Orange Is the New Black (25 page)

I checked the callout every day to see if my work assignment had changed. After a week I learned that my attempt to escape the electric shop had been thwarted because rotten DeSimon had gone on vacation unannounced, and Tex wouldn’t transfer me out to construction until he returned. I couldn’t understand this at all.

But when I pressed him, sounding as desperate as I was, the big Texan put his hands up as if to say stop. “You’re going to have to trust me and be patient, Miss Kerman. I’ll get you out of there.”

·  ·  ·  

M
IRACULOUSLY, MY
transfer from electric to construction finally happened, popping up on the callout at the end of July. Tex had been as good as his word. I did a little victory dance in the Camp’s main hall.

My new coworkers included my buddy Allie B., the cheerful six-foot oddball from B Dorm, and Pennsatucky, who was in contention for white girl with the biggest mouth. The carpentry shop was largely made up of Spanish mamis, including Maria Carbon, the almost-catatonic girl I had greeted in Room 6 back in February. She had regained her equilibrium in the intervening months, and the difference between that terrified girl and this slightly macho, bravado-filled convict was striking. Everyone was welcoming to me, and there was no evidence of the downtrodden misery I was used to in electric. The construction and carpentry shops were housed together and smelled of wood and paint and sawdust. I now worked for Mr. King, the chain-smoking Marlboro Man.

I
HAD
a new neighbor in B Dorm, who I nicknamed Pom-Pom based on her hairdo. Pom-Pom was a bashful twenty-two-year-old who spent a lot of time sleeping and quickly got a rep for laziness. She probably slept so much because she was depressed, a normal enough response to prison. She had been assigned to work in the garage, where she pumped gas into the prison vehicles enthusiastically; she didn’t seem lazy to me. If you looked at her and smiled, she would cast her eyes away but smile her own shy smile.

One day in the dinner line Pom-Pom abruptly turned to me and began to talk. I barely knew her and assumed she must be speaking to someone else, her coworker Angel perhaps, who was standing on my other side. No, she was speaking to me, and with some intensity.

“Boss called me into his office today, and he was asking me if I’ve had any relatives here before.” Mr. Senecal was her boss in the garage. “So he was asking me, and it turns out my mother worked for him.”

I looked at Pom-Pom. At present we had three sets of sisters locked up in the Camp, and another neighbor’s mother had apparently been shipped out right before I arrived. At this point in my own prison stay, it was less surprising to me that she was a second-generation federal inmate than that she did not know her mom had worked in the garage.

“You didn’t know she worked in the garage?” I asked.

“No, I knew she was here, my aunt told me, but she never told me nothing about it.”

I had a terrible suspicion that Pom-Pom’s mother might be dead.

Angel, her coworker, was of course listening in and gently asked the question: “Where’s your mom?”

“I have no idea,” replied Pom-Pom.

I felt even worse, but I was still curious. “How did Senecal know?”

“He just guessed. He thought it was my sister, but he just guessed.”

“Do you look like your mom? He guessed from looking at you?”

“I guess so—he asked me, ‘Tall and skinny, right?’” Pom-Pom laughed. “He said he just had a feeling, so he asked me. Then he asked me what I was doing here.”

I wondered if the prison staff connected the miseries of their chosen profession with the miseries of their prisoners’ children. Did it trouble Mike Senecal to find Pom-Pom in Danbury, and was he waiting for her children to show up? Maybe if her mother had been put in treatment for her addictions (which were implicit) rather than in the garage in Danbury, Pom-Pom wouldn’t be standing in his office today.

“What did Senecal say about your mom?”

“He said she never gave him any trouble.”

I didn’t much care for Pom-Pom’s boss, but I liked to hang out in the garage. I stopped in every morning to get the white construction pickup and shoot the breeze with the gals who worked there pumping gas and fixing trucks. There was a debate going on about what was the song of the summer.

Angel said it was the big crossover reggaeton hit with Daddy Yankee; I didn’t know the name was “Oye Mi Canto,” but we could all sing the refrain:

Bonnie snorted. “Y’all are crazy,” she said. “It’s Fat Joe!”

We all replied, “Lean Back,” and dropped one shoulder back in smooth unison.

Kenyatta said, “Well, I don’t like her, but that song by Christina Milian—‘Pop, Pop, Pop That Thang’? That song is blowing up.”

This made me giggle. In yoga class the other day Yoga Janet had been trying to get us to loosen up our hips. “Okay, everyone, wiggle your hips. Shake them out. Now rotate them, circle left… now right. Okay, now I want you to pop your hips forward, your pelvis, in a smooth motion. I want you to Pop That Thing!” Sister Platte had been bemused: “Pop that thing?” Camila and I had died.

Pom-Pom spoke up. “I don’t know where you think y’all are at, but there’s just one song this summer. And that’s ‘Locked Up.’ Look around you! End of discussion.”

We had to admit, she was dead on. All summer long, anywhere there was a radio playing, you could hear the almost eerie, plaintive voice of Akon, a Senegalese rapper, singing about prison.

Even if the song had not been a huge hit on the outs, it had to be the guiding anthem in a place like the Camp; you heard women who weren’t even hip-hop fans humming it tunelessly under their breath as they folded laundry: “‘I’m locked up, they won’t let me out, nooooo, they won’t let me out. I’m locked up.’”

