Orange Is the New Black (17 page)

O
ne hobby I did not pick up was crocheting, an obsession among prisoners throughout the system. Some of the handiwork was impressive. The inmate who ran the laundry was a surly rural white woman named Nancy whose dislike for anyone but “northerners” was hardly a secret. Her personality left a lot to be desired, but she was a remarkable crochet artist. One day in C Dorm I happened upon Nancy standing with my neighbor Allie B. and mopey Sally, all howling with laughter. “What?” I asked, innocently. “Show her, Nancy!” giggled Allie. Nancy opened her hand. Perched there in her palm was an astonishingly lifelike crochet penis. Average in size, it was erect, fashioned of pink cotton yarn, with balls and a smattering of brown cotton pubic hair, and a squirt of white yarn ejaculate at the tip.

“More sentimental than functional, I guess?” was all I could manage.

Allie B. lived several cubes down in B Dorm and was a tall, skinny woman with broad shoulders and a strong jaw, who teetered between odd-looking and good-looking. She loved candy bars and reminded me of Wimpy from
Popeye:
“I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a Snickers bar today!” A daffy horndog and an unrepentant junkie, she was counting the days out loud until she could go home, get laid, and score some junk, in that order. She was straightforward and unapologetic about her love of narcotics. Heroin was her drug of choice, but she was willing to get high on anything and often threatened to sniff
the solvents at her job in the construction shop. I didn’t think there was anything there worth huffing.

Allie’s sidekick was a young woman from western Pennsylvania who proudly called herself a redneck. I called her Pennsatucky. One day Pennsatucky and I were standing at my cube in B Dorm when my next-door neighbor Colleen and her pal Carlotta Alvarado walked by. Colleen had a big, shit-eating grin on her face as she asked Carlotta, “So? What’d you think about that little toy I gave you last week? Pretty sweet, huh?” Carlotta laughed, a rich, satisfied laugh, and they kept walking.

I cocked an eye at Pennsatucky. “Diiiiildoooos,” she drawled in her backwoods twang. I must have looked intrigued, because she hastened to explain: “Colleen prob’ly carved somethin’ nutty out of a carrot or something. Different than the usual.”

“Which is?”

“Pencil with an Ace bandage wrapped around it, with one a’ them finger condoms from the infirmary over the whole deal.”

“Doesn’t sound that enjoyable.”

“Huh. When I was locked up in county, they used to make dildos out of a spork, a maxipad, and a finger from a rubber glove!” Another use for maxipads revealed. The industrious hobbyists of the penal system would work with whatever materials they had.

“Desperate times, desperate measures, eh Pennsatucky?”

“Whatever
that
means.”

J
UST AS
we had sent eight prisoners down the hill to the drug program, the FCI returned the favor in kind, with a fresh batch of hard-timers “graduating” up the hill. Sometimes these women were very close to release, and sometimes they still had a stretch of time to do. Regardless, they usually hung together for a time, quietly watching the situation—unless of course they had friends in the Camp, either from the street or from the inside.

One of the new arrivals from the FCI was Morena, a Spanish woman who looked like a deranged Mayan princess. Deranged, but
not because she was unkempt or wild in her overall appearance. She had the clear air of someone who knows how to do time and was immaculately groomed, with “good” unis, pressed and sharp, and she was generally very composed. But Morena had unsettling eyes. She would stare at you; those crazy brown eyes were powerfully expressive, and you couldn’t tell what the hell it was they were telegraphing. Whatever was going on in her head, it was taking a lot of effort for her to restrain it, and her eyes were giving her away. It wasn’t just me who noticed her spooky eyes. “That one’s not right,” said Pop, tapping her temple. “Watch it.”

Imagine my surprise when Morena asked if she could walk with me in the morning to work—she had been assigned to the safety shop in CMS. I always chose to walk the half-mile to work alone, a little freedom that I treasured. I had no idea what to talk to her about. I thought she was about my age, wasn’t sure where she was from (her English was heavily accented and good), and I sure as hell wasn’t going to start asking personal questions. “How do you like safety?” was pretty neutral. Crazy Eyes couldn’t take offense at that.

“It’s fine,” she snorted. “I know the boss from the FCI. It’s no problem. Where are you from,
chica
?”

