Running the books : the adventures of an accidental prison librarian.
by Avi Steinberg.
Part I
UNDELIVERED
CHAPTER 1
The up&up and low low
Pimps make the best librarians. Psycho killers, the worst. Ditto con men. Gangsters, gunrunners, bank robbers-adept at crowd control, at collaborating with a small staff, at planning with deliberation and executing with contained fury-all possess the librarian"s basic skill set. Scalpers and loan sharks certainly have a role to play. But even they lack that something, the je ne sais quoi, the elusive it it. What would a pimp call it? Yes: the love.
If you"re a pimp, you"ve got love for the library. And if you don"t, it"s probably because you haven"t visited one. But chances are you will eventually do a little-or perhaps, a lot-of prison time and you"ll wander into one there. When you do, you"ll encounter the sweetness and the light. You"ll find books you"ve always needed, but never knew existed. Books like that indispensable hustler"s tool, the rhyming dictionary. You"ll discover and embrace, like long-lost relatives, entire new vocabularies. Anthropology and biology, philosophy and psychology, gender studies and musicology, art history and pharmacology, economics and poetry. French. The primordial slime. Lesbian bon.o.bo chimps. Rousseau nibbling on sorbet with his Venetian hooker. The complete annotated record of animal striving.
And it"s not just about books. In the joint, where business is slow, the library is The Spot. It"s where you go to see and be seen. Among the stacks, you"ll meet older colleagues who gather regularly to debate, to try out new material, to declaim, reminisce, network and match wits. You"ll meet old timers working on their memoirs, upstarts writing the next great pimp screenplay.
You"ll meet inmate librarians like Dice, who will tell you he stayed sane during two years in the hole at Walla Walla by memorizing a smuggled anthology of Shakespeare"s plays. He"ll prove it by reciting long pa.s.sages by heart. Dice wears sungla.s.ses and is an ideologue. He"ll try to persuade you of the "virtues of vice." He"ll tell you that a prison library "ain"t a place to better yourself, it"s a place to get better at getting worse." He"ll bully you into reading Sh.e.l.ley"s Frankenstein Frankenstein, and he"ll bully you further into believing that it"s "our story"-by which he means the story of pimps, a specialized cla.s.s of men, a priesthood, who live according to the dictates of Nature.
He means it. Like many a pimp preoccupied by ancient questions, Dice takes the old books seriously. He approves of Emersonian self-reliance, and was scandalized that many American universities had ousted Shakespeare and the Cla.s.sics from their curricula. He"d read about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education Chronicle of Higher Education.
"You kidding me, man?" he"d said, folding the newspaper like a ha.s.sled commuter, brow arching over his shades. "Now I"ve heard it all. This country"s going to h.e.l.l."
Men like Dice will inculcate you with an appreciation for tradition, what Matthew Arnold called "the best which has been thought and said." And you"ll discover precisely why it is so important to study the best that has been thought and said: How else you gonna top it?
This at least is what I"m told. I wouldn"t know. I"m not a pimp. I"m in a different sort of racket. My name is Avi Steinberg, but in the joint, they call me Bookie. The nickname was given to me by Jamar "Fat Kat" Richmond. Fat Kat is, or was, a notorious gangster, occasional pimp, and, as it turns out, exceptionally resourceful librarian. At thirty years old and two bullet wounds, Kat is already a veteran inmate. He"s too big-five foot nine, three-hundred-plus pounds-for a proper prison outfit. Instead he is given a nonregulation T-shirt, the only inmate in his unit with a blue T-shirt instead of a tan uniform top. But the heaviness bespeaks solidity, substance, gravitas. The fat guy T-shirt, status. He is my right hand, though it often seems the other way around.
"Talk to Bookie," he tells inmates who"ve lined up to see him. "He"s the main book man."
The main book man. I like that. I can"t help it. For an asthmatic Jewish kid, it"s got a nice ring to it. Hired to run Boston"s prison library-and serve as the resident creative writing teacher-I am living my (quixotic) dream: a book-slinger with a badge and a streetwise att.i.tude, part bookworm, part bada.s.s. This ident.i.ty has helped me tremendously at c.o.c.ktail parties.
