San Francisco was a welcome refuge-I might be a freak, but at least I was among many. I found a place on the Lower Haight with my old friend Alfie, a brewery coworker from back east who was now living in San Francisco. I was shell-shocked and felt like a smoking chunk of SkyLab that had crashed through the atmosphere back to Earth. When Alfie wasn’t around, I would sit on the floor of our apartment and ponder what I had done, astonished by how far afield I had wandered and how willing I had been to abandon myself on the journey. I vowed that I would never relinquish my sense of self again, to anything or anyone.
After spending months in the underworld, it took a while to get used to a normal life. I had been living on room service, exoticism, and anxiety for a long time. But I had several great friends from college now in the Bay Area who took me under their wing, pulling me into a world of work, barbecues, softball games, and other wholesome rituals. I quit smoking.
I was terrified all the time about money and immediately got two jobs. I rose early in the morning to get to job one in the Castro, opening Josie’s Juice Joint and Cabaret at seven A.M., and I got home late at night after hostessing at a swank Italian restaurant across town in Pacific Heights. Finally, I got a “real” job at a TV production company that specialized in infomercials. The job required coaxing passersby onto bizarre exercise equipment in public places, tending to the needs of C-list celebrities on set, and waxing facial hair off perfect strangers. I flew all over the country, filming people who wanted to be less fat, less poor, less wrinkled, less lonely, or less hairy. I found that I could talk to just about anyone, whether it was Bruce Jenner or a mom with a mustache, and find some common ground with them quickly-I wanted to be less poor, lonely, and hairy too. I worked my way up from Gal Friday to a real producer, working on preproduction, filming, and editing for broadcast. I loved my job, much to the amusement of my friends, who would tease me about the latest late-night life-changing widget, scheme, or cream.
I dated but still felt pretty crispy and gun-shy after the flame-out with Nora. I was fine being serially single, with the occasional crazy romance thrown in to distract me from work.
I never talked about my involvement with Nora to new friends, and the number of people who knew my secret remained very small. As time passed, I gradually relaxed inside my head. I started to feel as though there were no second shoe, and it had all been a crazy interlude. I thought I understood risk. I considered my time abroad with Nora as a crash course on the realities of the world, how ugly things can get, and how important it is to stay true to yourself even in the midst of an adventure or experiment. In my travels I had encountered all kinds of people whose dignity seemed to have a price-widely variable-and I thought that next time I had better set my price higher than anyone would pay.
With all that worldly wisdom secreted in my memory, I was feeling pretty damn lucky. Great job, great friends, great city, great social life. Through mutual friends I met Larry, the only pal I knew who worked as much as I did in leisure-loving San Francisco. He ran a wire service called AlterNet at a nonprofit media institute. When I would crawl, exhausted, out of the editing room after hours, I could always count on Larry for late dinner or later drinks.
In fact, Larry was always up for anything. Random tickets to a random music festival? Larry was in. Want to get up early on Sunday and go to church at Glide in the Tenderloin, and then go on a six-hour urban hike with pit stops for bloody Marys? He was Jewish, but sure, he’d come to church and lip-sync the hymns. He wasn’t my only straight male friend, but we shared a particularly simpatico sense of humor, and he quickly became the most reliable source of fun that I knew.
As Larry’s new best lesbian buddy, I got to hear about his every romantic conquest and reversal in gory detail, which was both appalling and entertaining. I spared him nothing in my evaluations of his progress. He returned the favor by treating me like a queen. One evening a bike messenger arrived at my office with a parcel that yielded a real Philadelphia soft pretzel, complete with spicy mustard, which Larry had personally imported just for me from a trip back east. How sweet, I thought, chewing.
But then a disturbing thing happened. Larry got hung up on one of his attempted conquests, and a rather drippy one at that. He became distinctly less fun. I was not the only one who noticed this. “She’s leading him around by his nose!” other friends smirked. We mocked him mercilessly, but that didn’t seem to have much effect. So I had to take matters into my own hands, and in a dark corner of a dirty nightclub, I sacrificed myself for Larry’s dignity, kissing him squarely on his surprised, wisecracking mouth.
That got his attention. And mine. What the hell was I thinking? I proceeded to pretend for several months that nothing had happened, while I tried to sort out my feelings. Larry was nothing like any guy I’d been involved with in the past. For one thing, I liked him. For another, he was a short, scrappy, eager-to-please guy with big blue eyes, a big grin, and exceedingly big hair. I had deigned to sleep only with tall, exotically handsome narcissists in the past. I didn’t particularly want to date a man, and this man wasn’t even my type!
