Newjack (9 page)

With four weeks to go, Dieter was really starting to get on my nerves. (I’m sure it would delight him to read this.) Now nicknamed Sarge by many in our session, he had in the first week been elected session leader—our group’s liaison to the instructors and Sergeant Bloom. This was, in large degree, because he knew how to march and had other military training that could keep us out of trouble. Even I had voted for him; he seemed conscientious and responsible. He was elected over his own objections: He was too impatient
with people, he freely admitted, and was basically a misanthrope. “I’m best off by myself,” he said one day.

His new authority seemed to give freer rein to his mean streak. Dieter had a sixth sense that told him I was somehow out of place in the Academy, and he didn’t like things that were out of place. He would ride me in a joking way in the room, criticizing my housecleaning or the way I wore my uniform.

I can’t remember having met a person who was more unlike me than Dieter. Our every habit was opposite—he rising at the earliest moment, I catching a few winks; he enamored of the martial life, I skeptical or oblivious of it; he in love with firearms and hunting, I indifferent; he a smoker and drinker, I doing little of either; he fond of gay jokes and full of violent fantasies about liberals and women, I counting among my friends many who are gay, liberal, or female or all three.

One night, when we had turned the lights off, he flat-out asked what I was doing in the Academy. I flat-out asked him back. “My job didn’t pay too good,” he said. “Not much security.” “Well I could say the same,” I retorted, with less than total candor. No other officer, in my entire state service, would ever ask me a question about my past, whether employment or education; the lack of curiosity surprised and relieved me. Previously, I’d vaguely told two or three classmates that I’d been involved in publishing and printing. Dieter now suggested I tell people I’d been working a job they’d understand. “Tell ’em you’re a ball-joint chromer,” he suggested. “Sure,” I said. “Tell me how that goes.”

Dieter would accuse me of shaking the bunk bed when I turned over; he joked that if I didn’t stop, he’d bring in one of his guns and shoot me. That left me no choice but to murder him before the weekend, I retorted. Then he started saying he’d shoot me whenever I did anything to irritate him—like when I wouldn’t move quickly enough out of his way when he was headed for his locker, which was directly beneath mine or, later, when I caught a cold.

I’m pretty sure Dieter gave me the cold. He came back from home with one on a Sunday night. By the end of the week, I had it. As his subsided, he treated me as if I had the plague. He wouldn’t touch anything I’d touched, whether it was a doorknob or a faucet, and he winced whenever I blew my nose. We always tried to sit apart in the mess hall, but sometimes seating arrangements were out of our hands, and one night we found ourselves across
the table from each other. I had a stuffy nose and was sniffing. “Don’t you blow that thing!” he warned, in what surely sounded like a joke to the woman sitting next to him; she smiled. But I knew, in the way I knew Dieter at some level
did
think about shooting me when he merely joked about it, that he was serious. I tried not to blow my nose, just for the sake of peace. But finally there was no other option. I took a napkin, turned away from the table in my seat, and blew my nose.

“Fuckin’ asshole!” Dieter muttered, throwing down his fork and standing up to clear his tray. He stormed away. The woman looked at me. “Was he serious?” she asked.

“He’s a different kind of guy,” I answered.

That night, when Dieter was telling Gary about how he had murdered his little brother when the kid sneezed at the dinner table, I knew we were near the point where something was going to give: Dieter was in abuse mode nightly. He threatened to shoot me in the top bunk as he shot the birds on the roof of his barn, made jokes about “fucking bitches”—indeed, about skinning them as you would skin a deer you’d shot—and about smashing the heads of toddlers. They were I’m-sick-and-I-like-it kinds of jokes. Would we fight, I wondered, or would I go to Nigro or the sergeant?

In the end, we were saved by a Howard Johnson’s motor lodge. So desperate was the state for new COs, they had started another training session before ours was finished; for our last three weeks, we were given rooms at a HoJo so that newer recruits could move into our dorm rooms. The motel rooms were doubles, and to my profound relief, my roommate was mild-mannered Gary.

Monday morning, and Colton and I had drawn the chore of reporting the count to Sergeant Bloom. Toward the beginning of our stay at the Academy, this job scared everyone, because of the likelihood that Bloom would find some fault in the presenters; you had to say things just right, look just right, move just right. But now we’d had a lot of practice, and neither Colton nor I had run badly afoul of Bloom. Also, Colton seemed among the most capable of my classmates. He had a degree from the John Jay College of Criminal Law in New York City. He scored well on our weekly tests. And he even had a sort of preppie, arrogant air about him: If I’d run into him wearing tasseled loafers in some uptown real estate
developer’s office, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Here, he seemed supremely overqualified. Nigro went over the drill with us as we left the classroom, but I felt we hardly needed a refresher. Colton and I were bulletproof: We were going to blow Bloom away.

