Orange Is the New Black (26 page)

Diva though she was, Vanessa had the intelligence and maturity to handle her new situation with some discretion. She began her time in the Camp almost demurely, with no histrionics. Several other women had come up from the FCI with her, including a startlingly beautiful young woman named Wainwright who was her bosom buddy—they both sang in the church choir. Wainwright was petite, with green cat
eyes, an enigmatic smile, and a college education—most of the other black women worshipped her on sight. They were a visually hilarious pair, similar-looking in theory and yet so dramatically different.

For their first several weeks in the Camp they hung together most of the time. Vanessa was friendly if approached but more reserved than her reputation and appearance would suggest. She went to work in the kitchen. “
He
can’t cook,” scoffed Pop, who fell into the “disgusted” category and was disinclined to be kind, although there was some truth in her culinary assessment. There was a ketchup-in-the-marinara-sauce episode that had the whole Camp up in arms. Pop hissed into my ear who the culprit was, but I kept it to myself.

I liked Vanessa. Which was a good thing, because she moved in next door to me. She and Wainwright managed to finesse the housing assignments they wanted. Wainwright bunked with Lionnel, from the warehouse, who was the voice of reason/discipline when it came to unruly young black women. (“Girl, you better get some act-right, or I’m going to bust your head to the white meat!”) And Vanessa moved in next door to me with Faith, a steel-haired Oxy-dealing granny who was straight out of the New Hampshire woods and had come up from the FCI with Vanessa and Wainwright. They got along great. Vanessa’s arrival in B Dorm evoked some eye-rolling from Miss Natalie, but she was more tolerant than her friend Ginger Solomon, who demanded, “Is that what you want to see in the bathroom, Miss Piper? Well, is it?!” I meekly pointed out that Vanessa was post-op, but no, I wasn’t necessarily looking for a free show.

Free shows were available. As Vanessa settled in, she got more boisterous, and she was thrilled to display her surgical glory at the merest suggestion. Soon half the Camp had seen what she’d got. Her D-cup breasts were her pride and joy, and given our height difference they were often the first things I saw in the morning. She was certainly better looking than many of the prisoners who had been born to our gender, but close quarters revealed some of her more masculine qualities. Her pits were positively bushy—she said that if she couldn’t wax them, then fuck it—and in the hot, close quarters of
B Dorm in the summer, she smelled unmistakably like a sweaty man. Vanessa was deprived of her hormones in prison and thus retained several male characteristics that would have been less evident otherwise, most notably her voice. While she spoke in a high, little-girl voice most of the time, she could switch at will to a booming, masculine Richard-voice. She loved to sneak up behind people and scare the crap out of them this way, and she was very effective at quieting a noisy dining hall, roaring, “Y’all hush up!” Best of all were her Richardian encouragements on the softball field, where she was a most sought-after teammate. That bitch could hit.

Vanessa was an entertaining and considerate neighbor, cheerful and drag-queen funny, smart and observant and sensitive to what others were thinking and feeling. She was quick to pull out her scrapbook and share photos and stories of the men whose hearts she had broken, cutting up to make the time pass. (“This is the program from the Miss Gay Black America pageant—I was third runner-up!”) All the born-female aspiring divas (most of whom lived in B Dorm) immediately recognized that here was a master at whose feet they could learn. And Vanessa was a good influence on the young girls who flocked around her. She admonished them gently when they were behaving badly, and exhorted them to educate themselves, get with God, and love themselves.

She had just one ritual that was hard to take. Every evening when she was finished with work in the kitchen, Vanessa would return to her cube, climb up in her bed, and bring out a contraband tape player, obtained somehow through the chapel. Her absolute favorite gospel song, detailing the fact that Jesus was loving, forgiving, and helping us to take every step, would soar over the cube walls, and Vanessa’s voice would soar with it. This was when the need for her hormones really became most apparent—Vanessa simply could not hit the high notes. The first couple of nights she did this, I smiled to myself, entertained; by the tenth, I was burying my head under the pillow. However, considering some of the other songbirds we had in close quarters, I decided to grit my teeth and bear it. One hymn a night wouldn’t kill me.

