by Piper Kerman
The next day Little Janet and I followed the other CMS workers out into the March chill to a big white school bus parked behind the chow hall. After more than a month of being trapped in the confines of the Camp, the bus ride was exhilarating. We rode around to the back of the FCI and were deposited amid an assembly of low buildings. These were the CMS shops—garage, plumbing, safety, construction, carpentry, grounds, and electric, each housed in its own building.
Janet and I entered the electric shop, blinking in the sudden dimness we found there. The room had a cement floor half-filled with chairs, many broken; a desk with a television sitting on it; and blackboards where someone was keeping a large hand-drawn monthly calendar, crossing off the days. There was a refrigerator and a microwave and a feeble-looking potted plant. One alcove was caged off and brightly lit, filled with enough tools to stock a small hardware store. An enclosed office had a door plastered with union stickers. My fellow prisoners grabbed all the functional seats. I sat on the desk next to the TV.
The door banged open. “Good morning.” A tall, bearded man with buggy eyes and a trucker hat strode through to the office. Joyce, who was friendly with Janet, said, “That’s Mr. DeSimon.”
About ten minutes later DeSimon emerged from the office and took roll call. He sized up each of us as he read out our names. “The clerk will explain the tool room rules,” he said. “Break the rules, you’re going to the SHU.” He went back into the office.
We looked at Joyce. “Are we going to do any work?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It just depends on his mood.”
“Kerman!” I jumped. I looked at Joyce.
She widened her eyes at me. “Go in there!” she hissed.
I cautiously approached the office door.
“Can you read, Kerman?”
“Yes, Mr. DeSimon, I can read.”
“Good for you. Read this.” He dropped a primer on his desk. “And get your convict buddies who are new to read it too. You’ll be tested on it.”
I backed out of the office. The packet was a basic course in electrics: power generation, electrical current, and basic circuitry. I thought for a moment about the safety requirements of the job and looked around at my coworkers with some concern. There were a couple of old hands like Joyce, who was Filipina and sarcastic as hell. Everyone else was new like me: in addition to Little Janet, there was Shirley, an extremely nervous Italian who seemed to think she was going to be shanked at any moment; Yvette, a sweet Puerto Rican who was halfway through a fourteen-year sentence and yet still had (at most) seventeen words of English at her command; and Levy, a tiny French-Moroccan Jew who claimed to have been educated at the Sorbonne.
For all her preening about her Sorbonne education, Levy was totally useless at our electrical studies. We spent a couple of weeks studying those primers (well, some of us did), at which point we were given a test. Everyone cheated, sharing the answers. I was pretty sure there would be no repercussions to either flunking the test or being caught cheating. It all seemed absurd to me—no one was going to get fired for incompetence. However, simple self-preservation demanded that I read and remember the explanations of how to control electric current without frying myself. This was not how it was all going to end for me, sprawled in polyester khaki on linoleum, with a tool belt strapped to my waist.
ONE SNOWY day just a week later we reported to the electric shop after lunch to find DeSimon jingling the keys to the big white electric shop van. “Kerman… Riales… Levy. Get in the van.”
We trundled out and climbed in after him. The van sped down a hill, past a building that housed a day care for the children of COs, and through a cluster of about a dozen little white government houses where some COs lived. We often spent our workdays changing exterior light bulbs or checking the electric panels in these buildings, but today DeSimon didn’t stop. Instead he pulled off of prison property and onto the main thoroughfare that skirted the institution. Little Janet and Levy and I looked at each other in astonishment. Where on earth was he taking us?
About a quarter mile from the prison grounds, the van pulled up next to a small concrete building in a residential neighborhood. We followed DeSimon up to the building, which he unlocked. A mechanical din came from inside.
“What ees this place, Mr. DeSimon?” asked Levy.
“Pump house. Controls water to the facility,” he replied. He looked around the interior, and then locked the door again. “Stay here.” And with that he climbed into the van and drove away.
Little Janet, Levy, and I stood there outside the building with our mouths open. Was I hallucinating? Had he really just left us here in the outside world? Three uniformed prisoners, out and about—was this some sort of sick test? Little Janet, who before Danbury had been locked up for over two years in extremely poor conditions, looked like she was in shock.
Levy was agitated. “What ees he sinking? What eef people see us? Zey will know we are prisoners!”
