by Piper Kerman
When cash ran low, I would be sent off to retrieve money wires from Alaji at various banks—a crime itself, although I did not realize it. Then I was sent on one such errand in Jakarta, one of the intended drug couriers asked to come along for the ride. He was a young gay guy from Chicago who was heavily into Goth but cleaned up well and looked the part of the perfect prepster; he was bored by the plush hotel. During the long, hot ride across the sprawling city, we were transfixed by the gridlock, the cages of barking puppies for sale at roadside, and the human strata that the Southeast Asian metropolis offers. At a traffic light a beggar lay in the street asking for alms. His skin was almost blackened by the sun, and he had no legs. I started to roll down my window to give him some of the hundreds of thousands of rupiah that I had with me.
My companion gasped and shrank back in his seat. “Don’t!” he shouted.
I looked at him, disgusted and perplexed. Our taxi driver took the money from me and handed it out his window to the beggar. We rode on in silence.
WE HAD tons of time to kill. We blew off steam in Bali beach clubs, Jakarta military pool halls, and nightclubs like Tanamur that were borderline brothels. Nora and I shopped, got facials, or journeyed to other parts of Indonesia—just the two of us, girl time. We didn’t always get along.
During a trip to Krakatoa we hired a guide to lead us on a hike in the mountains, which were covered by dense, humid jungle growth. It was hot, sweaty going. We stopped to eat lunch by a beautiful river pool at the top of a towering waterfall. After a skinny-dip, Nora dared me—double-dog-dared me, to be precise—to jump off the falls, which were at least thirty-five feet high.
“Have you seen people jump?” I asked our guide.
“Oh yes, miss,” he said, smiling.
“Have you ever jumped?”
“Oh no, miss!” he said, still smiling.
Still, a dare was a dare. Naked, I began to crawl down the rock that seemed like the most logical jumping place. The falls roared. I saw the churning, opaque green water far below. I was terrified, and this suddenly seemed like a bad idea. But the rock was slippery, and as I tried in vain to edge back like a crab, I realized that I was going to have to jump; there was no other way. I gathered all of my physical strength and flung myself off the rock and into the air, shrieking as I plunged deep into the green gorge below. I burst the surface, laughing and exhilarated. Minutes later Nora came howling down the falls after me.
When she popped up, she gasped, “You are crazy!”
“You mean you wouldn’t have gone if I had been too scared to jump?” I asked, surprised.
“No fucking way!” she replied. Right then and there I should have understood that Nora was not to be trusted.
Indonesia offered what seemed like a limitless range of experience, but there was a murky, threatening edge to it. I’d never seen such stark poverty as what was on display in Jakarta, or such naked capitalism at work in the enormous factories and the Texas drawls coming from across the hotel lobby where the oil company executives were drinking. You could spend a lovely hour chatting at the bar with a grandfatherly Brit about the charms of San Francisco and his prize greyhounds back in the U.K., and when you took his business card on the way out, he would explain casually that he was an arms dealer. When I rode the elevator to the top of the Jakarta Grand Hyatt at dusk, stepped into the lush garden there, and began to run laps on the track that circuited the roof, I could hear the Muslim call to prayer echoing from mosque to mosque throughout the entire city.
After many weeks I was both sad and relieved to say goodbye to Indonesia and head back to the West. I was homesick.
For four months of my life, I traveled constantly with Nora, occasionally touching down in the States for a few days. We lived a life of relentless tension, yet it was also often crushingly boring. I had little to do, other than keep Nora company while she dealt with her “mules.” I would roam the streets of strange cities all alone. I felt disconnected from the world even as I was seeing it, a person without purpose or place. This was not the adventure I craved. I was lying to my family about every aspect of my life and growing sick and tired of my adopted drug “family.”
