Running the Books Page 4

  I knew the rules: on the carousel of testosterone, there are winners and losers. I had lost. Only the well-adapted survive. I got exactly what I deserved. Knowing this, however, did not make me feel better.

  I looked up. Dancing expressionlessly was Rabbi Blumenthal. I was seized by the suspicion that it was he who had popped me, in fulfillment of the rabbinic dictum for dealing with the Bad Son, “you strike him in the teeth …” For a moment, I entertained the thought of jumping up and taking him out. Then I realized this was an awful idea—one of my worst. Then I realized he’d have been right to punch me.

  I had to admit that my head-pounding could have a pedagogic function. In the past it had.

  On a school trip to Toronto senior year of high school we had played laser tag (what else does one do in Toronto?). The major rule of laser tag at the laser arena/funzone place in Toronto was no running. We were told again and again. “Absolutely no running.” When I heard this, I guffawed to myself: No way I’m following that rule. Toronto had been godawful and now, given a chance to let off some steam, I was amped, raring to do battle, eager to get into the field, scout out a perch or two and commence the laser carnage. I wanted nothing short of the fucking lasertag battle of Midway.

  I was all over the place, blasting people right and left. I was runnin’ and gunnin’ like a disgruntled Texan. Late in the game, when only a few fighters remained, I scoped out a nice high spot, called for cover, got it, and, of course, ran to get there. At that point, I’d completely forgotten that there was even a rule against running.

  I saw the danger only once it was too late. The guy running directly at me was moving quickly and unrelentingly forward. I remember my last thought, right before we collided head-on, at full speed: Jesus Christ, who’s that crazy asshole running right at me? As I fell back, my glasses busted on my head, my nose exploded in blood, and my sensor unit buzzing after sustaining a direct shot from an opponent, I looked up and saw my own beat-up face staring back at me. In my thirst for laser dominance I’d disregarded the tenets of basic optics. I’d run headlong into a mirrored wall. Turned out the crazy asshole running at me was me.

  But this is how I learn: by stubbornly doing things my own way until I run face-first into a wall. Frankly, I’m grateful for that wall.

  Back in the bathroom at the wedding I looked at my face in the mirror. There wasn’t that much blood and I soaked up what there was of it. My head ached but I felt lucid for the first time in a long while, possibly years, and was struck by an urge to make decisions about my life.

  Got to get a haircut. Go to the dentist. Get in shape. Get more organized. Pay my taxes on time. Figure out my life. Stop being a damn beatnik. Get my shit together. Perhaps let Easy Go go.

  Looking at myself in the mirror, an old, favorite prayer returned to me. It is said when the Messiah arrives or when you see a long-lost friend:

  Blessed are you God, who revives the dead.

  The punch to the face, which may or may not have been delivered by the rabbi, had knocked me off of the fence. I lingered for a moment in this marvelous clarity of mind. Clear about what I knew and did not know.

  Rabbi Blumenthal had educated me well. He had taught me to take the prophets seriously. Yet, earlier at the wedding he’d said, “You should be involved in the Jewish community.” Why, he’d argued, waste time working in a prison? Is this any place for a good Jewish boy?

  But, as he knew, the prophets had spent time among outcasts and criminals. Many were criminals—and not just for their revolutionary ideas. Isaiah, like many brilliant preachers, had a weakness for indecent exposure. Elisha committed first-degree murder when someone made fun of his hair. Abraham did time; Joseph did time; Jeremiah did time; Daniel did time. So did Samson. Jacob was a con man who spent most of his life on the lam. Both Moses and Elijah were fugitives for committing murder. And so was David, until he returned with a loyal gang of outlaws. The prophet Hosea had a notorious predilection for hookers. Nearly every single one of the prophets was either a criminal or had spent time among criminals. Clearly the prophets themselves believed there was something to learn in prison, even if Rabbi Blumenthal did not.

