Running the Books Read online

  … a legend in my own rhymes

  So niggaz whisper when they mention

  Machiavelli was my tutor

  The majority of inmates who read The Prince, however, returned slightly disappointed. The sixteenth-century text wasn’t as user-friendly as they’d hoped.

  “Urban literature” was another popular genre, but inmates were frustrated that our collection was practically nonexistent. They would complain that the library “didn’t have no good books.” Standing feet away from shelves that held tens of thousands of books, some inmates would inform me “you guys don’t have any books here.”

  Eventually I got wise and took advantage of this scarcity. I subtly encouraged the inmates’ black market for street books to find a home in the library. If inmates were going to find and read them anyway, they ought to come to the library to do it. As Fat Kat, the former gangster, noted, “We don’t want no competition out there. We gotta put them out of business.” I agreed. When it came to books in prison, we wanted to be the main show in town.

  A few times a week, Forest and I would pack a few boxes of paperbacks, newspapers, and magazines onto a pushcart and visit those prison units that weren’t permitted to visit the library. The men in the vast federal immigration wing—a giant prison unto itself—the units of pretrial detainees, the infirmary, and New Man, the unit where newly minted inmates were housed until they received their permanent classification.

  These visits gave us the chance to explore different corners of prison. We would show up at the heavy door of a unit, wave to the officers on duty, wait for an eternity before the door would decide to roll open, then we’d push into the unit and place the goods in the designated spot. The first few times we made deliveries, we arrived when the cells were open and the inmates were roaming around the dayroom.

  This was a mistake. There was a palpable air of desperation in these prison units, whose inmates were almost completely cut off from the world. By a force of animal hunger, something like electromagnetism, the inmates would swarm us from all corners. A few would simply start grabbing the items, right out of our hands. It was almost as though they couldn’t see us or were looking right through us. They saw only what they wanted and lunged for it. Within seconds we were surrounded on all sides by burly, desperate prison inmates. It put us on edge.

  The officers on duty regarded this as hilarious. From afar, it probably was. Without fail, our arrival in New Man was accompanied by a grin from the officer on duty. Before opening the door for us, he’d tap his partner, the international sign for, Hey get a load of this … They were never disappointed. Just as we were getting swarmed and gang-mugged the officers would stand at the side with big smiles. One comedian of an officer would begin flapping his arms and screeching like a seagull, caw caw caw. And exclaim loudly, “Look, it’s like Revere Beach, the seagulls are coming down, guys!” It was a nasty comment made the more nasty because it had some truth to it. Equally nasty was this officer’s suggestion that we walk in and dump the goods onto a table—without even trying to arrange them properly—like a zookeeper dumping feed into a trough.

  The word seagull quickly gained currency all over the joint. People would ask us if we “got seagulled today” or warn us, “now don’t get seagulled over there.”

  The short but noteworthy era of seagulling soon ended when we stumbled on the brilliant discovery that we could time our deliveries for those moments when the inmates were locked in. But I did learn an important lesson during one particularly dicey seagulling session. While the officer kept to the side, too busy enjoying the spectacle to help us, I took matters into my own hands. I shouted—something I didn’t even know I was capable of doing—and told the inmates in front of me to step away. Now. This was directed at one particularly aggressive inmate. The young con pulled back, crossed his arms, and laughed.

  “Shit,” he said. “Ain’t me you got to be worrying about. You got to watch the people behind you, man.”

  I turned around and saw a group of inmates standing behind me, big shit-eating grins on their faces.

  That summed up how I felt during those first weeks. Every time I felt secure that a situation had come into focus, a more important fact, a new grinning variable would tap my shoulder from behind.

  The up&up and low low

  Mars Bar just got to prison; her pregnancy test was positive. Shizz, also relatively new to prison, accuses her of having cheated on him with a certain someone.

  “Lady, you know who!” he says.

  After reminding Shizz that he’d been spending a lot of time with his own babymomma, Mars Bar denies his charge, insisting that he, Shizz, is the father.

  “Remember the night before you was arrested? Why do you think I TOLD you I was pregnant!”

