“What? No, no,” said De Luca. “He’s coming with me.” And to Jason: “You, up. You’re going right back.”
And that was that. I wasn’t going to escalate things any further. I had made my point. (Law 47—Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop.) It was important to let the officer save face. He was, after all, the officer; in prison, it was his ass on the line.
As soon as De Luca had escorted Jason out, the other inmates commended me. “You go, Artie!,” “You tell that mutherfucka!” “We got yo back, bro”—all of which made me cringe. Nevertheless, it was respect, political capital that I could store away. And perhaps De Luca, the Angry Seven, and the inmates would think twice about crossing the Sheriff Librarian.
The Life-Skills Instructor’s View of the De Luca Incident
Yoni was getting rave reviews as a teacher in the 1-2-1 unit. The irony of his role as a “life-skills” instructor was of no consequence. When it came to teaching classes on résumé writing, job interview skills, task management, organizational methods, or any subject for that matter, he was a natural. Yoni’s classroom charisma, his native smarts, and his abundant dedication to his students compensated for his own loose organizational methods. He quickly won over his reluctant students. The inmates appreciated his ten-minute improvised stand-up routine on the potential drawbacks of listing “[email protected],” as the contact information on your résumé, as one inmate had proposed.
Outside the classroom, he was having a bit more difficulty. The two women with whom Yoni shared an office were put off by his habit of clipping his fingernails at his desk, of listening to the Grateful Dead on his desk speakers, his tendency to conduct loud, badgering, interminably long, speaker-phone negotiations with box office managers, credit card people, bank tellers, and family members.
One of his officemates noted that Yoni seemed like a guy who might benefit from a severe beating. This was prison, after all; if you got out of line, someone would probably slap you down. For Yoni, it happened sooner rather than later.
He’d had a particularly egregious week. While on the phone with an important contact, Yoni had struggled to find a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. Rifling his desk, he’d muttered, “Fuck me.” The contact had been offended and reported him.
But that was just the appetizer. Trying to make friendly conversation with his officemates, he’d asked one of the women who she thought was the sexiest inmate in the 1-2-1 unit. She didn’t appreciate the question and reported him, too.
But the low moment came when Yoni used the word nigger in his classroom. He was teaching a class on the economics of crime, trying to persuade the students that crime literally didn’t pay. To make this point he read aloud from the chapter in Freakonomics that explains why so many crack dealers live at home with their mothers. The book quotes a black crack dealer who uses the word nigger. Yoni simply read these passages in what was a clear educational context. But when a disgruntled inmate complained that he hadn’t signed up for a class in order to be called a nigger by some white guy, Yoni, like so many times before, realized he was in trouble.
No prison administrator would come to his defense. “You don’t ever use that word in prison,” he was told, “educational context or not.” The director of the Offender Re-entry Program, the NGO who had hired him, was furious: he had inadvertently compromised the entire outfit.
Yoni was formally reprimanded, forced to sign an official document of censure that listed his offenses—from cursing on the phone, to the inappropriate question, to his use of the word nigger. The document would be placed in his employment file for eternity. It was that kind of week.
The punishment served its purpose. Yoni reined in his behavior, and his officemates were willing to forgive and forget. Things were just beginning to quiet down, and his coworkers and students were starting to like him and to appreciate him as a lovable eccentric. Then the garlic incident happened.
Yoni had recently bought a gallon tub of peeled garlic. This was done to save money. But of course he hadn’t succeeded in eating it all, and the garlic had begun to turn. Ever eager to get his money’s worth, Yoni fried the remaining garlic cloves in oil. Once sufficiently browned, he poured them into a bowl, sat down, and gobbled up every last one. Upwards of thirty cloves of garlic. That was his dinner, a pound or so of fried not-quite-fresh garlic, and nothing else.
He didn’t die in his sleep. But he came close. On his way out to work the next morning, after a long, turbulent night, he emailed me a one-line update, “i smell quite putrid. interesting.”
Perhaps to him, a future anthropologist, it was. To the rest of humanity, however, it was insufferable. Roughly twelve hours after his garlic feast, Yoni showed up to work at prison, where the windows are sealed shut, the air recycled. He walked into the prison lobby, the sallyport, up a few halls, through the 1-2-1 prison unit, into his small, shared office. Everything seemed fine.
Everything was not fine. Yoni did not appreciate the extent of the problem. The stench pumped out from every pore, follicle, and orifice of his body, and hovered around him in a hazy poisonous aura. Nor had the smell diminished over the hours. On the contrary. Yoni was a walking radiator of toxicity, filling every space he entered with a wretched odor.
He walked into his office, sat at his desk, smiled, said good morning to his officemate, Peggy. She just looked at him in disbelief, covered her nose with her hand.
“Oh. My. God,” she said. “Are you kidding me?”
Less than a month after he’d been formally reprimanded, he was called back into his boss’s office. He was certain this was it. Holding her nose, a look of deep despair on her face, his boss said, “Yoni, I don’t know how to have this conversation,” and then quickly added, “You know what, we aren’t even going to have this conversation.” He assured her that this was really it. He was finally going to get his act together.
