Newjack (23 page)

“Come on, CO, that’s bullshit!” one protested loudly.

“Yeah, CO, the regular never make us do that,” the other joined in. I got them in anyway, but the complaining caught on with the two or three keeplocks whose cells were on the other side of the shower.

“Let ’em stay out, CO!”

“You too harsh, man!”

“You want to start a slave revolt, CO? That’s what you doing?”

It was too early in the day for this, I said to myself. I walked
over to the loudest keeplock, P-49, a somewhat scary-looking guy with unkempt dreadlocks, dirty clothes, and one gray and clouded eye.

“What I’m doing is absolutely appropriate, and you know it,” I said, trying to keep my voice low but unable to preserve my sangfroid. “Do me a favor. Shut up and let me do my job.”

“Woohoo, ‘Shut up!’ CO told me to shut up!” he crowed, completely jazzed, as I walked away. Others took up the hue and cry. “CO told him to shut up!” I walked back toward the center gate to start locking the returning keeplocks back into their cells.

And not a minute too soon. The keeplock officers, always eager to avoid extra work for themselves, were beating a hasty retreat down the center stairs.

“Hey!” I yelled after them as they waited for the officer downstairs to open the center gate. “How about sticking around a couple of minutes, help me get these keeplocks back in? I’ve got thirty of them out and don’t know where a single one locks. You going to leave me with that?” Grudgingly, they returned.

At 11
A.M.
, when it was time for the count, an officer newer than me appeared on the gallery. She was Reid, a tall redhead I had worked with one day when she was in training. The OIC had sent her to do the go-round—a list of where all the inmates planned to be after lunch, so that they could be tracked down in case they had a visit or had forgotten a medical appointment or the like. Go-round forms were filled out at the same time as count forms. To complete one, you stopped at each cell on a gallery and said, for example, “L-3, where are you going this afternoon?”

To let inmates know they’d better be dressed and decent, female officers always yelled, “Female on the gallery!” before setting out. That cry usually occasioned a dozen mirrors thrust out of cells so that inmates could get a good look at her. Sometimes catcalls would issue forth; today, they were especially obnoxious from P-north.

“Hey, Red! Show me that red pussy!” yelled one inmate. “You ain’t gettin’ enough, are you, Red?” called another. “I’m gonna give it you!” I had misgivings as Officer Reid marched bravely down P-north. She wasn’t the tough sort, just a farm girl who needed a job. And with her looks, she was an attention-getter. Some inmates tried to ejaculate on female officers; this had already happened to two of my classmates. I kept an eye on her until my phone rang.

Two minutes later, Reid was back in my office.

“You got a Misbehavior Form?” she asked, flustered.

“What happened?” I asked, handing her one.

“Masturbator,” she said.

“What cell?”

She told me. She seemed very tired.

“He’s a keeplock already—too bad,” I noted, checking my list. “Anything else?” Reid shook her head. I rang the sergeant’s office—Wickersham took the call—and let him know. He said to send her down.

I walked down P-north.

“What’s your fucking problem?” I demanded of the inmate. He was lying on his bunk, pants zipped up, smiling, looking smug. He wouldn’t answer. Upstate, I had heard, this kind of thing didn’t happen too often. Upstate, an inmate who spoke a wrong word to a female officer quickly regretted it.

“CO, you call the sergeant yet?” This was the voice of P-49, the keeplock I had told to shut up earlier in the morning. He’d been badgering me since then to get a sergeant upstairs to speak with him. I’d called the sergeant, a man who was working with Wickersham; he knew what P-49 wanted and said that he’d get back to him. I’d already told this to P-49. I repeated it to him again, impatiently, adding that there was nothing more I could do for him.

“Oh yes there is, CO. You can suck my dick!” P-49 proclaimed loudly. There were hoots of approval from the other keeplocks on P-north as I walked away.

P-49 continued to hector me the rest of the day. Unfortunately, his cell was close to my office. “CO, get away from my cell,” he’d yell when I walked by. “Homer, get back to the sticks.” His neighbor keeplocks would cheer in support; they were his chorus.

