by Piper Kerman
I tried to get my affairs in order, preparing to vanish for over a year. I had already read the books on Amazon about surviving prison, but they were written for men. I paid a visit to my grandparents, nervously fighting off the fear that I might not see them again. About a week before I was to report, Larry and I met a small group of friends at Joe’s Bar on Sixth Street in the East Village, for an impromptu going-away. These were our good friends from the city, who had known my secret and done whatever they could to help. We had a good time—shot pool, told stories, drank tequila. The night went on—I wasn’t slowing down, I wasn’t going to exercise any tequila restraint, I wasn’t going to be a bummer. Night turned into morning, and finally someone had to go home. And as I hugged them as hard and relentlessly as only a girl drunk on tequila can, it sank in on me that this was really goodbye. I didn’t know when I would see any of my friends again or what I would be like when I did. And I started to cry.
I never wept in front of anyone but Larry. But now I cried, and then my friends started to cry. We must have looked like lunatics, a dozen people sitting in an East Village bar at three in the morning, sobbing. I couldn’t stop. I cried and cried, as I said goodbye to every one of them. It took forever. I would calm down for a minute and then turn to another friend and start to sob again. Completely beyond embarrassment, I was so sad.
The next afternoon I could barely see myself between the puffy slits that were my eyes. I had never looked worse. But I felt a little better.
My lawyer, Pat Cotter, had sent his share of white-collar clients off to prison. He advised me, “Piper, I think for you the hardest thing about prison will be chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people. Call me if you run into trouble. And don’t make any friends.”
CHAPTER 3
#11187–424
On February 4, 2004, more than a decade after I had committed my crime, Larry drove me to the women’s prison in Danbury, Connecticut. We had spent the previous night at home; Larry had cooked me an elaborate dinner, and then we curled up in a ball on our bed, crying. Now we were heading much too quickly through a drab February morning toward the unknown. As we made a right onto the federal reservation and up a hill to the parking lot, a hulking building with a vicious-looking triple-layer razor-wire fence loomed up. If that was minimum security, I was fucked.
Larry pulled into one of the parking areas. We looked at each other, saucer-eyed. Almost immediately a white pickup with police lights on its roof pulled in after us. I rolled down my window.
“There’s no visiting today,” the officer told me.
I stuck my chin out, defiance covering my fear. “I’m here to surrender.”
“Oh. All right then.” He pulled out and drove away. Had he looked surprised? I wasn’t sure.
In the car I stripped off all my jewelry—the seven gold rings; the diamond earrings Larry had given me for Christmas; the sapphire ring from my grandmother; the 1950s man’s watch that was always around my wrist; all the earrings from all the extra holes that had so vexed my grandfather. I had on jeans, sneakers, and a long-sleeved T-shirt. With false bravado I said, “Let’s do this.”
We walked into the lobby. A placid woman in uniform was sitting behind the raised desk. There were chairs, some lockers, a pay phone, and a soda machine. It was spotless. “I’m here to surrender,” I announced.
“Hold on.” She picked up a phone and spoke to someone briefly. “Have a seat.” We sat. For several hours. It got to be lunchtime. Larry handed me a foie gras sandwich that he had made from last night’s leftovers. I wasn’t hungry at all but unwrapped it from the tinfoil and munched every gourmet bite miserably. I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary. Then again, you never know.
Finally, a considerably less pleasant-looking woman entered the lobby. She had a dreadful scar down the side of her face and neck. “Kerman?” she barked.
We sprang to our feet. “Yes, that’s me.”
“Who’s this?” she said.
“This is my fiancé.”
“Well, he’s gotta leave before I take you in.” Larry looked outraged. “That’s the rule, it prevents problems. You have any personal items?”
I had a manila envelope in my hands, which I handed to her. It contained my self-surrender instructions from the U.S. Marshals, some of my legal paperwork, twenty-five photographs (an embarrassing number of my cats), lists of my friends’ and family’s addresses, and a cashier’s check for $290 that I had been instructed to bring. I knew that I would need money in my prison account to make phone calls and buy… something? I couldn’t imagine what.
