Orange Is the New Black (16 page)

Pop had lived a crazy life on the outside, arriving in this country from Russia at the age of three. She was married out of her parents’ house at eighteen, to a Russian gangster. Their life together had included all the excessive disco splendor of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, and several years on the run from the feds. “The feds tried to nail us every which way… my husband would just laugh. Well, if they want you bad enough, they’re gonna get you. They don’t ever give up.” Her husband was in prison somewhere down south, and her children were grown now. She had lost everything, yet managed to take a dozen years in prison and hold it all together and make the best of it. Pop was cunning and exuberant. She was kind, but she could be ruthless. She knew how to work the system and also how not to let them break you. And they were always trying.

Pop’s grown children came to visit her every week, along with several other family members, murmuring in Russian. The visiting room was the only place I ever saw her in regulation khaki uniform—otherwise she was always in her checked kitchen pants, burgundy smock with “Pop” embroidered on the breast in white yarn, and a hairnet. But for visits she would always fix her hair and put on makeup, so she would look ladylike, girlish almost.

Anyone who received visits on a regular basis usually maintained at least one uniform exclusively for these occasions—one that fit well, was kept pressed and stain-free, and in some instances was specially tailored. It was against prison rules to alter clothing in any way, but that never stopped anyone from trying to find ways to make the drab men’s uniforms a bit more flattering, a bit more feminine. Some women would iron patterned folds into the backs of the boxy, billowy shirts. Everyone knew which inmates had sewing skills, and you could trade commissary goods for a better fit—the Spanish mamis particularly liked to wear their pants tight, tight, tight. I was thrilled when someone gave me a pair of the most desirable flat-front Dickies, which had been taken in at the waist and tapered narrow at the ankle. The inner thighs were threadbare, but my fellow prisoners clicked their tongues approvingly as I sashayed to my visits. “P-I Piper!” my neighbor Delicious shouted appreciatively. “Brick House!” Larry agreed, his eyes popping when he first saw me in the tight pants.

Hair was at least as important as unis. This was not an issue for a blond, straight-haired gal like me, but for the black and Spanish women, it was the source of endless preoccupation and countless woman-hours. You could generally tell who was expecting a visit by the state of their hair. There were frequent disputes about chair time in the salon room, played out against the overpowering smells of perm solution and burning hair. The electric supply for the room was insufficient for the demand, and the circuits tripped all the time. But reprehensible DeSimon refused to do anything about it. “They oughta close that so-called ‘beauty salon’ down,” he snarled when the gals in the shop suggested that the electric crew might work on the wiring there. “It’s not working on these convicts!”

Once a prisoner completed her coiffure, she could move on to makeup. Approximately a third of the population wore makeup almost every day—out of habit, as an effort to feel normal, or to be more alluring either to a staffer or another inmate. It was bought at the commissary or, in the case of one ex-stockbroker who was addicted to Borghese, smuggled in via a visitor. Before she left for the drug program, Nina gave me a little heart-shaped compact, the kind you might find at a dollar store, and I experimented with lurid eye shadow colors. A significant percentage of the Spanish women had tattooed eyeliner, lipliner, and eyebrows, an effect I found unnerving—I associated it with Meatpacking District transsexual hookers. The tattooed brows never matched the real brows, which then had to be plucked or shaved, and with time they would fade from black to blue.

Almost everyone expecting a visit would present themselves pressed, coiffed, and painted on the landing next to the pay phones, where you could see your loved ones approaching up the hill from the parking lot. Those who weren’t expecting visits would plant themselves on the stairs anyway to observe the comings and goings, as a source of vicarious entertainment—they could generally identify any regulars on sight. “Oh, there’s Ginger’s kids! There’s Angela’s parents—he always drops her mom off before he parks, she’s got a bad hip.”

Visitors had to fill out a form stating that they had no firearms or narcotics on their person. The CO would then check the inmate’s list to be sure that the visitor’s name was on it. You had to hope that the list was up to date, something that was completely dependent on the inmate’s counselor. Did he do his paperwork? Had he bothered to turn it in? If not, tough shit. It didn’t matter who your visitor was or how far they had come to see you—they were not getting in. Larry told me how painful it was to watch every visitor—old or young, street punk or fancy yuppie—have to suck it up and kiss the prison guard’s ass in the hope of culling some sort of favor. The power games that fueled so much of the prisoner-guard experience extended to the visiting room.

Larry came to see me every week, and I lived for those visits—they were the highlight of my life in Danbury, a chest-filling affirmation of how much I loved him. My mother drove six hours round-trip until I begged her to come every other week. I saw more of her during the eleven months I was at Danbury than I had in all my previous adult years.

Yoga Janet and Sister Platte always had lots of visitors, aging counterculture hipsters and rosy-cheeked lefties in homespun Guatemalan cottons, respectively. Sister Platte was frustrated by the BOP’s effective censorship of her visiting list—international peace figures had tried to gain permission to visit her and had been denied.

Some women never got visits because they had effectively said goodbye to the outside world. No children, no parents, no friends, nobody. Some of them were halfway around the world from home, and some of them didn’t have a home. Some women stated flatly that they did not want their people to see them in a place like this. In general, the longer you were down, the fewer and farther between were your visits. I worried about my bunkie, Natalie, finishing her eight-year bid; she spoke to her young son on the phone every night and received many letters but didn’t have a single visit in the year we lived together. I observed the unspoken privacy wall we erected between us in our seven-by-ten-foot space, and never asked.

A
LTHOUGH EACH
day often seemed endless, now each week came to an end before I expected it, hastened by visiting hours. I was remarkably lucky to have a visit from someone on Thursday or Friday, and also on Saturday or Sunday. This was a function of Larry and my mother’s commitment, plus that of a large stock of friends in New York who were eager to come see me. Larry juggled my complex visiting schedule with cruise-director aplomb.

