Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

But in a world of women confined to such close quarters, juicy stories and secrets had a way of leaking out, either because the prisoner in question had at some point taken a blabberer into her confidence, or because the staff had done the blabbing. Of course, staff is not supposed to discuss personal information with other prisoners, but it happened all the time. Certain stories had a lot of currency. Francesca LaRue, a vicious and crazy Jesus freak in B Dorm, had been disfigured by extreme plastic surgery. A bizarre sight with balloonlike breasts, duck lips, and even ass implants, she was rumored to have performed illegitimate backroom cosmetic surgery procedures and to have “injected people with transmission fluid” to dissolve cellulite. I suspected the truth was plain old medical fraud. A clever and manipulative middle-aged blonde was rumored to have stolen tens of millions of dollars in an elaborate fraud scheme. One elderly lady had barely got her walker through the door before it spread like wildfire that she had embezzled big money from her synagogue. Most viewed this with disapproval. (“You can’t steal from a church!”)

Any story you heard from another prisoner had to be taken with about a pound of salt. Think about it: put this many women in a confined space, give them little to do and a lot of time-what else can you expect? Still, true or not, gossip helped pass the time. Pop had the best gossip, the most historical and revealing. It was from her that I found out why Natalie had been sent down to the FCI all those years ago: she had thrown scalding water on another prisoner in the kitchen. I was incredulous. “Bitch was fucking with her, and what you don’t know, Piper, is your bunkie got a temper!” It was very difficult to reconcile that kind of rage and aggression with my quiet, dignified bunkie, who treated me so kindly. In Pop’s words, though, “Natalie’s no joke!”

Seeing how puzzled and disturbed I was by this new facet of Natalie, Pop tried to illuminate some prison realities for me.

“Look, Piper, things are pretty calm around here now, but that’s not always the way. Sometimes shit jumps off. And down the hill-forget about it! Some of those bitches are animals. Plus you’ve got lifers down there. You’ve got your little year to do, and I know it seems hard to you, but when you’re doing serious time, or life, things look different. You can’t put up with shit from anyone, because this is your life, and if you ever take it from anyone, then you’re always going to have problems.

“There was this woman down the hill I used to know-little woman, very quiet, kept to herself, didn’t bother nobody. This woman was doing life. She did her work, she walked the track down there, she went to bed early, that’s it. Then some young girl shows up down there, this girl was trouble. She starts in with this little woman-she’s giving her shit, she’s hassling her all the time, she’s a fucking stupid kid. Well, that little woman, who never said boo to no one, put two locks in a sock, and she let that girl know what time it was. I never seen anything like it, this girl was a mess, blood everywhere, she was fucked up good. But you know what, Piper? That’s where we are. And we’re not all in the same boat. So just remember that.”

When Pop told me a story like this one, I would hang on every word. I had no way of verifying whether it was gospel truth or not, like most things I heard in prison, but I understood that these stories held their own accuracy. They described our world as it was and as we experienced it. Their lessons always proved invaluable and inviolable.

Mercifully, the closest I got to fighting did not involve a slock (the formal name for a weapon made out of a combination lock inside a tube sock), but rather, roughage. Whenever something other than cauliflower and iceberg lettuce appeared on the salad bar, I went to town. One day there was a bunch of spinach mixed in with the iceberg, and I happily began to select dark green leaves for my dinner. I hummed a little melody under my breath, trying to tune out the din of the dining hall. But as I carefully plucked the spinach, avoiding the lettuce, words began to emerge out of the noise, near my ear.

“Hey! Hey! Hey you! Stop picking! Stop picking in that!”

I looked around to see where the shouting was coming from and at whom it was directed. To my surprise, a beefy young girl in a hairnet was glaring at me. I looked around, then gestured with the salad tongs. “Are you talking to me?”

“Hell, yeah. You can’t be pickin’ out the greens like that. Just fill up your plate and keep moving!”

I looked at my salad bar adversary, wondering who the fuck she thought she was. I vaguely recognized her as new, a reputed troublemaker up in the Rooms. Just the other day Annette, who was still stuck up there, had been complaining about the disrespectful mouth on this eighteen-year-old kid. I knew from Pop that the salad bar was among the least desirable kitchen jobs, because so much washing and chopping was involved in the prep. So it was usually done by the low woman on the culinary totem pole.

I was furious that she had had the nerve to step to me. By now I felt like I was pretty firmly established in the Camp’s social ecology. I didn’t mess with other people, I was friendly but respectful, and hence other people treated me with respect. So to have some kid giving me shit in the dining hall was enraging. Not only that, but she was breaking a cardinal rule among prisoners: Don’t you tell me what to do-you have eight numbers after your name just like me. To get into a public battle with a black woman was a profoundly loaded situation, but it didn’t even occur to me to back down from this punk kid.

I opened my mouth, mad enough to spit, and said loudly, “I don’t eat iceberg lettuce!”

Really? I asked myself. That’s what you’re going to throw down with?

“I don’t care what you eat, just don’t be pickin’ in there!”

Suddenly I realized that things had quieted down quite a bit in the dining hall and that this unusual conflict was being watched. All clashes between prisoners were sporting events, but for me to be in the mix was freakish. I was transported back to my middle school’s parking lot, when Tanya Cateris had called me out and I knew that the only choice was to fight or prove to every person in school that I was chickenshit. In suburban Massachusetts, I went with chickenshit; here that just wasn’t an option.

But before I could even draw breath to assert myself with Big Mouth and raise the stakes, Jae, my friend from work and B Dorm, materialized at my side. Her normally smiling face was stern. I looked at her. She looked at Big Mouth, not saying a word. And just like that, Big Mouth turned and slunk away.

“You okay, Piper?” said Jae.

“I am totally okay, Jae!” I replied hotly, glaring after Big Mouth. Disappointed, everyone turned back to their food, and the volume went right back up to its usual level. I knew that Jae had just saved me many months of trouble.

NOW THAT I had my headset radio, I couldn’t believe how much easier it was to carve some enjoyment out of the day. With a pair of white sneakers purchased from commissary, I began jogging around the track every evening. I could tune out the pandemonium of B Dorm at will, and go much farther around the quarter-mile track now that I had music in my ear.

Rosemarie tipped me off to WXCI, 91.7, the radio station of Western Connecticut State University. I had forgotten about the pleasures of college radio, the exquisite randomness of what got played, the twenty-minute between-songs banter of nineteen-year-olds, the smack of music I’d never heard against my brain cavity. I was in heaven as I went around and around that track, giggling at sophomoric radio skits about Dick Cheney and listening to the new bands like the Kings of Leon that I’d been reading about in my copies of SPIN but had never actually heard in the endless repeat of classic rock vs. hip hop vs. Spanish radio that is the soundtrack of daily life in prison.