Thursday, July 21, 2005 decoy
My source tells me that in Europe, they don't refrigerate their eggs. My mind is blown, and it's only Thursday. How I'm going to get through the rest of this week, I don't know, except I do. By my bootstraps. With pluck and luck. By not paying attention to my surroundings or thinking.
The other day Tracy and I had an amazing race back to my house. He had a wild theory about a counterintuitive bus stop being closer than the obviously closer one. Ridiculously, he was right. Now I am stuck between taking the route I'm used to, knowing that I am behaving inefficiently, and the new route I am so bored. I am so bored typing right now. Blah blah blah. Type type type. Jesus. You don't deserve this, internet. You've been there for me for so long, and how do I repay you?
I'm ashamed of me.
Let's work this out. I'll mend my ways.
After I was arrested for the first time, I got a room to myself for the night, and then the next day, they took me to central booking so that I could make new friends while I waited to be arraigned. I'm a girl, so I went to girl jail. Before the van left, they flexcuffed me to a woman who might have been in her fifties or might have been in her busted, busted thirties. She had a big, flat, heart-shaped face, like a cat, and thin red hair. She was in trouble for going into Union Station with her boyfriend. For some reason, they'd been banned for life, but they just couldn't get enough of the place, and then they were captured.
She was saying goodbye to him, because he was about to be shut in the other side of the van we rode in, behind a metal partition, and he'd be going to regular jail instead of girl jail once we got where we were going. I'll find you, she said. I'll find you when we get out. Later, I wondered how. She was homeless, and so was he. They each knew the other one had warrants out, all though she hoped--and I noticed this was a shared dream for many at Central Booking--that somehow, there would be an error or a stroke of luck, and the police just wouldn't find them, and the next day, she would be free to go.
"They've got me under my old name," she said to me. "There's nothing on that name, nothing new. It just came up when they got my prints." She bounced a little on the bench next to me. I bounced a little, too, because our wrists were connected.
Later, it turned out that of course her prints came up under every name she'd ever had. Technology. They put her back in the big holding cell after her arraignment, and she was crying, because she said they were going to take her to Virginia on an old charge. Everybody was sympathetic, but there was nothing we could do, and eventually, the marshalls came and put her in another cell where we couldn't see her anymore.
Before all that, when she still thought she had a chance to get out that day, I was mingling, and I heard the blonde woman who'd spent the morning pretending she was deaf, just to fuck with the marshalls, say to her, "You was pretty once, wasn't you?" and the woman with the cat's face snorted. She said, "Yeah. Was." but she still smiled a little.
We were in there all day, and it was freezing. People wore what they'd been wearing when they were arrested, and most of us hadn't exactly come bundled up. DC in August is hot anyway, and the night before there had been a big prostitution sweep, so lots of the women I was in there with were wearing lingerie.
We complained to the marshalls, but they said that to keep it comfortable in the court rooms, they had to keep it cold in the cells. People wet wads of toilet paper, the number one holding cell craft supply, and threw it as hard as they could at the vents on the ceiling, trying to block them. Every now and then a clammy gob of it would fall on someone's head, and she would scream. People tried to climb inside their t-shirts, if they had them. People huddled together with people they'd just met. We did jumping jacks and bounced around singing, trying to keep the blood flowing. People talked about the work they did, and what they were in for, if the two weren't the same thing.
"Is anyone here a murderer?" a woman asked loudly. We all got awkward and started looking around. I wondered if she was some kind of police informant, waiting to get us to incriminate ourselves. I wondered if anyone was going to go ahead and say, "Yes, actually. I did recently murder someone." No one did, and the woman who had asked corrected herself. "I mean, is anyone in here for anything real bad? No, right?" We all agreed. Not one of us had done anything real bad.
By mid-afternoon, people weren't as social. Every now and then, one or two people would get taken out for their arraignments, and the room got less crowed, but there was no clear pattern to who was getting taken when. Every time they came to call people, everyone in the room tensed up, but of course, each time, most people were disappointed.
Everyone was hungry, since they don't feed you in Central Booking, and people had other problems, too.
The woman who wasn't really deaf was telling a couple of us some anecdote about how to spot an undercover, and she stopped in midsentence. She opened her mouth and shut it, and opened it again, and I saw that she was gasping. I asked her if it was OK, and she looked like she wanted to snap at me, but then she forced a smile and said, "Yeah, well. Heroin withdrawal." I looked around, and realized that a lot of people were in the same boat. Lots of rocking back and forth.
It could have been boredom, though. By the time it was my turn to get arraigned, I thought I was going to lose it if I was in there another minute. I'd been staring at the same red-painted walls and shivering all day long, and like I said, people talked to pass the time, but it turned out that even while I was confined and had little choice, I was still shitty at smalltalk.
They lead me into the courtroom, and just seeing the inside of another room was a little shock and a little thrill. The room was warmer. They could have left me in there another twelve hours, and I could have spent that time revelling in the novelty, but they didn't.
They let me go. posted by Frenzy Lohan | 7/21/2005 04:17:00 PM
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