I gave her the standard bare-minimum information—New York City, fifteen months.

“You have children?”

No children. Did she?

Morena laughed, a throaty, crazy laugh that said,
Oh, you naïve and innocent straight girl, you can’t even tell that I am a bulldagger on the outs, not just up in this joint where one cannot get any dick… and how I will relish turning you out.
“No baby, I got no children.”

Over the next week or two Morena was my companion on the walk to work, like it or not. I got an earful about her low opinion of the women in the Camp. “They are like little girls, they think this shit is a game,” she opined, curling her lip. I was scrupulously polite and noncommittal, because Crazy Eyes made me nervous. In addition to many halting conversations on the way to work, her interactions with me in the Camp sharply increased. Morena would materialize at the
entry of my cube and coo at me in a bizarre way, “Hello, babeeeeee!” I had decided when I moved into B Dorm that I did not want anyone visiting me in my cube; the space was tiny and shared with Natalie and was as close to privacy as I was going to get. I went out to socialize. If I was in my cube, I was either reading or writing letters or sleeping. Other women, especially the young ones, loved to have people pile into their cubes, sit on their beds and footstools, and stand around and jaw; this was not for me.

“Looks like you have a new friend, bunkie,” Natalie observed drily.

One day while we were walking to work, Crazy Eyes cut to the chase. She was once again ranting about the immaturity and silliness of the women in the Camp. “They act like they are on vacation here or something, running around and acting silly. They need to act like women.”

I said rather mildly that most of the women were really bored and perhaps not so well educated and that they did indeed divert themselves with foolish things.

This observation prompted a sudden and passionate declaration from Crazy Eyes: “Piper, they are like children, and I am looking for a real woman! I cannot be bothered with this bullshit, with these silly girls! On the street, I am a big-time drug dealer! I do serious business, big business! My life is serious! Even in here, I cannot waste my time with these silly bitches—I need a real woman!”

I opened my mouth and then closed it. I felt like I had been dropped into a telenovela. Morena’s bosom was practically heaving under her prison khakis. Hey, I could understand what she was saying. Her life was indeed serious, her desires were serious, and I could understand why she didn’t want to mess around with some trifling bimbo who was experimenting with lesbianism just to entertain herself in prison. But hell no, not me.

I tried to choose my words with delicacy. “Er, well, Morena, I’m certain that you’ll find the right woman for you. It just might take a while for her to show up? Right?”

She looked at me with those unreadable crazy eyes. Was she pissed? Hurt? Vindictive? I couldn’t tell.

I was vastly relieved when we got to work—the ten-minute walk never seemed so long. I kept the conversation to myself.

Morena made a few more attempts to express her need for a real woman, perhaps thinking that I was too dense to get her meaning, but my response remained the same—I was sure that the right woman was out there somewhere in the correctional system and that providence would deliver her to Danbury with all haste. It wouldn’t be fast enough for me.

Once it was clear that I was not her future boo, Crazy Eyes quickly lost interest in me. The companionable walks stopped, and the cubicle drop-bys ceased. She still greeted me, but in a disinterested way. I felt that I had navigated the situation with as much grace as I had available, and no hideous repercussions to my tacit rejection seemed forthcoming. I breathed a little easier, hoping Crazy Eyes would spread the word to the other committed lesbians that I was not “like that,” even though in some other lifetime I had been.

F
OR THE
first time in many years I was living a completely chemical-free existence—right down to going off birth control pills. My body was returning to its actual organic state. And after almost three months of enforced celibacy, I was feeling very warm under the collar. If you had spit on me, I might have sizzled.

Larry was clearly feeling the pressure of our separation too. His hello kisses in the visiting room grew more ardent, and he wanted to play footsie under the card tables. My own yearnings for footsie were severely tempered by my fear of the guards. I understood on a visceral level, as he did not, that they really could end a visit and take all my visiting privileges away. This point was demonstrated to Larry one day when Gay Pornstar (aka Officer Rotmensen) materialized during visiting hours. Gay Pornstar was a strutting sadist with a flattop hairdo, close-set eyes, and a bristling mustache who resembled nothing so much as a Village People tribute-band reject. He had come into the visiting room to see his little buddy, Officer Jesus-Is-My-Homeboy, who was filling in for the regular visitation CO and
boring two prisoners who were helpers in the visiting room with predictions about the Rapture.

