Orange Is the New Black (39 page)

·  ·  ·  

F
INALLY WE
met what passed for the Welcome Wagon—Crystal. Crystal was a tall, skinny black woman in her fifties and the de facto mayor of the women’s unit. She appeared to be perfectly sane and was in charge of issuing uniforms and basics to new arrivals. She led us to a jumbled closet, where she began burrowing in boxes for more orange uniforms and some towels. They were short on underpants, and she handed me two pairs. I looked at them. “Crystal, these are… not clean.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie, that’s all we got. You put ’em in the laundry that goes out tomorrow. They’ll probably come back.”

There were no pajamas for us, no shampoo, not even eating utensils. I was relieved to hear that we could shop commissary once a week, but of course my ability to do that was going to depend on someone in this building doing their job and completing my paperwork, which seemed like a fantasy.

I was thrilled to discover that there were two private showers, though I was disgusted when I saw them. Before surrendering I had been warned never, ever to go into the shower without shower shoes. My feet had not touched tile in almost a year, but I had no shoes. I was dying to bathe. I turned on the water and gingerly stepped out of my canvas slippers and into the gross shower stall, holding a little bar of motel soap. My skin crawled, and icy water stung my back as I tried to get clean.

N
ORA WAS
cautious around me but was almost pathetically grateful that I wasn’t outright hostile. I certainly felt entitled to be nasty; when I was, she took it without resistance. Hester/Anne was bemused but didn’t interfere. I guess she figured her big sister could fend for herself, or that she had it coming. I learned that Nora had taught in a vocational program they had in Dublin; Hester/Anne was in the Puppy Program in Lexington. Before she’d been locked up, Hester/Anne had gotten sober, got married, and quietly embraced Jesus as her
personal savior. Nora was just as I remembered her—funny, scheming, curious, and sometimes an insufferably egotistical pain in the ass in need of a takedown.

Finally, I cut to the chase. “So why don’t you fill me in on everything that happened after we broke up in 1993?”

According to Nora, many months after my departure from her life, she did some soul-searching and tried to get out of the business with Alaji, who told her in no uncertain terms, no dice, and warned her of the consequences if she did walk. “I’ll always know where your sister is,” he threatened her. A while later, when a pair of drug couriers got arrested—separately in San Francisco and Chicago—things began to get messy and ugly, and of course the whole operation collapsed.

With her drug money Nora had built her dream home in Vermont—or at least it was her dream until a SWAT team of heavily armed federal agents arrived in jackboots to take her into custody. When the feds sat her down, she claimed, they already had detailed information about the whole enterprise. Someone—I thought probably her slimy business partner Jack—had been singing.

“Did they have my name?” I asked.

“Yes, they knew exactly who you were. But at first I told them you were just my girlfriend and you didn’t know anything.”

At this point it was hard to know what to believe. I had invested a lot of time and energy into hating Nora and elaborating fantasies of revenge. Her story was plausible, but it could easily be a lie. I believed that she felt terrible about the mistakes she had made, and when she looked across the table at her little sister, or talked about her elderly parents (who had not one but two children in prison), I felt bad for her in spite of myself. My brain and my guts were twisted, a snarled cat’s cradle that I would have to pick apart.

I was starting to understand what the Marlboro Man meant by “diesel therapy.”

E
very day in the Chicago MCC began the exact same way: at six
A.M.
male inmates (who were allowed to have jobs) brought food carts up to the women’s unit and through the massive metal security doors. Then the lone CO on duty would go around the unit unlocking the female prisoners’ doors. When the bolts clicked, everyone would vault out of bed and rush out into the unit to stand in line for breakfast. The line was not a happy place; no one spoke, and faces were hard and set or just stuporific. The food was usually cold cereal and a half-pint of milk and sometimes some bags of bruised apples, handed out by an inmate named Princess. Every now and then there were hard-boiled eggs. It was clear why everyone always got up: as in Oklahoma City, breakfast was the only meal of the day that was guaranteed to be edible.

As quickly as everyone had appeared, the room would empty. Almost everyone went back to bed. Sometimes they ate their breakfast or sometimes they just stashed it, sticking the milk on ice in a scavenged receptacle. The unit would remain quiet for several hours, and then the women would start to stir, the televisions would go on, and another miserable day in the high-rise fortress would begin.

E
VERYBODY WHO
loved me wanted me to be innocent—tricked, duped, all unawares. But of course, that was not the case. All those
years ago I wanted to have an adventure, an outrageous experience, and the fact of it being illegal made it all the more exciting. Nora may have used me all those years ago, but I had been more than ready to take what she was offering.

The women I met in Danbury helped me to confront the things I had done wrong, as well as the wrong things I had done. It wasn’t just my choice of doing something bad and illegal that I had to own; it was also my lone-wolf style that had helped me make those mistakes and often made the aftermath of my actions worse for those I loved. I no longer thought of myself in the terms that D. H. Lawrence used to observe on our national character: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Women like Allie, Pom-Pom, Pennsatucky, Jae, and Amy melted me. I recognized what I was capable of doing and how my choices affected the people I was now missing; not only Larry and my family but all my fellow penitents whom I had crossed paths with in this year, this season in hell. I had long ago accepted that I had to pay consequences. I am capable of making terrible mistakes, and I am also prepared to take responsibility for my actions.

