Orange Is the New Black

by Piper Kerman

  She flipped up the sunglasses. “I’m Minetta. I’m an inmate too.”

  “Oh!” I was flabbergasted that she was a prisoner, and she was driving—and wearing makeup!

  “What’s your name—your last name? People go by their last names here.”

  “Kerman,” I replied.

  “Is this your first time down?”

  “My first time here?” I was confused.

  “Your first time in prison.”

  I nodded.

  “You doin’ okay, Kerman?” she asked as she guided the minivan up a small hill. “It’s not so bad, you’re going to be all right. We’ll take care of you. Everyone’s okay here, though you’ve gotta watch out for the stealing. How much time do you have?”

  “How much time?” I bleated.

  “How long is your sentence?”

  “Oh! Fifteen months.”

  “That’s not bad. That’ll be over in no time.”

  We circled to the back entrance of a long, low building that resembled a 1970s elementary school. She pulled up next to a handicapped ramp and stopped the car. Clutching my laundry bag, I followed her toward the building, picking through patches of ice while the cold penetrated my thin rubber soles. Small knots of women wearing identical ugly brown coats were smoking in the February chill. They looked tough, and depressed, and they all had on big, heavy black shoes. I noticed that one of them was hugely pregnant. What was a woman that pregnant doing in prison?

  “Do you smoke?” Minetta asked.

  “No.”

  “Good for you! We’ll just get you your bed assignment and get you settled. There’s the dining hall.” She gestured to her left down several stairs. She was talking the entire time, explaining everything about Danbury Federal Prison Camp, none of which I was catching. I followed her up a couple of stairs and into the building.

  “… TV room. There’s the education office, that’s the CO’s office. Hi, Mr. Scott! CO, that’s the correctional officer. He’s all right. Hey, Sally!” She greeted a tall white woman. “This is Kerman, she’s new, self-surrender.” Sally greeted me sympathetically with another “Are you okay?” I nodded, mute. Minetta pressed on. “Here’s more offices, those are the Rooms up there, the Dorms down there.” She turned to me, serious. “You’re not allowed down there, it’s out of bounds for you. You understand?”

  I nodded, not understanding a thing. Women were surging all around me, black, white, Latino, every age, here in my new home, and they made a tremendous collective din in the linoleum and cinder-block interior. They were all dressed in khaki uniforms different from the one I was wearing, and they all wore huge, heavy-looking black work shoes. I realized that my attire made it glaringly obvious that I was new. I looked down at my little canvas slippers and shivered in my brown coat.

  As we proceeded up the long main hall, several more women came up and greeted me with the standard “You’re new… are you all right?” They seemed genuinely concerned. I hardly knew how to respond but smiled weakly and said hello back.

  “Okay, here’s the counselor’s office. Who’s your counselor?”

  “Mr. Butorsky.”

  “Oh. Well, at least he does his paperwork. Hold on, let me see where they put you.” She knocked on the door with some authority. Opening it, she stuck her head in, all business. “Where did you put Kerman?” Butorsky gave her a response that she understood, and she led me up to Room 6.

  We entered a room that held three sets of bunk beds and six waist-high metal lockers. Two older women were lying on the lower bunks. “Hey, Annette, this is Kerman. She’s new, a self-surrender. Annette will take care of you,” she told me. “Here’s your bed.” She indicated the one empty top bunk with a naked mattress.

  Annette sat up. She was a small, dark fiftyish woman with short, spiky black hair. She looked tired. “Hi,” she rasped in a Jersey accent. “How are you? What’s your name again?”

  “It’s Piper. Piper Kerman.”

  Minetta’s work was apparently done. I thanked her profusely, making no effort to hide my gratitude, and she exited. I was left with Annette and the other, silent woman, who was tiny, bald, and seemed much older, maybe seventy. I cautiously placed my laundry bag on my bunk and looked around the room. In addition to the steel bunk beds and lockers, everywhere I looked there were hangers with clothes, towels, and string bags dangling from them. It looked like a barracks.

