Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (2 page)

An inmate thanks me for my suggestion that he listen to “Sherbert” at our listening station. (He means Schubert.) Inmates ask me for a book about the band Nirvana, about the state of nirvana; for a self-help guide for fathers; for a yoga book; a book on “how to mix chemicals”; a guide to real estate. Ignoring the chemicals request, I suggest “Dummies” guides. I do this diplomatically, since inmates have been sensitive in the past to the possibility that I may be calling them dummies. A caseworker suddenly appears—she’s a crazy woman who talks nonstop and tells wild lies of dating European royals. She wants to borrow a book on tigers. Waiting patiently is C.C. Too Sweet, a mercurial, balding pimp memoirist who wants me to edit his revised manuscript.

My main challenge is to focus on the tasks at hand and not get sucked into the pimp and hustler gabfests. These are always entertaining and occasionally lead to fascinating discussions. I overhear an elder pimp tell an apprentice, “I wasn’t born, son, I was
hatched.”
But before I hear where that conversation is going, Ty pokes his way to the front of the line and politely demands to talk with me. Immediately.

He is a tower of an eighteen-year-old with a baby face and a jaw that can probably split a walnut shell in one clean crack. Today he looks spooked. As soon as I close my door—something I rarely do—Ty bursts into tears. His mother died last month and he was unable to attend the out-of-state funeral; yesterday his long-estranged father showed up in prison. These are not unusual issues in prison. I’ve encountered them many times before, but I still have no answers for him.

As he tells me his story, I look out the office window toward the library, wondering what atrocities are taking place in my absence. This is what I call Prison ADD: the inability to ever be present because there’s always something potentially heinous occurring nearby, something that is probably your responsibility. Ty is inconsolable.

While he cries, I try to gather my thoughts. I’ve posted a sheet on my wall, next to my desk. It’s a wordfind game that an inmate has created and sells to other inmates for the equivalent of fifty cents a pop. Thirty-eight terms, mixed into a jumble of letters. The words are listed, in roughly alphabetical order, at the side of the sheet. They form something of a mantra I use to orient myself in situations like this one.

Titled “Things Found in Prison,” the list reads:
attitude, bail bondsman, booking, contraband, count time, canteen, cellie
[i.e., cellmate],
drama, depression, family, fence, grievance, gossip, hunger, habe
[short for
habeas corpus
],
handcuffs, indigent, ID card, isolation, lawyer, medication, meditation, mail, noise, officer, PIN number, prayer, quarantine, recreation, rules, shower shoes, sheriff, solitude, telephone, tears, uniforms, worry, yard
. I’m forced to reschedule a meeting with Ty. Right now, I have to help the guy who thought it would be a good idea to rob a liquor store with a live grenade. In the prison library, it’s first-come, first-served.

 … hunger, habe, handcuffs, indigent …

The hour has passed. The inmates in green uniforms finally leave, returning to the block to play chess and watch
Judge Judy
or
Days of Our Lives
. A new group of inmates is on its way. This will go on for two full shifts, until 9 p.m. when all the inmates will gather in front of TVs—self-segregated by race—to watch
Prison Break
. I take in a deep breath of recycled prison air.

 … rules, shower shoes, sheriff, solitude, telephone, tears …

Before the next group arrives, Officer Malone saunters in. He and I undertake the regular task of scanning bookshelves, and other dark corners, for contraband, or for something that might be missing, especially something that can be refashioned into a weapon. This includes just about anything. We look for notes wedged into books by inmates, left for another inmate to pick up. Many of these notes are intended for the female inmates, who come down from their tower blocks at a separate time. I retrieve handfuls of these confessional letters every day. Taken as a whole literature, they give me an insight into the secret lives and concerns of inmates. I let some of the better ones pass under my radar.

Malone and I drop down to our knees simultaneously, Muslim prayer–style. We’re not entreating a deity, though, but sweeping under the shelves for contraband.

