Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

My friends joke that I’ve been to 27 weddings and now it’s finally time for one funeral-for my singlehood. Which is sad like any funeral, sure, but this death is no tragic accident. I look at it more like euthanasia I’m performing on myself, a mercy killing.

I’m ready, babe. Pull the plug.

Even here, without him, I couldn’t imagine any sweeter Christmas present.

I ALWAYS found New Year’s Eve a bore on the outside, but on the inside it held greater interest, and I was very conscious and grateful that it would be my only one at Danbury. It made sense that turning the calendar forward would make a prisoner feel more optimistic. Watching those numbers tick suggested progress.

Much more than any New Year, even the Millennium, it felt for me like something was coming to a definitive end. Pop cried as we counted down at midnight-it was her thirteenth New Year’s in prison, and her last. As I watched her, I tried to imagine the conflicting rush of emotions when you considered so much survival, regret, resilience, and lost time.

It seemed like half the Camp was focused on getting Pop home in one piece. She was supposed to be finished working in the dining hall-weirdly, prisoners do earn and accumulate vacation days in the BOP-but she didn’t even make it one day. I caught her back in the kitchen and had a fit, but she just told me to go fuck myself. She didn’t know what to do with herself if she wasn’t working. The funny, salty, heavily accented earth mother who had helped me through so much was a bundle of nerves-she was less than two weeks from leaving for the halfway house.

So I felt terrible when I got the call on January 3-“ Kerman! Pack out!”

Packing out meant you packed up your shit, because you were going somewhere. The prisoner is provided with army-issue duffel bags to temporarily hold her possessions. I elected to give most of my accumulated treasures away: my hot-pink contraband toenail polish, my prized white men’s pajamas that Pop had given to me, my army-green jacket, and even my precious headset radio. All my books went into the prison library. Given my secrecy until this point, my fellow prisoners were surprised by my impending departure. Some assumed I had won early release, but those who heard that I was going on Con Air were full of curiosity, concern, and advice.

“Wear a sanitary pad. They won’t always let you use the bathroom. So try not to drink anything!”

“I know you’re picky about food, Piper, but eat whatever you can, because it might be the last edible meal you get for a while.”

“When they shackle you, try to flex your wrists so there’s a little more room, and if you try to catch the marshal’s eye when he’s chaining you, maybe he won’t cuff you so tight your circulation goes. Oh, and double up your socks so the restraints don’t make your ankles bleed.”

“Pray they don’t send you through Georgia. They stick you in a county jail, and it’s the worst place I’ve ever been in my life.”

“There are tons of cute guys on the airlift. They will love you!”

I went to talk to the Marlboro Man. “Mr. King, they’re shipping me out on a writ, to Chicago.” I actually succeeded in making him look surprised.

Then he laughed. “Diesel therapy.”

“What?”

“Around here we call the airlift ‘diesel therapy.’”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Well, you take care of yourself.”

“Mr. King, if I come back before my release date, can I have my job back?”

“Sure.”

AS IT turned out, I didn’t get shipped out for two days. I called Larry one last time-other prisoners had warned me not to say anything about the details of prison travel over the phone: “They’re listening, and if you give specifics sometimes they think that you’re planning to escape.” Larry was bizarrely chipper, and I felt like he didn’t really understand what was happening, even though I told him I might not be able to talk to him for a long time.

I bade goodbye to Pop.

“My Piper! My Piper! You’re not supposed to go before me!”

I hugged her and told her she was going to be fine in the halfway house, and that I loved her.

Then I walked down the hill and began my next misadventure.

Like much airline travel these days, flying Con Air involved a lot of stewing in your own juices. Exactly eleven months since I had first set foot in R &D, I was brought back there, and I waited. One by one guards brought other women in to wait with me. A skinny, dreamy-eyed white girl. A pair of Jamaican sisters. An unpleasant hick from the Camp whom I worked with in CMS, and who was headed back to western Pennsylvania for a court case. A big dykey-looking black woman with a wicked scar that began somewhere behind her ear, wound around her neck, and disappeared down below the collar of her T-shirt. There was little talking.

Finally a prison guard whom I knew from the Camp appeared. Ms. Welch was a food service officer and knew Pop very well. I felt some measure of relief that she would be involved in our departure-much better than the guard who had welcomed me to Danbury. She issued us all new uniforms, the same khaki hospital scrubs and wussy canvas shoes I had been clad in upon arrival. I was sad to give up my steel-toes, even though they already had cracks in the soles. One by one she began to shackle us-chain around the waist, handcuffs that were then chained to your waist, and ankle cuffs with a foot of chain between them. I had never been cuffed in my life outside my boudoir. I thought about the fact that I had absolutely no choice in the matter; I was going to be shackled whether I was cooperative, disgruntled, or prone with a knee in the small of my back or a boot on my chest.

I looked at Ms. Welch as she approached me. “How are you doing, Kerman?” she asked. She sounded genuinely concerned, and I flashed on the fact that we were “theirs,” being sent out into the great unknown. She knew what the next few hours held for me, but the rest was probably as much of a mystery to her as it was to me.

“Okay,” I answered in an uncharacteristically small voice. I was scared, but not of her.

She started to chain me up, chatting in a distracting way, almost like a dental hygienist who knows she is doing something that causes discomfort. “How is that-too tight?”

“A little too tight on this wrist, yes.” I hated the gratitude in my voice, but it was genuine.

We had all been packed out-all of our personal belongings had been gone through by a prison guard (in my case, the same sneering midget I had encountered on my first day) and stored. The only thing you were allowed to bring on the airlift with you was a single sheet of paper that listed your property. On the back I had written all my important information-my lawyer’s phone number and the addresses of my family and friends. Also scrawled on the paper in many handwritings was the contact information for my friends in the Camp-and if they were due to go home soon, a street address; if they were down for a long time, their inmate registration number. It hurt to look at the list. I wondered if I would ever see any of those women again. I kept the paper in the breast pocket of my scrubs vest with my ID.

We were lined up and started to shuffle, clinking, out of the building toward a big unmarked bus that was used for prisoner transport. When your legs are chained together, you are forced to adopt a short, tippy-toe cadence. As we were waiting in one of the chain-link-fence chambers between the prison and the bus, the town driver’s van came speeding up. Jae hopped out, with duffel bags.

The big black dyke perked up. “Cuz?”