Every day in the Chicago MCC began the exact same way: at six A.M. male inmates (who were allowed to have jobs) brought food carts up to the women’s unit and through the massive metal security doors. Then the lone CO on duty would go around the unit unlocking the female prisoners’ doors. When the bolts clicked, everyone would vault out of bed and rush out into the unit to stand in line for breakfast. The line was not a happy place; no one spoke, and faces were hard and set or just stuporific. The food was usually cold cereal and a half-pint of milk and sometimes some bags of bruised apples, handed out by an inmate named Princess. Every now and then there were hard-boiled eggs. It was clear why everyone always got up: as in Oklahoma City, breakfast was the only meal of the day that was guaranteed to be edible.

As quickly as everyone had appeared, the room would empty. Almost everyone went back to bed. Sometimes they ate their breakfast or sometimes they just stashed it, sticking the milk on ice in a scavenged receptacle. The unit would remain quiet for several hours, and then the women would start to stir, the televisions would go on, and another miserable day in the high-rise fortress would begin.

EVERYBODY WHO loved me wanted me to be innocent-tricked, duped, all unawares. But of course, that was not the case. All those years ago I wanted to have an adventure, an outrageous experience, and the fact of it being illegal made it all the more exciting. Nora may have used me all those years ago, but I had been more than ready to take what she was offering.

The women I met in Danbury helped me to confront the things I had done wrong, as well as the wrong things I had done. It wasn’t just my choice of doing something bad and illegal that I had to own; it was also my lone-wolf style that had helped me make those mistakes and often made the aftermath of my actions worse for those I loved. I no longer thought of myself in the terms that D. H. Lawrence used to observe on our national character: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Women like Allie, Pom-Pom, Pennsatucky, Jae, and Amy melted me. I recognized what I was capable of doing and how my choices affected the people I was now missing; not only Larry and my family but all my fellow penitents whom I had crossed paths with in this year, this season in hell. I had long ago accepted that I had to pay consequences. I am capable of making terrible mistakes, and I am also prepared to take responsibility for my actions.

Yet you still had to resolve not to believe what the prison system-the staff, the rules, even some of the other prisoners-wanted you to think about yourself, which was the worst. When you chose to do otherwise, when you acted like you were a person worthy of respect, and treated yourself with respect, sometimes they did too. When doubt and shame or worse crept in, the letters and books and visits from my friends and lover and family were powerful proof that I was okay, more effective than charms or talismans or pills to fight those terrible feelings.

The Chicago MCC was a different story. I’d been taken away from all the people who’d helped me to do my time, people on the outside and the inside, and I was completely off-balance. The misery of the women surrounding me rattled me, as did the pointlessness of every day that passed here, and the complete disrespect and indifference with which we were treated. The COs who worked the unit were in fact often pleasant, if unprofessional, but they couldn’t do anything. Interacting with “the institution” in Chicago MCC was like staring at a concrete wall. Questions went unanswered. Underpants were not provided. My bedrock sense of myself was in some danger. Food, sometimes edible, was brought on a regular schedule, and in this new universe that was really all you could count on as a stable principle. My phone calls to Larry and my parents took on a desperate edge. For the first time in the year I had been in prison, I said the words, “You’ve got to get me out of here.”

I THREATENED to drown Nora in a toilet.

We had settled into a companionable antagonism, wherein I threatened to kill her several times a day, as we three codefendants would sit and play cards, reminisce, compare notes on our respective prisons, or just complain. It was very, very strange. I still had overwhelming flashes of hostility toward her, which I did not swallow. I didn’t really trust her, but I realized that it didn’t matter. Regardless of whether she was honest with me, I wanted to forgive her.

It made me feel better about myself, better about the crazy shithole we were currently residing in, and honestly, better about the fact that I was going home soon. She was going to be in prison for many more years. If I could forgive, it meant I was a strong, good person who could take responsibility for the path I had chosen for myself, and all the consequences that accompanied that choice. And it gave me the simple but powerful satisfaction of extending a kindness to another person in a tough spot.

It’s not easy to sacrifice your anger, your sense of being wronged. I still cautioned Nora regularly that today might be the day she drowned, and she laughed nervously at my mock-threats. Sometimes her sister offered to help with the drowning, if Nora was being annoying. But we were able to settle into a feisty rapport, like all ex-lovers who have a lot of water under the bridge but have elected to be friends. The things that I had liked about her over a decade earlier-her humor, her curiosity, her hustle, her interest in the weird and transgressive-all those things were still true; in fact, they had been sharpened by her years in a high-security prison in California.

We served each other as a barrier against the freaks, of which this small unit had an astonishing array. In addition to poor suicidal Connie, there were several bipolar arsonists, an angry and volatile bank robber, a woman who had written a letter threatening to assassinate John Ashcroft, and a tiny pregnant girl who would seat herself next to me and start running her hands through my hair, crooning. I saw more temper tantrums and freakouts in a few weeks than I had in many months in Danbury, all of which the CO basically ignored. There was no SHU for women in Chicago (we were one floor above the men’s SHU), so the only disciplinary action that could be taken against us was sending a female off to the Cook County Jail, the largest in the nation at ten thousand inmates. “You do not want to go there!” warned Crystal, the mayor, who seemed to know what she was talking about.

Now that we had been in the MCC for a couple of weeks, the sisters and I saw that there were in fact some sane women present. At first no one really came near us; it took a while to realize that some of the residents of the twelfth floor were scared of us-after all, we three were hardened cons from real prison. But after a bit they must have recognized that we were “normal” like them, and then they made eager overtures: a couple of sweet and friendly Spanish mamis, a very short sports fanatic, and a hilarious Chinese lesbian who introduced herself to me hopefully with the line “I like your body!”

We were instantly elevated as authorities on anything and everything involving the federal prison system. When we explained that in fact “real prison” was much more bearable than our present surroundings, they were perplexed. They also wanted legal advice, lots of it, and I found myself repeating, “I am not a lawyer. You have to ask your attorney…” But all of them had court-appointed lawyers who were rarely accessible. There was a bizarre black Batphone on the wall, which was supposed to tap directly into the public defender’s office. “Fat fucking lot of good that does us,” complained one of the arsonists.