Chapter One
“License and registration, please?”
Please don’t let her look in the glove compartment . . . please don’t let her look in
the glove compartment . . .
The female cop shone the flashlight into my face, blinding me. I fumbled around to the
glove compartment, opening it just a sliver, and delicately putting two fingers inside,
trying only to take out what I needed and nothing more . . .
The cop rapped the flashlight against the door. “Hurry up!” she shouted.
I was startled, and my hand spasmed. The glove compartment flew open, and all manner of
things fell out. I reached to cover things up with my hands, but the beam of the
flashlight was faster, and it fell on the small plastic baggie that had made its way to
the floor of the car.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me that’s oregano?”
I didn’t say a word.
The cop sneered. “Get out of the car.”
I climbed out. The cop reached into the car and took out my registration, as well as the
baggie of marijuana, which she waved in my face.
She then examined my wallet.
“Jack Conroy,” she said. “Freshman at Georgia Tech. Well, well, well. You’re in my town
now, and we don’t much like you druggie liberal college boys coming through our
communities. Am I gonna find any more drugs in this car?”
“No, ma’am,” I said truthfully. The irony – the really painful irony – was that the
drugs weren’t even mine. I had been visiting my cousin in Macon and was bringing the
half-ounce bag back to Atlanta as a favor.
“No? Well, maybe I’ll just take a look in this trunk here. Are you gonna make a run for
it if I do that, college boy?”
The policewoman moved close to me. She had a full two inches on me, who have never been
a particularly big guy (I’m five-seven and of a slight build), and she was pretty in a
way, with curly red hair and large breasts straining her blue uniform shirt, but I was too
nervous to have anything approaching a sexual response.
“No, officer, ma’am, I won’t make a run for it.”
“Imagine you might, though. Turn around and put your hands on the car roof.”
I did as I was told. The policewoman moved behind me and frisked me. Her hands moved
over my chest, lingering over my hips and buttocks, carefully probing my legs.
“All right. Wrists behind your back.”
“Ma’am?”
“Do it before I lose patience with you, college boy!” Her voice was sharp and
frightening. Immediately I crossed my wrists behind me. Then I heard a jangle, and felt
cold metal click on my wrists.
Cuffed!
Whistling, the cop strolled over to the trunk of the car while I leaned my chest against
the car and my cheek against the shut window, tugging lightly on my chained wrists. I
squeezed my eyes shut and heard the trunk opening. It seemed like hours, soundless hours
then, and then there was the clomp-clomp of her boots as she returned to my side.
“Look what we got here.”
I opened my eyes.
Dangling between her fingers was another baggie. A larger baggie. Filled with a white
powder. And in her other hands were a set of hypodermic needles.
“We really don’t like junkies in this town, boy.” The policewoman was grinning from ear
to ear.
I felt as if there was a snowstorm in my stomach. “But I’ve never seen that before! It
wasn’t in the trunk! I never – I never – “
The cop put a finger to my lips and shushed me. And she leaned close to me, and
whispered in my ear, softly, huskily, as if she was talking dirty to me:
“I think you’d better come with me.”
***
“It looks pretty bad for you, Jack. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of a thing to do
that will get you out of prison time.”
These were just about the last words that I needed to hear. I had been up all night,
confined to a cold cell, after an hour of questioning by the female cop who had brought me
in, in which I protested, in tears after a few minutes, that yes, it was my marijuana, but
no, I didn’t know anything about the heroin in the trunk of my car, that I had never seen
it before, that I had never even used heroin, and that I had no explanation whatsoever for
its presence in my car. All of which was true, but which didn’t seem to go over well with
the questioning officer, who had yelled, laughed, and blown smoke in my face, until
announcing that she was through with me. As she led me to my cell, she had provided me
with an interesting narrative about what I could expect in the state pen. It involved very
swiftly becoming the wife to whatever Neanderthal I ended up in a cell with, being shared
with his friends in the showers, branded as a prang, and eventually knifed to death in one
of the routine gang wars that spared nobody. So the prospect of prison time held very
little appeal at that moment.
The words were spoken by Dr. Amanda Nussbaum, J. D., M.D., a famous surgeon and
high-powered attorney who, as a favor to her good friend my mother, had flown in to give
me legal counsel. She sat across the conference room table, an expression of pity crossing
her full, red lips. She was a tall, elegant woman just on the south side of forty, with
long straight blonde hair, a splendidly curvy figure, ivory skin, and long, tapered
fingers. She was wearing a perfectly tailored gray pinstripe suit with a lighter blue-gray
blouse, a knee-length skirt, and Italian leather pumps. I had nursed a crush on her from
my adolescence, but all such thoughts were absolutely banished from my mind now that I
faced . . . what did I face?
“At least ten years,” Dr. Nussbaum said in reply to my unanswered question. “Possibly
more, depending on the judge’s mood.”
I moaned and buried my head in my hands. I hadn’t eaten, slept, or had a drink of water
in nine hours, and was on the verge of a total nervous collapse. Every time I thought
about my predicament, I felt worse, and if I tried not to think about it, I . . . failed.
