the commissary.”
That’s where she lost me. I turned and walked toward the pay phone.
One woman was on the phone while another was yelling at her, “Get off that goddamned phone, you fucking bitch! Your five minutes is up!” The officer with the sandwich cart was passing by and threw three sandwiches in our direction. I caught one thrown in my direction, took one look at the white bread with thumbprints on it, and tossed it in the trash bin next to me.
“What the fuck you thinking?” asked the woman in front of me waiting for the phone as she ran over and retrieved my sandwich from the trash. “You can trade that for something.” Then she handed it back to me.
“What can I trade it for?”
“Candy, soda, pills, whatever,” she said. Finally, someone was speaking my language.
“What kind of pills?” I asked.
The woman on the phone hung up and the woman in front of me almost caught air lunging toward the phone. She picked it up and started dialing. I leaned forward and tapped her on the shoulder. “What kind of pills?” I asked again. She looked at her shoulder where I touched it and gave me a look that said any more contact with her would not be rewarded.
When it was finally my turn to use the phone, I made a collect call to my aunt. My cousin Madison answered the phone, accepted the charges, and handed it to my aunt. I immediately started bawling. Being in jail was similar to being in a hospital bed: You’re fine until you see or speak to someone from your family, and then you completely lose your shit.
“When are you getting me out?” I asked her.
“We’re working on it. We had to put a lien on the house to get the money.”
“What’s a lien?”
“It’s a loan, dipshit, against our mortgage,” she explained.
“Oh, shit.”
“It’s fine, don’t worry, we should have you out by the morning.” Hearing for the second time in ten minutes that I would be spending the night caused the same sting that I felt hearing it from the officer behind the window, and a new rupture of tears exploded.
“Chelsea, are you okay?” my aunt demanded.
“No!” I wailed. “There are gangs here and people are trading sandwiches for tampons! It’s complete chaos, and…” I took a deep breath. “And…,” I continued, “I’m sleeping in a bunk bed.”
“Chelsea, just try and get some sleep. We will get you out of there as soon as we can. Dan’s going to the bail bondsman first thing in the morning.”
I used the sandwich I was holding to wipe the tears off my face. “Do not tell my father,” I told her.
“He already knows,” she told me. “He’s fuming.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah, he’s livid. He can’t believe your sister is such a jackass.”
“Oh, really?” I asked, comforted by this development.
“Yeah, he said he won’t speak to her until she starts taking medication.”
“Oh, wow.”
“Hey, Smurfette! Get off the fucking phone!” a woman behind me yelled. I was so startled, I didn’t even say good-bye or hang up. I dropped the phone, took my sandwich, and hightailed it back to my bunk. I was much taller than Smurfette and preferred the Barbie nickname from earlier in the afternoon. It wasn’t going to be easy to get any of these lunatics to take me seriously, but I was hell- bent on trying.
I climbed up on my bed and put my head down on the pillow, which had the consistency of a pancake. I placed my sandwich under it for extra support.
“You not gonna eat that?” asked a frosted blond-haired white woman in the top bunk next to mine, her mouth full of the sandwich she was already gnawing on.
“Do you want it?” I asked, jumping at the opportunity to make a friend.
“Shit, I’ll take it,” she said, and put out her hand. Her name was Lucille.
“What are you in for?” I asked her.
“Murder.”
The notion that someone who used a fake I.D. was put in a bed next to a killer was not lost on me. What kind of operation were they running here? I suddenly realized that this was what people were referring to with the phrase “hard time.”
I searched my mind for the correct lingo to converse with a murderer. “Who’d you knock off?” I asked nonchalantly, trying to hide my fear by picking in between my toes and then smelling my fingers.
“My sister, the cunt,” she said.
“Really? I’m thinking about killing mine,” I told her as coolly as I could.
“Yeah, sister was a cunt, slept with my man.”
“Did you kill the guy?”
“Nah, didn’t get the chance, would’ve though,” she said as she piled my whole sandwich into her mouth in one sweep.
“Right.” I nodded. I didn’t want to pry, yet I wanted to know how this frosted-blond petite woman murdered her sister and where in her body she was storing the two sandwiches she had just demolished. She couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred pounds and she was about five-foot-six. This woman/ killer was a testament to my theory that the crazier you are, the more calories you burn. That’s why psychos are always so skinny.
“The best sandwiches are around Thanksgiving. That’s when they use the real shit,” she said.
“Yeah, well, I’m not going to be here over Thanksgiving.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say,” she told me.
“No, really.” I told her. “I’m Jewish.”
“Lights out in ten minutes. Lights out in ten minutes!” someone announced over the loudspeaker. I hadn’t gone to the bathroom since that morning before I got on the bus, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it in much longer. I had seen an open area that looked like a bathroom near the information booth, which I had made a personal pact with myself to try and avoid. I thought I could hold it if I didn’t ingest any liquids.
