Newjack (21 page)

Mama Cradle had started “dropping the programs”—calling out inmate destinations, such as law library and commissary, waiting for the inmates to assemble near the front gate and then sending them out with an escort—so I was very busy pulling brakes. The inmate wouldn’t return to his cell. I ordered him in again. He was still there the next time I walked by, so I gave him a “direct order,” preliminary to issuing a Misbehavior Report, and a moment later, seeing that he was still out, I deadlocked his cell. This way, I figured, he’d be unable to leave the gallery, since he couldn’t reach his clothes, and I could deal with him when I had more time.

Then an inmate on my gallery got called on a visit, and he was entitled to a shower. I opened up a shower stall for him. My renegade porter lingered outside it. “You’d better not go in there when he’s done,” I warned him. But when I next saw him, that’s where he was, soaping himself. (Most shower stalls had no curtains.) I can’t
wait
to write this fucker up, I said to myself.

Finally, with recreation having been called, most inmates off the gallery, and things settled down, I went to find my disobedient porter and lock him into his cell. He was going to have to stay there today, missing rec, learning that actions had consequences. I was sure I’d find him standing outside it, still dripping from the shower, now feeling a little contrite. But he wasn’t there. I checked the other side of the gallery. Gone. Shit. He must have borrowed clothes and shoes from a friend and gone off to the yard with the others. But I knew who he was, and I could write him up anyway. The next officer could lock him in his cell.

By the time I finished writing up the Misbehavior Report, the sergeant for my shift had left. A less helpful sergeant was there in his place. He couldn’t sign my report, he said. I’d have to take it to the Watch Commander’s Office.

I sighed. The last time I’d been there was on my journey with the ill-fated heating element. After a long day on a difficult gallery, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to go through that again.

But now here I was, back before the same lieutenant. Watching
him read this time, I realized he was only semiliterate. I helped him as he stuttered through my report, trying hard to be patient, trying to take a little refuge in numbness. It was only two paragraphs. Finally, he got to the bottom.

“There’s too many loopholes in here,” he declared, twice. The infraction was so cut-and-dried, and my writing so plain and direct, that I was about to explode from frustration. “I don’t understand this,” he said finally, dropping the paper on his desk.

“What don’t you understand?” I asked, fighting the sarcasm that seemed my only defense against incompetence. Behind me, though I hadn’t seen him, Sergeant Wickersham had entered the room. Apparently, he signaled to the lieutenant.

“Get a clean form and meet me in the back room,” he said, as though doing me a favor. I got there first, and an officer sitting across the room counseled me to calm down. It had been a terrible day even before the shower incident, and now this. If they tell me when I get downstairs that I have to do overtime, I thought, I’ll quit.

Wickersham didn’t take the folding chair I set up next to mine. He sat in another chair, farther away. Speaking in such a low monotone (the faux-calm tone) that I could barely hear him, he asked what I had done before becoming a CO. “A million things,” I said.

“Answer specifically!” he thundered, glaring.

“Taxi driver, construction,” I began.

“Any military?”

“No.”

“You keep showing that attitude toward superiors and you’re going to have a lot of trouble around here, a lot of trouble,” he warned. “Just answer the question, just the
facts.”
Now he was the prosecutor.

He told me not to write a single thing on the new form, the implication being that I’d get it wrong. Then he read my report, and red-penned it. My “his cell” became “the cell.” “Who do you think it belongs to?” Wickersham demanded. “The inmate? Or the taxpayers who put out a hundred thousand dollars for each of these cells?” He asked me to tell him the whole story, and I actually had to think hard to remember it, because I had been so overwhelmed on the gallery. Upon hearing that I hadn’t called a sergeant and hadn’t locked the guy in the shower when I saw him there—I’d never even thought of it—Wickersham seethed. “This is
an embarrassment!” he pronounced, waving my report in the air. “He’s laughing at you now, saying he fucked you! You thought you could avoid confronting him and then come running to Daddy!”

“Sarge, I’m not afraid of inmates. I burned rec for two of them today, and—” I began. I knew at some level that I had mishandled the situation, but Wickersham’s approach made admitting a mistake the last thing I could possibly do.

“An embarrassment! Humiliation!” he repeated several times. As he stood and turned, the CO at the table who had earlier told me to take it easy signaled me to relax.

“Can I ask a question?” I interrupted.

“What?”

“Even if I messed up—and now I see that I did—does that change the fact that he did what he did?”

The sergeant didn’t answer, just continued mumbling about my crimes and misdemeanors. “An embarrassment!”

Wickersham stood and, with great theatricality, threw all my paperwork into the trash. I tried to catch his eye as he glared at me, but he looked away. So much for earning his respect by standing up to him. Now my day had been an utter failure. Wickersham began walking around the room.

“Are we finished?” I asked.

“I’m
finished,” he said. And left.

A crusty old instructor at the Academy with a flat-top crew cut and a mug of coffee seemingly grafted to his hand told us to learn from his mistakes: He had moonlighted as a local policeman in his off-hours from a prison upstate, and it had broken up his marriage.

“Enough cop is enough,” he said. “If you’ve got to work a second job, do anything besides police work. And my best advice is not to work a second job at all. Exercise, pursue a hobby, work on your car—anything to get the prison out of your system. Don’t take it home to the wife and kids.”

