Turning the Tables: From Housewife to Inmate and Back Again (25 page)

“Give it back now,” she said, standing over the new Gatekeeper, a tall, lanky woman in her mid-thirties, with short, braided hair, who was slouched in her chair.

The woman holding it looked up at her, shrugged, and said, “Sorry. We got it now.”

“Give it back . . .”

The new Gatekeeper sat up a bit in her chair and looked around at the others in the room. “Um, hey. We’re busy watching a show, so, ’bye, Felicia.”

All her conspirators laughed, which made Shirl even more mad. Now this was serious. Besides the Dictator, who chose the shows, and the Gatekeeper, who guarded the remote, every group had an Enforcer, an intimidating inmate, for just these occasions. Shirl went to get the group’s enforcer, Butchy, a beefy woman in her late forties, with thick arms and legs and a crew cut, who didn’t take crap from anybody.

She strode into the room with her chest puffed up and walked right up to the cocky Remote Thief.

“They told me you have a problem with your hearing,” Butchy growled. “Give us back the remote.”

When Butchy tried to grab it out of the Remote Thief’s hand, the thief jumped up and started yelling at Butchy.

“Fuck you, bitch! It’s ours now!”

By now, a bunch of inmates had gathered around them, ready to jump in if fists started flying.

I was watching the whole thing and had had it. I was friendly with both girls and didn’t want them to get a shot for a stupid fight over TV.

I stepped in and said, “Look—just give us back the remote. You have your own TV and you know we always watch our shows in here. We don’t go in and try grab your remote.”

The Remote Thief just gave me a funny look and turned back to Butchy, “Hey. If the remote was so fucking important to you, then you shouldn’t have left it laying around. You’re shit outta luck!”

I could see the red rising in Butchy’s cheeks. I thought she was going to belt her. She lunged at the Remote Thief, who laughed and held the remote high up in the air, so she couldn’t get it. By now, members of both groups were shouting at each other. The room was crackling with bad energy and I knew someone was about to get hurt. I moved to the back of the room so I wouldn’t be involved in any brawl that was about to break out. Don’t forget—I had seen this kind of thing before. But the guards heard all the yelling, ran in there, and broke it up before anyone could take a swing, thank God. Maybe I should bring the guards back to New Jersey, to keep as protection while we’re filming. Lord knows we need it sometimes . . .

“What’s the problem in here?” one of the guards yelled. “You—over here,” he said, pointing to the Remote Thief. She went over and almost started crying as she told the guards how our group ganged up on her and the others and threatened them. She was a regular Meryl Streep.

In all the chaos, she dropped the remote on her chair, and Butchy scooped it up. After the guard in charge assessed the situation, he told the group who tried to take over to get out. The Remote Thief and her girls trudged out of there, cursing under their breath. Shirl waved goodbye to them. Butchy folded her massive arms and gave them a victorious smirk.

“Right is right!” said one of the inmates who lost the battle over the remote. “They left it laying around and we got it. What’s the problem?”

“Bitches,” we heard them say.

“Fuck them . . .”

Once they were gone, we took our seats in
our
TV room and turned on what we wanted to watch. Nobody paid attention to what was on the screen. We were all still complaining about the nerve they had to try to take our remote. It just wasn’t done. They had stepped over the line.

We all forgot about it until the next day, when a bunch of us got called down to the office. Someone in the other group had complained to the guards about us. I felt like I was back in junior high, getting called to the principal’s office.

I was thinking,
Why did I get called down? I wasn’t fighting. I was trying to stop them from fighting.

But apparently, someone had told the guard I was getting mouthy. The guard wanted me to explain my role in this and my version of what happened. I started telling him and he said, “Stop. Go over there.” He pointed to a far wall. “You talk with your hands, Giudice, and wave them all around. Last time I had you in here, you almost hit me in the face.” I said, “Yes, I do. I’m Italian.” It was pretty funny.

After everyone took turns telling him what happened, he said, “I’ve heard enough. Get out of my office.”

We skulked back to our rooms, not sure if we were going to get in trouble or not. (We didn’t, thank God . . .)

