Orange Is the New Black

by Piper Kerman

  The truth is, I was having trouble being a good stoic. I couldn’t resist life’s emotional flow and pulse, or the imperfect people I found so vital. I kept on throwing myself into the current, although once in I could usually stay calm and keep my head above water.

  Still I had to wonder, why had my need to transgress taken me so far, to a prison camp? Perhaps I was just dense, unable to understand these things from a distance but instead intent on scorching myself face to the fire, burning off my eyelashes. Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world? The vilest thing I had located, within myself and within the system that held me prisoner, was an indifference to the suffering of others. And when I understood how rotten I had been, what would I do with myself, now that I was revealed as wretched, not just in private but in public, in a court of law?

  If there was one thing that I had learned in the Camp, it was that I was in fact good. I wasn’t so good with chickenshit rules, but I was more than capable of helping other people. I was eager to offer what I had, which was more than I had realized. Judging others held little appeal to me now, and when I did it, I regretted it. Best of all, I had found other women here in prison who could teach me how to be better. It seemed to me that my total demonstrated failure at being a good girl was more than matched by the urgency of being a good person. And that was something of which I hoped my grandmother would approve, and maybe forgive me, when I could not attend to her suffering.

  THE DAY after Thanksgiving my grandmother died. I mourned quietly and with the sympathy of my friends. I felt like a wrung-out rag. I stared for many hours over the valley, lost in the past, and slowed to a walk on the track. I had never received a response to my furlough request. As Pop said, I had had nothing coming.

  About a year later, when I was home on the street, I got a letter from Danbury. Formal, a little stilted, it was from Rosemarie, and folded in it were two photographs of my grandmother. My cousin had sent them to me in prison, and I had looked at them hundreds of times when I needed to smile. In the first, my grandmother has just opened a festively wrapped present, an oversize black Harley-Davidson T-shirt. Her face shows undisguised horror. In the second, the gag gift is clasped in her lap, and she beams at the camera, her eyes bright with laughter. Rosemarie wrote that she hoped I was doing well on the outs, and that she had found these photos in a book in the library and recognized who it was. Rosemarie said she knew how much I loved my grandmother, and also that she was thinking of me.

  CHAPTER 16

  Good Time

  The free world was getting closer. Despite my incident report in November, I was on course to serve thirteen months of my fifteen-month sentence and be released in March with “good time,” the standard federal sentence reduction for good behavior. In January I would be eligible to go to a halfway house in deep Brooklyn on Myrtle Avenue (known as “Murder Avenue” in the Camp). Prison scuttlebutt was that as soon as you passed a few drug tests and found a job, the halfway house would send you home—as long as they could claim your paycheck.

  Natalie would be waiting for me on Murder Avenue. I said goodbye to my bunkie the first week of December. The night before she left I was practically jumping out of my skin, asking her questions, leaning over from the top bunk to look at her lying below me for the last night. Natalie seemed to have willed herself into a state of calm. The next morning as she said goodbye to the assembled crowd of well-wishers, I was hopping nervously around the front door like a little kid. I wanted to be last. I was trying to keep my cool, even more than when Yoga Janet left.

  “Natalie, I don’t know what I would have done without you. I love you.” This was probably the most direct thing I’d ever said to the proud woman I had lived with so intimately for nine months. I was going to lose the battle with tears again. In the last month I had become the freaking waterworks queen.

  Natalie hugged me gently. “Bunkie, it’s okay, I’ll see you soon. I’m gonna be waiting for you in Brooklyn.”

  “That’s right, Natalie. Hold it down till I get there.”

  She smiled and walked tall out the door for the last time.

