Orange Is the New Black (37 page)

First they unloaded about a dozen prisoners from the plane, men in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and attires. Some of them appeared to be wearing paper jumpsuits, not the best deal in the biting January wind. Disheveled and cold, they seemed pretty interested in our little group huddled next to the Danbury bus. Then the armed figures were shouting at us over the wind to line up, with plenty of room between each of us. We performed the tarmac jig that is done when one is trying to move as quickly as possible against restraints. After a rough pat-down, a female marshal checked my hair and my mouth for weapons, and the hop was on to the stairs up to the plane.

On board were more marshals, enormous beefy men and a handful of weathered-looking women in navy blue uniforms. As we clinked and clanked into the passenger seating area, we were greeted by a wave of testosterone. The plane was packed with prisoners, all of whom appeared to be male. Most of them were very, very happy to see us. Some were making a lot of noise, declaring what they would like to do to us, offering critiques as we shuffled up the aisle as directed by the marshals. “Don’t you look at them!” the marshals shouted at us. Clearly, they had calculated that it was much easier to focus control on the behavior of a dozen females than two hundred males.

“What are you scared of, Blondie? They can’t do anything to you!” shouted the male prisoners. “Over here, Blondie!” They were proven wrong in my mind later in the trip when a big man rose from his seat, loudly protesting that he needed a bathroom, and the marshals promptly tasered him. He flopped around like a fish.

Con Air is like a layer cake of the federal prison system. Every sort of prisoner is represented; sad-looking middle-aged upper-class white men, their wire-rim glasses sometimes askew or broken; proud cholos looking vaguely Mayan and covered in gang markings; white women with bleached-out hair and very bad orthodontia; skinhead types with swastika tattoos on their faces; young black men with their hair bushed out because they had been forced to undo their cornrows; a skinny white father-and-son pair, obvious because they were the spitting image of each other; a towering black man in extra-heavy restraints who might be the most imposing figure I have ever seen; and of course, me. When I was escorted for a bathroom break (difficult to manage when one’s wrists are chained to one’s waist), in addition to lascivious invitations and threatening catcalls, I was treated to more than one “Whatcha doin’ HERE, Blondie?”

I was feeling more positively about everyone’s shackles. I was so glad that Jae was next to me, craning her head to see everything too. Still, it was unnerving that she and her cousin didn’t know what legal proceeding they were headed toward. We all agreed that if, God forbid, they had “caught another case” (been charged with another crime), they should have been told. But maybe not. They didn’t have high-end representation like me.

Con Air does not fly direct. The jumbo airliners act more like puddle-jumpers, stopping hither and yon to pick up convicts being transported all over the country for all kinds of reasons—court appearances, facility transfers, postsentencing designation. Some prisoners appeared to be fresh off the street, still in civilian clothes. They brought on a Spanish guy with long black hair who would have resembled Jesus were his face not so hard; he was so good-looking, it was like a kick in the gut. At one stop more women got on. One of them paused in the aisle, waiting for a marshal to tell her where to sit. She was a scrawny little white woman, missing teeth, with a cloud of hair that was an indeterminate shade somewhere between gray and peroxide. She looked like a woebegone yard chicken, like she had led a hard life. As she stood there, some wiseass called out, “Crack kills!” and half the plane, which must have contained some crack dealers, busted out laughing. Her homely face fell. It was like the meanest thing you ever saw on the schoolyard.

At about eight
P.M.
we landed in Oklahoma City. I believe that the Federal Transfer Center sits at the edge of the airport there, but I can’t be completely sure, as I never saw the outside world—the planes taxi right up to the prison to unload their heavily tattooed cargo. By default and necessity, it is a maximum-security facility that houses many prisoners during the course of their airlift experiences. Until I reached Chicago, this would be my new quarters.

We arrived at our new unit hours later, approximately twenty exhausted women who were issued sheets, pajamas, and small packets of hygienic necessities and ushered into a triangular cavern lined with two tiers of cells. It was darkened and deserted, because its inhabitants were already in lockdown. The CO was a ferocious six-foot Native American woman who barked out our cell assignments. I had never been in an actual cell before, let alone locked in with a cellie. I crept into my assigned spot, about six by twelve feet with a bunk bed, a toilet, a sink, and a desk bolted to the wall. I could see in the dim fluorescent light that someone was asleep in the top bunk. She rolled over and gave me the eye, then rolled away and went back to sleep. I crawled in and dozed off, grateful to have running water and free range of movement.

