Orange Is the New Black

fifty-year-old body was riddled with aches and pains, and the institution periodically sent her out to Danbury Hospital for epidural shots in her back. I nagged her to take days off—she wasn’t required to work so many hours.
    “Yes, Pop?” I smiled from the footstool. I was going to make her ask.
    “How about just a little foot rub?” I don’t remember exactly how Pop had first gotten me to give her a foot massage. But it had become a regular ritual several times a week. She would sit on her bed postshower in her sweats, and I would sit facing her with a clean towel across my lap. I would get a handful of commissary lotion and firmly grasp a foot. I gave a very firm foot massage, and she would occasionally yelp when I dug a knuckle in hard. My services were a source of great amusement in A Dorm—women would come by and chitchat with Pop while I worked on her feet, occasionally asking, “How do I get one of those?”
    I was, of course, out of bounds and also breaking the prohibition against inmates touching each other. But the regular Camp officers extended special considerations to Pop. One evening while I was rubbing her feet, a substitute officer, up from the FCI, stopped dead in his tracks at the doorway of Pop’s cube. He was a shaggy, craggy-looking white guy, with a mustache.
    “Popovich?” It sounded more like a question than a warning.
    I ducked my head, making no eye contact.
    “Mr. Ryan! It’s this foot of mine, I hurt it. She’s just helping get the cramp out. Happens all the time since I’m on my feet all day. Officer Maple allows it. Is it okay?” Pop was all charm when it came to interacting with COs.
    “Whatever. I’m gonna keep walking.” He thudded away.
    I looked at Pop. “Maybe I better beat it?”
    “Him? I known him for years, from down the compound. He’s all right. Don’t stop!”
    ·  ·  ·  
    T HE A MERICAN League Championship was so hotly contentious that year, I could barely stand to watch the games. The tension of being a Red Sox fan as they battled back from 0–3 made my stomach hurt, and my surroundings didn’t make it any easier. The running joke in the Camp was that half the population of the Bronx was residing in Danbury, and of course they were all ferocious Yankees fans. But the Red Sox had plenty of partisans too; a significant percentage of the white women were from Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and the always-suspect border state of Connecticut. Daily life was usually racially peaceful in the Camp, but the very obvious racial divide between Yankees and Sox fans made me nervous. I remembered the riot at UMass in 1986 after the Mets defeated the Sox in the World Series, when black Mets fans were horribly beaten.
    I’m not sure what kind of a brawl we could have come up with, though. The most hard-core Sox fans in the joint were a clique of middle-aged, middle-class white ladies, whose ringleader was nicknamed Bunny. For some reason most of them worked for the grounds department in CMS. During all of pennant fever, they went about their work cutting lawns and raking leaves serenading each other:
    John-ny Damon, how I love him.
He’s got something I can’t resist,
but he doesn’t even know that I exist.
    John-ny Damon, how I want him.
How I tingle when he passes by.
Every time he says “Hello” my heart begins to fly.
    Other fellas call me up for a date,
but I just sit and wait, I’d rather concentrate…
    …on John-ny Damon.
    Carmen DeLeon, the biggest Yankees fan of all, straight from Hunts Point, gave me the hairy eyeball. “Those are
your
peoples,” she pointed out acidly.
    I glared, but I was too nervous even to talk smack, not because I was scared of Carmen but because I was worried about jinxing the Sox. The year before, Larry and I had gathered a roughneck band of Sox fans in our apartment in the East Village for game seven, and based on our lead in the sixth inning, we felt confident enough to venture out to a local bar, in the hopes that we could celebrate our victory loudly and publicly there, in the face of the vile, overbearing Yanks fans who had made our lives miserable for… our entire lives. Instead, we sat wretchedly nursing overpriced beers through extra innings as Martinez inexplicably stayed in and Red Sox Nation’s hopes and dreams collapsed with the team.
    “I tell you what,” said Carmen, puffing out her already-considerable chest like a peacock. “If the Red Sox are in the World Series, I’m gonna root