Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  I waited for the sallyport to open. It seemed like I was always waiting for it to open. Even after almost two years, I was still awed at the simplicity of the machinery of imprisonment. There wasn’t much that separated captivity from freedom. It was basically a switch and an aging steel door that hummed and rumbled as it opened, and slammed shut with a big metallic crash, just like in the movies. Even after all this time in prison, the daily relief of reemerging into the lobby, experiencing that small moment of liberation, never lost its effect.

  The prison lobby was mostly empty that night, I slipped by Sully without a chat and was at my family’s seder within the hour.

  That Night

  Chudney was sitting in the backseat. His seventeen-year-old brother, Darius, was in the passenger seat; Darius’s girlfriend was at the wheel. It was just after 9:30 p.m. Late February in Boston. Roxbury. Icy streets, too cold for snow. They had to make a quick stop. Chudney needed something for lunch the next day. He’d just started a job working construction.

  They pulled up to a bodega on the corner of Maple and Washington. Less than half a mile from their mother’s home on Wharton Street, where Chudney was living at the time. They parked; Chudney ran in. Darius’s girlfriend stayed in the driver’s seat to make a phone call. Darius got out and struck up a conversation with some girls standing outside of the store. When Chudney emerged from the store he saw some young men hovering. They were glaring at his brother.

  From his vantage point across the street, Chudney recognized the menace first—though they were a few blocks from their home, they were in enemy gang territory. Tensions were on the rise. Just then Darius noticed the men. He stiffened up and glared right back at them. Words were exchanged. Chudney jogged over to his brother. In one quick action, he grabbed the boy’s arm and pulled him toward the car. He turned to the glaring young men and said, “It’s cool, man. We out.”

  Darius reluctantly climbed into the front seat, Chudney got into the back and slammed the door shut. In the next moment four things happened simultaneously: Chudney shouted to Darius’s girlfriend to drive, the car screeched, a shot went off, a glass window cracked.

  The gunfire had been absorbed into the noise and commotion, like a tiny bit of poison dissolved into a drink. The car raced up Maple Street. Darius turned around to see whether they were being followed. The next minute was sheer panic. His eyes widened.

  —Omigodomigodomigodshitshitshitshit.

  —What? What! his girlfriend said.

  He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Darius’s girlfriend glanced in the rearview mirror.

  —Oh shit, she screamed, and threw the wheel into a sharp turn, hastily parking the car a few blocks up Maple Street, across from Nazareth Baptist church.

  Chudney was slumped over, the back of his seat soaked in blood. The bullet had entered his head from behind, almost execution style—he probably hadn’t known what hit him. In the front seat, the two teenagers panicked. The girl was not from Boston and did not know the way to the hospital. Darius was in shock. Unable to think or speak or blink or draw air into his throat. He managed to call 911. They waited, sobbing and hysterical. Chudney died in the backseat of the car, parked next to the church.

  Work to Do

  The last time I saw Too Sweet, his smile was brief. From the moment he crossed into the library he was business. As he approached the front counter, I got a closer look. He was uncharacteristically disheveled, hair frizzed, uncombed and a bit long, beard coming in scraggily.

  “What’s good?” he said. He seemed exhausted.

  He gave me some skin—and I, by instinct, glanced around guiltily. He got right to the point.

  “Can’t kick it today,” he said. “I gotta get to work.”

  Standing alone at the counter, shaking his head and squeezing his lips shut, he said, “They’re pinchin’ me, man.” He tapped his fingers on the library counter.

  But suddenly and for no obvious reason his anxiety faded. He smiled and leaned back, an unmistakable prelude to one of his small dramatic performances. He threw a small air punch—more of a fist swat—and followed it with a verbal equivalent.

  “They pinchin’ a pimp!” he announced.

  C.C. was in playland. He looked around to see if anyone caught his little turn of phrase. Nobody was around.

  He embellished a bit: “Bitches be pinchin’ a pimp!”

