Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (36 page)

A few days later, Chudney reappeared in the library, speaking in semimysterious, musical phrases, some of which strained his mouth.
Steelhead trout with asparagus, aged balsamic vinegar and radicchio. Roasted Moulard duck leg with thyme and dandelion polenta
. He especially liked saying that phrase:
Dandelion Polenta
. Chudney was committing menus to memory, sorting out the different courses in a traditional Italian meal, learning how to pair spices.

I told him that I had a good recipe for a chicken with lemon. He noted, proudly, that this dish would go nicely with fresh basil or rosemary, sun-dried tomatoes, and olive oil. I agreed. I asked if he had ever tasted fresh basil, rosemary, sun-dried tomatoes, or olive oil. He had not. Nor, for that matter, had he ever tasted asparagus, aged balsamic vinegar, or radicchio. As for dandelion polenta, most people are in the dark on that front.

In his eagerness to advance onto this new path, he was training himself to cook by simply pairing words. From his reading, he knew that the words
balsamic vinegar
went with the word
asparagus
even though he had never tasted either. He knew that
rosemary
went with chicken and with lemon, even though he confessed that he wouldn’t recognize rosemary if he fell into a bush of it.

I began finding recipes and fragments of recipes left around the library. I knew where they had come from. Chudney was pursuing
The Plan
zealously. He was even “experimenting” with composing his own recipes. Again, this was a process of mixing and matching words and phrases without really even knowing what they referred to. Ingredients made of sound and syllables, not taste or smell. It was a poetic way to learn the culinary arts. And it was a start.

Feeders

I considered bringing in some basic herbs and spices for Chudney. Kick things off with some fresh basil, rosemary, thyme. But I quickly nixed the idea. I could already see Officer Chuzzlewit’s report:
Sir, today at
1450,
I did see the facility’s librarian hand inmate Franklin 0506891 an unmarked plastic baggie full of a green, leafy substance. They did proceed to exchange a handshake usually used by gangs
. He’d buy off three inmates to testify that I’d sold them OxyContin in the library, that I’d delivered it in a hollowed-out James Patterson novel. I’d be in handcuffs before supper.

Caution was advisable here. According to Mike Russo, a coworker of mine, there were two kinds of prison workers: those who were feeders, and those who weren’t. And Russo knew. Back in the days when he was an officer, before he became a prison computer teacher, he himself was a feeder.

Feeders were a secret subculture of prison workers who engaged in the illicit practice of bringing food in for inmates. Some did it routinely; some did it once in thirty years. There were as many motivations for breaking the rule as there were people who did it.

Russo had transgressed for pragmatic reasons. As an officer, he hadn’t given stuff to inmates because he was a nice guy, he did it because it made his job easier. If you could buy some peace for the small price of a cigarette, then why the hell not? Back in the days when he was an officer, he told me, rules were considered more of a suggestion.

“It’s not like today, when they’ll bust your fuckin’ balls for sneezing the wrong way.”

But while Russo’s willingness to give food to inmates may have been prompted by pragmatism, and spurred on by laxness, there was something else at play. He
identified
. As he told me, most of the inmates were “just regular guys.” Russo, a navy vet, always referred to the inmates as “the guys.” The inmates in his class were “my guys.” He had nothing against the guys, he told me.

“I don’t know their stories,” he said. “I’m not gonna judge.”

Russo also didn’t judge feeders: “When you see a man grubbing you just kind of feel bad for him, you know?”

I did know. And I also knew that it wasn’t just about feeling bad for the inmate, it was about feeling bad about yourself. An officer on an elevator in the Tower once told me he was proud of his job keeping bad guys out of society. “Someone’s gotta do it, right?”—but that didn’t stop him from going to church every week, for almost twenty years now, kneeling and confessing to what he called “the sin of locking a human being in a cage.”

For those who didn’t have the rite of confession—and perhaps even for some who did—feeding was a small, mostly symbolic, token of penance. A minor act of disobedience that helped you maintain a conscience, allowed you an identity apart from, and against, being a jailer.

