Read Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian Online
Authors: Avi Steinberg
Tags: #Autobiography
When we announced the addition, they’d argued that it diminished the credibility of the library; though really, they felt it compromised their status among their fellow inmates.
“What are you trying to do to me, man?” Odum had pleaded during his brief stint on the library detail—Odum was let go after a few days when it was determined that not only was he incorrigibly lazy but he also didn’t maintain a reliable grasp of the alphabet.
Everyone was having a good time heckling Pitts as he gingerly handled the gay books, mournfully reciting titles like,
Mondo Homo: Your Essential Guide to Queer Pop Culture
and
Talking Cock
while Fat Kat entered them into the database. Everyone, myself included, was thoroughly enjoying the spectacle.
Dice appeared from the back room and tapped me on the shoulder.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he whispered, “your friend from 3-1, the guy with all of the school applications—he got shot.”
I was in the midst of laughing at Pitts and in the lightness of the moment, Dice’s words didn’t register.
“What?” I said, still smiling.
He repeated himself.
Officially Gay
, I heard Pitts recite. The inmates burst out into a fresh peal of laughter.
Now the words settled into my mind.
He got shot. Chudney was shot
.
“I heard you the first time,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Avi. That’s some fucked-up shit, man. I know.”
“Is he dead?”
“Yeah.”
Queer Theory: An Introduction
, Pitts bellowed, to more catcalls. “What the fuck—they got
theories
now?”
I became suddenly exasperated at the inmates’ loud, crude laughter. I told Pitts that he was done, and retreated into my office.
CHAPTER 4
Delivered
There are various reasons to cry in prison.
Crying as initiation rite
. Dice claimed that any inmate who tells you he didn’t cry when he first came to prison is a liar. As he said this, the three inmates standing around us nodded. One of them confessed he was so stressed his first day in prison he could hardly breathe. When he heard the door of the cell bolt shut for the night, he panicked and began pacing, beating on the door and shouting.
“It’s hard to explain it,” he said. “It’s not like I wanted out. I just wanted the door unlocked. Just knowing that the door was locked made me freak out. I’d never been locked in.” His cellmate was an old guy who took pity on him. “He just said to me, ‘Get into bed, son. Let yourself cry. There ain’t no shame in that. Just do it, and then you’ll be done with it.’ And so that’s what I did.”
Thus he joined the club.
Bored to tears
. A woman inmate told me this can literally happen.
Crying as a nightly sleep aid
. “You can ignore shit during the day,” a woman inmate told me, “you can just go about your business, pretend this is normal. But in bed at night, you do a lot of thinking.” The only way to stop the thoughts and fall asleep is to give in and cry. She laughed and said that she’d developed the same habit as her baby daughter. “I can’t fall asleep without crying first.”
Crying to mark a season
. “I cry every Christmas, Easter, birthdays, you name it,” Jessica had once said. She thought she would cry on these days even when she got out. “This place gets you pretty well-trained.”
Crying on cue
. Prison life is full of Oscar-worthy moments. Some inmates become proficient at crying miserably at will, a skill they employ at various crucial moments: in court, in caseworkers’ offices, to officers, to the parole board, to the prison librarian. A prison teacher who got fooled by one of these actors came to the library just to tell me the story. “I’ve been doing this for a long time now,” she’d said, “I’m pretty hard to fool. This guy was
good.”
And just what is a good fake cry? The teacher explained: a professional sobber will:
In defense of crying on cue, Martha the gossip explained that she legitimately cried all the time, but no one was there to see it. So when she fake cried, she was just showing a person something they weren’t around to see for real. Her tears were a replica, not counterfeit.
“And once I get going,” she said, “I feel it for real.”
“But,” I asked, “you are crying in order to get something from someone, right?”
“Well, yeah,” she conceded.
Crying when it rains
. “Just seems like the thing to do,” a suggestible woman inmate told me.
Crying in your office
. After Dice informed me of Chudney’s death, I sat down at my desk and composed an email to my former obituary editor at the
Boston Globe
. For some reason, this had been my first reaction.
