Orange Is the New Black

by Piper Kerman

  When I first got to the Camp, I was far too shy to request a pedicure, though I admired Annette’s gold toenails. “I only go to Rose,” she explained. There was actually only one other option to Rose, and that was Carlotta Alvarado—Pop was among Carlotta’s clients. Between the two of them they split the market. Prison pedis are strictly a word-of-mouth business, and in this case prisoners were fiercely loyal.

  I had my first pedi back in the chilly early spring. Annette had given it to me as a gift. “I got you a pedicure with Rose Silva, I can’t stand looking at your toes in those flip-flops anymore.” A week later I dutifully reported to one of the Rooms’ bathrooms off the main hall to rendezvous with Rose, armed with my own pedicure tools—cuticle clippers, orange sticks, foot file (all of these were sold by the commissary, but no colors of nail polish). Rose arrived with her own toolkit, including towels, a square plastic basin, and an array of polishes, some in decidedly odd colors. I felt very awkward, but Rose had the gift of gab and was businesslike.

  Rose and I quickly established that we were both from New York, she from Brooklyn and me from Manhattan, and that she was Italian–Puerto Rican, born-again, and serving thirty months after getting caught trying to bring two keys of coke through the Miami airport. She had a no-nonsense briskness and liked to clown. She also gave a meticulous pedicure and a damn good foot massage. No one is supposed to touch you in prison, so the intimacy of a languorous foot rub, intended to please, almost sent me into ecstatic tears the first time. “Whoa, honey. Take some deep breaths!” she advised. For all this Rose charged five dollars of commissary goods—she would let me know on shopping day what to buy her. I was hooked. I was a customer.

  Rose’s latest effort on my feet was definitely her masterpiece so far. It was a pale-pink French pedicure with magenta and white cherry blossoms added on my big toes. I couldn’t stop looking at my toes in my flip-flops, they were so cotton-candy fabulous.

  DESPITE THE groove that I had settled into, I still had flashes of irritation with my fellow prisoners, which troubled me. In the gym I nearly lost my temper with Yoga Janet during class when she insisted that yes, I could get my foot behind my head if I just tried a little harder.

  “No, I can’t,” I snapped. “My foot is not going behind my head. Period.”

  Being among many people who very pointedly couldn’t or wouldn’t exercise much self-control was taxing, and I meditated a great deal more on self-control. Sitting there in prison, I heard a lot of horror stories, of women with many children they loved but couldn’t handle, of families with both parents locked away for long years, and I thought about the millions of children who are put through terrible experiences because of their parents’ poor choices. Coupled with the government’s crap response to the drug trade, which perpetuated the damaging myth that they could control the supply of drugs when demand was so strong, it seemed an enormous amount of totally unproductive misery, which could only come back to hurt us all later. I thought about my own parents, about Larry, and about what I was putting them through right now. This was the penitence that sometimes happens in the penitentiary. It was emotionally overwhelming, and when I saw women still making bad choices day to day in the Camp, or simply acting objectionably, it upset me.

  I was pretty staunch in maintaining an “us and them” attitude about the prison staff. Some of them seemed to like me, and I thought they treated me better than they did some other inmates, which I considered rotten. But when I saw other prisoners behaving in ways that challenged my sense of unity, for lack of a better term, behaving in petty or ignorant or just plain antisocial ways, I really had a hard time with it. It drove me a little nuts.

  I took this all as a sign that I was too engrossed in prison life, that the “real world” was fading too much into the background, and I probably needed to read the paper more religiously and write more letters. Focusing on the positive was hard, but I knew that I had found the right women at Danbury to help me do it. A little voice in my head reminded me that I might never see anything quite like this again, and that immersing myself in my current situation, experiencing it, and learning everything there was to know might be the way to live life, now and always.

  “You’re thinking too hard,” said Pop, who had managed to do over a decade on the inside and still stay sane.

