Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  When I passed him in the yard, I instinctively glanced up at the prison tower. From down there, the dark window where Jessica watched him during my class was more than just nondescript. It seemed inconsequential. Remote. There was some part of me that wanted to walk up to Chris and point out the window, explain its significance. To bring the thing into focus. Wouldn’t he want to know? Or perhaps he’d just be creeped out by the whole business. He was, after all, being watched by a near stranger. Two, as a matter of fact. I didn’t know him, and had only a staff-inmate relationship with Jessica. It wasn’t my place to meddle. And anyway I had other things on my mind, my own family drama.

  My mother was about to fly to California to visit her mother on her deathbed—for the fifth time. Or maybe it was the sixth. I’d lost count. When is she going to die already, I thought. It was a cruel thought. I wasn’t proud of it.

  I’d seen my grandmother, Fay, only a few times in my life. My formative encounter came when I was eight years old. In my grade-school presumptuousness, I’d asked if I could take full possession of her silver dollar collection. She barely regarded the question and flicked me away like a gnat. No. Then I asked if I could have just one silver dollar. Again, No. Then I asked her if I could hold one coin for just a moment. Finally, she turned to me and gave me her full attention.

  “When I die,” she said in her thick Polish Yiddish accent, eyes bulging and finger wagging, “you can dance on my grave with them!”

  It took me roughly a decade to see the humor in this comment. And then a few more years to sense the tragedy. At eight years old, however, it was much simpler: it filled me with horror. To me, a young American kid, my grandmother was a hideous demon who had emerged from the flames of the shtetl to curse our happy, safe lives in the New World. She’d survived death in all its European forms—typhus, pogroms, revolutions, world wars—for the sole purpose, it seemed to me, of blowing death’s secondhand smoke into our faces. Why was this grown woman so protective of her silver dollars? What did my request for her coins have to do with her grave? And why did she command me to remove a Michael Jordan poster and call him that schvartzer when she knew he was my hero?

  My mother’s feelings toward my grandmother were, of course, much sharper, and complicated by feelings of a daughter’s love and compassion. Fay had been a harsh and often unforgiving mother. She’d kept her house immaculately, terrifyingly clean and free of any ornamentation. Her food was bland. Her children called her “Mother.” She banned friends from the house and kicked out those who’d slipped in. My grandmother dished out the emotional abuse, which was constant, and delegated the physical abuse to my grandfather, a good-natured but passive man who obeyed his wife’s orders to beat the children.

  When I’d asked my mother to tell me about Fay’s life, she’d take a deep breath and tell me what she knew. That Fay’s mother, a saintly woman, had time for everyone but her daughter. What my mother knew, or cared to remember, often came in the form of isolated facts. Fay read the newspaper cover to cover, she told me. I always got the feeling that her internal world wasn’t known to my mother, and that it was better left that way. Glimpses into Fay’s soul mostly disturbed my mother. Why, for example, had she once advised my mother to not hug my sister, then a toddler, and wondered aloud why my mother verbally expressed love toward this child? For my mother, this was a shattering insight into her own unloved upbringing by this woman. And it wasn’t just love that went unexpressed. There were other things that could not be discussed.

  “I would have to beg her to tell me about her life in Poland,” my mother once told me. “She would begin to tell a story, but as soon as she mentioned anyone’s name, she would cut it off and say, ‘But what does it matter? Hitler killed all of them.’ Every story was like that.”

  For my grandmother, who escaped Poland as the clouds gathered on the Nazi invasion, storytelling was something worse than painful. It was a simple impossibility. As far as she was concerned, there were no stories. Stories develop, move in some direction. Stories have endings, need endings. Tragedies have a final act that implicitly allows the storyteller and the listener to believe that even cruel deaths retain some value—namely, their worth as a story for the living.

  “I am dead, Horatio,” says the tragic Hamlet. “Tell my story.”

