Newjack

by Ted Conover

  To me it was a weird contrast: the urgency about getting money on the outside versus the seeming lack of urgency about getting out of prison. But then I decided that his blasé attitude about serving time might be a pose. I saw Delacruz that afternoon checking a dictionary, making sure to spell correctly all the words in a legal appeal to get his sentence reduced.

  I’d been working up to asking Delacruz about his poem again, to see if now he’d tell me the exact words tattooed on his back. But as I walked into B-block one afternoon, I saw Sergeant Murray escorting him out of the block with all his belongings. Murray later told me he’d been taken to 5-Building after the superintendent received an anonymous letter claiming that when Delacruz got off keeplock, he’d be stabbed over money he owed. I wondered what Delacruz hadn’t told me. I remembered how often he did not take advantage of keeplock rec, and realized now that he might have been afraid. I wondered whether he himself might have written that letter.

  I left Sing Sing before I found out the answers to my questions. But months later, when I had become a civilian and Delacruz had become an inmate at a medium-security prison, I wrote him a letter, with my post office box as a return address. I gave him some news about myself, then closed with a question: “What were those lines of poetry on your back, anyway?”

  To my delight, he sent them to me in Spanish. I began my detective work. The library had plenty of editions of Anne Frank’s diary, but not one included a poem. I consulted a couple of experts. Anne Frank had written some poetry, but nothing like the lines Delacruz had sent me, they said. I wondered if Delacruz was somehow mistaken. But then I decided that, addiction to robbery aside, he seemed like a together enough person to keep straight the source of a poem he had inscribed on his own back. I sat down and read the diary one more time, looking for a clue, a reference, a snippet of something that I might have missed. I found it on the last page, in the very last words—not poetry in stanzas, just Frank’s prose.

  Delacruz had translated into Spanish from an English translation of Anne Frank’s original Dutch. But the gist was still there. It was unmistakable.

  When everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if … if only there were no other people in the world.

  It was easier to stay incurious as an officer. Under the inmates’ surface bluster, their cruelty and selfishness, was almost always something ineffably sad.

  The signs were few and sporadic: Perry Como carols played over the PA system in the waiting room of the commissary, seemingly to piss off the inmates; the wilting, Charlie Brown-type tree on Hospital, fourth floor; the memo, read to us at lineup several days in a row, about how this was a tough time of year for inmates, about how we should be on the lookout for signs of depression and encourage inmates who needed it to seek counseling “or the companionship of their fellow man.” This last line, with its homoerotic undertone, provoked smirks the first time it was read and unabashed laughter by the third or fourth. Even the sergeant reading it had to suppress a laugh.

  And then there was another memo, read for several days beginning around December 20, about how anyone who even thought about “banging in” (calling in sick) between now and New Year’s would need a separate doctor’s note for every single day and even then would have his records subject to disciplinary review. I had been considering that very thing, the thought of Christmas in prison being so depressing, but the memo pretty much torpedoed the idea.

  On the day of Christmas Eve, I supervised the distribution of little holiday “gift boxes” containing useless toiletries and a few snacks, compliments of a charity. And then I watched inmate representatives figure out how to distribute to every inmate the “holiday cheer” they had chosen: a can of Coke and two bags of chips. The cognitive dissonance grew. Standing on the mess-hall bridge, two sergeants waited for inmates to get out of earshot and then wished us all a Merry Christmas. The officer I was with disapproved of this well-wishing.

  “This is the time of year when a lot happens, and it’s because officers let their guard down,” he warned.

  Certainly it was true that a lot happened this time of year. Anecdotal evidence indicated there was an increased appetite for drugs and alcohol. Just the month before, an inmate on C-gallery had killed another by stabbing him in the heart—apparently, right in front of an officer (“there were gallons of blood,” I was told)—the first murder in a New York State prison that year. A deputy superintendent whose office I passed on my way out told me he was staying late because two years earlier there had been a Christmas Eve homicide on M-gallery. And just as there is said to be a jump in wife beatings on Super Bowl Sunday, so it was true that suicides in prison often occurred around the holidays.

