Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  And then there were the women of his narrative. They ranged from the abusive mother to the saintly prostitute Shirley. These two women were the poles of C.C.’s world.

  It was no wonder that C.C.’s early career in boosting (shoplifting) and drug dealing didn’t satisfy him. Or that he avoided drugs and guns. He had had a burning desire to be a pimp. It wasn’t just a way to make money, but a way of seeing the world, a way of being seen in the world. Or as C.C. Too Sweet—steeped in pop psych jargon—might say: to be appreciated for who he is.

  An Island of Deer

  My attempts at teaching nature writing met with some resistance. I realized that some of the inmate students had barely any experience in backcountry woods, on desolate beaches, in deserts, in the middle of seas. Almost none had ever beheld the night sky in its full glory; to them, the Milky Way was nothing but a second-rate candy bar. Nature bored them because they couldn’t relate. So I was told.

  I decided to demonstrate that they actually had experienced nature and that, after all, they lived in nature, that the human city was as much a part of nature as an ant colony or a beehive. So I forced the class to write about their observations of nature in the city.

  The responses to the assignment were interesting, as always.

  True to his experiences on the mean streets, Too Sweet spoke of nature in the city in the starkest terms.

  In the city nature is harsh.

  If you took a camera and made a National Geographic movie about the city it would look like a movie about life in the jungle, except with cars, lights, cigarettes and Armani suits. But otherwise everything else would be the same. The strong kill the weak, the smart survive, and the smartest live like kings. But there time comes too cause theres always someone smarter and younger. Someone with a short fuse and nothin to lose. Don’t get me wrong now. There are moments where things look beautiful. You’ll see a bird fly way up the sky early in the morning after a long night and you weren’t expecting it, or the snow fall really clean before people get it dirty.

  But Nature in the city is not really beautiful. The beautiful things are only accidents. There mostly kids stuff. Truth is there is something wrong with humans. There different from other animals. It is there fatal flaw. That thing is vice. Let me give you an example. A mother bear protects her young, no matter what. She kills for her young. So does a human mother. Except sometimes. Sometimes a human mother puts her own desires before her children. She might even harm the child, beat him or leave him defenseless. This is called vice. Only humans do it.

  But if you want to talk about nature in the city, think about this. Just like nature, the city don’t never sleep. There are some animals that live by day and some that live by night. The more dangerous ones live at night. That’s life in the city and the jungle. That’s how it always was and always will be. The jungle is open 24/7 and so is the city.

  Frank wrote an oddly touching description of his Christ-like dog, Paul. Justifying his interpretation on the topic of “nature in the city,” Frank explained that “a lady giving birth is part of nature, even if it happens in a hospital. Well, my lady and I couldn’t have a child so we adopted Paul. Paul was our dog but he was like our child.”

  The dog, as it turns out, had only three legs to begin with, so when the white SUV came gunning up the street, he had no chance to escape. He almost died. Indeed the people at the animal hospital said there was no hope, and that they should euthanize the dog. Frank’s wife, Tracie, refused. After the dog was stabilized, it was determined that it was paralyzed. Again, the vets insisted on putting him down. And again, Tracie refused. She took the dog home.

  Frank acknowledged that this was a strange thing to do, but insisted that this dog’s survival had been a miracle. Tracie had lost too much in her life and wasn’t ready to let the animal go. Frank fashioned a little bed, a converted coffee table, and attached wheels to it. They would wheel the wounded creature from room to room. When they cooked knocks and beans, he was there; when they watched Everybody Loves Raymond, he was there; and when they had friends over for poker, there he lay, on his makeshift gurney, always staring straight ahead.

  Frank worried that the dog was suffering. He himself knew about trauma from Vietnam and hated to think that poor Paul was constantly reliving the accident. Tracie would sit next to the paralyzed dog for hours, petting him, and whispering secrets into his ear.

  Frank concluded his touching, utterly bizarre story by saying that this was nature because a dog is part of nature and so are humans and so is a mother’s love for her child, even if this mother is human and the child is a sick dog. It was a counterpoint to Too Sweet’s cynical view of human motherhood.

