Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

ALTHOUGH EACH day often seemed endless, now each week came to an end before I expected it, hastened by visiting hours. I was remarkably lucky to have a visit from someone on Thursday or Friday, and also on Saturday or Sunday. This was a function of Larry and my mother’s commitment, plus that of a large stock of friends in New York who were eager to come see me. Larry juggled my complex visiting schedule with cruise-director aplomb.

When my counselor Butorsky suddenly left, I feared another bureaucratic nightmare. He reportedly preferred early retirement to submitting to the will of Warden Deboo, a much younger non-“northern” female, and he was replaced with another “lifer,” Mr. Finn, who was also nearing the twenty-year mark at the prison. Finn immediately made enemies among the Camp prisoners and staff by demanding a private office and harassing the orderlies about the quality of their floor-waxing. When he moved into his fancy private office, he placed a brass nameplate on the door. Of course, the damn thing disappeared immediately, which resulted in an army of COs coming in to shake down the Camp. They would not rest until Officer Finn’s nameplate was found!

“You out of the frying pan and into the fire, bunkie,” said Natalie, who knew Finn from previous years down the hill. “That man is nothing nice. At least Butorsky did his paperwork. Finn hates paperwork.”

This stressed me out, given the extensive visiting-list-juggling I was trying to perform. But my blond hair and blue eyes stood me in good stead, just as they had with Butorsky. Mr. Finn was automatically inclined to like me, and when I approached with a new visitor’s form and a timid request that maybe he would grant a special visit or shift my list around as Mr. Butorsky had done, he snorted.

“Gimme that. I don’t give a shit how many people you have on your visiting list. I’ll put ’em all on.”

“You will?”

“Sure.” Finn looked me up and down. “What the fuck are you doing in here? We don’t see women like you much.”

“Ten-year-old drug offense, Mr. Finn.”

“What a waste. It’s a waste for half of you people up in this Camp. Most of you drug people shouldn’t even be here. Not like those scumbags down the hill… there’s one that killed her two kids. I think it’s a waste to keep her alive.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. “So you’ll put that visitor on my list, Mr. Finn?”

“Sure.”

And he did. My visiting list grew beyond twenty-five rapidly, another example of the mystifying way that no prison rule was ever really cast in stone.

LARRY AND my mother were my lifelines to the outside world, but I was also lucky enough to have friends who came to see me. Their visits were particularly refreshing because they weren’t tinged with the guilty knowledge of what I was putting Larry and my family through. I could just relax and laugh my ass off as my friends brought news and questions and observations from their miraculously normal lives.

David, my San Francisco book club buddy and Larry’s ex-roommate, was a visiting room regular. He lived in Brooklyn now and would schlep up to Connecticut on the train once a month. What was especially wonderful about his visits was that he acted as if everything were perfectly normal, surveying the landscape with both curiosity and acceptance. He loved the vending machines-“Let’s stroll over there and get a nosh!” I wanted to weep at how my friends took my calamity in stride.

David excited much attention at the Camp. Perhaps it was his combination of red hair, blasé charm, and arty eyeglasses that attracted so much pointed comment. Or maybe they just weren’t used to gay New York Jews in that neck of the woods. “That’s quite a friend you’ve got there,” commented one of the male COs after a visit. Leered Mr. Finn, “Just pretend I feel about women the way that buddy of yours from the visiting room does.” But the other prisoners loved David, who was always chatty with them. “Did you have a good time today with your faggot friend?” Pop asked after one of David’s visits; of course I had. “Faggots make the best friends,” she said philosophically. “They’re very loyal.”

My dear friend Michael wrote to me every Tuesday on his beautiful Louis Vuitton writing paper; his letters seemed like artifacts of a distant and exotic culture. On his first visit to see me, he had the misfortune of arriving at the same time as the airlift transport bus, and he was treated to the sight of disheveled women in jumpsuits entering the FCI in full shackles, supervised by guards with high-gauge rifles. When I joined him at a card table, cheerful in my tidy khaki uniform, he looked shaken but relieved.

Friends also came from Pittsburgh, Wyoming, and California to visit. My best friend Kristen left her new business in Washington to come see me every month, peering worriedly at my face for signs of trouble that others might not have caught. We have been inseparable friends since the first week of college, an odd pair to be sure: she a fairly proper southerner, a straight arrow, an overachiever driven to please; I a not-so-straight arrow. But deep down she and I are very much the same-similar families, similar values, simpatico. She was going through a rough time; her marriage was ending as her company was being born; and to have a heart-to-heart talk with her best friend, she had to haul ass to a Connecticut prison. I noticed that every time Kristen came to see me, Officer Scott would materialize in the visiting room and gaze at her like a teenage boy.

Once a male friend came to visit me; a tall, curly-headed lawyer, he had been consulting with a pro bono client at a nearby men’s prison, so he decided to stop by on his way home. Usually he and his wife came to see me together. On that quiet Thursday afternoon he and I had a grand old time, talking and laughing for hours.

Afterward Pop cornered me. “I saw you in the visiting room. You looked like you were having some good time. So who is that guy? Does Larry know he’s visiting you?”

I tried to keep a straight face while I assured Pop that my visitor was an old college friend of Larry’s and that yes, my fiancé knew about the visit. I wondered if Larry had any idea how many fans he had behind bars.

When visiting hours were over, the last inmate stragglers hugged and kissed their loved ones goodbye, and we were left together, sometimes lost in our own thoughts, hoping the CO would be lazy and skip the strip searches. If someone was crying, you smiled sympathetically or touched their shoulder. If someone was grinning, you asked, “How was your visit?” as you unlaced your shoes. Once you were finished with squatting naked and coughing, you could burst back through the double doors into the rest of the Camp building, onto the landing, where there were always lots of women loitering, waiting for the phones, and watching the visitors walk down the hill to the parking lots. If you were quick, you could dart to the window and catch one last glimpse of your visitor departing. Larry only told me later, when I was safe at home, how devastating it was for him to turn back and see me waving goodbye through the glass, and then to head back down the hill, leaving me alone.

One hobby I did not pick up was crocheting, an obsession among prisoners throughout the system. Some of the handiwork was impressive. The inmate who ran the laundry was a surly rural white woman named Nancy whose dislike for anyone but “northerners” was hardly a secret. Her personality left a lot to be desired, but she was a remarkable crochet artist. One day in C Dorm I happened upon Nancy standing with my neighbor Allie B. and mopey Sally, all howling with laughter. “What?” I asked, innocently. “Show her, Nancy!” giggled Allie. Nancy opened her hand. Perched there in her palm was an astonishingly lifelike crochet penis. Average in size, it was erect, fashioned of pink cotton yarn, with balls and a smattering of brown cotton pubic hair, and a squirt of white yarn ejaculate at the tip.