  Though it fell on a Thursday, Christmas was handled like a weekend day at prison: no programs and few runs. This should have meant an easier-than-normal day, but I think that for most of us, the relative inactivity just meant more time to feel shitty about being in prison on Christmas. Everyone’s mood seemed subdued, inmates and guards alike. It wasn’t just because we couldn’t participate in Christmas (though a few inmates had visitors); it was because, as an officer, you mainly had to deny it. Christmas spirit—generosity, forgiveness, goodwill toward men—ran pretty much counter to what we were supposed to be doing. Prison was for punishment; it wasn’t ours to forgive. Kindness, as Nigro had said back in the Academy, was taken for weakness and exploited. Goodwill didn’t enter the picture. This job was about maintaining power, and goodwill could erode that power.

  Unless, I thought, it was surreptitious. This idea came to me when I took some men on a package run—the package room was open because of the potential for late-arriving Christmas presents. While the inmates milled around, waiting their turn at the window, I got the package room officers to let me inside, where I sat in a comfortable chair. They were pretty swamped. Bags with inmates’ names on them filled practically every available space. An extra officer was in there, X-raying new boxes and then going through them, throwing out things that weren’t allowed. The discard box was large, and it was quickly filled with toiletries that contained alcohol; clothing colored blue, black, gray, or orange; packages of food that hadn’t been factory-sealed; and … cigarettes.

  Cigarette packages that lacked a New York State revenue stamp—cigarettes purchased out of state, for example, or on Indian reservations—were not allowed to be distributed to inmates, and were apparently thrown away. I thought of the inmates I knew whom nobody was likely to remember at Christmas. There were lots of them. My heart went out to the most pathetic. When no one was looking, I stuffed about a dozen of the cigarette packs into my jacket.

  Mainly, I gave them to the bugs. One was Addison, a tall, middle-aged black man on W who for weeks had sported a Mohawk; he seemed like a furtive Manhattan homeless person, which perhaps he once had been. I’d had to escort him a few places, after which he didn’t seem as scary as he had initially. He was fearful of other inmates, not of officers, and spent half his time looking over his shoulder for would-be attackers. He spent the other half scanning the floor for cigarette stubs. He was an inveterate collector of these, which, in prison, tended to be extremely short. As I had paused for him to add to his handful one day, he sang a verse from “King of the Road”:

  I smoke old stogies I have found

  Short, but not too big around

  I told him about an old hobo I’d met who claimed you could tell the state of the economy by the length of butts on the ground, and Addison laughed and said, “Maybe so.”

  He was just starting his second “state bid,” he told me, having done numerous “skid bids” for turnstile jumping, etc. His nephew, he told me, was locked on the same gallery.

  He came from a fucked-up world. I gave him three packs.

  I gave Larson a pack. I didn’t think he smoked, b
ut cigarettes were like money.

  I gave Cameron (“Don’t get conned by Conover the con man”), who for days had been asking me what I was going to bring him for Christmas, two packs and a slice of spice cake from my lunch bag.

  I gave three packs to a bug on R who was forever cadging cigarettes and also had an incredible body odor problem.

  I did it all quietly, placing the packs on the cell bars as I walked by, trying not to let the recipients see me and get something on me, though I was planning to resign soon after the new year. When I walked back by the cell of the stinky bug, he was handing a fresh Newport to his neighbor, who was asking him quizzically, “Hey, how’d you get these?”

  I gave a pack to the Colombian.

  I gave a pack to the old bug who’d wanted Chapstick. Maybe he could trade the pack for some.

  I gave a pack to the young guy who thought he’d had a cockroach stuck in his ear.

  I gave packs to three guys I had keeplocked. No hard feelings.

