Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

Pop, who had spent many years “down on the compound” before being moved up to the Camp, had enlisted multiple messengers to deliver treats to her friends still behind the wire. Living in A Dorm, “the Suburbs,” Pop had an enormous locker in her cube, twice the size of mine and Natalie’s. It was crammed with a bounty of her favorite things-food items like SPAM that were no longer available on commissary, clothing from long ago that no one else had, and most important, perfume. She liked to mix her own-a little White Diamonds, a little Opium. Eau de Pop. “I’m almost done,” said Pop as she selected a few precious contraband lace brassieres to send to a friend doing life down the hill. “What am I hanging on to these for? I go home in January; I’ll get pretty new bras for my jewels!”

Pop was a source of wonder and mystery and revelation. I didn’t know it at the time, but Nina had set me up with the woman who would help me do my time in every sense of the word, who would baby me when I needed it most and tell me to suck it up and get tough when there was no other option. She had cast a skeptical eye over me at first. But when I procured a wooden board from the CMS shop to put under her mattress for back support, her opinion of me improved significantly. My ability to write her furlough requests was also useful. But it was my voracious appetite for her cooking and her stories that won her over.

Pop had lived a crazy life on the outside, arriving in this country from Russia at the age of three. She was married out of her parents’ house at eighteen, to a Russian gangster. Their life together had included all the excessive disco splendor of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, and several years on the run from the feds. “The feds tried to nail us every which way… my husband would just laugh. Well, if they want you bad enough, they’re gonna get you. They don’t ever give up.” Her husband was in prison somewhere down south, and her children were grown now. She had lost everything, yet managed to take a dozen years in prison and hold it all together and make the best of it. Pop was cunning and exuberant. She was kind, but she could be ruthless. She knew how to work the system and also how not to let them break you. And they were always trying.

Pop’s grown children came to visit her every week, along with several other family members, murmuring in Russian. The visiting room was the only place I ever saw her in regulation khaki uniform-otherwise she was always in her checked kitchen pants, burgundy smock with “Pop” embroidered on the breast in white yarn, and a hairnet. But for visits she would always fix her hair and put on makeup, so she would look ladylike, girlish almost.

Anyone who received visits on a regular basis usually maintained at least one uniform exclusively for these occasions-one that fit well, was kept pressed and stain-free, and in some instances was specially tailored. It was against prison rules to alter clothing in any way, but that never stopped anyone from trying to find ways to make the drab men’s uniforms a bit more flattering, a bit more feminine. Some women would iron patterned folds into the backs of the boxy, billowy shirts. Everyone knew which inmates had sewing skills, and you could trade commissary goods for a better fit-the Spanish mamis particularly liked to wear their pants tight, tight, tight. I was thrilled when someone gave me a pair of the most desirable flat-front Dickies, which had been taken in at the waist and tapered narrow at the ankle. The inner thighs were threadbare, but my fellow prisoners clicked their tongues approvingly as I sashayed to my visits. “P-I Piper!” my neighbor Delicious shouted appreciatively. “Brick House!” Larry agreed, his eyes popping when he first saw me in the tight pants.

Hair was at least as important as unis. This was not an issue for a blond, straight-haired gal like me, but for the black and Spanish women, it was the source of endless preoccupation and countless woman-hours. You could generally tell who was expecting a visit by the state of their hair. There were frequent disputes about chair time in the salon room, played out against the overpowering smells of perm solution and burning hair. The electric supply for the room was insufficient for the demand, and the circuits tripped all the time. But reprehensible DeSimon refused to do anything about it. “They oughta close that so-called ‘beauty salon’ down,” he snarled when the gals in the shop suggested that the electric crew might work on the wiring there. “It’s not working on these convicts!”

Once a prisoner completed her coiffure, she could move on to makeup. Approximately a third of the population wore makeup almost every day-out of habit, as an effort to feel normal, or to be more alluring either to a staffer or another inmate. It was bought at the commissary or, in the case of one ex-stockbroker who was addicted to Borghese, smuggled in via a visitor. Before she left for the drug program, Nina gave me a little heart-shaped compact, the kind you might find at a dollar store, and I experimented with lurid eye shadow colors. A significant percentage of the Spanish women had tattooed eyeliner, lipliner, and eyebrows, an effect I found unnerving-I associated it with Meatpacking District transsexual hookers. The tattooed brows never matched the real brows, which then had to be plucked or shaved, and with time they would fade from black to blue.

Almost everyone expecting a visit would present themselves pressed, coiffed, and painted on the landing next to the pay phones, where you could see your loved ones approaching up the hill from the parking lot. Those who weren’t expecting visits would plant themselves on the stairs anyway to observe the comings and goings, as a source of vicarious entertainment-they could generally identify any regulars on sight. “Oh, there’s Ginger’s kids! There’s Angela’s parents-he always drops her mom off before he parks, she’s got a bad hip.”

Visitors had to fill out a form stating that they had no firearms or narcotics on their person. The CO would then check the inmate’s list to be sure that the visitor’s name was on it. You had to hope that the list was up to date, something that was completely dependent on the inmate’s counselor. Did he do his paperwork? Had he bothered to turn it in? If not, tough shit. It didn’t matter who your visitor was or how far they had come to see you-they were not getting in. Larry told me how painful it was to watch every visitor-old or young, street punk or fancy yuppie-have to suck it up and kiss the prison guard’s ass in the hope of culling some sort of favor. The power games that fueled so much of the prisoner-guard experience extended to the visiting room.

Larry came to see me every week, and I lived for those visits-they were the highlight of my life in Danbury, a chest-filling affirmation of how much I loved him. My mother drove six hours round-trip until I begged her to come every other week. I saw more of her during the eleven months I was at Danbury than I had in all my previous adult years.

Yoga Janet and Sister Platte always had lots of visitors, aging counterculture hipsters and rosy-cheeked lefties in homespun Guatemalan cottons, respectively. Sister Platte was frustrated by the BOP’s effective censorship of her visiting list-international peace figures had tried to gain permission to visit her and had been denied.

Some women never got visits because they had effectively said goodbye to the outside world. No children, no parents, no friends, nobody. Some of them were halfway around the world from home, and some of them didn’t have a home. Some women stated flatly that they did not want their people to see them in a place like this. In general, the longer you were down, the fewer and farther between were your visits. I worried about my bunkie, Natalie, finishing her eight-year bid; she spoke to her young son on the phone every night and received many letters but didn’t have a single visit in the year we lived together. I observed the unspoken privacy wall we erected between us in our seven-by-ten-foot space, and never asked.