#40 Camaraderie When You Least Expect It

            Over the next 24 hours while Maureen and I waited out our time in jail for court on Thursday, I took interest in catching discussions of fellow inmates and observing what life in jail can mean for those spending weeks, months, and even years there.
            What most struck me as the camaraderie I experienced there, including many small gestures of helping out a sister inmate. I remember a most startling comment tossed off gaily by Jenna as she climbed the steps to the dorm, called back to someone downstairs. “Either way, I’ll still love you.” I tipped my head over my bed to see if Maureen, lying down below me, had heard it, too. We raised our eyebrows and smiled. Such references to love were possible in this cold and sterile place? Women can talk about this love among friends here? Did men form such bonds on the other side? What remarkable creatures women can be.
            I saw several forms of intimate talk, including one conversation between Angela and Cherise after Angela was crying on the phone during a difficult conversation with her boyfriend. With her mother literally on her deathbed and her boyfriend saying he didn’t think he could accept her as a non-drinker when she would get out soon, Angela was watching what little life she had going for her on the outside collapsing before she even got there. Cherise was by Angela’s side for an hour, talking it all through with her.
            How vulnerable, how troubled, how revealing the talk. Maria, a beautiful young Latina, perhaps age 28, with the names of her two children emblazoned in tattoos across her neck, told her buddies in the bunks nearby: “It just hit me that I’m not going to have any retirement. I don’t have a mother and father to go home to. I’m not going to have anything! That shit just hit me.” Here they were, trying to help each other figure out how to stay clean and get their lives back on track with absolutely no support.
            The conversation was often far from lively. Other main descriptors for jail I heard there are “boring” and “disgusting.” As for boring, Angela insisted that “you can only read so much.” Perhaps 30 books were on the shelves in the women’s dayroom. I want now to find out how to get more interesting books to the inmates. I remember one woman in particular talking about what a good book she was reading, telling others about the book’s message of taking control of your life. More rehabilitation opportunities inside would be a good thing, even if just through some stimulating reading.
            I did get to visit the small jail library which had a couple of teachers on hand to help with GED studies. The room was fairly well stocked with books and films (and a variety of TV video/CD players), much of it aimed at GED studies, but also geared towards topics like “How to Find a Job When You Get Out” and “Staying Clean and Sober on the Outside.” During our two permitted hours at the library, the other women watched dramas, including Dr. Zhivago, and nature films, with only one studying for her GED test. One teacher was ready to do my intake as a new student for the GED, but I said I wouldn’t be in long enough to pursue it. I just settled in with Angela’s copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, enjoying the relative quiet of the library without America’s Got Talent blasting on the TV. The library also had a real bathroom with a door you could shut—what a privilege!
            Because jail can be so boring, many women seek the opportunity to work if they can. While the men get to work in the kitchen and the garden, a huge expanse of green growth that Maureen and I saw when we arrived, women were limited to working in the laundry. I won’t share stories I heard about the disgusting clothing they had to sort through in the laundry, mostly from the men’s side, they insisted, or about the athlete’s foot and other diseases they talked about circulating. Even when it came to women’s underwear, one of my roommates suggested we ask for maxi pads to put in our underwear if we didn’t want to be exposed to jail panties. Yeah, I’ll stop there on the topic of “disgusting.”
            The boredom also meant that if you didn’t have a job and weren’t into watching one TV show after another, you might sleep a good deal of the day, as did one woman who was a perpetual lump on her bunk. But some exercise was avidly pursued, including by Cherise who had lost nearly 50 pounds in a year and a half with the daily exercise that she and a few other women engaged in, doing 500 jumping jacks and other aerobics in the tiny cement enclosed yard. We also saw women walking lap around the edges of the dayroom at different times, just to get some kind of exercise.
            Finally, boredom means that the meals become a focus, as boring as they are, too. Fortunately, it wasn’t just white bread and hot dogs, but we did get two pieces of whole wheat bread with every meal, which meant you could gain a lot of weight if you weren’t doing jumping jacks and rounds. There was a salad or (overcooked) vegetable with lunch and dinner, and fruit with each meal, including a fresh orange at breakfast, even if the fruit was canned at other meals. Pasta or beans were a big feature. At lunch, a woman who was laughingly called the human garbage pail asked me if I wanted the bologna on my sandwich. When I said no, she asked if she could have it and then gave me a high five in her joy. What we can take pleasure in when we have few pleasures available…
            With so much boredom, a fight in jail between a guard and an inmate was a real highlight. The guard, Ms. Jensen, seemed to garner much respect from the inmates, and she had respect for what Maureen and I had done to land us there--an odd kind of camaraderie we weren't expecting. She told Maureen, “It’s good that you stand up for what you think is right, but you’re a real burden to the system.” Strategically, we want the system to feel the burden—as we know that the system of the watershed, its delicate balance of forests, creeks and wetlands are certainly feeling the burden of decimated hillsides, compressed “swamps,” and desiccated rivers, not to mention state coffers robbed of equally valuable resources for a useless cement river.
            But I digress. Officer Jensen was viewed by others as fair and friendly, if not firm. How firm? Maureen and I were upstairs in the dorm with the lump in the bed while the other women were down in the dayroom, watching TV, waiting for lunch, or in the tiny exercise yard. Suddenly we heard the still indistinguishable muffled voice of the intercom with some kind of shouted order, and the noise of a scuffle downstairs below us. The women in the dayroom quickly moved outside and then turned to look through the glass windows to watch what was going on below, which we could not see upstairs. The lump in the bed leaped up as she heard yelling downstairs and came to stare out the fenced wall before us.
            “What’s happening?” I asked, clueless about this choreographed scene, still evolving as we heard louder shouts below us. A couple of male officers ran into the room.
            “Lock down!” our companion told us. “It’s a fight. Sounds like someone in the med room.”
            In another minute, yet more male officers ran into the room. In a split second, I saw the women in the exercise yard laughing and smiling or looking on with concern at the scene taking place below us, like an odd mirror of the drama we couldn’t witness ourselves. Suddenly, a posse of guards led out a female in an orange jumpsuit—she had not been part of our minimum security group, for sure, since we were all dressed in green. One guard had grabbed a fistful of her hair in his hand and was pulling her head back to keep her in control, while another had her wrists behind her back in handcuffs.
            The inmate was whisked out through the magic door. We could hear the telltale clicks in the doors to indicate that we were no longer in lock down.  We headed downstairs, both for lunch and for news. The women in the exercise yard poured in, all excitement. “What happened?” we asked.
            “She was crazy!”
            “She hit Ms. Jensen in the arm—”
            “—and then Ms. Jensen socked her in the jaw.”
            “She broke her jaw!”
            “No, she didn’t.”
            “Yes, she did. Then they gave her a sedative.”
            “Hey!” cried someone. “Turn off the TV.”
            I thought, “Great idea!” But the impetus wasn’t to annihilate the inanity on the screen, as I had hoped, but to hear the continued scuffling and screaming on the other side of the door from the mad woman and her captors. It was all alluring and sad at the same time, like the excitement, I imagine, from watching the Christians tossed to the lions or for some Southern whites watching a lynching, or perhaps going to any super violent film today. We thrive on brutal entertainment.