Another day at Star Jail (Estrella means star in Spanish). Another day of LaBorde’s mouth, too. Five times that mouth woke me up. We’ve been getting LaBorded an awful lot lately.

The plumber was here checking into the leak in the water wells. I’m surprised he didn’t come in here.

I overheard Mindy asking for a brownie for envelopes, so I traded her my last brownie.

I hate Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Those days seem to go the slowest. At least there are no clothes exchanges and Brea and Chambers usually work the weekends.

I went and mailed home the ‘to do’ and ‘to buy’ list because it’s written in pen. I doubt anyone would ever see it because they don’t look closely at papers, but I felt it best not to have it on me.

I might’ve lost my hour out for tomorrow. If I did, it’s no big deal. I didn’t go out for it today because it was too early, I was exhausted, and I showered yesterday. This means that I didn’t do my “daily job.” Lately, they’re threatening to snatch our hour out for not doing our so-called jobs, but hey, I’m not going to play housekeeper around here. Let them have the trustees sweep, mop and clean tables. They clean the showers. This is jail, not a private school.

It’s around 2:00 now and I still feel tired. I can’t wait to go home and sleep without half a dozen interruptions! I could sleep for 10 hours straight! I miss my soft, comfy bed, and sleeping nude.

Nancy, who was in court all day, just came down for her hour out. Gibb informed her she’d be locked down if she were at anyone’s door.

I’m fed up with this hot dog shit. We’re getting them 4 times a week, and more often than not, they’re too damn spicy to eat. I’m going to grieve about it if all it does is allow me to vent and get my frustrations out. Others say they’re going to grieve about it, too. We all know it’s a waste of time and that grievances are completely useless, but I wish we could have more variety in our food!

There’s a commercial on now for body wraps. I’d like to try having one of those done, but I don’t know. I hear they don’t really work.

It’s hard to believe I’ve been alone now for just under a week. Believe it or not, though, if I had to choose between being alone or being with Rosa, I’d be with Rosa. We laughed the nights away and slept the days away.

NOTE: The following section is what I typed in after leaving Estrella because of missing journal pages that never made it home. Around the time there was this big screw-up at the post office, about 20 pages got lost. The missing pages cover a 5-day time span.

About half a dozen things happened during that time that stand out in my mind. Psycho Nancy K left M Dorm. Before she did, she came to my door and asked me if I wanted to give her a couple of brownies for a cross she made out of blanket threads, as if nothing ever happened.

I told her to fuck off and she did.

A coffee cart started coming around, selling instant coffee, tea, hot chocolate, soup, and then they eventually added soda.

I was with Teresa B for a few days, then with Silvia Alegre for a day before I moved back to 3, my favorite cell in the pod.

The worst thing to happen in that time span was the Shadow Men’s raid on M Dorm. The men in black, dubbed the Shadow Men, work this special task force.

I also had a meeting with Jackson, head of the gang intelligence unit, that wasn’t too pleasant.

Teresa, a plump 46-year-old Mexican woman with hair a little below her shoulders and who was actually shorter than me, arrived from Madison at 4 AM on March 2nd. I had been alone for just under a week. Although I had been woken from a dead sleep after falling asleep only two hours earlier, I could sense right away that Teresa and I would get along.

We did.

Then on March 7th Armiderez swapped her with Silvia, a tall, heavy-set Mexican with shoulder-length hair who was impressed with the Spanish I knew and who never shut up, as sweet and polite as she was for the short time we were cellies. The swap was made because someone in 4, where Silvia had been, was screaming racial shit at her. Armiderez first tried to swap me, but I refused. “I don’t do big cells,” I told her, “and I certainly don’t do them with people like Mindy E.” After promising Armiderez to kill Mindy if she put me up there, she swapped Teresa instead, who ended up liking the bigger cell better. Not everyone shares my view of smaller cells. Some feel claustrophobic in them and prefer having more cellies.

