Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  “What?” Dumayne laughed in disbelief. “What the fuck was that?”

  “Man,” said Chudney, taking his seat, “you don’t know nothing about love, do you?”

  Dumayne looked mortified, suddenly conscious of his ignorance.

  “Just trust me, lil’ cuz,” said Chudney. “You make wifey a little card that says, This is how much I love you, then you put that recipe in there, and when she’s reading it, right, you pull out some cookies that you made for her, on a nice plate with flowers and shit. You’ll see what happens.”

  Dumayne nodded solemnly.

  Since he had the floor, and confident that his love poem was the best in class, Chudney announced that his life’s goal was to be the host of a TV cooking show. He even had a name for it: Thug Sizzle, with your host Chudney Franklin. He promised that one day, he would host all of us in his restaurant and that Chef Chudney—wearing a “big ass chef hat”—would serve us a feast on the house.

  Frank, appropriately, asked if even he would be invited.

  “Yeah,” said Chudney, “you and your wife. Not the dog, though.”

  The Plan

  A few days later, on a bleak winter afternoon both outside and in the prison, after I weathered a particularly gruesome wave of inmate demands, I spied Chudney waiting patiently at the end of the library counter. A Boston Herald was spread before him, which he glanced at absently. A younger inmate suddenly appeared behind him, leaned in very close, and whispered something into his ear. Chudney nodded slightly, but neither said a word nor changed his expression. The younger inmate vanished.

  There was something in that small interaction that left me with the distinct feeling that I didn’t know Chudney. And probably never would.

  He had come to see me, which was obvious from the distracted way he had been reading the paper. As soon as I was free to talk, I motioned him over.

  “I was serious about what I said the other day,” he said.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “I want to be a …” he looked around and lowered his voice to a whisper, “I want to be a chef, man. I want to have my own TV program. I’m serious about this shit.”

  And he was. He stared at me—almost imploring me, it seemed, to take him seriously. But he didn’t need to implore. Sure, it was slightly ambitious, but not unfeasible. And kind of clever. He’d create a niche and then fill it: a hood cooking show. He was just the guy for the job. He was charismatic, smart, funny, loved food. He could have a show, why not? He could brand himself on marinara sauces and stuff. Thug Sizzle, sure. (Name should probably change, but who knows, maybe not?) And if Plan A didn’t pan out, he could at least be a chef or something. It was probably a better career plan than selling cocaine.

  On the library counter, he laid out a sheet of paper with the words The Plan written carefully at the top, and a frightening number of handwritten boxes each containing a word or two, parole, construction halfway house, business degree, culinary school, TV internship, moms, son, bank, loan, brothers … and on they went. There were probably thirty boxes connected through a battle plan of looping arrows. An even more complicated color-coded legend at the bottom explained this dizzying flowchart.

  “Okay,” he said, sensing my confusion, “forget that for now.”

  There was a strange desperation in his actions. He spoke in haste. Folded the sheet in a quick, rapid action, almost ripping it. It was as though he had to finalize and execute The Plan before daybreak.

  When he got out of prison in a few months he wanted to work in construction for a while, make some money, pay some debts, some child support, and generally get on his feet. He had his high school equivalency wrapped up. Soon, he would start taking some business and culinary classes. He would intern or work in the mailroom or do whatever he could to get his foot in the door in TV. He would take acting classes. He would continue to rise through the ranks in the culinary field. He would do everything he needed to do to achieve his goal: To star in his own cooking show.

  “Five to ten years,” he said. It sounded like a prison sentence.

  He had a lot of questions and wondered if I might answer them or help him find the answers. I agreed. This seemed like a worthy project for the library.

  He fired off his first question: How is that final step achieved? Meaning: How does one go from having all the right degrees and experience to actually having a show? This was an answer I could give him on the spot.

  “That’s simple,” I said, “you can’t know right now.”

  He did not like this answer. It didn’t jibe with The Plan. I explained that he must use his imagination to see how it might happen—and talk to people who have done it. I told him to use the same imagination he used in class to picture a scene: he’s working as a TV intern, with a culinary certificate. He’s a rookie gofer, but a trusted, hardworking part of the team. When the timing is right, he pitches something to the producer. If it’s of value to the producer, the producer will use it. (This is not a favor he’s doing for you, I pointed out, he’s doing it because it’s in his interest. Don’t forget that.) If that segment airs, it goes into his résumé as a TV writing credit. It has begun.

  “My point,” I concluded, “is you can’t know for certain now. But put yourself into the scene. You’ll be front and center when an opening happens, and you’ll seize it. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s okay. You’ll have good experience and can work as a chef or have your own place or something. Always have to have a good Plan B, right?”

  “Yes,” he said. He was taking notes. “That’s good, that’s good.”

  I told him to hold on to The Plan and to make me a list of what the library could provide him to help prepare this effort. He said he’d get started on it immediately. He’d have me a list within ten minutes.

  There was one more thing, Chudney said. “Don’t tell nobody.”

  I promised him my silence—always a dangerous proposition in prison.

  “I’m telling you about The Plan cause I trust you, man,” he said. “There’s a lot a fuckin’ haters around here, Avi.”

