Mullin and Quinn had different styles. There was a widely understood good cop/bad cop dynamic to their leadership team. Mullin, the senior deputy, was an attorney. Wry, judicious, above the fray: the good cop. Quinn, on the other hand, had a touch of upstart to him. Cocky, six-foot-something, shaved-head. The bald, virile type. A former college women’s basketball coach and relative newcomer to the administration, he flipped between two modes: charming or confrontational.
I followed Quinn into Mullin’s office. Something about it seemed strange to me. Then it hit me, literally. Sunlight. There was actual sunshine streaming into the office, which was on the first floor, on the edge of the yard. This was a courtside luxury box to inmate basketball games. As I entered the office, I heard the door close behind me and a languid voice, tinged with a mild case of Boston.
“Thanks for coming here, Avi.”
It was Mullin. He’d materialized out of thin air.
“We’re taking this matter very seriously,” he said, gravely. I turned around to look at him.
He was standing behind his desk, wearing a New England Patriots jersey over his white dress shirt and tie. The Pats were set to play a big playoff game in two days. The absurd contrast between the football jersey and his grim police tone brought me perilously close to smiling. But I held it together, in deference to the sober subject of the meeting.
Quinn crossed his arms.
“There coulda been a riot,” he said, abruptly.
I couldn’t tell whether he was talking to me or to Mullin. But one thing was clear: he was outraged. For a second, it seemed he was blaming me.
“That’s why we gotta look into this,” replied Mullin, taking a seat behind his desk.
Both men were in war-room mode and didn’t so much speak as debrief. I wondered if this was how they actually spoke to each other, or if it was some kind of act for my benefit. It was as though they wanted me to feel I was eavesdropping. I would have been perfectly happy to turn into vapor and slide out under the door.
Mullin looked at his watch, scribbled something down, and then looked at Quinn. “We should check his locker.” This was part question, part statement.
Quinn, jaw clenching, didn’t miss a beat. “We should check all of their lockers.”
I turned back to Mullin to see how he’d react to this sudden descent into Stalinism. I’d always wondered how much these men acted in concert and how much they actually clashed. But Mullin gave no response, nor any indication he’d heard the statement. Was this a form of consent? He took a few more moments to scribble, then looked up again.
“There could have been a riot over there,” he said finally, echoing Quinn’s earlier statement. “And that’s how we have to treat this.” Mullin was clearly talking to me now. “Do you understand why that is?”
“Yes,” I said. And I did: as preposterous as the incident was, the inmates were genuinely angry about it. And rightly so.
But still, I was a bit surprised that they were “taking this seriously.” Mostly because it was a fart bomb. But also because as management, Mullin and Quinn had strategic alliances to maintain—why would they want to get embroiled in a petty squabble between union members?
“Okay,” said Mullin, leaning back in his seat. “We read the report, but tell us again what happened.”
Was this on the record or off? I wondered. I didn’t want to ask, fearing that it would sound suspicious. But I had nothing to hide.
I told them all that had happened, including certain morsels that had been beyond the concern of my report. “And here’s another piece,” I added, leaning in. “This same thing, this business with the fart spray, apparently also happened the day before, on Forest’s shift.”
Mullin and Quinn exchanged a glance and a nod, a gesture familiar to me from cop shows. It said, We got our guy.
Feeling confident, I leaned back in my seat and offered up a modest proposal. “I think he should attend our class next week and apologize to the inmates.”
The deputies exchanged another knowing look.
“Absolutely not,” said Quinn, as Mullin muttered something about how this would endanger the officer.
I had figured I’d give my opinion even though I knew they wouldn’t go for it. I knew the rules. Staff, especially officers, don’t apologize to inmates. Such an action would undermine the power dynamic.
Quinn changed the subject. And he got to the point of why I was there. They wanted more names. As the deputies started flipping through officer photos—asking me, “Was this guy there? What about this guy … how about this guy?”—I got the sinking feeling that they were using this incident to settle some other scores. They seemed to have some people they wanted to nail.