“I have an interesting, slightly unusual candidate for an obit,” it began. I saved the email in my Draft folder.
Later, during my dinner break, I called the editor to make the pitch. He didn’t respond immediately. I heard some typing. Then I heard him mutter, “yeah, hmm.” He politely declined the obit.
“Looks like we already ran a piece on this story,” he said.
He read the headline. Yes, he said, he remembered this article: local man shot, some vague details, a five-year-old boy left without a father, police investigating. I had read it, too.
Forced to make some small talk, the editor paused.
“How’s, um, prison,” he asked with a touch of irony.
“Fine,” I said, suddenly regretting that I had made this call.
“See any
crazy
prison stuff?”
But before I could answer, he excused himself to take an urgent call. I was relieved to say goodbye.
After I hung up the phone, I Googled Chudney. There were exactly two hits. Twins, as it turned out: a notice of the murder on the Boston Police Department’s website and the
Globe
article.
We already ran a piece on this story
, the editor had said. I focused on that phrase—
this story
. What, after all, was
this story
, the story of Chudney? To a coldly pragmatic newspaper editor, the answer was clear. The story
Globe
readers needed to read was the story of this person’s murder, not of his life. Perhaps it was the correct editorial decision.
In writing obituaries for the
Globe
I always tried to include the subject’s voice. I would try to read something he or she wrote—a letter, novel, essay, book, poem—and quote it in the story. For some reason, a recently deceased person’s voice takes on strange properties. His words are finite and instantly more valuable. Sometimes they take on completely new meanings. This was certainly true of Chudney’s last kite to me:
Next time I write I WILL have good news. Don’t know what it’s gonna be but it’s gonna be GOOD
.
I looked at the doleful Google search page: two hits, one story.
This story
, the story of the murder, would be his story. That’s it. There would be nothing else.
I got up and did something I hated to do. I locked the library. I did it instinctively, perhaps as a protest, a small labor strike. And then I continued shutting things down. In my office, I turned off the light. Locked my door. Exited the Google search page. Turned off the glaring monitor. Then I closed my eyes and was initiated into an ancient club: those who cry alone in the darkness of prison.
Stories on Walls
I walked into the prison Friday morning for the early shift with a copy of
Newjack
by Ted Conover tucked under my arm. The moment I’d discovered it in a used book store, I knew it had a place in the library. In the book, Conover, a journalist, tells the story of his year working as an officer in Sing Sing. As I walked through the sallyport, the long hallway, and the yard, I got all kinds of reactions to the book from passing officers. Some smiled, some gave me a wink or a thumbs up. More than one asked to borrow it. A few officers gave me dirty looks—though these particular guys always gave me dirty looks, so I didn’t read anything into it.
When I caught a member of the Angry Seven looking at the book as I paused to unlock the library I seized the moment to reach out and resolve our lingering hostilities.
“It’s the story of a year in the life of a CO in Sing Sing,” I said. “It’s supposed to be pretty good. Want to read it? I’ll lend it to you, if you want.”
He looked at me in disgust.
“Why the hell would I want to read about
that?”
he said.
As I walked into the dark library and flipped the light switch, letting loose a wave of fluorescence, I considered his point. Why the hell would an officer want to read about those things he knew so well? All too well. The stuff that had vexed him day in and day out for the last twenty years? Getting feces thrown at you, being cursed out, twisting your ankle and not getting enough time off to recover, not being able to afford living in the city in which you’re a public servant. This was the last story he wanted to hear.
But I suspected that many officers were interested in the book for precisely that reason. For them, telling their story was essential. For many officers in South Bay, Sgt. Richard “Ricky” Dever, a colleague of theirs, was the hero of that story.
One night in late March, Dever had intervened in a bar fight. It was shortly after midnight at Sullivan’s Pub in Charlestown. A drunk, abusive man named Francis X. “Kicka” Lang, recently released from prison, was making a big scene and harassing a bartender, a friend of Dever’s. Lang was told to leave. Dever, trained to deal with violent assholes, gave the man an ultimatum, then escorted him to the door. Outside, Lang became enraged. Soon they were scuffling. Lang pulled out a knife and slashed Ricky’s face. Then stabbed him repeatedly. Then bolted. Ricky staggered back into the bar. He was taken to Mass General. Shortly after 1 a.m., he was dead. The next day, police found Lang hiding in a basement crawlspace.
