Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (24 page)

Through the dark, bulletproof glass that separated the sallyport from the central command center, I could see security cameras broadcasting the chaos in 3-3. I leaned in toward the thick glass to get a better view of the screen, which beamed a lurid light into the darkness of central control. I saw inmates in blue prison uniforms running in and out of the picture. Then an officer running. Then an inmate hop on a table and shout something. The wisdom of bolting prison tables to the floor suddenly dawned on me.

I was so absorbed in the scene broadcast live from the prison war zone that I almost missed the drama happening right there in the sallyport. As the group grumbled and sighed, and shifted uncomfortably inside our accidental prison cell, someone spoke. At least I thought he was speaking. A second later it was clear he wasn’t speaking, but singing.

Everyone went quiet and turned to the source. The singer was a large, loping labrador retriever of a man, top-heavy, a shaggy officer’s uniform, scraggly beard and stately belly, a big, nutty grin affixed to his face. He smiled as he sang.

“My story is much too sad to be told—but practically everything leaves me totally cold …”

An officer heckled him from the other side of the sallyport, “We’re not gonna give ya dolla bills, ya fat bastard.”

A few people, mostly officers, laughed. But he ignored the comment and pressed on. Though still barely audible, his singing gained in strength. It had a pleasant little swing to it. He was playing it up, cocking his fist like a microphone, and assuming various jazz singing poses, to the extent possible in a tight, locked space, packed with people.

“The only exception I know is the case—when I’m out on a quiet spree—fighting vainly the old ennui—and I suddenly turn and see …”

And with this, the big man made a surprisingly lithe full spin in his bulky officer’s boots and, mischievous smile widening to capacity, swung around until he was in a face-to-face serenade with a short, plump contractor.

“Your fa-bu-lous face …”

She blushed, and everyone laughed.

I suddenly remembered the chaos in 3-3 and I turned my attention back to the closed-circuit security TV.

By the time the officer launched into the refrain,
“I get no kick from champagne—mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all,”
every staff person locked in the sallyport, including me, was smiling. And not despite the violence up in 3-3 but because of it. You had to be open to humor in order to work in this place or you’d grow hopelessly bitter. Or simply numb.

Often the humor turned dark. During a recent staff holiday party I’d laughed with everyone else when, during a gift exchange, someone presented, as a gag gift, a “hooter kit”—the container of bathroom supplies, a tiny cheap toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap, given to inmates who were too poor to purchase these things from the prison canteen. The hooter kit is one of the bleaker, more poignant expressions of prison loneliness. The question I’d asked myself at the party, while twenty or so of us laughed as a coworker pulled the hooter kit out of a hat, was not whether the joke was witty (it was not) nor whether it was tasteless (it certainly was). The question was why was it funny anyway. Partly it was the surprise of seeing the kit appear out of place. But mostly it was because in prison you were often presented with the options of dark humor or no humor. And the former seemed like the better choice, the only way to feel that your strange place of employment was also just a human workplace, complete with awkward holiday parties and stupid gag gifts.

But my ability to cope through humor, my smile, was short-lived that day. I just wasn’t feeling up to it. At that moment, stuck in the sallyport, I
felt
stuck. Crammed inside of a machine, I was given to the sudden awareness that this wasn’t the mere sensation of feeling crammed, but the literal fact of it: I was crammed inside of a machine. A small system with two heavy doors rolling on tracks, controlled by a remote will, a situation not unlike that of a lab rat. It took only this small bit of pressure to puncture my equilibrium, letting in a torrent of emotions. Jessica’s death. I wasn’t doing well with it. It had shaken me personally.

I kept returning to what she’d said to me, her face and hair done up with such sincerity—it must have taken her hours to acquire all of the materials and to pull that off—she’d turned to me, smiled, and said, “This is a big deal, right?” What an understatement that had been. It was the first time in many years, maybe since she’d abandoned her son, that she was taking some major initiative, exerting her will. She was trying to push back against the immense machine of her fate, before it was too late. It had been a very big deal indeed.

