or the right?” she asked, and we both looked for another huge sign but couldn’t find one. We were several miles away, in the heart of downtown Chicago, so it would have to be a big flashy sign for us to see it.
“Doesn’t it seem like that was in a different lifetime?” I asked.
“It does. I can’t believe how stupid we were.”
We—you mean me.
A few days later, in one of our rare hours of rec time at the gymnasium, we talked. I had finished riding the elliptical bike and she was in the middle of the gymnasium finishing up her yoga. I sat down on the floor nearby and just came right out and asked her if she thought I was responsible for her conviction. She did. She had every right to her anger at my grand jury testimony, but I felt she was blaming me for too much of her situation, as if she were not at all responsible for her predicament. We talked about our other co-defendants briefly—but she only knew a couple of them aside from Donald, Phillip, and Hester—comparing what we knew about the fate of each, which was not much.
I still don’t know how they got to me and I no longer care. But when being asked to shoulder the entire blame, instead of letting her have this, I deflected blame. I pointed my finger at Phillip, positing he must have led the feds to me, since the guy in Chicago who was the first to get caught and cooperate did not know me from Eve. Like I said, I was still not quite finished assigning and accepting blame myself. I regret that. I stole from her a priceless opportunity to forgive me and retarded a healing process we both desperately needed. Aside from that, Phillip did the right thing and neither he nor any of my friends owned the blame for anyone else’s fate but their own. The only one who didn’t sign a plea agreement and cooperate with the government was Henry. He risked everything for that brand of moral clarity and he lost. He was found guilty and sentenced to ten years.
We all blame someone for the things we do that go wrong; I’m certain of it, even if it’s only for a second. But unless you want to play the victim for your whole life, you have to come around sooner or later and face yourself. I made a much easier target for that blame than for her to look at her own role in it. But I have no room to judge, as I did the same thing. It took me longer than it took Piper to stop being a victim, and I still have to work at it. I blamed everything from A to Z for my circumstances, but not me.
I blamed Alajeh for scaring me and my society for its barbaric drug laws. Prohibition does not work; it just increases the value of the thing being banned, and that amplifies the problem and creates a whole new set of them, much uglier. Drugs like alcohol should be regulated, not barred. Addicts should be treated, not jailed. The drug wars have failed; we have more people dying from heroin overdoses than ever before in history. We also have the highest prison population of any country in the world, most from first-offense drug crimes.
I blamed the whole justice system for being so flawed and Opie for his unintended deception. I chose to believe t
hat Opie really had wanted to help me. I understood why Piper was still so freshly full of angst when I found out she had only been down a year. It had taken me two years to make peace with my punishment and accept that I had earned it myself, all myself.
The trip back to Dublin was the beginning of my karmic retribution for testifying against Henry, I was sure of it. When we got back to the MCC after our part in the trial was over, Piper, Hester, and I had put together a nice dinner in the MCC microwave, the night before we were certain we would be picked up by the marshals to begin our trips back. We would be returned to the Oklahoma transfer facility, and we longed to get that far. At least that place was clean and quiet. That is like saying at least it’s just the frying pan, not the fire. But it was an improvement, and being in Oklahoma would mean we were on our way back to our respective facilities—home.
In the morning, my sister and I got called to pack out. Piper was not on the list. We felt so awful leaving her behind in that godforsaken hole. The place was horrible, made up of mostly lunatics and women in a very different place than we were, with absolutely nothing to do but read, play cards, and watch TV or the soap operas going on in the lives around them. But at least we’d had each other. Even in a place that small, it helps to have your own people. Now we were going to have to abandon her to contend all alone with the lunatics, whom we had joined forces against. I had managed to piss a couple of the women off by being assigned to a bunk they wanted. Piper and Hester had saved me from the crafty, crazy old ladies trying to get rid of me. Leaving Piper there with them felt awful.
Out of Orange: A Memoir Page 27