During a brief stay in the States to visit with my real and very suspicious family, I received a call from Nora, who said that she needed me to meet her in Chicago. O’Hare Airport was known as a “safe” airport, whatever that meant, and it was where the drugs were flown. I met her at the Congress Hotel on Michigan Avenue. What a dump, I thought. I was used to the Mandarin Oriental. Nora explained tersely that she needed me to fly out the next day, carrying cash to be dropped off in Brussels. She had to do this for Alaji, and I had to do it for her. She never asked anything of me, but she was asking now. Deep down I felt that I had signed up for this situation and could not say no. I was scared. And I agreed to do it.
IN EUROPE things took a darker turn. Nora’s business was getting harder for her to maintain, she was taking reckless chances with couriers, and that was a very scary thing. Her partner Jack joined us in Belgium, and things went downhill rapidly. I thought he was greedy, lecherous, and dangerous. And I could see that Nora trusted him far more than she cared for me.
I was scared and miserable, retreating into almost constant silence as we all moved from Belgium to Switzerland. I moped around Zurich alone, while Nora and Jack schemed. I saw The Piano three times in a row, gratefully transported to another place and time as I cried throughout the movie.
When Nora informed me in no uncertain terms that she wanted me to carry drugs, I knew that I was no longer valuable to her unless I could make her money. Obediently I “lost” my passport and was issued a new one. She costumed me in glasses, pearls, and a pair of ugly loafers. With makeup she tried in vain to cover up the fish tattooed on my neck. I was told to get a conservative haircut. Caught in a cold Saturday afternoon rainstorm trying to find a hairdresser who would transform my overgrown blond tresses into something presentable, I staggered dripping into a tiny salon, the fifth I had tried. I had been met with an arctic Swiss reception in the previous four, but now a soft familiar accent asked, “Y’all need some help?”
I almost cried when I saw the fellow who was asking—a sweet young southerner named Fenwick who looked like Terence Trent D’Arby. He took my wet coat, sat me down in his chair, and gave me hot tea and a haircut. He was curious but gentle when I balked at explaining myself or my presence in his salon. He talked about New Orleans, music, and Zurich. “It’s a great city, but we have a terrible heroin problem here. You see people just lying in the streets, out of it.” I felt ashamed. I wanted to go home. I thanked Fenwick profusely as I left his salon, the only friend I’d made in months.
At any time, with one phone call, my family would have helped rescue me from this mess of my own making, yet I never placed that call. I thought I had to tough it out on my own. I alone had signed up for this misadventure, and I alone would navigate it to some conclusion, although I was now petrified that it might be a very dismal end.
Nora and Alaji developed an elaborate and risky scheme to switch suitcases inside the Zurich airport, but mercifully the drugs she wanted me to carry never showed up, and I narrowly avoided becoming a drug courier. It seemed like it was only a matter of time before disaster would strike, and I was in way over my head. I knew I had to escape. When we got back to the States, I took the first flight to California I could get. From the safety of the West Coast I broke all ties with Nora and put my criminal life behind me.
CHAPTER 2
It All Changed in an Instant
San Francisco was a welcome refuge—I might be a freak, but at least I was among many. I found a place on the Lower Haight with my old friend Alfie, a brewery coworker from back east who was now living in San Francisco. I was shell-shocked and felt like a smoking chunk of SkyLab that had crashed through the atmosphere back to Earth. When Alfie wasn’t around, I would sit on the floor of our apartment and ponder what I had done, astonished by how far afield I had wandered and how
willing I had been to abandon myself on the journey. I vowed that I would never relinquish my sense of self again, to anything or anyone.
After spending months in the underworld, it took a while to get used to a normal life. I had been living on room service, exoticism, and anxiety for a long time. But I had several great friends from college now in the Bay Area who took me under their wing, pulling me into a world of work, barbecues, softball games, and other wholesome rituals. I quit smoking.