  There was only a minute or so left in the class. I decided to wrap things up and push off the remaining essays until the next session. Dumayne’s hand shot up. It gave me boundless joy that he raised his hand in class. He was the only inmate in the class who did this, and he did it often, regardless of how many times I’d told him it wasn’t necessary. But I would have been disappointed if he had stopped.

  “Yes, Dumayne,” I said.

  “Chudney wants to read his joint. You should let him.”

  Chudney seemed a little annoyed that his young friend was speaking on his behalf, but didn’t contradict him.

  “Okay, fine,” I said, “make it quick.”

  Chudney did exactly that; he read way too quickly. I couldn’t really understand him and I was already distracted by the officer outside, pointing to his watch. I told him that it was good, even though I hadn’t really heard it. And then I collected the notebooks and pencils.

  Later, I had a chance to actually look at it. I read his essay on the elevator going up the prison tower to deliver books. It caused me to miss my floor.

  One morning when I was ten I was up real early. I don’t know why. Maybe I was just done sleeping for the night but I was up and atom right after the sun came up. I looked out my window and what did I see. A deer eating some grass in the lot across the way! Like it wasn’t nothing at all. Then he got scared of a garbage truck. He ran up the street and stopped. After that he ran away just like that. I don’t know about you but this don’t happen to me everyday. I never seen a deer in my life and mos def not in the city with broken glass all over and cars parked all up on the side of the street. Even at the time I knew it was something special. Like a sign or something. I still wonder where it came from and where it went. I wonder if anyone else seen it.

  Now I know your probably gonna ask me to DESCRIBE what I seen, cause you always do.

  I smiled when I read that.

  Not much tell you the truth. But I remember it like yesterday. The way it moved. Jumping and running like at the same time. I never seen that before. I also remember the sun coming up gold splitting through blue. I remember the deer’s big black eyes. I remember his little white tail waving as he disappeared into the city.

  C.C. the Author

  C.C. dropped out of my class. He had other work to do. I didn’t hold it against him. It’s hard to hold a grudge against a macho guy who reads self-help books and talks earnestly about wanting to “boost my self-esteem.” He wasn’t ashamed to tell the story of the time a prison psychologist asked him to look in a mirror and describe what he saw. He had replied: “a balding guy who’s too short.”

  He was working studiously to write his book. I encouraged him to read a passage of his book-in-progress at a poetry reading that I held in the library. He strutted up to the front of the room, full of bravado, and prefaced his reading by saying that he was “keepin’ it strictly street!” He went on to boast that, “I am currently entertaining a few book offers.” This latter claim was a complete lie, of course, and the former, about keepin’ it street, was, as his audience was about to find out, highly debatable.

  The passage that he read—a recollection of a childhood trauma, which he identified as his first encounter with violence—described his experience witnessing a cab driver being beaten and robbed. In a co
nversation with me afterward, he expressed regret and anxiety for having read the passage in front of the other inmates. It had revealed more vulnerability than he’d intended. And yet, it was interesting that of all the passages in his book, this was the one he had chosen to read.

  He was so desperate to amount to something, to gain respect, that he felt he had to lie about fancy book deals. He was trying to figure out this new persona and it wasn’t easy. He explained to me that a pimp is like a toddler: always trying so damn hard to learn how to walk and talk right. Obsessed with mastering the art of it. Now, it seemed he was trying to learn a new way to walk and talk.

  And he was indeed working hard. Toiling over his manuscript, rewriting it, editing it, carefully piecing it together. And all in a harsh environment that conspires to make such efforts remarkably difficult. He was eager to learn the terminology and techniques of writing. We discussed approaches to editing and revising.

  One day C.C. asked me, “What’s the big thing missing from the book?” I thought for a moment and told him that he needed to draw his female characters more fully. Many of his descriptions only fed into his readers’ assumptions of him as a user and abuser of women. I watched for his reaction to this comment; he was listening intently. The best way to speak to his readers, I suggested, was to show that he understood the prostitutes’ perspective, that he viewed them as something other than prostitutes.