In prison Fat Kat, Dice, and their ilk are the intellectual elite, hence their role as inmate librarians. But the library itself is not elitist. To gain entrance, one need only commit a felony. And the majority of felons, at least where I work, do make their way to the library. Many visit every day. Even though some inmates can barely read, the prison library is packed. And when things get crowded, the atmosphere is more like a speakeasy than a quiet reading room. This place is, after all, the library of "all rogues, vagabonds, persons using any subtle craft, juggling, or unlawful games or plays, common pipers, fiddlers, runaways, stubborn children, drunkards, nightwalkers, pilferers, wanton and lascivious persons, railers and brawlers." This according to a nineteenth-century state government report. I"ve met only one fiddler. No pipers, common or otherwise. But I do meet a good number of rappers and MCs. With the addition of gun-toting g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers and c.o.ke dealers, the old catalog remains fairly accurate.
Which is all to say that a library in prison is significantly different than a library in the real world. Yes, there are book clubs, poetry readings, and moments of silent reflection. But there isn"t much shushing. As a prison crossroads, a place where hundreds of inmates come to deal with their pressing issues, where officers and other staff stop by to hang out and mix things up, the pace of a prison library is social and up-tempo. I spend much of my time running.
The chaos begins right away. There is no wake-up call more effective than twenty-five convicts in matching uniforms coming at you first thing in the morning.
First come the greetings. This takes a while. Inmates exchange intricate handshakes and formal t.i.tles: OG, young G, boo, bro, baby boy, brutha, dude, cuz, dawg, P, G, daddy, pimpin", n.i.g.g.a, man, thug thizzle, my boy, my man, homie. Then, the nicknames: Flip, Hood, Lil Haiti, Messiah, Bleach, Bombay, K*Shine, Rib, Swi$$, Tu-Shay, The Truth, Black, Boat, Forty, Fifty (no Sixty), Giz, Izz, Rizz, Fizz, Shizz, Lil Shizz, Frenchy, P-Rico, Country, Dro, Turk, T, Africa...
And, yes, occasionally, Bookie. Incidentally I have other, less-used prison nicknames: Slim, Harvard, Jew-Fro (though my hair is stick straight). Mostly, people just call me Arvin or Harvey.
Next comes business. Every inmate wants a magazine and/or newspaper. Most inmates also want a "street book," the wildly popular pulp "hip-hop novels" whose t.i.tles tend to have the word hustler hustler in them. I let Fat Kat handle these requests. Kat keeps a secret stash and runs a snug little business in these books, to which I-for mostly self-interested reasons-turn a blind eye. We have a mutually beneficial arrangement. in them. I let Fat Kat handle these requests. Kat keeps a secret stash and runs a snug little business in these books, to which I-for mostly self-interested reasons-turn a blind eye. We have a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Then comes a flurry of random requests. Some legit, some not. Demands to make illicit calls to the courts, to parole boards, to "my mans on the outs," to mommas and babymommas, wifeys and wifey-wifeys. All denied. Whispered requests for information on AIDS, for information on the significance of blood in urine, for help reading a letter. All noted. I dismiss inmates" requests to use my Internet for "just one second." I deflect an inmate"s charges that I"m an Israeli spy; confirm that indeed, I really did go to Harvard, ignore the follow-up question of why I ended up working in prison if I graduated from Harvard. I give serious thought to an inmate"s request for me to check his rap alb.u.m"s website. I am, after all, the prison"s self-appointed CGO, Chief Google Officer.
I field legal queries. I am asked about the legal distinction between homicide and manslaughter, the terms of probation, sentencing guidelines, the laws relating to kidnapping one"s own children, of extradition, of armed robbery with a grenade. There are also clever criminals: a guy who wants to learn state regulations regarding antique guns and antique ammunition, items he hopes might be governed by laxer laws and fraught with loopholes. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice an inmate sporting a marker-drawn musketeer-style mustache, talking to himself in a phony posh English accent. Somebody might need to take his meds. I note this, as well.
