Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (31 page)

“Um, Chudney,” I said, “sit down. Right now. Don’t touch him.”

You didn’t touch someone else in prison unless you were asking for trouble. This was a basic rule. I noticed Shizz, on the other side of the room, tighten his grip on his pencil. The last thing I needed in my classroom was a fight.

But Chudney ignored me. “Ain’t no thing,” he said, grabbing Dumayne’s writing hand and pulling his fingers into the correct posture. “This little man here’s a friend of mine growing up,” said Chudney. “I call him my little cousin.”

And indeed, as Chudney aggressively set his hand straight, Dumayne wore the proverbial sulk of a compliant younger brother.

“Now
that’s
how it’s done, son,” Chudney said, patting him on the back.

The men returned to their silent work. I noticed Dumayne struggling, in vain, to hold the pencil as Chudney had instructed him. I noticed other things, too. You can tell a lot about a person by the way he sits and writes. Fernando, who hadn’t uttered a word yet in this class, was a curious little man with an implausibly round head, an expressionless lampshade mustache, an autocratic pout. He sat with ironing-board-straight posture and scribbled decisively in florid Catholic-school penmanship, writing on his prison-issue loose-leaf paper as though he were drafting an armistice. He resembled a deposed but proud South American strongman. Perhaps he was.

I was pretty certain Shizz was not a strongman. His pleading eyes were the only steady feature on a face that was in a state of constant and rapid flux: a mask of worry morphed into despair morphed into a wicked private joke morphed into self-flagellation. The overall effect being a troubled, ambivalent soul. His pencil, too, was in constant motion and never left the page, though he employed the eraser end as much as the business end, and did so emphatically and with elaborate displays of emotion.

Frank was more sedate when writing than speaking. And certainly more punctuated. I sensed he was out of his element with the written word. This was probably a good thing for everyone.

Too Sweet seemed distracted and wrote a word or two every few minutes. This was a man who sat in his cell and wrote dozens of meticulously handprinted pages a day. He was tired out. I got the strong impression he didn’t want to be here, that he had signed up out of politeness to me. When he did write, though, he did so in bursts, like a Richter scale registering a distant tremor.

And then there was Chudney. Chudney was, it seemed, a noticer. He stared at the heavens, waiting for the words to drop right out of the troposphere, poised, ready to catch them before they hit the ground and smashed to pieces. Since there was no window to the outdoors—or penguin movie to watch—he was stuck gazing at the ceiling. He assumed two distinct poses: sitting perfectly still, elbows on the table, fingers linked, head bowed as though in prayer, pencil, out of his hands, sitting on paper—and then, perhaps ready to receive his answer, he’d pick up the pencil and raise his head to gaze at the ceiling. He frowned often and occasionally copied some words down onto the page.

I gazed at the ceiling, too, to see if I could see what he saw. All I could make out, though, was an aged water stain with a dark, wet brown border that was slowly expanding.

After twenty minutes, an officer swung by, leaned against a bookcase, and pointed to his watch. I collected the papers, thank yous were muttered by all. I gathered up the pencils and counted them. Seven for seven. Every potential weapon was accounted for. This was the basic metric of a successful class in prison.

L
ater that night I read the short essays from the class. Shizz’s was full of false starts, rhymes, plagiarized lyrics, extended metaphors, and other varieties of quasilyrical filler. It’s hard to believe what a remarkable, tortured, smudgy mess a person can make of an innocent white sheet of paper in the span of twenty-five minutes. But there were some heartfelt and affecting moments in his account of a man trying, and failing, to catch a train. An appropriate subject for him, I thought.

Chudney’s was a short and oddly compelling inventory of the strange people you see at the train station (himself included, he admitted). Dumayne offered a spare description of the physical space, floor to ceiling. Fernando’s was incoherent; it was unclear whether he understood the assignment. Or English. Too Sweet sketched out a sad encounter he once had there. And Frank, in his frank attempt to be “exciting,” wrote a fast-paced thriller about a train robber and a group of cops engaged in a shootout during rush hour (the upshot: there was blood). This, he said, was “based on real events,” though he didn’t specify which. Jason had given up, erased the sentence or two he had written, and filled the page with gang graffiti.

