Today is our second day off due to weather. No one is complaining. I have another installment of the prison memoir below, and ArmsMerchant (that’s my soulmate, resident old fart, and partner in crime, the shaman, street peddler and cat furniture–Greyfox) had enough time yesterday to write (twice) a funny blog about life as a street peddler, and about some of the creatures he deals with: the kiter, the booster, the looky-loo, the be-back, and the don’t-get-up. I laughed until there were tears in my eyes.
FEMINISM
First off, I am not now a sexist. My earliest social programming indoctrinated me to the myth of masculine superiority. When two events converged at the start of the nineteen seventies the pendulum swung the other way. When I was in prison listening to sixty-some women talk about how their men did them wrong, the women’s liberation movement was running at full hoopla. I was ripe for feminism. Not for hating men, no; absurd notion, that. My take on feminism was that I have to take care of myself, not trade my autonomy or self-esteem or any other emotional coin for the protection and support of a man. I felt confident to handle that, and thought I could do it without giving up the companionship of men. The jury is still out.
For a decade or so, I tended to think of myself as a feminist. I gave withering looks to men who opened doors for me. I got into intense raps with the men with whom I lived and worked if they tried to be too protective or controlling of me. Then the pendulum found a point of balance. Currently, I think the genders are wise to cooperate and depend on each other, to form partnerships and cross-gender collectives for their common well-being. But for a while, I was a fairly radical and activist feminist.
I listened to feminist rhetoric, and read the classics of feminist literature, of which there were several in the institution’s library. I gave it a lot of thought. I reflected on Ayn Rand’s principles of self-reliance and independence for which I had always held great respect. I thought of my father, and his insistence that I could do… whatever, just so long as I didn’t say, “I can’t.” I thought about all the times men had influenced me to go against my best interests or better judgement, and to my detriment. I took the feminist rhetoric, cranked it up a notch and added my own little twist to it.
I joined in the discussions and watched some other women get their heads turned around. I don’t know how long the attitude lasted after their release, but for a while in there, a number of women had fire in their eyes and a clear intent to let men make their own mistakes from here on out, while we do what feels right for us. They had been some of the meekest and most dependent to begin with. Like me they were ripe for feminist indoctrination, for “consciousness raising”, as we were calling it then.
There was a large segment of the population there that was sour on men from the start. One woman in her thirties was a vehement man hater. She said that first these men gave her these children and then left her with them and the only way she could support these kids was by claiming eight on her welfare apps while in fact she only had three, and running a shoplifting ring with several other suburban single moms. When she had been busted in the mall’s parking lot, she was driving a station wagon with two other women, five of their combined total of eleven kids and several thousand dollars worth of hot merchandise. The welfare fraud came to light when social workers got involved in finding foster homes for the kids.
Another one expressed no interest in having anything to do with a man again. She had been a one man woman, and she had been convicted of killing him. They were both Native American, and one of the things they did together was drink. Sometimes when he was drunk, he was abusive. The night he died they were both drinking. She said he had beaten her up recently and she was drinking more than usual out of pain and anger.
She said the next thing she remembered was a knock at the door. She answers the door. It’s a couple of sheriff’s deputies. One asks her what she’s doing with the rifle. That’s when she noticed she had the rifle in her hand. It was the rifle that had killed her husband. She got a twenty-five year sentence. When I knew her, she had seven years left before she would be eligible for parole. She wasn’t ever sure she had killed her husband, nor was she sure that she hadn’t. She went to AA, to Toastmasters and every class that was offered. She attended Sunday religious services and worked in the sewing room, a model prisoner. She had soulless, dead eyes.
There were a few women around there on various tranquilizers or psychotropics. Two of them did the lithium shuffle. One of those two was Diane, a quiet little woman still in her teens with an ironic sense of humor, a wicked laugh, and a fondness for juvenile humor and riddles. She had been convicted of killing her father. The other was Angie, a BIG, childlike Klamath Indian who had gone berserk and maimed and killed some of the men who were raping her.
