Orange Is the New Black (15 page)

“Um… let me think about it, Mr. Butorsky?”

“Sure, Kerman, you go right ahead and think about it.”

On the one hand, being the town driver would mean the opportunity to rendezvous with Larry in gas station bathrooms in the outside world. On the other hand, the town driver was widely held to be the designated Camp snitch. I was no snitch, no way, and clearly no good could come from coziness with prison staff, which the town driver position required. The uncomfortable privilege and collaborator subtext was more than I could stomach. Plus, after my screwdriver misadventure, I didn’t have the stomach for illicit activities, even assignations, no matter how much I lusted for Larry. The next week in Butorsky’s office I quietly turned the job down, much to his surprise.

·  ·  ·  

W
HEN
I first arrived at the Camp, Pop, the ruler of the kitchen, would watch the prison-screened movie-of-the-week flanked by Minetta and Nina, Pop’s bunkie. They would sit in a prime spot in the back of the room and kibitz and enjoy contraband delicacies, courtesy of Pop. When Minetta left for the halfway house, her movie seat was briefly taken by a tall, imposing, and largely silent white girl who was a prolific crocheter and was also leaving soon. Nina was also preparing to depart, but she was going “down the hill” to a nine-month residential drug program. It was for prisoners with documented drug and alcohol addictions who had been fortunate enough to be flagged for the program by their sentencing judge. It was the only serious rehabilitative program at Danbury (other than the puppies), and it is currently the only way in the federal system to significantly reduce your sentence. Campers headed to the drug program were always scared, as it took place not in the Camp but in the “real” prison: high security, lockdown, and twelve hundred women serving serious time, some with life sentences.

Nina had the added concern of finding an acceptable replacement for herself at Pop’s side. After my initial faux pas in the dining room, it didn’t even occur to me that I was a candidate, but one Saturday night in the common room Nina beckoned to me. She and the quiet girl were sitting with Pop. “Piper, come have some food!” Contraband food was irresistible—one did not readily pass up the simple novelty of eating something other than institutional food, cooked with a measure of love. I was pretty damn shy, though, after Pop’s veiled threat in the chow hall.

They had guacamole and chips. I knew the avocados had been purchased from commissary and were not really contraband. I took a little bite but didn’t want to seem greedy. “It’s soooooo good! Thank you!” Pop was looking at me sidelong.

“Go on, have some more!” Nina said.

“I’m okay, I’m kind of full, but thank you!” I started to edge away.

“C’mon, Piper, sit down for a minute.”

Now I was nervous. But I trusted Nina. I pulled up an extra chair and perched on it, ready to flee at any sign of Pop’s displeasure. I made
small talk about the other woman’s imminent return to the outside world, how great it would be for her to be reunited with her teenage son, and whether she would find work with the carpenter’s union. When the movie started I excused myself.

They made the same advance the next week. That night they offered me burgers, fat and juicy compared to the ones in the dining hall. I wolfed one down without prodding, tasting oregano and thyme. Pop seemed entertained by my relish and leaned over to confide: “I use extra spices.”

A day or two later Nina posed a question to me: “Whaddaya think about watching the movie with Pop when I go to the drug program?” she asked.

What?

“She needs someone to keep her company when I leave, and get her ice and soda for her, you know?”

Did Pop really want my company?

“Well… you’re not a wacko, you know? That’s why we’re friends, ’Cause I can really talk to you about things.”

The invitation seemed like the ultimate endorsement… and not one to be turned down lightly. When I saw Pop, I tried to be charming, and perhaps I was somewhat successful. The nonwacko contingent must have been thin on the ground at that time in the Camp, because a week or so later Nina asked me if I wanted to take her place as Pop’s bunkie in A Dorm, “the Suburbs.”

I was perplexed. “But I’m already in B Dorm—I can’t move.”

Nina rolled her eyes. “Piper, Pop gets whatever bunkie she wants.”

I was stunned by this revelation that a prisoner could get what she wanted. Of course, if that inmate is the prime reason that your institutional kitchen runs in an orderly fashion… “You mean, they’ll move me?” More eye rolling. I frowned, lost between contradictory impulses.

B Dorm was certainly living up to its “Ghetto” moniker, with all the irritants of any ghetto. One B Dorm practice alone drove me to the tooth-grinding brink of sanity: people would hang their little
headphones on the metal bunks and blast their pocket radios through the makeshift “speakers,” foisting their staticky music on everyone at top, tinny volume. It wasn’t the music I objected to, it was the terrible audio quality.

But A Dorm seemed populated by a disproportionate number of fussy old ladies, plus the Puppy Program dogs and their people, who were mostly nuts. And I didn’t want anyone to think I was a racist—although nobody else in the Camp seemed to have the slightest compunction about expressing the broadest racial generalizations.

“Honey,” another prisoner drawled to me, “everyone here is just trying to live up to the worst cultural stereotype possible.”

In fact, that was part of the motivation of this new invitation. “Pop don’t want any lesbians in there,” said matter-of-fact Nina. “And you’re a nice white girl.”

On the one hand, Pop would certainly be an advantageous bunkie, as she clearly wielded a lot of influence in the Camp. On the other hand, I had a strong suspicion that she would be a high-maintenance cubemate—look at the hustle Nina was putting on for her.

Finally, I thought about Natalie: how kind she had been to me and how easy she was to live with—and she was just nine months from going home. If I bailed on her, who knew what kind of kook they would stick in Cube 18? “Nina, I don’t think I can just ditch Miss Natalie,” I said. “She has been really good to me. I hope Pop understands.”

Nina looked surprised. “Well… help me think about who else we can get. What about Toni? She’s Italian.”

I said that sounded grand, they would be a perfect fit, and retreated to B Dorm, my Ghetto home.

