Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (20 page)

“It’s in the back,” I said.

He seemed annoyed that I wasn’t getting it for him.

“So what do you
do
all day?” he asked. “Are you going to be, like, a prison librarian forever? Do you go to school for that?”

I changed my mind and decided to get the DVD player for him after all. I retrieved it from the back room, wheeled it out the door, and sent him on his way.

Later that morning, I made some copies in the main Education Department office area, down the hall from the library. My boss, Patti, had uncharacteristically closed the door to her office. Through her window, I could see her on the phone, taking notes. Union boss Charlie emerged from his office with purpose. Now I knew something was wrong. He seemed tense, not at all his usual good-humored self. I noticed Miller approaching.

Charlie stood in front of the main door to the office area, blocking Miller’s entrance.

“Hey,” Charlie said. “SID wants to see you. Right now.”

Miller froze.

“SID?”

Charlie nodded slowly. “That’s right, Scott.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

Yes he did. Everyone did. I had worked at the prison considerably less time than Miller, but I knew SID. It stood for Sheriff’s Investigative Division. They were the prison’s internal detectives. Miller must have known as well, and yet he was playing dumb. Now I was absolutely certain: something was definitely very wrong. Charlie wasn’t having it.

“They want to talk to you, Scott. I think you know what this is about.”

Miller stared. His face had gone alarmingly, cadaverously pale.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Just go to their office, kid. It’s next to the shift commander’s.”

Miller closed his eyes, bit his lip, and departed. I turned to Charlie.

“What the hell was that?”

“Trouble.”

“Is it about this lockdown?”

“I don’t wanna know,” he said as he retreated into his office. Once inside, he shouted out, “And neither do you, Avi.”

Holla!

But knowledge in prison is recycled like air, and I was certain to find out about Miller. In the meantime, the library continued to play its part revealing prison secrets. The kite, and skywriting, it turned out, were not the only means of long-distance communication. Inmates also communicated through radio waves.

I’d learned of this during a lull in the women’s library period. I’d been chatting with some inmates who lingered around the circulation counter, leaning against the Amato sign, which, in all its crusty resilience, continued to warn inmates against doing just that. The women tried in vain to shake me down for information about “the teacher guy,” Miller, while I, behind my honest claims to ignorance, silently wondered what channel of information had relayed the news up to the Tower. Staff? A kite? A skywriter? A few more minutes of chitchat culminated in one of the women, a ringleader-type named Whiz—who claimed to be a “notorious female pimp”—smiling at me and saying:

“You know what, Av? You a’ ight, dawg.”

A few minutes later, after the women had conferred, a shy young inmate approached the counter and handed me a note. I noticed Jessica on the other side of the library, alone, pulling books off of the shelves, pretending not to pay attention to what the others were doing.

I unfolded the note. In razor-sharp cursive, in a script known as the “Felon’s Claw”—which I suspect belonged to Whiz—I was instructed to listen to late-night 88.1 FM. This, it turned out, was an R&B call-in show on MIT campus radio. The inmates, led by Whiz, had decided to include my name in their weekly list of shout-outs. I felt honored. Why they had decided to tell me this by folded note, I couldn’t say.

“What should we call him?” asked one, ignoring the fact that I was standing right there.

“How about
L-Boy
, or
LB
, for
Library Boy?”

They all laughed. Jessica disappeared into the back stacks.

“How about, ‘Avi,’ ” I said.

T
hat Sunday I eagerly tuned in to “For Your Pleasure,” with your host Ré Antoine. I turned the volume up so that I could hear it as I washed dishes. Ré Antoine, elongating each luscious vowel, described the show as a “comforter, keeping you and your partner warm with music that makes your body … 
respond
to the rhythms …”

Respond? You and your partner?

I glanced over at Kayla, my girlfriend, to see if she’d caught this turn of phrase. She was busy checking her email. Across town, in a concrete cell block, a group of women inmates was also sitting next to the radio, all of us simultaneously keeping ourselves “warm with music.” What exactly had I agreed to? Perhaps I shouldn’t have let them use my real name on the show. My bosses certainly wouldn’t have been thrilled to have my name included in a sexy late-night call-in show with a group of women inmates.

