Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (45 page)

The deconstruction of the steel bookcases required a careful amount of group coordination. This delicate effort had to be carefully organized or someone was certain to get hurt. As it was, an inmate was caught on the shoulder, very nearly his head, by a lowering beam and knocked down hard, the result of a miscommunication. When he fell, a few other men unwisely let go and jumped to help him, leaving the rest of us clinging to the hopelessly cumbersome shelf, nearly causing us to drop it. This could have been unfortunate for everyone, particularly for the man lying underneath it.

But this incident was the exception and served only to remind everyone what a good job the captain was doing coordinating the workers.

Captain Sweeney was a small, structurally sound balding man who chewed two sticks of gum with a crooked grin. Unlike many other officers, he didn’t simply supervise work projects, standing at the side as the inmates toiled; he rolled up his sleeves and got to work. When he got sweaty, he’d strip down to his undershirt, and he encouraged the inmates to join him. The inmates respected him.

At the end of a particularly grueling workday, we all sat around the wreckage, chatting and bullshitting. At that point, it was five inmates, three officers, and me. An outsider walking in would not have been able to distinguish who was staff and who was a prisoner. And it wasn’t just because we were stripped down to matching white undershirts and work pants. It was the familiar way in which the men spoke to one another, the casual way they reclined together at the work site. The body language here was clear. If the deputy had suddenly appeared, the officers would surely have jumped up and corrected their posture.

After the inmates departed for count-time, the officers discussed lunch. One suggested that we order the inmates lunch “from the staff line”—not four stars, but significantly better than what the inmates got for chow. Sweeney agreed, but when the other officers left, he came up to me and said, “You might wanna get the guys something at the end of the job. Something small, like Chicken McNuggets or fries or something—and make sure they eat it in here. And don’t broadcast it.” I wasn’t surprised that Sweeney was a feeder; nor was I surprised that he delegated the task to someone else. He was kind but he wasn’t stupid.

A few days after we completed the job, one of the inmate workers dropped by. “Man, I wish we were still working in here,” he said. “There was, like, a different vibe last week.” He was right. The rigidity of prison life had softened during the library deconstruction project. Never was the drama of prison more clear. The uniforms seemed like theatrical costumes. It was as if the dismantling of the theater set also undid the script. And people were free to fill it briefly with another reality.

But now the library had been fully reconstructed, the work accomplished, the food (secretly) shared. And now the uniforms stayed on. The set was reassembled, the roles reestablished. After a week or two, the pleasantly tart smell of fresh paint dissolved completely. People forgot that the place looked different—and actually much better than before. It was as if it never happened.

Joining Elia

The banter behind the library counter, the bar, was as boisterous as ever. There had been some turnover in the inmate work detail. Coolidge had been transferred to a different prison. Pitts had been released. So had Stix. Dice, Teddy, John, and others, had fallen prey to prison mischief and had their details revoked. The inmate staff was still captained by Fat Kat, who’d somehow regained his library job despite his violent actions in 3-2. As usual, Kat held silent sway, sitting placidly with his magazines, keeping a half-shuttered eye on operations.

Two newer detail workers had become inseparable. They formed a house comedy team: the wily old-timer, Boat, and the most recent addition, a young jester named Nequieste. They were an odd couple. Boat, a grizzled Irish Italian small-time mobster and possible ex-hit man, his legs numb with FBI ammunition—one bullet of which remained lodged—leaned on his cane, offering trenchant straight-man commentary.

Nequieste, a baby-faced twenty-year-old black guy who oozed intelligence and ingenuous criminal optimism, would run literal circles around Boat, doing brilliant impressions of inmates and prison staff. They were deeply entertained by their own duets.

Their routines were not unfunny. But most of the time, they were just loud. Their friendship was quickly turning into an irritating convict mentorship. Nequieste listened enraptured as Boat recounted the catalog of his old bank robberies, mob jobs, brushes with the notorious Stevie “Machine Gun” Flemmi and Whitey Bulger, one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives, whom he called by his neighborhood name, Jimmy.

