Mother’s Day was off the chain at the Camp. From the moment we awoke, every woman wished another “Happy Mother’s Day”… repeatedly. I quickly gave up explaining that I had no children and just said, “Happy Mother’s Day to you!” About eighty percent of the women in U.S. prisons have children, so odds were I was right.
A lot of women had crocheted long-stem red roses for their “prison mamas” or friends. Some women organized themselves into somewhat formalized “family” relationships with other prisoners, especially mother-daughter pairs. There were a lot of little clans at Danbury. The younger women relied on their “moms” for advice, attention, food, commissary loans, affection, guidance, even discipline. If one of the young ones was misbehaving, she might get directed by another irritated prisoner, “Go talk to your mama and work your shit out!” Or if the kid was really out of control with her mouth or her radio or whatever, the mama might get the request, “You need to talk to your daughter, ’cause if she don’t get some act-right, I’ma knock her out!”
My de facto prison “family” revolved around Pop. It exemplified the complex ways that family trees grow behind bars, like topiaries trained into very odd shapes. My immediate “sibling” was Toni, the new town driver who had replaced Nina as Pop’s bunkie. By automatic extension Rosemarie, Toni’s best buddy, was another sibling-I thought of them as the Italian Twins. But Pop had many other “children,” including Big Boo Clemmons, the even bigger Angelina Lewis, and Yvonne who worked with Pop in the kitchen. I took a particular liking to Yvonne; we called each other “the sister I never wanted.” All of Pop’s black “daughters” called her Mama. All of the white ones called her Pop. She didn’t have any Spanish daughters, though she did have Spanish pals from her own peer group.
Motherhood in prison was revered but also complicated by separation, guilt, and shame. To my eye, my fellow prisoners were mostly ordinary poor or middle-class mommies, grandmas, and even great-grandmothers, and yet some of them were serving very long sentences-five years, seven years, twelve years, fifteen years. I knew that, by virtue of being in the minimum-security Camp, they were unlikely to have been convicted of violent crimes. As I watched my neighbors, young women who lacked even a high school education, with their children in the visiting room, I found myself asking again and again (in my head), What could she possibly have done to warrant being locked up here for so long? Criminal masterminds they were not.
In the three months since my arrival in Danbury I had seen a number of pregnant women become mothers; in February young Doris was the vessel of my first prison nativity. I had never seen a woman in labor before and was both mesmerized and horrified to watch Doris enter a zone in which her body and her baby were taking over, regardless of surroundings. To my fascination, the population of the Camp snapped to attention and stepped in to help her as much as anyone could. She had a half-dozen surrogate midwives hovering over her at any given moment, checking to see what she needed, coaching her on how to get more comfortable, relating stories of their own labors, and reporting on her progress to an anxious audience of prisoners. The staff certainly wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening; prison births were no big deal to them.
It was Doris ’s first child, and all she wanted to do was curl up in her bunk, which apparently was not a good thing for her or the baby struggling to be born. Older women took turns walking with her up and down the long main hall of the Camp, talking to her gently, telling stories, and cracking jokes. Observing keenly was Doris ’s roommate, also heavy with her first child and due any day. They both looked scared.
The next morning, as the contractions were growing closer, Doris was taken off to the hospital in handcuffs. In many places in the United States pregnant female prisoners are kept chained in shackles during their deliveries, a brutal and barbaric practice, though this was not the case for poor Doris. After many hours of labor she gave birth to a nine-pound baby boy in Danbury Hospital and was brought back to prison immediately, pale and drawn and sad. Her mother took the baby back to the rural outpost where she lived, eight hours away. There wasn’t much chance that the new arrival would see his father anytime soon- Doris told me that her baby’s daddy had just been picked up on three outstanding warrants. Fortunately she was due to go home within the year.