Still, it was a fairly upbeat program. The phrase “do the right thing” got used a lot. There was a vaguely positive, AA-type message. The show’s music, incidentally, turned out to be a dud, as far as I was concerned. I sat through it, mostly bored. I’d hoped for R&B classics, or at least the best contemporary. Instead, they played one whiny, derivative pop ditty after another. It was a schmaltz-fest. I was beginning to look at the clock, suddenly feeling sleepy.

At long last, the hour for the “Roll Call” arrived. Kayla and I, and, across town, scores of inmates leaned in a bit closer to the radio to hear what would come next. In his cool cat, late-night voice, Mr. Antoine read what seemed like a full half hour of shout-outs, one-line messages addressed from one person or group to another. In many instances these messages were coded and identified only by initials or street names.
This one goes out to RJ and Mookie from L-Ray: we on that
. Most were messages of support,
Keep strong, my
good brother
. Some vaguely romantic,
I wanna see that beautiful smile of yours soon
.

To my amazement, most, possibly all, of the messages contained prison lingo. The shout-outs, it seemed, were all from or to inmates. Many were both to
and
from inmates—an interesting method of intraprison communication. Almost all of the messages referenced the prison where I worked.
This one goes out to all those turtles in the Bay, up in 1-10-2: “stay strong,” from T.R. trying to do the right thing out here
. One after the other, prison people got shout-outs.

I was confused—was everyone who listened to this show an inmate in prison? This was a new concept for me: a radio station, based in the free world, which catered to mostly inmates. Even some officers and other staff got shout-outs:

Thanks to Lieutenant G. for trying to do the right thing over in the 1-Building
.

It occurred to me that sending a shout-out was a great way of buttering up a staff member. Clearly I had fallen for this. Finally, my shout-out came.

This one goes out to
 … (Ré Antoine paused as he struggled to read the note)
to … Avery … from the L-Crew
.

“Wait,” said Kayla, detecting my irritation. “Was that
it?”

“Yes,” I said, miserably.

“I never thought I’d be with someone named ‘Avery,’ ” she said, throwing her arms around me. “I’m so happy!”

That made one of us. Although I was usually amused by the never-ending corruption of my name, the use of
Avery
at that particular moment disappointed me. This was my big moment. I’d suffered through a good deal of third-rate pop for it—and it wasn’t every day that I was mentioned on the radio. But I appreciated the coinage of
L-Crew
, “Library Crew.” I liked that. I flipped the radio off.

The next day I thanked the L-Crew for their recognition—and I even hollered a thanks to Jessica, who was hiding somewhere in the back. But I also felt compelled to remind them, once again, that my name was pronounced
ah-vee
. Whizz looked deeply offended.

“You kiddin’, me, dawg? I know your name is Avi!”

It’s true, she did. It was an unfair charge.

“Okay, but Ré Antoine called me
Avery
. How’d that happen?”

Nobody knew.

As if on cue, a very large, very loud member of the L-Crew burst through the door. Brutish, of course.

“Hey
Avery,”
she shouted, a triumphant smile on her face. “Did you hear the shout-out? I sent it myself.”

“That sounds right,” I said.

“Don’t say we don’t holla at you.”

I
’d said no such thing. On the contrary, I’d often mentioned that it seemed as though people were constantly hollering at me in the library. And it wasn’t just the library.
Holla
was an apt description for prison communications generally. At any given moment, there was a great deal of hollering across the prison yard and in the blocks themselves. It was the best, and often the only, way to deliver messages. In prison, if you weren’t whispering, you were hollering.

Of course, one of the few inmates who didn’t holla, and who barely whispered, was Jessica. It wasn’t an accident that I’d seen her sequestered among the library shelves while the other women—the L-Crew—sat together, composing their weekly shout-outs for Ré Antoine, or while they secretly stashed kites imploring male inmates to
holla back at yo girl
. Jessica was miles removed from all of this. She was incommunicado. A part of me wanted to draw her out somehow. But I decided to give her space.

