Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  The note that came to me that night was an abandoned letter, a fragment from one of the prison library’s tragic Plaths:

  Dear Mother,

  My life is

  Nothing more. An anonymous, half-finished sentence with no object and no conclusion. A life indefinite, unarticulated, open-ended. An unfinished, unsent letter. An infinity of white space. This too is a way to remember a prison.

  DELIVERED

  Part II

  CHAPTER 3

  Dandelion Polenta

  Tousled and disheartened, tired as a fossil, the Messiah shuffled into the prison library at 3:26 p.m. on a partly cloudy Wednesday afternoon. Few noted his presence. Sitting behind the counter, Dice called out, “Hey, Messiah, how’s it going, brother?” But the poor guy didn’t seem to hear. Dice turned to me, shrugged, and resumed reading the paper. When the man reached the counter, he clutched it like a lifesaver, and rewarded himself with a quick, standing thirty-second nap. The Messiah, a.k.a. Chuck, an inmate in the 3-1 unit, was a dud. In retrospect, though, he was right about the one thing he told me before he shoved off back into the void.

  “See that guy over there,” he said, leaning on the counter. “You’re gonna want to know that guy. C.C. Too Sweet.”

  I already did know a bit about this man, though only from afar. I saw how he rolled. He’d let the rabble shove in first: the users, gangbangers, thieves, pushers, and bustas. These were not his people. Only then would he make his entrance. He’d glide into the library at a peripatetic pace, conducting an animated conversation with a young inmate or two. Disciples. Or he’d come in alone, his mind working through its own dialogue. You could see it in his face.

  When he arrived at the front counter, he’d ask Dice, or Fat Kat, or me, to see a road atlas. It seemed odd, and somehow subversive, to hand out maps in a prison. None of these men was going anywhere. For them, there was only point A.

  But C.C. had his reasons. Maps were crucial visual aids to the stories he told. C.C. favored the omniscient perspective. He liked to set his scene on a large scale, to claim large tracts of territory, to pinpoint the exact spot where his life intersected with the great big world.

  “Right here,” he once told me, pointing to Pennsylvania Avenue on a map of Washington, D.C. “That belonged to me. That’s where you’d find Too Sweet, man. Right next to the White House. I ran the Black House.”

  When he saw a crowd gather for him, he’d take a little step back to give himself space to emote. He’d pause a moment to allow his audience to situate themselves. Then he’d smile.

  “There’s two things you need to know about C.C. Too Sweet,” he’d begin, “he’s iniquitous and he’s ubiquitous.”

  Too Sweet had a million of these.

  “Anyone here know what ‘pimp’ stands for?”

  Nobody knew.

  “Part pope, part chimp.”

  C.C. always put a special Southern emphasis on that word, pimp, like the way an Evangelical preacher says Jesus—Geeee-zus. C.C. said pee-yimp. I couldn’t substantiate his claim to be a “famous pee-yimp, known around the nation,” but he seemed fairly well known within the prison. He was a pal of Fat Kat, which meant that he was in deep. Prison elite.

  A light-skinned black man of Cape Verdean descent, midthirties, slightly red-toned hair, balding and squat, with bricklayer forearms, Too Sweet was most proud of his “teddy bear” eyes, greenish yellow, small, perfectly round, and close set. His head seemed a bit too small for his body. On one forearm, a giant Playboy bunny tattoo encroached awkwardly on a tattoo of a thorny rose. It was as if he hadn’t taken the ten seconds necessary to consider its placement. On his other arm, the name C.C. floated in pristine isolation—no other tats to cloud or complicate these letters.

  You have to wonder about a person who etches his own name into his body. Usually one tattoos the name of the person one loves beyond all others. Or of one’s God. Was this true also for those who tattoo their own name? Or perhaps they’re simply uncreative. C.C. was certainly not in this latter category.

