Out of Orange

For Dad

Cincinnati, Ohio
2013

I
DEVELOPED A SKILL
, where if I want to concentrate on something, anything, and my surroundings are distracting or loud, I can block out the noise and activity surrounding me and focus solely on whatever task needs my attention. It’s a very useful skill at times, but it bugs the shit out of my mother when I’m not listening to her. In that case, it’s not really a skill; it’s a habit. It’s not my intention to ignore her. But if we are watching one of our favorite television shows together at the end of a very long day, I might miss the fact that she has been talking to me for a while.

It was in one of these typical end-of-day scenes where she was going on and on about something trivial, like how many lights our neighbor has on tonight compared to any other night or the number of cars that have driven down our road. I was tuned in to a comedy when she clapped to get my attention away from the show and onto her dilemma. Dad’s been gone for years, and I don’t hear dead people, so I can’t really help her resolve their most recent spat. Besides that, I have a hard time imagining Dad making the long trip all the way back from heaven just to discuss the day of Mom’s hair appointment.

Mom is a bit senile, and she’s a talker. Sometimes I think she loves the sound of her own voice—maybe it helps her hold on to her fading reality. Other times, I think she’s just loopy, like when she talks during the climax of a show we are watching, then hushes me during the commercials. As I was saying, this is a typical end-of-day scene with Mom and me. It’s over when she falls asleep, usually after I discover her trying to find her bed in the bathroom, or vice versa. That is when I help her to the right room for the right purpose, tuck her in, and go to bed myself.

On this particular night, though, I hadn’t gone straight to bed myself. I was about to turn the TV off when a commercial for shampoo or bath soap captured my attention. A cute baby getting a bath in a sink laughed, then the scene changed to an attractive woman in a bubble bath sipping a glass of red wine, then she’s naked snuggling with a man in a different tub, and then the same woman stood alone in a shower with water spraying over her face. The woman had been talking about water and her happy places. I had my thumb poised over the power button of my remote when the background music, a softly tinkling piano that matched the happy water theme, ended abruptly.

This was not a shampoo commercial. A loud angry alarm had interrupted the piano, and the haunting sound of a heavy metal door slamming shut gave me goose bumps. The camera zoomed out from a close-up on the showering woman’s face to reveal she was in prison, not in a happy place. A scene change later and the same young blond woman popped out of a van fully dressed. She was hugging a familiar pin-striped pillow to her chest and she was in an orange uniform. The narrator of the story said, “My name is Piper Chapman,” and I dropped the remote.

The rest of the dialogue and scene changes in the brief commercial came too quickly. I heard, “lesbian lover . . . drug smuggling . . .” Then I saw “Donna” from
That ’70s Show
appear a couple of times wearing my glasses. I realized that what I was looking at was a fucking trailer for
my life—
and I don’t mean the show being promoted was something I could relate to—I mean, literally, my fucking life.
Piper is my ex-lover and I used to be the drug-smuggling lesbian they were talking about. I stared dumbstruck at my television screen after the commercial for the new Netflix series ended.

I had heard about her book,
Orange Is the New Black
. That was more than two years earlier in the spring, right after I had moved back to my childhood home in Cincinnati from a halfway house also in Cincinnati. Piper’s memoir was a surprise then too. I was gardening when my sister, Hester, called me on my cell and told me to turn on NPR immediately. Piper Kerman, my ex-lover and co-defendant, was being interviewed about her then new book. I recall being amazed with what she said in the interview. Hester and I stayed on the phone and cheered through the interview as if her victory was ours. Piper was off paper by then and totally out from under the oppressive system that still had our backs pinned to the wall. Hearing her stand up to that system, fearlessly poking at its faults, had filled me with indescribable joy.