Except that he was. Larry was completely my type. Even after the weirdness of our barroom kiss, we were still inseparable, although he was understandably confused. But he didn’t push, he didn’t demand answers or clarity, he just waited. When I remembered that pretzel, I realized that Larry had been in love with me back then, and I was in love with him. Within months we were a real, official couple, much to the shock of our skeptical friends.
In fact, it was the easiest relationship I had ever been in, by far. Being with him made me undeniably happy, so when Larry came to me, conflicted and confused, to tell me that he had been offered a great magazine job back east, it didn’t really disturb my equilibrium. My next step seemed so obvious, so natural, that the decision practically made itself. I quit my beloved job to move back east with him-by far the best risk I have ever taken.
LARRY AND I landed in New York in 1998-he was an editor at a men’s magazine, I worked as a freelance producer-and settled in a West Village walk-up. One warm May afternoon the doorbell rang. I was working at home, still in my pajamas.
“Who is it?” I asked over the intercom.
“Miss Kerman? It’s Officers Maloney and Wong.”
“Yes?” I wondered what the local cops wanted in the building.
“Can we speak with you a moment?”
“What is this about?” I was suddenly suspicious.
“Miss Kerman, I think it would be better if we spoke face-to-face.”
Maloney and Wong, large men dressed in street clothes, walked up five flights of stairs and sat themselves down in the living room. Maloney did all the talking while Wong looked at me impassively. “Miss Kerman, we are U.S. Customs officers. We are here to notify you that you’ve been indicted in federal court in Chicago, on charges of drug smuggling and money laundering.” He handed me a sheet of paper. “You need to appear in court on that date, at that place. If you do not appear, you will be taken into custody.”
I blinked at him silently, and the veins in my temples suddenly pounded as if I had run miles at top speed. The noise in my head scared me. I had put my past behind me, had kept it secret from just about everyone, even Larry. But that was over. I was shocked at how physical my fear was.
Maloney took out a pad and paper and conversationally asked, “Would you like to make a statement, Miss Kerman?”
“I think I’d better speak with a lawyer, don’t you, Officer Maloney?”
I staggered uptown to Larry’s office, barely remembering to change out of my pajamas. Babbling, I pulled him out onto West Twenty-second Street.
“What’s wrong? Are you mad at me?” he asked.
I drew a deep breath, because I couldn’t talk otherwise. “I’ve been indicted in federal court for money laundering and drug trafficking.”
“What?” He was amused. He looked around, as if perhaps we were participating in some secret street theater.
“It’s true. I’m not making it up. I just came from the house. The feds were there. I need to use a phone. I need a lawyer. Can I use a phone?”
Wait, maybe I couldn’t use the phone. Maybe all the phones remotely associated with me, including all of Larry’s office phones, were tapped. Every crazy, paranoid thing that Nora had ever told me was screaming for attention inside my head. Larry was looking at me as if I had lost my mind.
“I need to use someone else’s cell phone! Whose phone can I use??”
Minutes later I was on the fire escape outside Larry’s office, using Larry’s coworker’s phone to call a friend in San Francisco who was the biggest big-shot lawyer I knew. He got on the line.
“Wallace, it’s Piper. Two federal agents just came to my door and told me that I’ve been indicted for money laundering and drug trafficking.”
Wallace laughed. This was a reaction I would eventually get used to when friends first learned of my predicament.
“Wallace, I’m totally fucking serious. I have no idea what to do. I’m freaking out!! You have to help me.”
“Where are you calling me from?”
“The fire escape.”
“Go find a pay phone.”
I walked back into Larry’s office. “I need to find a pay phone.”
“Honey, what the hell is going on?” he said. He looked exasperated, worried, and a little annoyed.
“I really don’t know. I gotta go make this call. I’ll come back and find you.”
Later, when he heard a condensed (and probably less than coherent) explanation of the situation, Larry was uncharacteristically quiet. He didn’t yell at me for not telling him I was a former criminal before we combined our lives. He didn’t chastise me for being a reckless, thoughtless, selfish idiot. As I emptied my savings account for lawyer’s fees and bond money, he didn’t suggest that perhaps I had ruined my life and his too. He said, “We’ll figure it out.” He said, “It will all work out. Because I love you.”
