Out of Orange (25 page)

I asked the keeper of the fire where the chapel was located. She told me it was closed. I was not, by any means, a religious individual. But in much the same way chocolate pudding and mashed potatoes are comfort foods, I found that religious icons, churches, and priests could be soothing, just without all the calories. It probably had something to do with being raised by my father, the almost-priest, and my guilty Catholic mother, and then spending all that time in Catholic school with the nuns. Whatever the cause, Mom’s suggestion had given me something constructive to do the next day if I was still there.

Two weeks later, when two marshals finally arrived to whisk me away to California, my bunkie inherited most of the commissary I had just received, my sneakers, and a couple of bits of precious comfortable clothing that a friend from Brattleboro had brought to me. Even though a lot of what my bunkie had counseled me about was useless bullshit, she’d also had a lot of commonsense advice for me that was priceless.

She had already completed a five-year federal sentence but had
screwed up on the last year of her federal probation. She blamed this on her being reassigned to a new officer for her supervision. She said this new officer turned out to be a nut job. He got her fired from her job by repeatedly harassing the people she worked with. He then followed her from that job to her next job and did much the same, by walking up to a table she was taking an order from at lunch rush and handing her a cup to go pee in. While she was in the bathroom filling the little portable specimen cup, he asked both her manager and the owner of the restaurant for their driver’s licenses. He told them he needed to run a background check on them because my bunkie could not associate with other felons. She lost that job too. She gave up and turned herself in to the probation office. She told them she was unable to comply with the employment requirement.

I flipped my wig while listening to her tell the story. I asked why she had not gotten a lawyer involved, reported the guy to his superiors, anything other than what she had done. She had laughed at my inexperience with the system, which was about to swallow me whole. I prayed she was wrong. I prayed that her story was bullshit, that she and her hippie-looking husband, who I had seen with her in the visiting room, were addicts or something. Maybe she had fucked up and gotten high and didn’t want to admit to being so stupid. What she’d said couldn’t be true. Otherwise, I could not completely discredit the one piece of advice she’d repeated more than any: “Don’t cooperate with those motherfuckers. They’re evil.” I hadn’t told her that I was relying on them to protect my sister, my family, and all my friends.

Two marshals—a man and a woman in their midfifties—picked me up that day. They drove a burgundy SUV unmarked by the presence of family life, like Opie’s vehicle had been. It seemed like they were an older married couple or they could have been longtime professional partners. The woman shackled me while the man handled the paperwork for their parcel, me. The woman was very apologetic about the shackles but assured me I would be happy that she was the one who put them on and not her partner.
I told her about the bruises I had gotten from my last adventure in shackles. I shuffled into the backseat of their van and realized she hadn’t been any more generous with the room she’d left for my ankles in the cuffs than the previous guy had been. We started our drive.

About two hours into the drive, I asked them where we were going. My query triggered a conversation between the two of them, but not an answer. They were trying to decide where to stop and grab something to eat quickly. They chose a McDonald’s drive-thru. They placed their order and turned to me as an afterthought. “Do you want something?”

“Yes, please. Thank you.”

“Okay. Don’t tell on us.” She smiled, a weird, crooked, toothy grin, and her hairline jumped backward when she did so.

“Okay,” I responded blankly.

“Add a small Coke, cheeseburger, and fries to that!” She yelled into the drive-thru’s intercom without asking me what I wanted.

“Do you have to use the little girls’ room?” She made the weird smile again, and again her hairline moved as if she were wearing a wig that moved when she smiled.

“How much longer till we get to where we are going?” I didn’t really have to go, but I could make it happen if we were going to be driving for much longer.

“Yes or no. Do you have to go?” She was short with me and didn’t turn to me to add her big scary smile and wiggle-wig head trick.

“Yes.” I wondered why she wouldn’t tell me where we were going.

“Okay, that wasn’t so hard. Let’s eat while it’s hot. You’re not going to pee yourself, are you?” She laughed, turned, and did the freaky smile again.

“No.”

The guy pulled the SUV over into a parking space. She handed me my food and my Coke. I had never had to negotiate something so simple with handcuffs on. I was wearing my layers again, a long thick knit skirt for court over my cutoff sweat-shorts for leisure time. This made it difficult to place the cup of Coke between my
legs and apply the right pressure without popping the plastic lid off. One near miss was enough to convince me not to try. I held on to the cup with one hand and ate with the other. I finished my food quickly, not wanting to be the holdup. When the lady was done with her lunch, she hopped out of the front seat and opened the sliding door.

