Conversation among those on the bus brought me back from the fantasy du jour in time to watch some men in identical blue denim and chambray OSP uniforms harvesting broccoli and cabbage. When I wasn’t lost in escapist fantasy, I was in self-consoling rationale mode: the Scarlett O’Hara-Pollyanna persona, pie in the sky by and by. Everything will be just peachy, so why worry. This is what I tell myself, whistling past the graveyard. At least I’ll be among my kind of people there, eh?

Then the bus turned off the highway and skirted the high fence topped with razor wire and made a right, up a tree-lined lane toward the big gray outer wall of the prison. Another right at the wall and around the side, to a fenced compound enclosing the women’s prison, OWCC.

Access to the outer gate is by electric lock triggered from the Control Center at the intersection of the four wings of the sprawling low yellow cinderblock building. The driver talked on the intercom, then the high gate rolled back and let us in. The gate rolled shut again before we were led off the bus.

Inside the visiting room, our shackles were removed and the driver and guards took them, signed off on us and left. It was a pleasant waiting-room-like lobby area with institutional seating like you’d find in many government offices. There were eight potted plants: five rubber trees and three philodendrons. The woman who signed the receipt for us was built like a fire hydrant. Support hose up to a corseted torso, and little arms that never rested at her sides, were topped by a face on which I never in that year-and-a-bit saw a smile. She was gesturing as she ran down some basic rules, gesturing with the red rubber douche bag in her hand.

She led us through the inner door from the visiting room and turned left, down the North Wing to the showers in I & O. I and O was either intake and orientation or isolation and observation or all of the above. After taking us one by one into a dressing-room/shower area and having us strip, she did full cavity searches and then watched us douche and shower, using disinfectant.

Then, clutching towels, we were led into a storage room where we picked uniforms off racks. Goodwill from hell, these racks held the clothing manufactured by an elite five women whose labor earned them some of the very few bucks available to be earned at paying jobs in the joint. Almost everything there had been worn and washed many times. There were five basic components: tent dresses, A-line skirts, straight sheath skirts, short sleeve shirts and long-sleeve shirts. We each got a dress and two sets of separates. Everything was either light blue, medium blue, tan or beige.

The uniforms provided at least a little variety, and when I noticed that Mrs. Burt handed me a tent dress two sizes too big, I commented that it was just as well, since I was pregnant. Her response indicated that we were all getting clothes to “grow into.” “Everyone gets fat in here,” she said. She was right.

Shoes were brand new Hush Puppies and they fit perfectly. I had never been able to afford such a pair of shoes in my life. I loved those shoes. I suppose I needed some consolation to hang onto at that time, and a good, comfortable pair of shoes is something worth hanging onto. White cotton bobby sox and underpants (not new) completed the ensemble.

Nightwear was more colorful. Patterned flannel in all sorts of pastel colors and floral or nursery prints, sewn into mother hubbards and muu muus. I had a pink muu muu with blue teddy bears, and a white mother hubbard so old that its design of pink roses was amost invisible. Both were heavenly to wear, warm and long and full and flowing. One of the nicest times was after dinner when we’d be let out of our separate cells to watch TV in a little room diagonally across the day room from the control center, with windows facing the sewing room. Those who didn’t watch TV would either play cards at one of the dayroom tables, or attend various meetings or activities in the dining room just off the dayroom next to CC, central control. There was also a room just past the sewing room, at the entrance to the East wing, with two or three shampoo sinks and chairs. I was never in that room, the “beauty shop”, during my entire sentence. But most evenings women were in and out of there and the other common areas at the core of the cross, in their flannel nighties, looking as cute and cuddly as any gaggle of sixty or so women of all ages and sizes can look. But that came later.

First, I had two weeks of I & O. There were three I & O cells between the section of the north wing where we showered and the nurse’s and teacher’s offices, library, and classroom at the end of that wing. There were not enough I & O cells for everyone, so I went to an empty cell in the east wing, E-19.