  I decided to apply for the job as a prison librarian. The idea of it had been with me for weeks. Now was the moment to admit it was something I wanted, perhaps needed, to do. I wasn’t sure why, exactly. It probably had something to do with my education. Harvard was a lovely assisted-living facility from which I’d emerged, like my classmates, stupider and more confident. I still had a lot to learn. When I imagined grad school, though, all I could see was long, passionately argued footnotes on the iconography of Bugs Bunny’s carrot—I wasn’t going to be of any use to a university, and vice versa. And so the choice crystallized in my mind: It was either law school or prison. The decision was clear.

  I ran back out into the wedding celebration and found Yoni. Bathed in sweat, wearing some type of tribal headdress, his tux in tatters, he was bellowing a rowdy Hebrew fight song that called for the Messiah to immediately restore the Great Temple in Jerusalem on the site of the Temple Mount.

  “I think I’m going to apply for that job,” I said.

  “What?” he shouted. The music was blaring.

  “I think I’m going to prison,” I shouted into his ear.

  He flashed a big grin.

  “Nice,” he shouted back. “And honestly, dude? It’d probably do you some good.”

  The Hair Test

  “While I don’t have a degree in library science,” I reasoned in a cover letter, “I possess both the skills and motivation to be a successful prison librarian.” This was résumé talk. The truth: I had never stepped foot in a prison nor worked as a librarian. Until I’d come across the listing, I hadn’t even known such a job existed.

  I was interviewed by three people. The director of the prison’s Education Department—which sounded ominous to me—the union boss, and the head of personnel.

  The blunt questions came from the union boss, Charlie (pronounced the Boston way, Chahlie).

  “Where’d you grow up?” he asked.

  “A bit in Cleveland,” I said, “but mostly in Boston.”

  “Oh yeah, where?”

  “Cambridge.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Cambridge,” he said, “is not Boston.”

  Coming from a man raised in the Irish projects of Dorchester, a proud union man, this comment had a particular resonance: he was calling me out as a child of Cambridge privilege who either didn’t know the difference between an Ivy League enclave and the big working-class city or, worse, was posing as a city kid.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but we have excellent views of Boston from our condos.”

  Charlie seemed to like this answer.

  “You know,” he said. “We don’t like newspaper reporters, especially those know-it-alls at the Globe. Why should we let you in?”

  He said this with a smile. But he was serious. And it was a good question. I danced around it and mentioned that, having recently quit reporting on living people, I didn’t pose too much of a threat.

  After Charlie finished his routine, the head of the Education Department presented me with some scenarios and asked how I would deal with each one. The answer was the same each time: I’d defer to the security personnel.

  “We need team players here,” she said.

  “I could do that,” I replied, realizing immediately that my answer subtly revealed a deeper truth, a psychological insight that, until that point, I myself had only faintly acknowledged: I’m not much of a team player.

  Finally, we reached the last question. Is there anything else you’d like us to know about you?

  I tried not to allow my eyes to widen before this delicious feast of a question. There were so many possibilities. Did they want to know that I read Cat Fancy magazine? That my feet are flat and duck-like? That my initials are A.S.S.? Were they angling at something specific? Were they asking if I’m gay? A Zionist? I decided not to chance a reply. Instead muster
ed up a “No, I think that just about covered everything.”

  This seemed to do the trick. I was told the position—which included working as a librarian and a creative writing teacher—was mine. That is, on condition my background check was clean and that I passed a drug test.

  “No problem,” I said.

  And I had thought it wasn’t. But, as it turned out, I was wrong. I realized after the interview that my pre-wedding smoke with Yoni—roughly two months earlier—would most certainly pose a problem.

  What would happen if I failed the drug test? This wasn’t a typical employer. It was, after all, the Sheriff’s Department. The guy who’d sold Yoni the marijuana might be sitting in a cell in this very prison. I had a bad feeling about this.

  When the head of personnel called to discuss benefits and payment plans she asked me point blank, “Are you going to pass this test?”

  “Yes,” I replied reflexively, “of course.”

  How did she know to ask, I wondered. Was there something about me? The nefarious moptop? Did she really want to discuss this issue openly? Blissfully ignorant of the prison’s internal investigative division, and their habit of tapping phone conversations, I decided to level with her, thinking perhaps she’d give me a break.

