Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (3 page)

“Right,” I sighed, “the book guy.”

If this were an inspirational prison movie, this would be the point at which he would have given the money back to me, cried, and thanked me for believing in him (just as “Lean on Me” cues in on the soundtrack). I, also in tears, would grab him just as he was about to leave and tell him that he didn’t have to do this anymore. There would be more tears. He would turn his life around; I would have learned an important lesson about the power of books to transform lives, about the inherent goodness of people, or whatever. The last scene would show me in a stupid tweed jacket, a few more wrinkles in my face and a sprinkle of white in my hair, as I take my seat at a UN ceremony honoring my reformed mugger for a lifetime achievement in humanitarian causes. But that’s not what happened.

A long second passed. I got the distinct feeling that he was smiling behind his mask. He signaled to someone in the distance, turned away, and jogged briskly into the park with my forty-three bucks, earned at the prison that had, until recently, held him. Perhaps this was justice. I’m not one to say.

He however did have something to say.

“Hey,” he yelled, from about twenty feet away, “
I still owe you guys two books
.”

And then he disappeared, laughing, into the night.

I
n his careworn, gravel-voiced, is-he-doing-a-Pacino-impression way, Boat continued laughing at me for weeks afterward. (I shouldn’t have told inmates about the mugging, I later realized.) At every opportunity he’d repeat the line, “Hey, you work at the Bay?” With the help of his cane, he’d drag his shot-up legs across the library, and interrupt me with a mock earnest, “Hey, you work at the Bay?”

He told me that I shouldn’t dwell on the fact that the mugger robbed me of my money and mocked me.

“Bottom line,” said Boat, leaning on his cane, getting serious, “this cocksucker didn’t stab you in the throat, right? He’s got a personal beef with you, he woulda.
Believe
me. You gotta focus on the right facts here.”

I didn’t quite agree. And, in any case, soon there were some new facts to contend with. My anxiety had caught up with me. As luck would have it, it happened in the library one afternoon. While moving cartons of books, a sudden, crippling back spasm buckled my knees, sending the contents of an entire box, dozens of books, cascading out of my hands. The books had been destined for my pet shelf, the Classics section. My back was clenching like an angry fist. I couldn’t breathe without sending a scalding pain through my lower back, legs, and arms, right down to my fingertips and toes. I couldn’t even reach for my glasses sitting on the floor next to me. I couldn’t move. Over a year and half in prison and now this, the floor.

I looked up and saw a young inmate in a tan prison uniform. He was licking a bootlegged prison lollypop and regarding me with detached curiosity.

“Daaamn,”
he said, swiveling the lollypop from his mouth and shaking his head in what was, perhaps, sympathy. “That’s a bad hit, cuz.”

Was I just knifed?

It certainly felt that way. In prison, you can’t rule it out. Alas the stabbing pain was internal, self-generated. The mind can do this. My former friend and mugger didn’t need to stab me that night in front of the train station. He needed only propose the idea. My body gladly finished the job. Before Boat, Dice, Fat Kat, or any of the other loyal men on my staff could rally me to my feet, I had a moment alone, flat on the floor.

I understood why religions conduct prayers from down there. There’s a certain irrefutable eloquence to a floor. You can’t help but adopt an honest perspective. I recalled something an inmate had recently told me. As a laborer he had actually helped construct the current prison facility in 1990. He had laid down steel for the very building in which he was now imprisoned, the 3-Building.

“That’s a hell of a mind fuck,” he told me. “You’re sitting there locked in this small fuckin’ cell, feeling like shit and about to go out of your mind, and you’re thinking:
Christ, I
built
this
.”

We build our own prisons. Usually, by accident. And so it was that, lying on a polluted prison floor, incapacitated and half-blind, surrounded by a messy pile of the Great Books, I was forced to consider the existential question. The question that takes on a peculiar twist for a prison worker who, unlike an inmate,
chooses
to spend his days in prison. That deceptively simple question buried deep in
The Jailer
by Sylvia Plath, in a book lodged somewhere in the pile next to me on the prison floor.