A few significant things stand out in my mind when I remember the few days I was with Teresa. First of all, she hit on me, although she did it in a much subtler way compared to Nancy. I explained to Teresa, who took it well, that not only would I feel extremely awkward doing anything in jail, but I wasn’t attracted to her in that way. She had nice eyes, but that was about it. Also, I couldn’t stand to be with anyone shorter than me! I like the person to be noticeably taller than me.

The Shadow Men stormed the place on March 6th during the time Teresa and I were cellies, taking shit that wasn’t even illegal or contraband if they couldn’t find stuff that really was illegal or contraband. Just the thrill of knowing they were taking from people really boosted their egos and sense of power. You could tell they were totally into it, too. Totally enjoyed every moment of it. It was sickening. I just wanted to rip the shit out of them. I felt like a child all over again with my mother going through my room and dumping whatever toys she wanted, and to hell with what I wanted. It was a very humiliating, degrading experience.

It was 9:30 AM. Teresa and I were both asleep. Vasquez came in and told us to step out. She had us spread our legs and put our hands against the wall, then she patted us down. The Shadow Men cuffed us together and had us sit at the table where Mary, Brandie and Peaches were all cuffed together. (Myra was at Medical) The handcuffing incident alone was a sign of pure power play. Where the fuck could we have gone? Did they think we’d just up and run away through two locked doors?

So, the rude, power-hungry cocks trashed our cell, then after deciding what to take, one of them led us back to the door of our cell. Poor Teresa had been crying all along. As this dude was unlocking the cuffs, I noticed the cell was in shambles and muttered to Teresa, “The fucking bastards trashed the place.”

The dude goes, “Do you know who you’re talking to? Huh? Huh? I’ll have your write-up for you afterward.” Then he goes on to threaten me with my visitation for 30 days and to brag about what a hotshot chief or commander or something like that he is as if that’d impress me or intimidate me into feeling inferior to this piece of shit.

“I’m sorry, but it wasn’t necessary for them to make this much of a mess, and I was talking to her,” I said motioning to Teresa. “And sir?” I added. “I don’t care who you are.”

When he saw that I wasn’t the least bit scared of him and that I totally looked down upon him as no better than a cockroach itself, he shook his head in frustration. I thought my blow to his ego would make him want to write me up all the more to spite me. Thanks to Vasquez, though, the little fuck never did write me up. She diverted his attention, from what she later told me. After I bitched to her about how the rude bastards trashed the cell and rearranged it by putting my legal mail under Teresa’s mattress and shit like that, she agreed that a write-up would be uncalled for. All I did was swear (like this guy never swears at anyone himself?) and hey, I was woken up out of a dead sleep just to have my shit trashed and some of it taken, so what did they expect? Utter kindness?

Vasquez wasn’t happy with the way these bastards were presenting themselves, either. “They had the juvies in tears,” she said.

Anyway, after they tossed the dorm and wrote up a couple of juvies, including Silvia, Mr. I’m So Big and Powerful said, “Is that all? Are we forgetting anyone?”

This is when Vasquez quickly jumped in and changed the subject, saying she really had a lot of work to do, etc. I was like – thanks so much, Vasquez!

A few days later, after I had moved back to 3 for the second to last time, Jackson, another pathetic asshole, decided to piss me off.

Of the things the Shadow Men swiped, there were little tubes of indigent toothpaste and toothbrushes given to me by Ida and Marilyn, 5 pencils, letters I had started to friends and family, and a journal page. Fortunately, it was just one page with not much more than a few sentences. After this little raid, I mailed fewer journal pages home more often and used initials for people’s names, and quite often it would be just their first or last initial. Of course, they had to unblock the vent, too.

The taking of the pencils was definitely a control thing, but taking the letters, which they ought to know can be rewritten, and which mentioned the corrupt pig involved in my case, makes me think the Shadow Men had something to hide. Or maybe someone to protect. It tells me that they may know something about this pig and his bullshit. Why else would they take them?

