Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (42 page)

S
peaking at the official prison dais, an officer told the story of how Dever was the only person in the prison infirmary, which had been his post, who’d been able to calm a certain terrified inmate. He’d established a rapport with her; she’d trusted only him. And he gained her faith, said the officer, “by speaking to her as a person, human heart to human heart.”

All around the visiting area, fellow officers were nodding their heads. This was a rare opportunity to be known and understood on their own terms. The telling of this story was made a permanent prison fixture, nailed directly onto the institution’s walls: the sign outside of the infirmary would now read, This Place of Medical Care and Healing is Dedicated to the Memory of Sergeant Richard T. Dever. This would be followed by a quotation from Andrew Jackson: “One man with courage makes a majority.”

In his concluding remarks, the speaker offered his interpretation of the new sign. It wasn’t remarkable, he said, for an officer to run into harm’s way to break up a fight, as Dever had done that night at Sully’s. That after all was his job, his training. But for him to find a way to be compassionate in an environment like prison, that was courage.

An Epi-Prologue

I revisited the C.C. Too Sweet question. To find compassion for someone guilty of C.C.’s crimes truly did demand some act of courage. A type of bravery I hadn’t been able to muster, and had indeed tried to escape.

For a while, I’d been uneasy with how things had ended. We’d had a productive working relationship, a rapport. I’d become familiar with his story, his quirks, those things that draw people together in sympathy. I’d helped him find a picture of Nemo, the cartoon fish, so that he could design a birthday card for his five-year-old son. I knew too much about his life to simply dismiss him. Even though he’d committed some scumbag crimes, I wished him the best. In fact, I wished him the best precisely because he had done those things. He needed it more than most.

And I was still rooting for him to figure things out. His book, at least the parts I’d seen, were truly gripping. He had a valuable story to tell. I didn’t want him to think I was trying to undermine his extraordinary resolve to see it through—but there was no way for me to explain my hesitations to him without making things worse.

At first, C.C. seemed to be doing just fine for himself. I watched as he set up a literary shop, standing with his arms crossed managerially, while two cornrowed young recruits simultaneously typed different parts of his manuscript. But soon his editorial process fell into the mire. Instead of revising and rewriting, he busied himself with trifles: choosing a pretty computer font, designing a book cover (maps, maps, and more maps). This was all an amateurish waste of time.

But it was the issue of the floppy disk that finally swayed me. Ever since our relationship had soured, he’d refused to use the disk I had stored in my office and which I’d been backing up. He now kept a contraband disk stashed in his Legal Materials folder, an infraction to which I turned a blind eye. It killed me that all of his work lived solely on this one terrifyingly unreliable disk. I begged him to let me back it up in some other way. He had refused. It was a matter of pride.

This had gone too far. C.C. Too Sweet was many things, including many extremely bad things, but he was earnestly trying to tell his story. It was a legal endeavor, and a worthy project. This wasn’t a “tell-all”—it was a serious account of his life. Perhaps in telling his story he’d redeem that story. But even if he didn’t, perhaps I still had a duty to help him try.

It wasn’t my job to judge his past. For this, there were attorneys, judges, juries. If he wanted to do something creative, perhaps it was not only permissible for me to help, but actually my duty. After all, as the great Officer Chuzzlewit had said, this wasn’t the Quincy Public Library. It was a
prison
library, the library for the bad guys. The beauty of this job, if there was beauty, was in giving people like C.C. a shot to do something right and do it well. To remind them that they’re more than criminals, if they choose to be. In practice, this turns out to be harder and more complicated than it sounds.

When we first met I had asked why he wrote with such fervor. He didn’t think for a second.

“The truth?” he’d said, leaning in close and whispering. “It’s because I’m homeless.”

That wasn’t pimp talk. He’d whispered because he didn’t want the other inmates to hear. This writing stuff wasn’t a hobby for C.C. It was serious business. I decided to act, to do something I had been trained never to do in prison: apologize to an inmate. When I did, C.C. remained standoffish until I offered to write a prologue for his book. Before things between us had soured, this had been something he’d asked me to do for him—though he’d never straightened out the difference between a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue would be my small act of Dever-like prison courage, to attach my name to C.C.’s project.