Angie was the center of the only violent incident during my stay at OWCC. Violence is a daily reality in the men’s joint, but women tend to do their cutting with their tongues. There were plenty of scathing bitch sessions, but no cat fights. Angie simply went berserk in the dining hall and threw a few chairs around until a matron tackled her, then she threw a few matrons around until they organized and overpowered her.
She had been under stress. One of her long-term table mates for meals had been released. The place was at peak capacity or above, and she had to accept not just one but two new meal companions at “her” table. Her other long-term dinner companion was the depressed lesbian lover of the recently released, motherly, nurturing femme who had taken care of them both. Angie got one month, then another and another in the hole, until they adjusted her medication and she was allowed back into a more relaxed isolation in her room. She hadn’t returned to the dining room by the time I was released.
One of the straight pairs who buddied up for mutual support were two women in their twenties who had gone to the same small-town high school. One of them was in there and her husband was next door for lewd and lascivious acts with a minor. They had been giving “sex lessons” to little kids in the neighborhood. Her best friend and her husband were in for negligent homicide in the death of their baby from an intestine punctured by a glass thermometer.
Besides Thisba Hubbard, the classy old lady doing seven for embezzlement of her church’s funds, my closest friend at OWCC was Jill. 
Jill came in from Eugene not long after I did. She had been chased down on foot and arrested outside the Lane County Jail for providing narcotics to prisoners. It was her boyfriend’s birthday. He was in the dorm on the second floor. The screen on the window nearest his cell had a wide mesh. Jill filled soda straws with weed and folded the ends shut, then shot them at the window with a blowgun. Two of the straws sailed through the screen and landed in a passageway outside the barred fronts of a row of cells, and a third stuck in the mesh of the screen.
Jill’s family lived in the same Hillsborough, California neighborhood as Patricia Hurst’s family. She was a student at U of O, and we liked all the same drugs, celebrities, movies, songs and musicians. She, Thisba, Aleta and Mary were all at various times table mates at the corner table by the window. We talked about everything over those meals. They were the highpoints of everyone’s life in there.
We all got the same platefull of food, no substitutions and no one opted to pass on anything even if she didn’t want to eat it. We traded among those at our own and neighboring tables, surreptitiously but without serious opposition from admin. For some reason, liver often came with cauliflower. I traded cauliflower for liver, even traded cherry pie for liver, would pig out on liver whenever we had it, because I love it and few other people do. There was always someone willing to trade liver for anything.
On the 4th of July, we ate in the yard and had a feast. Each of us was allowed, along with lots of side dishes, half a barbecued chicken, and two bottles of pop, the only occasion on which I even saw pop in there. Since there was also unlimited lemonade, I traded both of my cokes for chicken halves and ate a chicken and a half. I also won the monthly weight-loss contest three months in a row. Eating and losing weight were major pastimes in the joint, and were played as sports. I became a legend with my chicken and a half, especially since I lost more weight than anyone else that month, about eight pounds. The prize for losing the most weight was a little bag of sample-size shampoo, mouthwash, a toothbrush and other such freebies that had been donated to the prison.
I got five teeth filled in there, all temporary fillings, the only kind the state would provide. They later came out, and never, of course, at an opportune time. When is it ever convenient to lose a filling? The dentist also did a kind service for inmates. He used the surgical steel dental wire to make earrings for those of us with pierced ears, to keep our pierces from closing. We were not allowed to bring jewelry into the joint or to have it sent to us, but these little loops of wire were ubiquitous and never taken as contraband. I still have one of mine.
This was an era when psychologists and social scientists were influencing penal policies. There were programs designed to help inmates assimilate into society. One of them provided corrective surgery for vocal abnormalities, facial disfigurement and such. I had an illicit correspondence with a man in the laundry who was in the program and was set to have his harelip corrected. He enclosed notes in my mesh undie bag until one was intercepted. He had opened our exchange of kites by saying he liked the way my panties smell. He was looking forward to his surgery, said he would send a picture after.
