Newjack

by Ted Conover

  The tunnel between the two gates is the pat-frisk area. If an inmate misbehaves in the mess hall, every newjack learns, you don’t take him to task in the mess hall itself: That could inflame his friends and start a riot. Instead, you notify the officers in the tunnel. They’ll pull the inmate aside when his gallery leaves and talk to him when his friends are far beyond the locked gates.

  Waffle day. I said hello to the two inmate servers behind the steam table, as usual; one nodded in response. I thought the best position for me was four or five feet behind them and slightly to the side. This gave me a view of their area, where they passed out the three allotted toaster-size waffles, syrup, butter, and bacon, as well as of the juice dispenser, where inmates were supposed to help themselves to one small plastic cupful. The server who hadn’t acknowledged me had a round, shaved head and, like many food workers, had grown a bit pudgy from the practically unlimited opportunity he had to filch food.

  I watched as he gave four waffles apiece to two inmates in a row. My first test.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “It’s three, right?”

  He turned and glared at me before placing three waffles on the next plate. It seemed only a few minutes later that he passed a large fistful of sugar packets to another friend of his, instead of the prescribed six.

  “Hey,” I said, this time stepping up next to him. “Are we going to have trouble today?”

  He took a step away from my disagreeable presence. “What—you gay, right, CO? That’s why you paying so much attention to me?”

  “You flatter yourself,” I said. “Just do the job you’re supposed to.”

  He muttered as he went back to serving. “Motherfucker’s gay,” I heard him say to the next inmate in line. It was an unfortunate way to start the day, since sometimes one inmate’s hostility seemed to spread, through a form of osmosis, to those who hadn’t even witnessed any altercation.

  And on a waffle day, of all things. Like pieces of fried chicken, waffles found ways to fly out of the serving pan and into the hands and pockets of inmates. Only the most obsessive surveillance could prevent this. During the exit frisks, we’d find waffles stuffed inside pants and shirts. Servers would sometimes tuck a couple into the loose disposable serving gloves they wore and slide them around the edge of the steam table to friends on the other side. If the servers lined up just so—which my two occasionally did—they would obstruct my view so I couldn’t see their hands. Once, when I saw this alignment about to occur again, I shifted suddenly to the side and caught the servers in the act of waffle-gloving. I grabbed the glove and lofted it into the trash without comment.

  Cueball gave me a look of pure hatred. “Anyone ever tell you you look like Mark Fuhrman?” he asked. “No,” I said.

  An hour or so later, when I made an inmate return an extra helping of bacon that Cueball had bestowed, he glared at me anew and pointed at the inmate I had stopped.

  “On the street, you probably wouldn’t even look at that brother,” he charged. “You probably afraid he gonna rob you or something.”

  So now I was a racist homosexual who feared all young black men. In this case, though, the fear would have been justified—the man, after all, was a violent con.

  I smiled, then grinned. “He probably would be about to rob me,” I said. The more I thought about that, the funnier it seemed.

  “Shut up, man!” he said. “You look better when you ain’t talking.”

  I had worked my first steam tables acting as rigid as that server was hostile. Letting inmates get away with things struck me as letting leaks spring in a dike—the other inmates would notice, and would be encouraged the next time I was on the steam table to try for extras. The massive pilferage that ensued would make me look powerless, ridiculous.

  “Juice cup!” I would insist to an inmate who’d given himself the larger, milk-size cup of juice, as though he had shorted me ten dollars in change for a twenty.

  “But I already poured it, CO!” the man might protest.

  “So pour it out,” I would say.

  “Pour it out?”

  “Pour it out.”

  Or I’d demand to count the sugar packets of an inmate who, I was sure, had taken too many. Or I’d say an inmate couldn’t have an extra plate for his salad, that he had to fit everything on one plate. It was petty stuff in a transaction that was already law enforcement at its most utterly trivial level. The inmates’ protests, though they had a patina of moral force, only hardened my resolve.