Although other officers had been in on the mischief, I’d omitted their names from my report. I didn’t want this to snowball. But when Quinn asked me point-blank if anyone else was there, I told the truth. I hadn’t gone out of my way to indict any officer—not even Chuzzlewit himself—but I certainly wasn’t going out of my way to cover for them. And some questions could not be avoided. For example, just where was the officer who was actually on duty at that post, whose job it was to protect the library? The answer: he had been standing right there, watching the incident unfold and smiling like a ninny.
I would have been happy to see this thing die. But the department actually seemed to be taking the incident seriously, as Mullin, in his football jersey, had promised. I was called in to speak with the prison’s secret police, the SID. In a small windowless room, with a camcorder on a tripod staring me in the face, I answered minute questions for over an hour (with a break for water) from two investigators: a chatty, diminutive Italian American fellow and his unsmiling foxy partner, who said little but asked the tougher questions. Forest and an assortment of officers and inmates were likewise shaken down for answers.
During my water break, when the camera was off, the Italian American investigator confided in a near whisper that, “when I first saw these reports on my desk I thought, ‘C’mon we’re gonna spend our time solving the Case of the Fart Spray? We got better things to do.’ But when I started reading through everything I thought, ‘So these guys wanna bring in unauthorized HAZMAT into a correctional facility, which could be a felony, by the way, and then fudge the truth? These guys want to play it like that? Okay, fine, we can play like that, too.’
“Some officers think they can run around here doing whatever they want. Know what I mean?”
I got the feeling he was laying some bait for me, trying to catch me with my guard down, to coax more information out of me, or get me to reveal some personal bias against the officers. I just smiled and nodded politely. This whole thing was getting sillier by the moment.
Game Tight
The story begins in Manhattan. A harried and anxious wannabe young pimp named C.C. Too Sweet is driving a car full of prostitutes. The front seat is vacant, saved for the captain of his sex-for-hire squad. His most trusted ho. Although referred to by the title “bottom bitch,” she is the top prostitute on this team, privileged to sit in the front.
After picking her up, he plays the women off of each other, making their night’s earnings into a competition. Nothing is good enough. Each could do better. Predictably, the bottom bitch has brought in the biggest cash return and Too Sweet, after heaping abuse on the others, holds her up as a shining example. In so doing, he has proven that he’s not all bad, that he appreciates and rewards good work. This gives the less experienced prostitutes something to strive for, while at the same time instilling in them a requisite sense of worthlessness.
C.C., the narrator of this story, now anticipates the sensitivities of his reader. A prostitute, he explains, expects abuse. If she doesn’t get it, she won’t respect you nor will she trust that you can protect her. Eventually she’ll leave and find protection elsewhere. The women call him Daddy, and he has indeed become the abusive father figure they have come to expect. Through the abuse, Too Sweet has also formed a hierarchy th
at places the bottom bitch at the helm, a kind of middle manager, and makes her a crucial female ally.
C.C. emphasizes that a good pimp must know and understand women in order to control them. This requires psychological astuteness, a finely calibrated intuition. He has to possess a natural understanding of the female mind. To be a sort of sensitive guy.
After reading this, I’d asked him to elaborate. He thought for a moment and then said, “You ever heard of ‘emotional intelligence’?”
I nodded.
“The best pimp’s got great emotional intelligence. No bullshit. And,” he added, “C.C. Too Sweet’s got some real skills in that department.”
Too Sweet had a theory. When it comes to rhetoric, the pimp is king, Too Sweet claims. He asked me to consider Malcolm X. “Check it out,” he said. “How does a man like Malcolm learn to move people, large crowds? He’s got talent, right, and in prison, he gets knowledge from books. But where did he get the courage, the ability to stand up and chop it up like that? When I see old tapes of Malcolm speaking—and I’m talking about Malcolm with his clean-cut preacher’s shirt and tie—when I see Malcolm talking, I say, damn, that man is a pimp.”
