Out of Orange (31 page)

Tatiana was pulled from one of the grunt crews to work in the lab shortly after that. The “institutional need” she fulfilled probably had more to do with her appearance than her background. She was hired right after one of the underskilled clerks, who looked a lot like Tatiana, went home. Tatiana and I became quick friends after all that and my crush on her became a topic she teased me with. I didn’t deny my attraction to her but told her not to worry about it, no one could ever replace Sissy, who had gone home to Seattle. At the time, I thought I was going to move to Seattle and live happily ever after with Sissy when I got out.

Tatiana and I started playing tennis together regularly, then going to lunch, then dinner. I got to know one of her relatives, who was also a resident in FCI Dublin. I learned of the horrific details of her family’s long tragedy and how they eventually had been granted asylum in the United States. But they’d ended up in a nonsensical drama that had resulted in much of her family being sent to federal prison for a conspiracy to help illegal aliens get to and stay in the United States.

I started hanging out with Tatiana’s friends, a group of eastern Slavic women from various countries once part of the Soviet Union. They were referred to as the KGB by others. Tatiana taught me to speak and write their common language, Russian—well, tried anyway. One day we were having a heated debate on whether or not homosexuality was an abomination, a perversion, and completely unnatural, as she believed, or a natural and genetically assigned tendency, as I believed. Somehow we got on the topic of what this abnormal sex was like.

“What do lesbians do?” she asked.

“Oh my God! Tatiana, use your imagination.” She had made
herself blush by asking the question and that amused me. But not enough to give her a
Joy of Sex
introduction to lesbian positions. Her curiosity grew and then focused on me.

This was a particularly tricky relationship to conduct. Not only did we have to keep it secret and hidden from the prison staff. Sex in federal prison is a 200-series infraction, a 205 specifically, which is of the same severity as rioting or assault. Getting caught would result in going to the SHU, losing the great computer lab jobs, getting sent back to an A and O room (that is “arrival and orientation”), and an A and O job in the kitchen and in the garbage. But we also had to worry about the KGB. Tatiana did not want anyone to find out what we were doing.

As Tatiana’s release date approached, the status of her asylum was in jeopardy because of her possible status as a convicted felon. Her five-year sentence was nearly completed, but due to a series of continuances, her family’s appeal for wrongful conviction was still stalled in the Appellate Court. After the fruits of prosecutorial misconduct were removed from a potential new trial, if a new and fair trial were granted, she said there would be no case or conviction for her or her family members. Her husband would be released from prison the same day as Tatiana.

Tatiana and I were together for only a year by then and I was still in that madly in love phase when we had to split up. We had spent all of our time playing tennis, teaching in the computer lab, working on special projects for the facility, or
doing inventory
in the storage closet in the lab. While it’s not as easy to do as fictional fantasies about women and sex in prison suggest, it is possible to have a lover. The one thing you cannot do is determine when and how your relationship will end. It comes with an expiration date; someone gets to go home first.

Our relationship was originally scheduled to end on her release date. This is a traumatic time for lovers in prison. It’s one lover’s release day, the happy day you wait and pray for years you will make it to. But with a lover, it’s also the end of a love affair. Somebody has to leave somebody behind, which puts a bit of a damper
on what would otherwise be an amazing day. Being left behind is excruciating; I had gone through that happy event once already with Sissy. But with Tatiana, it was all the more confusing because I didn’t know if she would be all right when she left. It all depended on whether she and her husband lost their asylum and had to find someplace else on the planet to run to for safety.

Our goodbye was cut extremely short. About a week before her release date, I went back to my unit for the four
P
.
M
. count and she went to hers. I found out I was going to be transferred to the camp, and by dinner I was gone. I was only across the street, but it might as well have been in another universe, hundreds of light-years away. My unplanned departure was probably a heavenly intervention. Tatiana would also be leaving some of her family behind. God had wanted Tatiana and her family to spend that last week together, not us.

I spent the first week at the camp bored out of my mind, sitting on a picnic table across the street and staring at the FCI entrance, hoping to get one more glimpse of Tatiana before she left my universe. I worried about her too. Because of the questionable state of her asylum, there was a good chance she would be picked up by Immigration and taken to a county jail being used for immigration holdovers when she walked out the front gates of the prison.

