Out of Orange (33 page)

“Oh fuck, Wolters!” Ms. Bright didn’t believe me. I am pretty certain she was about to start laughing. Because if she had believed me, she would have already exploded or been on the phone telling the lieutenant to come get me.

“You can’t do this. You know how crazy these women are. Someone just said they would kill the cat . . . that it would shut you up.” I did a quick gasp. I was so angry, I was about to cry. Nope, it was happening. I was crying.

“Aw shit.” Mr. Dansler stood up. “She’s right.” He started to walk out of the office, as if by doing so it would be assumed he had no part in what they had done.

“Who said it?” Ms. Bright was genuinely furious now, though not with me. But, oh boy, if she only knew, she probably would have leapt across her desk and stabbed me with her index finger. Either that or peed herself laughing. I could never tell if her whole rage thing was an act or not. Something deep down told me it was a put-on and that if I had met her in the real world, she might be a friend. She was almost exactly my age, a slightly heavyset blonde, smart, with an infectious laugh and twisted sense of humor. But as the target of her potential rage, it was better to assume the worst and be cautious.

“I have no clue who said it! I heard it through the windows, while I was outside trying to make a temporary house for my poor cat. It’s raining and the ground under the building floods when it rains.” I looked at Mr. Dansler. He was still trying to escape the office but trapped in his corner by Ms. Hosen’s seat. Ms. Hosen was apparently frozen in her seat, so he was stuck standing there. I think she was frightened that something bad was about to happen, and if she stayed perfectly still, it would pass her over, whatever it was. Dansler was the one who had suggested Patches sleep under the building.

“She’s not your cat, Wolters. She’s not a house cat. She’s fine.” Ms. Bright offered this bit of wisdom up as a solution. I guess she thought if she cleared that up, I would shut up and quit my bellyaching,
and stop my ridiculous confession and attempt to save Patches. But I could hear the fun draining out of her voice.

“Tell Patches that!” I laughed a little, because I didn’t know what else to do and couldn’t quite figure out where this was all going to go. “What does that matter anyway? The cigarettes are mine, so give the cat her home back and take me to the SHU.” I put my hands out in front of me and held my wrists together. This was too much, I guess. Ms. Bright turned red and started laughing so hard, I know she peed herself a little, and I know she didn’t believe me.

None of them believed me, but my confession totally fucked up their fun game. Ms. Bright didn’t like having to back down from threats she had made to the whole camp, and she had told the camp at least a hundred times that the cat wasn’t getting her house back until someone claimed the cigarettes. It was no secret how much I loved Patches and it would not remain secret that I had complied with her demands. If she didn’t give the cat its house back, she would look like an unreasonable beast. If she punished me, she would look worse. Everyone would say I confessed to save Patches even though that was not the case. Mr. Dansler told me to get out of the office, to wait in the hall, so they could speak. So I did. I waited, trying to eavesdrop on their conversation, and listening for the jangling keys of a fetched lieutenant.

A couple of minutes later, Mr. Dansler came out and called me back in. “You’re not going to the SHU. We’re writing a shot. Two weeks’ commissary and phone restriction, and extra duty. We’re giving the house back, but your extra duty is to build her a real house.” Ms. Bright sat quietly, content, while Dansler handed down my judgment.

Everyone would think she was an asshole. They would think I had fessed up to something I hadn’t done just to save Patches and she had punished me anyway. But she could lift the sanctions off Patches without losing face. Ms. Bright added, “Get Barnes. Go with her to CMS Monday morning and she will show you how the houses are made. I’ll clear it with Mr. Smith. Happy?”

“Happy.” I was so grateful. I knew exactly how lucky I was, so the
fact that they had punished me for something they thought I hadn’t done didn’t bother me one bit. I had a funny feeling Ms. Bright did know what had just happened and had saved my ass. It’s weird. I had started out in the FCI hating her almost as much as she terrified me. But now, when I saw her breaking in women who had just arrived at the camp from the street, the same way she had me, her vitriol actually made sense. It didn’t bother me to hear it anymore. She was a Band-Aid ripper, that’s all. Instead of timidly peeling it off slowly, trying to help an inmate avoid her inevitable pain, she made it clear you were an inmate, nobody gave a shit who you were or how you felt, and you had nothing coming, period. The sooner you accepted this, the easier your time would be.

