Orange is the New Black

CHAPTER 8. So Bitches Can Hate

One hobby I did not pick up was crocheting, an obsession among prisoners throughout the system. Some of the handiwork was impressive. The inmate who ran the laundry was a surly rural white woman named Nancy whose dislike for anyone but “northerners” was hardly a secret. Her personality left a lot to be desired, but she was a remarkable crochet artist. One day in C Dorm I happened upon Nancy standing with my neighbor Allie B. and mopey Sally, all howling with laughter. “What?” I asked, innocently. “Show her, Nancy!” giggled Allie. Nancy opened her hand. Perched there in her palm was an astonishingly lifelike crochet penis. Average in size, it was erect, fashioned of pink cotton yarn, with balls and a smattering of brown cotton pubic hair, and a squirt of white yarn ejaculate at the tip.

“More sentimental than functional, I guess?” was all I could manage.

Allie B. lived several cubes down in B Dorm and was a tall, skinny woman with broad shoulders and a strong jaw, who teetered between odd-looking and good-looking. She loved candy bars and reminded me of Wimpy from Popeye: “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a Snickers bar today!” A daffy horndog and an unrepentant junkie, she was counting the days out loud until she could go home, get laid, and score some junk, in that order. She was straightforward and unapologetic about her love of narcotics. Heroin was her drug of choice, but she was willing to get high on anything and often threatened to sniff the solvents at her job in the construction shop. I didn’t think there was anything there worth huffing.

Allie’s sidekick was a young woman from western Pennsylvania who proudly called herself a redneck. I called her Pennsatucky. One day Pennsatucky and I were standing at my cube in B Dorm when my next-door neighbor Colleen and her pal Carlotta Alvarado walked by. Colleen had a big, shit-eating grin on her face as she asked Carlotta, “So? What’d you think about that little toy I gave you last week? Pretty sweet, huh?” Carlotta laughed, a rich, satisfied laugh, and they kept walking.

I cocked an eye at Pennsatucky. “Diiiiildoooos,” she drawled in her backwoods twang. I must have looked intrigued, because she hastened to explain: “Colleen prob’ly carved somethin’ nutty out of a carrot or something. Different than the usual.”

“Which is?”

“Pencil with an Ace bandage wrapped around it, with one a’ them finger condoms from the infirmary over the whole deal.”

“Doesn’t sound that enjoyable.”

“Huh. When I was locked up in county, they used to make dildos out of a spork, a maxipad, and a finger from a rubber glove!” Another use for maxipads revealed. The industrious hobbyists of the penal system would work with whatever materials they had.

“Desperate times, desperate measures, eh Pennsatucky?”

“Whatever that means.”

JUST AS we had sent eight prisoners down the hill to the drug program, the FCI returned the favor in kind, with a fresh batch of hard-timers “graduating” up the hill. Sometimes these women were very close to release, and sometimes they still had a stretch of time to do. Regardless, they usually hung together for a time, quietly watching the situation-unless of course they had friends in the Camp, either from the street or from the inside.

One of the new arrivals from the FCI was Morena, a Spanish woman who looked like a deranged Mayan princess. Deranged, but not because she was unkempt or wild in her overall appearance. She had the clear air of someone who knows how to do time and was immaculately groomed, with “good” unis, pressed and sharp, and she was generally very composed. But Morena had unsettling eyes. She would stare at you; those crazy brown eyes were powerfully expressive, and you couldn’t tell what the hell it was they were telegraphing. Whatever was going on in her head, it was taking a lot of effort for her to restrain it, and her eyes were giving her away. It wasn’t just me who noticed her spooky eyes. “That one’s not right,” said Pop, tapping her temple. “Watch it.”

Imagine my surprise when Morena asked if she could walk with me in the morning to work-she had been assigned to the safety shop in CMS. I always chose to walk the half-mile to work alone, a little freedom that I treasured. I had no idea what to talk to her about. I thought she was about my age, wasn’t sure where she was from (her English was heavily accented and good), and I sure as hell wasn’t going to start asking personal questions. “How do you like safety?” was pretty neutral. Crazy Eyes couldn’t take offense at that.

“It’s fine,” she snorted. “I know the boss from the FCI. It’s no problem. Where are you from, chica?”

