Orange is the New Black - Страница 23

David excited much attention at the Camp. Perhaps it was his combination of red hair, blasé charm, and arty eyeglasses that attracted so much pointed comment. Or maybe they just weren’t used to gay New York Jews in that neck of the woods. “That’s quite a friend you’ve got there,” commented one of the male COs after a visit. Leered Mr. Finn, “Just pretend I feel about women the way that buddy of yours from the visiting room does.” But the other prisoners loved David, who was always chatty with them. “Did you have a good time today with your faggot friend?” Pop asked after one of David’s visits; of course I had. “Faggots make the best friends,” she said philosophically. “They’re very loyal.”

My dear friend Michael wrote to me every Tuesday on his beautiful Louis Vuitton writing paper; his letters seemed like artifacts of a distant and exotic culture. On his first visit to see me, he had the misfortune of arriving at the same time as the airlift transport bus, and he was treated to the sight of disheveled women in jumpsuits entering the FCI in full shackles, supervised by guards with high-gauge rifles. When I joined him at a card table, cheerful in my tidy khaki uniform, he looked shaken but relieved.

Friends also came from Pittsburgh, Wyoming, and California to visit. My best friend Kristen left her new business in Washington to come see me every month, peering worriedly at my face for signs of trouble that others might not have caught. We have been inseparable friends since the first week of college, an odd pair to be sure: she a fairly proper southerner, a straight arrow, an overachiever driven to please; I a not-so-straight arrow. But deep down she and I are very much the same-similar families, similar values, simpatico. She was going through a rough time; her marriage was ending as her company was being born; and to have a heart-to-heart talk with her best friend, she had to haul ass to a Connecticut prison. I noticed that every time Kristen came to see me, Officer Scott would materialize in the visiting room and gaze at her like a teenage boy.

Once a male friend came to visit me; a tall, curly-headed lawyer, he had been consulting with a pro bono client at a nearby men’s prison, so he decided to stop by on his way home. Usually he and his wife came to see me together. On that quiet Thursday afternoon he and I had a grand old time, talking and laughing for hours.

Afterward Pop cornered me. “I saw you in the visiting room. You looked like you were having some good time. So who is that guy? Does Larry know he’s visiting you?”

I tried to keep a straight face while I assured Pop that my visitor was an old college friend of Larry’s and that yes, my fiancé knew about the visit. I wondered if Larry had any idea how many fans he had behind bars.

When visiting hours were over, the last inmate stragglers hugged and kissed their loved ones goodbye, and we were left together, sometimes lost in our own thoughts, hoping the CO would be lazy and skip the strip searches. If someone was crying, you smiled sympathetically or touched their shoulder. If someone was grinning, you asked, “How was your visit?” as you unlaced your shoes. Once you were finished with squatting naked and coughing, you could burst back through the double doors into the rest of the Camp building, onto the landing, where there were always lots of women loitering, waiting for the phones, and watching the visitors walk down the hill to the parking lots. If you were quick, you could dart to the window and catch one last glimpse of your visitor departing. Larry only told me later, when I was safe at home, how devastating it was for him to turn back and see me waving goodbye through the glass, and then to head back down the hill, leaving me alone.

CHAPTER 8. So Bitches Can Hate

One 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.”

JUST 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.