  At lineup the next week I was feeling a bit giddy, trying hard to repress the joy that was gathering in my soul: I had turned in my resignation papers, and today, though not quite my last day at Sing Sing, would be my last one on R-and-W.

  There was a symmetry in this, as R-and-W had been the place where I’d spent my first, awful day as a Sing Sing trainee more than eight months before. Maybe it was naive, even reckless, to expect it, but I had a premonition that today’s shift could be the best yet. With each succeeding month, I’d learned how to run a gallery more smoothly. It wasn’t clear what this ability would count for in the outside world—maybe the complaints desk at a department store would be a breeze—but at least, I thought, I would enjoy this hard-earned expertise on my last day as the R-and-W officer.

  I sat down in the gallery-office cell, started a new page in the logbook, and then leaned back to savor my coffee and catch up on recent events on the gallery. Stone, the regular officer, had been on duty the day before. Most of his log entries were just a few words—“7:10 A.M., R chow”—but midday, he’d written a whole paragraph. He’d stopped an inmate from another gallery who was on R without permission and asked him what was in his paper sack. The inmate had sprinted for the gate, but Stone had caught him and found … a “16 in. shank.”

  Sixteen inches? I thought. That wasn’t a shank, that was a sword. Why the hell would anyone have a weapon that length? What mayhem did he contemplate? There was no indication that Stone had been hurt in the confrontation, but still, it seemed a bad omen.

  I had a zillion keeplocks—approximately one out of every five inmates—and today, alas, was keeplock shower day. My second officer, as usual, had disappeared after doing his go-rounds, leaving me to move all these guys through the showers myself. I thought I could do it if I got an early start.

  Minutes into this process, I found that of seven shower cells, only two were operable. Normally, there were three or four working. B-block’s plumbing was unbelievably dismal, I thought as I locked an inmate into the second shower.

  “Hey, CO!” he hollered after about five minutes. I walked over to the shower cell and looked through the bars. He was covered head to toe in suds. “The hot water went off!”

  It was true. It had suddenly gone off throughout the block. I could hear the complaints from other floors. “Guess you’re out of luck,” I told him, thinking, as I said it, that I was the one who was out of luck: The hot water never went off all day, which would have allowed me to cancel showers. Usually, it was off for just an hour or two, long enough to make it plain that not all the keeplocks would get their showers and that they’d have to compete with the porters for showers in the afternoon.

  Just then I had an unwelcome visitor to the gallery—one of the tough transportation officers with a reputation for meanness. Apparently, they didn’t have any work for him this morning, so they’d sent him to “help” in B-block. I’d seen how he acted around inmates, and now I’d get a taste of his attitude toward young officers.

  “What are these inmates doing out?” he demanded of me, sounding like some asshole sergeant.

  “I believe they’re cleaning the floors.”

  “You have five porters cleaning the floors?” He was counting two he’d seen on the other side.

  “One of those is my clerk. This other guy is just out for a second.” Why was I defending myself to him?

  He stood there looking disgusted. W-gallery inmates began to return from chow. I gave them a couple of minutes to lock in, then stood near the brake and hollered, “Step in, gentlemen!”

  “You shouldn’t waste your breath yelling,” he said after a moment of watching me. “You should just pull the brake and then, anybody who didn’t get in, lock ’em up.”

  “I know,” I sighed. “In a perfect world.”

  “If you know, then why don’t you do it?” he demanded.

  He was starting to bother me. I came to work prepared to do battle with inmates, not fellow officers, and I felt I wasn’t handling it quite right.

  “Listen,” I said to him. “I’m a regular here. I know these guys. This is how I want to do it today.” Pathetic, I thought after I’d spoken. I should have fired a louder shot over his bow.

  “How you want to do it,” he said in a mocking tone.

  “That’s it,” I said, looking him in the eye.

  “Fine,” he said, and descended the stairs to the flats.

  Good riddance, I was thinking. Then I heard his announcement come over the PA system.

