Orange is the New Black

CHAPTER 14. October Surprises

The more friends I had, the more people wanted to feed me; it was like having a half-dozen Jewish mothers. I was not one to turn down a second dinner, as you could never be quite sure when the next good one would be served. But despite my high-calorie diet, I was getting pretty competent at yoga, I was lifting eighty-pound bags of cement at work, and running at least thirty miles a week, so I wasn’t getting fat. Detoxed, drug- and alcohol-free, I figured the minute I hit the streets I would either go wild or become a true health nut like Yoga Janet.

I was going to lose Yoga Janet very soon. She was going to be a free woman, so I’d do yoga with her every chance I got, trying to listen carefully and follow her guidance on my postures. I had never had mixed feelings about anyone going home before, it was such a happy thing, but now the prospect of her leaving felt like a terrible personal loss. I would never have admitted this to anyone, it made me feel ashamed. But I still had more than four months to go and couldn’t imagine getting by without her comforting and inspiring presence. Yoga Janet was my guide on how to do my time without abandoning myself. I learned from her example how to operate in such adverse conditions with grace and charm, with patience and kindness. She had a generosity that I could only hope to achieve someday. But she was tough too: she wasn’t a sucker.

Janet’s “10 percent date,” the point in one’s federal sentence when a prisoner is eligible to go to a halfway house, had come and gone, and she was wigging out because they had still not given her an out date. Everyone got edgy before they went home. These numbers and dates were something to cling to.

But Yoga Janet finally got to go home, or rather, to a halfway house in the Bronx. On the morning of her release, I headed up to the visiting room during the breakfast hour, where all Campers depart through the front door. For some reason, custom demanded that the town driver would pull up her white minivan to this door, where a small crowd gathered to say goodbye, and then Toni would drive the soon-to-be-free woman fifty yards down the hill. Most women just walked out the door with nothing more than a small box of personal items, letters, and photographs. Janet’s friends had gathered to wave goodbye to her-Sister, Camila, Maria, Esposito, Ghada. Ghada was sobbing and carrying on-she always went bananas when anyone she liked went home. “No mami! No!” she would wail, tears streaming down her face. I still didn’t have any idea how long Ghada’s sentence was; long was a fair assumption.

Usually I loved saying goodbye. Someone going home was a victory for us all. I would even go up there in the morning to say goodbye to people I didn’t know very well-it made me that happy. But this morning, for the first time, I understood what Ghada felt. I wasn’t about to throw my arms around Yoga Janet’s legs and sob, but the impulse was there. I tried to focus very hard on how happy I was for Janet, for her nice boyfriend, for anyone who was getting their freedom. Yoga Janet was wearing a pink crocheted vest that someone had made her as a going-away present (another tradition that flew in the face of the rules). She wanted to be gone so badly that it was obviously taking all of her considerable patience to bid each one of us goodbye.

When it was my turn, I threw my arms around her shoulders and hugged her hard, pressing my nose against her neck. “Thank you, Janet! Thank you so much! You helped me so much!” I couldn’t say anything else, and I started to cry. And then she was gone.

Bereft, I went down to the gym in the afternoon. There were some VHS exercise tapes and a TV/VCR down there, and a couple of yoga tapes among them. In particular, there was one that Janet liked to do by herself. “Just me and Rodney,” she would sigh. The tape was by a popular yogi named Rodney Yee-“my prison fantasy object!” she would laugh. I looked at the cover, at a guy with a long ponytail in the chair pose. He looked familiar. I popped it in.

A beautiful Hawaiian beach appeared on the screen. The waves of the Pacific were lapping on the shore, and there was Rodney, a smoothly handsome Chinese guy in a black banana hammock. I had a flash of recognition. This was the yoga guy who had been on the in-hotel channel in Chicago where Larry and I and my family had stayed when I was sentenced to this human warehouse! I took this as a sign, a powerful sign… of something. I thought it meant that I’d better stick with the yoga, and if Rodney was good enough for Janet, he was good enough for me. I fetched a yoga mat and got into Downward Dog.

ON OCTOBER 8 Martha Stewart was finally headed up the river. A week before, it had been announced in the press that she’d been designated to Alderson, the large federal prison camp in the mountains of West Virginia. Built in 1927 under the auspices of Eleanor Roosevelt, it was the first federal women’s prison, intended as a reformatory. Alderson was an entirely minimum-security facility for about a thousand prisoners and according to the BOP grapevine by far the best facility for women. The ladies of Danbury were deflated by this news. Everyone had been hoping that against all odds she’d be sent to live with us, either because they believed that her presence would somehow raise all our boats or just for the entertainment value.

