Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (32 page)

This comment draws mixed reactions from some of the inmates in the vicinity.

Later he elaborated. “It’s like this,” he said. “I’m reading this book about jazz, right? Dude says that a lot of the best musicians, right, are classically trained. Like to play Mozart, right? That’s how it was with Malcolm. That man was classically trained in the street swagger. And you gotta understand, man, this shit is ancient skills. There was mad pimps in ancient Egypt, wearing their togas and shit. It wasn’t invented yesterday. Once he mastered it, got that classical training, see, then he picked up all that book knowledge and discipline, that man was ready to take over the world.”

There was certainly something true in what Too Sweet said. Malcolm X’s transformative experience occurred in prison, when his mentor, a fellow inmate, showed him, as he wrote in his autobiography, how to “command total respect … with words.” Too Sweet abided by this. It was a belief that conferred some credibility to his behavior. He respected words because words bestowed respect onto him.

And this was where emotional intelligence—based on Too Sweet’s extensive reading in pop psych—came into play. He had a theory that the most powerful men speak the language of women. It’s much easier for a man to speak the language of men, he explained. But if he knows how to also move women, he is king. I noticed that Too Sweet’s handwriting was curiously feminine. Or, to be more precise, its carefully wrought curly letters and circles over
i
’s resembled a seventh-grade girl’s handwriting.

As a narrator, Too Sweet was good at anticipating his listeners’ biases. Just as his unrelenting descriptions of a night in the life of a pimp were growing too malicious to keep me reading, he changed gears completely. As he’d promised: “before they can say ‘damn,’ I’m gonna back up and start from the beginning.”

Until the age of ten, C.C. had had a happy childhood. His mother hailed from Tuskegee, Alabama; his father had been a U.S. paratrooper and ran a successful cleaning business. The family lived a happy middle-class existence in the Mattapan section of Boston. It was father, mother, C.C., his two older brothers, and the family dog. Family photos showed C.C. as a child, running around, playing, smiling, and hugging his mother.

One day C.C. came home to piles of shattered glass. His brothers were distressed. His mother, furious over his father’s liaisons—or as C.C. put it, “his tricky dick for young pussy”—had smashed every window of the family home. These windows were never repaired. The family split. C.C.’s father, the family’s provider, left.

At age ten, C.C. entered a universe of crime and violence from which he never returned. His mother relocated the family to Roxbury, to the projects right around the corner from where Malcolm Little had grown into a hustler and pimp before his rebirth as Malcolm X.

This move was more than geographic; it was a distinct and dramatic drop in economic class, C.C. wrote, a sudden fall from middle class stability into a chasm of poverty. It was the early 1980s. Young C.C. suddenly inhabited a world of urban decay: garbage-lined streets, empty lots, graffiti, rampant crime and homelessness, guns, gangs, junkies, rotting tenements, bombed-out neighborhoods. In order to get to school, he had to step over passed-out bodies lying in his building’s hallway and in the streets.

A decade of race wars had left Boston as racially polarized as ever. Nobody—white or black—dared cross the clearly delineated borders into the Other’s neighborhood. And if you did, you were, in C.C.’s words, “subject to a serious ass whipping.” The worst—the crack and AIDS epidemics, the proliferation of automatic weapons—was right around the corner.

But the worst was what happened at home. C.C.’s mother, embittered by her husband’s flight, by her heavy burden and her sudden poverty, struck out at her children in rage.

When his mother was at work cleaning homes C.C. was left alone to wander his new surroundings. He didn’t have to go far to find trouble.

My first lesson in understanding the street swagger was when I would come home from school and spend the rest of my afternoon hanging out in the hallway listening to the local thugs talk about everything from pussy to robberies. My hallway was The Spot.

I used to sit in the hallway, listening to those exciting stories, watching the thugs roll their weed, load their pistols, grab their crotches, and flicking their noses in between sentences. All of it had me fascinated.