“He looks like a puppet, don’t he?” he taunted as I tried to keep my temper in check. I knew I had a loose-jointed style of running, but I had never heard it suggested about my walk before.

My nerves were frayed. I’d noticed that he was holding his mirror out on the gallery to keep track of my approaches and also that, against the rules, he sometimes left it balanced up on his bars. Once I had tried to grab the mirror, but he had anticipated that move and snatched it away before I could. Half an hour later, I noticed it was up again. Quietly this time, I walked up and took it. He was furious. “You better watch out when you come back by, CO,” he threatened, adding something that I couldn’t understand
but that I presumed to be about shitting me down. That was an angry keeplock’s trump card.

In my eagerness to get the mirror, I’d placed myself on the wrong side of his cell. To get back to my office, I’d have to pass by again.

Another officer was on the gallery, escorting a civilian who was repairing the chain-link fence. “Cespedes, watch me as I go by P-forty-nine,” I said. Something told me that a witness might come in handy.

I collected myself and walked down the gallery as I normally would have. I probably should have sprinted past the cell, but I didn’t want to betray any fear. As I drew even with P-49, it all happened very fast: a gob of spit flew past my nose, with my cheek catching some spray, and then the keeplock’s arm swung out at full length, his fist catching my head just behind the ear. I stumbled forward and then looked back. Cespedes and the fence guy had both seen the incident. The fence guy’s mouth was wide open.

My heart was beating fast. I spent a minute calming myself down and then called the sergeant’s office. Wickersham answered. I told him what had happened.

“Who was it?”

“P-forty-nine. Folk.”

“Bring down your Misbehavior Report,” he said curtly. And hung up.

And leave the gallery without an officer? I wondered. That was against rules. But it was only a half hour or so until I was relieved, and it would take me a while to write the report.

Cespedes came into the office with another officer. He asked if I was okay (I only had a little bump) and what had led up to the incident. He turned over the mirror. On the back, in graffiti-style script, Folk had written:
The Universal Don. Da Silva-Back Guerrilla. The Assassin
. I told them about the harassment, told them Wickersham wanted to see me.

“Hey, Wick’s a good guy,” the other officer said. “He’ll take care of you.”

“Wickersham’s a horse’s ass,” I replied.

The man looked taken aback. Evidently, he was a Wickersham partisan. “Hey, pal, you’re on your own then,” he said, walking out.

Though he hadn’t said he was going to, Wickersham did send an officer to relieve me. She said things like, “Too bad we can’t go
in there and show that asshole what the fuck is what.” I felt a little better.

When I arrived in his office downstairs, Wickersham glanced up and pointed to the chair beside his desk. I sat. He read my ticket and then went through a reprise of the just-the-facts interrogation he had administered that afternoon in the Watch Commander’s Office. This time I didn’t even care. He wrote out a new ticket for me in red pen. I watched his right arm as he did, with its six shiny, hairless, cigarette end—size circles. Other officers and a sergeant came in to offer sympathy and read the ticket, many of them assuming I had been shitted down. The nice thing about the finished ticket was that it all sounded worse than it was, containing words such as
assault, unhygienic act, threats
, etc. I did feel an element of shame in being a victim, and heard myself pointing out to everyone that this was the first time it had happened to me. Wickersham asked why I was walking close enough for him to reach me; I said that I hadn’t wanted to appear afraid, which he accepted, though he told me an officer should always walk as far as possible from the cells. “It might give you more time to grab his arm and break it,” he said, never cracking a smile.

It wasn’t really a joke to me, either. This very fantasy had already crossed my mind.

There was more paperwork. Wickersham had to send me to the ER to be checked for injuries. There, a nurse let me wash up with antibacterial soap. She was vociferous in her scorn for my assailant, and I felt warmly toward her, at least until she whispered, “I’ll bet he was black, right?” Wickersham entered with a Polaroid camera and took front and profile shots of me—required, I think, in case I made a claim for workmen’s comp. I looked at the photos as we walked to the Watch Commander’s Office. They were the first time I’d ever seen myself through Wickersham’s eyes, as it were. The officer in those shots appeared gaunt and wimpy to me.

