Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (40 page)

“I know you’re not married,” she said. “But do you got yourself a cute little college girlfriend, or what?”

“Yeah, Halby,” said another. “You got a wifey stashed back there?” She craned her neck and peered behind me, into my office.

Poor women. Forced in prison to live vicariously through the love life of a librarian. You may be a homeless heroin addict, you may be doing one of those unfortunate 125-year sentences, but surely this has got to be rock bottom.

“Fix your uniform,” I said to the shamrock woman, trying hard to keep my gaze above her neck. “You trying to get me in trouble?”

“Maybe I am,” she said, hands now on her hips, wielding her shamrock. “Unless you want to fess up.”

I’m being shaken down by a brassy hooker
, I thought with some amazement. In this moment of distraction, I lowered my gaze. All it took was a mere blink of the eyes.

“What’re you looking at there, kid?” she said with a sly grin. This woman was a pro. She specialized in blinks. “You like that?”

I flipped my gaze over to the officers’ post, outside of the library. Officer Malone had his attention elsewhere—more specifically, on a cute Boston College volunteer, whom he was merrily chatting up. Malone was acquainting her with the finer points of his walkie-talkie; he had her examining it.

I noticed Jessica making her way to the front counter. This was unusual. I’d seen her at the front counter once, but she had left after a minute, rolling her eyes at the endless jabbering. My initial impression of her as solitary, and that image of her in cold profile, had been borne out repeatedly. But that night she’d approached the counter with a rare smile on her face. She’d witnessed shamrock woman running circles around me. This apparently had enticed her to join the conversation.

“Yeah, Avi,” Jessica said, as she placed herself at the counter. “You like girls?”

The crowd
oohed
, in accordance with the training they’d all received by daytime television.

“Damn, son,” said another one of the mean-girl hookers, shaking her head at me. “You ain’t gonna let her do you like
that?
You
got
to answer now.”

The war of attrition on my male ego was now a concerted effort.

Shamrock woman piped up. “I know he likes girls,” she said.

Perhaps I was bored, or just a sucker for playing to a female audience, but I played along.

“I don’t like girls,” I said. “I like real, live American
women.”

A cheer went up from the assembled crowd. I immediately regretted my comment. Shamrock woman shot me a skeptical look.

“Tell us more!” came a hoarse little voice from the back.

“No, no,” I said.

“C’mon, man,” said the big bouncer lady, “you got a chick?”

I repeatedly invoked the fifth, an amendment with which these women were well acquainted. Unable to get me talking, the women proceeded to lecture me, about me. In the absence of any concrete facts about my life, the women instead adopted assumptions—challenging me to correct them—and then proceeded to voice strong opinions based on those assumptions. Perhaps they’d learned this tactic from cops.

“We
know
you got a girl,” someone said.

“You got to marry her,” one of hookers told me. “No offense, but don’t be a pussy.”

“No offense taken,” I said.

“It’s true,” shamrock woman nodded gravely.

To my surprise, it was a position that adhered, in content if not in terminology, to my family’s and former rabbis’ view.

But that’s where the similarity ended. What emerged from the next few minutes of conversation was that shamrock woman, who claimed to be an actress and high-priced prostitute, held three beliefs about marriage: 1) a man must marry or he’s a pussy, 2) if the man doesn’t also have extramarital affairs, he’s a pussy, and 3) if he confuses these two things, he’s a pussy.

According to her, a woman will love you if you propose and if you’re a good husband/father, but she’ll only respect you if you’re the kind of guy who also gets some on the side. A hustler. (Of course, the wife wouldn’t want to
know
about it …) There was a consensus of nods all around.

From the gallery one woman added, “Um-hm. That’s on some
real
shit now.”

“It ain’t easy,” I was told. “Most guys can’t pull it off. But you want the truth?
That’s
the truth.”

I hadn’t recalled asking for the truth.

“You got your work cut out for you, Avi,” said Jessica.

“I don’t think he can do it,” the bouncer woman said.