  Pop was also supposed to go to a halfway house in January. One reason she and I grew so close was that we were going home at the same time. For Pop, as well as Natalie, going home meant something very different than it did for me. Pop had been down for more than twelve years, since the early 1990s. She remembered a world with no cell phones, no Internet, and no probation officer to report to. She was nervous as hell. We spent many hours talking about what it would be like when she was released, first to a halfway house for six months and then to the house that she would share with her family. Her husband was in prison down south, due for release in three years. She planned to work in a restaurant and confided that she would like to buy and run a hot dog cart someday. She was nervous about computers, nervous about the halfway house, nervous about her kids, and nervous about leaving the place that, for better or worse, had been her home for more than a decade.

  I was nervous too, but not about going home. In the second week of December I received a letter from my lawyer, Pat Cotter in Chicago, that informed me that one of my codefendants, a man named Jonathan Bibby, was going on trial, and I might be called to testify as a witness. He reminded me that under the terms of my plea agreement, I was required to provide complete and truthful testimony if called upon by the government. Pat advised me that the feds could choose to transport me to Chicago to appear in court and were in fact planning to do so. He wrote:

  It is not that I would not enjoy the opportunity to see you again, of course, but it is my understanding based on comments of prior clients that travel courtesy of the Bureau of Prisons can be an uncomfortable and tiring experience for the inmate involved. I would like to spare you that experience, if possible.

  I was horrified. Jonathan Bibby was a stranger to me. I didn’t want to go to Chicago, and I certainly didn’t want to be a government witness—a rat. I wanted to stay right here in the Camp and do headstands and go to movie night with Pop. I called my lawyer and explained that I had never even met Jonathan Bibby, that I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. If I were moved to Chicago for his trial, it might screw up my halfway house date in January. Could he please make some calls on my behalf and let the U.S. Attorney know that I had no personal experience with the defendant and couldn’t possibly be a valuable witness?

  “Of course.” he said.

  I sensed I shouldn’t count on staying in Danbury.

  I kept it all to myself, telling only Pop about the letter.

  “Oh, baby,” she said. “The airlift.” She was talking about the federal transport system, Con Air. “The airlift is nothing nice.”

  WITH NATALIE gone, I lived solo in my cube for several days. The naked ticking stripe of her mattress made me feel lonely. I had been down long enough to know that just waiting passively for the prison gods to give me a wonderful new bunkie was a losing strategy. Faith, my next-door neighbor, was a good egg, and so a switch of cubes was engineered, and I got permission to move next door. I was now sleeping in the bunk that Vanessa had occupied, and Colleen before her. Faith was very different from Natalie, though happily not much more talkative. She was very glad to have me as a bunkie and would tell me about her pretty teenage daughter back in New Hampshire while she knitted—she had a special knitting permit.

  Faith was doing a long drug sentence, and I vaguely gathered that she had taken the fall for someone else. She worried constantly about her daughter, whom she hadn’t seen in over a year. She was making her a green sweater for Christmas. There never seemed to be more than three or four colors of acrylic yarn at the commissary—gray, white, burgundy, and green—and they would run out of the burgundy and green all the time, frustrating the hobbyists. Jae was crocheting Christmas toys for her kids—she had started months in advance. I couldn’t see anything harder in prison than being a mom, especially at the holidays.

  I GOT a letter from Pom-Pom
, formerly of the garage, who had just gone home to Trenton.

  Dear Piper,

  I just asked about you. I’m so happy to receive a letter + some pictures from you. My sister said I was fatter when I was in there. I told her it’s just the clothes. Anyway, I can’t believe you got a shot! Amy wrote me her bunkie went to the SHU, but she didn’t tell me you got a shot. That place is really going nuts.

  Pom-Pom, whose mother had preceded her at Danbury, had been worried about what would happen when she was released. She had relatives who grudgingly agreed to let her live with them, though she also considered going straight to a homeless shelter.

  Now she was back on the outside and she had received a chilly reception. The apartment where she was living was in a neighborhood where gunfire was audible every day—much scarier than the Danbury shooting range. The cupboards had been completely bare, and she had taken the little money she had to stock the house with food, shampoo, and toilet paper. She was sleeping on the floor.