“Can’t take that,” she said, handing the check to Larry.
“But I called last week, and they told me to bring it!”
“He has to send it to Georgia, then they’ll process it,” she said with absolute finality.
“Where do we send it?” I asked. I was suddenly furious.
“Hey, do you have that Georgia address?” the prison guard asked over her shoulder to the woman at the desk while poking through my envelope. “What are these, pictures? You got any nudie Judies in here?” She raised an eyebrow in her already-crooked face. Nudie Judies? Was she for real? She looked at me as if to ask, Do I need to go through all these photos to see if you’re a dirty girl?
“No. No nudie Judies,” I said. Three minutes into my self-surrender, and I already felt humiliated and beaten.
“Okay, are you ready?” I nodded. “Well, say goodbye. Since you’re not married, it could be a while until he can visit.” She took a symbolic step away from us, I guess to give us privacy.
I looked at Larry and hurled myself into his arms, holding on as tight as I could. I had no idea when I would see him again, or what would happen to me in the next fifteen months.
He looked as if he was going to cry; yet at the same time he was also furious. “I love you! I love you!” I said into his neck and his nice oatmeal sweater that I had picked for him. He squeezed me and told me he loved me too.
“I’ll call you as soon as I can,” I croaked.
“Okay.”
“Please call my parents.”
“Okay.”
“Send that check immediately!”
“I know.”
“I love you!”
And then he left the lobby, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. He banged the doors hard and walked quickly to the parking lot.
The prison guard and I watched him get into the car. As soon as he was out of sight, I felt a surge of fear.
She turned to me. “You ready?” I was alone with her and whatever else was waiting for me.
“Yeah.”
“Well, come on.”
She led me out the door Larry had just exited from, turning right and walking along that vicious, towering fence. The fence had multiple layers; between each layer was a gate through which we had to be buzzed. She opened the gate, and I stepped in. I looked back over my shoulder at the free world. The next gate buzzed. I stepped through again, wire mesh and barbed metal soaring all around me. I felt fresh, rising panic. This was not what I had expected. This was not how minimum-security camps had been described; this didn’t look at all like “Club Fed.” This was scaring the crap out of me.
We reached the door of the building and again were buzzed in. We walked through a small hallway into an institutional tiled room with harsh fluorescent light. It felt old, dingy, clinical, and completely empty. She pointed into a holding cell with benches bolted to the walls and metal screens over all visible sharp edges. “Wait in there.” Then she walked through a door into another room.
I sat on a bench facing away from the door. I stared at the small high window through which I could see nothing but clouds. I wondered when I would see anything beautiful again. I meditated on the consequences of my long-ago actions and seriously questioned why I was not on the lam in Mexico. I kicked my feet. I thought about my fifteen-month
sentence, which did nothing to quell my panic. I tried not to think about Larry. Then I gave up and tried to imagine what he was doing, with no success.
I had only the most tenuous idea of what might happen next, but I knew that I would have to be brave. Not foolhardy, not in love with risk and danger, not making ridiculous exhibitions of myself to prove that I wasn’t terrified—really, genuinely brave. Brave enough to be quiet when quiet was called for, brave enough to observe before flinging myself into something, brave enough to not abandon my true self when someone else wanted to seduce or force me in a direction I didn’t want to go, brave enough to stand my ground quietly. I waited an unquantifiable amount of time while trying to be brave.
“Kerman!” As I was unaccustomed to being called like a dog, it took her a number of shouts before I realized that meant “Move.” I jumped up and peered cautiously out of the holding cell. “Come on.” The prison guard’s rasp made it hard for me to understand what she was saying.