  My grandmother did not believe in this. For her, murder ended more than life. It ended the possibility of telling the life’s story. “He has my dying voice,” says Hamlet, “the rest is silence.” Even in life my grandmother didn’t have a voice, just silence.

  As a child my mother was not satisfied with this silence. She wanted to know. She’d sneak into her mother’s room in search of clues. Hidden in her mother’s drawers were photos full of mysterious people, mostly cheerful girls. My grandmother’s girlfriends and cousins. When my mother asked Fay about the people in the photos, she would begin a story and then cut it off. It doesn’t matter, they were all murdered. And that was it. When my mother persisted, Fay pointed to one of the smiling girls in the photos and told her young daughter that the Nazis had hanged this girl in a well by her pigtails. This was the only detail she would divulge. The only one that mattered.

  A few years before she died, I visited my grandmother at her nursing home in Northern California. She was very frail and had mellowed considerably. But she never lost her edge. I asked her how she was enjoying the surroundings, the nicest weather in the known universe. She shrugged dismissively. I suggested she walk in a nearby garden, resplendent in gorgeous plants. She glanced skeptically at the garden and said, with her pitch-perfect comic timing, “The flowers bring the dogs.” My grandmother was terrified of dogs.

  It could have been the title of her autobiography: The Flowers Bring the Dogs. She was an alchemist of misery; she could turn anything, even tulips and lilies, into pure negativity.

  I pressed on. I asked her to tell me about her past. She would speak only about her arrival in America and how displaced she’d felt. She told me she “used to be someone” in Poland. In America, she said, “I was nothing.” I asked her who she used to be in Poland. She didn’t answer. I asked about the photos. She denied knowledge of them. I asked about her friends. She ignored the question, pretended she didn’t hear.

  I had decided to tape our conversation. I wanted some documentary evidence of her life. Something, anything, to remember her by. I knew she’d never agree to speak into a recording device. This was a woman who, after all, distrusted flowers. As her grandson, though, I felt entitled to this small inheritance and decided to record her secretly.

  But paranoids have sharp senses. And I’m not much of a secret agent. She detected my fidgeting with something under the table, and my guilty face gave me away. Now it was her turn to ask the questions, my turn to deny. So went our conversation. It was about as emotionally honest as a police interrogation, and ended with each of us staring at the other with guarded eyes.

  Later, I listened to the recording and was struck by the textured sound of the empty air, a breeze interrupted only by the hum of a distant airplane, the creak of shifting chairs, the slight whistle of my grandmother’s breathing. The microphone had captured the contours of her silence. That was the last conversation I had with her.

  My mother took a morning flight to California to be with Fay at the end. I probably should have gone with her. Instead, I was standing in the prison yard—coming up for air—watching Chris struggle to run the length of the basketball court. Above us, the window, now dark, where Jessica watched him during my class. And above that, an airplane soared.

  Blueberry Muffin Day

  At long last it was my turn to attend the three-day prison orientation. One might think that orientation would, like orientations the world over, like orientations since the dawn of time, occur during the first few days on the job, or better yet, before work began. God knows I could have used some official training for dealing with the Coolidge-types, the Angry Seven, and various others. But, for reasons unstated, many months we
re allowed to pass before any official orienting would occur. But, even so, I was grateful. I still didn’t have a grip on things.

  I arrived fashionably late. But not too late to take in the sights. The sheriff’s outpost in Chelsea was a low, cinderblock bunker wedged between a muffin factory and a methadone clinic. Muffin World, as the factory was called, emitted a constant, wonderful cakey aroma; Methadone World, as I called it, thankfully emitted no aroma. The sheriff’s outpost was used to train new prison guards, but doubled as an orientation space for civilian prison workers like me. A man, clad in double denim—blue jeans and a blue jean jacket, mismatched—was splayed out unconscious on the wheelchair ramp of Methadone World. His long hair and arms dangled brutally over the railing. An obese, red-bearded trucker sat across the way, on the loading dock of Muffin World. Holding a steaming cup of coffee and a cigarette in one hand and a half-eaten muffin in the other, he was squinting at the passed-out man.

