Orange Is the New Black (24 page)

The construction and carpentry shops were led by Mr. King and Mr. Thomas, respectively. Mr. Thomas was round and volcanic and inclined to noise, jokes, and occasional blue-streak outbursts, like a present-day Jackie Gleason. Mr. King was lean and lanky, taciturn and weathered, always with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He looked like the Marlboro Man. They had been sharing this shop for many years and had a close working relationship. When I would walk into the shop to use the facilities, Mr. Thomas would usually note my presence with a shout: “Hey, criminal!”

Now he wanted to know what the hell I was doing. My fellow B-Dormer, Alicia Robbins, was in the seat of the truck next to him. Alicia was Jamaican and tight with Miss Natalie. She was giggling, so I doubted that I was in trouble.

“Um… nothing?”

“Nothing?! Well, do you want to work?”

“Sure?”

“Well g-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-t in!!!!”

I jumped up and climbed into the truck. Alicia scooted over to make room for me. I didn’t think I could get in trouble if I was with a CO. Mr. Thomas pressed the gas and the truck took off. We veered past
the plumbing and grounds shops, headed behind the FCI, and then abruptly plunged down a steep gravel road. I had no idea where it led. Almost immediately the buildings disappeared, and all I could see through the pickup’s open windows was forest—trees and boulders and the occasional creek—all sloping sharply downward.

The truck radio was blasting classic rock. I looked at Alicia, who was still giggling. “Where is he taking us?” I asked her.

Mr. Thomas snorted.

“Boss crazy” was all Alicia would say.

The road plunged down, down, down. We had been driving for many minutes. It didn’t feel like I was in prison anymore. I felt like a girl in a truck heading toward an adventure. Resting my bare forearm on the truck door, I fixed my gaze deep into the woods, so that when the trees flew by, all I saw was a blur of green and brown.

After several minutes the truck broke into a sort of clearing, and I saw signs of people. In front of us was a picnic area, and some of the women who worked in construction and carpentry were painting wooden picnic tables. But they didn’t interest me at all, because what I saw beyond them filled me with so much excitement. The picnic area lay on the edge of an enormous lake, and the June sunlight was glinting off the water that lapped gently at the edge of a boat launch.

I gasped. My eyes widened, and I could not have cared less about maintaining my cool.

Mr. Thomas parked the truck, and I jumped out. “It’s a lake! I can’t believe how beautiful it is!”

Alicia laughed at me, grabbed her painting gear out of the back of the truck, and ambled over to a picnic table.

I turned to Mr. Thomas, who was also looking at the lake. “Can I go look at it? Please?”

He laughed at me too. “Sure, just don’t jump in. Get me fired.”

I rushed down to the edge, where there were floating docks and a number of small motorboats that belonged to prison staff were moored. I was trying to look everywhere at once. On the far bank I could see houses, beautiful houses with lawns that sloped down to the water. The lake appeared to be very long, disappearing out of sight on
both my right and my left. I crouched down and stuck both my hands into the cool water. I looked at my two white hands through the brownish cast of lake water, palms down, and imagined myself submerged, holding my breath in with my eyes open underwater, and kicking as hard as I could to swim fast. I could almost feel the water swirling in currents around my body, and my hair rising like a halo around my head.

I edged along ten yards of the lake shore in one direction and back again, thinking that this would be the first summer of my life without swimming. I had always been a total water baby, never scared of the surf. Now I itched to rip off my clothes and throw myself in. But that wouldn’t be prudent or fair to the guy nice enough to have brought me down here. The sunlight off the water made me crinkle my eyes. I looked for a long time, and no one said anything to me. Finally I turned and climbed back up the concrete embankment.

I went over to Gisela, who drove the bus and worked for Mr. King, and asked her if there were any extra paintbrushes.

She smiled. “Sure, let me show you.”

And I spent the rest of the afternoon silently painting under the trees, listening to boats on the lake and the sounds of water birds.

When it was time to go, Mr. Thomas drove us back up to the shops. I got out and stood on the passenger side with my hands on the window frame and looked into the truck at him.

