Turning the Tables: From Housewife to Inmate and Back Again (20 page)

Before I knew it, it was dinnertime! It was at 3 p.m. sharp if you were short-lining it like I did. So early! They served turkey ham, which I refused to eat. I think one of the bulldaggers named it dick meat because it was gross and inedible (believe me, I was laughing hard at that one). I couldn’t agree more. It was a grayish pink and looked like it was going to slither off the plate. No, thanks. I opted for the sweet potato and beans, instead. I skipped the greens, too, because they looked slimy. Not the best dinner on the planet, but at least I got something to eat.

After I checked my emails and wrote back to Joe, the girls, and a few other people, I took a shower and washed my hair for the first time. I didn’t wash it when I took my first shower because I wanted to keep my blowout intact as long as I could. Rinsing all the shampoo out was hard because I have so much hair and I had to keep pressing the button to keep the wonderfully cold water running. At this point, I hadn’t yet discovered the prison hairdresser, so when I got out of the shower, I let my hair air dry. This was the first time in more than five years that I wore it naturally curly! I always had it blown out, along with my extensions. I looked in the mirror and thought,
I don’t even look like myself.

I know this is silly—but that’s really when it all hit me. I was looking into the mirror, and of course, my own eyes were staring back at me. But I didn’t feel like myself. Not really. It felt like a dream, like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. There were so many times I’d squeeze my eyes shut, if only for a second, and think of Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
.

There’s no place like home.

I
f you thought the women on
Real Housewives
argued, bickered, and battled, well, that was nothing compared to all the drama I saw and experienced in prison. I mean, when more than two hundred women have to eat, sleep, shower, and get through the day in one building together, there are bound to be fireworks. And there were.

I witnessed my first fight soon after I got there. I had just gotten back from the gym and was sitting on my bed reading Ellen Degeneres’s book,
Seriously . . . I’m Kidding
, when I heard arguing in the “streets.” A sweet, sometimes shy woman named Letizia was in a big fight with her girlfriend. Letizia was going home to her husband and three kids in a few days, and her girlfriend, who still had six years to go in there, was fit to be tied.

“You are
my
wife, not his! If I find out you touched him, I’m gonna break out of here and kick your ass—and
his
!”

Letizia started yelling back, which surprised me because she always seemed so meek. “I am so sick of your shit! You don’t own me! I’m
glad
I’m leaving so I don’t have to see your ugly-ass face anymore!”

The angry lover stormed back to her room, gathered up a bunch of things Letizia had given her over the years, and dumped them on the floor in front of her doorway. “Fine—then here’s all the shit back that you gave me.”

Letizia started crying and was swearing out loud to herself and shut her door. When the other woman saw her do that, she raced back down the hallway and flung the door open. “Who do you think you are?
Don’t
you shut
me
out!”

After hearing all the commotion, I climbed down off my bunk and was peeking out our doorway, with some of my roommates, to see what was going on.

“This is better than TV!” one of them said.

And I thought a table flip was bad . . .

Matilda, who looked out for me, told me to just stay in the room. “Don’t go out there, even if you have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “Just wait. Things can get pretty crazy and you don’t want to be dragged into it.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” I said. “But thanks.”

Another inmate came over and yelled at the ladies to stop fighting. They were lucky that none of the officers caught wind of their dustup. After everything died down, I climbed back up to my bunk, but my roommates were all fired up from the fight, so they all started talking about how they’d landed in there. They told me they had seen what had happened to me on TV.

“Everybody was mad that the judge sent a mother of four to prison for nothing,” said Dreadlocks.

“But that’s what they do,” said Heaven. “They don’t give a shit about nobody. They just want to get you in and out of their court. Like, ‘
Next!
’ ”

At this point it was about 10 p.m. and I was ready to go to sleep. I was so tired. I am a morning girl. But they were still going on and on (one inmate told me they call that “monkey mouth” in there) about how unfair the judicial system is toward women. I was just listening at this point and had gotten under the covers, ready to go to bed.

