Newjack

by Ted Conover

  In the meantime, the hot water was back, and the keeplocks were clamoring for their showers. One of them, Henderson, who was about my height but with seventy-five more pounds of muscle, told me I’d better get him in before I left or else.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” I told him.

  “What?” he said, surprised. Officers normally tried to avoid inflammatory talk like that, but I’d had it.

  He challenged me with the line that had pushed Phelan to action on the flats. “You wouldn’t talk like that if I weren’t in the cell,” he charged.

  With memories of Phelan’s bravado, and a giddy recklessness, I turned around, opened the cell door, and repeated myself with no intervening bars.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Henderson,” I said. “It just slows me down.”

  I don’t know what I was thinking. Henderson pushed the cell door open and walked out past me. In that moment I could have jumped him. But I didn’t want to start a fight and lose it. Pull my pin or call for help? It would be too embarrassing to have to describe how I’d arrived in this situation. Instead, I tried to reason with him.

  “Listen, nobody’s going to get a shower if you don’t go back in.”

  “Just a second. I got to have a word with my friends,” said Henderson, walking a few cells down.

  “Hey,” said an officer on the flats, who could see Henderson and knew he was supposed to be in his cell. Henderson looked over his shoulder and waved at the officer.

  “Come on, give me a break,” I pleaded with Henderson, humiliated. Three or four minutes later, he went back in.

  There was still time, I thought, to try to get a couple of other keeplocks into the shower before my gym porters came back and demanded theirs. But no sooner had I unlocked one of the cells and turned the corner than a gym porter who shouldn’t have been there tried to beat me to it. To my amazement, he actually tried to open the shower cell door as I held it closed. It was a total meltdown! We were in the middle of this little power struggle when another gallery officer appeared from downstairs and shifted the balance of power to my favor. I locked the porter in his cell, prefatory to keeplocking him, and tried to come to grips with the splitting headache that had crept up on me. Though I disliked the pushiness of my gym porters, the other officer counseled me that things would probably go more smoothly if I just announced that keeplock showers were dead and let the gym porters figure out for themselves who would shower in the remaining half hour of my shift.

  I had just a few minutes to write my Misbehavior Report. The phone rang: a sergeant, telling me that members of the executive team might be making a spot inspection soon, and to let out my porters for a quick cleanup straightaway.

  “Right, Sarge,” I said, hanging up. I locked up the office and hustled down the gallery to see who was available.

  “Conover!” called Larson, laughing, as I walked madly by. “Calm down! You’re gonna have a heart attack!”

  If it had been anyone else, he would only have succeeded in pissing me off. But in that moment, I finally got it. Fuck getting the porters out. Fuck writing up one last Misbehavior Report. Fuck the executive team. Given my lame-duck status, none of it really mattered.

  I stopped, turned around. I took a deep breath and went back to Larson’s cell, leaned against the bars. A problem I’d had from day one, I knew, was taking it all too seriously. Perfectionism was unattainable on a gallery in B-block. Getting yelled at now and then—whether by sergeants, other officers, or inmates—was just life, especially in Sing Sing.

  For a minute I just stood there, incapable even of making conversation.

  Larson passed over an old National Geographic that showed the architectural detailing of some ancient Mesoamerican temples. He was particularly interested in the inscriptions on the stelae.

  “Look at those,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, taking the magazine. “I’d like to see them. It would be cool to know what they meant.”

  “I’d like to touch them,” said Larson.

  I took more deep breaths, trying to calm myself.

  “This is it for me today, Larson,” I told him. “No more R-and-W. I’m leaving the service. I’ll be back New Year’s Eve, though, filling in on S-and-X.”

  “Is that right, Conover?” he asked. “What are you going to be doing? I mean, you got another job lined up?”

  “You’ll hear from me about that,” I said.

  “R-and-W, center gate!”

  Back to work.

  I closed out the logbook and just sat. Fifteen minutes into the evening shift, I still had not been relieved. Wouldn’t that be perfect? I thought to myself. Stuck for overtime on my last day on the gallery … With a growing feeling of disgust at the prospect, I waited for the phone to ring, for Holmes or some other sergeant to give me the bad news.

