So at 4:30, with a cloudy, bloated sky already darkening and shutting out all light from the stars, we put on our warmest clothes – navy peajackets, dark blue stocking caps, sweatshirts, long underwear, gray cotton gloves, two pairs of socks and brown work boots made at Leavenworth – and walked casually out of the dorm one by one, pretending to jog down the road in the direction of the Weight Room. At the agreed place we ducked under the barbed wire fence and crawled through the virgin snow into the hickory forest. My teeth chattered from the cold. The branches of the trees were tufted with snow that fell down our necks. Willie led us about a mile, mostly downhill, along what the men call the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
We went over the chainlink fence at the road and Claude’s brother from Pittsburgh was waiting in a Buick with the motor running, the exhaust pipe sending a cloud of smoke as high as the tallest tree.
He drove us to a motel on the outskirts of Williamsport. Sioti wanted to stop at an Italian restaurant for lasagna, but we outvoted him. The feeling of driving in a warm car, bundled together that way, was unreal, eerie, and we were alternately silent and cackling with laughter. Claude’s brother had roast beef sandwiches on rye bread and four bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label and two hookers waiting for us in the motel. The hookers were from Pittsburgh and they were already drunk. They were both brunettes with enormous tits and bushy cunts. Not my ideal. But I couldn’t believe how soft their flesh was. Mindlessly, I fucked them both – with a roast beef sandwich and three shots of scotch on the rocks in between – and so did everyone except Willie, who couldn’t raise a hardon.
“I knew it,” he groaned. “My luck don’t change.”
“You beat your meat too much back in the joint,” Sioti said seriously. Sioti slept diagonally across from Willie.
It started to snow again and Claude’s brother drove us back at eight o’clock, and we dove over the chainlink fence again into a snowdrift. The snow made it hard to see and we were all tired and dizzy from the scotch. Sioti stumbled in the snow and fell down – we were going uphill now, and all of us panting. I helped him up, but he clung to me and couldn’t stop shivering. And it was seriously cold. I could hear my heart thumping under my peajacket. Our teeth chattered – we could hear everybody’s teeth, a kind of crazy chorus in the darkness. My eyelids felt frozen. It was Siberia out there, not a Christmas postcard.
“I can’t make it,” Sioti said weakly, and fell again. I said, “Come on, Sy,” and tried to help him, but I couldn’t lift him this time.
“I can’t do it,” he whispered.
“What?”
A snow flurry hit us in the face. “I can’t do it,” he said. He was drunk. “You guys leave me. Go ahead. Save yourselves.” It was like a bad World War Two movie.
Willie floundered back to us and said, “You beat your meat too much back in the joint, Sioti,” and then he grabbed him powerfully under the arms and hauled him up the hill through the hickory forest, half dead with cold and exhaustion. The two of us got him through the barbed wire fence and up the road to the dorm.
On balance, it wasn’t worth it, and that’s my last such foray. I keep thinking today of my kids out there, waiting to come visit me in March, and the parole board meeting in May to decide my immediate fate. I can’t afford to do any dumb things. I was lucky that time; but I won’t press.
February 3
We have yellow towels, and yellow sheets with matching pillowcases, surplus from somewhere. One of my neighbors, a nice kid named Steinberg, wrote precisely this to his mother in New York who wrote back, “Please, son, don’t make fun of me and tell me silly stories.”
There’s also a private golf course nearby, and last August, just before I arrived here, someone hit a golf ball through Willie Polk’s window. Now it’s snowing and he’s freezing. He patched the hole with cardboard but the wind and snow beat a way through it. He’s been complaining to the hacks for months but they never believed his story, and he says if he writes home to his wife or to his lawyer they won’t believe it, either.
February 16
A dude named Chester was badly hurt last night. The men had decided he was the one who ratted on Joe D. I don’t believe it but once an idea like this gets fixed in the men’s minds, it’s almost impossible to dislodge it. Someone claims he saw Chester’s jacket file in Huntsinger’s office and it noted that he was paid FBI informer on the street – got $250 a week. This seems unlikely – that anyone could peer into the file and that such a thing would be itemized there – but the men don’t like Chester, who is over-polite, pale, practices yoga on his bed at 6 a.m. every morning, and in fact asks a hell of a lot of personal questions in a high-pitched, nervous voice; and therefore they elect to believe.