I hadn’t witnessed anything at Danbury to allay my fear of childbirth, but for the first time I had some tiny insight on the mother-child relationship. The single most reliable way to get another prisoner to smile was to ask her about her children. There were always families in the visiting room; this was both the best and the worst thing about the many hours I spent there. Young children were growing up while their mothers did time, trying to have a relationship via fifteen-minute phone calls and the hours spent in visitation. I never saw these women look happier than when they were with their children, playing with the small collection of plastic toys kept in the corner and sharing Fritos and Raisinets from the vending machine. When visiting hours were over, it was gut-wrenching to watch the goodbyes. In one year a child could change from a squirming baby to a boisterous talkative toddler and mothers would watch football championships and prom nights come and go from the distant sidelines, along with their children’s graduations, wedding days, and funerals.
As tough as it could be for a prisoner to visit with her children, it was also hard for parents to see their babies locked up. There were so many young girls among us, eighteen and nineteen years old. Some of these kids had been heading to a place like Danbury for some time, but one bad decision could suddenly land a young woman in a merciless and inflexible system. A lack of priors and a history of general good conduct didn’t matter at all-federal mandatory minimums dictated sentences, and if you were pleading guilty (the vast majority of us did), the only person with real leeway in determining what kind of time you would do was your prosecutor, not your judge. Consequently there were sad-looking parents visiting their kids-though not mine. My mother was like a ray of sunshine in that room.
For our visits every week my mother was always dressed immaculately in soft, cheerful colors, with her blond hair carefully styled, her makeup perfectly applied, wearing a piece of jewelry that I had given her for a distant Christmas or birthday. We would talk for hours about my brother, her students, my uncles and aunts, the family dog. I would fill her in on whatever new electrician’s skill I’d learned that week. She always seemed perfectly comfortable in the visiting room, and every time she visited, I got comments from other prisoners afterward. “Your mama is so nice, you’re a lucky girl,” or “That’s your mother? Get out! I thought it was your sister!”
I had been hearing that one most of my adult life. People would often say it to her as well, and even though she had received that compliment approximately three thousand times before, it always made her glow. In the past, this familiar exchange made me feel resentful. Do I look like I’m in my late forties or fifties? But now I enjoyed watching her pleasure when people drew a close comparison between us. Even with this disaster I had dragged us all into, she was still proud to be my mother. It occurred to me that I had never seen my mother defeated, even when life presented difficulties and disappointments. I hoped that our resemblance extended beyond our blue eyes.
My father, more than a thousand miles away, was able to come visit me when the academic year was over. His relief when he saw me was palpable. I have always been a daddy’s girl, and I could tell how it pained him to see his baby, even a baby in her thirties, in a place like this. We still enjoyed our time, eating peanut M &Ms while I spun all the intrigues of the place out for him to absorb. The difference between our weekly phone calls and an actual in-person conversation was like a text message versus a weekend-long visit. If there was one silver lining to this whole mess, it was the reminder of my family’s greatness.
I had a lovely visit with my mother that Mother’s Day-although the visiting room was deranged. I had never seen it so crowded with large family groups. A lot of women in Danbury had families who lacked the resources to come and visit often, even though many of them lived in New York City. Tired grandmas and aunties, taking care of their daughter’s or sister’s children during their prison stays, had a very hard time marshaling toddlers and teenagers on the buses, trains, and taxis necessary to get to Danbury-the trip could take four hours each way from the city and cost money. But Mother’s Day was special, and children of every age swarmed the place, and a cacophony of conversations flowed in many languages and accents. In the midst of all of it was my mother, smiling happily when she spotted me walking into the madness.
TWO COPIES of The New Yorker arrived for me at mail call, to my horror. Someone out there had sent me a second subscription. Miss Esposito from C Dorm also got the magazine, and had been mad at me when my first copy showed up in March-she thought it was a waste of money for both of us to get it. The damn things were piling up all over the prison.