  Boy, was that a nice pedicure. Plus there were lightbulbs to change, term papers to ghostwrite, sugar packets and hardware to steal, puppies to play with, and gossip to gather and pass along. When I thought too much about my prison life, when I should have been thinking about Larry, I felt a little guilty. Still, certain things brought my absence from the outside world into sharp relief, like once-in-a-lifetime events that would happen without me. In July our old friend Mike would be wed in the meadow on his fifty-one-acre spread in Montana. I wanted to be there, among friends, in the gorgeous Montana summer, toasting Mike and his bride with tequila. The world kept going despite the fact that I had been removed to an alternate universe. I wanted to be home desperately, and when I said “home,” that meant “wherever Larry is” more than Lower Manhattan, but the next seven months stretched out in front of me. I now knew I could do them, but it was still way too early to count the days.

  ON JULY 20 Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement, a pretty typical “split sentence” for white-collar criminals but far below the maximum for her conviction. Some prisoners raised eyebrows over her sentence. About 90 percent of criminal defendants plead guilty. Usually, a defendant who does take a case all the way to court and loses a federal trial is hit hard by the judge, with the maximum sentence, not the minimum; this had happened to a number of women in the Camp who were doing very long bids. Regardless, most of the Camp was convinced that Stewart would be someone’s new bunkie in Danbury, and that would certainly liven things up. If Martha were designated to Danbury I felt pretty sure they’d stick her in the A Dorm “Suburbs” with the OCD cases.

  I HAD been hearing about Children’s Day since I got to Danbury. Once a year the BOP held an event when kids could come to the prison and spend the day with their mothers. Activities were planned, including relays, face painting, piñatas, and a cookout, and the children got to walk around the Camp grounds with their moms, very vaguely like a regular family enjoying a day at the park. All the other prisoners were confined to their housing areas. For this reason, gals in the know had strongly suggested that I volunteer to help out, if only so that I would not be stuck in my cube for eight hours on a potentially hot day.

  They needed a lot of hands, so in the first week of August I was summoned to a volunteer meeting. I would be manning the face-painting booth. When Saturday arrived, it was in fact hot as hell, but the Camp was humming with nervous energy. Pop and her crew were toiling to get the hot dogs and hamburgers ready. Volunteers were either milling around or getting our stations ready; there was a little pop-up canopy over the face-painting table, scattered with pots and pencils of rainbow-colored greasepaint. I was surprised at how nervous I was. What if the kids were badly behaved and I couldn’t handle them? I certainly wasn’t about to reprimand another prisoner’s kid—just imagine how that would go over. I anxiously questioned the other face painter, who was an old hand. “It’s easy. Just show them the designs and ask ’em what they want,” she said, totally bored. There was a sheet with line drawings of rainbows and butterflies and ladybugs.

  The first children arrived for their big day. Kids had to be registered ahead of time, and they had to be dropped off at the visiting room and picked up by the same adult, who could not come into the Camp—the kids had to come alone. Many families had managed to get the kids there from long distances—Maine, western Pennsylvania, Baltimore, and farther—and for some of them it might be the only time they saw their mother this year. Being processed in through the visiting room must have been scary for the kids, who then could go racing into their mother’s arms. After hugs and kisses, they could take their mother’s hand and wa
lk down the stairs by the dining hall and out behind the Camp, to the track and the picnic tables and the outdoors and the whole day stretching in front of them.

  Our first customer shyly approached the face-painting booth with her mother, a coworker from the carpentry shop. “Piper, she wants a face painting.”

  The girl was probably about five, with curly golden-brown ponytails and chubby cheeks. “Okay, sweetie, what do you want?” I pointed at the sheet with the designs. She looked at me. I looked at her. I looked at her mother. “What does she want?”

  Mom rolled her eyes. “I don’t know, a rainbow?”

  The rainbow in the picture was coming out of a cloud. It looked kind of hard. “How about a heart with a cloud—in blue to match her dress?”

  “Great, whatever.”

  I cupped her tiny chin in my hand and tried to keep my other hand steady. The final result was very big, and very… blue. Mom examined my handiwork and then gave me a look like What the fuck? But she cooed, “That’s so cute, baby, que linda!” and off they went. This was harder than it looked.

