Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

It hadn’t occurred to me that I could change jobs. A couple days later I sidled up to Mr. King in front of the shop, shy but desperate. I wasn’t used to asking COs for anything.

“Mr. King? I know that Gisela is leaving soon, and I was wondering if maybe I could come work for you in construction?” I waited, hopefully. I knew I was a desirable prison employee: I had my prison license, was willing to work, never “idled” (faked being sick), was educated, and could read manuals, do math, and so forth. And I didn’t have a big mouth.

Mr. King looked at me, chewing on his cigarette, flinty eyes unreadable. “Sure.” My heart leaped, then crashed: “But DeSimon has to sign your cop-out.”

I wrote up the cop-out, a simple one-page form the official title of which was BP-S148.055 INMATE REQUEST TO STAFF. The next morning I marched into DeSimon’s office and handed it to him. He did not take it from me. After a while I got tired of thrusting it toward him and put it on the desk.

He looked at it with distaste. “What is that, Kermit?”

“It’s a cop-out, asking you to let me go work in construction, Mr. DeSimon.”

He didn’t even read it. “The answer is no, Kermit.”

I looked at him, his bulbous, shiny pink head, and smiled grimly. I wasn’t surprised. I marched back out of the office.

“What did he say?” asked Amy. We were down to me, my young Eminemlette pal, Yvette, and a couple other women working in the dim, airless electric shop.

“What do you think?” I said.

Amy just laughed, with a hollow wisdom way beyond her years. “Piper, that man is not going to let you go anywhere, so you might as well get used to him.”

I was furious. Now that I knew there was a better way to live within the confines of the prison, that there were jobs where prisoners were not the constant object of insults, I was desperate to make the switch. Getting out of electric and escaping from DeSimon filled my thoughts.

Summer was getting hot, and for months we had been working on a new circuit for the visiting room air conditioners. The only rooms in the Camp that had air conditioners were the staff offices and the visiting room, but the existing power was insufficient, and they always tripped off. So we had hung and wired a new circuit panel, bent and run conduit around the visiting room, and wired new outlets. Now we were close to finished, and all that remained was to connect the circuit board to the building’s main power source, a floor below in the boiler room.

This involved pulling new cables up from the boiler room power source to the new panel in the visiting room-physically yanking them up through the guts of the building. When the momentous day dawned, we all gathered the tools that DeSimon had directed us to bring and stood in the boiler room, waiting for direction. We didn’t have any big girls in the electric shop, and so reinforcements had been called in from plumbing, which had a bunch of them.

DeSimon busied himself with the cables. They were big thick industrial cables, totally different from the wiring that I now worked with every day. He bundled several of them, then bound them together with black electrical tape, taping over and over until they were bound together for over a foot. At the end he strung a rope, the end of which was snaked up to the visiting room. The women from plumbing were all up there, waiting.

Down in the boiler room stood me, Amy, Yvette, and Vasquez. We looked at DeSimon.

“They’re gonna pull, and you’re gonna push. You’re gonna feed it upward. But we’re missing one thing. We need a greaser.”

The way he said those words, I knew that it must be an unpleasant job. And I knew who it would be.

“Kermit. You’ll be the greaser. Take these.” He handed me elbow-length rubber gloves. “Now grab that tub of lube.” He pointed at a vat of industrial lubricant next to his feet. I could see where this was going. My cheeks were beginning to burn. “You’re going to need a lot, Kermit.”

I grabbed the container. DeSimon shoved the bound cables toward me. They were rigid and inflexible, and I was rigid with humiliation. “That’s gonna need a lot to squeeze in there, Kermit. Lube it up good.”

I bent and scooped up two handfuls of the stuff. It was like bright blue jelly. I slapped it onto the huge, previously innocuous but now disgusting foot-long phallus.

DeSimon threw his head back and yelled “Pull!” The rope yanked, but not enough to move the cables. “C’mon, Kermit, do your duty!”

I was so angry, I could barely see. I concentrated on turning the blood in my veins into ice. I tried floating up to the ceiling in detachment, but the scene was so ugly that my usual technique didn’t work. I scooped up more blue jelly and slapped it all over the bound cables.

“Oooh, horse cock. You like that horse cock, don’t you, Kermit.”

Horse cock? I dropped my hands to my sides, in their big gooey gloves. Amy was looking at her shoes, and Yvette was pretending she didn’t understand any English.

DeSimon yelled “Pull!” again, and somewhere above us prison laborers heaved on the rope. The cables slid. “Pull!” They slid again. “Push!”

My coworkers pushed the cables upward. Seeing them strain, I bent my knees and helped them push up as hard as I could. The cables started to slither upward, and then it was all over but the pulling. I stalked out of the boiler room, stripped off the gloves, and threw them down.

I was blind, nuclear mad. And all I could do was throw the ladders, the tools, and the gear into the back of the truck as hard as I could. My coworkers were unnerved. I didn’t speak to anyone for the rest of the afternoon, and DeSimon didn’t speak to me. Back in the Camp, I tried to shower the slime and humiliation off me. Then I wrote another cop-out, this time to DeSimon’s boss. It read something like this:

As I have discussed with you on previous occasions Mr. DeSimon, my work supervisor, sometimes speaks to us at work in ways that I find crude, disrespectful and sexually graphic.

On 6/23/04 while working in the boiler room on the new electric circuit for the visiting room, we were working with large electric wires bound together with electrical tape. Mr. DeSimon referred to these materials, which I had to grease to pull through pipes, as horse genitalia, which I found very offensive. He did not use the word “genitalia,” but rather a vulgarity.

That was all the room there was to explain a request on a cop-out.

I was not going to spend the next seven months under the thumb of this pig, I vowed. And I hoped that, in the form of horse cock, he had handed me the trump card for my escape.

At my next opportunity I went to the office of DeSimon’s boss. He was a horse of a different color, making a career of the BOP and moving from prison to prison, climbing the corporate ladder. He was from Texas, where they certainly know something about prisons, and a complete professional. Very tall, he always wore a tie and often cowboy boots, and was unfailingly polite. He was also even-handed, which won him the admiration of the prisoners. Pop called him “My Texas Ranger” and liked it when he would come up to the Camp to eat her cooking.

I knocked on his door, walked in, and handed him my cop-out.

He read through it silently, then looked up at me. “Miss Kerman, I’m not sure I understand what you’re tryin’ to say here. Will you please have a seat?”

I sat and took off my white baseball cap. I could feel my cheeks getting hot again. I chose a spot on his desk to stare at so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with him, so he couldn’t see my shame and I wouldn’t start crying in front of a police. Then I explained what my cop-out meant, in great detail. When I was finally finished, I took a deep breath. Then I raised my eyes and looked at Tex.