Esposito was an odd duck. A big, solid woman in her fifties, she wore her dark hair in a disconcertingly girlish Dutch boy bob. She was always part of the welcome wagon for any new prisoner, regardless of race-she herself was Italian-American. She volunteered that she had been a gang leader with the Latin Kings, a claim I was at first skeptical about-why would the Latin Kings have an Italian Queen?-but it turned out to be true. She was a former 1960s radical intellectual who’d gotten involved with gang activity at a pretty high regional level. Esposito was doing a long, long sentence.
I could tell pretty quickly that Esposito, although a needy person, wasn’t after anything from me that I wasn’t willing to give, and she was heartwarmingly appreciative of my magazines and books. One day she came to me, with a fan in her hand. It was a medium-size oscillating plastic table fan, like you might buy in Woolworth’s. It looked just like the one Natalie had. “Bunkie, you going to be glad we got this when summer comes,” she said. “You can’t get these no more. They stopped selling them at commissary.” The commissary now sold a much smaller fan, a crappy little one that cost $21.80. The old-school ones were prized, especially by the older ladies, who seemed to feel the heat most acutely.
Esposito’s fan was broken. It wasn’t even hot out yet, but she was stressed. “Can you maybe take a look at this, down in the electric shop? I’ll do anything to get it fixed.” No promises, but sure, was my reply. I toted the thing down to work on the bus the next morning and took it apart, with my coworkers observing keenly. It turned out to be an easy fix, and I was glad that my access to tools was helpful to another prisoner. Back in the Camp, when I triumphantly plugged the fan in and it whirred to life, Esposito almost fainted with joy. I refused to take any commissary payment, but Esposito paid me in reputation.
Almost immediately another old-timer approached me, hoping for a board to slide under the mattress to help ease her back pain. There were a handful of older ladies doing very long sentences-Pop, Esposito, Mrs. Jones-and if I did one of them a favor, they were sure to tell everyone. Soon I was besieged by women bearing broken radios and broken fans and seeking repair for things in their cubicles-hooks for their clothing, loose conduits, busted shoe racks, all sorts of things.
Little Janet thought this was over the line. “That stuff’s not our job, Piper. It’s not electric, so why should we fix it?”
“No one else is going to do it, babe. The feds aren’t going to take care of us in this shithole. We have to do for each other.”
She could accept that logic, and besides she had other things on her mind at the moment. Little Janet had attracted an admirer, a tiny little white girl named Amy with a loud mouth. Amy was new among the always-present subset of prisoners I called “Eminemlettes,” Caucasian girls from the wrong side of the tracks with big mouths and big attitudes, who weren’t taking shit from anyone (except the men in their lives). They had thinly plucked eyebrows, corn-rowed hair, hip-hop vocabularies, and baby daddies, and they thought Paris Hilton was the ne plus ultra of feminine beauty. Amy was the tiniest and the most obnoxious of the new crop of Eminemlettes, and she was smitten with Little Janet, who despite her two-year tenure in prison seemed to have no idea how to handle a middle-school crush. Little Janet did not mess with girls, so Amy was barking up the wrong tree. Little Janet wasn’t so mean that she’d ice Amy; she tolerated her puppyish worship.
When Amy got assigned to the electric shop, though, Janet had to lay down the law. If Amy didn’t stop writing her mash notes and acting like a lovelorn cow, Little Janet would stop talking to her. Amy seemed dejected but resigned. My read on the situation was that Amy was not in fact a lesbian and that this was basically a schoolgirl crush. I took one for the team, taking pity on Janet by taking Amy away with me on some of the housekeeping errands. I would not deny a fix-it request, even from someone I didn’t like. We must have hung a hundred extra cubicle hooks, which we would make out of C-clamps with a hammer, Amy spluttering and cursing the entire time.
