Running the Books Read online

  I have to admit I had a soft spot for Brutish. Sure, she was brutish. She behaved like a frat boy, displayed little to no socialization. She’d slump in her chair, drop her hands deep into her prison-issue pants, probe the region, make a little adjustment, cop a little feel. She said whatever came to mind. The profane, the foolish, the casually defamatory. “Your shirt is old,” she’d say. Or “Your hair looks like shit.” (At least, that’s what she’d say to me.) Everything was shit—shit was her currency and her compass. Negative developments were bad shit; positive were good shit. Her winters were cold as ____, and her summers hot as ____. She picked her nose, passed gas, betrayed confidences. But she meant no harm, and it was a testament to her irrepressible good humor that somehow people forgave her for acting like a prize hog at the state fair.

  She and Poor were pals. They were an odd couple: Brutish, fat and carnal, Poor, a stick figure—though sturdy in her boniness—constantly grubbing, ever fearful. A permanent expression of doom in her eyes. Brutish abused Poor’s neediness, but also watched out for her. Or so it seemed.

  Solitary intrigued me. She sat at the far end—alone, of course—staring out the window. Later, after everything that happened, I still held on to that first image of her: sitting very upright, legs crossed, hands folded neatly on her lap, squinting in the sun, a frowning, preoccupied Betsy Ross–at–work air about her (if Betsy Ross had been a washed up ex-stripper). She was hard, proud, and prim. Didn’t utter a peep during our first meetings.

  The first words out of Solitary’s mouth, however, immediately endeared her to me. For the first two classes, I had brought in three short readings—poems by Philip Larkin and Amiri Baraka and a passage from Beloved by Toni Morrison. We read and discussed each in class. I did this mostly to get a sense of where these women were in terms of their reading skills and interests. The discussions were a bit forced but not entirely discouraging. Solitary, for her part, kept mum.

  Finally, I decided to up the ante. For homework—which, Poor corrected me, should not be called homework but “cellwork”—I asked them to read a short story by Flannery O’Connor.

  Solitary raised her hand.

  “Can we see a picture of her first?”

  “You won’t read it until you see a picture?” I said.

  “That’s right,” she replied, unsmiling.

  I flipped to the author’s photo in the Library of America edition of O’Connor’s collected works, and forked it over. Solitary examined the photo.

  “Okay,” she said, handing it back, “I’ll read it.”

  What in Flannery O’Connor’s countenance met with Solitary’s approval?

  “I dunno,” she said. “She looks kind of busted up, y’know? She ain’t too pretty. I trust her.”

  Details, Details

  On my first day flying solo in the library, I was met by five men in prison uniforms—one in a prison-issue fat-guy T-shirt—facing me, awaiting instructions. Only then, and with some dryness of mouth, did I realize what my job entailed: I was, first and foremost, a prison boss. My main task involved not books or teaching, but running a prison inmate work detail. I’d never been a boss to anyone, let alone a staff of convicted felons. During my initial interview I’d been informed of this responsibility, but hadn’t known what it meant.

  What it meant, at least at first, was that I stood helplessly behind the inmates, observing them do their jobs. The library detail was a group of six to eight inmates: four or five men, two or three women—of course, never remotely in the space at the same time. For this detail, inmates were compensated to the tune of two dollars a day, funds that were deposited directly into their personal inmate accounts (unless they owed money). Inmates could use this account to order items from the prison’s canteen, to pay medical co-payments and court fines, and, if they pleased, to disperse funds to parties outside of the prison. Outside parties could deposit money there for them. This was also the channel for illicit transactions.

  The library offered the cushiest detail. Working the prison library—with its stock of books, magazines, movies, and company—was an understandably more attractive option for the inmates than mopping the floor alone in their unit. To get the detail, one had to have some education, or at least relevant skills. In the words of the head classification officer—a man who, incidentally, spent his spare time authoring erotic prison thrillers—the prison library was “the elite detail.” Often an inmate came recommended by other staff members. Sometimes an inmate put in his own application.