I gave her the standard bare-minimum information- New York City, fifteen months.

“You have children?”

No children. Did she?

Morena laughed, a throaty, crazy laugh that said, Oh, you naïve and innocent straight girl, you can’t even tell that I am a bulldagger on the outs, not just up in this joint where one cannot get any dick… and how I will relish turning you out. “No baby, I got no children.”

Over the next week or two Morena was my companion on the walk to work, like it or not. I got an earful about her low opinion of the women in the Camp. “They are like little girls, they think this shit is a game,” she opined, curling her lip. I was scrupulously polite and noncommittal, because Crazy Eyes made me nervous. In addition to many halting conversations on the way to work, her interactions with me in the Camp sharply increased. Morena would materialize at the entry of my cube and coo at me in a bizarre way, “Hello, babeeeeee!” I had decided when I moved into B Dorm that I did not want anyone visiting me in my cube; the space was tiny and shared with Natalie and was as close to privacy as I was going to get. I went out to socialize. If I was in my cube, I was either reading or writing letters or sleeping. Other women, especially the young ones, loved to have people pile into their cubes, sit on their beds and footstools, and stand around and jaw; this was not for me.

“Looks like you have a new friend, bunkie,” Natalie observed drily.

One day while we were walking to work, Crazy Eyes cut to the chase. She was once again ranting about the immaturity and silliness of the women in the Camp. “They act like they are on vacation here or something, running around and acting silly. They need to act like women.”

I said rather mildly that most of the women were really bored and perhaps not so well educated and that they did indeed divert themselves with foolish things.

This observation prompted a sudden and passionate declaration from Crazy Eyes: “Piper, they are like children, and I am looking for a real woman! I cannot be bothered with this bullshit, with these silly girls! On the street, I am a big-time drug dealer! I do serious business, big business! My life is serious! Even in here, I cannot waste my time with these silly bitches-I need a real woman!”

I opened my mouth and then closed it. I felt like I had been dropped into a telenovela. Morena’s bosom was practically heaving under her prison khakis. Hey, I could understand what she was saying. Her life was indeed serious, her desires were serious, and I could understand why she didn’t want to mess around with some trifling bimbo who was experimenting with lesbianism just to entertain herself in prison. But hell no, not me.

I tried to choose my words with delicacy. “Er, well, Morena, I’m certain that you’ll find the right woman for you. It just might take a while for her to show up? Right?”

She looked at me with those unreadable crazy eyes. Was she pissed? Hurt? Vindictive? I couldn’t tell.

I was vastly relieved when we got to work-the ten-minute walk never seemed so long. I kept the conversation to myself.

Morena made a few more attempts to express her need for a real woman, perhaps thinking that I was too dense to get her meaning, but my response remained the same-I was sure that the right woman was out there somewhere in the correctional system and that providence would deliver her to Danbury with all haste. It wouldn’t be fast enough for me.

Once it was clear that I was not her future boo, Crazy Eyes quickly lost interest in me. The companionable walks stopped, and the cubicle drop-bys ceased. She still greeted me, but in a disinterested way. I felt that I had navigated the situation with as much grace as I had available, and no hideous repercussions to my tacit rejection seemed forthcoming. I breathed a little easier, hoping Crazy Eyes would spread the word to the other committed lesbians that I was not “like that,” even though in some other lifetime I had been.

FOR THE first time in many years I was living a completely chemical-free existence-right down to going off birth control pills. My body was returning to its actual organic state. And after almost three months of enforced celibacy, I was feeling very warm under the collar. If you had spit on me, I might have sizzled.

Larry was clearly feeling the pressure of our separation too. His hello kisses in the visiting room grew more ardent, and he wanted to play footsie under the card tables. My own yearnings for footsie were severely tempered by my fear of the guards. I understood on a visceral level, as he did not, that they really could end a visit and take all my visiting privileges away. This point was demonstrated to Larry one day when Gay Pornstar (aka Officer Rotmensen) materialized during visiting hours. Gay Pornstar was a strutting sadist with a flattop hairdo, close-set eyes, and a bristling mustache who resembled nothing so much as a Village People tribute-band reject. He had come into the visiting room to see his little buddy, Officer Jesus-Is-My-Homeboy, who was filling in for the regular visitation CO and boring two prisoners who were helpers in the visiting room with predictions about the Rapture.

