CHAPTER 16. Good Time

The free world was getting closer. Despite my incident report in November, I was on course to serve thirteen months of my fifteen-month sentence and be released in March with “good time,” the standard federal sentence reduction for good behavior. In January I would be eligible to go to a halfway house in deep Brooklyn on Myrtle Avenue (known as “ Murder Avenue ” in the Camp). Prison scuttlebutt was that as soon as you passed a few drug tests and found a job, the halfway house would send you home-as long as they could claim your paycheck.

Natalie would be waiting for me on Murder Avenue. I said goodbye to my bunkie the first week of December. The night before she left I was practically jumping out of my skin, asking her questions, leaning over from the top bunk to look at her lying below me for the last night. Natalie seemed to have willed herself into a state of calm. The next morning as she said goodbye to the assembled crowd of well-wishers, I was hopping nervously around the front door like a little kid. I wanted to be last. I was trying to keep my cool, even more than when Yoga Janet left.

“Natalie, I don’t know what I would have done without you. I love you.” This was probably the most direct thing I’d ever said to the proud woman I had lived with so intimately for nine months. I was going to lose the battle with tears again. In the last month I had become the freaking waterworks queen.

Natalie hugged me gently. “Bunkie, it’s okay, I’ll see you soon. I’m gonna be waiting for you in Brooklyn.”

“That’s right, Natalie. Hold it down till I get there.”

She smiled and walked tall out the door for the last time.

Pop was also supposed to go to a halfway house in January. One reason she and I grew so close was that we were going home at the same time. For Pop, as well as Natalie, going home meant something very different than it did for me. Pop had been down for more than twelve years, since the early 1990s. She remembered a world with no cell phones, no Internet, and no probation officer to report to. She was nervous as hell. We spent many hours talking about what it would be like when she was released, first to a halfway house for six months and then to the house that she would share with her family. Her husband was in prison down south, due for release in three years. She planned to work in a restaurant and confided that she would like to buy and run a hot dog cart someday. She was nervous about computers, nervous about the halfway house, nervous about her kids, and nervous about leaving the place that, for better or worse, had been her home for more than a decade.

I was nervous too, but not about going home. In the second week of December I received a letter from my lawyer, Pat Cotter in Chicago, that informed me that one of my codefendants, a man named Jonathan Bibby, was going on trial, and I might be called to testify as a witness. He reminded me that under the terms of my plea agreement, I was required to provide complete and truthful testimony if called upon by the government. Pat advised me that the feds could choose to transport me to Chicago to appear in court and were in fact planning to do so. He wrote:

It is not that I would not enjoy the opportunity to see you again, of course, but it is my understanding based on comments of prior clients that travel courtesy of the Bureau of Prisons can be an uncomfortable and tiring experience for the inmate involved. I would like to spare you that experience, if possible.

I was horrified. Jonathan Bibby was a stranger to me. I didn’t want to go to Chicago, and I certainly didn’t want to be a government witness-a rat. I wanted to stay right here in the Camp and do headstands and go to movie night with Pop. I called my lawyer and explained that I had never even met Jonathan Bibby, that I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. If I were moved to Chicago for his trial, it might screw up my halfway house date in January. Could he please make some calls on my behalf and let the U.S. Attorney know that I had no personal experience with the defendant and couldn’t possibly be a valuable witness?

“Of course.” he said.

I sensed I shouldn’t count on staying in Danbury.

I kept it all to myself, telling only Pop about the letter.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “The airlift.” She was talking about the federal transport system, Con Air. “The airlift is nothing nice.”

WITH NATALIE gone, I lived solo in my cube for several days. The naked ticking stripe of her mattress made me feel lonely. I had been down long enough to know that just waiting passively for the prison gods to give me a wonderful new bunkie was a losing strategy. Faith, my next-door neighbor, was a good egg, and so a switch of cubes was engineered, and I got permission to move next door. I was now sleeping in the bunk that Vanessa had occupied, and Colleen before her. Faith was very different from Natalie, though happily not much more talkative. She was very glad to have me as a bunkie and would tell me about her pretty teenage daughter back in New Hampshire while she knitted-she had a special knitting permit.

Faith was doing a long drug sentence, and I vaguely gathered that she had taken the fall for someone else. She worried constantly about her daughter, whom she hadn’t seen in over a year. She was making her a green sweater for Christmas. There never seemed to be more than three or four colors of acrylic yarn at the commissary-gray, white, burgundy, and green-and they would run out of the burgundy and green all the time, frustrating the hobbyists. Jae was crocheting Christmas toys for her kids-she had started months in advance. I couldn’t see anything harder in prison than being a mom, especially at the holidays.