As we headed to work that day, news helicopters hovered over the federal plantation. We gave them the finger. No one appreciates being treated like an animal in the zoo. The staff was irritable too. Allegedly the perimeter guards had caught a photographer trying to infiltrate the grounds, crawling commando style on his belly. This was amusing, but overall the collective mood was dejected-we were missing out.

Homegrown drama quickly erupted to distract Campers from their disappointment. Finn, who cared so little about enforcing most of the prison rules, had been waging a somewhat covert war against Officer Scott and Cormorant.

As soon as I arrived in the Camp, I had noticed something odd that happened when Scott was on duty. A skinny white chick would materialize at the door of the CO’s office, where she would remain, talking and laughing with him for hours on end. She had a job as an orderly and would spend several hours cleaning the tiny office whenever he was on duty. “What gives?” I asked Annette.

“Oh, that’s Cormorant. She’s got a thing with Scott.”

“A thing? What exactly do you mean, Annette?”

“I don’t know for sure. No one’s ever seen them do anything but talk. But she’s in that doorway every time he’s on duty.”

Other prisoners complained about this curious situation, out of spite, jealousy, or genuine discomfort. Even if the relationship was platonic, it was still totally against prison rules. But Scott was widely understood to be Butorsky’s buddy, so nothing had ever been done about the odd, perhaps unrequited affair taking place in plain view. No one had ever caught them doing anything but talking, and everyone watched them like hawks. Amy was Cormorant’s bunkie, and she said they passed love notes, but Cormorant was never missing from her bed.

Whatever the weird relationship entailed, Finn didn’t like it, so he did the only thing he could within the reality of how prisons work: he went after Cormorant. Rumor had it that he had warned her that if he caught her hanging around Officer Scott, he was going to give her a shot (an incident report) for disobeying a direct order. All summer long they had been playing a cat-and-mouse game; when Finn was off duty and Scott was on, Cormorant was still a permanent fixture at the CO’s office. Finn would probably never confront another prison staffer, and when he wasn’t present, it was business as usual. Until now. Quite suddenly Cormorant had been taken to the SHU, at Finn’s behest.

This was shocking to all. Butorsky had retired in the spring, and it was rumored that Scott and Finn couldn’t stand each other. Cormorant now seemed to be a pawn in a disturbing power play, and as soon as word spread throughout the Camp that she was gone, everyone wondered what Scott would do.

He quit. This was far more shocking. No one ever quit the BOP. They were all doing twenty years until their pensions kicked in, although some staffers daydreamed loudly of transferring to other federal agencies, like Forestry. No one quite knew how to take the dramatic Officer Scott development, but when we learned that Cormorant would not be coming back from the SHU, the prisoners who had been around for a long time were not surprised. The BOP had changed her security level, and she’d be down in the high-security FCI for the rest of her sentence.

Pop said she had seen much worse. “Down on the compound I had a friend, very pretty girl, she was with an officer. So one night he’s on duty, he comes to get her, he takes her in the staff bathroom, he’s doing her. Something happens, he’s gotta rush out, he locks her in the bathroom. She’s in there, and another officer walks in, so she starts to scream.”

They kept her in the SHU for months during the internal investigation. They shot her full of psych drugs-she blew up like a balloon. When they finally let her out, she was a zombie. “It took a long time for her to get back to herself,” Pop said. “They do not play here.”

THE RIGHTS of a prisoner are so few, so unprotected, and so unenforced that a small minority of prisoners have an urgent need to fight for them at every opportunity. Or they see a way to make some commissary as a jailhouse lawyer. One way or the other. There were only a couple self-appointed legal experts in the Camp. But one was a totally untrustworthy wacko, and the other just wasn’t that bright, and they both charged for their services. When other prisoners approached me for help writing legal documents, it made me uneasy.

I flat-out refused to help anyone with anything but a letter. I wasn’t interested in learning how to draft a motion or a writ of habeas corpus or other common jailhouse documents. And I wasn’t going to charge for my help. Very often the people who were seeking some remedy around their sentences were serving the most time, and to me their prospects seemed dismal without a real lawyer. Plus, the stories behind these efforts were often heartbreakingly awful-full of abuse and violence and personal failure.