  Still, no one heard him. But he didn’t mind. C.C. thirsted for a large and adoring audience, but he would settle for just himself, if necessary.

  He got serious again. “I got a lot of work,” he repeated.

  For some reason, I took this to mean he had a lot of law work to do. But, of course, out came the manuscript. I should have guessed: His main occupation was not his legal defense but his narrative defense. His apologia. With his back up against a wall, in the world of lawyers, judges, prison guards, and humiliating press coverage—in which his narrative was being shaped by people who despised him—he struggled to tell another version.

  “Man, I got no love in court today, Avi.”

  “Are you scared?” I asked. This is the wrong question to ask in prison. But it was the best I had for him.

  “Nah, man,” he said, as he shrugged and looked away. “It’ll be a’ ight; ain’t nothin for a real, live P-I-M-P.”

  I didn’t press the issue. Instead I exchanged his ID card for an ink cartridge.

  Deconstructing the Prison Library

  The order came from on high. The Education Department wanted to update the library. The whole place had to be cleared: Every book was to be boxed; every bookshelf disassembled; every table, chair, and computer removed. The entire area was to be taken apart, piece by piece. And then, after the work was done, reconstructed. The library needed new carpeting.

  My duty switched from the norm, such as it was, to the work of dismantling. It was an involved, dirty, and annoying responsibility.

  But the order had been long overdue. The carpeting was in tatters. Nearly fifteen years and thousands of hours of prison traffic didn’t look pretty. It was deeply stained and, in some spots, ripped to shreds and held together by duct tape. The smell was of rotting apples. As Dice had put it, “This carpet here is tainted.”

  And it was killing morale, sending the message that the library wasn’t being watched. Across the prison, graffiti increased markedly when a space looked beaten up, and was usually a sign of lapsed discipline. And it was bad PR (the library, of course, was a routine stop for pols and other official visitors).

  When we began the project, I’d estimated the work would occupy a day or two. In the end, it ate up almost two and a half (union) weeks. Reconstruction added another five days.

  After a few officers sorted out among themselves who was boss—and one of them threw a mini-tantrum when his cause failed—the work commenced. At first, the only people working were the five members of the library detail, plus me and Forest. But after an hour or so the immensity of the task became clear and the officer in charge asked us to enlist more workers.

  I was always hesitant about using prison labor. It felt dirty, too much like slavery for my taste. My staff, at least, got some compensation, meager though it was. But this overhaul job offered no pay for any of the inmates involved. When I mentioned this to one of my officer friends, he said, “You ever hear of cons ‘paying their debt to society’? These guys should be working. It’s good for them to be working. Nobody owes them nothing. They’re the ones who owe something.” When I continued to express my doubts, he said, “Look, these guys fucked up. You gotta give them a chance to earn trust back. You give ’em work and they do it good, they can walk out of here with pride and say, ‘I did my time right.’ Nobody can take that away from them.”

  As it turned out, inmates lined up for the work. After a day or two of backroom negotiations, when caseworkers and officers came into my office to advocate for their favorite inmates—guys they knew from the neighborhood or who they we
re rooting for or, even more obscurely, owed a favor—we had a small workforce of about ten. This force grew as the need increased.

  At first every book was taken off the shelf and stacked onto a linoleum-tiled patch of the library. There were twenty-thousand-plus books and we were trying to keep them roughly organized. Halfway through this massive job, we were informed that the library also needed to be repainted, and the books could not remain stacked on the floor. Now we needed to redo a couple days’ worth of work and put every book into a box, again maintaining a rough order. We were awash in books; it was as if someone had made a small puncture in a dam. Once the shelves were down, the flow continued ferociously. Nobody could take a step without tripping over a pile of books.

