Newjack (53 page)

I gave a pack to the young guy who thought he’d had a cockroach stuck in his ear.

I gave packs to three guys I had keeplocked. No hard feelings.

At lineup the next week I was feeling a bit giddy, trying hard to repress the joy that was gathering in my soul: I had turned in my resignation papers, and today, though not quite my last day at Sing Sing, would be my last one on R-and-W.

There was a symmetry in this, as R-and-W had been the place where I’d spent my first, awful day as a Sing Sing trainee more than eight months before. Maybe it was naive, even reckless, to expect it, but I had a premonition that today’s shift could be the best yet. With each succeeding month, I’d learned how to run a
gallery more smoothly. It wasn’t clear what this ability would count for in the outside world—maybe the complaints desk at a department store would be a breeze—but at least, I thought, I would enjoy this hard-earned expertise on my last day as the R-and-W officer.

I sat down in the gallery-office cell, started a new page in the logbook, and then leaned back to savor my coffee and catch up on recent events on the gallery. Stone, the regular officer, had been on duty the day before. Most of his log entries were just a few words—“7:10
A.M.
, R chow”—but midday, he’d written a whole paragraph. He’d stopped an inmate from another gallery who was on R without permission and asked him what was in his paper sack. The inmate had sprinted for the gate, but Stone had caught him and found … a “16 in. shank.”

Sixteen inches? I thought. That wasn’t a shank, that was a sword. Why the hell would anyone have a weapon that length? What mayhem did he contemplate? There was no indication that Stone had been hurt in the confrontation, but still, it seemed a bad omen.

I had a zillion keeplocks—approximately one out of every five inmates—and today, alas, was keeplock shower day. My second officer, as usual, had disappeared after doing his go-rounds, leaving me to move all these guys through the showers myself. I thought I could do it if I got an early start.

Minutes into this process, I found that of seven shower cells, only two were operable. Normally, there were three or four working. B-block’s plumbing was unbelievably dismal, I thought as I locked an inmate into the second shower.

“Hey, CO!” he hollered after about five minutes. I walked over to the shower cell and looked through the bars. He was covered head to toe in suds. “The hot water went off!”

It was true. It had suddenly gone off throughout the block. I could hear the complaints from other floors. “Guess you’re out of luck,” I told him, thinking, as I said it, that I was the one who was out of luck: The hot water never went off all day, which would have allowed me to cancel showers. Usually, it was off for just an hour or two, long enough to make it plain that not all the keeplocks would get their showers and that they’d have to compete with the porters for showers in the afternoon.

Just then I had an unwelcome visitor to the gallery—one of the tough transportation officers with a reputation for meanness. Apparently,
they didn’t have any work for him this morning, so they’d sent him to “help” in B-block. I’d seen how he acted around inmates, and now I’d get a taste of his attitude toward young officers.

“What are these inmates doing out?” he demanded of me, sounding like some asshole sergeant.

“I believe they’re cleaning the floors.”

“You have
five
porters cleaning the floors?” He was counting two he’d seen on the other side.

“One of those is my clerk. This other guy is just out for a second.” Why was I defending myself to him?

He stood there looking disgusted. W-gallery inmates began to return from chow. I gave them a couple of minutes to lock in, then stood near the brake and hollered, “Step in, gentlemen!”

“You shouldn’t waste your breath yelling,” he said after a moment of watching me. “You should just pull the brake and then, anybody who didn’t get in, lock ’em up.”

“I know,” I sighed. “In a perfect world.”

“If you know, then why don’t you do it?” he demanded.

He was starting to bother me. I came to work prepared to do battle with inmates, not fellow officers, and I felt I wasn’t handling it quite right.

“Listen,” I said to him. “I’m a regular here. I know these guys. This is how I want to do it today.” Pathetic, I thought after I’d spoken. I should have fired a louder shot over his bow.

“How you want to do it,” he said in a mocking tone.

“That’s it,” I said, looking him in the eye.

“Fine,” he said, and descended the stairs to the flats.

Good riddance, I was thinking. Then I heard his announcement come over the PA system.

“All inmates out on the gallery on R-and-W without a reason, return to your cells!”

That fucker. He was trying to embarrass me. No doubt he had been badmouthing me to all who would listen downstairs.

“Hey, Blaine!” I shouted down through the mesh, suddenly angry. “What’s your fucking problem?” He was somewhere under the overhang near the OIC’s office, and I couldn’t tell whether he’d heard me. What, I wondered, would be the penalty for punching a fellow CO? I got back to work, decided to try to let it slide.

To my surprise, he was back a couple of hours later when the R side returned from lunch. I thought he must be trying to mend
fences, because he asked for the south-side keys—he was actually going to help me lock my guys in, not just stand there and criticize. He had a hard time getting the brake closed—you had to know which doors tended to jump out and get in the way—but finally succeeded, a little bit winded.

Then, one of my gym porters appeared. The gym OIC had let him out, he explained, so that he could take a crap in his own cell. He was on some kind of medication for diarrhea. He locked on the row of cells that Blaine had just secured, and whether to let him in was entirely up to me.

“That okay, Conover?” the inmate asked.

“Have you already told him no?” I asked Blaine.

The officer shook his head.

“Then you can,” I told the inmate, opening the same brake Blaine had so labored to close moments before. Blaine, despite my gesture of respect, gave me a look of pure disdain and with a laugh of disgust left the gallery. I felt I’d handled it just the right way.

