Orange Is the New Black

sigh. The tape was by a popular yogi named Rodney Yee—“my prison fantasy object!” she would laugh. I looked at the cover, at a guy with a long ponytail in the chair pose. He looked familiar. I popped it in.
    A beautiful Hawaiian beach appeared on the screen. The waves of the Pacific were lapping on the shore, and there was Rodney, a smoothly handsome Chinese guy in a black banana hammock. I had a flash of recognition. This was the yoga guy who had been on the in-hotel channel in Chicago where Larry and I and my family had stayed when I was sentenced to this human warehouse! I took this as a sign, a powerful sign… of something. I thought it meant that I’d better stick with the yoga, and if Rodney was good enough for Janet, he was good enough for me. I fetched a yoga mat and got into Downward Dog.
    O N O CTOBER 8 Martha Stewart was finally headed up the river. A week before, it had been announced in the press that she’d been designated to Alderson, the large federal prison camp in the mountains of West Virginia. Built in 1927 under the auspices of Eleanor Roosevelt, it was the first federal women’s prison, intended as a reformatory. Alderson was an entirely minimum-security facility for about a thousand prisoners and according to the BOP grapevine by far the best facility for women. The ladies of Danbury were deflated by this news. Everyone had been hoping that against all odds she’d be sent to live with us, either because they believed that her presence would somehow raise all our boats or just for the entertainment value.
    As we headed to work that day, news helicopters hovered over the federal plantation. We gave them the finger. No one appreciates being treated like an animal in the zoo. The staff was irritable too. Allegedly the perimeter guards had caught a photographer trying toinfiltrate the grounds, crawling commando style on his belly. This was amusing, but overall the collective mood was dejected—we were missing out.
    Homegrown drama quickly erupted to distract Campers from their disappointment. Finn, who cared so little about enforcing most of the prison rules, had been waging a somewhat covert war against Officer Scott and Cormorant.
    As soon as I arrived in the Camp, I had noticed something odd that happened when Scott was on duty. A skinny white chick would materialize at the door of the CO’s office, where she would remain, talking and laughing with him for hours on end. She had a job as an orderly and would spend several hours cleaning the tiny office whenever he was on duty. “What gives?” I asked Annette.
    “Oh, that’s Cormorant. She’s got a thing with Scott.”
    “A thing? What exactly do you mean, Annette?”
    “I don’t know for sure. No one’s ever seen them do anything but talk. But she’s in that doorway every time he’s on duty.”
    Other prisoners complained about this curious situation, out of spite, jealousy, or genuine discomfort. Even if the relationship was platonic, it was still totally against prison rules. But Scott was widely understood to be Butorsky’s buddy, so nothing had ever been done about the odd, perhaps unrequited affair taking place in plain view. No one had ever caught them doing anything but talking, and everyone watched them like hawks. Amy was Cormorant’s bunkie, and she said they passed love notes, but Cormorant was never missing from her bed.
    Whatever the weird relationship entailed, Finn didn’t like it, so he did the only thing he could within the reality of how prisons work: he went after Cormorant. Rumor had it that he had warned her that if he caught her hanging around Officer Scott, he was going to give her a shot (an incident report) for disobeying a direct order. All summer long they had been playing a cat-and-mouse game; when Finn was off duty and Scott was on, Cormorant was still a permanent fixture at the CO’s office. Finn would probably never confront another prison staffer, and when he wasn’t present, it was business as usual.Until now. Quite suddenly Cormorant had been taken to the SHU, at Finn’s behest.
    This was shocking to all. Butorsky had retired in the spring, and it was rumored that Scott and Finn couldn’t stand each other. Cormorant now seemed to be a pawn in a disturbing power play, and as soon as word spread throughout the Camp that she was gone, everyone wondered what Scott would do.
    He quit. This was far more shocking. No one ever quit the BOP. They were all doing twenty years until their