As I entered the visiting room, I kissed Larry hello, and then he stole another kiss as we sat down at our assigned table.

Seeing this, Gay Pornstar bellowed across the room, pointing, “Hey!!! One more time and you’re outta here!!!” Every head turned to stare silently.

Larry was rattled. “What the hell is wrong with that guy?” He tried to grab my knee under the table.

“That’s just what they’re like, darling-don’t touch me! He’s not fucking around!”

It killed me to snap at him like that, when all I wanted was for him to touch me, but Larry didn’t understand that pushing boundaries in prison can have dire consequences. These men had the power not only to end our visits but to lock me up in solitary on a whim; my word against theirs would count for little.

Afterward, still traumatized, I asked Elena, one of the prisoners who worked in the visiting room, what the hell had happened. “Oh, the little guy was watching you, and he was turning red,” she said, “so Rotmensen got pissed off when he saw that his buddy was embarrassed seeing you kiss.”

The next week the regular CO was back on duty. “I heard you were out of line last week,” she said, patting me down before allowing me in to see Larry. “I’ll be watching you.”

In such a harsh, corrupt, and contradictory environment, one walks a delicate balance between the prison’s demands and your own softness and sense of your own humanity. Sometimes at a visit with Larry I would be overwhelmed, suddenly overcome with sadness about my life at that moment. Could our relationship weather this insanity? Larry had been steadfast for all those years waiting for me to go to prison; now that I was here, could we make it through the real test? Our minutes in the visiting room were so precious, we could never bear to discuss anything difficult or negative. We wanted every second in that room to be sweet and perfect.

Different women had different ways of dealing with prison’s impact on their relationships. On a sleepy weekend afternoon I stood by the microwave with my friend Rosemarie. She was in the midst of an elaborate cooking project, making gooey cheese and chicken enchiladas, and I was “helping.” Although I could be counted on to chop an onion (tricky with a butter knife), mainly my help took the form of indulging her passion for talking about our future weddings. Rosemarie was engaged to a sweet, quiet guy who visited her faithfully every week, and she was obsessed with wedding planning. She had subscriptions to all the bridal rags, which piled up in her cubicle, and she loved to dream and scheme about her Big Day.

She also wanted to plan for my Big Day-Larry and I had been engaged for almost two years. But I was hardly interested in a traditional ceremony, plus I knew we weren’t getting married anytime soon, and this colored my willingness to take wedding planning very seriously. Which drove Rosemarie nuts. When I told her I would wear a red bridal dress, she squealed with outrage.

On this particular day, Rosemarie was preoccupied with my headgear. If I was not going to wear a veil (a shame, she thought), then a tiara was most advisable. I snorted, “Rosemarie, do you really think I am putting a crown on my head to walk down the aisle?” In the heart of a budding wedding planner, anything is possible.

As Rosemarie filled tortillas and argued passionately in favor of seed pearls, Carlotta Alvarado approached: she wanted to know who was in line for the microwave. This was a strategic question. Carlotta, a committed system-gamer, was assessing who would let her cut the line, and Rosemarie was a definite possibility. The two of them worked together training seeing-eye dogs, and while Carlotta, an around-the-way girl from the Bronx, and Rosemarie, a preppy geek from New England, didn’t seem to have a lot in common, they got along very well. Rosemarie agreed to put the enchiladas on pause so Carlotta could fry some onions with Sazón, the Latin seasoning that makes everything orange, salty, and spicy.

“Carlotta’s engaged too!” said Rosemarie as the onions sizzled. Engagements were rare around the Camp.

“That’s great, Carlotta. What’s your man’s name?”

Carlotta beamed. “Rick-he’s my sweetie, he comes to visit me all the time. Yeah, I’m getting married. I can hardly wait.”

“It’s so exciting!” sang Rosemarie. Then she grinned. “Tell her what you told me, Carlotta.”

Carlotta smiled triumphantly. “Yeah, I can’t wait to get married. You know why?”

I didn’t.

Carlotta stepped back, to better deliver the truth that, when she contemplated holy matrimony, made her heart beat faster. She pushed her palm toward me, index finger pointing skyward for emphasis. “So bitches can hate!”