I GOT a letter from Pom-Pom, formerly of the garage, who had just gone home to Trenton.

Dear Piper,

I just asked about you. I’m so happy to receive a letter + some pictures from you. My sister said I was fatter when I was in there. I told her it’s just the clothes. Anyway, I can’t believe you got a shot! Amy wrote me her bunkie went to the SHU, but she didn’t tell me you got a shot. That place is really going nuts.

Pom-Pom, whose mother had preceded her at Danbury, had been worried about what would happen when she was released. She had relatives who grudgingly agreed to let her live with them, though she also considered going straight to a homeless shelter.

Now she was back on the outside and she had received a chilly reception. The apartment where she was living was in a neighborhood where gunfire was audible every day-much scarier than the Danbury shooting range. The cupboards had been completely bare, and she had taken the little money she had to stock the house with food, shampoo, and toilet paper. She was sleeping on the floor.

God, I miss you! It’s sad to say I miss that place cause it is crazy out here… All this freedom, but I still feel like I’m locked up. I could truly say y’all was my family. I had a birthday and what did I get? Nothing, and I had to beg for a Thanksgiving dinner. Now you know why I was so scared to come home.

We would have made a big deal about her birthday in the Camp. But Pom-Pom still drew on a deep reserve of good humor, which she’d needed to survive her life so far. She sent me a list of people she wanted me to give her good wishes-her bunkie, Jae, the remaining garage girls-and a heartfelt pep talk on how to make it to my own release. She closed, “Love always, Pom-Pom.”

It was the strangest feeling ever, but I wished that Pom-Pom was back with us in prison. I was scared for her out there. At least in the BOP ghetto the perimeter guards were the only ones armed with guns, and they never got out of their trucks.

“Piper?” Amy peeked around my cube doorway. I didn’t usually allow company up in my cube, preferring to do my visiting out in the common areas.

“What’s up, Monster?” I had started calling Amy “the little monster” back when we worked together in electric. It was a deserved nickname, as she was foul-mouthed and foul-tempered and disrespected just about everyone and everything. But I loved Amy in spite of myself, and she made me laugh. She wanted to be so tough, and she was in a street-urchin way, but I thought of her as a spitting, hissing kitten that you could hold at arm’s length by the scruff of its neck. Still, kittens have sharp claws and teeth.

Now Amy rushed to the side of my bunk and scrambled up on my footstool. I could see she was upset. She was supposed to go home before me, to upstate New York. I knew there was uncertainty waiting for her at home too, though not as dire as Pom-Pom’s situation. For several weeks she had been trying to sort out her living and work arrangements over the phone, and she was stressed out. She was trying to get hold of her father with increasing desperation, and having trouble with the phone system. As she explained her frustration, the words spilled out faster and faster, until she choked on them, hiccupping.

“Come up here, Amy.” I made room on my bed, and she scrambled up. “I’m sorry things are uncertain right now. It’s going to be okay, you’re going to be home soon.” I put my arm around her while she cried.

She buried her head in my lap. “I want my daddy!”

I shushed her and patted the blond curls she was so proud of, and inside I grieved angrily over the insanity of locking up children, and then returning them to neighborhoods that were more desperate and dangerous than jails.

I SAW on the callout that I was scheduled to spend my afternoon in a mandatory prerelease class on housing, and my blood pressure started to rise. All federal prisoners are required to go through a series of prerelease classes before they reenter society. This made perfect sense. Many of the women in Danbury had been cloistered away in prison for years, and despite the harshness of being institutionalized, it was also infantilizing. The idea that they were going to hit the ground running and be able to cope with the day-to-day requirements of life “on the outs” was ridiculous.

I had been pretty curious about what the reentry classes would convey to us. The first one I was required to attend was on health. I showed up in the visiting room at the appointed time; chairs had been set out for twenty women, and a CO who worked in food services down in the FCI was there to lead it. I leaned over and asked Sheena, seated next to me, why he was teaching.

“He used to play professional baseball,” she replied by way of explanation.

I thought about that for a minute, as if there were any sense to it. “But why is someone from Danbury teaching this class-and why not someone from health services?” Sheena rolled her eyes at me. “Are all the classes taught by the prison staff? They don’t work on the outside, with ex-offenders. They spend all their time here. What do they know about reentry?”

“Pipes, you’re looking for logic in all the wrong places.”