An inmate thanks me for my suggestion that he listen to "Sherbert" at our listening station. (He means Schubert.) Inmates ask me for a book about the band Nirvana, about the state of nirvana; for a self-help guide for fathers; for a yoga book; a book on "how to mix chemicals"; a guide to real estate. Ignoring the chemicals request, I suggest "Dummies" guides. I do this diplomatically, since inmates have been sensitive in the past to the possibility that I may be calling them dummies. A caseworker suddenly appears-she"s a crazy woman who talks nonstop and tells wild lies of dating European royals. She wants to borrow a book on tigers. Waiting patiently is C.C. Too Sweet, a mercurial, balding pimp memoirist who wants me to edit his revised ma.n.u.script.
My main challenge is to focus on the tasks at hand and not get sucked into the pimp and hustler gabfests. These are always entertaining and occasionally lead to fascinating discussions. I overhear an elder pimp tell an apprentice, "I wasn"t born, son, I was hatched." hatched." But before I hear where that conversation is going, Ty pokes his way to the front of the line and politely demands to talk with me. Immediately. But before I hear where that conversation is going, Ty pokes his way to the front of the line and politely demands to talk with me. Immediately.
He is a tower of an eighteen-year-old with a baby face and a jaw that can probably split a walnut sh.e.l.l in one clean crack. Today he looks spooked. As soon as I close my door-something I rarely do-Ty bursts into tears. His mother died last month and he was unable to attend the out-of-state funeral; yesterday his long-estranged father showed up in prison. These are not unusual issues in prison. I"ve encountered them many times before, but I still have no answers for him.
As he tells me his story, I look out the office window toward the library, wondering what atrocities are taking place in my absence. This is what I call Prison ADD: the inability to ever be present because there"s always something potentially heinous occurring nearby, something that is probably your responsibility. Ty is inconsolable.
While he cries, I try to gather my thoughts. I"ve posted a sheet on my wall, next to my desk. It"s a wordfind game that an inmate has created and sells to other inmates for the equivalent of fifty cents a pop. Thirty-eight terms, mixed into a jumble of letters. The words are listed, in roughly alphabetical order, at the side of the sheet. They form something of a mantra I use to orient myself in situations like this one.
t.i.tled "Things Found in Prison," the list reads: att.i.tude, bail bondsman, booking, contraband, count time, canteen, cellie att.i.tude, bail bondsman, booking, contraband, count time, canteen, cellie [i.e., cellmate], [i.e., cellmate], drama, depression, family, fence, grievance, gossip, hunger, habe drama, depression, family, fence, grievance, gossip, hunger, habe [short for [short for habeas corpus habeas corpus], handcuffs, indigent, ID card, isolation, lawyer, medication, meditation, mail, noise, officer, PIN number, prayer, quarantine, recreation, rules, shower shoes, sheriff, solitude, telephone, tears, uniforms, worry, yard handcuffs, indigent, ID card, isolation, lawyer, medication, meditation, mail, noise, officer, PIN number, prayer, quarantine, recreation, rules, shower shoes, sheriff, solitude, telephone, tears, uniforms, worry, yard. I"m forced to reschedule a meeting with Ty. Right now, I have to help the guy who thought it would be a good idea to rob a liquor store with a live grenade. In the prison library, it"s first-come, first-served.
...hunger, habe, handcuffs, indigent...
The hour has pa.s.sed. The inmates in green uniforms finally leave, returning to the block to play chess and watch Judge Judy Judge Judy or or Days of Our Lives Days of Our Lives. A new group of inmates is on its way. This will go on for two full shifts, until 9 p.m. when all the inmates will gather in front of TVs-self-segregated by race-to watch Prison Break Prison Break. I take in a deep breath of recycled prison air.
...rules, shower shoes, sheriff, solitude, telephone, tears...