·  ·  ·  

O
NE OF
the many contraband items I had in my possession was nail polish. There had been a time when it was sold on commissary, but now it was a banned item. Yoga Janet had given me a bottle of gorgeous bright magenta polish, which my pedicurist Rose Silva openly coveted. I promised that I would give it to her when I went home, but for now I kept it for myself and for Yoga Janet, who also loved beautiful toes. Any self-respecting New York woman has a good pedicure, even if she’s in the clink.

I had been Rose’s customer for a while now. That there were prison pedicurists was one of the few true things I had gleaned in my pre-prison research, along with the strong recommendation that if you were going to avail yourself of their services, you had better buy your own tools from the commissary. The prison population has a high incidence of blood-borne diseases like HIV and hepatitis, and you don’t want to risk an infection of any kind.

When I first got to the Camp, I was far too shy to request a pedicure, though I admired Annette’s gold toenails. “I only go to Rose,” she explained. There was actually only one other option to Rose, and that was Carlotta Alvarado—Pop was among Carlotta’s clients. Between the two of them they split the market. Prison pedis are strictly a word-of-mouth business, and in this case prisoners were fiercely loyal.

I had my first pedi back in the chilly early spring. Annette had given it to me as a gift. “I got you a pedicure with Rose Silva, I can’t stand looking at your toes in those flip-flops anymore.” A week later I dutifully reported to one of the Rooms’ bathrooms off the main hall to rendezvous with Rose, armed with my own pedicure tools—cuticle clippers, orange sticks, foot file (all of these were sold by the commissary, but no colors of nail polish). Rose arrived with her own toolkit, including towels, a square plastic basin, and an array of polishes, some in decidedly odd colors. I felt very awkward, but Rose had the gift of gab and was businesslike.

Rose and I quickly established that we were both from New
York, she from Brooklyn and me from Manhattan, and that she was Italian–Puerto Rican, born-again, and serving thirty months after getting caught trying to bring two keys of coke through the Miami airport. She had a no-nonsense briskness and liked to clown. She also gave a meticulous pedicure and a damn good foot massage. No one is supposed to touch you in prison, so the intimacy of a languorous foot rub, intended to please, almost sent me into ecstatic tears the first time. “Whoa, honey. Take some deep breaths!” she advised. For all this Rose charged five dollars of commissary goods—she would let me know on shopping day what to buy her. I was hooked. I was a customer.

Rose’s latest effort on my feet was definitely her masterpiece so far. It was a pale-pink French pedicure with magenta and white cherry blossoms added on my big toes. I couldn’t stop looking at my toes in my flip-flops, they were so cotton-candy fabulous.

D
ESPITE THE
groove that I had settled into, I still had flashes of irritation with my fellow prisoners, which troubled me. In the gym I nearly lost my temper with Yoga Janet during class when she insisted that yes, I could get my foot behind my head if I just tried a little harder.

“No, I can’t,” I snapped. “My foot is not going behind my head. Period.”

Being among many people who very pointedly couldn’t or wouldn’t exercise much self-control was taxing, and I meditated a great deal more on self-control. Sitting there in prison, I heard a lot of horror stories, of women with many children they loved but couldn’t handle, of families with both parents locked away for long years, and I thought about the millions of children who are put through terrible experiences because of their parents’ poor choices. Coupled with the government’s crap response to the drug trade, which perpetuated the damaging myth that they could control the supply of drugs when demand was so strong, it seemed an enormous amount of totally unproductive misery, which could only come back
to hurt us all later. I thought about my own parents, about Larry, and about what I was putting them through right now. This was the penitence that sometimes happens in the penitentiary. It was emotionally overwhelming, and when I saw women still making bad choices day to day in the Camp, or simply acting objectionably, it upset me.

I was pretty staunch in maintaining an “us and them” attitude about the prison staff. Some of them seemed to like me, and I thought they treated me better than they did some other inmates, which I considered rotten. But when I saw other prisoners behaving in ways that challenged my sense of unity, for lack of a better term, behaving in petty or ignorant or just plain antisocial ways, I really had a hard time with it. It drove me a little nuts.