 … mail, noise, officer, PIN number, prayer …

Malone likes to talk. He tells me about his time in the service, about working in a paper mill. He advises me to trade in my bicycle for a Ford S150, like his. He tells me about his wife, who went back to school. She’s smarter than he is, he admits. He resumes a line of conversation we’ve had off and on for months: he wants to help me out. I seem like a good kid, he tells me with a shrug. I should get a raise, more vaca, better retirement. My union is shitty. He urges me to join his, to become a prison guard.

I am, he says, already most of the way there.

Prison Fever

And that’s exactly my problem. After working almost two years full-time in prison, it was finally dawning on me that I was a
jailer
. The book-slinging sheriff persona still worked charms at cocktail parties, but the reality of it was starting to give me acid reflux. I wasn’t a visitor in this prison. I held a key and was beginning to feel infected by it. I was frankly falling apart, headed toward something of a mental and physical breakdown.

You know you’re not doing well when a prisoner regards you with pity. Blue Line was a heavy-lidded man who’d been addicted to heroin since he was thirteen years old, in and out of foster care, group homes, sober houses, shelters, and prisons. He could narrate the gruesome entirety of his life through the scars on his body. When a man like Blue gives you the once-over and says, “You okay, pal? You don’t look too good,” this, if you’re keeping score, is the exact moment you know there’s trouble.

And he was being kind. To be precise, I looked like hell. I didn’t admit it to anyone, but prison was kicking my ass. I’d taken the job largely to get health insurance but, the truth was, I hadn’t
needed
health care until I took the job. And once I did, I subsisted only by the grace of a dream team of health care professionals: allergists, infectious disease specialists, ophthalmologists, dermatologists, orthopedists, off-duty nurses, chiropractors, Internet quacks, back doctors, front doctors, head doctors. I was even getting meds from an ob-gyn.

Every day my body passed through the prison gate, but my mind was getting caught in the mess of high walls and barbed wire. I was getting severe pains in my back. My landlady, the ob-gyn, mentioned casually that men sometimes experience menopause. “Rare,” she noted, sipping her chai, “but it does happen.”

Why was she telling me this?

People were beginning to dislike me. My friends were starting to find me lame. “When we hang out,” my friend and prison colleague Mary Beth told me, “I feel like I’m visiting my great-grandfather.” My ex-landlady was leaving passive-aggressive phone messages accusing me of not spending enough time with her; my longtime, recently long distance girlfriend and I were losing touch. And, of course, Blue Line thought I didn’t “look too good.”

On top of all that, I found myself having to watch my back for trouble from an emotionally stunted prison guard. A schoolyard feud between the officer and me had spiraled out of control. Suddenly I found myself facing disciplinary action for, of all things, “laying hands” on him.

That’s right: I, the prison’s librarian, stood accused of
assaulting
a veteran prison guard, a man trained to subdue violent felons. An improbable charge, certainly. But in prison, nothing is really improbable. That the accusation was false—okay, mostly false—was irrelevant. Prisons overflow with people claiming they’ve been charged falsely. Now I’d officially joined their ranks, another chump who’d caught a case.

Caught a case
is prisonese for getting in trouble with the law. The expression echoes common idioms like “caught a cold.” It implies passivity, inevitability. There’s something distinctly casual in it. For many in prison, this is indeed the point: catching a nasty little case of gun possession, murder in the first degree, or selling heroin in prison, assaulting an officer—
hey, shit happens
, goes the refrain among those who catch a case,
wrong place, wrong time
. Criminal cases float in the air like pathogens and might infect you at any moment. People catch cases all the time. It’s part of everyday life, common as the cold. Now I had caught my own mild case. Prison has always had its own diseases. In the early modern period it was called “prison fever” and it infected inmates, jailers, and even visitors who had come to reform the place. Nobody is immune.

The essence of my strain of prison fever wasn’t mysterious, just persistent. It boiled down to this: I was, according to a shrink, “having trouble leaving my work at work.” I was assured this was “mostly in my head.” I just needed to relax a bit.

And that was precisely why I’d decided to see a movie after my last shift during a particularly bleak week in January. Something completely escapist. As luck would have it,
Jackass 2
was in the cheap theater. I called the stupidest person I knew (at the time). We were to meet at the theater. He had trouble finding it.