After the talk show, my sister and I came down from our initial euphoria a bit and decided we had better get the book, see if she mentioned us in it, and how. While Piper had the distance and mobility necessary to poke at these bears safely, we did not. My sister and I were still very engaged in the pointless and arbitrary fight for survival and against recidivism that Piper had just described so eloquently on NPR. We still had to navigate life very carefully, making sure our criminal pasts didn’t haunt our still very fragile futures. Living on paper can be like living in a house of cards: a gentle breeze can be all it takes to topple everything. You can too easily find yourself in court for an absurd violation and a quick return to prison. It’s not really just a simple matter of behaving perfectly.

So while Piper had devoted herself to a great cause, I was still within arm’s length of the system she criticized and the people who controlled my fate. I needed to read the book to know just how hard she was poking. I bought Piper’s memoir, read it, and relaxed . . . sort of. Piper hadn’t used my real name—she’d used Nora. She had also changed my physical description. Even if my PO did know which
character I was in her memoir, she really hadn’t said much about me that could change my PO’s opinion so much that he would react.

There was also my career to consider. While I had disclosed my felonious past to my recruiter, human resources, and my boss before I was hired as a software test analyst, I had never discussed my colorful history with anyone but them. That was two years earlier and I hadn’t shared my private life with anyone at work since. A year later it felt deceitful to know them all so well. I didn’t lie, I just never offered up any salacious details about my life. My house of cards would fall without my job, so as much as I wanted to share more than cordial banter, I couldn’t risk it.

When the book came out, I feared the consequence of my coworkers discovering I was the woman depicted in Piper’s bestseller. I hadn’t even shared that I was gay at work. If anyone had a problem working with me because of that or my past, what would I do? It had been a miracle getting my career in software development restarted in Cincinnati. A felony conviction in the conservative corporate world of Cincinnati was a deal breaker everywhere else I had applied, and my PO could violate me for being unemployed.

Fortunately, it seemed almost impossible that anyone at work would even read her book, much less make the connection. But that was before Netflix began streaming Piper’s story and mine onto every laptop and smart TV in the universe. No, this was an entirely different beast. The stakes were no different than they had been when the book came out two years earlier. If anything, they were higher and my house of cards was even more fragile. Having had a heart attack and open-heart surgery, living without health insurance would be insane, and returning to prison with a heart condition, suicidal.

I wanted to see the trailer again. Maybe I was wrong, maybe it wasn’t me being portrayed by Laura Prepon. Maybe the glasses she wore in the commercial were just a coincidence. After all, nothing else about her appearance looked like me. After consulting Google I knew when the show would be available on Netflix. I also confirmed that Laura Prepon
was
playing me, Piper’s former lover and the one
who had gotten her involved in drug smuggling. But, unlike Nora in the book, this character would be front and center.

I tried to go to sleep that night, but it was pointless. My imagination kept bouncing between extremes, from horrible doomsday scenarios to fantasies of fame.

When I went to a meeting at work the following Monday morning, someone asked, “How was your weekend?” People used to always ask me this, and I would answer but leave out the parts that included anything related to my legal status.

“Uneventful,” I responded, smiled, and took my seat at the conference table. I wanted to tell them—tell everyone—what was really happening. But it didn’t seem prudent to run through the halls and cubicles at work announcing my good news and revealing all my secrets. So when I learned “Donna” from
That ’70s Show
was going to be playing a role based on my life, I kept it under my lid.

I waited with the rest of the world for the release date: July 11, 2013. I told a couple of my close friends at home. They knew about my past, about the book, and now the show. At first they treated it like a great novelty. “Maybe you’ll get to meet Laura Prepon,” one said. When nobody contacted me from the production, I began to worry. As the date neared, the commercials increased, as did my paranoia.
Was the show going to disclose more than the book had? Was this why they hadn’t contacted me?
I knew Piper wouldn’t try; she knew I couldn’t communicate with her because I was still prohibited from any contact with my co-defendants. But surely someone could have connected with me, if only to assure me not to worry.

I came home from work on the Friday after
Orange Is the New Black
was released, and instead of waiting until Saturday, when my friends and I were supposed to watch it together, I watched the first episode by myself. I couldn’t wait.