I
was a big fan of my coworker Allie B. She made me laugh all the time. She seemed lighthearted—that is, when she wasn’t pissed off about something; her pendulum swung a little wildly. She didn’t have the heavy hallmarks of incarceration on her, even though this was not her first time down—in fact she was a violator, which made sense because she was a junkie. But she wasn’t locked up for a drug crime, so she wasn’t getting any kind of treatment for her addictions.

I would ask her, “C’mon, you’re clean, and you’ve been clean for the whole time you’ve been locked up, so why go back to it?”

She would just cock her head and smile. “You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about, Piper,” she said. “I cannot wait to get a taste, that and some dick.”

This we knew: as much as Allie loved to get high, she also loved sex. She would run filthy and hilarious commentary under her breath about any man she saw who struck her fancy—prison guard, staffer in a tie, or the occasional unsuspecting delivery guy who wandered into our field of vision.

Allie would sometimes refer to me as her “wife,” to which I would respond, “Fat fucking chance, Allie.” She occasionally experienced bursts of (I think) mock-lust, during which she would chase me around B Dorm screaming filthy things and trying to yank down my gray running shorts while I screeched. Our neighbors quickly grew irritated by our roughhousing.

From her speech and her writing, and despite her passion for
Fear Factor
, I could tell that Allie was better educated than most prisoners. Without asking my pal the personal questions,
verboten
even between friends, I had to guess that her multiple stints in prison were due to her addiction. I worried about Allie; I certainly hoped that she would never see the inside of a prison again, but more than that, I was concerned that she could end up dead.

I had similar concerns for Allie’s sidekick Pennsatucky, who had been a crack addict (I could tell from her blackened front teeth). Unlike Allie, Pennsatucky didn’t want to get high as soon as she hit the streets. She wanted to get her daughter back. The child, an angelic-looking toddler, lived with her father. Pennsatucky had no parental rights. She was “not right,” according to women around the Camp, which was something said about people who struggled with behavioral problems or sometimes outright mental illness. The conditions of the prison did not make these challenges easier.

Now that I had known Pennsatucky for a while and worked with her, I thought she had more on the ball than people gave her credit for. She was perceptive and sensitive but had great difficulty expressing herself in a way that was not off-putting to others, and she got loud and angry when she felt disrespected, which was often. There was nothing wrong with Pennsatucky that would have prevented her from living a perfectly happy life, but her problems made her vulnerable to drugs and to the men who had them on offer.

If your drug problem lands you on the wrong side of the law, you might end up detoxing on the floor of a county jail. Once you get to your long-term prison home, the first thing they’ll want to do is assess your psychiatric state… and prescribe you some drugs. The twice-daily pill line in Danbury was always long, snaking out of the medical office into the hall. Some women were helped enormously by the medication they took, but some of them seemed zombified, doped to the gills. Those women scared me; what would happen when they hit the streets and no longer could go to pill line?

When I walked through the terrifying gates of the FCI seven months before, I certainly didn’t look like a gangster, but I had a
gangster mentality. Gangsters only care about themselves and theirs. My overwhelming regret over my actions was because of the trauma I had caused my loved ones and the consequences I was facing. Even when my clothes were taken away and replaced by prison khakis, I would have scoffed at the idea that the “War on Drugs” was anything but a joke. I would have argued that the government’s drug laws were at best proven ineffectual every day and at worst were misguidedly focused on supply rather than demand, randomly conceived and unevenly and unfairly enforced based on race and class, and thus intellectually and morally bankrupt. And those things all were true.

But now, when I looked in dismay at Allie, who was champing at the bit to get back to her oblivion; when I thought about whether Pennsatucky would be able to keep it together and prove herself the good mom that she aspired to be; when I worried about my many friends at Danbury whose health was crushed by hepatitis and HIV; and when I saw in the visiting room how addiction had torn apart the bonds between mothers and their children, I finally understood the true consequences of my own actions. I had helped these terrible things happen.

What made me finally recognize the indifferent cruelty of my own past wasn’t the constraints put on me by the U.S. government, nor the debt I had amassed for legal fees, nor the fact that I could not be with the man I loved. It was sitting and talking and working with and knowing the people who suffered because of what people like me had done. None of these women rebuked me—most of them had been intimately involved in the drug business themselves. Yet for the first time I really understood how my choices made me complicit in their suffering. I was the accomplice to their addiction.

A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. (I was lucky to get
there on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead, our system of “corrections” is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in.

V
ANESSA ROBINSON
was a male-to-female transsexual who had started her bid down the hill in the FCI. Within the confines of the Danbury plantation, her presence was notorious; the COs insisted on calling her “Richard,” her birth name. One day the Camp was abuzz. “The he-she is coming up!!!”

There was great anticipation of Miss Robinson’s arrival. Some women swore that they would not speak to her; others professed fascination. The West Indian women and some of the Spanish mamis expressed disgust; the born-agains made outraged noises; and the middle-class white women looked bemused or nervous. The old-timers were blasé. “Ah, we used to have a bunch of girls that were trying to go the other way. They were protesters,” said Mrs. Jones.

“The other way?” I asked.

“Go from a girl to a boy, always bitching about their medication and bullshit,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand.

I soon got my first glimpse of Vanessa—all six feet, four inches of blond, coffee-colored, balloon-breasted almost-all-woman that she was. An admiring crowd of young women had gathered around her, and she lapped up the attention. This was no unassuming “shim” unfortunately incarcerated and trying to get along; Vanessa was a full-blown diva. It was as if someone had shot Mariah Carey through a matter-disrupter and plunked her down in our midst.