Newjack

by Ted Conover

  His sister pooped out during the reading of Horton Hears a Who, and I laid her in her crib. But my son, too tired and too excited, began to act up. He knocked things over. He climbed onto the back of a chair. He grabbed for things—scissors—that he wasn’t supposed to have. As I took a phone call from Margot, who had to work late at her job in Manhattan, he announced that he was going to go wake up his sister.

  “No you’re not,” I said.

  “Yes I am!” he cried gleefully.

  “A—, don’t do that,” I repeated.

  “Okay!” he said, but he shot up the stairs toward her room.

  Something in me sort of snapped. All day long I was disrespected by criminals; I felt that home should be different. I ran up the stairs and picked him up by his pajama tops outside her door. “When I say no, you will listen!” I whispered angrily, giving him a spank, surprising myself.

  I had never done that before, and it surprised him, too. He burst into tears. This woke his sister. I was furious, and I ordered her to go back to sleep. She didn’t obey, either. The house filled with sobs. “Into your room,” I ordered my son, and carried him bodily when he “refused to comply.”

  A use-of-force on my own son, I realized the moment after it happened. There were better ways to handle the situation, I knew, but none that I seemed capable of at the time. I asked him to lie down with me in his bed so I could read him another book, and eventually he did. Then he held on to my arm, kind of tight. I felt like crying into his shirt, breaking down, sobbing for a good hour. I turned my head and read the story.

  That night started a trend. Margot and I had seen others take hours to get their kids to bed, and had vowed we’d be relatively firm about it: We would read a story, kiss them good night, turn off the light, and leave the room.

  Only now, I’d started fudging. I’d read my son the book on his bed and then lie down next to him for a minute. I only had to do it once or twice before he started requesting it. Then it became a part of our routine: my arm around him, his little hand on my arm, and soon his sonorous breathing. It was, truly, the sweetest thing in my day, and often I would fall asleep, too, out of exhaustion and the feeling of peace.

  When I woke up and staggered into our bedroom, Margot, normally the more softhearted of the two of us, would look at me skeptically.

  “I know, I know,” I’d say. “I really don’t mean to fall asleep in there, but I’m so tired.”

  It was an excuse, an evasion, a way not to examine the fact that I’d never been meaner or more vulnerable.

  The next morning, I listened to a news station on the car radio as I drove to work. It was still dark outside. There was a story about the murder of a New York City public school teacher, Jonathan Levin, by one or two former students who wanted money. Levin, like me, was a son of privilege (big privilege in his case; his father was the chairman of Time Warner), and evidently beloved by his students. The killers were two more fucked-up inner-city teenagers, who in a few months would be moving into a place like R-and-W gallery.

  The story reminded me of another from just the week before: The emotionally disturbed grandson of Dr. Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, had been arrested and charged with setting the fire that engulfed her in the apartment they shared.

  Young black men killing the people who loved them. I felt I’d never heard sadder stories in my life. And as a CO, I knew something the newspapers didn’t: the next step, the kinds of lives these boys would lead from here on in. I felt sad for them, sad for me, sad for the world.

  I sat for a while in the Sing Sing parking lot to collect myself. You couldn’t walk into work this way, upset about things. It made you vulnerable. In the locker room I searched around for my game face, found it around the time I strapped the gear onto my belt: baton, latex-gloves holder, key clips—the tough stuff, the accoutrements of guard identity. They were a help, at times like this. I put the emotions away, and punched in.

  Margot had agreed to my project almost as blindly as I had pursued it. Generously and supportively, she adjusted her schedule and cut back on other commitments to accommodate mine. We have a strong marriage that thrives on our mutual curiosity about the world. Even so, the strains grew. Our social life suffered, sometimes because of my schedule, sometimes because mentally I just couldn’t handle certain kinds of Manhattan parties or dinner dates after a day of work in the prison. Ambitious people, mannered people, neurotic people, high-society people—the kind of people who make life in the city so interesting—became unbearable to me. I was overwhelmed. I just wanted plain vanilla, down-to-earth.