  Once the books were gone, each shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases had to be unscrewed and removed. Then the steel frames of the cases had to be carefully felled. Fifteen men would have to carefully lower these surprisingly heavy beams down, unscrew them, and then haul them out or stack them. Hampered by the tight prison schedule and interruptions for lockdowns (following violence on the units), this effort dragged on for days.

  The deconstruction of the steel bookcases required a careful amount of group coordination. This delicate effort had to be carefully organized or someone was certain to get hurt. As it was, an inmate was caught on the shoulder, very nearly his head, by a lowering beam and knocked down hard, the result of a miscommunication. When he fell, a few other men unwisely let go and jumped to help him, leaving the rest of us clinging to the hopelessly cumbersome shelf, nearly causing us to drop it. This could have been unfortunate for everyone, particularly for the man lying underneath it.

  But this incident was the exception and served only to remind everyone what a good job the captain was doing coordinating the workers.

  Captain Sweeney was a small, structurally sound balding man who chewed two sticks of gum with a crooked grin. Unlike many other officers, he didn’t simply supervise work projects, standing at the side as the inmates toiled; he rolled up his sleeves and got to work. When he got sweaty, he’d strip down to his undershirt, and he encouraged the inmates to join him. The inmates respected him.

  At the end of a particularly grueling workday, we all sat around the wreckage, chatting and bullshitting. At that point, it was five inmates, three officers, and me. An outsider walking in would not have been able to distinguish who was staff and who was a prisoner. And it wasn’t just because we were stripped down to matching white undershirts and work pants. It was the familiar way in which the men spoke to one another, the casual way they reclined together at the work site. The body language here was clear. If the deputy had suddenly appeared, the officers would surely have jumped up and corrected their posture.

  After the inmates departed for count-time, the officers discussed lunch. One suggested that we order the inmates lunch “from the staff line”—not four stars, but significantly better than what the inmates got for chow. Sweeney agreed, but when the other officers left, he came up to me and said, “You might wanna get the guys something at the end of the job. Something small, like Chicken McNuggets or fries or something—and make sure they eat it in here. And don’t broadcast it.” I wasn’t surprised that Sweeney was a feeder; nor was I surprised that he delegated the task to someone else. He was kind but he wasn’t stupid.

  A few days after we completed the job, one of the inmate workers dropped by. “Man, I wish we were still working in here,” he said. “There was, like, a different vibe last week.” He was right. The rigidity of prison life had softened during the library deconstruction project. Never was the drama of prison more clear. The uniforms seemed like theatrical costumes. It was as if the dismantling of the theater set also undid the script. And people were free to fill it briefly with another reality.

  But now the library had been fully reconstructed, the work accomplished, the food (secretly) shared. And now the uniforms stayed on. The set was reassembled, the roles reestablished. After a week or two, the pleasantly tart smell of fresh paint dissolved completely. People forgot that the place looked different—and actually much better than before. It was as if it never happened.

  Joining Elia

  The banter behind the library counter, the bar, was as boisterous as ever. There had been some turnover in the inmate work detail. Coolidge had been transferred to a different prison. Pitts had been released. So had Stix. Dice, Teddy, John, and others, had fallen prey to prison mischief and had their details revoked. The inmate staff was still captained by Fat Kat, who’d somehow regained his library job despite his violent actions in 3-2. As usual, Kat held silent sway, sitting placidly with his magazines, keeping a half-shuttered eye on operations.

  Two newer detail workers had become inseparable. They formed a house comedy team: the wily old-timer, Boat, and the most recent addition, a young jester named Nequieste. They were an odd couple. Boat, a grizzled Irish Italian small-time mobster and possible ex-hit man, his legs numb with FBI ammunition—one bullet of which remained lodged—leaned on his cane, offering trenchant straight-man commentary.

  Nequieste, a baby-faced twenty-year-old black guy who oozed intelligence and ingenuous criminal optimism, would run literal circles around Boat, doing brilliant impressions of inmates and prison staff. They were deeply entertained by their own duets.