What we did get was control of the remote again. Since the other group told on us, they were now considered snitches, so the whole camp started freezing them out and calling them “rats” everywhere they went. They had tried to take over our remote—and it backfired, big-time.

This wasn’t the only fight I tried to stop. I got to know a sweet, quiet girl named Bonita. She and I used to read the Bible together and talk about what various passages meant to us. She was in there because she was accused of helping her boyfriend in a drug deal, when she said she had had no idea she was doing anything wrong. She said she simply answered the phone at his house and passed it to him when the guy on the other end of the line asked for him. She got six months for conspiracy to sell drugs. I don’t know the whole story, but like a lot of what I heard in there, I didn’t think that one was fair.

Two days before she was going home, a bully down the hall who had a beef with her from the minute she saw her decided to stir up trouble. The bully was hoping she’d rope Bonita into a fight so that the prison would extend her sentence. The bully got in Bonita’s face and started reading her the riot act about Bonita’s boyfriend, who the bully hated because he had dissed the bully somehow before she got locked up.

I followed Bonita into her room. I grabbed her arm. “Listen to me. Don’t fight her. It isn’t worth it.”

She went on and on about how that woman had made her life miserable from the day Bonita arrived at Danbury—and how her insults just now were over the line.

“I know,” I said. “I get it. You have no idea. But you’re leaving in two days. She’s mad you’re getting out and doesn’t want you to leave. Don’t take the bait.”

I told her to sit down on the bed. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her.

“Just think about your family,” I said. “In two days, you will be out of here. She’ll still be in here for another six years.”

Bonita wiped the tears from her eyes.

“I guess you’re right. Thank you.”

When I was sure she had calmed down, I hugged her and went back to my room. The tough-ass girl was gone. She continued to harass poor Bonita right up until she left, but Bonita took my advice and ignored her, as hard as it was. We had a going away party for Bonita, and she hugged me and thanked me.

“God bless you, honey,” I said, hugging her back. “You’re going to be all right.”

I didn’t say too much to anyone about it, but I was proud of myself for stepping in and protecting her. Yes, I was really learning a lot in here about compassion, and how to approach certain tough situations. Much more than I’d ever thought I would.

W
hen I’d first gotten to my room, I thought I would be living with the same five women who were in there at the time. I didn’t know how it worked. But the longer I was there, the more I felt like my room had its own revolving door. With each new roommate, I had to put up with a whole new set of annoyances. Let’s just say it is
not
easy living with other people you don’t know. I never lived in a college dorm, so I had nothing to compare it to. Now I was living with more than two hundred women, who were usually PMSing at the same time. Wow . . .

I liked Lala, but she was always eating in the room or on her bunk. I got reprimanded when I ate a salad in my room when I first got there, not knowing the rules. But she got there on the same day I did, so she knew the rules. She honestly felt that rules didn’t apply to her. She acted entitled, for whatever reason, so our room always smelled like food, had dirty Tupperware containers lying around in it, and candy wrappers on the floor. She was a total slob, which made me crazy.

Then there were the beds. My shoulder was killing me from having to sleep on top of a bar under the mattress. I went and got another massage and it helped a little bit, but the pain came back. I was hoping that yoga would help make it feel better . . . If my shoulder pain kept rearing its ugly head, I was going to have to go to the doctor for it—and believe me, I had no desire to do that, since I probably wouldn’t have gotten treated for a long time.

U
nless the weather was bad, I saw my daughters pretty much every weekend, as long as one of them didn’t have to be somewhere for one of their many activities. They would come with my mom, my friend Lisa G., or with Joe. I always loved their visits but felt drained emotionally after because I hated saying goodbye to them.

A bit after my last visit with my mom, the girls, and Lisa G., I went to a party for one of the inmates, who was leaving after thirty months. Franchie made this great punch and some of the girls made the most delicious popcorn balls! That was probably my favorite thing to eat in there. They would melt caramel and butter in a Tupperware container in the microwave, add in some kind of candy bar, like Snickers, pop some popcorn, and mix it all together.
Delizioso!