When my counselor Butorsky suddenly left, I feared another bureaucratic nightmare. He reportedly preferred early retirement to submitting to the will of Warden Deboo, a much younger
non-“northern” female, and he was replaced with another “lifer,” Mr. Finn, who was also nearing the twenty-year mark at the prison. Finn immediately made enemies among the Camp prisoners and staff by demanding a private office and harassing the orderlies about the quality of their floor-waxing. When he moved into his fancy private office, he placed a brass nameplate on the door. Of course, the damn thing disappeared immediately, which resulted in an army of COs coming in to shake down the Camp. They would not rest until Officer Finn’s nameplate was found!

“You out of the frying pan and into the fire, bunkie,” said Natalie, who knew Finn from previous years down the hill. “That man is nothing nice. At least Butorsky did his paperwork. Finn hates paperwork.”

This stressed me out, given the extensive visiting-list-juggling I was trying to perform. But my blond hair and blue eyes stood me in good stead, just as they had with Butorsky. Mr. Finn was automatically inclined to like me, and when I approached with a new visitor’s form and a timid request that maybe he would grant a special visit or shift my list around as Mr. Butorsky had done, he snorted.

“Gimme that. I don’t give a shit how many people you have on your visiting list. I’ll put ’em all on.”

“You will?”

“Sure.” Finn looked me up and down. “What the fuck are you doing in here? We don’t see women like you much.”

“Ten-year-old drug offense, Mr. Finn.”

“What a waste. It’s a waste for half of you people up in this Camp. Most of you drug people shouldn’t even be here. Not like those scumbags down the hill… there’s one that killed her two kids. I think it’s a waste to keep her alive.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. “So you’ll put that visitor on my list, Mr. Finn?”

“Sure.”

And he did. My visiting list grew beyond twenty-five rapidly, another example of the mystifying way that no prison rule was ever really cast in stone.

·  ·  ·  

L
ARRY AND
my mother were my lifelines to the outside world, but I was also lucky enough to have friends who came to see me. Their visits were particularly refreshing because they weren’t tinged with the guilty knowledge of what I was putting Larry and my family through. I could just relax and laugh my ass off as my friends brought news and questions and observations from their miraculously normal lives.

David, my San Francisco book club buddy and Larry’s ex-roommate, was a visiting room regular. He lived in Brooklyn now and would schlep up to Connecticut on the train once a month. What was especially wonderful about his visits was that he acted as if everything were perfectly normal, surveying the landscape with both curiosity and acceptance. He loved the vending machines—“Let’s stroll over there and get a nosh!” I wanted to weep at how my friends took my calamity in stride.

David excited much attention at the Camp. Perhaps it was his combination of red hair, blasé charm, and arty eyeglasses that attracted so much pointed comment. Or maybe they just weren’t used to gay New York Jews in that neck of the woods. “That’s quite a friend you’ve got there,” commented one of the male COs after a visit. Leered Mr. Finn, “Just pretend I feel about women the way that buddy of yours from the visiting room does.” But the other prisoners loved David, who was always chatty with them. “Did you have a good time today with your faggot friend?” Pop asked after one of David’s visits; of course I had. “Faggots make the best friends,” she said philosophically. “They’re very loyal.”

My dear friend Michael wrote to me every Tuesday on his beautiful Louis Vuitton writing paper; his letters seemed like artifacts of a distant and exotic culture. On his first visit to see me, he had the misfortune of arriving at the same time as the airlift transport bus, and he was treated to the sight of disheveled women in jumpsuits entering the FCI in full shackles, supervised by guards with high-gauge rifles. When I joined him at a card table, cheerful in my tidy khaki uniform, he looked shaken but relieved.

Friends also came from Pittsburgh, Wyoming, and California to visit. My best friend Kristen left her new business in Washington to come see me every month, peering worriedly at my face for signs of trouble that others might not have caught. We have been inseparable friends since the first week of college, an odd pair to be sure: she a fairly proper southerner, a straight arrow, an overachiever driven to please; I a not-so-straight arrow. But deep down she and I are very much the same—similar families, similar values, simpatico. She was going through a rough time; her marriage was ending as her company was being born; and to have a heart-to-heart talk with her best friend, she had to haul ass to a Connecticut prison. I noticed that every time Kristen came to see me, Officer Scott would materialize in the visiting room and gaze at her like a teenage boy.

Once a male friend came to visit me; a tall, curly-headed lawyer, he had been consulting with a pro bono client at a nearby men’s prison, so he decided to stop by on his way home. Usually he and his wife came to see me together. On that quiet Thursday afternoon he and I had a grand old time, talking and laughing for hours.

Afterward Pop cornered me. “I saw you in the visiting room. You looked like you were having some good time. So who is that guy? Does Larry know he’s visiting you?”

I tried to keep a straight face while I assured Pop that my visitor was an old college friend of Larry’s and that yes, my fiancé knew about the visit. I wondered if Larry had any idea how many fans he had behind bars.

When visiting hours were over, the last inmate stragglers hugged and kissed their loved ones goodbye, and we were left together, sometimes lost in our own thoughts, hoping the CO would be lazy and skip the strip searches. If someone was crying, you smiled sympathetically or touched their shoulder. If someone was grinning, you asked, “How was your visit?” as you unlaced your shoes. Once you were finished with squatting naked and coughing, you could burst back through the double doors into the rest of the Camp building, onto the landing, where there were always lots of women loitering,
waiting for the phones, and watching the visitors walk down the hill to the parking lots. If you were quick, you could dart to the window and catch one last glimpse of your visitor departing. Larry only told me later, when I was safe at home, how devastating it was for him to turn back and see me waving goodbye through the glass, and then to head back down the hill, leaving me alone.