Then, out of nowhere, Teeny asked me if I washed my “chucky.”

I was literally dumbfounded and at a loss for words. No one had ever asked me that in my life. Not even my gynecologist.

“Do you use soap on the outside
and
the inside?”

I tried hard not to look shocked. It took me a few seconds to answer.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

Apparently she liked my answer, because she said, “Good.” Then she started going off on one of the inmates in the “streets,” saying she didn’t have the best, um, personal hygiene habits.

“She doesn’t wash the inside so she smells. A lot.”

Madonna mia . . .

I
went to my first party the first week I was there. I had no idea they threw parties in prison. This one was for a woman who was finally leaving after seven years. Her sentence had gotten extended because she was selling contraband cigarettes and got caught when someone gave her up. They held a special dinner for her: turkey with rice, cabbage, salad, and a chocolate cake. She got up in the dining room and gave a speech, telling everyone how much they meant to her, how they had made these past seven years a lot easier and how much she would miss them.

“May God bless you all,” she said. “God has a special place in his heart for all of you . . . Thank you for being there for me when I needed it most . . .”

I found out later that some of the women were mad that I got invited to the party and they didn’t. Really? This was high school drama. No, elementary school drama. You’re not going to get invited to every single party in there—or in real life. I was like, “Get over it.”

After the party, I called home to say good night to the girls. Joe told me he had gotten my clothes in the mail from the prison—the ones I had handed over to the guard that first night. He said when he opened the package, he held my clothes and could smell me and my perfume on them. I couldn’t help but break down. Then Milania got on the phone and kept asking me, “When are you coming home?” That broke my heart. I love her and all my girls so much. She has a tough exterior sometimes, and gets revved up for the cameras, but she’s really just a sweet little girl who missed her mommy. She was still a baby to me. I told her I would be here for a while, working on my book, but that I loved her so much. When the call ended, I leaned up against the wall, put my face in my hands, and because no one was around, started sobbing.
Why was I in here?

(She did make me laugh, though, months later, when I asked her why she didn’t email me that much. She wrote back, “I’m busy, Mom! But I love you to the moon and back!” That’s my Milania!)

When I got back to my room, I found one of my roommates in bed with her girlfriend, under a sheet, kissing and fooling around. They didn’t even seem to notice me.

Here we go again
 . . .

I climbed up to my bunk and started writing in my diary. I wondered if they sold earplugs in the commissary. If not, I would have to see if anyone “made” them. If not, I would need to figure out how to make my own, so I could block out the noise coming from the lovebirds next to me, and their “smoochy, smoochy” session.

I
was offered some kind of contraband or illegal “invention” almost on a daily basis. I always said no, because you never knew if someone was doing it to trick you so they could turn you in. I was still very new at this point—and a lot of eyes were watching me—so I had to be extra careful. Aside from the few people I trusted, I didn’t know who really liked me or who had it in for me. I took that stuff from Magic, who seemed to keep up her end of the deal. She wasn’t gonna rat me out because if she did, she would get in trouble, too. More trouble than I would. But I decided to avoid buying or taking anything more.

One inmate, though, offered me loosies—loose cigarettes—for seven dollars, which was cheaper than what Magic charged. I said no. Except for that one electronic cigarette I smoked before I turned myself in, I didn’t smoke. I wasn’t about to start, either, because I didn’t want to get in trouble. Another inmate told me I could get pills if I wanted them and who to go to if I did. No, thanks. I had never done drugs before and I certainly wasn’t going to start now. But I knew other girls did buy them, because one of the inmates told me that if you paid attention, you would notice huge mood swings in certain women. One day they would be totally fine and then the next? Either super-hyper or just plain out of it, with glazed, red eyes. When I saw other inmates acting funny, I just steered clear of them. God knows what they could do or say. Who knows? Maybe in their drug-fueled stupor they would say that I gave them their pills or whatever they were on. Again, I wanted to avoid any and all trouble.

