Orange Is the New Black

by Piper Kerman

  But he had one habit so evil that I wished debilitating illness would befall him. He screamed on the mic. All the time. The PA system was wired throughout the entire building, with multiple loudspeakers in all the Dorms. These were hung just feet from some women’s beds. And he would get on the PA and just scream invective at us, all evening long, at painful volume. Poor Jae’s bunk was right under a speaker. “Pipes, you think you can bring your electric skills over here?” That was something I was not confident I could do, or get away with, without electrocuting myself or going to the SHU. So we all had to listen to his abuse, and the word torture took on new meaning.

  AS CHRISTMAS Day neared, Larry delivered the bad news from my lawyer: I would be called as a witness to Chicago. I felt ill. What if I missed my halfway house date? Actually, there was no question that I was going to miss my halfway house date. Right down to the wire, my past would get in the way of my freedom. And what if I saw Nora? No way were they summoning me and not calling her.

  I was nervous, but no one noticed; the Camp was in the midst of holiday mania. It had been building since before Thanksgiving, but now it burst out in force with a team of prisoners busy preparing for the annual Christmas decoration contest. Every unit in the FCI competed—there were a dozen units down in the prison, and the Camp was considered one unit. Leftover decorations from previous years were already hung around the Camp, giant signs that proclaimed NOEL and PEACE in dingy red and white tissue. But the 2004 decorating crew had something new, something big up their khaki sleeves. They toiled in secret, hour after hour in an off-limits television room that had been officially commandeered for them. All we got a glimpse of were the strange papier-mâché creatures they were preparing. “Check out my faggot elf!” one volunteer boasted happily, showing me an odd little humanoid.

  The day before Christmas the Camp decorating crew’s handiwork was revealed. It was, frankly, incredible: they had transformed a dingy beige television room with gray linoleum floors into a dazzling Christmas village on a winter night. The particleboard ceiling was concealed by an inky blue starry-night sky, a village was spread out as if in a mountain valley, and the workshops, the barroom, even the carousel were populated by little elves of debatable sexual preference. They frolicked in sparkling snow that drifted across the linoleum. Everything twinkled. Awestruck, we all examined the handiwork with glee. I still have no idea how they pulled it off.

  We waited nervously all afternoon for the judging to come down. When the verdict was made public, for the first time ever the Camp was victorious! The guards assured us that the competition had been stiff—down on the compound the Puppy Program was housed in Unit Nine, which also included the psych unit, and they had fashioned antlers for all the Labrador retrievers and created a herd of reindeer. A herd of reindeer!

  A special screening of Elf, with free popcorn to boot, was the entire Camp’s prize. Faith, my bunkie, surprised me in our cube: “Piper, do you want to watch Elf together?”

  I was taken aback; assuming things went as they always did, I would be watching the movie with Pop, or maybe with the Italian Twins. But it was clearly important to Faith.

  “Sure, bunkie. That would be cool.”

  The movie was being screened in a different room than was typical, with several showings. Faith and I got our popcorn, grabbed two good seats, and settled in to watch together. We would not be making Christmas cookies, or picking out the perfect tree to decorate, or kissing the people we loved under mistletoe. But Faith could claim her special place in my life, and I had one in hers, especially at Christmastime. And it was cool.

  ON DECEMBER 27 people got their Sunday New York Times in the Monday mail. I sidled up to Lombardi and asked, “Hey, could I have the Styles section?”

  I scurried up to my bunk with the paper; Larry had a piece in it, and not just any piece. It was the “Modern Love” column, the weekly personal essay about love and relationships. He had been working on it for a long time, and I knew it was about our long-delayed decision to get married. Other than that, I had no idea what the Times readers and I had in store.

  He described, with great humor, our untraditional courtship, and why neither of us really thought it was important to get married, although we’d been to twenty-seven weddings together. But something had changed.

  THERE was never a tipping point, no eureka moment when I realized that doing the most traditional thing possible was a good idea. Some guys say they know immediately She’s the One. Not me. Whether it’s a sweater or software, it takes some time for me to know if I want to keep something, one reason I always save receipts. I can’t say there was an instance when I looked into the pale blue eyes of the girl I met over corned beef hash at a cafe in San Francisco and thought, “This is it.” Now, after eight years, I know.

  When did I know? Was it the way she helped me deal with the death of my grandfather? The relief I felt when she finally answered her cellphone on Sept. 11? That great hike in Point Reyes? Because she sobbed with joy when the Sox finally won? The way my nephews greet her like a rock star when she walks into the room?

  Perhaps I should have known right from the start, that morning in the middle of our cross-country trip, when she required one last stop at Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City for a half slab of ribs for breakfast (and 10 minutes into the feast saying to me, “Hey, baby, why don’t you pop open a beer?”).

  Or did I not truly know until seven years later when we found ourselves forced apart for more than a year? Who can say? It’s the big moments, maybe, but it’s the little moments as much or even more.

  I could of course conjure up every one of those instances in perfect detail, right down to the chewy tang of those ribs and how good that beer had tasted.

