Orange Is the New Black (9 page)

I went to wait outside the big recreation room where visits were held. A red light was mounted on the wall of the visiting room. After a prisoner saw her people walk up the hill and into the Camp building, or if she heard her name called over the PA system, she would flip a light switch by the side of the room’s double doors, and a red light on the other side of the doors would go on too, alerting the visiting room CO that the prisoner was in place, waiting to see their visitor. When the CO felt like it, they would get up, go to the doors, pat down the inmate, and allow her into the visiting room.

After an hour or so on the landing next to the visiting room, I began to wander the main hall, bored and nervous. When I heard my name called over the PA system—“Kerman, report to visitation!”—I racewalked up to the landing. A female guard with curly hair and bright blue eye shadow was waiting for me on the landing. I spread my arms and legs, and she skimmed her fingertips along my extremities, under my collar, below my sports bra, and around my waistband.

“Kerman? First time, right? Okay, he’s in there waiting for you. Watch the contact!” She pulled open the visiting room door.

For visits the large room was set up with card tables and folding
chairs. When I arrived, they were about half filled, and Larry was sitting at one of them, looking anxious and expectant. When he saw me, he jumped to his feet. I walked as quickly as I could to him and threw my arms around him. I was so grateful that he looked happy. I felt like myself again.

Hugging and kissing your visitors (no tongue!) was permitted at the beginning and end of the visit. Some guards would allow hand-holding; some would not. If a guard was having a bad day, week, or life, we would all feel it in that bleak, linoleum-floored visiting room. There were always two prisoners working in the visiting room too, assisting the CO, and they were stuck making small talk with the guard for hours.

Larry and I took our seats at the card table, and he just stared at me, smiling. I felt suddenly shy, and wondered if he saw a difference in me. Then we started to talk, trying to cover an impossible amount of ground all at once. I told him what had happened after he left the prison lobby, and he told me what it had been like for him to have to leave. He said that he had talked to my parents, that they were holding up, and that my mother was coming to visit tomorrow. He listed all the people who had called to try to find out how I was and who had sent in requests to be approved as visitors. I explained to him that there was a twenty-five-person limit on my visitor list. Our friend Tim had set up a website,
www.thepipebomb.com
, and Larry was posting all the relevant information (including an FAQ) there.

We talked for hours (visiting hours were three to eight
P.M.
on Fridays), and Larry was curious about every detail of prison so far. Together at the card table, I could relax the taut watchfulness and caution that had governed my every move for the last three days and almost forget where I was, even as I shared every discovery that my new life offered. I felt so loved sitting there with him, and more confident that someday I would be able to leave this horrible place behind. I reassured Larry countless times that I was okay. I told him to look around—did the other prisoners look so bad? He thought they did not.

At seven forty-five it was time for Larry and the other visitors to leave. My whole heart clutched up. I had to leave the bubble of love around our card table. I wouldn’t see him for another week.

“Did you get my letters?” he asked.

“No, not yet, no mail. Everything here is on prison time… slow motion.”

Departures were tough, and not just for us. A toddler didn’t want to leave her mother and wailed as her father struggled to get her into her snowsuit. Visitors and prisoners shifted from one foot to another as they tried to say goodbye. We were all permitted a final hug, and then watched as our loved one’s backs disappeared into the night. The more experienced prisoners were already unlacing their shoes, getting ready for the strip search.

This ritual, which I’d repeat hundreds of times in the next year, never varied. Remove shoes and socks, shirt, pants, T-shirt. Pull up your sports bra and display your breasts. Show the soles of your feet. Then turn your back to the female prison guard, pull down your underpants and squat, exposing yourself. Finally, force a cough, which would theoretically cause any hidden contraband to clatter to the floor. I always found the interchange between the person who has no choice but to strip naked and the guard who gives the order to be brisk and businesslike, but some women found strip searches so humiliating that they would forgo visits in order to avoid it. I would never have survived without my visits and so would grit my teeth and rush through the motions. It was the prison system’s quid pro quo: You want contact with the outside world? Be prepared to show your ass, every time.