The lieutenant who had been my shift commander asked if I was okay. Wickersham had already been in touch with the Box and had reserved a cell for my assailant. This may have spoken to his clout, since there often wasn’t room in there. I felt a touch of gratitude. He spoke to a team of officers, who were doing some overtime, about relocating Folk to the Box. “He might not go willingly,” he said, which was greeted with nods of satisfaction. I would have enjoyed watching the “relocation,” but they would never have let me. And to be honest, all I really wanted to do was leave.

As I walked through the front gate and outside, a sergeant whom I liked, Murray, called out. “Hey, Conover,” he said, and made a hawking sound. I smiled weakly.

“So you already heard, huh?” I asked.

“Heard about it in about a minute,” Murray answered. The prison was a small world. I wondered if the incident would make the announcements at lineup.

I had a pounding headache—it had been growing all afternoon—and as I pulled my car onto the highway, I experienced a vivid fantasy of A-block going up in flames, all the dross inside being consumed by the fire. And then came dissonant flashes of memory from that same day: the inmate who had tried to tell me a joke as I set up the locking board outside his cell; the inmate who had warned me about Wickersham approaching; the inmate whose classical guitar playing, particularly gorgeous in that setting, had drifted into my office around lunchtime. They weren’t all bad, I thought. Just most of them.

Officially, the dark, squat building was the Special Housing Unit, abbreviated SHU and pronounced
shoe
. But officers called it the Box. It was solitary confinement, a place of punishment within a place of punishment.

The Box had a doorbell and a heavy metal door with a peephole, and a barred gate as well. The structure was compact—redbrick, two-story. Each floor had two galleries, back to back, with fifteen cells. What made it fundamentally different from the other housing units of Sing Sing was that its inmates did not, as a rule, leave the building; in fact, they barely left their cells. Meals were delivered in the Styrofoam “clamshells” that restaurants use for takeout orders; library books, for those granted access to them, were wheeled in on a cart; inmate barbers were brought in to clip Box inmates one at a time at the end of the short galleries; even disciplinary hearings were conducted in the individual cells.

Half of the inmates in the Box, as it turned out—all thirty on the upper floor—were not disciplinary cases but men under protective custody, of which there were two kinds. Those who had asked to be protected were rats or rape or slicing victims who had identified their assailants—people who had enemies and, if left in the general population, might reasonably be expected to be hurt or killed. Among those in the Box involuntarily were victims who had
not
ratted out their assailants, and thus were feared to be either loaded guns, waiting for their chance to get revenge, or sitting ducks, soon to be victimized again. One inmate in there was a suspected gang member whose bed in A-block had been set on fire by a Molotov cocktail; another was a borderline bug convinced that a particular officer was trying to kill him.

Downstairs, by contrast, were the baddest of the bad—almost exclusively, inmates who had assaulted guards. It felt like a dungeon down there, in part because entry to the building was via the floor above, but also because it was darker, with smaller windows and lower ceilings.

The Box had the highest testosterone level in the prison, and somehow smelled like it—close, musty, with an acrid whiff of perspiration. Among COs, working in a max was considered more macho than working in a medium or anywhere else. To work in the Box of a max was—well, the maximum. The officers who chose it tended to be size large. They had a habit of tucking their trousers into the tops of their unlaced boots and rolling even their short-sleeved shirts up over their muscles, the casual SWAT team look.

One was a shaved-headed monster named Perlstein. The day I worked downstairs during OJT, he helped a fellow officer change
his shirt; the man was so muscle-bound, he couldn’t reach back far enough to get his second hand into the sleeve hole. Perlstein then reviewed for us the pat-frisking procedure used on every single inmate before and after the inmate was released to the Box’s small exercise courtyard. “You, get on the wall,” he grunted at me.