Orange is the New Black - Страница 19

On a Friday when we returned from work to the Camp, Big Boo Clemmons from B Dorm came out to meet the CMS bus. “Guilty on all four counts!” she reported with great excitement. Inside we found the TV rooms packed, because a jury had found Martha Stewart guilty on four counts of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about a well-timed stock sale. The style diva was going to have to do fed time. Her case had been followed with keen interest at Danbury -most prisoners thought she was being targeted because she was a famous female: “Guys get away with that shit all the time.”

· · ·

ONE AFTERNOON Levy, our nervous coworker Shirley, and I, geared up in our tool belts, were shuttling around the staff housing on the grounds, checking the circuit panels in every house. DeSimon escorted us from house to house, where he would make small talk with the occupants while we did our thing. It was bizarre to go into the homes of our jailers and see their angel collections and family photos and pets and laundry and messy basements.

“Zey have no class,” sneered Levy. I didn’t like prison guards, but she was insufferable.

When we got back to the shop, DeSimon left, and it was up to us to clean out the truck and return the tools to the cage. That’s when I discovered the extra screwdriver in my belt.

“Levy, Shirley, I’ve got one of your screwdrivers.” They both checked their belts-no, they had theirs. I held two screwdrivers in my hands, confused. “But if you’ve got yours, then where…” I was mystified. “I must have… picked this one up in one of the houses?”

My eyes met Levy and Nervous Shirley’s, which were huge.

“What are you going to do?” Shirley hissed.

My stomach dropped. I started to sweat. I saw myself in the SHU, with no visits from Larry, with another criminal charge for stealing a CO’s potentially deadly screwdriver. And I had these two fools in on the game, no one’s choice for accomplices.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but you don’t know a thing about this, understand?” I hissed back.

They hurried into the shop, and I stood outside, looking around wildly. What the fuck was I going to do with this screwdriver? I was terrified, because I knew it could be construed as a weapon. How could I get rid of it? If I found a hiding place, what if someone found it? How did you destroy a screwdriver?

My eyes fixed on the CMS dumpster. It was big, and all the shops threw their garbage, all kinds of garbage, in there. It got emptied often, and the garbage was taken away, to Mars as far as I was concerned. I grabbed the shop garbage and strode toward the Dumpster. I fiddled with the garbage bag while I surreptitiously wiped the screwdriver like a maniac, trying to get rid of fingerprints. Then I flung both into the Dumpster, which unfortunately didn’t sound very full. It was done. Heart pounding, I returned to the shop and put away my tool belt. I didn’t even look at Nervous Shirley or Levy.

That night I went over the screwdriver problem again and again in my mind. What if the CO noticed it was missing and remembered that inmates had been in his house? He would raise the alarm, and then what? An investigation, interrogations, and then Levy and Nervous Shirley would give me up in a hot second. I closed my eyes. I was dead.

The next morning at the shop, an eerie air-raid siren went off. I almost vomited. Shirley looked faint. Levy appeared completely unconcerned. Usually the siren was used for “recalls”-sending us back to our housing units for either emergency or special practice counts. But this time nothing happened; the alarm went off for many excruciating minutes until it just stopped. Shirley went outside to smoke a cigarette with trembling hands.

At lunch I found Nina and told her what had happened, deeply rattled.

She rolled her eyes. “Jesus Christ, Piper. Let’s go look for it after lunch. You’ll just give it to DeSimon and explain. They ain’t gonna lock you up.”

But the Dumpster was empty. Nina frowned, and looked at me.

I wanted to cry. “Nina, you don’t think the siren this morning…?”

Although she was concerned, this struck her as hilarious. “No, Piper, I don’t think the siren this morning was for you. I think the garbage is gone, and the screwdriver’s gone, and if the evidence is gone, then they can’t prove shit. Most likely nothing at all’s gonna happen, and if it does, it’s your word against Levy or Shirley, and let’s face it, they’re wackos, who’s gonna believe them?”

· · ·

ONE AFTERNOON I returned to B Dorm to find my neighbor Colleen in a state of great excitement.

“My girls Jae and Bobbie just got here from Brooklyn! Pipestar, you got any extra toothpaste I can give them, or any other stuff?” Colleen explained that before she’d been designated to Danbury, she had spent time with her two friends in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Correctional Center, aka a federal jail. Now her pals had just arrived off the transport bus. “They’re both real cool, Piper, you’ll like them.”

