Reading behind Bars

by Jill Grunenwald

  They looked at each other, daring the other to ask whatever it was that needed to be asked. “We have a question,” said the one on the right side. I stole a quick glance at his name badge. Hardy.

  “Okayyyy,” I said, drawing it out, intrigued.

  Another beat. Another minute of them passing glances back and forth. Finally, Hardy gave a resigned sigh. He leaned in close, lowering his voice. “So, um, what would happen if we were to request Mein Kampf from the outside library?”

  I knew these inmates. I knew this was merely a philosophical exercise, not something they were seriously considering, nor was it a book they wanted to read. They were testing the boundaries. That said, Mein Kampf was an interesting title to select because while it was allowed in the prison and, therefore, I wouldn’t have to practice any kind of censorship, I would have to break patron confidentially and report it to the security team. And I really didn’t want to do that. There’d be red tape and paperwork and incident reports, plus that whole nonexistent patron privacy thing, all for men I knew didn’t really want to read this book.

  “Well,” I started. “If you were to request Mein Kampf, I would put in a request and you would be allowed to read it. However, I would have to report you to Catalina.”

  Catalina was our resident Investigator. A former Ohio State Patrolman, Catalina handled all internal investigations and information related to security threat groups. Technically speaking, just having this conversation was enough to report to Catalina but, again, I really didn’t want to have to do that.

  “So,” I continued, “did you want to put in an ILL request?”

  They smiled and shook their heads. With a wave, they left the library. The interaction left me conflicted. On the one hand, I knew these men well enough to know the request for Mein Kampf wasn’t a security threat and that, more likely, the question was about satisfying their own curiosity. On the other hand, what would happen if an inmate, who I felt posed a risk, requested the book? Would I get it for him? Outside, at a public library, I would have had no problem providing a book a patron asked for. Inside, I was still against censorship, but also realized that the rules existed and I had agreed to hold them up when I accepted the job.

  To be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what I would have done if a different inmate had asked for that book. But I liked to believe that I’d follow the protocol: I’d have to tell Catalina, but Mein Kampf was allowed inside. It was not banned, so if an inmate asked for it—regardless of what I knew about him—I would hope I’d get it for him. Sometimes, when your professional passion feels challenged, you have to figure out how to circumvent the rules when you can. And as I’d learn, even I like to test boundaries sometimes, too.

  One sunny summer day, I was sitting at my desk, updating the Excel spreadsheet with some of the donated books. I couldn’t guarantee how accurate it was when it came to the titles that were on there, but I could maintain accuracy going forward as I added new titles.

  I picked up the title on top of the pile. It was a V. C. Andrews title, Crystal, from the Orphans series. Albeit a slightly older title, but V. C. was impossible to keep on the shelves, her books always checked out and reserved, so I was excited the donation pile included several of her books. Holding the paperback in my hands, I held it up close to my face to look for the miniscule encircled R that came after her name indicating V. C. Andrews was a registered trademark.

  The real V. C. Andrews died in December of 1986. She had written the original four books in the Dollanganger series, starting with the notorious Flowers in the Attic, and a small collection of series starters including My Sweet Audrina and Heaven. But everything else attributed to her name had been created at the hands of a ghostwriter. One ghostwriter, in fact: Andrew Neiderman, who is a bestselling thriller writer under his own name. But along with writing his books, Neiderman has kept the V. C. Andrews legacy alive for over thirty years and is still publishing books to this day (many of which I have read. Sorry not sorry.).

  I opened the paper to the copyright page so I could start inputting some of the necessary information into the Excel spreadsheet. After just two keystrokes, I noticed something fluttering in my peripheral vision.

  I leaned forward in my seat, squinting. What was that thing?

  In the far back corner of the room, up near the ceiling, there was movement. Fantastic. I thought. Had a bird gotten in again? A few months before, a sparrow had flown in one day, piggybacking through the open door when an inmate entered. She perched on one of the ceiling rafters, happy as could be. She was too high for any of us to reach, but the last thing I wanted was for her to get too comfortable and start nest building. When Officer Chester came by on his hourly round soon after, I pointed up to the bird and asked how to get her out.

  Chester laughed at me. Actually laughed.

  “Eh. She’s not bothering anyone,” he said.

  Well, okay, well that wasn’t entirely true, as she was bothering me. The last thing I wanted to do was deal with bird poop on my entire collection. That was way above the normal repair procedures and if we had to throw out the books, I didn’t have the budget to buy new copies.

  Sure, she was a little sparrow and how much damage could she really do? But to quote Shakespeare, “Though she be but little she is fierce.”

  But my opinion on the matter didn’t count it seemed.

  In the end, it didn’t matter: the bird stayed for a couple of days before sneaking out, presumably the same way she came in. One day I came to work and she was just gone.

  Still squinting, I tilted my head, hoping to gain a better vantage point without having to physically go into the stacks. Whatever was back there, I didn’t think it was a bird. But what else had wings—

  My eyes widened.

  I was about to find out whatever was back there, because the damn thing was flying towards me. No, not towards me: at me.