Perhaps it was my exhaustion with prison, or my low expectations, or the disarmingly childlike enthusiasm of my companion that evening, but the movie delivered. Happily ignoring its deeply nihilistic undertones, I gave myself over to a night in the land of
Jackass
, readily accepting the fantasy of buoyant and freewheeling guyness. Who can quibble with a dude running his skateboard full speed into a brick wall, or a blindfolded guy, in only his underwear, crawling on all fours through a giant room of armed mouse traps, or a group of stoners driving a golf cart through a golf course, crashing it repeatedly and with increasingly shocking violence? This was great fun. It was as if the id had driven the superego deep into the woods and abandoned it there. It was a world free of moral seriousness, of crime without consequences, without prison.

After the movie, I took the T home. I got lucky, just barely catching the last train. The car was full of happy drunks and couples in love for the night. I arrived at my stop, the Green Street station on the Orange Line, feeling sufficiently groovy. But it was always at those moments that my thoughts switched to the inmates and guards: while I’d enjoyed a night on the town, stopping in ten different locales all over the city, they hadn’t moved an inch. Still sitting under the same fluorescent lights, still staring at the same cinderblock walls painted institutional colors. Still breathing that prison air. Another few hours lost to the abyss. Prison never closes.

I remember what Boat said. He was an old Boston wiseguy, a former bank robber and mobster recently hired to the library’s inmate staff, joining Fat Kat, Dice, and the rest. Boat liked to give me advice. “There’s plenty a shit to go around here, kid,” he’d said one day, while we were stamping books. “The windows in here are sealed shut. No circulation. You breathe the same fuckin’ diseased air we breathe.” I really didn’t need to hear this. “You stay in here long enough,” he continued, “you take in that air? It gets all up into your cells and shit? You’ll take it with you. You’ll
never
get it out of your system.” I thanked him for the public service message. He was, I suspect, trying to be helpful.

I emerged from the subway station into the chilly evening. Jamaica Plain, my neighborhood of less than two months. Through the crystalline winter air, downtown Boston glistened in the east. There I spotted a sign. That single cautionary word—
PRUDENTIAL
—glowed high in the heavens, beaconing from the crest of the skyscraper.
Prudence
, an antiquated word that sums up my hometown’s patrimony of dread and pessimism. I promptly wrapped a scarf around my neck, adjusted my hat, zipped up my coat.

As I turned left to walk home, I heard a voice behind me. Barely audible. Muffled.

“Go into the park,” it said.

He shoved me.

“Don’t
fuckin’
run,” said the voice. “I got a gun. Walk normal, give me the money in the park.”

I tried not to look at him. I took a deep breath. There was a police station around the corner. This guy’s audacity worried me. But I stayed calm and so did he. At least, for the moment.

“I’m getting my money out now,” I said, putting my hand into my pocket.

There was no cash. Any semblance of calm drained out in a cold sweat. I reached into my other pocket. There’d been an ATM stop outside of the theater. Forty bucks. I could breathe again.

“Let’s stay calm, okay,” I said, speaking more to myself than to him. He didn’t respond.

I stopped in the park and held out the money toward him, two crisp twenty-dollar bills, plus a few singles, all folded up to seem like more. I was calm, but my hands were shaking. I looked at the ground and caught a glimpse of his weapon, not a gun, but a six-inch knife, slightly rusted along the edges, concealed under a long shredded sleeve. I sensed he was looking at me. He took the money. But didn’t move.

Why isn’t he leaving?

“Hey,” he said suddenly. There was a new, unidentifiable tenor in his voice. “You work at the Bay?”

Every single joint in my body tensed. My throat locked. It was true: my work
was
following me home. It wasn’t in my head.

Here is what I should have said:
The Bay? What’s that? A seafood place? Never heard of it
.

But I didn’t. Instead, I turned to him. He was tall and thin. Long arms, steady shoulders. He wore a blue ski mask with a worn-out black hood over it.

“Yeah,” I said, “I run the library there.”

“Yeah, shit!” he said, his Spanish accent coming on strong now. “I
remember
you, man. The
book guy!”