Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (39 page)

The final provocation greeted me upon my arrival for a Friday morning shift. Sitting on my desk was a freshly printed report. Written by none other than Officer Chuzzlewit himself, the document claimed I’d freely and knowingly given an inmate contraband including pens, pencils, and markers, tools that could be refashioned into knives or tattoo-making implements or sold for these purposes. In the report, I was indentified as “the short, thin blondish guy in the library.”

Although relieved that the charge was relatively minor—that is, compared to the accusation of selling drugs—I was still unnerved. Was he signaling a warning? Was he demonstrating his ability to get away with any charge against me? Was I paranoid? Mostly, though, I resented the subtle suggestion that I was some sort of malnourished leprechaun who dwelled between the bookshelves. The short, thin blondish guy in the library, indeed. I’d had enough of this. I officially flipped my lid.

B
ecause of my bad back, I hadn’t slept the night before and was already in a state. It was 7:40 a.m. Twenty minutes until the day’s first inmates were due in the library. Not enough time to get my cereal: looked like I’d be having revenge for breakfast.

Slightly deranged, I rifled through my desk in search of a Post-It note. They were all hot pink. No good. I needed something staid.
Yellow!
Yes, a nice, professional yellow note would be perfect. My mind was racing. I searched more. Still, all I could find were pads of hot pink. Half a dozen of them.
Fuck it
, I thought.
As Don Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.”
I scrawled my name on the hot pink adhesive note. And then, like a psychotic, I traced over my name a second time. A third. I underlined it three times, then peeled the note from the pad. I could feel myself smiling like a goblin. I threw open the library door. Chuzzlewit! Standing right there in the hall, holding his morning cup of coffee. Perfect. I walked up to him.

“Next time you wanna write a report on me,” I said, “don’t forget to include my name.”

As I spoke, I placed the Post-It note with my name on his forearm. Unfortunately, my gesture lost a good deal of its dramatic flair: the note didn’t stick. Not even close. With awkwardly intimate care, like a mother putting a bandage on a child, I reapplied the Post-It to his plastic coffee cup.

“What?”
he said. He seemed genuinely confused.

I have a slight tendency to mumble, especially early in the morning (and especially, though I don’t have much experience, when I’m slightly deranged). It occurred to me that I should have warmed up first. I’d flubbed my line. Regaining my composure, I repeated, this time enunciating like a freshman theater major.

“I said: ‘Next time you write a report on me at least get my name right.’ ”

I pointed to the hot pink note with my name printed maniacally on it, hanging precariously from his coffee cup. He glared at me.

Feeling confident, I added, “And by the way, I’m not ‘short,’ I’m your height.”

Chuzzlewit took my advice. Within thirty seconds, he’d written a report. Once again, I was summoned to the Deputy’s Office. This time, however, to the windowless office of bad cop Deputy Quinn. And instead of Deputy Mullin, the good cop, Quinn was accompanied by svelte Major Morrison.

Was Morrison, this lissome, handsomely groomed gentleman, ever
not
a senior officer? His long face and sad eyes, his debonair mustache and crisp officer whites, demanded the accompaniment of a noble cavalry horse. He was present ostensibly in his role as shift commander, and probably as witness, but I got the strong impression he was actually there to amuse himself. The major crossed his legs, sipped tea like a diplomat, and did not bother to suppress a large grin. Quinn, as usual, put on the tough guy routine.

“Read this,” he said, as I sat down.

It was Chuzzlewit’s report about the Post-It note. The document, scripted in a bulky but supple hand, gave an oddly gripping fictional account of the incident. As per my demented provocation, Chuzzlewit had indeed used my Post-It note and referred to me by my full name. He claimed I shoved him. Twice. (He was good with details.) I’d also threatened him in a barrage of expletives, which he’d spun into full quotations that bore an uncanny resemblance to his own speech patterns. In the climactic moment of this tale, I had vowed bloody vengeance. According to this fanciful version of our encounter—which, despite myself, I found enormously entertaining—my attempted witty remark about our shared height was imagined as a dark threat:
And don’t think that I won’t do it
, I had allegedly said,
we’re the same size you know
.

