Orange is the New Black - Страница 44

“Popovich?” It sounded more like a question than a warning.

I ducked my head, making no eye contact.

“Mr. Ryan! It’s this foot of mine, I hurt it. She’s just helping get the cramp out. Happens all the time since I’m on my feet all day. Officer Maple allows it. Is it okay?” Pop was all charm when it came to interacting with COs.

“Whatever. I’m gonna keep walking.” He thudded away.

I looked at Pop. “Maybe I better beat it?”

“Him? I known him for years, from down the compound. He’s all right. Don’t stop!”

· · ·

THE AMERICAN League Championship was so hotly contentious that year, I could barely stand to watch the games. The tension of being a Red Sox fan as they battled back from 0-3 made my stomach hurt, and my surroundings didn’t make it any easier. The running joke in the Camp was that half the population of the Bronx was residing in Danbury, and of course they were all ferocious Yankees fans. But the Red Sox had plenty of partisans too; a significant percentage of the white women were from Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and the always-suspect border state of Connecticut. Daily life was usually racially peaceful in the Camp, but the very obvious racial divide between Yankees and Sox fans made me nervous. I remembered the riot at UMass in 1986 after the Mets defeated the Sox in the World Series, when black Mets fans were horribly beaten.

I’m not sure what kind of a brawl we could have come up with, though. The most hard-core Sox fans in the joint were a clique of middle-aged, middle-class white ladies, whose ringleader was nicknamed Bunny. For some reason most of them worked for the grounds department in CMS. During all of pennant fever, they went about their work cutting lawns and raking leaves serenading each other:

John-ny Damon, how I love him.
He’s got something I can’t resist,
but he doesn’t even know that I exist.
John-ny Damon, how I want him.
How I tingle when he passes by.
Every time he says “Hello” my heart begins to fly.
Other fellas call me up for a date,
but I just sit and wait, I’d rather concentrate…
…on John-ny Damon.

Carmen DeLeon, the biggest Yankees fan of all, straight from Hunts Point, gave me the hairy eyeball. “Those are your peoples,” she pointed out acidly.

I glared, but I was too nervous even to talk smack, not because I was scared of Carmen but because I was worried about jinxing the Sox. The year before, Larry and I had gathered a roughneck band of Sox fans in our apartment in the East Village for game seven, and based on our lead in the sixth inning, we felt confident enough to venture out to a local bar, in the hopes that we could celebrate our victory loudly and publicly there, in the face of the vile, overbearing Yanks fans who had made our lives miserable for… our entire lives. Instead, we sat wretchedly nursing overpriced beers through extra innings as Martinez inexplicably stayed in and Red Sox Nation’s hopes and dreams collapsed with the team.

“I tell you what,” said Carmen, puffing out her already-considerable chest like a peacock. “If the Red Sox are in the World Series, I’m gonna root for them. That’s a promise.” When pigs fly, I thought gloomily.

When the Yankees went down in flames after a seven-game series, and the Red Sox were facing the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, the crowds in the TV room were actually smaller. But Carmen DeLeon was there front and center, grinning and rooting for the Sox. And the series was surreally easy, a four-game sweep. I couldn’t trust it-after each victory I felt my anxiety mount. At the end of game four, after the final out by the Cards, I started to shake uncontrollably. Rosemarie, also a lifelong Sox fan, grabbed my knee. “Are you okay?”

Carmen looked at me in amazement. “Piper’s crying!”

I was amazed too. I do love the Red Sox, but my reaction shocked even me.

I calmed down enough to watch the postgame celebration dry-eyed, but alone in the bathroom between B and C Dorms, I started to cry again. I went outside to stare at the half-cloaked moon and cry alone, out loud. Huge, shuddering sobs. I wasn’t crying because I wished I was home celebrating, but I was completely taken aback at the level of my own emotion. I had joked that I had to do hard time in order to break the Curse so the Red Sox could win, and now I felt that there was some strange truth to that. The world I knew had changed right there in the bottom of the ninth.

