Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (37 page)

“I know
exactly
what you mean,” I said, confident in my pimp training, courtesy of C.C. Too Sweet. “Poppin’, never stoppin’.”

“That’s what I’m fuckin’
talkin’ ’bout
, book man,” he said, leaning across the table and giving me some dap. Again, I couldn’t help myself. It had been a long day and pimp banter was really the only perk of my job. I never indulged myself during work—but I have a general rule: in Dunkin’ Donuts, all bets are off.

Just then, I discovered who’d been drinking the second cup of coffee. Exiting the bathroom was a slim, heavily made-up young woman tottering toward us on stilettos. She wore a complex updo, and a cross-cut polyester royal purple minidress. Through some concealed hardware, her small breasts were given a mighty boost.

“Avi?” she said, stopping short, almost toppling over.

Oh crap
, I thought.
Who is this?

This was a whole new kind of awkward. I tried to play it cool, to study her face without looking like I was studying her face. This likely amounted to a dumb grin.

“Do you remember me?” she said, giving Ant a quick look. Through a fake smile, he dug his teeth into the cigarette holder.

“Of course I remember you,” I said. And, at just that moment, I did. “From the library.”

I could picture her in the library, not quite twenty years old, undersized in her uniform. She was fond of art books. Deep in the stacks of the library she’d retreat with one of these volumes. She’d been an eager participant in the Frida Kahlo fad that had gripped the library months earlier. When I’d asked which Kahlo painting was her favorite, she’d immediately flipped to
What the Water Gave Me
, a bather’s-eye perspective of a full tub—framed by two nail-polished feet—in which assorted toy-sized images hovered over the bathwater: two women floating on a sponge, the Empire State Building erupting from a volcano, a tightrope, various flora and fauna.

What did she like about it?

“No idea,” she’d said. “But I love it.”

This was one of perhaps two short conversations we’d had in the library.

“Oh
shit
, Avi,” she was saying now at Dunkin’ Donuts, collapsing into her seat, sinking her face into her palm. “You’re not supposed to be here. What are you
doing
here?”

“Don’t talk to the man that way,” Ant said, quietly.

I gave him a dirty look.

“I’m trying, I swear I’m
trying,”
she said to me, “I was in a program, I’m gonna do the right thing.”

I didn’t know how to respond. But Ant did.

“Bitch, shut the
fuck
up.”

He said this in a near whisper, with such muted affect, that the meaning of his words almost slid right past me. A pimp knows how to be abusive in public without causing a scene, without creating even a ripple. It’s part of his professional expertise.

“Hey, easy there,” I said.

It took some restraint not to give him a piece of my mind. Or to tell her that she could still make things right, that there was help, that she was still a kid and shouldn’t give up on school, that there were people who believed in her. Et cetera. In short, all the things she needed to hear from someone she trusted.

But I decided it would be counterproductive to speak. She would be blamed for his loss of face and later would bear the brunt of his anger. Anything I wanted to say to either of them would only further provoke and undermine Ant and endanger her—and possibly me. This wasn’t prison. It was real life. Ant was her pimp and I was just some bony guy in khakis. Out here there wasn’t much I could do. Getting involved would be, at best, pointless; at worst, dangerous.

Ant played it cool and ordered his bitch to buy me a doughnut, which she did, before I could object. He inquired after certain other inmates.
Fine
, I answered to almost every question. This whole situation was depressing me in a major way. What did he want from me? Why had he invited me in?

The answer depressed me even more: Why
wouldn’t
he invite me in? I’d played along with his act, respected him with that title,
Pimpin’
, and generally honored his street persona. And now I was suddenly angry with him? Was I upset simply because I knew the girl? And if I hadn’t, would it be okay?

I knew men and women like this. I’d heard their stories. But it wasn’t until I actually witnessed them together, dressed in their street clothes, and until I myself was implicated in the situation, that I got it. The pimp talk, like the nicknames, identified me with the wrong side. In this case, with the abuse and exploitation of a young drug-addicted woman. If I indulged it, I was, in some way, complicit.