Despite her foul little mouth and frequent tantrums, I found within myself a surprising reserve of patience for Amy and adopted a mild but firm approach. She was kind of like a SweeTart-sugary but also puckeringly sour. No one else was showing her any positive attention. Amy reacted with undying allegiance to me, loudly alternating between calling me her mom and her wife-both of which caused me to snort with mock outrage. “Amy, I am not old enough to be your mother, and as for the other-you’re not my type!”
Being helpful did make us more popular, and I got a lot more smiles and nods around the Camp, which made me a little less shy. After almost four months in prison I was still cautious, supercautious, and kept most people at arm’s length. Many times I fielded the sly question, “What is the All-American Girl doing in a place like this?” Everyone assumed I was doing time on a financial crime, but actually I was like the vast majority of the women there: a nonviolent drug offender. I did not make any secret of it, as I knew I had lots of company; in the federal system alone (a fraction of the U.S. prison population), there were over 90,000 prisoners locked up for drug offenses, compared with about 40,000 for violent crimes. A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more.
Most of the women in the Camp were poor, poorly educated, and came from neighborhoods where the mainstream economy was barely present and the narcotics trade provided the most opportunities for employment. Their typical offenses were for things like low-level dealing, allowing their apartments to be used for drug activity, serving as couriers, and passing messages, all for low wages. Small involvement in the drug trade could land you in prison for many years, especially if you had a lousy court-appointed lawyer. Even if you had a great Legal Aid lawyer, he or she was guaranteed to have a staggering caseload and limited resources for your defense. It was hard for me to believe that the nature of our crimes was what accounted for my fifteen-month sentence versus some of my neighbors’ much lengthier ones. I had a fantastic private attorney and a country-club suit to go with my blond bob.
Compared to the drug offenders, the “white-collar” criminals had often demonstrated a lot more avarice, though their crimes were rarely glamorous-bank fraud, insurance fraud, credit card scams, check kiting. One raspy-voiced fiftyish blonde was in for stock fraud (she liked to keep me up to speed on her children’s misadventures in boarding school); a former investment banker had embezzled money to support her gambling habit; and marriage-minded Rosemarie was doing fifty-four months for Internet auction fraud.
I gleaned this information about people’s crimes either because they’d volunteered it or because another prisoner told me. Some people would discuss their offense matter-of-factly, like Esposito or Rosemarie; others would never utter a word.
I still had absolutely no idea why Natalie had been sentenced to eight years in this snake pit. We got along well and some evenings would spend companionable time together in our cube. I would sit on my bunk, reading or writing letters, while Natalie listened to her radio below. She would announce, “Bunkie, I’m going to get in my bed, listen to my music, and relax!” Every Sunday we cleaned the cube together-we would use her irreplaceable plastic basin filled with warm water and laundry soap. She cleaned the floor with one of her special rags taken from the kitchen, while I did the walls and the ceiling with Maxipads from the box that sat in the bathroom, getting all the dust and grime off of the slanting metal I-beams and the sprinkler system that ran over my bed. Then we would fix my bed together. No one who has been down a long time will let the junior bunkie make the bed, as I had been schooled on my first day.
I grew powerfully attached to Natalie in just a short time-she was very kind to me. And I could tell that being her bunkie conferred on me an odd credibility among other prisoners. But despite, or because of, the fact that we lived in the closest of quarters, I knew virtually nothing about her-just that she was from Jamaica and that she had two children, a daughter and a young son. That was really it. When I asked Natalie whether she had started her time down the hill in the FCI, she just shook her head. “No, bunkie, back in the day things were a little different. I went down there for a little while-an’ it was nothin’ nice.” That was all I was going to get. It was clear that where Natalie was concerned, personal subjects were off limits, and I had to respect that.
