Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

For the weeks that we spent in Oklahoma City, I refused to acknowledge the sisters’ presence. Max lockdown was torturous in its monotony and lack of stimulation; the hours and the days crawled by. Flights arrived and departed almost every day, but you never knew when you might be put on one. It was the perfect realization of limbo-departure from one realm of being, waiting to arrive at another. Oklahoma City made me homesick for the Danbury Camp, a surreal and disturbing feeling. I was accustomed to hours of strenuous activity every day, between working construction, running, and the gym. Here the only options were push-ups and yoga in my cell and “walking the tiers,” actually circling the tiers hundreds of times in my canvas slippers until my blisters bled. Back in Danbury Sister Platte had used the hall as a makeshift treadmill during inclement weather. I would sometimes fall into step next to her. She moved pretty fast for a sixty-nine-year-old, and her constant good spirits amazed me. “How are you holding up, dear?” the little nun would ask me.

I was lucky to have Jae by my side to share the stress and uncertainty and to blow off steam, and her cousin was funny as hell and a reassuring (if also menacing) presence. I asked Jae one day about her cousin’s scar.

“Guy jumped her, tried to rape her, and he cut her with a box cutter. Hundred stitches.” Pause. “He’s in jail now.” And the nickname? “It’s her favorite drink!”

It was easy to lose track of what day it was-there were no newspapers, no magazines, no mail, and since I avoided the TV rooms, no significant way to tell one day from the next. You can only play so many games of gin. I tried to count off which day was January 12, when Pop would be released from Danbury. I couldn’t talk to Larry on the pay phone, and there were no clear windows, so I couldn’t even watch the progression of the sun. I wasn’t remotely interested in messing with prison pussy, one of the only available distractions. I learned dominoes. And I learned to understand the true punishment of repetition without reward. How could anyone do significant amounts of time in a setting like this without losing their mind?

No one was all that inclined to be social with strangers, but some limited intrigue took place around cigarettes. In Danbury, the opportunities for hustle were many. But in Oklahoma City, the only things on the market were sex, other people’s psych meds, and, most important, nicotine. Prisoners who volunteered as orderlies got to “shop,” but all there was to buy were cigarettes. Once a week, when the cigarettes got doled out, there would be frenzy right below the surface, threatening to bust out. The orderlies were either companionable and split their cigs up into smaller “rollies,” to be shared out of the milk of human kindness, or were paid in psych meds, which would help you sleep away the days like LaKeesha. I found the whole deal completely stressful and was glad I didn’t smoke. My hair was turning into a rat’s nest absent conditioner-all we had were little packets of shampoo. Finally, I turned to scavenging packets of mayonnaise, which made my locks greasy, but at least I could get a prison-issue little black plastic comb through it.

Suddenly Jae and Slice got shipped out. At four A.M. Jae and I said goodbye through the thick glass rectangle in my door. “Stick next to Slice!” I said. “I’ll track you down after I get home!”

Jae fixed me with her huge liquid brown eyes, sweet and sad and scared. “Be careful, Piper!” she said. “And remember the Vaseline trick I told you!”

“I will!” I waved goodbye through the inches of glass. When they let us out for breakfast two hours later, I felt truly alone, left to navigate the seas myself. I missed my girls, and I glared across the unit in Nora’s direction. I knew that whatever my immediate future held, it included her.

A few days later my bunkie LaKeesha left for Danbury. I was jealous. As she was scrambling into her clothes, I instructed her, “When you get to the Camp, tell Toni, that’s the town driver, that you saw Piper in Oklahoma City and she’s okay, she says hello.”

“Okay, okay… wait, who is Piper?”

Why wasn’t I surprised? I sighed. “Just tell them you met a white girl who does yoga from Danbury and she’s all right!”

“That I can remember!”

I had a couple of days of total privacy in the cell. I cycled through my yoga poses repeatedly, gazing at the opaque window that let some daylight in; it was the full height of the room and about six inches wide. I would save my bag of milk at breakfast and put it at the bottom of the window, where it stayed cold for hours. The milk was the one guaranteed edible thing every day. I had also learned to sleep against the wall with my arm shielding my eyes from the fluorescent light that was on in the cell twenty-four hours a day. For the first time I had a bottom bunk, a strange novelty.

Then a new bunkie showed up, a young Spanish girl. She was from Texas, on her way to a prison in Florida. She had never been down before, was wide-eyed and full of questions. I played the role of seasoned prisoner and told her what I thought she could expect. She reminded me of Maria Carbon from Room 6 and the construction shop, which made me sad.

Finally, a week later there was a thud on my door at four A.M. “ Kerman, pack out!” I had no possessions to pack other than my now-crinkled paper from Danbury with its scribbled reminders of the people I knew there. I practically danced into my khaki uniform, at this point ready for anything that would get me out of there, Nora or no Nora. Per Jae’s instructions, I fished my precious contraband store of Vaseline out of its hiding place in a sock and tucked gobs of it into the curves of my ears. During the long hours of travel on the flight largely without water, I could dab it on my lips to keep them from cracking.

As I shuffled onto the airplane, shackled again, one of the feds who had also been on my previous flight stared at me. “What’s wrong, Blondie?”

I was stone-faced.

“You better improve your attitude, Blondie,” he advised sharply.

The marshals made me sit next to Nora on the plane. At this point I wasn’t even surprised at my bad fortune, though I was rigid with fury. Shackled, with Vaseline in my ears, and sitting next to the cow who got me into the whole mess, I refused to look at her. We maintained a wall of uncomfortable silence between us as the flight stopped in Terre Haute, Detroit, and other snow-covered midwestern wastelands. At least I had the window seat.

Descending into a sunny, wintry Chicago, I felt, despite my extreme agitation and acute physical discomfort, a quiet thrill. I retained a tiny shred of humor with which to appreciate the irony of the whole situation. Here was the city that was the hub of this whole mess, and it seemed somehow fitting that I should be here, with her next to me.

THE TARMAC in Chicago was lively and bitterly cold. I was freezing in my thin khakis. Convicts were hopping every which way in shackles under the direction of the marshals, and Nora and Hester grew excited at the sight of one floppy-haired white boy. “It’s George!” they exclaimed.

I looked closely, as he turned our way and cheerfully indicated greeting with his chin before being hustled onto a bus. If that was Hester’s old friend George Freud, he had lost some weight in ten years. It seemed that the whole gang was being recalled to Chi-town for the big event of Jonathan Bibby’s trial. We were loaded into a passenger van with a bunch of guys and whisked downtown through rush-hour traffic in a phalanx of unmarked and heavily secured white vehicles.

Hester was seated next to me, and she gazed into my eyes intently for a moment. “Are you doing all right?” she asked, very genuinely, in her flat midwestern tone. I muttered that I was okay, and looked out the window, unnerved by her kindness.