Turning the Tables: From Housewife to Inmate and Back Again (23 page)

A bit later, I was called to the camp administration office, where I met with an officer and the assistant warden.

“Have you ever played poker before?” the assistant warden asked.

What kind of question was that?

I said no.

“When you run out of chips? Game over,” he said, looking at me with a hard stare.

“But I didn’t know I could check my minutes. No one told me about that. I thought I could make as many calls as I wanted.”

He just shrugged.

“So now you know you have to keep track of these things.”

I wanted to cry.

“I just want to call my daughter and wish her happy birthday—for two minutes. I have never missed her birthday in my life.”

“Well, I have had to go without calling my kids on their birthday because I had to work. So you’ll just have to deal with it. You’re dismissed.”

As soon as I left his office, I started crying. Ugly-face crying. I started hyperventilating and couldn’t catch my breath. I felt like he’d run me over with one of the pickup trucks outside, then backed up and run me over again, before throwing me off the roof.

How could he not call his child? There are phones everywhere. I couldn’t understand how you couldn’t call your child on his or her birthday in this day and age, unless you were an inmate in prison, like me.

Here’s the thing. I could have tried to beat the system and break the rules. But I didn’t. When some of the women in there ran out of minutes, they would use other inmates’ minutes in exchange for commissary items and other favors. They did that all the time. But that’s against the rules. Every time you make a call you have to type in your code, and all of the calls are monitored and recorded by the Bureau of Prisons. So if they catch you using someone else’s code, it’s a big deal, because when they are monitoring and recording the calls they need to know exactly who they are listening to. And again, the way they viewed me in there was like the way they viewed every other inmate. No special treatment. The rules were the rules. And I was determined to follow them.

B
esides calling Joe and the girls and my parents and emailing with them and close friends, one of things that helped brighten my stay at Danbury was all the fans who wrote to me while I was in there. Each day when we had mail call, I would get cards and letters from family and friends and hundreds of fans in the United States and all over the world. They wrote to me telling me how much I had inspired them and changed their lives. I found it really amazing that people who didn’t even know me took the time to write to me. It really touched my heart. Some of the letters made me cry, because fans told me that they could see how much I loved my daughters and how loyal I was to Joe. I looked forward to mail day each week and just cannot thank my fans enough for supporting me while I was in prison.

While most of my fan mail was from women—moms in particular—I had a lot of men write to me, too. Some of them told me I needed a “real man” like them and to ditch Joe, which always made me laugh. I got a lot of letters and cards from other male inmates across the country, asking me to be their pen pals. I had no interest in talking to these guys, but I would say to the other girls, “Hey, if you want to write to this guy or that guy—here’s his info!”

N
ow, ever since I’d gotten to Danbury, two of my roommates had fooled around with their girlfriends pretty much every night. I thought it was beyond disrespectful to do that in the same room with me and our other roommates. But there was nothing I could do about it, so I would either stay out of my room as long as I could, or if I was really tired or just wanted to read or write, I would turn my head the other way, climb up to my bunk, and face the wall while I read or wrote in my diary. Thank God for the loud fan we had in our room. It helped drown out the moaning and heavy breathing. The ladies were getting it on so much in there that our room became known as the Boom Boom Room.

Inmates in the dining room or the gym would kid me about it. So would my friends. What was I gonna say? That I had to put up with this every single night? As I said, the one thing you didn’t want to be in there was a rat, so I just kept my mouth shut. I was thankful, though, for that fan so I didn’t have to hear them.

But I got a lucky break toward the end of my first month when one of the busiest lovebirds got moved out of our room so that another woman could move in. I liked that girl a lot, but I didn’t like knowing
so
many personal things about her sex life, if you know what I mean.

The new woman, Katie, was being moved to our room because she had gotten in trouble for using an emergency door and in an area that was considered out-of-bounds—not where she was allowed to go. We got another new roommate, too, Lala, since one other roommate had just gone home. Lala had a lot of friends, so we had people coming in all day long. I really wanted to move to A Dorm because I couldn’t take all this traffic in my room all the time. I just wanted more privacy and a little more peace and quiet.

At this point, I was working out three times a day, every day. It was one of the main things that kept me sane in there. I also started doing yoga DVDs every day and taking yoga classes when they held them. I truly feel like yoga changed my life. Besides getting an incredible workout, I was starting to feel really centered. Yoga helped me see things more clearly. I started using yogic breathing during the day, too, when I could feel myself begin to get worried or frustrated. I loved stretching every day, which made me feel so relaxed and like I could deal with anything that came my way. Yoga is my passion. It is going to be a part of my life from now on because I really love it.

The night after I got my new roommates, I did a fantastic Bob Harper workout DVD with Nikki. At least I got some of my frustration out about the chaos in my room. But when I got back, I only found more drama. A bunch of girls on my block came up to tell me that Heaven was leaking information about me to the media—particularly
US Weekly
. They told me that they had also heard that I caught someone smoking outside, which never happened. I felt like I was truly back on
RHONJ
—it was all drama, drama, drama.

Each one of them was trying to prove that she wasn’t the one leaking the information. I said, “I don’t care. Just be happy. I don’t have time for this nonsense.” Then Heaven came in and started crying.

“It wasn’t me! I swear it wasn’t!”

I had no idea who to believe in there, but something told me it wasn’t her. Just a gut feeling I had. Maybe it was her tears and how upset she truly seemed.

“Look, people are just trying to stir up trouble. Just ignore it. I do.”

“Well, I’m gonna set those bitches straight and tell them that I’m not putting those stories out there!”

“They’re just stirring things up because you are leaving soon and they’re mad.”

