The most coveted jobs were in telemarketing and hotel reservations. The pay was the best and you didn’t have to lift anything heavy. But that kind of work only went to prison inmates. In management’s eyes, those of us in jail awaiting trial wouldn’t be around long enough to go through the training—or, more to the point, for our names to move to the top of the long waiting list for the cushiest jobs.

Of course what I was most interested in was the clothes shop. When I was in line at the dining hall or working out in the rec room, or in my cell writing letters for women, I kept trying to find someone who worked there or who roomed with someone who worked there. Everyone had a different story about it, and no one wanted to work there.

“But I knew one woman, Nicola, she wrote her mom that the pay was really good,” I said one day in the rec room when several women were watching me shoot baskets.

They didn’t play themselves, but they were hoping someone who did play would show up—watching and betting on games was a popular pastime. One of the women asked who Nicola was.

“She was that girl from China who ran away,” one woman said.

“She wasn’t from China, it was some other place over there, like maybe Japan,” someone named Dolores chimed in.

“Philippines,” I suggested, jumping up for the ball as it banged off the rim. “I know her mother, and she said Nicola wrote she was really happy to have a job in the clothes shop.”

“Of course, if she wrote it in a letter home,” Dolores snorted. “They don’t let you say nothing bad about it, or it won’t get past the censors. One woman, she worked there, she was crying all the time, they treat you too rough there.”

The third woman said they only took foreign girls in the shop; they worked them to death and then brought in more foreign girls as replacements.

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Dolores said. “They use foreign girls because they know foreigners won’t complain in case their children get deported.”

“Yes, but don’t you remember Monique? She was from Haiti, and she said the back room was foreign girls on death row. They’re all in segregation, and the CO’s bring them over in the morning in a locked van to work and then take them back at night.”

It was a startling notion, but I said I didn’t think there was a death row at Coolis.

“Maybe not,” the friend said stubbornly, “but still, there’s something spooky over there. Maybe it’s because they don’t let Americans work there. It’s all Mexicans and Chinese and—where did you say Nicola was from? Uh–oh—Polsen’s looking at us queer; better go to our cells for head count.”