Turning the Tables: From Housewife to Inmate and Back Again (29 page)

Later on, one of the Stud’s girlfriends came up to me and told me that she thought the Stud got her pregnant. I said, “And how did she do that?” She replied, “Cuz girl! She rocked my world!”

This is what I was dealing with (and this one really made me laugh with tears running down my face!).

S
oon after that episode, Jim called me to tell me that Joe had arranged to do a three-part special with Bravo about what life was like raising the four girls without me there, called
Teresa Checks In
.

In June, my brother came to see me in prison for the first time, for the special. He came up with my mother and the girls—and a camera crew. They couldn’t come inside the prison to film us, but they filmed him driving there and back.

I was so happy to see him. He had called and emailed me during my stay there, but it was amazing to see him in person. We hugged and started to tear up, but I didn’t want my mother to get upset, so I told him not to cry. Gia started tearing up, too, when she saw us together.

I missed him so much. We all sat down on the hard, red plastic chairs in the visitation room, and he told me what was going on with Melissa and the kids and what they were doing for the summer. I told him what my girls were doing and a little bit about what it was like in there. I had to be careful because we had lots of ears around us, listening to every word.

A couple of the women recognized Joey and came up to him to say hello and tell him they loved him on the show. One of the older ladies told him, “You are so handsome!,” which made us all laugh.

We had such a nice visit and it made me sad when he left because I felt like I’d gotten my brother back.

A
bit later, I was watching
Secrets and Wives
on Bravo, when one of the guards came to the TV room, looking for me. “We need to see you,
now
,” he said.

He led me to a small room, where a female officer was waiting for me. “Take everything off,” she said.

I had no clue why they were doing this—and I was more stunned than angry. I took off my uniform, faced the wall, and did the dreaded squat and cough. When we were done, the guard ordered me to stand in the hall. They were also strip-searching Tonya. When they were done, they put us in a room and told us to sit there and wait.

“Tonya, I don’t have any contraband,” I said quietly. “You don’t either. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, but I’m nervous,” she said.

While we were waiting, someone walked by and said officers were downstairs, shaking down our room. They were tearing apart the cubicle I shared with Tonya. They flipped the mattresses off the bed, ripped the sheets off, and emptied everything out of our lockers. I had no idea what they were looking for, but I heard later on that someone had told the guards that I had a phone and that they had seen me texting on it. That made me shake my head in disgust because—hello—of course I didn’t.

When we were allowed to return to our cubicle, they told us that they hadn’t found anything and to straighten the room back up. We put the sheets and blankets back on the beds, put everything back in our lockers, and went to bed. The next morning, I got up at 6:15 a.m. like usual, went to breakfast, and then went to the rec room to watch the news. Just after I sat down, one of the officers came over the loudspeaker asking us to all go outside. We stood there in a line while they patted each of us down to see if we had any contraband—or phones—on us.

“There are so many officers here!” Nikki whispered to me.

“I wonder what they’re looking for,” I whispered back.

We found out a little later that they were shaking down everyone’s room, looking for a cell phone and an iPad. After they finished, they patted us down again when we went back inside. When I got to my cubicle, it had been turned upside down—again. But I thought,
Who cares?
I had nothing to worry about.

After lunch, two inmates I didn’t know stopped me in the hallway. “Yo—what the fuck you think you’re doing?” one of the women said to me.

“You the reason for the shakedown with your stupid-ass tweeting,” said her friend.

She had her hands on her hips then started pointing her finger right in my face. My Italian temper was starting to get going, but I stayed calm, at least on the outside. “I don’t have a phone,” I said. “My daughter tweeted that for me, and I cleared it up with the officers a while ago.”

“Well, they shook your room down again. They must really be looking for something,”

“They can look all they want,” I said, “but I don’t have anything for them to find.”

“Yeah, right. Well, all this shit is your fault.”

They were pissed off because they had contraband like nail polish and makeup that was taken away from them. Whatever. Not my problem.