I had prayed, done voodoo dances, and made chocolate cupcake offerings to the squirrel gods for the whole week prior to her release for her unimpeded passage to Los Angeles. Being over in the camp, I couldn’t find out how it all turned out until her release day. Her husband was getting out of his prison on the same day from a facility somewhere in Texas. If she came out of the FCI, got into a waiting car, and no Immigration van pulled up to intercept her, all was well. If not, I had mailed her contact information to my father and he promised to find out what had happened to her and her husband and make sure they had the legal representation they needed. Dad was my hero.

If nothing went wrong, Tatiana and her husband would both be safely at home by nightfall. I had already gotten her sister’s phone number in Los Angeles added to my approved list, and so I could
call there with my PAC (phone access code). We were only able to dial out to a preapproved list of telephone numbers on the phone systems in prison, and Tatiana and my calls would be monitored, so I would have to be careful about what we said when we spoke, if we spoke. I would also have to make sure her sister’s number made it onto my list in time.

There is a form I had to fill out and hand in to my counselor to get a new number added to this list. The counselor would then type the number into another computer-based form if she approved it. The electronic addition is instant, but my counselor was not so quick to make the entry, unless I brought the form to her in person and urged her to add the number then and there.

I hadn’t tried to expedite the process by personally delivering the form and sitting with my counselor until she added it, lest she get curious and figure out the number belonged to Tatiana’s sister and not a former coworker from the free world. But I found the number added to my list two days after I’d submitted it and in plenty of time for Tatiana’s release day. All that was left to happen, so that I could talk to my Tatiana at least one more time, was that she not be picked up by Immigration and booted out of the country.

My dad was sending a note to both Tatiana and her husband at the sister’s house in Los Angeles. He’d told me this was the best way he could think of to let her know I was happy for both of them, for her whole little family. He knew I had been her lover for a year and had told me he thought her husband would understand. He cautioned me, though, that if she never told him, to be her friend and keep her secret safe. She’d been through enough already.

On Tatiana’s release day, I followed a bunch of campers who did landscaping work across the street to the front of the FCI and pretended to be sweeping the parking lot near the entrance while the rest of the group of campers spread out to do their real work, mowing, pruning, watering, and planting. The parking lot near the entrance to the FCI was way past the yellow line we were not to cross without permission, but a friend, a former FCI inhabitant and now camper, had gotten me added to her landscaping team to be a
sweeper for the day. My plan, if I got caught out of bounds, was to play dumb, like I had not understood I was to sweep only the camp parking lot and not the neighboring area in front of the FCI.

Tatiana came out of the FCI entrance dressed in black. I was shocked to see her in a different color than khaki, when that and gray sweats were the only colors I had ever seen her dressed in. Her hair had been styled, and she was all made up. She was absolutely stunning. She saw me milling about in the parking lot with a broom in hand, trying to pretend I was sweeping and not lurking around the entrance to the FCI. I was wearing my new colors. Camp residents wore light blue, not khaki. She waved and smiled at me and then waved at her friends in the waiting car and yelled something to them in her language. She couldn’t come to me, but I could tell how happy she was to see me, and how happy she was to be free after five years in prison. She yelled to me that it felt funny walking out of the prison and she kept looking up at the sky, like something might drop from it and crush her. I laughed loudly.

I had never understood the weird reactions some women had on their release days, until I had walked out the front gate of the FCI myself after thirty months. Shit, one lady had even turned around and wanted to come back in. The phenomenon is strange, because you are not going from being locked indoors to suddenly seeing the sky above you for the first time in however long. You are just walking through a building; on one side you are free, on the other you are not. Even so, something subtle feels off, like when you get off a boat and it feels like the ground is fluid. I had gotten the odd sensation of being untethered when I had walked out a week earlier, and all I had been doing was walking across the street to the camp unescorted.

“I don’t know what I am doing!” She laughed at herself and the strange reaction she had to walking out the front door of the FCI. “I love you!” She yelled this to me right in front of her friends in the car and it surprised me. Tatiana’s crew of Russian friends inside were big homophobes. “I will see you again in London!”

