Newjack (22 page)

“Ah, ease up a little,” Chilmark, the officer in charge, counseled. “Nobody takes Wick seriously. He’s a fuckin’ bug.”

Bug
was prison slang for nutcase. I’d never heard the expression applied to a member of the staff before, only to inmates. But it made sense, in light of the other information that circulated about the sergeant. What was known for certain was there for all to see: several circular round scars on his right forearm. He had been a POW in Vietnam, people said. Upon returning, he had started work as a Sing Sing CO and had been there just two and a half weeks when he and sixteen others were taken hostage and held by inmates for more than fifty hours during the B-block occupation of 1983. Those scars, everyone said, were cigarette burns inflicted by his captors during one of those experiences.

Hearing this story, I checked out some newspaper reports from the time. There was a bearded young Wickersham in a large photo after the incident was over, acting as spokesman for the just-released hostages. Instead of the dominating father figure abusing us for our own good, he was a chain-smoking newjack begging reporters to “bear with me—I’m a little nervous.” Being held hostage—suddenly finding yourself prisoner on a volatile inmaterun
Death Row—could damage a person in fundamental ways. I thought about odd Sergeant Bloom. What was the legacy of those terror-filled days to Wickersham’s psyche?

Perhaps it was the particular context of the B-block riot that had marked Wickersham. In a report to the governor following the incident, a state watchdog gave credence to inmate and officer statements that the sergeant assigned to B-block the night the incident began had arrived at work drunk and had so angered inmates with his inappropriate and abusive orders that they gradually refused to comply with anything the officers said and finally rioted. The backdrop was a prisonwide feeling of rebelliousness: inmates in A-block had been demonstrating during the preceding weeks over prison mismanagement. But it seemed that the one sergeant had set it off.

At some level, I thought, Wickersham hated our innocence and wanted to cure it through abuse. But on another, by keeping new officers on their toes and keeping the blocks running according to the rules—by being a force for consistency—Wickersham may have been insuring himself against repeating the experience. The work inside was never finished. New officers always needed guidance, inmates always had to be listened to but at the same time kept in their place. Wickersham, I thought, probably derived a sense of purpose from obsessively riding herd on us. Part of it may even have been a generous impulse. But it came wrapped up in all sorts of nastiness.

In July, I was penciled in for two weeks as officer in charge of the A-block gym. This huge room was filled morning, afternoon, and evening with inmates, and my day shift spanned two of those times. It was regarded as a fairly good post in that you generally didn’t have to spend a lot of time telling people what to do. The regular officer, presently on vacation, had had it for years. Its main downside was risk. On a cold or rainy day, the gym could fill with upward of four hundred inmates, and there were moments when I would be the only officer there with them.

Depending on the time of day, eight to twelve porters were assigned to the gym. I had to put through their payroll, I was told, and therefore to keep porter attendance. (The twelve to fifteen cents an hour they earned was credited to their commissary accounts.) Because I knew the B-block porters to be a tight and surly
bunch, I thought I’d better let the crew know right away who was in charge.

They arrived before rec was called, supposedly to get a jump on the cleaning. There was a lot to do, because an inspection of the block was scheduled for the next day. The gym had a full-size basketball court with a spectator area around it, a weights area the size of a half court, a table-and-benches zone for cards, chess, dominoes, and similar games, and two television areas. There was also a locked equipment room in front of which sat my desk, on an elevated platform, with a microphone on top. Instead of hopping to work, the porters turned on the TVs and sat down. I turned off the one most of them were watching.

“Gentlemen, I’m going to be here for the next two weeks and I want to talk with you about when the cleaning gets done and who does what.”

They sat silently.

“For example, who normally cleans today?”

At first, nobody said anything. There were stares of indifference and defiance. A pudgy inmate whose nickname, I would later learn, was Rerun finally spoke. “Don’t nobody normally clean today,” he said. “Tuesday’s the day off.”

“The day off. So when do you clean?”

“Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. We know what to do.”

I tried wresting more details out of them, but they wouldn’t say more. Firing porters, I knew, was a bureaucratic procedure that took weeks; I’d be working elsewhere in the prison before the wheels had even begun to turn. And evidently the regular officer was satisfied with these men. Wishing I’d never started down this path, I finally had to settle for a plea dressed up as an order. “Those ledges up there? They’re covered with dust, and the inspectors will be looking. So tomorrow, make sure somebody takes care of that along with all the rest.”

“They don’t never check those ledges,” came the quick reply as I walked to my desk. And the TVs went back on.

The next day, somewhat to my surprise, six or seven of the porters set to work in earnest upon their arrival. For half an hour, they swept and mopped and picked up trash. As promised, they skipped the ledges. The place looked pretty good, and the inspectors never came.

I began to relax, and as I did, I began to understand the complex culture of the gym. There was, naturally, a big basketball scene—
a league, in fact, with prison-paid inmate referees and a scoreboard and games that took place about every other day. The games were often exciting to watch—sometimes even a few officers would attend—but also nervous-making, as the crowds that gathered for matches between popular teams were partisan and players would sometimes get into fights.