With my clothes back on, I walked back out into the main hall, floating on air and memories of everything Larry had said. Someone said, “Hey Kerman, they called your name at mail call!” I headed straight to the CO’s station, and he handed me sixteen wonderful letters (including Larry’s!) and a half-dozen books. Somebody out there loved me.

The next day my mother was due to arrive. I could only guess at how awful the last seventy-two hours had been for her, and I worried
what she would think when she saw that razor-wire fence—it evoked a primal fear. When they called my name on the PA, I could barely stand still for the pat-down. I flew through the doors of the visiting room, scanning for my mother’s face. When I saw her, it was as if all our surroundings faded into a distant background. She burst into tears when she saw me. In thirty-four years I couldn’t remember her ever looking more relieved.

I spent most of the next two hours trying to reassure Mom that I was okay; that no one was bothering me, or hurting me; that my roommates were helping me; and that the guards were leaving me alone. The presence of other families in the visiting room, many with little kids, was a reminder to me that we were not the only ones. In fact, we were just one of millions of American families trying to cope with the prison system. My mother fell silent as she watched a little girl playing with her parents at another card table. The strain on her face wiped away any complaint or self-pity I might have had. She was putting on a brave front, but I knew she would cry all the way to the car.

The hours I would spend in the prison visiting room were among the most comforting of my life. They sped by, the only occasion at the Camp in which time seemed to move quickly. I could completely forget about the human stew that lay on the other side of the visiting room doors, and I carried that feeling with me for many hours after each visit was over.

But I could see how awful and scary it was for my family to see me in my khaki uniform and get a tiny taste of what I was experiencing, surrounded by guards, strangers, and powerful systems of control. I felt terrible for exposing them to this world. Every week I needed to renew my promises to my mother and Larry that I was going to make it, that I was okay. I felt more guilt and shame witnessing their worry than when I stood in front of the judge—and it had been terrible standing in that courtroom.

T
HE
C
AMP
had distinct rhythms of frenzied action and lulls of calm, like a high school or an ER ward. In bursts of activity the polyglot of
women came and went, clustered in groups, hurried, loitered, very often waited, and almost always chattered in an overwhelming rush of noise, accents, and emotions mixing into swirling eddies of language.

Other times the place was still and silent… sleepy during some hours of the day, when most of the campers were off at their job assignments and the orderlies had already hustled through their cleaning assignments and gone off to nap, crochet, or play cards. At night, after ten
P.M.
lights out, the halls were quiet, haunted by the occasional woman in her muu-muu heading to the bathroom or the mail drop box, navigating by the distant light from a common room where someone was sitting, perhaps illicitly watching after-hours TV.

My understanding of the causes of these patterns of movement—meals, mail call, work call, pill line, commissary days, phone time—was still tenuous. But I learned more every day, filing away the information and trying to figure out where I fit in.

Letters and good books—an overwhelming number of good books—started to pour in from the outside world. At mail call almost every day the Gay Pornstar would bellow “Kerman!” and shove a plastic bin overflowing with a dozen books toward me with his boot, half disgusted and half perplexed. The entire population of the Camp would watch me claim my mail, with the occasional wisecrack—“You keeping up?”

On the one hand, folks were impressed at this evidence that people on the outside cared about me. On the other hand, the literary avalanche was proof that I was different, a freak: “She’s the one with the books.” Annette and a few other women were delighted by the influx of new reading material and borrowed from my library with abandon (and permission). Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and
Alice in Wonderland
definitely served to fill the time and keep me company inside my head, but I was really lonely in my actual physical life. I was cautiously trying to make friends, but like everything else in prison it was tricky; there were too many places where a newbie like me could easily misstep. Like the chow hall.