  When he wasn’t performing, C.C. kept apart from the crowd. Sometimes he appeared dejected, slumped in his seat like a ruined millionaire. But most of the time, there was something active brewing. I’d see him studying a map alone, lost in thought. Devising an escape, it seemed. And this wasn’t so far from the truth. To C.C., maps were not a way of plotting a future route as much as returning to the past, to the lost places of his life—the list of which was ever mounting. He was a man whose life had been shaped primarily by streets, intersections, alleys, and highways. All of which had led him here. So he gravitated toward a book that laid these streets out before him once again, clean and blank and open to his interpretations. This was all he needed to begin his journey back.

  It was in the midst of listening to one of these stories that I had asked him to join my creative writing course.

  The Penguin Joint

  I was in a recruiting phase for the class. Though pimps and hustlers were a natural—and, in the library, a most readily available—group from which to draw, I found students in all corners. C.C. was enlisted from the front. But I came across others in the back, on the periphery.

  The back room, Coolidge’s former office, had been liberated. It was now open to the general inmate public (though I did keep a few legal volumes there in his honor.) We occasionally used the room to screen movies—National Geographic nature films, PBS documentaries, and assorted features. The women favored The Color Purple or Beloved. Roots was a favorite among men and women alike.

  But the most popular genre among the male inmates was nature documentaries about carnivorous animals. The men loved watching films with titles like Cheetahs on the Prowl or Snake Safari. When they grew bored of these, they’d play a film about tornadoes. But they preferred for the mayhem to have a face, and so predator flicks it was.

  Some men would sit and watch the film, others would set up shop nearby—with a chessboard or a law book—and only give their full attention to the film during the good parts. Even from the other side of the library, I knew that the lioness had finally pounced when I’d hear inmates yelling at the screen, “Get ’em! Get ’em!”

  Once, and only once, I heard an inmate take the gazelle’s side and cry out, “Run, run!” You knew that the gazelle had succumbed and was being devoured when you heard inmates shouting, “You show ’em, lion!” or “That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!” I suggested March of the Penguins—a film that documents the struggle of penguins, who walk hundreds of miles to lay eggs, then spend an excruciating winter as the males shield the eggs while the females waddle, in epic fashion, to the sea to hunt before returning, again epically, to their starving kin with bellyfuls of food. The inmates scoffed.

  “I’m a grown man,” one inmate growled at me.

  Another better-humored inmate tried to keep it simple for me: “Avi, man, that penguin shit is whack. Nobody wants to watch it.”

  I understood where he was coming from. The aesthetics of testosterone are clear on this one: lions make for better action than penguins. But still, I didn’t relent. I forced the movie on them. Those bored enough to stay enjoyed the drama.

  The next day a youngish inmate swaggered into the library in the exaggerated faux limp popular among my thug clientele.

  “Yo,” he said, as he approached the counter. I braced myself for his request. “You still got that penguin joint? We didn’t finish it yesterday.”

  I smiled and handed him the DVD. After dispensing with the usual requests, I wandered to the back room, where March of the Penguins was wrapping up with the satisfying conclusion, the miraculous collective hatching of the eggs. The only person sitting there was the inmate who had requested the movie. He was watching the film intently and scribbling furiously in a prison-issue notebook.

  “You like writing?” I asked, taking a seat next to him. Annoyed by my presence, he paused the movie and looked up.

  “Just taking some notes.”

  “On th
e penguins?”

  “Yeah. Listen, I’m trying to finish up here and I only got ten minutes.”

  I cut to the point.

  “I run a creative writing class,” I said. “You should join.”

  “Fine,” he said, “sign me up.”

  He said this without so much as lifting his head from his scribbling. My eye picked off a phrase from his notebook, It’s about being a MAN.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Franklin,” he said, “Chudney.”

  “Chutney?”

  “Chudney. What’s yours?”

  “Avi.”

  “Javi?”

  “No, Avi.”

  We shook hands and I expected to never see him again.

  The Ides of January

  Meanwhile, Shakespeare month was not going well.

  I can’t say I wasn’t warned. There was plenty of Shakespearean foreshadowing. As usual, young Dumayne—recently back from yet another trip to the Hole—played the role of the truth-telling average Joe, the “saucy fellow” of Julius Caesar, whose streetwise cynicism portends problems in the universe.

