Newjack (46 page)

Once, when I escorted some inmates to the commissary and we were all hanging around in the hall waiting for a gate to open, two
female officers fixed their attention on Sam. “Is that lipstick you’re wearing?” asked one. It looked like one of the trendy dark shades, meant to convey a ghoulish look, à la Morticia Addams.

“No, doll, it’s not. I made it myself.” He giggled. “It’s ground-up pencil lead. But it works, doesn’t it?”

The two officers looked at him in amazement. Then the three of them chatted some more. The commissary was taking forever to open. Sam suddenly pressed his knees together.

“I’ve got to pee so bad!” he exclaimed, then asked me, “Could you take me to the State Shop, please, officer?” I said I would see, and headed to a wall phone to ask if the State Shop was willing to let him use the bathroom. As I dialed, he added, “You could watch. I bet you’d like that. You’d be surprised what you see.”

“No doubt I would,” I agreed.

Sam had admirers, and sat at mess hall tables like anyone else. But that did not seem to be true about the third sexually ambiguous personality I supervised, a transsexual in his forties whom the other black inmates called Grandma. Of the three, Grandma was by far the most freakish. Under his sagging, mango-size breasts protruded a potbelly. A bun, which he had fashioned out of an uneven coif and tried to angle forward, did not hide the fact that his hairline was in full retreat. His teeth were long and yellow; behind black-frame glasses, you could see he had plucked and then redrawn his eyebrows. He was short and slightly swaybacked. I had spoken to him a couple of times, and he was unfailingly courteous, even charming. Clearly, though, he was the “ugly transsexual.” And, as no one could consider him an object of desire, he was ostracized.

Soon after he arrived on V-gallery, I noticed that Grandma often didn’t go to the mess hall. When he did, he usually sat at the untouchables’ table. One day, though, when I was assigned seating duty, I saw Grandma head out of the service line with his tray and aim straight for the regular tables. I seated him normally.

There was an immediate uproar. The man who had sat down before him stood up and said something like, “Don’t you put your rat ass down on that stool.” Grandma slammed down his tray. I felt sorry for him and angry at the inmate and told the inmate to sit down.

“There is no fuckin’ way I’m going to eat next to this freak!” he pronounced loudly.

I started feeling righteous. “Don’t act like an asshole. He’s a
human being. He won’t hurt you.” Numerous inmates shouted back their disagreement at me, but rising over them all was the roar of Grandma.

“The problem here is all you silly young black men!” he cried with vehemence.

“Fuck you, faggot!” came the response, followed by a fusillade of further insults.

“Come on, sit in back, where it’s calm,” I suggested, and Grandma came with me to the untouchables’ table.

After that, Grandma became one of my regular chat buddies on the gallery. There was something sympathetic about him; and both of us, though in different ways, were outsiders in B-block.

He was also, strange as it is to say, a refreshing sort of female presence in a place where macho was the rule. One day, for example, I made a special phone call for him because, instead of going to the hospital, he had somehow ended up at the School Building and missed a medical appointment. “I just have no sense of direction!” he said with exasperation, placing a hand on his cheek like a befuddled belle.

To reschedule his appointment, I’d had to take his I.D. card to the office. It was full of surprises. “Edward?” I asked when I gave it back, not sure, perhaps, what I had expected his real name to be.

“My friends call me Janice,” he said with a smile.

“But why do you have a beard in this picture? It’s only two years old! Were you, um …” I didn’t quite know how to ask how long he’d “been a woman.”

“Oh, I’ve had
breasts
a long time, if that’s what you mean,” he said, reading my mind. “But what happened was, they took that photo when I was keeplocked. Sometimes when you’re keeplocked, you just can’t be bothered to shave, you know?”

“Sure,” I said, smiling.

The birth date on the card showed that “Janice” had been born just two years before me, though from his appearance, I would have guessed that he was at least ten years older than that. Prison had that kind of effect on many men. He had been in and out of it for most of his adult life, he told me—mostly arrests for prostitution. But now he was maxing out on a four-to-twelve bid for second-degree murder. He’d been paroled not long before but had fallen immediately back into old bad habits.