  I hurled myself against my chair and kicked off with my feet, rolling into my porters like a bowling ball just as a reddish blur brushed past my cheek. Behind me, there were two thumps in quick succession: the first, when whatever it was hit the window by my desk, and the second when it fell on top of the pile of books right beneath said window.

  For several seconds, nobody breathed, let alone moved. The only sound in the room was a rustling of wings and paper. My swift reaction and roll got the attention of every inmate in the library, and they all fell silent.

  My office chair had rolled in such a way that I was facing my inmates and the stacks of the library. I pushed myself up off the chair, using the back of it to steady myself, then took a deep breath and turned around.

  I gingerly took a step forward, slow and patient as if I thought the floor might fall beneath my feet. Like a giraffe, I craned my neck in the direction of the rustling sound.

  A bat laid on its back, wings frantic against the books beneath it. Caught in a moment of flight or fight, the bat had chosen flight, only it was unable to right itself up. That nice little crash into the window probably hadn’t helped. I was honestly surprised the run-in with the glass hadn’t knocked the thing unconscious.

  As it twitched a little, I jumped back.

  By now, several of the inmates who had been seated were standing, trying to get a better view of whatever was going on by the window. Because of the circulation desk and my desk, they couldn’t see anything. Some of my porters from the law library had come forward and gathered around the circulation desk.

  “So,” I started. I glanced over my shoulder once more at the furiously flapping wings then faced the room. “There’s a bat.”

  “You better get away from him, Ms. G.!” McDougal yelled from his spot back in the law library. “Bat’s gotta be sick if he’s out in the daylight.”

  That had not occurred to me, so well now that’s just great. There’s not only a bat by my desk but now I was at risk for rabies? I’d rather have the sparrow back. Bird poop, while annoying, was a much better option than rabies. I’ve read Cujo. Sure,
Stephen King himself has admitted he was blitzed out of his mind on cocaine while writing the book and, sure, this was a bat not a dog, but that somehow made it worse, not better.

  This was, surprisingly, not the first time I’d ever dealt with a bat in a library setting. When I was still working in my hometown, the staff came in one morning to discover that a bat had gotten in overnight and decided to stay. There he was, hanging from the ceiling in the reference section, right above the phone books, his black wings wrapped tightly around his body like a Vampire’s cloak.

  The managers cornered off that small section of the library temporarily, patrons encouraged to stay away until a professional could come in and take care of the bat.

  That bat at least knew the rules of the library: be quiet and don’t disturb the other patrons. This bat, however, did not.

  After the incident with Chester laughing at me, I had no idea what to do. Surely a bat flapping his wings on a pile of books was a bigger problem than a bird cheerfully hanging out in the rafters, right?

  While internally panicking, out of the crowd came Draper, an inmate who was an exact mimicry of Jon Hamm in Mad Men, down to the perfectly polished black hair. He didn’t say a word, just walked past me removing his state-issued lightweight blue jacket in one fluid motion.

  I was so confused as to his intentions that I didn’t even notice, let alone chastise him, when he stepped across the faded red line on the floor and came behind my desk. I merely took a few steps back and moved out of his way.

  Arms outstretched, hands draped by his jacket, he leaned down and enveloped the flapping bat in the folds of his open jacket. Draper hugged the ball of fabric and flight close to his chest and quickly exited the library.

  I pressed my head against the window, angling to watch him release the bat into the wild. He shook his coat out and walked back in and resumed his seat at the table right in front.

  “Thank you,” I said. Draper merely nodded, resuming his reading of the Canton Repository as if nothing had happened. “Uh,” I continued, “you probably want to take that jacket to Quartermaster and get another one.” He made some vague gesture with his hand and went back to reading, the newspaper in front of him far more important to him than whether or not the jacket he received from the prison was infected by whatever that bat may or may not have been carrying.

  Priorities.

  Later, while we were closing up, Washington was near to bursting with laughter as he came towards the door. “Man, Ms. G.,” he said, shaking his head. “I ain’t never seen anybody move as fast you did in that chair.” He clapped his hands and dragged his right palm across his left. “Woosh.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, yeah,” I deadpanned. “So hilarious.”

  Washington was released a few months later, free to return to his wife and kids and grandkids on the outside. Without fail, at least once a week right up until the day he left, he would remind me of that bat and how quickly I moved out of the way, his retelling punctuated by his laughter.

  It’s been ten years and I still think about that bat all the time. I hear the rapid flapping of his wings, imagine how terrified he must have been to realize he had no way of righting himself up and escaping. And that’s all he wanted to do, really: escape. He probably snuck in through the vents and ended up in our little library. To him, that window looked like freedom. He didn’t know, of course, that it was a window. All he saw was the vast green field of the yard and the cool blue sky of summer. And so, when he had what he thought was a moment, his one moment, he made a mad dash for that great green expanse, only to dive headfirst into plate glass.

  In some ways, we’re all the bat. All of us—me, the inmates, the staff. We all have goals and aspirations and sometimes, more often than not, there are invisible obstacles that get in the way of our achieving our goals. Obstacles that we don’t see until we literally run into them. We get knocked on our backs, staring up at the ceiling, wondering how the hell we’re going to get out of this predicament.

  Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, sometimes we all depend on the kindness of strangers.

  And if we are really, really lucky, our rescuer will look a little bit like Don Draper.

  Chapter 11

  Heartbreaker

  Investigation: A process that attempts to draw conclusions of fact in a complex or disputed matter, or when known facts are ambiguous. An Investigation is distinguished from problem-solving processes designed to evaluate and improve administrative procedures after collecting undisputed facts. An Investigation is an undertaking that seeks to clarify or discover factual information. A problem-solving process is an undertaking that collects undisputed information in order to seek improvements in the efficiency of programs. An Investigation should not be substituted or blended with a problem-solving process in most cases, particularly if the incident itself is controversial or complex, unless this blend is specifically desired.

  —ODRC Policy 09-INV-03

  There’s a saying in prison. An attitude and approach to working inside that is shared among all staff. A mantra, if you will:

  Keep your shit at the gate.

  It doesn’t matter which direction you’re moving, whether you are just starting your shift, or on your way out the door. Either way, you leave it all at the gate.

  Highland used a pair of shoes as a reference. “I have a pair that I only wear here,” she explained. “When I get home at night, I take them off right away and leave them right at the door. Here, we walk all around the grass and the dirt—who knows what my shoes are picking up. I don’t want to track that into my house, so the shoes stay by the door.”

  To be fair, she was literally talking about a pair of shoes she wore, but the concept remains the same. Working inside requires a level of defense beyond the razor-wire fence. I was lucky: my job in the library meant that the vast majority of the time, the inmates I saw were polite and well-behaved. But still, even polite and well-behaved inmates had bad days.

  It was not even just dealing with bad days, though. It was about dealing with bad situations and dealing with being unable to do anything because they were incarcerated. Sometimes it was emotionally exhausting.

  For example, there was an earnest, quiet kid who had a baby mama in California trying to force him to sign away his parental rights while he was in a prison in Ohio. Whenever her attorneys sent him another packet of papers, he would bring them to me in a desperate hope I’d be able to help him navigate the legalese.

  There was the older man suffering from a long-standing hernia, who kept getting the runaround from the infirmary because the doctors didn’t consider it bad enough to act on. Every time I politely asked him how he was doing that day, I braced myself for his usual complaint. He knew I couldn’t do anything, he just wanted someone to listen.

  In the law library, we saw inmates dealing with all sorts of legal difficulties, from housing foreclosures to divorce. I often had to notarize and sign my Jill Hancock on papers dealing with the marital relationships of the inmates, the life they had outside gone with a single signature.

  The absolute worst, though, was the young twenty-year-old whose three-year-old son was murdered at the hands of his mother. The incident was so horrific, it made the front page of the local newspaper, his story and loss on display for all of us to see and read about.

  He was given a single day leave to attend the funeral but then had to immediately return to the prison to deal with his grief from inside.

  These are things you don’t want to track into your house. These are the shoes you want to leave at the door.

  The reverse was also true as well, though: no matter what was happening at home, we as staff members could not bring that inside with us. Letting our personal problems in distracted us, made us less effective at our jobs. When staff members got lazy and stopped paying attention, they put the safety of the entire prison at risk.

  However, in the summer of 2009, I did not do so well at leaving my shit at the gate.

&nbs
p; It started when my boyfriend called me up one day and said something to the effect of, “I don’t think I want to be in a relationship anymore. Also, I cheated on you back in December.”

  We were long-distance, as he lived two hours away. Just a few days prior he had spent Fourth of July weekend in Cleveland, and we had celebrated our two-year anniversary. Now he wanted some space to figure out his feelings. I wanted to jump in my car and drive to see him, desperate to talk this out, to salvage this in some way. We’d been friends for years prior to dating, surely there was a way to fix this.

  He talked me out of it.

  I called off work the next day and spent it in bed. I returned on Saturday, specifically knowing the staff would be limited, and I wouldn’t have to do too much explaining. During the morning break, I locked myself into the Education building and took a nap on the worn blue mat in the middle of the room.

  I was so stressed I gave myself a nosebleed.

  After work was done for the day, I went home, grabbed my cat Chloe, and spent the night at my parents’. All told, I didn’t eat for three days, and by the end of the weekend, we had officially broken up.

  I never saw him again.

  In the weeks after, I struggled to keep my shit at the gate when I came to work every day. Like dirt on the bottom of my shoe, I tracked it everywhere I went. Every day was a fight. A fight to wake up. A fight to get out of bed. A fight to take a shower and put on clothes and get in my car and drive to work. Once I arrived at work, I was just fighting to make it to the end of the day so I could go home and crawl back beneath the comfort of my bed and fall into a restless, dreamless sleep.

  I was Alice. I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and was now drowning in a pool of my own tears. I was Esther Greenwood, suffocating under the weight of the bell jar that covered me like a dome. It wasn’t lost on me that Sylvia Plath had given the fictional version of herself the Anglicized version of my own last name.

  I am. I am. I am.

  Was I?