“It was really nice of you to bring me down there. Thank you so much, Mr. Thomas. It meant so much to me.”

He looked away; he seemed embarrassed. “Yeah, well, I know that boss of yours won’t bring you down there. So thanks for helping out.” He drove away. From that moment forward, I was obsessed with getting back to the lake.

A
RRIVING AT
work one day, we were startled to discover that DeSimon had shaved off his beard and mustache and now looked a lot like a lost penis, wandering around in search of a body. My interactions with him had grown unpleasant, as I resented the fact that I worked
for the nastiest man in construction services, and he seemed to take perverse pleasure in treating me in as degrading a manner as he could devise. At lunch I was complaining bitterly about him when Gisela stopped me. “Why don’t you come work in construction? I’m going home in September. Mr. King will need somebody good. He’s so nice, Piper.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I could change jobs. A couple days later I sidled up to Mr. King in front of the shop, shy but desperate. I wasn’t used to asking COs for anything.

“Mr. King? I know that Gisela is leaving soon, and I was wondering if maybe I could come work for you in construction?” I waited, hopefully. I knew I was a desirable prison employee: I had my prison license, was willing to work, never “idled” (faked being sick), was educated, and could read manuals, do math, and so forth. And I didn’t have a big mouth.

Mr. King looked at me, chewing on his cigarette, flinty eyes unreadable. “Sure.” My heart leaped, then crashed: “But DeSimon has to sign your cop-out.”

I wrote up the cop-out, a simple one-page form the official title of which was
BP-S148.055 INMATE REQUEST TO STAFF.
The next morning I marched into DeSimon’s office and handed it to him. He did not take it from me. After a while I got tired of thrusting it toward him and put it on the desk.

He looked at it with distaste. “What is that, Kermit?”

“It’s a cop-out, asking you to let me go work in construction, Mr. DeSimon.”

He didn’t even read it. “The answer is no, Kermit.”

I looked at him, his bulbous, shiny pink head, and smiled grimly. I wasn’t surprised. I marched back out of the office.

“What did he say?” asked Amy. We were down to me, my young Eminemlette pal, Yvette, and a couple other women working in the dim, airless electric shop.

“What do you think?” I said.

Amy just laughed, with a hollow wisdom way beyond her years.
“Piper, that man is not going to let you go anywhere, so you might as well get used to him.”

I was furious. Now that I knew there was a better way to live within the confines of the prison, that there were jobs where prisoners were not the constant object of insults, I was desperate to make the switch. Getting out of electric and escaping from DeSimon filled my thoughts.

Summer was getting hot, and for months we had been working on a new circuit for the visiting room air conditioners. The only rooms in the Camp that had air conditioners were the staff offices and the visiting room, but the existing power was insufficient, and they always tripped off. So we had hung and wired a new circuit panel, bent and run conduit around the visiting room, and wired new outlets. Now we were close to finished, and all that remained was to connect the circuit board to the building’s main power source, a floor below in the boiler room.

This involved pulling new cables up from the boiler room power source to the new panel in the visiting room—physically yanking them up through the guts of the building. When the momentous day dawned, we all gathered the tools that DeSimon had directed us to bring and stood in the boiler room, waiting for direction. We didn’t have any big girls in the electric shop, and so reinforcements had been called in from plumbing, which had a bunch of them.

DeSimon busied himself with the cables. They were big thick industrial cables, totally different from the wiring that I now worked with every day. He bundled several of them, then bound them together with black electrical tape, taping over and over until they were bound together for over a foot. At the end he strung a rope, the end of which was snaked up to the visiting room. The women from plumbing were all up there, waiting.

Down in the boiler room stood me, Amy, Yvette, and Vasquez. We looked at DeSimon.

“They’re gonna pull, and you’re gonna push. You’re gonna feed it upward. But we’re missing one thing. We need a greaser.”

The way he said those words, I knew that it must be an unpleasant job. And I knew who it would be.

