FORTY MINUTES LATER, the psycho bitch and I were tucked like ticks into the back of a Yolo County police car, the matter now being way too big for the guileless campus cops. Handcuffed, too, which hurt my wrists a great deal more than I’d ever imagined it would.
Being arrested had seriously improved the woman’s mood. “I told him I wasn’t fucking around,” she said, which was almost exactly what the campus cop had also said to me, only more in sorrow than in triumph. “So glad you decided to come with. I’m Harlow Fielding. Drama department.”
No shit.
“I never met a Harlow before,” I said. I meant a first name Harlow. I’d met a last name Harlow.
“Named after my mother, who was named after Jean Harlow. Because Jean Harlow had beauty and brains and not because Gramps was a dirty old man. Not even. But what good did beauty and brains do her? I ask you. Like she’s this great role model?”
I knew nothing about Jean Harlow except that she was maybe in Gone With the Wind, which I’d never seen nor ever wanted to see. That war is over. Get over it. “I’m Rosemary Cooke.”
“Rosemary for remembrance,” Harlow said. “Awesome. Totally, totally charmed.” She slid her arms under her butt and then under her legs so her cuffed wrists ended up twisted in front of her. If I’d been able to do the same, we could have shaken hands, as seemed to be her intention, but I couldn’t.
We were taken then to the county jail, where this same maneuver created a sensation. A number of policemen were called to watch as Harlow obligingly squatted and stepped over her cuffed hands and back again several times. She deflected their enthusiasm with a winning modesty. “I have very long arms,” she said. “I can never find sleeves that fit.”
Our arresting officer’s name was Arnie Haddick. When Officer Haddick took off his hat, his hair was receding from his forehead in a clean, round curve that left his features nicely uncluttered, like a happy face.
He removed our cuffs and turned us over to the county for processing. “As if we were cheese,” Harlow noted. She gave every indication of being an old pro at this.
I was not. The wildness I’d felt that morning had long since vanished and left something squeezed into its place, something like grief or maybe homesickness. What had I done? Why in the world had I done it? Fluorescent lights buzzed like flies above us, picking up the shadows under everyone’s eyes, turning us all old, desperate, and a little green.
“Excuse me? How long will this take?” I asked. I was polite as could be. It occurred to me that I was going to miss my afternoon class. European Medieval History. Iron maidens and oubliettes and burned at the stake.
“It takes as long as it takes.” The woman from the county gave me a nasty, green look. “Be faster if you don’t irritate me with questions.”
Too late for that. In the next breath, she sent me to a cell so I’d be out of her hair while she did the paperwork on Harlow. “Don’t worry, boss,” Harlow told me. “I’ll be right along.”
“Boss?” the woman from the county repeated.
Harlow shrugged. “Boss. Leader. Mastermind.” She gave me that flaming-Zamboni smile. “El Capitán.”
The day may come when policemen and college students aren’t natural enemies, but I sure don’t expect to live to see it. I was made to remove my watch, shoes, and belt, and taken barefoot into a cage with bars and a sticky floor. The woman who collected my things was as mean as she could be. There was an odor in the air, a strong amalgamation of beer, cafeteria lasagna, bug spray, and piss.
The bars went all the way to the top of the cell. I checked to be sure; I’m a pretty good climber, for a girl. More fluorescents in the ceiling, louder buzzing, and one of the lights was blinking, so the scene in the cell dimmed and brightened as if whole days were rapidly passing. Good morning, good night, good morning, good night. It would have been nice to be wearing shoes.
Two women were already in residence. One sat on the single naked mattress. She was young and fragile, black and drunk. “I need a doctor,” she said to me. She held out her elbow; blood was slowly oozing from a narrow gash, its color changing from red to purple in the blinking light. She screamed so suddenly I flinched. “I need help here! Why won’t anyone help me?” No one, myself included, responded and she didn’t speak again.
The other woman was middle-aged, white, nervous, and thin as a needle. She had stiff, bleached hair and a salmon-colored suit that was dressy, considering the occasion. She’d just rear-ended a cop car and she said that only the week before she’d been arrested shoplifting tortillas and salsa for a Sunday afternoon football party at her house. “This is so not good,” she told me. “Honestly, I have the worst luck.”
Eventually I was processed. I can’t tell you how many hours had passed, as I had no watch, but it was considerably after I’d given up all hope. Harlow was still in the office, shifting about on a rocky chair, making the leg thump while she fine-tuned her statement. She’d been charged with destruction of property and creating a public nuisance. They were garbage charges, she told me. They didn’t concern her; they shouldn’t concern me. She made a phone call to her boyfriend, the guy from the cafeteria. He drove right over and she was gone before they finished my paperwork.
I saw how useful it could be to have a boyfriend. Not for the first time.
I faced the same charges, but with one important addition—I was also accused of assaulting an officer and no one suggested this charge was garbage.
By now I’d convinced myself I’d done absolutely nothing but be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I called my parents, because who else was I going to call? I hoped my mother would answer, as she usually did, but she was out playing bridge. She’s an infamous bridge hustler—I’m amazed there are still people who’ll play with her, but that’s how desperate for bridge some people get; it’s like a drug. She’d be home in an hour or two with her ill-gotten winnings rattling in a silver catch purse, happier than usual.
Until my father told her my news. “What the hell did you do?” My father’s voice was exasperated, as if I’d interrupted him in the midst of something more important, but it was just as he’d expected.
“Nothing. Called out a campus cop.” I felt my worries slipping from me like skin from a snake. My father often had this effect on me. The more irritated he was, the more I became smooth and amused, which, of course, irritated him all the more. It would anyone, let’s be fair.
“The littler the job, the bigger the chip on the shoulder,” my father said; that’s how quickly my arrest became a teaching moment. “I always thought your brother would be the one to call from jail,” he added. It startled me, this rare mention of my brother. My father was usually more circumspect, especially on the home phone, which he believed was bugged.
Nor did I respond with the obvious, that my brother might very well go to jail, probably would someday, but he would never ever call.
Three words were scratched in ballpoint blue on the wall above the phone. Think a head. I thought how that was good advice, but maybe a bit late for anyone using that phone. I thought how it would be a good name for a beauty salon.
“I don’t have a clue what to do next here,” my father said. “You’re going to have to talk me through it.”
“It’s my first time, too, Dad.”
“You’re in no position to be cute.”
And then, all of a sudden, I was crying so hard I couldn’t speak. I took several runny breaths and made several tries, but no words came out.
Dad’s tone changed. “I suppose someone put you up to it,” he said. “You’ve always been a follower. Well, sit tight there”—as if I had a choice—“and I’ll see what I can do.”
The bleached blonde was the next to make a call. “You’ll never guess where I am!” she said. Her tone was bright and breathy, and it turned out she’d dialed the wrong number.
Because of who he was, a professional man used to having his own way, my father managed to get the arresting officer on the phone. Officer Haddick had children of his own: he treated my father with all the sympathy my father felt he deserved. Soon they were calling each other Vince and Arnie, and the assault charge had been reduced to interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty and soon after that it was dropped altogether. I was left with destruction of property and creating a public nuisance. And then these charges were dropped, too, because the eyeliner woman at the cafeteria came down and spoke for me. She insisted that I was an innocent bystander and had clearly not meant to break my glass. “We were all in shock,” she said. “It was such a scene, you can’t imagine.” But by then I’d been forced to promise my dad that I would come home for the whole of Thanksgiving so the matter could be properly discussed over four days and face-to-face. It was a heavy price to pay for spilling my milk. Not even counting time served.