This comment draws mixed reactions from some of the inmates in the vicinity.
Later he elaborated. “It’s like this,” he said. “I’m reading this book about jazz, right? Dude says that a lot of the best musicians, right, are classically trained. Like to play Mozart, right? That’s how it was with Malcolm. That man was classically trained in the street swagger. And you gotta understand, man, this shit is ancient skills. There was mad pimps in ancient Egypt, wearing their togas and shit. It wasn’t invented yesterday. Once he mastered it, got that classical training, see, then he picked up all that book knowledge and discipline, that man was ready to take over the world.”
There was certainly something true in what Too Sweet said. Malcolm X’s transformative experience occurred in prison, when his mentor, a fellow inmate, showed him, as he wrote in his autobiography, how to “command total respect … with words.” Too Sweet abided by this. It was a belief that conferred some credibility to his behavior. He respected words because words bestowed respect onto him.
And this was where emotional intelligence—based on Too Sweet’s extensive reading in pop psych—came into play. He had a theory that the most powerful men speak the language of women. It’s much easier for a man to speak the language of men, he explained. But if he knows how to also move women, he is king. I noticed that Too Sweet’s handwriting was curiously feminine. Or, to be more precise, its carefully wrought curly letters and circles over i’s resembled a seventh-grade girl’s handwriting.
As a narrator, Too Sweet was good at anticipating his listeners’ biases. Just as his unrelenting descriptions of a night in the life of a pimp were growing too malicious to keep me reading, he changed gears completely. As he’d promised: “before they can say ‘damn,’ I’m gonna back up and start from the beginning.”
Until the age of ten, C.C. had had a happy childhood. His mother hailed from Tuskegee, Alabama; his father had been a U.S. paratrooper and ran a successful cleaning business. The family lived a happy middle-class existence in the Mattapan section of Boston. It was father, mother, C.C., his two older brothers, and the family dog. Family photos showed C.C. as a child, running around, playing, smiling, and hugging his mother.
One day C.C. came home to piles of shattered glass. His brothers were distressed. His mother, furious over his father’s liaisons—or as C.C. put it, “his tricky dick for young pussy”—had smashed every window of the family home. These windows were never repaired. The family split. C.C.’s father, the family’s provider, left.
At age ten, C.C. entered a universe of crime and violence from which he never returned. His mother relocated the family to Roxbury, to the projects right around the corner from where Malcolm Little had grown into a hustler and pimp before his rebirth as Malcolm X.
This move was more than geographic; it was a distinct and dramatic drop in economic class, C.C. wrote, a sudden fall from middle class stability into a chasm of poverty. It was the early 1980s. Young C.C. suddenly inhabited a world of urban decay: garbage-lined streets, empty lots, graffiti, rampant crime and homelessness, guns, gangs, junkies, rotting tenements, bombed-out neighborhoods. In order to get to school, he had to step over passed-out bodies lying in his building’s hallway and in the streets.
A decade of race wars had left Boston as racially polarized as ever. Nobody—white or black—dared cross the clearly delineated borders into the Other’s neighborhood. And if you did, you were, in C.C.’s words, “subject to a serious ass whipping.” The worst—the crack and AIDS epidemics, the proliferation of automatic weapons—was right around the corner.
But the worst was what happened at home. C.C.’s mother, embittered by her husband’s flight, by her heavy burden and her sudden poverty, struck out at her children in rage.
When his mother was at work cleaning homes C.C. was left alone to wander his new surroundings. He didn’t have to go far to find trouble.
My first lesson in understanding the street swagger was when I would come home from school and spend the rest of my afternoon hanging out in the hallway listening to the local thugs talk about everything from pussy to robberies. My hallway was The Spot.
