It was a startling notion, but I said I didn’t think there was a death row at Coolis.
“Maybe not,” the friend said stubbornly, “but still, there’s something spooky over there. Maybe it’s because they don’t let Americans work there. It’s all Mexicans and Chinese and—where did you say Nicola was from? Uh–oh—Polsen’s looking at us queer; better go to our cells for head count.”
This last she muttered out of the corner of her mouth in the prison mumble everyone mastered in their first few days. CO Polsen was always looking at women “queer,” when he wasn’t outright touching or threatening to touch us.
Polsen was one of the CO’s that I tried to avoid, but of course the guards had enormous power in our lives. If they took a dislike to you they wrote you up—gave you a ticket, which could result in anything from a loss of commissary privileges to a stint in segregation. Women they liked they brought gifts for, ranging from better cosmetics than you could get in the commissary to drugs. But the women they liked had to pay a price for that attention. Rohde, sleeping with one of the Iscariots, wasn’t the only CO having sex with the inmates.
One of the hardest things to take during my time at Coolis was the constant sexual harassment. It was verbal, it was physical, it was incessant. Many of the CO’s, not just Rohde, put their hands on your ass when you were waiting in line for dinner. When they searched you after you had a visitor, they would linger a long time on your breasts. I had to learn to hold myself very still, very aloof, not act on the impulses of a lifetime to break an arm or separate a rib. If I saw something blatant I tried to photograph it with my wrist–camera, but it was the language as much as the behavior that was demeaning. It was hard to accept the abuse passively, and it fueled both my rage and my fear.
Morrell brought me the wrist–camera from the Unblinking Eye on my second Sunday in Coolis. In the crowd of women and children in the visitors’ room, we managed to exchange my wristwatch for the camera model. I now had a watch that could take pictures, although I hated seeing mine go out the door with Morrell—my father’s mother gave it to him when he graduated from the police academy fifty–five years ago.
The tiny camera had cost over fourteen hundred dollars. Freeman was paying my bills while I was locked up, but I wondered how I’d ever pay him back—my prison time wasn’t a good advertisement to clients.
At least the camera made me feel a modicum of control over the crazy world I was inhabiting. I started taking pictures of some of the worst outrages I saw, but I would have needed the video model I took to Georgia to capture the verbal abuse.
“Looking good, Cream,” CO Polsen said as I came into the rec room a few days later. “Like to see you in shorts. I bet that * of yours has seen plenty of action, so I’d fit right in.”
I moved past him without breaking stride or looking at him: Polsen had constituted himself an enemy, and right now the only defense I could come up with was to pretend he didn’t exist.
The problem had really begun over my fight in the shower: he’d been watching on the monitors and felt cheated by my taking out my assailants before anything serious got under way. But his hostility was exacerbated the night after I got my camera, when I was running a load of laundry. The laundry room lay beyond the rec room, so I was watching TV with some of the women while I waited on my clothes.
Polsen was one of the CO’s on duty. He abruptly called Dolores out of the room. The sudden slackness in her face and her dragging posture as she obeyed made me get up a few minutes later and follow after her into the laundry room.
Polsen was behind the door trying to pull down her jeans. Dolores was struggling to keep them up, hissing, “No, please don’t do this, please don’t do this, I’ll tell the lieutenant,” and he was laughing and saying she was dirt, no one believed her lies, but that if she did say something, he’d see she got into segregation so fast it would make her head spin. I had been practicing with my wristwatch and used it now, wishing I could tape him as well. Polsen looked up and I turned quickly and moved my clothes out of the washer. He let go of Dolores, who ran from the room back toward the prison wing. Polsen gave me a look that liquefied my hamstrings.