  The secrecy of my project took a different kind of toll on our relations with friends: Nobody knew about it; nobody could know. The world was too small, and both my safety and my livelihood were at stake.

  Also—and this was probably a mistake—I didn’t want to tell Margot everything I knew or had seen. Back at the Academy, Sergeant Bloom had recommended that we all discuss with our families the possibility of being taken hostage. I didn’t want to scare her with that kind of stuff, didn’t want to alarm her any more than necessary. And in a different way, I didn’t want to sully the kitchen table with the kinds of things I’d seen and heard during the day; it just seemed best to keep it inside.

  But inside is a bad place for stress. This is very obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t obvious on those nights after we got the kids to bed. I wouldn’t volunteer details of my day, and when she tried to update me on her life, often I would just tune her out. I found myself impatient in a way I couldn’t explain. I didn’t want to hear about the minutiae of her day. There wasn’t room in my brain for what seemed trivialities. Black moods would come from out of nowhere and envelop me. I tried to hide them by acting civil, but “civil” came off as chilly and robotic.

  One day we were driving back to the city from a visit with friends upstate. I’d had the weekend off for a change—a chance to relax, be with Margot and the kids. But in the middle of the Saw Mill River Parkway, with all of them asleep, I was seized with the closest thing I’ve ever had to a panic attack. What if I got assigned to R-and-W tomorrow? I thought. The feeling of dread was a dense cloud that blocked my view of everything around me. I slowed down, tried to repress it. I’d been away from R-and-W for a couple of weeks now. There was no reason Holmes would stick me over there again. The odds were ten to one, twenty to one. I turned on the radio, tried listening to the news.

  It was a beautiful evening, and when we got home, Margot suggested that we all take a walk around the neighborhood. We put the baby in the stroller and set off. Relaxed, Margot started telling me about her friend’s visit to her sister in Colorado and her sister’s critiques of her and her friend’s critiques of the children and her mom chiming in and … and suddenly I couldn’t bear to listen to it right now, I thought—or did I say it out loud? I probably did; something had to give. Who cared about the friend when I might have to work R-and-W tomorrow? Margot got mad. I had no time or patience anymore for any of them, her or the kids, she charged. I had never been in a harder situation in my life, I responded. Couldn’t she see? There was no room in my head for it! You’re not just oblivious, she responded, you’re ridiculously rigid and prickly. And with that, I got hostile. You have no idea, I answered, no idea what this is like. And I thought, How dare she complain when I’m working so hard to hold myself together, to maintain a calm exterior?

  Maybe that’s because you don’t tell me what it’s like! she shot back. Four more months, I answered, wearily. Can we just hang on four more months and then it will be over. Can you deal with it for that long?

  Many mornings as I returned to Sing Sing—leaving home at the gate, in this direction—I asked myself the same question. Could I make it until the end of the year? Most often (though not always) the answer was yes. Despite the problems, work still intrigued me on many levels. There was the existential level: A young inmate’s bitter statement that he was going to be in here “till the sun burns out” got me wondering abo
ut the torture of time, the strange practice of “doing time.” There was the human-behavior level: The character played by Woody Allen in his current film said that whenever he met a woman, no matter how young or how old, somewhere in his mind he was thinking about having sex with her. My take on it, working in a place where physical confrontation was always possible, was that most men, meeting other men, instantly asked themselves: Could I beat him in a fight?

  But also I had been assessing myself as a prison guard and was bothered by my conclusions. Up in Albany, Nigro had given me an overall evaluation of excellent—rare in the Department, he assured me. Here at Sing Sing, I had dropped a notch—my first evaluation by the sergeants was “good.” No complaints offered; just nothing stellar.

  What vexed me was that I knew it was true, that despite my exertions and desire to do well, despite my college degree, I wasn’t better at the actual job of being a guard than anybody else. Too often I lost my cool, wavered in emergencies, forgot details of the ninety-nine rules (how many magazines could they have in their cell?), failed to use force when it might have been a good idea to do so. Several officers around me—I thought of Miller, Smith, Stone, Singleton, Stickney—seemed much more effective. And I would have trouble in areas where they had no trouble at all.