  God, I miss you! It’s sad to say I miss that place cause it is crazy out here.… All this freedom, but I still feel like I’m locked up. I could truly say y’all was my family. I had a birthday and what did I get? Nothing, and I had to beg for a Thanksgiving dinner. Now you know why I was so scared to come home.

  We would have made a big deal about her birthday in the Camp. But Pom-Pom still drew on a deep reserve of good humor, which she’d needed to survive her life so far. She sent me a list of people she wanted me to give her good wishes—her bunkie, Jae, the remaining garage girls—and a heartfelt pep talk on how to make it to my own release. She closed, “Love always, Pom-Pom.”

  It was the strangest feeling ever, but I wished that Pom-Pom was back with us in prison. I was scared for her out there. At least in the BOP ghetto the perimeter guards were the only ones armed with guns, and they never got out of their trucks.

  “Piper?” Amy peeked around my cube doorway. I didn’t usually allow company up in my cube, preferring to do my visiting out in the common areas.

  “What’s up, Monster?” I had started calling Amy “the little monster” back when we worked together in electric. It was a deserved nickname, as she was foul-mouthed and foul-tempered and disrespected just about everyone and everything. But I loved Amy in spite of myself, and she made me laugh. She wanted to be so tough, and she was in a street-urchin way, but I thought of her as a spitting, hissing kitten that you could hold at arm’s length by the scruff of its neck. Still, kittens have sharp claws and teeth.

  Now Amy rushed to the side of my bunk and scrambled up on my footstool. I could see she was upset. She was supposed to go home before me, to upstate New York. I knew there was uncertainty waiting for her at home too, though not as dire as Pom-Pom’s situation. For several weeks she had been trying to sort out her living and work arrangements over the phone, and she was stressed out. She was trying to get hold of her father with increasing desperation, and having trouble with the phone system. As she explained her frustration, the words spilled out faster and faster, until she choked on them, hiccupping.

  “Come up here, Amy.” I made room on my bed, and she scrambled up. “I’m sorry things are uncertain right now. It’s going to be okay, you’re going to be home soon.” I put my arm around her while she cried.

  She buried her head in my lap. “I want my daddy!”

  I shushed her and patted the blond curls she was so proud of, and inside I grieved angrily over the insanity of locking up children, and then returning them to neighborhoods that were more desperate and dangerous than jails.

  I SAW on the callout that I was scheduled to spend my afternoon in a mandatory prerelease class on housing, and my blood pressure started to rise. All federal prisoners are required to go through a series of prerelease classes before they reenter society. This made perfect sense. Many of the women in Danbury had been cloistered away in prison for years, and despite the harshness of being institutionalized, it was also infantilizing. The idea that they were going to hit the ground running and be able to cope with the day-to-day requirements of life “on the outs” was ridiculous.

  I had been pretty curious about what the reentry classes would convey to us. The first one I was required to attend was on health. I showed up in the visiting room at the appointed time; chairs had been set out for twenty women, and a CO who worked in food services down in the FCI was there to lead it. I leaned over and asked Sheena, seated next to me, why he was teaching.

  “He used to play professional baseball,” she replied by way of explanation.

  I thought about that for a minute, as if there were any sense to it. “But why is someone from Danbury teaching this class—and why not someone from health services?” Sheena rolled her eyes at me. “Are all the classes taught by the prison staff? They don’t work on the outside, with ex-offenders. They spend all their time here. What do they know about reentry?”

  “Pipes, you’re looking for logic in all the wrong places.”

  The guy from food services was very nice and very funny. We liked him a lot. He told us that it was important to eat right, exercise, and treat your body as a temple. But he didn’t tell us how to get health care services that people with no money could afford. He didn’t tell us how we could quickly obtain birth control and other reproductive health services. He didn’t recommend any solutions for behavioral or psychiatric care, and for sure some of those broads needed it. He didn’t say what options there might be for people who had struggled with substance abuse, sometimes for decades, when they were confronted by old demons on the outside.