How did I get here?
asks the poet.

Signifiers of Bunnyness

Two years earlier, on a warm April afternoon, as the sun cast long shadows over the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as slim trees stretched out in their cottony pink and white delicates, I arrived at the Hyatt Hotel in Cambridge, Mass. A friend from high school was getting married—almost all of my former classmates were married, many with children. All I had to my name was a haircut that resembled a bad toupee and a stalled novel,
Easy Go
—a title chosen, after weeks of deliberation, over
Easy Come
—whose first line went, “I sing of legs and the woman,” an homage to the opening of Virgil’s
Aeneid:
“I sing of arms and the man.” The novel was pretty much downhill from there.

Under the toupee-hair, my brain was in commotion, afflicted by half-cocked ideas: To start a cable network that played nonstop bar mitzvah videos, complete with commentary. To open a business renting puppies by the hour to help people attract dates. New plot twists for
Easy Go
. These schemes left me more than spaced out; I was functionally senile.

That spring day, I walked, slightly dazed, up to the hotel, an edifice along the Charles River that bears a strong resemblance to a ziggurat, a striking sight, even to one who is not strung out and stoned. I, however, was both. A few years out of college, I was still contemplating my future. Let me amend that: I was having the early stages of a drug-induced panic attack about my future. Short of breath, a bleak strain of agoraphobia and doom rising in my chest, I pulled out a wrinkled yarmulke from my wrinkled jacket pocket, clipped it to the toupee-hair, and proposed to myself but one modest goal for the evening: to avoid my former rabbis.

Deep in indirection, I was anxious about appearing before my former community. In the past, these weddings left me feeling crappy and rejected. As an unabashed breaker of Jewish law, I was no longer permitted to take part in the serious, legally binding tasks at the Orthodox weddings of my friends. Not permitted to serve as a witness and sign the
ketubbah
, the marriage contract. Even at close friends’ weddings, at which I would certainly have been given this duty, I was instead given nominal tasks designed to make me feel included but which actually served to remind me that I was a persona non grata, relegated to the Talmud’s club of second-class losers: children, slaves, hermaphrodites, the mentally deranged, and women.

But in my community a sin graver even than religious treachery was professional inadequacy. My yeshiva high school’s basketball team was named not the Tigers or the Hawks, but the MCATS. As in, the Medical College Admission Test. This was a joke, but not a joke. If you weren’t on a track to becoming some variety of lawyer, businessman, or doctor, if you weren’t en route to grad school or a post-graduation job at a bank, you were guilty of something worse than worshipping Baal (which is at least an ambitious pursuit). From the various weddings I’d attended in the past months, I already had a reasonable idea how the small talk would go. A chat with the father of a former classmate a few months earlier had provided a rough template:

RICH BALD GUY:
Now what is it you do? You write death notices?

ME:
Obituaries.

RBG:
Isn’t that the same thing?

ME:
Obituaries are articles; death notices are lists of dead people.

RBG:
But the articles are about dead people.

ME:
Yeah.

RBG:
Well, you seem like a nice guy, I’m sure something will come along.

ME:
Thanks.

RBG:
Can you make a living off writing death notices?

ME:
Obituaries.

RBG:
Right.

ME:
Well …

RBG:
How are you going to afford to send your kids to Jewish schools?

ME:
I don’t know, maybe I won’t have kids. Or maybe I won’t have Jewish kids.

This suitably horrifying answer had done the trick—but I didn’t know how many more times I could put myself through the emotional strain. I considered walking around wordlessly as hors d’oeuvres were being served with one of those long-winded panhandler signs:
Hello, I am living in sin. I have forsaken the Torah and strayed far from the Orthodox community. My rabbis were right about Harvard. All I did was chase girls, do drugs, and write a carefully argued, typo-ridden satire of a senior thesis paper on Bugs Bunny. “This essay,” I wrote, “will explore the iconography and signifiers of Bunnyness in the context of wartime cinema, that is, in the wartime theater as both a capitalist venue and aesthetic-ideological spectacle.” These days I earn poverty wages as a freelance obituary writer. I know I need a haircut
.

