by Ted Conover
“Don’t worry. They all come back,” she said offhandedly.
“Run, Forrest, run!”
Inmate Nolen enjoyed calling that out whenever I walked by, particularly when I was in a hurry. I reminded inmates of many different actors and the characters they played in movies, but he was the first one to see a resemblance to Forrest Gump. At first it didn’t bother me, but then I saw the movie. Forrest had some kind of disability in his legs and looked foolish running. Nolen yelled it for weeks, and finally I asked him to stop.
“Sure, Forrest, why not?” he said, grinning. But he didn’t stop. He did it more. He was just that kind of person: annoying, exasperating—you wanted to pop him in the mouth. The closest I ever got was one day when he was escorted down from the mess hall after an argument with the disputatious Officer Colon, who was always stirring things up. Nolen was loudly announcing that he was going to charge her with sexual harassment and that he wouldn’t go into his cell until he could speak with “at least a captain.” The officers all thought that was hilarious. Even Sergeant Murray, who watched three of us form a threatening ring around Nolen, which finally induced him to enter his cell, later commented to Colon, “Tell Nolen if you wanted a stupid white man, you’d find one who made more than fifty-three cents a day.”
Apparently, he had been a plumber on the outside. For a while he was keeplocked, but it was the most ineffectual keeplock I ever witnessed. Sergeants and OICs kept getting him out, to deal with one of B-block’s chronically overflowing toilets or stuck basin valves or nonfunctioning showers.
The only other white man on V-south at the time was Elliot Markowitz, a decaying old murderer who smoked too much, got pushed around by young gangsters, and was prone to depression. He was sallow and overweight and had a style of kvetching that got under the skin of many officers. But I kind of liked Elliot. I called him by his first name and could persuade him to do things when other officers failed.
Nolen apparently noticed this. One day he told me that I should read some of Elliot’s poetry, that it was “really good.” Elliot sorted through a deep box full of pages and passed me a few with his yellowed fingertips. I sat down at one of the picnic tables on the flats outside his cell and read. The first one was entitled “Seagulls”:
Long hours
waiting waiting
to see the
flying
seagulls
to really see them
I waited around all day
Keeping peace with in
as best I could
Trying to grow and
accept the truth
of reality
To see flying seagulls.
Another one I liked was called “Singing in the Shower”:
I get a lot of pussy
heh heh men’s talk
honey, pass the soap
put it deep in me baby
ooh ahh
pass the shampoo
fuck the shampoo
let’s fuck
we are fucking
ooh
aah
Nolen, out of his cell and supposedly doing work as a plumber, saw me with the papers, came by, and tried to grab them. I would have sooner died than have Nolen reading my poetry, but Elliot said, “Okay, sure.”
“Singing in the Shower” didn’t interest Nolen much. But he fixated on “Seagulls” and mocked it loudly, declaiming it in his pseudo-retard voice. An hour later, on his way to chow, Nolen was still chortling about it and cracking himself up.
“‘Waiting to see,’” he chanted, “‘the flying seagulls.’”
Perhaps even more than people on the outside, inmates appreciate pets. Though forbidden, living contraband kept finding its way into cells. The most common were probably the sparrows that nested in B-block, often atop small utility boxes high on the outer walls, next to the long windows that were open at least a crack to the outdoors. Inmates would carry bread back from chow, stuff it into the chain-link fence along the gallery, and watch from their cells as the birds came to feed.
Some were experts on bird life: I saw a Pakistani on U-gallery, way up at the top, peering down through his bars into a nest where a mother was feeding her babies. “The second set this year,” he told me in early summer. He directed me to the cell of a friend of his, who had fit a square of cardboard into the bottom of one of the mesh laundry bags that inmates put their underwear in, placed a sparrow in the bag, and hung it from his ceiling.