But in a world of women confined to such close quarters, juicy stories and secrets had a way of leaking out, either because the prisoner in question had at some point taken a blabberer into her confidence, or because the staff had done the blabbing. Of course, staff is not supposed to discuss personal information with other prisoners, but it happened all the time. Certain stories had a lot of currency. Francesca LaRue, a vicious and crazy Jesus freak in B Dorm, had been disfigured by extreme plastic surgery. A bizarre sight with balloonlike breasts, duck lips, and even ass implants, she was rumored to have performed illegitimate backroom cosmetic surgery procedures and to have “injected people with transmission fluid” to dissolve cellulite. I suspected the truth was plain old medical fraud. A clever and manipulative middle-aged blonde was rumored to have stolen tens of millions of dollars in an elaborate fraud scheme. One elderly lady had barely got her walker through the door before it spread like wildfire that she had embezzled big money from her synagogue. Most viewed this with disapproval. (“You can’t steal from a church!”)
Any story you heard from another prisoner had to be taken with about a pound of salt. Think about it: put this many women in a confined space, give them little to do and a lot of time-what else can you expect? Still, true or not, gossip helped pass the time. Pop had the best gossip, the most historical and revealing. It was from her that I found out why Natalie had been sent down to the FCI all those years ago: she had thrown scalding water on another prisoner in the kitchen. I was incredulous. “Bitch was fucking with her, and what you don’t know, Piper, is your bunkie got a temper!” It was very difficult to reconcile that kind of rage and aggression with my quiet, dignified bunkie, who treated me so kindly. In Pop’s words, though, “Natalie’s no joke!”
Seeing how puzzled and disturbed I was by this new facet of Natalie, Pop tried to illuminate some prison realities for me.
“Look, Piper, things are pretty calm around here now, but that’s not always the way. Sometimes shit jumps off. And down the hill-forget about it! Some of those bitches are animals. Plus you’ve got lifers down there. You’ve got your little year to do, and I know it seems hard to you, but when you’re doing serious time, or life, things look different. You can’t put up with shit from anyone, because this is your life, and if you ever take it from anyone, then you’re always going to have problems.
“There was this woman down the hill I used to know-little woman, very quiet, kept to herself, didn’t bother nobody. This woman was doing life. She did her work, she walked the track down there, she went to bed early, that’s it. Then some young girl shows up down there, this girl was trouble. She starts in with this little woman-she’s giving her shit, she’s hassling her all the time, she’s a fucking stupid kid. Well, that little woman, who never said boo to no one, put two locks in a sock, and she let that girl know what time it was. I never seen anything like it, this girl was a mess, blood everywhere, she was fucked up good. But you know what, Piper? That’s where we are. And we’re not all in the same boat. So just remember that.”
When Pop told me a story like this one, I would hang on every word. I had no way of verifying whether it was gospel truth or not, like most things I heard in prison, but I understood that these stories held their own accuracy. They described our world as it was and as we experienced it. Their lessons always proved invaluable and inviolable.
Mercifully, the closest I got to fighting did not involve a slock (the formal name for a weapon made out of a combination lock inside a tube sock), but rather, roughage. Whenever something other than cauliflower and iceberg lettuce appeared on the salad bar, I went to town. One day there was a bunch of spinach mixed in with the iceberg, and I happily began to select dark green leaves for my dinner. I hummed a little melody under my breath, trying to tune out the din of the dining hall. But as I carefully plucked the spinach, avoiding the lettuce, words began to emerge out of the noise, near my ear.
“Hey! Hey! Hey you! Stop picking! Stop picking in that!”
I looked around to see where the shouting was coming from and at whom it was directed. To my surprise, a beefy young girl in a hairnet was glaring at me. I looked around, then gestured with the salad tongs. “Are you talking to me?”
“Hell, yeah. You can’t be pickin’ out the greens like that. Just fill up your plate and keep moving!”
I looked at my salad bar adversary, wondering who the fuck she thought she was. I vaguely recognized her as new, a reputed troublemaker up in the Rooms. Just the other day Annette, who was still stuck up there, had been complaining about the disrespectful mouth on this eighteen-year-old kid. I knew from Pop that the salad bar was among the least desirable kitchen jobs, because so much washing and chopping was involved in the prep. So it was usually done by the low woman on the culinary totem pole.
