Tuesday, April 1
My heart pounded with anxiety as I sat on the cold, hard cement bench in the small holding tank in the courthouse’s central booking station.
It was 10:00 in the morning. There were eight other women in the small, stale-smelling room with me. To the right of where I sat was another cement bench. To the left were three steel beds bolted to the wall, which bore no mattresses. Against the back wall was a toilet with a four-foot wall alongside it.
Relax. You’re only going in for thirty days, not thirty years.
I thought of my longtime friend Andy, also given thirty days for his part in the little egg-throwing spree we’d gone on a few months earlier.
Oh, why did one of those cars have to belong to a cop!
I worried about Andy, who looked as gay as he was and who was utterly terrified at the thought of going to jail—perhaps more so than I was, though we both believed he would be put in protective custody if he had any problems.
Still, it didn’t seem fair as I replayed in my mind the events in the courtroom earlier that day.
“Do you want these people to clean the vehicle that was vandalized?” the judge asked the cop, a mean-looking stocky guy whose vivid bald spot gleamed under the fluorescent lighting.
“No, the car’s already been cleaned. I’d like them to serve time.”
“So be it,” said the judge, as if we were merely puppets on a string that only others could operate.
“What time is it?” one of the other inmates asked the uniformed guard who walked by the cell, jarring me out of my thoughts.
“5:00,” came the answer.
I hadn’t eaten since 7:00 that morning—not that I could eat now if I wanted to and food was available.
After a grueling nine hours, the door finally opened, and we were handcuffed in pairs and taken by bus for a short trip to where we would temporarily reside.
ns216.73.217.39da2
and then Add to home screen.