Orange Is the New Black

that Gisela is leaving soon, and I was wondering if maybe I could come work for you in construction?” I waited, hopefully. I knew I was a desirable prison employee: I had my prison license, was willing to work, never “idled” (faked being sick), was educated, and could read manuals, do math, and so forth. And I didn’t have a big mouth.
    Mr. King looked at me, chewing on his cigarette, flinty eyes unreadable. “Sure.” My heart leaped, then crashed: “But DeSimon has to sign your cop-out.”
    I wrote up the cop-out, a simple one-page form the official title of which was BP-S148.055 INMATE REQUEST TO STAFF. The next morning I marched into DeSimon’s office and handed it to him. He did not take it from me. After a while I got tired of thrusting it toward him and put it on the desk.
    He looked at it with distaste. “What is that, Kermit?”
    “It’s a cop-out, asking you to let me go work in construction, Mr. DeSimon.”
    He didn’t even read it. “The answer is no, Kermit.”
    I looked at him, his bulbous, shiny pink head, and smiled grimly. I wasn’t surprised. I marched back out of the office.
    “What did he say?” asked Amy. We were down to me, my young Eminemlette pal, Yvette, and a couple other women working in the dim, airless electric shop.
    “What do you think?” I said.
    Amy just laughed, with a hollow wisdom way beyond her years.“Piper, that man is not going to let you go anywhere, so you might as well get used to him.”
    I was furious. Now that I knew there was a better way to live within the confines of the prison, that there were jobs where prisoners were not the constant object of insults, I was desperate to make the switch. Getting out of electric and escaping from DeSimon filled my thoughts.
    Summer was getting hot, and for months we had been working on a new circuit for the visiting room air conditioners. The only rooms in the Camp that had air conditioners were the staff offices and the visiting room, but the existing power was insufficient, and they always tripped off. So we had hung and wired a new circuit panel, bent and run conduit around the visiting room, and wired new outlets. Now we were close to finished, and all that remained was to connect the circuit board to the building’s main power source, a floor below in the boiler room.
    This involved pulling new cables up from the boiler room power source to the new panel in the visiting room—physically yanking them up through the guts of the building. When the momentous day dawned, we all gathered the tools that DeSimon had directed us to bring and stood in the boiler room, waiting for direction. We didn’t have any big girls in the electric shop, and so reinforcements had been called in from plumbing, which had a bunch of them.
    DeSimon busied himself with the cables. They were big thick industrial cables, totally different from the wiring that I now worked with every day. He bundled several of them, then bound them together with black electrical tape, taping over and over until they were bound together for over a foot. At the end he strung a rope, the end of which was snaked up to the visiting room. The women from plumbing were all up there, waiting.
    Down in the boiler room stood me, Amy, Yvette, and Vasquez. We looked at DeSimon.
    “They’re gonna pull, and you’re gonna push. You’re gonna feed it upward. But we’re missing one thing. We need a greaser.”
    The way he said those words, I knew that it must be an unpleasant job. And I knew who it would be.
    “Kermit. You’ll be the greaser. Take these.” He handed me elbow-length rubber gloves. “Now grab that tub of lube.” He pointed at a vat of industrial lubricant next to his feet. I could see where this was going. My cheeks were beginning to burn. “You’re going to need a lot, Kermit.”
    I grabbed the container. DeSimon shoved the bound cables toward me. They were rigid and inflexible, and I was rigid with humiliation. “That’s gonna need a lot to squeeze in there, Kermit. Lube it up good.”
    I bent and scooped up two handfuls of the stuff. It was like bright blue jelly. I slapped it onto the huge, previously innocuous but now disgusting foot-long phallus.
    DeSimon threw his head back and yelled “Pull!” The rope yanked, but not enough to move the cables. “C’mon, Kermit, do your duty!”
    I was so angry, I could barely see. I concentrated on turning the blood in my veins into ice. I tried floating up to the ceiling in detachment, but the