Jackie, one of my favorite women, had breast reduction surgery. She was, I think, a federal prisoner, one of half a dozen or so women considered escape risks who had been sent to OWCC for security reasons. At that time, the feds didn’t have anything but minimum security facilities for women. Jackie had a great sense of humor, saw the ridiculous in every situation. After surgery, Jackie came back triumphant, boasting that she could see her feet, and could now for the first time since childhood, sleep on her tummy.
She was also a practical joker. She had a running feud of little pranks between herself and another woman, the shoplifting welfare cheat. Jackie got the last laugh, won the decisive battle in that war, with a gallon or so of soapy water set to fall in the other woman’s face when she reached for her supplies from a top shelf in the janitor closet. It took invention, planning, stealthy set-up, and some quiet conspiracy to arrange to have about five other women standing around to observe the denouement. I was there when the obese, whiny bitch came sputtering out of the closet, wiping wet strands of hair off her face.
Few of the rivalries I witnessed in there went that far. Most ended with snubbing or arguments. Some women were shunned by certain others because of the nature of their crimes. The one in there for lewd acts was one of these. Two federal prisoners who came in shortly before my release got the silent treatment from some of the women who had to have known more about them than I did. I’m sure that before long the con pipeline, the old grapevine, had all the details, but all I have is curiosity.
We had hierarchies and cliques in abundance. There was one woman everyone called Mama, who ran the place. She was big, friendly, smiling, gregarious and funny, with very black skin and straightened hair. Hair was a big thing at the time among the black women. “Conked” hair was politically incorrect among some of the younger women, and “natural” hair was considered low-class by many of the older ones. Mama held court in the dayroom at the central table, playing whist, usually, or sometimes playing dominoes.
I was never “in” enough to play at Mama’s table, and I often spent those free times not in the dayroom but in my own room, which is one reason I never got in with any cliques. It was not for lack of affection for the others on my part, but just the greater comfort of my bunk compared to the scramble for the too-few available chairs, and my preference for puzzles, books and meditation, over card games and gossip. At various times, I had some other projects, crafts, in progress in my room, as well.
When I was first incarcerated there, our bedding consisted of a pair of white cotton sheets and a gray wool blanket. Inmates submitted a petition asking for relief from the fibers, presumed to be asbestos, which blew out the ventilator grilles and settled in clumps, “dust bunnies” in corners and under things. Many of us had breathing difficulties and felt that the fibers in the air contributed to them.
The administration declared that the dust bunnies were from our wool blanket fibers, and issued each of us another white cotton sheet which we were allowed to decorate with embroidery and use for a bedspread, to cut down on the spread of the fibers. It made no difference in the dust bunnies, of course, but for some of us with needlework skills it brightened up the rooms a bit. Some of us got cloth scraps from the sewing room and taped them over the vents as filters, and that cut down on bunnies in our rooms.
All of those improvised filters were removed as contraband during a sweep. In the same sweep all my friends lost the various items I’d made as holiday gifts for them, little fake vases of flowers composed of empty thread spools, wire, paper and cloth, or photo-montage collages, drawings, etc., and the many other handcrafted items that some of us made for a pastime, to brighten our rooms or to give as gifts. I lost my magazine photo of Rudy Nuryev dancing, and my bedspread.
I had used three shades of blue floss to embroider a kabalistic Tree of Life on my white sheet. It was ten simple drawings to symbolize the ten Sephira, each Sephiroth about one square foot. Because of its “occult” symbolism, it was contraband. It had been some of my best work, too, and, of course as the lengthy project went along, my skills improved, so that by the time I got to Kether, the Crown of White Light, the back of the design looked as neat as the front.
At least I kept the skills I developed in there. E.J. Gold, the hi-tech shaman, says it is important for labyrinth voyagers to develop and refine our manual skills, because when we lose our minds in there, manual skills are all we have to depend on. He’s right.
[Don't forget Greyfox's funny blog]
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