“And another thing,” said shamrock woman. “You
better
know how to please a woman. Do you know how to please a woman? ’Cause if you don’t, that girly’s out of there, believe me.”

Again, I just made a face and glanced over at the guard’s post. Officer Malone’s lady friend was long gone. He was now staring at the ceiling. His walkie-talkie lay forlornly on his countertop.

“And
another
thing,” said shamrock woman, who seemed to have an infinite store of these addendums. I braced myself.

“Fuckin’
Date Night—you
do Date Night with your lady, you’re a confused little boy.”

I probably looked perplexed, because she asked me, “You know what Date Night is? I hope not.”

I told her I was familiar with the concept, yes.

“These girls here know what I’m talking about,” said Shamrock. “Married guys come to you, and I’m talking regular clients, lawyers and businessmen and shit, kind of guys you probably went to college with, and they can’t come to see me next Saturday night because,” and now she switched into a tone of devastating mockery,
“that’s Date Night
. Are you fuckin’
kidding
me?”

Her friends wailed in recognition.

“But lemme tell you something. These guys’
real
date night is with
me
, and with whatever other little thing they’re chasing around. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be. You don’t date your fuckin’ wife, you fuckin’ pussy.”

“Is that what you tell them?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” she said, lightening up a bit. “Not to a client. Unless of course I know he likes gettin’ chewed out. Then I fuckin’ tell him whatever I think.”

It would have been easy to dismiss this shamrock-wielding woman’s view as mere street cynicism. True, she may have had a skewed perspective—but it was hard to refute her contention that her clients, and their wives, also had a skewed perspective. Her opinion, at least, wasn’t delusional. This woman worked in the trenches of marital warfare. She had something to say on the subject.

And to be honest, I agreed there was something awful about date night, and the entire
happy marriage
industry it represents. Every marriage propagandist seems to agree: the happy marriage requires “a lot of hard work.” So, at the same time Americans are told that they work too hard, they’re also enjoined to do more hard work. A lot of it. But who really wants to go home and begin a graveyard shift? Is it possible modern marriage requires so much hard work because it’s a busted up and obsolete old machine? For all of Oprah’s cant, her guides to Recession-Proofing Your Marriage, her enthusiastic advice to “Go Outside Yourself—
Often!”
one can’t help wonder why people don’t just follow Oprah’s real approach, the one she herself follows: simply refrain from entering into the quagmire of wedlock to begin with. Why ruin a perfectly wonderful relationship by turning it into a marriage?

After the conversation in the library had ended—or rather, after I had dispersed it—Jessica quietly approached the corner where I was shelving books. I could tell she had something to say. I figured it concerned the situation with her son. In a way, perhaps it did.

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” she said. “You do have a girlfriend, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

I was open because I knew and trusted her.

“You serious with her?”

“I am.”

“So why don’t you get married?” she asked.

I laid out my highly speculative cultural criticism. She cut me off somewhere during the Oprah oration.

“Awright,” she said. “But at some point, when push comes to shove, remember what I’m telling you now:
it matters.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know—”

“That’s right,” she said. “You don’t know. You got no idea what it’s like to lose everything that matters to you, okay. I do. That’s why I’m telling you.”

I wasn’t going to argue.

“I’m telling you this ’cause I know you listen. You take everything so serious. Too serious. I know. I can tell. So take this serious. And listen to what I’m telling you:
it matters
. Take a vow and mean it. Don’t listen to those stupid bitches in my unit. Put it down on paper, sign that dotted line. Say it in front of your family and God—”

“I get the point,” I said.

“I’m serious, Avi,” she said. “Look at me, in my prison PJs. Why should you listen to me, right? It’s true. I don’t know nothing worth knowing—but that.”

A few months later she was dead, the letter and drawing for her son ripped up and discarded. She had nothing left to say, and left no words of counsel, except those two:
it matters
. It had been the single piece of advice for which Jessica broke her silence. Perhaps she wanted urgently to convey this message to me because she knew she’d never deliver it, or anything, to her own son. Perhaps I was the only person available to receive her single scrap of wisdom.