“I love you too. Be safe!” We had made plans to meet in London
when we could travel again, but we both knew it was fantasy. I stared right through the car with her in it for a moment, imagining what it must feel like to be sitting down in the air-conditioned car, about to drive away as she was, instead of standing in the hot sun, pushing a broom, with so much time left to do, as was my fate. Her friend jumped out of the car and put her bag into the trunk. He was tall and beefy and probably had no idea who I was or that he was driving away with my lover. He waved to me, almost dismissively, and got back into the car.

I could see Tatiana, sitting in the passenger seat, light up a cigarette and she made sure I saw this. Smoking had been banned from federal facilities in January while I had been away in Chicago. We had paid twenty dollars in commissary for one cigarette when I’d gotten back, then we’d quit. But now she took a big puff of her pink Nat Sherman, the brand she’d smoked on the streets. We’d only had access to cheap generic brands when they had sold them legally inside, then stale tobacco rolled up in paper from tampon and toilet paper wrappers after smoking had been banned.

I saw the taillights flash once and heard the Volvo’s engine, then it pulled forward and circled the same roundabout I had been dropped at thirty months earlier. As the Volvo made its way around the big circle, they came closer to where I was standing with my broom and slowed down a little. Tatiana smiled at me. She stretched her arms out wide, like a bird, and when the car accelerated, she flew away.

Federal Prison Camp, Dublin, California
August 2005 to October 2008

T
HE
V
OLVO
T
ATIANA WAS IN
disappeared around the corner of the perimeter fence at the end of Eighth Street and vanished. On the other side of that fence was the free world. It was so close all the time I was inside the FCI but invisible until now. Eighth Street was used only by cars and service vehicles entering and exiting there to go to either the federal prison camp (FPC) on the left, the federal correctional institution (FCI) for women, the federal detention center (FDC) for men on the right, or the warehouses and staff housing farther up the road. That road intersected with Eighth Street, about an eighth of a mile beyond where the FPC and FCI entrances faced each other.

There was a yellow line at the edge of the parking lot in the camp. The line crossed the paved entryway, which was just past the last building in a row of five identical buildings that made up the camp. If you were not assigned to landscaping, to the warehouses, or to some duty that required you to cross that line, it was out-of-bounds. I was approximately fifty yards beyond that yellow line, out-of-
bounds and trying to look busy, as if I had a reason to be there. The campers roamed all over the area I have just described, and we all wore blue uniforms; there were no special outfits for newcomers. So I knew I was as invisible as the ground squirrels to most of the staff passing by me, but there was always the chance someone like my old computer lab boss from the FCI might take notice that it was me in the blue they were accustomed to ignoring on their way into work.

I had to make a quick dash across the parking lot, Eighth Street, and back into the camp without getting an incident report for being out of bounds. Mr. Green, the boss at CMS, which I think stood for Contracting Maintenance Service, didn’t write me up when he’d caught me lurking near the FCI’s entrance earlier that week. I was still accustomed to the more militant posturing from the guards inside the razor wire at the FCI. So I had been certain I was in for a good dose of humiliation and a shot when Mr. Green caught me over there the first time, but nothing had happened. He had just laughed, asked me if I was lost, turned around, and buzzed away across the parking lot on his golf cart.

It would have sucked to start out my stay at the camp with commissary or phone restriction for thirty days, especially since my parents were coming to visit me the following week. I had not seen them in over two years and changing their plans would have been impossible this late in the game. They were visiting me on their way to Hawaii. Besides, I didn’t want to do anything to cancel their annual visit. It meant so much to me and I couldn’t wait to see them. They would be so happy too, to visit me in the camp where we could sit at picnic tables in the beautiful green outdoors—so much nicer than their visit was inside FCI the year before.

When I reached the edge of the FCI parking lot, I dashed back across Eighth Street and over to the smaller camp parking lot, stopping every so often to look busy, like I had actually been sent out there to work with the landscaping crew I had tagged along with. I swept random swaths of clean blacktop or sidewalk with such purpose you would have thought I was competing, except that I was all alone. Still being an A and O, though, sweeping and raking leaves
was what I should have been doing all morning, just not across the street. That made me nervous, the closer I got to camp. Though I was an A and O again—which stands for “arrival and orientation” or “Please humiliate and torture me; I am new”—all the camp staff knew me already from the FCI. Therefore, with exception to my living arrangement, I was spared the normal routine abuses for newcomers, like being stalked around the compound and harassed or belittled until you were humbled enough to willingly accept your newly acquired, subhuman stature. But this familiarity meant they would know I had no business being as far out as I had gone.