  I generally worked a 1:30 to 9 p.m. shift; the day shift, which began at 7:30 a.m., went to Forest, a man who, unlike me, was actually trained as a librarian and had worked in the New York City Public Library system. The library’s daily schedule consisted of consecutive one- to one-and-a-half-hour periods organized by prison unit, from 3-1—i.e., the unit from the first floor of the 3-Building—to 4-3. (The units in the 1-Building, the Tower, were constructed to have more than one unit per floor, and went by numbers like 1-2-1, or 1-11-2.) During their designated period, up to thirty inmates were permitted into the library at once, which meant they had to get onto their unit’s list ahead of time. Sometimes the demand was too high and inmates would have to wait a day or two until it was their turn.

  At 3 p.m.—and, as Charlie ensured, not a second later—Forest and much of the civilian staff blew off for the day. Occasionally Forest and I would swap shifts, usually as the result of his charitable donation to my Friday night social life. But I was mostly in prison during the afternoon, evening, and night. Perhaps I felt more comfortable during the night shift—all of my later problems occurred, or at least originated, during my rare stints on the early shift.

  It was the night shift that brought me into daily contact with the women inmates. Every evening at 6:30 p.m. the men would be locked down in their cells, and the women would descend from the prison tower. For logistical reasons—namely their status as a minority population—the women were rarely permitted to emerge from their units and had very limited time away. And once out they were fired up. For an hour and a half each night, the library was engulfed by lively crowds of women inmates.

  The women were much more social and talkative than the men. You could document on graph paper the cultural difference between the sexes by the way in which each used the library space: women would sit together in two or three big circles, while the men retreated to private corners, with only a small group surrounding the counter. There was a thick sense of group among the women—they didn’t balkanize like the male prisoners. Same-sex dating was common and openly accepted. Interracial friendships were the norm. There was less gang activity, if any. Unlike the men, the women were all deeply involved in each other’s business. Gossip was the standard currency. Even in the first few sessions, I could discern the differences. I had to break up a few sex-acts in the corners of the book stacks, a few physical fights. The drama among the men did not play out openly like this, and certainly not in the space of the library.

  When I arrived on the scene there were two women working the library detail, a young pregnant woman and an older “madam” who went by the name Momma D. During my first week there, the pregnant woman tried to persuade me to hire one of her friends for the library detail. If I failed to do so, she threatened to name her child after me.

  “You don’t want people to start talking, do you?” she said, in what I believe was a joke.

  She also informed me, in praise of her friend, that “hoes make the best librarians.” Why? “Because they know how to be sweet but they will bust yo’ ass if you get out of line.” I agreed that this profile fit the qualifications of an effective librarian. Overhearing this conversation, Momma D, however, demurred. Madams are the best librarians, she argued. They know how to “run an operation.” It all sounded plausible to me.

  The men’s library detail was also already in place when I began working. Coolidge—veteran thief, flimflam man, and law clerk—was the self-appointed elder statesman of the group. He
helped me steer the ship at the beginning. Coolidge was a large-scale talker and four-time religious convert. He’d alternated between various streams of Christianity and Islam. He was an autodidact and prison diploma holder. The staff member who actually ran legal affairs, a certified lawyer, told me that Coolidge truly did maintain an impressive grasp of the law. Coolidge’s vocabulary was extensive, though he often stretched it beyond its limits. In conversations, he quickly turned bully. But I enjoyed talking to him—at first.

  His knowledge of the library and of the prison was indispensable. He knew more than my bosses about the actual, day-to-day operation of the library, and he took the time and interest to explain things to me. As a result, I was slightly under the sway of his paranoid delusions.

  “Everyone’s gonna want a piece of you in here,” he warned me. “Watch yourself.”

  When I asked him what he meant, he just said, “You’ll see.”

  In addition to his current sentence, Coolidge was facing another robbery charge that could tack on a few decades to his countless years as an adult in captivity. He was busy preparing a vigorous, full-scale legal defense.