The guy from food services was very nice and very funny. We liked him a lot. He told us that it was important to eat right, exercise, and treat your body as a temple. But he didn’t tell us how to get health care services that people with no money could afford. He didn’t tell us how we could quickly obtain birth control and other reproductive health services. He didn’t recommend any solutions for behavioral or psychiatric care, and for sure some of those broads needed it. He didn’t say what options there might be for people who had struggled with substance abuse, sometimes for decades, when they were confronted by old demons on the outside.

Another class had been titled “Positive Attitude” and was taught by the former warden’s secretary. We liked her very little, as she was deeply condescending toward us. Her talk detailed her epic struggle to diet her way into a fancy dress for a holiday party. Tragically, she had not been able to lose the weight, but she still had fun at the party, because she had managed to keep her positive attitude. I looked around the room in disbelief. There were women in there who had lost their parental rights and would have to battle to reunite with their children; women who had nowhere to go and so would be heading to homeless shelters; women who had never worked in the mainstream economy and must find real jobs or end up back in prison. I had none of these concerns, because I was so much luckier than the majority of the women I’d been living with in Danbury, but I felt disrespected by how trivial these classes were turning out to be. The next one was led by the dour German nun who ran the chapel and was so vague it’s hard to recall but dealt with “personal growth.”

Next we heard about housing. Housing, employment, health, family-these are the factors that determine whether a person returning home from prison will succeed or fail as a law-abiding citizen. I knew the guy who was leading this session from CMS-he was a nice enough guy. And he talked about what he knew-which was insulation, and aluminum siding, and the best kind of roof to put on your house. He talked about interiors too. I was so disgusted with the BOP’s farcical prerelease program that I just shut my eyes and waited for it to be over.

One woman raised her hand. “Um, Mr. Green, that’s cool and all, but I need to find an apartment to rent. Can you talk a little bit about how to get an apartment, and if there are any programs we could qualify for, you know, affordable housing and stuff? Someone told me I should go to a homeless shelter…”

He looked not irritated, but unsure. “Yeah, well, I don’t really know too much about that. The best way to find an apartment is in the paper, or there are websites now that you can search.”

I wondered how big the BOP’s budget for reentry was.

I STARED intently at Larry across the card table. He looked worn out, with deep dark circles under his eyes. I remembered something Yoga Janet had said to me about our boyfriends: “They do the time with us.”

Every visit now focused on a single topic: me coming home. It didn’t matter if it was Larry, my mother, my brother, or a friend. Among my people there was a collective sense of relief, a feeling that we were almost out of the woods. I didn’t want to be a killjoy, so I tried to hold my sense of dread about the possibility of Chicago in check.

It seemed like half the people in the visiting room would be going home soon-Pop, Delicious, Doris, Sheena. Big Boo Clemmons had gone home after Thanksgiving, and her girlfriend Trina had taken to her bed for a week.

Camila was going too, but not home yet. The Camp was about to send another group down the hill to the drug program, and she was among them. Nina was supposed to come back in January, having completed the program, before being released. I hoped that I would see her before I left.

I sat in Camila’s cube, watching her sort through her stuff. She had just given me a pair of big black work boots. The drug program was very strict, so she had to dispose of contraband before she went, and give away excess clothing. Camila was in a good mood. The drug program would cut her sentence by a year, from seven to six. I worried about her mouth; more than most of the women in the Camp, Camila would talk back to the guards if they made her mad, and she had a temper. The program was strict, and people got kicked out of it all the time.

“I’m going to miss you. Who will I do yoga with?”

She smiled. “You’re going home, tomorrow almost!”

“Camila, you have to promise me you will bite your tongue down there. It’s no joke.”

She made a perplexed face at me. “Bite my tongue? Why would I do that?”

“Bite your tongue. It’s an expression. I mean you can’t talk shit to the officers down there. Even if they’re like Welch or that asshole Richards.”

True to his word, Officer Richards was doing his best to make everyone’s life miserable in the Camp. If DeSimon had reminded me of a lost detachable penis, Richards was like a furious one. He was ludicrously angry; he always looked like his shiny bright pink head might explode at any moment. He was petty, refusing to give a prisoner her letters if she had not been present at mail call, and rigidly enforcing the TV hours, much to the displeasure of the insomniacs. I didn’t care about most of his new-sheriff activities, although Pop was bitter about having foot massages only when he was not on duty.

But he had one habit so evil that I wished debilitating illness would befall him. He screamed on the mic. All the time. The PA system was wired throughout the entire building, with multiple loudspeakers in all the Dorms. These were hung just feet from some women’s beds. And he would get on the PA and just scream invective at us, all evening long, at painful volume. Poor Jae’s bunk was right under a speaker. “Pipes, you think you can bring your electric skills over here?” That was something I was not confident I could do, or get away with, without electrocuting myself or going to the SHU. So we all had to listen to his abuse, and the word torture took on new meaning.

