Orange Is the New Black (33 page)

“Bunkie, you cutting it close.” Natalie would shake her head.

Best case, I was only getting in about six miles on a weekday. I tried to make it up on the weekend, running ten miles around the quarter-mile track on Saturdays and Sundays, but that didn’t help with my daily tides of stress and anxiety about things and people I could not control.

So I started doing more yoga. Initial interest in keeping the yoga class going had surged a bit, but a number of the new adherents (Amy, cursing and squealing with every pose) didn’t last long. Ghada still appeared occasionally to stretch beside me, crooning at me affectionately, but I didn’t have any decent Spanish or Janet’s soothing yogi presence, and she never dozed off with me. Camila would come and do a tape with me sometimes on the weekend, and she was still radiant good company (and could arch into a backbend next to mine), but she was preoccupied with her impending departure to the drug program down the hill. It was mainly me and Rodney Yee.

I got into the habit of rising at five, checking carefully to be sure that the morning count was complete—boots thudding, flashlight beams bobbing, keys sometimes jangling if the CO didn’t care enough to hold them still. I’d stand silently in my cube, hoping to startle them and make them jump. Natalie would already be gone to the kitchen to bake. I would revel in the complete darkness of B Dorm, listening to forty-eight other women breathe in a polyrhythm of deep sleep as I prepared the right measures of instant coffee, sugar, and Cremora. It was warm and peaceful in B Dorm, as I slithered through the warren of cubicles to the hot water dispenser. Occasionally I would see someone else awake—we would nod or sometimes murmur to each other. Steaming mug in hand, I would slip out of the building into the bracing cold and down to the gym to commune with the VCR and Rodney. In the perfect privacy of the empty gym, my body would slowly awaken and warm on the cold rubber floor, my head and heart stayed calmer longer, and the value of Yoga Janet’s teaching became clearer every day. I missed her terribly, and yet she had given me a gift that allowed me to cope without her.

In the last ten months I had found ways to carve out some sense of control of my world, seize some personal power within a setting in which I was supposed to have none. But my grandmother’s illness sent that sense spinning away, showed me how much my choices eleven years earlier and their consequences had put me in the power of a system that would be relentless in its efforts to take things away. I could choose to assign very little value to the physical comforts I had lost; I could find the juice and flair in who and what was precious in my current surroundings. But nothing here could substitute for my grandmother, and I was losing her.

O
N A
gray afternoon I was whipping around the track, pushing myself to keep at a seven-minute-mile speed. Mrs. Jones had given me a digital wristwatch that she never used, and I paced myself relentlessly with it. The weather was crap, it was going to rain. Jae appeared at the top of the hill, gesturing to me urgently. I looked at the watch and
saw that it was only 3:25, thirty-five minutes until count time. What did she want?

I pulled off my earphones, annoyed. “What’s up?” I shouted into the wind.

“Piper! Little Janet wants you!” She beckoned me up again.

If Little Janet wanted something she should bring her young ass down here to the track to talk to me… unless something was wrong?

Sudden panic pushed me up the stairs to Jae. “What is it? Where is she?”

“She’s in her cube. Come on.” I strode along with Jae, tense. She didn’t look like disaster had struck, but Jae was so used to disaster that you couldn’t always tell. We got to A Dorm quickly.

Little Janet was sitting on her bunkie’s bottom bed, and she looked okay. I looked around her cube. It was bare, and there was a box on the floor.

“Are you okay?” I wanted to shake her for scaring me.

“Piper? I’m going home.”

I blinked. What the hell was she talking about?

“What are you talking about, baby?” I sat down on the bed, pushing a pile of paper aside. I thought she might have lost her rabbit-ass mind.

She grabbed my hand. “I got immediate release.”

“What?” I looked at her, afraid to believe what she was saying. Nobody got immediate release. Prisoners put in motions that took months and months to wend their way through the legal system, and they always lost. Immediate release was like the Easter Bunny.

“Are you sure, sweetie?” I grabbed both of her hands. “Did they confirm, did they say for you to pack out?” I looked at her pile of stuff, and I looked at Jae, who was smiling a huge smile.