I took this all as a sign that I was too engrossed in prison life, that the “real world” was fading too much into the background, and I probably needed to read the paper more religiously and write more letters. Focusing on the positive was hard, but I knew that I had found the right women at Danbury to help me do it. A little voice in my head reminded me that I might never see anything quite like this again, and that immersing myself in my current situation, experiencing it, and learning everything there was to know might be the way to live life, now and always.

“You’re thinking too hard,” said Pop, who had managed to do over a decade on the inside and still stay sane.

Boy, was that a nice pedicure. Plus there were lightbulbs to change, term papers to ghostwrite, sugar packets and hardware to steal, puppies to play with, and gossip to gather and pass along. When I thought too much about my prison life, when I should have been thinking about Larry, I felt a little guilty. Still, certain things brought my absence from the outside world into sharp relief, like once-in-a-lifetime events that would happen without me. In July our old friend Mike would be wed in the meadow on his fifty-one-acre spread in Montana. I wanted to be there, among friends, in the gorgeous Montana summer, toasting Mike and his bride with tequila. The world kept going despite the fact that I had been removed to an alternate universe. I wanted to be home desperately, and when I said “home,” that
meant “wherever Larry is” more than Lower Manhattan, but the next seven months stretched out in front of me. I now knew I could do them, but it was still way too early to count the days.

O
N
J
ULY
20 Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement, a pretty typical “split sentence” for white-collar criminals but far below the maximum for her conviction. Some prisoners raised eyebrows over her sentence. About 90 percent of criminal defendants plead guilty. Usually, a defendant who does take a case all the way to court and loses a federal trial is hit hard by the judge, with the maximum sentence, not the minimum; this had happened to a number of women in the Camp who were doing very long bids. Regardless, most of the Camp was convinced that Stewart would be someone’s new bunkie in Danbury, and that would certainly liven things up. If Martha were designated to Danbury I felt pretty sure they’d stick her in the A Dorm “Suburbs” with the OCD cases.

I
HAD
been hearing about Children’s Day since I got to Danbury. Once a year the BOP held an event when kids could come to the prison and spend the day with their mothers. Activities were planned, including relays, face painting, piñatas, and a cookout, and the children got to walk around the Camp grounds with their moms, very vaguely like a regular family enjoying a day at the park. All the other prisoners were confined to their housing areas. For this reason, gals in the know had strongly suggested that I volunteer to help out, if only so that I would not be stuck in my cube for eight hours on a potentially hot day.

They needed a lot of hands, so in the first week of August I was summoned to a volunteer meeting. I would be manning the face-painting booth. When Saturday arrived, it was in fact hot as hell, but the Camp was humming with nervous energy. Pop and her crew were toiling to get the hot dogs and hamburgers ready. Volunteers
were either milling around or getting our stations ready; there was a little pop-up canopy over the face-painting table, scattered with pots and pencils of rainbow-colored greasepaint. I was surprised at how nervous I was. What if the kids were badly behaved and I couldn’t handle them? I certainly wasn’t about to reprimand another prisoner’s kid—just imagine how that would go over. I anxiously questioned the other face painter, who was an old hand. “It’s easy. Just show them the designs and ask ’em what they want,” she said, totally bored. There was a sheet with line drawings of rainbows and butterflies and ladybugs.

The first children arrived for their big day. Kids had to be registered ahead of time, and they had to be dropped off at the visiting room and picked up by the same adult, who could not come into the Camp—the kids had to come alone. Many families had managed to get the kids there from long distances—Maine, western Pennsylvania, Baltimore, and farther—and for some of them it might be the only time they saw their mother this year. Being processed in through the visiting room must have been scary for the kids, who then could go racing into their mother’s arms. After hugs and kisses, they could take their mother’s hand and walk down the stairs by the dining hall and out behind the Camp, to the track and the picnic tables and the outdoors and the whole day stretching in front of them.

Our first customer shyly approached the face-painting booth with her mother, a coworker from the carpentry shop. “Piper, she wants a face painting.”