Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (44 page)

Josh told me that he had been the quintessential “good Jewish boy.” Everyone had loved him, all the community ladies wanted to set up their daughters with him. “I was a good catch,” he said with a little laugh. The one problem: his secret hobby. Once he tried heroin in college, that was it. For a while he led a double life.

“At first,” he said, “I was a put-together college guy. I was dating this great girl. A beautiful girl.”

She’d had no idea that he was a dope fiend, until one night, when his secret spilled out. Literally. On a date, he excused himself to the bathroom, for a quick, surreptitious shooting session. Upon returning to the table, the girl stared at him as though she were beholding the devil. Her expression terrified him—recalling it still spooked him. This was his nightmare: to be recognized, exposed. He looked down and saw blood trickling out of the puncture wound on his arm. Right there, at the table.

That night, he lost more than the girl. The shame of that experience threw him into a crisis. “It changed everything,” he told me. From then on, he no longer saw himself as Josh, from the Schrieber family, son, grandchild, friend, neighbor.

“When I made that decision,” he said, “that I was no longer a part of that community, that I had let everyone down so fuckin’ hard, that I literally wasn’t that person they thought I was. That this was
who
I was. Who I
really
was: I wasn’t Josh, I was a fuckin’ dope fiend. When I made that decision, it was over. I became that person completely. I went from living a relatively normal life to fuckin’ living in abandoned buildings downtown. Within one week, Avi.”

He was crying now.

“Josh,” I said, “it’s true that you made that decision then, but listen to what you said: You made a decision. That means you have the
power
to make decisions. And that you can make other decisions now.”

I wasn’t sure whether this was a helpful or really idiotic thing to say.

Josh suddenly bolted up with an odd, slightly terrifying, fake smile plastered on his face.

“Hey,” he said, adopting an upbeat, sporting tone, “did you see what Francona said yesterday?”

He was referring to Red Sox manager, Terry Francona.

“Um, no,” I replied. “What did Francona say?”

“Ah, man,” he said. “It was
hilarious.”

He launched into a manic monologue about all the wild shenanigans happening in the world of the Red Sox. He was all smiles now, spinning anecdotes and jokes, peppering his stories with commentary. Soon he was telling me about
this crazy girl
he once knew … He went on, breathlessly, until we were safely miles and an ocean away from our previous conversation. He simply didn’t want to talk about his reality. Perhaps he thought I was preaching to him. Perhaps he was right.

As he walked out of the library that day, after successfully filibustering our conversation, he told me he wanted to apologize for abruptly and weirdly changing the subject. That he would like to continue “that conversation.”

“Really?” I asked. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. And you don’t have to apologize.”

I wasn’t good at the tough-love mentor thing; I considered giving it a rest. Giving us both an out. But this time, he persisted.

“No, I’m serious, I really want to. You’ll be like my rabbi here.” He said this with a wink.

I have to admit, this comment left a vomitty zing in my mouth. A rabbi was the last thing I wanted to be. He knew this. I’d told him as much. That’s why he’d said it. A little revenge for making him cry.

A
s I stood momentarily locked in the sallyport—I was going to my parents’ Passover Seder—I considered what the rabbis said about the holiday: that when you recount the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt, you must feel as though you yourself made that journey. You must tell their story as if it had literally happened to you. The story of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt is probably not factual. But it is factual that my family has been telling this story, in this way, forever.

Sitting in his cell upstairs, Josh would not be telling this story with his family. He was still deciding whether he could overcome his personal Narrow Place and live to tell the story.

I’d met many inmates who were figuring out their life story, determining their role in shaping that narrative. Some chose to leave it all behind, like Jessica. Chudney had emphatically decided to script his future, but the decision was ultimately clinched by someone else. Like Josh, Too Sweet was sitting in his cell at that very moment. He, however, was busy writing his story, page by page.