Toni appeared in the doorway of the now-crowded cube with her coat on, jingling the town driver keys in her hand. “Are you ready, Janet? Piper, can you believe this! It’s incredible!”

I whooped, not a scream but more like a war whoop. And then I crushed Little Janet in a bear hug, squeezing her as hard as I could and
laughing. She was laughing too, in joy and disbelief. When I finally let her go, I put both hands on my head to try to steady myself. I was staggered, as if it were me who was leaving. I stood up and sat down.

“Tell me everything! But hurry, you have to go! Toni, are they waiting for her in R&D?”

“Yeah, but we gotta get her down there before the count, or she’s gonna be stuck behind it.”

Little Janet hadn’t told a soul that she had a motion entered in court—typical jailhouse circumspection. But she had won, and her sixty-month sentence had been cut to the time served, two years. Her parents were on their way to pick up their little girl and bring her home to New York. We hustled her out of her cube and out the back door to where the white van was parked next to the chow hall. It was almost dusk. There were just a few of us, everything was happening so fast no one else knew what was up.

“Janet, I am so happy for you.”

She hugged me, hugged Jae, and kissed her bunkie Miss Mimi, a tiny old Spanish mami. Then she climbed in next to Toni, and the van pulled away, up the incline to the main road that circled the FCI. We waved wildly. Little Janet was turned around in her seat, calling goodbye to us out the window, until the van crested the hill and turned right, out of sight.

I kept watching for what seemed like many minutes after she had disappeared. Then I looked at Jae—Jae who had seven more years to do of a ten-year sentence. She put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “You okay?” she said. I nodded. I was more than okay. Then we turned back and helped Miss Mimi into the Camp.

I
TRIED
to share the indescribable miracle of Little Janet’s freedom with Larry, and he tried to cheer me up with news of our new home in Brooklyn. Larry had been house-hunting while I was away, and many people on the outside found it astonishing that I was comfortable with him picking out a new home for me sight unseen. But not only was I grateful, I also trusted completely that he would find a
great place for us to live. He bought an apartment for us in a lovely, tree-shaded neighborhood.

Still, at the moment it was a little difficult for either of us to grasp the other’s good news. I was having trouble imagining owning anything more than a bottle of shampoo, or living anywhere other than B Dorm, and I stared rather stupidly at the floor plan and paint chips he brought with him. I assured Larry that when I came home to him, I would be Ms. Fixit in our new apartment with all my prison-acquired skills.

On the way out I scowled at the guard on duty; he was a pig, all hands. Before you could enter the visiting room, the guard stepped out to frisk you, to ensure that you were not bringing anything out with you to pass to your visitor. (In fact, a guard could pat you down at any time if they suspected you had contraband on you.) These pat-downs were delivered by both male and female guards and ran the gamut from perfunctory to full-out inappropriate.

Most of the male guards made a great show of performing the absolute minimal frisk necessary, skimming their fingertips along your arms, legs, and waist in such a way that said “Not touching! Not touching! Not really touching!” They didn’t want any suggestion of impropriety raised against them. But a handful of the male guards apparently felt no fear about grabbing whatever they wanted. They were allowed to touch the lower edge of our bras, to make sure we weren’t smuggling goodies in there—but were they really allowed to squeeze our breasts? Sometimes it was shocking who would grope you—like polite, fair, and otherwise upstanding Mr. Black, who did it in a businesslike way. Other male COs were brazen, like the short, red-faced young bigmouth who asked me loudly and repeatedly, “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?” while he fondled my ass and I gritted my teeth.

There was absolutely no payoff for filing a complaint. A female prisoner who alleges sexual misconduct on the part of a guard is invariably locked in the SHU in “protective custody,” losing her housing assignment, program activities (if there are any), work assignment,
and a host of other prison privileges, not to mention the comfort of her routine and friends.

Guards were not supposed to ask us personal questions, but this rule got broken all the time. Some of them were completely matter-of-fact about it. One day, while I was learning how to solder in the greenhouse with one of the cheerful plumbing officers, he posited a friendly “What the hell are you here for?”