“Good. Now get the fuck out of my face.”
Rip!
I could have sworn she was trying not to smile. The idea that she might know she had just saved my ass was kind of endearing. If it were true, she was both apologizing for the cat-house thing and confirming she knew her coworkers were idiots. I just had to do my part now and whine to everyone about my unjust punishment.

My phone restriction bothered me more than I thought it would, certainly more than the commissary ban. I hadn’t realized that my weekly call home played such an important role in my well-being until I couldn’t make it.

Hamilton County Justice Center, Cincinnati, Ohio
January 2007

A
T SIX YEARS OLD
, my grasp of death was totally spot-on. When I had returned from my grandfather’s funeral, my weepy grandmother, concerned with my emotional state, had asked me if I understood what was happening. I had told her, “We drove all over town looking for a hole to put Gramps in.”

My real belief about life and death remained fairly simple and it has not changed much since my grandmother died when I was eleven years old. I’m told that when she died, I insisted on knowing the exact time of her death. I was afraid she had seen me do something of which she would not have approved. On January 22, 2007, I prayed my dad wasn’t observing me, not at the moment.

“What are you looking at?” A darling young girl, who had either mixed the wrong drugs or missed a few doses of something she should have been on, asked me as she crawled across our cement bench toward me, kind of like a cross-eyed cat. I tried to scoot
another inch or two away from her, but I had already backed myself up into the corner. I really didn’t want any trouble and these can be such unpredictable folks. She had already claimed she loved me and was going to kill me, and I hadn’t even spoken to her yet.

Fortunately, her arresting officer walked in front of the glass partition that separated the temporary holding cell we were in from him, and he stopped. Distracted, she flew from the bench to the glass and started making love to it. The officer outside the glass laughed, told her to settle down, and acknowledged her as a regular visitor. From his side of the glass it was probably quite a show; she was mashing her bare breasts against the glass, grinding, and French-kissing her reflection. Not for long though. She spun around, fell flat on her face, and started crying. It’s unusual that anyone can cycle through emotions this quickly.

“Am I being moved?” I asked the officer, but he ignored me and walked back out the door that kept the sound in our wing from interrupting the business being conducted in the intake area.

The young lady, still on the floor, had violated a restraining order that her ex-boyfriend had taken out on her, and she found that ridiculous. She was the one, she believed, who had put a restraining order on his restraining order. She seemed fairly convinced, too, that she was not in the wrong and that showing up at his work in her current state and kicking his scrawny ass was perfectly acceptable behavior. He had cheated on her and slept with his wife.

I had been sitting in the holding cell for about five hours. It didn’t take long to figure out I was in the drunk tank. Aside from the glass-licking loon, there were three other nice ladies in the cell with me, but they were sound asleep now. One was on the cement floor, curled around the base of the nasty metal toilet bowl with her dress up around her ears and an obscenely large black bush where I wished her panties were. The other two were passed out on the cement bench opposite me. One of them kept rolling over and stopping herself just short of falling face-first onto the dirty cement floor.

I patiently waited for my nice hosts at the Hamilton County jail
to find me a bunk to sleep in. Ms. Bright would retrieve me in the morning and take me to my father’s funeral. But it was beginning to look like I would not be getting any sleep or a place to do that before then. This was the same jail my mother had taught adult basic education classes in for so many years. Mom had been retired for a few years, but I had foolishly hoped that someone who processed me into the facility for the night might remember her and know about Dad’s passing, and that might translate into a little compassion—maybe a cell with a door, a blanket, and some quiet. We have the same name, remember, so even if they didn’t recognize me personally, surely they would know the name on the paperwork and get curious. In any case, they knew that whoever I was, I was here for my father’s funeral. Ms. Bright had told the lady she had dropped me off with that much.

Unfortunately, they forgot me altogether. I know this because Ms. Bright was pissed off and told me so when she finally got me out of there the next morning. They apparently had a little trouble finding me, which had freaked her out. I had spent the night sitting in a cold block of cement, trying to avoid the rage, affection, and vomit of a drunk crackhead, and it had cost my brother his entire savings to get me there. It had probably taken him ten years to save up the money. I wondered if I could sue for the fee we’d had to pay for their hospitality.