Yet you still had to resolve not to believe what the prison system—the staff, the rules, even some of the other prisoners—wanted you to think about yourself, which was the worst. When you chose to do otherwise, when you acted like you were a person worthy of respect, and treated yourself with respect, sometimes they did too. When doubt and shame or worse crept in, the letters and books and visits from my friends and lover and family were powerful proof that I was okay, more effective than charms or talismans or pills to fight those terrible feelings.

The Chicago MCC was a different story. I’d been taken away from all the people who’d helped me to do my time, people on the outside and the inside, and I was completely off-balance. The misery of the women surrounding me rattled me, as did the pointlessness of every day that passed here, and the complete disrespect and indifference with which we were treated. The COs who worked the unit were in fact often pleasant, if unprofessional, but they couldn’t do
anything. Interacting with “the institution” in Chicago MCC was like staring at a concrete wall. Questions went unanswered. Underpants were not provided. My bedrock sense of myself was in some danger. Food, sometimes edible, was brought on a regular schedule, and in this new universe that was really all you could count on as a stable principle. My phone calls to Larry and my parents took on a desperate edge. For the first time in the year I had been in prison, I said the words, “You’ve got to get me out of here.”

I
THREATENED
to drown Nora in a toilet.

We had settled into a companionable antagonism, wherein I threatened to kill her several times a day, as we three codefendants would sit and play cards, reminisce, compare notes on our respective prisons, or just complain. It was very, very strange. I still had overwhelming flashes of hostility toward her, which I did not swallow. I didn’t really trust her, but I realized that it didn’t matter. Regardless of whether she was honest with me, I wanted to forgive her.

It made me feel better about myself, better about the crazy shithole we were currently residing in, and honestly, better about the fact that I was going home soon. She was going to be in prison for many more years. If I could forgive, it meant I was a strong, good person who could take responsibility for the path I had chosen for myself, and all the consequences that accompanied that choice. And it gave me the simple but powerful satisfaction of extending a kindness to another person in a tough spot.

It’s not easy to sacrifice your anger, your sense of being wronged. I still cautioned Nora regularly that today might be the day she drowned, and she laughed nervously at my mock-threats. Sometimes her sister offered to help with the drowning, if Nora was being annoying. But we were able to settle into a feisty rapport, like all ex-lovers who have a lot of water under the bridge but have elected to be friends. The things that I had liked about her over a decade earlier—her humor, her curiosity, her hustle, her interest in the weird
and transgressive—all those things were still true; in fact, they had been sharpened by her years in a high-security prison in California.

We served each other as a barrier against the freaks, of which this small unit had an astonishing array. In addition to poor suicidal Connie, there were several bipolar arsonists, an angry and volatile bank robber, a woman who had written a letter threatening to assassinate John Ashcroft, and a tiny pregnant girl who would seat herself next to me and start running her hands through my hair, crooning. I saw more temper tantrums and freakouts in a few weeks than I had in many months in Danbury, all of which the CO basically ignored. There was no SHU for women in Chicago (we were one floor above the men’s SHU), so the only disciplinary action that could be taken against us was sending a female off to the Cook County Jail, the largest in the nation at ten thousand inmates. “You do not want to go there!” warned Crystal, the mayor, who seemed to know what she was talking about.

Now that we had been in the MCC for a couple of weeks, the sisters and I saw that there were in fact some sane women present. At first no one really came near us; it took a while to realize that some of the residents of the twelfth floor were scared of us—after all, we three were hardened cons from
real prison.
But after a bit they must have recognized that we were “normal” like them, and then they made eager overtures: a couple of sweet and friendly Spanish mamis, a very short sports fanatic, and a hilarious Chinese lesbian who introduced herself to me hopefully with the line “I like your body!”

We were instantly elevated as authorities on anything and everything involving the federal prison system. When we explained that in fact “real prison” was much more bearable than our present surroundings, they were perplexed. They also wanted legal advice, lots of it, and I found myself repeating, “I am not a lawyer. You have to ask your attorney…” But all of them had court-appointed lawyers who were rarely accessible. There was a bizarre black Batphone on the wall, which was supposed to tap directly into the public defender’s office. “Fat fucking lot of good that does us,” complained one of the arsonists.

I did not have the representation problems of my fellow prisoners. One day I was called out of the unit, told I was going “to court,” and sent down to R&D to sit in a holding cell for hours. Finally I was handed off to my escorts, two big, young Customs agents, federal cops. I’m not sure what they were expecting, but it wasn’t me. When I turned my back to them to be cuffed, the guy doing the honors got rattled.

“She’s too small. They don’t even fit her!” He sounded anguished.

His counterpart stuck a thick finger between the cuffs and my wrist and said he thought we were good.

In the worldview of these burly, clean-cut young guys, I was clearly not supposed to be resident in this fortress. I probably looked too much like their sister, their neighbor, or their wife.

After being locked away for so many weeks, I enjoyed the ride through the streets of Chicago. At the federal building on South Dearborn, I was taken upstairs to a nondescript conference room and deposited, with the less-rattled officer to guard me. We sat across the table from each other, in silence, for fifteen minutes. I wasn’t looking at him, but I could tell he was watching me, which I guess was his job. He seemed to be getting agitated. He shifted in his chair, looked at the clock, looked at me, shifted again. I thought he was just bored. With prison Zen, I waited for whatever was going to happen next. Finally he couldn’t stand it anymore.

“You know, we all make mistakes,” he said.

I turned my eyes to him. “I know that,” I replied.

“What were you, an addict?”

“No, I just made a mistake.”

He was silent for a moment. “You’re just so young.”