Newjack

by Ted Conover

  “Come on, sit in back, where it’s calm,” I suggested, and Grandma came with me to the untouchables’ table.

  After that, Grandma became one of my regular chat buddies on the gallery. There was something sympathetic about him; and both of us, though in different ways, were outsiders in B-block.

  He was also, strange as it is to say, a refreshing sort of female presence in a place where macho was the rule. One day, for example, I made a special phone call for him because, instead of going to the hospital, he had somehow ended up at the School Building and missed a medical appointment. “I just have no sense of direction!” he said with exasperation, placing a hand on his cheek like a befuddled belle.

  To reschedule his appointment, I’d had to take his I.D. card to the office. It was full of surprises. “Edward?” I asked when I gave it back, not sure, perhaps, what I had expected his real name to be.

  “My friends call me Janice,” he said with a smile.

  “But why do you have a beard in this picture? It’s only two years old! Were you, um …” I didn’t quite know how to ask how long he’d “been a woman.”

  “Oh, I’ve had breasts a long time, if that’s what you mean,” he said, reading my mind. “But what happened was, they took that photo when I was keeplocked. Sometimes when you’re keeplocked, you just can’t be bothered to shave, you know?”

  “Sure,” I said, smiling.

  The birth date on the card showed that “Janice” had been born just two years before me, though from his appearance, I would have guessed that he was at least ten years older than that. Prison had that kind of effect on many men. He had been in and out of it for most of his adult life, he told me—mostly arrests for prostitution. But now he was maxing out on a four-to-twelve bid for second-degree murder. He’d been paroled not long before but had fallen immediately back into old bad habits.

  “I’m an alcoholic, you see, and I was sitting in a park in Chelsea drinking vodka when I heard a car horn honking. I turned around and thought, My, that’s a familiar face … and it was my parole officer!” No drinking was a condition of his parole; by getting caught, he had earned a ticket back to prison. So now he was waiting to finish his sentence, of which less than two years remained. He had spent earlier parts of it in Auburn, Clinton, and Attica. His victim was his ex-lover, but he claimed to have been falsely convicted—“because I just happen to be poor, black, and gay,” he said. “They didn’t have my prints on the knife or anything.” Though Janice seemed sweet, I had no trouble imagining him capable of murder. The longer I spent in Sing Sing, in fact, the easier it was to imagine anybody, anywhere, committing practically any crime.

  I had thought there might be some solidarity between Grandma and the other gender-benders until the day I heard him being hectored by a new queen, who was getting lots of attention in the block.

  “The boys in here don’t want an old lady!” the pretender proclaimed. “They want a sexy young man!”

  Did Janice feel persecuted inside prison because of who he was? I asked one day. “Oh, not really,” he said. “It’s not fair that other gay men can hug sometimes, like during V-Rec or something, but if I hug anybody, people talk.

  “The main thing, you know, is they’re all hypocrites. Just last week a boy said, ‘Janice, show me your titties.’ I said, ‘Okay, but I’m going to tell everyone.’ He said, ‘No!’ I mean, really. Be yourself!”

  Not even macabre interest made me want to catch a glimpse of Janice’s titties. But I’m not sure I could vouch for my desires if I were imprisoned for a long time in a densely packed world without women and at the peak of my sexual vigor. With its raucous sounds and smells of sweat and threat, B-block virtually seethed with testosterone. Some of it was channeled into bodybuilding; much more found its outlet in masturbation. Jerking off is the main sexual activity in any prison. Sometimes you’d catch a glimpse; occasionally you’d catch a whiff. The cumulative daily output of these 636 men was probably huge, a sad symbol of their thwarted energies.

  It must have always been so in prison, though it cannot be said that earlier generations looked upon it with today’s tolerance. A state prison inspectors’ report of 1845 showed that masturbation had been considered far from benign:

  J.S.—sent to the asylum in March, 1844; we cannot ascertain what is his real name, nor by what name he was received in the prison, nor how long he is to continue; he is a confirmed lunatic; brought on him by onanism.