I was furious that she had had the nerve to step to me. By now I felt like I was pretty firmly established in the Camp’s social ecology. I didn’t mess with other people, I was friendly but respectful, and hence other people treated me with respect. So to have some kid giving me shit in the dining hall was enraging. Not only that, but she was breaking a cardinal rule among prisoners: Don’t you tell me what to do-you have eight numbers after your name just like me. To get into a public battle with a black woman was a profoundly loaded situation, but it didn’t even occur to me to back down from this punk kid.
I opened my mouth, mad enough to spit, and said loudly, “I don’t eat iceberg lettuce!”
Really? I asked myself. That’s what you’re going to throw down with?
“I don’t care what you eat, just don’t be pickin’ in there!”
Suddenly I realized that things had quieted down quite a bit in the dining hall and that this unusual conflict was being watched. All clashes between prisoners were sporting events, but for me to be in the mix was freakish. I was transported back to my middle school’s parking lot, when Tanya Cateris had called me out and I knew that the only choice was to fight or prove to every person in school that I was chickenshit. In suburban Massachusetts, I went with chickenshit; here that just wasn’t an option.
But before I could even draw breath to assert myself with Big Mouth and raise the stakes, Jae, my friend from work and B Dorm, materialized at my side. Her normally smiling face was stern. I looked at her. She looked at Big Mouth, not saying a word. And just like that, Big Mouth turned and slunk away.
“You okay, Piper?” said Jae.
“I am totally okay, Jae!” I replied hotly, glaring after Big Mouth. Disappointed, everyone turned back to their food, and the volume went right back up to its usual level. I knew that Jae had just saved me many months of trouble.
NOW THAT I had my headset radio, I couldn’t believe how much easier it was to carve some enjoyment out of the day. With a pair of white sneakers purchased from commissary, I began jogging around the track every evening. I could tune out the pandemonium of B Dorm at will, and go much farther around the quarter-mile track now that I had music in my ear.
Rosemarie tipped me off to WXCI, 91.7, the radio station of Western Connecticut State University. I had forgotten about the pleasures of college radio, the exquisite randomness of what got played, the twenty-minute between-songs banter of nineteen-year-olds, the smack of music I’d never heard against my brain cavity. I was in heaven as I went around and around that track, giggling at sophomoric radio skits about Dick Cheney and listening to the new bands like the Kings of Leon that I’d been reading about in my copies of SPIN but had never actually heard in the endless repeat of classic rock vs. hip hop vs. Spanish radio that is the soundtrack of daily life in prison.
Best of all was a recurring weekly show, 90s Mixtape, which compiled the best songs from every year of the 1990s, one year every week. The 1991 top ten included Pavement, N.W.A., Naughty by Nature, Teenage Fanclub, Blur, Metallica, Nirvana, and LL Cool J. Those songs made me think of Larry and of the trouble-seeking girl I had been when they were first released. Running around the track, I relived every song I had heard in the background when I was running around the globe, a careless and ignorant young girl, launching myself into trouble so deep that it put me on this prison gravel eleven years later. No matter how stupid, how pointless, how painful my current situation was, as I listened to Mixtape every week I couldn’t deny the love I still felt for that reckless, audacious fool who was still me, if only in my mind.
MAY 17 was Larry’s and my anniversary. The wretched fact that we were separated and it was all my fault was impossible to deny, but when I found the right Hallmark greeting in the free collection handed out via the chapel, I felt a tiny bit better.
This is you, Baby,
such a fine black man-
Who knows who he is
and knows where he stands.
Who doesn’t have time
to play any games,
Who’s earned my respect
and gives back the same.
Who gives of himself
to build up trust
And commits his heart
to big dreams for us.
