The police made everyone who was going to be transferred to Central Cell Block stand up against the wall. Central Cell Block was the one place in DC that everyone–cops, criminals, lawyers, hookers, activists–told you not to end up. It was the dirtiest, most disgusting lock-up in the city.
The other ACT UP protesters had already been processed, and I was the only one left. A tall cop in a huge, metallic-blue cop coat turned me around to cuff me. She said, “Girl, what the hell are you doing here? You don’t belong here.”
I looked around the room. I’d never felt so white in my life. In racist DC, the prison population is mostly black. I said defensively, “I belong here as much as anyone. I broke the law. I have a right to be here.” I wished I could switch myself off like a light bulb.
Later, when I related this story to an African American friend, she said, “You have the right to be there? They’re probably still talking about you! ‘Remember that white girl who said she has the right to be here?’” And she dissolved into laughter.
When the Central Cell Block cops arrived, a large male officer checked one man’s handcuffs and bellowed, “This isn’t the way we cuff people in Central Cell Block.” He and his cadre took off everyone’s handcuffs and put them on again tight.
I said to the extra-tall female officer who cuffed me, “Aren’t you gonna ask me my safe word?”
All around me, people screamed for their cuffs to be loosened, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want anyone to see me squirm. The Central Cell Block cops herded about fifteen of us into a police van divided into two narrow sections by a metal partition. They crammed the men in one side and the women in the other. I slid in first along the bench, my face almost touching the wall in front of me. I pulled up my feet and slammed my monkey boots into the small, plastic window that separated me from the backs of the officers’ heads in the front seat. As I did, I had a vision of the dark-haired woman in my head in her monkey boots.
The only time I saw my women these days was when I was at an ACT UP demonstration. It was the one unselfish thing I was doing. The rest of the time I focused on myself and my future “career” as a university professor, and this violated a sense of morality we shared. I thought about Gertrude Stein saying in Lectures in America that the writer can either serve God or Mammon. I assumed that this was true for musicians and English lit majors, too. In graduate school, I was serving Mammon.
The cops drove us into an underground parking garage and left us there. It was hot in the van, and I imagined myself dead and forgotten somewhere along the Potomac. I hadn’t been able to feel my hands for a while, the plastic flex-cuffs cutting into my skin, and I worried about the blood not reaching them. I closed my eyes and tried to quell my worst OCD fear that my hands were coming off. Dead but proud, I assured myself. To keep myself from panicking, I often pictured myself dead rather than mutilated. I saw myself locked up and lost in the system. I thought of an old Clash song: “I got nicked fighting in the road / the judge didn’t even know / what’s my name!”
I thought about Patty Hearst locked up in a closet and raped repeatedly by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Next to that, I had nothing to complain about, and I tried to contain my claustrophobia. Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people, I thought, remembering an old SLA slogan. The only punk song I knew that mentioned the SLA was “The American in Me” by the San Francisco group, the Avengers. After I was sure we’d used up our entire air supply, the cops finally opened the back of the van and let us out.
I was the only white person in Central Cell Block. A huge woman behind the desk shouted at us, “You’re in my house now.” My handcuffs were removed, and I was put into a small cell. Left to myself, I evaluated the marks on my wrists and a welcoming committee of cockroaches. The paint on the bars was a filthy, peeling-off, puke green.
At least while I was in custody, I could relax because everything was out of my control. My mental problems peaked during graduate school. Instead of merely being paranoid and thinking that people were judging me all the time, people were judging me all the time. I was in a constant state of anxiety, and even when I stood still, I felt like I was running. My intrusive thoughts intruded even deeper into my head. And I only felt like I caught up with my real self when I was sitting in a cell. I sat on the upper metal bunk, the one without the thin, roach-stained mattress, and felt temporarily at peace.