Stuck in the sallyport and feeling stuck, my defenses breached, I was suddenly overcome by a wave of emotion. For Jessica: who, with the complicated staff-inmate relationship behind us, I could now call a friend—one who died broken and alone. And for her son, a kid with a rough future. And for me: a fool for using the library as anything else but a place for inmates to get silly thrillers. I felt deeply ashamed for telling Chris that his long-awaited letter was “in the mail.” Books are not mailboxes, said Amato’s sign. I hated that sign. To me, the library was at its best when creating the space for Jessica’s letter to pass through, to be delivered. But perhaps the sign was right. My optimism amounted to a cruel joke played on a troubled eighteen-year-old orphan. I was overcome by a shrinking feeling.
Oh shit
, I thought,
I’m actually going to cry like a little girl in the sallyport
.

I stared at the one-ton steel door and willed it to open, so that I could spare myself this. I stared and willed it open, but the door remained locked. It wasn’t working. I tried to divert my mind with something else.

I shifted my gaze to the dark figures moving around in the control room itself. Set against little flashing red and green lights, switches and levers, and various monitors beaming images from the violence in 3-3 and from all over the prison—and a monitor, set low and out of view, that beamed in daytime TV—these dark forms stood, sat, leaned, held paper cups of coffee to their shadow-darkened faces. From where I was standing in the sallyport, it was hard to make out anything in there. But I noticed two long, fine feminine hands, like a pianist’s, working over a switchboard. I hadn’t noticed it before: such brutal doors operated by such a pair of refined hands. While their owner remained shrouded in darkness, those elegant fingers, illuminated under a small lamp, tapped buttons, pulled switches. After a few more painful moments, they hit a master stroke. The heavy steel door rumbled open and we were set free until the next day.

The Automat

The next evening I spotted the prison shrink in the staff cafeteria. I made a beeline for her. She was a tall, thin woman with big clunky jewelry and poofy hair that hovered over her like a fair-weather cumulus cloud. There was something comforting about her professorial disarray. She pursed her lips, furrowed her brow, and paused for long moments before answering serious questions. I had one for her that day.

Before saying hello, before giving the woman an honest chance to dig into the tofu salad she’d brought from home, I put my tray down next to her and said, “So what’s so bad about countertransference anyway?” She paused, and pursed her lips.

Countertransference was a concept I’d heard her mention once before. The idea, as she had used it, was basically that people who work with populations like psych patients or prison inmates might identify a particular individual with someone important in their own lives. And, as a result, regard this patient or inmate in a similar mode as they would this person. For example, treating an inmate with a strange, seemingly unwarranted blend of sympathy and jealousy because he reminds you of your brother.

“Well,” said the therapist, “a lot, potentially. Especially if you aren’t, for whatever reason, paying attention to it.”

The practical dangers, she said, included inappropriate unprofessional behaviors of all sorts, from bending rules to throwing all propriety out the window. The feelings themselves are natural and inevitable. It’s important to be aware of what is happening, to keep the situation in check by setting boundaries, and, in some cases—especially for a therapist—to ask yourself if the patient is eliciting these feelings in you because of
her
behavior toward you: that you see her like a daughter, for instance, because she views you as a mother. A therapist may have to carefully explore this patient-doctor relationship in the context of the session itself.

“Sounds like a headache,” I said.

“It is,” she laughed. “But I’m in the headache busines, and so are you, by the way.”

She added, “Let me know if you ever want to talk about it.”

I didn’t. The talking cure doesn’t do much for me. I tend more toward the brooding cure. In my brooding, I had decided that I was experiencing a reverse transference: not seeing an inmate as though she were a loved one, but rather seeing a loved one as though she were an inmate. I saw some of Jessica—her tortured solitude, the abyss of silence—in my mysterious grandmother. I had always judged my grandmother by her malicious words and actions, and never tried to understand her predicament. Never really appreciated that she was an intensely lonely person. A prisoner.