On my second trip to the commissary, I bought a radio and headphones, which was great because now I could listen to music while I worked out. You needed them to watch TV, too, because it got so loud in the TV rooms that you couldn’t hear the sound without them. While I was tuning in to various stations, I heard that TMZ, Radar Online, and others were trying to get information about me while I was in there.
Get a life,
I thought.

I went to lunch and skipped the spaghetti. I was trying to eat as low carb as possible and wasn’t sure about the tomato sauce. (You know how I love my tomato sauce just right! I am Italian, after all! But I did tell one of my friends how to make potato and macaroni salads the way I do, which is in one of my cookbooks.) So I just had a salad and a banana. Then I went to make my coffee, which had now become my after-lunch ritual. We all drank instant coffee, which we bought at the commissary because the coffee maker in the dining room wasn’t working for most of the time that I was there.

I had really gotten into a groove now, schedule-wise. I got up at either six or six-thirty every morning, had breakfast, called home, checked my emails, then went to work out in the gym. I started doing these great workout tapes by Cathe Friedrich that I loved. Then I would head to lunch, check emails again, work out, go to dinner, take an exercise class, jump in the shower, check emails, and watch TV or hang out in my room and write in my diary or read.

A week or so after I got to the camp, I had to go to Admissions & Orientation, which every single newbie before me had attended. It was at 7:15 a.m., so I got up extra early at 5:30, took a shower, ate breakfast, and headed over to the visitation room where the class would be held. The class went on for about eight hours—with a break for lunch. But they told you everything you needed to know while living at the camp. Well, not everything . . . My fellow inmates had already filled me in on some of the unofficial, and arguably the most important, rules to follow.

They went over information in the handbook they gave us—the programs and services available to us, and all the official rules. There were a lot of them. We had to wear our uniforms from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. every day. Before and after that, we could wear our T-shirts and sweats. We had to make our beds every day, according to certain regulations. We had to mop and sweep the floors in our rooms (I had that covered already, of course) and keep our lockers neat and organized (check).

All of our clothes had to be put away neatly and our shoes had to be placed under our beds. So far, so good, I thought. They talked about the shakedowns, when the officers searched your room for contraband, and how we couldn’t be in the shower during head count. They told us about the mandatory self-improvement classes we had to take, on everything from managing a checkbook to how to write a résumé.

When I called home that day to talk to Joe and the girls, Dina Manzo was there! It was so good to hear her voice. She asked me how I was doing and I said I was fine and that I missed her. She said Joe and the girls were doing great, but that, of course, they missed me.

I felt so uplifted by the time I hung up. I missed Dina a lot, and hearing her lovely voice just brought back so many memories of a great friendship. She and I were always so close and I was glad she was there for Joe and the girls. I waited a half hour and then called my parents. They seemed to be doing well, which made me happy, since I was so worried about them and their health. My mom was coming to see me soon, which was fantastic—but also, of course, made me a little nervous.

After dinner I went to Tonya’s room, which was in another section of the camp, in the lower dorms, so she could paint my nails. She could only use clear nail polish because colored polish was considered contraband because they didn’t sell it in the commissary. But of course, some inmates had it!

The next day, I was scheduled to have blood drawn, for God knows what, but I refused and just didn’t show up. I had had enough blood drawn from me already. I hate needles, but I was also worried that they would be dirty and that I would catch something. Instead, I decided to go outside for the first time to walk around the track. It was about thirty degrees out, but despite it being cold, the walk felt good. They gave us warm jackets, which I was truly thankful for, because it meant I could enjoy the outdoors through fall and winter. Breathing fresh air is just so important to your sanity—and to have that basic privilege restricted is unbelievably hard. Also, the view from the track was gorgeous. Looking at the snow-covered hills surrounding the prison grounds, I felt like I was in Vermont. But this was no cozy ski chalet, that’s for sure. What was so interesting to me was that there was no barbed wire fence around the camp, unlike the men’s prison at the bottom of the hill. I was so glad I was in a minimum-security facility like this. I may have had my challenges cut out for me, but hey, when the going got tough, at least I had that view.