Gypsy Bitch

I.

Jail is a sad place. My blue party dress is hoisted up by long black strings that criss-cross over my back. The dress is deemed ‘unsafe’ by the LAPD department and is confiscated. I was put into blue medical scrubs and escorted into the first room with two prostitutes who had been picked up in a sting raid on Sepulevda Blvd by the vice squad.

The room was the size of a large elevator with thick muffling glass beginning at our waist line and steel, the color of washed out bile, started up at the floor.  Other arrestees, male arrestees, waiting to get booked outside our cell put their foreheads onto the glass and looked down into our waterless fishbowl.

Nicole wasn’t worried about her boyfriend.

He saw her get picked up. She was worried about her 8 month year old at her grandmother’s house. “My daughter is going to be scared that I didn’t pick her up this morning.” Nicole has been tricking for 5 months, her boyfriend watches as she goes on car dates to make sure she is OK. She started hooking after she lost her job as a teacher’s aid in a middle school and could not afford rent.

Tonight Nicole accidentally got into the car with a cop.

She is curled up on the bench shivering —because it is 4am, she is in a small dress, and the room is positively freezing. She is rolling the balls of her palms against her forehead.

Megan is pacing. This is Megan’s third time in the Van Nuys holding jail.

“These cops are just pissed because we make more money than they do,” she says facing the guards who are looking into our cell.  She wants to find out if her 3 priors are going to force her to be bounced to Lynwood’s Female Jail. Megan is trying to walk Nicole through what Lynwood  will be like, as neither of the ladies will see a judge before Monday because of their early weekend arrest.

“I spent 23 days there. I do NOT want to go back to that place and worry about my asshole the whole time,” Megan says to herself.

Megan looks like she was on her way to buy groceries before she got arrested for prostitution. She’s a blocky blond, with her hair  pulled into a high pony tail, summery jeans that cut off at the knees, and a cotton purple tee. She has three black cursive tattoos. One is of her ex boyfriend’s name on her calf, her son’s name on the meaty part of her bicep, and the words “GYPSY BITCH” on her the side of her neck.

Megan is the first of us to get her mugshot.

Quickly after Megan is escorted out Chirsty gets tossed on in. She’s the best dressed of all of us — by this time I had banged on the glass and mouthed the word ‘BLANKET’ to a guard because Nicole was cold and particularly sick because she was pregnant.

Christy crumples into a corner of the cell. She looks very young and very scared. She sobs loudly in the corner. Her baggy, black boots are wet. “I fell into a pool at this party I was at,” I take off the cardigan I’m wearing over my scrubs and drape it across Christy’s exposed knees. Her cut off shorts, white shirt and black vest are also still damp from the pool party.

Christy will lose her license because she is 19 and now has a DUI on her record. Nicole and I try to calm her down by asking her questions about herself. Red faced and clinging to my black Banana Republic cardigan, Christy tells us that she is from Ohio and is attending Loyola Marymount college in Santa Monica.

She sniffles and tells us that she is majoring in “psychology”.

II.

It is best to smile in your mugshot. It is already such a shame-inducing activity to be finger printed, cataloged, and interrogated, in front of a bunch of armed strangers who are ordered to taze you if you’re deemed uncooperative that you can only smile.

The camera is a mounted to the top of the cage (the cage is the workplace of the on duty officers who spend the night shift doing the paper work of your arrest). So you are forced to stand at attention and point your eyes to a spot 4 feet above your head.
In front of the black booted audience, you have to decide if your face will reflect the dehumanization of the past several hours. To stare blankly or menacingly into the camera would be silly because at this point, you’ve been stripped of any power or free choice, and are at the complete mercy of a bloated and savage correctional institution. Trying to look to tough or aloof would be an act of delusion.

So I found it more comfortable to smile, not in an ‘OOPSIE you caught me’ kind of way. Or in a “this is a joke to me” way but in the way you would if you were having your picture taken in any other circumstances because the only thing you own at at this moment is your personality. So why sacrifice that? Plus, I’ve never been shy in front of a camera.

III.

Moments after I call my dad, Passion grabs the phone to call her daddy. Passion and Keisha were also busted in the Sepulveda sting and are pissed that their pimp will not come bail them out.