  W.H.—sent from New-York 15th December, 1843, for two years, for grand larceny; nineteen years old; native born; became addicted to onanism three or four years before he came here, and was in a shocking state of dementia when he came in; he is now in a fair way of being cured, but is still very stupid and idiotic.

  Truly, long-term autoeroticism probably does have ill effects, though of a different nature than was thought in the nineteenth century. The Minnesota hatchet murderer I wrote about earlier, imprisoned for seventeen years starting at age nineteen, still had a pretty girlfriend when he was paroled and I met him. But even after a few months with her, he confided, intercourse took a backseat to the familiar pleasures of his own hand.

  The next-most-common type of prison sex, after the autoerotic, is certainly consensual. My classmate Dimmie had pulled down a sheet hung across bars one day to find two inmates having sex. Baywatch and his beau had been caught in the act, as well. John Cheever, who wrote from his home in Ossining, has a consensual affair take place between two otherwise straight inmates in Falconer, his prison novel, and such a relationship—between the transvestite Molina and the guerrilla Valentin—is the very gist of Manuel Puig’s magnificent Kiss of the Spider Woman. But consensual sex is something that the authors of most novels and scripts about prison can’t seem to acknowledge.

  Most common in drama, by far—and least common in real life—is forcible sex. The rape of the white middle-class inmate is a staple of contemporary prison movies, from American Me to Midnight Express to The Shawshank Redemption, and it even takes place in the supposedly hyperrealistic TV prison series Oz. It is such a fixture of how middle-class America thinks about prison that people who hear I worked in Sing Sing always bring it up within a few minutes—if they dare bring it up at all.

  The rape-of-the-white-guy trope has roots in a 1967 play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, by John Herbert, in which a friendly, essentially noncriminal newcomer to a Canadian boys’ detention facility is raped by a predatory roommate. It was further developed in a play called Short Eyes, written at Sing Sing by an inmate named Miguel Piñero and turned into a critically acclaimed feature film by Westchester filmmaker Robert Young in 1977. Short Eyes tells the story of a skinny white guy, thought to be a child molester, who is raped and then murdered by his fellow inmates with the tacit complicity of his guards.

  Certainly, prison rape still occurs in New York and elsewhere. Phelan told me that two of B-block’s long-term keeplocks had been caught exiting the cell of a distraught inmate who lay facedown on his bunk with his pants around his ankles. But the famous punk-protector system of popular lore seems to be outdated or exaggerated. Several longtime inmates I spoke with thought it was almost a thing of the past—for several reasons. One is the willingness of courts to hear inmates’ lawsuits against states. This trend, which began in the early 1970s, is said to have forced states to make the protection of vulnerable prisoners a high priority. Protective custody (PC) is now a big deal. Inmates who ask for protection but fail to get it can make expensive claims.

  Another factor is the decline, to some degree, of the cons’ code of ethics. Longtime inmates seem to agree that in the old days, rape victims would never speak up, because that would mean informing on a fellow inmate. Now, however, though the code of silence is still nominally in place, inmate lips seem looser and officers’ use of snitches more widespread.

  I would even guess that, at least at Sing Sing, sex between (female) officers and inmates is presently more common than forcible sex between inmates. Certainly, I heard mo
re about it. A young woman I had trained as an OJT on V-gallery was fired about a year after I left for having had sex with an inmate in Tappan. (According to the story officers told, another inmate, who had guarded the bathroom door while the officer and her boyfriend were inside, demanded his own piece of the action, and then blabbed when she turned him down.) And just a few weeks after I left Sing Sing, another female officer was apparently fired for having had sex with one of my most macho and obnoxious keeplocks on R-gallery.

  Sing Sing’s one female sergeant, Cooper, who was in charge of housekeeping, warned female officers several times at lineup that they were not to wear makeup or engage in any flirtatious behavior with inmates. Obviously, there was a reason for that: Sex was just so much in the air.