Before the next group arrives, Officer Malone saunters in. He and I undertake the regular task of scanning bookshelves, and other dark corners, for contraband, or for something that might be missing, especially something that can be refashioned into a weapon. This includes just about anything. We look for notes wedged into books by inmates, left for another inmate to pick up. Many of these notes are intended for the female inmates, who come down from their tower blocks at a separate time. I retrieve handfuls of these confessional letters every day. Taken as a whole literature, they give me an insight into the secret lives and concerns of inmates. I let some of the better ones pa.s.s under my radar.
Malone and I drop down to our knees simultaneously, Muslim prayerstyle. We"re not entreating a deity, though, but sweeping under the shelves for contraband.
...mail, noise, officer, PIN number, prayer...
Malone likes to talk. He tells me about his time in the service, about working in a paper mill. He advises me to trade in my bicycle for a Ford S150, like his. He tells me about his wife, who went back to school. She"s smarter than he is, he admits. He resumes a line of conversation we"ve had off and on for months: he wants to help me out. I seem like a good kid, he tells me with a shrug. I should get a raise, more vaca, better retirement. My union is s.h.i.tty. He urges me to join his, to become a prison guard.
I am, he says, already most of the way there.
Prison Fever And that"s exactly my problem. After working almost two years full-time in prison, it was finally dawning on me that I was a jailer jailer. The book-slinging sheriff persona still worked charms at c.o.c.ktail parties, but the reality of it was starting to give me acid reflux. I wasn"t a visitor in this prison. I held a key and was beginning to feel infected by it. I was frankly falling apart, headed toward something of a mental and physical breakdown.
You know you"re not doing well when a prisoner regards you with pity. Blue Line was a heavy-lidded man who"d been addicted to heroin since he was thirteen years old, in and out of foster care, group homes, sober houses, shelters, and prisons. He could narrate the gruesome entirety of his life through the scars on his body. When a man like Blue gives you the once-over and says, "You okay, pal? You don"t look too good," this, if you"re keeping score, is the exact moment you know there"s trouble.
And he was being kind. To be precise, I looked like h.e.l.l. I didn"t admit it to anyone, but prison was kicking my a.s.s. I"d taken the job largely to get health insurance but, the truth was, I hadn"t needed needed health care until I took the job. And once I did, I subsisted only by the grace of a dream team of health care professionals: allergists, infectious disease specialists, ophthalmologists, dermatologists, orthopedists, off-duty nurses, chiropractors, Internet quacks, back doctors, front doctors, head doctors. I was even getting meds from an ob-gyn. health care until I took the job. And once I did, I subsisted only by the grace of a dream team of health care professionals: allergists, infectious disease specialists, ophthalmologists, dermatologists, orthopedists, off-duty nurses, chiropractors, Internet quacks, back doctors, front doctors, head doctors. I was even getting meds from an ob-gyn.
Every day my body pa.s.sed through the prison gate, but my mind was getting caught in the mess of high walls and barbed wire. I was getting severe pains in my back. My landlady, the ob-gyn, mentioned casually that men sometimes experience menopause. "Rare," she noted, sipping her chai, "but it does happen."
Why was she telling me this?
People were beginning to dislike me. My friends were starting to find me lame. "When we hang out," my friend and prison colleague Mary Beth told me, "I feel like I"m visiting my great-grandfather." My ex-landlady was leaving pa.s.sive-aggressive phone messages accusing me of not spending enough time with her; my longtime, recently long distance girlfriend and I were losing touch. And, of course, Blue Line thought I didn"t "look too good."
On top of all that, I found myself having to watch my back for trouble from an emotionally stunted prison guard. A schoolyard feud between the officer and me had spiraled out of control. Suddenly I found myself facing disciplinary action for, of all things, "laying hands" on him.
That"s right: I, the prison"s librarian, stood accused of a.s.saulting a.s.saulting a veteran prison guard, a man trained to subdue violent felons. An improbable charge, certainly. But in prison, nothing is really improbable. That the accusation was false-okay, mostly false-was irrelevant. Prisons overflow with people claiming they"ve been charged falsely. Now I"d officially joined their ranks, another chump who"d caught a case. a veteran prison guard, a man trained to subdue violent felons. An improbable charge, certainly. But in prison, nothing is really improbable. That the accusation was false-okay, mostly false-was irrelevant. Prisons overflow with people claiming they"ve been charged falsely. Now I"d officially joined their ranks, another chump who"d caught a case.