And if I had any doubt about this, I needed only recall her words.
I’m trying
, she’d said, almost in tears. Her desperate excuses to me that she’d been in a program, that she was trying to “do the right thing.” Why had she been so defensive around me? She and I had never remotely spoken of a program or of her doing the right thing, or any of that. At least not that I could remember; many inmates asked me to help them find programs, to write application letters. Too many to remember.

But it didn’t matter whether I remembered—she did. In my role at the prison, this woman had clearly identified me as a person involved in her rehab process, whatever that entailed. Now here I was kicking it with her pimp. Had she seen me call him
Pimpin’?
Had she heard me banter with him?

Even after working in prison, I hadn’t shaken American culture’s casual use of
pimp
and
ho
. But there was no ironic detachment with the real version of it, no dabbling.

You’re not supposed to be here
, she’d said when she saw me. She was right.

Too Too

My encounter at Dunkin’ Donuts left me with some serious second thoughts about C.C. Too Sweet. Had I been turning a blind eye to this troubling character? In theory, I knew what he was about; he had told me. But did I really comprehend it?

Too Sweet’s argument about pimping, that it was an art form—indeed the great male art form, the art form to which all others aspired—had been borne out by his writing talent. His verbal enticements, his ability to self-reflect and verbalize, proved his point: he was a good seducer and could shape the world through words.

He had no use for guns—these were for people who didn’t know how to use words. Or, to quote him, “I don’t need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.” It hadn’t been obvious how to take such comments. But the truth was I hadn’t given it much thought. They were amusing. That was all.

When he wasn’t talking to me, though, I saw him overdoing it, boasting. I witnessed him indulge in the very “slick dialogue,” the trappings of hustlerdom, that he himself had identified in his memoir as the telltale sign of a fraud. His wit, when it was working too hard, mostly betrayed his intentions.

“A real pimp always keeps it
low down
and
down low,”
I once heard him say. And it was precisely in the act of enunciating this principle that he was in violation of it.

I was getting a sinking feeling about all of this. Was I being taken in by C.C.’s words, willingly hypnotized into buying his story and, by extension, him?

When I didn’t return a revision in a timely manner—I did, after all, have a job—he let his rage show. He pounded his fist on the library’s front counter and started pacing, restraining himself, it seemed, from putting his fist through a wall, or a person. My reaction to his anger startled me: I felt vaguely guilty, as though I had let him down, even though I was helping him free of charge and stretching, possibly violating, my work duties for him. For a fleeting moment, I could relate to those prostitutes sitting in the backseat, how they had felt bad for not bringing back enough money to satisfy him. This thought jarred me. I had to ask the unfortunate question: Was C.C. treating me like a ho?

I saw him in the library counseling young pimps, encouraging them, guiding them, teaching them the tricks of the mind control game—just as old heads had done for him when he was a young upstart.

I wondered about that musical name of his.
C.C. Too Sweet
. His friends often shortened it to just “Sweet” or “Sweets,” which was apt; there was an undeniable charm about him. But lingering in the middle, that small but suggestive word:
Too
. Perhaps in its connotations of
overly
and
excessive
, that word revealed more than intended.

Until I met C.C. Too Sweet and the library regulars, I hadn’t spent any time with pimps. My association with pimps was limited to what I saw in movies. Or to the zoot suited, fedora- and long-feather-wearing persona I’d encountered at collegiate pimp and ho parties, those get-togethers that gave elite kids permission to dress tough and, it was hoped, get drunk enough to get laid. But C.C. Too Sweet’s life was far from a party.

As I considered this question—whether I had allowed myself to be blinded by C.C.’s enticements—I decided to Google the man. I didn’t have any policy about Googling inmates; typically, I only did it if there was a specific reason. When, for example, hiring a particular inmate, I might want to Google him to make sure he didn’t have a record of cannibalizing prison librarians. But the fact that I hadn’t searched C.C. earlier, after I’d spent so much time working with him, may have indicated that I didn’t really want to know. The morning after my encounter at Dunkin’ Donuts, I did a quick search.