“There is no way that this is not against the rules,” I said.
“We’re gonna get in trouble!” Little Janet wailed.
I wondered what would happen if we left. Obviously we would be in massive trouble and be sent to the SHU and probably catch a new charge for “escape,” but how long would it take them to nab us?
“Look at zeez houses! Oh my god… a school bus! Aieee! I mees my children!” Levy started to cry.
I felt terrible for anyone who was separated from her children by prison, but I also knew that Levy’s kids lived nearby and that she would not allow them to come visit her because she didn’t want them to see her in prison. I thought this was horrible and that for a kid the unpleasantness of the prison setting would be more than offset by the eyewitness reassurance that their mother was okay. Anyway, I wanted Levy to stop crying.
“Let’s look around.” I said.
“No!!” Little Janet practically shouted. “Piper, we are gonna get in so much trouble! Don’t even move your feet!” She looked so stressed that I acquiesced.
We stood there like idiots. Nothing was happening. The suburban neighborhood was quiet. Every couple of minutes a car would drive by. No one pointed or screeched to a halt at the sight of three convicts off the plantation. Eventually a man walked by with an enormous shaggy dog.
I perked up. “I can’t tell if that’s a Newfoundland or a Great Pyrenees… good-looking dog, huh?”
“I can’t believe you—you’re looking at the dog!?” said Little Janet.
The man was looking at us.
“He sees us!”
“Of course he sees us, Levy. We’re three female inmates standing on a street corner. How’s he going to miss us?”
The man raised his hand and waved cheerfully as he passed.
After about forty-five minutes DeSimon returned with brooms and set us to work cleaning the pump house. The next week we were made to clean out the root cellar, a long low barn on the prison grounds. The root cellar contained a hodgepodge of equipment from all the shops. In the dark shadows we discovered enormous snakeskins that had been shed, which freaked us out and made DeSimon cackle with glee. An outside inspection was coming soon, and the prison staff wanted to be ready.
There was actual trash to be removed from the root cellar, a dirty and often heavy job, and we spent days hauling huge metal pipes, stockpiles of hardware, fixtures, and components out to the giant Dumpsters. Into the Dumpster went ceramic bathtubs and sinks still in their boxes, new baseboard heating components, and unopened fifty-pound boxes of nails.
“Your family’s tax dollars at work,” we muttered under our breath. I had never worked so physically hard in my life. By the time we were finished, the root cellar was empty, spotless, and tidy for inspection.
While I was quickly learning that even in prison rules were made to be broken by staff and prisoners alike, there was one aspect of work in the electric shop that was meticulously observed and enforced. A large “cage” of tools, where the shop clerk sa
t, contained everything from band saws to Hilti drills and myriad types of special screwdrivers, pliers, wire cutters, and individual tool belts loaded with complete sets of the basics—a whole room filled with potentially murderous objects. There was a system for checking out those tools: each prisoner had an assigned number and a bunch of corresponding metal chits that looked like dog tags. When we went out to do a job, each prisoner signed out a tool with a chit, and was responsible for returning it. At the end of each shift DeSimon would inspect the tool cage. He made it clear that if a tool went missing the prisoner whose chit occupied the empty space and the shop clerk were both going to the SHU. It was the only rule that appeared to matter to him. One day a drill bit went missing and we tore the shop and the truck apart looking for it while he watched, the clerk on the edge of tears, until finally we found the twisted piece of metal rolling around in the lid of one of the toolboxes.
DeSimon was relentlessly unpleasant to many of the prison staff as well, who called him “Swamp Yankee” (and worse). He may have been widely disliked, but he was also the head of the institution’s union chapter, which meant that management let him do as he pleased. “DeSimon’s a prick,” one of the other shop heads told me candidly. “That’s why we elected him.” Under the Prick’s indifferent tutelage, I learned the rudimentary basics of electric work.
A group of totally inexperienced women working with high voltage and nearly no supervision did yield moments of broad comedy and only occasional bodily injury. In addition to a butch tool belt, prison work gave me a greater sense of normalcy, another way of marking time, and people with whom I had something in common. Best of all, I was sent over to the garage to obtain my prison driving license, which allowed me to drive the CMS vehicles. Although I loathed DeSimon, I was glad to be kept semibusy five days a week, and ecstatic at the freedom of movement I had driving the electric shop van around the prison grounds.
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.
