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One day in the di
“Boss called me into his office today, and he was asking me if I’ve had any relatives here before.” Mr. Senecal was her boss in the garage. “So he was asking me, and it turns out my mother worked for him.”
I looked at Pom-Pom. At present we had three sets of sisters locked up in the Camp, and another neighbor’s mother had apparently been shipped out right before I arrived. At this point in my own prison stay, it was less surprising to me that she was a second-generation federal inmate than that she did not know her mom had worked in the garage.
“You didn’t know she worked in the garage?” I asked.
“No, I knew she was here, my aunt told me, but she never told me nothing about it.”
I had a terrible suspicion that Pom-Pom’s mother might be dead.
Angel, her coworker, was of course listening in and gently asked the question: “Where’s your mom?”
“I have no idea,” replied Pom-Pom.
I felt even worse, but I was still curious. “How did Senecal know?”
“He just guessed. He thought it was my sister, but he just guessed.”
“Do you look like your mom? He guessed from looking at you?”
“I guess so-he asked me, ‘Tall and ski
I wondered if the prison staff co
“What did Senecal say about your mom?”
“He said she never gave him any trouble.”
I didn’t much care for Pom-Pom’s boss, but I liked to hang out in the garage. I stopped in every morning to get the white construction pickup and shoot the breeze with the gals who worked there pumping gas and fixing trucks. There was a debate going on about what was the song of the summer.
Angel said it was the big crossover reggaeton hit with Daddy Yankee; I didn’t know the name was “Oye Mi Canto,” but we could all sing the refrain:
Boricua, Morena, Dominicano, Colombiano,
Boricua, Morena, Cubano, Mexicano
Oye Mi Canto
Bo
We all replied, “Lean Back,” and dropped one shoulder back in smooth unison.
Kenyatta said, “Well, I don’t like her, but that song by Christina Milian-‘Pop, Pop, Pop That Thang’? That song is blowing up.”
This made me giggle. In yoga class the other day Yoga Janet had been trying to get us to loosen up our hips. “Okay, everyone, wiggle your hips. Shake them out. Now rotate them, circle left… now right. Okay, now I want you to pop your hips forward, your pelvis, in a smooth motion. I want you to Pop That Thing!” Sister Platte had been bemused: “Pop that thing?” Camila and I had died.
Pom-Pom spoke up. “I don’t know where you think y’all are at, but there’s just one song this summer. And that’s ‘Locked Up.’ Look around you! End of discussion.”
We had to admit, she was dead on. All summer long, anywhere there was a radio playing, you could hear the almost eerie, plaintive voice of Akon, a Senegalese rapper, singing about prison.
Can’t wait to get out and move forward with my life,
Got a family that loves me and wants me to do right,
But instead I’m here locked up.
Even if the song had not been a huge hit on the outs, it had to be the guiding anthem in a place like the Camp; you heard women who weren’t even hip-hop fans humming it tunelessly under their breath as they folded laundry: “‘I’m locked up, they won’t let me out, nooooo, they won’t let me out. I’m locked up.’”
CHAPTER 12. Naked
I was a big fan of my coworker Allie B. She made me laugh all the time. She seemed lighthearted-that is, when she wasn’t pissed off about something; her pendulum swung a little wildly. She didn’t have the heavy hallmarks of incarceration on her, even though this was not her first time down-in fact she was a violator, which made sense because she was a junkie. But she wasn’t locked up for a drug crime, so she wasn’t getting any kind of treatment for her addictions.
I would ask her, “C’mon, you’re clean, and you’ve been clean for the whole time you’ve been locked up, so why go back to it?”
She would just cock her head and smile. “You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about, Piper,” she said. “I ca
This we knew: as much as Allie loved to get high, she also loved sex. She would run filthy and hilarious commentary under her breath about any man she saw who struck her fancy-prison guard, staffer in a tie, or the occasional unsuspecting delivery guy who wandered into our field of vision.
Allie would sometimes refer to me as her “wife,” to which I would respond, “Fat fucking chance, Allie.” She occasionally experienced bursts of (I think) mock-lust, during which she would chase me around B Dorm screaming filthy things and trying to yank down my gray ru
From her speech and her writing, and despite her passion for Fear Factor, I could tell that Allie was better educated than most prisoners. Without asking my pal the personal questions, verboten even between friends, I had to guess that her multiple stints in prison were due to her addiction. I worried about Allie; I certainly hoped that she would never see the inside of a prison again, but more than that, I was concerned that she could end up dead.
I had similar concerns for Allie’s sidekick Pe
Now that I had known Pe
If your drug problem lands you on the wrong side of the law, you might end up detoxing on the floor of a county jail. Once you get to your long-term prison home, the first thing they’ll want to do is assess your psychiatric state… and prescribe you some drugs. The twice-daily pill line in Danbury was always long, snaking out of the medical office into the hall. Some women were helped enormously by the medication they took, but some of them seemed zombified, doped to the gills. Those women scared me; what would happen when they hit the streets and no longer could go to pill line?
When I walked through the terrifying gates of the FCI seven months before, I certainly didn’t look like a gangster, but I had a gangster mentality. Gangsters only care about themselves and theirs. My overwhelming regret over my actions was because of the trauma I had caused my loved ones and the consequences I was facing. Even when my clothes were taken away and replaced by prison khakis, I would have scoffed at the idea that the “War on Drugs” was anything but a joke. I would have argued that the government’s drug laws were at best proven ineffectual every day and at worst were misguidedly focused on supply rather than demand, randomly conceived and unevenly and unfairly enforced based on race and class, and thus intellectually and morally bankrupt. And those things all were true.