  Annette got out of bed and revealed herself to be about five feet tall. “That’s Miss Luz. I’ve been keeping stuff in your locker. I gotta get it out. Here’s some toilet paper—you gotta take it with you.”

  “Thank you.” I was still clutching my envelope with my paperwork and photos in it, and now a roll of toilet paper.

  “Did they explain to you about the count?” she asked.

  “The count?” I was getting used to feeling completely idiotic. It was as if I’d been home-schooled my whole life and then dropped into a large, crowded high school. Lunch money? What’s that?

  “The count. They count us five times a day, and you have to be here, or wherever you’re supposed to be, and the four o’clock count is a standing count, the other ones are at midnight, two A.M., five A.M., and nine P.M. Did they give you your PAC number?”

  “PAC number?”

  “Yeah, you’ll need it to make phone calls. Did they give you a phone sheet? NO? You need to fill it out so you can make phone calls. But maybe Toricella will let you make a call if you ask him. It’s his late night. It helps if you cry. Ask him after dinner. Dinner’s after the four o’clock count, which is pretty soon, and lunch is at eleven. Breakfast is from six-fifteen to seven-fifteen. How much time do you have?”

  “Fifteen months… how much time do you have?”

  “Fifty-seven months.”

  If there was an appropriate response to this information, I didn’t know what it was. What could this middle-class, middle-aged Italian-American lady from Jersey possibly have done to get fifty-seven months in federal prison? Was she Carmela Soprano? Fifty-seven months! From my presurrender due diligence, I knew it was verboten to ask anyone about their crime.

  She saw that I was unsure what to say and helped me out. “Yeah, it’s a lot of time,” she said sort of drily.

  “Yeah.” I agreed. I turned to start pulling items out of my laundry bag.

  That’s when she shrieked, “Don’t make your bed!!!”

  “What?” I spun around, alarmed.

  “We’ll make it for you,” she said.

  “Oh… no, that’s not necessary, I’ll make it.” I turned back to the thin cotton-poly sheets I’d been issued.

  She came over to my bunk. “Honey. We’ll. Make. The. Bed.” She was very firm. “We know how.”

  I was completely mystified. I looked around the room. All five beds were very tidily made, and both Annette and Miss Luz had been lying on top of their covers.

  “I know how to make a bed,” I protested tentatively.

  “Listen, let us make the bed. We know how to do it so we’ll pass inspection.”

  Inspection? No one told me anything about inspections.

  “Inspection happens whenever Butorsky wants to do them—and he is insane,” Annette said. “He will stand on the lockers to try to see dust on the light fixtures. He will walk on your bed. He’s a nut. And that one”—she pointed to the bunk below mine—“doesn’t want to help clean!”

  Uh-oh. I hated cleaning too but was certainly not about to risk the ire of my new roommates.

  “So we have to make the beds every morning?” I asked, another penetrating question.

  Annette looked at me. “No, we sleep on top of the beds.”

  “You don’t sleep in the bed?”

  “No, you sleep on top with a blanket over you.” Pause.

  “But what if I want to sleep in the bed?”

  Annette looked at me with the complete exasperation a mom shows a recalcitrant six-year-old. “Look, if you wanna do that, go ahead—you’ll be the only one in the wh
ole prison!”

  This sort of social pressure was irresistible; getting between the sheets wasn’t going to happen for the next fifteen months. I let go of the bed issue—the thought of hundreds of women sleeping on top of perfectly made military-style beds was too strange for me to deal with at that moment. Plus, somewhere nearby a man was bellowing. “Count time, count time, count time! Count time, ladies!” I looked at Annette, who looked nervous.

  “See that red light?” Out in the hallway, over the officers’ station, was a giant red bulb that was now illuminated. “That light comes on during count. When that red light is on, you better be where you’re supposed to be, and don’t move until it goes off.”

  Women were streaming back and forth in the hallway, and two young Latinas came hurrying into the room.

  Annette did a brief round of introductions. “This is Piper.” They barely glanced at me.