That afternoon, Yoni, with his toxic reek, thankfully did not make his usual visit to the library to say hello. But we spoke over the phone. He told me the pitiful tale of his day. The most surprising part, for me, was the moral of the story.
“The garlic was a really bad move,” he admitted, “but you were much stupider, and fuckin’ crazy, for getting into a beef with De Luca.”
I argued the point with him. But it was academic. A man who’s recently consumed thirty fried garlic cloves has crossed over into some mystical realm few have entered and has achieved some kind of Zen-like understanding of human folly. You cannot challenge the master’s authority. When he criticizes your behavior, you heed his words.
And he was right. I’d jeopardized my relationship with De Luca, who was after all a necessary ally. With a day’s introspection, and Yoni’s metaphysical guidance, I was able to admit that I not only behaved rashly, but out of weakness. And that De Luca, despite his contentious “style,” and regardless of his association with the seedy likes of the Angry Seven, was really after all a decent guy who liked to sing jingles. I had to smooth things over with him. But before I had a chance, De Luca approached me.
I was standing behind the counter. No one else was around. De Luca seemed very uncomfortable, almost as though forced to talk to me. He addressed me by name—having clearly asked someone what to call me—and apologized for removing one of my students and for “stepping on your toes.” He explained that he had to take action against the inmate. I agreed in principle, apologized for my rude comment, and reiterated that we needed to work together to avoid misunderstandings. It was all very statesmanlike.
For the next few days I maintained my Sheriff Librarian persona, enforcing the rules with gusto, banishing inmates, speaking with authority to officers, and basically taking no shit from anybody, Amato-style. Fat Kat pulled me aside and gave me some advice.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said with a smile. “And I think it’s a good idea. But watch yourself. And don’t ever, never, do what you did with De Luca again, or you’re asking for some
serious trouble. And De Luca’s okay, you know? Don’t go crazy here.”
I shrugged.
“Listen,” said Fat Kat, “you might think you’re a badass. You are not a badass, my friend. You’re, at best, a punk. So why don’t you just stick to being a librarian?”
De Luca and the inmates in the library probably thought of me as an overeducated young brat who didn’t know the first thing about the real world of tough-guy prison combat. And they were completely right. But if they feared me a tiny bit or thought I might be a loose cannon, that was fine with me. I now knew the 48 Laws of Power.
“To quote Dirty Harry,” I replied, “I work for the city.”
“To quote Dirty Harry? Okay, Avi,” Kat said, walking away, laughing, “I’ll remember that.”
Jessica Returns
After the public embarrassment of my tainted Katrina drive and of my scene with De Luca, I decided to keep a low profile. I turned to a quieter matter: Jessica. I’d been mulling over her situation for weeks, wondering what it was Jessica was really after. If she wanted to connect with her son, she could. She knew where he lived. She could send him a note. Perhaps she had. She may have left him a letter, a kite, in the library books, just like everyone else. But my guess was she hadn’t and that her need to look out the window came in lieu of actually contacting him.
But what exactly was she doing in that window? Did she simply want to see what he looked like after all these years? Was she tormenting herself? Was she looking for some clue, some insight, some way to understand him? Everything about this scenario, this type of longing, was entirely beyond the scope of my life experience. It was inscrutable to me.
One thing was certain. When I saw her that first day, squinting in the sun, sitting with her perfect posture, hands folded in her lap, she seemed almost hypnotized by whatever it was she saw through the window. She was oblivious to the other people in the room. I’d had to rouse her. I’d been curt with her. I’d felt immediately bad for my impatience, and doubly so for wielding my authority crudely over someone older than I. But I think my regret originated from a less palpable source, from a sense that something else, something imperceptible to me, was happening. Even before I knew the truth, that I was interrupting her in some way.
But this remained a vague feeling. Even by the standards of this class, I barely knew her. She’d spoken maybe twice in the class, and almost always refused to hand in her writings. When she did, she rarely offered up more than a few stingy lines and was totalitarian in self-censorship. I remember the day I first got arrested, she once wrote for an essay assignment. It was cold and cloudy. I don’t remember much else. She didn’t bother including a fourth sentence in this essay (which was more of a haiku).
But still, I knew her silences were not for want of perception. This after all was the woman who’d examined Flannery O’Connor’s photo and, even before reading a word, clairvoyantly summarized O’Connor’s sensibility: She ain’t too pretty. I trust her. The little I knew of Jessica indicated that she had a sharp eye and that she trusted her vision. Perhaps that’s why I wanted to know what she saw through that window. I thought about this often. So often, in fact, I had to wonder further: Why did I care so much?
I decided to pay her a visit in the Tower. That was one advantage of teaching in prison. The inmate students could run but they couldn’t hide. It was impossible to play hookie in the joint. But as I stood in the elevator, I still wasn’t sure why I was pursuing this.
Even as the door to the 1-11-2 unit rolled open, I still didn’t know what I was planning to say. Before I could think about it, dozens of eyes turned my way. The women inmates, suffering from annihilating boredom, began to approach me. In seconds I was surrounded. My first reaction was, Cool, I’m a rock star. My second reaction was, Get me out of here. Immediately. I found myself in yet another seagulling situation. This time, it wasn’t reading material inmates wanted, but attention.