Er… bitches?

“That’s right. I’m going back to my neighborhood, and I’m going to get married, and that will show all those bitches who talk shit about me. I’ll be married, with my man, and you know what they’ll have? No man. A bunch of babies by a bunch of guys. I cannot wait to get married, so those bitches can just hate on me!”

I studied Carlotta, her pretty face bright and animated as she envisioned her future-one that included her man, some bitches, and a ring around her finger. I was fairly certain that she would get what she wanted. Among all the women at the Camp, she was one who could always figure out an angle. She had a primo prison job training the service dogs, she had all the contraband onions she needed, she ran a side business doing pedicures, and rumor was that she even had a cell phone secreted somewhere in the prison, so she could call her man on the outside without waiting in line and paying the prison’s sky-high rates. She was a smart cookie, with an unsentimental eye on the world. Rick, I concluded, was a lucky guy.

AS FOR me, I felt caught between the world I lived in now and the world to which I longed to return. I saw that those who couldn’t come to terms with their imprisonment had a very difficult time with staff and with other prisoners. They were in constant conflict because they couldn’t reconcile themselves with their fellow prisoners. I saw young women who had been running wild in poverty most of their lives rail against authority, and middle-aged, middle-class women who were aghast to find themselves living among people they thought were beneath them. I thought they were all unnecessarily unhappy. I hated the control the prison exercised over my life, but the only way to fight it was in my own head. And I knew I wasn’t better than any other woman locked up in there, even the ones I didn’t like.

On the other hand, some people were way too comfortable in prison. They seemed to have forgotten the world that exists on the outside. You try to adjust and acclimate, yet remain ready to go home every single day. It’s not easy to do. The truth is, the prison and its residents fill your thoughts, and it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be free, even after a few short months. You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful prison is rather than envisioning your future. Nothing about the daily workings of the prison system focuses its inhabitants’ attention on what life back on the outside, as a free citizen, will be like. The life of the institution dominates everything. This is one of the awful truths of incarceration, the fact that the horror and the struggle and the interest of your immediate life behind prison walls drives the “real world” out of your head. That makes returning to the outside difficult for many prisoners.

So I became obsessed with the almost daily departures and found myself asking Who’s going home this week? I kept a running tally in my mind, and if I liked the person, I would head up to the front door of the visiting room after breakfast to wave them off, a ritual observed by a gaggle of prisoners for every departure. It was bittersweet to watch them leave, because I would have given anything to be going with them. People planned their going-home outfit, which someone from the outside would ship to Receiving and Discharge (R &D) for them; their friends would prepare a special meal; and they would start to give away all their stuff-commissary clothing and “good” uniforms and blankets and other things of value that they had accumulated while doing their time. I fantasized about giving all my stuff away.

Watching people arrive was less pleasant but also interesting. I certainly felt bad for them, but my regard was tinged with a funny little sense of superiority, because at least I knew more about the workings of the Camp than they did and thus had a leg up. This impulse was often proved wrong when someone turned out to be returning to Danbury after violating the terms of their probation-they would often march right into the counselors’ office and ask for their old bunkie and job assignment back. I knew that as many as two-thirds of all released prisoners are locked up again, a fact that mystified me at first-there was no way they would get me back in prison. Ever. And yet… no one ever seemed surprised to see a familiar face return to Danbury.

“Self-surrenders” who came to the Camp were easy to spot. They were usually white and middle-class and looked totally overwhelmed and scared to death. I would ask myself, Did I look that wigged out? and then I’d go get them some of the extra shower shoes and toothpaste I now kept stashed in my locker for such occasions.

But most new arrivals had been in custody for a while, sometimes since their initial arrest if they had not been granted bail or couldn’t make the bail payment, and they were coming from county jails or from federal jails, called MCCs or MDCs-metropolitan correctional centers or metropolitan detention centers. The county jails were described to me as universally nasty, full of drunks, prostitutes, and junkies-not up to the standards of us federales. No shock then that the women arriving at Danbury from county usually looked fried. They seemed happy to get to Danbury because the conditions were better-that depressed me.

