Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [63]
I was afraid to steal the rice. I was sure they’d miss it and catch up with me. So I figured I would pull off the same effect by using potato peelings. Even that was tricky. For doing something as petty as peeling potatoes too thick, you caught hell. But I managed to get the peelings together and I soon had a mess of whisky so good you could smell it working. But that was just the beginning of the trouble. The smell was so potent I had hell hiding that stuff.
The more it fermented, the more it stank. I tried every place to hide it, under the woodpile, behind the stove, in my room. And the warden tried just as many places looking for the stuff. She was no damn fool. She could smell the stuff. But by this time the smell was all over the joint.
She figured something must have crawled in somewhere and died. So she made me clean the joint immaculate. There was nobody working in the kitchen but me and a woman who was sixty-five years old, so she figured it had to be one of us doing the bootlegging.
Finally the warden got around to looking in the last place I had hid it—underneath the coal pile. For this I lost my cigarettes for two weeks, and all that great whisky too.
After your first five months in the joint you get assigned to a beautiful room with a hospital-type bed—not soft, not hard, but O.K. You had one comfortable chair and one straight chair. They let you buy material, if you got the loot, to make drapes and slip covers for the bed. But you have to keep the whole joint clean, waxing the floors and everything. When inspection time comes, one of the matrons comes around with a white glove on her hand, and there better not be any dust on anything, or puff, there go those cigarettes again.
The only thing they had in the joint that I cared about was cigarettes. When I went in I was at the point where I smoked almost a carton a day. It took some doing to get my butt habit down to three packs a week, the limit the law allowed.
The rule was that if you didn’t have the money to buy them in the joint they’d give you three packs a week of their own brand, an old Virginia weed. But no matter how much money you had, or how many cigarettes you got sent in from outside, you could still have only three packs a week legally.
Of course trading went on. I used to give up candy, soap—anything—for cigarettes. But if you were caught trading, you lost smoking privileges. It was a constant fight to keep in cigarettes. And the rules they had were so tight that every time you got out of line you lost your cigarettes. They were tough to live by.
The only other thing I wanted besides butts was a little yarn to knit with. I got on the knitting kick fairly early and it really helped me from going nuts. I had an idea I could do it, but I really didn’t know how. The girl next to me, Marietta, from San Francisco, who was in for forgery, she really taught me how in her spare time. She was a real nice dame, my only real friend in the joint. She had come from a fine home, was nice and talented and sweet. She had worked as a cashier in a restaurant, and something happened she needed some loot right away—too late to get it from the bank. So she took it out of the till and meant to put it back in the morning. But before she could, they grabbed her and busted her, never gave her a chance, but sent her up for three years on a first-offense deal.
She was the only really intelligent chick in our cottage. Most of the rest of them were poor illiterate bitches from the South somewhere, and with them I just didn’t have anything in common. I couldn’t have snooted anybody if I’d tried; it was just that I didn’t hit it off with anyone except Marietta. I had always been that way, one for very few people, and jail couldn’t change that.
After Marietta taught me, I knitted up a storm and got real fancy. I made cable knit sweaters for Bobby Tucker and his little boy. After I got to be a wheel in the kitchen, I used to take care of Marietta by saving her the best