As I entered the visiting room, I kissed Larry hello, and then he stole another kiss as we sat down at our assigned table.

Seeing this, Gay Pornstar bellowed across the room, pointing, “
Hey!!!
One more time and you’re
outta
here!!!” Every head turned to stare silently.

Larry was rattled. “What the hell is wrong with that guy?” He tried to grab my knee under the table.

“That’s just what they’re like, darling
—don’t touch me!
He’s
not
fucking around!”

It killed me to snap at him like that, when all I wanted was for him to touch me, but Larry didn’t understand that pushing boundaries in prison can have dire consequences. These men had the power not only to end our visits but to lock me up in solitary on a whim; my word against theirs would count for little.

Afterward, still traumatized, I asked Elena, one of the prisoners who worked in the visiting room, what the hell had happened. “Oh, the little guy was watching you, and he was turning red,” she said, “so Rotmensen got pissed off when he saw that his buddy was embarrassed seeing you kiss.”

The next week the regular CO was back on duty. “I heard you were out of line last week,” she said, patting me down before allowing me in to see Larry. “I’ll be watching you.”

In such a harsh, corrupt, and contradictory environment, one walks a delicate balance between the prison’s demands and your own softness and sense of your own humanity. Sometimes at a visit with Larry I would be overwhelmed, suddenly overcome with sadness about my life at that moment. Could our relationship weather this insanity? Larry had been steadfast for all those years waiting for me to go to prison; now that I was here, could we make it through the real test? Our minutes in the visiting room were so precious, we could never bear to discuss anything difficult or negative. We wanted every second in that room to be sweet and perfect.

Different women had different ways of dealing with prison’s
impact on their relationships. On a sleepy weekend afternoon I stood by the microwave with my friend Rosemarie. She was in the midst of an elaborate cooking project, making gooey cheese and chicken enchiladas, and I was “helping.” Although I could be counted on to chop an onion (tricky with a butter knife), mainly my help took the form of indulging her passion for talking about our future weddings. Rosemarie was engaged to a sweet, quiet guy who visited her faithfully every week, and she was obsessed with wedding planning. She had subscriptions to all the bridal rags, which piled up in her cubicle, and she loved to dream and scheme about her Big Day.

She also wanted to plan for my Big Day—Larry and I had been engaged for almost two years. But I was hardly interested in a traditional ceremony, plus I knew we weren’t getting married anytime soon, and this colored my willingness to take wedding planning very seriously. Which drove Rosemarie nuts. When I told her I would wear a red bridal dress, she squealed with outrage.

On this particular day, Rosemarie was preoccupied with my headgear. If I was not going to wear a veil (a shame, she thought), then a tiara was most advisable. I snorted, “Rosemarie, do you really think I am putting a crown on my head to walk down the aisle?” In the heart of a budding wedding planner, anything is possible.

As Rosemarie filled tortillas and argued passionately in favor of seed pearls, Carlotta Alvarado approached: she wanted to know who was in line for the microwave. This was a strategic question. Carlotta, a committed system-gamer, was assessing who would let her cut the line, and Rosemarie was a definite possibility. The two of them worked together training seeing-eye dogs, and while Carlotta, an around-the-way girl from the Bronx, and Rosemarie, a preppy geek from New England, didn’t seem to have a lot in common, they got along very well. Rosemarie agreed to put the enchiladas on pause so Carlotta could fry some onions with Sazón, the Latin seasoning that makes everything orange, salty, and spicy.

“Carlotta’s engaged too!” said Rosemarie as the onions sizzled. Engagements were rare around the Camp.

“That’s great, Carlotta. What’s your man’s name?”

Carlotta beamed. “Rick—he’s my sweetie, he comes to visit me all the time. Yeah, I’m getting married. I can hardly wait.”

“It’s
so
exciting!” sang Rosemarie. Then she grinned. “Tell her what you told me, Carlotta.”

Carlotta smiled triumphantly. “Yeah, I can’t wait to get married. You know why?”