Also intriguing were the women like Morena who had “earned” their way up the hill from the high-security FCI to the minimum-security Camp-in theory, the really hardened and potentially dangerous criminals. They were always very composed in terms of physical appearance-hair done and uniforms just so, with their own name and reg number embossed on the shirt pocket. (Campers didn’t get that.) They never looked scared. But they were often freaked out because they were unaccustomed to as much “freedom” as we were afforded, and they reported that there was far less to do in the Camp in the way of programs and recreation. In fact many of them were miserable in the Camp and wanted to go back to max lockup. One woman, Coco, marched right into the counselors’ office and explained that she couldn’t handle the freedom, and would they please send her back down the hill, because she didn’t want to lose her good time due to an escape attempt. I heard that the truth was she couldn’t stand to be apart from her girlfriend, who was still down in the FCI. Coco was sent back the next day.

SPRING WAS coming slowly to the Connecticut hills, and we were starting to shake off the cold. Being cooped up with so many “wackos” was affecting my worldview, and I feared that I would return to the outside world a bit cracked too. But I was learning something every day, resolving some new subtlety or mystery through observation or instruction.

The track by the field house gym was now mush, but I slogged determinedly around it, encouraged by the fact that I kept getting thinner and thinner and every visitor who came to see me said with astonishment, “You look fantastic!” I was making those mucky circles in silence, because the commissary was still out of the damn crappy headset radios that cost $42. Every week I put the radio on my shopping list before I turned it in, and every week, no radio. The commissary CO, who was a real prick in public and friendly in private, just barked, “No radios!” when I asked when they would get some. All the other new arrivals were in the same boat, and we commiserated bitterly. Movie night was all about reading lips for me, and my time on the track or in the gym left me with my thoughts echoing noisily in my skull. I had to have that radio!

Lionnel, the inmate consigliere of the warehouse, was one of my closest neighbors in our cramped quarters. Her bunkie had been the target of Lili Cabrales’s protest pee on my first morning in B Dorm, and it was she who had sopped up the puddle. Lionnel had a black name plaque like Natalie’s, indicating that she had been down the hill in the FCI and probably had a long sentence. She was formidable but still friendly, a no-nonsense player when it came to doing time, and a cheerful Christian who was quick with a wry observation. Lionnel was vocal about what you might call “community issues”-not stealing, “acting right” during count, treating other prisoners with respect. She wasn’t about to go out of her way to befriend a random white girl like me, but she would still say good morning and occasionally smile at my attempts at humor when we found ourselves side by side at the bathroom sinks.

One quiet afternoon as I was fixing lights in B Dorm, Lionnel materialized outside her cube. This was unusual, as she would normally be at work in the warehouse. I seized the opportunity to find out more about the mysterious radios.

“Lionnel, I hate to bother you, but I’ve got a question.” I quickly explained my radio problem. “I’m going crazy with no music. I just can’t get the CO to tell me when they’re coming in. What do you think?”

Lionnel gave me a skeptical, sidelong look. “You know you’re not supposed to ask warehouse folks about that, we’re not allowed to talk about any goods in the warehouse?”

I was taken aback. “No, Lionnel, I didn’t know that. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I’m sorry.”

“No problem.”

May was a week away. The sun was really starting to make itself known now, drying up the mud. There were leaves on the trees, migratory birds, and tons of baby bunnies all over the track. I realized that it wasn’t so bad to be listening to my own thoughts when there was so much to look at. I had made it three months, almost a quarter of my sentence. If I had to watch silent movies for the next ten, so be it. I almost didn’t bother putting the radio on my commissary list that week; someone who had already shopped was complaining that they were still out. So when a new radio headset came flying past the register to land in my grocery pile, I just stared at it.

“Is there something wrong with you, Kerman?” shouted the CO. “It’s true what they say about blondes, huh?”

I looked past him, into the glassed-in commissary, and spotted Lionnel. She didn’t meet my eye. I just smiled to myself as I signed my receipt and handed it back to him. It was funny how things worked around here, how other prisoners could make things happen. I wasn’t really sure what I had done right, but did it matter?

