Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

Pop fixed me with a ferocious glare and a pointed finger. “Listen, honey, I know you just got here, so I know that you don’t understand what’s what. I’m gonna tell you this once. There’s something here called ‘inciting a riot,’ and that kind of shit you’re talking about, hunger strikes, that kind of shit, that’s inciting a riot. You can get in big trouble for that, they will lock your ass up in the SHU in a heartbeat. Now, me, I don’t care, but you don’t know these people, honey. The wrong one hears you saying that shit, she goes and tells the CO, you’re going to be shocked how quickly the lieutenant is coming to lock your ass up. So take a tip from me, and watch what you say.” And with that, she left. Nina looked at me, silently telegraphing, You asshole. From then on I stayed out of Pop’s path, ducking my head to avoid her eyes on the chow line.

February is Black History Month, and someone had festooned the dining hall with posters of Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington Carver, and Rosa Parks. “They didn’t put shit up for Columbus Day,” groused a woman named Lombardi behind me in line one day. Was she really objecting to Dr. King? I kept my mouth shut. The minimum-security camp at Danbury housed approximately 200 women at any given time, though sometimes it climbed to a nightmarishly cramped 250. About half were Latino (Puerto Rican, Dominican, Colombian), about 24 percent white, 24 percent African-American and Jamaican, and then a very random smattering: one Indian, a couple of Middle Eastern women, a couple of Native Americans, one tiny Chinese woman in her sixties. I always wondered how it felt to be there if you lacked a tribe. It was all so very West Side Story-stick to your own kind, Maria!

The racialism was unabashed; the three main Dorms had organizing principles allegedly instituted by the counselors, who assigned housing. A Dorm was known as “the Suburbs,” B Dorm was dubbed “the Ghetto,” and C Dorm was “Spanish Harlem.” The Rooms, where all new people went first, were a strange mix. Butorsky wielded housing assignments as a weapon, so if you got on his bad side, you would be stuck into rooms. The most physically ill women in the Camp, or pregnant women like the one I had seen when I first arrived, occupied the bottom bunks; the top bunks were full of newbies, or behavior problems, of which there was never a shortage. Room 6, where I lived, was serving as a sick ward rather than a punishment room-I was lucky. At night I would lie in the dark in my bunk over the snoring Polish woman, listening to the thrum of Annette’s breathing apparatus and gazing past the sleeping top-bunk shapes out the windows, which were level with my bunk. When there was a moon, I could see the tops of fir trees and the white hills of the far valley.

I spent as many hours as I could standing out in the cold, staring to the east over an enormous Connecticut valley. The Camp sat perched atop of one of the highest hills in the area, and you could see rolling hills and farms and clusters of towns for miles over the giant basin of the valley below. I saw the sunrise every day in February. I braved the rickety icy stairs that led down to a field house gym and the Camp’s frozen track, where I’d crunch around bundled in my ugly brown coat and itchy army-green hat, muffler, and mittens before heading into the cold gym to lift weights, almost always mercifully alone. I wrote letters and read books. But time was a beast, a big, indolent immovable beast that wasn’t interested in my efforts at hastening it in any direction.

Some days I barely spoke, keeping eyes open and mouth shut. I was afraid, less of physical violence (I hadn’t seen any evidence of it) than of getting cursed out publicly for fucking up, either breaking a prison rule or a prisoner’s rule. Be in the wrong place at the wrong time, sit in “someone’s” seat, intrude where you were not wanted, ask the wrong question, and you’d get called out and bawled out in a hurry, either by a terrifying prison guard or by a terrifying convict (sometimes in Spanish). Except to pester Nina with questions, and to theorize and trade notes with my fellow A &O newbies about what was what, I kept to myself.

But my fellow prisoners were in fact looking out for me. Wormtown Rosemarie brought me her Wall Street Journal every day and checked on how I was. Yoga Janet would make a point of sitting with me at meals, and we would chat about the Himalayas and New York and politics. She was appalled when a subscription to The New Republic showed up for me at mail call. “You might as well read the Weekly Standard!” she said with disgust.

ONE COMMISSARY day-shopping was twice a week in the evening, half the Camp on Monday, the other half on Tuesday-Nina appeared in the door of Room 6. Still without money in my prison account, I was washing with loaned soap and was deeply envious of the other prisoners’ weekly shopping excursions.

“Hey Piper, how about a root beer float?” said Nina.

“What?” I was dumbfounded, and hungry. Dinner had been roast beef with an eerie metallic-green cast. I had eaten rice and cucumbers.

“I’m gonna get ice cream at commissary, we can make root beer floats.” My heart soared, then crashed.

“I can’t shop, Nina. My account didn’t clear yet.”

“Would you shut up? Come on.”

You could get a pint of cheap ice cream at the commissary-vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. You had to eat it right away, because of course there was no freezer, just a big ice dispenser for prisoners. Woe to the inmate who stuck a pint into the ice machine and got caught by another inmate! You would get yelled at for being disgustingly unsanitary. Like many things, it just wasn’t done.

Nina bought vanilla ice cream and two cans of root beer. My mouth was watering as she prepared our floats in plastic coffee mugs, the foam a luscious rich brown. She handed me one, and I sipped, wearing a foam mustache. It was the best thing I had tasted since I got to prison. I felt tears pricking behind my eyes. I was so happy.

“Thank you, Nina. Thank you so much.”

AT MAIL call I continued to be blessed with an avalanche of letters, every one of which I savored. Some were from my closest friends, some were from family, and some were from people I had never met, friends of friends who had heard about me and taken the time to offer some solace with pen and paper to a total stranger. Larry told me that one of our friends had told her folks about me, and her father had decided to read every one of the books on my Amazon wish list. In short order I had accumulated, via the mail: beautiful postcards from my old coworker Kelly and letters written on my friend Arin’s exquisitely decorated writing paper, which were a treasure in the drab ugliness of the facility; seven printout pages of Steven Wright jokes from Bill Graham; a little book about coffee, hand-illustrated by my friend Peter; and a lot of photographs of other people’s cats. These were all of my riches and in fact my only valuable possessions.

My uncle Winthrop Allen III wrote to me:

Pipes,

Your Web page was well received. I forwarded it to a few of my friends and acquaintances, so don’t be surprised to get bundles of old books from unknown sources.

Enclosed is Japanese Street Slang. You never know when you’re going to need just the right insult. Joe Orton, he needs no introduction, but there is one in the front of the book, anyhow. Parkinson was an amusing old duffer, inventor of Parkinson’s Law, which I kinda forget. No, I remember now, it’s about tasks expanding to fill the available time. When you are finished getting your group therapy sessions, safe-sex lectures, and 12-step sermons, you may be able to test the hypothesis.

The Prince, Mach’s my all-time fave. Like you and me, he’s forever maligned.