The camp was made up of five long two-story buildings, like giant train cars set side by side. Between each of the buildings, there was a walkway and two or three entrances to the buildings on either side. The buildings were labeled C1, C2, C3, and C4. It had taken all of about five minutes to get the lay of the land there. C1 and C2 were permanent housing. The rooms were about twice the size of those in the FCI. I wasn’t yet fortunate enough to have one of these rooms, but I would soon. In these units, each prisoner shared a room with four others, but there was plenty of space to move around; they were like college dorm rooms.

The dining room, kitchen, and a room big enough for two desks, which served as the law library, were on the first floor of C1. Education classrooms and the computer lab were on the first floor of C2. The administrative offices, commissary, medical services, and a rec room with a few stationary bikes and old funky gym equipment were in C3.

Unlike the FCI, where a toilet and sink were inside each tiny cell, the toilets and sinks at the camp were in a bathroom where they belonged. The one and only guard or officer in charge (OIC), as they were called at the camp, was stationed on the first floor of C2. That was a big adjustment, not having an officer everywhere I looked. The OIC was different every shift, but the same three covered the camp for at least a quarter of the year before a new set were condemned to the camp from one of the other facilities.

C4 was the zoo and where I lived. This is what they called “temporary
housing.” It was where I was sent to live first or where I would be sent back to if I lost my nice permanent room as punishment for getting into trouble. There was no privacy, just big open areas filled with bunk bed after bunk bed, county jail style. Illusory room sections were created by the arrangement of beds and lockers, each section containing three or four bunk beds arranged around a tower of stacked lockers in the middle. These bed-and-locker configurations ran along the length of the unit on either side of an aisle the guards could walk down unimpeded.

There was a shared bathroom in the middle of the first and second floors. But these amenities were identical to those in the other units. But in C4 they were shared by twice as many women as in C1 and C2. This was not a peaceful space. But as soon as someone in permanent housing got released or tossed in the SHU, someone in C4 would take her place. That only took about one hundred and eighty sleepless nights.

The staff was funny at the camp. There were a bunch of camp residents who had started at the FCI. We had been sent from the FCI to the camp as a reward for good behavior, but the staff considered being sent to work at the camp for a quarter a hardship or a punishment. It was boring there, and for the first time, I actually had something obvious in common with the staff and officers. They had congratulated me for making it to camp, and we’d both had to try not to laugh. Either that or they would’ve had to simply welcome me to the slums.

At camp, being an A and O meant I could be sent anywhere to work, to do anything. More often than not, though, this meant I got garbage duty in the kitchen, or sweeping or raking leaves in the yard at the crack of dawn. Mr. Green was my boss the day Tatiana left. He was a nice guy, but he was not the only staff member I had to worry about, and the closer I got to camp, the easier it would be for the other staff to recognize me coming back from the FCI.

The first one to watch out for was the OIC. Our OIC that day was Ms. Presley, a truly psychotic bitch. She was supposedly working in the camp because she was not allowed to work inside the FCI for a
period of time. She was allegedly being punished for some misdeed. Officers rotated all posts among the three facilities on a quarterly basis and the OIC post in the camp was the short straw. Most of them hated it; Ms. Presley did, and if she was miserable, so were we. We all prayed Ms. Presley would only be in the camp as our OIC for one quarter.

As I crossed the yellow line and back into the safe zone, Ms. Presley came busting out of the door of C2, the building that held the officers’ station, an itty-bitty air-conditioned room with a glass partition. I started sweeping and did not look up, but I could hear her big clodhopper boots and jangling keys and chain coming toward me. Then she passed right by me and hopped into a perimeter truck that had pulled up, which had also worried me, and rode away.

I took a deep breath, relieved I was not the focus of Ms. Presley’s attention. I walked over and sat down on the stairs of the porch in front of C4, my new home. Mission accomplished.

Theresa, a fellow lesbian who had transferred from the FCI months earlier and was still pining for the lover she had left inside the FCI, was walking out of C4, carrying a ladder. “Did you get to see her?”

“I did. Tatiana’s on her way, and I got to see her. Thanks.”

“You okay?”

“I am.” I tried to make a big smile, but I think I was actually making the same face you do when you have really bad gas.