  “Well,” I said, “I did … smoke. Once. I mean most recently, a while ago though—at a party. I mean, it was a wedding, actually. And it was obviously before the wedding. The party at the wedding, I mean.” I winced. “But that shouldn’t be a problem, right?”

  Dead silence.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “It’s a heya tess,” she said finally.

  On the phone, and thrown off balance, I was having trouble with the Boston brogue.

  “A what?” I asked.

  I heard her sigh. She didn’t want to discuss this further.

  “Heya tess,” she said and quickly changed the subject to dental plan options.

  That night I searched online for information on drug screening. Within two clicks, I understood that the woman from personnel had been trying to tip me off: I was facing a hair test. I delved into the minutiae of this screening method. In addition to being alarmingly accurate, it also covered a longer period of time than the imprecise, tamper-prone urinalysis. Apparently hair, even more than urine, is articulate of its master’s misdeeds.

  This didn’t surprise me. I’d always held quiet beliefs about hair, vague but persistent suspicions of a treacherous, even demonic, aspect, the more sinister for its allure. It grows beautifully even though it’s dead. That’s creepy. I’d always sensed it wasn’t to be trusted.

  Now was the time to act. The incriminating data was hidden at a certain point in every strand of hair on my head. I had to locate, then remove, evidence—a wonderful start to a job at the Sheriff’s Department. There was only one surefire way to accomplish this: to shave my head completely. But I’d been taught etiquette, and it was bad manners to arrive at a hair test with no hair. I’d have to take a risk, tell Manny the barber to go as short as possible, and hope the evidence ended up on the floor of his shop.

  I emerged from the barber’s—my exposed scalp cool to the breeze—with a chill of doom. Even if I passed the test, I was marked as guilty. The moment my new bosses saw my drastic haircut on the day of the hair test, the sequence of events would be plainly obvious. I was a criminal applying for a job in a prison. I might as well walk into the joint festooned in oversized dollar-sign pendants, wearing an I ♥ Drugs T-shirt. I felt so exposed I actually wore a baseball cap on the way to the prison, as though my guilt were apparent to all. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was making a misstep in pursuing this. Maybe the woman from personnel had been trying to tell me to quietly drop out.

  The thought of turning and fleeing was unavoidable as I neared the front entrance. But before I could weigh this option, I was already walking fatefully into the lobby. Within a second, an officer told me to remove my cap. That was the rule, apparently. No headgear in prison. There was no anonymity, no hiding here.

  I sat down on a bench, cap in hand—a gesture that felt comfortingly Victorian—waiting for my potential boss, poised to catch her reaction to my radical new hairdo. Would she smile? What type of smile would it be? Would it be better or worse if she said nothing? This was no way to begin a new job.

  But the boss took her time. I had a moment to absorb the surroundings. The lobby was an accumulation of wide gray pillars, like somber votives, which alerted you to the immense weight bearing down from above, the concrete and steel tower balancing overhead. This was a very heavy building. From the moment you entered, you were being watched. You were on record and were meant to know this. You were dimly aware of a control room, which flickered and buzzed behind heavily tinted windows next to the door to the prison—or was it the door to the door of the prison?—located at the far end of the lobby. The officer guarding this door, identified by his name-patch as Grimes, fidgeted with his pistol holster and toyed with the metal detector. He kept a well-worn book of Zen Buddhist philosophy at his post.

  It was the three o’clock shift change. Large groups of officers came and went, ribbing each other loudly, dodging children who were running around, doing silly dances, playing hide and seek, while their mothers or grandmothers sat by nervously. The children seemed intimately acquainted with the prison lobby, well-versed in the fun-making dimensions built into the wide pillars. This was, I gathered, where they waited to see daddy or mommy.

  A few officers stood nearby, next to a No Fumar sign by the front steps, puffing cigarettes and ogling women. Speaking in semi-code, they gossiped about union matters.

  “Hey, ya hear Fitzy’s taking some heat?”

  “Really? For …”

  “Yup, that.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yah, no shit is right …”

  Both laughed.

