We were given fifteen minutes to relieve ourselves and buy something at the vending machines. I used one of my six dollars to buy a can of juice, which I had to drink in quick gulps under the intense glare of a guard: they would confiscate any metal we tried to sneak onto the bus.
While we waited for the driver, some of the women exchanged small talk with the guards. When we were finally loaded back on, the smart talkers got to move closer to the front, away from the diesel fumes. I got to move closer to the back. My reward for trying to speak up for the pregnant woman.
It was three when the bus pulled in through the main gates at Coolis. A heavily armed force supervised our unbuckling from the pole and emergence into the prison yard. I ended up behind the pregnant woman. She was small and dark, like Nicola Aguinaldo, and deeply ashamed of the vomit down her front. She tried timidly to ask for help but none of the guards responded. They were busy counting us and comparing lists. It was here that the sheep and the goats were separated—some bound for prison, some for jail.
“This woman needs help,” I said to one of the guards near me.
When he ignored me I repeated myself, but the woman next to me hissed and stepped on my left foot. “Shut up. They only start over from the beginning each time they’re interrupted, and I need to use the john.”
A smell of urine now came from the pregnant woman and she began to weep. The guards ignored her and began the count again. Finally, when the heat of the sun and the long wait made me wonder if she might faint, they started calling us forward. My traveling companions disappeared one by one into the building. Another half hour went by. I badly needed a toilet myself, but they were taking us in alphabetical order. There were three of us left when they called me.
“Warshki.”
I shuffled forward in my chains. “Warshawski, not Warshki.”
I should have kept quiet—speech was their license to kill. They sent me back to wait, took “White” and “Zarzuela” while I compressed my thighs as best I could for the chains. And finally was called again. Not “Warshki” this time but “Warshitski.”
At the door I was unlocked, printed again, sent under double escort to an interior room where I once again took off all my clothes, squatted, coughed, tried to remove myself from the burn of shame at my exposure, and the dribble of urine I couldn’t help releasing. A guard barked me into the shower, where hair and a whitish film of soap covered the floor and sides. I was given a clean IDOC uniform, the pants too short on my long legs and riding too tightly in the crotch, the shirt big enough for three of me. At least it covered my waist so I could leave the pants unzipped.
On this far side of the gates my shackles were finally removed. A guard took me through a series of locked corridors to the jail wing. At five I joined the line to the refectory and had a Fourth of July special: hard–fried chicken, overboiled green beans, corn on the cob, and cooked apple slices on something that looked like cardboard. It was too tough to cut with the plastic utensils we were issued, so most of the women picked it up and ate it by hand.
I was eating the corn when I felt something on my leg. I looked down and saw a roach working its way toward my food. I smacked it off in revulsion, then saw that the floor and table were covered with them. I tried to stand, but a guard quickly came over and slapped me back down. Even though I hadn’t eaten since the lunch Morrell bought me yesterday in Pilsen, I couldn’t face the food. I kept flicking roaches, real and imagined, from my legs and arms until the guards were willing to escort us back to our cell blocks.
At nine I was locked in an eight–by–twelve room with another woman, a black woman young enough to be my daughter, who told me she’d been arrested for possessing crack. We were given bunk beds, metal frames bolted deep into the wall with a thin mattress, a nylon sheet, and a blanket on each. A toilet and sink formed out of a single piece of stainless steel was buried in the concrete floor. There is no privacy in prison—I would have to learn to perform intimate functions in the open.
Like the shower, the sink was caked with hair and mold. I didn’t know how to get soap or cleansers to make it palatable to brush my teeth—but then, I didn’t have a toothbrush either.