My walk along the flats was interrupted one day when I noticed a long string stretched out from the front of an inmate’s cell and then saw that the far end was tied around the leg of a tiny sparrow. The inmate started to reel the bird in, but I put my foot on the string. It reminded me of a town where I had lived in Mexico, where boys used to stun birds with slingshots, tie strings to their legs, and, when they revived, fly them tethered like kites. The birds almost always died of exhaustion. One day I had seen it happen to a baby owl. I took out my small pocketknife and cut the string. The inmate howled.
“No bird torture,” I explained.
“No, CO, he can’t fly!” the Spanish-speaking inmate protested. “He fell down from the nest. I feed him, else he die!”
“Oh.” I saw that I might have acted prematurely. I walked over and cupped the bird in my hand; to my surprise, he perched on my finger. I handed him back to the inmate.
Another day, a baby sparrow was chirping loudly on the flats as we officers left the mess hall one morning after breakfast; its mother, perched on a nearby trash can with food in her beak, looked ready to feed him. The baby opened its mouth and vibrated its wings, as a hungry baby will do. This time an inmate porter intervened. He chased the mother away with a broom, then kept trying to shoo the baby in the other direction.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked.
“I want her to know she can’t save it,” he said. I want her to know she can’t save it. Was this part of a conversation he’d been having with himself about his own life? Make mother admit the truth? The phrase stuck in my mind for days after.
Finally, another inmate had gone after the baby sparrow—it almost hopped onto his finger, but then got spooked and went fluttering into somebody’s cell. A passing officer looked in and, turning to a colleague, said, “Sparrow soup.”
And there were furry animals. Back in the 1930s, warden Lewis Lawes had upset the inmate population by prohibiting the popular practice of tending rabbits. These days, there were no rabbits about, but within the walls of the prison lived a large colony of wild cats. You’d notice them stretched out on grassy slopes on a sunny day or milling beneath the windows of certain buildings where inmates dropped food for them.
Somehow, one of my inmates on V-gallery had gotten one of the kittens into his cell. He was a big Italian-American from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and someone had sent him a matching set of linens for his cell: burgundy sheets, burgundy pillowcase, burgundy mat beside the bed, burgundy handkerchief over the basin light, which produced a burgundy glow in the cell. He kept cardboard alongside the bottom bars to keep the animal from getting out, though often she did anyway and he’d have to find her on the gallery when he returned. Though it was probably against the rules, I thought having a pet was healthy, and occasionally asked him about it.
“Only pussy I’ll ever get,” he quipped.
That made me nervous for the cat.
There was another pet on V-gallery that I didn’t notice until I had worked there several weeks. I must have looked into the cell of Medina, chief of the block’s painting crew, twenty times during my morning go-round before I realized that, inside a clear pyramid he had constructed from plastic wrap, masking tape, and sticks, a large spider was suspended in her web.
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked, peering into the dark cell.
“Yeah, but I don’t know what kind of spider,” he said.
“What do you feed it?”
“Mostly roaches. Though there ain’t so many in here since I caug
ht her. She’s getting bigger, too, you know. Want to see her eat?”
I nodded. He pulled his bunk away from the wall and tipped up a box he kept on the floor; soon, wriggling between his thumb and pinky was a small cockroach. He opened a hatch and popped the bug into the pyramid. The reaction was swift.
“She’ll be happy for a week or two on that,” he said.
Kindergartens have their gerbils, firehouses their Dalmatians. Of all possible pets, that spider seemed right for Sing Sing.
At the end of the day shift, the OIC often dispatched three or four or five of the departing officers on a final sweep of the flats. The sweep was an almost leisurely circumnavigation of the block on ground level, to check that all inmates were in and all gates were locked, that everything was in order. The sweep officers were generally keeplock or escort officers who otherwise would be idling near the front gate, waiting for their earliest chance to head down the hill. I liked being part of the sweep whenever I was an escort officer; the five or ten minutes of measured steps, conversation, and—what else to call it?—esprit de corps were a good way to end the day.