Caught a case is prisonese for getting in trouble with the law. The expression echoes common idioms like "caught a cold." It implies pa.s.sivity, inevitability. There"s something distinctly casual in it. For many in prison, this is indeed the point: catching a nasty little case of gun possession, murder in the first degree, or selling heroin in prison, a.s.saulting an officer- is prisonese for getting in trouble with the law. The expression echoes common idioms like "caught a cold." It implies pa.s.sivity, inevitability. There"s something distinctly casual in it. For many in prison, this is indeed the point: catching a nasty little case of gun possession, murder in the first degree, or selling heroin in prison, a.s.saulting an officer-hey, s.h.i.t happens, goes the refrain among those who catch a case, wrong place, wrong time wrong place, wrong time. Criminal cases float in the air like pathogens and might infect you at any moment. People catch cases all the time. It"s part of everyday life, common as the cold. Now I had caught my own mild case. Prison has always had its own diseases. In the early modern period it was called "prison fever" and it infected inmates, jailers, and even visitors who had come to reform the place. n.o.body is immune.
The essence of my strain of prison fever wasn"t mysterious, just persistent. It boiled down to this: I was, according to a shrink, "having trouble leaving my work at work." I was a.s.sured this was "mostly in my head." I just needed to relax a bit.
And that was precisely why I"d decided to see a movie after my last shift during a particularly bleak week in January. Something completely escapist. As luck would have it, Jacka.s.s 2 Jacka.s.s 2 was in the cheap theater. I called the stupidest person I knew (at the time). We were to meet at the theater. He had trouble finding it. was in the cheap theater. I called the stupidest person I knew (at the time). We were to meet at the theater. He had trouble finding it.
Perhaps it was my exhaustion with prison, or my low expectations, or the disarmingly childlike enthusiasm of my companion that evening, but the movie delivered. Happily ignoring its deeply nihilistic undertones, I gave myself over to a night in the land of Jacka.s.s Jacka.s.s, readily accepting the fantasy of buoyant and freewheeling guyness. Who can quibble with a dude running his skateboard full speed into a brick wall, or a blindfolded guy, in only his underwear, crawling on all fours through a giant room of armed mouse traps, or a group of stoners driving a golf cart through a golf course, crashing it repeatedly and with increasingly shocking violence? This was great fun. It was as if the id had driven the superego deep into the woods and abandoned it there. It was a world free of moral seriousness, of crime without consequences, without prison.
After the movie, I took the T home. I got lucky, just barely catching the last train. The car was full of happy drunks and couples in love for the night. I arrived at my stop, the Green Street station on the Orange Line, feeling sufficiently groovy. But it was always at those moments that my thoughts switched to the inmates and guards: while I"d enjoyed a night on the town, stopping in ten different locales all over the city, they hadn"t moved an inch. Still sitting under the same fluorescent lights, still staring at the same cinderblock walls painted inst.i.tutional colors. Still breathing that prison air. Another few hours lost to the abyss. Prison never closes.
I remember what Boat said. He was an old Boston wiseguy, a former bank robber and mobster recently hired to the library"s inmate staff, joining Fat Kat, Dice, and the rest. Boat liked to give me advice. "There"s plenty a s.h.i.t to go around here, kid," he"d said one day, while we were stamping books. "The windows in here are sealed shut. No circulation. You breathe the same f.u.c.kin" diseased air we breathe." I really didn"t need to hear this. "You stay in here long enough," he continued, "you take in that air? It gets all up into your cells and s.h.i.t? You"ll take it with you. You"ll never never get it out of your system." I thanked him for the public service message. He was, I suspect, trying to be helpful. get it out of your system." I thanked him for the public service message. He was, I suspect, trying to be helpful.
