Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (14 page)

“Yes, Avi, that’s my point,” he said. “And that’s exactly what’s gonna get you in the end. Listen, De Luca ain’t your boss. But you don’t take control, he will be. Yeah, Amato was an asshole but he understood control; you ignore it and you’ll get a hundred De Lucas in here carving the place up for themselves and having a big ol’ barbecue right up on your desk.”

Of course, Coolidge should know. He had done just that, which was his point. Ever since Amato had paid me a visit and warned me not to spare the iron fist, I had noticed some slippage. Both inmates and officers treated the library like a truck stop. Things were getting sloppy. There was occasionally an utter lack of decorum. Materials were disappearing right and left, including a good deal of materials that could be made into weapons. We were discovering a greater volume of graffiti, of notes relating to drug deals, prostitution, and other illicit activities. After each period, there was a lot of trash left behind on the tables and floors. I noticed that some of the beefs from the prison units were playing out within the library space itself. If the place was, at its best, a neighborhood pub, it was, at its worst, a frontier saloon. Something had to be done. The library needed a sheriff.

As luck would have it, one of the inmates had just returned our well-worn edition of
The Prince
. His bookmark slipped out. It was a list of the 48 Laws of Power, a distillation of the Machiavelli-inspired 1998 Robert Greene book of the same title. Possibly the most requested book in the library. I read the list of the 48 Laws of Power and flipped through
The Prince
.

Hmm
, I thought.

A
fter the rousing success of my creative writing class for women in the tower, I decided to inaugurate my class for men. The class met every Monday and Wednesday in the back-back room of the library. Ten inmates signed up.

On a Wednesday afternoon, I was standing in front of the circulation desk, waiting for the inmates to file into the classroom. Just then, the front door swung open and one of the inmates, Jason, strode in, looking straight ahead and perturbed. Officer De Luca appeared behind him, arms swinging, according to his style. His head shook as though it were about detonate.

“ ’Ey, get back here!” he shouted.

Jason glanced behind him. “I’m here for my class,” he said casually and proceeded to enter the room.

“Oh no you don’t …” De Luca said. He was almost running now.

I decided to try to defuse the situation. “It’s okay, Officer, he’s in the class. His name is on the list.”

Without so much as glancing at me, De Luca said: “No, no, no, no … this guy punked me out, he’s going back up to the unit. Or maybe the hole.”

This was not what I wanted to hear.

I hadn’t seen what had happened. Jason probably had said something stupid to him. On the other hand, De Luca’s bellicose “style” no doubt provoked him. I knew Jason well. He was mild-mannered and perfectly respectful when respected. I also knew that the inmate had every right to be in the library and that by giving him a hard time and now kicking him out, De Luca was pulling a macho power play that had nothing to do with any immediate security concern. And if there was a security situation, it was because De Luca was escalating the situation.

I could feel myself getting angry. The edges of my ears began to tingle. I was sick of De Luca’s style turning my library into Gitmo. Nor did I appreciate how he’d just blown me aside, without any attempt to give respect—you don’t do that in prison. There were less rational things churning through my head, as well. I was still annoyed that Coolidge had conned and embarrassed me. That my bosses had fired my employee without any regard for my position. I was generally sick of being messed with. And so, as my class of ten inmates and the four members of the inmate library detail stood by, I was suddenly overcome by a spirit, the impulse to
go rogue
.

Every piece of prison swag I’d heard suddenly swirled into my head, and was absorbed directly into my bloodstream. The 48 Laws of Power. Law 17—Keep others in suspended terror; cultivate an air of unpredictability. Law 37—Create compelling spectacles. And the boasting of the kite writer:
I’m never one that’s lost for words. A bitch like me can’t be stuck on chuck, the boss is lost, for nada. I’m a go-getter, and I go for what I want, and usually, I get what I want. Early!
And not only that: The spirit of Don Amato himself descended upon me. My lips curled into a faint sneer, the haughty gaze of the prison’s newest wise guy, the Sheriff Librarian.
On the up&up and low low, you go for yourz
. Law 28—Enter action with boldness.