I was exhausted from another long day in there and from all the drama, and I just wanted to go to sleep, but I was anxiously preparing myself for my other sexaholic roommate to start doing her thing. But for the first time since I had been there, she got into bed alone and went to sleep.

I wondered if she and her girlfriend had broken up. I found out later that there would be no more boom boom going on in our room anymore, because Katie wouldn’t allow it. I heard Katie didn’t care about snitching and had told her former bunkies that she wasn’t about to put up with that in her new room.

So from that night on, the Boom Boom Room was closed for business—because we had a new bunkie in the house.

S
ince I had a mandatory meeting with staff at 3 p.m. the next day, I missed the short line for dinner. When I went to dinner at 4:30, I saw Liz waiting in line. She handed me a plate she had gotten for me, which I thought was so nice. We had a pleasant talk over dinner and then I went to the gym to do some cardio and stretching. Later on I found out that a bunch of the girls were complaining about me, saying that I got dinner before everyone else because I was getting special treatment in there.

Here we go again,
I thought. I couldn’t take a breath without everyone having to say something about it.
Wow,
I thought.
This feels like I’m right back on
Real Housewives
again . . .
I laughed to myself and thought,
Maybe we should do
Real Housewives of FCI Danbury . . .

I called home, which I thought would make me feel better. But Milania got on the line and kept asking, “Mommy. When are you coming home? When?”

I hated hearing her so upset.

“Soon, honey. Mommy loves you so much. I’m going to see you on Sunday! I’m so excited!”

I still couldn’t believe I was away from my girls. This was really the hardest part of being at Danbury. It was killing me that they didn’t have their mommy home with them. These were the times when I felt like my anger over being in there—and the extreme sadness I felt—was going to overwhelm me and drag me under. That’s when I used what I learned in yoga to breathe deeply to center myself. I was so lucky I had that, because otherwise, I’m not sure what I would have done.

OK, so things didn’t go so well that day, but at least I had a big treat to look forward. That night at 11 p.m., Gia was going to be on TV talking about her new song and music video, “Just 13,” which is about how she felt about my going to prison.

“Mama said be strong/So against the storm I stand through it all,” she sings in part of the song.

Of course, she came on at the very end of the show, but I didn’t care. It was so worth it. The music video made me cry. When she started talking on camera, she was so composed and well-spoken, I teared up again. I was so incredibly proud of her. They asked her how she felt with her mom being in prison, and she said she had come to see me and that I was doing really well. She said I had my hair and makeup done and looked amazing.

I called home the next day to check in. Gabriella and Milania had gone skiing, Gia was getting ready for a cheerleading competition, and Audriana was in bed watching TV with Joe. Everybody seemed busy and content, which made me feel better.

I stopped by Diamond’s salon, so she could roll my hair in curlers. I sat under the dryer for forty-five minutes. After she wrapped my hair, I put on a kerchief and went to the TV room for movie night.

I was so excited to see the girls the next day. After I had breakfast and went to the gym to do a yoga tape, I started getting ready for my visit from my daughters and my friend Lisa G., who acted as though we went for coffee at Ladurée SoHo in Manhattan when she came to visit, just like old times. We shared stories and laughed like we always did. What I loved about her was that she invited the girls to stay with her in New York City while I was gone, and they shopped, went out to fun restaurants, and did some sightseeing. She even took the girls to playdates, to their soccer games, and to see me while I was at Danbury. I was lucky to have such a good friend I could rely on when I was in there.

I did my makeup and had another one of the girls, Margarita, put braids in my hair on both sides of my face. She was in her mid-twenties, was covered in tattoos, and was in there for selling drugs. She was very gifted when it came to hair, so I loved going to see her. I had brunch at 10:30 a.m.—French toast, scrambled eggs, potatoes, and an apple.

Lisa and the girls arrived at noon. I was so happy to see them! We sat in the chapel/kids’ room, and I caught up with each of the girls. I asked how Gabriella was doing in soccer, and she started telling me how well it was going and the latest goals she had scored.

While Milania and I were coloring, I found out that she had hit a tree when she was skiing the day before. No one had said a word to me about it! The ski patrol had to pick her up and carry her down the hill on a stretcher. This was not what I wanted to hear! But thank God she was OK. I told her to be careful when she was up there on the slopes.
Madonna mia . . .

Saying goodbye to them was a tiny bit easier than the last time, but still not a walk in the park. When I was bundling Audriana up in her coat, she started crying. Gia, bless her heart, bent down and said softly to Audriana, “Don’t cry. Remember we talked about this? If you cry, then Mommy will cry.” Gabriella and Milania started comforting Audriana, too.

I was so proud of my girls for being so strong and for helping their little sister get through this surreal, horrible moment—when we had to detach from each other. It seemed so unnatural to me. A mother is supposed to be with her children. I tried to keep so busy in prison because if I didn’t, all I thought about was how I was supposed to be home with them. This, to me, was the worst punishment of all. For something I didn’t even think I had done.

But whoever said life was fair?

After they left, I went to dinner and then headed to the TV room, because they were showing
Jersey Boys
. Anything to get my mind off Joe and the girls. But the movie had a sad ending, which got me all worked up, so I started crying again when I had a moment alone. I always cried in private. When I called home, though, I felt much better. Joe said he was brushing Milania’s hair and that Gia was videotaping him. I loved hearing that. Before I went to prison, I used to do all that kind of stuff, so I thought it was adorable that now Joe was doing it, too. He really picked up and kept marching on after I began serving time. So many husbands would not have been able to soldier on the way he did . . . and for that, I am so grateful.