  A good example was the laundry run. A gallery’s laundry was done a couple of times a week. One day was sheets and towels; another was clothing. Volunteer porters went cell to cell in the morning collecting the dirty laundry, they carried it about a quarter mile through tunnels and down a prison drive to the Laundry Building, and later in the day, always escorted by an officer, they picked it up.

  One rainy September afternoon I was the officer escorting four R-gallery porters back from the Laundry Building. It was a sheets-and-towels day, and the loads were heavy; four porters really weren’t enough to carry it all. I walked at the end of the procession, as was customary, and could see that the last porter in the file, a slight jokester inmate known as Beezle, was barely making it. Beezle was hardly over a hundred pounds, and his enormous, unwieldy bundle of sheets and towels had to weigh fifty or sixty pounds.

  One of the things I had learned at Sing Sing was, as it had been put to me, “an officer never helps an inmate carry his shit.” This rule was unwritten but hard and fast. An inmate moving from one cell to another often had big garbage bags full of property to carry; you didn’t help him with it. An inmate who had received your permission to swap his sagging bunk with a firmer one in the empty cell next door usually needed a hand, but it couldn’t be yours—it had to be that of another inmate. Officers who lent their strength to help an inmate were openly mocked.

  Still, Beezle was seriously overmatched. He staggered under his load like an ant carrying a jelly bean. We had gone only fifty yards and already the inmates in front of him had turned a corner and were waiting at the 5-Building gate; he and I were alone on the paved drive that led to the building. Still, I resisted the urge to help. I was an officer. I knew the rules.

  From around a corner appeared a young black man in slacks and glasses, a civilian. He had probably come from the School Building; he looked like a teacher, maybe of one of the GED classes. As he approached, he glared at me.

  “Why don’t you help the man?” he demanded angrily as he passed us.

  I ignored him, but the remark stung. It was exactly what my conscience was asking. Once we turned the corner and he couldn’t see me, I caught up with Beezle and helped him support the teetering load.

  Of course it was only about ten seconds before we passed an officer. “Get one of those other porters to carry that!” he chided.

  “Their hands are full, too,” I answered, trying to look a little embarrassed.

  Four more officers weighed in before we had made it back to B-block:

  “He-e-ey,” in a disapproving tone.

  “What, you need some exercise?”

  “You shouldn’t be doing that.”

  “Oh, how nice.”

  Back at the Academy, more than one instructor had said it took four or five years to make a good CO. I had wondered why. There seemed to be no difficult concepts to master; the rules were all straightforward. In terms of civil service, you were only on probation for a year. The easiest way to get in trouble, everyone said, was to arrive at work late or call in sick too often. The four or five years thing had sounded like self-flattery.

  But after five months at Sing Sing, I understood. Experience mattered. Or, more precisely, it took time (and confrontations) to decide (or to discover) what kind of person was going to be wearing your uniform. A hard-ass or a softie? Inmates’ friend or inmates’ enemy? Straight or crooked? A user of force or a writer of tickets? A strict overseer or a lender of hands? The job was full of discretionary power and the decisions about how to use it were often moral.

  I envied my classmates who had been penciled-in to easy posts: patrolling the parking lot, guarding the sally port, perched atop a wall tower. With a job like that, you could go home with your peace of mind intact. But moving into the fall, with the end in sight, I wanted to squeeze as much of the four or five years it took to make a good CO into my single rookie year. I wanted to deepen my experience, achieve as much mastery as I could in the time I had. And with that end in mind, I did something that would have been unthinkable a short while before: I bid B-block. I would be there every day.

  With my meager seniority, the choice of steady posts was limited. My first choice was V-gallery, the single gallery on the flats that Smith once had. I didn’t get it, but I did get my second pick—a regular rotation, every couple of days, between R-and-W, V-gallery, and escort. For better and worse, my daily fate was thenceforth sealed, and I was freed of the awful unpredictability of Sergeant Holmes.