I looked squarely at De Luca.

“Okay,” I said. “But now
you’re
punkin’
me
out. He’s in
my
class.”

De Luca looked at me as though for the first time. It wasn’t a look of anger but of abject confusion, as though I’d just assumed physical form out of thin air. It suddenly occurred to me that he hadn’t ever really noticed me. And now, out of nowhere here I was, some stranger, dressed like a first-week college freshman, talking at him like a tough guy. It must have been a bit puzzling.

“What? No, no,” said De Luca. “He’s coming with me.” And to Jason: “You, up. You’re going right back.”

And that was that. I wasn’t going to escalate things any further. I had made my point. (Law 47—Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop.) It was important to let the officer save face. He was, after all, the officer; in prison, it was his ass on the line.

As soon as De Luca had escorted Jason out, the other inmates commended me. “You go, Artie!,” “You tell that mutherfucka!” “We got yo back, bro”—all of which made me cringe. Nevertheless, it was respect, political capital that I could store away. And perhaps De Luca, the Angry Seven, and the inmates would think twice about crossing the Sheriff Librarian.

The Life-Skills Instructor’s View of the De Luca Incident

Yoni was getting rave reviews as a teacher in the 1-2-1 unit. The irony of his role as a “life-skills” instructor was of no consequence. When it came to teaching classes on résumé writing, job interview skills, task management, organizational methods, or any subject for that matter, he was a natural. Yoni’s classroom charisma, his native smarts, and his abundant dedication to his students compensated for his own loose organizational methods. He quickly won over his reluctant students. The inmates appreciated his ten-minute improvised stand-up routine on the potential drawbacks of listing “[email protected],” as the contact information on your résumé, as one inmate had proposed.

Outside the classroom, he was having a bit more difficulty. The two women with whom Yoni shared an office were put off by his habit of clipping his fingernails at his desk, of listening to the Grateful Dead on his desk speakers, his tendency to conduct loud, badgering, interminably long, speaker-phone negotiations with box office managers, credit card people, bank tellers, and family members.

One of his officemates noted that Yoni seemed like a guy who might benefit from a severe beating. This was prison, after all; if you got out of line, someone would probably slap you down. For Yoni, it happened sooner rather than later.

He’d had a particularly egregious week. While on the phone with an important contact, Yoni had struggled to find a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. Rifling his desk, he’d muttered, “Fuck me.” The contact had been offended and reported him.

But that was just the appetizer. Trying to make friendly conversation with his officemates, he’d asked one of the women who she thought was the sexiest inmate in the 1-2-1 unit. She didn’t appreciate the question and reported him, too.

But the low moment came when Yoni used the word
nigger
in his classroom. He was teaching a class on the economics of crime, trying to persuade the students that crime literally didn’t pay. To make this point he read aloud from the chapter in
Freakonomics
that explains why so many crack dealers live at home with their mothers. The book quotes a black crack dealer who uses the word
nigger
. Yoni simply read these passages in what was a clear educational context. But when a disgruntled inmate complained that he hadn’t signed up for a class in order to be called a
nigger
by some white guy, Yoni, like so many times before, realized he was in trouble.

No prison administrator would come to his defense. “You don’t ever use that word in prison,” he was told, “educational context or not.” The director of the Offender Re-entry Program, the NGO who had hired him, was furious: he had inadvertently compromised the entire outfit.

Yoni was formally reprimanded, forced to sign an official document of censure that listed his offenses—from cursing on the phone, to the inappropriate question, to his use of the word
nigger
. The document would be placed in his employment file for eternity. It was that kind of week.

The punishment served its purpose. Yoni reined in his behavior, and his officemates were willing to forgive and forget. Things were just beginning to quiet down, and his coworkers and students were starting to like him and to appreciate him as a lovable eccentric. Then the garlic incident happened.