  Another class had been titled “Positive Attitude” and was taught by the former warden’s secretary. We liked her very little, as she was deeply condescending toward us. Her talk detailed her epic struggle to diet her way into a fancy dress for a holiday party. Tragically, she had not been able to lose the weight, but she still had fun at the party, because she had managed to keep her positive attitude. I looked around the room in disbelief. There were women in there who had lost their parental rights and would have to battle to reunite with their children; women who had nowhere to go and so would be heading to homeless shelters; women who had never worked in the mainstream economy and must find real jobs or end up back in prison. I had none of these concerns, because I was so much luckier than the majority of the women I’d been living with in Danbury, but I felt disrespected by how trivial these classes were turning out to be. The next one was led by the dour German nun who ran the chapel and was so vague it’s hard to recall but dealt with “personal growth.”

  Next we heard about housing. Housing, employment, health, family—these are the factors that determine whether a person returning home from prison will succeed or fail as a law-abiding citizen. I knew the guy who was leading this session from CMS—he was a nice enough guy. And he talked about what he knew—which was insulation, and aluminum siding, and the best kind of roof to put on your house. He talked about interiors too. I was so disgusted with the BOP’s farcical prerelease program that I just shut my eyes and waited for it to be over.

  One woman raised her hand. “Um, Mr. Green, that’s cool and all, but I need to find an apartment to rent. Can you talk a little bit about how to get an apartment, and if there are any programs we could qualify for, you know, affordable housing and stuff? Someone told me I should go to a homeless shelter.…”

  He looked not irritated, but unsure. “Yeah, well, I don’t really know too much about that. The best way to find an apartment is in the paper, or there are websites now that you can search.”

  I wondered how big the BOP’s budget for reentry was.

  I STARED intently at Larry across the card table. He looked worn out, with deep dark circles under his eyes. I remembered something Yoga Janet had said to me about our boyfriends: “They do the time with us.”

  Every visit now focused on a single topic: me coming home. It didn’t matter if it was Larry, my mother, my brother, or a friend. Among my people there was a collective sense of relief,
a feeling that we were almost out of the woods. I didn’t want to be a killjoy, so I tried to hold my sense of dread about the possibility of Chicago in check.

  It seemed like half the people in the visiting room would be going home soon—Pop, Delicious, Doris, Sheena. Big Boo Clemmons had gone home after Thanksgiving, and her girlfriend Trina had taken to her bed for a week.

  Camila was going too, but not home yet. The Camp was about to send another group down the hill to the drug program, and she was among them. Nina was supposed to come back in January, having completed the program, before being released. I hoped that I would see her before I left.

  I sat in Camila’s cube, watching her sort through her stuff. She had just given me a pair of big black work boots. The drug program was very strict, so she had to dispose of contraband before she went, and give away excess clothing. Camila was in a good mood. The drug program would cut her sentence by a year, from seven to six. I worried about her mouth; more than most of the women in the Camp, Camila would talk back to the guards if they made her mad, and she had a temper. The program was strict, and people got kicked out of it all the time.

  “I’m going to miss you. Who will I do yoga with?”

  She smiled. “You’re going home, tomorrow almost!”

  “Camila, you have to promise me you will bite your tongue down there. It’s no joke.”

  She made a perplexed face at me. “Bite my tongue? Why would I do that?”

  “Bite your tongue. It’s an expression. I mean you can’t talk shit to the officers down there. Even if they’re like Welch or that asshole Richards.”

  True to his word, Officer Richards was doing his best to make everyone’s life miserable in the Camp. If DeSimon had reminded me of a lost detachable penis, Richards was like a furious one. He was ludicrously angry; he always looked like his shiny bright pink head might explode at any moment. He was petty, refusing to give a prisoner her letters if she had not been present at mail call, and rigidly enforcing the TV hours, much to the displeasure of the insomniacs. I didn’t care about most of his new-sheriff activities, although Pop was bitter about having foot massages only when he was not on duty.