My cellmate was angry and jumpy and smoking heavily, which made my head ache. If I had to live with it for more than a day I’d ask her to stop, but it was the kind of request that could escalate into a fight in here, and I didn’t want to be fighting other prisoners. My quarrel was most assuredly not with them.
I was exhausted, I was sick to my stomach, my shoulders were sore, but I couldn’t sleep. It terrified me to be locked inside a room, subject to the whims of men—or women—in uniform. All night I lay rigid on a narrow mattress as prayers and shouts hurtled through the corridor. I am strong, and a skilled street fighter, but the misery and madness around me kept swooping toward mob hysteria. Like telephone poles dipping past a train, swooping down, veering away just as you were sure they would hit you. Every now and then I dozed off, but then a cell door would slam, a woman would scream or cry out, my neighbor would mutter in her sleep, and I would jerk awake again. I was almost happy when a corrections officer came around at five to rouse us all for breakfast and the day’s first head count.
35 A Little Game on a Small Court
All day sunday I tried signing up for phone privileges, but I wasn’t able to get a time slot until Monday afternoon. All day Sunday I fumed uselessly about my incarceration. I was furious at being locked up—as were many of the people around me. The level of rage was so high that the building could have exploded at any time. Everywhere we went guards watched us behind double–thick glass, or behind TV monitors, tracking the furies and the fights before the corridors turned incandescent.
The calmest women were those who’d been in the jail wing for some months, waiting for trial. These were the people who either had been denied bail—or more commonly didn’t have a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars to post it. For half a dozen or so women, this marked the second Independence Day they’d spent in jail. They had gotten used to the routine and were more or less at ease with it, although they worried about their children, their lovers, sick parents, whether they’d still have a place to live if they got off the charge that had brought them here in the first place.
A jail is a place where someone awaits trial. A prison is where you go if you’ve been convicted and sentenced. Coolis was the great experiment in combining the two places for cost–saving reasons. And while the jail was technically separate from the prison, one of the ways Carnifice saved money was by combining as many functions as possible. We jailbirds ate with the prisoners and used the same common room for recreation.
On Sunday afternoon a guard took me down there for my hour of recreation. It was a multipurpose room, with an exercise area separated from the entertainment unit simply by a difference in floor—green linoleum for the common room, bare concrete for exercise. The entertainment side included a television set attached to the wall and a long deal table with cards, checkers, and some jigsaw puzzles. A handful of women were watching some inane game show, turned to top volume, while three others yelled ribald insults at each other over a game of hearts.
I went to the exercise area to work the worst knots out of my shoulders and legs. The room didn’t have much in the way of equipment, but it did have a basketball hoop and ball. I began shooting. At first my shoulders resisted and I had trouble making my hook shot, but after a while the muscles loosened up and I got into a rhythm. Shooting baskets is a narcotizing, private kind of routine. Dribble, shoot, retrieve the ball, dribble, shoot, retrieve. I began to relax for the first time since Friday afternoon. The blare of the television and the shouted insults of the women playing cards receded.
“You’re pretty good.” One of the women in front of the television had turned around to watch me.
I grunted but didn’t say anything. I play most Saturdays through the winter with a group of women who’ve been together for fifteen years. Some of the young ones were in tough collegiate programs—I’ve had to get better to keep in the game with them—but mostly I play for the pleasure of feeling my body move through space.
“Play you one–on–one,” she persisted. “Dollar a point.”
“Play you one–on–one for nothing,” I panted, not breaking stride. “I don’t have one thin dime in my possession.”
“No shit?” she demanded. “Your family, they haven’t sent you nothing for a prison account?”
“No shit. Anyway, I only got here yesterday.” I jumped up and pulled an errant shot off the backboard.