THAT DAY was the beginning of a long, torturous expedition through the labyrinth of the U.S. criminal justice system. Wallace helped me find a lawyer. Confronted with the end of my life as I knew it, I adopted my standard pose when in over my head and scared: I closed myself off, telling myself that I had gotten into this mess and it was no one’s fault but my own. I would have to figure out a solution on my own.
But I wasn’t in this alone-my family and my unsuspecting boyfriend came along for the miserable ride. Larry, my parents, my brother, my grandparents-they all stood by me the entire way, though they were appalled and ashamed by my heretofore hidden criminal past. My father came to New York, and we spent an excruciating four hours driving up to New England, where my grandparents were spending the summer. I wasn’t feeling hip, cool, adventurous, counterculture, or rebellious. All I felt was that I had willfully hurt and disappointed everyone I loved most and carelessly thrown my life away. What I had done was beyond their comprehension, and I sat in my grandparents’ living room rigid with shame at the emergency family meeting, while they questioned me for hours, trying to make some sort of sense of what was happening. “What on earth did you do with the money?” my grandmother asked me finally, mystified.
“Well, Grandmother, I wasn’t really in it for money,” I answered lamely.
“Oh, Piper, for heaven’s sake!” she snapped. Not only was I a shame and a disappointment, I was an idiot too.
She didn’t say I was an idiot. No one actually said I was a shame or a disappointment either. They didn’t have to. I knew it. Incredibly, my mother, my father, and my grandparents-all my family-said they loved me. They were worried for me. They would help me. When I left, my grandmother hugged me hard, her tiny arms circling my rib cage.
Although my family and the few friends I told took my situation seriously, they doubted that a “nice blond lady” like me could ever end up in prison, but my lawyer quickly impressed upon me the severity of my situation. My indictment in federal court for criminal conspiracy had been triggered by the collapse of my ex-lover’s drug-smuggling operation. Nora, Jack, and thirteen others (some of whom I knew and some I did not), including African drug lord Alaji, shared my indictment. Nora and Jack were both in custody, and someone was pointing fingers and naming names.
No matter how badly things had ended between us, I never dreamed that Nora would turn me in to try to save her own skin. But when my lawyer sent me the prosecutor’s discovery materials-the evidence the government had gathered against me-it included a detailed statement from her that described me carrying cash to Europe. I was in a whole new world, one where “conspiracy charges” and “mandatory minimum sentencing” would determine my fate.
I learned that a conspiracy charge, rather than identifying individual lawless acts, accuses a group of people of plotting to commit a crime. Conspiracy charges are often brought against a person just on the strength of testimony from a “coconspirator” or, even worse, a “confidential informant,” someone who has agreed to rat out others in exchange for immunity. Conspiracy charges are beloved by prosecutors, because they make it much easier to obtain indictments from grand juries and are a great lever for getting people to plead guilty: once one person on a conspiracy indictment rolls over, it’s pretty easy to convince their codefendants that they won’t stand a chance in open trial. Under a conspiracy charge, I would be sentenced based on the total amount of drugs involved in the operation, not on my small role in it.
In the United States mandatory minimum sentencing was a critical part of the late-twentieth-century “War on Drugs.” Guidelines established by Congress in the 1980s required federal judges to impose set sentences for drug crimes, regardless of the specific circumstances of a case, and without discretion to evaluate the person being sentenced. The federal laws have been widely duplicated by state legislatures. The length of the sentences completely freaked me out: ten, twelve, twenty years. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are the primary reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to over 2.5 million people, a nearly 300 percent increase. We now lock up one out of every hundred adults, far more than any other country in the world.
Gently but firmly, my lawyer explained to me that if I wished to go to trial and fight the conspiracy charge, I would be one of the best defendants he had ever worked with, sympathetic and with a story to tell; but if I lost, I risked the maximum sentence, probably over a decade in prison. If I pleaded guilty, make no mistake, I was going to prison, but for a much shorter time.
I chose the latter. There were some agonizing conversations with Larry and with my still-reeling family. But it was my decision to make. My lawyer negotiated hard and smartly on my behalf, and ultimately the U.S. Attorney’s Office allowed me to plead guilty to money laundering rather than conspiracy, for which they would require a minimum sentence of thirty months in federal prison.