The only inmate allowed to speak to me was the one who brought me five books the first day, and took my request for more books. The five books were her random choice, as librarian. Rosemary’s Baby was one of her choices, I remember. I don’t think I read any of the others because I started getting the books of my choice by the time I’d read Rosemary’s Baby.

I also got jigsaw puzzles from the library. Most of my time there I had a jigsaw puzzle in progress, and often several books at a time. On a restless day when I wanted to go for a walk I could go from my bunk and a book to the desk and a puzzle and back. In I and O, I also had to fill out a million forms and answer questionnaires up the derrierre. Meals were occassions, major occasions, the only occasions in some uneventful day.

Against the rules, I got to know my neighbor across the hall, Sunny. Like me, she was in there for weed, a longer sentence than mine, ten years, and for less than I’d had: 2 joints. She had been there about five years and would be out before long, with good time. One of the first things I noticed was that she and I had ended up with some identical outfits, a sand-colored separate set that looked like Israeli army uniforms.

About nine days into my isolation, I miscarried. I had cramps at dinner and went back to my room. When I started bleeding, I tried to get someone’s attention, but it wasn’t until Sunny started banging on her door, others took it up, and the ruckus traveled down the hall to CC that a matron came to check on me. They took me to the hospital for a D & C. It was the State Hospital, where I hoped to get to work at another of those elite paying jobs as an aide. I was back in my own bed by morning. Wheelchaired from the front door to my room, through a busy dayroom, to cheers and good wishes, I then had four or five more days of isolation before I got into the population and started my new job as librarian. The girl who had brought me my books had just gotten out.

I had to find a new fantasy after I lost the baby. I’d been looking forward to weekly visits from the baby and its foster parents until I got out, which I knew was SOP for babies born in the joint.

I’ve had about two miscarriages for every live birth during my childbearing years. My mother’s history was even worse than that and I was her only surviving offspring. My grandmother had a similar history and died in childbirth. Even with the family history and my own experience of previous miscarriages, every one was traumatic, a loss no less for not being unexpected. As surely as I knew that not all pregnancies end in babies, every time I was expecting, I expected a baby. Each time I miscarried, I lost a baby. It hurt.

I was also hurting from drug withdrawal and a bunch of medical and dental problems that took time to get attention for. The doctor, when I got to see him, prescribed a Primatene inhaler for my asthma and Coricidin for my allergies. The asthma got worse and because the staff thought I was overusing the inhaler, they took it away. For the year I was in there I slept sitting up most nights, because I couldn’t breathe lying down. After several severe attacks that led me to kick the door until everyone in the hall started kicking, I got permission to have the inhaler kept in CC for emergencies. Nobody liked the nights when I had to get everyone’s help to call for the inhaler, but nobody bitched at me about it. We all just bitched about admin.

As librarian, I was the only inmate who was allowed contact with new inmates before they were out of I & O. My best friend in there and several others who became friends had the ice broken for our friendships by the stack of books I selected for them their first days there. “Something for everyone” was what I aimed for, and that was what Thisba Hubbard said when she looked at the stack of books I handed her. She had just moved into Sunny’s old room across from mine, so we had plenty of time to get acquainted even before we started sharing a table in the dining room and walking the fence together during our outdoor time. One day Mrs. Hubbard saw a croquet set in the guard room off the sally port, and asked about it. After that, she and I and some of the others, those who didn’t get into the rough volleyball games, played croquet.

Imprisoned for seven years for embezzling funds from the church where she was bookkeeper, Mrs. Hubbard was about seventy when I met her. The money had gone for her husband’s cancer treatment and funeral costs. She had been widowed before the crime was detected. She was a classy old bird with a classic education and excellent credentials.

She introduced me to Richard Halliburton’s books. He was an English adventurer who swam the Hellespont, climbed mountains, darkened his skin with tea and made the Hajj to Mecca, and wrote lots of books about his adventures in the nineteenth century. Mrs. Hubbard also guided my study of mythology and made good conversation.