  The outpost was chock-full of cop gear. Posters identifying various species of handgun. Badges from various brother cop outfits, many with curious cartoon insignia. Inspirational slogans about Courage and Fortitude. For three days we were to sit from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. in marathon classes on topics that ranged from dealing with security threats to writing incident reports to ratting on our coworkers to recognizing contraband. And of course, lessons on why it’s not wise to comment on your colleague’s cleavage.

  Any thought that this day would be productive was quickly dashed when I saw my union boss, Charlie, sitting at a desk with a big smile on his face.

  “This is my favorite time of year,” he whispered to me. “Total waste of time.”

  Charlie was a connoisseur of malingering. He enjoyed killing time the way some people savor aged gouda.

  “Just sit back and relax,” he said.

  Relaxation, however, was not likely. The orientation, which was required of all staff once a year, had little to do with teaching us how to do our actual jobs. It was more of a guided tour through the nine levels of Dante’s Inferno. Rapes, suicides, druggings, hypnosis, pistol-whippings, hangings. The sharpening of daggers. We explored every manner of villainy devised by man. But instead of Virgil as our guide, we had Sgt. Dan Hickey.

  Actually, we had various officers, taking turns horrifying us. One officer went off on a half-hour tangent in praise of his favorite constitutional amendment.

  “Fact,” he said. Almost every thought began with this word. “None of you would be sitting here if it wasn’t for the Second Amendment.” Considering that we would have been happy to not be sitting in a cinderblock bunker in Chelsea at 8 a.m., his argument lost a good deal of its rhetorical force. Noting that some states allow off-duty prison guards to carry guns, he called on the Massachusetts legislature to change its laws so that he could carry his piece on the playground in case a child called his daughter a name. Charlie slipped me a note: “Fact. This guy is going to be in jail by the end of the year.”

  We spoke of stress. “Raise your hand if you have a second job,” asked the officer. Almost every single hand went up. “We all know the middle class is dying in this country,” the officer continued. This wasn’t a theory or a seminar topic. It was a shared reality for everyone sitting in the room. Although everyone there worked a government job, complete with union benefits, almost no one was making enough to live and support families.

  “If you’re an officer, you probably got alimony,” he smiled at his own joke, which actually is no joke. “The bottom line: You got to find healthy ways of dealing with that stress.”

  One healthy way, he noted, was giving yourself a little treat. When his marriage was on the rocks, he told us, he would allow himself a slice of cake before bed every night. Those still paying attention found this comment heartbreaking.

  Another officer spent an entire ninety minutes on the subject of suicide. To be fair, suicide is truly an important subject in prison; inmates under extreme pressure may turn to suicide and it is the prison’s responsibility to prevent it. But the level of detail on the issue and passion with which this session was taught seemed excessive. Halfway through, the truth came out. When someone subtly asked why we were studying the latest national statistics on suicide, stratified by region, age, and gender, the officer blew up.

  “My brother, okay, didn’t have the courage to face his problems, just like the rest of us do every day, so you know what he decided to do?”

  Here the janitor, a friendly Albanian man, raised his hand; the officer ignored him and went on.

  “He found the closest train tracks and threw himself in front of a commuter train. There were parts we never found.”

  An audible gasp went up in the class.

  “And do you know when he did it?”

  I looked at the janitor, but he wasn’t raising his hand this time. I heard someone whisper, “Oh shit, no … Christmas?”

  “On Mother’s Day,” said the officer, crossing his arms. “Do you have any idea what our Mother’s Days are like now? Do you know what kind of hell my mother goes through every Mother’s Day? Do you know what his wife and kids go through? He took the easy way out, left us to deal with life’s problems. My brother was a coward.”