On Halloween Day 1998, Larry and I traveled to Chicago in costume as “teenagers”; maybe my misery was masked by the disguise. That night we hit the town with our friends Gab and Ed, who had no clue about my predicament and thought I was in Chicago for work. The next morning I was standing tall, if pale, in my best suit as we went to the federal building where the court was located. With Larry looking on, I choked out three words that sealed my fate: “Guilty, Your Honor.”
SHORTLY AFTER I pleaded guilty, something surprising happened. Alaji, the West African drug kingpin, was arrested in London on a U.S. warrant. Suddenly my date with prison was postponed-indefinitely-while the United States tried to extradite him to stand trial. They wanted me in street clothes, not an orange jumpsuit, to testify against him.
There was no end in sight. I spent almost six years under supervision by the feds, reporting monthly to my pretrial supervisor, an earnest young woman with an exuberantly curly mullet and an office in the federal court building down on Pearl Street in Manhattan. Once a month I would go through building security, ride the elevator up to Pretrial Services, and sign in, waiting in a dingy room decorated with inspirational and cautionary posters that reminded me about Perseverance and to Use Condoms. I was often alone in the waiting room. Sometimes I was joined by young black or Latino men, who either sized me up silently or stared straight ahead. The occasional thick-necked older white guy with lots of gold jewelry would appear-and he would look at me with frank surprise. Once in a while there would be another female, never white, sometimes accompanied by children. They always ignored me. When my Miss Finnegan would finally appear and beckon, I would trail her to her office, where we would sit awkwardly for a few minutes.
“So… any news on your case?”
“Nope.”
“Well… this sure is a long one.”
Every now and then she would apologetically drug-test me. I always tested clean. Eventually Miss Finnegan left the department to go to law school, and I was transferred to the equally mild-mannered Miss Sanchez. She had long Frito-chip fingernails painted Barbie pink. “You’re my easiest one!” she would say every month, cheerfully.
Over more than five years of waiting, I thought about prison in every imaginable way. My predicament remained a secret from almost everyone I knew. Initially it was too terrible, too overwhelming, and too uncertain to tell anyone what was happening. When the extradition delay struck, the situation grew too weird to broach with friends who didn’t know: “I’m going to prison… someday?” I felt that I just had to gut it out in silence. My friends who did know were mercifully quiet on the subject as the years dragged on, as if God had put me on hold.
I worked hard at forgetting what loomed ahead, pouring my energies into working as a creative director for Web companies and exploring downtown New York with Larry and our friends. I needed money to pay my huge ongoing legal fees, so I worked with the clients my hipster colleagues found unsexy and unpalatable-big telecom, big petrochemicals, and big shadowy holding companies.
With everyone but Larry, in my interactions I was partially absent. Only to him could I reveal my fear and shame. With folks who knew nothing of my criminal secret and looming imprisonment, I was simply not quite myself-pleasant, sometimes charming, but aloof, distant, perhaps even indifferent. Even with close friends who knew what was happening, I wasn’t fully engaged-I was always observing myself with an unstated foresight, a sense that whatever was happening now didn’t matter much given what was to come. Somewhere on the horizon was coming devastation, the arrival of Cossacks and hostile Indians.
As the years passed, my family almost began to believe that I would be miraculously spared. My mother was certainly logging a lot of hours in church. But never for a minute did I allow myself to indulge in that fantasy-I knew that I would go to prison. There were times when I was pretty damn depressed. But the revelation was that my family and Larry still loved me despite my massive fuckup; that my friends who knew my situation never turned away from me; and that I could still function in the world professionally and socially, despite having ostensibly ruined my life. I began to grow less fearful about my future, my prospects for happiness, and even about prison, as more and more time passed.
The main reason was Larry. When I was indicted, we were definitely in love, but just twenty-eight and freshly arrived in New York, we were not thinking about the future beyond where we would move when the guy we were subletting from reappeared from London. When my criminal past reappeared, who could have blamed him if he had sat me down and said, “I did not sign up for this crazy shit. I thought you were good crazy, not scary-crazy”? Who could predict how a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey would process the information that his ex-lesbian, boho-WASP girlfriend was also a soon-to-be-convicted felon?
Who knew that my extroverted, mercurial, overcaffeinated boyfriend would be so patient, so capable, and so resourceful? That when I cried myself into hyperventilation, he would hold my head and comfort me? That he would guard my secret and make it his own? That when I moped for too long, letting the poor-me blues clamp around my ankles and drag me down to very bad places, he would fight to get me back, even if it meant terrible battles and tough days and nights at home?