“Sheeet, that nigga don’t even know my real name!” Passion jokes outloud. Christy, a Russian named Alexandria, and myself are in bunks. We had been moved into a bigger room with hard cots and scratchy gray blankets, our focus was to keep warm.  There was a TV on the outside of the glass pumping in Saturday morning cartoons.

While Passion and Keisha are hurriedly slurping down the kids sized cartons of orange juice they’d been given, Alexandria, in a thick Muscovite accent asks me what the words “bail” and “warrant” mean. I asked Alexandria how she got caught driving drunk.

“I had just come out of the club, and I was making a U-turn, which I thought was legal in this country!”

Passion and Keisha are sharing our cots and are joking loudly while excitedly eating their soggy, breakfast of fake eggs and soft toast. “Damn bitch! This shit is like the Hilton. My ass is getting breakfast in bed and watching cartoons! Imma stay in here all weekend! HAAAY!”

Before Passion and Keisha came in Chirsty was telling me about the submission she would be writing to  FUCKMYLIFE.COM about her night in prison. We start talking about what clever facebook updates we could make when we could access our cellphones again.

” ____ is just chillin IN JAIL LOL!” 

By now the cell had taken on an atmosphere of a primitive summer camp.   We continued to call our family, friends and Daddies on the free phone; one-upping the other by leaving outlandish voicemails that ended in the phrase “OH AND I’M IN JAIL.” It was 7am and none of us tried to sleep anymore.

IV.

We lost Passion by the time we were put in the dorm bunk. She was an unrelenting shit talker to the guards. A particularly surly chicana who yelled at me when I asked for another blanket for Nicole, who was  feeling the full effects of morning sickness, was the target of Passion’s rage:

“DAMN BITCH! HOW MUCH DID YOU MAKE TONIGHT?? I MADE TWO G’s! YOU NEED, A LOAN, YOU DYKE BITCH?!”

Passion was put into a solitary cell while we took our blankets into our silent new cell that had a toilet in the middle of 12 bunks. This is when a panic that I had been staving off siezed.

To have complete security, the door of the cell is a steel shuttered garage door. It is solid metal with a a book sized hole cut out for the guards to push things like toliet paper, blankets, and release slips through.

There is no natural light so it is impossible to know what time it is. It is freezing and it is filled with women who are mean and without sleep. Kiesha grabs the bunk underneath mine and explains that this is what group homes are like. She had been in and out of them since she was 13.

I can’t sleep, I’m shivering, and I’m trying not to sob because when I do a large woman who was high on crack lunges at me. Every one in the room was silent and dazed; unable to sleep but laying still in their bunks.

I wanted to pee but did not want to do it in front of 24 women. I thought to ask the guard to let me use a private one and then the lunacy of this statement struck me. I couldn’t do that because I was in jail. I could no longer ask for anything and if I was given anything it would be against the rules. This was the new order that I was existing in. The darkness, the claustrophobia, and fear made me put my head between my knees for the next hour. Trying, with every bit of me, to not lose my shit in totality. 

V.

The cops were polite and sympathetic and drove my dress back to my car. They folded it and put in my purse which sat baking inside of a Santa Monica tow truck yard.
At 3am they had stopped me en route to seeing a man. A man who does not like to have conversations with me when we sleep together.

All night I had debated going to see him. Our last two hookups made me feel cheap because they were undeniably transactional. But he’s so handsome and desired by other women that my ego-high felt worth the crushing alienation I’d eventually feel when I’d drive away from his apartment knowing that I had slept with man I think about daily who does not like to hear me talk.

He was making me wait until after he was done doing whatever it was that kept him busy until 3am. To kill time I decided I would drive to the beach. I was listening to music, speeding on the empty 10 freeway, and  trying to convince myself that the clear contemptuousness that this men felt towards me, and maybe all women who he sleeps with, was just some sort of a kink. That this late night tryst was not some referendum on my self worth but some exploration of sexuality. Mine or his, it was unclear.

Sitting in jail all night I was anxious that he believed I had stood him up. The last time we had spoken, I said I would be at his apartment at 3:45. What did he think, at 4:30, when I had not shown up and was unreachable?

When they handed me the plastic evidence bag with my keys, wallet, and phone, I hurriedly clicked on my cellphone and saw there were no messages.