So: if you flush a toilet in the john, it uses cold water and the showers run very hot for a moment. Usually you can hear the toilet start to flush and step out of the way in time; you become adept at this. The men waited until Chester was in the shower, alone, and then flushed a single toilet. Chester heard it and ducked out of the spray a moment. Then he started back under. Nicely timed, at a signal, they flushed every toilet in the shithouse at the same time. Chester’s whole back was scalded and they took him off to the hospital in Williamsport.
March 5
I’m in the hole at Lewisburg, The Wall. Incredible!
About a week ago Fitz, the runner, borrowed $50 from me. He had to make a buy and he was broke. I didn’t see why not. I trusted Fitz. You can’t be the runner and a rat at the same time. Two nights ago he asked me if I wanted a drink. I said sure, I invited a few friends to share it with me, and around 10 p.m. after showering I picked up a paper bag in his house containing a Tasters Choice coffee jar with a pint of vodka in it. Sarkany, one of the hacks, was waiting for me in the corridor. He said, “What have you got there, Irving?”
He knew. Someone had ratted on me. I had no chance to run or dump it. I couldn’t think of anything to do. The Boy Scout in me said, take your punishment like a man. I just handed him the paper bag without a word. A lot of men were watching and fell silent, realizing exactly what had happened. It was like the silence at a funeral.
He took me down the hill through the snow and mud to Control. I couldn’t say goodbye to anyone. He handcuffed me. Then another hack arrived with Fitz in tow and they handcuffed him. I asked where we were going and the other hack laughed and said, “To jail, Irving.”
At 11 p.m. they drove us in a van through the snowy darkness to The Wall. It’s an awful place at night: silent, solemn, huge and gray. We were stripsearched and sent to individual cells on the fifth level of the hole. The doors were steel with just a tiny slit. A bare bunk, no pillow or blanket. The heat comes from a thick vertical pipe that extends from ceiling to floor; it’s so hot that it will burn your hand, and if you throw water on it, it sizzles. There’s a tiny window which I opened to admit a blast of icy air. I slept in my clothes. I was in semi-shock and I slept like a child.
In the morning I looked out the barred window and I could see a pearl gray sky, fog, half of a pitted, unused concrete tennis court and some men in gray sweatsuits jogging through the slush like ghosts. I see a guntower, too, in the fog. It’s cold out there. No birds sing. The cell has a shitter, sink, bare bulb with a long string. I jogged in place, did fifty pushups. I gasped for air, it was so hot. Around noon the hacks gave me paper and envelopes, so I could write this. Meals are shoved in through the slot on a tray. You can talk to the men in the nearby cells but you can’t see their faces.
There’s a black dude across the way they call Crazy. Crazy’s been in the hole, he tells me, for eight months. What did he do? “Don’t remember,” he says. “Musta been somethin pretty good, though.” Deftly he passes me a pack of cigarettes with a long wire that he tosses four or five times across the corridor until I can catch it. It’s a pack of Camels with three Camels, a Marlboro and a Viceroy in it, and a book of damp matches. But they light, with care. Now I’m in Crazy’s debt and so I can’t tell him to shut up when he t
alks — that is, when he shouts at the top of his lungs — all evening long, until nearly midnight, to a brother named Teabag who is either on the tier above us or the tier below us, I can’t tell which. Sounds like they’re yelling in Swahili. Teabag’s voice is very distant. I don’t know what they’re yelling about. I drift off to sleep as soon as they stop.
We’re supposed to get a shower and an hour’s exercise twice a week here, but so far I haven’t had either. One of the hacks told me there was a murder in the shower room last week. Some dude called Peanuts who’d been in the hole for a few months went berserk and killed two blacks and wounded two others — he’d been carrying a shank under a towel. He’d had a feud with one of the men he killed. The hack, whose name is Heisman, asked why he stabbed the other three, too. Peanuts said, “Well, Mr. Heisman, they was standing right there.”