“Lunch is over. Let’s go.” She took the Coke from me and tossed it on the ground. I slid over on the seat, twisted my feet out in front of me, intending to step down on the running board and then to the ground. The woman made a twirling motion with her finger at about the same moment I realized I could not step down with the shackles on my ankles the way they were. I turned around and backed out of the SUV without doing a face-plant and she took hold of my elbow. It dawned on me that we were going inside McDonald’s to use the restroom.

“I can wait.” I didn’t want to be paraded in front of the people in the restaurant.

“Trust me. Take care of this now or you’ll regret it later.” She nudged me forward and I followed her lead, focusing only on the ground in front of me and not any of the people we passed.

She followed me into the bathroom but thankfully not into the stall itself. Getting my skirt, shorts, and underwear down was no problem, but getting them back up after I finished my business was almost impossible with the handcuffs and the chain wrapped around my waist.

“Hurry up in there!” the lady barked out, and I heard another customer in the restroom object and say she wasn’t in any hurry. My escort laughed and told her we were late for a flight.

“I can’t get my skirt up in the back.”

“Open up.” She knocked on the door when she said this. I opened the door. She reached around my back and roughly pulled my skirt back up and pulled the chain out of the way. I laughed nervously; it was like she was hugging me.

We finally arrived someplace about an hour later. I have no idea where, but it was past the Connecticut state line, an airfield of some
sort—not a commercial airport, but there was a runway. It was surrounded by a few enormous airplane hangars. There were also several other SUVs, each with a pair of drivers like I had and passengers of their own. Two drivers to every sad sack like myself. I found it oddly comforting that there were other human beings on my side of this strange situation. Apparently, I was not getting my own private jet to San Francisco, as I had imagined.

Another hour passed while I sat in the back of the SUV. During that hour, a white bus pulled up to join our little line of vehicles. Four armed guards hopped out of the bus and started unloading. There were about fifteen men packed in the little bus, all dressed in khaki scrubs. They were struggling with their shackles, trying to shuffle down the aisle, negotiate down the stairs, and disembark. As if on cue, a huge plane was landing in our deserted airfield, much bigger than the group of people assembling on the tarmac would require.

When it finished taxiing and stairs were secured to its open doorway, a few militaristic marshals came down the stairs. A couple of them quickly positioned themselves around the plane. They were armed with M16s, dressed in dark blue tactical uniforms, and ready for war or a photo shoot. The other marshals had come down the stairs a little slower, dressed similarly but armed with clipboards and paperwork. These marshals waved the group of shackled men forward. The prisoners were led by the bus driver and their guards over to the plane. They were each subjected to a strange ritual they all appeared to know—lifting hair, sticking their tongues out, getting patted down—then they were prodded up the stairs, where they were greeted by a gigantic black woman. She wasn’t fat though. She was big, as in football-player, don’t-mess-with-me big. She had the meanest mug I had ever seen on a woman, and, well, I’m a lesbian.

When it was my turn in line, the guy who had driven me there walked me over and handed my paperwork to one of the marshals, who scanned his clipboard for my name. He found it, dismissed my escort with a nod, and waved me off to his side. “Wait right there.” I waited by his side for everyone else to board the plane. I was soon
joined by one of the armed marshals and then three other passengers like myself. According to the computer printout on his clipboard, I was listed as a flight risk. I told him it was a mistake. He laughed and fitted me with a nice little metal black box. It closed down over the intersection of the two handcuffs in such a way that it locked my wrists into a fixed position. He tightened my wrist cuffs and locked the box with a click.
Ouch
.

I stepped onto the plane and took in the jet that the marshal who had arrested me had told me about, the jet he’d said the U.S. marshals were preparing for me. There had to be more than a hundred men, dressed in the same khaki scrubs the guys from the white bus had been wearing, already seated. There were a couple of women in the front seats and I was directed to sit next to an older woman having an exceptionally bad hair day. She was dressed in street clothes like me, black-boxed like me, but she looked far more ragged than I felt. She turned and looked at me curiously. “Where are we?”

“Eyes forward, no talking, stay in your seat!” the big female marshal yelled as if she were trying to address a packed stadium, not the close quarters of our portable pokey.