  Slow as ever, yet indeed as sure as it gets, it dawned on me: She wants to get married. And if that’s true, then I want to get married. To her. This is perhaps the least original idea I’ve had in a long time, but I needed to get here myself, on my own terms. And after all these years one thing I actually had going for me was the element of surprise.

  So what the hell, let’s do it. I still don’t believe marriage is the only path to happiness or completeness as a person, but it’s the right thing for us. So I asked her. Or, more accurately, what I said, sitting next to her on that silly island in a scene straight out of Bride’s magazine, was something about love and commitment and not going anywhere and here’s these rings I got you, and if you want actually to make it official, that’s cool, and if you don’t, that’s cool, too. And if you want to have a wedding, I’m into it, and if you don’t, who needs it. She’s still unclear what it was I was asking, exactly, but when she got done laughing, she said yes. And then she threw off her clothes and jumped in the water.

  My friends joke that I’ve been to 27 weddings and now it’s finally time for one funeral—for my singlehood. Which is sad like any funeral, sure, but this death is no tragic accident. I look at it more like euthanasia I’m performing on myself, a mercy killing.

  I’m ready, babe. Pull the plug.

  Even here, without him, I couldn’t imagine any sweeter Christmas present.

  I ALWAYS found New Year’s Eve a bore on the outside, but on the inside it held greater interest, and I was very conscious and grateful that it would be my only one at Danbury. It made sense that turning the calendar forward would make a prisoner feel more optimistic. Watching those numbers tick suggested progress.

  Much more than any New Year, even the Millennium, it felt for me like something was coming to a definitive end. Pop cried as we counted down at midnight—it was her thirteenth New Year’s in prison, and her last. As I watched her, I tried to imagine the conflicting rush of emotions when you considered so much survival, regret, resilience, and lost time.

  It seemed like half the Camp was focused on getting Pop home in one piece. She was supposed to be finished working in the dining hall—weirdly, prisoners do earn and accumulate vacation days in the BOP—but she didn’t even make it one day. I c
aught her back in the kitchen and had a fit, but she just told me to go fuck myself. She didn’t know what to do with herself if she wasn’t working. The funny, salty, heavily accented earth mother who had helped me through so much was a bundle of nerves—she was less than two weeks from leaving for the halfway house.

  So I felt terrible when I got the call on January 3—“Kerman! Pack out!”

  Packing out meant you packed up your shit, because you were going somewhere. The prisoner is provided with army-issue duffel bags to temporarily hold her possessions. I elected to give most of my accumulated treasures away: my hot-pink contraband toenail polish, my prized white men’s pajamas that Pop had given to me, my army-green jacket, and even my precious headset radio. All my books went into the prison library. Given my secrecy until this point, my fellow prisoners were surprised by my impending departure. Some assumed I had won early release, but those who heard that I was going on Con Air were full of curiosity, concern, and advice.

  “Wear a sanitary pad. They won’t always let you use the bathroom. So try not to drink anything!”

  “I know you’re picky about food, Piper, but eat whatever you can, because it might be the last edible meal you get for a while.”

  “When they shackle you, try to flex your wrists so there’s a little more room, and if you try to catch the marshal’s eye when he’s chaining you, maybe he won’t cuff you so tight your circulation goes. Oh, and double up your socks so the restraints don’t make your ankles bleed.”

  “Pray they don’t send you through Georgia. They stick you in a county jail, and it’s the worst place I’ve ever been in my life.”

  “There are tons of cute guys on the airlift. They will love you!”

  I went to talk to the Marlboro Man. “Mr. King, they’re shipping me out on a writ, to Chicago.” I actually succeeded in making him look surprised.

  Then he laughed. “Diesel therapy.”

  “What?”

  “Around here we call the airlift ‘diesel therapy.’”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Well, you take care of yourself.”

  “Mr. King, if I come back before my release date, can I have my job back?”

  “Sure.”

  AS IT turned out, I didn’t get shipped out for two days. I called Larry one last time—other prisoners had warned me not to say anything about the details of prison travel over the phone: “They’re listening, and if you give specifics sometimes they think that you’re planning to escape.” Larry was bizarrely chipper, and I felt like he didn’t really understand what was happening, even though I told him I might not be able to talk to him for a long time.

  I bade goodbye to Pop.

  “My Piper! My Piper! You’re not supposed to go before me!”

  I hugged her and told her she was going to be fine in the halfway house, and that I loved her.

  Then I walked down the hill and began my next misadventure.

  CHAPTER 17

  Diesel Therapy

  Like much airline travel these days, flying Con Air involved a lot of stewing in your own juices. Exactly eleven months since I had first set foot in R&D, I was brought back there, and I waited. One by one guards brought other women in to wait with me. A skinny, dreamy-eyed white girl. A pair of Jamaican sisters. An unpleasant hick from the Camp whom I worked with in CMS, and who was headed back to western Pennsylvania for a court case. A big dykey-looking black woman with a wicked scar that began somewhere behind her ear, wound around her neck, and disappeared down below the collar of her T-shirt. There was little talking.