When I learned about Ricky’s murder, I immediately thought of my own encounter with a knife-wielding ex-con. The officers, too, had their own personal take on it.
A veteran officer summarized it to me thus. “Ricky was a CO; the bastard who killed him was a con. Far as I’m concerned, it don’t matter if neither of them was wearing their uniform. That’s what it was: a good guy officer versus a shitbag.”
Their confrontation could very well have been the resolution of an old prison beef. But it made no difference if it was or not. To them, Dever was the good cop, doing the right thing; Lang was a worthless con, a coward who would savagely kill another human being over the pettiest issue. Ricky had principles, Lang did not. There was no disputing that.
For a group of soldiers doing a dangerous, underpaid job—a line of work so routinely disparaged in society that some officers tell strangers that they “work for the city” or the state—this murder carried a great deal of meaning. The experience of victimhood cut to the core of their professional identities. They do right, toil and suffer, only to get shit on by society. It was unjust.
After Kicka Lang was handed his life sentence without parole, the harshest sentence in the state, a courtroom packed to capacity with Dever’s family, friends, and hundreds of fellow officers erupted in cheers and applause. Given a chance to speak, a bespectacled Lang smiled broadly and was quoted as saying, “What I got is still better than what Ricky got.” These remarkably inflammatory comments, unusual even for a murderer—and possibly indicative of clinical psychosis—made blaring front page headlines in the
Boston Herald:
Twisted Killer Taunts Victim’s Family in Court.
As one enraged officer put it to me, “It was like a perfect ad for the death penalty. I mean this guy is Satan, for crissakes. No kidding. It sent shivers down my spine.”
The
Herald
article featured a photograph of an off-duty prison officer jumping out of his courtroom seat, pumping his fist in celebration of the life sentence. But, even amid the feeling of vindication, none of the officers forgot what the murderer’s statement had implied.
“What I got is still better than what Ricky got”—in other words, that life in prison is better than death. Some officers took this comment as something of a challenge.
An officer in the prison cafeteria told me that if Lang was under the impression that he had a fate better than death, he’d find out the truth soon enough: “The COs over there will give him what he fuckin’ deserves. You can be sure of that,” he told me, as we waited in line. “And I know guys in here who wish they could help out with that themselves.”
T
he prison organized a giant memorial for Dever. It was held in the inmate visiting area, which doubled as an auditorium. The same space where, months earlier, the entire prison staff had been warned against behaving like Miller, the teacher who’d aided an inmate in disposing of a weapon—the meeting in which we were told to honor the two names on our ID cards: ours and the sheriff’s.
Dever’s prison memorial was a dizzying array of lapel pins. The visiting area was filled with people from all strata of local politics. City pols in fire-sale suits, state officials wearing imports. Full refreshments, fruit platters, veggies with ranch dressing, cheap diced cheese, cookies, brownies, coffee. The honor guard was present. Union heads, representatives of city and state cop outfits. Prison guards in dress uniforms. You could identify the members of Dever’s family by the grim expressions of the people speaking to them.
I
thought of Chudney’s memorial. It had taken place months earlier during a poetry reading I’d held in the library. These open-mic-style events were often used by inmates as an improvisational platform to memorialize various people, friends and relatives, whose funerals they were unable to attend. Dumayne had stood up and offered a tearful eulogy for Chudney, his friend from childhood. “We all know you had big dreams, brother,” he’d said. “We all know you wasn’t able to finish your work here. There was stuff you wasn’t able to accomplish in this world. Big cuz, I know you in heaven. I know you hear me when I say: I promise to be a better man because of the example you gave me. I promise to use my gift of life to finish some of your work. And I’m gonna take these words,” he concluded, shakily holding up the paper from which he read, “and I’m gonna tape them to my wall, so I don’t never forget.” He ended by reading a poem Chudney had liked, something we’d read in class.