My studies in OWCC were mostly myth and folklore, since admin prohibited any “occult” or “witchcraft” books. I did get to read Castañeda’s Teachings of Don Juan, and enough other metaphysics in sheep’s clothing to adequately continue my education. I was obsessively chasing the Light, pursuing metaphysical Truth, but it didn’t keep me from indulging other interests. Through Interlibrary Loan I studied archaeology, handwriting analysis, more semantics, linguistics… all sorts of things, whatever came to mind. I could get ten books a week. I did.

Volunteer teachers came in and taught classes. I took typing, psych and sociology courses that way, and learned to program in Fortran II by correspondence, as well as other correspondence courses in math and biology. There was a limit of two courses at a time, and lag time between courses, but I crammed in as much college credit as I could.

The library had a budget for books and periodicals, and I took requests from the readers in the population. Didn’t get many requests, and ended up purchasing mostly the books I wanted to read. Not everyone used the library. Twice a week during the after-dinner pajama party the library was open to inmates. Usually 4-6 women showed up, and maybe 20-some, total, maybe a third of the population, ever visited the library. Weekday mornings I was there alone, shelving, filing, and such, and reading. Afternoons everyone, even sewing room trusties, were back in their rooms for three hours of lockdown. Some crocheted, embroidered, played solitaire, worked crossword puzzles or jigsaws, drew, painted, wrote, or read. I did all of the above. A few of my poems were published in the Walled Street Journal, the prison’s monthly inmate newsletter, printed in the men’s joint. I also did hatha yoga and astral projection, yoga by day and astral flight at night.

I was putting out new magazines in the library one day and throwing out old ones, when some of the pictures in the newsmagazines caught my eye. I cut out lots of pictures over a period of weeks. I salvaged cardboard for a backing and got glue from the classroom’s arts and crafts supplies, and made two photo montages. One had a political theme: women carrying signs for the Women’s Strike: “Don’t iron while the strike is hot!” and battle scenes from Vietnam. That famous shot of the South Vietnamese officer executing the kneeling man was there, and a lot of shots of campus unrest. The unpleasantness at Kent State was represented there, as well as many other headliners and headlines.

Sarah commented that I had “fast tracked” the last blog. She has a valid point there, as I will address below. Greyfox calls it “informationally dense” when I write that way. I love it when he talks brainy.

I was away from the house for a while today, which in itself is a novelty. Until recently, our family only had one functioning car and it being the old fart’s place of business, I walked or stayed home unless he was here. “Lassie” is still Greyfox’s Last Stand, and now “Streak”, a Subaru wagon almost as old as Lassie, has joined the family.

 I’ve got wheels. Whee. But, I digress….

I think I’ve been fast tracking this whole memoir thing, even though it has sometimes taken me several days and many virtual pages to get through a few months that seemed to fly by in real life. The speed freak summer was like that: an instant to live, forever to tell the tale. Other parts seem to go faster in the telling. Writing these memoirs is very close to automatic writing. I don’t start thinking about what I’m writing until I’m done and start editing. I just remember, and let the fingers do the rest.

I have been looking at what I’ve produced, thinking about stylistic differences from one blog to the next and things like that. I can see that the time of day when I write makes a difference in my style. It may be as simple as the difference between caffeine and cannabis, or there may be some other explanation. I’m still in the process of critically examining my writing, so it’s still largely a mystery to me.

Anyhow, driving down the highway this afternoon (Saturday: it is evening now and I’m on the bed with the laptop), I remembered that there was a big chunk I left out of that time between when I was detoxing and convalescing in the county jail, and when I went into the state prison. Memory is a vexing thing, unreliable, tricky, and elusive at times. I ended the last blog on my way to prison in Salem, but now I’m back a few months before that, in Eugene again, tying up loose ends, flashback fashion.

Placing this slice of memory in the correct chronological slot is problematic. Weather was cold and I didn’t have a job, so it is most likely to have been before I went to work at the taco place. There were a few weeks when I spent a lot of nights in an apartment upstairs over a bar in a seedy part of downtown Eugene. Three young men lived there. I recall that, but I only clearly recall one of those men: Jesse Boone. The others were officially the renters of the place, but Jesse and I, and a few dozen other people wandered in and out of there. At night, there were sometimes nine or ten of us stretched out on the floors, snoring to the sounds of hillbilly tunes, crying-in-your-beer music, coming up from the jukebox downstairs in the bar.