I was terrified all the time about money and immediately got two jobs. I rose early in the morning to get to job one in the Castro, opening Josie’s Juice Joint and Cabaret at seven A.M., and I got home late at night after hostessing at a swank Italian restaurant across town in Pacific Heights. Finally, I got a “real” job at a TV production company that specialized in infomercials. The job required coaxing passersby onto bizarre exercise equipment in public places, tending to the needs of C-list celebrities on set, and waxing facial hair off perfect strangers. I flew all over the country, filming people who wanted to be less fat, less poor, less wrinkled, less lonely, or less hairy. I found that I could talk to just about anyone, whether it was Bruce Jenner or a mom with a mustache, and find some common ground with them quickly—I wanted to be less poor, lonely, and hairy too. I worked my way up from Gal Friday to a real producer, working on preproduction, filming, and editing for broadcast. I loved my job, much to the amusement of my friends, who would tease me about the latest late-night life-changing widget, scheme, or cream.
I dated but still felt pretty crispy and gun-shy after the flame-out with Nora. I was fine being serially single, with the occasional crazy romance thrown in to distract me from work.
I never talked about my involvement with Nora to new friends, and the number of people who knew my secret remained very small. As time passed, I gradually relaxed inside my head. I started to feel as though there were no second shoe, and it had all been a crazy interlude. I thought I understood risk. I considered my time abroad with Nora as a crash course on the realities of the world, how ugly things can get, and how important it is to stay true to yourself even in the midst of an adventure or experiment. In my travels I had encountered all kinds of people whose dignity seemed to have a price—widely variable—and I thought that next time I had better set my price higher than anyone would pay.
With all that worldly wisdom secreted in my memory, I was feeling pretty damn lucky. Great job, great friends, great city, great social life. Through mutual friends I met Larry, the only pal I knew who worked as much as I did in leisure-loving San Francisco. He ran a wire service called AlterNet at a nonprofit media institute. When I would crawl, exhausted, out of the editing room after hours, I could always count on Larry for late dinner or later drinks.
In fact, Larry was always up for anything. Random tickets to a random music festival? Larry was in. Want to get up early on Sunday and go to church at Glide in the Tenderloin, and then go on a six-hour urban hike with pit stops for bloody Marys? He was Jewish, but sure, he’d come to church and lip-sync the hymns. He wasn’t my only straight male friend, but we shared a particularly simpatico sense of humor, and he quickly became the most reliable source of fun that I knew.
As Larry’s new best lesbian buddy, I got to hear about his every romantic conquest and reversal in gory detail, which was both appalling and entertaining. I spared him nothing in my evaluations of his progress. He returned the favor by treating me like a queen. One evening a bike messenger arrived at my office with a parcel that yielded a real Philadelphia soft pretzel, complete with spicy mustard, which Larry had personally imported just for me from a trip back east. How sweet, I thought, chewing.
But then a disturbing thing happened. Larry got hung up on one of his attempted conquests, and a rather drippy one at that. He became distinctly less fun. I was not the only one who noticed this. “She’s leading him around by his nose!” other friends smirked. We mocked him mercilessly, but that didn’t seem to have much effect. So I had to take matters into my own hands, and in a dark corner of a dirty nightclub, I sacrificed myself for Larry’s dignity, kissing him squarely on his surprised, wisecracking mouth.
That got his attention. And mine. What the hell was I thinking? I proceeded to pretend for several months that nothing had happened, while I tried to sort out my feelings. Larry was nothing like any guy I’d been involved with in the past. For one thing, I liked him. For another, he was a short, scrappy, eager-to-please guy with big blue eyes, a big grin, and exceedingly big hair. I had deigned to sleep only with tall, exotically handsome narcissists in the past. I didn’t particularly want to date a man, and this man wasn’t even my type!
Except that he was. Larry was completely my type. Even after the weirdness of our barroom kiss, we were still inseparable, although he was understandably confused. But he didn’t push, he didn’t demand answers or clarity, he just waited. When I remembered that pretzel, I realized that Larry had been in love with me back then, and I was in love with him. Within months we were a real, official couple, much to the shock of our skeptical friends.
In fact, it was the easiest relationship I had ever been in, by far. Being with him made me undeniably happy, so when Larry came to me, conflicted and confused, to tell me that he had been offered a great magazine job back east, it didn’t really disturb my equilibrium. My next step seemed so obvious, so natural, that the decision practically made itself. I quit my beloved job to move back east with him—by far the best risk I have ever taken.
