Orange Is the New Black

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

    O ne 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 sniffthe 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.”
    J UST 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, butnot 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