Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  But Chudney had changed my line to “Sunday morning,” a moment of the week with vastly different connotations. I’d noticed this alteration when he made it and had wondered if it had anything to do with Sunday as the Lord’s day. I had meant to ask him, but forgot.

  But it wasn’t just that. The images in this lonely Sabbath morning encounter with the sky also suggested a spiritual meditation. The contrast between the plane soaring, an image of heaven-bound freedom and power, and with his own radical feeling of earthboundness—standing alone, static, in captivity, in the prison yard. There was some kind of longing in that. It was the quiet fire that burned under The Plan. He rarely spoke of it. But it was understood.

  Chudney’s mother told me that she found comfort in the fact that he had died next to a church. “It might have been the last thing he saw on this planet,” she said.

  Marcia told me that, as a child, Chudney had wanted to be a clown. He had made her look in the Yellow Pages for clown jobs. He loved making people around him smile.

  The second oldest of five, he would do anything for his mother: cook, clean, put the children to bed. And when he did these things, he went all out. He didn’t just clean the oven, he would take it apart and scrub it clean. He would make sure that the house looked presentable and cozy when his mother returned home from a long day of work as a janitor at Beth Israel Hospital.

  “You know when you come home, you want everything to look right—Chudney always made sure that happened, even without my asking him. There were some things he just knew to do.”

  After he was released from prison, he began working in construction. Every night before he went to bed, he’d make his lunch for the next day. He’d make his tuna sandwich with great care and would wrap it with great care. Each part of his lunch was placed together in the refrigerator, ready for him to grab it on his way to work, she told me.

  When she returned from the hospital after he was pronounced dead, Marcia opened the refrigerator. There was his sandwich—still fresh—meticulously made and wrapped, ready for him to grab on his way out. She picked it up and examined it: it was put together so thoughtfully, by his living fingers, only hours ago.

  There were questions about Chudney’s death that I didn’t dare ask his mother and she probably wouldn’t have known the answers in any case. Did Chudney know the killers? Was this the result of a previous conflict? The prison beef? And how many people had witnessed this murder but were bound by the code of silence—or were too scared to talk?

  Was the bullet intended for Darius? Was Darius in a gang? Was Darius plotting revenge? For all I knew, he’d already taken it. For all I knew, Chudney’s killer would walk into the library next week and ask for a good book.

  A few weeks later I dropped by Marcia’s home again to chat and to look at photos. I stayed for a while and when I finally left, it was dark. As I walked out of the apartment complex, I heard a voice behind me.

  “Hey, you from South Bay?”

  I turned around. A man, whom I did not recognize, was sitting on the stoop. He was glaring at me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m not from there, I work there. You don’t seem happy to see me.” This was my attempt to be friendly. He continued to stare.

  “Yeah, I remember you,” he said. “You’re the guy in the library.”

  “That’s right. What’s your name?”

  He smiled sarcastically and shook his head. Even through the shadows I sensed his truculent eyes searching me.

  “I remember you, you didn’t let me make some important copies. You were just like the rest of them.”

  Yes, now I did remember him. He had made a big scene in the library about how I was trying to prevent him from doing some important legal work, because I hesitated to make him sixty pages of copies. The library’s policy was no more than ten pages per person at a time, which I extended within reason. We were perennially short on paper and ink.

  As I stood on a dark side street of Roxbury, this anonymous man began berating me about how his rights were violated again and again in prison, how I had no idea about the abuse he suffered in there. He told me that there were some people from prison—both inmates and staff—whom he had vowed to “fuck up” if he ever caught them on his turf.

  It occurred to me that if I were one of those people, I was in serious trouble. If anything did happen to me, the cops would undoubtedly have wondered why I thought it was a good idea to be in this neighborhood at this hour. There wasn’t anyone nearby, just me and a belligerent and possibly intoxicated ex-con.

  I thought about turning around, going straight to my car and booking it the hell out of there. But then I remembered what happened to Chudney. Turning my back to him would be a sign of blatant disrespect and also make me vulnerable. The less risky option was to try to have a conversation with him. I took a step toward him.

  I apologized to him and said, “The only reason that I denied you copies was that we are always short on paper, crazy as that sounds. If I give you all those pages, it means someone else doesn’t get anything. And you know what the person will say to me? You’re preventing me from doing my legal work—and he’d be right. My job is to make sure each person there has equal resources.”

  He continued to stare.

  “You chose to be a part of that system,” he said, “you profit off that system, man—you gotta answer for it. And then you be coming into this building up in here … Why you here?”

  I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. I devised an exit strategy: to talk like telemarketer.

  “I appreciate your criticism,” I said absurdly. “Whether you believe me or not, I do try to make the library a place that goes above and beyond. If I’m performing under par, please tell me how to improve. I welcome it.”

  I extended my hand to him. He looked at it in disgust but took it, squeezing a bit harder than he needed to.

  “I need to run,” I said.

  Never had those words been so true.

  “But thanks for your comments. I’m always trying to improve the library.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “My name is Avi Steinberg, by the way.”