Somebody leapt out of the crowd—Short.
“Whaddup Harvey!” she said.
Another inmate, whom I recognized only by face, shouted toward me. “Hey library guy,” she said, waving a women’s magazine, “I’m learning how to be Forty & Fabulous!” She beamed a big, semi-toothless grin. Short suddenly turned serious and began working crowd control. She jostled her fellow inmates and said, “Let the man through, let the man through.” She escorted me. The world’s smallest bodyguard. Finally, I managed to slip through the crowd.
I found Jessica playing checkers. I thanked Short for her services and asked her for privacy. Jessica was not happy to see me. I cut straight to the point, even though I still wasn’t sure what my point was.
“I want you to rejoin my class,” I said.
She shrugged.
“I know why you left.”
She gave me a doubtful look.
“You wanted to see your son, right?” I said.
Again, she shrugged. Inmates rarely answered pointed questions, never sure if they were digging a grave for themselves or someone else.
“Okay, listen, I don’t care if your son is out there or who he is or anything. But I’m willing to make a deal with you. You can sit by the window, but you can’t stare out the whole class. You need to look at me as much as you look outside, you need to do it quietly and not draw attention to yourself. And you need to participate in class. That means speaking up and putting real effort into your assignments. And do me a favor,” I said, with a sigh, “don’t tell anyone, no one, or I’m going to get every single person asking me to make deals. Got it?”
She smiled faintly. We had a deal.
The Green Light
Written words continued to wash up in the library. Each wave of inmates that crashed through brought forth more prison literary detritus.
At the end of a period the library would be littered with notes and shards of notes. I would walk around like a shell collector on a beach, gathering up legal documents, love letters, queries, manifestos, grievances, marginalia, scribbled receipts, remnants of illicit transactions, wrap dates, rap sheets, rap lyrics, business plans, country songs, handmade advertisements for “entertainment” businesses, journal entries, betting lines, greeting cards, prayers, recipes, incantations, and lists. Many lists. The found poetry of the everyday:
T-shirts
socks
the divorce
US v. Ferguson
M&Ms
In their brevity, some of these notes possessed a wise cryptic quality, like a message from an oracle. A single suggestive word or phrase: No! or Please or It was his heart. One that gave me pause: Take Heed.
And plenty of new kites—aborted, shredded, completed. The inmate who described the terror of a recurring dream, a reliving of an actual trauma, in which he is caught in a house fire—only to wake up, in a fright, and realize, “Thank God, I’m only in prison.” Sometimes a line or two would stay with me for days: “To Whom It May Concern: I am a 36 year old mother, grandmother and addict. The latter I’m not proud of.”
The kites also brought new insights. That in the world of inmate dating, for example, a full set of teeth was a prized enough possession that it was often mentioned along with other relevant measurements. And as always, the kite writers introduced me to new, dizzying patois: “I miss u so much remenicen about them summer days buggin out bottles of henn purp hayes burning in the dutch us and the goonies … I wanna get dipped out and make my rounds yo! Saly laided up 40’s bagged will actin up like he was contributing to me popin my tags …”
Among the staff, the library was synonymous with inmates leaving letters for each other. It was common for me to come across an officer in a far-flung corner of the prison—usually when I was making deliveries—who would smile upon learning that I was the prison’s librarian. I always knew exactly what he was about to say: “Read any good letters lately?” And I told him the truth. “Yes, always.”
The letters had clearly vexed hardline Don Amato. He had posted an enormous sign on the door leading out o
f the library. Like all of his signs, this was impossible to remove:
BE AWARE!
LIBRARY BOOKS
ARE NOT
MAILBOXES.
IF CAUGHT,
WE WILL TAKE AWAY
ALL
YOUR
LIBRARY PRIVILEGES.
Although Forest and I didn’t exactly allow letters, we didn’t hand out punishments either. And so this was another immovable Amato sign unheeded. As usual, our semi-relaxed attitude was perceived as a green light, and we were left with a steady flow of missives from the shadows.
CHAPTER 2
Books Are Not Mailboxes
I couldn’t help myself. I saw an opportunity for Jessica. She was a woman in her late thirties; her son was an eighteen-year-old kid, her only child, whom she had abandoned when he was almost two, and when she had been roughly his current age. Their lives had brought them to this place, to this self-enclosed world, visible to each other through the window.
And they were even nearer to each other than that. There was a portal through which they could almost touch. The library. It was a space they shared, though not at the same time. The place-ness of the library—that dynamic physical quality that made it somehow different than a pushcart of books wheeled to cells—created many unforeseen possibilities.
For a Sudanese woman awaiting deportation, for example, the library was a place for prayer. She’d find a quiet spot between the shelves, facing Mecca, pronounce the shahada, and prostrate herself before Allah. I asked her why she chose the library. There were two reasons. First, it was simply that time of day. And the second reason:
“This,” she said, indicating the library with a sweep of her hand, “book place, holy place. Good place for pray.”
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