Newjack (38 page)

There are some people in this life that you mysteriously like the moment you see them, and Mama was that way for me. I had no good reason to like her. She would sometimes reassign me from easy jobs that Holmes had given me to hard ones, and in the beginning, especially, she had a low opinion of me. But I liked her. I liked her aura, her toughness, her … shape. The novelist Jim Harrison once wrote of dancing for five hours in Mexico with “a maiden who resembled a beige bowling ball.” (“She was, in fact, shaped rather like me,” he wrote.) I’m married to a slender woman, but Mama was that appealing round girl to me—spherical but solid—and I always pictured us together on a dance floor, my hands in no danger of meeting behind her back.

Inexplicably, I wanted to
please
Cradle. At the beginning, I always
failed. She assigned me to the center gate and Q-south, the gallery next to her office and told me, “I don’t want to see nobody out where they ain’t supposed to be.” I ran them as strictly as I could but confronted the limits of my ability when the keeplocks returned from their rec. Two of them ran past their cells and, despite my commands to stop, past me, up to the gate, where they hollered for Cradle.

“Mama got to help me with this form,” said one.

“I’ll help you with the form after you lock in,” I told him. “Direct order.”

He ignored me and kept hollering for Cradle, who eventually walked over, telling one of the men to go into his cell and the other to come see her. When she ignored me as he had, I knew I’d messed up. I was new, and they didn’t respect me. I wondered what it took, and in hindsight, I wished I’d knocked down or tackled the little one. It might have been seen as an overreaction, but at least I would have gotten everyone’s attention.

Later in the day Mama replaced me on the gate with a larger, more senior officer and sent me to patrol the gym. I felt she was sending me a message, and at the end of the day I told her I’d do better tomorrow. If Mama wanted me to run, I’d run.

I did fare a bit better the next day, and the day after that, Mama sent me to V-gallery, at the back, where Officer Smith had taught me so well during my training. Smith was gone for a while, she explained. “And it ain’t V-Rec today—remember!” she warned, meaning, nobody out when they weren’t supposed to be.

Without Smith there, of course, that was easier said than done. Inmates asserted privilege in time-tested ways that were difficult to deny (“I’m the head yard porter, CO, so I’ve got to get out there before they drop rec—Smitty always just lets me wait by the door down there.”). And inmates from other galleries dropped by, some of them for legitimate reasons (the law library porter was supposed to be walking around picking up and dropping off books) and some not (errant gallery porters from other floors who parked themselves in front of their buddies’ cells were a constant problem).

Aragon was working Q-south, a short gallery that I handled the paperwork for, and, probably unlike any of his predecessors, he thought it important to turn in mental-health referrals on a couple of his inmates who seemed in need of help. While we were in my
office looking for the forms, two or three unauthorized inmates apparently appeared on the gallery and were noticed by some wandering senior officer, who, knowing we were new and vulnerable, tattled to Cradle. Soon we heard ourselves summoned over the PA system. We walked over and squished ourselves into Cradle’s office, where she chewed us out.

“What did I say about keeping your galleries clear?” she demanded. “Can you do it, or do I need to find someone else?”

We said we could do it, and I thought Aragon felt the same respect and grudging affection for Cradle that I felt. But as soon as we were out of earshot, he said, “I can’t stand that bitch! I’m running that gallery better than at least ninety percent of officers do.”

Inmates also had somewhat polarized reactions to Cradle. Seeing her anywhere in the block besides the OIC office provoked comment, because Mama’s physical stature seemed to keep her from venturing very far. Not that she was frail. I was on a gallery upstairs one day and after she ambled by, two inmates started talking about her in terms I can only describe as admiring: “Mama gonna kick you in the nuts, and you gonna start to fall. Then she gonna get you with an uppercut and knock your head back. You think you bad, but Mama gonna show you who’s toughest.”

Another day, I saw her infuriate some inmates on R-gallery north, just above her office. She was in the middle of dropping runs when she stepped from her office out onto the flats to gaze up at the front-side galleries. What she saw was a lot of inmates out of their cells when they weren’t supposed to be, hanging out mainly in anticipation of rec.

“Officers, clear your galleries!” she called into the PA microphone. “I’m not calling another run until all those inmates are in their cells! Clear your galleries!”

That day was the commissary run for R-gallery, and the inmates right above her office put their faces to the chain-link fence and started yelling at her. The issue wasn’t really Mama herself but Sing Sing’s poor administration: The commissary didn’t always have room for all the inmates who were allowed a buy, and often those who weren’t at the front of the line downstairs didn’t get to go. Mama, however, with her loud voice and take-no-lip approach, was their lightning rod. The inmates started getting abusive, and Mama, of course, yelled right back. She wouldn’t budge. Pretty soon, with countless inmates from other floors joining in, it
sounded like Mama against the world. I quickly joined a group of officers who marched upstairs to get the R inmates to lock in. It was a fight for Mama’s dignity! We spread ourselves out, made our presence known to the main instigators. I stood right next to one man who was directing a particularly abusive string of epithets toward Mama. He ignored me, so I told him to stop. Still he ignored me, so I asked for his I.D. He gave it to me, but then, like a true knucklehead, kept on swearing. I wrote him up (106.10, direct order; 107.10, interference with staff; and 107.11, verbal harassment). I did it for Mama.