Unable to endure his mother’s beatings and abuse, C.C. ran away again and again. His mother would hire local thugs to retrieve him and then she would beat him mercilessly. One of these beatings, a savage attack in which she used whatever she could find lying around—an extension cord, a chair, a lamp—left scars all over his body and turned C.C. to the street for good. He would squat in crack houses, stairwells, roofs, abandoned cars. He would lie on a cold floor staring at the ceiling, cursing his mother and wishing she would take him back with love.

He had a terrifying recurring dream: a rabid black dog chased him, but his legs were too heavy to move. He was never able to put any distance between him and it.

One day his luck changed:

I laid on the floor and fell asleep and started dreaming about the big black dog chasing me when suddenly I was awoken cold, sweating and trembling. When I looked up someone was standing over me. For a minute my eyes couldn’t get focused because of the bright light that was in back of the person’s head.

As soon as my eyes cleared all I could see was a tall pretty lady standing over me with a sparkling beautiful smile. I thought I was dreaming and she was an angel that came to take me away from the pain and misery of my life. I extended my arms so she could pick me up and fly off into the sky like in the movies.

She kneeled down, hugged me and said, “Hey little man, why you sleeping in the hallway?”

Once she spoke I realized she was a real person.

I softly responded, “ ’Cause if I go home, my mama gonna beat me.”

“Why she gonna do that?”

“I don’t know why, she mean, I hate her.”

The lady sat on the grimy hallway floor with me and we talked for a while. She lived on the same floor where I was staying, she stumbled across me while taking out the trash through the back hallway. The lady took me inside her apartment and made me something warm to eat. Her name was Shirley and she lived in a very clean two-bedroom apartment with her man, Otis.

Shirley was 26 years old, tall, cinnamon brown skin, thin, with a beautiful Diana Ross mane that flowed past her shoulders to the middle of her back. She was a prostitute; Otis was her pimp. Both were heroin addicts.

Otis was a 260 lb. gorilla-looking nigga, but the slickest-talking, sharpest-dressing cat that I had ever met. Otis liked me right away and treated me like his son. He told me I could stay with them as long as I take the trash out and do chores around the house. I didn’t mind because I didn’t want to go home and get beaten. I stayed there and was happy. They made me feel appreciated.

Shirley would go out every night and work the street, come home every morning with big piles of money and toss it on the living room table before she went and took her morning shower. That was her routine every morning.

Otis would sometimes call me into the living room to help him count the money and he would say, Lil nigga there ain’t no money like ho money.

Otis owned two Cadillacs, a motorcycle—I never seen so much money before. I thought Otis was the richest nigga on the planet. I later learned that Otis was a minor player in the game and what he had was only scratching the surface of what a pimp could acquire by peddling pussy. I was only 12 years old then and I didn’t understand anything about pimping, let alone sex. I thought that men would pick her up and give her money because she was so pretty.

Like so many subsequent father figures Otis was a mixed character: part role model, part cautionary tale. He was slick and successful—showing C.C. around the strip, showboating at the swanky Sugar Shack club in the South End—but he was also a miserable heroin addict who would leave C.C. in his Caddy while he went into a shooting gallery to get his fix. The presence of the child in the car, Otis believed, would deter potential thieves. He’d return two hours later smelling “as though he ate a bowl of shit, from vomiting, which happens when the dope enters the system.” Cadillacs aside, Otis was a wretched mess.

C.C.’s narrative was a series of vignettes of such men: role models with deadly flaws. Men of talent and energy, and principle, who ended up broken, penniless, addicted. And worst of all, powerless and compromised. Pimps who had become the prostitutes of their own vices—and then of the system. He vowed never to be like that. But these were the people who had educated him, who loved and accepted him, who had taken him in when he was weak. To them he owed his allegiance. His fate was linked to theirs.

And then there were the women of his narrative. They ranged from the abusive mother to the saintly prostitute Shirley. These two women were the poles of C.C.’s world.