She led me into the next room, where her coworkers were lounging. Both were bald, male, and white. One of them was startlingly big, approaching seven feet tall; the other was very short. They both stared at me as if I had three heads. “Self-surrender,” my female escort said to them by way of explanation as she started my paperwork. She spoke to me like I was an idiot yet explained nothing during the process. Every time I was slow to answer or asked her to repeat a question, Shorty would snort derisively, or worse, mimic my responses. I looked at him in disbelief. It was unnerving, as it was clearly intended to be, and it pissed me off, which was a welcome switch from the fear I was battling.
The female guard continued to bark questions and fill out forms. As I stood at attention and answered, I could not stop my eyes from turning toward the window, to the natural light outdoors.
“Come on.”
I followed the guard toward the hallway outside the holding cell. She pawed through a shelf filled with clothing, then handed me a pair of granny panties; a cheap nylon bullet bra; a pair of elastic-waist khaki pants; a khaki top, like hospital scrubs; and tube socks. “What size shoe are you?” “Nine and a half.” She handed me a little pair of blue canvas slippers like you would buy on the street in any Chinatown.
She indicated a toilet and sink area behind a plastic shower curtain. “Strip.” I kicked off my sneakers, took off my socks, my jeans, my T-shirt, my bra, and my underpants, all of which she took from me. It was cold. “Hold your arms up.” I did, displaying my armpits. “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue. Turn around, squat, spread your cheeks and cough.” I would never get used to the cough part of this drill, which was supposed to reveal contraband hidden in one’s privates—it was just so unnatural. I turned back around, naked. “Get dressed.”
She put my own clothes in a box—they would be mailed back to Larry, like the personal effects of a dead soldier. The bullet bra, though hideous and scratchy, did fit. So in fact did all the khaki prison clothes, much to my amazement. She really had the eye. In minutes I was transformed into an inmate.
Now she seemed to soften toward me a bit. As she was fingerprinting me (a messy and oddly intimate process), she asked, “How long you been with that guy?”
“Seven years,” I replied sullenly.
“He know what you were up to?”
Up to? What did she know! My temper flared again as I said defiantly, “It’s a ten-year-old offense. He had nothing to do with it.” She seemed surprised by this, which I took as a moral victory.
“Well, you’re not married, so you probably won’t be seeing him for quite a while, not until he gets on your visitor list.”
The horrifying reality that I had no idea when I would see Larry again shut me right down. The prison guard was indifferent to the devastating blow she had just dealt me.
She had been distracted by the fact that no one seemed to know how to use the ID machine camera. Everyone took a turn poking at it, until finally they produced a photo that made me look remarkably like serial killer Aileen Wuornos. My chin was raised defiantly, and I looked like hell. I later figured out that everyone looks either thuggish and murderous or terrified and miserable in their prison ID photo. I’m proud to say that, against all odds, I fell into the former category, though I felt like the latter.
The ID card was red, with a bar code and the legend “U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons—INMATE.” In addition to the unflattering photo, it also bore my new registration number in large numerals: 11187–424. The last three numbers indicated my sentencing district—Northern Illinois. The first five numbers were unique to me, my new identity. Just as I had been taught to memorize my aunt and uncle’s phone number when I was six years old, I now silently tried to commit my reg number to memory. 11187–424, 11187–424, 11187–424, 11187–424, 11187–424, 11187–424, 11187–424, 11187–424, 11187–424, 11187–424.
After the ID debacle, Ms. Personality said, “Mr. Butorsky’s gonna talk to you, but first go into medical.” She pointed into another small room.
Mr. Who? I went and stared out the window, obsessing about the razor wire and the world beyond it from which I had been taken, until a medic—a round Filipino man—came to see me. He performed the most basic of medical interviews, which went quickly, as I have been blessed with more or less perfect health. He told me he needed to perform a TB test, for which I extended my arm. “Nice veins!” he said with very genuine admiration. “No track marks!” Given his total lack of irony, I thanked him.