But for the guards who knew me better, I could tell, this was a more disturbing question, one that some of them brooded over. One afternoon alone in a pickup truck, another CMS officer turned to me intensely and said, “I just don’t understand it, Piper. What is a woman like you doing here? This is crazy.” I had already told him that I was doing time on a ten-year-old drug charge. He wanted the story badly, but it was more than clear to me that intimacy with a guard would be ruinous for me—or for any prisoner. It made no sense to share any of my secrets with him.

O
N THE
weekend when the New York Marathon took place, I completed thirteen miles on the quarter-mile track, my own private prison half-marathon. The following weekend was unusually warm, beautiful really, and I was enjoying my sabbath ritual,
Little Steven’s Underground Garage
, a two-hour radio program devoted to garage rock and hosted by Steven Van Zandt from the E Street Band and
The Sopranos
that was broadcast on a local radio station at eight every Sunday morning.

Best of all was listening to Little Steven, whether he was riffing on film noir, women, religion, rock rebellion, or the fate of the legendary CBGB’s back home in New York. I never missed the show. I felt like it was keeping a part of my brain alive that would otherwise lie completely dormant—even in prison you had to work at being a nonconformist. I was a freak and an outcast, but in the Underground Garage I always had a home out in the ether. Unless the weather was awful, I would usually listen while chugging around the track for the
full two hours, often laughing out loud. It was like a lifeline that went straight into my ears.

Just one thing marred my ritual today, and that was LaRue, the nasty plastic surgery casualty from B Dorm. LaRue was the only woman in the Camp whom I flat-out loathed. I did not hide my revulsion well, which was considered odd by my friends. “She’s a freak for sure, Piper, but no more so than some of these other wackos. It’s weird how she gets to you.”

She was getting to me now. She was walking around the track in the center of the path, listening to what I assumed must be one of her fundamentalist radio shows, with her arms extended, Christ-like, and singing tunelessly in her high-pitched squeak about Jesus. Every time I lapped her, she remained smack in the middle of the gravel strip, arms spread wide. She was doing it on purpose, I was sure, to aggravate me and to force me off of the path. By the tenth time I passed her, my vision had stained red and I was boiling with focused fury. She was ruining Little Steven, she was ruining my run. I ground my teeth with hatred.

On my eleventh circuit, I watched her from across the oval, fantasizing her own crucifixion. I zoomed around the curve into the straightaway, gaining on her quickly. Her weird ass, fat with implants, remained in the center of the track; her arms stayed pinned to her imaginary cross. And as I closed the distance between us, I raised my own hand and smacked one of hers down as I passed her.

LaRue squawked in surprise and dove to the edge of the track, dropping her radio headset. A stream of Spanish invective followed me around the track. My heart soared for one moment and then immediately crashed. What the hell was wrong with me? What had I allowed this place to do to me? I couldn’t believe I had raised my hand in aggression against another prisoner, especially this pathetic nutjob. Shame washed over me. I stopped running, sick to my stomach.

When I got around the track, LaRue was by the gym, with one of the Spanish mamis I knew from work.

I apologized awkwardly. “Francesca, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Are you all right?”

This was answered with another stream of irate Spanish. I got the gist.

“Francesca, she said she was sorry. Let it go, mami,” advised my coworker. “She’s fine. Just keep running, Piper.”

I
F YOU
are a relatively small woman, and a man at least twice your size is bellowing at you in anger, and you’re wearing a prisoner’s uniform, and he has a pair of handcuffs on his belt, I don’t care how much of a badass you think you are, you’ll be fucking scared.

One of the lieutenants was doing the bellowing, his mouth grim under his bristling mustache and crew cut. It had nothing to do with my smacking LaRue’s imaginary stigmata on the track. I had been caught out of bounds in A Dorm by a renegade, off-duty Mr. Finn, who turned up out of the blue on a night he wasn’t even working and wrote shots for me and seven other out-of-bounds women, lining us up outside his office. This, in turn, earned each of us private face time with the senior officer, who demanded to know if I disputed the charge, shot number 316 in the prison rule book. I said quietly that I did not and offered no excuse.