I waited for the sallyport to open. It seemed like I was always waiting for it to open. Even after almost two years, I was still awed at the simplicity of the machinery of imprisonment. There wasn’t much that separated captivity from freedom. It was basically a switch and an aging steel door that hummed and rumbled as it opened, and slammed shut with a big metallic crash, just like in the movies. Even after all this time in prison, the daily relief of reemerging into the lobby, experiencing that small moment of liberation, never lost its effect.

The prison lobby was mostly empty that night, I slipped by Sully without a chat and was at my family’s seder within the hour.

That Night

Chudney was sitting in the backseat. His seventeen-year-old brother, Darius, was in the passenger seat; Darius’s girlfriend was at the wheel. It was just after 9:30 p.m. Late February in Boston. Roxbury. Icy streets, too cold for snow. They had to make a quick stop. Chudney needed something for lunch the next day. He’d just started a job working construction
.

They pulled up to a bodega on the corner of Maple and Washington. Less than half a mile from their mother’s home on Wharton Street, where Chudney was living at the time. They parked; Chudney ran in. Darius’s girlfriend stayed in the driver’s seat to make a phone call. Darius got out and struck up a conversation with some girls standing
outside of the store. When Chudney emerged from the store he saw some young men hovering. They were glaring at his brother
.

From his vantage point across the street, Chudney recognized the menace first—though they were a few blocks from their home, they were in enemy gang territory. Tensions were on the rise. Just then Darius noticed the men. He stiffened up and glared right back at them. Words were exchanged. Chudney jogged over to his brother. In one quick action, he grabbed the boy’s arm and pulled him toward the car. He turned to the glaring young men and said, “It’s cool, man. We out.”

Darius reluctantly climbed into the front seat, Chudney got into the back and slammed the door shut. In the next moment four things happened simultaneously: Chudney shouted to Darius’s girlfriend to drive, the car screeched, a shot went off, a glass window cracked
.

The gunfire had been absorbed into the noise and commotion, like a tiny bit of poison dissolved into a drink. The car raced up Maple Street. Darius turned around to see whether they were being followed. The next minute was sheer panic. His eyes widened
.

—
Omigodomigodomigodshitshitshitshit
.

—
What?
What!
his girlfriend said
.

He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Darius’s girlfriend glanced in the rearview mirror
.

—Oh
shit,
she screamed, and threw the wheel into a sharp turn, hastily parking the car a few blocks up Maple Street, across from Nazareth Baptist church
.

Chudney was slumped over, the back of his seat soaked in blood. The bullet had entered his head from behind, almost execution style—he probably hadn’t known what hit him. In the front seat, the two teenagers panicked. The girl was not from Boston and did not know the way to the hospital. Darius was in shock. Unable to think or speak
or blink or draw air into his throat. He managed to call 911. They waited, sobbing and hysterical. Chudney died in the backseat of the car, parked next to the church
.

Work to Do

The last time I saw Too Sweet, his smile was brief. From the moment he crossed into the library he was business. As he approached the front counter, I got a closer look. He was uncharacteristically disheveled, hair frizzed, uncombed and a bit long, beard coming in scraggily.

“What’s good?” he said. He seemed exhausted.

He gave me some skin—and I, by instinct, glanced around guiltily. He got right to the point.

“Can’t kick it today,” he said. “I gotta get to work.”

Standing alone at the counter, shaking his head and squeezing his lips shut, he said, “They’re pinchin’ me, man.” He tapped his fingers on the library counter.

But suddenly and for no obvious reason his anxiety faded. He smiled and leaned back, an unmistakable prelude to one of his small dramatic performances. He threw a small air punch—more of a fist swat—and followed it with a verbal equivalent.

“They
pinchin’
a pimp!” he announced.

C.C. was in playland. He looked around to see if anyone caught his little turn of phrase. Nobody was around.

He embellished a bit: “Bitches be pinchin’ a
pimp!”

Still, no one heard him. But he didn’t mind. C.C. thirsted for a large and adoring audience, but he would settle for just himself, if necessary.