Yoni had recently bought a gallon tub of peeled garlic. This was done to save money. But of course he hadn’t succeeded in eating it all, and the garlic had begun to turn. Ever eager to get his money’s worth, Yoni fried the remaining garlic cloves in oil. Once sufficiently browned, he poured them into a bowl, sat down, and gobbled up every last one. Upwards of thirty cloves of garlic. That was his dinner, a pound or so of fried not-quite-fresh garlic, and nothing else.

He didn’t die in his sleep. But he came close. On his way out to work the next morning, after a long, turbulent night, he emailed me a one-line update, “i smell quite putrid. interesting.”

Perhaps to him, a future anthropologist, it was. To the rest of humanity, however, it was insufferable. Roughly twelve hours after his garlic feast, Yoni showed up to work at prison, where the windows are sealed shut, the air recycled. He walked into the prison lobby, the sallyport, up a few halls, through the 1-2-1 prison unit, into his small, shared office. Everything seemed fine.

Everything was not fine. Yoni did not appreciate the extent of the problem. The stench pumped out from every pore, follicle, and orifice of his body, and hovered around him in a hazy poisonous aura. Nor had the smell diminished over the hours. On the contrary. Yoni was a walking radiator of toxicity, filling every space he entered with a wretched odor.

He walked into his office, sat at his desk, smiled, said good morning to his officemate, Peggy. She just looked at him in disbelief, covered her nose with her hand.

“Oh. My. God,” she said. “Are you
kidding
me?”

Less than a month after he’d been formally reprimanded, he was called back into his boss’s office. He was certain this was it. Holding her nose, a look of deep despair on her face, his boss said, “Yoni, I don’t know how to have this conversation,” and then quickly added, “You know what, we aren’t even going to have this conversation.” He assured her that this was really it. He was finally going to get his act together.

That afternoon, Yoni, with his toxic reek, thankfully did not make his usual visit to the library to say hello. But we spoke over the phone. He told me the pitiful tale of his day. The most surprising part, for me, was the moral of the story.

“The garlic was a really bad move,” he admitted, “but you were much stupider, and fuckin’
crazy
, for getting into a beef with De Luca.”

I argued the point with him. But it was academic. A man who’s recently consumed thirty fried garlic cloves has crossed over into some mystical realm few have entered and has achieved some kind of Zen-like understanding of human folly. You cannot challenge the master’s authority. When he criticizes your behavior, you heed his words.

And he was right. I’d jeopardized my relationship with De Luca, who was after all a necessary ally. With a day’s introspection, and Yoni’s metaphysical guidance, I was able to admit that I not only behaved rashly, but out of weakness. And that De Luca, despite his contentious “style,” and regardless of his association with the seedy likes of the Angry Seven, was really after all a decent guy who liked to sing jingles. I had to smooth things over with him. But before I had a chance, De Luca approached me.

I was standing behind the counter. No one else was around. De Luca seemed very uncomfortable, almost as though forced to talk to me. He addressed me by name—having clearly asked someone what to call me—and apologized for removing one of my students and for “stepping on your toes.” He explained that he had to take action against the inmate. I agreed in principle, apologized for my rude comment, and reiterated that we needed to work together to avoid misunderstandings. It was all very statesmanlike.

For the next few days I maintained my Sheriff Librarian persona, enforcing the rules with gusto, banishing inmates, speaking with authority to officers, and basically taking no shit from anybody, Amato-style. Fat Kat pulled me aside and gave me some advice.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said with a smile. “And I think it’s a good idea. But watch yourself. And don’t ever, never, do what you did with De Luca again, or you’re asking for some serious trouble. And De Luca’s okay, you know? Don’t go crazy here.”

I shrugged.

“Listen,” said Fat Kat, “you might think you’re a badass. You are not a badass, my friend. You’re,
at best
, a punk. So why don’t you just stick to being a librarian?”

De Luca and the inmates in the library probably thought of me as an overeducated young brat who didn’t know the first thing about the real world of tough-guy prison combat. And they were completely right. But if they feared me a tiny bit or thought I might be a loose cannon, that was fine with me. I now knew the 48 Laws of Power.

“To quote Dirty Harry,” I replied, “
I work for the city
.”