As usual, he named inmates who had witnessed the brutal attack—none of whom, to my knowledge, were actually there.

“Did you threaten him?” Quinn asked me.

“No,” I said, trying desperately to restrain a smile. “Look at me, Jack. I haven’t been to the gym in months, I’ve got a bum back. And you
know
me: Do you think I go around threatening people, especially a CO? He’s lying and he’ll continue lying until he’s exposed.”

Major Morrison, no longer amused, cut in.

“We could have had a serious problem over there, you know,” he said, “You’re lucky he didn’t take a swing at you.”

“He’s lucky he didn’t take a swing at me,” I said.

This restored Morrison’s cheer. He smiled again and sipped his tea.

“Did you assault him?” Quinn asked.

“Yeah, assault with a deadly Post-It note.”

“Did you lay hands on him?”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Did you touch him?”

“Okay, yes,” I conceded, “I put the note on him. Did I sprain his arm? I didn’t realize he was so delicate. First I’m a short, skinny nothing and now I’m a guy who’s intimidating him?”

“So you admit that you laid hands on him.”

“I admit exactly what I said in my report: I touched him gently with a Post-It note, and not at all in the context of a physical threat. I think the issue here is—”

“I can’t have staff members laying hands on other staff members inside this facility.”

I looked at Quinn; he looked at me. Major Morrison drained his tea. And I knew that Officer Chuzzlewit, with his constipated face, had me in checkmate.

Within the week I was served with notice of my suspension without pay. Chuzzlewit’s allies were impatient to hear word of my punishment. They asked my union boss Charlie to spill the beans. He refused, and in fact gallantly offered to pick up the notice from the Deputy’s Office himself, so as to deprive the officers the pleasure of witnessing my walk of shame. Less than a month and a half after a released inmate had mugged me for $43, an officer mugged me for a good deal more than that. And this time, I had only myself to blame.

The Knowledge of the Knife

When I got home the night I was mugged in the park, I’d called my girlfriend, Kayla, to tell her the story. It’s not every day you get mugged by someone who knows you. As I took off my coat and fetched the cell phone deep in my pocket, I composed the story in my head, organizing the comic elements. I would tell her that the mugging was my just punishment for paying money to see
Jackass 2
. I’d gotten what I deserved. The comedy of the event itself needed little embellishment. And that punch line,
I still owe you guys two books
, was funny stuff.

After a few rings, Kayla answered. She sounded tired. Her first year of medical school had thoroughly exhausted her.

“I’ve got a hilarious story to tell you,” I said. “I got mugged, I’m fine, but here’s the thing—”

“What!”

There was a dreadful pitch of desperation, of genuine fear, in her voice. This should have been my cue to stop.

“I know it sounds bad,” I said, “but, trust me, it’s funny.”

But before I got to the part where the mugger recognized me as “the book guy,” I could hear her getting upset. The sound was of choking.

“Wait, seriously,” I said, “this is a funny story.”

By the time I reached the part about the knife, she was crying.

“I guess that part’s not so funny,” I said.

Sitting alone in her room three hundred miles away, she was now sobbing miserably. It was past midnight. It had been a hard year for her. For us. I heard her say, not quite into the phone, “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, what am I going to do?” I tried to comfort her, but it was useless.

“I don’t know …” she was saying, “I don’t know …” She sounded like an animal in pain—she
was
an animal in pain.

“Nothing happened,” I said. “Hey, babe, it’s okay, I’m totally fine. I’m right here, I’m talking to you.”

Through her tears she was trying hard to say something. She took a breath.

“I don’t know what I would do if something happened to you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

I could feel my heart literally clench when she said that. I was speechless. I’d never heard her this upset and was completely unprepared for this late-night surge of raw emotion, for the unforeseen immediacy of that statement,
I don’t know what I’d do without you
. When said in earnest this sentiment, abused in countless idiotic love songs, is startling.