  The class sat in stunned silence. The janitor looked bored. When the officer returned to his slides and began a massively detailed description of the warning signs of suicidal ideation, everyone was able to relax a bit. After a short session on arson, we watched an unedited amateur video from the inside of the infamous Station nightclub fire, which killed a hundred people, one of the worst nightclub fires in American history. After watching the harrowing footage of people screaming and crying and pushing and burning to death, the officer flicked the lights back on.

  “Lunch,” he said.

  The afternoon session picked up where we had left off. An officer walked in and, without saying a word, slammed a billy club really, really hard onto a desk. The whole class jumped. The desk almost buckled. The woman seated in front of me cried out, Dear God! The white-haired caseworker seated to my right clutched his chest. Charlie just leaned back and grinned. The janitor, I believe, was still in the john.

  “Now, ladies and gentlemen, anyone wanna tell me what that could do to your skull or to the skull of one of your coworkers?” said the officer.

  It turns out that the billy club was actually not a billy club but five or six magazines curled up tightly and then duct-taped together. Apparently, this creates a rather devastating weapon. And a handy introduction to contraband. It was a session that touched upon my post in the prison.

  “Any librarians here?” asked the officer. It sounded like, and was, an accusation.

  Possibly because the officers spoke in a staccato of rhetorical cop questions or because we knew where this was going, Forest and I didn’t answer. Finally, when it became clear that the officer actually wanted an answer to the question, Forest generated some form of pitiable squeak.

  “Raise your hands,” the officer commanded.

  We complied.

  “We rely on you, gentlemen. Contraband of all kinds, including weapons, often starts in the facility’s library—why do you think inmates go there? It’s not to read Moby-Dick, okay?”

  Forest looked deflated and sunk into his chair.

  We were presented with a sideshow of curious contraband objects, homemade weapons that bore an uncanny resemblance to a medieval armory. Homemade maces, spikes, mauls, flails. A battle ax–looking thing. Shanks of every size and shape. A homemade baseball bat. Nothing was as it seemed—every item looked vaguely familiar as something else. Scotch tape and chips of plaster could be squeezed into a tight ball, placed into a sock, swung at your head. This could also be accomplished by a bar of soap in a sock, or hardcover books in a laundry bag. The sock weapon could knock you unconscious. A fan in a computer needed little alteration—it was already a sharp blade. Magazines and hard covers from books could be used as body armor. An orange peel could be fermented into a nasty little batch of liquor,
“homebrew.” Once fermented, it could be used to burn through metal to help cast a knife. In other words, an inmate could get drunk and make a shank at the same time—a lovely combination.

  A floppy disk? Easily outfitted into a switchblade. Chairs could become guillotines. Shoelaces might result in genocide. A pen? The officer just laughed.

  “You kidding me? You could assassinate the president with a pen.”

  But before we could think about how that might work, the lights were off and the officer was setting up a video. “This oughta show you what a pen can do.”

  We were treated to another unedited security video. This one starred an inmate sneaking into a prison dayroom, barricading the door, and proceeding to beat another inmate senseless and then stab him repeatedly with a pen (which he lifted, to my relief, not from the library but from the infirmary). We were witnessing an actual murder. By the time the footage picked up, the victim had given up resistance. He just lay there. The murderer seemed bored. He stabbed his victim slowly and methodically. And repeatedly. But without a soundtrack or any contrived cinematic frenzy, murder turns out to be rather dull on film. It looked more like he was poking holes into a raw potato. The video ended, the lights went up, and we were given the end of the day quiz.

  Waiting for the quizzes to be graded, we stood out on the front steps, staring out at nothing. Those who smoked, smoked. Those who’d quit smoking ate potato chips.

  The folks at Methadone World must have been on break, too, or just had nowhere to go, because they stood on their steps, a mirror image of us, smoking and eating potato chips and staring. We were like two groups of weary sailors aboard dingy pontoon boats, floating past each other on a polluted river.