The
Boston Globe
reported: “Three Boston men were charged with kidnapping yesterday after they allegedly abducted two young women in Worcester and tried to force them to work as prostitutes in Boston’s Combat Zone and turn over their proceeds.”

Another, more recent, newspaper report: “Charles Jarvis, 35, of Roxbury, was arrested in a Super 8 motel in Quincy, Mass., with a girl, aged 14. She had run away from home the day before. He stood accused of three counts of rape, kidnapping, and attempting to sell the girl’s body for sex.”

Kidnapping, raping, and pimping a minor! A ninth grader!
I almost fell off my seat. The image of him with this girl in a motel sickened me. This was so much worse than what I’d encountered the night before at Dunkin’ Donuts. This was among the worst kinds of crime, the kind that even hardened criminals find reprehensible.

Perhaps more nauseating was how easily, how readily, I’d embraced him. For months he’d told me he was a pimp, had boasted of it. And now I was going to get angry and accuse him of … 
being a pimp?
What had I taken that to mean? I had to own up to my willful ignorance of what being a pimp actually entailed.

Still, he had glossed over certain crucial details. There were chapters of his book he’d conveniently neglected to show me. He told me they weren’t ready. Perhaps that was true. Or perhaps he didn’t want me to know the whole story. But of course, the responsibility was mine. I had allowed myself to get taken in.

My bosses would not be pleased with me, nor would they want to stand by me if I were placed under scrutiny. They certainly weren’t going to risk their jobs on it and would advise me to do likewise.

I was a paid public servant, after all, part of a governmental agency that was under constant media scrutiny. The story of a naïve Harvard grad and former
Boston Globe
reporter, using public time and taxpayer money to help a career felon/pimp sex offender publish a tell-all book—which would be how a muckraking reporter would characterize C.C.’s work—this was certainly the kind of story the tabloid
Boston Herald
would relish. More importantly, though, perhaps they’d be right: why should a public servant help this guy? Maybe he should just rot in his cell.

I was also vaguely worried that C.C. could compromise me by spinning my bosses—or the paper—a salacious version of what was going on. In our editorial collaboration I was compromising myself and giving him leverage over me. He had little to lose at this point (except, of course, his manuscript). I, on the other hand, had my job, my reputation, my pride. If he felt pinched in some way, he might decide to humiliate me or to blackmail me with this. I kept imagining the tabloid headline,
Outraged Parents: Our Tax Dollars Helped Our Teenaged Daughter’s Rapist Write His Tell-All!
The article would be accompanied by my prison ID photo, with my crew cut and my bewildered grin, bearing the caption “I thought it was a good read.” These paranoid scenarios kept me up at night.

I backed away from C.C., without giving him an explanation. What was I supposed to tell him?
Sorry, it just occurred to me that you’re a sack of shit?
Should I write a letter to Miss Manners:
What’s the etiquette for breaking up with a pimp friend?

After my initial disappointment and anger with him, and with myself, I settled into a more neutral position: simple self-protection. I took the road of avoidance. He was too sweet and I was too busy. I suddenly became too busy to sit and talk with him, too busy to edit or type his work. I needed some distance. He quickly grew guarded with me, barely containing his resentment in formal gestures of politeness. He knew that I knew.

The Season of the Hawk

It was the season of the hawk. High on the roof ledge, overlooking the prison yard, it sat, watching. Around prison, there had been much speculation about this bird. Many people, inmates and staff, were terrified of it. Some saw it as a good omen, a “spirit animal,” possibly even the soul of a prisoner, flying around its cage.

As usual in the library, theories abounded. Some believed the red-tailed hawk favored the prison for its alarmingly large population of mice. Some claimed it made its nest here, though no one had seen it. Others said the government couldn’t legally exterminate a protected species, and so had conveniently relocated the nest to prison, as a sort of cruel joke on the inmates. Naysayers dismissed it as a plastic decoy, designed to scare away pigeons (a mission that was very much accomplished). But the majority of eyewitnesses had noticed it move. Including those who had observed the bird soaring, larger than a man.