A week went by. And another. In the writing class, Brutish was still brutish, Nasty still curt like clockwork, Short continued to hold her ground. A new woman, Cheerful, turned out to be not so, after all. She’d been banished to the Hole. Meanwhile, solitary Jessica kept her vigil, and I kept mine. But her days of silent watching were winding down.

After class that Thursday, she lingered, waiting until the others had left.

“I’m leaving,” she said.

“Where to?”

“Framingham [State Prison].”

“How soon?”

“You know how it is around here. Who knows? Probably next week sometime.”

“What about Chris?”

The question of her life. She stiffened.

“What about him?”

I wasn’t sure what I’d meant.

“I mean,” I said, “are you going to try to, um, connect with him before you leave, or something?”

She gathered up her papers.

“No. Sorry,” she said, and walked out.

After the next class she lingered again. And again, waited for the others to leave.

“I was thinking.” She paused for a long minute, reluctant to continue. Perhaps by habit, she gazed toward the window.

“Yes,” I said, finally. The guard outside was beginning to get antsy. “You were thinking …”

“Yeah, so I want to give Chrissy a letter from me before I go.”

“Okay.”

“Will you give it to him?”

I sighed, but agreed to do it. I was officially breaking with prison protocol and sticking my neck out.

“And a little gift.”

Again, I sighed. Passing notes between inmates was already pushing the boundaries, but passing “gifts” between inmates was courting serious problems.

“I can’t do that,” I said. Then hesitated. “What’s the gift?”

“A drawing.”

“Fine,” I said. “Of what?”

“Of me.”

Naming and Unnaming

I went into the staff cafeteria for an early supper. The caf was self-segregated between officers and civilian staff members. In the evening, when the shifts were smaller, the officers sat on one end of the room and civilians on the other, with four or five empty tables between. It was as if each group was trying to sit as far from the other as possible. On rare occasions, an officer and civilian staffer would sit together. Food was prepared and served by inmates. It was a strange and subtly charged setting.

That night, it was more so. I detected a feeling of hostility emanating from the officers’ table. A few officers I didn’t know gave me dirty looks. Others with whom I was friendly simply avoided eye contact.

I took out my sandwich and sat with a colleague of mine from the Education Department. She was friendly with people all over the prison and was a fount of juicy gossip.

“What’s going on here?” I asked her.

She knew exactly what I was talking about, and leaned across the table.

“Miller was named,” she whispered.

An inmate, she told me, was facing heat for something or had reason to believe his cell would be shaken down—a standard action against inmates for both official security reasons and officers’ personal vendettas. This inmate, who was a student of Miller’s, approached Miller with a shank, an improvised knife, asking him to dispose of it for him. Miller, probably thinking “no harm no foul,” allegedly did exactly that, throwing the shank out in the trash bin of his classroom.

Miller had known the inmate a bit, and perhaps they’d become friendly. Perhaps he wanted to help the guy avoid further trouble and stay in class and earn a diploma. The inmate was, after all, one of his students. Or perhaps he was simply afraid to say no, fearing the possible repercussions of snitching on a violent criminal. Miller worked in prison. He knew the code:
snitches get stitches
(if they’re lucky). He also knew that inmates have friends on the outside. Or perhaps the inmate blackmailed him.

Once the inmate had presented him with the shank, he couldn’t pretend to not know about it: the choice was either to play along or to report the inmate. This itself was a form of blackmail. There could be no neutrality. Miller tried to compromise and deal with the situation quietly. This turned out to be a miscalculation.

When the inmate was brought in for questioning, he tried to curry favor with SID by offering them a juicy morsel: a staff member’s name. Indeed that’s likely why he’d strong-armed Miller into throwing out the weapon to begin with, something that he probably could have done himself: he needed some leverage for the interrogation he knew was coming. Miller’s name was that leverage. And to make matters considerably worse for Miller, SID searched the trash bin. It was empty. The shank, it appeared, had been retrieved by another inmate and transferred back to the inmate population. The entire sequence may well have been orchestrated.