Newjack (15 page)

“Without mentioning it?”

“Right.”

I pictured Sergeant Bloom, red in the face, saying accusingly, “False report!” We might be held liable if the State Shop burned down! But we rewrote it, because we didn’t want the officer to hate us. Reality had set in.

Three more hours passed with nothing to do. DiPaola finally said, “I didn’t think prison work was going to be anything like this. I don’t want to just stand around and play with my fuckin’ dick all day.” Another hour passed. It was now Friday afternoon. Three newly arrived inmates were placed in a holding cell near us, awaiting their issue of clothing, and one started watching Davis.

“Be drivin’ home up north to visit the missus this afternoon, right, Davis? Countin’ the minutes?”

Davis ignored him. But it was unnerving. Inmates had little to
do but watch the officers, we’d been told in the Academy; “you’re like their TV.” From careful watching, they’d read his name tag; from Davis’s wedding band, they knew he was married. From our behavior and the way other officers talked to us, they knew we were OJTs (and therefore that we had the weekend off). Statistical probability told them that Davis was from upstate; maybe something in his bearing betrayed it, as well.

Finally, four inmates arrived who had to be strip-frisked before being placed in a holding cell. This was Nuts and Butts, in officer parlance, a very specific procedure that had to be followed to the letter. (Blurred, laminated photocopies of some court order regarding this search were posted in bathrooms; apparently, inmates had won some redress in court because officers had conducted the searches disrespectfully.) We’d quickly been taught the procedure at the Academy, but Davis had spent the entire previous day doing strip-frisks outside the Visit Room: All inmates had to submit to one after a visit, to make sure they hadn’t been passed any contraband (primarily cash or drugs) by a visitor. So Davis went over it with us.

My inmate, Ortiz, was clean-shaven, slope-shouldered, bespectacled, and out of shape; he looked like a college student. He handed me cigarettes and matches from his pockets before entering a small cubicle with a curtain for a door. Then he passed me out his glasses and clothing as he removed them: T-shirt, trousers, socks, shoes. I ran my fingers over each item, hung them all on pegs, and stepped inside.

He stood naked facing me on a small square of carpet, briefs in his hand. He offered them to me, and I checked them quickly. There was some blood in the seat. “You okay?” I asked. He nodded, and I began directing him through the obligatory motions. But he knew them better than I did and was always a step ahead.

“Hands through your hair. Pull your ears forward. Mouth open. Put out your tongue, pull out your lips and cheeks.” I looked quickly under the tongue. “Arms up.” I checked the armpits. “Turn around.” He did, and immediately bent over and spread his buttocks so I could see his anus. “Fine, thanks.”

I left the booth so he could dress. That was my first strip-frisk, and I hated it. I hated Ortiz’s pliant submission. I almost wished he had resisted more, caused me some trouble—I didn’t enjoy his servility. I didn’t enjoy the visual memory of his anus and dick and the blood on his underwear. (“’Roids,” DiPaola would suggest later.)
Half an hour before we left, an inmate who was being transferred to another facility (on a draft, in the lingo) came in with his personal property to be inventoried. His state-issued clothing was all clean and immaculately folded: six T-shirts, three pairs of green trousers, three green short-sleeved work shirts, one white dress shirt, one green sweatshirt, one zippered winter coat, six sets of underwear, “Felony Flyer” sneakers, and leather half-height boots. He had a Koran and a couple of spare kufis (skullcaps). It took us all of five minutes.

“Enjoying yourselves?” asked a black officer who I assumed was an old-timer. He’d been out of the Academy only a few months, it turned out, but had already been assigned several times to the State Shop. His take on the boredom was that it “beats working a gallery.” But a given day could bring either one—hair-pulling overwork on a gallery or absolutely nothing to do in a place like the State Shop. I thought of myself as a fairly flexible person, but not knowing what each day would bring was nerve-racking. What were you supposed to do—shut down your brain when you walked into the prison or drink extra coffee and prepare to go into overdrive?

“I just try to make myself go numb,” he said.

Ten days later, after I’d spent some time in A-block, Davis, DiPaola and I worked together again, this time in B-block. DiPaola was on the U-and-Z galleries, at the very top, and Davis on S-and-X, in the middle. My job, by comparison, was humdrum: I was posted at the front gate, the main passage into and out of B-block. Several times an hour, when I heard the doorbell ring, I’d stick a key into the heavy metal door, twist it, and give the door a big shove to let an officer or inmate with a pass in or out. It didn’t close easily; you had to open it wide and then use its momentum to swing it shut. In an emergency, I was supposed to step outside the block into the corridor and lock the door from there. That way, any disturbance that got out of hand could be contained.

But the job was so dull that I was almost dozing off and could hardly respond when the radio of a nearby officer loudly blared out the emergency tone. An alarm had been pulled on S-and-X galleries, a voice advised. All red dots were to respond.

Half a dozen officers rushed upstairs through the center gate. Shaking myself into wakefulness, I let another half-dozen red dots
in through the front gate before stepping out, locking it, and leaving B-block to its fate.