In July 2003 we were in Massachusetts at my family’s beach shack. On a beautifully sunny day Larry and I kayaked out to Pea Island, a speck of rock and sand set in a small cove off Buzzard’s Bay. The island was placid and deserted. We swam and then sat on a rock looking back at the cove. Larry was fumbling with his swimming trunks, and I eyed him sideways, wondering why he was being so weird. He withdrew a plastic Baggie from his swim trunks and from it a metal box. “P, I got you these rings, because I love you, and I want you to have them because you mean so much to me. There’s seven of them, for every year we’ve been together. We don’t have to get married if you don’t want to. But I want you to have them…”
Of course I can’t remember another word he said, because I was so surprised and astonished and touched and thrilled that I couldn’t hear anything anymore. I just shouted, “Yes!” The box held seven hammered-gold rings, each as thin as manila paper, to be worn stacked. And he had gotten himself a ring too, a thin silver band that he worried nervously on his finger.
My family was ecstatic. Larry’s parents were too, but despite the length of my relationship with their son, there was a lot they didn’t know about their future daughter-in-law. They had always been kind and welcoming to me, but I was terrified of what their reaction would be to my nasty secret. Carol and Lou were different from my former-hippie parents: they were 1950s high school sweethearts who predated the counterculture. They still lived in the bucolic county where they grew up, and they went to football games and bar association dinners. I didn’t think they were going to understand my adolescent fascination with the underbelly of society, my involvement in international drug trafficking, or my impending incarceration.
By now more than five years had passed since I had been indicted. Larry thought it was important to tell his parents what was happening. We decided to practice on some other people, a tactic Larry described as “tell the truth and run.” Reactions were pretty consistent-our friends would laugh uproariously, then have to be persuaded of the truth, then be horrified and worried for me. Despite our friends’ responses, I was deeply frightened that my luck would run out with my future in-laws.
Larry called his parents and told them there was something important we needed to discuss with them in person. We drove down on an August evening, arrived late, and ate a classic summer dinner-steak, corn on the cob, big juicy Jersey tomatoes, delicious peach cobbler. Larry and I sat opposite each other at their kitchen table. Carol and Lou looked far more than nervous but not quite terrified. I think they assumed it was about me and not about Larry. Finally Larry said, “Bad news, but it’s not cancer.”
The story spilled out of me, with interruptions from Larry, not entirely coherent, but at least it was out, like a splinter.
Carol was sitting next to me and she took my hand, squeezed it hard, and said, “You were young!”
Lou tried to organize this radical new information in his head by switching into lawyer mode, asking about my indictment, my lawyer, the court in question, and what he could do to help. And was I a heroin addict?
The beautiful irony of Larry’s family was that when something minor was amiss, it was as if the Titanic were going down, but when a real disaster struck, they were the people you wanted in your life raft. I had expected an explosion of recrimination and rejection and instead got a big hug.
ULTIMATELY BRITAIN declined to extradite the kingpin Alaji to America and instead set him free. My lawyer explained that as a Nigerian, he was a citizen of the British Commonwealth and enjoyed certain protections under British law. A little bit of Web research revealed that he was a wealthy and powerful businessman-gangster in Africa, and I could certainly imagine that he might have connections that could make pesky things like extradition treaties go away.
Finally, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago was willing to move forward with my case. To prepare for my sentencing, I wrote a personal statement to the court and broke my silence with more friends and coworkers, asking them to write letters vouching for my character and asking the judge for leniency. It was an incredibly humbling and difficult experience to approach people I had known for years, confess my situation, and ask for their help. Their collective response was devastating; I had steeled myself for rejection, knowing that it would be perfectly reasonable for someone to decline on any number of grounds. Instead, I was overwhelmed by kindness and concern and cried over every letter, whether it described my childhood, my friendships, or my work ethic. Each person strived to convey what they thought was important and great about me, which flew in the face of how I felt: profoundly unworthy.
One of my dearest friends from college, Kate, wrote this to the judge:
I believe that her decision to enter into criminal activity was partially motivated by a sense that she was alone in the world and had to look out for herself. Since the time that she made those decisions, her relationships with others have changed and deepened. I believe that she now knows that her life is entwined with those of people who love her…
Finally my sentencing date drew near. While the cliché “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” had been echoing in my brain over the almost six years of waiting, I had to consider the truth it offers, like most hoary, oft-repeated ideas. I had dealt myself the cards of deceit, exposure, shame, near-bankruptcy, and self-imposed isolation. It was a pretty crappy hand to try to play. And yet somehow I was not alone at this stage of the game. My family, my friends, my coworkers-these good people had all refused to abandon me despite my rotten, wild, reckless behavior all those years ago and my I-am-an-island-fortress method of dealing with my problems. Maybe, because all these good people loved me enough to help me, maybe I wasn’t quite as bad as I felt. Maybe there was a part of me that was worthy of their love.