“Kermit. You’ll be the greaser. Take these.” He handed me elbow-length rubber gloves. “Now grab that tub of lube.” He pointed at a vat of industrial lubricant next to his feet. I could see where this was going. My cheeks were beginning to burn. “You’re going to need a lot, Kermit.”

I grabbed the container. DeSimon shoved the bound cables toward me. They were rigid and inflexible, and I was rigid with humiliation. “That’s gonna need a lot to squeeze in there, Kermit. Lube it up good.”

I bent and scooped up two handfuls of the stuff. It was like bright blue jelly. I slapped it onto the huge, previously innocuous but now disgusting foot-long phallus.

DeSimon threw his head back and yelled “Pull!” The rope yanked, but not enough to move the cables. “C’mon, Kermit, do your duty!”

I was so angry, I could barely see. I concentrated on turning the blood in my veins into ice. I tried floating up to the ceiling in detachment, but the scene was so ugly that my usual technique didn’t work. I scooped up more blue jelly and slapped it all over the bound cables.

“Oooh, horse cock. You like that horse cock, don’t you, Kermit.”

Horse cock? I dropped my hands to my sides, in their big gooey gloves. Amy was looking at her shoes, and Yvette was pretending she didn’t understand any English.

DeSimon yelled “Pull!” again, and somewhere above us prison laborers heaved on the rope. The cables slid. “Pull!” They slid again. “Push!”

My coworkers pushed the cables upward. Seeing them strain, I bent my knees and helped them push up as hard as I could. The cables started to slither upward, and then it was all over but the pulling. I stalked out of the boiler room, stripped off the gloves, and threw them down.

I was blind, nuclear mad. And all I could do was throw the ladders, the tools, and the gear into the back of the truck as hard as I could. My coworkers were unnerved. I didn’t speak to anyone for the rest of the afternoon, and DeSimon didn’t speak to me. Back in the Camp, I tried to shower the slime and humiliation off me. Then I wrote another cop-out, this time to DeSimon’s boss. It read something like this:

That was all the room there was to explain a request on a cop-out.

I was not going to spend the next seven months under the thumb of this pig, I vowed. And I hoped that, in the form of horse cock, he had handed me the trump card for my escape.

At my next opportunity I went to the office of DeSimon’s boss. He was a horse of a different color, making a career of the BOP and moving from prison to prison, climbing the corporate ladder. He was from Texas, where they certainly know something about prisons, and a complete professional. Very tall, he always wore a tie and often cowboy boots, and was unfailingly polite. He was also even-handed, which won him the admiration of the prisoners. Pop called him “My Texas Ranger” and liked it when he would come up to the Camp to eat her cooking.

I knocked on his door, walked in, and handed him my cop-out.

He read through it silently, then looked up at me. “Miss Kerman, I’m not sure I understand what you’re tryin’ to say here. Will you please have a seat?”

I sat and took off my white baseball cap. I could feel my cheeks getting hot again. I chose a spot on his desk to stare at so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with him, so he couldn’t see my shame and I wouldn’t start crying in front of a police. Then I explained what my cop-out meant, in great detail. When I was finally finished, I took a deep breath. Then I raised my eyes and looked at Tex.

He was as red as I was. “I’ll switch you out of there immediately,” he said.

J
ULY DAWNED
with a sour flavor. The entire Camp facility seemed to groan in the heat, overtaxed. The phones stopped working. The washing machines broke, a horror show. Suddenly all the hair dryers disappeared. Two hundred women, no phones, no washing machines, no hair dryers—it was like
Lord of the Flies
on estrogen. I sure as hell wasn’t going to be Piggy.

To escape the Camp’s simmering tensions, I liked to sit under the row of pine trees overlooking the track and the valley beyond, especially at sunset. Now that I knew what the lake looked like, I would imagine diving in, deep under the water, and swimming away. I would strain my ears to catch the sound of the motorboats far below. It was such a pretty spot here, why did they have to ruin it with a prison? I missed Larry terribly on those evenings, wishing that I were with him.