AS CHRISTMAS Day neared, Larry delivered the bad news from my lawyer: I would be called as a witness to Chicago. I felt ill. What if I missed my halfway house date? Actually, there was no question that I was going to miss my halfway house date. Right down to the wire, my past would get in the way of my freedom. And what if I saw Nora? No way were they summoning me and not calling her.

I was nervous, but no one noticed; the Camp was in the midst of holiday mania. It had been building since before Thanksgiving, but now it burst out in force with a team of prisoners busy preparing for the annual Christmas decoration contest. Every unit in the FCI competed-there were a dozen units down in the prison, and the Camp was considered one unit. Leftover decorations from previous years were already hung around the Camp, giant signs that proclaimed NOEL and PEACE in dingy red and white tissue. But the 2004 decorating crew had something new, something big up their khaki sleeves. They toiled in secret, hour after hour in an off-limits television room that had been officially commandeered for them. All we got a glimpse of were the strange papier-mâché creatures they were preparing. “Check out my faggot elf!” one volunteer boasted happily, showing me an odd little humanoid.

The day before Christmas the Camp decorating crew’s handiwork was revealed. It was, frankly, incredible: they had transformed a dingy beige television room with gray linoleum floors into a dazzling Christmas village on a winter night. The particleboard ceiling was concealed by an inky blue starry-night sky, a village was spread out as if in a mountain valley, and the workshops, the barroom, even the carousel were populated by little elves of debatable sexual preference. They frolicked in sparkling snow that drifted across the linoleum. Everything twinkled. Awestruck, we all examined the handiwork with glee. I still have no idea how they pulled it off.

We waited nervously all afternoon for the judging to come down. When the verdict was made public, for the first time ever the Camp was victorious! The guards assured us that the competition had been stiff-down on the compound the Puppy Program was housed in Unit Nine, which also included the psych unit, and they had fashioned antlers for all the Labrador retrievers and created a herd of reindeer. A herd of reindeer!

A special screening of Elf, with free popcorn to boot, was the entire Camp’s prize. Faith, my bunkie, surprised me in our cube: “Piper, do you want to watch Elf together?”

I was taken aback; assuming things went as they always did, I would be watching the movie with Pop, or maybe with the Italian Twins. But it was clearly important to Faith.

“Sure, bunkie. That would be cool.”

The movie was being screened in a different room than was typical, with several showings. Faith and I got our popcorn, grabbed two good seats, and settled in to watch together. We would not be making Christmas cookies, or picking out the perfect tree to decorate, or kissing the people we loved under mistletoe. But Faith could claim her special place in my life, and I had one in hers, especially at Christmastime. And it was cool.

ON DECEMBER 27 people got their Sunday New York Times in the Monday mail. I sidled up to Lombardi and asked, “Hey, could I have the Styles section?”

I scurried up to my bunk with the paper; Larry had a piece in it, and not just any piece. It was the “Modern Love” column, the weekly personal essay about love and relationships. He had been working on it for a long time, and I knew it was about our long-delayed decision to get married. Other than that, I had no idea what the Times readers and I had in store.

He described, with great humor, our untraditional courtship, and why neither of us really thought it was important to get married, although we’d been to twenty-seven weddings together. But something had changed.

THERE was never a tipping point, no eureka moment when I realized that doing the most traditional thing possible was a good idea. Some guys say they know immediately She’s the One. Not me. Whether it’s a sweater or software, it takes some time for me to know if I want to keep something, one reason I always save receipts. I can’t say there was an instance when I looked into the pale blue eyes of the girl I met over corned beef hash at a cafe in San Francisco and thought, “This is it.” Now, after eight years, I know.

When did I know? Was it the way she helped me deal with the death of my grandfather? The relief I felt when she finally answered her cellphone on Sept. 11? That great hike in Point Reyes? Because she sobbed with joy when the Sox finally won? The way my nephews greet her like a rock star when she walks into the room?

Perhaps I should have known right from the start, that morning in the middle of our cross-country trip, when she required one last stop at Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City for a half slab of ribs for breakfast (and 10 minutes into the feast saying to me, “Hey, baby, why don’t you pop open a beer?”).

Or did I not truly know until seven years later when we found ourselves forced apart for more than a year? Who can say? It’s the big moments, maybe, but it’s the little moments as much or even more.