  Yes, he remembers. It was a night that started at that Jamaican joint and ended at his crib. His mood changes completely. Suddenly he’s thrilled, planning their future, promising to be a better father than Mars Bar’s other babydaddy, from whom she kidnapped her oldest son.

  But then it turns out she’s not pregnant.

  Not long after the pregnancy episode has concluded, Mars Bar accuses Shizz of having HIV and not telling her. He becomes furious and demands to know where she heard this. She admits it’s a rumor.

  He promises to produce a document that proves he’s HIV-negative and to find the rat who is spreading the rumor. Again, they reconcile and reminisce about the times they used to get fucked up, make baked ziti and play video games together.

  Every day for nearly a month I tuned into this soap opera—all of which took place inside an ordinary reference book. Using volume 57 of the Federal Reporter, a bulky series of case law, as their ad hoc mailbox, Shizz and Mars Bar, two inmates who never came face-to-face inside the prison, maintained their stormy relationship. The correspondence ended one day, leaving me to wonder what ever became of their complicated romance.

  As I made my daily rounds, I discovered notes—sometimes pages long—wedged in books. In an art book, or a guide to women’s health, or a giant concordance of Lord Tennyson’s works. The denser, the better.

  “Ill leave you the next one in the boring books,” wrote one inmate to his lady pen pal. He was referring to the Encyclopedia Brittannica.

  As I learned from reading them, a prison letter is known as a kite. The word appeared everywhere. Stix, a nineteen-year-old first-time convict, always signed off his letters with a promise to “fly ya another kite next week.”

  I liked the connotation of the word. It was a tidy metaphor for a letter, especially from prison, a precious and precarious little creation, a physical object—unlike most forms of letters today—folded up and sent out into the world for another person to see from afar. Sometimes these letters were addressed to a specific person, sometimes they were left for whomever found them. Often, that person was me.

  I didn’t always intercept these missives. When a male inmate, who had just entered the prison, broke the news to his sister, an inmate in the tower, that their mother had just died, I obviously wasn’t going to remove the letter.

  “See lil’ sis,” he wrote, “you know you still got me. Don’t never forget.”

  But in general, I treated even the innocuous letters as contraband, as per my job description and Amato’s warning to prevent the library from becoming an “anything-goes zone.” I made regular searches through the books and shelves, scouring hot spots, keeping an eye out for inmates dropping notes. I checked disks and computer desktops for e-kites. I felt bad tampering with other people’s mail. One never knows what’s behind even a silly letter, what the context is. Removing letters seemed more of a misdeed than the placing of one.

  Secretly, I was grateful for the kites. They taught me a great deal about the language and culture of my workplace. Like actual kites, these notes came in all shapes and sizes. They were some of the best reading on the library shelves. Some were masterpieces of the genre, contenders for the Great American Kite. One guy tried to win back his erst
while girlfriend by writing in the voice of God. “Behold,” he wrote on page 5, “I give thee today the Blessing and the Curse.” The takeaway lesson from his letter: if you decide to speak in the name of the Almighty, don’t make so many spelling errors (“… for I shall reek vengince …”).

  Another inmate alternated between English and Spanish, sometimes in the same paragraph: in Spanish she was sweet and conciliatory, but in English she was a raging lunatic.

  But few could match the swashbuckling antics of a kite that dropped out of an economics textbook one dreary afternoon. This letter from one woman to another—unsigned, though all evidence suggested Ms. Brutish—may be the voice America has been waiting for: the diesel-fueled lesbian hybrid of Saul Bellow’s Augie March and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle:

  What’s good Baby girl?!

  Yo, your kite was right!! Chic, ya off the hook, and on some real shit, I’m feelin’ that! But anyhow, I’m never one that’s lost for words. A bitch like me can’t be stuck on chuck, the boss is lost, for nada. I’m a go-getter, and I go for what I want, and usually, I get what I want. Early!… so you need to be dicked down and licked down? Well, ma, I can’t help ya with the first one, but I’ve been told that my skills on the other is SWEEEEEET! Ya need ya estrogen levels balanced by a pro. Make a bitch forget reality, speak in ancient tongues and shit … But like I said, I aint tryin’ to step on no one’s toes cuz that’s not the type of bitch I am. But on the up&up and low low I gots to make a proper attempt though, cuz I’d kick myself in the ass, ass backwardz if I didn’t attempt to get the goodz, knowin’ that I wanted a piece of the pie … So, ya crown jewels make a nigga rob banks. Only if ya crown jewels shine ma, like I know they do. An Italian princess like you should never be anything less, always have ya jewels shine … and if you feel the need to be unfaithful, then it be what it be ma. Go for yourz … now thatz the shiiiiit! I like the answers as usual. You keep shit rockin’. Here’s some more questions girly girl.

