Orange Is the New Black (30 page)

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.

O
N
O
CTOBER 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.”

T
HE 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?”