I emerged from the subway station into the chilly evening. Jamaica Plain, my neighborhood of less than two months. Through the crystalline winter air, downtown Boston glistened in the east. There I spotted a sign. That single cautionary word-PRUDENTIAL-glowed high in the heavens, beaconing from the crest of the skysc.r.a.per. Prudence Prudence, an antiquated word that sums up my hometown"s patrimony of dread and pessimism. I promptly wrapped a scarf around my neck, adjusted my hat, zipped up my coat.
As I turned left to walk home, I heard a voice behind me. Barely audible. m.u.f.fled.
"Go into the park," it said.
He shoved me.
"Don"t f.u.c.kin" f.u.c.kin" run," said the voice. "I got a gun. Walk normal, give me the money in the park." run," said the voice. "I got a gun. Walk normal, give me the money in the park."
I tried not to look at him. I took a deep breath. There was a police station around the corner. This guy"s audacity worried me. But I stayed calm and so did he. At least, for the moment.
"I"m getting my money out now," I said, putting my hand into my pocket.
There was no cash. Any semblance of calm drained out in a cold sweat. I reached into my other pocket. There"d been an ATM stop outside of the theater. Forty bucks. I could breathe again.
"Let"s stay calm, okay," I said, speaking more to myself than to him. He didn"t respond.
I stopped in the park and held out the money toward him, two crisp twenty-dollar bills, plus a few singles, all folded up to seem like more. I was calm, but my hands were shaking. I looked at the ground and caught a glimpse of his weapon, not a gun, but a six-inch knife, slightly rusted along the edges, concealed under a long shredded sleeve. I sensed he was looking at me. He took the money. But didn"t move.
Why isn"t he leaving?
"Hey," he said suddenly. There was a new, unidentifiable tenor in his voice. "You work at the Bay?"
Every single joint in my body tensed. My throat locked. It was true: my work was was following me home. It wasn"t in my head. following me home. It wasn"t in my head.
Here is what I should have said: The Bay? What"s that? A seafood place? Never heard of it The Bay? What"s that? A seafood place? Never heard of it.
But I didn"t. Instead, I turned to him. He was tall and thin. Long arms, steady shoulders. He wore a blue ski mask with a worn-out black hood over it.
"Yeah," I said, "I run the library there."
"Yeah, s.h.i.t!" he said, his Spanish accent coming on strong now. "I remember remember you, man. The you, man. The book guy!" book guy!"
"Right," I sighed, "the book guy."
If this were an inspirational prison movie, this would be the point at which he would have given the money back to me, cried, and thanked me for believing in him (just as "Lean on Me" cues in on the soundtrack). I, also in tears, would grab him just as he was about to leave and tell him that he didn"t have to do this anymore. There would be more tears. He would turn his life around; I would have learned an important lesson about the power of books to transform lives, about the inherent goodness of people, or whatever. The last scene would show me in a stupid tweed jacket, a few more wrinkles in my face and a sprinkle of white in my hair, as I take my seat at a UN ceremony honoring my reformed mugger for a lifetime achievement in humanitarian causes. But that"s not what happened.
A long second pa.s.sed. I got the distinct feeling that he was smiling behind his mask. He signaled to someone in the distance, turned away, and jogged briskly into the park with my forty-three bucks, earned at the prison that had, until recently, held him. Perhaps this was justice. I"m not one to say.
He however did have something to say.
"Hey," he yelled, from about twenty feet away, "I still owe you guys two books."
And then he disappeared, laughing, into the night.
In his careworn, gravel-voiced, is-he-doing-a-Pacino-impression way, Boat continued laughing at me for weeks afterward. (I shouldn"t have told inmates about the mugging, I later realized.) At every opportunity he"d repeat the line, "Hey, you work at the Bay?" With the help of his cane, he"d drag his shot-up legs across the library, and interrupt me with a mock earnest, "Hey, you work at the Bay?"
He told me that I shouldn"t dwell on the fact that the mugger robbed me of my money and mocked me.