The next week, when I handed him the prologue, which was really a glowing blurb, his face lit up. It seemed as though he wanted to jump over the counter and hug me. I wasn’t expecting this sort of reaction. He read it again; then again, aloud.

“Thank you, man,” he said.

There was a sincerity in how he said it that prodded my attention. It was like he was speaking in a different voice altogether. There was nothing Too Sweet about it.

“It was nothing,” I said. And it really wasn’t all that big a deal. The path of privilege, which I had treaded, was paved with bombastic recommendation letters. It was a pittance at this point. What actual difference, after all, did my blurb make? To what end, exactly?

“No, man. It really means a lot to me. I’m gonna show this to my mother.”

Now he had my attention. After everything that had happened in his life, the abuse and the nasty crimes, perpetrated by and against him, the years hustling on the street, the homelessness, the lifetime in prison, it all came down to a simple thing: a good review. Possibly his first ever, possibly his last. All of it—the bogus talk of book deals, his fame, the constant macho posturing—it all amounted to a short, slightly balding guy wanting the approval of his momma. He was still that kid lying on the grimy hallway floor of the projects hoping his mother would appear and take him back gently into their home.

Prison Yard Lighting: A Queer Theory

It’s odd to speak of outcasts in prison. Inmates live on the fringe of society. They are all, by definition, outcasts. But within the closed society of prison itself, there was mainstream, and then there was the fringe. The outcasts of the outcasts.

Katy was one of the more obvious examples. She was the coolest chick in Unit 3-2. She was also the only chick in 3-2. And technically she wasn’t a chick. But she was part of 3-2 and would roll into the library, together with her fellow inmates in tan—uniform pants rolled up rakishly at her ankle—walk up to the front counter, comb her luxuriant locks from her face, and flash a weary half smile.

Dread seized the inmate librarians. It was palpable. Teddy, the young Muslim convert, crossed his arms and scowled through his beard. Stix looked at the ground and giggled. Pitts actually backed away slowly, as though beholding the glory of the Archangel Gabriel. Schofield, a library regular, smiled stupidly, a clear attempt to be affable, but he straightened his spine and puffed his chest out, as though trying to scare away a mountain lion. As usual, Fat Kat kept his face planted in a car magazine and just shook his head. Not in disapproval—though he did disapprove—but rather in neutrality.

The only inmate librarian who acted civil was Dice.

“What can I do for you today?” he asked her, with a smile.

Later Dice explained his attitude to me.

“Man, I was educated on Forty-second Street in New York in the 1970s,” he said, his sunglasses flashing. “I’ve seen it all.”

What Dice saw, or did not see, was of ongoing interest to me. With those sunglasses, and a slight migration of gaze when he spoke, he had the distinct mien of a blind man. Was he in fact blind? I sometimes wondered. Mostly I wondered how he’d managed to get sunglasses in prison.

“Those were some crazy times,” Dice continued. “In my opinion, that’s when New York was New York. I’ll tell you what though, some of the best people I met on the street there was the transvestites, man. I ain’t afraid to say that. These young guys here don’t know shit about the world.”

There seemed to be a generational divide on the question of Katy. Ironically, it was the elders who were more accepting. Boat, too, didn’t seem the least bit put off. On the contrary.

“Toughest motherfuckers I met in the joint were the queers,” he told me. “Fuckin’ guys gotta be tough, you know? I knew this queer guy in Leavenworth. I’m talking
queer
. Didn’t make no bones about it. You said something wrong to him, though,
Boom!
He’d fuckin’ gut you. I got nothing but respect, nothing but.”

Boat told me that the toughest motherfucker in South Bay was a queer. He’d introduce me. The next week, Brian showed up in the library. He was an intriguing character. By his own modest admission, Brian was “fuckin’
smaht.”
With his cocky intelligence, his brash accent, and lapsed altar boy persona, he was the kind of wounded, tough Boston Irish kid Matt Damon has made famous. Brian was the son of a crooked Statie, and was full of self-serving stories about police corruption. He was also a tank. Probably about six foot three and solidly built. Giant hands. He was definitely not someone even a prison tough guy would cross.