  Finally a prison guard whom I knew from the Camp appeared. Ms. Welch was a food service officer and knew Pop very well. I felt some measure of relief that she would be involved in our departure—much better than the guard who had welcomed me to Danbury. She issued us all new uniforms, the same khaki hospital scrubs and wussy canvas shoes I had been clad in upon arrival. I was sad to give up my steel-toes, even though they already had cracks in the soles. One by one she began to shackle us—chain around the waist, handcuffs that were then chained to your waist, and ankle cuffs with a foot of chain between them. I had never been cuffed in my life outside my boudoir. I thought about the fact that I had absolutely no choice in the matter; I was going to be shackled whether I was cooperative, disgruntled, or prone with a knee in the small of my back or a boot on my chest.

  I looked at Ms. Welch as she approached me. “How are you doing, Kerman?” she asked. She sounded genuinely concerned, and I flashed on the fact that we were “theirs,” being sent out into the great unknown. She knew what the next few hours held for me, but the rest was probably as much of a mystery to her as it was to me.

  “Okay,” I answered in an uncharacteristically small voice. I was scared, but not of her.

  She started to chain me up, chatting in a distracting way, almost like a dental hygienist who knows she is doing something that causes discomfort. “How is that—too tight?”

  “A little too tight on this wrist, yes.” I hated the gratitude in my voice, but it was genuine.

  We had all been packed out—all of our personal belongings had been gone through by a prison guard (in my case, the same sneering midget I had encountered on my first day) and stored. The only thing you were allowed to bring on the airlift with you was a single sheet of paper that listed your property. On the back I had written all my important information—my lawyer’s phone number and the addresses of my family and friends. Also scrawled on the paper in many handwritings was the contact information for my friends in the Camp—and if they were due to go home soon, a street address; if they were down for a long time, their inmate registration number. It hurt to look at the list. I wondered if I would ever see any of those women again. I kept the paper in the breast pocket of my scrubs vest with my ID.

  We were lined up and started to shuffle, clinking, out of the building toward a big unmarked bus that was used for prisoner transport. When your legs are chained together, you are forced to adopt a short, tippy-toe cadence. As we were waiting in one of the chain-link-fence chambers between the prison and the bus, the town driver’s van came speeding up. Jae hopped out, with duffel bags.

  The big black dyke perked up. “Cuz?”

  Jae blinked in disbelief. “Slice? What the hell is going on??”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  We were all herded back into the FCI so they could pack Jae out and truss her up—she was joining our motley little crew, and I was really glad to have a friend along for the ride.

  Finally, at gunpoint, we were loaded onto the bus and headed into the outside world. It was disorienting to see suburban Connecticut rushing by, eventually giving way to the highway. I had no idea where we were heading, though the odds were on Oklahoma City, the hub of the federal prison transport system. Jae caught up with Slice, her actual cousin, on the bus. Neither of them would cop to knowing why they were being transported, but they were probably codefendants, as the guard had been concerned that they should have extra restraints.

  “Naw, naw, we cousins, we love each other!” they protested.

  The guard had also indicated that they were headed to Florida, which was most worrisome. “Piper, I don’t know shit about Florida, I’m from the Bronx, I been to Milwaukee, and that’s it,” declared Jae. “No fucking reason I should be going to Florida unless they be taking us to Disney World.”

  We finally arrived at what seemed like an abandoned industrial vacant lot. The bus stopped, and there we sat, for hours. If you think that it is impossible to sleep in shackles, I am here to prove you wrong. They gave us chicken sandwiches, and I had to help the Pennsylvania hick eat—the guard had not been as kind to her as to me and had chained her tightly and put her in an extra “black box” restraint that immobilized her thumbs—this to protect her codefendant, a woman with whom she was now excitedly gossiping. Finally the bus rumbled to life and pulled onto a huge tarmac. We had company—there were at least a half-dozen other transport vehicles, an
other bus, unmarked vans and sedans, all idling in the cold winter dusk. And then quite suddenly an enormous 747 landed, taxied briefly, and pulled up among the vehicles. In a moment I recognized that I was in the midst of the most clichéd action thriller, as jackbooted marshals with submachine guns and high-powered rifles swarmed the tarmac—and I was one of the villains.

  First they unloaded about a dozen prisoners from the plane, men in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and attires. Some of them appeared to be wearing paper jumpsuits, not the best deal in the biting January wind. Disheveled and cold, they seemed pretty interested in our little group huddled next to the Danbury bus. Then the armed figures were shouting at us over the wind to line up, with plenty of room between each of us. We performed the tarmac jig that is done when one is trying to move as quickly as possible against restraints. After a rough pat-down, a female marshal checked my hair and my mouth for weapons, and the hop was on to the stairs up to the plane.

  On board were more marshals, enormous beefy men and a handful of weathered-looking women in navy blue uniforms. As we clinked and clanked into the passenger seating area, we were greeted by a wave of testosterone. The plane was packed with prisoners, all of whom appeared to be male. Most of them were very, very happy to see us. Some were making a lot of noise, declaring what they would like to do to us, offering critiques as we shuffled up the aisle as directed by the marshals. “Don’t you look at them!” the marshals shouted at us. Clearly, they had calculated that it was much easier to focus control on the behavior of a dozen females than two hundred males.