Thudding, shouting, and my cellmate vaulting out of her bunk awakened me. “Breakfast!” she said over her shoulder, disappearing. I got up and stepped cautiously out of the cell, wearing the washed-out hospital-green pajamas I had been given the night before. Women were scurrying from the numbered cells to get into line on the other side of the unit. Not one of them was in her pajamas. I hurried to get back into yesterday’s nasty clothes and headed toward the line. After receiving a plastic box, I located Jae and Slice, who had claimed a table near my cell. Our boxes contained dry cereal, a packet of instant coffee, a packet of sugar, and a clear plastic bag of milk that struck me as one of the strangest things I had ever seen. But when you mixed the coffee powder with the milk and sugar in a green plastic mug and put it in the unit microwave (an ancient contraption that looked like it belonged on a
Lost in Space
episode), it tasted okay. I pretended that it was cappuccino. “We’re going to starve,” Slice declared. Jae and I feared she was right. We discussed our predicament, and Slice, who was a hungry woman of action, departed on a recon mission. Jae and I retreated to our respective cells.

I finally got a formal introduction to my new bunkie. “What’s your name?” she drawled. I introduced myself. She was LaKeesha, from Atlanta, and on her way to… Danbury! The minute she heard I was coming from Danbury, she had a million questions. Then she
crawled back into her bed and went to sleep. I soon discovered that LaKeesha slept about twenty-two hours a day, getting up three times to eat and, mercifully, shower. She always looked disheveled, though, emerging from our cell with her twists sticking out in all directions. “Peeper, what’s wrong with your bunkie? She looks like Celie in
The Color Purple
!” cracked Slice.

I was totally wired on my first day in Oklahoma City—it was a brand-new scenario to get the hang of, with all new rituals and routines. Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing to do. There were three TV rooms without chairs, and one little rolling bookshelf filled with a bizarre assortment of volumes—Christian books, ancient copies of John D. MacDonald, Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
, a handful of romances, and two Dorothy L. Sayers novels. A weird structure in the middle of the unit looked like a reception desk and contained nothing but stubby little pencils and various forms of scrap paper. Next to three pay phones there was an outdoor room where smokers shivered, and you could see a slice of the sky over a partial wall topped with razor wire. The unit felt like a train or bus station, but without a newsstand or a coffee shop. I tried to use the pay phone to call Larry or my parents to tell them I was alive, but the phone would place only collect calls, and no one’s phone service would accept them, which intensified the feeling that I had been dropped into a plane of being that didn’t exist to the rest of the world.

Women came and went quietly. The place was subdued and spotlessly clean. The unit seemed to be at most half full, maybe sixty women in the breakfast line. At eleven
A.M.
the CO brought in large rolling carts, signaling that lunch was going to be served. I watched a woman emerge from a cell on the top tier and descend the stairs on the opposite side of the unit. That curly hair, that fireplug shape… glasses. Something stirred in my belly; I sat up very straight. What was Nora Jansen doing in here with me?

I had been certain that a “separation order” would be placed on my codefendants and me, but apparently I was wrong. I stared at her as she got in the chow line. “Come on, Peeper!” Slice nudged me to get my lunch. Despite her obvious misgivings about befriending
skinny white girls, she was willing to accept me as Jae’s buddy, especially given that I didn’t eat much. I trailed behind my two companions, drawing a bead on the woman who I thought was Nora.

In the past eleven months I had occasional thoughts of Nora—bad thoughts. I wanted to be certain before I made a move. I had fantasized about confronting the woman I’d followed down the wrong path, the woman who had likely ratted me out. In my head I usually set the moment in a lesbian bar in San Francisco and imagined much smashing of bottles with pool cues and breaking of pug noses and general bloodletting. Now the real moment had arrived. What was I going to do?

The short, curly-headed, and decidedly middle-aged woman received her lunch box and turned to head to a table. It was the same woman I had followed to Indonesia, to Zurich, to the Congress Hotel. If I had never met her, I wouldn’t be sitting here now holding a bag of lukewarm milk and wearing government clothing. It was the same French bulldog face ten years later—ten apparently long, hard years. She looked like hell. She glanced at me as she passed, and I saw the shock of recognition cross those flattened features. I held my breath, my pulse pounding.

At the table with my companions, I hissed, “Jae! I think I see one of my codefendants!”