Mr. Butorsky was a compact, mustachioed fiftyish man, with watery, blinky blue eyes and, unlike the prison staff I had met so far, of discernible intelligence. He was leaning back in a chair, with paperwork spread out in front of him. It was my PSI—the presentencing investigation that the Feds do on people like me. It is supposed to document the basic facts of one’s crime, one’s prior offenses, one’s family situation and children, one’s history of substance abuse, work history, everything important.
“Kerman? Sit down,” he gestured, looking at me in a way that I suspect was much practiced to be calculating, penetrating, and measuring. I sat. He regarded me for several seconds in silence. I kept my chin firm and didn’t look at him. “How are you doing?” he asked.
It was startling to have anyone show the slightest interest in how, exactly, I was doing. I felt a flood of gratitude in spite of myself. “I’m okay.”
“You are?”
I nodded, deciding this was a good situation for my tough act.
He looked out the window. “In a little bit I’m going to have them take you up to the Camp,” he began.
My brain relaxed a bit and my stomach unclenched. I followed his gaze out the window, feeling profound relief that I wouldn’t have to stay down here with evil Shorty.
“I’ll be your counselor at the Camp. You know I’ve been reading your file.” He gestured at my PSI on the desk. “Sort of unusual. Pretty big case.”
Was it? I realized I had absolutely no idea if it was a big case or not. If I was a big-time criminal, who exactly would my cellmates be?
“And it’s been a long time since you were involved in all that,” he continued. “That’s pretty unusual. I can tell you’ve matured since then.” He looked at me.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I muttered.
“Well, look, I’ve been working up at that Camp for ten years. I run that Camp. It’s my Camp, and there’s nothing that goes on up there that I don’t know about.”
I was embarrassed by how relieved I felt: I didn’t want to see this man, or any prison staffer, as my protector, but at the moment he was the closest thing to human I had encountered.
“We’ve got all types up there. What you really have to watch is the other inmates. Some of them are all right. No one’s going to mess with you unless you let them. Now, women, they don’t fight much. They talk, they gossip, they spread rumors. So they may talk about you. Some of these girls are going to think you think you’re better than them. They’re going to say, ‘Oh, she’s got
money.’”
I felt uncomfortable. Was that how I came across? Was I going to be pegged as a snotty rich bitch?
“And there’s lesbians up there. They’re there, but they’re not gonna bother you. Some are gonna try and be your friend, whatever—just stay away from them! I want you to understand, you do not have to have lesbian sex. I’m old-fashioned. I don’t approve of any of that mess.”
I tried very hard not to smirk. Guess he didn’t read my file that closely. “Mr. Butorsky?”
“Yes?”
“I’m wondering when my fiancé and my mother can come to visit me?” I could not control the querulous tone in my voice.
“They’re both in your PSI, right?” My PSI detailed all the members of my immediate family, including Larry, who had been interviewed by the probation department.
“Yes, they’re all in there, and my father too.”
“Anyone who’s in your PSI is cleared to visit. They can come this weekend. I’ll make sure the list is in the visiting room.” He stood up. “You just keep to yourself, you’re gonna be fine.” He gathered up my paperwork and left.
I went out to retrieve my new creature comforts from the prison guard: two sheets, a pillowcase, two cotton blankets, a couple of cheap white towels, and a face cloth. These items were crammed into a mesh laundry bag. Add to that an ugly brown stadium coat with a broken zipper and a sandwich bag that contained a stubby mini-toothbrush, tiny packets of toothpaste and shampoo, and a rectangle of motel soap.
Heading out through the multiple gates of the monster fence, I felt elated that I would not be behind it, but now the mystery of the Camp was rushing toward me, unstoppable. A white minivan waited. Its driver, a middle-aged woman in army-issue-looking street clothes and sunglasses, greeted me warmly. She wore makeup and little gold hoops in her ears, and she looked like she could be a nice Italian-American lady called Ro from New Jersey. The prison guards are getting friendlier, I thought as I climbed into the passenger seat. She closed the door, and smiled encouragingly at me. She was chipper. I stared back at her.