I was satisfied with this start.

To the Principal’s Office

Word got back to me that Officer Chuzzlewit had submitted his incident report. He had, it turned out, conveniently omitted the detail about his chemical attack on the library. In turn, I submitted a report to my supervisor, Patti. She kicked it up to her supervisor. Within hours, I got a call informing me that the sheriff’s deputies, Geoffrey Mullin and Jack Quinn, wanted a word with me.

Mullin and Quinn had different styles. There was a widely understood good cop/bad cop dynamic to their leadership team. Mullin, the senior deputy, was an attorney. Wry, judicious, above the fray: the good cop. Quinn, on the other hand, had a touch of upstart to him. Cocky, six-foot-something, shaved-head. The bald, virile type. A former college women’s basketball coach and relative newcomer to the administration, he flipped between two modes: charming or confrontational.

I followed Quinn into Mullin’s office. Something about it seemed strange to me. Then it hit me, literally.
Sunlight
. There was actual sunshine streaming into the office, which was on the first floor, on the edge of the yard. This was a courtside luxury box to inmate basketball games. As I entered the office, I heard the door close behind me and a languid voice, tinged with a mild case of Boston.

“Thanks for coming here, Avi.”

It was Mullin. He’d materialized out of thin air.

“We’re taking this matter very seriously,” he said, gravely. I turned around to look at him.

He was standing behind his desk, wearing a New England Patriots jersey over his white dress shirt and tie. The Pats were set to play a big playoff game in two days. The absurd contrast between the football jersey and his grim police tone brought me perilously close to smiling. But I held it together, in deference to the sober subject of the meeting.

Quinn crossed his arms.

“There coulda been a riot,” he said, abruptly.

I couldn’t tell whether he was talking to me or to Mullin. But one thing was clear: he was outraged. For a second, it seemed he was blaming me.

“That’s why we gotta look into this,” replied Mullin, taking a seat behind his desk.

Both men were in war-room mode and didn’t so much speak as debrief. I wondered if this was how they actually spoke to each other, or if it was some kind of act for my benefit. It was as though they wanted me to feel I was eavesdropping. I would have been perfectly happy to turn into vapor and slide out under the door.

Mullin looked at his watch, scribbled something down, and then looked at Quinn. “We should check his locker.” This was part question, part statement.

Quinn, jaw clenching, didn’t miss a beat. “We should check
all
of their lockers.”

I turned back to Mullin to see how he’d react to this sudden descent into Stalinism. I’d always wondered how much these men acted in concert and how much they actually clashed. But Mullin gave no response, nor any indication he’d heard the statement. Was this a form of consent? He took a few more moments to scribble, then looked up again.

“There could have been a riot over there,” he said finally, echoing Quinn’s earlier statement. “And that’s how we have to treat this.” Mullin was clearly talking to me now. “Do you understand why that is?”

“Yes,” I said. And I did: as preposterous as the incident was, the inmates were genuinely angry about it. And rightly so.

But still, I was a bit surprised that they were “taking this seriously.” Mostly because it was a fart bomb. But also because as management, Mullin and Quinn had strategic alliances to maintain—why would they want to get embroiled in a petty squabble between union members?

“Okay,” said Mullin, leaning back in his seat. “We read the report, but tell us again what happened.”

Was this on the record or off?
I wondered. I didn’t want to ask, fearing that it would sound suspicious. But I had nothing to hide.

I told them all that had happened, including certain morsels that had been beyond the concern of my report. “And here’s another piece,” I added, leaning in. “This same thing, this business with the fart spray, apparently also happened the day before, on Forest’s shift.”

Mullin and Quinn exchanged a glance and a nod, a gesture familiar to me from cop shows. It said,
We got our guy
.

Feeling confident, I leaned back in my seat and offered up a modest proposal. “I think he should attend our class next week and apologize to the inmates.”

The deputies exchanged another knowing look.

“Absolutely not,” said Quinn, as Mullin muttered something about how this would endanger the officer.

I had figured I’d give my opinion even though I knew they wouldn’t go for it. I knew the rules. Staff, especially officers, don’t apologize to inmates. Such an action would undermine the power dynamic.