  Typically, when Dumayne came into the library his mouth was already in motion. He had little use for pauses between words. One afternoon he entered the library, mouth a-running.

  “Yo-what-the-movie-this-week?”

  “It’s a Shakespeare play that was made into a movie,” I said. Then added, with a touch of masochism, “Macbeth.”

  Dumayne flashed me a snapshot grin. He really looked like a larky kid when he smiled.

  “You-kidding-right?”

  “ ’Fraid not.”

  “Aw-man-that’s-some-corny-ass-shit, man.”

  “Since when is murder and revenge corny? And it’s got one of the great crazy bitches of all time. You’ll love it, Dumayne.”

  “Shakespeare’s-old!”

  “You mean old school?” I said, fully aware of how lame I sounded.

  “No-old, cuz. Like boring.”

  “Did you know that Shakespeare’s characters call each other ‘cuz’?”

  “No-but-I-do-know-that-Shakespeare-is-whack.”

  This was, more or less, the consensus around the library. Unfortunately Shakespeare was the theme for January’s film group, held each Friday morning. I wasn’t surprised by the negative reaction. So I held my ground, hoping for at least some endorsements from certain key inmates. But nothing. I turned to Fat Kat. But the big man just sat there, arms crossed, shaking his head.

  “Nah, man,” he said. “Not this time. Nobody here wants to watch a bunch of British dudes waltzing around in pantyhose speaking old English. C’mon, Avi. Whaddayathinkin’?”

  “It’s Shakespeare,” I reasoned. “Don’t be afraid to admit that what’s best is best. Every wannabe rapper in here wishes he had Shakespeare’s skills.”

  But Fat Kat just waved me off. My teacher guy routine wasn’t flying. He was right, of course. To make Shakespeare relevant to this crowd would require more time—and a group smaller than thirty. We were digging ourselves a hole.

  The first week was a bust. Ignoring my pleas, Forest screened the 1940s Orson Welles Macbeth. The combination of British dudes waltzing around in pantyhose and ancient film production was a death knell. An audible groan went up as soon as the opening black and white credits appeared on the screen. We had done nothing but reinforce the notion of Shakespeare as outdated.

  Dumayne approached me later that week. “You better have a good one next week, Harvey,” he warned, “or there’s gonna be trouble up in here.”

  The next film, Shakespeare Behind Bars, a 2005 documentary of a group of inmates putting on The Tempest, was slightly better received. This was the advantage of having set an astonishingly low bar. Even so, the abundance of sensitive/effeminate characters in the documentary put off most of my inmate audience. The fact that one of the strongest characters in the documentary was a sex offender was a major turnoff—particularly to a certain vocal inmate who just happened to be a sex offender. But at least the film was in full Technicolor. I could tell that some of the audience enjoyed the movie, but were too afraid to admit it.

  Dumayne remained unmoved. His dark prophecies for what would happen if I showed another corny-ass Shakespeare movie had become distilled into a wordless shaking of his head and wagging of his index finger. His message was clear enough. Trouble was on the way.

  But that Friday, we triumphed. Othello, starring Laurence Fishburne, had just the right combination of blackness, Laurence Fishburneness, Hollywood slickness, and raw sex appeal to go over well. Even Dumayne conceded that the library had finally done right. But his warnings remained in place. Othello would be long forgotten if we attempted another Macbeth.

  But our final Shakespeare screening continued the hot streak. In retrospect, this should have been my warning. After screening the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film, Romeo + Juliet—starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as “contemporary inner-city gang rivals and star-crossed lovers”—the inmates kept to their seats. Usually they’d check out the moment a film was over, often sooner, and try to escape the library before the discussion of the film began. But not that day. Even Dumayne conquered his notorious ADD.