Jesse was a direct descendant of Daniel Boone, but most of his ancestors had apparently been Native American. He had an infectious grin and irresistible sparkling dark eyes. Jesse was a red-freak, a freaky redskin, but that’s not what I meant. He liked “reds”, Seconal, secobarbital, a highly addictive drug that was overused, overprescribed before doctors started overprescribing SSRIs. I was very useful to Jesse and his red-freak friends because I didn’t do downers at all. They liked to hit these things up, but they were sensitive to the potential for overdose.

It was tricky, getting just enough to knock them out, without going over into a potentially lethal overdose. The nod-off, the loss of consciousness, was the goal. If it was done right, they would awake in a few moments, breathing normally, euphoric for an hour or so. The tricky thing was that if they injected themselves coordination went out before consciousness and they could either run too much into the vein or drop the works, blow a vein… there was a range of accidents that could happen. This is where I came in.

Jesse would sit down on the side of a bed, so he had something to fall back on. Then he would tie off and I would very slowly inject the barbs, watching his eyes. As soon as the lids fluttered and the eyeballs rolled back, I’d pull out the needle. Then I would be there to watch and make sure he woke up within a reasonable time. We never had any mishaps, though every time we played that game it was an anxious time for me. I guess anxious is an appropriate state for a person in my position there.

The reds were street drugs, in capsules, readily available and not very expensive. During this time, Jesse or one of the others introduced me to a gay couple who worked as orderlies in a hospital. They had vials of pharmaceutical injectable Nembutal, called “yellows” when it came in capsules. Their stuff was preferable to wetting down and cooking up the contents of capsules, for reasons of convenience and sterility, but also because they gave it away. Their house was always open and there was usually a party going on. I wondered then and still wonder how they got away with stealing such a variety and quantity of drugs from their jobs. I don’t think they got away with it for very long, because the parties came to an abrupt stop.

One of the drugs they stole ended up in my hands, and later in my veins, because no one else wanted it. It was sodium pentathol, AKA “truth serum”. The dopers were afraid of it… afraid, I suppose, of the truth. I guess it was an ego thing, a fear of making a fool of oneself. Pentathol had figured in the plots of a few B movies where it had been grossly misrepresented as an aid to interrogation. I think the pharmaceutical classification for it is “hypnotic”. Maybe the unwillingness to try it was just ignorance: the fact that this was not one of the common street drugs, an unknown.

I ended up with a little carton of twelve 5cc vials of it. I didn’t know the correct dosage, so I had Jesse hit me up the same way I did with his downers. Whoof, what a trip. Euphoria, U-4-E-aah. This might well be the reason that I almost left out that chunk of the memoir. It does produce amnesia for what goes on while you’re under its influence. I recall being handed the full box, and looking at the neat little rows of tiny bottles. I recall preparing my first hit of it. I don’t recall how long the supply lasted, who I might have shared it with, or much else about the time around then, except for a general sense of calm and pleasant well-being. Oddly, as I’ve been writing this, all of my teeth have started to ache. They used to do that on speed, and they do it on nitroglycerine, which I’ve taken for angina. Hmm, as I said, odd….

One of those transients who drifted through the place over the honky tonk was different from the rest. He was an old guy named Archibald Yow. He arrived one gray morning in a green station wagon loaded with clothes and other personal items. When he came in, I was in the bar, having a pickled egg and a Coke for breakfast, listening to “Here Comes the Sun” on the jukebox. How the Beatles got in there with all that old country music, I don’t know, but that’s how I remember it. Archibald was a writer, poet, playwright–had publication credits, showed us some of his poetry. He moved in upstairs, got his portable stereo out of the station wagon, and his record album. He had one pair of vinyl LPs: Tchaikowski’s Pathetique Symphony, to which he listened continuously. There is one string passage from it that comes to mind now, and frequently gets stuck in my mind for days and days. Someone once gave it lyrics and recorded it as a love song: “Oh let my love be strong enough for two….” It might have been in a movie.

