Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

The garage girls liked to hang out in the visiting room together in the evenings during the week. I was chilling with them, surrounded by prisoners who were crocheting industriously, watching Fear Factor with their headsets on, or just talking. Pom-Pom was doing some sort of art project with colored pencils, probably a birthday card. Suddenly a woman rushed into the room, wild-eyed.

“The CO is destroying A Dorm!”

We followed her out into the hall, where a crowd was gathering. The new CO on duty that night was a pleasant, seemingly mild-mannered, and very big young guy. He, like a huge number of the prison guards, was former military. These folks would finish their commitment to the armed services and have several years in on a federal pension, so they’d end up working for the BOP. Sometimes they’d tell us about their military careers. Mr. Maple had been a medic in Afghanistan.

The CO on duty that night was fresh from Iraq and had just started work at the prison. It was rumored that he had been stationed in Fallujah, where the fighting had been brutal all spring. That night someone from A Dorm had been giving him trouble-some sort of backtalk. And something snapped. Before anyone really knew what was going on, he was down in A Dorm pulling the contents of the cubicles apart, yanking things off the walls, and ripping bedding off mattresses and turning them over.

We were scared-two hundred prisoners alone with one guard having a psychotic break. Someone went outside and flagged down the perimeter truck, which got help from down the hill. The young soldier left the building, and A Dorm residents started to put their cubes back together. Everyone was rattled. The next day one of the lieutenants came up from the FCI and apologized to A Dorm, which was unprecedented. We did not see the young CO again.

NEWLY ZEN thanks to Yoga Janet, well fed by Pop, and now proficient in concrete-mixing as well as rudimentary electrical work, I felt as if I were making the most of this prison thing. If this was the worst the feds were going to throw at me, no problem. Then when I called my father on the prison pay phone to talk about the Red Sox, he told me, “Piper, your grandmother is not doing well.”

Southern-proper and birdlike but possessing a stern, formidable personality, my grandmother had been a constant figure in my life. A child of West Virginia who grew up in the Depression with two brothers and then raised four sons, she had little idea what to do with a young girl, her eldest grandchild, and I was scared of her. I remained in awe of her, although as I got older, we developed an easier rapport. She spoke frankly to me in private about sex, feminism, and power. She and my grandfather were dumbstruck and horrified by my criminal misadventures, and yet they never let me forget that they loved me and worried about me. The one thing that I feared most about prison was that one of them would die while I was there.

I pleaded with my father on the pay phone-she would be fine, she would get better, she would be there when I came home. He didn’t argue back, just said, “Write her.” I was on a regular schedule of writing short, cheery updates to my grandparents, reassuring them that I was fine and couldn’t wait to see them when I got home. Now I sat down to write a different kind of letter, one that tried to convey how much she meant to me, how much she had taught me, how I wanted to emulate her rigor and rectitude, how much I loved her and missed her. I couldn’t believe that I had screwed up so badly, to be in this place when she needed me, when she was sick and maybe dying.

Immediately after posting the letter, I asked the Camp secretary for a furlough request form. “Were you raised by your grandma?” she asked brusquely. When I said no, she told me there was no point in giving me the form-I would never be granted a furlough for a grandparent. I sharply said that I was furlough-eligible and would make the request anyway. “Suit yourself,” she snapped.

Pop gently counseled me that in fact I had no chance of getting furloughed, even for a funeral, unless it was my parent, my child, or maybe my sibling, and that she did not want me to get my hopes up. “I know it’s not right, honey. That’s just how they do things.”

I had seen many other prisoners suffer through the illnesses of their loved ones and had felt helpless watching them when the worst would come-when they had to confront not only their grief, but also the personal failure of being in prison and not with their families.

I was not festive that Halloween. I was feeling some kinda way, like I had been walloped in the gut with a sledgehammer. But there was no escape from the festivities of the two hundred-plus women I was living with cheek by jowl every day. The women love their holidays.

Halloween in prison was odd, I had been told. Could it be odder than anything else here? How would one create a costume with such limited and colorless resources as we had at our disposal? Earlier that day I had seen some idiotic cat masks made from manila folders. Besides, I was in no mood for anything, let alone handing out candy.

The faithful could be heard from halfway across B Dorm. “Trick or treat!”

Trying to focus on my book, I stayed in my bunk. Then Delicious spoke to me from the doorway of my cube. “Trick or treat, P-I Piper!”

I had to smile. Delicious was dressed as a pimp, clad in an all-white outfit she had put together somehow using her kitchen uniform and inside-out sweatpants. She had a “cigar” and a cluster of hoes around her. This included a bunch of the Eminemlettes but also Fran, the motormouthed Italian grandma, at seventy-eight the oldest woman in the Camp. The hoes had tried to sexy themselves up, hiking sweatshorts high and T-shirt necklines low, but mostly relying on makeup that was garish even by prison standards. Fran had a long “cigarette holder” and headband she had made from paper, and heavy rouge; she looked like an ancient flapper.

“C’mon, Piper, trick or treat?” Delicious demanded. “Smell my feet. Gimme something sweet to eat, y’know?”

I never kept candy in my cube. I tried to muster up a big smile to let them know I appreciated their creativity.

“I guess Trick, Delicious. I am flat out of sweetness.”

I BEGAN to stalk the prison officials who might have some say in whether I ever saw my grandmother again. One was the always-absent temporary unit manager, Bubba, who could tell you to go fuck yourself in the most pleasant possible way. My counselor Finn, another BOP lifer, was an indifferent jokester who was quick with an insult and never did his paperwork, but he liked me because I was blond and blue-eyed and had “a tight ass,” as he would mutter under his breath. He very kindly offered to let me call my grandmother from his office-the hospice number was not on the approved list in the prison phone system, so I could not call from the pay phones. She sounded exhausted and astonished to hear my voice on the line. When I hung up the phone, I dissolved in sobs. I rushed out of his office and down to the track.

I returned to my old, lonely ways. I shut myself off and kept quiet, determined to gut out this worst-case scenario alone. Anything else would be an admission to the world that the feds had succeeded in bringing me down, lower than my knees, flat on my face; that I couldn’t survive my imprisonment unscathed. How could I admit that the All-American Girl’s force field of stoicism and self-reliance and do-unto-others-and-keep-smiling wasn’t working, wasn’t keeping pain and shame and powerlessness away?

From a young age I had learned to get over-to cover my tracks emotionally, to hide or ignore my problems in the belief that they were mine alone to solve. So when exhilarating transgressions required getting over on authority figures, I knew how to do it. I was a great bluffer. And when common, everyday survival in prison required getting over, I could do that too. This is what was approvingly described by my fellow prisoners as “street-smarts,” as in “You wouldn’t think it to look at her, but Piper’s got street-smarts.”