  1. When is ya man getting out of jail?

  2. Have you ever had a 3some?

  3. Have you ever had a 4some?

  4. Would ya ever pose for “Girlz Gone Wild”?

  5. Can you skip the jail house panties, and just stick with the Georgia peach (straight up and down)?

  6. Have you ever seen a man cry?

  7. Does your office space have room for 2?

  8. Have you ever had cyber sex?

  9. Do you see yourself with a future? A different future?

  10. Can I get a Woop Woop?

  11. Can we be friends?

  12. Can we be m.t.j.f.? [more than just friends]

  13. “Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”… courtesy of Chris Tucker

  14. What’s ya fave movie?

  15. What’s ya fave flavor?

  16. You want to smoke an “L” with me?

  17. You want to smoke the judge who sent you here?

  Her Secret

  One night, Martha dropped by to say hello. A hooker hooked into just about everything, Martha was a notorious gossip who would hang out at the library counter, reading aloud from the newspaper’s police log and offering a running commentary on the catalog of recent crimes, the vast majority of which were committed by her relatives, close friends, neighbors, and an endless train of acquaintances named “Timmy” and “John John.”

  “I knew that ho was headed to jail! … Oh Christ, not Timmy! … Tony, you dumb fuck!”

  And on it went. It was hard not to like Martha. If she had been remotely trustworthy, I’d have hired her to work the library detail.

  That night, Martha leaned in across the counter.

  “Hey Arvin,” she said. “You wanna know something?” She was smiling like a crocodile.

  “Probably not,” I replied.

  “Your friend, Jessica,” she said, using Solitary’s Christian name, “she don’t come to your class no more ’cause she can’t look out that window.”

  “What a shame,” I said. “When I teach a class on window gazing, I’ll sign her right up.”

  “Yeah, funny. But she’s got her reasons.”

  “Oh really, why?”

  “She wants to look out the window cause her son’s in the yard. 3-3’s in the yard same time as your class. Poor girl goes to your class to catch a view of him. You get what I’m telling you?”

  I must have looked incredulous because Martha straightened her back and placed her hand over her heart, as though she were about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. This woman took her gossip as a solemn duty.

  “Honest to God,” she said, carefully enunciating her thick Boston ohwnest ta Gowad. “She ain’t seen the kid in like ten years or something, and then, like that, her baby boy shows, wearin’ blue.”

  The Man in the Lime-Beige Plaid Suit

  Jessica’s son wasn’t the only unexpected arrival. My good friend Yoni had been prison-bound for a long time—possibly his whole life. Like many a rambling man before him, Yoni’s adventures ended pitifully by the side of a lonesome Tennessee highway, police flashers ablaze in his rearview mirror. The officer took one look at his car, with its tinted windows and its Support the Troops bumper sticker (placed there in order to curry favor with cops). One look at Yoni’s hippie getup, at his roguish dimples. The car was searched—an unfortunate turn of events, as the satchel stashed in the trunk, the one embroidered with a zebra-skin map of Africa, contained enough homegrown to qualify for “intent to sell,” a class D felony.

  Did it matter that Yoni had committed no crime? That the bag, along with the intent to sell its contents, belonged to his new friend, the man sitting in the passenger seat, a fiftysomething ex–Black Panther/out-of-work teacher/subsistence farmer? Of course it didn’t matter. That was for a judge to decide. Cops have a different way of doing things. As the old Southern folksong says,

  The sheriff’ll grab ya and the boys will bring you down the next thing you know, son, you’re prison bound.