One day I set off on the sweep with Smith, Phelan, Phelan’s sidekick Pacheco, and Chilmark. Somehow as we left the front gate heading north on Q-gallery, the conversation turned to the last big unrest Sing Sing had had. It had taken place in B-block just a month before my arrival, when I was training at the Academy. In those days, following breakfast, the B-block inmates bound for programs in various other parts of the prison were allowed to congregate on Q-north prior to being released from the block in smaller, escorted groups. It was no longer done that way, and the events of that morning were the reason.
Suddenly all hell had broken loose on Q-north. The 150 or so inmates gathered there were suddenly shouting, running, in disarray. It was later determined that only seven or eight inmates were fighting, but at the time it had seemed like a full-scale riot. Smith had been around the corner on V-gallery, and the first he knew of what was going on was the strange thuds that issued from under the north stairs—the sounds, he later learned, of an inmate being thrown against a metal wall. By the time he got to the scene, one inmate was lying with his head on the north-end stairs while another inmate, the size of “a moose,” was jumping up and down on it.
“I saw it go squish, bounce back, squish, bounce back—it actually changed shape,” he said. Having been in the block just a few months, Smith said, “That’s the first time I really understood where I was.”
Chilmark said that he had been standing near the front gate, ten feet away and on the other side of the fence from an inmate who was getting the shit beaten out of him by two others. A third inmate waited until the beating was done and the victim was motionless before reaching down with a knife and cutting his face from ear to ear, right across his nose. Even though I had only a verbal description, it affected me deeply, somewhat like the video footage of the truck driver, Reginald Denny, who was dragged from his cab at a stoplight in riot-torn Los Angeles in 1992. While a helicopter filmed from above, man after man kicked Denny in the face, dropped rocks and bricks on his head, abused him far beyond the point of helplessness. Pure atavistic hatred and butchery from people who moments before might have said, “Good morning, Officer.”
The group of us rounded the corner onto V-gallery. I had never witnessed mass chaos, but just the weekend before I had seen the precursor. I was one of probably four officers assigned to supervise the hundred-plus inmates at V-Rec on a Sunday afternoon. A visitor wouldn’t have noticed anything strange: three TVs on, as usual (showing NFL football, Spanish-language drama, and Xena: Warrior Princess), chess, checkers, and dominoes being played, general milling about. Only, for some reason, something made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Something was palpably weird. As I made my way to the center gate, searching the crowd for another gray uniform, I was tremendously relieved to spot Miller, an unusually competent officer from my class, whom I really liked. Just as I was about to open my mouth, Miller took me to the side and said, “Does it seem kind of creepy to you in here today?” We sought out a third officer, who had felt the same thing, and he went to get the sergeant. More officers started dribbling in; soon there were maybe a dozen, as well as the sergeant. He came to talk to me.
“Well?” he said.
“I don’t know, Sarge. Something’s not right.”
“They had told us something might be going on between the Muslims and the Latin Kings,” he said, never once questioning our fear.
Nigro had described this phenomenon at the Academy, and he was absolutely right: Somehow you just knew. The sergeant, after a couple of minutes, knew too. He called the lieutenant. The lieutenant arrived and told us to lock the two middle gates, which effectively divided the group in half. Then he got on the PA system and announced that V-Rec was over. Once everyone was back in their cells, he terminated rec in the gym and the yard for good measure. There was loud grumbling, and even shouts of protest, but his actions—though nothing was ever proven to be in the air—struck me as totally sensible.
Some officers fed on the violence, I knew. Phelan and Pacheco were probably two of them. Pacheco had been talking the day before about how many new uniforms he’d had to buy because of all the blood he got on them. He’d made it sound like a complaint, but I knew it really wasn’t. A new uniform was a CO’s Purple Heart.
We rounded the last corner, nodded at the officer at the gym door, and headed toward the front gate and freedom. But there was music—an inmate was playing a tape loudly from his cell. This was forbidden: Inmates had to use headphones. “Turn that down,” said Phelan, the biggest of us.