  “Where’s the woman who sleeps here?” I asked about my missing bunkmate.

  “That one! She works in the kitchen, so they count her down there. You’ll meet her.” She grimaced. “Okay, shhhhh! It’s a stand-up count, no talking!”

  The five of us stood silent by our bunks, waiting. The entire building was suddenly quiet; all I could hear was the jangling of keys and the thud of heavy boots. Eventually a man stuck his head into the room and… counted us. Then, several seconds later, another man came in and counted us. When he left, everyone sat down on beds and a couple of footstools, but I figured it wouldn’t be cool to sit on my absent bunkmate’s bed, so I leaned on my empty locker. Minutes passed. The two Latina women began to whisper to Miss Luz in Spanish.

  Suddenly we heard, “Recount, ladies!” Everyone leaped back on their feet, and I stood at attention.

  “They always screw it up,” muttered Annette under her breath. “How hard is it to count?”

  We were counted again, this time with seeming success, and the payoff of inspections became apparent to me. “It’s suppertime,” said Annette. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, by New York City standards an unimaginably uncivilized time to eat dinner. “We’re last.”

  “What do you mean, last?”

  Over the PA system the CO was calling out numbers: “A12, A10, A23, go eat! B8, B18, B22, go eat! C2, C15, C23, go eat!”

  Annette explained, “He’s calling honor cubes—they eat first. Then he calls the Dorms in order of how well they did in inspection. Rooms are always last. We always do the worst in inspection.”

  I peered out the door at the women heading to the chow hall and wondered what an honor cube was but asked, “What’s for dinner anyway?”

  “Liver.”

  After the liver-and-lima-beans dinner, served in a mess hall that brought back every dreadful school-age cafeteria memory, women of every shape, size, and complexion flooded back into the main hall of the building, shouting in English and Spanish. Everyone seemed to be lingering expectantly in the hall, sitting in groups on the stairs or lining the landing. Figuring that I was supposed to be there too, I tried to make myself invisible and listen to the words swirling around me, but I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Finally, I timidly asked the woman next to me.

  “It’s mail call, honey!” she answered.

  A very tall black woman up on the landing seemed to be handing out toiletries. Someone on my right gestured toward her. “Gloria’s going home, she’s down to a wake-up!” I stared at Gloria with renewed interest, as she tried to find someone to take a small purple comb off her hands. Going home! The idea of leaving was riveting to me. She looked so nice, and so happy, as she gave away all her things. I felt a tiny bit better, knowing that it was possible someday to go home from this awful place.

  I wanted her purple comb very badly. It looked like the combs we used to carry in the back pockets of our jeans in junior high, that we’d whip out and use to fix our winged bangs. I stared at the comb, too shy to reach up and ask, and then it was gone, claimed by another woman.

  A guard, different from the one Minetta had pointed out earlier, emerged from the CO’s office. He looked like a gay pornstar, with a bristling black crew cut and a scrub-brush mustache. He started bellowing “Mail call! Mail call!” Then he started giving out the mail. “Ortiz! Williams! Kennedy! Lombardi! Ruiz! Skelton! Platte! Platte! Platte! Wait a minute, Platte, there’s more. Mendoza! Rojas!” Each woman would step up to claim her mail, with a smile on her face, and then skitter away somewhere to read it—perhaps someplace with more privacy than I had yet observed? The hall’s population thinned as he worked through the bin of mail, until there were only hopefuls left. “Maybe tomorrow, ladies!” he shouted, turning the empty bin upside down.

  After mail call I crept around the building, feeling vulnerable in my stupid little canvas slippers that so obviously marked me as new. My head was spinning with new information, and for the first moment in hours I was sort of alone with my own thoughts, which turned immediately to Larry and my parents. They must be freaking. I had to figure out how to let them know that I was okay.

  Very timidly, I approached the closed door to the counselors’ office, clutching a blue phone sheet that Annette had shown me how to fill out, bubbling in the numbers of people I wanted permission to call on the pay phones at some future date. Larry’s cell phone, my family, my best friend Kristen, my lawyer. The lights in the office were on. I rapped softly, and there was a muffled snort from within. Gingerly I turned the handle.