When Pennsatucky came to me to ask for help writing a letter to her judge, I was relieved. She had a relatively short sentence of a couple of years but was trying to get an earlier release based on assistance she’d given to the prosecutor. Pennsatucky, like most of the Eminemlettes, always seemed to be looking for a fight. But she was like a lost girl. She talked about her baby’s daddy and her boyfriend but not her family. She had shown me a picture of her sister, but I’d never heard a word about parents. Pennsatucky’s boyfriend visited a couple of times, and her child’s father brought the toddler to see her twice. I wondered what awaited her in the outside world. Pennsatucky drove me crazier than Amy, but I worried about her more.

She was one of the only people I knew who’d gotten anything positive out of her prison stay: new teeth. When she first showed up from county jail, her front teeth bore the hallmark of crack addiction-they were brown and damaged, and she rarely smiled. But recently, after several sessions with the cheerful little dentist (the only prison medic I liked and thought was competent) and Linda Vega, prisoner hygienist par excellence, she had undergone an amazing transformation. Usually they pulled teeth, but not this time. With sparkling white choppers, Pennsatucky was a very pretty girl, and her Jessica Simpson imitation was even better now that she would plaster a giant fake smile on while she was doing it.

Pennsatucky and I met in the converted closet that served as the Camp law library, where there was an old beat-up typewriter. “Tell me again what you think this letter needs to say, Pennsatucky?” I asked. She explained the facts of her cooperation, and then said, “And throw some other stuff in there, about how I’ve learned my lesson and shit. You know what to say, Piper!”

So I wrote about the cooperation, and then I wrote about how she had used the two years she had been incarcerated to think seriously about the consequences of her actions, and how much she regretted them; I wrote about her love for her daughter and what her hopes and dreams were for being a better mother, a good mother; I wrote about how hard she had been working to be a better person; and I wrote about how cocaine had taken away all the things that were most important to her, had hurt her health, her judgment, her most important relationships, and wiped out years of her youth; I wrote about how she was ready to change her life.

When I handed Pennsatucky the letter, she read it right there. She looked at me, with big wet brown eyes. All she said was: “How did you know all this?”

I STOOD on line for twenty-five minutes to call Larry, just to hear his voice. He almost always picked up.

“Hey babe, I’m so glad you called. I miss you. Listen, my parents want to come see you this Friday.”

“That’s fantastic!” His parents, Carol and Lou, had come up to see me once before, but they had gotten stuck behind a highway accident for hours, and had arrived fifteen minutes before visiting hours were over, with Larry overheated and them flustered.

“Yeah, they’re going to do some foliage stuff too, so I actually told them to go ahead and book the inn where they want to stay. I can’t come then-I’ve got a big meeting.”

Panic. “What? What do you mean? You’re not going to come with them?”

“I can’t, baby. It doesn’t matter-it’s you they want to see.”

In no time at all, the infuriating click on the line was telling me my fifteen minutes were up and the prison system was going to end the call.

I went to see the Italian Twins. “My future in-laws are coming to see me… without Larry!”

This cracked them up. “They’re going to make you an offer you can’t refuse!”

Pop didn’t think it was funny. “You should feel lucky they want to see you. They’re good people. What’s wrong with you girls?”

I loved visits with my family. My mother, my father-each provided a calm, loving, reassuring presence at the folding card tables that reinforced the fact that this would all be over eventually and I would be able to resume my life. My kid brother, the artist, showed up for his first visit in an Italian suit he’d bought in a thrift store. “I didn’t know what to wear to prison!” he said. When my aunt brought my three young cousins to see me, little Elizabeth wrapped her arms around my neck and her skinny little legs around my waist, and a lump rose in my throat, and I almost lost it as I hugged her back. They were all blood relatives. They had to love me, right?

I had always gotten along well with Larry’s parents. But I was still really nervous about a three-hour prison visit. So nervous that I let someone talk me into a haircut in the prison salon, which looked sort of choppy and uneven. It’s a miracle I didn’t end up with bangs, that week’s jailhouse beauty trend.

On Friday I made myself as presentable as humanly possible, short of setting my hair in rollers. And then there they were, looking mildly nervous themselves. Once we had settled in at our card table, I was relieved to have them there. Carol had millions of questions, and Lou needed a tour of the vending machines. I think he was trying to gauge the likelihood of his own survival if he were standing in my shoes, and for Lou that means food. If that was true, his prospects were dim, as we peered at the anemic-looking chicken wings in the old-fashioned automat-style vending machine. The time flew by, and we didn’t even miss Larry. Carol and Lou were cheery, and so normal, it felt almost like we were chatting in their kitchen in New Jersey. I was grateful that they had taken the time to see me, and at the end of the visit I waved until they disappeared from sight.