  Escort officer was, actually, a bit of a misnomer. On the day shift, an escort officer usually spent about half his day supervising in the mess hall, during breakfast and lunch. A relatively large number of officers—eight to a dozen—were assigned to each meal because of the prison mess hall’s well-known reputation as a place where inmates can “go off.” There was a variety of duties. The mess hall OIC stood on the bridge and decided when a gallery would be called to eat and when it would be excused. Another officer locked and unlocked the gates that controlled inmate movement off the galleries. Two or three others monitored the metal detector and pat-frisked inmates as they passed through the short tunnel between the mess hall and the bridge.

  But the worst job, and the one I was usually assigned because I was new, was overseeing the steam table. At this post—one of the several spots in Sing Sing where sheer boredom and the potential for sudden mayhem existed side by side—your feet got tired and your authority was questioned constantly. Standing at the steam table, watching as the population of B-block shuffled by, each inmate receiving his plate from the servers, I always thought of an assembly line in a poorly run explosives factory. Tedium, tedium, tedium, then—bang—you’d be missing your hands.

  And never did the stakes seem higher than on waffle day. Waffle day! The news was passed to the knot of officers outside the mess hall by one who worked in the kitchen. It was a morning in October. Alcantara, the mess-hall OIC, got on the phone with the B-block OIC downstairs.

  “Chilmark?” he said. “It’s waffle day. You got any extras to send me?” Extra officers, he meant, because waffle day presented an enforcement challenge on the food line. The inmates loved waffles and sometimes went to great lengths to acquire more than their share. It was not as bad as the situation on fried chicken day, but still it was bad—a little worse than, say, fish-stick day.

  Chilmark said he’d see what he could find but that in the meantime Alcantara had better get started. Running the ten galleries of B-block through the 226-seat mess hall sometimes took nearly two hours.

  “Okay, send me Q-and-V,” said Alcantara. There was a pause of a few seconds and then we heard, echoing through the cavern of B-block, the voice of Chilmark bellowing over the PA system. />
  “Q-and-V galleries, on the chow!” he cried. “X on standby!”

  In a minute or two the inmates from the flats would be streaming up the stairs, over the third-floor bridge, and into the mess hall. It was important for us to assume our posts first.

  Alcantara made the assignments. “Ruane, you got the north-end gates? Bailey on the split. Baker, Smith, Singleton on the pat-frisk.” He paused to see who remained. “Conover, steam table. Goldman, you take the other steam table.”

  The mess-hall building, in the shape of a plus sign, is centrally situated; A-block, B-block, 5-Building, and the Sing Sing storehouse each back up to one of its four sides. There is a central kitchen, and a separate mess hall for each of the three cellblocks; the busy crossroads between them all is known as Times Square. The officer doing the “split” divides incoming inmates into two contingents that line up on either side of the room’s periphery and wait their turn on the serving line. The three mess halls vary only slightly in size and configuration. All have tall barred windows on two sides, with loud exhaust fans at the top. All have long steel tables with stools bolted to the floor in pairs and an aisle down the middle. The rooms are loud, with no decoration. Steel I-beams span the ceiling. White-clad mess-hall workers mill around the steam tables, walk back and forth wiping off the tables with rags, tie up bags of garbage, and mop up spills.

  Security precautions are fairly elaborate. The two heavy gates that block the route between the B-block shell and the mess hall proper, for example, are locked whenever a gallery has passed in or out; every officer inside knows that if rioting erupts, the gate officers are instructed to lock us in with all the inmates so that the riot is contained. (During the hostage crisis of 1983, inmates broke down the single gate that then separated the mess hall from B-block and might have spread the riot to the rest of Sing Sing if they hadn’t been stopped at Times Square.) Newer maximums and mediums and many older ones have ceiling-mounted chemical agent dispensers in case of riot, and often an officer in an observation booth who can activate them. Sing Sing, for reasons no one could ever explain to me, has never been retrofitted with gas.