  A few days later, he wordlessly dropped me a few revised chapters on the library counter. Instead of simply describing the physical attributes of each prostitute and where he met each one, he described the path each had taken. Their lives had been shaped by many of the same forces that had shaped his life.

  C.C. had unwittingly changed the story. No longer was he simply the man in charge and they the female dupes. Instead, both he and his prostitutes came off as near equals in a shared and complex struggle for survival. Sometimes he exploited them, sometimes they exploited him—but most of the time, both worked together to simply stay alive and out of trouble.

  Soon thereafter C.C. told me that he decided to stop referring to the women in his story as “bitches.” I laughed when he told me this.

  “Are you going soft?” I asked him.

  But the switch made sense. After transforming the women in his story into three-dimensional characters, it was simply inaccurate to refer to them in this way. His characters were now complex human beings and the descriptive language had to follow suit. In his revised draft, the word bitch only came out of the mouths of his characters—including the C.C. Too Sweet character—but C.C. the narrator never used it. There was now a clear distinction between the voice of the author and the voice of the pimp. While the other inmates marveled at C.C. and me as we sat by the library’s computer, discussing the literary merits of using the words bitch and ho, C.C. was making some progress. He seemed satisfied to have achieved this separation between his personas.

  In developing a more honest storytelling voice, he had, literally, changed his life story. This narrator C.C. was just as real—or perhaps, just as put on—as the persona of pimp C.C. Which one was the real C.C.? I was never entirely certain. I doubt he himself knew.

  As he often insisted, pimping was an identity, not simply a racket. If that were so, then disentangling who he was from what he did would be difficult indeed.

  Sharing Books

  Unlike Too Sweet, Fat Kat did not seem difficult to disentangle. He struck me as a mellow guy, not too concerned with proving himself. He loved kids and animals. My image of him was shaped by the time I saw him looking with pity at a pile of worn out and abused paperbacks that Forest was throwing out to make space for cleaner editions. When Forest invited him to join in this effort, Fat Kat shook his head and smiled.

  “Nah, nah,” he said. “I can’t throw out no books, man.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “In my home growing up, you did not throw out books. No sir, never, um-mm.”

  He laughed and shook his head with this recollection of the past. At some level, perhaps, he recognized that he was being superstitious and yet he deeply abided by this mythos of his youth, the taboo of book disposal, the concept that books are sacred objects.

  I knew exactly what he meant; I had also secretly excused myself from this exercise, recoiling at tossing books into the rubbish heap. And like Fat Kat, it had everything to do with my upbringing. For me, the seed of this feeling was planted in my parents’ home—which is essentially a library with a kitchen and bedrooms—and later cultivated in yeshiva. It bore some fruit in the summer of 1995.

  I had recently become a religious nut—which is saying a lot, considering that my family was already Orthodox Jewish. My family’s relocation from Cleveland to Boston had brought about this change. In the wasteland of Cleveland I had been a budding juvenile delinquent. Although I’d attended a yeshiva day school, populated by wealthy Jewish kids, my neighborhood friends were anything but.

  My buddies were young street punks and aspiring street punks. (I was in the latter category.) My ability to reliably shoot a basketball with both my right and left hands—coupled, I might add, with a wicked crossover dribble—helped me fit in despite being a yarmulke-wearing Orthodox Jew. At school, I studied the Torah and the Talmud; in my neighborhood, I shoplifted, rumbled, listened to hard-core rap, talked smack, and engaged in a variety of other activities that often don’t end well.

  When my father got a job as head of Harvard’s Jewish community, my family moved to Boston. I landed in a quieter neighborhood and a more demanding school. My street-kid days were done. But, alienated from my new goody-goody classmates at my new yeshiva high school, the Maimonides School in Brookline, Massachusetts, I channeled my considerable adolescent hooligan rage into, of all things, intense Torah study.

