Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

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 assaulting 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 passivity, 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, assaulting an officer—hey, shit happens, goes the refrain among those who catch a case, 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. Nobody 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 assured 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, Jackass 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.

  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 Jackass, 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 institutional 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 shit 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 fuckin’ 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 shit? You’ll take it with you. You’ll never 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 skyscraper. 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. Muffled.

  “Go into the park,” it said.

  He shoved me.

  “Don’t fuckin’ 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 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.

  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, shit!” he said, his Spanish accent coming on strong now. “I remember you, man. The 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 passed. 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 cocksucker didn’t stab you in the throat, right? He’s got a personal beef with you, he woulda. Believe 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 Classics 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 glasses 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.”

  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 hell of a mind fuck,” he told me. “You’re sitting there locked in this small fuckin’ cell, feeling like shit and about to go out of your mind, and you’re thinking: Christ, I built 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 to spend his days in prison. That deceptively simple question buried deep in The Jailer 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.

  Signifiers of Bunnyness

  Two years earlier, on a warm April afternoon, as the sun cast long shadows over the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as slim trees stretched out in their cottony pink and white delicates, I arrived at the Hyatt Hotel in Cambridge, Mass. A friend from high school was getting married—almost all of my former classmates 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—a title chosen, after weeks of deliberation, over Easy Come—whose first line went, “I sing of legs and the woman,” an homage to the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid: “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-cocked 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. These schemes left me more than spaced 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 crappy 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, 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-class 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 classmate a few months earlier had provided a rough template:

  RICH BALD GUY: Now what is it you do? You write death notices?

  ME: Obituaries.

  RBG: Isn’t that the same thing?

  ME: Obituaries are articles; death notices are lists of dead people.

  RBG: But the articles are about dead people.

  ME: Yeah.

  RBG: Well, you seem like a nice guy, I’m sure something will come along.

  ME: Thanks.

  RBG: Can you make a living off writing death notices?

  ME: Obituaries.

  RBG: Right.

  ME: Well …

  RBG: 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.

  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: Hello, 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.

  My college career had run exactly like the morality plays drilled into me at yeshiva, the kind of cautionary tale that illustrates why “secular college” was thoroughly treyf, or unkosher: Sure, a ben torah, a learned and pious Jewish kid, goes to college with the best of intentions, determined to pray three times a day, keep kosher, keep shabbes, the holidays, the fasts, learn Torah for x hours a day, wear his yarmulke and tzitzis with pride, stay away from girls—and especially, Heaven help us!, from shiksas—before long, though, even this ben torah will be drunk, on all fours in Dunster House on a Friday night, on Yom Kippur, unlatching the stately bra of a jun
ior from rural Pennsylvania, whom he met in a core class on Islam. As the rabbis say, the rest is commentary.

  It’s not as if there weren’t warnings. On a junior year trip to see my grandparents, I had overheard my beloved grandfather, a shtetl-born grocer, “whisper” to my grandmother, in his agreeable Midwestern accent, “You know, he’s reading these Shakespeare books. I’m worried he has no, you know, direction.”

  “You might be right,” said Grandma Edna, flipping through her Hadassah magazine.

  “And,” added Grandpa, “he’s dressing like some kind of beatnik.”

  There’d been earlier warnings. In the “Destination” section of my yeshiva high school yearbook, my fate was described in these terms: “Avi’s destination … is to be a shepherd in the Negev desert.” As a seventeen-year-old religious nut, this warmed my heart, vindicated my adolescent spiritual yearnings. Now, in hindsight, I could see the designation as it had been intended: that I was a bit of loner and romantic, destined neither for gainful employment nor a useful role in the twenty-first century.

  In a worrying recent development, my good friend, Yoni, who was even more aimless than I, expressed concern about my direction. As we prepared for the wedding with a pipe of medicinal pot, he asked if I was happy writing obituaries.

  I paused to consider this question. Yoni grew impatient.

  “I mean,” he said, “obviously that’s not really what you wanted to be doing now, right? I’m assuming that’s not what you hope to be doing with your life.”

  I expected this from the bald rich man—but Yoni? This was a guy who’d sent me hallucinogenic emails from Amsterdam, during his infamous layovers: I’ve lost track of time, he’d written in one. That’s what happens when you don’t sleep regularly and nab various half-hours on park benches. My body is weary. I need dignity. The Van Gogh museum was an unbelievable experience. There were some real lows but some real highs. I am writing down where I need to be otherwise I’ll get lost. I have to remind myself at times that I am not clinically insane. My flight is at 2:50. I’d say 95% chance I’m on it.