Quinn changed the subject. And he got to the point of why I was there. They wanted more names. As the deputies started flipping through officer photos—asking me, “Was this guy there? What about this guy … how about this guy?”—I got the sinking feeling that they were using this incident to settle some other scores. They seemed to have some people they wanted to nail.

Although other officers had been in on the mischief, I’d omitted their names from my report. I didn’t want this to snowball. But when Quinn asked me point-blank if anyone else was there, I told the truth. I hadn’t gone out of my way to indict any officer—not even Chuzzlewit himself—but I certainly wasn’t going out of my way to cover for them. And some questions could not be avoided. For example, just where was the officer who was actually on duty at that post, whose job it was to
protect
the library? The answer: he had been standing right there, watching the incident unfold and smiling like a ninny.

I would have been happy to see this thing die. But the department actually seemed to be taking the incident seriously, as Mullin, in his football jersey, had promised. I was called in to speak with the prison’s secret police, the SID. In a small windowless room, with a camcorder on a tripod staring me in the face, I answered minute questions for over an hour (with a break for water) from two investigators: a chatty, diminutive Italian American fellow and his unsmiling foxy partner, who said little but asked the tougher questions. Forest and an assortment of officers and inmates were likewise shaken down for answers.

During my water break, when the camera was off, the Italian American investigator confided in a near whisper that, “when I first saw these reports on my desk I thought, ‘C’mon we’re gonna spend our time solving the Case of the Fart Spray? We got better things to do.’ But when I started reading through everything I thought, ‘So these guys wanna bring in unauthorized HAZMAT into a correctional facility, which could be a felony, by the way, and then fudge the truth? These guys want to play it like that? Okay, fine, we can play like that, too.’

“Some officers think they can run around here doing whatever they want. Know what I mean?”

I got the feeling he was laying some bait for me, trying to catch me with my guard down, to coax more information out of me, or get me to reveal some personal bias against the officers. I just smiled and nodded politely. This whole thing was getting sillier by the moment.

Game Tight

The story begins in Manhattan. A harried and anxious wannabe young pimp named C.C. Too Sweet is driving a car full of prostitutes. The front seat is vacant, saved for the captain of his sex-for-hire squad. His most trusted ho. Although referred to by the title “bottom bitch,” she is the top prostitute on this team, privileged to sit in the front.

After picking her up, he plays the women off of each other, making their night’s earnings into a competition. Nothing is good enough. Each could do better. Predictably, the bottom bitch has brought in the biggest cash return and Too Sweet, after heaping abuse on the others, holds her up as a shining example. In so doing, he has proven that he’s not all bad, that he appreciates and rewards good work. This gives the less experienced prostitutes something to strive for, while at the same time instilling in them a requisite sense of worthlessness.

C.C., the narrator of this story, now anticipates the sensitivities of his reader. A prostitute, he explains, expects abuse. If she doesn’t get it, she won’t respect you nor will she trust that you can protect her. Eventually she’ll leave and find protection elsewhere. The women call him Daddy, and he has indeed become the abusive father figure they have come to expect. Through the abuse, Too Sweet has also formed a hierarchy that places the bottom bitch at the helm, a kind of middle manager, and makes her a crucial female ally.

C.C. emphasizes that a good pimp must know and understand women in order to control them. This requires psychological astuteness, a finely calibrated intuition. He has to possess a natural understanding of the female mind. To be a sort of sensitive guy.

After reading this, I’d asked him to elaborate. He thought for a moment and then said, “You ever heard of ‘emotional intelligence’?”

I nodded.

“The best pimp’s got great emotional intelligence. No bullshit. And,” he added, “C.C. Too Sweet’s got some real skills in that department.”

Too Sweet had a theory. When it comes to rhetoric, the pimp is king, Too Sweet claims. He asked me to consider Malcolm X. “Check it out,” he said. “How does a man like Malcolm learn to move people, large crowds? He’s got talent, right, and in prison, he gets knowledge from books. But where did he get the courage, the ability to stand up and chop it up like that? When I see old tapes of Malcolm speaking—and I’m talking about Malcolm with his clean-cut preacher’s shirt and tie—when I see Malcolm talking, I say, damn, that man is a
pimp.”