  But it got easier. After the kids’ shyness around strangers wore off, everyone wanted their face painted. The children were well behaved, waiting patiently in line and smiling sweetly when it was finally their turn and they got to pick their design. We were busy for hours, until we all finally got a lunch break. I went and ate a hamburger with Pop and watched families dotting the grass and the picnic tables. The little kids were playing together. Gisela’s teenage daughters were flirting with Trina Cox’s teenage sons, who were frankly pretty fine. Some of the mothers looked overwhelmed—they were no longer accustomed to supervising their own kids in a normal, day-to-day way. But everyone was having fun. I got that feeling again, the feeling I had when Natalie’s GED scores had come back, that tornado feeling inside. So much concentrated happiness, in such a sad place.

  After lunch I went back to the face-painting booth. Now some of the older kids started to approach.

  “Can you do a tattoo? Of a tiger, or a lightning bolt?”

  “Only if it’s okay with your mom.” Once I had secured maternal permission, I went to work “inking” thunderbolts and anchors and panthers on forearms and shoulders and calves, much to the delight of the postpubescent set. I showed off my own tattoo, which got gratifying oohs and aahs.

  The younger of Trina Cox’s two boys approached me. He was wearing an immaculate white New York Jets jersey, with matching new hat and green shorts.

  “That’s my team,” I said, as he took a seat in my tattoo parlor.

  He looked at me seriously. “Can you do Olde English?”

  “Olde English? You mean, like fancy lettering?”

  “Yeah, like the rappers have?”

  I looked around for his mother, but I didn’t see her. “I’ve never done that before, but I can try. What do you want it to say?”

  “Um… my nickname, John-John.”

  “Okay, John-John.” We sat knee to knee, and I held his forearm. I guessed he was about fourteen. “You want it lengthwise, or stacked?”

  He thought about it a little harder. “Maybe it should be just ‘John’?”

  “That sounds good. ‘John.’ I’m going to do it lengthwise, big.”

  “Okay.”

  Neither of us talked while I worked, bent over his arm. I was very careful, and tried to make it as cool-looking as I could, as if it really were going to be permanent. He was quiet, watching me and maybe imagining what it might feel like to get a real tattoo. Finally I sat up, satisfied. But was he?

  I got a big smile. He admired his arm. “Thank you!” John-John was a sweet kid. He ran off to show his older brother, the football star.

  In the afternoon, near the end of the scheduled activities, it was time for the prison-made piñatas stuffed with candy and little trinkets. Breaking them open was supervised by the jerk from the commissary, who was uncharacteristically nice to all of the kids. John-John, blindfolded, whaled on the Pokémon piñata I had decorated until it burst, giving up its goodies to the throng of children. Now the moment we had all been trying to put out of our minds was drawing very close: the end of the day and the goodbyes. Kids who had traveled from far away, gotten closer to their moms than they had been all year, and then eaten a bunch of candy could hardly be blamed for shedding tears when they had to leave, even if they were “too big for that.” At dinner the mothers appeared subdued and exhausted, if they came to the chow hall at all. I am just glad that I was too busy to think all day because afterward, curled up in a ball in my bunk, I also cried and cried.

  ONE MORNING I checked the callout and saw that I had OBGYN next to my name.

  “Oof, girl, the annual gynecologist! You can refuse the exam,” commented Angel, who was also checking the callout and always had something to say.

  Why should I refuse it? I asked.

  “It’s a man. Almost everyone refuses it because of that,” Angel explained.

  I was horrified. “That’s ridiculous. It’s probably the most important exam most of these women could have all year! I mean, of course a prison for fourteen hundred women should bring in a female gynecologist, but still!”

  Angel shrugged. “Whatever. I’m not having no man do that shit.”

  “Well, I don’t care if it’s a man or not,” I announced. “I’m getting a checkup.”