In prison kindness was literally outlawed. Written policies not only precluded staff from selling, but even from
sharing
any item, no matter how small, with an inmate. This was part of what made the prison library—a
lending
library after all—such a radical concept. Resources were so limited, the rules so stringent, that whatever goods or services existed were sold at high prices. It was exceedingly rare to find an item that wasn’t also a commodity. Everything was a quid pro quo. The idea that a valuable item like a library book or magazine, or one of the many services provided in the library, could actually exchange hands free of charge was anomalous in prison. To cynics, it was laughable. And sometimes they were right: it wasn’t uncommon for free library services to be abused for financial gain. I heard reports of inmates checking out popular books like
The Da Vinci Code
, then auctioning off reading rights to fellow inmates.

Even gifts given from sheer kindness were illegal. That ribbon Jessica had given her cellmate to calm her nerves, was, from the prison’s perspective, technically contraband. And it was part of what gave meaning to that small act. Jessica had actually taken a small risk in doing it.

In this environment of scarcity and distrust, a feeder was wading into trouble. If you pitched in some item, anything, you immediately became part of the black market. There wasn’t much middle ground. Most contraband—including drugs—was brought into prison by staff. As a feeder, you entered the gray area between law-abiding and crooked government employee. You may have only given an inmate a sandwich, but the real problem was you knowingly breached the code of your job as a government employee. You compromised your credibility as a loyal, honest public servant. And the worst sin of all: you may have set your boss up to be embarrassed in front of his boss.

Feeders existed on the periphery. I mostly heard of them through gossip. A teacher who was a former monk, who did it out of charity. A bawdy older prison teacher with strong maternal impulses, who was constitutionally incapable of denying a person food. There were whispers of some who did it just for the thrill of breaking the rules.

I
did it for Elia’s birthday. He’d been an integral member of my inmate library staff since my first day there. I’d recently noticed that he seemed deeply depressed. He would mope around the library, organizing books in silence for hours on end. Just opening his mouth to talk seemed to pain him. In conversations, he’d trail off and say, “I don’t know, man, I just don’t know.” He told me he felt eighty years old, even though he was in his early forties. He was lonely.

Elia had mentioned to me how, when he was living on the streets, he used to buy a chocolate cupcake at a certain café and sit on a park bench. For a moment, he’d escape his troubles. For his birthday, I bought him the chocolate cupcake. I invested far too much neurotic energy into this gesture. At ten different moments from when I bought the damn cupcake to when Elia showed up to work, I considered just eating it myself and forgetting about the whole thing. But, in the end, I decided to do it.

I approached him in the back storage room, after the other inmates had left. I told him, with evident anxiety, that I’d got him a little something for his birthday. I took out the cupcake and handed it to him quickly. I was officially giving contraband to an inmate—contraband that could be sold in prison at three times the amount I’d paid for it. Immediately I felt nervous. Then I felt guilty for feeling nervous. Then I felt stupid for making such a dramatic show of anxiety over a pastry.

He looked me in the eyes and thanked me, in that painfully sincere manner of taciturn people. Then he sat down, laid a napkin on the table, and began to eat. I stood by. This was a lonely man’s birthday party, after all, the least I could do was keep him company. I also had a more self-interested motive: I didn’t want him to take it out of the library and incriminate me. Though, of course, standing next to him while he ate was arguably more damning.

The way he feasted on this treat was oddly intimate, almost sensual. For a deprived inmate, a chocolate cupcake from the outside is more than just a chocolate cupcake. He was satisfying his hunger.

Actually, that wasn’t quite accurate:
I
was satisfying his hunger. And now, like a voyeur, I watched. It occurred to me that there could be another, murkier motivation for a prison worker to become a feeder: to thrill themselves with exactly this dynamic, to enact a carnal powerplay with a prisoner. There could be something almost kinky in gratifying a helpless inmate’s creaturely appetite. In prison, where power inequalities are extreme and absolute, where inmates have virtually no privacy, there exists a very real danger of relationships taking on an S&M quality. It really was hard to be simply kind.