I could of course conjure up every one of those instances in perfect detail, right down to the chewy tang of those ribs and how good that beer had tasted.

Slow as ever, yet indeed as sure as it gets, it dawned on me: She wants to get married. And if that’s true, then I want to get married. To her. This is perhaps the least original idea I’ve had in a long time, but I needed to get here myself, on my own terms. And after all these years one thing I actually had going for me was the element of surprise.

So what the hell, let’s do it. I still don’t believe marriage is the only path to happiness or completeness as a person, but it’s the right thing for us. So I asked her. Or, more accurately, what I said, sitting next to her on that silly island in a scene straight out of Bride’s magazine, was something about love and commitment and not going anywhere and here’s these rings I got you, and if you want actually to make it official, that’s cool, and if you don’t, that’s cool, too. And if you want to have a wedding, I’m into it, and if you don’t, who needs it. She’s still unclear what it was I was asking, exactly, but when she got done laughing, she said yes. And then she threw off her clothes and jumped in the water.

My friends joke that I’ve been to 27 weddings and now it’s finally time for one funeral-for my singlehood. Which is sad like any funeral, sure, but this death is no tragic accident. I look at it more like euthanasia I’m performing on myself, a mercy killing.

I’m ready, babe. Pull the plug.

Even here, without him, I couldn’t imagine any sweeter Christmas present.

I ALWAYS found New Year’s Eve a bore on the outside, but on the inside it held greater interest, and I was very conscious and grateful that it would be my only one at Danbury. It made sense that turning the calendar forward would make a prisoner feel more optimistic. Watching those numbers tick suggested progress.

Much more than any New Year, even the Millennium, it felt for me like something was coming to a definitive end. Pop cried as we counted down at midnight-it was her thirteenth New Year’s in prison, and her last. As I watched her, I tried to imagine the conflicting rush of emotions when you considered so much survival, regret, resilience, and lost time.

It seemed like half the Camp was focused on getting Pop home in one piece. She was supposed to be finished working in the dining hall-weirdly, prisoners do earn and accumulate vacation days in the BOP-but she didn’t even make it one day. I caught her back in the kitchen and had a fit, but she just told me to go fuck myself. She didn’t know what to do with herself if she wasn’t working. The funny, salty, heavily accented earth mother who had helped me through so much was a bundle of nerves-she was less than two weeks from leaving for the halfway house.

So I felt terrible when I got the call on January 3-“ Kerman! Pack out!”

Packing out meant you packed up your shit, because you were going somewhere. The prisoner is provided with army-issue duffel bags to temporarily hold her possessions. I elected to give most of my accumulated treasures away: my hot-pink contraband toenail polish, my prized white men’s pajamas that Pop had given to me, my army-green jacket, and even my precious headset radio. All my books went into the prison library. Given my secrecy until this point, my fellow prisoners were surprised by my impending departure. Some assumed I had won early release, but those who heard that I was going on Con Air were full of curiosity, concern, and advice.

“Wear a sanitary pad. They won’t always let you use the bathroom. So try not to drink anything!”

“I know you’re picky about food, Piper, but eat whatever you can, because it might be the last edible meal you get for a while.”

“When they shackle you, try to flex your wrists so there’s a little more room, and if you try to catch the marshal’s eye when he’s chaining you, maybe he won’t cuff you so tight your circulation goes. Oh, and double up your socks so the restraints don’t make your ankles bleed.”

“Pray they don’t send you through Georgia. They stick you in a county jail, and it’s the worst place I’ve ever been in my life.”

“There are tons of cute guys on the airlift. They will love you!”

I went to talk to the Marlboro Man. “Mr. King, they’re shipping me out on a writ, to Chicago.” I actually succeeded in making him look surprised.

Then he laughed. “Diesel therapy.”

“What?”

“Around here we call the airlift ‘diesel therapy.’”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Well, you take care of yourself.”

“Mr. King, if I come back before my release date, can I have my job back?”

“Sure.”

AS IT turned out, I didn’t get shipped out for two days. I called Larry one last time-other prisoners had warned me not to say anything about the details of prison travel over the phone: “They’re listening, and if you give specifics sometimes they think that you’re planning to escape.” Larry was bizarrely chipper, and I felt like he didn’t really understand what was happening, even though I told him I might not be able to talk to him for a long time.

I bade goodbye to Pop.

“My Piper! My Piper! You’re not supposed to go before me!”

I hugged her and told her she was going to be fine in the halfway house, and that I loved her.

Then I walked down the hill and began my next misadventure.

Загрузка...