I was getting tired of all the noise.

I ventured out into the stacks, where I found the detail’s most elusive member, Elia. He was quietly shelving books. At first he looked annoyed to see me, but he was actually just surprised. He smiled shyly, sighed, and asked, “Finally had enough of them guys, huh?”

He said this with a touch of frustration, as though he’d been waiting, almost two years, for me to realize this and join him.

In the gaps through the shelves, I could just make out Nequieste on the other side of the room. He was hunched over, quaking, and with the help of Boat’s cane, walking at an agonizingly slow pace and with theatrical feebleness. His pants were pulled obscenely high, and his uniform top tucked into them. He wore Boat’s thick glasses pushed down all the way to the end of his nose.

I can’t walk, I need my meds, where are my meds, I can’t see
, I heard him say, blending Boat’s gritty Boston smoker’s voice with, to my surprise, an old Jewish man’s accent.
My bladder is
killing
me
.

His audience, including the now-blind Boat, giggled.

You fuggin’ ass’ole
, said Boat, approvingly.

I reached into the carton of books next to Elia and began shelving alongside him.

“You wanna see my kid?” Elia asked, in his usual whisper.

He held out his well-thumbed photo of the beaming four-year-old girl. Then, just as quickly, returned it to his chest pocket. And with it, his smile. We continued silently shelving. I asked him how he’d earned the nickname, “Forty.” He paused for a long second and I knew I’d asked the wrong question.

“It’s an old drinker’s name,” he said finally. “You know, like forty ounces? But I don’t like it. I’m trying to live it down, okay? But it’s the name I got.”

We continued shelving books. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched his quiet labors. He would lift a volume, dust it off with his uniform top or with a little paper towel he kept folded in his pocket like an oldtime handkerchief. Or he would blow a soft breath over the book. Then he’d rest his eyes on the cover, squint, pronounce the title carefully to himself, compare it against a printout of the database. Then he’d use both hands to firmly install the book in its precise spot, in accordance with the Dewey Decimal system. Then he’d align the book on the shelf so that it looked comfortable and secure in its new home. Then he’d dust the neighboring books a bit and check their order and classification markings. He would pick up the next one and begin the process again.

The man was more than meticulous; he handled these books with love and elegance. I recalled all the times I had noticed him from afar, sometimes just merely detecting his movements at the outer reaches of the library. All those hours—how many hundreds of hours?—he had been engaged in this silent monastic repetition.

Fuuuck you, you fuckin’ Jamaican
, I heard Boat say from the other side of the room,
why donya get on a banana boat and go back to your fuckin’ island
.

I spied Nequieste, feeling Boat’s face like a blind man:
What did you say, young man? I can’t hear good and my pants are soaking
.

More giggling.

I said, Fuck you, Jamaican
.

I saw Elia tense up, close his eyes, sigh, and shake his head for a moment. Then he returned to his work, installing a book into its spot. I suddenly felt awful for all of the times over the years when his brittle equilibrium was disrupted by the frequent banter I’d permitted at the front of the library.

I apologized to him for it. He cocked his head at me and flashed a jagged smile.

“Aw, I don’t mind,” he said with a shrug. It was a friendly little lie that neither of us had any intention of correcting. “But thank you,” he added.

We continued shelving books in silence. I didn’t dare shatter his peaceful rhythm. He was among these shelves to escape talk. To let questions sit. We finished the carton and got another. It was a task with no end, the steady job of the old Jewish Messiah joke. This didn’t seem to bother Elia, though. In fact he seemed comforted by it.

T
ime has its own peculiar meaning in prison.
All I got is time
was an expression Elia, and others, often used. In its everyday prison usage it means,
I’m in prison, I’m never too busy
. But it is always said with irony, in the sense of having
only
time and nothing else. Although a person in prison always has countless hours, he has no access to time’s attendant meanings. When it comes to time, most inmates are like the tragic mariner:
water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink
. There’s endless time but not the nourishing kind, no seasons, no holidays, no cycles. At least, nothing that can be shared with others.