  And perhaps the sex was not only between inmates and female officers. A young inmate who arrived on V-gallery after I’d bid it kept finding reasons to ask me questions. He was a light-skinned black man with a shaved head, and he was always trying to make eye contact with me. He was very outgoing, using any excuse to start a chat. Like everyone else, he began in one of the two double-bunked cells but after six weeks or so was moved to his own cell. One day during afternoon rec, when I was deadlocking all the cells, he called me back to his.

  “Conover,” he said excitedly, waving to me.

  “Yeah?”

  “Come over here.”

  “What do you want?” I asked from several cells away. I was going to have to change direction and interrupt my chores to go talk with him. But he was insistent.

  “Just come over here.”

  I did.

  He asked, “Anyone else out there?”

  “Where?”

  “On the gallery!”

  I looked around warily. It was one of the few times in the day when the gallery was practically empty; mainly, it was keeplocks who were still in the cells. “Nope.”

  “Mirrors?”

  “Why?” I demanded. I could not imagine these questions as anything but a prelude to violence—not only did he plan to strike me or throw something but he also wanted me to help him make sure there would be no witnesses. He looked very excited.

  “Conover,” he whispered. “You know I go both ways?”

  “What?”

  “Shhh! I go both ways!”

  “Yeah, okay, so you go both ways,” I said quietly.

  “Come in here!”

  “What? Why?”

  He was frustrated that I still didn’t get it. “I want to blow you!” He opened his mouth and pointed at my crotch. I was surprised—first, that he would declare his desire, and second, that he would believe there was any chance in the world that I would take him up on it, even if I were gay.

  “Sorry, not my thing.”

  “Come on! Nobody will see!”

  “I’m the wrong guy!” I said. “Not into it!” I started walking away. But again he summoned me, in a loud whisper.

  “Conover!”

  “What!” I answered, annoyed. I turned around and, frowning, stood back in front of his cell.

  “Conover, don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  It was just as Janice had said.

  “Okay, man. Don’t worry. I won’t.”

  After that, he never looked at me again.

  R-and-W was my adrenaline challenge and stress test; V-gallery, by virtue of being half the size, was a place where I could be a better officer and have more of a chance of feeling, at shift’s end, that some of the inmates were actually human. Though inmates still tested and tried to intimidate me on V, they did so without knowing that after the pressures of working R-and-W, I felt almost impervious to their lesser demands. I caught more glimpses of the humanity of inmates on V-gallery than anywhere else at Sing Sing.

  Perch struck me as the kind of guy who probably had acted badly since he was about nine. He was an unfortunate combination of mental disability (my guess) and rage. And he was also big and strong enough to do real damage. Though keeplocked, he got a special escort to the psych floor twice a day to take his meds. I was surprised the morning I saw him, unescorted, walking by me on the flats with a group of inmates headed for the gym. I had figured he was keeplocked for a good long time.

  That afternoon—it was early in my experience on V-gallery—I was using my go-round sheet as a guide for pulling the brake to release the runs. When the OIC called out, “Law library,” for example, I would check the sheet to see if anyone had put down law library when the officer doing the go-round came by his cell. If nobody had, I wouldn’t pull the brake. If three had, I would pull the brake and count off the three. If four came out, I’d know who was out of place. Most officers didn’t use the sheets for this, but I saw no reason not to.

  The OIC called for the hospital run. I checked. Nobody on V-north had put down hospital. Two on V-south had, so I let them out, closed the brake, then walked into my office to answer the phone.

  When I came out, someone down on V-north was waving his arm madly out of his bars. I walked down to see what he wanted and heard the voice of the OIC as I did, announcing that the run to the hospital building had been “terminated”—it had left the block, in other words. The arms belonged to Perch.

  “CO, I been waving to you for five minutes!” he shouted, greatly agitated. “Why the fuck you don’t let me out for hospital? Let me out now!” He shook his door.