  An officer approached me with a message. The boss was skipping our meeting. He told me to follow him. What was going on? Had my boss seen my crew cut on a closed-circuit security TV and decided I was a criminal? And if so, where was I being led? I followed the officer, though not without trepidation, into a back hallway. He directed me to some guy named O’Shea, who would administer the hair test. Nothing was wrong—the boss was merely overbooked. I would be spared the awkward encounter.

  The hall led to the clubhouse of Local 419, the officers’ union. It had vending machines, an empty lounge with a giant sheriff’s badge painted on the wall, and a TV that beamed in a daytime talk-show in which a studio audience scrutinized a messy family drama.

  Further on were unmarked offices, men’s and women’s locker rooms. A transistor radio blasted classic rock from an unoccupied weight room. A glass trophy case displayed artifacts and photos from the old prison at Deer Island: a dusty set of nineteenth-century-era handcuffs, shackles—both of which called to mind Harry Houdini—an old-fashioned mug shot number sign, a billy-club and tear gas canister from the neolithic age. Nearby, plaques honored officers from the prison who were serving in the wars. And next to that, a handwritten sign: Inmates do only as much as you let them.

  I waited a few minutes in front of O’Shea’s office, cap in hand. There was no turning back now. Finally, the door swung open and a large man with a buzz cut and a mischievous smirk emerged. He winked at me and said “g’ luck” as he walked by. He’d just taken the hair test himself.

  The office was cramped, though there was nothing in it. O’Shea was a short, aggrieved man. After a quick how y’doin’, he took a few snips of my hair, and sealed it in an envelope. It was an oddly intimate gesture, like he was taking a lock of my hair as a romantic keepsake. Perhaps that was why the conversation turned to sports. We reviewed the Red Sox’s prospects. O’Shea was openly disdainful of my optimism.

  “I don’t care what they did last year,” he told me, referring to the Sox World Series title. “They’re still the Red Sox and they’ll always fold in the clutch. Any asshole can get lucky once in a while.”

 
Sitting in that office, anxious and radically shorn, I readily agreed. I myself was just such an asshole, hoping to get lucky this once.

  Two weeks of low-grade dread passed. Finally I got a phone call from personnel. I was to begin ASAP, she said. There was no more talk about the hair test, no congratulations, you passed the drug screening! It was official. I was now on the side of angels. The Po-Po. The Fuzz. The Heat. The Big Blue Machine.

  The transformation was immediate. Over the weekend, I couldn’t help spinning around quickly, scowling into a mirror and saying, “I’m with Johnny Law.” Or simply, “Whada you lookin’ at?” This act was first performed for the benefit of my girlfriend, Kayla. But pretty soon I was doing it all alone, for the benefit of no one.

  “I heard that,” Kayla shouted from the next room, during one of these supposedly private performances. “You better not freak out on me. I know you.”

  The next Monday I headed off to the prison—or to work, I wasn’t sure how I’d refer to it—with a brand new sheriff’s badge in my pocket. The photo on it had been taken by O’Shea the day of the hair test, when I hadn’t known the outcome, when I was feeling exposed, still feeling as though I were sitting for a mug shot. In the photo, I am captured with the buzz cut and a crooked, bewildered grin. This photo—which I was required to wear at all times—was to be my official image in prison.

  The Tour

  In Boston, justice is a mom-and-pop shop. Bob throws you into the joint, Patti takes it from there. Patti, director of the prison’s Education Department, was my supervisor. She is married to Boston’s number-two cop, a perennial candidate for the police commissioner job. Patti agreed with the general perception that Bob was “too rough around the edges, too much of a street cop, not enough of a politician.” She said this with some resignation but mostly with pride.

  Patti herself was much smoother. She was friendly, smartly dressed, bobbed and highlighted, clearly the hip lady in her weekly fifty-plus knitting group in Dorchester. On my first day, I was an observer. Patti was my tour guide. After drifting through the classrooms, we entered the library. We immediately ran into an inmate, or rather he nearly ran into us. He emerged from the back room, walking briskly with a giant stack of papers tucked under his arm. Patti gave him a skeptical look.