S
&M fantasies are an architectural feature of prison. In a kite I once read, a woman inmate narrated this fantasy to a male inmate: that he would show up in her cell wearing a prison guard’s uniform—she fixated on the boots—and issue her a stern warning to get on her knees. At first, she’d be defiant and wouldn’t comply. He would get a bit more forceful with her, etc.

In real life, prison affairs took on a whole new meaning when the risk of getting caught involved inmates and prison guards and security cameras. One staffer indeed did get caught, which turned out to be significantly less sexy than the proverbial workplace fantasy. The woman, a civilian worker who was married with children, was caught screwing a young male inmate in a maintenance closet. Another woman, an officer, was fired for becoming too friendly with the male inmates. And these were only the people who were busted.

I’d tiptoed into something here in the backroom with Elia. My real offense hadn’t been giving him the contraband food but not giving him the space to enjoy it on his own.

Halfway through his treat, I wished Elia a happy birthday and told him I hoped this year would be better than last. Then I walked out, slid the glass door shut, and gave him some approximation of privacy.

In the Free World

It had been a long, late shift and it was almost 10 p.m. when I finally emerged in the free world. As I walked down Mass Ave., on my way to the bus, I heard, then saw, a man banging on the plate-glass window from inside a Dunkin’ Donuts, trying to get my attention. I drew a blank. But when he lifted his sunglasses, I recognized the eyes, small and sleepy, almost swollen shut—they belonged to an old library visitor, a pimp named Anthony, or Ant. He liked to read Spanish royal history and
Car & Driver
magazine.

It was difficult to recognize a former inmate on the street. While I looked exactly as I did in prison, an ex-con looked like a completely different person in his street clothes and jewelry, under new lights, in a new setting. Often he’d possess a different affect, a different attitude. Sometimes he’d be drunk and/or high (not that I didn’t encounter inebriated inmates). The free person would bear an only abstract resemblance to the inmate you knew. As if he were the brother of that person. In most cases, the evil twin.

Especially when he was elaborately arrayed, covered, as Ant was, head to toe in the brightest of whites: a rakish pink-trimmed sweatband with matching belt, a giant fake diamond stud earring, thick-rimmed DKNY women’s sunglasses, a button-down Lacoste short-sleeve shirt, with the top two buttons generously unlatched, matching knee-length dress shorts, and spotless white penny loafers (with a quarter, not a penny in the lip). No socks. On Ant’s hands, bright red and yellow baseball batters’ gloves; a Bulgari watch, or a quality knockoff, loosely fastened. A cheap, unlit Phillies Blunt, stuffed into a cigarette holder, dangled expertly from the side of his mouth, under a wisp of a degenerate’s mustache.

In short, he was a model of the ghetto/prep school look favored by the contemporary American pimp, which Too Sweet chalked up to the pimp’s tendency toward all things classic.

These run-ins had been happening more often. I could almost measure my time working in prison by the number of inmates—former inmates—I encountered on the streets. Before I worked in prison, there were none. After a few months, I would occasionally run into an ex-con. After a year it was a steady flow. There were days it seemed I couldn’t take a step without seeing one. This sometimes amazed my friends. I’d be at a movie downtown, or on the subway, and a rough-looking thug would come up to me with a big smile and we’d catch up like old pals.

Holding one glove folded in his palm, like an equestrian, Ant gestured for me to join him in Dunkin’ Donuts. This would break an unstated rule of prison work—my boss, Patti, had told me that she’d worked out an entire spiel for politely saying hello to an ex-con and moving on. She would never have sat down with this man. But I figured,
What the hell, I could use a doughnut. I’m not breaking any laws
.

“What’s good?” Ant said, giving me an earnest thug hug. I gave a quick look around to make sure there weren’t any prison colleagues around. Always a bad sign when you’re on the lookout for snitches. The other few people in the Dunkin’ Donuts shot us leery looks.

“What’s up, pimpin’?” I replied. I couldn’t help myself. He was wearing designer women’s sunglasses in the middle of the night—a man’s fashion decisions should be honored.

“Just keeping my P poppin’, y’ know whadImean?” he said, the cigarette holder dancing between his lips. We sat down at his table. He took out a napkin, wiped away some crumbs. I noticed two large cups of coffee. Long night ahead, I supposed.