I thought to myself at that very moment, the camera may see hate. Is that what I look like now? Hate-filled? When all I feel is anguish, am I projecting only hate to the world?
Once inside the holding cell, I felt like a caged animal on display in a cold neon-lit box. My only refuge was the phone and a list of bail bond numbers on the wall. I tried to ignore the woman on the phone beside me as I went down the list one-by-one, my calls going unanswered each time. I guessed that there might not be any bondsmen sitting by the phone at midnight waiting for the criminals to call. I began to feel that the process of trying to make bail in time to get to work in the morning was a futile one. I sat down on the chilly cement bench and stared at the numbers on the wall.
The woman on the other phone—the only other woman in the room with me—turned to me and asked me in broken English to help her with her phone call. I told her that I needed to make my own call, and I selfishly resumed my attempt to make a connection and simultaneously ignore her presence beside me. But she was persistent. She told me that she was trying to make bail, but that she didn't understand exactly what she should say. She also told me which numbers had people on the other end to answer the call.
I thanked her for wanting to help me with my phone call, and I told her that I would do whatever I could to help her with hers. We introduced ourselves. She told me that she was born in Oaxaca, and that her English was not so good because she had only been here for five years. Then she asked me, "Why are you in here?"
I hesitated, but she just went on. "Me? I am here because I stole... How do you say? Esmalte para... nail polish? Is that right?" I nodded. "I know it was wrong, but I do it anyway because I have no money and I think maybe nobody will know. But they catch me, and now I have three-thousand dollars bail! How much is your bail?"
I hesitated again, but this time she was waiting for my answer.
"Fifty-thousand dollars," I said.
She looked at me as if she thought I had been mistaken, but I showed her the arrest report I'd been given; with it's four zeros and a comma, there was no mistaking that my crime was far worse than hers.
"What did you do to have that much bail?"
"I beat up my boyfriend," I said.
"You?" She looked surprised, as if she didn't think I had a violent bone in me. "What did he do to you?"
"He kept pushing me." I answered her without hesitating that time.
"Why didn't they arrest him, if he was pushing you?"
"He didn't literally push me. He pushed me with words. He kept yelling at me and calling me names, and I tried to stay calm and get away from him, but I got so angry that I hit him. And he had me arrested."
I thought that she might judge me as dangerous and evil, but instead I saw a look of compassion and sympathy in her eyes.
Then she said, "Sometimes when we know what is right we still make bad choices. And god is always there to show us the way. I try to steal polish for nails because I did not have three dollars to pay, and now I am here with three-thousand dollars bail to pay. You did not want your boyfriend to hurt you with words so you hit him, and now you are here. I learn never to steal again, and you learn never to hit your boyfriend again. Right?"
I wanted to answer her. I wanted to agree with her, and to believe that it could be just that easy to acknowledge that what I had done was wrong and to vow never to do it again. Before I could respond, an officer escorted a new inmate into the holding cell, a rake-thin emo girl with a large gauze bandage on the inside of her forearm. She looked strung-out on heroine.
She began speaking inattentively to both of us. "Do you know if Officer ____ is here? He runs this place and he's a good friend of my dad's. The cops that put me in here said that if I talk to him he can get me out the back door."
I exchanged a disgusted glance with my original cellmate. "No, I don't know if Officer ____ is here. If he's the guy I talked to before they put me in here, he left about an hour ago. And from what I've seen, there is no back door to this place."
"Oh there will be for me," the loaded girl answered, her eyes drifting off into space. "He's a good friend of my dad's and he'll pull some strings to get me out of here tonight."
The girl's unwavering determination that the justice system did not apply to her because she had 'connections' made me think about what my new Oaxacan friend shared with me. "And god is always there to show us the way."
I could bang and blame. I could shirk responsibility for my actions. I could pretend that there's a back door out of accountability for my crime. But none of these avoidance techniques would show me the way back to being at peace with my self.