  “My name is Mike. Mike Tree,” he said, as his eye caught a tree.

  Really original, I thought.

  “Nice to meet you again, Mike Tree,” I said as I walked toward my car.

  As I drove home, I felt as though I were surreptitiously slipping back across a border at midnight. Two cop cruisers tore past my car in full shriek and throttle.

  Picking up some new library patrons, I thought.

  As I drove past the corner where Chudney was shot, I flicked my odometer to zero. I thought of Chudney’s final poem, with its longing for a realm apart from our fallen world. As I drove, I recalled the poem Chudney wrote about his baby son, a poem heavily laden in question marks. I decided to commit it to memory:

  Where did you come from?

  No Place that I know.

  A place full of the love

  And the glory of pure joy.

  Where did you come from?

  Where is this place?

  When I got home, I looked down. I lived 3.4 miles from the corner where Chudney was shot.

  Prologue

  Shortly after I left the prison for the last time—which had the miraculous effect of instantly healing my back—I found myself in Copley Square, walking toward the stately Boston Public Library. It was late May. In some corners of the city, the scent of lilacs could hold its own against rush hour’s amassed fumes. The flower of Boston’s spring is short-lived, a life-span of mere hours, but it was in full bloom that day.

  I thought of Hawthorne’s description of the wild roses blossoming next to this city’s first prison, “which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.” His prison rose bush struck me as a fine metaphor for a pr
ison library, freely giving a small gift of beauty to a criminal. And as Hawthorne, a fellow fatalist after all, had also noted: this tiny, freely given object of beauty, a rose (or a book), was fragile, a mere token—and probably nothing more.

  It had been almost a month since I had walked into a library. I missed it. I mounted the steps of Boston’s great marble hall of books. All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons—with libraries—were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years. Even in his fatalism—envisioning the New World Utopian dream dashed early by the grim necessity of building a prison—it is doubtful Hawthorne would have imagined so many prisons, the biggest penal system in the history of the world. America has 5 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of the world’s prison population. A population the size of an American city left without a vote. If, as Hawthorne wrote, prison was the “black flower of civilized society,” how would he describe the modern American penal system?

  The central Boston Public Library however was still open, and lovely as ever. Inside, I discovered a crowd that was somehow familiar to me from prison and was suddenly struck by the universal culture of daytime libraries, both those in prison and in the free world: they are havens for all variety of loners and outcasts.

  There were manic scribblers, filling legal pads with their musings; schizos, the obsessive and the compulsive; conspiracy theorists sitting with piles of books filling notecards in a careful effort to document their revisionist views of history; skeletal women grimly surveying massive tomes with magnifying glasses; an ancient gentleman smartly attired in a fedora and necktie (with tie clip), shuffling by at a glacial pace. His houndstooth sports jacket may have fit him handsomely during the Johnson administration but now came almost to his knees. There were others. Angry, bearded weirdos. Nap seekers. Grad students with Macs. A librarian snickering over an email.

  All were equal in the main reading room, Bates Hall, with its magnificent fifty-foot vaulted ceiling and arched windows set high upon the wall, carefully placed, so it would seem, to remind one that the effulgence pouring through streamed directly from the heavens. Rows upon rows of reading tables dotted in glowing green lamps, like the wonderful affirmation signaled by the endless chain of green traffic lights that occasionally turns Broadway into a joyride through Manhattan.

  Somebody stirred nearby.

  Psst.

  I turned around. I was being summoned with a smile and an elaborate gesture. This man knew me, which meant I probably knew him. But I didn’t recognize him. Not until I got close.

  “Maestro,” he whispered fervently. It was Al, the above-ground swimming pool salesman I’d met in the prison library during the winter.

  “You don’t recognize me!” he said, as I took a seat next to him. “I remember you, Mr. Prison Librarian.”

  “Of course I remember you,” I said. “How could I forget?”

  I might have been forgiven for not immediately identifying him. He was generously cloaked, wizard-like, in a fluttering, immaculately white Arabian thobe, with equally well-scrubbed white Air Jordans on his feet. There were the beginnings of a beard.

  I remember he once told me that he wore the cap of whatever baseball team was currently the World Series champion. This was a man intent on partaking of greatness. Perhaps there was something like optimism in that—though, as a baseball fan myself, I tend toward more loyal forms of optimism. True to his word, though, he was wearing a new, red St. Louis Cardinals cap that day.

  His head was the site of much activity. Over the Cardinals cap was a hood from his red sweatshirt, and thick headphones connected to an iPod. Under the cap, a white silken do-rag. And under that, a white kufi. The final tally: five items wrapped around this man’s cranium. Until I arrived, he’d been hunched over an Arabic Quran, with facing English translation. An Arabic-English dictionary sat nearby.

  The process of saying hello was pleasantly delayed by his methodical effort to remove each piece of headgear. He peeled off each layer, and with it, an entire persona. First, he doffed the hoodie, headphones and cap, his city garb. He was now left in a white do-rag that clung tightly to his hair and dangled nobly down his right shoulder. Together with the white robe, he was a jewel-encrusted dagger away from being a proud Moorish sentry. Then he ran his hand under the do-rag, removing it, and revealing the hand-knit kufi. Now he was a pilgrim on the hajj.

