The persistent knocking on the front door thundered through my Fruitvale District house, rattling the windows. Shit. Was it that cop again—the one who’d come by a few days ago? Cops showing up at my front door (or pulling over my battered old Ford Ranch Wagon on some flimsy excuse—“A car like yours was just involved in a robbery…Why don’t you give me your phone number in case we need to investigate?”) weren’t entirely unexpected. I was tall, tan, blond, and twenty-four—apparently irresistible to some members of law enforcement. Like that policeman last week, looking like he’d just left the station, his dark blue uniform spotless. “Pretty hot today, huh?” He’d stood on my front porch, his brown eyes making a slow excursion over my body. “I can come in and cool you off.”

Trying not to laugh, I’d pressed my teeth against my lower lip. “Thanks, I’m fine. Actually, I’m expecting my boyfriend pretty soon.”

“You sure? I’m on a break.”

I’d heard of women who had a thing for men in uniform, maybe liked to fuck the guy while pressing their naked breasts against the sharp silver badge, stroking his shiny boots. Well, I wasn’t one of them.

The cop turned to leave. “Well, next time I’m in the neighborhood, I can check in on you.”

So who was banging on my door now? Was it the dark-haired street cop again? Throwing on a cotton robe, I flung my magazine onto the old mattress on the floor that served as my bed, and shuffled toward the door. Peering through the door viewer, I saw a tall, muscular man with a round face and thinning blondish hair. He looked vaguely like Paul, an Oakland cop I’d dated briefly. But he wasn’t in uniform. If this was Paul, why was he here? Surely not planning to revive our short, totally unsatisfying affair.

Just as I began to open the door, it banged wide, pressing me backward. Another plainclothes cop stepped inside, shoving me against the wall. “Police!” he barked, waving a search warrant an inch from my nose. His handcuffs rattled as he flipped them open.

“No, just have her sit here.” It was Paul. “No need to cuff her.” He pointed to the pink daybed in the front room.

Great, I was being busted by the narcs. Probably twenty recently harvested marijuana plants lay on the concrete in the back of my garage. I’d chopped down my marijuana crop, but hadn’t gotten around to dumping it over the side of the road up by Tilden Park. It was worthless—its THC content must’ve been close to zero. You could smoke a pound of the stuff without getting high. I knew because a friend had already rolled a doobie, and we’d both given it a try. Nothing.

Apparently narcs know where people stash their shit—the hard-ass cop was busy yanking uppers and some half-forgotten mescaline and LSD out of my medicine cabinet.

Paul, hanging back for a minute, whispered, “Hey, if it was up to me, I’d forget the whole thing. But my partner is hardcore.”

Just my luck. I pulled my robe closer, despite the hundred-degree summer heat.

Out in the garage, the by-the-book cop surveyed the pile of drying weed, seven feet long and four feet high, dumped in a dark back corner. Hell, anyone could’ve walked into my unfenced yard and seen it. Later, when I read the search warrant, it was obvious the narcs had done just that.

Sitting in the back of the cop car, I wondered if I’d do prison time. There’d been news stories of people busted for one joint and getting years in the slammer.

How had I been so stupid? So foolish? I’d always been trying to find ways to increase my lousy waitress job income. Another waitress, Holly, had pulled this off, planting a small plot in her fenced East Oakland yard. She made more money selling lids of her homegrown than what she brought home in tips. But, unlike me, Holly had a protection-trained German shepherd. He kept thieves and curious neighbors away from her flourishing plants—hidden in a corner of her yard between the fence and some shrubs. I hadn’t been so clever. And my plants seemed to have Jack and the Beanstalk genes—growing taller than the backyard fence. The kid next door liked to sit on his roof and gawk at me when I lay out sunbathing in the backyard, my cat curled next to me. “What are those?” he’d even asked, like having a conversation between a horny teenage Peeping Tom and a topless twenty-something woman was perfectly normal.

After I was booked, Paul interviewed me. Bottles of pills were strewn across a coffee-stained desk. “What’s this one?” he’d ask, unscrewing the top, shaking out a few pills for me to see. Identifying the illegal contents of my medicine cabinet, I tried to keep focused and stop running images of myself in a concrete cell, ill-fitting prison garb hanging like an oversized Goodwill clothing donation over my slumped shoulders, wondering what would happen to my cats, how I would tell my parents. Toward the end of the interview, Paul said, “You’ve been cooperative, that’ll help.” What he didn’t say and I didn’t know was that he planned to talk to the DA about reducing the charges.