Tonya and I didn’t get shots, but two other inmates did—big ones—when one of the officers found cigarettes in the gym while Nikki and I were working out. He acted like the biggest hero. “What would they do without me here?” he said, while we rolled our eyes.

I heard later on that when he started checking lockers, he found a couple of flat irons too, which we weren’t supposed to have. This is the stuff they worried about when they had much bigger problems they should have been dealing with—like the drugs, phones, and weapons people snuck inside, and the unsanitary and downright hazardous living conditions we were faced with. The guards were so strict during room checks and would give us heat if our beds weren’t made properly. Yet, if they’d looked up, they’d have seen that there were inches of disgusting dust on the pipes over our heads, which were too high up for us to clean. Why didn’t they worry about
that
stuff? The cancer-causing, dangerous stuff?

Right after the officer left, two other inmates came down to the gym, then went around back and started smoking, which we could see out the window. I’m not sure where they got the cigarettes since he had just confiscated a bunch of them. Nikki told me she thought one of them had hidden them in her makeup case.

“I’m going to head back to the camp,” I told Nikki when I was done on the bike. “Do you want to come?”

“No,” she said. “I want to do some more abs.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll see you later. I want to take a shower and then call home.”

As I was leaving the gym, the two smokers came up to me and stopped me. “You aint gonna say nothin’, are you?” one of them asked.

“No way,” I said. “I don’t care what you do. Just don’t get caught!”

As I said before, I knew what happened to rats in there. As long as no one was hurting me, I really didn’t care what they did. My feeling was that they were doing whatever they could to cope with life in that hellhole. I totally understood where they were coming from, believe me.

After I showered and called home, we had head count at 9 p.m. Tonight we had the Incredible Hulk do our count. We called him that because he was way too muscular—too many steroids, we thought. He would yell at the ladies to keep quiet because he would lose count of how many inmates were in a room if they were all yapping, which they weren’t supposed to be doing. We thought that was hilarious.

After head count, I went to brush my teeth and ran into Motor Mouth. She never fucking shut up! I never knew what to believe with her, either. She was always telling me not to trust anyone, but sometimes she would lie to me. One time she told me she wasn’t friends with someone I didn’t like in there—someone I thought had ratted me out about the phone I didn’t have. Literally, as she was telling me this, Tonya and her friend Gigi were standing behind her, giving me a look like, “She is lying through her teeth.”

When Motor Mouth left, Gigi grabbed my arm. “You are way too trusting,” she said, telling me something I have been told again and again, even by my daughter Gia. “Open your eyes,” said Gigi. “She is a liar. Stay away from her.”

Ugh. I didn’t care about all this drama involving two-faced women, but at the same time, I did have to watch my back to make sure nothing too crazy was going on . . .

I just couldn’t wait to get out of there. I was sick of all of the stupid shit they focused on.

T
he next day, we had a birthday party for my friend Talia. Some of the ladies surprised her with a dress they had made out of T-shirts! She loved it and ran down the hall to the bathroom to try it on. She came back out and modeled it for us, pretending to walk like a supermodel on a runway—but in the streets at Danbury. We all laughed and cheered for her. I was having such a good time that for a minute, I actually forgot I was in prison.
Those
were the women who fueled my fire during my stay. The women who encouraged me to keep on going, and who made every difficult day just a little bit easier. Just one of my friends in prison could make me forget about the snitching rumors, Motor Mouth, bat-shit crazy old ladies, and wacko guards—and honestly, that’s what mattered most to me in the world.

W
hile I was in there, I started to hear about more and more tabloid stories saying that Joe was cheating on me with different women. What got us both mad was that these “homewreckers” were literally friends of friends. If Joe went out with a guy friend and his girlfriend, the paparazzi would sell the photos in which only Joe and the girl appeared. If he sat across the table or next to a woman at a restaurant who was friends with his friend, they said he was cheating. If he posed for a picture with a woman, they said he was unfaithful. One time, he posed for a fan picture with a woman, and “a source” said he was having sex with her. Her fiancé was literally standing behind her when the picture was taken! I told Joe to say no to having his picture taken with any female, but he was like, “I don’t want to say no and be an asshole.” That’s how Joe is—an easygoing, good guy who doesn’t want to be a jerk. But there were so many evil people out there who just wanted to nail him any way they could. I hated that so much.