The inmate only pretended to turn it down. “Hey,” said Phelan, and we all stopped.
The inmate looked up at Phelan defiantly. “The gallery officer don’t care. What’s it to you?” he demanded. “You’re just talking big ’cause you’re on the other side of those bars.”
The gallery officer was standing just a few cells down. Phelan grabbed the keys from the guy’s belt, strode over to the inmate’s cell door, unlocked it, and flung it open with a bang. He reached over, yanked the tape player out of its plug, and stood in the doorway holding it like a club.
“Now I’m not,” he said fiercely. “You want to come out?”
I had never seen an inmate cower so, and for good reason: Phelan’s stance said he was ready to take the man’s head off. The show was gratifying to watch; Phelan was not afraid to put his massive physical presence to work. The little touch of Elam Lynds was good for our morale.
Violence and the potential for violence were a stress on inmates and officers, but not on all of them, and not all the time. There were moments when, due to the constant tension of prison life and the general lack of catharsis, violence and the potential for violence became a thrill. It had been a long, hot summer in B-block—a long, low wave of attacks and reprisals, and then lockdowns to let everything cool off. Following almost every series of incidents, officers would search the yard, the gym, and other places inmates congregated and prepared for battle, looking for weapons. Usually, we would find scores of them—in trash cans, under rocks, on ledges, or just beneath the dirt. Sometimes our efforts seemed to forestall the next wave, sometimes not.
I remembered the day I’d been standing outside the commissary, waiting to escort my inmates back to B-block, when the gate officer told me there’d be a delay—some kind of fight had broken out in the block. Frustrated that I’d missed it, I paced the floor, locked my inmates behind another gate, and waited for some news. Then, up the tunnel from B-block, a long succession of officers and handcuffed inmates came into view. The first three inmates were bleeding badly around the head; the officers wore latex gloves. The inmates I was in charge of shouted out encouragement and support.
“Did you get the motherfucker?”
“Yo, Smiley!”
“Ernest, my man!”
The handcuffed, injured inmates looked not despondent but electrified. Regardless o
f their wounds, they looked utterly thrilled by what had just happened.
Finally we got to return to the block, which by now was locked down. I helped make sure my group of escorted inmates got locked into their cells, then went down to the flats. My friend Scarff was working Movement and Control, next to the OIC’s office. A group of us asked him to tell us what had happened.
Apparently, three or four inmates had chased and beaten two others as they were leaving the gym. The pursued inmates headed toward the OIC’s office, where officers were congregated. When the officers realized what was happening, several of them, including Scarff, chased the attackers back down toward the gym. There had been pileups of officers and inmates; Scarff had recovered a shank. One of the assailants, as his victim was marched by in handcuffs, his shirt bloodied, had gleefully taunted him, “I got you! I got you!”
Scarff wasn’t a newbie like many of us others; he had worked corrections in Maryland before coming here. But he now seemed as excited as the inmates had been.
“It was the first time in five years that I’ve been involved in a major incident,” he said. “And I loved it! I wanted to hit somebody!” It seemed that Scarff had experienced some of the same intoxicating rush that the inmates had felt. It made all kinds of sense. There were so many unresolved angry exchanges in Sing Sing, so much that never got settled. How many times had I heard an inmate or an officer say, semi-facetiously, “I’m gonna set it off!” Light a fuse! Start a little chaos! In some warped and exaggerated form, it seemed like the same kind of impulse as getting wild on a Saturday night, letting off steam after a week of tension or boredom.
Our sweep was done, the shift nearly over. I walked down to the time clock with everyone else, then noticed on the chalkboard that a meeting of the union local was to begin in about half an hour. Officers had been injured in a melee in the B-block yard the week before, and it seemed likely the matter would come up. As much as I preferred to go home, I thought it would be a good thing to attend.