Who can heat me up
and then love me down,
And within his arms
all my joy is found…
And on the inside:
This is you Baby
such a fine black man.
This is me loving you-
hard as I can.
Joking aside, the sentiment was all true.
I spent an evening in my bunk composing what I would write on the card. It was our eighth anniversary of dating. I told him how quickly that time had passed, a quarter of our lives spent together. How all the risky choices we had taken together were the right ones, and how I couldn’t wait to come home to him, the only man for me. I promised to keep counting sunrises until I could be where he was, anywhere that might be.
ONE DAY when we got to work, DeSimon stepped out of his office and locked the door. “Today we’re going to practice with the lift,” he announced. What the hell did that mean?
The lift turned out to be a mechanical hydraulic lift. I tried to figure out what it might be used for-all of the buildings were pretty low-lying, and the FCI itself was only a few stories tall. DeSimon shed some light on my question. There were a handful of area lights around the grounds that were hundreds of feet high. The lift was used when a bulb or fixture on one of them needed attention. “Oh, hell no!” said Jae, who was trying to get transferred to the warehouse. “No motherfuckin’ way are you getting me up on that!” The rest of the crew were in agreement with her.
But we still had to go through the elaborate process of setting up the lift properly-essentially a metal platform a few feet square with a railing that went straight up in the sky when you pressed a button. If you screwed up one of the safety measures, it was easy to imagine the splat on concrete.
When we had finally done it properly, DeSimon said, “Who wants a ride?” A few intrepids-Amy, Little Janet, Levy-climbed onto the platform and pushed the button, each stopping long before the lift reached its full height, then coming down. “Scary!”
“I want to try!” I climbed onto the platform, and DeSimon handed me the control button. Up, up, up-my heart beat hard as I left the concrete behind, the faces of six women and a beard upturned to watch me. Higher, higher. I could see everywhere, for miles farther than I had imagined beyond the confines of the prison. Maybe I could see my future from up here. The entire platform was swaying in the breeze, as I kept my finger on the button. I wanted to go all the way up, even though I was clutching the railing with white knuckles and the blood was pounding in my ears.
At its highest extension the lift stopped with a jerk, scaring me even more. A little half-cheer rose from my coworkers, who were shading their eyes to see me. Women were coming out of the other shops to have a look. “She crazy!” I heard someone say admiringly.
I peered over the railing that I was clinging to, grinning. Mr. DeSimon appeared to be trying to hide a smile in his beard. “Come on down, Kerman. No one wants to clean you off the concrete.” I almost liked him that day.
THE PLACE was emptying out. Early in the month there was a rush of new faces, including a clique that had smuggled in marijuana via the cootchie express (squat and cough doesn’t really seem to work) and brought a flurry of shakedowns onto the entire Camp. But then the flow of new prisoners seemed to stop abruptly. The prevailing rumor was that the BOP had “closed” the Camp, accepting only prisoners who were already doing time in other facilities, because they didn’t want Martha Stewart designated to Danbury. Unclear was whether this was because the place was a broken-down dump, or for some other, more sinister reason. The moratorium on new prisoners seemed real, because the flow of new faces slowed to a feeble trickle. But people kept leaving to go home.
I wished that I was leaving. The adrenaline of the initial “Can I do this?” period was definitely over, and the rest of my time in Danbury stretched ahead of me. Larry and I had spent much time and energy hoping to get my sentence down to a year, feeling like that would be a victory. Now I was in the midst of it, and the months felt like they would never end.
Still, the novelties of prison socializing could distract me. Jae, like many of my favorite people, was a Taurus, a fact I learned when Big Boo Clemmons approached me in B Dorm to invite me to Jae’s birthday party. Big Boo was a giant bulldyke. When I say giant, I mean at least three hundred pounds. She had skin like a Dove ice cream bar and was the most attractive three-hundred-pound woman I have ever seen. She used her massive bulk to intimidate, but her girth was less daunting than her wit. She had a lightning-sharp way with words-she was the resident rhymemaster, and her charisma and charm were undeniable. Her girlfriend Trina, at two hundred pounds, was pretty but a bitch on wheels and was commonly referred to by other prisoners as “Pieface”-but only behind her back. She loved to argue, was as disagreeable as Boo was smooth.