  “Why, CO? It come outta your paycheck?”

  “You denying a man his food? That’s low, CO, that’s as low as it gets.”

  “You gonna think back on this in twenty years, CO, and you gonna be ashamed of yourself.”

  I looked at it this way: If there was only a set amount of food available at a given meal, we had to control the portions. And the inmates were not badly fed—only slightly worse than we had been at the Academy. Of most entrees, whether spaghetti and meatballs or chili or chicken fricassee, they were allowed larger portions than most people could eat. They just couldn’t get as much of certain things as they wanted—waffles, fish sticks, cups of juice, or cookies. This is when they tried to make us feel like the bastards who ran the workhouse in Oliver Twist.

  “I’ll say a prayer for you, Officer,” said one pious Muslim whom I had stopped from taking extra coffee cake early that summer. Right behind the Muslim was an inmate I knew a little bit. He looked at me sort of pityingly, and I wondered if he was about to join the prayer campaign for my soul. “In a few days, CO,” he advised me, “you won’t give a fuck anymore.”

  He wasn’t completely right, but I did realize I was wearing myself out with zeal. Other officers, though they would uniformly deny it, let the servers give away much more food than was allowed. Who really gave a damn about two extra cookies? I looked again at Officer Smith and liked what I saw.

  Smith had a certain presence as he stood there near the tiny packets of ketchup, arms crossed in front of him. You could tell he cared, but you could also tell it wasn’t a personal thing for him. We were there to enforce the rules, that was all. He looked bemused, not angry, when he saw an infraction, and his look said to the inmate, “Did you really think you were going to get away with that?”

  I tried to relax. To an inmate with the extra juice, I began to say, “Drink it here.”

  “Here?”

  “Just don’t leave the steam table with it.”

  That way, we could both win. No sergeant or other inmates would observe him with a big cup of juice on his tray, but I could show I didn’t mind if he drank it, that it was appearances that mattered to me. I nodded at the servers to allow porters I had worked with an extra helping—that was a traditional consideration. And at the end of the day, when the last house was being served the last portions, I basically told the servers they could divide the food up equally, because we all knew that what wasn’t eaten would be tossed into the trash.

  Still, there were some transgressions I just couldn’t abide. One day I worked the steam table at breakfast. My counterpart on the neighboring steam table was Thurston Gaines, an Ossining local who had been in my training class. An hour or so into the serving there was a commotion at Gaines’s table, and the mess hall grew silent. Gaines, a black officer so big that he seldom seemed to have to raise his voice, had traded words with an inmate who tried to cadge extra juice from under his nose. The inmate then tossed all the juice at Gaines, drenching his uniform. He was relieved by another officer so that he could change into a clean shirt and wipe off his glasses.

  On my side of the room, two inmates caught the spirit of this incident and utterly ignored my warnings to take only the allowed amount of juice. They just pretended not to hear me. One I had had trouble with before, and I advised the officer at the gate to get his I.D. card on the way out. Then, with the meal finished, I wrote up my first mess-hall ticket. A stolen cup of juice was good for: 106.10, direct order; 124.16, mess-hall procedure; and 116.10, thef
t of state property.

  To my surprise, however, the sergeant who signed the ticket did not have the inmate keeplocked pending his hearing. Later, I would learn that the disciplinary committee, inundated with more serious offenses, had essentially thrown this one into the circular file. That really made me feel like Barney Fife.

  I was sitting in the gym with Thurston Gaines later that day, and he was philosophical about our respective humiliations. He had known some of Sing Sing’s officers and white-shirts his whole life. “They say it’s a lot different upstate,” he said wistfully. “COs don’t have the kind of power here that they do up north—we’re too close to the media, to their [inmates’] families, to lawyers.”

  “Like, what goes on upstate that we don’t do here?” I asked.

  “If the tiniest thing goes down in the mess hall in Attica?” he said. “They march them outside.” In the winter. Literally to chill. At Attica and Clinton, he said, inmates didn’t even talk to female officers. It was flat-out forbidden.

