Newjack (40 page)

“Not this year,
compa
.”

I locked up Marshall, Buddy, Van Essen, Medellín, and all the others and waited for the morning programs to be called.

Inmates not only often referred to each other by nickname, they amused each other by coming up with nicknames for officers, too. In the months I worked in B-block, inmates offered up the following nicknames for me:

Italiano: A Dominican on W-gallery had heard me speak Spanish and decided that I had probably learned it because I was Italian, and Italian was similar to Spanish.

Boy George: The inmate who thought this up couldn’t stop laughing.

Huck Finn: My college roommate had called me that, too.

Stress Agent: An inmate I was always having to shoo off the gallery would announce me with this nickname whenever he saw me coming. (Another inmate I was always chasing called me Robocop.)

Christopher Walken: I probably hadn’t slept much the night before I reminded someone of this gaunt actor.

Ferris Bueller: Actor Matthew Broderick played this teenager in a comedy film.

R2D2: The amusing, short robot in the original
Star Wars
.

Rob Lowe: Probably an attempt to flatter.

Three’s Company: The inmate associated me with John Ritter, the actor on this sexually suggestive 1970s sitcom.

Conman: “Don’t get conned by Conover the Conman. He knows a conman ’cause he’s a conman,” said a friendly inmate with rapper inclinations.

125th Street: I overheard an inmate discussing this main thoroughfare in Harlem with his neighbor and volunteered that I’d been there the past weekend. Assuming I was from upstate, he
thought I was lying. “Martin Luther King Boulevard, the other name for it,” I said.

“What, you were goin’ to the peep shows?” he asked me.

But the nickname I heard the most often was, unfortunately, dreamed up by one of my mentally ill keeplocks. I did something to annoy him, and he shouted it out that first day for perhaps an hour, nonstop—and thereafter, whenever his off-kilter brain told him to, which was pretty much daily. He was black, but he shouted it with a broad white-guy accent like Eddie Murphy’s. The name he shouted was that of the TV character most synonymous with the archetypical skinny, ineffectual, small-town policeman. He shouted it over and over, day after day:
Barney! Barney Fii-i-i-ife! Barney!

Come over here, Barney! Barney, where’d you go?

Let me out of jail, Barney!

Hey, Barney! Hey, Don Knotts!

With my programs dropped, and out of the block at a little past 9
A.M.
that morning, my main job was to keep the galleries clear until about 10:30
A.M.
, when inmates began returning for the 11
A.M.
count. Porters mopping the floor and new arrivals moving into empty cells were the only ones who were supposed to be out of their cells. I patrolled to make sure the work got done and no one was loitering. Almost always, I had to stop at the cell of Larson.

“You chasin’ away my company again, Conover?” Shooing inmates away from the cell of my most popular keeplock was a never-ending job. All sorts of inmates liked to lean on the bars of R-29 cell and talk, talk, talk. Larson was, as I liked to tell him, an “attractive nuisance.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s lawyer talk—like a swimming pool with no fence around it; little kids come by and fall in.”

“Conover!” Larson feigned offense.

“I know—nobody’s drowning here. But why does everybody want to talk to you?”

Larson, tall and slope-shouldered, with long, braided hair, was sitting on his bunk as usual. Except for one hour of rec per day and a shower on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, it’s where he was
all the time. According to a printout in Cradle’s office, he was the block’s longest-term keeplock, having spent the past seventeen months in his cell, with three more to go, a sentence within a sentence. But instead of seething with anger like so many other keeplocks, Larson had an aura of beatific calm. A stoner’s calm, I had thought at first, given the slow, spacey way he spoke and blinked. And a friend in the disciplinary office lent credence to this speculation, telling me that Larson was keeplocked mainly for the repeated use of marijuana in prison.

But there was more to him than that. I had at first suspected Larson of being a conduit for contraband—and I never ruled this possibility out—because he was always exchanging everything from magazines to M&M’s with the inmates who stopped by. But that was too cop-brained. Larson was also, clearly, a sort of spiritual figure, and one with a head on his shoulders. His inmate nicknames were Powerful, Powwow, and PW.

“They come to me because … I’m like family to them,” he said to me that day, as one of my porters stopped to listen. “Most of these guys didn’t have a father, and I can be that.” It was only a partial explanation. But I had connected with Larson better than I did with most inmates, and I wanted to know more.

Our friendship, if you could call it that, had started a couple of months before with his mocking me, but in a way that I deserved. I was running keeplock showers and came to his cell to take him to his. Though my floor had seven shower stalls (regular cells, with shower heads and drains), B-block’s decayed plumbing and incredibly poor water pressure meant that usually, only three or four were usable. “Word on the street,” I said to Larson as I unlocked his cell, “is that the W-36 back-side shower is the best today.”

Slipping his feet into flip-flops and reaching for his towel, Larson paused to laugh. “‘Word on the street’? Where’d you hear that? How about, ‘Word on the avenue’? ‘Word on the street’ is like ‘chill out’—dig what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, you the upstate homeboy, CO,” chimed in his neighbor.

I was embarrassed. I felt the same way I had when I heard my parents say “Groovy!” sometime around 1970.

“Okay, what should I say, Larson?” I asked, trying to save face. “‘Rumor has it’?”

