Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (11 page)

Secretly, I was grateful for the kites. They taught me a great deal about the language and culture of my workplace. Like actual kites, these notes came in all shapes and sizes. They were some of the best reading on the library shelves. Some were masterpieces of the genre, contenders for the Great American Kite. One guy tried to win back his erstwhile girlfriend by writing in the voice of God. “Behold,” he wrote on page 5, “I give thee today the Blessing and the Curse.” The takeaway lesson from his letter: if you decide to speak in the name of the Almighty, don’t make so many spelling errors (“… for I shall reek vengince …”).

Another inmate alternated between English and Spanish, sometimes in the same paragraph: in Spanish she was sweet and conciliatory, but in English she was a raging lunatic.

But few could match the swashbuckling antics of a kite that dropped out of an economics textbook one dreary afternoon. This letter from one woman to another—unsigned, though all evidence suggested Ms. Brutish—may be the voice America has been waiting for: the diesel-fueled lesbian hybrid of Saul Bellow’s
Augie March
and Snoop Dogg’s
Doggystyle:

What’s good Baby girl?!

Yo, your kite was right!! Chic, ya off the hook, and on some real shit, I’m feelin’ that! But anyhow, I’m never one that’s lost for
words. A bitch like me can’t be stuck on chuck, the boss is lost, for nada. I’m a go-getter, and I go for what I want, and usually, I get what I want. Early!… so you need to be dicked down and licked down? Well, ma, I can’t help ya with the first one, but I’ve been told that my skills on the other is SWEEEEEET! Ya need ya estrogen levels balanced by a pro. Make a bitch forget reality, speak in ancient tongues and shit … But like I said, I aint tryin’ to step on no one’s toes cuz that’s not the type of bitch I am. But on the up&up and low low I gots to make a proper attempt though, cuz I’d kick myself in the ass, ass backwardz if I didn’t attempt to get the goodz, knowin’ that I wanted a piece of the pie … So, ya crown jewels make a nigga rob banks. Only if ya crown jewels shine ma, like I know they do. An Italian princess like you should never be anything less, always have ya jewels shine … and if you feel the need to be unfaithful, then it be what it be ma. Go for yourz … now thatz the shiiiiit! I like the answers as usual. You keep shit rockin’. Here’s some more questions girly girl
.

1. When is ya man getting out of jail?

2. Have you ever had a 3some?

3. Have you ever had a 4some?

4. Would ya ever pose for “Girlz Gone Wild”?

5. Can you skip the jail house panties, and just stick with the Georgia peach (straight up and down)?

6. Have you ever seen a man cry?

7. Does your office space have room for 2?

8. Have you ever had cyber sex?

9. Do you see yourself with a future? A different future?

10. Can I get a Woop Woop?

11. Can we be friends?

12. Can we be m.t.j.f.? [more than just friends]

13. “Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”… courtesy of Chris Tucker

14. What’s ya fave movie?

15. What’s ya fave flavor?

16. You want to smoke an “L” with me?

17. You want to smoke the judge who sent you here?

Her Secret

One night, Martha dropped by to say hello. A hooker hooked into just about everything, Martha was a notorious gossip who would hang out at the library counter, reading aloud from the newspaper’s police log and offering a running commentary on the catalog of recent crimes, the vast majority of which were committed by her relatives, close friends, neighbors, and an endless train of acquaintances named “Timmy” and “John John.”

“I
knew
that ho was headed to jail! … Oh Christ, not Timmy! … Tony, you
dumb fuck!”

And on it went. It was hard not to like Martha. If she had been remotely trustworthy, I’d have hired her to work the library detail.

That night, Martha leaned in across the counter.

“Hey Arvin,” she said. “You wanna know something?” She was smiling like a crocodile.

“Probably not,” I replied.

“Your friend, Jessica,” she said, using Solitary’s Christian name, “she don’t come to your class no more ’cause she can’t look out that window.”