It was no wonder that C.C.’s early career in boosting (shoplifting) and drug dealing didn’t satisfy him. Or that he avoided drugs and guns. He had had a burning desire to be a pimp. It wasn’t just a way to make money, but a way of seeing the world, a way of being seen in the world. Or as C.C. Too Sweet—steeped in pop psych jargon—might say: to be appreciated for
who he is
.

An Island of Deer

My attempts at teaching nature writing met with some resistance. I realized that some of the inmate students had barely any experience in backcountry woods, on desolate beaches, in deserts, in the middle of seas. Almost none had ever beheld the night sky in its full glory; to them, the Milky Way was nothing but a second-rate candy bar. Nature bored them because they couldn’t relate. So I was told.

I decided to demonstrate that they actually had experienced nature and that, after all, they lived in nature, that the human city was as much a part of nature as an ant colony or a beehive. So I forced the class to write about their observations of nature in the city.

The responses to the assignment were interesting, as always.

True to his experiences on the mean streets, Too Sweet spoke of nature in the city in the starkest terms.

In the city nature is harsh.

If you took a camera and made a National Geographic movie about the city it would look like a movie about life in the jungle, except with cars, lights, cigarettes and Armani suits. But otherwise everything else would be the same. The strong kill the weak, the smart survive, and the smartest live like kings. But there time comes too cause theres always someone smarter and younger. Someone with a short fuse and nothin to lose. Don’t get me wrong now. There are moments where things look beautiful. You’ll see a bird fly way up the sky early in the morning after a long night and you weren’t expecting it, or the snow fall really clean before people get it dirty.

But Nature in the city is not really beautiful. The beautiful things are only accidents. There mostly kids stuff. Truth is there is something wrong with humans. There different from other animals. It is there fatal flaw. That thing is vice. Let me give you an example. A mother bear protects her young, no matter what. She kills for her young. So does a human mother. Except sometimes. Sometimes a human mother puts her own desires before her children. She might even harm the child, beat him or leave him defenseless. This is called vice. Only humans do it.

But if you want to talk about nature in the city, think about this. Just like nature, the city don’t never sleep. There are some animals that live by day and some that live by night. The more dangerous ones live at night. That’s life in the city and the jungle. That’s how it always was and always will be. The jungle is open 24
/
7 and so is the city.

Frank wrote an oddly touching description of his Christ-like dog, Paul. Justifying his interpretation on the topic of “nature in the city,” Frank explained that “a lady giving birth is part of nature, even if it happens in a hospital. Well, my lady and I couldn’t have a child so we adopted Paul. Paul was our dog but he was like our child.”

The dog, as it turns out, had only three legs to begin with, so when the white SUV came gunning up the street, he had no chance to escape. He almost died. Indeed the people at the animal hospital said there was no hope, and that they should euthanize the dog. Frank’s wife, Tracie, refused. After the dog was stabilized, it was determined that it was paralyzed. Again, the vets insisted on putting him down. And again, Tracie refused. She took the dog home.

Frank acknowledged that this was a strange thing to do, but insisted that this dog’s survival had been a miracle. Tracie had lost too much in her life and wasn’t ready to let the animal go. Frank fashioned a little bed, a converted coffee table, and attached wheels to it. They would wheel the wounded creature from room to room. When they cooked knocks and beans, he was there; when they watched
Everybody Loves Raymond
, he was there; and when they had friends over for poker, there he lay, on his makeshift gurney, always staring straight ahead.

Frank worried that the dog was suffering. He himself knew about trauma from Vietnam and hated to think that poor Paul was constantly reliving the accident. Tracie would sit next to the paralyzed dog for hours, petting him, and whispering secrets into his ear.

Frank concluded his touching, utterly bizarre story by saying that this was nature because a dog is part of nature and so are humans and so is a mother’s love for her child, even if this mother is human and the child is a sick dog. It was a counterpoint to Too Sweet’s cynical view of human motherhood.