He got serious again. “I got a lot of work,” he repeated.

For some reason, I took this to mean he had a lot of law work to do. But, of course, out came the manuscript. I should have guessed: His main occupation was not his legal defense but his narrative defense. His apologia. With his back up against a wall, in the world of lawyers, judges, prison guards, and humiliating press coverage—in which his narrative was being shaped by people who despised him—he struggled to tell another version.

“Man, I got no love in court today, Avi.”

“Are you scared?” I asked. This is the wrong question to ask in prison. But it was the best I had for him.

“Nah, man,” he said, as he shrugged and looked away. “It’ll be a’ ight; ain’t nothin for a real, live P-I-M-P.”

I didn’t press the issue. Instead I exchanged his ID card for an ink cartridge.

Deconstructing the Prison Library

The order came from on high. The Education Department wanted to update the library. The whole place had to be cleared: Every book was to be boxed; every bookshelf disassembled; every table, chair, and computer removed. The entire area was to be taken apart, piece by piece. And then, after the work was done, reconstructed. The library needed new carpeting.

My duty switched from the norm, such as it was, to the work of dismantling. It was an involved, dirty, and annoying responsibility.

But the order had been long overdue. The carpeting was in tatters. Nearly fifteen years and thousands of hours of prison traffic didn’t look pretty. It was deeply stained and, in some spots, ripped to shreds and held together by duct tape. The smell was of rotting apples. As Dice had put it, “This carpet here is tainted.”

And it was killing morale, sending the message that the library wasn’t being watched. Across the prison, graffiti increased markedly when a space looked beaten up, and was usually a sign of lapsed discipline. And it was bad PR (the library, of course, was a routine stop for pols and other official visitors).

When we began the project, I’d estimated the work would occupy a day or two. In the end, it ate up almost two and a half (union) weeks. Reconstruction added another five days.

After a few officers sorted out among themselves who was boss—and one of them threw a mini-tantrum when his cause failed—the work commenced. At first, the only people working were the five members of the library detail, plus me and Forest. But after an hour or so the immensity of the task became clear and the officer in charge asked us to enlist more workers.

I was always hesitant about using prison labor. It felt dirty, too much like slavery for my taste. My staff, at least, got some compensation, meager though it was. But this overhaul job offered no pay for any of the inmates involved. When I mentioned this to one of my officer friends, he said, “You ever hear of cons ‘paying their debt to society’? These guys should be working. It’s good for them to be working. Nobody owes them nothing.
They’re
the ones who owe something.” When I continued to express my doubts, he said, “Look, these guys fucked up. You gotta give them a chance to earn trust back. You give ’em work and they do it good, they can walk out of here with pride and say, ‘I did my time right.’ Nobody can take that away from them.”

As it turned out, inmates lined up for the work. After a day or two of backroom negotiations, when caseworkers and officers came into my office to advocate for their favorite inmates—guys they knew from the neighborhood or who they were rooting for or, even more obscurely, owed a favor—we had a small workforce of about ten. This force grew as the need increased.

At first every book was taken off the shelf and stacked onto a linoleum-tiled patch of the library. There were twenty-thousand-plus books and we were trying to keep them roughly organized. Halfway through this massive job, we were informed that the library also needed to be repainted, and the books could not remain stacked on the floor. Now we needed to redo a couple days’ worth of work and put every book into a box, again maintaining a rough order. We were awash in books; it was as if someone had made a small puncture in a dam. Once the shelves were down, the flow continued ferociously. Nobody could take a step without tripping over a pile of books.

Once the books were gone, each shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases had to be unscrewed and removed. Then the steel frames of the cases had to be carefully felled. Fifteen men would have to carefully lower these surprisingly heavy beams down, unscrew them, and then haul them out or stack them. Hampered by the tight prison schedule and interruptions for lockdowns (following violence on the units), this effort dragged on for days.