Turning the Tables: From Housewife to Inmate and Back Again (16 page)

The camp where we lived was very dirty and old. “Down the hill” there was a low-security prison where about a thousand men were held, which was built in 1932 and opened in 1940. Though the camp where we lived wasn’t nearly as old, one of the inmates told me that some of the Watergate criminals spent time here. That sent a shudder through my spine . . . I was being held in a facility that once housed the most notorious white-collar criminals of our time.
So why was I here?

When I first got there, I was so grossed out that I didn’t want to touch anything. But like anything else in this life, you get used to it and you adjust. But it did make me appreciate all that I have that much more. The inmates who are on the cleaning detail try their best to make it look shiny and new, but it’s really an impossible job. It’s hard to keep it clean with more than two hundred women living there, especially when many of them are messy. No matter how vigorously the cleanup crew scrubbed everything, it still looked the same. The pipes in the ceiling were covered with inches of dust, and we were constantly inhaling that debris. When it rained, the dining room and other areas of the camp got flooded. In the bathrooms, you needed to put your hands underneath the faucets in the sinks for water to come out, but they shut off after a few seconds. So I would jump from sink to sink to have running water for more than a few seconds. There were only six sinks in each bathroom, and only four worked, even though there were fifty women in my dorm. The sinks usually had food or garbage in them. The water in the showers was freezing cold, so we asked other inmates to flush the toilets, which would trigger the hot water to come on in the showers, even for just a few minutes. The water there was hard, and bad for our skin, but honestly, that was the least of my worries.

Living in a prison dorm is like living in an unfinished, cement basement. Our rooms were like dark, dreary, cold dungeons, which had very little space. It got so hot in the summer that I thought I was going to suffocate. All we could do was either take ice-cold showers or soak the hard, scratchy paper towels they had in the bathroom in cold water and put them on our faces and necks. In the fall, it was freezing because the heat didn’t get turned on until the middle of October. It was so cold that my bones ached at night. I slept in long johns, sweatpants, a T-shirt, a fleece top, and socks with two blankets over me just to keep warm.

When I say prison was like being in the military, it’s because there are rules and regulations you have to follow for
everything
. They told us when to wake up and when to go to sleep, when to eat and when to stand still for head count, which is a routine where the guards check to make sure no one has escaped. (I heard that if you tried to escape, you would get an extra five years in prison.) For the first month or so of my stay there, I felt so demeaned when I had to stand there while they counted us—like we were sheep or something. They could raid your room anytime they wanted to, make a mess of it, and take whatever they wanted. A lot of women would get in trouble for taking fruit from the cafeteria to eat later on, because you weren’t allowed to bring food back to your room. You could only bring food back that you bought from the commissary. They didn’t sell fresh fruit—or fresh anything—there.

I hated the food. They served hot dogs and sauerkraut and hamburgers and French fries a lot. Women should not be eating like this. There was no nutritional value in most of the food they gave us, but I tried my best to eat as healthy as I could while I was there. Believe me, the food wasn’t giving us the strength we needed to fight off sickness . . . and you’d better not catch anything, because it took days and sometimes longer to get the medicine you needed, if you ever got any.

Then there were the TV rooms. The chairs in the TV rooms were made of hard plastic. They were horrible and killed my back and ass. Everyone was constantly fighting over the TV because there just weren’t enough sets for all of us. We constantly had to wait in long lines for everything—the phone, the dining room, the showers, the sinks, and on and on. I swear, I spent 50 percent of my time in prison standing in line. Airport security will never again seem like a hassle.

When I first went into the bathroom, I gagged. It smelled like a porta-potty that hadn’t been cleaned out in months. It was filthy. Soggy clumps of toilet paper and paper towels were lying on the floor, which collected stagnant water in the sinking tiles. Women tossed their used sanitary napkins and tampons right on top of the garbage, for all to see, and in the toilets. When I looked up, I saw that the ceiling was missing in spots. I saw exposed pipes and, stuck to the ceiling, dried balls of toilet paper that some of the inmates had tossed up there. Why? I have no idea. Boredom, I guess. The sinks were lined with a brown layer of scum and mold, plus the garbage and discarded food. I wanted to throw up. I didn’t want to touch a thing. All I could do was stand there and cringe. The first time I saw that bathroom, I closed my eyes and tried to block it all out.

I can’t believe I’m in here . . .

What’s funny about that first, skin-crawling trip to the bathroom is that about ten days or so into my stay at Chez Danbury, one of my friends emailed me some stupid story she read online that said I became the talk of the prison because I sat directly on a toilet seat in my cell. The story said we had stainless steel toilets with no seats in our prison cells, and that no one sat on them because they were so disgusting. Are you kidding me? Whoever wrote that might have been watching too many episodes of
Lockup
on MSNBC. First of all, we didn’t have toilets in our cells, because we weren’t in cells. We lived in rooms or cubicles, in what they called dorms, and shared bathrooms in the areas where we lived. What I want to know is: who
saw me
on the toilet in a stall? I’d rather die than sit directly on a public toilet seat, let alone on a
prison
toilet seat.
Madonna mia . . .