He laughed again. “That’s it, CO. ‘Rumor has it.’”

After that he looked at my name tag for the first time.
“Conover,” he said slowly, committing it to memory. He preceded me to the shower, and I locked him in for his ten or so minutes of allotted bliss.

Larson’s cell decor reflected his difference. Like so many other inmates, he had a dozen or so girlie pinups on his wall, but his were conspicuously clothed. And they weren’t white but African-American, like him. He had a pile of cassette tapes, mostly hip-hop, but he had a much taller stack of books. His
Dictionary of Evolution
, he told me, he had bought from another inmate for a pack of cigarettes. There were volumes of Afrocentric history like the ones that are sold on the sidewalk in downtown Brooklyn, social science primers, and an academic survey of perceptions of race over the years.

I had stopped at his cell another day after he knew me a little and asked what he was reading.

“Here,” he said, passing the book through the bars. “Read this page.” The book was an old work of physical anthropology, and the passage was about the classification of
Homo sapiens
into different racial strains.

“Ah, yes,” I said. “They used to worry about this stuff a lot.”

“Who?”

“Anthropologists.”

Larson stared at me. “What’s your story, Conover?” he asked a moment later. “You’re not like the other COs here.”

“What do you mean? You mean because I’m not from upstate?”

“No. It’s something else. The way you think and the way you walk.”

My heart rate rose a bit. Except for Dieter, back at the Academy, my passage through the Department of Correctional Services had been blissfully free of anyone, officer or inmate, with the slightest interest about my background. Prisons were full of people who liked to talk more than they liked to listen, and lack of curiosity had been my friend. But Larson was smart and uncannily observant. “You went to college?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“And what did you study?”

“Anthropology.”

“Anthropology? That’s a hard and deep subject, man. I respect that.” He stared at the wall for a moment. “What are you doing here? You should be a teacher or something.”

I paused and swallowed. It was my feeling exactly, and I wanted to tell him so. Instead, I evaded by saying, “Life takes funny turns, Larson. You probably know something about that. How did you end up here?”

It was his third bid, he said. After doing time for assault in Alabama, where he grew up, and a second sentence for weapons possession, he had been in New York, dating a woman who was also dating a CO. He and the man had gotten into an argument in the lobby of her building. The CO had drawn his gun but Larson had shot him first—“too many times,” he said—and Larson had been sent back to prison, with a sentence of eight years to life.

“Conover, when I came into prison the first time, I couldn’t read or write.” Apart from prison literacy courses, he said, he was entirely self-educated. Instead of wasting so much of the inmates’ time on rec, Larson thought, Sing Sing should put a small library on every gallery so that inmates could sit in their cells and read.

Over days and weeks, I found myself, like his fellow inmates, stopping by to talk to Larson fairly often. Sometimes I had to wait my turn, as one of my porters, or another person authorized to be outside his cell, would be deep in discussion already. One day it was my porter known as Itchy, for all the time he spent scratching his scalp. “What kind of God lets people suffer?” Larson was demanding of Itchy as I approached. Itchy, a short, middle-aged murderer, wasn’t used to my being party to his conversation and went silent.

“He’s a Christian,” Larson explained to me.

“Well, excuse me for butting in, but don’t all gods let people suffer?” I asked. Helping people deal with suffering was a large part of most religions, I ventured, and suggested that none of them promised complete happiness. “What god makes everybody happy?” I asked Larson.

“Me—my own,” he said, smiling, a little smugly, I thought.

“If everybody’s his own god, that’s different from a religious God,” I answered, then was called to the gate. The next time I came near, Larson was demanding of Itchy, “Who
is
your God, anyway?”

I stood by. Itchy, who usually seemed lighthearted and funny, looked a little mad, and I said so.

An inmate I couldn’t see from two cells down was listening and chimed in. “He’s mad because Powerful tell him the truth and he
ain’t ready to hear it.” Later, I offhandedly asked Itchy if he was still mad. No, he said, he wasn’t. He liked talking to Larson no matter what he said, “because he’s interested in history and where we all came from and what we’re supposed to do.”

Larson, sounding a bit like the Savior, once said to me of those who came to talk to him, “They can’t love me like I love them because they don’t love themselves. They don’t know who they are.” These two deprivations, he maintained, along with a third one—that of “a good model of a decision maker to look up to” when they were growing up—were behind most of their criminal careers. They made bad choices, and most had been taught since they were young that they wouldn’t amount to much. His own mother, he said, made comments that “dulled” his “potentials and capacities.”

Apart from the excitement of meeting a thinking person in prison, I liked talking with Larson because it gave me hope that the inmate-officer gap had some chance of being bridged. Then one day, a few cells down the gallery from his, I got into something of a shouting match with an inmate named Curry, who was angrily refusing to leave the slop sink despite repeated requests. Larson, to my surprise, started adding to the noise with calls of, “Anthropology! Anthropology!” Under the circumstances, it sounded a bit mocking.

“What’s up with that?” I demanded the next day.

“What’s wrong, Conover? You don’t want people to know?”

Larson, I already knew, had talked about me to other inmates; twice in the past week inmates I didn’t know had asked me whether it was true I had a Ph.D.

“Yeah, there’s that. But maybe it’s also the tone. You didn’t sound exactly … friendly.”