Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

“You’re not going to believe this story,” Toni told Rosemarie and me. The town driver usually had the inside scoop early on. “These two dumb bunnies had somebody outside drop a package for them. They go pick it up during CMS work hours, and then they’ve got the stuff with them, and they’re walking by the FCI lobby, and they remember that they’re supposed to do the monthly safety inspection in there. So they go into the lobby with their contraband, probably looking like the guilty idiots they are, and Officer Reilly for some reason decides to pat them down. So of course, she finds the contraband. Get this-cartons of cigarettes and vibrators! They were smuggling dildos!”

This was generally taken as hilarious, but it would be the last we saw of Bianca and Lump-Lump. Smuggling contraband was a very serious shot, a breach of security, and whenever they got out of the SHU, they would stay down on the Compound.

October 19, 2004

Piper Kerman

Reg. No. 11187-424

Federal Prison Camp

Danbury, Connecticut 06811

Dear Ms. Kerman,

I would like to thank you for your assistance in preparing the Warden’s house for my arrival. Your eagerness to please and enthusiasm for the project made my arrival to Danbury a pleasant one. Your good workmanship was evident and is to be commended.

Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

W. S. Willingham

Warden

“Huh! Maybe this one’s going to be better,” said Pop. “The best ones are the ones who are for the inmates. The last one, Deboo, she was just a politician. Smile in your face, acts like she feels your pain, but she’s not gonna do shit for you. When they come from a men’s institution, like Willingham, they’re usually better. Less bullshit. We’ll see.”

I was sitting on a footstool in her cube where I had brought the typewritten note from the new warden-I’d just received it at mail call. Pop had been through a lot of wardens, and I knew she’d be able to tell me if this was as surprising as I found it.

“Piper?”

I knew that tone of voice. Pop was never at mail call because she was still in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. She worked harder than any other person in the Camp. She was up and in the kitchen at five most mornings, and she usually worked serving all three meals, in addition to the cooking. Her fifty-year-old body was riddled with aches and pains, and the institution periodically sent her out to Danbury Hospital for epidural shots in her back. I nagged her to take days off-she wasn’t required to work so many hours.

“Yes, Pop?” I smiled from the footstool. I was going to make her ask.

“How about just a little foot rub?” I don’t remember exactly how Pop had first gotten me to give her a foot massage. But it had become a regular ritual several times a week. She would sit on her bed postshower in her sweats, and I would sit facing her with a clean towel across my lap. I would get a handful of commissary lotion and firmly grasp a foot. I gave a very firm foot massage, and she would occasionally yelp when I dug a knuckle in hard. My services were a source of great amusement in A Dorm-women would come by and chitchat with Pop while I worked on her feet, occasionally asking, “How do I get one of those?”

I was, of course, out of bounds and also breaking the prohibition against inmates touching each other. But the regular Camp officers extended special considerations to Pop. One evening while I was rubbing her feet, a substitute officer, up from the FCI, stopped dead in his tracks at the doorway of Pop’s cube. He was a shaggy, craggy-looking white guy, with a mustache.

“Popovich?” It sounded more like a question than a warning.

I ducked my head, making no eye contact.

“Mr. Ryan! It’s this foot of mine, I hurt it. She’s just helping get the cramp out. Happens all the time since I’m on my feet all day. Officer Maple allows it. Is it okay?” Pop was all charm when it came to interacting with COs.

“Whatever. I’m gonna keep walking.” He thudded away.

I looked at Pop. “Maybe I better beat it?”

“Him? I known him for years, from down the compound. He’s all right. Don’t stop!”

THE AMERICAN League Championship was so hotly contentious that year, I could barely stand to watch the games. The tension of being a Red Sox fan as they battled back from 0-3 made my stomach hurt, and my surroundings didn’t make it any easier. The running joke in the Camp was that half the population of the Bronx was residing in Danbury, and of course they were all ferocious Yankees fans. But the Red Sox had plenty of partisans too; a significant percentage of the white women were from Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and the always-suspect border state of Connecticut. Daily life was usually racially peaceful in the Camp, but the very obvious racial divide between Yankees and Sox fans made me nervous. I remembered the riot at UMass in 1986 after the Mets defeated the Sox in the World Series, when black Mets fans were horribly beaten.

I’m not sure what kind of a brawl we could have come up with, though. The most hard-core Sox fans in the joint were a clique of middle-aged, middle-class white ladies, whose ringleader was nicknamed Bunny. For some reason most of them worked for the grounds department in CMS. During all of pennant fever, they went about their work cutting lawns and raking leaves serenading each other:

Carmen DeLeon, the biggest Yankees fan of all, straight from Hunts Point, gave me the hairy eyeball. “Those are your peoples,” she pointed out acidly.

I glared, but I was too nervous even to talk smack, not because I was scared of Carmen but because I was worried about jinxing the Sox. The year before, Larry and I had gathered a roughneck band of Sox fans in our apartment in the East Village for game seven, and based on our lead in the sixth inning, we felt confident enough to venture out to a local bar, in the hopes that we could celebrate our victory loudly and publicly there, in the face of the vile, overbearing Yanks fans who had made our lives miserable for… our entire lives. Instead, we sat wretchedly nursing overpriced beers through extra innings as Martinez inexplicably stayed in and Red Sox Nation’s hopes and dreams collapsed with the team.

“I tell you what,” said Carmen, puffing out her already-considerable chest like a peacock. “If the Red Sox are in the World Series, I’m gonna root for them. That’s a promise.” When pigs fly, I thought gloomily.

When the Yankees went down in flames after a seven-game series, and the Red Sox were facing the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, the crowds in the TV room were actually smaller. But Carmen DeLeon was there front and center, grinning and rooting for the Sox. And the series was surreally easy, a four-game sweep. I couldn’t trust it-after each victory I felt my anxiety mount. At the end of game four, after the final out by the Cards, I started to shake uncontrollably. Rosemarie, also a lifelong Sox fan, grabbed my knee. “Are you okay?”

Carmen looked at me in amazement. “Piper’s crying!”

I was amazed too. I do love the Red Sox, but my reaction shocked even me.

I calmed down enough to watch the postgame celebration dry-eyed, but alone in the bathroom between B and C Dorms, I started to cry again. I went outside to stare at the half-cloaked moon and cry alone, out loud. Huge, shuddering sobs. I wasn’t crying because I wished I was home celebrating, but I was completely taken aback at the level of my own emotion. I had joked that I had to do hard time in order to break the Curse so the Red Sox could win, and now I felt that there was some strange truth to that. The world I knew had changed right there in the bottom of the ninth.