When snow collects in the yard—it is winter. When your cellmate smells particularly rank—it is summer. But these things don’t imply anything beyond themselves. Snow doesn’t mean sledding with your children, or skiing, or playing football or going to concerts for Christmas. It means snow.

The closest approximation of seasons in prison are the gambling seasons. When the Super Bowl gambling crunch hits, it is winter; when the NCAA basketball tourney happens, it is spring. These are the Christmas and Easter of prison. Aside from these sad interludes, prison time is neither marked nor shared by a community. It is personal and moves toward one holiday: the end of one’s sentence. Each individual follows his own private eschatological calendar, which has only one holiday, the Last Day, the End of Days.

This is a very practical matter for those who work in prison. When you leave before a holiday, a well-meaning caseworker instructed me, you don’t say “Merry Christmas” to the inmates. It doesn’t make sense and, as she added, “It’s kind of a slap in the face.” In prison, seasons are best left unmarked and unremarked upon. And indeed it was always poignant to close up shop before a holiday, or even before a weekend. The looks that came my way then were invariably pitiful, sometimes desperately so, and it was in those moments I got a sense of what the library meant to many of the inmates.

For the next few days, I imposed a no-noise policy. I joined Elia in the stacks. For hours, we’d shelve books wordlessly. I heard the textures of silence, like those in the recorded interview of my grandmother. In the library one could hear the sudden crank and surge of nearby pipes. Digital squeaks. The low thrum, high hiss, of prison air pumping constantly from shafts in the ceiling—and the barely audible voices, occasional quiet shouting, from some far corner of the prison, all of it deposited into the library along with the processed air. These sounds were remarkable because they stream around constantly but are never heard.

This was the first real silence I’d experienced in the library since the night I showed up late after visiting Deer Island and the Liberty Hotel. And just like that night, the stillness of the library opened up the space in a new way.

E
lia often used the phrase “doing time.” I saw what he meant by it. Time in prison isn’t celebrated, commemorated, or even lived in, but something
done
with your hands, a repetitive chore, like doing laundry or shelving books. There’s a difference between
being in prison
and
doing time
. Elia was, I now saw, making masterful work of that task.

Every time Elia placed a book on the shelf, he acted in opposition to the order of prison. His labors involved small interpersonal acts he created for himself and which affirmed he wasn’t merely an object with a number attached to it. No:
He
was the person, the subject, who imposed the order.

He dusted and arranged each book with deliberation and grace. Aware of his place in an infinite circulation, Elia was not in any rush, not concerned with
finishing
but only with
doing
. By dusting, then placing each individual book in its precise spot he was reaching out, anonymously and indirectly, kindly, to a stranger, perhaps even an enemy. He was making it possible for others to find what they were looking for. He was using the library to set things straight. Carton by carton, shelf by shelf, book by book.

He wasn’t the only one. Everyone who enters a library is in search of
something
. It was right there, in the stacks, where Elia had made a home, where Jessica had sat for her portrait with a paper flower in her hair, where she’d given her anxious cellmate a comfort ribbon. It was where the young prostitute from Dunkin’ Donuts had sat with her art books. Where Chudney had learned some of his first recipes. Where hundreds of inmates had paused and searched. Sometimes not even certain what they were looking for.

In the silence of those hours of shelving books I remembered I had also arrived at the library in that way. In search of something, not certain what.

After nearly two years, I was still trying to figure out the purpose of my job and of the library at large. For this, I needed only take Elia’s example. He wasn’t merely counting down the days with each book. His elegant librarianship, his hands deliberating over each title, the gentle way he dusted and kept notes and piles, the care with which he arranged the shelves, his silence, made me appreciate how order is created: Not through grand schemes—to which I was often drawn—but by small graceful actions, repeated often and refined with time.