  Finally, half an hour late, an officer arrived—but, he was quick to explain, he wasn’t my relief, only an OJT. Then another OJT. They couldn’t run the gallery by themselves—they were useless! Five minutes later, another officer appeared. No, he told me, he wasn’t an OJT. He had finished training three days before. And, yeah, this was his gallery tonight.

  “How’s your day been so far?” I asked him.

  “Not so good,” he answered.

  “Well, it’ll get worse,” I assured him.

  He hadn’t even known to bring up a fresh radio battery with him from the OIC’s office. He had no clue how to do anything on the gallery. I sent an OJT to fetch one. I explained how the keys worked, or didn’t work—how some cells wouldn’t open with the key that was supposed to open them, so you had to go try the other set … but then I saw how hopeless it was. The basic lesson was at least an hour long. And now the OIC was on the PA system, telling all gallery officers that inmates were on the go-back, and to open their end gates.

  “Where’s the end gate?” the officer asked.

  “Your immediate problem,” I answered, “is that all the cells are still on deadlock. You’ve got to get them off right away, while the gallery’s still clear and you have some elbow room.”

  “Hey, thanks, man.”

  Thanks, sure, I thought sardonically. Unlocking all the cells was a five- to ten-minute procedure, and within a couple of minutes, returning inmates from R-and-W would be clogging the north-end stairs, creating a huge traffic jam for inmates headed higher as they waited at the gates. I could have been a great guy and stuck around to help with the impending chaos. But my head was about to split open.

  Fuck it, I thought. And in the true, not-my-problem spirit of Sing Sing, I fled.

  EPILOGUE

  THE FIRES OF THE NEW YEAR

  Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.

  —Robert Frost, “Mending Wall,” 1914

  Sing Sing at night felt like a catacomb. The parking lot and locker room were deserted. In the lineup room, the skeleton crew barely filled a single file. I recognized the B-block contingent from having relieved them on galleries or passed them in the tunnel on many mornings. There were only five of them.

  “Nice way to spend New Year’s Eve, huh?” said Greene, sarcastically. He was the R-and-W guy. I’d first tried to swap shifts with him, but he wasn’t interested. Instead I’d swapped with Tracy Scott, just upstairs on S-and-X. My wife had to work tonight at her job, I’d told Tracy, so I’d decided I might as well, too. In fact, I’d been wondering whether the stories about B-block on New Year’s Eve were true or exaggerated and wanted to find out firsthand.

  Greene joked with me as we walked the tunnels to B-block. I was obviously a day-shift guy; he could tell by my baton. I looked around and realized that nobody else was wearing his.

  “It’s because no inmates are out at night—you’d never be standing next to one,” he explained. “They only can leave their cells in an emergency, and in that case you’ve got to have a supervisor standing there.”

  The main duty of the shift, he reminded me, was just making sure that the inmates weren�
�t dead. “If they’re dead and hard, you’re gone” was the way the white-shirts put it. Dead and warm, on the other hand, showed you were doing your job.

  I’d had a recurring dream about Sing Sing that took place in this tunnel at night. In the dream, I was turning the corner that led to the B-block front gate. The way had been only faintly lit, but once I turned that corner I found myself in complete darkness. A light-bulb had burned out, I figured. I’d have to make it to the gate on intuition. In the silence, then, I realized I wasn’t alone: There were inmates sprawled across the floor, sleeping. I toed my way tentatively forward, shuffling so as not to step on them. Reaching out for the wall to keep myself oriented, I touched an inmate’s shirt and recoiled. Men were standing along the wall, too, I realized, on either side of a gate that had been inadvertently left ajar. I could make out vague outlines. Suddenly, instead of the guy in charge, I was the one at risk, and I tried to slip by silently, not even stirring the air.

  I was surprised, in real life, by how dark the block was when we walked in around 11 P.M. All the main lights were off; only the center-stairway landings were illuminated. Besides this, scattered inmates had on the short fluorescent lights over their basins, so standing on the flats, looking up at all the galleries, reminded me of being on a dark street near some hulking apartment building where only a few tenants were still up.