“Yeah, great. I can tell.” Theresa was being sarcastic and she laughed as she walked away with her ladder. She was all too familiar with how I felt at the moment—sort of anyway. “One door closes, another opens!” She yelled over her shoulder as Kara, an absolutely scrumptious girl, walked by, too young for either of us. Theresa probably didn’t realize how tactless she’d sounded. Everyone dealt with expiration/release dates differently, and while I had gone almost directly from Sissy to Tatiana, it had not been my intention. I wondered if Sissy would write me back if I tried to write her again. Getting letters out of the camp that I didn’t want read by the mail monitors was much easier than it had been from inside the FCI.

When Theresa disappeared into C5, the CMS building, it got very quiet. I listened to the leaves rustle in the big trees overhead and it reminded me of home. Not Vermont or Northampton; the sound made me think of my parents’ house in the woods outside Cincinnati, where I grew up. I used to sit on the porch in the backyard there, on this huge stump of a tree that had been cut down years earlier, or lie for hours on a big rock up on our hill with my cat, just listening to the birds and the leaves rustle, when I wanted to be alone. I had been one of those teenagers who want a lot of alone time. As I sat there in front of C4, I realized it had been years since I had been alone like this, sitting in the quiet outdoors.

Lunchtime would roll around soon though, and that would be the end of my temporary solace. But for the moment, I had no place else to be and no real work assignment. As far as I could tell, there was nothing other than work to keep me busy at the camp.

There was a camp cat named Patches that lived on the porch. When I had first come over to the camp, she sat on my lap while I had a good cry over Tatiana, and Miss Kitty, and Dum Dum, and Edith, and my sister, and everything under the sun. I had gotten my period the next day after my arrival. Apparently, my biological clock had reset itself to the cycle of the women at the camp in an instant. I briefly turn into an emotional basket case once a month for about ten minutes, usually over something totally innocuous, like a piece of paper on the floor or a bird eating a worm. I would have known my period was going to make a surprise visit a week early had I not had so many real issues on my plate at the time.

Patches was sweet and she reminded me of all my little black girls, for some reason, even though she was a calico and drooled when you pet her. I had thought my crying binge over everything was triggered by that or by my first realization that I would be bored out of my mind for the next three years, not by my pointless biological clock. Really, why do lesbians have to have periods anyway, and why do women’s monthly cycles get synchronized with other women and not by the presence of men?

I asked Patches the cat what she was up to, even though that was
obvious. She was currently sleeping on the rail of the porch, looking as though she might be about to fall off it. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She seemed to be a little bit grumpy and unresponsive to my kissing noises. She twitched her ears each time I made the noise, like she was being bothered by a fly. She finally got up and gave me a look that said,
Okay! I’m coming. Shut up already
. But before she made her way down to me, one of my old bosses pulled up in front of the camp and honked his horn at me.

It took me a minute to register the horn honk was for me and that I knew the driver of the beat-up old car. I had never seen any of my computer lab bosses outside of the computer lab and in street clothes instead of his gray uniform. It was weird, all this semi-freedom. Mr. Wonka had been on a two-week vacation when my transfer happened, so he had missed it and missed Tatiana’s departure date too, though he’d known that was coming. He had been pissed, not at me, but for the fact that no one had given him or any of the computer lab supervisors a heads-up. With Tatiana’s release and my unexpected departure, he had been left pretty short-handed.

“Please get me transferred back!” As I said this, I wondered if that was what I really wanted.

“Man, I wish I could. Shit like that doesn’t look right though, Wolters.”

“What about institutional need?” I asked. Nobody would think I was sleeping with the computer lab boss. He knew that. I hoped he knew that. I knew the staff in education knew I was gay; it was just never openly discussed, since sex is prohibited. But the real prison staff in education didn’t care about my sexuality and a couple of them definitely turned a blind eye to Tatiana’s and my obsession with inventory in the storage room in the lab.

I think they were actually a little uncomfortable with the idea of punishing a gay person for being gay. Unlike some of the other guards and correctional officers, they had enough intellect to have an intellectual conflict. On the one hand, prison was for punishment and they couldn’t allow inmates to turn a prison stay into an
orgiastic feast or all of the lonely gays in San Francisco would be lining up to rob banks. On the other hand, they all lived in the Bay Area, so persecuting homosexuality probably felt a little off.