CHAPTER 15. Some Kinda Way

The garage girls liked to hang out in the visiting room together in the evenings during the week. I was chilling with them, surrounded by prisoners who were crocheting industriously, watching Fear Factor with their headsets on, or just talking. Pom-Pom was doing some sort of art project with colored pencils, probably a birthday card. Suddenly a woman rushed into the room, wild-eyed.

“The CO is destroying A Dorm!”

We followed her out into the hall, where a crowd was gathering. The new CO on duty that night was a pleasant, seemingly mild-mannered, and very big young guy. He, like a huge number of the prison guards, was former military. These folks would finish their commitment to the armed services and have several years in on a federal pension, so they’d end up working for the BOP. Sometimes they’d tell us about their military careers. Mr. Maple had been a medic in Afghanistan.

The CO on duty that night was fresh from Iraq and had just started work at the prison. It was rumored that he had been stationed in Fallujah, where the fighting had been brutal all spring. That night someone from A Dorm had been giving him trouble-some sort of backtalk. And something snapped. Before anyone really knew what was going on, he was down in A Dorm pulling the contents of the cubicles apart, yanking things off the walls, and ripping bedding off mattresses and turning them over.

We were scared-two hundred prisoners alone with one guard having a psychotic break. Someone went outside and flagged down the perimeter truck, which got help from down the hill. The young soldier left the building, and A Dorm residents started to put their cubes back together. Everyone was rattled. The next day one of the lieutenants came up from the FCI and apologized to A Dorm, which was unprecedented. We did not see the young CO again.

NEWLY ZEN thanks to Yoga Janet, well fed by Pop, and now proficient in concrete-mixing as well as rudimentary electrical work, I felt as if I were making the most of this prison thing. If this was the worst the feds were going to throw at me, no problem. Then when I called my father on the prison pay phone to talk about the Red Sox, he told me, “Piper, your grandmother is not doing well.”

Southern-proper and birdlike but possessing a stern, formidable personality, my grandmother had been a constant figure in my life. A child of West Virginia who grew up in the Depression with two brothers and then raised four sons, she had little idea what to do with a young girl, her eldest grandchild, and I was scared of her. I remained in awe of her, although as I got older, we developed an easier rapport. She spoke frankly to me in private about sex, feminism, and power. She and my grandfather were dumbstruck and horrified by my criminal misadventures, and yet they never let me forget that they loved me and worried about me. The one thing that I feared most about prison was that one of them would die while I was there.

I pleaded with my father on the pay phone-she would be fine, she would get better, she would be there when I came home. He didn’t argue back, just said, “Write her.” I was on a regular schedule of writing short, cheery updates to my grandparents, reassuring them that I was fine and couldn’t wait to see them when I got home. Now I sat down to write a different kind of letter, one that tried to convey how much she meant to me, how much she had taught me, how I wanted to emulate her rigor and rectitude, how much I loved her and missed her. I couldn’t believe that I had screwed up so badly, to be in this place when she needed me, when she was sick and maybe dying.

Immediately after posting the letter, I asked the Camp secretary for a furlough request form. “Were you raised by your grandma?” she asked brusquely. When I said no, she told me there was no point in giving me the form-I would never be granted a furlough for a grandparent. I sharply said that I was furlough-eligible and would make the request anyway. “Suit yourself,” she snapped.

Pop gently counseled me that in fact I had no chance of getting furloughed, even for a funeral, unless it was my parent, my child, or maybe my sibling, and that she did not want me to get my hopes up. “I know it’s not right, honey. That’s just how they do things.”

I had seen many other prisoners suffer through the illnesses of their loved ones and had felt helpless watching them when the worst would come-when they had to confront not only their grief, but also the personal failure of being in prison and not with their families.

I was not festive that Halloween. I was feeling some kinda way, like I had been walloped in the gut with a sledgehammer. But there was no escape from the festivities of the two hundred-plus women I was living with cheek by jowl every day. The women love their holidays.

Halloween in prison was odd, I had been told. Could it be odder than anything else here? How would one create a costume with such limited and colorless resources as we had at our disposal? Earlier that day I had seen some idiotic cat masks made from manila folders. Besides, I was in no mood for anything, let alone handing out candy.