LARRY AND I landed in New York in 1998—he was an editor at a men’s magazine, I worked as a freelance producer—and settled in a West Village walk-up. One warm May afternoon the doorbell rang. I was working at home, still in my pajamas.
“Who is it?” I asked over the intercom.
“Miss Kerman? It’s Officers Maloney and Wong.”
“Yes?” I wondered what the local cops wanted in the building.
“Can we speak with you a moment?”
“What is this about?” I was suddenly suspicious.
“Miss Kerman, I think it would be better if we spoke face-to-face.”
Maloney and Wong, large men dressed in street clothes, walked up five flights of stairs and sat themselves down in the living room. Maloney did all the talking while Wong looked at me impassively. “Miss Kerman, we are U.S. Customs officers. We are here to notify you that you’ve been indicted in federal court in Chicago, on charges of drug smuggling and money laundering.” He handed me a sheet of paper. “You need to appear in court on that date, at that place. If you do not appear, you will be taken into custody.”
I blinked at him silently, and the veins in my temples suddenly pounded as if I had run miles at top speed. The noise in my head scared me. I had put my past behind me, had kept it secret from just about everyone, even Larry. But that was over. I was shocked at how physical my fear was.
Maloney took out a pad and paper and conversationally asked, “Would you like to make a statement, Miss Kerman?”
“I think I’d better speak with a lawyer, don’t you, Officer Maloney?”
I staggered uptown to Larry’s office, barely remembering to change out of my pajamas. Babbling, I pulled him out onto West Twenty-second Street.
“What’s wrong? Are you mad at me?” he asked.
I drew a deep breath, because I couldn’t talk otherwise. “I’ve been indicted in federal court for money laundering and drug trafficking.”
“What?” He was amused. He looked around, as if perhaps we were participating in some secret street theater.
“It’s true. I’m not making it up. I just came from the house. The feds were there. I need to use a phone. I need a lawyer. Can I use a phone?”
Wait, maybe I couldn’t use the phone. Maybe all the phones remotely associated with me, including all of Larry’s office phones, were tapped. Every crazy, paranoid thing that Nora had ever told me was screaming for attention inside my head. Larry was looking at me as if I had lost my mind.
“I n
eed to use someone else’s cell phone! Whose phone can I use??”
Minutes later I was on the fire escape outside Larry’s office, using Larry’s coworker’s phone to call a friend in San Francisco who was the biggest big-shot lawyer I knew. He got on the line.
“Wallace, it’s Piper. Two federal agents just came to my door and told me that I’ve been indicted for money laundering and drug trafficking.”
Wallace laughed. This was a reaction I would eventually get used to when friends first learned of my predicament.
“Wallace, I’m totally fucking serious. I have no idea what to do. I’m freaking out!! You have to help me.”
“Where are you calling me from?”
“The fire escape.”
“Go find a pay phone.”
I walked back into Larry’s office. “I need to find a pay phone.”
“Honey, what the hell is going on?” he said. He looked exasperated, worried, and a little annoyed.
“I really don’t know. I gotta go make this call. I’ll come back and find you.”
Later, when he heard a condensed (and probably less than coherent) explanation of the situation, Larry was uncharacteristically quiet. He didn’t yell at me for not telling him I was a former criminal before we combined our lives. He didn’t chastise me for being a reckless, thoughtless, selfish idiot. As I emptied my savings account for lawyer’s fees and bond money, he didn’t suggest that perhaps I had ruined my life and his too. He said, “We’ll figure it out.” He said, “It will all work out. Because I love you.”
THAT DAY was the beginning of a long, torturous expedition through the labyrinth of the U.S. criminal justice system. Wallace helped me find a lawyer. Confronted with the end of my life as I knew it, I adopted my standard pose when in over my head and scared: I closed myself off, telling myself that I had gotten into this mess and it was no one’s fault but my own. I would have to figure out a solution on my own.