Larry and I again flew to Chicago, and I met with my lawyer, Pat Cotter, the day before my sentencing. We hoped for a shorter sentence than thirty months, and with Pat’s careful, painstaking, and persuasive legal work the U.S. Attorney had agreed not to oppose our motion in light of the lengthy delay. I showed Pat my options for courtroom wardrobe: one of my sleek “creative director” pantsuits; a militaristic navy coatdress that had to be the most conservative piece of clothing I owned; and a bonus choice, a skirt suit from the 1950s that I had won on eBay, soft cream with a delicate blue windowpane check, very country club. “That’s the one,” said Pat, pointing at the skirt suit. “We want him to be reminded of his own daughter or niece or neighbor when he looks at you.” I couldn’t sleep that night, and Larry flicked on the hotel television to a yoga channel, where a smooth, handsome yogi struck pretzel poses on a hypnotic Hawaiian beach. I wished fervently that I were there instead.
On December 8, 2003, I stood in front of Judge Charles Norgle with a small group of my family and friends sitting behind me in the courtroom. Before he handed down my sentence, I made a statement to the court.
“Your Honor, more than a decade ago I made bad decisions, on both a practical and a moral level. I acted selfishly, without regard for others, I knowingly broke the law, I lied to my loving family, and I distanced myself from my true friends.
“I am prepared to face the consequences of my actions, and accept whatever punishment the court decides upon. I am truly sorry for all the harm I have caused to others and I know the court will deal fairly with me.
“I would like to take this opportunity to thank my parents, my fiancé, and my friends and colleagues who are here today and who have loved and supported me, and to apologize to them for all the pain, worry, and embarrassment I have caused them.
“Your Honor, thank you for hearing my statement and considering my case.”
I was sentenced to fifteen months in federal prison, and I could hear Larry, my parents, and my friend Kristen crying behind me. I thought it was a miracle it wasn’t a longer sentence, and I was so exhausted by waiting that I was eager to get it over with as quickly as possible. Still, my parents’ suffering was worse than any strain, fatigue, or depression that the long legal delay caused me.
But the wait continued, this time for my prison assignment. It felt a lot like waiting for my college acceptance letter-I hope I get into Danbury in Connecticut! Anywhere else would have proved disastrous in respect to seeing Larry or my family with any frequency. West Virginia, five hundred miles away, had the next closest federal women’s prison. When the thin envelope arrived from the federal marshals telling me to report to the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Danbury on February 4, 2004, my relief was overwhelming.
I tried to get my affairs in order, preparing to vanish for over a year. I had already read the books on Amazon about surviving prison, but they were written for men. I paid a visit to my grandparents, nervously fighting off the fear that I might not see them again. About a week before I was to report, Larry and I met a small group of friends at Joe’s Bar on Sixth Street in the East Village, for an impromptu going-away. These were our good friends from the city, who had known my secret and done whatever they could to help. We had a good time-shot pool, told stories, drank tequila. The night went on-I wasn’t slowing down, I wasn’t going to exercise any tequila restraint, I wasn’t going to be a bummer. Night turned into morning, and finally someone had to go home. And as I hugged them as hard and relentlessly as only a girl drunk on tequila can, it sank in on me that this was really goodbye. I didn’t know when I would see any of my friends again or what I would be like when I did. And I started to cry.
I never wept in front of anyone but Larry. But now I cried, and then my friends started to cry. We must have looked like lunatics, a dozen people sitting in an East Village bar at three in the morning, sobbing. I couldn’t stop. I cried and cried, as I said goodbye to every one of them. It took forever. I would calm down for a minute and then turn to another friend and start to sob again. Completely beyond embarrassment, I was so sad.
The next afternoon I could barely see myself between the puffy slits that were my eyes. I had never looked worse. But I felt a little better.
My lawyer, Pat Cotter, had sent his share of white-collar clients off to prison. He advised me, “Piper, I think for you the hardest thing about prison will be chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people. Call me if you run into trouble. And don’t make any friends.”