Just a few minutes later, as I was regaining my composure, I noticed the smell of smoke, an acrid odor I couldn’t quite place. And then heard Blaine’s voice again.
What the hell
, I was thinking when I realized he and others were banging on my center gate—the red dots were responding to an emergency on the top floor. It turned out to be an inmate’s bedding and mattress on fire. Saline, on U-and-Z, had seen smoke billowing out of a cell and, unsure if there was anyone inside, had pulled his pin on his way to the fire extinguisher. It turned out nobody was at risk. But the unsettling fumes that accompanied this kind of arson—which was usually started by a small Molotov cocktail, and almost always gang-related—persisted and unsettled me for a long time, nudging out the last possibility of a sentimental journey on this last day on the gallery.

And in fact the afternoon took the form of an ever-growing pile of aggravations. One of my keeplocks began shouting at me that lunch had never been brought to his cell. (On his wall he had posted a bit of dyslexic Christian cheer: “This is day the God made.”) When I called the mess hall, they said I needed a request form from the OIC; when I called the new OIC, he said he didn’t have one. An inmate on the other side—Addison, to whom I’d made the gift of cigarettes just a couple days before—was furious with me because when he’d declined breakfast, I’d deadlocked the door to his cell on his request (he was afraid of intruders) but had
then forgotten to unlock it at lunch. Lacking any help, I had to escort him to the north gate personally and get the attention of officers on the mess-hall bridge. By the time I got back, half a dozen officers were waiting on my center gate—impatient, in a couple of cases, to the point of anger. Over the PA system, the OIC instructed me to pick up my phone, then asked why I hadn’t heard it ringing: The Adjustment Committee was about to call me to do a disciplinary hearing over their speakerphone. (Officers often testified this way in absentia.)

Three inmates, W-3, W-10, and W-22, said they needed to go to the Emergency Room. Two keeplocks, R-55 and W-59, wanted to know what they were charged with; they claimed they’d never been issued a ticket. A new inmate arrived on W from the psych unit with one arm and no mattress—I’d have to make a few calls to straighten that one out. Another new inmate arrived on W and rightly observed that his cell was a mess. Though I was under no obligation to do so, I thought it would encourage the right habits to let him mop it out. This was a mistake. He turned the cleaning into a big production, making separate requests for the tiny bags of powdered soap we kept in the office, for a toilet brush, for garbage bags. He made a huge pile of his personal shit on the gallery that was hard to walk around. And each time I was about to call an end to the chaos, I got sidetracked by exigent cries of “R-and-W, center gate!”

In the meantime, the hot water was back, and the keeplocks were clamoring for their showers. One of them, Henderson, who was about my height but with seventy-five more pounds of muscle, told me I’d better get him in before I left or else.

“Don’t be an asshole,” I told him.

“What?” he said, surprised. Officers normally tried to avoid inflammatory talk like that, but I’d had it.

He challenged me with the line that had pushed Phelan to action on the flats. “You wouldn’t talk like that if I weren’t in the cell,” he charged.

With memories of Phelan’s bravado, and a giddy recklessness, I turned around, opened the cell door, and repeated myself with no intervening bars.

“Don’t be an asshole, Henderson,” I said. “It just slows me down.”

I don’t know what I was thinking. Henderson pushed the cell
door open and walked out past me. In that moment I could have jumped him. But I didn’t want to start a fight and lose it. Pull my pin or call for help? It would be too embarrassing to have to describe how I’d arrived in this situation. Instead, I tried to reason with him.

“Listen, nobody’s going to get a shower if you don’t go back in.”

“Just a second. I got to have a word with my friends,” said Henderson, walking a few cells down.

“Hey,” said an officer on the flats, who could see Henderson and knew he was supposed to be in his cell. Henderson looked over his shoulder and waved at the officer.

“Come on, give me a break,” I pleaded with Henderson, humiliated. Three or four minutes later, he went back in.

There was still time, I thought, to try to get a couple of other keeplocks into the shower before my gym porters came back and demanded theirs. But no sooner had I unlocked one of the cells and turned the corner than a gym porter who shouldn’t have been there tried to beat me to it. To my amazement, he actually tried to open the shower cell door as I held it closed. It was a total meltdown! We were in the middle of this little power struggle when another gallery officer appeared from downstairs and shifted the balance of power to my favor. I locked the porter in his cell, prefatory to keeplocking him, and tried to come to grips with the splitting headache that had crept up on me. Though I disliked the pushiness of my gym porters, the other officer counseled me that things would probably go more smoothly if I just announced that keeplock showers were dead and let the gym porters figure out for themselves who would shower in the remaining half hour of my shift.

I had just a few minutes to write my Misbehavior Report. The phone rang: a sergeant, telling me that members of the executive team might be making a spot inspection soon, and to let out my porters for a quick cleanup straightaway.

“Right, Sarge,” I said, hanging up. I locked up the office and hustled down the gallery to see who was available.

“Conover!” called Larson, laughing, as I walked madly by. “Calm down! You’re gonna have a heart attack!”

If it had been anyone else, he would only have succeeded in pissing me off. But in that moment, I finally got it. Fuck getting the
porters out. Fuck writing up one last Misbehavior Report. Fuck the executive team. Given my lame-duck status, none of it really mattered.

I stopped, turned around. I took a deep breath and went back to Larson’s cell, leaned against the bars. A problem I’d had from day one, I knew, was taking it all too seriously. Perfectionism was unattainable on a gallery in B-block. Getting yelled at now and then—whether by sergeants, other officers, or inmates—was just life, especially in Sing Sing.

For a minute I just stood there, incapable even of making conversation.

Larson passed over an old
National Geographic
that showed the architectural detailing of some ancient Mesoamerican temples. He was particularly interested in the inscriptions on the stelae.

“Look at those,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, taking the magazine. “I’d like to see them. It would be cool to know what they meant.”

“I’d like to touch them,” said Larson.

I took more deep breaths, trying to calm myself.