  “And if they do?” I asked, knowing that every jailhouse rule was eventually violated.

  Gaines paused and smiled. He was a soft-spoken, gentle-tempered man.

  “They get the fucking shit beat out of them,” he said.

  The possibility no longer bothered me as it once had.

  The second-worst mess hall job was seating. Until a year or two before I arrived, inmates could sit more or less where they wanted to. Now, to fill the room more efficiently, they had to sit next to the last person who had come off the line. But sometimes, through reluctance or obtuseness, they seemed to have a hard time figuring out which seat was theirs. One or two of us stood in the middle of the room to direct traffic and make sure seats weren’t skipped.

  This wasn’t a good job for a brand-new officer, in part because even this new, strict seating plan had its exceptions. I was told about the first ones during my early tries at the job: The outermost seats at every table, for example—those next to the men in line at the room’s perimeter—were left empty. This was because a fight could start around those seats, with the accidental bump of a diner by an inmate standing in line or a deliberate act, such as a clandestine stabbing. The seats nearest the trash can where inmates scraped off their plates were left empty, too, so that no one would get splashed. Two tables at the very back of the room were reserved, mainly for kitchen workers. And then there were the seats left dirty or wet by previous inhabitants that the kitchen workers had failed to wipe clean. We didn’t try to make anyone sit in those.

  The hardest part for a new officer, though, was inmates’ love of testing a newjack. If three friends wanted to sit together and there was one seat remaining in a row, the first inmate might refuse it, since that would separate him from the others. The officer’s job was to insist—though, as a fallback position, an experienced officer might simply see whether the fourth inmate in line would take the seat. Sometimes inmates would intentionally spill something on a seat they did not wish to occupy or tell the officer that a friend in line was coming to take it “in just a second.”

  Over time these challenges to authority tended to diminish. The inmates came to recognize me from my time in B-block. I realized how much that familiarity was worth, and felt that in bidding my job, I’d done a smart thing.

  By late October I was feeling a bit like an old-timer: fewer surprises on a given day, and correspondingly fewer problems. But in fact I was still quite new, a fact driven home to me one day as I was seating inmates in the mess hall.

  At first it looked like a routine hassle: An inmate refused to sit next to the one adjacent to his assigned seat.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “I won’t sit there.”

  “Why not? What’s the reason?” I repeated.

  “He stinks, CO! The dude stinks!” Some at the table laughed, and the alleged stinker looked up at me. I felt bad for him, and thought the inmate with the tray in his hands was perhaps being oversensitive.

  But a senior officer saw what was happening and came up to me. “Let him skip a seat,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Sure. You ever smelled that guy?”

  I recognized the inmate, but I didn’t realize he smelled worse than everyone else.

  “The guy really smells bad. Usually he sits at the back table there. I don’t know why he didn’t today.”

  That was when I realized that one of the back tables, or at least one end of it, was not just for workers but for the B-block untouchables. Even among the stigmatized—criminals—there were social distinctions, and here was a big one. Several people back there stank so badly that it was unappetizing to eat next to them. The more time I spent in my new, permanent assignment, the clearer it became that prison sociology was more complex than it first appeared. It wasn’t long, for example, until a new arrival in the block pointed to another kind of untouchable: “the ugly transsexual.”

  B-block had, at the time, five transgender inmates that I was aware of, and between R-and-W and V-gallery, I supervised three of them. Though all three seemed to feel they were actually women, they had very different styles.