“Are you here to play house with us?” I asked Jackson when I entered the computer room and took a seat.

“Sure,” she said.

“Well, I don’t exactly like being made to feel like an object you can just toss around like some game piece on a game board.”

She looked at me all confused and I realized – this stupid shit has no clue as to what I’m talking about! When she admitted that I was like, “Then why’d you say sure?”

She just shrugged, and I explained to her why I didn’t like it when she and Jill shuffled us around. That was done at the captain’s orders, she said (they always blame each other or someone else for the shit they do to irk us).

Then she asked me things like, what do I think of the coffee cart? What’s the hardest part about being in jail?

I told her the hardest part was getting psycho cellies that threaten to kill me, and this is when she went on to tell me that the average inmate’s IQ is equivalent to that of a 6th grader’s, and they’re not serious, either.

Well, I took her threats seriously.

“Have you ever been strip-searched?” she asked me.

“That’s a stupid question,” I said. “I’m in jail, aren’t I? Don’t they strip search us at intake?”

“Are you a racist?” she asked me next.

“Why? Because I used slurs in my journal when I was pissed off for being a part of the grand shuffle?”

“Well, the men who did the search were looking for bullets and then they found…”

This is where my fuse blew and I hauled off at her, “Yeah, I know about your little swat team buddies, high on power-play, swiping legal and non-contraband stuff just to feel in control. If they were searching for bullets, then they should’ve stuck to the task at hand, and you and your little pals shouldn’t have been sticking your noses in other people’s business where it didn’t belong. And by the way, you’re neglecting to mention the part where I referred to Jill as “white trash” when I was pissed off at her, too. A fat lady once cut my husband and I off in traffic. I called her a fat bitch. Doesn’t mean I hate all fat people. I happen to be fat myself. If a group of whites had a “white beauty pageant” or a “white TV station,” would you consider them racists?”

Another shrug.

“There are black pageants and back TV stations so who’s the real racist here, Miss Jackson?”

We never spoke again after this little meeting.

The best memory I have of this little gap is definitely one pertaining to Teddy Bear, who was still Johnson to me at the time. When I was with Teresa, Teddy Bear would often pop in to chat with me. I remember one of the things she mentioned was some rat she saw on TV. After she left after stopping to chat with me for the third time, Teresa said, “I didn’t know you were friends with her and that you knew her on the outside.”

“Neither did I,” I said, and Teresa insisted that she liked me, but I was like – nah. Johnson’s friendly to everyone.

Then she came in again to chat for a sec, and upon leaving, she looks at me and goes, “OK, babe,” then looks at both of us and quickly tries to cover that up with “ladies,” after a second of looking like – oops!

It was soooo funny, not to mention quite an honor! It took everything I had not to burst out laughing.

Officer Johnson, you can call me babe anytime. Anytime!

As soon as she left, Teresa looked at me and said, “Told you so,” and I thought to myself – this is the second person that’s said that. Deanna thought she might like me, too. I thought about the time I caught her staring at me. The blushing and smiling out of context. The things she’s said. Not so much the things she’s said, but how she’s said them.

Could Johnson possibly like me, a 20-pound-overweight, middle-aged woman, sprouting 10 new gray hairs a day? Well, I wasn’t sure if she could like me, but I was going to find out. I just didn’t know how I was going to go about it. I thought about it and thought about it and decided that the best way to start would be by letting her know I was into women and that Tom didn’t mind. Then I’d let her know I liked her. I had the opportunity as soon as I was alone again, and set out to find the answer to my question. One of the things I did for starters was to tell her a gay joke, making sure to let her know that it wasn’t that I had anything against gays since I’m into women myself and that Tom knows and doesn’t mind. Technically, Tom’s the only one that makes me bi. Without him, I’m completely gay, but I didn’t need to get technical with Johnson at that point.