I was new enough to the job, that evening in June after the encounter with Wickersham, to still believe it was possible to leave prison behind me at night. After I got home, I went for a run, had a beer with dinner, then helped my two-and-a-half-year-old son get
into his pajamas. I was doing well at keeping work off my mind until I noticed his younger sister with her hands on the slats of her crib, looking out. Unnervingly, it reminded me of the same view I had all day long. Like an inmate, she was dependent upon me for everything. These two jobs were too much the same, I thought with disgust. My son, tired but rambunctious, didn’t want to brush his teeth and, struggling, mistakenly hit me in the eye. I grabbed him angrily and shouted, made him cry. Well, there was one difference between him and the inmates, I thought darkly as I tried to calm us both down. He was destroyed when I got mad; they, on the other hand, seemed energized.

I thought I owed my wife, Margot, an explanation for my temper, but I didn’t know how to begin. Certainly, I didn’t want to fill her mind with all the unpleasant images from my day. She seemed stressed enough by her own job and the many other things she had to do, and so, avoiding the matter, we both just fell asleep.

I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, having had a vivid dream. I’d been keeplocked. I’d startled a prison clerk in some grocery store-like setting, and that was the automatic punishment. Whether I was an officer or inmate was unclear, but it suddenly dawned on me, as I sat in my cell, that I’d missed the twenty-four-hour deadline for appealing the charges against me. As a result, I now faced a year of disciplinary confinement. The feeling of terror that seized me was so strong that it woke me up.

A month or two later, Margot and I took a brief vacation by ourselves in Jamaica. My officer friend Miller had, half facetiously, cautioned me against vacation, saying that in his experience, taking time off almost wasn’t worth the nausea of reentry. But as I packed my swimsuit, sunglasses, and Walkman, I knew it was the right decision. There was another life out there, a good life.

During my first three days in the tropics, slathered with sunscreen, gazing out over the ocean with a rum drink in my hand, I felt I’d successfully left Sing Sing behind. Then, on my fourth night, I dreamed vividly of Sergeant Wickersham. We were hunting together in the mountains somewhere, on horseback. He was still my superior, but in the dream he was tolerant toward me. Suddenly, he gestured at me to look to the left: Across a ridge, bathed in yellow light, was a tiger. Not an ordinary tiger, but one double the usual size. It looked tame, but I knew it might be very, very dangerous. Shhh, the sergeant said, don’t tell anyone there’s a tiger up here or all the hunters will come and shoot it. Everyone else
thought there were no tigers left. He was letting me in on a CO’s secret.

The tiger had smelled or seen us, and I watched as it sniffed out our trail, came closer and closer behind us. I had the feeling that he was not following
us
but following
me
. Wickersham and I, on our horses, rode through a swinging glass door into a room, and soon it was just the tiger and us in there. A trick for you to try, Wickersham said: The tiger’s here because we’re carrying shrimp in our saddlebags. Chew some up and spray it out of your mouth at him. I did so, and the tiger hesitated, then fled—something to do with the seasoning, it seemed. Then the tiger came back and approached me on my horse. I repeated the trick, but this time only by going through the motions. I made him flee by just pretending I was going to spit! This was such a shock that again I woke up, trembling with happiness. Or was it fear?

I puzzled over that dream several times, and weeks later even wrote to a friend about it. “Seems to me it’s about domination, fear, predation,” Jay wrote back. “You’re caught between two tigers, Wickersham and the mass of inmates; you use an inmate technique—spraying—to defend yourself. The fact that it works is significant: It shows that for all his meanness, maybe you know you’re learning something valuable from Wickersham. But at the same time, he’s a dominating tiger to you.” The tiger coming indoors, Jay suggested, represented prison, a bottled-up wilderness within walls.

That sounded right to me, but while I was in Jamaica, it was much less clear. All I knew then was that even though my body was two thousand miles away, my mind was still trapped in Sing Sing.

Many officers were aggrieved by Wickersham, and I was delighted when one of my favorites, Goldman, from B-block, joined the club. Goldman was from Queens, a streetwise, muscled Air Force veteran in his forties, and I considered him a stalwart. One day I’d been pulling the brake on R-and-W when a high-spirited inmate running down the gallery (a rules violation) crashed into my back, almost knocking me over. It was apparently a mistake, though in the seconds after it occurred I wasn’t quite sure. During those seconds, Goldman appeared from the stairwell. As the inmate apologized to me, Goldman sized it all up and awaited my verdict: He
was poised to jump the guy if I deemed it an attack. I hardly knew him, but I immediately loved him for that.

Goldman had been on the B-block door one day when a red-dot alarm was pulled inside. Per procedure, he exited the block and locked the gate from the outside. In a few minutes, Wickersham arrived with some red-dot officers from A-block.

“What did you see?” the sergeant demanded as Goldman unlocked the door.

Goldman told Wickersham where he thought the alarm had come from, which officers had been involved, and who had responded.

“You didn’t see anything,” replied the sergeant, dismissing him with a wave of his hand.

“Hey!” Goldman shouted as the sergeant moved past. “I’m an adult—you can treat me like an adult.”

Wickersham had turned and, according to Goldman, said, “It’s not my job to baby you.”

Offended, Goldman filed a grievance against the sergeant. He’d been treated disrespectfully too many times by him, he complained to some B-block officers a day or two later, and was too old to put up with it.