The chow hall was like a high school cafeteria, and who has fond memories of that? A vast linoleum room filled with tables with four
attached swivel chairs, it was lined on two sides by windows that looked out toward the main back entrance to the Camp, where there were parking spaces, a handicapped ramp, and a forlorn and unused basketball hoop. Breakfast was a quiet affair, attended by only a fraction of the prisoners, mostly the older ones who appreciated the almost meditative peace of the morning ritual at six-thirty
A.M.
There was never a wait at breakfast—you grabbed a tray and plastic cutlery and approached the kitchen line from which food was dished out by other prisoners, some blank-faced, some chatty. It could be cold cereal or oatmeal or, on a really good day, boiled eggs. Usually there was a piece of fruit for every person, an apple or banana, or sometimes a rock-hard peach. Big vats of watery coffee sat next to cold drink dispensers filled with water and something like weak Kool-Aid.

I got in the habit of going to breakfast, where I would sit alone peacefully, not drinking the terrible coffee, observing the other prisoners come and go and watching the sun rise through the east-facing windows.

Lunch and dinner were altogether different: the line of women waiting for their food stretched the length of the wall below the windows and sometimes out the door, and the noise was tremendous. I found these meals nerve-racking and would cautiously advance with my tray, darting my eyes around for someone I knew near an empty chair, or even better, an empty table that I could grab. Sitting with someone you didn’t know was a dicey proposition. You could be met with the hairy eyeball and a resounding silence, or a pointed, “This seat is saved.” But you could also be met with a chatterer or a questioner, and when I ventured afield, I was often nabbed after the meal by Annette: “You wanna stay away from that one, Piper. She’ll be after you to buy her commissary in no time.”

Annette had a maternal instinct that was a force of nature and helped me navigate the official rules, like remembering the counts, and the PAC numbers, and what day I was allowed to bring my clothes to the laundry to be washed. But she was leery of most other prisoners who were not middle class and white. It turned out that early on Annette had been gamed by a young girl who had gotten the
older woman to buy her lots of commissary items, playing on her pity. The girl was in fact notorious for her hustles of new prisoners, so Annette felt burned, and her caution was outsize. Annette included me in endless Rummy 500 games with her set of Italians, who grudgingly tolerated my poor play. The black women played far more boisterous games of Spades a few tables over; the Italians sniffed that they all cheated.

Annette introduced me to Nina, a fellow Italian, who was my age and lived a few rooms down, and she also took me under her wing. Nina had just returned from a month in the SHU (she had refused to shovel snow) and was waiting to get put back in the Dorms. Annette seemed scared of most other prisoners, but not Nina, who was Brooklyn street-smart, and just as wary of others as Annette: “They’re all wackos—they make me sick.” She had lived a tough life and was prison-savvy, funny as hell, and surprisingly tolerant of my naïveté, and I followed her around like a puppy. I paid close attention to her advice about how not to get rooked by another prisoner. I was definitely interested in figuring out who the nonwackos were.

I got along well with some of the women in my A&O group (plus I could remember their names): the tattooed Latina from my room, who was doing just six months for getting caught with six keys of coke in her car (made no sense to me); the salty redhead, who was still going on about how much better the prison in West Virginia was than Danbury, “although there’s more of us northerners here, if you know what I mean…”

Then there was little Janet from Brooklyn, who was slowly warming up to me, although she still seemed to think I was strange for being friendly. She was just twenty years old, a college girl who had been arrested on vacation as a drug mule. She had been locked in a Caribbean jail for an entire harrowing year before the feds came to get her. Now she was doing sixty months—more than half of her twenties would be spent behind bars.

One day I was joined at lunch by a different Janet, who was fiftyish, tall, fair, and striking. I had been watching her and wondering what her story was—she reminded me of my aunt. Janet was like
me—a middle-class drug criminal. She was doing a two-year sentence on a marijuana charge. As we made conversation, she was friendly but never pushy, explicitly respectful of other people’s space. I learned that she was a world traveler, a classic eco-peacenik intellectual, a fitness fanatic and yoga expert, and a devout Buddhist possessed of a wry sense of humor, all incredibly welcome attributes to encounter in a fellow prisoner.