  “All inmates out on the gallery on R-and-W without a reason, return to your cells!”

  That fucker. He was trying to embarrass me. No doubt he had been badmouthing me to all who would listen downstairs.

  “Hey, Blaine!” I shouted down through the mesh, suddenly angry. “What’s your fucking problem?” He was somewhere under the overhang near the OIC’s office, and I couldn’t tell whether he’d heard me. What, I wondered, would be the penalty for punching a fellow CO? I got back to work, decided to try to let it slide.

  To my surprise, he was back a couple of hours later when the R side returned from lunch. I thought he must be trying to mend fences, because he asked for the south-side keys—he was actually going to help me lock my guys in, not just stand there and criticize. He had a hard time getting the brake closed—you had to know which doors tended to jump out and get in the way—but finally succeeded, a little bit winded.

  Then, one of my gym porters appeared. The gym OIC had let him out, he explained, so that he could take a crap in his own cell. He was on some kind of medication for diarrhea. He locked on the row of cells that Blaine had just secured, and whether to let him in was entirely up to me.

  “That okay, Conover?” the inmate asked.

  “Have you already told him no?” I asked Blaine.

  The officer shook his head.

  “Then you can,” I told the inmate, opening the same brake Blaine had so labored to close moments before. Blaine, despite my gesture of respect, gave me a look of pure disdain and with a laugh of disgust left the gallery. I felt I’d handled it just the right way.

  Just a few minutes later, as I was regaining my composure, I noticed the smell of smoke, an acrid odor I couldn’t quite place. And then heard Blaine’s voice again. What the hell, I was thinking when I realized he and others were banging on my center gate—the red dots were responding to an emergency on the top floor. It turned out to be an inmate’s bedding and mattress on fire. Saline, on U-and-Z, had seen smoke billowing out of a cell and, unsure if there was anyone inside, had pulled his pin on his way to the fire extinguisher. It turned out nobody was at risk. But the unsettling fumes that accompanied this kind of arson—which was usually started by a small Molotov cocktail, and almost always gang-related—persisted and unsettled me for a long time, nudging out the last possibility of a sentimental journey on this last day on the gallery.

  And in fact the afternoon took the form of an ever-growing pile of aggravations. One of my keeplocks began s
houting at me that lunch had never been brought to his cell. (On his wall he had posted a bit of dyslexic Christian cheer: “This is day the God made.”) When I called the mess hall, they said I needed a request form from the OIC; when I called the new OIC, he said he didn’t have one. An inmate on the other side—Addison, to whom I’d made the gift of cigarettes just a couple days before—was furious with me because when he’d declined breakfast, I’d deadlocked the door to his cell on his request (he was afraid of intruders) but had then forgotten to unlock it at lunch. Lacking any help, I had to escort him to the north gate personally and get the attention of officers on the mess-hall bridge. By the time I got back, half a dozen officers were waiting on my center gate—impatient, in a couple of cases, to the point of anger. Over the PA system, the OIC instructed me to pick up my phone, then asked why I hadn’t heard it ringing: The Adjustment Committee was about to call me to do a disciplinary hearing over their speakerphone. (Officers often testified this way in absentia.)

  Three inmates, W-3, W-10, and W-22, said they needed to go to the Emergency Room. Two keeplocks, R-55 and W-59, wanted to know what they were charged with; they claimed they’d never been issued a ticket. A new inmate arrived on W from the psych unit with one arm and no mattress—I’d have to make a few calls to straighten that one out. Another new inmate arrived on W and rightly observed that his cell was a mess. Though I was under no obligation to do so, I thought it would encourage the right habits to let him mop it out. This was a mistake. He turned the cleaning into a big production, making separate requests for the tiny bags of powdered soap we kept in the office, for a toilet brush, for garbage bags. He made a huge pile of his personal shit on the gallery that was hard to walk around. And each time I was about to call an end to the chaos, I got sidetracked by exigent cries of “R-and-W, center gate!”