The night’s stay in the Hamilton County jail was only one part of the expense for the trip. We had to have at least four thousand dollars in my commissary account to cover the plane fare for both myself and Ms. Bright, her overtime pay for escorting me, her hotel and meals, and my lovely accommodations. Ironically, my security level should probably have already been dropped. If it had, I would have been given a furlough like Hester and been permitted to stay at my parent’s house and get myself to the funeral and back to camp unescorted.

Hester’s and my efforts to get furloughed had started out as a request for a bedside visit. That is what it’s called when you are granted a forty-eight-hour furlough to go to see someone whose
death is imminent and validated by their doctor in triplicate. As long as this someone is your parent, child, or spouse, you can request to be furloughed to go to their bedside and say goodbye, in case they really do die. If you have to be escorted, very few of those forty-eight hours are actually spent with the relative.

Getting a doctor to put it in writing that they are losing a patient is no easy piece of work, but my aunt Jane and my mother succeeded in doing so. At that point, Hester got her furlough and my counselor dropped the bomb that my commissary account needed to have the funds required to cover expenses in it before she could submit my request for an escorted furlough to the warden. I suspected they hadn’t told us about the money from the get-go because either they thought we wouldn’t be able to get the necessary documentation from the hospital or they thought my father wasn’t as sick as I claimed—inmates being so full of shit and all.

In any case, by the time we got that little bit of added information, my mother couldn’t leave my father’s side to go do banking, so my brother stepped in with his savings and sent the money via Western Union. Once my counselor, Ms. Hosen, could verify the funds had been sent, they disclosed the next obstacle to my furlough: everyone needed to make it happen was on vacation. I all but gave up. But Ms. Bright and Ms. Hosen jumped through hoops to get my trip approved, and Ms. Bright volunteered to escort me.

Before I knew that was happening, though, I went to work that Monday in the computer lab and told my boss what had happened over the weekend. I had been called to the chapel from work on the preceding Friday, right before the four o’clock count, so my boss knew something had happened over the weekend, just not what. Hearing my name over the intercom followed by “Report to the chaplain’s office” meant bad news. I knew it was going to be about my father but hoped otherwise. He had been fighting Merkyl cell carcinoma, a rare but largely curable form of cancer.

We had two chaplains sort of available to us in the camp, but we shared them with the FCI, so it had taken some persistence on my mother’s part to get one of them to come over to the camp that
Friday to talk to me. The Asian female chaplain was the one who finally came over, if for no other reason than to get my mother to stop calling. Once we were in the chaplain’s office, she dialed the hospital and was connected to my father’s room. Mother answered the phone, and I braced myself for the news. Dad had fallen the preceding Sunday. His heart had stopped. They’d had to give him a pacemaker to keep his heart beating, and he had already had five blood transfusions. He was stabilized, but they were having difficulty keeping his red blood cell count up. Mother told me I needed to come home.

All I heard was “He’s stabilized.” Mother asking me to come home sounded exactly like something she would say, something crazy. I was in jail. I couldn’t come home. I can’t recall the rest of the conversation, other than she’d thought she had lost him. My aunt Jane was on her way to Cincinnati and my dad’s other brothers and sisters were coming behind Jane. That relieved me. Knowing Mom would have them there to help her deal with my father’s hospitalization made all the difference in the world.

We hung up and I broke down in tears. I was about to ask the chaplain why it had taken five days for them to get this information to me. But the chaplain warned me not to get too emotional, as it was her responsibility to put me in the SHU if she thought I could not handle the news I had just received.

I left the chaplain’s office and went into the chapel. She followed me and stood with her arms crossed at the back of the room, watching me pray. There is very little more absurd than a prison chaplain wielding their power. I had to stay with her until the four
P
.
M
. count was over. I closed my eyes, pretended I was alone, and prayed for my father’s quick recovery and the strength I needed not to kick the chaplain’s ass out of the second-story window.

When I heard “Clear!” I knew it was safe to move about. I left the building, walking slowly and calmly past the chaplain. She was still watching me, trying to determine if she should have me tossed in the hole.