"Bottom line," said Boat, leaning on his cane, getting serious, "this c.o.c.ksucker didn"t stab you in the throat, right? He"s got a personal beef with you, he woulda. Believe Believe me. You gotta focus on the right facts here." me. You gotta focus on the right facts here."
I didn"t quite agree. And, in any case, soon there were some new facts to contend with. My anxiety had caught up with me. As luck would have it, it happened in the library one afternoon. While moving cartons of books, a sudden, crippling back spasm buckled my knees, sending the contents of an entire box, dozens of books, cascading out of my hands. The books had been destined for my pet shelf, the Cla.s.sics section. My back was clenching like an angry fist. I couldn"t breathe without sending a scalding pain through my lower back, legs, and arms, right down to my fingertips and toes. I couldn"t even reach for my gla.s.ses sitting on the floor next to me. I couldn"t move. Over a year and half in prison and now this, the floor.
I looked up and saw a young inmate in a tan prison uniform. He was licking a bootlegged prison lollypop and regarding me with detached curiosity.
"Daaamn," he said, swiveling the lollypop from his mouth and shaking his head in what was, perhaps, sympathy. "That"s a bad hit, cuz." he said, swiveling the lollypop from his mouth and shaking his head in what was, perhaps, sympathy. "That"s a bad hit, cuz."
Was I just knifed?
It certainly felt that way. In prison, you can"t rule it out. Alas the stabbing pain was internal, self-generated. The mind can do this. My former friend and mugger didn"t need to stab me that night in front of the train station. He needed only propose the idea. My body gladly finished the job. Before Boat, Dice, Fat Kat, or any of the other loyal men on my staff could rally me to my feet, I had a moment alone, flat on the floor.
I understood why religions conduct prayers from down there. There"s a certain irrefutable eloquence to a floor. You can"t help but adopt an honest perspective. I recalled something an inmate had recently told me. As a laborer he had actually helped construct the current prison facility in 1990. He had laid down steel for the very building in which he was now imprisoned, the 3-Building.
"That"s a h.e.l.l of a mind f.u.c.k," he told me. "You"re sitting there locked in this small f.u.c.kin" cell, feeling like s.h.i.t and about to go out of your mind, and you"re thinking: Christ, I Christ, I built built this this."
We build our own prisons. Usually, by accident. And so it was that, lying on a polluted prison floor, incapacitated and half-blind, surrounded by a messy pile of the Great Books, I was forced to consider the existential question. The question that takes on a peculiar twist for a prison worker who, unlike an inmate, chooses chooses to spend his days in prison. That deceptively simple question buried deep in to spend his days in prison. That deceptively simple question buried deep in The Jailer The Jailer by Sylvia Plath, in a book lodged somewhere in the pile next to me on the prison floor. by Sylvia Plath, in a book lodged somewhere in the pile next to me on the prison floor.
How did I get here? asks the poet. asks the poet.
Signifiers of Bunnyness Two years earlier, on a warm April afternoon, as the sun cast long shadows over the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony, as slim trees stretched out in their cottony pink and white delicates, I arrived at the Hyatt Hotel in Cambridge, Ma.s.s. A friend from high school was getting married-almost all of my former cla.s.smates were married, many with children. All I had to my name was a haircut that resembled a bad toupee and a stalled novel, Easy Go Easy Go-a t.i.tle chosen, after weeks of deliberation, over Easy Come Easy Come-whose first line went, "I sing of legs and the woman," an homage to the opening of Virgil"s Aeneid: Aeneid: "I sing of arms and the man." The novel was pretty much downhill from there. "I sing of arms and the man." The novel was pretty much downhill from there.
Under the toupee-hair, my brain was in commotion, afflicted by half-c.o.c.ked ideas: To start a cable network that played nonstop bar mitzvah videos, complete with commentary. To open a business renting puppies by the hour to help people attract dates. New plot twists for Easy Go Easy Go. These schemes left me more than s.p.a.ced out; I was functionally senile.