  First there was Rivera, known also as Baywatch. Baywatch was slender, with plucked eyebrows and center-parted, shoulder-length hair bleached a shade of light auburn. He had a boy’s figure but a girl’s walk, and a scared-doe look. Of all of them, he seemed the most sought after by inmates. Baywatch wouldn’t talk to officers, but his presence was widely accepted by inmates. He was no untouchable. On the contrary, he was the “girlfriend” of a member of the Latin Kings gang, who, I was told, regarded himself as heterosexual. Baywatch was his prize. I would see them nuzzling in the yard like a pair of junior high school lovers. When the two of them were caught in the same cell in flagrante delicto, both were keeplocked—101.21, contact between inmates; 109.10, inmate out of place; 118.22, unhygienic acts. (Officers even had to break up a necking session while they were waiting in the disciplinary office bull pen.) But these measures didn’t end the affair. It was said that later, when Baywatch was off keeplock but the boyfriend was still on, a rival for the transvestite’s affections got himself intentionally keeplocked in order to be able to try to stab the boyfriend during keeplock rec.

  Behind Baywatch on W-gallery was a black inmate named Sam. A big-boned guy with breasts, Sam would probably qualify as a transsexual, but that seemed to be the least of his differences with Baywatch. Sam was catty, and a vamp. He wore his state pants tight and exaggerated his hip movement when he walked. His hair was short and upswept, close on the sides and poufy on top. He put a hand on his hip and swung the other limply in front of him when he stopped to talk to me. And I had to talk to Sam a lot: He was chronically tardy, in everything from leaving his cell at chow time to getting back in it after a meal. I began to get fed up, but he would always shrug and apologize and, sounding like a can’t-be-bothered-heiress on a soap opera, sigh, “I just cahhhn’t seem to get myself together, cahhn I?”

  Once, when I escorted some inmates to the commissary and we were all hanging around in the hall waiting for a gate to open, two female officers fixed their attention on Sam. “Is that lipstick you’re wearing?” asked one. It looked like one of the trendy dark shades, meant to convey a ghoulish look, à la Morticia Addams.

  “No, doll, it’s not. I made it myself.” He giggled. “It’s ground-up pencil lead. But it works, doesn’t it?”

  The two officers looked at him in amazement. Then the three of them chatted some more. The commissary was taking forever to open. Sam suddenly pressed his knees together.

  “I’ve got to pee so bad!” he exclaimed, then asked me, “Could you take me to the State Shop, please, officer?” I said I would see, and headed to a wall phone to ask if the State Shop was willing to let him use the bathroom. As I dialed, he added, “You could watch. I bet you’d like that. You’d be surprised what you see.”

  “No doubt I would,” I agreed.

  Sam had admirers, and sat at mess h
all tables like anyone else. But that did not seem to be true about the third sexually ambiguous personality I supervised, a transsexual in his forties whom the other black inmates called Grandma. Of the three, Grandma was by far the most freakish. Under his sagging, mango-size breasts protruded a potbelly. A bun, which he had fashioned out of an uneven coif and tried to angle forward, did not hide the fact that his hairline was in full retreat. His teeth were long and yellow; behind black-frame glasses, you could see he had plucked and then redrawn his eyebrows. He was short and slightly swaybacked. I had spoken to him a couple of times, and he was unfailingly courteous, even charming. Clearly, though, he was the “ugly transsexual.” And, as no one could consider him an object of desire, he was ostracized.

  Soon after he arrived on V-gallery, I noticed that Grandma often didn’t go to the mess hall. When he did, he usually sat at the untouchables’ table. One day, though, when I was assigned seating duty, I saw Grandma head out of the service line with his tray and aim straight for the regular tables. I seated him normally.

  There was an immediate uproar. The man who had sat down before him stood up and said something like, “Don’t you put your rat ass down on that stool.” Grandma slammed down his tray. I felt sorry for him and angry at the inmate and told the inmate to sit down.

  “There is no fuckin’ way I’m going to eat next to this freak!” he pronounced loudly.

  I started feeling righteous. “Don’t act like an asshole. He’s a human being. He won’t hurt you.” Numerous inmates shouted back their disagreement at me, but rising over them all was the roar of Grandma.

  “The problem here is all you silly young black men!” he cried with vehemence.

  “Fuck you, faggot!” came the response, followed by a fusillade of further insults.