But what had she meant by
it matters
. What matters? Why does it matter? I hadn’t asked. Frankly, I hadn’t wanted to know.

A
fter Kayla’s emotional outpouring the night of the mugging—the question of our relationship weighing heavily in the background—I couldn’t fall asleep. Why had I thought it was a good idea to call her late at night, while she was alone hundreds of miles away, to tell her my “hilarious” story?

Male pride. Couldn’t admit that I’d felt scared, that I’d just been in very real danger. I couldn’t even admit it to myself. It took her sincere, emotional reaction to shake me into seeing, into feeling, what had actually just happened. I’d just encountered an armed, possibly intoxicated man. A knife-wielding ex-con with the upper hand and a motive to attack. It was not hard to imagine that this man might want to take revenge against a card-carrying agent of his imprisonment. I could have been hurt or killed. I’d decided to jump ahead, to use humor to deflect this discomfiting experience, to ignore the fact that my decision to work in prison had possibly just put my life in danger. My
life
.

Lying in bed, wide awake, I could see it. The mugger’s knife. I could feel it. The chill of steel against my skin. The knife was inanimate, but the force behind it, the pressure of it, was not. That was alive. A human will, not my own, an outside agent whose motives were unknown to me. A stranger who could make the most important decision of my life. In that knife, I was given a hint of something more than fear. The sorrow of loss: for everything that my life could be, for me and for those who loved me, but wouldn’t, if this man, by some inscrutable calculus, made that decision.

This was what Jessica had meant by
it matters
. There are things we don’t control, decisions that are not ours to make—sometimes even the most important ones. For those we do control, Jessica had advice.
Sign the dotted line
, she’d said,
put it down on paper, take a vow, say it
. She wasn’t evaluating the theory of modern marriage but was speaking to something primal. The need to protect one’s most fragile possession, to put love into words, to commit those words to paper, to read them aloud, to store them for safekeeping.

This was something even a man with a knife could not take away—what Jessica herself, facing death, had tried but failed to accomplish for her son. As she had said to me, “You don’t know, but I do.” Life had imparted to her the knowledge of the knife. She’d tried to pass it on to me, but it took seeing the knife for myself to understand why
it matters
.

There had been something emotionally lacking in my attempt to spin the story to Kayla as a mere comedy. The more honest moment came in my impulse to call her. Instinctively I knew whom to call, even if I was confused about what needed to be said. But she was not. She wasn’t afraid to bare her most vulnerable emotions. That was why I loved her, why I’d picked up the phone and dialed her number.

I turned on the reading light next to my bed. On a piece of paper I scribbled,
Listen to Jessica
, folded it up and stashed it in a book. Only then was I able to fall asleep.

Don’t Know What

I wasn’t able to say goodbye to Chudney in person. This was how it often went in prison: people seemed to appear and disappear at random. An inmate might think he was being discharged in a week or a month, only to get a knock on his cell at 5 a.m. and be told to pack it up immediately. Comings and goings happened at the whim of faceless, external forces. And it was usually in the interests of those forces to keep inmates, and nonessentials, in the dark.

Perhaps in anticipation of a sudden departure, Chudney wrote a note, which was delivered by his cellmate to the library. It was typed and formatted as a formal business letter.

Dear Avi
,

Next time I write I WILL have good news. Don’t know what it’s gonna be but it’s gonna be GOOD. I’m gonna start working construction or something soon and get in my applications. I got my plan. Pray for me. Just wanted to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!! Here is a recipe. Don’t steal it or I WILL find you
.

He signed it:

Chudney Franklin © 2006

I waited for word from Chudney. It arrived one late-winter day. I was working with the library detail, entering books into our handy new database. Forest had just ordered Pitts to shelve books in the Gay section, as punishment for calling him “chunky” and for advising him, loudly and in front of a dozen inmates, to “get on that treadmill, man, get on it
immediately.”
The inmates and I were all very pleased with Forest’s creative punishment—and in an odd way, it helped the inmate librarians warm up to the newly inaugurated Gay/Lesbian section.