I don’t know what they’ll do to me now, or how long I’ll be here. My kids are due to arrive from Spain next week to visit me. I imagine I’ve blown my parole. I don’t know what to do or how to handle this. I can’t really believe it’s happening — no, that it’s happened — to me.
To me! I thought I was smart, I thought I knew how to jail. How fucking dumb can you be?
Now I know.
PART TWO
March 10, 1973
I’m in Danbury — not the town, which snuggles comfortably in a green valley in the western part of Connecticut; but the FCI, the Federal Correctional Institution. There are six hundred of us. It’s crowded. Daniel Berrigan called it “a popsicle prison, because every aspect of the life there is enervating rather than openly vicious or wounding in a physical sense. It amounts to a dislocation of the human spirit.” I can dig it.
My own fault: busted at Allenwood for possession of a pint of vodka, hustled off at night in handcuffs to the hole at Lewisburg penitentiary, The Wall. Someone had ratted on me. I was five days in the hole. After the second day my anxieties dropped off me like an old skin and I grew peaceful. Because I was alone for the first time since my imprisonment six months ago, not in a dormitory with fifty snoring, farting, groaning, yelling men. I could sleep. I had forgotten how good it could make you feel to sleep eight uninterrupted hours. And I slept more than that. What drove me to it, I suppose, was the realization that my kids were out there somewhere waiting for me and that I had seriously imperiled my chances for parole. I can’t apply now in May, I have to wait until July. This makes me feel a little sick. So I slept.
At The Wall I went before what’s called a Forfeiture Board Hearing. They took away thirty days of my accumulated “good time” — days knocked off my 2-1/2 year sentence for meek and mild behavior — and told me I was being transferred to Danbury. Three days ago I was outfitted with a torn peajacket, pants several sizes too small for me, and three of us were driven across barren, icy Pennsylvania and part of New York State on a cold, gray day. The two hacks fed us a ham sandwich, an orange and a Hershey bar en route. Handcuffed and shackled, it wasn’t easy to peel the orange. We had to get out once and piss into a river, too — that was even harder than peeling the orange.
Arrived Danbury in the late afternoon: a prison as gray and grim as the day, a solemn, forlorn rectangle set high on a big empty hill. The buildings themselves form a wall around a compound the size of a softball stadium, which is what it’s used for during the summer. There is a big indoor gym. I went there yesterday and pumped iron until I was exhausted enough to sleep. In the yard you can’t see the surrounding hills or the town or more than a single sign of life beyond the wall. You see the bowl of gray sky and the bare branches of a maple tree. This place could be anywhere. In fact, it’s nowhere. It might as well be Kansas or the Yukon. I hate it. A cloud of sullenness surrounds me and I get the feeling that the other men are staying out of my way, avoiding the aura of hostility and menace.
March 12
My two little boys came to visit me, brought by Kay, a friend. They were shy at first. Then they jumped all over me, hugged me, kissed me nonstop. I was so glad to be with them again, even in this insane place. We had a Polaroid photograph taken of us in the Visiting Room. They asked me a hundred questions about prison and I kept smiling and saying, “It’s okay. It’s really okay. We have some fun here. But I’m not here because I want to be. Remember that. I wish I could be with you kids, on our boat in Spain or playing in the snow here.”
The visit saddened me deeply for a short time but it also made me breathlessly happy to see them, touch them, to be able to love them other than abstractly in my mind. Later I felt invigorated. And today I’m calm and that cloud of hostility and menace is gone, and I start to get to know the men around me, with whom I’ll jail.
March 28
Here at Danbury they have euphemistic names for the dormitories and cell blocks. They’re called Hartford House, Fairfield Hall, Boston, Maine, etc. For two weeks I was in Massachusetts, in an A & O (Admission & Orientation) group. That was relatively uncrowded. A week ago I was moved to Providence House, an upstairs dorm with 76 howling lunatics, or so it seems. At night the radios are tuned to three or four different stations throughout the dorm, resulting in cacophony. The men argue constantly over what they’ll watch on TV in the evening. The only free bed was in that part of the dorm called the ghetto — all black, but for me. That’s okay. After six months at Allenwood I speak the language. Man, motherfucker, faggot.