Jae looked at me, very serious. Almost all drug prisoners have codefendants, and that can have a host of meanings, but Jae knew immediately from my tone that this was not a good thing.

“What’s up?” asked Slice, catching that there was a problem.

“Piper thinks she got one of her codefendants here, and she’s surprised.”

“Where?”

I indicated without pointing.

They relaxed a little. “That old lady?” “Shee-it, Peeper, what kind of gangster is you anyway?”

I glared at them. “Jae, I think that bitch ratted me out.”

All levity ceased. Slice studied Nora. Jae thought for several moments, then spoke deliberately.

“Piper, you do what you need to do, knowhatmsayin’, but know
this—you will be in the SHU the rest of the time here. If it sucks like this here, imagine what the SHU is like. And fuck knows what else is gonna happen to you. You about to go home, to your man who you know loves you, he got his ass up in the visiting room every damn week. Is that bitch worth it to catch another case? I’ma back you up
to a point.
I’m telling you f’real though, I am not going to the SHU, but I respect that you gotta do what you need to.”

Slice piped in, “I’m not going to the SHU either, not for some white girl I don’t even know. No offense, Peeper. But do your thing.”

I did nothing. Jae kept a worried eye on me. Slice procured a full deck of playing cards from another prisoner and began to shuffle them. I couldn’t stand it, though. I took a break and lay on my bunk and stared at the cinder-block wall. The woman who had landed me here was finally within my grasp, and I was paralyzed. Would I really do nothing?

I left my cell and stalked around the unit, which took about three minutes. Nora was nowhere to be found. Jae gestured me over. “C’mon, Piper, play with us.”

Jae and her cousin riffed back and forth as we played cards. Slice was full of very funny accounts about the life of a bulldagger on the make in the FCI back in Danbury, including the story of being caught in the act in the middle of the night by a guard we all knew. “I froze, man, he’s got his flashlight on us, and it wasn’t the kinda situation where you can deny, know what I mean? And he just said, ‘Let me watch.’ Sooooooo…” and she indicated getting back to business. It was the same guy who had bird-dogged me for giving Pop an innocent foot massage. Filthy pig.

By the time the dinner cart showed up after the four o’clock count, we were laughing our asses off. When we took the lid off the plastic trays, the stench made us slam them back on immediately. Jae spoke up, after a beat: “We’re gonna have to kill one of these bitches and eat her, or starve.”

I was crossing the unit to return my tray when I saw Nora headed toward me. I squared my shoulders and adopted my most arctic ice-queen stare. As we passed, she looked at me uncertainly.

“Hi,” she said, almost under her breath.

I stalked by her.

“What happened?” asked Jae, concerned.

“Tried to say hello to me.” I shook my head, and we started playing cards again. “You know, the thing I can’t figure out is why she’s here and her sister isn’t.”

“Her sister?”

“Yeah, her sister’s my codefendant too. She’s doing time in Kentucky.”

The next morning at breakfast, there was Hester. That was the way it was in Oklahoma—new people materialized in the middle of the night while you were locked down in the cells. They popped up at breakfast, a day-making novelty. I witnessed the sisters’ reunion from my turf—they hugged ecstatically and headed to a corner to confer.

My companions took note. “You need to kill sis, too?” asked Slice.

“Nah, I never had any beef with Hester—she’s all right.”

Time had been kinder to Hester. She looked more or less the same, perhaps due to her old chicken bone charms: long reddish curly hair, a faraway but quizzical expression, and a witchy, mystical demeanor.

For the weeks that we spent in Oklahoma City, I refused to acknowledge the sisters’ presence. Max lockdown was torturous in its monotony and lack of stimulation; the hours and the days crawled by. Flights arrived and departed almost every day, but you never knew when you might be put on one. It was the perfect realization of limbo—departure from one realm of being, waiting to arrive at another. Oklahoma City made me homesick for the Danbury Camp, a surreal and disturbing feeling. I was accustomed to hours of strenuous activity every day, between working construction, running, and the gym. Here the only options were push-ups and yoga in my cell and “walking the tiers,” actually circling the tiers hundreds of times in my canvas slippers until my blisters bled. Back in Danbury Sister Platte had used the hall as a makeshift treadmill during inclement weather.
I would sometimes fall into step next to her. She moved pretty fast for a sixty-nine-year-old, and her constant good spirits amazed me. “How are you holding up, dear?” the little nun would ask me.