We were all pretty sick of Archibald and his music and his poetry and his egotistical reminiscences and paranoiac political rants by the time the guys in white coats showed up. He had walked away from a “care facility” somewhere, but they eventually tracked him down and took him back. We applauded them as they led him out. Archibald turned and took a bow.

I’ve mentioned Fred, who salvaged my I Ching from our house when Hulk and I got busted. That winter, he took me to several concerts where he helped do the light shows. He’s one of my soulmates, I now realize, though at the time I knew nothing about soulmates. Moments with Freddy were golden. We relaxed in each other’s auras. He told me his life story, and I probably told him a lot of mine. I remember him talking, me watching his beautiful face and expressive mouth. I loved him totally and he scared me shitless. He was too good for me, inaccessible. That beat up old yellow copy of the Wilhelm Baines translation of I Ching is still one of the most precious books in my library as much for the marginal notes Fred added to it as for my notes or the original text. *sigh*

Steve was apparently gone. No one I talked to knew what happened to him. I never saw or heard anything from him again after that. The speed in town mostly came from the bikers. There was a small group of people that had sometimes had speed for sale before I got busted, four of five of them that always hung around together at the coffeehouse. I talked to one of them and he told me they weren’t doing speed any more: “Too much bad karma in it.” Who knows if that was true. Most dopers were avoiding me because I’d been in jail and therefore might have been turned into a snitch. Getting out of jail can be seen as an act of betrayal in that culture. How dare I?!

My needle tracks were healing and they itched. The itch reminded me of how I’d gotten the tracks, and I craved more. I decided to get my mind off the itches and the cravings while pursuing some of my new interests and continuing some earlier studies. The library’s collections were deficient in metaphysics, but local bookstores were user friendly. After I got my room upstairs over the travel agency, I shoplifted a variety of books. I stole Steal this Book that winter, a handbook for urban underground survival. I also boosted, read and passed along to the coffeehouse crowd a few paperbacks on Edgar Cayce, Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard, Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, and The Book of the Hopi.

I liked staying home alone and reading sometimes, and late at night when there was plenty of hot water, I’d slip into the communal bath with my bubble stuff. But there were guys around, too. There was “Mush” (he lived in a mushroom), who had been around the bikers and dopers even before I came to town. Rhys started coming up to my room sometimes, too.

I missed Hulk. Sometimes, in the first few weeks I was out of jail, at the library I’d go into a stairwell or public restroom just to have a private warm place to cry. Then I’d distract myself with a book or study the help-wanted ads, or just go from one business to the next, asking if they needed any help.

All that was before Rhys read the cards for me, I talked the man at the taco joint into hiring me, and got a room to stay in. A place of my own felt good. I didn’t feel so much like crying all the time. Now I could check books out of the library and take them home, I had an address, a message phone in the office downstairs, and a very interesting job. That old guy in the taco place had mementos, portfolios of publicity stills, scrapbooks of press clippings. Sometimes, between lunch and dinner shifts, we’d just hang around there with him, get cooking lessons and look at his souvenirs. After he got us into our “uniforms” of babydoll pajamas, the job, which had always been more fun than work, became a million laughs. Neither my roomie nor the old guy nor I thought much of nudity and the pjs were well within legal bounds, but the reactions of guys who would drive by slow, then cruise through the lot gawking before parking and coming in and buying a bag of burritos were priceless. When they’d leave, the two of us would giggle, and the old guy would wink and say, “I told you so.”

After I’d worked a few days and had some money from tips and had had a lot of time to think about Rhys’s Tarot card reading for me, I went back to him. I wanted him to do another reading for me, but he refused. He just told me to learn to do it myself. So I shoplifted a deck of Tarot cards and a book on how to read them. That first deck was the Marseilles deck. I could read them only with the help of the book, and I found a few people at the coffeehouse who would let me read for them. It was slow going, with me looking things up in the book as I went along, but the readings seemed to impress them. The cards and the way they always seemed to make sense impressed me.