“What a shame,” I said. “When I teach a class on window gazing, I’ll sign her right up.”

“Yeah, funny. But she’s got her reasons.”

“Oh really, why?”

“She wants to look out the window cause her son’s in the yard. 3-3’s in the yard same time as your class. Poor girl goes to your class to catch a view of him. You get what I’m telling you?”

I must have looked incredulous because Martha straightened her back and placed her hand over her heart, as though she were about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. This woman took her gossip as a solemn duty.

“Honest to God,” she said, carefully enunciating her thick Boston
ohwnest ta Gowad
. “She ain’t seen the kid in like ten years or something, and then, like that, her baby boy shows, wearin’ blue.”

The Man in the Lime-Beige Plaid Suit

Jessica’s son wasn’t the only unexpected arrival. My good friend Yoni had been prison-bound for a long time—possibly his whole life. Like many a rambling man before him, Yoni’s adventures ended pitifully by the side of a lonesome Tennessee highway, police flashers ablaze in his rearview mirror. The officer took one look at his car, with its tinted windows and its
Support the Troops
bumper sticker (placed there in order to curry favor with cops). One look at Yoni’s hippie getup, at his roguish dimples. The car was searched—an unfortunate turn of events, as the satchel stashed in the trunk, the one embroidered with a zebra-skin map of Africa, contained enough homegrown to qualify for “intent to sell,” a class D felony.

Did it matter that Yoni had committed no crime? That the bag, along with the intent to sell its contents, belonged to his new friend, the man sitting in the passenger seat, a fiftysomething ex–Black Panther/out-of-work teacher/subsistence farmer? Of course it didn’t matter. That was for a judge to decide. Cops have a different way of doing things. As the old Southern folksong says,

The sheriff’ll grab ya and the boys will bring you down the next thing you know, son, you’re prison bound
.

After the arrest, the holding cell, and the arraignment, after bond was posted, after a sleepless summer facing possible jail time, up to a year, Yoni had finally gotten justice. It wasn’t simple. For the events of Yoni’s life tend to unfold on an Old Testament scale; his god is an Angry God. It took driving his jalopy to court directly through Hurricane Katrina, through sideways rain that gave the impression of operating underwater, but his record was finally wiped clean, his mug shot expunged. His name cleared. Again.

Yoni’s name had been cleared more times than a table at Big Boy—and each time, ready for the next greasy feast. The man was a glutton for trouble. While living in the Mississippi Delta, where he taught high school English, he had tried his hand at the Southern hospitality thing. When a rifle-toting cowboy drifter, wandering next to the Mississippi River, asked him if there was “anything fun to do in town,” Yoni immediately invited the man home for a platonic dinner. The meal ended with the irate, sexually frustrated cowboy exposing himself to Yoni. During his own travels, Yoni saved money by sleeping on park benches instead of in hostels.

And then there was the kind of trouble that hadn’t happened yet, the evil seed that might one day yield a poison fruit: writing on a housing application for graduate student housing, for example, that he had a problem with
nocturnal enuresis
, a.k.a. bedwetting. While this lie achieved his immediate objective, securing a rare single room, he still wonders if one day, down the road, this bedwetting document will somehow end up in the wrong hands. Perhaps a tenure committee, perhaps a congressional committee. When that day comes, he’ll need to clear his name once again.

Yoni has lived much of his life under the shadow of false accusations. His slovenly and peculiar ways led a college administrator to interrogate him over the (completely false) charges that he was a heroin addict. On a separate occasion, Yoni was summoned to this same administrator’s office, this time accused of a hate crime—again, a terrible misunderstanding. True he’d yelled, in his booming voice, out of his window and into a crowded courtyard of a college dorm, “Hey, Avi, you
fucking
Jew!” But it had been a joke, a Jewish thing, he explained to the administrator. Even at the biological level, Yoni stood falsely accused: he once tested positive, falsely, for syphilis.