Processed into the towering concrete Oakland jail, I was fingerprinted, strip-searched, and locked into a cell with several other women, including a meth addict with black teeth and tangled Phyllis Diller hair. In a bottom bunk by the wall, a junkie was in hellish drug withdrawal. “Fucking got me for sales,” the meth addict said, rubbing at a scratch on her face. “And they ain’t doing nothin’ for her.” She nodded toward the moaning junkie, curled up in the fetal position on her bunk, periodically vomiting or gagging.

The next morning, after picking at a breakfast of spongy white bread, congealing oatmeal, and a half-pint of low-fat milk, I joined a group of women prisoners in an elevator descending toward the courtroom floor. A couple women looked at me, curious. “Whatcha doin’ in jail? You sure don’t look like you belong here.” 

Surveying my companions, I realized I was the only white, middle-class, clean-and-sober-looking one in the group. I guessed most were drug addicts, low-level dealers, or hookers. My life had probably been a Disney Princess dream compared to the lives of these women.

Shivering, I waited for my case to be heard. Overhead fluorescent lights blinked in a crazed Morse code pattern. Dizzy, I rose as my name was called, expecting the worst. Then I spotted my boyfriend in a back row, his face grave. Good, he could bail me out if it wasn’t too much. Instead, the judge OR’d me—let me out on my “own recognizance.”

Wordless, my boyfriend drove me home. He was an alcoholic, had been jailed more than once for drunk driving, had to do weekends at Santa Rita—the county facility. I’d visited him there, talking through a wire screen, hoping I’d never have to do time.

I got lucky—charges were reduced and I was put in a diversion program. If I didn’t fuck up, if I stayed clean, the charges wouldn’t count on my record. My rap sheet would still show the arrest and original charges, but as my probation officer said, “It doesn’t count and you don’t have to list the arrest on a job application.”

When I applied for a job as a correctional officer at San Quentin a few years later, I did not check the box that asked, “Have you ever been arrested or convicted of a crime?” After all, the probation office had told me I didn’t need to. Back then, background checks for guards were only completed months after you’d been hired and were already working at the prison. Still, I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was called into the personnel lieutenant’s office. Again, I was lucky.

It was Dick Nelson, the man who’d helped retake the Adjustment Center after the bloody George Jackson escape that resulted in the deaths of six people. Entering through an emergency back door, Lt. Nelson had fired a few bursts from a tommy gun, quelling the bloodletting. You’d think that after seeing three of his comrades dead—throat slit or head shot—Dick would be a true hard-ass.

“Close the door,” he’d said when I’d entered. A CI&I—Criminal Investigation and Identification—sheet lay on his desk. It was my rap sheet. “This just came in.” Lt. Nelson held it for me to see.

My gut became heavy like hardening concrete. He was going to tell me I was being fired. What would I do? Returning to waitress work would be a defeat. I’d only taken the prison job as a springboard to becoming a parole agent, a “totally sweet gig,” a friend had enthused. There’d be no chance now.

“You didn’t list this drug arrest on your job application.” Lt. Nelson pointed at the paper.

“No, because I’d been told that I didn’t need to since I was placed in a diversion program.” My eyes felt hot and scratchy; I swallowed hard.

“It’s fine. But I need to know if you’re still smoking marijuana. The inmates might find out and cause you problems, try to get you to bring in drugs.”

“Oh, no, Lieutenant, I gave all that up.” Being busted had cured me. Sure, I was in prison, but at least I wasn’t behind bars.

“Good, now go back to your job.” Nelson smiled.

I headed for the door. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the beginning of what became a career in corrections.

# # #

Christine Holmstrom’s work has been published in Bernie Siegel’s book, Faith, Hope, and Healing. Several of her essays and nonfiction stories have been published or are forthcoming in Gulf Stream, The Gravel, The Penmen Review, Jet Fuel Review, Streetlight Magazine, among others others. After surviving riots, an armed escape and a death threat while working at San Quentin prison, she finally had the good sense to retire. Christine is now working on a memoir about her prison years.

Photo: Rob Tol