Orange Is the New Black

nozzle shooting out of control, spraying water everywhere, to my surprise everyone laughed instead of cursing me out. Maybe, just a little, I was starting to fit in.
    I N THE free world your residence can be a peaceful retreat from a long day at work; in prison, not so much. A loud discussion of farting was happening in B Dorm. It had been initiated by Asia, who didn’t actually live in B and was chased out. “Asia, you’re out of bounds! Get your grimy ass outta here, ya project ho!” someone bawled after her.
    I was surviving just fine in “the Ghetto” of B Dorm, due to my luck in having been paired with Natalie, and maybe to my stubborn conviction that I would be acting like a racist baby if I tried to get moved, and perhaps also to the fact that I had gone to an elite women’s college. Single-sex living has certain constants, whether it’supscale or down and dirty. At Smith College the pervasive obsession with food was expressed at candlelight dinners and at Friday-afternoon faculty teas; in Danbury it was via microwave cooking and stolen food. In many ways I was more prepared to live in close quarters with a bunch of women than some of my fellow prisoners, who were driven crazy by communal female living. There was less bulimia and more fights than I had known as an undergrad, but the same feminine ethos was present—empathetic camaraderie and bawdy humor on good days, and histrionic dramas coupled with meddling, malicious gossip on bad days.
    It was a weird place, the all-female society with a handful of strange men, the military-style living, the predominant “ghetto” vibe (both urban and rural) through a female lens, the mix of every age, from silly young girls to old grandmas, all thrown together with varying levels of tolerance. Crazy concentrations of people inspire crazy behavior. I can just now step back far enough to appreciate its surreal singularity, but to be back with Larry in New York, I would have walked across broken glass barefoot in a snowstorm, all the way home.
    M R. B UTORSKY , my counselor, had a policy he had come up with all by himself. Once a week he would put every prisoner he supervised—half the Camp—on the callout for a one-minute appointment with him. You had to report to the office he shared with Toricella and sign a big log book to acknowledge you had been there.
    “Anything going on?” he would ask. That was your chance to ask questions, spill your guts, or complain. I only asked questions, usually to have a visitor approved.
    Sometimes he was feeling curious. “How are you doing, Kerman?” I was fine. “Everything going all right with Miss Malcolm?” Yes, she was great. “She’s a nice lady. Never gives me any problems. Not like some of her kind.” Er, Mr. Butorsky—? “It’s a big adjustment for someone like you, Kerman. But you seem to be handling it.” Is there anything else, Mr. Butorsky? ’Cause if not I’m going to go.…
    Or chatty.
    “I’m almost done here, Kerman. Almost twenty years I’ve been at this. Things have changed. People at the top have different ideas about how to do things. ’Course they have no idea what really goes on here with these people.” Well, Mr. Butorsky, I’m sure you’ll enjoy retirement. “Yeah, I’m thinking of someplace like Wisconsin… where there’s more of us northerners, if you know what I mean.”
    Minetta, the town driver who had brought me up to Camp on my first day, was due to be released in April. As her date was nearing, the line of succession was the hot topic around Camp, as the town driver was the one prisoner who was allowed off the plantation on a daily basis. She was responsible for doing errands for the prison staff in town, ferrying inmates and their CO escorts to hospital appointments, and driving prisoners to the bus station after they had been released—plus any other mission that was handed to her. Never, ever had a town driver been chosen who was not a “northerner.”
    One day I went into the counselors’ office for my callout minute. As I was signing the book, Mr. Butorsky stared at me. “Kerman, how about applying for the town driver position? Minetta is leaving soon. We need someone responsible for that job. It’s an important job.”
    “Um… let me think about it, Mr. Butorsky?”
    “Sure, Kerman, you go right ahead and think about it.”
    On the one hand, being the town driver would mean the opportunity to rendezvous with Larry in gas station bathrooms in the outside