That first day, I took inventory of my new room. Three metal bunk beds were packed into a small space. They had hard bars supporting the thin, stained mattresses. There was a big, dirty window, concrete walls, and a scuffed-up tile floor—like one you might see in a public school. No more walk-in closet for me. We were all given a locker in our rooms to keep our things secure. My locker was tan, about three feet high and maybe three feet wide, with three rickety, rusted shelves on each side. After I thoroughly cleaned the shelves, I put the clothes I had been given on the left-hand shelves. On the top right-hand shelf, I stored my legal folder with all my important papers in it. On the second shelf were my vitamins and toiletries, and as time went on, instant coffee, rice cakes, bottles of water, peanut butter, cereal, and oatmeal. We weren’t allowed to tape pictures to the walls, but were allowed to hang pictures inside our lockers. Later on, I taped pictures of me, Joe, and the girls in happier times, as well as pictures of them that I had cut out of magazines or that my fans had printed out from my Instagram page and sent me, which was so thoughtful. I smiled every time I opened my locker and saw my family smiling back at me.

When I thought back to my bedroom at home, I wanted to cry. My bedroom was almost half the size of the whole block I was in. I had a massive, super-king-sized canopy bed with elegant draping around it, a chaise lounge, a fireplace, doors that opened to a balcony, and cathedral ceilings. I used to love to lie on one of the plush, fluffy cream-colored carpets in my bedroom and talk on the phone or tickle the girls. My walk-in closet was twice the size of my new room. But I had to stop myself from thinking about that—and about the fun memories I had with Joe and the girls there. I had to be strong and get through this—one long hour at a time. Pitying myself wasn’t going to help. I’d never been that way and wasn’t planning on starting now.

As I began getting situated in my little area of the room, a parade of inmates started coming in to say hi to me or to just walk by the room to get a glimpse of me. The last famous person in here had been singer Lauryn Hill, in 2013. (Piper Kerman became famous after she left. Inmates who knew her said she was always helpful, funny, and really nice.) Now that I was the new celebrity inmate, I seemed to be causing quite a stir. My roommates said they had never seen so many people inside or outside their room. The hall was packed with inmates, waiting to get in there. Most of the women were really friendly. A lot of them told me they watched me on the show. Others told me they couldn’t believe they were really meeting me because they were such big fans. Some of them told me about all the things you could do there, like the workout classes, which sounded great to me because one of my goals was to get into the most amazing shape of my life while I was at Danbury. Some of them, I later found out, were jockeying to get me to be their friend because that was considered prestigious. But I did get a few menacing stares, too, from some of the women who just walked by my room in the “streets,” which is what they called the hallways outside the rooms. They would turn their heads, glance in, give you a strong look, and keep going. I called them the “drive-bys.” They made me nervous because I had heard some of the women in there were
tough
. I kept my guard up in case I got hassled or jumped or something. I had to be ready for anything. But I knew I could handle whatever came my way. I am one tough Italian cookie, after all . . .

The other thing I was on red alert for was people trying to get my picture in prison. I had heard that the tabloids were willing to pay top dollar for a photograph—or information about me. I heard that Lauryn Hill made friends with a woman who ended up selling information about her to the rags. They were the hunters and I was their prey, so I needed to be careful about what I did and said because I knew I was a target. I couldn’t stop worrying about the media, even in there.

Even though I had a lot of things that I wanted to do to organize my area, so many people still kept coming by that my roommates started to get mad. I felt bad. But it wasn’t my fault that all these people wanted to gawk at me. I was used to people staring at me because I’m on TV, but even I was starting to feel like a caged animal at the zoo.

Breakfast was from 6:15 to 7:15 a.m., but on that first day I skipped it. I wanted to fill out my paperwork so I could get Joe, the girls, and my parents on my visitors’ list, so they could come see me as soon as possible. Getting approved for visitation takes a few weeks to a month in some cases, because they have to do background checks on everyone. Since Joe was a codefendant with me in our case, he had limited visiting time—just one day a month, which got changed to two days a month later on, thank goodness, even though that still didn’t seem like enough time.

I had this constant gnawing in my stomach because I couldn’t stop thinking about Joe and the girls, especially after our heartwrenching goodbye the night I left. I turned on my side and faced the wall so the two girls in the room couldn’t see me crying. I tried hard not to make a noise or sniffle. I just wiped the tears from my eyes with my shirt while I finished filling out the papers.

I really wanted to talk to my family and let them know I was OK. I missed them so much and hadn’t even been there for twenty-four hours yet. I felt like I was dying inside, but I tried not to show it. Around 9 a.m., I headed to the computer room so I could email them. But I wasn’t set up to use CORRLINCS, the prison’s email system. Another thing I had to wait for.

One of the things I thought I’d be able to do in prison was surf the Internet during computer time. That thought kept me from truly feeling I was absolutely cut off from the outside world. I soon found out that the computers were for email—and email only. You had to press your thumbprint onto an electronic pad to even get into the computer room and the commissary. So I had no access to what was going on in the world at all, unless someone let me know or I happened to see it on TV. I soon found out that you had to watch what you emailed, too, because the officers read everything that came in and out. Same with snail mail. The officers opened all your mail and read and inspected it before you heard your last name yelled out to come get it at mail call. But people could send you a limited number of books and magazines, which was great. I definitely wanted to grow my reading list while I was there.

I decided to take my first prison shower, which I had been dreading after I saw the bathroom. I put on the shower shoes Nikki had given me and brought a tiny, worn towel (that looked worse than some of the rags I used to clean my house), a threadbare washcloth, and some of Nikki’s donated bath supplies to the shower area. All eyes were on me when I got there. I could see some of them whispering to each other and looking at me, like, “There’s Teresa!” Some of the ladies in there came up to me and said hi. A couple of them looked me up and down or gave me a side eye. I heard one of them say to her friend, “This bitch better not think she’s better than us . . .” I just looked away and pretended like I didn’t see or hear a thing.