Brian was more or less openly gay. Standing at the library counter, he told me, with a sly grin, that he’d seen a couple of prison guards in “my kind of club.” When he said this, inmate eyebrows in the vicinity raised.

“I should probably watch myself,” he said to me, without lowering his voice. He was, in fact, slowly raising his voice. “I’m not in hiding, you know, but I don’t get much by advertising it, either. Especially with all the ignorant
fucks
in this place.”

The inmates standing around regarded this comment for what it was: an open threat. Teddy didn’t cross his arms and glare, Pitts didn’t cower. Stix didn’t giggle. Everyone just pretended not to hear. Brian smiled smugly.

Katy wasn’t a hardass like Brian. At least that wasn’t her persona. (I wouldn’t tangle with her, though.) She wasn’t a mean queer, but an old-fashioned queen.

And as a queen, she had a predilection for royalty. She was making her way through our small collection of books on the late Princess Diana. Every few days, she’d give me updates on the saga: the fairy tale courtship, divine wedding, the saintliness, the betrayals, the martyrdom.

After three books, Katy had all but tapped the library’s Princess Di collection. I tried to meet her needs for a couple more weeks by pawning off books on other female monarchs in history. Mary Queen of Scots, Cleopatra, Isabella of Spain. But it wasn’t the same. She wanted more Di. Needed more Di.

I looked for other titles of potential interest. The only thing I could rustle up was the autobiography of Shirley MacLaine. When I presented her with the book, she just looked at me and said, “Omigod, are you serious?” and then, catching herself, “I mean, that’s
really
sweet of you, but puhleeze.”

Instead she gathered a pile of women’s magazines and went to the table, took a seat next to a couple of gangbangers, tossed her hair back, and started flipping through the glossies. The guys exchanged quick glances but went back to their own reading.

“Nobody talks to me,” she confided to me once. “Not a word. But I guess I should be happy about it, ’cause I probably don’t want to know what they’re thinking.”

Unlike most of the inmates, Katy’s problem wasn’t direct conflict, but extreme loneliness.

T
here was a more literal version of this prison-within-a-prison. One night, at about 10 p.m., after I’d lingered an hour or so after the end of my shift, I encountered it. As I walked out of the 3-Building, I saw a large group of inmates lining the prison yard. They were wearing gray uniforms. In over a year working in prison I had seen exactly one inmate wearing a gray uniform. Now I saw probably sixty, standing in a line, shoulder to shoulder. There was something disturbing about this group. For a moment I paused to figure it out.

The men themselves seemed deeply unsettled. Under the brilliant stadium lights, some stared, bug-eyed and unblinking. Haunted. Some wrung their hands. Most of the men stood, shrinking, as though naked and cornered. A few shielded their faces with their arms or retracted their heads into their uniform tops, turtle style. A few mumbled to themselves, giggled, snickered, twitched. At the tail of the group, like a punctuation mark at the end of a long and bizarre sentence, a tiny sullen bald man held a basketball under his arm.

I’d heard about this unit. They were the inmates of the Protective Custody (PC) unit: the homos, snitches, psychos, and pedophiles. The outcasts of the outcasts, the freaks of prison, the queers of the queers. The inmates that the prison mainstream, criminals all, considered criminals. These men were—sometimes by choice, often not—kept completely separate from the rest of the prison population. This was done for everyone’s safety. Katy and Brian were given the option of joining this prison unit, if they felt threatened.

Rarely did the inmates of PC ever emerge from their unit on the fifth floor of the Tower. Among inmates of the general population, a sighting of a PC freak held a nearly sacred significance. Once in a while, a PC inmate gained special permission to visit the library. When he did, all of the other inmates would be evacuated, though they’d try to linger for a moment, to catch a view of the mythical gray creature. Afterward they’d shower me with questions:
What was he like? What did he say? What did he look like? How did he seem? Did he try to touch you? Was he a total freak?

The one man in gray I met was, in fact, rather disturbed. He had visited the library to do some legal work. After photocopying dozens of cases and laws, he told me, “I’m gonna nail the prosecution.” With great care, he produced a document and asked me to photocopy it. It would, he told me, clinch his case, prove conclusively that a “lizard overlord” had arrived on Earth and, with the help of the CIA, quietly overthrown the U.S. government.