Turning the Tables: From Housewife to Inmate and Back Again (17 page)

Since I seemed to be the newest victim of the prison spotlight, I didn’t want anyone to get a glimpse of
anything
, so I went into the shower stall with my T-shirt and sweatpants on, took them off behind the curtain, and hung them up outside the shower stall on a hook, draping the thin, scratchy towel over my clothes. The curtain didn’t cover the opening of the shower stall all the way, which of course made me nervous. I tried to stand directly behind the protection of the curtain while I was in there, which is pretty difficult in a tiny little shower stall (especially when you don’t want your body to rub up against the tiled walls or the slimy curtain). I would come to find that other women were like me—they got undressed behind the safety of the curtain. But others didn’t seem to care who saw them
au naturel
. A bunch of them were walking around naked, strutting around like proud peacocks, talking and laughing. I didn’t want to get an eyeful of that, especially since many of these ladies were not into bikini waxes at all, if you know what I mean . . .

I was looking forward to a long, hot shower, but of course, I was horribly mistaken. You had to keep a button pressed to keep the water running, which was a pain. Parts of the shower walls and floor were moldy or covered with a thin layer of brown slime. I took one of the fastest showers of my life because I totally skeeved the sight of this bathroom. God knows what was growing on that floor. It was like one big prison petri dish.

I found out that I wasn’t far off with thinking that way. When I first got to prison, all the inmates were worried about catching MRSA or another kind of staph infection, because one of the inmates had come down with it. Then I heard that another one had shingles. So I was not about to touch the walls or the floors in the shower at all. I was scared I’d need any sort of medical attention—and God knows if I’d even get it.

When I was done, I grabbed the towel on the hook, dried off behind the curtain, and put my clothes back on in the stall before I stepped out of the shower. All eyes were on me again, but I was thinking to myself,
Sorry ladies! No peep show from me today!

After I put my shower things back in my locker, I had a mandatory meeting with my counselor, my case manager, and the on-site psychologist, who were all really nice and told me to come to them with any questions or concerns I had. I went back to my room and chatted with the woman in the bunk under mine. She was in her early sixties, was married with grown kids, and carried a heavy fourteen-year sentence for drug-related crimes. She said she was an addict in her former life who sold drugs, and that her “asshole husband” ratted her out, which is how she ended up locked up. I could barely cope with the fact that I had to be in there for a year. I had no idea how she dealt with the thought of being in there for so long.

I was straightening out my locker when a woman from down the hall brought me a notebook, which I began using as a diary. Before that, I just wrote on any scrap of paper I could find. It’s so funny because I kept hearing reports that I was keeping this diary while I was in there and that tons of people wanted to know what was in it. I guarded it with my life. When I was done writing in it each day, I always made sure to lock it up. (This turned out to be a very good thing because later on in my stay, someone told me that some of the ladies tried to break into my locker to steal my ID card with my picture on it and the diary I kept in there. Someone told me they thought the diary was worth millions . . . which made me laugh.)

After the lady who brought me the notebook left, my roommates protectively gathered around me and shared some of the most important advice I’d ever hear in prison. They told me not to take
anything
from anyone. I felt like an orphaned baby cub, surrounded by mama lions in the jungle, who were just trying to keep me safe. Before Jim dropped me off, he had said the same thing to me: do not trust anyone inside, and keep your eyes and ears open at all times.

“Some people may just want to help you, but you never know,” said one of my roommates, Matilda, talking very softly and leaning close in to my face. “You don’t want to have to owe nothing to nobody down the line.”

“It happened to me when I first got in here,” said Teeny, who, at twenty-one, was the youngest one in our room. “Someone gave me some tuna packets and spices on my first or second day, then jacked me up in the hallway a week later and said I hadn’t paid her back yet. She wanted a whole bunch of stuff from the commissary from me. I had no idea what was going on.”

Oh my God . . .
I was starting to get overwhelmed, if I hadn’t been before. I’d had to watch my back with many of the
Real Housewives
ladies, but never anything like this.

Lunch was at 11 a.m., but I decided not to go. They were serving hot dogs and tater tots. No, thanks. I don’t think I had eaten anything like that since I was in third grade. I also wanted to avoid eating beef or any fatty meats when I was in there. I just wanted to eat as clean as I could, if that was possible. As I was sitting on my bed, wondering what to do next, Nikki, who worked in the kitchen, came into my room with a salad she’d had someone make for me—mixed greens, peppers, carrots, broccoli, cucumbers, cauliflower, and cheese, tossed with vinaigrette. I thought about what my roommates had said, but this salad looked incredible and I was hungry, so how could I say no?

“I thought you might like this,” Nikki said.

I wanted to jump off the bed and give her a big hug, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sure if I should do something like that so soon after meeting her. I had to get the lay of the land first.

“Oh my God, thank you so much! This is exactly what I wanted. Hot dogs and tater tots aren’t really my thing.”

“Me, neither!” she said, laughing.

I know my roommates told me to be careful about taking anything from anyone, but there was something about Nikki that made me feel good about her the minute I met her. As it turned out, I was right. She and I became good friends and hung out the entire time I was at Danbury. Like me, she loved to exercise. We worked out all the time together. She even taught some of the exercise classes, which was great, and let me help lead some of the classes when there were too many ladies there. All in all, I was just happy to have made a new friend.