T
here were a host of religious opportunities at Danbury: a Friday Mass for Catholics, and sometimes a Sunday Mass as well (usually delivered by the “hot priest,” a young padre who played guitar and spoke Italian and was thus adored by all the Italian-Americans); a Spanish Christian service on the weekends; a Buddhist meditation group and also rabbinical visits on Wednesdays; and a wacky weekly nondenominational be-in led by volunteers armed with acoustic guitars and scented candles. The biggie, though, was the “Christian” (aka fundamentalist) service held in the visiting room on Sunday evenings after visiting hours were over.

In March I asked Sister Rafferty, the German nun who was the head chaplain, whether there would be any provision for Episcopalians on Easter Sunday. She looked at me as if I had three heads, then replied that if I wanted to hunt down my own minister and put him or her on my (full) visitors’ list, then we could use the chapel. Thanks for nothing, Sister!

I found the religious prostrations of my saber-rattling born-again neighbors tedious. Some of the faithful had a distinct aspect of roostering, loudly proclaiming that they were going to pray on any number of topics, how God was walking beside them through their incarceration, how Jesus loved sinners, and so on. Personally, I thought that one could thank the Lord at a lower volume and
perhaps with less self-congratulation. You could worship loudly and still act pretty lousy, abundant evidence of which was running around the Dorms.

There were no new spring hats or dresses in prison, but the week before Easter someone erected a creepy giant wooden cross behind the Camp, right outside the dining hall. I was confronted with it at breakfast and could only ask “What the fuck?” of Mrs. Jones, the gruff old queen of the Puppy Program and one of the old ladies who always came to breakfast. I was surprised to learn that she was only fifty-five. Prison will age a gal prematurely.

“They always put it up,” she reported. “Some clown from CMS came up and did it.”

A few days later Nina and I were discussing the impending holidays over a cup of instant coffee. Levy and the one other Jew in residence, the decidedly more likable Gayle Greenman, had been given boxes of matzoh by the German nun for Passover. This excited the interest of the other prisoners. “How come they get them big crackers?” a neighbor from B Dorm asked me, probing the mysteries of faith. “Them crackers would be good with jelly.”

Nina, her bangs in rollers, tilted her head as she reminisced about Passovers past. “One year I was in Rikers. Matzoh was the only edible thing they gave us,” she mused, rolling her cigarette thoughtfully between her fingers. “It’s a delicious with buttah.” This year I would not be ferrying back and forth between Larry’s family’s seder and my own Easter traditions. Too bad—I love the ten plagues.

Pop and her crew pulled out all the stops for Easter dinner. It was positively lavish, a spring miracle. The menu: baked chicken and cabbage with astonishing dumplings, so dense you could have used them as weapons; mustardy deviled eggs; and real vegetables on the salad bar. For dessert, we had Natalie’s very special bird’s nest confection—a deep-fried tortilla cupping a mound of pudding, covered with lush green-dyed coconut “grass” strewn with jelly bean “eggs,” and a gaily colored marshmallow Peep perched on top. I just stared at it, unable to believe my eyes, while everyone around me ate enthusiastically. I
didn’t want to eat this incredible diorama. I wanted to shellac it and save it forever.

R
IGHT AFTER
Easter, Nina left to go down the hill to the high-security prison for the drug program. I would miss her. She had been knitting a scarf for weeks and weeks, and I had been consulting on it. “What color do you think now?” she would say, pulling out a remarkable collection of little scraps of yarn she had scavenged. “Purple!” I would point. “Green!”

The whole Camp was in the process of readying the eight women who were entering the strict nine-month drug program. This process included purging any contraband they might have, acquiring new stuff at commissary, and loading them up with snacks and messages to carry to women who were doing time down the hill. It was a bit like sending them off to a scary summer camp.

Nina would be just a few hundred yards away behind that awful fence, but it might as well have been thousands of miles. I might never see her again.

Along with the seven other women, her duffel bag was loaded into the town driver’s van, and I hugged her. “Thank you, Nina, for everything.”

“The scarf’s for you, Piper! I’m gonna finish it!” Pop was crying.

As Nina headed down the hill to the FCI, I felt a real sense of loss. She was the first real friend I had made, and I wouldn’t have any contact with her at all. Prison is so much about the people who are missing from your life and who fill your imagination. Some of the missing were just across the prison grounds—I knew a half-dozen women who had sisters or cousins down the hill in the high-security prison. One day while walking back to work after lunch, I glimpsed Nina through the back gate of the FCI and went crazy jumping up and down and waving. She saw me and waved too. The truck that patrolled the prison perimeter screeched to a halt between us. “Cut that shit out!” came sharply from the guard inside.

Pop, who had spent many years “down on the compound” before being moved up to the Camp, had enlisted multiple messengers to deliver treats to her friends still behind the wire. Living in A Dorm, “the Suburbs,” Pop had an enormous locker in her cube, twice the size of mine and Natalie’s. It was crammed with a bounty of her favorite things—food items like SPAM that were no longer available on commissary, clothing from long ago that no one else had, and most important, perfume. She liked to mix her own—a little White Diamonds, a little Opium.
Eau de Pop.
“I’m almost done,” said Pop as she selected a few precious contraband lace brassieres to send to a friend doing life down the hill. “What am I hanging on to these for? I go home in January; I’ll get pretty new bras for my jewels!”

Pop was a source of wonder and mystery and revelation. I didn’t know it at the time, but Nina had set me up with the woman who would help me do my time in every sense of the word, who would baby me when I needed it most and tell me to suck it up and get tough when there was no other option. She had cast a skeptical eye over me at first. But when I procured a wooden board from the CMS shop to put under her mattress for back support, her opinion of me improved significantly. My ability to write her furlough requests was also useful. But it was my voracious appetite for her cooking and her stories that won her over.