My first temporary job here was cleaning the toilets. That was okay, too. No problem getting your hands dirty as long as you know where to find a bar of soap and hot water. Now I’m on the construction gang. Our first job was building an inside wall in the warehouse. And that was okay, too. We took turns laying bricks while the others bullshitted and smoked a joint and kept an eye out for the hack, who stayed in his little office with a pint of Southern Comfort. Then we went outside into the yard to build a wooden platform and corrugated metal roof for an outdoor weightlifting area. That was fine — the weather was cold but the work kept us warm.
Today, however, we were sent outside the walls to a nearby hillside area known as Hackville, where the hacks and prison officials have their houses. All of us had been classified minimum security. No supervision. We had to rake last autumn’s leaves. I didn’t like that at all. We had too much liberty and the leaves gave me an awful sense of time passing and time still to pass. The leaves were ochre and dark red, still crisp underfoot. The earth smelled of spring. The sky was such a clear bright blue that it hurt your eyes, and I didn’t have sunglasses. A car drove by with a blonde girl behind the wheel. The wife of the A.W. — the Associate Warden, who really runs the joint — stepped out on her back porch and offered us coffee and home-made chocolate chip cookies, which we accepted. We sat on the porch with her for a while. She was formally friendly, about thirty five and not bad looking, but sexual thoughts are cramped deep, deep inside me in a dungeon of their own. Light hurts their eyes, too, so to speak.
I didn’t like any of this excursion. It was too human, too normal, and in the joint you can’t afford to nurture the illusion that life is either one of those things. I’m applying for a transfer to a job that will keep me penned up.
March 31
I seem to get on best with the Italians. They can be trusted. Joe D. was my best friend at Allenwood. He was busted for possession of contraband and shipped here, but by the time I arrived he was gone — he’d made parole. That stunned me and also gave me hope.
Here, so far, I’m most friendly with Pete Costa and Tony L. There are some pezzo novante in residence, too — big guns, allegedly, in organized crime. One man they call Charlie the Blade: he carries a wad of hundred dollar bills in his pocket, and they (his friends, not the hacks) bring him breakfast in bed. Charlie’s an old man and not well. And then Johnny Dio, who has a freshly pressed shirt and trousers brought to him every morning from the Laundry Room, and holds court with Pete and Funzi and Gus on the benches outside Hartford House, browning his face in the midday sun. Also John T., who looks exactly like my grandfather
and is the same kind of warm, cordial man; he plants flowers and bushes and tends them lovingly in the little yard outside the Control Center. Straight out of The Godfather. He ran the garbage racket for the syndicate in Yonkers, they say. He makes a daily telephone call home and it’s assumed that one or two of the hacks have been bribed. Tony L. brings me an occasional ice cream from the commissary, where he works. He wants nothing in return. Tony’s in his late twenties, a hit man for the Gambino family — one of the best, they say. He’s here for income tax evasion. He couldn’t be a sweeter guy. We toss a football around whenever we can — he was a quarterback at Stuyvesant High, I was an end at Cornell — and jog together around the yard, two miles a day. A lap is one fifth of a mile. You’re only allowed to jog clockwise. Tony and I never talk about what either of us did professionally on the street; that’s the etiquette.
Once, sitting on a bench with a man freshly arrived from the federal joint at Forth Worth, he said, “Hey, you’re the writer, right?” I said, “Yeah. What do you do when you’re not in the joint?”
He said, grinning, “I’m a thief, man.”
April 10
Every day in the yard I’d been seeing one man playing handball, for hours on end. Or reading on a bench. I found out his name was Monroe. I went up to him last week, introduced myself, and said, “Hey, ah, Monroe, where do you work?” He told me he was the clerk in the Clothing Room, but he’d just been paroled and was leaving in two weeks. “I want your job,” I told him. It turned out I knew his rap partner, Lembke, from Allenwood, and he promised to ask his supervisor if I could take his place when he left.
Jailing Page 4