“I’m an alcoholic, you see, and I was sitting in a park in Chelsea
drinking vodka when I heard a car horn honking. I turned around and thought, My, that’s a familiar face … and it was my parole officer!” No drinking was a condition of his parole; by getting caught, he had earned a ticket back to prison. So now he was waiting to finish his sentence, of which less than two years remained. He had spent earlier parts of it in Auburn, Clinton, and Attica. His victim was his ex-lover, but he claimed to have been falsely convicted—“because I just happen to be poor, black, and gay,” he said. “They didn’t have my prints on the knife or anything.” Though Janice seemed sweet, I had no trouble imagining him capable of murder. The longer I spent in Sing Sing, in fact, the easier it was to imagine anybody, anywhere, committing practically any crime.

I had thought there might be some solidarity between Grandma and the other gender-benders until the day I heard him being hectored by a new queen, who was getting lots of attention in the block.

“The boys in here don’t want an old lady!” the pretender proclaimed. “They want a sexy young man!”

Did Janice feel persecuted inside prison because of who he was? I asked one day. “Oh, not really,” he said. “It’s not fair that other gay men can hug sometimes, like during V-Rec or something, but if I hug anybody, people talk.

“The main thing, you know, is they’re all hypocrites. Just last week a boy said, ‘Janice, show me your titties.’ I said, ‘Okay, but I’m going to tell everyone.’ He said, ‘No!’ I mean, really. Be yourself!”

Not even macabre interest made me want to catch a glimpse of Janice’s titties. But I’m not sure I could vouch for my desires if I were imprisoned for a long time in a densely packed world without women and at the peak of my sexual vigor. With its raucous sounds and smells of sweat and threat, B-block virtually seethed with testosterone. Some of it was channeled into bodybuilding; much more found its outlet in masturbation. Jerking off is the main sexual activity in any prison. Sometimes you’d catch a glimpse; occasionally you’d catch a whiff. The cumulative daily output of these 636 men was probably huge, a sad symbol of their thwarted energies.

It must have always been so in prison, though it cannot be said that earlier generations looked upon it with today’s tolerance. A state prison inspectors’ report of 1845 showed that masturbation had been considered far from benign:

Truly, long-term autoeroticism probably does have ill effects, though of a different nature than was thought in the nineteenth century. The Minnesota hatchet murderer I wrote about earlier, imprisoned for seventeen years starting at age nineteen, still had a pretty girlfriend when he was paroled and I met him. But even after a few months with her, he confided, intercourse took a backseat to the familiar pleasures of his own hand.

The next-most-common type of prison sex, after the autoerotic, is certainly consensual. My classmate Dimmie had pulled down a sheet hung across bars one day to find two inmates having sex. Baywatch and his beau had been caught in the act, as well. John Cheever, who wrote from his home in Ossining, has a consensual affair take place between two otherwise straight inmates in
Falconer
, his prison novel, and such a relationship—between the transvestite Molina and the guerrilla Valentin—is the very gist of Manuel Puig’s magnificent
Kiss of the Spider Woman
. But consensual sex is something that the authors of most novels and scripts about prison can’t seem to acknowledge.

Most common in drama, by far—and least common in real life—is forcible sex. The rape of the white middle-class inmate is a staple of contemporary prison movies, from
American Me
to
Midnight Express
to
The Shawshank Redemption
, and it even takes place in the supposedly hyperrealistic TV prison series
Oz
. It is such a fixture of how middle-class America thinks about prison that people who hear I worked in Sing Sing always bring it up within a few minutes—if they dare bring it up at all.