  The counselor named Toricella, who always wore a look of mild surprise, was blinking his little eyes at me, annoyed at my interruption.

  “Mr. Toricella? I’m Kerman, I’m new. They said I should come talk to you…” I trailed off, swallowing.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “They said I should turn in my phone list… and I don’t have a PAC number…”

  “I’m not your counselor.”

  My throat was getting very tight, and there was no need to fake tears—my eyes were threatening to spill. “Mr. Toricella, they said maybe you might let me call my fiancé and let him know that I’m okay?” I was begging.

  He looked at me, silent. Finally he grunted. “Come in and close the door.” My heart started pounding twice as hard. He picked up the phone and handed the receiver to me. “Tell me the number and I’ll dial it. Just two minutes!”

  Larry’s cell phone rang, and I closed my eyes and willed him to answer it. If I lost this opportunity to hear his voice, I might die right on the spot.

  “Hello?”

  “Larry! Larry, it’s me!!”

  “Baby, are you okay?” I could hear how relieved he was.

  Now the tears were falling, and I was trying not to screw up my two minutes or scare Larry by totally losing it. I snuffled. “Yes, I’m okay. I’m really okay. I’m fine. I love you. Thank you for taking me today.”

  “Honey, don’t be crazy. Are you sure you’re okay, you’re not just saying that?”

  “No, I’m all right. Mr. Toricella let me call you, but I won’t be able to call you again for a while. But listen, you can come visit me this weekend! You should be on a list.”

  “Baby! I’ll come on Friday.”

  “So can Mom, please call her, and call Dad, call them as soon as we get off the phone and tell them you talked to me and tell them I’m okay. I won’t be able to call them for a while. I can’t make phone calls yet. And send in that money order right away.”

  “I mailed it already. Baby, are you sure you’re okay? Is it all right? You would tell me if it wasn’t?”

  “I’m okay. There’s a lady from South Jersey in my room, she’s nice. She’s Italian.”

  Mr. Toricella cleared his throat.

  “Darling, I have to go. I only have two minutes. I love you so much, I miss you so much!”

  “Baby! I love you. I’m worried about you.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m okay, I swear. I love you, darling. Please come see me. And call Mom and Dad!”

  “I’ll call them as soon as we get off the p
hone. Can I do anything else, baby?”

  “I love you! I have to go, honey!”

  “I love you too!”

  “Come see me on Friday, and thank you for calling my folks… I love you!”

  I hung up the phone. Mr. Toricella watched me with something that looked like sympathy in his beady little eyes. “It’s your first time down?” he said.

  After thanking him, I headed out into the hall wiping my nose on my arm, depleted but exponentially happier. I looked down at the doors of the forbidden Dorms and studiously examined the bulletin boards covered with incomprehensible information about events and rules I didn’t understand—laundry schedules, inmate appointments with various staffers, crochet permits, and the weekend movie schedule. This weekend’s film was Bad Boys II.

  I avoided eye contact. Nonetheless women periodically accosted me: “You’re new? How are you doing, honey? Are you okay?” Most of them were white. This was a tribal ritual that I would see play out hundreds of times in the future. When a new person arrived, their tribe—white, black, Latino, or the few and far between “others”—would immediately make note of their situation, get them settled, and steer them through their arrival. If you fell into that “other” category—Native American, Asian, Middle Eastern—then you got a patchwork welcome committee of the kindest and most compassionate women from the dominant tribes.

  The other white women brought me a bar of soap, a real toothbrush and toothpaste, shampoo, some stamps and writing materials, some instant coffee, Cremora, a plastic mug, and perhaps most important, shower shoes to avoid terrible foot fungi. It turned out that these were all items that one had to purchase at the prison commissary. You didn’t have the money to buy toothpaste or soap? Tough. Better hope that another prisoner would give it to you. I wanted to bawl every time another lady brought me a personal care item and reassured me, “It’ll be okay, Kerman.”