As I have said before, if I knew for sure that Joe was cheating, if I had 100 percent proof that he had, I would leave him in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t be able to stay with him. I trust Joe with my life and am so blessed that he is my husband. I think about him every day and am dreading the day when he goes away to prison. That is going to be much harder than any of these stupid cheating rumors, and so handling that hurdle is what we are trying to focus on getting through.

For Father’s Day, I sent him a card with three pages of printouts of positions I told him I wanted to try when I got home. I told him that I had gotten very flexible in there from doing so much yoga. I thought he would like seeing those printouts—and he did! He emailed me when he got the card, saying he laughed out loud because I had
never
shown him anything like that before in my life—and that he couldn’t wait until I got home . . .

In late July, I was in yoga class at about 9:15 a.m. when we were all told to go into the dining hall. Someone said there were eight cop cars outside on one side of the building and a bunch more on the other side. They patted us all down before we were able to go into the dining hall. While we waited in there, they brought in a couple of German shepherds.

“What are they doing?” I asked Shaniqua.

“They are sniffing for drugs,” she said. “This is what they do when they think someone has shit they shouldn’t have in here.”

They kept us in the dining room for more than two hours. It felt like it was a hundred degrees in there because there was no air-conditioning inside that room. We were dying. We had to wear pants, which made it even hotter for us.

After a bit, they brought the dogs outside and were looking everywhere. I had heard that that was where inmates hid drugs and other things. Finally they let us out. It was too hot to work out, although I walked around the track from 7:45 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. just to get some air because I felt like I couldn’t breathe inside the building. I couldn’t fall asleep that night because it was so hot. I kept getting up to wet towels to put on my head and neck. It was brutal.

I prayed that night for God to bring me home to my family and get me out of this hellhole. I hated it in there. For all the people out there who wanted to see me punished and suffer, well, they got their wish. But I wasn’t going to let that get me down.

I found this saying in one of the Joel Osteen books that said something like, “Father, thank you for taking me further, faster. Thank you for turning my water into wine.” If I ever needed God to turn my water into wine, it was now. I really didn’t know how much longer I could hang on. But I knew I had to.

W
hen Fourth of July rolled around, I told my family not to come, because of the traffic. Joe and the girls, my parents, and his cousin Teresa and her boyfriend went to the shore house. I tried to keep busy, but it was hard not to think about how I was missing such a fun holiday. Anyone who knows me knows that summer is my season. I love everything about it: the warm weather, trips to the beach, spending time outside, getting to wear bikinis(!), and just relaxing. The year before, Joe and the girls and I had gone down to the shore house for the Fourth. We cooked out on the grill, went to the beach, and had friends over. I love watching the fireworks from our deck.

I tried to keep busy so I wouldn’t think about my family. I worked out, had lunch, and then walked on the track. I had to take a moment in my cubicle, though, to cry, thinking about how much I wanted to be with them. I kept asking God why I was there and away from Joe and the girls. I said, “Please answer me, God.” I was told that if you ask God for something, He will eventually answer you. All I wanted was for God to bring me back home. I couldn’t stop crying all day, whenever I could find some time alone, thinking about my family and how much I missed them.

I made it through the Fourth of July not knowing there were more fireworks coming my way because of a woman I referred to as the Stalker and another one I called Trouble. They started something up that led to a huge fight between me and Tonya. I liked the Stalker at first, and thought she was fun to hang out with, until she started to follow me everywhere, even into the bathroom, trying to get as much information about me as she could. It was really weird. She and Trouble would make nice with my family in the visiting room while trying to pump them for info on me. I was like, “Are you kidding me?”