Boo told me the day and time when the party would take place, and that I could bring a cheesecake. “Where’s the party?” I asked, and was surprised when she said, “Right here in B Dorm.” Prison parties were usually held in the common rooms; otherwise you risked being hassled by the guards.
When Jae’s birthday arrived, I wondered how she felt. This must have been her second or third birthday in prison, and she had seven more stretching in front of her like hurdles on a very long track. I turned up for the party promptly after dinner, cheesecake in hand (it was the only prison cuisine I knew how to make). The party guests gathered in the middle corridor of B Dorm outside Jae’s cube, which she shared with her bunkie Sheena. B Dorm residents made up most of the guests, and we pulled up the folding chairs and stools from our cubes.
My neighbor bipolar Colleen was there, and so were Jae’s buddy Bobbie, the biker mama from back in the Brooklyn MCC, Little Janet, Amy, and Lili Cabrales, who I had observed in action on my first morning in B Dorm. Lili almost drove me insane when I first moved in, as she would call out across the room again and again, “Pookie, what you doin’? Pookie, come over here! Pookie, do you got any noodle soups? I’m so hungry!” Pookie was her very quiet special friend, who lived two cubicles over from me. I would sit on my bunk and ask myself (and sometimes Natalie), “Will she ever shut up?” Lili was a loud-ass Bronx Puerto Rican gay-for-the-stay don’t-fuck-with-me piece of work. But a funny thing happened, especially after Pookie went home and Lili quieted down a bit-she began to grow on me. I guess maybe I grew on her, until we got to the point where she nicknamed me “Dolphin” after my tattoo, and I could get a big smile out of her with a little joke.
Delicious the cheerful tittie-admirer was there-she played Spades with Jae. Delicious might have been my old friend Candace’s doppelganger. This may seem surprising, as Candace is a North Carolinian, white Dartmouth grad who is a high-powered technology PR maven on the West Coast, mother of one and a clown enthusiast, whereas Delicious is a black D.C. native with a five o’clock shadow, a bunch of tattoos, and unusually long nails, who worked as a prison dishwasher while sharpening her excellent singing voice and off-the-cuff witticisms. But they had similar hair, similar stature, the identical button nose, and the same mellow-with-a-touch-of-hyper way of looking at the world. It gave me goosebumps. Delicious sang all the time. All. The. Time. She would rather sing than speak. As soon as I got to B Dorm, she asked me, “Y’all got any gangsta books?” When I told her about my friend Candace on the outside, and how they were like twins, Delicious looked at me as if I were the weirdest person she had ever met.
For the party, Boo had prepared a game for us to play. She made up a rhyme that was a riddle about every invitee, and the game was to guess the identity of the riddle’s subject. This was an irresistible novelty, and soon we were laughing at each other, although Boo had refrained from being really mean at anyone’s expense.
She lives right here
Between you and me,
And when you see her
You think of the sea.
When Boo read that rhyme, I had to bite my lip to hide my smile while I looked around quickly. Most people looked confused, but a few were smirking, pleased with themselves for getting it right away.
“Who is it?” asked Boo. A lot of shoulders were shrugged, which irked her.
“It’s Piper!” shouted Sheena and Amy in triumphant unison.
“I don’t get it,” Trina pouted at her girlfriend. “That don’t make no sense.”
Boo was exasperated. “‘She lives right here between you and me’-that means she lives in B Dorm. ‘And when you see her, you think of the sea,’ that’s her tattoo. Get it? See, sea? The fish?!”
“Oh yeah!” Lili Cabrales grinned, “That’s my Dolphin!”