Out of Orange (35 page)

On another occasion my mother had dropped me off a block away from the halfway house after giving me an illegal ride home from work. She did this a couple of times just to get to see me, talk to me, and make sure I was fine and ready to come home. When I finally got through on the phone to my brother that night to make sure Patches was still in, as had become a necessary prerequisite to my sleep, I found out that Mom had not made it back home. He had just gotten home from the hospital where she had been taken. She had a nasty fall outside of a restaurant she had stopped at on her way home. It was a bad fall. But he said, “At least she hadn’t been driving.”

Mom was beginning to show more of the signs of Alzheimer’s my brother had said I needed to come home because of, and the martinis didn’t help the symptoms go away. It was after hours when I learned of her accident. She had a broken nose and road rash on her face. He said she looked like she’d been in a boxing match and told me what her blood alcohol level had been. I wanted to go to the hospital to be there when she woke up, but they wouldn’t let me. It was after business hours, so no one could approve a pass for me to go.

At another time in my life, I might not have been able to stifle all the urges I had when the snarky woman at the desk said, “Sorry, I guess you should have thought of that when you broke the law.” But instead of walking out the door of the halfway house, shaming her for her lack of basic decency, and running to my mother’s bedside, I smiled and walked away. The snarky woman was right, of course, except that if anyone had that kind of wisdom at the time it was
required, no laws would ever be broken, not even the ten she had probably broken in the last week.

Even my release from the halfway house was problematic. They released me and before I was fully unpacked at home, they called to say,
Oops!
They had screwed the date up and I had to go back for another week. But I made it home. I had never seen a cat smile before, but when I didn’t get up and leave her after watching a whole season of
Dexter
from the long-absent comfort of a fluffy bed, I noticed she had a big fat cheesy smile on her face.

In the end, the thing that bothered me most was that it felt like I was being punished for my decision to come home and take care of my mother. The halfway house in California would have been a breeze. In California, if you don’t “drop a dirty” (that is when you test positive for drugs), you keep your job, and you don’t bother your PO, that’s all it takes to get released from your federal probation after a year. But not me, not in Ohio.

I had no desire to break the rules; get drunk and fight or drive, get high, rob a bank, or do any of the obvious things everyone thinks people get violated over. Neither did Hester. We never were real criminals, whatever that is, just young and stupid. But we still wanted off paper. Almost three years into my period of supervision, I had a great job, I was helping to support my mother and brother, I had finally completed my bachelor’s and my master’s, and I was working on my Ph.D. Hester had also completed her bachelor’s and was starting her master’s. But we were both still on paper.

Hester stopped waiting for her PO to file the paperwork and paid her lawyer to file a motion with the court for early dismissal of her supervised release. The probation department and even our prosecutor recommended the judge grant it. That he would not surprised everyone. I didn’t even bother trying.

My greatest remaining fear was being violated while stuck on paper for something not in my control. I’d survive even if they did send me back to Dublin. But the impact it would have on everyone who depended on me now would be cruel. My mother and brother could become prisoners too. We could not leave Mom alone anymore
and she didn’t want to go to a nursing home. As long as Gene and I shared the duty of keeping her company, it worked. But it wouldn’t if I was violated.

It’s every ex-felon’s fear, to be unfairly violated; it happens too often to believe it can’t happen to you. One thing I could be certain of is that the people in power are not always the ones that should be, and those were the people my fate depended on until the day I received that last piece of news, a brief letter from the Department of Justice that said I am done, paid in full. I let this fear get the best of me and ceased to exist at some point.

I didn’t want anyone I worked with to know about my past—what if I was judged by that and not my abilities—so I kept to myself at work. While it’s not illegal to be gay in prison, years of being hunted for practicing it twisted it for me. I was afraid that engaging in the free world might be like my gateway drug, so I didn’t seek out other gay women. It felt like I had crawled back into the closet. But, between working, taking care of my mother and the house, and being in school twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, I was safe.

I think I got a little stressed out after a while. I had a heart attack on August 8, 2012, and nearly died at forty-nine years old. Open-heart surgery, a five-way bypass, and a very handsome doctor saved my life. I felt blessed and full, but I was still hiding under a rock made of so many secrets.

Then the strangest thing happened. I was watching television and a commercial came on. This girl stepped out of a van, dressed in some familiar clothes, hugging a pillow, and said, “My name is Piper Chapman . . .”

Cincinnati, Ohio
2013

Y
OU KNOW WHERE
Piper and I landed at the end of all this. Hester is working with recovering addicts now. I have no idea how she does that work. We go to lunch on Fridays and on one of these occasions she expressed how it was like an out-of-body experience for her, coming face-to-face with someone she knew all too well but had long since forgotten: herself.

I was just beginning to allow myself the latitude to explore my earlier self and it had not occurred to me that in writing this all down, I would also have to face head-on how horribly my poor choices had affected persons directly in my life, much less the countless others whom I’ll never know. I would have to acknowledge my part in their pain, suffering, and loss.