In my writing class I found myself distracted by the empty chair in which Jessica used to sit looking down at her son through a prison window. I had asked the women to write about Edward Hopper’s 1927 painting
Automat
, to personify in words the lonely woman in the painting. The assignment was inspired by Jessica. But when I started to think about the woman in the painting, I found myself thinking of a certain portrait of my grandmother.

Once, in order to shake my grandmother out of despondency, my aunt had forced her to buy a new dress, get a makeover, and sit for a photo portrait at a local mall. I knew this photo well. It was the one of my pale grandmother in a hideous blue suit, hair set like a trench helmet, wearing too much lipstick and looking as dour as ever. This was the photo I had long associated with the sneering portrait of Mussolini in my eighth-grade history textbook. The moment I’d turned to that page in the World War II chapter I’d thought,
Whoa, that looks
exactly
like grandma’s picture!
I hadn’t shaken that feeling since then.

But now I saw things more clearly. Like Jessica preparing for her portrait, my grandmother had been dressing up her vulnerability—one accessory, one stroke of makeup at a time—in order to sit defiantly in the presence of her loneliness. It was an act of self-preservation and quiet courage.

A small detail about Jessica returned to me. The day of her portrait, she had arrived with the bottom of her uniform pants cuffed, following a prison style popularized by the cool crowd of women inmates. She’d never cuffed her pants before. At the time, it seemed unremarkable.

But now, I got it. The cuffed pants—and for that matter, the perfume—were not meant to be depicted. They had nothing to do with the portrait itself. And that’s not why she wore them. It was intended for her, to allow her to playact, to give her a way to imagine herself, for a moment, in a beautiful light. To be the person she’d wished she had been. I had to wonder if perhaps the entire portrait session was never really meant for her son. If it was, like her recurring dream of him, a fleeting moment of private grace.

I looked at Hopper’s automat woman through the reflections of Jessica’s portrait, and of my grandmother’s. When I gave in-class writing assignments, I usually jotted down something myself. In the fifteen minutes remaining in the period I wrote the following notes into my wire-free, prison-issue notebook:

the privacy of droopy hats and thick lipstick
to keep the darkness at bay

clothed in brightness against the night
to make it all go away

but nothing can protect her from Nothing
from the empty seat across the table
the impossible window
the overwhelming sense
her tea has grown cold
.

In mourning Jessica this way, I’d found a means of mourning my difficult grandmother, an experience I’d been dreading for as long as I could remember. It clarified something else, as well. That I’d begun to need these writing classes as much as the prisoners who were my students.

After class I went down to my office in the library and did what any semi-repressed Midwest-raised kid would do with such a crush of emotions. I called my mother and provoked an argument about her parking ability. Which expanded into a commentary on her driving skills, before resolving into a critique of her commitment, or lack of, to a proper exercise regimen.

When I paused, she said, “Is that all?”

Could I admit the truth? That I was just calling to hear her voice, because I knew that, at some point in my life, this simple act would be impossible.

“No,” I said instead, “that’s
not
all. But I gotta get back to work now, ’bye.”

Messiah by Kite

I reach into my pocket to fetch a coin for the vending machine in the officers’ union clubhouse. I have my eye on a certain PayDay peanut caramel bar. Instead I pull out a note. I’d forgotten about it. Kites sometimes glide into my life like this, out of the blue. Sometimes wildly out of context. I’ll be at home, at a movie or a restaurant, light years from prison, and one of these small, insistent voices brings me right back. I unfold the note.

Dear Messiah
, it reads,
I know things is tough but you gotta hang in there brutha
 …

I smile. One tiny ballot cast for theological optimism. I know the note refers to an inmate named Messiah, but one can’t help but wonder. I take out my notebook, copy the words of the short note, and append a short gloss: “the Messiah’s plight.” I had never considered the unfortunate fate of the Messiah himself (perhaps Christians have a better sense of this). The Messiah has to suffer as long as the rest of us, forced to await his own long-overdue arrival. Poor guy. Maybe his fate is worse than ours.