  I gave him my word.

  And so he sat down and composed a long list. His writing posture was exactly as I had remembered from the first day in the writing class: meditating—pen lying flat on the table—then staring at the ceiling, waiting for the words to precipitate down. It wasn’t long before they did. In a flurry, he wrote:

  degree programs (business, culinary)

  CORI [Criminal Offender Record Information] issues

  TV jobs, how do you get them?

  recipes

  more recipes

  information on how to write a résumé and a business plan

  loan info

  recipes!!!!

  When the officer arrived to end the library period, Chudney folded up the paper and whispered, “we’ll call this thing TS—for Thug Sizzle.”

  As the officer ushered him out, I shook my head.

  “No,” I said, “let’s not call it that.”

  I was sticking to my policy of no nicknames.

  Dandelion Polenta

  I created a hardcopy file for Chudney. In it I placed a growing stack of information. Applications for business and culinary classes, financial aid and loan papers, information about business plans, licensing for starting a business, tax forms, materials from the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and other culinary schools, with special regard given to schools that didn’t exclude ex-cons. It was always in these types of efforts—in the attempt to help an inmate figure out a legitimate life path—that I learned about the obstacles facing people with criminal records. Chudney, for example, was excluded from getting a federal loan for college.

  I also threw in reviews of TV shows, bios, Wikipedia entries, and interviews of TV culinary personalities. And of course, I included some recipes. I knew that he liked Italian food, so I put in some recipes from Chef Giovanni Scappin, a teacher at CIA. I also enlisted the inmate librarians to scour the libra
ry for cookbooks.

  “You having a chick over, Avi?” Fat Kat asked.

  “You know it,” I said.

  It was a harmless lie. The guys would work harder to find the books if they were aiding in a sexual conquest. And I’d need all the help I could get. It would be strange to find a cookbook in a prison library—but, of course, it was a strange place. After an intrepid search, the inmate library detail turned up two books. One in the Art section and another in Fiction.

  “Make something with a good sauce,” Pitts advised me, handing me a Southwestern cookbook.

  “Why?”

  He grinned. “So you can feed it directly to her in a spoon at the end of the meal. Drives ’em crazy.”

  He moaned and pantomimed this, making me deeply regret having asked the question. He also advised me to wear a “really soft shirt, makes them want to touch you.”

  When Chudney showed up in the library the next day, I slid him the cookbooks and the file of documents. His face brightened up. He grabbed my hand and shook it.

  “Thank you, man,” he said. “This really means a lot to me. I’m gonna pray for you.”

  He seemed genuinely moved, which caught me by surprise. He flipped through the information, occasionally reading a passage aloud. He was in high spirits.

  “ ‘Dress Code,’ ” he read from the information I gave him from Chef Scappin’s Italian restaurant, “ ‘Business or country club casual (collared shirt and dress or chino-style slacks) attire is preferred. No jeans or sneakers, please.’ I like that, man! You can tell people what they allowed to wear in your restaurant. ‘No jeans or sneakers, please,’ ” he said, affecting an English accent. “That’s some good shit, cuz.”

  He grabbed my hand again, enacting upon it a handshake of Rube Goldberg complexity. Again, he thanked me.

  I asked him how he first got into cooking. He told me he used to cook for his mother; she relied on him to cook for his siblings. He also told me that when “working at home”—a subtle way of telling me he was selling drugs, or some such—he would sit in front of the TV watching hours of cooking shows (I imagined him measuring out baggies of cocaine, loaded gun resting on the table, waiting for his hooker to call—all the while, watching the Barefoot Contessa). Even in prison, he was sometimes able to watch some cooking shows, especially when a certain officer, a fellow closet foodie, happened to be on duty.

  A few days later, Chudney reappeared in the library, speaking in semimysterious, musical phrases, some of which strained his mouth. Steelhead trout with asparagus, aged balsamic vinegar and radicchio. Roasted Moulard duck leg with thyme and dandelion polenta. He especially liked saying that phrase: Dandelion Polenta. Chudney was committing menus to memory, sorting out the different courses in a traditional Italian meal, learning how to pair spices.

  I told him that I had a good recipe for a chicken with lemon. He noted, proudly, that this dish would go nicely with fresh basil or rosemary, sun-dried tomatoes, and olive oil. I agreed. I asked if he had ever tasted fresh basil, rosemary, sun-dried tomatoes, or olive oil. He had not. Nor, for that matter, had he ever tasted asparagus, aged balsamic vinegar, or radicchio. As for dandelion polenta, most people are in the dark on that front.

  In his eagerness to advance onto this new path, he was training himself to cook by simply pairing words. From his reading, he knew that the words balsamic vinegar went with the word asparagus even though he had never tasted either. He knew that rosemary went with chicken and with lemon, even though he confessed that he wouldn’t recognize rosemary if he fell into a bush of it.

  I began finding recipes and fragments of recipes left around the library. I knew where they had come from. Chudney was pursuing The Plan zealously. He was even “experimenting” with composing his own recipes. Again, this was a process of mixing and matching words and phrases without really even knowing what they referred to. Ingredients made of sound and syllables, not taste or smell. It was a poetic way to learn the culinary arts. And it was a start.