That night I thought about my own mother. I worried about Mom. She was supportive, positive, dedicated, but the stress of my imprisonment must have been terrible for her, and I knew that she worried about me all the time. Her forthrightness in the face of the disaster into which I had dragged my family had been impressive-she had informed her coworkers and her friends about my situation. I knew intellectually that she had a support system out there, but a great deal of the weight of helping me get through prison was clearly falling on her shoulders. How could she look so happy to see me every week? I searched her face at our next visit and saw only that maternal classic: unconditional love.

Afterward Pop asked me, “How was your visit with your mom?”

I told her I was worried about the strain my mess was causing.

Pop listened, and then asked me, “So your mother-is she like you?”

“What do you mean, Pop?”

“I mean is she outgoing, is she funny, does she have friends?”

“Well, sure. I mean, she’s the reason I am the way I am.”

“Sweetie, if you two are the same, then she’s going to be okay.”

AS SOON as Martha Stewart was dispatched to West Virginia, the Danbury Camp was suddenly “open” and a rush of new inmates arrived to fill all the empty beds. Any influx of new prisoners means problems, as new personalities are injected into the mix, and scarcity places more demand on both staff and inmates. It meant longer chow lines, longer laundry lines, more noise, more intrigue, and more chaos.

“Say what you will about Butorsky, bunkie, at least he was all about the rules,” said Natalie. “Finn, he ain’t about nothing.” Over the summer daily discipline in the Camp had been largely nonexistent, and the low population had counteracted this in a pleasant “Go about your business and don’t bother anyone” vibe. But now, with the place suddenly full of new “wackos” and lax oversight plus the ongoing contraband cigarette drama, the Camp was off the chain.

The cigarette situation was particularly irritating. Far more people were trying to get contraband from the outside now, with occasionally comic results. There were only a handful of ways to get outside contraband. A visitor could bring it in, or rumor had it, the warehouse was a source. Or someone from the outside could drop it on the edge of the prison property where there was a public road; the recipient had to either work for the grounds department or have an accomplice in grounds who would grab the package. Contraband included things like cigarettes, drugs, cell phones, and lingerie.

I was surprised to hear one day that Bianca and Lump-Lump had been taken to the SHU. Bianca was a pretty young girl with blue-black hair and wide eyes-she looked like a voluptuous World War II pinup. She was not the sharpest tool in the shed (it was a standing joke around the Camp), but she was a good girl, her family and boyfriend came to see her every week, and everyone liked her. Lump-Lump, her friend, was pretty much as you would expect given her nickname, in both appearance and personality. They both worked for the safety department in CMS, which was a do-nothing job.

“You’re not going to believe this story,” Toni told Rosemarie and me. The town driver usually had the inside scoop early on. “These two dumb bunnies had somebody outside drop a package for them. They go pick it up during CMS work hours, and then they’ve got the stuff with them, and they’re walking by the FCI lobby, and they remember that they’re supposed to do the monthly safety inspection in there. So they go into the lobby with their contraband, probably looking like the guilty idiots they are, and Officer Reilly for some reason decides to pat them down. So of course, she finds the contraband. Get this-cartons of cigarettes and vibrators! They were smuggling dildos!”

This was generally taken as hilarious, but it would be the last we saw of Bianca and Lump-Lump. Smuggling contraband was a very serious shot, a breach of security, and whenever they got out of the SHU, they would stay down on the Compound.

October 19, 2004

Piper Kerman

Reg. No. 11187-424

Federal Prison Camp

Danbury, Connecticut 06811

Dear Ms. Kerman,

I would like to thank you for your assistance in preparing the Warden’s house for my arrival. Your eagerness to please and enthusiasm for the project made my arrival to Danbury a pleasant one. Your good workmanship was evident and is to be commended.

Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

W. S. Willingham

Warden

“Huh! Maybe this one’s going to be better,” said Pop. “The best ones are the ones who are for the inmates. The last one, Deboo, she was just a politician. Smile in your face, acts like she feels your pain, but she’s not gonna do shit for you. When they come from a men’s institution, like Willingham, they’re usually better. Less bullshit. We’ll see.”

I was sitting on a footstool in her cube where I had brought the typewritten note from the new warden-I’d just received it at mail call. Pop had been through a lot of wardens, and I knew she’d be able to tell me if this was as surprising as I found it.

“Piper?”

I knew that tone of voice. Pop was never at mail call because she was still in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. She worked harder than any other person in the Camp. She was up and in the kitchen at five most mornings, and she usually worked serving all three meals, in addition to the cooking. Her fifty-year-old body was riddled with aches and pains, and the institution periodically sent her out to Danbury Hospital for epidural shots in her back. I nagged her to take days off-she wasn’t required to work so many hours.