Then I found a deck I liked better: Book of T: the new Tarot for the Aquarian Age. Very different in appearance from the Mediaeval decks, with different symbols for the four suits and a new set of Major cards that used symbolism that came naturally to me. They were easy to read without consulting the book. People started coming to me to ask for readings instead of my having to ask them if I could practice on them.

The library had nothing on Tarot, very little on metaphysical or “occult” subjects. (I don’t like that word. It’s obsolete, came into usage when such things had to be hidden from Inquisitors, but later acquired a connotation suggesting hermetic or secret knowledge. Lies can be kept secret, but knowledge, true knowledge, is there in the collective consciousness and can’t be hidden.) Enough ranting, back to remembering.

A man named Bill Baker, who struck me as a sort of mellowed-out beatnik, was often in the coffeehouse in the morning. When we met there, we’d discuss Tarot and metaphysics in general, philosophy, cosmology, and life. I read for him several times and he gave great feedback. He and Esther Leinbach, a professional astrologer and author on astrology who also hung out in there, usually in the afternoon, helped me perfect my techniques with readings, through their feedback. It was invaluable. Their telling me what I was doing right gave me confidence, and their criticism showed me where I needed more work.

I did readings for Rhys and Mush, too, and everyone who came around. I did readings for myself. Some people say you “can’t” do that, or that you shouldn’t. It’s okay if you’re honest with yourself. Most people tend to read their hopes and/or fears into it. I enjoy having someone else around to consult an oracle for me sometimes, and lots of times we will trade reading for reading, but I can do it for myself, too. No prob, just pay attention to every detail and be objective… my strong suits.

It got ridiculous that winter. Our circle of friends had started remarking on the synchronicites that began when we started using I Ching about a year earlier. People were coming up to me in the coffeehouse and reporting on the way my readings related to what had happened afterward. It blew them away. And I wasn’t having any surprises any more. I was so into oracles, meditation, prophecy and divination that real life was all deja vu. It was unsettling. It was absurd. So I had a little talk with my spirit guides and with their help I worked out this arrangement where I’m content to get by on logic and intuition on an everyday basis and they let me know if something critical is coming up around the corner. Our arrangement has been renegotiated a few times, upgraded and updated, and it still works just fine.

The taco job came to a quick sad end when the old guy had a heart attack. His daughter let us know that the place would be sold. My roomie and I were not getting along. The facilitator at the NA therapy group suggested that What’s-her-name found me a challenge to her femininity, whatever that means. Whatever it meant, what’s-her-name agreed that that was the problem. She went on to say that whenever guys were around, they were all over me and ignoring her. Anyhow, it was time to move out and move on.

I found a live-in child care and housekeeping job. A man and five kids in a big old house with very little furniture. Nobody wanted to talk about mom. Mom was gone. They went to church on Sunday at the Salvation Army. The dad worked at some blue-collar job and the budget he gave me for food would barely keep us all on oatmeal and beans. That’s only a slight exaggeration. The whole family was malnourished. The kids were hungry. I started shoplifting the occasional extra nutrition. Eventually, the guy caught on, noticed that we were eating better than we should be. He fired me and the kids all cried. They had started calling me their human encyclopedia. They liked trying to find questions to stump me. Doing homework with them was kinda fun but frustrating. They were dim, but not nearly as dim as their dad.

While I was there that spring and summer, at night in my little room at the quiet end of the house, I had been getting into astral travel. That’s where I had my first non-traumatic out of body experience. It’s also where I had one of this life’s most embarrassing moments, when I did something so stupid that I dislike telling it on myself. I was still having needle-cravings. I still couldn’t get any speed, but I did get some weed. I couldn’t smoke it there in my employer’s house, so I made tea tea and took it intravenously. SICK!! You can’t imagine. First I was afraid I’d die, then I was afraid I wouldn’t. Oooogh. *shudder*.

