Orange Is the New Black (31 page)

“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.”

A
S 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.

“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!”

·  ·  ·  

T
HE
A
MERICAN
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.

T
he garage girls liked to hang out in the visiting room together in the evenings during the week. I was chilling with them, surrounded by prisoners who were crocheting industriously, watching
Fear Factor
with their headsets on, or just talking. Pom-Pom was doing some sort of art project with colored pencils, probably a birthday card. Suddenly a woman rushed into the room, wild-eyed.

“The CO is destroying A Dorm!”

We followed her out into the hall, where a crowd was gathering. The new CO on duty that night was a pleasant, seemingly mild-mannered, and very big young guy. He, like a huge number of the prison guards, was former military. These folks would finish their commitment to the armed services and have several years in on a federal pension, so they’d end up working for the BOP. Sometimes they’d tell us about their military careers. Mr. Maple had been a medic in Afghanistan.

The CO on duty that night was fresh from Iraq and had just started work at the prison. It was rumored that he had been stationed in Fallujah, where the fighting had been brutal all spring. That night someone from A Dorm had been giving him trouble—some sort of backtalk. And something snapped. Before anyone really knew what was going on, he was down in A Dorm pulling the contents of the cubicles apart, yanking things off the walls, and ripping bedding off mattresses and turning them over.

We were scared—two hundred prisoners alone with one guard having a psychotic break. Someone went outside and flagged down the perimeter truck, which got help from down the hill. The young soldier left the building, and A Dorm residents started to put their cubes back together. Everyone was rattled. The next day one of the lieutenants came up from the FCI and apologized to A Dorm, which was unprecedented. We did not see the young CO again.

N
EWLY
Z
EN
thanks to Yoga Janet, well fed by Pop, and now proficient in concrete-mixing as well as rudimentary electrical work, I felt as if I were making the most of this prison thing. If this was the worst the feds were going to throw at me, no problem. Then when I called my father on the prison pay phone to talk about the Red Sox, he told me, “Piper, your grandmother is not doing well.”

Southern-proper and birdlike but possessing a stern, formidable personality, my grandmother had been a constant figure in my life. A child of West Virginia who grew up in the Depression with two brothers and then raised four sons, she had little idea what to do with a young girl, her eldest grandchild, and I was scared of her. I remained in awe of her, although as I got older, we developed an easier rapport. She spoke frankly to me in private about sex, feminism, and power. She and my grandfather were dumbstruck and horrified by my criminal misadventures, and yet they never let me forget that they loved me and worried about me. The one thing that I feared most about prison was that one of them would die while I was there.