The lady next to me ignored the big girl and repeated her question a little impatiently this time. “Where are we?”

“I’m not sure. I think we are in Connecticut.” I still didn’t know exactly where we were.

She accepted my answer and let her head fall against the window, closing her eyes and I think falling asleep the minute her head settled.

The guy in the seat behind me started pushing on the seatback. “Hey, why you got da box?”

“No idea.” The big black marshal was walking back up the aisle, talking to one of her associates, so I ignored the persistent attempts of the guy behind me to get my attention and chat. He quit as soon as she passed by us and the plane started taxiing.

The ragged lady next to me popped her head up without opening her eyes and said, “That’s right, baby. You don’t know nothing,” then slipped back into her nap.

The cabin smelled like it was suddenly infused with dirty oil, and the plane shook as it picked up speed for the takeoff, until it vibrated like it might be about to fall apart just before we left the ground. The noisy vibration stopped and I could feel the wheels being mechanically retracted back into the plane’s belly with a squeal as something struggled to close. A little square plastic bag of water dropped onto my lap, then another onto the lap of my companion, as one of the marshals passed. I grabbed it before it slid off my lap and held on to it. I had never seen a bag of water before. The man sitting in the aisle seat across from me bit the bag, tearing it slightly with his teeth, and sucked the corner he had torn until the bag was empty. Then he made an awful face and dropped the bag on the floor between his knees. I decided the lady next to me had the right idea. I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep.

San Francisco to Dublin, California
July 1996 to January 2003

C
LOCKS
,
WATCHES
,
AND CALENDARS
are funny things. Every second is supposed to measure the exact same increment of time as every other second, right? Wrong. Some hours last days. At the same time, though, years can pass in a heartbeat, even if some of the days contained therein take forever. According to the calendar, almost seven years lapsed from the time I stepped onto that rickety jet full of convicts somewhere in Connecticut and the day I finally surrendered myself to the care of the Bureau of Prisons in Dublin, California. It took this much time for the wheels of justice to do what would normally have taken a few months. Two facts, in particular, best describe this long period: I was not living, nor was I doing my time. Time passed all the same. I turned forty, waiting.

I was thirty-three when the marshals got me out to California after my arrest in Vermont; I was released from jail while the courts made up their mind about me, but not released from California or their clutches. I was ordered to stay in the very same halfway house in San Francisco that Bradley had been in two years earlier. The
residents of my new home in the heart of the Tenderloin referred to the place as just “Turk Street.” That was not its real name, and its entrance was on Taylor Street. But it sits on the corner of Turk and Taylor Streets. It wasn’t obvious to me why the residents opted to call it this, since both streets were equally dismal.

Turk Street was a far cry from my converted carriage house in the quiet, woodsy mountains of Vermont with Edith and Dum Dum. The first and most notable adjustment I had to make was to sound. The soothing noise of chirping birds and crickets at night was replaced with blasting boom boxes, sirens, arguments, cars backfiring, and gunshots. The second adjustment was to smell. The corner of Turk and Taylor Streets reeked of urine-soaked sidewalks and desperate poverty.

The day that I was released on my own recognizance, no bail, I was released directly from the courthouse and rode with Alan to his office, located in the financial district. When I left his office on foot, I had an hour left to get myself to the halfway house. Santa Rita, the county jail I had been deposited at for a few days, had lost my box of clothing, which should have followed me, so I had been sent to court wearing a pale yellow set of scrubs. The layered outfit that had made it with me all the way there was lost. I was released to my lawyer in the same yellow scrubs that I’d had to go to court in. Interestingly enough, nobody looked twice at my outfit as I walked down Battery Street and turned up Market.

I had no money, not one thin dime. I was starving and hadn’t smoked in days. It had not occurred to me to ask my lawyer for a few dollars before making my walk to the halfway house. I had been too narrowly focused on getting from point A to point B in time, terrified I would screw up and get popped back into Santa Rita Jail. But the fresh air did a number on me, and I began to slow down and relax my frantic pace. I asked the few smokers I passed in the financial district if they could spare a cigarette, and they pretended as though they didn’t see me or flat-out said no. I laughed when one really well-dressed young man shook his hands in front of his face and scurried away. I couldn’t quite figure out the
meaning of his gesture, but I knew what a beggar feels like for that second.

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 friends 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.