Orange Is the New Black

scene was so ugly that my usual technique didn’t work. I scooped up more blue jelly and slapped it all over the bound cables.
    “Oooh, horse cock. You like that horse cock, don’t you, Kermit.”
    Horse cock? I dropped my hands to my sides, in their big gooey gloves. Amy was looking at her shoes, and Yvette was pretending she didn’t understand any English.
    DeSimon yelled “Pull!” again, and somewhere above us prison laborers heaved on the rope. The cables slid. “Pull!” They slid again. “Push!”
    My coworkers pushed the cables upward. Seeing them strain, I bent my knees and helped them push up as hard as I could. The cables started to slither upward, and then it was all over but the pulling. I stalked out of the boiler room, stripped off the gloves, and threw them down.
    I was blind, nuclear mad. And all I could do was throw the ladders, the tools, and the gear into the back of the truck as hard as I could. My coworkers were unnerved. I didn’t speak to anyone for the rest of the afternoon, and DeSimon didn’t speak to me. Back in the Camp, I tried to shower the slime and humiliation off me. Then I wrote another cop-out, this time to DeSimon’s boss. It read something like this:
    As I have discussed with you on previous occasions Mr. DeSimon, my work supervisor, sometimes speaks to us at work in ways that I find crude, disrespectful and sexually graphic.
    On 6/23/04 while working in the boiler room on the new electric circuit for the visiting room, we were working with large electric wires bound together with electrical tape. Mr. DeSimon referred to these materials, which I had to grease to pull through pipes, as horse genitalia, which I found very offensive. He did not use the word “genitalia,” but rather a vulgarity.
    That was all the room there was to explain a request on a cop-out.
    I was not going to spend the next seven months under the thumb of this pig, I vowed. And I hoped that, in the form of horse cock, he had handed me the trump card for my escape.
    At my next opportunity I went to the office of DeSimon’s boss. He was a horse of a different color, making a career of the BOP and moving from prison to prison, climbing the corporate ladder. He was from Texas, where they certainly know something about prisons, and a complete professional. Very tall, he always wore a tie and often cowboy boots, and was unfailingly polite. He was also even-handed, which won him the admiration of the prisoners. Pop called him “My Texas Ranger” and liked it when he would come up to the Camp to eat her cooking.
    I knocked on his door, walked in, and handed him my cop-out.
    He read through it silently, then looked up at me. “Miss Kerman, I’m not sure I understand what you’re tryin’ to say here. Will you please have a seat?”
    I sat and took off my white baseball cap. I could feel my cheeks getting hot again. I chose a spot on his desk to stare at so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with him, so he couldn’t see my shame and I wouldn’t start crying in front of a police. Then I explained what my cop-out meant, in great detail. When I was finally finished, I took a deep breath. Then I raised my eyes and looked at Tex.
    He was as red as I was. “I’ll switch you out of there immediately,” he said.
    J ULY DAWNED with a sour flavor. The entire Camp facility seemed to groan in the heat, overtaxed. The phones stopped working. The washing machines broke, a horror show. Suddenly all the hair dryers disappeared. Two hundred women, no phones, no washing machines, no hair dryers—it was like
Lord of the Flies
on estrogen. I sure as hell wasn’t going to be Piggy.
    To escape the Camp’s simmering tensions, I liked to sit under the row of pine trees overlooking the track and the valley beyond, especially at sunset. Now that I knew what the lake looked like, I would imagine diving in, deep under the water, and swimming away. I would strain my ears to catch the sound of the motorboats far below. It was such a pretty spot here, why did they have to ruin it with a prison? I missed Larry terribly on those evenings, wishing that I were with him.
    I checked the callout every day to see if my work assignment had changed. After a week I learned that my attempt to escape the electric shop had been thwarted because rotten DeSimon had gone on vacation unannounced, and Tex wouldn’t transfer me out to construction until he returned. I couldn’t understand this at all.
    But when I pressed him, sounding as