  Their routines were not unfunny. But most of the time, they were just loud. Their friendship was quickly turning into an irritating convict mentorship. Nequieste listened enraptured as Boat recounted the catalog of his old bank robberies, mob jobs, brushes with the notorious Stevie “Machine Gun” Flemmi and Whitey Bulger, one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives, whom he called by his neighborhood name, Jimmy.

  I was getting tired of all the noise.

  I ventured out into the stacks, where I found the detail’s most elusive member, Elia. He was quietly shelving books. At first he looked annoyed to see me, but he was actually just surprised. He smiled shyly, sighed, and asked, “Finally had enough of them guys, huh?”

  He said this with a touch of frustration, as though he’d been waiting, almost two years, for me to realize this and join him.

  In the gaps through the shelves, I could just make out Nequieste on the other side of the room. He was hunched over, quaking, and with the help of Boat’s cane, walking at an agonizingly slow pace and with theatrical feebleness. His pants were pulled obscenely high, and his uniform top tucked into them. He wore Boat’s thick glasses pushed down all the way to the end of his nose.

  I can’t walk, I need my meds, where are my meds, I can’t see, I heard him say, blending Boat’s gritty Boston smoker’s voice with, to my surprise, an old Jewish man’s accent. My bladder is killing me.

  His audience, including the now-blind Boat, giggled.

  You fuggin’ ass’ole, said Boat, approvingly.

  I reached into the carton of books next to Elia and began shelving alongside him.

  “You wanna see my kid?” Elia asked, in his usual whisper.

  He held out his well-thumbed photo of the beaming four-year-old girl. Then, just as quickly, returned it to his chest pocket. And with it, his smile. We continued silently shelving. I asked him how he’d earned the nickname, “Forty.” He paused for a long second and I knew I’d asked the wrong question.

  “It’s an old drinker’s name,” he said finally. “You know, like forty ounces? But I don’t like it. I’m trying to live it down, okay? But it’s the name I got.”

  We continued shelving books. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched his quiet labors. He would lift a volume, dust it off with his uniform top or with a little paper towel he kept folded in his pocket like an oldtime handkerchief. Or he would blow a soft breath over the book. Then he’d rest his eyes on the cover, squint, pronounce the title carefully to himself, compare it against a printout of the database. Then he’d use both hands to firmly install the book in its precise spot, in accordance with the Dewey Decimal system. Then he’d align the book on the shelf so that it looked
comfortable and secure in its new home. Then he’d dust the neighboring books a bit and check their order and classification markings. He would pick up the next one and begin the process again.

  The man was more than meticulous; he handled these books with love and elegance. I recalled all the times I had noticed him from afar, sometimes just merely detecting his movements at the outer reaches of the library. All those hours—how many hundreds of hours?—he had been engaged in this silent monastic repetition.

  Fuuuck you, you fuckin’ Jamaican, I heard Boat say from the other side of the room, why donya get on a banana boat and go back to your fuckin’ island.

  I spied Nequieste, feeling Boat’s face like a blind man: What did you say, young man? I can’t hear good and my pants are soaking.

  More giggling.

  I said, Fuck you, Jamaican.

  I saw Elia tense up, close his eyes, sigh, and shake his head for a moment. Then he returned to his work, installing a book into its spot. I suddenly felt awful for all of the times over the years when his brittle equilibrium was disrupted by the frequent banter I’d permitted at the front of the library.

  I apologized to him for it. He cocked his head at me and flashed a jagged smile.

  “Aw, I don’t mind,” he said with a shrug. It was a friendly little lie that neither of us had any intention of correcting. “But thank you,” he added.

  We continued shelving books in silence. I didn’t dare shatter his peaceful rhythm. He was among these shelves to escape talk. To let questions sit. We finished the carton and got another. It was a task with no end, the steady job of the old Jewish Messiah joke. This didn’t seem to bother Elia, though. In fact he seemed comforted by it.