Ten minutes later, the emergency was over and I went back in. The red-dot officers were coming down the stairs with two inmates in handcuffs. One had a deep cut across his face and was bleeding profusely. He was taken to the Sing Sing emergency room. The other, who had attacked him, was locked into an empty shower cell. Apparently, an officer on U-and-Z had mistakenly unlocked a keeplock’s cell. Taking advantage of this error to settle a grudge, the keeplock had walked out of his cell when the brakes were opened to let inmates go to their programs, descended two floors to S-and-X, burst into the cell of his unsuspecting enemy, and slashed him.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, sergeants were interviewing Di-Paola and Davis—they had been working on those same galleries—as well as other officers who had been involved. Within an hour, rumors were circulating among our class that DiPaola had been the one who let the inmate out. He denied it, and of course, there was no way to know for sure. Keys were passed back and forth between officers all the time. Still, regular officers reflexively blamed OJTs when there was a screwup, and often they were right. Before our shift the next day, the training officer underscored the seriousness of what had happened and said that the injured inmate was very likely to sue the Department. A lieutenant entered the room just as this comment was being made.

“I don’t give a shit about the inmate,” he said, unexpectedly. “An officer could’ve been cut. Who here could live with that?” We were quiet. I don’t think anybody had expected the case to turn into a lesson about protecting our fellow officers.

Keys were power. And they were responsibility—because many, many bunglings could be traced back to a set of keys and the person who had been entrusted with them. When to lock and when to unlock was, by one reckoning, what we were here to learn. “You are never wrong, in prison, to lock a gate,” a sergeant had reassured us at lineup one day. But it was more complicated than that. Gates had to be unlocked for the prison to function smoothly—and then, at the right moment, to be locked again. Sing Sing was a place of, probably, over two thousand locks, many with the same
key. The cardinal sin, the one thing you were never, ever to do, was lose your keys. A lost key could fall into inmates’ hands. A lost key was a disaster.

I was back in B-block a few days later, responsible for half of Q-gallery, on the flats, as well as the center gate—the main access point from the flats to the galleries above. To learn this job, I had to handle the keys. But while the regular officer, a fat, powerful-looking cigar chomper named Orrico, was at pains to explain the job, he was not handing me the ring of keys. Instead, he played with them, twirled them around a big finger, caught them in his meaty palm. There were several, I could see: the cell key, the brake-padlock key, a gym-door key or two, an end-gate key, a center-gate key, a fire-alarm key, and at least one other, all of them different. The pewter-colored cell key was the biggest, its shaft as thick as a Mont Blanc pen, with a silver dollar-sized handle at one end and skeleton key-like chiselings in a tab at the other.

In case of a red-dot emergency, Orrico was saying, I was to get to the center gate as soon as possible. It was the main passage to the upper floors, and I would need to let through all the officers who had to pass, then lock it back up. In no case was I to follow the responding red-dot officers upstairs—even if my best friend worked up there, even if I heard officers screaming out in agony—because control over the gate was essential to the block’s security.

Concluding his lecture, Orrico left to pursue a cup of coffee and handed me the keys. No sooner had he disappeared than the red-dot alarm sounded. Officers were dashing toward the center gate, arriving before me. I rushed through them to open the gate, then realized I had no idea which key to use. My heart rate soared as I stood there fumbling with the key ring while more and more officers shouted at me to hurry up. “Somebody just take it!” I heard someone say.

I had just stuck the right key into the lock when the officers disappeared behind me. The alarm wasn’t upstairs, they’d realized, but through the short passage, to V-gallery. I peered around the corner and saw them massing in two huge piles, evidently on top of inmates. Then
bang bang bang—
on the center gate again. This time, officers were on the other side of it, responding from upstairs. Among them was my classmate Don Allen. “Come on, Conover, let’s go!” he yelled excitedly. I found the key again. I turned it. A second flood of officers pushed by me.

A few minutes later, everyone was back on his feet, including three mashed-looking inmates, who were handcuffed behind their backs. Each inmate had an officer holding the chain of his cuffs and marching him back to my gallery. First came a young black man with some swelling over his brow and a lot of blood flowing down the left side of his face. Next was a long-haired Latino with no shirt. Finally, there was another young black man, bleeding from gashes around the temple. They were to be locked in empty shower stalls on Q-gallery, and for that they needed keys.

Orrico appeared. “Where are they?” he demanded, holding out his open palm. I checked my belt. They weren’t there! I looked in the center-gate keyhole—not there either. My heart sank. “What?” Orrico demanded loudly. “You don’t have them?” This was the cardinal sin. Orrico called out to the milling officers, “Anybody got the center-gate key?” From the throng of officers came some questioning looks. Finally, Don Allen emerged holding—God bless him—my keys. Orrico snatched them away in disgust.

“You dropped them,” Allen said quietly. I had no idea how it had happened. Allen quickly and kindly changed the subject. He had seen part of the incident from above, he said. Apparently, the attacker was a V-gallery porter who had been sweeping the flats with a push broom. When another inmate appeared, walking down the flats, the porter attacked him, first breaking the broom handle over his head and then trying to gouge his face with the splintered ends. How the third inmate got involved, Allen didn’t know.

Allen had already seen a lot of action. “You heard about the guy who hung up yesterday?” he asked me. I’d heard it mentioned at lineup, a minor news item; for seasoned officers, this was a mundane occurrence. “I was there when they cut him down,” Allen told me. “He’d tied his shoelaces up high on the bars, but I guess not high enough to kill him, so he’s there all pale going
gaagaa-gaaghh.”
Allen, a natural comedian, was so funny making this sound with his eyes bugging out that I laughed despite myself. “We cut him down, then we carried him to the infirmary. My God, this place is crazy.” Allen, who had previously worked in juvenile detention for the Division for Youth, knew from crazy.