My close friends were already outside C3 when I stepped through
the door. Kara and Misty hugged me and I started sobbing again. That was not a phone call I had ever expected to get. The idea that Mom, Hester, Gene, and I had come so close to losing my father freaked me out. Hester was going to be released in March. We were almost there, almost to the end of our decadelong nightmare. It had never occurred to me that one of us wouldn’t be there when it was all finally over. My family was always there, no matter what. If that vanished, I would be lost.

I could not reach anyone on my approved phone list through the weekend. On Monday, my boss let me call my father’s hospital room from his office in the computer lab. Mom answered and told me he was still too weak to hold the phone, but he could talk a little. I asked her to stop trying to tell him what I was saying and hold the phone up to his ear for me; I wanted to talk to him. She did so. “Dad. Dad! It’s me, Cleary.”

“I waw-waw-walk.” I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say. Mom told me he had just had the breathing tubes removed from his throat and his mouth was so dry he couldn’t speak well yet. They were only letting him suck on ice cubes, so far. I told her to put the phone back up to his ear.

“Dad. I love you! I’m coming home to see you, okay?” I yelled into the phone.

“Wa-wo.” It almost sounded like he’d said “Uh-oh,” and this made me laugh, him too. It was a pathetic, sad little laugh, but still a laugh.

“Stop trying to talk. Your tongue might break off!” I heard him laugh again and then try to say something.

“A-uhb-ewe. Aw-etting-etter.” He stopped talking and made an awful noise, like he couldn’t breathe. Then he was quiet again, and I could hear his slow, steady breath.

“I love you too.” I think he had also said he was getting better. He had repeated this like a mantra, every time I had called home for the last three months. “I know. You are getting better. You sure scared the bejesus out of me though.”

“Awry.” Dad’s reply had been either “All right” or “Sorry.” It couldn’t be easy for him to try to speak, so I kept talking.

I remembered something special. “Dad, one of the times I was being a big baby, you told me ‘Let the arms of Morpheus hold you now and take you to your dreams.’” I had been in Santa Rita Jail, crying, begging him to get me out of that hellhole, when he’d said this to me. It was so long ago. It had just popped into my head while I was trying to keep talking. Dad had lots of these little nuggets from his stage and seminary days. He could pull the most obscure but perfectly timed tidbits out of his hat.

I remembered him and the Fonze spontaneously busting out in Shakespeare one Saturday afternoon at Playhouse in the Park. This was just before Henry Winkler had joined the cast of
Happy Days
. At the time, though, he had been just the cute guy who watched me and bought me Cokes in a glass bottle when Dad was on stage rehearsing. Dad’s friends had been theater people or work people, not both. Our Christmas parties had been fancy and stuffy; his cast parties had not.

I remembered when he got his first bell-bottom hip-huggers: my birthday in 1973. They were red, white, and blue striped; mine were a smaller version of the same. I remembered speeding down Columbia Parkway in his red Fiat and thinking I had the coolest, most handsome dad in the world. I remembered him imitating Julia Child, looking for his pastry bag, and I remembered his man purse. In 1985, he wore it to the Tea Dance at the Boatslip in Provincetown and one of Hester’s gay friends had had an instant crush on him. He was sure the man purse had meant there was hope.

“You can do that too, you know. You don’t have to stay awake and take care of anyone.” I understood now that he had been lying to me every time he’d said he was getting better. He hadn’t wanted me to worry. “Be a baby and let Morpheus take you. Mom says they’re giving you a morphine drip. It would be such a shame to waste that.” He laughed again. His laugh was so warm. I couldn’t believe this was happening, why he had to be so sick when I couldn’t be there for him. “Dad, close your eyes and go to sleep. I’ll be there Tuesday and Hester will be there when you wake up.” I had to make that happen, no matter what it took. I couldn’t just give up.

Dad died that night, before Hester arrived. Aunt Jane said he went peacefully, and with a smile. Hester missed him by just a few hours, but she only had a forty-eight-hour furlough, so she had to leave before the wake and the funeral, before all of our family gathered.

Instead, she said goodbye in private. She wrote him a letter and tucked it into his breast pocket. They read this at the funeral mass. The funeral home prepared Dad’s body early. T. P. White and Sons arranged a private viewing; just Dad, Hester, and her husband, Matt.