After she left, I finished the salad and started thinking about my family, and started crying again. It was only 12:50 p.m. and the day was
dragging
by. It was so noisy in there because the ladies would talk and laugh really loud, yell, sing, gossip, and argue in the streets all day long. I had zero privacy and just felt like I couldn’t escape. Even though I had mopped the floor and cleaned the room, it still looked dirty. I still couldn’t believe my mattress was stained with urine or blood. At least that’s what I
hoped
it was, compared to the dozens of alternatives. I could literally
see
the dust blowing out of the air vents in my room. And honestly, I was still a little scared about being in there. I didn’t know what to expect. Even though a lot of people were being really nice to me, I didn’t trust anyone yet. I was a little worried about the scarier-looking inmates who kept shooting me those dirty looks. At this point, I didn’t know if people there got violent, and if so, how violent, so I was watching out for that, too. I thought back to the time I was almost jumped in high school . . . I didn’t see that coming. But I held my own back then and knew I would here, too, but still, I wanted to keep my eyes wide open, just like Jim and my roomies told me to.

More than anything, though, I felt lonely. All I wanted to do was talk to my family. But I found out that I wouldn’t be able to call them until the next day. As a new inmate, I had to wait twenty-four hours before I could make my first call. I don’t know why they had this rule in there, but it seemed so harsh. I was so upset. It was killing me not to be able to talk to them.

Although dinner was at 4, you could go at 3 p.m. They called that the short line. I liked that better because it was beyond crowded when everyone from the camp packed into the dining room for the main mealtimes—like Times Square in New York City during the holidays. A woman named Liz invited me to go to dinner with her on my first day. She was in her mid-sixties, with a blond bob, who always wore pink lipstick with fuchsia lip liner.

I was wary of Liz at first. When she first approached me, she told me she knew a lawyer who had reached out to me. I already had a great lawyer I loved, so I didn’t need another one. I was standoffish, because my roommates had told me to be careful of anyone who tried to help me in any way. But then, other girls started telling me that she was OK. So when I ran into her again, I told her I was sorry for acting the way I did.

“I was feeling a little overwhelmed by everything when I first met you,” I told her.

“I’ve been there,” she said. “I get it.”

So we headed to dinner—at 3 p.m.—the prison’s early bird special. I had my first meal in the dining room: chicken salad, beef soup, and an orange, which was surprisingly good. While we ate, she told me that she was a former paralegal who liked to help other inmates file motions and other legal paperwork. She said she didn’t ask for anything in return because she just wanted to help. I found out later on that there were women in there who were attorneys—but they charged inmates for their services. Of course, you’re not supposed to charge anyone for anything there, but a lot of people did anyway.

Even though I was new at the camp, I was relieved to see that my schedule was already starting to fill up fast—I was one step closer to keeping busy. I planned to take a workout class every day at 5:30 p.m. and head to the gym after that. What I liked about Danbury was that even though they told you when to eat, sleep, and work, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted the rest of the time. You had to be in your room for head count at 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. (except on weekends, when head count started at 10 a.m.), show up for your job, go see your counselor here and there, and attend six mandatory educational classes. Other than that, you could do arts and crafts, go to exercise classes, work out in the gym, knit or crochet, play cards, watch TV or movies, email on the computer—or just hang out “in the streets.”

When I got to that first workout class, there were too many women in there so I walked out. I went out a back door in the camp and walked down a huge flight of stairs to the little gym near the track and did my own thing for that hour. And no surprise: the gym was disgusting. Nothing like the place where I work out at home. Most of the equipment was rusty and run-down. The walls and floor were scuffed-up. It looked like a gym someone had set up in their garage. But it had a stationary bike, a spinning bike, weights, and an elliptical machine, so I was happy. I made sure to wipe down the handles and the seat before I got on the stationary bike, which made me feel better. And the session on the bike got rid of a little of the stress from the day before, and made that terrible gnawing feeling in my stomach go away—at least for the moment.

I
was so tired by the time I got back to my room that evening because I had only gotten two hours of sleep the night before. I told my roommates how upset I was that I couldn’t call my family, trying so hard not to break down in tears. I did not want them to think I was weak. I went to bed early, because I was determined to get up at the 5:30 a.m. wake-up call so I could get to the computer room at 6 a.m. and register my home phone number in the system and finally call home. That’s all I could think about. The only thing more valuable in prison than weekend visits with your family is being able to speak to them on the phone.

When I curled up in bed, I started thinking about Joe and the girls again. I cried myself to sleep that night, thinking about how badly I ached for them. I tried to be quiet and muffled my sobs in my pillow. I hoped my roommates couldn’t hear me sniffling. Finally, I went to sleep—where everything was blissfully empty.

The next morning, I learned the hard way that wake-up call was not always at 5:30 a.m., as I had originally thought. Sometimes there was no wake-up call whatsoever; it all depended on which guard was working. At the beginning of my stay, we happened to have an officer on duty in the mornings who didn’t do wake-up calls at all (later on, though, we got a female officer who would walk into your room at 6 a.m., flip on the lights, and say, “Time to wake up!” If someone shut them off again, she would come back in and yell.)

Even if there was no wake-up call, at 7:30 a.m., an officer would call the inmates over the loudspeaker to go to work. Thank goodness Matilda woke me up that second day around 6:15. She knew how upset I was about not being able to call my family. I literally jumped out of bed, threw on my uniform, grabbed my paperwork, and raced to the computer room to register my home number. I couldn’t wait to hear their voices.

The officer there told me I had to wait an hour or so to get approved. I had never waited so long to make a call in my life. I wanted to scream but kept my cool. I headed to breakfast—my first one there—and had cereal, an orange, and a banana nut muffin, which was good (and would become a staple of my prison diet). I headed back to the computer room to add more phone numbers and email addresses to my contact list so I could start communicating with my family and friends. But I still couldn’t use the computer because
that
had to be approved.
This is ridiculous
, I thought. Life in prison, I was discovering, is nothing but one big, long waiting game. But then again, all I had was time . . . and lots of it. Life there was the exact opposite of life at home for me.