But Yoni was the master of underdog brio. As an overweight Little Leaguer, his record of striking out over twenty times in a row did not prevent him from stepping up to the plate and, like Babe Ruth, grandly pointing to the outfield fence, calling his imminent home run. Years later, after reading an article on Donald Trump in an in-flight magazine, he decided to heed the great man’s advice and always wear a tie in professional settings. Yoni was a stalwart optimist.

His great moment would arrive on
Jeopardy
, in front of nine million viewers. After two rounds the studio audience hadn’t exactly turned on him, but they’d undoubtedly written him off. Yoni’s goof-ball antics—blowing a lewd kiss and winking into the camera during his introduction, his funny voices, his fist-pumping enthusiasm, his lime-beige plaid sportcoat, Byronic shirt collar, his sagging, belt-less trousers, his scruffiness—had announced that he was performing some sort of personal sideshow. Nobody, and certainly not his mother sitting in the studio audience, knew what to say when the bantering segment of the show became a nationally televised session of Freudian analysis:

ALEX TREBEK:
It says here that in college you ran naked around Harvard Yard, wearing only a giant orange wig, during the annual Primal Scream event. And that your
mother
was there to watch?

YONI:
My mother was a supportive mother. As was her friend. And my brother. And my grandmother.

TREBEK
: All of these people ran naked?

YONI
: No, they watched.

TREBEK
: What about your grandma?

YONI
: She was intrigued from the sidelines. Didn’t realize how many shapes and sizes …

TREBEK
: Right, right, okay …

Before the largest audience of his life, Yoni had succeeded at playing the fool. As if to give weight to this role, he’d played two uneven rounds, entering Final Jeopardy in last place, $11,900 behind his opponents. Nobody in the studio audience believed that this lightweight, this clown in the loud sportcoat, had the mettle. But after the Final Jeopardy think-music had ended and the lights went up, it was Yoni alone who had identified the person on the Warren Commission who later faced assassins. Thanks to President Gerald Ford and his would-be assassins, Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, Yoni was on national television, $25,799 richer, dancing a ludicrous jig as his preppy co-contestants stood by in shock. He’d proved his point: the fool prevails.

But it took a long time to get to that nationally televised jig. Years earlier, Yoni was just a guy out on bail, with a mountain of legal debts, looking for work. After Halloween and the end of his job as a haunted house persona—a malevolent German scientist—Yoni had applied for gigs as a fruit vendor, a street musician, a bicycle tour guide, a Dunkin Donuts guy, a bar mitzvah tutor, a stripper—and secured all but the last three positions. But the money was never right, and the job search continued.

As luck would have it, the prison at which I worked had an opening. After waiting for his criminal record to be cleared, and allowing his system to rid itself of any illicit residue, he shaved and came in for an interview.

One sunny afternoon, a few weeks later, mere months after he’d barely eluded prison time, Yoni strode through the hallway door to the yard, walked past the guards, and threw open the prison library door. He marched in, a contractor’s ID dangling from his shirt, a big ironic smile on his face.

“Whaddup up, pimp,” he said, and gave me a goofy fist bump. This delighted the assembled library regulars.

“This your boy?” asked Fat Kat, with a big grin.

“I think
so,”
said Dice.

“Um,” I said, “guys, please meet Yoni, he’s the new ‘Life Skills instructor.’ ”

The Katrina Hustle

This was about the time when I found myself in the sallyport—the little limbo between the prison’s front double security doors (never open at the same time)—crowded in with six or seven staff members. An older woman flashed me the overly familiar smile that invariably prefaces unsolicited comments from strangers. I get these a lot.

“You a volunteer?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “staff.”

I flashed her my shiny ID, the one with the photo of my incriminating haircut and befuddled expression.

“Hey,” she said again, after it was evident that the officer in central control was taking his time giving us clearance. “I thought we had child, uh, labor laws in this country.” She could barely get this comment out before expelling a smoker’s guffaw. “What are you—twelve, thirteen years old?” This prompted grins, even among those who’d been pretending not to hear.