“I can’t go to prison. I wouldn’t last! There’s no chance the charges won’t stick?”
“I really can’t imagine it, Jack. You shouldn’t have admitted to the marijuana, you
know. But even so, I wouldn’t attempt to defend it in open court by choice. It’d be
suicide.”
“You’re right about one thing though, Jack. You wouldn’t last in prison.” She snapped
her fingers. “I’d give you two months, tops. You wouldn’t leave alive.”
“She must have planted it.” I held my palms, fingers outstretched, in front of my eyes.
I was so strung out that I imagined I could see the veins working under the skin. “The cop
. . . Officer Mustaine? . . . she planted the smack in my car.”
Dr. Nussbaum sighed.
“Why would she do that, Jack? Be serious.”
I stared at her, the beauty of her features prompting a swell of memory, delicate as
cotton puffs, in my mind, and giving way to a sickening wave of disappointment.
“You don’t believe me.”
She reached out and took my hands between hers, and looked directly into my face,
sadness in her aristocratic features.
“How does it look, Jack? How does it look?”
I was content for a minute, just letting the cool pressure of her hands on mine be the
only sensation I could feel. And for a moment he had a weird wave of longing: if I could
just be held by somebody like this, taken care of, I’d be all right. I’d be glad to have
everything taken away. Just to be taken care of.
But then her hands were gone, and that strange feeling of peace was gone, and there was
only nausea and physical discomfort and terror, terror, terror.
“There may be options, though I couldn’t really say what. But sit tight and let me get
back to you.”
I retreated to my cell, paced it for an hour, and finally collapsed on my skinny bed,
exhaustion over coming nervousness and sending me to sleep.
***
My dreams were feverish and weird. I found myself wandering through ancient stone
tunnels, resembling the crypt-like basement of a medieval cathedral. I was naked, except
for a giant watch, with as much diameter as a basketball, hanging from my neck on a silver
chain. The chain wrapped around my neck in an elaborate knot. Its ticking was deafening.
I kept running through the dream, the tick-tock of the clock echoing in my head and in
the tunnels. I felt that he had to keep running, no matter what.
Suddenly, the tunnel opened out into a huge chamber. I looked up and saw white clouds
between the floor and the vaulted roof. Stained-glass windows, showing scenes of the
martyrdom of saints, let streams of multicolored light into the room.
In the middle of the room was Dr. Nussbaum. She was sitting on a stone mushroom about
two feet up. She was wearing a wispy purple dress, made out of a light tulle, that covered
her entire body, with skirts that spread over the entire mushroom head. Gloves hid her
hands. A wide-brimmed purple hat and a veil covered her face.
I tried to speak, but my words came out in soap-bubbles, written in an elaborate
cursive. Did you work on my case?
Dr. Nussbaum replied in kind. Her voice was sad.
“I gave up trying, Jack. You just wouldn’t last.”
I realized I was shrinking. My face was barely level with the mushroom-head.
“But my college education . . .” I pleaded, stretching out his hands. The clock was
still ticking.
When Dr. Nussbaum replied, her words producing tiny tremors in the fabric of her veil, I
was no more than a foot high.
“I’m doing the best I can. You have to make do with this.”
She reached down and picked me up. I was the size of a pen. I squirmed in her hands.
From the voluminous folds of her skirts, she produced a purse, the same purple as
everything else she was wearing. I was the size of her thumb by then, and she dropped me
into its dark interior.
New guy. That was the voice of her lipstick, walking towards me on tiny stick legs. Its
voice was like the voice of the cop who arrested me. He won’t last.
On my other side, a nail polish advanced towards me. Get him into the showers, it said
with an almost identical voice.
Stick figure hands gripped my waist. My head was pushed down. My bowels quivered in
terror. And the clock around my neck – by this time much larger than me – kept ticking,
louder and louder and louder . . .
***
The sound of a nightstick rapping against the bars of my cell replaced the clock’s tick,
and then woke me up.
“Lawyer’s on the phone, college boy,” the arresting officer said. “I wouldn’t get your
hopes up, though. Some witnesses that swear you tried to sell them heroin are going to
come forward any minute, I have a feeling. That you tried to sell them heroin on a
playground. You are not leaving my state and my system, except in a pine box, with
Property of Billy Joe tattooed on your ass.”
Groggily, I only had time to file this in the back of my head before I had stumbled to
the phone. She kept a close distance as I spoke.
“Jack?” Dr. Nussbaum’s voice was bright, unnaturally bright. “I’ve got some good news,
if you’re willing to make some concessions.”
“Anything!” I whispered desperately. “Just get me out of here!”
“Well, you’re going to have to do some time; there’s no way around that. I’ve pulled a
few strings, though, and if you waive the trial, and sign a confession, I can get you on a
different track than standard imprisonment.”
That didn’t sound too bad. Drug treatment? Some sort of work-community service-group
home thing? Whatever it was, it had to be better than what I had been hearing.
“You got it. Bring me the papers and I’ll sign them today. What’s the track?”
Dr. Nussbaum paused before answering that, and her voice was weirdly chipper.
“You’d be in the women’s prison.”
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