  But the lights didn’t really tell who was awake. I was a bit taken aback when, at eleven-thirty, simultaneous whoops broke out from all over the building. The cue, I realized, must have been the in-house radio station, tuned to 97.1 FM (“Hot 97—blazing hip-hop and R&B”), probably part of the countdown to midnight. Behind all the dark and quiet was a certain electricity, an expectancy I wasn’t used to feeling in B-block and didn’t fully understand. What did New Year’s Eve mean here?

  I made my rounds. Greene had advised me not to shine my flashlight into inmates’ faces while they slept but rather just to aim it at the ceiling or the floor. That would cast enough light over the cell to make sure the inmate hadn’t hung up or slit his wrists. (“Just check for blood on the floor,” the officer had advised.) I stood for a few moments in front of each cell, checking whether an inmate was breathing by the rise and fall of sheets and blankets. Some sleeping inmates had left their lights on. Some wakeful inmates had turned their lights off. I was disconcerted by the cells with lights still on and inmates standing up, because they were invariably backlit and I couldn’t see their faces or what their hands were doing. Many of those awake were holding their mirrors out and chatting with their neighbors. I had to tell several to quiet down—there was supposed to be no talking at all at this hour.

  Occasionally, I could eavesdrop. Turning the corner from S to X, I heard one inmate say to another wistfully, “Another year.”

  “Yeah, another year closer to goin’ home, you heard?”

  Unlike my friends, they weren’t celebrating the arrival of the New Year so much, it seemed, as closing the book on the old.

  The other officers seemed jumpy. I heard my office phone ringing as I finished my rounds at about 11:45 P.M. The sound was much more audible at night, I realized. The OIC downstairs told me to quiet down whoever it was that was speaking so loudly on X—a silly request, I thought, so close to midnight. Even so, I told her I’d go check on it. Then, as I walked away from the office to do so, the ringing phone summoned me back again.

  It was her again. “And don’t go out on the gallery after this,” she warned.

  “Okay, why not?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea already.

  “Just don’t,” she repeated. “You’ll see, if you haven’t already heard about it.”

  As I walked, I heard the big windows in the outer wall being cranked open by somebody downstairs. A cool breeze started blowing through the block on this winter night. Somebody was anticipating the events to come so that they wouldn’t have to walk out on the flats again for a while.

  The first fires started maybe ten minutes before midnight. I saw them flickering way down the gallery on either side of my office, one a pile of magazines, one maybe a roll of toilet paper. Turning the corner to X-gallery, I saw three more, one of them larger, like a small campfire, sending bits of burning embers flying into the dark space beyond the fence. Smoke was suddenly everywhere, like the air in a living room where someone forgets to open the flue before starting a fire.

  I looked across the open space to the outer wall, which was now a wall of reflections. In its windows were a series of twinkling flames from floor to ceiling. Every gallery, apparently, was like mine. Then began a sixty-second countdown, with maybe a hundred voices jumping in by the end: “… nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.” Then whoops and shouts pealed from every quarter, and howls and even a trombone blasting. Everyone rattled the gates and the block literally shook.

  Meanwhile, down on the flats, three or four big fires were getting going. From small starter fires, inmates had been throwing out boxes and sheets of newspaper and Lord knows what else, trying to achieve the fuel density necessary for a real blaze. And in at least two spots, they were succeeding. Flames from these fires were leaping some five feet into the air, producing a lot of cheers.

  The fire alarm went off. It was a bell that, given the block’s acoustics, echoed loudly off everything and lent an aura of nightmare to the surreal scene. It sounded for about five minutes, and then, I guessed, was shut off manually. Less than a minute later, though, it began ringing again. One last time it was shut off, and then, apparently, the OIC gave up: The bell just rang and rang, unanswered, jangling my nerves and no doubt many others’. It put me in mind of those nuclear power plants where blasé technicians had grown so weary of false alarms that they’d begun to miss the real ones, with profound consequences.