We checked each other’s appearance and then smartly wound our way through the halls. Coming upon the open door to Bloom’s office, we slowed, then halted, Colton in front. We could hear Bloom on the phone. Wait, or proceed? Nigro had been late arriving, so we would certainly be the last session to report—and it was getting later by the minute. We waited at attention for a while and then, consulting each other in whispers, decided to proceed. Colton reached around the doorway and rapped on Bloom’s door. Bloom kept on talking. Finally, we heard the phone being slammed down. “Come in!” he roared.

Spinning on our toes as required, we stepped into Bloom’s office and then stood side by side at attention before his desk. Bloom rose and approached to get a close look at us. “Correction officer recruits Colton and Conover with the seven forty-five
A.M.
count, sir,” said Colton. “It’s twenty-seven total, twenty-six in, one out.” I handed him the paperwork.

Bloom looked at the clock on his wall. “It’s eight-fifteen,” he said accusingly. We stared straight ahead, not responding. He glanced at the count slip, the classroom inventory and, finally, the meal evaluation form. (We had learned the first week never to criticize any of the food. After our class gave the inedible pea soup an “unsatisfactory” rating, Bloom angrily demanded of the messengers why they hadn’t taken it up with the kitchen staff before complaining to him.) The meal evaluation we gave him now was for the preceding Friday. Bloom noticed that we had rated Friday’s dinner “good” and barked out that we hadn’t eaten dinner at the Academy on Friday—we’d gone home.

“It’s a false report!” he yelled. He paused as we stood still. “Well? Get me another one!”

Colton and I beat our retreat to the classroom and filled out a new form. Nigro rolled his eyes when we told him the mistake. In a matter of minutes we were back before Sergeant Bloom. He scrutinized the new report and acidly noted that we had neglected to sign it. Caught in some continuing confusion over whether to carry pens in our shirt pockets or hide them in our pants pockets (there was no official Academy policy; all that mattered was that everyone in a session did the same thing), Colton and I realized
that we did not, at the moment, have pens. We had taken them out before coming to see Bloom, since none of the other sessions carried pens in
their
breast pockets. Bloom stared at us as we realized our dilemma.

“May we borrow a pen, sir?” Colton finally asked, with trepidation. Sighing loudly, Bloom handed Colton his. Colton signed and handed the report to me; I signed and returned it to Colton, who said, “It’s the sergeant’s.” I smiled and, with a little laugh, handed the pen back to Bloom.

“Why are you laughing?!” Bloom thundered, reddening. (“Because who on earth could ever take this seriously?” I wanted to say.) He was now beyond his usual ruddy color—he’d gone deep crimson. “I have to buy these!” That was even funnier, I thought, but the sight before me took care of my smile. Colton decided that our duty was done. We slunk back to the classroom and assured Nigro that our second trip had gone just fine.

Things were getting worse at Coxsackie. We’d heard rumors of disturbances there since our visit, the first week of March. Colton came back one Sunday night in early April and said he’d heard through his father that two officers had been stabbed there the week before. Later that week Chamberlain, whose father was a sergeant in the department (and had, incidentally, been Sergeant Bloom’s roommate when both of them were at the Academy), said he’d heard that three more had been hurt. Finally, on a Monday morning in mid-April, Nigro asked us if we’d seen the papers: Eight Coxsackie COs had been hospitalized on Saturday, and two more on Sunday. And, related or not, another large group of officers had been hurt at a midstate medium-security facility called Mohawk. The journalist in me wanted details: Where in the prison had the attacks occurred? What had instigated them? How unusual were they? But as I was learning, part of being a CO was appearing indifferent to such details. Curiosity, perhaps, was not very macho. I prayed that somebody would ask Nigro for more information, but nobody did; and there the discussion ended.

But it cast a pall, this news. The very place we’d visited was in turmoil. Experienced officers, not newjacks, which we’d soon be, were getting badly beaten up. Despite the silence, I knew everyone was thinking the same thing: Would we be next? The feeling must be somewhat similar in the military among troops about to be dispatched
to faraway trouble spots: Some of us are going to get hurt. And yet the nature of both jobs was that, ceding the decision making to commanding officers, you went anyway. In this agreement to go, there was solidarity.

During the pain from chemical agents, the classroom boredom, and—especially—my conflicts with Dieter, I had always consoled myself with the knowledge that my career as a guard might easily end after seven weeks, with graduation from the Academy. My real life was still waiting for me, and there was plenty of work out there.

But some group feeling was overtaking me. More and more, the thought of leaving now was unimaginable. Everything so far had been prelude: From what we’d been told, you could be a star at the Academy and then fall flat on your face inside a real prison. There was no true preparation for the main act—you just had to do it. I wanted to see if I could; I wanted to see what would happen to all of us. The group had momentum, and a probable trajectory—Sing Sing. Down that road lay fear, but the deal was that we went anyway, together.

Later that week, we heard that two more Coxsackie officers had been hurt, bringing the total to seventeen. A lieutenant attached to the Academy was dispatched, telling us at the end of a lecture on another subject that somebody had to go “and straighten things out down there.” We officers said nothing—just swallowed hard.