  James, a young staff teacher and theology student, led the discussion. I took a perch in the back of the space, eager to hear the inmates’ reactions. The film’s themes of gang violence, love, and loyalty during conflict—and the urban, though somewhat unconvincing, American setting—resonated with the men. The conversation got off to a dizzying start. Hands were going up in every corner. Everyone had an opinion. Romantics lined up against cynics, young inmates united against old veterans. It was a rare occasion that one of these film discussions actually went well.

  I asked the class how they thought costumes affected their experience of the play. I gave a quick crash course in theatrical costuming, in the construction of identity through clothing, of Shakespeare’s affinity for identity confusion, the distinction between uniforms and costumes. For a group of men sitting in the shadow of uniformed officers, themselves in variously hued prison uniforms, this topic had a particular immediacy. Many of these men had traded gang colors for prison colors. Again, everyone had something to add. There were so many hands up and loud voices trying to talk over one another I hardly noticed a man walk past me.

  This man was outfitted in the uniform of an officer. He was one of the many who routinely hung out at the post outside of the library, loitering in the hallway during the day shift.

  Some of these officers were members of a SERT team—the Sheriff Escort and Response Team—a squad that could be dispatched quickly to prison trouble spots. When they weren’t in action, they’d sit around gossiping, talking pussy and Patriots football and concocting union discord. SERT was a more desirable job than a harrowing post on a cell block—many of the SERT members were vets and saw SERT as their hard-earned right.

  Though many officers were fit, some were simply fat fucks. Their years in the department could be measured in waist size, their fates on earth deduced from piles of prison cafeteria sausage on their lunch trays. Healthy young cadets sometimes grew into shuffling lardaceous blobs. The union ensured that the fitness test remained a onetime event, given as part of an entrance requirement and then never again. The sight of the SERT team mobilizing was sometimes a Keystone Kops affair. As a young cadet, a Marine, once noted to me, the SERT guys were “supposed to be a crack squad but are actually more of a butt crack squad.”

  The man who walked by me was a member of SERT. Or maybe a friend of the squad—I wasn’t sure. What I did know, at a mere glance, was that he passed his misfortunes onto his hair and that his face, tormented by male pride, alternated three expressions: smug, constipated, and blank.

  That day, he walked by me with purpose, without offering the slightest acknowledgment. It was strange that he was in the library. He wasn’t a regular, as far as I knew. But random officers sometimes appeared like this, making rounds, sweeping for contraband, mak
ing their presence known. I noticed him as a shadow but quickly got distracted trying to help run the class.

  The officer didn’t look at or speak to any inmates, but instead disappeared into the library’s book stacks. A moment later, he emerged. Retracing his steps, he walked right by me again, this time on his way to the door. Again, he ignored me.

  And that’s when it happened.

  It started modestly enough, but grew with ferocious speed. Within seconds, there was no ignoring it. A foul, sulfuric smell overwhelmed the library space, no small feat. Inmates, who had their hands up to ask questions or to say their piece, instead covered their faces with uniform shirts. Some ducked their heads between their knees. Dumayne was jolted out of his seat, as if suddenly waking from a nightmare of attentiveness.

  “It stinks like shit in here, dawg!” he announced, as if this wasn’t completely obvious.

  “Somebody farted,” sighed an old-timer. “Bad.”

  The class devolved into pandemonium. The once orderly discussion, which had been contained to the main clearing, instantly disintegrated. A few inmates ducked out of the library. Those who remained took advantage of the chaos to do their dirty business: slipping notes and other contraband into favorite hiding spots. I stopped an inmate in the process of pocketing the library’s newspaper, only to see another walk off with two magazines. At the other end of the library, an inmate quickly, surreptitiously, passed something to another. Another inmate who had been pestering me throughout the class to use a typewriter finally got his way. Inmates were streaming into the stacks, into the back computer room—doing everything but sitting and talking about Romeo + Juliet.

  I was trying to understand what had happened. Did an officer just come into the library in the middle of a class and pass a massive gas bomb? Easily the worst and most tragic I’d ever encountered. Had he, a grown man, actually come into the library during the class with the sole intention of doing this? It seemed too crazy to be true.