I used to sit in the hallway, listening to those exciting stories, watching the thugs roll their weed, load their pistols, grab their crotches, and flicking their noses in between sentences. All of it had me fascinated.
Unable to endure his mother’s beatings and abuse, C.C. ran away again and again. His mother would hire local thugs to retrieve him and then she would beat him mercilessly. One of these beatings, a savage attack in which she used whatever she could find lying around—an extension cord, a chair, a lamp—left scars all over his body and turned C.C. to the street for good. He would squat in crack houses, stairwells, roofs, abandoned cars. He would lie on a cold floor staring at the ceiling, cursing his mother and wishing she would take him back with love.
He had a terrifying recurring dream: a rabid black dog chased him, but his legs were too heavy to move. He was never able to put any distance between him and it.
One day his luck changed:
I laid on the floor and fell asleep and started dreaming about the big black dog chasing me when suddenly I was awoken cold, sweating and trembling. When I looked up someone was standing over me. For a minute my eyes couldn’t get focused because of the bright light that was in back of the person’s head.
As soon as my eyes cleared all I could see was a tall pretty lady standing over me with a sparkling beautiful smile. I thought I was dreaming and she was an angel that came to take me away from the pain and misery of my life. I extended my arms so she could pick me up and fly off into the sky like in the movies.
She kneeled down, hugged me and said, “Hey little man, why you sleeping in the hallway?”
Once she spoke I realized she was a real person.
I softly responded, “ ’Cause if I go home, my mama gonna beat me.”
“Why she gonna do that?”
“I don’t know why, she mean, I hate her.”
The lady sat on the grimy hallway floor with me and we talked for a while. She lived on the same floor where I was staying, she stumbled across me while taking out the trash through the back hallway. The lady took me inside her apartment and made me something warm to eat. Her name was Shirley and she lived in a very clean two-bedroom apartment with her man, Otis.
Shirley was 26 years old, tall, cinnamon brown skin, thin, with a beautiful Diana Ross mane that flowed past her shoulders to the middle of her back. She was a prostitute; Otis was her pimp. Both were heroin addicts.
Otis was a 260 lb. gorilla-looking nigga, but the slickest-talking, sharpest-dressing cat that I had ever met. Otis liked me right away and treated me like his son. He told me I could stay with them as long as I take the trash out and do chores around the house. I didn’t mind because I didn�
��t want to go home and get beaten. I stayed there and was happy. They made me feel appreciated.
Shirley would go out every night and work the street, come home every morning with big piles of money and toss it on the living room table before she went and took her morning shower. That was her routine every morning.
Otis would sometimes call me into the living room to help him count the money and he would say, Lil nigga there ain’t no money like ho money.
Otis owned two Cadillacs, a motorcycle—I never seen so much money before. I thought Otis was the richest nigga on the planet. I later learned that Otis was a minor player in the game and what he had was only scratching the surface of what a pimp could acquire by peddling pussy. I was only 12 years old then and I didn’t understand anything about pimping, let alone sex. I thought that men would pick her up and give her money because she was so pretty.
Like so many subsequent father figures Otis was a mixed character: part role model, part cautionary tale. He was slick and successful—showing C.C. around the strip, showboating at the swanky Sugar Shack club in the South End—but he was also a miserable heroin addict who would leave C.C. in his Caddy while he went into a shooting gallery to get his fix. The presence of the child in the car, Otis believed, would deter potential thieves. He’d return two hours later smelling “as though he ate a bowl of shit, from vomiting, which happens when the dope enters the system.” Cadillacs aside, Otis was a wretched mess.
C.C.’s narrative was a series of vignettes of such men: role models with deadly flaws. Men of talent and energy, and principle, who ended up broken, penniless, addicted. And worst of all, powerless and compromised. Pimps who had become the prostitutes of their own vices—and then of the system. He vowed never to be like that. But these were the people who had educated him, who loved and accepted him, who had taken him in when he was weak. To them he owed his allegiance. His fate was linked to theirs.
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