  After the arrest, the holding cell, and the arraignment, after bond was posted, after a sleepless summer facing possible jail time, up to a year, Yoni had finally gotten justice. It wasn’t simple. For the events of Yoni’s life tend to unfold on an Old Testament scale; his god is an Angry God. It took driving his jalopy to court directly through Hurricane Katrina, through sideways rain that gave the impression of operating underwater, but his record was finally wiped clean, his mug shot expunged. His name cleared. Again.

  Yoni’s name had been cleared more times than a table at Big Boy—and each time, ready for the next greasy feast. The man was a glutton for trouble. While living in the Mississippi Delta, where he taught high school English, he had tried his hand at the Southern hospitality thing. When a rifle-toting cowboy drifter, wandering next to the Mississippi River, asked him if there was “anything fun to do in town,” Yoni immediately invited the man home for a platonic dinner. The meal ended with the irate, sexually frustrated cowboy exposing himself to Yoni. During his own travels, Yoni saved money by sleeping on park benches instead of in hostels.

  And then there was the kind of trouble that hadn’t happened yet, the evil seed that might one day yield a poison fruit: writing on a housing application for graduate student housing, for example, that he had a problem with nocturnal enuresis, a.k.a. bedwetting. While this lie achieved his immediate objective, securing a rare single room, he still wonders if one day, down the road, this bedwetting document will somehow end up in the wrong hands. Perhaps a tenure committee, perhaps a congressional committee. When that day comes, he’ll need to clear his name once again.

  Yoni has lived much of his life under the shadow of false accusations. His slovenly and peculiar ways led a college administrator to interrogate him over the (completely false) charges that he was a heroin addict. On a separate occasion, Yoni was summoned to this same administrator’s office, this time accused of a hate crime—again, a terrible misunderstanding. True he’d yelled, in his booming voice, out of his window and into a crowded
courtyard of a college dorm, “Hey, Avi, you fucking Jew!” But it had been a joke, a Jewish thing, he explained to the administrator. Even at the biological level, Yoni stood falsely accused: he once tested positive, falsely, for syphilis.

  But Yoni was the master of underdog brio. As an overweight Little Leaguer, his record of striking out over twenty times in a row did not prevent him from stepping up to the plate and, like Babe Ruth, grandly pointing to the outfield fence, calling his imminent home run. Years later, after reading an article on Donald Trump in an in-flight magazine, he decided to heed the great man’s advice and always wear a tie in professional settings. Yoni was a stalwart optimist.

  His great moment would arrive on Jeopardy, in front of nine million viewers. After two rounds the studio audience hadn’t exactly turned on him, but they’d undoubtedly written him off. Yoni’s goof-ball antics—blowing a lewd kiss and winking into the camera during his introduction, his funny voices, his fist-pumping enthusiasm, his lime-beige plaid sportcoat, Byronic shirt collar, his sagging, belt-less trousers, his scruffiness—had announced that he was performing some sort of personal sideshow. Nobody, and certainly not his mother sitting in the studio audience, knew what to say when the bantering segment of the show became a nationally televised session of Freudian analysis:

  ALEX TREBEK: It says here that in college you ran naked around Harvard Yard, wearing only a giant orange wig, during the annual Primal Scream event. And that your mother was there to watch?

  YONI: My mother was a supportive mother. As was her friend. And my brother. And my grandmother.

  TREBEK: All of these people ran naked?

  YONI: No, they watched.

  TREBEK: What about your grandma?

  YONI: She was intrigued from the sidelines. Didn’t realize how many shapes and sizes …

  TREBEK: Right, right, okay …

  Before the largest audience of his life, Yoni had succeeded at playing the fool. As if to give weight to this role, he’d played two uneven rounds, entering Final Jeopardy in last place, $11,900 behind his opponents. Nobody in the studio audience believed that this lightweight, this clown in the loud sportcoat, had the mettle. But after the Final Jeopardy think-music had ended and the lights went up, it was Yoni alone who had identified the person on the Warren Commission who later faced assassins. Thanks to President Gerald Ford and his would-be assassins, Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, Yoni was on national television, $25,799 richer, dancing a ludicrous jig as his preppy co-contestants stood by in shock. He’d proved his point: the fool prevails.