That week the entire population of the Camp was summoned into the main hallway for an impromptu meeting with the staff-a bunch of white men looking too bored to smirk. We were told:

1. Your sanitation is wanting! We will hold more inspections!

2. No smoking under the unit manager’s window! You have been warned!

3. No sex in the Camp! No exceptions! Zero tolerance! This means you!!

We were collectively unimpressed. All of us prisoners knew that Finn, the senior counselor, was way too lazy to bother inspecting the Dorms beyond the bare minimum and didn’t care enough to enforce most rules. The only thing Finn did appear to care about was hierarchy (as demonstrated to us by the nameplate fiasco). And the administrative unit manager didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything having to do with the Camp.

True to the staff’s charges against us, though, there had been quite an uptick in “sexin’” among the ladies since Butorsky’s departure, which led to some comical matchups. Big Mama was a cheerful leviathan who lived in A Dorm-quick with a play on words, generally benevolent, and prodigious in girth. She was slim on modesty, however, as was proven by her shameless sexin’ with a series of much younger, much skinnier girls in her open cubicle. I liked Big Mama and was fascinated by her romantic success. How did she do it? What were her tricks? Were they the same as those employed by fat middle-aged men to get young nubile girls to sleep with them? The girls didn’t then turn around and disrespect her, so was it curiosity on their part? I was curious, but I wasn’t quite brave enough to ask.

There was a constant dance between the prisoners and the staff around the rules. With a new rotation of officers on detail in the Camp, the dance would start anew. I was washed in relief to be rid of Gay Pornstar; it was amazing how much more bearable it was around the Camp with him gone.

In Pornstar’s place we now had Mr. Maple, who seemed to be his predecessor’s exact opposite. Mr. Maple was young, recently out of the military after service in Afghanistan, and exaggeratedly courteous and friendly. He was instantly popular with the women of the Camp. I still considered all COs the enemy on principle, but I was beginning to understand a bit better why a prisoner might look at them with anything other than a baleful eye. Regardless of “gay for the stay,” the vast majority of female prisoners are heterosexual, and they miss male companionship, male perspective, and male attention. A fortunate minority have a husband or a boyfriend who visits regularly, but most are not so lucky. The only men they come in contact with are prison guards, and if the CO is a half-decent human being, he will find himself the object of crushes. If he is a cocky bastard, even more so.

It is hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard. The formal relationship, enforced by the institution, is that one person’s word means everything and the other’s means almost nothing; one person can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total physical restraint. That fact is like a slap in the face. Even in relation to the people who are anointed with power in the outside world-cops, elected officials, soldiers-we have rights within our interactions. We have a right to speak to power, though we may not exercise it. But when you step behind the walls of a prison as an inmate, you lose that right. It evaporates, and it’s terrifying. And pretty unsurprising when the extreme inequality of the daily relationship between prisoners and their jailers leads very naturally into abuses of many flavors, from small humiliations to hideous crimes. Every year guards at Danbury and other women’s prisons around the country are caught sexually abusing prisoners. Several years after I came home, one of Danbury ’s lieutenants, a seventeen-year corrections veteran, was one of them. He was prosecuted and spent one month in jail.

When Mr. Maple was on duty in the evening, he constantly patrolled the Dorms. There was something unnerving to me about the male COs seeing me in nothing but my muu-muu, billowing though it was. It was more unnerving still when I would look up from changing after the gym, in shorts and a sports bra, to see the eyes of a prison guard. It wasn’t so much the idea of them seeing my body, although the thought made me recoil. It was more the idea that my intimate moments-changing clothes, lying in bed, reading, crying-were all in fact public, available for observation by these strange men.

On one of his early days on duty, Maple was running through mail call. “ Platte! Platte! Rivera! Montgomery! Platte! Esposito! Piper!”

I stepped up and he handed me my mail, and I turned back to the crowd to rejoin it. Some of the women were tittering and whispering. I stood next to Annette and looked at her quizzically.

“He called you Piper!” Other prisoners were looking at me with curiosity. It wasn’t done. I felt embarrassed and showed it by flushing deeply, which provoked more tittering.

“He just doesn’t know. He thinks it’s my last name,” I explained defensively. The next day at mail call, he did it again. “That’s her first name,” some wiseass said pointedly, as I blushed again.

“It is?” he asked. “That’s unusual.”

Still, he kept calling me Piper.