I had never watched a series on Netflix before and was not yet accustomed to the way a series prompts you to watch episode after episode, back to back. I had figured I would just watch the first one a second time with my friends the next day. But I watched a second one, then another, then another, then . . .

About halfway through the series, I realized I couldn’t have watched this with my friends. The experience was too weirdly personal. I would have driven them crazy. It was incredibly unnerving to see how someone I didn’t know had interpreted the little tidbits of my life that the show had touched.

I was both disappointed and relieved that almost everything regarding the character of Alex was pure fiction. I never had sex with Piper in prison—we didn’t even do our time together. But it got weird as I sat through each episode, trying to figure out what actual reality might have inspired which scene. I loved how well they depicted the life of women in a federal prison camp. It bugged me, though, that they missed huge things like 205s, two-for-ones, and the smoking-ban wars. I was also disappointed that they never sent anyone up the hill to the big house so I could see how they depicted that. But the characters who played prison staff were dead-on. We had a few porn stashes where I served my time, and we had the same nasty guards in admitting and in visiting, the same counselors, and the same evil prison executives.

It all made me wonder what part of Alex’s character came from consulting Piper. Why did they choose to make me the product of a poor childhood with no education or marketable skills other than smuggling dope?
Is that what Piper thought of me?
It bothered me that they made Alex’s father a failed rock star, a drug addict, and a loser. Then they killed Mom. I had strange emotional reactions to the bizarre mix of reality with fiction. The whole subplot about whether I was
the
snitch who ratted Piper out really pissed me off. They painted a big target on my back for any psychotic ex-felon with a snitch-grudge to scratch and the wherewithal to look up who Alex’s character was based on. I’m sure there are plenty of those out there. Maybe only a handful nearby and fewer still that might act on it, but still.

The “rat versus ratted-on” cliché didn’t fit our circumstance. It was hardly representative of what happened in real life. If cooperating and pleading guilty were Alex’s shortcomings, they were Piper’s too. Only one of our many co-defendants had the right to stake
a claim to that particular plot of questionably moral high ground, and it wasn’t Piper or me.

Somewhere around episode seven my dog barked, growled, and scared the bejesus out of me. She saw something outside, probably a raccoon or a deer. I became keenly aware of the dark woods outside my house. It had been a long time since the inability to see what might be lurking out there in the night scared me. I went around and locked all our doors, checked the windows, and turned on all the outside lights.

By three
A
.
M
. I had watched nine out of thirteen episodes. My butt hurt from sitting at my desk in front of my computer for so long. I stopped Netflix before episode ten played. I had smoked every one of the cigarettes that I shouldn’t have been smoking. I’d quit smoking less than a year earlier. But I had been sliding lately. I impulsively Googled “the real Alex Vause” hoping to discover nothing, but saw my picture staring back at me in the first results page. I Googled my own name, just as I had done repeatedly for three years, making sure nothing damaging had surfaced. There was my face again, a blurry mug shot from a popular inmate search website. I checked out the site and learned I could have my photo removed for a fee. But that’s a scam. You pay them to remove your information and image at one site, and it pops up at five other sites five minutes later with new fees to remove those.

I nervously reached for a cigarette, forgetting my pack was already empty. I crushed the box and threw it, disgusted with myself and irritated that I was actually going to run to the store for another pack, a whole new pack of swear-they-are-my-lasts. But I was a wreck. This was it, the absurd and random glitch that everyone ever on probation fears will cause them to violate. The show was going to be a hit. It was incredible, and I wanted to smoke.

A year earlier, I had lost thirty-five pounds, not just quit smoking. I suppose you could say the heart attack was my wake-up call. I realized I could die waiting for my circumstances to change to begin living again. It had surprised me how quickly I lost the weight, bounced back, and returned to work. It didn’t surprise me, though,
that I had been slowly regressing, one suicide stick and Coca-Cola after another. It had taken a year, but my brilliant resolve to live a long, healthy, and meaningful life had wilted into a weird, drab apathy.