It held a particular meaning for us at that time. A few months earlier she had moved to Philadelphia to begin medical school, to begin a new stage of her life. With the distance, our happy four-year relationship, for much of which we’d lived together, now had to justify itself. Was this a temporary separation, or the beginning of a serious drifting apart? It was clear that we couldn’t float along forever on autopilot. Our relationship would require some sort of a decision.

One of the possibilities was marriage. At least this was how various friends and family advised me. But I couldn’t shake the notion that Groucho Marx was right. “Marriage is a great institution,” he’d said. “But who wants to live in an institution?” Especially given that I already worked in one. Aside from Groucho, the only guidance that grabbed my attention had come many months earlier, and from an unexpected source: Jessica.

I
t had been a strange night in prison. Sunset had been awkward and inconclusive, the sky remained a shade of weak yellow tea through the night. Inside, things also felt off. It was as if a switch had been thrown in some corner of the prison, causing a widespread simultaneous unhinging. The previous night one of the women inmates had scuttled into the library, pounced like a feral lynx roughly four feet through the air directly
onto
the counter, arched her neck at disbelieving bystanders, crawled the length of the counter, almost bit a library detail member—who had made a valiant effort to prevent her advance—then pounced again, ambushing the magazine display I kept stashed safely (or so I’d thought) a full five feet behind the counter. Having missed her mark by a considerable margin, she proceeded to roll on the floor, giggling uncontrollably.

The following night, the library had been tranquil, suspiciously so, until the stillness was dramatically shattered by Janet Jackson’s “You Want This”—or was it “Throb”? It was hard to tell, it was so loud. A group of five lady inmates—the cool clique, the mean girls (which in prison meant mean)—had hijacked the back room and converted it into their own private club, complete with a bouncer. At the entry, they’d posted a lackey, a plus-sized woman who clung to the belief that she had a chance of earning her way into their bitchy graces. The fab five had gotten their hands on an ancient tape of music videos, which I hadn’t known existed in the library, and were having themselves a retro dance party.

In a flash, I was on the scene, face-to-face with the large bouncer. I recognized her as the woman who’d recently been hauled out of her prison unit in tears and shackles after intentionally cutting herself. She tried to turn me away from the party, then thought better of it and let me through.

The dancers had refashioned their uniforms into club outfits: pants rolled high from the bottom, low from the top—shirts twisted and retied to bare midriffs. They were dancing for the gold, writhing around invisible poles and gyrating like strippers. Three of the five, I later learned, were strippers (among other things). One of these women—who told me that she used to moonlight as a Monica Lewinsky–impersonating stripper at private parties—was starting to inch her shirt higher and higher. It became immediately evident that there would be a topless prison inmate, who bore a slight resemblance to Monica Lewinsky, slut-dancing in my library. And if I had any doubts about this, the woman began shouting, “I’m gonna take this motherfucker
off
!” The other women watched in awe from the wings. Some joined in from afar.

They didn’t hear me shout the first couple of times. I waited for the right moment, and made a wild dash between their squirming bodies, lunging at the old VCR, just barely reaching the stop button. Perhaps they teach you these commando tactics in library school—I wouldn’t know.

In the spirit of full disclosure I must admit that, in the past, I’d quietly permitted modest amounts of dancing in the library. Don Amato, the former prison librarian, would have strangled me. And my bosses would surely have scolded me. But I couldn’t help it. It seemed cruel and unusual to offer music while demanding that people sit quietly (a clear sign, if one was needed, that I wasn’t cut out for the librarian business). But still, this particular dance session was going a bit too far. I imposed a no-video punishment on the entire group for the rest of the evening.

The cool group of hookers regrouped, however, and exacted their revenge by relocating their party to the front counter. They demanded to know about my life. I told them to readjust their uniforms.

“Cut the shit, Avi,” one of them said, folding her arms, tough-broad style, her bare midriff revealing a proud green shamrock, peeking out just over her underwear. I hadn’t met this woman before and was taken aback that she knew both my name and how to pronounce it. And that I could see the tattoo on her thong-line.