  Meanwhile, the block filled with smoke. This was not like the smoke from the mattress on U-and-Z a few days before but a thick, eye-burning, lung-choking smoke. The air moving through the windows—it was getting cold in the block—didn’t seem to diminish it at all. Under the stairway lights, you could see the dark smoke billowing, moving by in clouds.

  CO Greene came up the stairs from R-and-W to take a look at my gallery. “Got any marshmallows?” he asked with a grin.

  I slipped down the stairs to look at his gallery; the picture was the same. I walked over to chat with Larson. He had a blanket pulled over his head, was apparently asleep, absenting himself from the whole affair.

  Back to my gallery. Twelve-thirty now. The officer on T-and-Y came downstairs and sniffed around disapprovingly. He was an old-timer and apparently had thought of a way to assuage his own irritating feelings of loss of control.

  “You should put these out and write them up!” he said sternly.

  “Probably,” I said. “But don’t you have your own fires to worry about?”

  “Mine are all out.”

  I looked at the windows on the outside wall, saw reflections of flickering flames just overhead. I pointed. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  He left. It was hard to know how seriously to take the fires. The contents of individual cells could burn, and wood in the catwalk area between the galleries could burn, but not the block as a whole. I didn’t know about the roof. Smoke inhalation was a concern, but with the windows open there was some air circulation. Just to have something to do, I got out a fire extinguisher and blasted the smoldering toilet roll nearest the office. It didn’t put out the flames, just sent it spinning down the gallery. Inmates nearby immediately complained about the smoke. I walked down and tried to stamp it out with my boots, but it smoldered all the more.

  “Tough luck,” I said over their complaints.

  I passed another fire on my way back to the office. The inmate who had probably set it appeared to be having second thoughts. He was trying to seal off the front of his cell by hanging plastic bags and blankets all over the bars—the smoke was that dense.

  I sat in the office chair and closed my eyes, trying to get s
ome of the smoke sting out. The phone rang. It was an officer outside the locked front gate of the block, wondering why nobody was answering the bell. He said he’d been standing there for fifteen minutes.

  “I think it’s the same bell the fire alarm uses,” I told him. “As you can probably hear, the fire alarm bell is ringing.” I told him I’d go downstairs and let him in myself.

  “Christ,” he shouted, stepping into the block and standing a little too close to the bell. We looked in both directions down the flats. The fires were as high as our heads. The sight, I thought, would give Sergeant Bloom a heart attack. “B-block’s out of its mind. I just came from A-block, and there’s no fires at all over there.”

  “It’s because it’s so young here,” said the OIC, whose nerves seemed frayed.

  I thought about the day I’d been helping another officer search a cell on Q-south. We’d taken an inmate’s junk outside his cell, piled it on the flats, and were searching the remaining contents one piece at a time. Unbeknownst to us, an inmate from some nearby cell—we never found out which one—was tossing lighted matches at the heap. Maybe he hated us, maybe he hated that inmate, maybe he didn’t know what he hated, but eventually the pile caught fire. We felt the heat from a sudden inferno on our backs and leaped out of the cell. Dragging corners of things that weren’t yet alight, we pulled the bonfire apart. It took a long time to burn out. Tonight’s would take longer.

  “Guess they just need to let off some steam,” said Greene with a grin as we stood on R-and-W, still gazing at all the little fires as the clock approached 1 A.M. 1998.

  “Huh,” I said. That explanation seemed a bit thin. I thought about the photograph I’d stood next to in the basement hallway of the Academy countless times as we waited for chow, entitled something like Smoldering Ruins of Auburn Prison. There had been a massive riot there in 1929. I thought about my anger and frustration after I’d been slugged in A-block, my fantasy of the building and all its contents going up in flames. An incident later in B-block had called my bluff: I’d discovered a fire in the service area that ran down the center of the block; welders upstairs had unwittingly ignited a length of PVC pipe. When I’d blasted it with water from the fire extinguisher, the burning plastic had simply scattered and the fire spread, and for a moment I’d been terrified—the service area was full of old wood. The thing had finally gone out by itself, but not before an image of a stable full of burning horses had flashed through my mind.