Now Magnum began trying to defend me again, spewing out more half-truths and some rather bold predictions (considering my track record) about my future conduct under house arrest. But I couldn't listen anymore. I knew where this was going, and I knew where /was going. And it wasn't home.
Finally there were a few moments of silence. I fought the urge to turn around and sneak a peek at my favorite spectator. She thought she would be sitting through a boring hearing, and now she was about to see a guy who had put up $10 million in bail have it revoked!
Gleeson started talking, and I knew that he was speaking English words, but for some reason I couldn't understand them. He sounded like the muffled teacher from the Charlie Browncartoons .I felt dizzy, ready to puke. The room seemed to be slowly revolving, like a merry-go-round.
Then I heard Gleeson say, “No… no… I don't like this… get to the bottom of this… blatant disregard… helicopter… where… did he get cash…” Then suddenly more Charlie Brown: “Weep, womp… Womp, weep… Weep, womp…”and then: “I hereby remand the defendant to custody.” Next thing I knew, Magnum was saying, “Give me your watch and your money, and your belt too.”
I had only a few seconds of freedom left, and my mind immediately jumped to the kids. I was supposed to pick them up this afternoon. Such sadness.I had let them down again. As I removed my watch, I said to Magnum in an urgent tone, “You gotta call Nadine right now and tell her what happened. Tell her that I don't know when I'll be able to call, but to kiss the kids for me and tell them that I love them. And that I'll always love them.”
“I'll take care of it right away,” he said. “I'm sorry this happened.”
“Not as sorry as me,” I said softly. “Is there any way out of this?”
He shook his head. “Not now; we need to let Gleeson calm down for a while. A longwhile.”
“How long is a long while?” I asked.
“At least a few months, probably longer.”
In no time flat, the man with the bulge under his jacket was standing next to me. Rather kindly, he said, “Would you mind coming with me, sir?”
“Do I have a choice?” I asked, with a nervous smile.
“I'm afraid not,” he replied, and he put his beefy hand on my shoulder and gently guided me in the direction of a secret door at the front of the courtroom.
I took a few steps, then turned to Magnum and said, “Oh, shit! You gotta call Yulia! She's at the Four Seasons Hotel. I told her I'd be back in an hour.”
“I'll take care of it,” he said calmly. “As soon as I'm done with Nadine.”
“The room's under my name,” I screamed over my shoulder.
And then I was gone—walking through a door and finding myself in a little-known area of 225 Cadman Plaza, consisting of holding cells, fluorescent lights, and desperate people. The area didn't have a name, but I had been here once before and nearly frozen to death. Now I was back.
As usual, I had no one to blame but myself.
CHAPTER 25
THE INEVITABLE
The marshals had taken their sweet-ass time shuttling me over here; from holding cell to holding cell, from cement hallway to cement hallway, from prison van to prisoner loading dock, I was herded, handcuffed, and shackled, like a cow, and all the while, whether by design or by accident, the average room temperature never exceeded the surface temperature of Pluto.
But now the worst was over.
Stripped of my clothing and my dignity, and then ordered to lift up my schlongand nut-sack and bend over and cough, I had arrived in style—that is to say, I was now in a windowless, partitionless, hopeless room known as “Pod 7N,” which was on the seventh floor on the north side of the building. I was now sitting on the edge of my razor-thin mattress, engaged in a conversation with my new “bunkie,” Ming, who was sitting beside me. Alas for Ming: Despite being a thirty-year-old Chinaman, he looked like a sixty-year-old ghost.
“So let me get this straight,” I said skeptically. “You haven't seen the sun in six years? I find that a little bit hard to believe, Ming.”
Ming shrugged his narrow shoulders, which were connected to a series of equally narrow body parts. He said, in heavily accented English, “Not six year, six and one-halfyear. Judge say I flight risk, so he no give bail.”
“That sucks!” I muttered. “So we never get to go outside?”
Ming shook his head no. “Just this room. Do all here.”
Christ,it seemed only logical that, since a plant needs sunlight to survive, a human being would too, didn't it? Apparently not. With a sinking heart, I took a moment to regard the room. It was a vast space, perhaps forty by eighty feet, packed to capacity with 106 inmates—or detainees,as the phrase went—all living barracks-style, doing everything from eating to sleeping to pissing to shitting to showering to brushing their teeth for months or sometimes yearson end beneath a sea of buzzing fluorescent lights. Without a partition in sight, I could see from one end of the pod clear to the other.
Not that there was much to see—simply a vast sea of metal bunk beds and low-backed plastic chairs bounded at the rear by six gruesome toilets and three germ-laden showers. At the center of the room were two dozen stainless-steel picnic tables, a falling-apart Ping-Pong table, a sometimes-working microwave oven, an ancient toaster oven, and three color TVs suspended from the ceiling. Other than at mealtimes, the picnic tables were used for either watching TV (with headphones on) or for playing chess, checkers, cards, or, if you were a Dominican, a jailhouse version of dominoes, which required you to smash the dominoes onto the table while muttering strings of broken-Spanish curses.
And that was all Pod 7N had to offer—unless you included, as one must, the three pay phones affixed to a cement wall up by the guard station, where a single corrections officer now sat behind a cheap wooden desk with his finger on a panic button. The pay phones were the pod's highlight, a place where detainees,most of them blacks or Hispanics (less than ten percent were white or Asian), would try to stay vaguely connected to the outside world. From morning ‘til night, lined up six deep, they waited to speak to their loved ones, who, for the most part, were loving them less and less with each passing day. My particular bunk was located by the pay phones.
So here I was, sitting with Ming, trying to make sense of it all.
He was blessed with a generous smile, an altogether kindsmile. It was hard to imagine that he was a heroin dealer for the Chinese mob, a pint-size enforcer who had once lit a competitor on fire and then used his burning carcass to roast spareribs.
“What's the story with the phones?” I asked Ming the Merciless.
“Collect calls only,” he answered.
Just then, three detainees came scurrying by, single file. They were rotating their hips awkwardly and swinging their arms in an exaggerated fashion. Speed-walkers, I reasoned. Like everyone else, they wore gray sweatpants, white T-shirts, white canvas sneakers, and headphones. Ming and I leaned forward and watched them grow smaller in the distance. I motioned toward the speed-walkers. “What are they doing?”
Ming shrugged. “They exercise. Walk circles all day. Pass time.”