Addiction: I fed this dog of greed for a season, all for the sake of my own creature comforts and safety without so much as a thought to the misery I helped to traffic. I did not understand then the cost of my choices on generations of families troubled by addiction. I do now. To those whom I owe the most considered confession, generations
of nameless families troubled by addiction, what remains now for me is to tell you that I am sorry, and I
am
sorry.

Piper’s work inspired me to join a growing chorus illuminating a part of society in desperate need of attention. When the occasion came for me to sit down and write my record of events, I hoped it would all come together into a neat little package, that I would be able to convey it without much effort. I did not imagine the utter shame I would feel while retelling my past for the entire world to read.

Telling my story in all of its embarrassing detail, alongside so many others doing the same, might make a difference though, so I tossed my heavy shell and planted this seed. This is what finally set me free, not the piece of paper from the Department of Justice that said I’m done, time served, debt paid.

F
OR THE PRIVILEGE
of your eyes upon these pages, so many dominoes had to be stood up, aligned just so, and then set into motion. There was a time in my life when my perspective permitted me to see only the dominoes fall, one at a time. It would be years before I was graced with the wisdom, distance, and perspective that allowed me to view the intelligent design behind it all. If your faith in God has ever been shaken, these pages are a proof of life, my beauty for ashes.

I want to thank my father for lighting my way, and both my mother and father for holding my hand and never letting it go. I thank my big brother, Gene, for being my port in a storm, and Hester for being my touchstone—no matter how crazy I get she is always there to pull me back. I am grateful to her husband, Matt, for being the light in my sister’s eyes and the song in my sister’s heart. Thank you all for your wisdom, beauty, strength, and forgiveness.

Without the encouragement, work, and bravery of Piper Kerman no one would even care about my real life or the lives of the many incarcerated men and women who benefit from her efforts to right so many wrongs. Thank you for your precious coattails and your astounding integrity.

Without the following people these pages would not have come to life and found you:

Sue Carswell interviewed me for
Vanity Fair Online,
never allowing the interest in my story to override her patience and the ethical manner in which she respected my need to remain quiet for so long. Sue helped me select, from an infinite number of possibilities, the small number of salient points from which to best tell my story, and then she gave me the confidence to do so.

I cannot forget my friend and unbelievably great literary agent, Claudia Cross at Folio Literary Management, for her unmovable albeit questionable faith in my ability to write my own story, for convincing me of the importance of my voice’s addition to the choir, and for finding the best home for my story: HarperOne.

Out of Orange
was placed in the care of Nancy Hancock. She is, with the exception of my father, the finest and most brilliant editor in the universe. She became my friend, my navigator, my confessor, and my conscience, and then she introduced me and my work to another astonishing editor, Hilary Lawson. If you think I write well, trust me, it’s all their doing. They got me to the finish line, along with Elissa Cohen, Mark Tauber, Claudia Boutote, Laina Adler, Terri Leonard, and Suzanne Quist. Thank you.

I would like to offer my sincere gratitude to my lawyer and old friend Alan Dressler for his contributions to this story and to my life. I thank him for his generosity and his desire for justice and for his faith twenty years ago that this young broke moron was worth saving.

I would like to thank my employer, Reed Elsevier, for giving me the chance to prove myself in spite of my past and for their continued support even after my unexpected infamy.

I would like to thank Jenji Kohan and Laura Prepon for creating Alex Vause and making me tall.

Last but not least, I want to thank God’s little creatures, the precious strays that find themselves in prison consoling broken people, teaching some to care for something other than themselves, and
dodging the monsters. But most of all, Patches, whose unconditional love and companionship all these many years, saved me. Patches died of cancer on December 17, 2014, at nineteen years old (that is almost 140 in human years). She died peacefully. She fell fast asleep in my arms and went home to God, Dad, catnip clouds, and a bunch of little winged mice eager to play.

This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as remembered by the author, to the best of her ability. Many names and personal details have been changed in order to protect the privacy of individuals involved. Though conversations come from the author’s keen recollection of them, they are not written to represent word-for-word documentation; rather, they have been retold in a way that evokes the real feeling and meaning of what was said, and in keeping with the true essence of the events.

OUT OF ORANGE
:
A Memoir
. Copyright © 2015 by Cleary Wolters. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollins website:
http://www.harpercollins.com

HarperCollins
^®
,
^®
, and HarperOne™ are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolters, Cleary.

Out of orange : a memoir / Cleary Wolters. — First edition.

      pages cm

ISBN
978–0–06–237613–8

EPub Edition May 2015 ISBN 9780062376152

1. Wolters, Cleary. 2. Women drug dealers—United States—Biography. 3. Women ex-convicts—United States—Biography. 4. Women prisoners—Connecticut—Danbury—Biography. 5. Drug trade—United States. I. Orange is the new black (Television program) II. Title.

HV5805.W65A3 2015

364.1'77092—dc23

[B]
                                    
2015001467

15
  
16
  
17
  
18
  
19
    
RRD
(
H
)
    
10
  
9
  
8
  
7
  
6
  
5
  
4
  
3
  
2
  
1