“Yes, Pop?” I smiled from the footstool. I was going to make her ask.

“How about just a little foot rub?” I don’t remember exactly how Pop had first gotten me to give her a foot massage. But it had become a regular ritual several times a week. She would sit on her bed postshower in her sweats, and I would sit facing her with a clean towel across my lap. I would get a handful of commissary lotion and firmly grasp a foot. I gave a very firm foot massage, and she would occasionally yelp when I dug a knuckle in hard. My services were a source of great amusement in A Dorm-women would come by and chitchat with Pop while I worked on her feet, occasionally asking, “How do I get one of those?”

I was, of course, out of bounds and also breaking the prohibition against inmates touching each other. But the regular Camp officers extended special considerations to Pop. One evening while I was rubbing her feet, a substitute officer, up from the FCI, stopped dead in his tracks at the doorway of Pop’s cube. He was a shaggy, craggy-looking white guy, with a mustache.

“Popovich?” It sounded more like a question than a warning.

I ducked my head, making no eye contact.

“Mr. Ryan! It’s this foot of mine, I hurt it. She’s just helping get the cramp out. Happens all the time since I’m on my feet all day. Officer Maple allows it. Is it okay?” Pop was all charm when it came to interacting with COs.

“Whatever. I’m gonna keep walking.” He thudded away.

I looked at Pop. “Maybe I better beat it?”

“Him? I known him for years, from down the compound. He’s all right. Don’t stop!”

THE AMERICAN League Championship was so hotly contentious that year, I could barely stand to watch the games. The tension of being a Red Sox fan as they battled back from 0-3 made my stomach hurt, and my surroundings didn’t make it any easier. The running joke in the Camp was that half the population of the Bronx was residing in Danbury, and of course they were all ferocious Yankees fans. But the Red Sox had plenty of partisans too; a significant percentage of the white women were from Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and the always-suspect border state of Connecticut. Daily life was usually racially peaceful in the Camp, but the very obvious racial divide between Yankees and Sox fans made me nervous. I remembered the riot at UMass in 1986 after the Mets defeated the Sox in the World Series, when black Mets fans were horribly beaten.

I’m not sure what kind of a brawl we could have come up with, though. The most hard-core Sox fans in the joint were a clique of middle-aged, middle-class white ladies, whose ringleader was nicknamed Bunny. For some reason most of them worked for the grounds department in CMS. During all of pennant fever, they went about their work cutting lawns and raking leaves serenading each other:

Carmen DeLeon, the biggest Yankees fan of all, straight from Hunts Point, gave me the hairy eyeball. “Those are your peoples,” she pointed out acidly.

I glared, but I was too nervous even to talk smack, not because I was scared of Carmen but because I was worried about jinxing the Sox. The year before, Larry and I had gathered a roughneck band of Sox fans in our apartment in the East Village for game seven, and based on our lead in the sixth inning, we felt confident enough to venture out to a local bar, in the hopes that we could celebrate our victory loudly and publicly there, in the face of the vile, overbearing Yanks fans who had made our lives miserable for… our entire lives. Instead, we sat wretchedly nursing overpriced beers through extra innings as Martinez inexplicably stayed in and Red Sox Nation’s hopes and dreams collapsed with the team.

“I tell you what,” said Carmen, puffing out her already-considerable chest like a peacock. “If the Red Sox are in the World Series, I’m gonna root for them. That’s a promise.” When pigs fly, I thought gloomily.

When the Yankees went down in flames after a seven-game series, and the Red Sox were facing the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, the crowds in the TV room were actually smaller. But Carmen DeLeon was there front and center, grinning and rooting for the Sox. And the series was surreally easy, a four-game sweep. I couldn’t trust it-after each victory I felt my anxiety mount. At the end of game four, after the final out by the Cards, I started to shake uncontrollably. Rosemarie, also a lifelong Sox fan, grabbed my knee. “Are you okay?”

Carmen looked at me in amazement. “Piper’s crying!”

I was amazed too. I do love the Red Sox, but my reaction shocked even me.

I calmed down enough to watch the postgame celebration dry-eyed, but alone in the bathroom between B and C Dorms, I started to cry again. I went outside to stare at the half-cloaked moon and cry alone, out loud. Huge, shuddering sobs. I wasn’t crying because I wished I was home celebrating, but I was completely taken aback at the level of my own emotion. I had joked that I had to do hard time in order to break the Curse so the Red Sox could win, and now I felt that there was some strange truth to that. The world I knew had changed right there in the bottom of the ninth.