  Feeders

  I considered bringing in some basic herbs and spices for Chudney. Kick things off with some fresh basil, rosemary, thyme. But I quickly nixed the idea. I could already see Officer Chuzzlewit’s report: Sir, today at 1450, I did see the facility’s librarian hand inmate Franklin 0506891 an unmarked plastic baggie full of a green, leafy substance. They did proceed to exchange a handshake usually used by gangs. He’d buy off three inmates to testify that I’d sold them OxyContin in the library, that I’d delivered it in a hollowed-out James Patterson novel. I’d be in handcuffs before supper.

  Caution was advisable here. According to Mike Russo, a coworker of mine, there were two kinds of prison workers: those who were feeders, and those who weren’t. And Russo knew. Back in the days when he was an officer, before he became a prison computer teacher, he himself was a feeder.

  Feeders were a secret subculture of prison workers who engaged in the illicit practice of bringing food in for inmates. Some did it routinely; some did it once in thirty years. There were as many motivations for breaking the rule as there were people who did it.

  Russo had transgressed for pragmatic reasons. As an officer, he hadn’t given stuff to inmates because he was a nice guy, he did it because it made his job easier. If you could buy some peace for the small price of a cigarette, then why the hell not? Back in the days when he was an officer, he told me, rules were considered more of a suggestion.

  “It’s not like today, when they’ll bust your fuckin’ balls for sneezing the wrong way.”

  But while Russo’s willingness to give food to inmates may have been prompted by pragmatism, and spurred on by laxness, there was something else at play. He identified. As he told me, most of the inmates were “just regular guys.” Russo, a navy vet, always referred to the inmates as “the guys.” The inmates in his class were “my guys.” He had nothing against the guys, he told me.

  “I don’t know their stories,” he said. “I’m not gonna judge.”

  Russo also didn’t judge feeders: “When you see a man grubbing you just kind of feel bad for him, you know?”

  I did know. And I also knew that it wasn’t just about feeling bad for the inmate, it was about feeling bad about yourself. An officer on an elevator in the Tower once told me he was proud of his job keeping bad guys out of society. “Someone’s gotta do it, right?”—but that didn’t stop him from going to church every week, for almost twenty years now, kneeling and confessing to what he called “the sin of locking a human being in a cage.”

  For those who didn’t have the rite of confession—and perhaps even for some who did—feeding was a small, mostly symbolic, token of penance. A minor act of disobedience that helped you maintain a conscience, allowed you an identity apart from, and against, being a jailer.

  In prison kindness was literally outlawed. Written policies not only precluded staff from selling, but even from sharing any item, no matter how small, with an inmate. This was part of what made the prison library—a lending library after all—such a radical concept. Resources were so limited, the rules so stringent, that whatever goods or services existed were sold at high prices. It was exceedingly rare to find an item that wasn’t also a commodity. Everything was a quid pro quo. The idea that a valuable item like a library book or magazine, or one of the many services provided in the library, could actually exchange hands free of charge was anomalous in prison. To cynics, it was laughable. And sometimes they were right: it wasn’t uncommon for free library services to be abused for financial gain. I heard reports of inmates checking out popular books like The Da Vinci Code, then auctioning off reading rights to fellow inmates.

  Even gifts given from sheer kindness were illegal. That ribbon Jessica had given her cellmate to calm her nerves, was, from the prison’s perspective, technically contraband. And it was part of what gave meaning to that small act. Jessica had actually taken a small risk in doing it.

  In this environment of scarcity and distrust, a feeder was wading into trouble. If you
pitched in some item, anything, you immediately became part of the black market. There wasn’t much middle ground. Most contraband—including drugs—was brought into prison by staff. As a feeder, you entered the gray area between law-abiding and crooked government employee. You may have only given an inmate a sandwich, but the real problem was you knowingly breached the code of your job as a government employee. You compromised your credibility as a loyal, honest public servant. And the worst sin of all: you may have set your boss up to be embarrassed in front of his boss.

  Feeders existed on the periphery. I mostly heard of them through gossip. A teacher who was a former monk, who did it out of charity. A bawdy older prison teacher with strong maternal impulses, who was constitutionally incapable of denying a person food. There were whispers of some who did it just for the thrill of breaking the rules.

  I did it for Elia’s birthday. He’d been an integral member of my inmate library staff since my first day there. I’d recently noticed that he seemed deeply depressed. He would mope around the library, organizing books in silence for hours on end. Just opening his mouth to talk seemed to pain him. In conversations, he’d trail off and say, “I don’t know, man, I just don’t know.” He told me he felt eighty years old, even though he was in his early forties. He was lonely.

  Elia had mentioned to me how, when he was living on the streets, he used to buy a chocolate cupcake at a certain café and sit on a park bench. For a moment, he’d escape his troubles. For his birthday, I bought him the chocolate cupcake. I invested far too much neurotic energy into this gesture. At ten different moments from when I bought the damn cupcake to when Elia showed up to work, I considered just eating it myself and forgetting about the whole thing. But, in the end, I decided to do it.