After the party, I went to take a shower, and lo and behold, there was Big Bertha, who had asked me if she could be my bodyguard, getting a peep show from her girlfriend of that week. I said hi to Big Bertha and, despite trying to zoom by her on the way to an open shower stall, got an eyeful of her naked girlfriend. I was like, “Oops . . . sorry!” I may not have loved every second at Danbury, but I have to say, there was rarely a dull moment.

L
ife got a lot more dramatic for me after the first five or six months at Danbury, if you can believe it. One cold, sunny morning, some of the admins called me into the office to tell me I had to change my schedule. On more than one occasion, someone had noticed a small, low-flying plane circling the prison overhead. Officials had heard a rumor that a media company had hired the plane to take pictures of me leaving the actual building and walking down the outdoor staircase to the gym and track. Apparently, someone inside had leaked details of my daily routine. And because of one reason or another, officials actually ended up putting the entire prison on lockdown, to prevent anyone from going outside. I couldn’t believe this. I was still being hunted—even while I was
locked up
. I was sick of it.

What was even crazier was when I found out that one of the inmates, a chunky, thirty-something Latina named Frederica, had sold my schedule and other personal, prison-related information to one of the tabloids for a supposed three thousand dollars! Well, it was actually her husband who sold the information, but she passed it along. I couldn’t believe she was spying on me, and selling bits and pieces of my private life to the media, during one of the darkest times in my life. What a bitch. Some of the other inmates told me that she had been trying like hell to get a picture of me to sell to the tabloids, too. She had snuck a phone with a camera inside the prison, which was major contraband. One day, her husband brought a diaper bag to the visitation room, set it down on a table right near me—and I immediately wondered if he had hidden a camera in it. Who knows what people are capable of? I literally had to have eyes in the back of my head, and keep them peeled for potential weasels who could sell details to the media. As if I needed one more thing to be creeped out about.

When I found out that this bitch and her husband were trying to sell a picture of me in prison, I wanted to beat them to the punch. Over the course of my career, I’ve truly come to understand the often bizarre relationships celebrities have with the media—especially the tabloids. We’ve got to outsmart them at their own game, and sometimes, that means handing them a story that otherwise would have remained private. And so, Jim made calls to some of the top magazines, and got some huge offers for pictures of me inside prison in my uniform. They would get their story and I would get a paycheck—that would go toward something important, like doing my part to pay off the restitution. Even if they weren’t things I would have shared to begin with, at least they were details I shared on my own terms, and were not given to them by some sleazy rat who could profit off totally underhanded and manipulative actions. So there.

Soon after the
US Weekly
cover story hit newsstands—complete with the photos my family and I took during visitation—we were put under lockdown. The guards tore through our rooms, looking for a rumored contraband phone or camera. The guards had gotten wind that one of the inmates was taking illegal photos of me, on the sly, during day-to-day activities. Of course, they found one, and of course, it belonged to Frederica—but they found it in her friend Teetsee’s room. I found out later that Frederica had asked her to take pictures of me in yoga class and in the gym—and Teetsee obliged. Teetsee—who was also found with a carton of cigarettes on her—got sent to Brooklyn for having contraband and taking the pictures. At first I thought Frederica got off scot-free, but she got a shot for her part in all this. (I don’t know why she wasn’t sent to Brooklyn. I’m not sure they knew she had sold a story—or stories—about me or given Teetsee the camera.) I was glad that the guards had found the phone, but I wondered who else was playing paparazzi in there.

A
fter I survived the plane and camera drama, I got some good news in the late spring: I was finally moving! Hooray! One of the counselors called me to her office one pretty April morning and told me I could move downstairs to A Dorm. I was so happy because a bunch of my good friends lived down there, too. I packed up my stuff as fast as I could, hauled it downstairs, and moved into a two-person cubicle with Tonya. My new room had a bunk bed, two rusty lockers, and a rickety chair. If you were lucky, you got a hook so you could hang up your uniform or towel, and I did. The concrete block walls dividing the cubicles were low in A Dorm—maybe five feet tall. If you had a top bunk, you could see over the “walls” into the next cubicle, and believe me, I was thanking my lucky stars I got the bottom bunk. I did
not
need a bird’s-eye view of other inmates having sex with each other, because
ew
(while I couldn’t see them, I could still hear everything . . . and believe me, I could’ve used some earplugs half the time).