On my way to the gym, I saw a black woman and a white woman standing out behind the Camp building in the early spring drizzle, staring up at the clouds. I didn’t recognize them; I decided they must be Colleen’s friends.

“Hey, I’m Piper. Are you guys Colleen’s friends? I live next to her. Let me know if you need anything.”

They lowered their faces from the sky and looked at me. The black woman was about thirty, pretty, and solidly built with high cheekbones. She looked like she had been carved out of supersmooth wood. The white woman was smaller and older, maybe forty-five, and had coarse skin like a coral reef and eyes with as many shades of blue as the ocean. Right now they looked aquamarine.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m Bobbie. This is Jae. You got any cigarettes?” Her heavy New York accent suggested many late nights and many cigarettes.

“Hi, Jae. No, sorry, I don’t smoke. I’ve got toiletries, though, if you need.” I was getting wet, and it was cold. Still, I was curious about these two. “Kinda crap weather out here.”

At this they looked at each other. “We ain’t felt the rain for two years,” said Jae, the black woman.

“What?”

“In Brooklyn there’s a little rec deck they take us up on, but it’s covered over, barbed wire and shit, and you don’t really see the sky,” she explained. “So we don’t mind the rain. We love it.” And she put her head back again, face up, as close to the sky as it could get.

· · ·

IN THE electric shop things were changing. Vera, the woman with the most experience, left to go to the only women’s Boot Camp program, in Texas. Boot Camp (an early-release program that has since been eliminated) was six hard months in the Texas heat, where rumor had it that you were housed in a giant tent and required to shave your pubic hair to make insect detection easier.

Vera’s departure to Texas meant that the leadership in the electric shop shifted to Joyce. Joyce was a reasonably confident replacement, having learned from Vera how to do the electric work that was required on a frequent or daily basis-changing eight-foot-long fluorescents, replacing the ballasts of light fixtures, installing new exit signs and fixtures, and checking circuit boards.

Levy soon became the unifying factor in the shop: the rest of us united against her. She was insufferable, crying daily and complaining loudly and constantly about her measly six-month sentence, asking inappropriate personal questions, trying to boss people around, and making appalling and loud statements about other prisoners’ appearance and lack of education, sophistication, or “class,” as she put it. More than once Campers had to be talked out of kicking her ass, which was done by reminding them that she was not worth the trip to the SHU. Most of the time she was nervous-verging-on-hysterical, which manifested in dramatic physical symptoms; an astonishing hivelike swelling made her look like the Elephant Man, and her always-sweating hands made her particularly useless for working with electricity.

DeSimon kept a television in the shop. He would periodically emerge from his office, toss a VHS tape at us, and grunt, “Watch this,” then leave us for hours. These instructional videos explained the rudiments of electrical current and also very basic wiring procedures. While uninterested in the content of the videos, my coworkers quickly figured out how to rig up the TV with an illegal makeshift antenna. That way we could watch Jerry Springer; one con would man the lookout post by the window to spot any approaching COs.

I was trying to learn some Spanish, and my coworker Yvette was very patiently trying to teach me, but what I managed to pick up was almost exclusively about food, sex, or curses. Yvette was by far the most competent of my coworkers, and she and I would often work together on any electrical job requiring proficiency with tools. This occasioned conversations where every sentence suffered from multiple fractures, coupled with a lot of cautious mime-neither of us wanted to get shocked. I had already learned the hard way what that was like-your head snaps back as if you’ve been kicked under the chin.

Jae, my neighbor Colleen’s pal, was assigned to the electric shop-she had been cleared to work back in the Brooklyn MCC, so her paperwork didn’t take long. She got the clerk job. “As long as I don’t have to touch wires and shit, I’m cool,” she said.

By default, she hung out with me at work-I was best buddies with Little Janet, and Little Janet was the only other black person in electric. As the New England spring took its sweet time arriving, the three of us occupied the bench in front of the shop, smoking and watching the comings and goings of other prisoners. The guards went in and out of their deluxe gym, which was located directly across from the electric building. There were long stretches of inactivity during which we shot the shit… about the drug game (distant memories for me), about New York City (where we all were from), about men, about life.