The rape-of-the-white-guy trope has roots in a 1967 play,
Fortune and Men’s Eyes
, by John Herbert, in which a friendly, essentially noncriminal newcomer to a Canadian boys’ detention facility is raped by a predatory roommate. It was further developed in a
play called
Short Eyes
, written at Sing Sing by an inmate named Miguel Piñero and turned into a critically acclaimed feature film by Westchester filmmaker Robert Young in 1977.
Short Eyes
tells the story of a skinny white guy, thought to be a child molester, who is raped and then murdered by his fellow inmates with the tacit complicity of his guards.

Certainly, prison rape still occurs in New York and elsewhere. Phelan told me that two of B-block’s long-term keeplocks had been caught exiting the cell of a distraught inmate who lay facedown on his bunk with his pants around his ankles. But the famous punk-protector system of popular lore seems to be outdated or exaggerated. Several longtime inmates I spoke with thought it was almost a thing of the past—for several reasons. One is the willingness of courts to hear inmates’ lawsuits against states. This trend, which began in the early 1970s, is said to have forced states to make the protection of vulnerable prisoners a high priority. Protective custody (PC) is now a big deal. Inmates who ask for protection but fail to get it can make expensive claims.

Another factor is the decline, to some degree, of the cons’ code of ethics. Longtime inmates seem to agree that in the old days, rape victims would never speak up, because that would mean informing on a fellow inmate. Now, however, though the code of silence is still nominally in place, inmate lips seem looser and officers’ use of snitches more widespread.

I would even guess that, at least at Sing Sing, sex between (female) officers and inmates is presently more common than forcible sex between inmates. Certainly, I heard more about it. A young woman I had trained as an OJT on V-gallery was fired about a year after I left for having had sex with an inmate in Tappan. (According to the story officers told, another inmate, who had guarded the bathroom door while the officer and her boyfriend were inside, demanded his own piece of the action, and then blabbed when she turned him down.) And just a few weeks after I left Sing Sing, another female officer was apparently fired for having had sex with one of my most macho and obnoxious keeplocks on R-gallery.

Sing Sing’s one female sergeant, Cooper, who was in charge of housekeeping, warned female officers several times at lineup that they were not to wear makeup or engage in any flirtatious behavior with inmates. Obviously, there was a reason for that: Sex was just so much in the air.

And perhaps the sex was not only between inmates and
female
officers. A young inmate who arrived on V-gallery after I’d bid it kept finding reasons to ask me questions. He was a light-skinned black man with a shaved head, and he was always trying to make eye contact with me. He was very outgoing, using any excuse to start a chat. Like everyone else, he began in one of the two double-bunked cells but after six weeks or so was moved to his own cell. One day during afternoon rec, when I was deadlocking all the cells, he called me back to his.

“Conover,” he said excitedly, waving to me.

“Yeah?”

“Come over here.”

“What do you want?” I asked from several cells away. I was going to have to change direction and interrupt my chores to go talk with him. But he was insistent.

“Just come over here.”

I did.

He asked, “Anyone else out there?”

“Where?”

“On the gallery!”

I looked around warily. It was one of the few times in the day when the gallery was practically empty; mainly, it was keeplocks who were still in the cells. “Nope.”

“Mirrors?”

“Why?” I demanded. I could not imagine these questions as anything but a prelude to violence—not only did he plan to strike me or throw something but he also wanted me to help him make sure there would be no witnesses. He looked very excited.

“Conover,” he whispered. “You know I go both ways?”

“What?”

“Shhh! I go both ways!”

“Yeah, okay, so you go both ways,” I said quietly.

“Come in here!”

“What? Why?”

He was frustrated that I still didn’t get it. “I want to blow you!” He opened his mouth and pointed at my crotch. I was surprised—first, that he would declare his desire, and second, that he would believe there was any chance in the world that I would take him up on it, even if I were gay.

“Sorry, not my thing.”

“Come on! Nobody will see!”

“I’m the wrong guy!” I said. “Not into it!” I started walking away. But again he summoned me, in a loud whisper.

“Conover!”

“What!” I answered, annoyed. I turned around and, frowning, stood back in front of his cell.

“Conover, don’t tell anyone, okay?”

It was just as Janice had said.