  I reported to the medical office at my appointed time, feeling smug about getting my money’s worth out of the system. My smugness evaporated when the doctor called me into the room that served as his exam room. He was a white man who looked to be in his eighties and whose voice quavered. He commanded me, irritated, to “take off all of your clothes, wrap yourself in the paper sheet, and climb up on the examining table. Put your feet in the stirrups and slide all the way down. I’ll be right back!”

  In a minute I was stripped down to my sports bra, cold and freaked out. The paper sheet was inadequate covering for my body. I should have had a robe on, or at least my T-shirt. The doctor knocked, then entered. I blinked at the ceiling, trying to pretend that this was not happening.

  “Slide down,” he barked, getting his instruments ready. “Relax, I need you to relax!”

  Let me just say, it was horrible. And it hurt. When it was over, and the old man gone, departed with a bang of the door, I was left clutching that paper sheet around me, feeling just like this prison system wanted me to—utterly powerless, vulnerable, alone.

  THE WORK in construction was a lot more physically challenging than being an electrician. I got stronger and stronger, lifting extension ladders and paint cans and two-by-fours, loading and unloading the pickup. By the end of August we were almost finished with our work preparing the warden’s house for its new resident, painting the garage door bright red and cleaning up the postconstruction debris. It was an old New England house that had been expanded a couple of times, with low ceilings and tiny upstairs bedrooms, but it was comfortable enough. It was nice to spend time in a house, after months of living in a barracks. At the far edge of the prison grounds, my coworkers and I would scatter around the empty house to finish various projects.

  One afternoon, alone in the upstairs bathroom, I caught my reflection in the big mirror with surprise. I looked as though years had fallen away from me, shed like dry old snakeskin. I took off my white baseball cap and pulled my hair out of its ponytail and looked at myself again. I locked the bathroom door. Then I took off my khaki shirt and my white T-shirt and shucked off my pants. I was standing in my white sports bra, granny panties, and steel-toes. I took those off. I looked at my own body in the mirror, seeing myself naked for the first time in seven months. In the Dorms there was never a moment or a place where a woman could stand and stretch and regard herself and confront who she was physically.

  Standing there naked in the warden’s bathroom, I could see that prison had changed me. Most of the accumulated varnish of the five unhappy years spent on pretrial was gone. Except for a decade’s worth of crinkly smile lines aro
und my eyes, I resembled the girl who had jumped off that waterfall more closely than I had in years.

  CHAPTER 13

  Thirty-five and Still Alive

  The red maple and sourwood trees were already starting to change color, which thrilled me with the promise of an early fall and the speedy arrival of winter. In Danbury I had learned to hasten the days by chasing the enjoyment in them, no matter how elusive. Some people on the outside look for what is amiss in every interaction, every relationship, and every meal; they are always trying to hang their mortality on improvement. It was incredibly liberating to instead tackle the trick of making each day fly more quickly.

  “Time, be my friend,” I repeated every day. Soon I would go down to the track and try to chase the day away by running in circles. Even under very bad circumstances life still held its pleasures, like running and Natalie’s homemade cookies and Pop’s stories. It was these simple things that were within your grasp in the degraded circumstances of life in prison; the things you could do yourself, or the small kindnesses one prisoner could extend to another.

  I needed some track time after a long day of painting the lobby down the hill. It was the new warden’s first day on the job, and to celebrate, I overheard that they shook down the whole FCI, a tremendous and rare undertaking encompassing twelve units of twelve hundred women and every one of their lockers. I was pretty sure the Camp’s turn would come quickly. The feds were looking for cigarettes.

  The Bureau of Prisons had decreed that all of its institutions were to go smoke-free by 2008. It put financial incentives in place for prisons to do it even before the deadline. Warden Deboo’s parting shot to the women of Danbury was to impose the ban, to officially take hold on September 1. The preceding months had seen extensive communications about the ban. First of all, the commissary ginned up the demand for cigarettes in July, trying to get rid of their stock. Then in August everyone had one month in which to smoke their brains out before going cold turkey on one of the most addictive drugs known to man.