My college career had run exactly like the morality plays drilled into me at yeshiva, the kind of cautionary tale that illustrates why “secular college” was thoroughly
treyf
, or unkosher: Sure, a
ben torah
, a learned and pious Jewish kid, goes to college with the best of intentions, determined to pray three times a day, keep kosher, keep
shabbes
, the holidays, the fasts, learn Torah for
x
hours a day, wear his yarmulke and
tzitzis
with pride, stay away from girls—and especially, Heaven help us!, from shiksas—before long, though, even this
ben torah
will be drunk, on all fours in Dunster House on a Friday night, on Yom Kippur, unlatching the stately bra of a junior from rural Pennsylvania, whom he met in a core class on Islam. As the rabbis say, the rest is commentary.

It’s not as if there weren’t warnings. On a junior year trip to see my grandparents, I had overheard my beloved grandfather, a shtetl-born grocer, “whisper” to my grandmother, in his agreeable Midwestern accent, “You know, he’s reading these Shakespeare books. I’m worried he has no, you know, direction.”

“You might be right,” said Grandma Edna, flipping through her
Hadassah
magazine.

“And,” added Grandpa, “he’s dressing like some kind of beatnik.”

There’d been earlier warnings. In the “Destination” section of my yeshiva high school yearbook, my fate was described in these terms: “Avi’s destination … is to be a shepherd in the Negev desert.” As a seventeen-year-old religious nut, this warmed my heart, vindicated my adolescent spiritual yearnings. Now, in hindsight, I could see the designation as it had been intended: that I was a bit of loner and romantic, destined neither for gainful employment nor a useful role in the twenty-first century.

In a worrying recent development, my good friend, Yoni, who was even more aimless than I, expressed concern about my direction. As we prepared for the wedding with a pipe of medicinal pot, he asked if I was happy writing obituaries.

I paused to consider this question. Yoni grew impatient.

“I mean,” he said, “obviously that’s not
really
what you wanted to be doing now, right? I’m assuming that’s not what you hope to be doing with your
life.”

I expected this from the bald rich man—but Yoni? This was a guy who’d sent me hallucinogenic emails from Amsterdam, during his infamous layovers:
I’ve lost track of time
, he’d written in one.
That’s what happens when you don’t sleep regularly and nab various
half-hours on park benches. My body is weary. I need dignity. The Van Gogh museum was an unbelievable experience. There were some real lows but some real highs. I am writing down where I need to be otherwise I’ll get lost. I have to remind myself at times that I am not clinically insane. My flight is at 2:50. I’d say 95% chance I’m on it
.

I wasn’t sure what to say to his question about writing obits. Unsatisfied by my continued reflective silence, Yoni listed, for my dispassionate consideration, various mutual friends who were, he noted, outperforming me in my chosen field of writing. He detailed those who had better jobs, better insurance plans, better party invites, major awards, people who were getting serious book deals, selling screenplays to major studios, getting raves in the
New York Times
. And here I was, he observed, writing freelance articles about people who, in addition to being obscure, were now also dead.

“You’re not exactly ‘living the dream,’ ” he pointed out. “How does that feel? Does that
suck?”

A word about Yoni: It’s true he wasn’t great at reading social cues or anticipating/obeying basic sensitivities in others. But he meant no harm. He was just curious. Yoni subsisted on a diet of six to twenty cups of coffee a day and canned string beans stir-fried in a witch’s brew of ranch dressing and massively ill-proportioned dry spices. He spent most of his college years dazed and unshowered, wandering Harvard Yard in filthy hot-orange sweatpants pulled up like pantaloons. His current job involved wearing a six-foot-tall cougar costume at high school football games in the Deep South, where he tried in vain to ward off platoons of middle schoolers who assaulted him with kamikaze fervor. Yoni was a man convinced a hemorrhoid affliction was explained by his grandmother’s childhood diagnosis that he had “an unusually small anus”; who was once ejected from Fenway Park for heckling; who was literally moved to tears by a slow, acoustic version of “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” he performed in the subway during a period of unemployment.