While I was working for that family, my court date came up, I was sentenced to three years in prison, suspended pending successful completion of probation. I met my probation officer, an enormous obese blonde. I saw two people get off an elevator in her office building, when she got on–because she got on. I was thankful that she had a big caseload and not much time or attention to spare for me. We set a date for my monthly reports to her office and I scrammed out of there. From the amount of attention she paid to me, I didn’t think she’d recognize me if we met on the street. See how wrong I can be.

In jail, I’d met two women my age who became fast, close friends: Johanna and Miriam. They were out before I was, but Johanna gave me her street address. It happened to be only a few blocks from the home of the dim daddy and his kids. I was at her house a lot that summer. She was Wapato Indian and one of the fun things we shared was love of cooking. Between Glenn’s lessons on medicinal herbs and hers, plus a lot of walks where we foraged for edible plants for the stew pot, I got the foundations of my wildforaging skills at that time.

One day that stands out in memory was a visit to the jail to see Hulk. It was my 26th birthday. Leaving there without him was always hard. I was scuffing along, head down, headed toward Johanna’s place for a planned party. Right there on the sidewalk, I saw a little ball of foil. I picked it up and unwrapped it and found a sticky ball inside, about 2 grams of black hashish. Johanna had a hash pipe, and they sat me down on the floor in the middle of a figure 8 “circle” so that I got the pipe coming and going. When I stood up, after the hash was gone and we’d smoked some of someone else’s weed, I went down again. Visually, everything had gone a bright turquoise blue similar to what I see when our VCR is off the channel. I heard a whooshing noise and then I was looking up into a circle of concerned faces. Odd, some of the things one remembers.

When I got fired from my live-in job, I moved into a crash pad at a different apartment from the one I’d stayed at before, in the same fourplex. This one was upstairs over the place where the Black Ravens had taken me when they grabbed me at the Alice Cooper concert. The yellow dog was still around, and she slept with her head on me all the time. Then Hulk got out of jail.

We hadn’t been sure of his release date because it varied according to the “good time” he’d be allowed. I found out a day or two ahead of time because Fred, the former Crow Farmer, light-show artist extraordinaire and sweet, sweet lover, had seen Hulk in a work crew raking leaves in a city park. Fred came and relayed the message from Hulk and said it would be sad for him when my old man got out. I consoled him a bit, but couldn’t conceal my excitement.

While I had been in jail, one of the other women there had given me the benefit of her prior experience of the effects that probation and its various rules could have on relationships. “Fall partners,” co-defendants are never supposed to be allowed to associate with each other, and forget about cohabitation. My probation prohibited me from seeing Hulk. My visits to the jail to see him were risky, but I managed to get away with them simply by signing in as his wife. It got sticky only once, when his ex-wife, mother of his two kids was there when I arrived, and had also signed in as “wife”. She straightened it out, though, and I still got to see him.

The woman I’d met when they let me out of isolation and into the dorm, had solved her problems by getting married to her fall partner. She said that made it impossible for the authorities to keep her and her man apart. One of the first things Hulk and I did after he got out was to hitchhike across the line to Washington to avoid the waiting period. Hulk was highly amused at the Justice of the Peace who intoned our vows. He called him a “bass buffoon.” I think he was more a baritone, but the buffoon part fit to a T. Self-important, droning, patronizing… he got no tip from us.

The school year at U of O started out with street demonstrations against the Vietnam war. I was right there at one of the barricades on campus one night. So were the TV news cameras. My PO saw me at the barricade, fist in the air, chanting my heart out. She immediately revoked my probation and had a warrant issued for me. It took them a while to find me, since I was no longer at my last known address. She added my failure to notify her of change of address to the eventual list of ten violations, which included crossing state lines and entering into a legal (marriage) contract without her consent.

I think Hulk and I had spent about two weeks or so together after he got out, before the PO spotted me again, going into the job service office, and called the cops to pick me up. After a few days back in the dorm at Lane County Jail, I was transported with four other women to Salem and locked up in OWCC–Oregon Women’s Correctional Center, a little cross-shaped cinderblock building surrounded by a high chainlink fence topped with razor wire, in the shadow of the tall wall surrounding the old stone and concrete men’s prison, OSP.

Edited for faster loading–all that’s gone is a string of quiz boxes.