Though Mama seemed aware of my shortcomings, Sergeant Holmes kept assigning me to V-gallery, and somebody finally told me that Mama must be requesting me. “You’re kidding,” I said, truly amazed. It was the first hint of praise I’d received, however indirectly, from anyone at Sing Sing. I didn’t think Cradle even knew my name. Others confirmed that Mama had daily conversations with Holmes about whom she wanted back and whom she didn’t. They had a warm relationship. I answered her phone one day when she was away from the desk, and Holmes said, “Is L.B. there?”

“L.B.?”

“Cradle,” he said. “Is Ms. Cradle there?”

“It’s for you, L.B.,” I told her a moment later, and when she hung up, I asked what that stood for.

“Oh, L.B.?” she said with a wide smile. “Little Bitch.”

Officers who weren’t assigned to galleries had time at the end of the shift to laze around and chat a bit. One day I heard Cradle advise one whose two weeks of vacation were coming up that he “shouldn’t just sit around at home, like all the other COs do on vacation. Go somewhere.”

“Like, what do you mean?”

“Like Colonial Williamsburg.” Cradle mentioned an officer friend who had just returned from a package tour to the Virginia attraction and sang its praises. The officer gazed into the distance. “Colonial Williamsburg,” he said. He’d never go.

Another time little Baez, the front-gate officer, was talking about what he’d do when he got home—the cold beer, the game on TV, the relatives coming over. He asked Cradle about her evening.

“Cook dinner, wash my hair, set it,” she said.

“Set your hair?” asked Baez. “You sleep with rollers, Mama?”
He was intrigued. Cradle didn’t wear her hair natural, but in a wavy do. It took some time. She put up with the officers asking tongue-in-cheek questions about her procedures.

An officer like me hadn’t been there long enough to see the change, but older ones clued me in to the upsetting news: Cradle was burning out. After seventeen years on the job, fourteen of them in B-block, she was showing signs of stress. A couple of these signs I recognized, such as the way she’d press her left hand to her forehead and close her eyes when some officer, usually a new one like me, committed an error like losing a keeplock or dropping a run at the wrong time. Or she would get into loud arguments with inmates. I’d taken it all as just part of her style, but apparently it wasn’t. Rumor had it she was exploring transfer options and might be headed on to Fishkill or Downstate. Of all times, I thought. Just when I’d arrived.

8/24/97 7:05 a.m. CO T Conover on duty with census of R-63 and W-64 and 4 sets of keys, PAS #831, 2nd officers Corbie and Cespedes, and the following K/L’s: R-3, 6, 11, 12, 20, 26, 28 (adj.), 42, 51, 52, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, and W-10, 23, 28, 46, 47, 55, 60, 61
.

A new page in the logbook began each of my shifts as a gallery officer. Like untold numbers of officers before me, I acknowledged receiving the equipment of the previous officer (keys and PAS, or Personal Alarm System—the radio with the emergency pull-cord) and the essential numbers regarding inmates. The activity was half brain-dead ritual and half Cover Your Ass (“I didn’t know he was a keeplock, Lieutenant—the list I was given didn’t have him on it!”). I didn’t mind the logbook as much as the officers who cringed at paperwork of any kind did. But I was depressed by what it represented—the hours measured, the boredom of inmates and irritation of officers, the ticking of the clock, the niggling accountability. What the upstate union rep had told me years earlier about an officer’s career amounting to “a life sentence in eight-hour shifts” seemed to be encapsulated in that big red-bound ledger.

Still, I always scanned previous days’ entries for moments of excitement. This Sunday morning—8/24/97—there was a wad of bloodstained inmate clothing and sneakers stuffed into a corner of the office. It was probably related to something that Miller, who
had filled in here a couple of days earlier, had mentioned to me at lineup. As W had headed to chow, Miller said, he’d noticed an inmate, W-9, holding his face, trying to hide blood that was coming out from under his hand. The inmate claimed his cut was an accident, but clearly he’d been attacked. The next day, someone else on W had been beaten up—a reprisal, from the looks of it—and was taken to the ER. I liked to look up these things in the log to see how the officers, who were generally taciturn, had described the dramatic events: “7:57
A.M.
, W9 seen bleeding, sgt. called, gallery locked down” was Miller’s whole story.

They said that at some prisons upstate, guys with seniority
wanted
to be gallery officers, that the galleries were small and tightly run and relatively peaceful. I could see liking that: You’d get to know a small group of men, their characters and foibles, and they’d get to know you. Maybe there wouldn’t be the constant testing or rudeness or invective, because you’d know you were going to be together the next day. But not in B-block. These reverberations of gangland strife at Rikers, plus the huge size of the galleries, the constant turnover of inmates and, especially, officers, ensured there was no chance of cozy community developing. I dreaded the job.

But I wanted to like it, because gallery work was the essential job of jailing. Forget running a gate or being an escort or doing construction supervision or transportation or manning a wall tower—a good robot might almost do those. The real action was on the gallery looking after inmates. To do this job well you had to be fearless, know how to talk to people, have thick skin and a high tolerance for stress. Nigro had told us that whenever prison administrators wanted to know what was really going on in a prison, what the mood of the inmates was, they asked the gallery officers. We were like cops on a beat, the guys who knew the local players, the ones who saw it all.

I thought I could do it. I
wanted
to do it, to satisfy myself that the toughest job was not beyond my capacity. But there were days when I wasn’t so sure. And at the end of those days, when my head was pounding and my feet ached and I contemplated the meliorative effects of alcohol or a joint, I was always haunted by that mental image of Mendez, the officer who had cracked under the strain of a string of bad days in A-block. I felt his presence on the crowded gallery, saw him in the parking lot—my dark brother, a quivering ghost.