That spring day, I walked, slightly dazed, up to the hotel, an edifice along the Charles River that bears a strong resemblance to a ziggurat, a striking sight, even to one who is not strung out and stoned. I, however, was both. A few years out of college, I was still contemplating my future. Let me amend that: I was having the early stages of a drug-induced panic attack about my future. Short of breath, a bleak strain of agoraphobia and doom rising in my chest, I pulled out a wrinkled yarmulke from my wrinkled jacket pocket, clipped it to the toupee-hair, and proposed to myself but one modest goal for the evening: to avoid my former rabbis.
Deep in indirection, I was anxious about appearing before my former community. In the past, these weddings left me feeling c.r.a.ppy and rejected. As an unabashed breaker of Jewish law, I was no longer permitted to take part in the serious, legally binding tasks at the Orthodox weddings of my friends. Not permitted to serve as a witness and sign the ketubbah ketubbah, the marriage contract. Even at close friends" weddings, at which I would certainly have been given this duty, I was instead given nominal tasks designed to make me feel included but which actually served to remind me that I was a persona non grata, relegated to the Talmud"s club of second-cla.s.s losers: children, slaves, hermaphrodites, the mentally deranged, and women.
But in my community a sin graver even than religious treachery was professional inadequacy. My yeshiva high school"s basketball team was named not the Tigers or the Hawks, but the MCATS. As in, the Medical College Admission Test. This was a joke, but not a joke. If you weren"t on a track to becoming some variety of lawyer, businessman, or doctor, if you weren"t en route to grad school or a post-graduation job at a bank, you were guilty of something worse than worshipping Baal (which is at least an ambitious pursuit). From the various weddings I"d attended in the past months, I already had a reasonable idea how the small talk would go. A chat with the father of a former cla.s.smate a few months earlier had provided a rough template: RICH BALD GUY: Now what is it you do? You write death notices? Now what is it you do? You write death notices?ME: Obituaries. Obituaries.RBG: Isn"t that the same thing? Isn"t that the same thing?ME: Obituaries are articles; death notices are lists of dead people. Obituaries are articles; death notices are lists of dead people.RBG: But the articles are about dead people. But the articles are about dead people.ME: Yeah. Yeah.RBG: Well, you seem like a nice guy, I"m sure something will come along. Well, you seem like a nice guy, I"m sure something will come along.ME: Thanks. Thanks.RBG: Can you make a living off writing death notices? Can you make a living off writing death notices?ME: Obituaries. Obituaries.RBG: Right. Right.ME: Well... Well...RBG: How are you going to afford to send your kids to Jewish schools? How are you going to afford to send your kids to Jewish schools?ME: I don"t know, maybe I won"t have kids. Or maybe I won"t have Jewish kids. I don"t know, maybe I won"t have kids. Or maybe I won"t have Jewish kids.
This suitably horrifying answer had done the trick-but I didn"t know how many more times I could put myself through the emotional strain. I considered walking around wordlessly as hors d"oeuvres were being served with one of those long-winded panhandler signs: h.e.l.lo, I am living in sin. I have forsaken the Torah and strayed far from the Orthodox community. My rabbis were right about Harvard. All I did was chase girls, do drugs, and write a carefully argued, typo-ridden satire of a senior thesis paper on Bugs Bunny. "This essay," I wrote, "will explore the iconography and signifiers of Bunnyness in the context of wartime cinema, that is, in the wartime theater as both a capitalist venue and aesthetic-ideological spectacle." These days I earn poverty wages as a freelance obituary writer. I know I need a haircut h.e.l.lo, I am living in sin. I have forsaken the Torah and strayed far from the Orthodox community. My rabbis were right about Harvard. All I did was chase girls, do drugs, and write a carefully argued, typo-ridden satire of a senior thesis paper on Bugs Bunny. "This essay," I wrote, "will explore the iconography and signifiers of Bunnyness in the context of wartime cinema, that is, in the wartime theater as both a capitalist venue and aesthetic-ideological spectacle." These days I earn poverty wages as a freelance obituary writer. I know I need a haircut.