Weight lifting was also popular, and when I was new at Sing Sing, it was intimidating to be faced with the huge, muscle-bound inmates who took it seriously. But soon I noticed that these purposeful, self-disciplined inmates were almost never the ones who gave us problems, and I came to agree with the opinion, generally held among officers, that the weights and machines were valuable. The only complaint I ever heard from officers was that inmates’ weight equipment was much better than what was provided to officers in the small weight room in the Administration Building.

Beyond these activities, the gym held many surprises. On a busy day, it seemed almost like a bazaar. A dozen fans of
Days of Our Lives
gathered religiously every day for the latest installment of their favorite soap. Behind them, regular games of Scrabble, chess, checkers, and bridge were conducted with great seriousness. (One of the bridge players, known as Drywall—a white-bearded man with dreadlocks—came from 5-Building; more than once when he was late, his partners asked me to call the officers over there and make sure he’d left so they could start their game.) At the table next to the games, an older man sold hand-painted greeting cards for all occasions to raise money for the Jaycees, one of Sing Sing’s “approved inmate organizations.” In a far corner behind the weight area, at the bottom of a small flight of stairs, a regular group of inmates practiced some kind of martial art. Martial arts were forbidden by the rules, but these guys were so pointedly low-key, and the rule seemed to me so ill conceived, that I didn’t break it up. In the men’s bathroom, inmates smoked—also against the rules but, from what I could tell, tacitly accepted.

A floor-to-ceiling net separated these areas from the basketball court. At court’s edge, a transvestite known as Miss Jackson would braid men’s hair as they watched the game or press their clothing with one of the electric irons inmates were allowed to use in the gym. She received packs of Newport cigarettes—the commissary’s most popular brand—as payment. Miss Jackson seemed a sweet man who was at pains to be noticed: She stretched the collar of her sweatshirt so that it exposed one shoulder, and cut
scallop-shaped holes in the body so that it held some aesthetic interest. She often wore Walkman headphones, disconnected, just for the look. She must have been rich in cigarettes, and I wondered how she spent them.

Out on the court one day, just a few yards from Miss Jackson’s enterprise, four short-haired, long-sleeved, bow-tied members of the Nation of Islam stood in a close circle, sternly chastising another member of the group, who must have somehow strayed. One of them was also a gym porter, among those most courteous to me. The juxtaposition of such opposites—the ideologues of the Nation and the would-be sexpot—reminded me of street life in New York City.

I walked the floor every fifteen or twenty minutes, making sure no one was smoking too openly, telling those inmates who had put on do-rags to take them off (it violated the rule against wearing hats inside), and making announcements when there was room at the bank of inmate phones that were lined up on the flats near the front gate. (Inmates who had signed up on a list could be excused from the gym to make a call.) It wasn’t a bad job overall, and I suppose I should have been sad to see it go. But, as usual, I was simply relieved that nothing awful had happened under my watch.

I’d been away from A-block for a while—Sergeant Holmes had been sending me to B-block, which I liked better—but one day a different chart sergeant was on duty and back I went. I was sad to see that Rufino was still the officer in charge. For weeks, it seemed, he had sported a big shiner, courtesy of an inmate he’d angered, who one day had marched straight into Rufino’s tiny office and popped him in the eye. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, I thought. Wickersham’s abusiveness seemed to enable Rufino’s; they were a twin star of meanness. Soon after he was punched, Rufino had spotted me chatting at the front gate with Allen while a keeplock I was escorting to the hospital waited to the side. Rufino called me into his office. “Don’t you
ever
turn your back on an inmate,” he scolded me fiercely.

Unfortunately, in practical terms, it was impossible not to turn away from an inmate occasionally—as Rufino’s shiner demonstrated. I didn’t point this out.

“Right, right, sure, sure,” I said.

The day of my arrival back on A-block, I told Rufino my post number and learned that I was an escort, which delighted me. I would be spending brief periods on a gallery but would also have a lot of time off, accompanying inmates to the mess hall and, later, to the commissary or package room or school building. I relaxed, knowing I wasn’t being put in charge of an unfamiliar gallery.

Before I could leave, though, Wickersham emerged from his office and looked over the day’s list of postings. L-and-P gallery, on the top floor, had been assigned to a brand-new officer. The guy was so new that he didn’t even seem worried about it. Wickersham scanned the group of us milling around the OIC’s office. “Switch him with Conover,” he told Rufino.

Son of a bitch! Did he have it in for me? I was sure he did, until someone later suggested he perhaps thought I was a competent gallery officer and that things were less likely to go wrong with me up there. I doubted that theory, and in any case, it was small comfort. I was going to be on L-and-P gallery all day.

There were a lot of keeplocks up there, which was never a good thing. P-north, in particular, had a high concentration: ten keep-locks, or one for every four cells. Several of these were in consecutive cells, which concentrated the bad vibe. Most of them left for keeplock rec about an hour into the shift. My problems began when they returned, an hour or so later. When the OIC announced the return over the PA system, my first job was to clear the galleries of other inmates. This was to minimize the chance of trouble—it was chaos enough to have a gallery full of keeplocks at large. The only inmates who were out on the galleries were three or four porters. Two of them were slow to return to their cells and lock in; when I saw the keeplocks arriving—and Wickersham lurking near the end gates—I ordered these two laggards into a shower stall on P-north, next to my office.