Except for being able to buy overpriced, poor–quality shampoo and soap, my first trip to the commissary was a disappointment. The women around me had talked about what they planned to do on their expeditions as if their weekly thirty–minute trip was an outing to Water Tower Place. I suppose the women found the trips exciting because they made a break in the routine. They were also our main contact with the outside world, which we could experience through magazines like Cosmo or Essence. Soap Opera Digest was also popular.
Besides magazines and toiletries, you could buy canned or packaged food, cigarettes, and artifacts made by inmates throughout the Illinois prison system. A large number of male inmates seemed to like to embroider. We could get handkerchiefs, place mats, head scarves, even blouses with intricate designs of birds and flowers, brought in from Joliet and points south.
Also available were Mad Virgin T–shirts and jackets—the average age of the prison population was, after all, Lacey’s target audience, and many of the inmates were fans. Curious, I inspected the labels. They read Made with Pride in the USA, so I didn’t think Nicola Aguinaldo had bought the shirt she died in here. The commissary also stocked spin–offs from other Global favorites, including Captain Doberman and the Space Berets, which women liked to buy for their children.
On my first outing I bought cheap lined writing paper—the only paper the commissary carried—and a couple of ballpoint pens. When I asked the clerk if they had plain paper or roller–ball pens, she snorted and told me to go to Marshall Field’s if I didn’t like the selection here.
When I got back to my cell, my roommate, Solina, apathetically watched me scrub the basin. She had been at Coolis only a week longer than me, and the fact that the sink was filthy when she got here meant it wasn’t her job to clean it up.
“We’ll take turns,” I said, my voice bright with menace. “I’m getting it spick–and–span, and that means tomorrow, when it’s your turn, it will be easy for you to clean up.”
She started to say she didn’t have to obey orders from me, then remembered my prowess against Angie and said she’d think about it.
“We can control so few things in here,” I said. “Keeping the place clean means at a minimum we can control the smell.”
“Okay, okay, I already got the point.” She stomped out of our cell down the hall to watch television on a small set belonging to an inmate who’d been awaiting her trial date for eleven months.
I had to laugh to myself, picturing the friends who’ve complained about my slovenly housekeeping over the years—they’d be astounded to find me laying down the law on hygiene to my roommate.
Besides making it possible for me to bathe, Freeman had also delivered my message to Morrell. On Thursday near the end of my first week, I got summoned to see him in the visitors’ room.
My arrest had stunned him. He hadn’t even known about it until he saw a paragraph in the Tribune on Sunday—Mr. Contreras, never fond of communicating with the men in my life, had been too rattled to call Morrell. Like Freeman, Morrell talked to me persuasively about all the reasons to leave Coolis, but unlike Freeman, he could see a point to my staying.
“Are you learning anything helpful?”
I grimaced. “Not about Nicola, so far. About the way people without power turn on each other because they feel too helpless to see who’s really to blame for their day–to–day misery—I’m learning way too much about that.”
I leaned forward to talk more privately, but an alert CO made me back away the requisite arm’s length—if we touched, Morrell might pass drugs to me. After five minutes of glaring scrutiny the CO decided I wasn’t trying anything too heinous and turned her attention to another inmate. Only a handful of women got visitors on weekdays; it was hard to speak privately.
“There’s a place called the Unblinking Eye where you can get a particular kind of watch–camera,” I said in a prison–yard mumble as soon as the CO turned her attention away. “If you buy one for me and bring it on a Saturday or Sunday when there’s a mob here, we ought to be able to make a switch.”
“Vic, I don’t like it.”
I smiled provocatively. “I don’t think they’ll do anything to you if they find you with it—except bar you from visiting me.”
He gave an exasperated sigh. “I’m not worried about that but about you, you fool.”
“Thanks, Morrell. But if I ever manage to get into the clothes shop, I may see something that I should document. And frankly, there’s plenty else to record here between the inmates and the guards.”