“Do you want to go to the bathroom together?” I asked Lucille.
“Sure.” She smiled. “I’ll go to the bathroom with you. Ain’t nobody gonna bother you.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about that,” I lied. “I play karate. I’m a black belt.” I wanted to trust Lucille, but knew if she had turned on her own sister, the chances of her turning on me were pretty strong. I wanted her to know that if it came down to it, I could protect myself. “I’ve done time before,” I added as we headed toward the bathroom.
“Yeah, where?” Lucille asked.
I searched my mind trying to think of another prison. “Alcatraz.”
“Fuck.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I told her. There were a few stalls in the bathroom as well as some open seating, but I opted for some privacy. The first stall I walked into looked like someone had just had a miscarriage. I walked out and chose the next one. I peed for about three minutes straight and when I came out of the stall, Lucille was sitting on a toilet taking a dump.
“Hold on,” she said with her teeth clenched. “I’m just finishing up.” This was obviously how she stayed so thin: She immediately shit out any food she consumed.
“Hand me some toilet paper.”
I grabbed some tissue and handed it to my new best friend.
After she wiped her ass, she pulled up her pants and headed back out to the main room. I wanted her to wash her hands, but didn’t want to be bossy. “I’m just gonna wash my hands,” I said, hoping she would take the hint. Instead, she took a menthol cigarette out of her pocket and lit it.
We walked back to our respective bunks and hopped in. I laid my head down facing Lucille, wondering if she was my prison soul mate. I was starting to understand the tales of lesbianism you hear on the outside. It made perfect sense that without any men around, women had only two options: weight-lifting or other women. I wondered if Lucille and I would have a wedding ceremony by our bunk beds or in the cafeteria. I would be so skinny by that time from all this self-starvation that I could probably fit into any gown my heart desired. Maybe Lucille and I could even fit into the same gown.
I wasn’t really attracted to her, but I had on occasion slept with guys I wasn’t attracted to, and figured there wouldn’t be a huge difference. I stared at her as she mashed her cigarette out on the side of her bedpost. “So, how did you kill your sister?” I asked, trying to make small-talk with my future bride.
“With a hammer,” she replied. “Took the bitch a good forty minutes to finally die.”
I was not prepared for that response. My body immediately went into shock. It was everything I could do not to vomit. The only other time my body had this reaction was when I was ten years old and my next door neighbor pulled down his pants and showed me his penis. But even then, I was less taken aback. I leaned my head over the edge of my bed gagging, but nothing was coming out. I knew this was not the appropriate reaction to Lucille’s declaration. I put my hand up to say I was okay until moments later, when I finally stopped heaving.
Lucille was sitting on her bed looking at me. I racked my brain trying to come up with an excuse for my reaction, but was so thrown off-guard, I just put my head back down on my pillow and said, “We should definitely keep in touch after I leave tomorrow.” Then I rolled over and cried myself to sleep. I thought about how lucky my sister was that Lucille wasn’t in our family. I wanted to hug Sloane tightly and tell her, “You stupid, stupid girl, do you know that under no circumstance would I ever hammer you?”
I woke up very early the next morning and opened my eyes. I looked around the room trying to think of a situation that could be any worse than this, and decided that the only thing that could be worse than prison was the navy. I looked over and Lucille wasn’t in her bed. I grabbed my bag of toiletries and went straight to the bathroom. I had to pee and I desperately needed to floss.
Once I was done washing my hands, I heard my name being called over the loudspeaker along with five or six others. “Finally!” I exclaimed, and ran over to the glass booth, where a guard was waiting with a clipboard. I stood there while we waited for the other girls called to find their way over, thinking about how thin I felt. One more day of this, and my stomach would officially be concave. I loved it. Once the others arrived, the guard led us out a door, down a hall, and down two flights of stairs into what looked like a principal’s office.
My name was called rather quickly and I went into the office, sitting down across from a Latino woman in her forties.
“Hi,” I said, with a bounce in my step.
“Hi, Miss…Handler?” she said, looking up at me with what I took to be sympathy. Finally.
“Yup, that’s me,” I said, shaking my head at the injustice of it all.
“Okay, there are a couple of options. Do you have any special skills?”
“Skills? Not really, no. I’m good at reading, I can type pretty fast… I’m not sure what you’re asking me?” I asked, confused.
“Well, you’re here for work placement, so there are different things to choose from: You could work in the kitchen, or you could work in the industrial shop, where you could make anything from license plates to wooden wind chimes, or you can enroll in school and get your GED.”
“What are you talking about? No, no, no…I’m not working here, you don’t seem to understand. First of all, I am supposed to be getting bailed out this morning. I do not want a job making wood
