Like much airline travel these days, flying Con Air involved a lot of stewing in your own juices. Exactly eleven months since I had first set foot in R &D, I was brought back there, and I waited. One by one guards brought other women in to wait with me. A skinny, dreamy-eyed white girl. A pair of Jamaican sisters. An unpleasant hick from the Camp whom I worked with in CMS, and who was headed back to western Pennsylvania for a court case. A big dykey-looking black woman with a wicked scar that began somewhere behind her ear, wound around her neck, and disappeared down below the collar of her T-shirt. There was little talking.

Finally a prison guard whom I knew from the Camp appeared. Ms. Welch was a food service officer and knew Pop very well. I felt some measure of relief that she would be involved in our departure-much better than the guard who had welcomed me to Danbury. She issued us all new uniforms, the same khaki hospital scrubs and wussy canvas shoes I had been clad in upon arrival. I was sad to give up my steel-toes, even though they already had cracks in the soles. One by one she began to shackle us-chain around the waist, handcuffs that were then chained to your waist, and ankle cuffs with a foot of chain between them. I had never been cuffed in my life outside my boudoir. I thought about the fact that I had absolutely no choice in the matter; I was going to be shackled whether I was cooperative, disgruntled, or prone with a knee in the small of my back or a boot on my chest.

I looked at Ms. Welch as she approached me. “How are you doing, Kerman?” she asked. She sounded genuinely concerned, and I flashed on the fact that we were “theirs,” being sent out into the great unknown. She knew what the next few hours held for me, but the rest was probably as much of a mystery to her as it was to me.

“Okay,” I answered in an uncharacteristically small voice. I was scared, but not of her.

She started to chain me up, chatting in a distracting way, almost like a dental hygienist who knows she is doing something that causes discomfort. “How is that-too tight?”

“A little too tight on this wrist, yes.” I hated the gratitude in my voice, but it was genuine.

We had all been packed out-all of our personal belongings had been gone through by a prison guard (in my case, the same sneering midget I had encountered on my first day) and stored. The only thing you were allowed to bring on the airlift with you was a single sheet of paper that listed your property. On the back I had written all my important information-my lawyer’s phone number and the addresses of my family and friends. Also scrawled on the paper in many handwritings was the contact information for my friends in the Camp-and if they were due to go home soon, a street address; if they were down for a long time, their inmate registration number. It hurt to look at the list. I wondered if I would ever see any of those women again. I kept the paper in the breast pocket of my scrubs vest with my ID.

We were lined up and started to shuffle, clinking, out of the building toward a big unmarked bus that was used for prisoner transport. When your legs are chained together, you are forced to adopt a short, tippy-toe cadence. As we were waiting in one of the chain-link-fence chambers between the prison and the bus, the town driver’s van came speeding up. Jae hopped out, with duffel bags.

The big black dyke perked up. “Cuz?”

Jae blinked in disbelief. “Slice? What the hell is going on??”

“Fuck if I know.”

We were all herded back into the FCI so they could pack Jae out and truss her up-she was joining our motley little crew, and I was really glad to have a friend along for the ride.

Finally, at gunpoint, we were loaded onto the bus and headed into the outside world. It was disorienting to see suburban Connecticut rushing by, eventually giving way to the highway. I had no idea where we were heading, though the odds were on Oklahoma City, the hub of the federal prison transport system. Jae caught up with Slice, her actual cousin, on the bus. Neither of them would cop to knowing why they were being transported, but they were probably codefendants, as the guard had been concerned that they should have extra restraints.

“Naw, naw, we cousins, we love each other!” they protested.

The guard had also indicated that they were headed to Florida, which was most worrisome. “Piper, I don’t know shit about Florida, I’m from the Bronx, I been to Milwaukee, and that’s it,” declared Jae. “No fucking reason I should be going to Florida unless they be taking us to Disney World.”

We finally arrived at what seemed like an abandoned industrial vacant lot. The bus stopped, and there we sat, for hours. If you think that it is impossible to sleep in shackles, I am here to prove you wrong. They gave us chicken sandwiches, and I had to help the Pennsylvania hick eat-the guard had not been as kind to her as to me and had chained her tightly and put her in an extra “black box” restraint that immobilized her thumbs-this to protect her codefendant, a woman with whom she was now excitedly gossiping. Finally the bus rumbled to life and pulled onto a huge tarmac. We had company-there were at least a half-dozen other transport vehicles, another bus, unmarked vans and sedans, all idling in the cold winter dusk. And then quite suddenly an enormous 747 landed, taxied briefly, and pulled up among the vehicles. In a moment I recognized that I was in the midst of the most clichéd action thriller, as jackbooted marshals with submachine guns and high-powered rifles swarmed the tarmac-and I was one of the villains.

First they unloaded about a dozen prisoners from the plane, men in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and attires. Some of them appeared to be wearing paper jumpsuits, not the best deal in the biting January wind. Disheveled and cold, they seemed pretty interested in our little group huddled next to the Danbury bus. Then the armed figures were shouting at us over the wind to line up, with plenty of room between each of us. We performed the tarmac jig that is done when one is trying to move as quickly as possible against restraints. After a rough pat-down, a female marshal checked my hair and my mouth for weapons, and the hop was on to the stairs up to the plane.

On board were more marshals, enormous beefy men and a handful of weathered-looking women in navy blue uniforms. As we clinked and clanked into the passenger seating area, we were greeted by a wave of testosterone. The plane was packed with prisoners, all of whom appeared to be male. Most of them were very, very happy to see us. Some were making a lot of noise, declaring what they would like to do to us, offering critiques as we shuffled up the aisle as directed by the marshals. “Don’t you look at them!” the marshals shouted at us. Clearly, they had calculated that it was much easier to focus control on the behavior of a dozen females than two hundred males.

“What are you scared of, Blondie? They can’t do anything to you!” shouted the male prisoners. “Over here, Blondie!” They were proven wrong in my mind later in the trip when a big man rose from his seat, loudly protesting that he needed a bathroom, and the marshals promptly tasered him. He flopped around like a fish.

Con Air is like a layer cake of the federal prison system. Every sort of prisoner is represented; sad-looking middle-aged upper-class white men, their wire-rim glasses sometimes askew or broken; proud cholos looking vaguely Mayan and covered in gang markings; white women with bleached-out hair and very bad orthodontia; skinhead types with swastika tattoos on their faces; young black men with their hair bushed out because they had been forced to undo their cornrows; a skinny white father-and-son pair, obvious because they were the spitting image of each other; a towering black man in extra-heavy restraints who might be the most imposing figure I have ever seen; and of course, me. When I was escorted for a bathroom break (difficult to manage when one’s wrists are chained to one’s waist), in addition to lascivious invitations and threatening catcalls, I was treated to more than one “Whatcha doin’ HERE, Blondie?”