  I told him I hadn’t known he was a devout Muslim.

  “Is the pope Catholic?” he said to me. “Then why can’t I be Muslim?”

  As usual, I couldn’t quite tease out whether this was wit or sheer nonsense.

  “What about Marx?” I asked. “I remember you were into the whole religion thing as a false ideology designed to keep the masses—”

  “Fuck that,” he whispered. “Man’s got to believe.”

  I asked him about his star-selling business and about the swimming pools. He seemed uneasy with the questions. I got the sense he’d moved on from these things, or that it had gone sour. Or perhaps it had been nothing more than prison talk.

  “I can still get you one … if you want,” he said, referring to either a star or an above-ground swimming pool. Possibly both. I didn’t ask.

  “Nah,” I said, “I’m all set.”

  After playing a bit of prison geography, I told him about my worries regarding Josh and other inmates with whom I was trying to stay in touch. He re-outfitted himself, wrapping and rewrapping his head. We floated out of the reading room together. He told me that he still remembered the jokes I told in the writing class (I would often start the class with a joke). I thanked him for saying that.

  “No man, I’m serious,” he told me, as we rounded down toward the grand staircase. “I wrote them all down, that was some serious shit you was spinning.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “Jokes are serious. I’m glad you agree.”

  We turned through the triumphal arch, past a clutter of columns and parapets, into the soft yellow, Siena marble arcade. The grand staircase. Under the murals of Aeschylus, Virgil, and Plato, we began our descent. He grabbed my arm, apparently in need of help balancing. We walked past the stone library lion—libraries really do need lions to protect them, the way that Officer Eddie Grimes had once told me, “the sword protects the pen.”

  I continued telling him about my issues. It wasn’t clear that he was listening. We passed through the arched front door. It felt strange to walk about freely with an ex-inmate, with nobody watching, no restrictions or checkpoints. We stood under the heavy wrought-iron lanterns on the building’s facade. Through the warm air, a swirl of scents reached us, cotton-candy, burgers, and buses. A twist of sewage. It was a Saturday—and even though I no longer kept the traditions, I resolved to observe the loveliness of this particular Shabbat day, to walk the forty-five minutes home.

  As I rattled on about my concerns for the various people I had left behind in the prison, Al stared out over Copley Square, toward Trinity Church and the reflection of Trinity Church in the mirrored John Hancock building.

  Finally, he cut me off.

  “Let me tell you a good one,” he said. “You told me this one. But I think you need to hear it again.”

  He told me the joke, getting it mostly right.

  A merchant bought a sack of prunes from his competitor.

  I smiled. I knew where this was going.

  Opening the sack, he saw that the prunes had begun to rot. He went back to the seller and demanded his money back. The seller refused, and the two men went to see the rabbi to settle their dispute.

  The rabbi sat down at a table between the two men and emptied the sack in front of them. Then he put on his glasses, and without saying a word, he went to work, slowly and carefully tasting one prune after another and each time shaking his head.

  After some time had passed, the plaintiff finally spoke up, “So, Rabbi, what do you think?”

  The rabbi, wh
o was about to consume the last of the prunes, looked up and replied sharply: “Why are you fellows wasting my time? What do you think I am—a prune expert?”

  “You did write those jokes down, didn’t you?” I said.

  “I told you, man, that’s some deep shit.”

  “What do you think it’s about?” I asked.

  “I’ve thought about it,” he said, “and I’ll tell you exactly what it is: in this life, a man don’t got to have all the answers.”

  “That’s funny,” I said, “I thought it was about a hungry thief who calls himself a rabbi.”

  “Nah, man. Shit. You missed the whole point.”

  He seemed genuinely agitated.

  “It’s about a smart guy, okay, but he ain’t smart in the right way, see? Just ’cause you think about something a lot don’t mean you know anything about it. Maybe you went to rabbi school, or you’re an imam, or whatnot, but that don’t mean you know shit about no damn prunes.”

  He gave me a stern look. We descended a few more steps. And I decided to accept his interpretation.

  At the curb, Al released my arm—only when he finally let go did I realize how tightly he’d been clutching me. He gave me the Islamic farewell. I followed his lead: we alternated pecking each other’s cheeks until he seemed satisfied that the gesture had been properly executed, after what felt like forty, possibly fifty turns. Then we thug hugged. Then fist bumped. Then we shook hands, and parted ways. He in a cab, I by foot.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to the following people who, in different and indispensable ways, helped make this book possible.

  To Steve Fredman, Anita Leyfell, Lorna Owen, Jed Perl, Marcie Richardson, and Sasha Weiss; to Jennifer Lyons, for her patience and wisdom; to my brilliant and clairvoyant editor, Ronit Feldman, the hard-working staff at Doubleday, and of course to the inimitable Nan Talese.

  To Cathy, Charlie, Dottie, Forest, Kamau, Kelly, Mary Beth, Ming, Rick, Yoni, and all of the good people at the Bay.