  “It’s not a legal defense, Avi,” he said, as we waited for a legal brief to print. “It’s a legal offense. I will be taking umbrage, you understand? It’s gonna be like Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, except I’m gonna win.”

  I wasn’t sure what a Napoleon-complex would look like in a man over six feet tall, but was confident I would find out.

  Coolidge’s focus on his own legal matters kept him removed from the rest of the detail, an arrangement that seemed to suit everyone. He’d set up shop in the back room, the computer room. Other inmates were not to interfere with him back there. He was magnanimous, though, and held office hours to help inmates with their legal questions.

  Fat Kat was over ten years younger than Coolidge, but probably a generation or so removed. He was a child of the chaos of 1980s Boston, the first generation to run serious drugs and guns on the streets. He and his buddies had been rounded up in the nineties by the Feds, in a historic sweep of Boston’s street gangs (meanwhile, Irish Southie mob boss and FBI double agent, Whitey Bulger, continued running his rackets miraculously unabated). Many of Kat’s friends had done or were doing serious time. Some of them were beginning to hit the streets again. Kat had a couple of years left.

  Coolidge and Kat got tight and bonded over a shared passion for case law. Coolidge once told me that he viewed Kat as a son. It wasn’t clear to me that Kat saw it this way.

  Cherubic and clever in equal measure, Fat Kat never boasted, but also never bothered to conceal his large aspirations. He could tell you which boutique designed which NBA players’ plus-sized custom-tailored leather tailcoats. He could expound upon the logic of each cut, button, and stud, could make the structural argument for fusible interfacing, for the need of contrast stitching. Kat’s collection of couture sneakers went into the hundreds of pairs. He could talk shop about yachts. But, touched by the curse of self-awareness, his flourishes of connoisseurship always amounted to sorrow.

  “I grew up poor,” he told me, with sigh. “I need this stuff. At least that’s how it feels.”

  Fat Kat also said he wanted out of “the game.” How these wants and needs would sort themselves out in the future was unclear. If there was a way, he was certain he’d find it. The respect accorded him by both inmates and staff was real. His playfulness, his vegetarianism, his love of National Geographic, his fantasies of relocating to the woods of Quebec, all complicated the stereotype of the street thug.

  Elia was a quiet, lumbering man in his mid forties. Hair pulled back into a tiny ponytail, deep creases in his forehead. A shy smile, missing some crucial teeth. There was a faded bohemian smoothness to him. His demeanor was gentle, courtly. Born in Alabama and shuttled to Boston at a young age, he used to hang out with the musicians of Harvard Square, where he helped found Spare Change, the local street newspaper written and sold by homeless people. He wasn’t ashamed that he’d stayed in shelters, he told me. Or that he struggled with a drinking problem. He was trying to patch things up with his wife. He missed the way she dragged him to ballets and plays. A photo of their beautiful four-year-old daughter was always with him in his prison uniform.

  From prison disciplinary reports, I knew of his cycle of violent behavior. Although he was quiet and I never saw him in full throttle, his underlying rage didn’t surprise me. I could imagine how he’d react if his delicate pride were defiled, even in a small way. It would provoke a holy windstorm.

  Elia spoke in hushed tones and didn’t hang around the library’s counter, where the brash talking happened—the loud conversations, political debates, pimp verbal jousts, religious disputations, chess trash talk, and other varieties of bullshitting. Instead he retreated into the library stacks, where he quietly reshelved books.

  Pitts, on the other hand, loved to be in the fray. Somehow, even in his prison uniform, he was a sharp and flamboyant dresser. Handsome and pampered, Pitts was a high-roller. Raised in North Carolina, where he picked tobacco as a child, he was now a thirty-five-year-old bachelor and ex-Navy man. No kids: not unless he gets married, he said. This had been a vow taken by him and his siblings in an effort to end generations of familial disorder.