  It would probably take years of therapy to determine why I turned to the Talmud instead of, say, pyromania, at this point in my life. Perhaps I was attracted to the competitive, male-dominated world of the yeshiva. As Fat Kat himself had noted, the Orthodox exhibit some eerie resemblances to a well-organized gang—as an aspiring punk, I probably understood this unconsciously. Convinced that Maimonides School’s daily 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. schedule was not rigorous enough for the serious scholar—i.e., me—I eagerly gave up my vacation and signed up to study Torah at a yeshiva in Efrat, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. It was the summer after my sophomore year in high school.

  My West Bank Torah summer camp was a fanatic’s wonderland. It was perfect for me. Baruch Lanner, the rabbi who founded and ran the yeshiva, was a charismatic fat man who delivered brilliant, albeit maniacal, Talmudic discourses in the rasping style of an insult comedian. I appreciated the way he combined brash Brooklyn street talk with rabbinic erudition. The last I heard of Lanner, he was doing seven to nine years in the New Jersey system for abusing children; his crimes had apparently been an open secret in the Orthodox community for over thirty years. Rabbi Lanner liked to describe the yeshiva’s schedule thus: “breakfast at 7, lunch at noon, dinner at 6. And when do you study? Every moment that’s not breakfast, lunch or dinner.” Luxuries such as recreation, sleep, and basic hygiene were for the weak and the lily-livered. I was in holy-roller heaven.

  I loved rocking the Torah texts. The exacting legal debates; the wild, provocative stories. I loved wrestling with the ancient books, having them speak to me in their original mysterious languages. Every morning, I’d wake up with Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” playing in my head and strut to the House of Study—the beit midrash—like a prizefighter going to the ring for a title match. I was ready to kick some ass. Or get my ass kicked. Either way, I was content.

  I camped out in the beit midrash, which was open 24/7. It was a giant room lined with bookshelves and rows of tables on the verge of collapse from the sheer quantity of books stacked on them. You were given a designated spot at a table. This is where you stacked your books, studied with your learning partner, prayed three times a day, and took power naps. Every student ha
d a full tabletop set of the Talmud (six volumes), a complete Hebrew Bible, a complete set of Maimonides’ Code (two fat volumes), Hebrew and Aramaic dictionaries. Then you had some of your other favorite medieval and modern commentators, and sundry tomes on Jewish law. If you were freaky, you had books on Hasidism or Kabbalah. If you were cheesy, you read contemporary “inspirational” texts. Whatever gave you your religious jollies.

  I kept a five-subject three-ring notebook in which I had secretly begun work on my magnum opus: a verse-by-verse commentary on the Bible, from Genesis until Chronicles. In the great tradition of biblical commentators, I wrote my glosses in Hebrew, undeterred by the fact that my Hebrew writing skills were at a roughly sixth-grade level.

  The windows in the beit midrash overlooked the terraced Judean Hills of the West Bank—the landscape Melville once described as “old cheese.” The brilliant Middle Eastern sun poured in. Like a divine reward, the desert heat gave way every day at around 4 p.m. to a pleasant light breeze, which left a sandy deposit over all of the books. This was holy sand. Twenty minutes north was Jerusalem. Ten minutes north was Bethlehem, where the biblical matriarch Rachel was buried. Ten minutes south was Hebron, where Adam, Eve, Abraham, and Sarah were buried. On the next hill over, a three-minute drive from my yeshiva in Efrat, was the army base where my father had undergone his combat training for the IDF. This was where my ancestors had communed with God; now it was my turn.

  The political situation was even more tumultuous than usual. The Oslo Peace Accords were going into effect. The Jewish settlers of Efrat, and their allies across Israel, were in a rage. Their target: Yitzhak Rabin. Just mentioning his name sent them into a foaming frenzy. Every day, there were demonstrations and confrontations with the army. From my seat in the beit midrash, I could hear throngs of people outside chanting, “Rabin is a traitor! The Land of Israel is in Peril! Rabin is a Nazi!” The entire town was awakened routinely at four in the morning by bullhorns: Awake, awake, residents of Efrat! Go immediately to Rimon Hill for a demonstration! In compliance with the peace accords, the army was trying to dismantle settler outposts, using the quiet of night to complete their mission. The settlers weren’t having it.