Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

“Let’s look around.” I said.

“No!!” Little Janet practically shouted. “Piper, we are gonna get in so much trouble! Don’t even move your feet!” She looked so stressed that I acquiesced.

We stood there like idiots. Nothing was happening. The suburban neighborhood was quiet. Every couple of minutes a car would drive by. No one pointed or screeched to a halt at the sight of three convicts off the plantation. Eventually a man walked by with an enormous shaggy dog.

I perked up. “I can’t tell if that’s a Newfoundland or a Great Pyrenees… good-looking dog, huh?”

“I can’t believe you-you’re looking at the dog!?” said Little Janet.

The man was looking at us.

“He sees us!”

“Of course he sees us, Levy. We’re three female inmates standing on a street corner. How’s he going to miss us?”

The man raised his hand and waved cheerfully as he passed.

After about forty-five minutes DeSimon returned with brooms and set us to work cleaning the pump house. The next week we were made to clean out the root cellar, a long low barn on the prison grounds. The root cellar contained a hodgepodge of equipment from all the shops. In the dark shadows we discovered enormous snakeskins that had been shed, which freaked us out and made DeSimon cackle with glee. An outside inspection was coming soon, and the prison staff wanted to be ready.

There was actual trash to be removed from the root cellar, a dirty and often heavy job, and we spent days hauling huge metal pipes, stockpiles of hardware, fixtures, and components out to the giant Dumpsters. Into the Dumpster went ceramic bathtubs and sinks still in their boxes, new baseboard heating components, and unopened fifty-pound boxes of nails.

“Your family’s tax dollars at work,” we muttered under our breath. I had never worked so physically hard in my life. By the time we were finished, the root cellar was empty, spotless, and tidy for inspection.

While I was quickly learning that even in prison rules were made to be broken by staff and prisoners alike, there was one aspect of work in the electric shop that was meticulously observed and enforced. A large “cage” of tools, where the shop clerk sat, contained everything from band saws to Hilti drills and myriad types of special screwdrivers, pliers, wire cutters, and individual tool belts loaded with complete sets of the basics-a whole room filled with potentially murderous objects. There was a system for checking out those tools: each prisoner had an assigned number and a bunch of corresponding metal chits that looked like dog tags. When we went out to do a job, each prisoner signed out a tool with a chit, and was responsible for returning it. At the end of each shift DeSimon would inspect the tool cage. He made it clear that if a tool went missing the prisoner whose chit occupied the empty space and the shop clerk were both going to the SHU. It was the only rule that appeared to matter to him. One day a drill bit went missing and we tore the shop and the truck apart looking for it while he watched, the clerk on the edge of tears, until finally we found the twisted piece of metal rolling around in the lid of one of the toolboxes.

DeSimon was relentlessly unpleasant to many of the prison staff as well, who called him “Swamp Yankee” (and worse). He may have been widely disliked, but he was also the head of the institution’s union chapter, which meant that management let him do as he pleased. “DeSimon’s a prick,” one of the other shop heads told me candidly. “That’s why we elected him.” Under the Prick’s indifferent tutelage, I learned the rudimentary basics of electric work.

A group of totally inexperienced women working with high voltage and nearly no supervision did yield moments of broad comedy and only occasional bodily injury. In addition to a butch tool belt, prison work gave me a greater sense of normalcy, another way of marking time, and people with whom I had something in common. Best of all, I was sent over to the garage to obtain my prison driving license, which allowed me to drive the CMS vehicles. Although I loathed DeSimon, I was glad to be kept semibusy five days a week, and ecstatic at the freedom of movement I had driving the electric shop van around the prison grounds.

On a Friday when we returned from work to the Camp, Big Boo Clemmons from B Dorm came out to meet the CMS bus. “Guilty on all four counts!” she reported with great excitement. Inside we found the TV rooms packed, because a jury had found Martha Stewart guilty on four counts of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about a well-timed stock sale. The style diva was going to have to do fed time. Her case had been followed with keen interest at Danbury -most prisoners thought she was being targeted because she was a famous female: “Guys get away with that shit all the time.”

ONE AFTERNOON Levy, our nervous coworker Shirley, and I, geared up in our tool belts, were shuttling around the staff housing on the grounds, checking the circuit panels in every house. DeSimon escorted us from house to house, where he would make small talk with the occupants while we did our thing. It was bizarre to go into the homes of our jailers and see their angel collections and family photos and pets and laundry and messy basements.

“Zey have no class,” sneered Levy. I didn’t like prison guards, but she was insufferable.

When we got back to the shop, DeSimon left, and it was up to us to clean out the truck and return the tools to the cage. That’s when I discovered the extra screwdriver in my belt.

“Levy, Shirley, I’ve got one of your screwdrivers.” They both checked their belts-no, they had theirs. I held two screwdrivers in my hands, confused. “But if you’ve got yours, then where…” I was mystified. “I must have… picked this one up in one of the houses?”

My eyes met Levy and Nervous Shirley’s, which were huge.

“What are you going to do?” Shirley hissed.

My stomach dropped. I started to sweat. I saw myself in the SHU, with no visits from Larry, with another criminal charge for stealing a CO’s potentially deadly screwdriver. And I had these two fools in on the game, no one’s choice for accomplices.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but you don’t know a thing about this, understand?” I hissed back.

They hurried into the shop, and I stood outside, looking around wildly. What the fuck was I going to do with this screwdriver? I was terrified, because I knew it could be construed as a weapon. How could I get rid of it? If I found a hiding place, what if someone found it? How did you destroy a screwdriver?

My eyes fixed on the CMS dumpster. It was big, and all the shops threw their garbage, all kinds of garbage, in there. It got emptied often, and the garbage was taken away, to Mars as far as I was concerned. I grabbed the shop garbage and strode toward the Dumpster. I fiddled with the garbage bag while I surreptitiously wiped the screwdriver like a maniac, trying to get rid of fingerprints. Then I flung both into the Dumpster, which unfortunately didn’t sound very full. It was done. Heart pounding, I returned to the shop and put away my tool belt. I didn’t even look at Nervous Shirley or Levy.

That night I went over the screwdriver problem again and again in my mind. What if the CO noticed it was missing and remembered that inmates had been in his house? He would raise the alarm, and then what? An investigation, interrogations, and then Levy and Nervous Shirley would give me up in a hot second. I closed my eyes. I was dead.

The next morning at the shop, an eerie air-raid siren went off. I almost vomited. Shirley looked faint. Levy appeared completely unconcerned. Usually the siren was used for “recalls”-sending us back to our housing units for either emergency or special practice counts. But this time nothing happened; the alarm went off for many excruciating minutes until it just stopped. Shirley went outside to smoke a cigarette with trembling hands.