Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

I TRIED to share the indescribable miracle of Little Janet’s freedom with Larry, and he tried to cheer me up with news of our new home in Brooklyn. Larry had been house-hunting while I was away, and many people on the outside found it astonishing that I was comfortable with him picking out a new home for me sight unseen. But not only was I grateful, I also trusted completely that he would find a great place for us to live. He bought an apartment for us in a lovely, tree-shaded neighborhood.

Still, at the moment it was a little difficult for either of us to grasp the other’s good news. I was having trouble imagining owning anything more than a bottle of shampoo, or living anywhere other than B Dorm, and I stared rather stupidly at the floor plan and paint chips he brought with him. I assured Larry that when I came home to him, I would be Ms. Fixit in our new apartment with all my prison-acquired skills.

On the way out I scowled at the guard on duty; he was a pig, all hands. Before you could enter the visiting room, the guard stepped out to frisk you, to ensure that you were not bringing anything out with you to pass to your visitor. (In fact, a guard could pat you down at any time if they suspected you had contraband on you.) These pat-downs were delivered by both male and female guards and ran the gamut from perfunctory to full-out inappropriate.

Most of the male guards made a great show of performing the absolute minimal frisk necessary, skimming their fingertips along your arms, legs, and waist in such a way that said “Not touching! Not touching! Not really touching!” They didn’t want any suggestion of impropriety raised against them. But a handful of the male guards apparently felt no fear about grabbing whatever they wanted. They were allowed to touch the lower edge of our bras, to make sure we weren’t smuggling goodies in there-but were they really allowed to squeeze our breasts? Sometimes it was shocking who would grope you-like polite, fair, and otherwise upstanding Mr. Black, who did it in a businesslike way. Other male COs were brazen, like the short, red-faced young bigmouth who asked me loudly and repeatedly, “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?” while he fondled my ass and I gritted my teeth.

There was absolutely no payoff for filing a complaint. A female prisoner who alleges sexual misconduct on the part of a guard is invariably locked in the SHU in “protective custody,” losing her housing assignment, program activities (if there are any), work assignment, and a host of other prison privileges, not to mention the comfort of her routine and friends.

Guards were not supposed to ask us personal questions, but this rule got broken all the time. Some of them were completely matter-of-fact about it. One day, while I was learning how to solder in the greenhouse with one of the cheerful plumbing officers, he posited a friendly “What the hell are you here for?”

But for the guards who knew me better, I could tell, this was a more disturbing question, one that some of them brooded over. One afternoon alone in a pickup truck, another CMS officer turned to me intensely and said, “I just don’t understand it, Piper. What is a woman like you doing here? This is crazy.” I had already told him that I was doing time on a ten-year-old drug charge. He wanted the story badly, but it was more than clear to me that intimacy with a guard would be ruinous for me-or for any prisoner. It made no sense to share any of my secrets with him.

ON THE weekend when the New York Marathon took place, I completed thirteen miles on the quarter-mile track, my own private prison half-marathon. The following weekend was unusually warm, beautiful really, and I was enjoying my sabbath ritual, Little Steven’s Underground Garage, a two-hour radio program devoted to garage rock and hosted by Steven Van Zandt from the E Street Band and The Sopranos that was broadcast on a local radio station at eight every Sunday morning.

Best of all was listening to Little Steven, whether he was riffing on film noir, women, religion, rock rebellion, or the fate of the legendary CBGB’s back home in New York. I never missed the show. I felt like it was keeping a part of my brain alive that would otherwise lie completely dormant-even in prison you had to work at being a nonconformist. I was a freak and an outcast, but in the Underground Garage I always had a home out in the ether. Unless the weather was awful, I would usually listen while chugging around the track for the full two hours, often laughing out loud. It was like a lifeline that went straight into my ears.

Just one thing marred my ritual today, and that was LaRue, the nasty plastic surgery casualty from B Dorm. LaRue was the only woman in the Camp whom I flat-out loathed. I did not hide my revulsion well, which was considered odd by my friends. “She’s a freak for sure, Piper, but no more so than some of these other wackos. It’s weird how she gets to you.”

She was getting to me now. She was walking around the track in the center of the path, listening to what I assumed must be one of her fundamentalist radio shows, with her arms extended, Christ-like, and singing tunelessly in her high-pitched squeak about Jesus. Every time I lapped her, she remained smack in the middle of the gravel strip, arms spread wide. She was doing it on purpose, I was sure, to aggravate me and to force me off of the path. By the tenth time I passed her, my vision had stained red and I was boiling with focused fury. She was ruining Little Steven, she was ruining my run. I ground my teeth with hatred.

On my eleventh circuit, I watched her from across the oval, fantasizing her own crucifixion. I zoomed around the curve into the straightaway, gaining on her quickly. Her weird ass, fat with implants, remained in the center of the track; her arms stayed pinned to her imaginary cross. And as I closed the distance between us, I raised my own hand and smacked one of hers down as I passed her.

LaRue squawked in surprise and dove to the edge of the track, dropping her radio headset. A stream of Spanish invective followed me around the track. My heart soared for one moment and then immediately crashed. What the hell was wrong with me? What had I allowed this place to do to me? I couldn’t believe I had raised my hand in aggression against another prisoner, especially this pathetic nutjob. Shame washed over me. I stopped running, sick to my stomach.

When I got around the track, LaRue was by the gym, with one of the Spanish mamis I knew from work.

I apologized awkwardly. “Francesca, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Are you all right?”

This was answered with another stream of irate Spanish. I got the gist.

“Francesca, she said she was sorry. Let it go, mami,” advised my coworker. “She’s fine. Just keep running, Piper.”

IF YOU are a relatively small woman, and a man at least twice your size is bellowing at you in anger, and you’re wearing a prisoner’s uniform, and he has a pair of handcuffs on his belt, I don’t care how much of a badass you think you are, you’ll be fucking scared.

One of the lieutenants was doing the bellowing, his mouth grim under his bristling mustache and crew cut. It had nothing to do with my smacking LaRue’s imaginary stigmata on the track. I had been caught out of bounds in A Dorm by a renegade, off-duty Mr. Finn, who turned up out of the blue on a night he wasn’t even working and wrote shots for me and seven other out-of-bounds women, lining us up outside his office. This, in turn, earned each of us private face time with the senior officer, who demanded to know if I disputed the charge, shot number 316 in the prison rule book. I said quietly that I did not and offered no excuse.

This did not make him happy, and he growled. “Do you think this is funny, Kerman?”