  I checked the list. “I didn’t let you out because you didn’t put down for hospital,” I said, showing him. “You put down for yard.”

  “CO, I don’t know what the fuck I put down. I just know I got an appointment in the hospital! Let me out!”

  “Hospital run’s over,” I told him. “That’s what the go-round’s for—to let us know where you’re going.”

  “What? You telling me I can’t go to the hospital?” he cried.

  “Right.”

  The OIC was calling another run, but over Perch’s yelling I couldn’t hear what he said. I began to walk back toward my office. “CO, come back here!” His shouting continued. A couple of inmates advised me that Perch really did need to go to the hospital, that I should find a way. I saw Smith passing by.

  “You were right not to let him out, technically, but this guy’s a bug,” he said. We noticed that Perch was now in the process of trashing his cell and was throwing things—clothing, paper, toiletries—across the flats. “Let me see if I can find somebody to escort him to the hospital.”

  Perch showed no signs of recognizing me the next time I worked the gallery. He had gotten keeplocked again, and I made a point of treating him courteously. It was keeplock shower day. I gave him the second shower. A keeplock officer appeared and asked me to let out another inmate just as Perch told me he was done.

  “Hang on a sec,” I told Perch. “I’ve got to let this other guy out.”

  Perch flipped. I heard him yelling at me from the shower cell as I went to unlock the other inmate. He was angrier than ever when I came back.

  “You pussy-ass motherfucker!” he shouted. “Let me out of here now, you cocksucker!”

  Though Perch was no doubt imagining how he’d like to tear me limb from limb, I felt strangely calm, fatalistic. I went through the center-stairway passage and asked another officer to accompany me while I unlocked Perch’s shower cell. Perch didn’t stop cursing me as he walked to his cell, but he didn’t swing at me, either. I locked him in and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Weeks went by. Perch appeared to have forgiven or forgotten me. Then a sergeant came by and asked me to do a psych referral on a new inmate on V-gallery and paused to check his notepad for the cell number.

  “V-forty-eight?” I asked. I already knew the one. He was next door to Perch, a toothless old guy who had asked me to read his commissary account statement for him so that he could learn whether he had enough money to buy “grease,” by which he meant Chapstick—his lips were cracked, and he kept touching them when I asked what he meant.

  “Sorry,” I had explained. “You’ve only got four cents.�
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  The sergeant told me that the man had been found wandering in A-block, having signed up for law library (you would get in trouble for this if you were sane); that he had arrived back in B-block holding his dick, he had to pee so badly; and that he had told the gate officer that his cell was the little cage we used for monitoring telephone use. I said I’d be happy to do the psych referral.

  The psych-referral form required me to get the old man’s responses to some simple questions.

  “Do you know what prison this is?”

  The man paused for a moment. “Downstate, right?”

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  At this point, Perch started to heckle me. “Stop asking him that shit, man!”

  I tried to continue. “Do you know your name?”

  The man looked confused. Perch, meanwhile, was working himself up into a lather equal to his previous ones.

  “Fuck you, man! Leave that motherfucker alone! Can’t you see he’s crazy?”

  With that last question, I stopped trying to conduct my interview. I turned and looked at Perch. I was glad to see he recognized insanity and could appreciate, on some level, his hostility toward my amateur psych-testing. What could we really do for this guy, anyway? Even after I submitted the report, the only thing that appeared to change for the old man was that he got transferred, for reasons unknown, to a cell upstairs on R-gallery.

  Crazier than Perch or the old man, however, was the day a woman from the Department of Parole came to interview Perch. I stood next to her as she talked to him—standard procedure when a civilian was on the gallery. Perch, to my amazement, was to be released on Friday. “Did you know he’s still keeplocked?” I asked her, disbelieving, as I walked her back to the gate.

  She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. He’s still getting out.”

  “I’ve got to tell you, that seems like a big mistake,” I said, trying to imagine what would happen on the first day Perch forgot to take his meds and somebody bumped into him on the subway.