  Pitts’s closest drinking buddies were cops who liked to party hard. They had taught him, among other things, how to bullshit his way through a Breathalyzer test. When it came to vice, he tended toward the classics: women, gambling, and booze. And all-you-can-eat buffets. He almost cried once upon arriving at the airport in Vegas. He was just so happy to be there.

  “Honestly man,” he said, “my eyes got misty.”

  Pitts was on a quest to discover the true nature of the early Church. He read extensively on the Apocrypha, on the redaction of the Bible. He was in search for the authentic Christianity. Nothing he read satisfied him. A born salesman, Pitts rejected Judaism on the grounds that it “didn’t offer a good plan for Redemption.” When I had suggested that religion didn’t function like a cell phone company he replied, “Well maybe it should.”

  He’d sit at the library counter, plumbing the depths of some heavy theological tome, ignoring the mundane requests of our inmate library patrons. Invariably he’d slam the book shut, shake his head, and say something like, “Ain’t that a bitch.” He wasn’t getting the answers he needed.

  Pitts, who also worked as the prison’s barber (for black inmates), was witty and affectionate; we quickly became close and had many fascinating discussions on the nature of faith. He was wrestling with the question of getting baptized. He even spoke of studying in a seminary and asked for my advice, as a lapsed seminarian myself. His search for truth in the Bible eventually subsided, however, and he channeled his considerable passions into chess and trash talk.

  Thomas was round-headed, fair-minded, and impatient. A slight man with thick, circular spectacles, and a pinched, perpetually affronted countenance. He was a clean-shaven older Muslim convert, a stickler for etiquette who never failed to call an older inmate OG (old gangsta) and younger inmate Young G. Details of his biography were not divulged. Least of all, to me. He was stationed with Kat and Pitts behind the counter.

  John, high-spirited and garrulous, was the white guy. He would narrate freewheeling sagas of various concerts and sporting events attended and of the various drugs taken before, during, and after. When he spoke of the old days, back when he used to get “fuckin’ retarded,” his eyes bulged and twinkled and you got the sense he was, in the retelling of the story, able to rekindle just the tiniest bit of the old high. Addicts will smoke even the ashes. His stories were always upbeat, full of madcap near-death exploits and fights gloriously lost—and they always culminated in a request to undertake some personal favor for him. He tried to ally himself to me as the lone white guy. He was a quick study with the law and would often huddle with Coolidge.

  And so it went. The roles people played in the library matched their personalities/criminal vice
s: the operators and crime boss types ran the front desk, the con man ran his own small law firm, the gregarious drug fiend had no place and bounced around hustling whatever he could muster, the depressive homeless alcoholic found a private corner for his own reveries. The library, it seemed, was big enough to accommodate many types.

  And then there was me, standing with my arms crossed, taking it all in, wondering what my role would be.

  Diana had said that the library wasn’t complicated, that it was just a place for people to pass time with books. Perhaps that was true back in the old days, when the prison would simply deliver books to inmates in their cells, a practice that had lasted hundreds of years. But the library was different: it was a place, a dynamic social setting where groups gathered, where people were put into relation with others. A space an individual could physically explore on his own.

  This seemed important, even though I wasn’t sure yet what it meant. But I was about to get a hint.

  The Great Amato

  During lulls, Officer Gilmore would drift away from his hallway post and into the library for one of a few reasons: to read the sports papers, to give me security updates, to warn me that the big boss was coming, to use a dictionary or thesaurus—as aids to writing incident reports—or to chat. Often it was some combination of these. On a certain Tuesday afternoon, he was on a mission to recover a word. It had been driving him mad. After a minute with Roget’s Thesaurus, he found it: precarious! His sanity was restored.

  “I love that book,” he said, slipping it back onto the shelf. “Never fails.”

  Something in the hall caught his eye. He leaned back, tapped me on the shoulder, and nodded in that direction.

  “By the way,” he said. “There’s your man right there.”

  “That guy?”

  “That’s him, all right,” he said, “the famous Don Amato.”