Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  A thirtysomething man in a gray wool suit, a young attorney type, paces. His muscular greyhound, who appears to be wearing a sweater set, is leashed to a park bench.

  “Honey,” I hear him say into his cell, “we both know you weren’t a good wife, but that’s water under the bridge, okay? But please don’t take this out on our son.”

  Later I see him blow up at his misbehaving dog and pull it violently into submission.

  I see a mother speak to her early tween daughter as though they are competitive girlfriends. “Why were you shy when you were talking to that man?” asks the daughter. Her mother gets defensive: “I wasn’t shy,” she says, “why were you shy?”

  A young yuppie family wheels by, a father, mother, and one-year-old in a thousand-dollar stroller that appears to have anti-lock brakes. I hear the mother say to the child, “We’re going to make a big circle around the park—Wow-wee!” She claps ecstatically. I don’t know whether this gesture is touching or unspeakably grim. I decide to call it even. On the other side of the park, a seven-year-old in a tutu is overtaken by a spirit: she runs full speed, leaps onto a park bench, howls mightily at the moon, and then rushes back to mommy. The young professionals take this as a sign. They relinquish the park to the fiends for the night.

  Back at the prison, I stand at the top of the outdoor stairs, taking in a last fresh breath. A toddler comes over to inspect me. In his tiny one-piece winter suit, his giant eyes peering at me through a tightly pinched hood, he resembles a little space explorer, roving a strange and foreign territory. And so he is. He examines my shoelace for a bit, and perhaps likes what he sees, because he smiles broadly. He continues on his journey, and discovers a fascinating discarded lottery ticket.

  The line in front of the prison has swelled considerably in the thirty minutes since I began my walk. A mass of worried people, like refugees trying to cross a border. For many, these visits are a complex ritual, often political in nature, a single mother’s diplomatic mission to secure a reliable ally in her man. While children from my community sit in marble synagogues in other parts of the city, followed by a warm Shabbat dinner at home, these children wait in the cold to visit a mother or father, or both, in a steel and concrete prison.

  About now in the synagogues, the congregations are singing.

  L’kha dodi l’krat kallah …

  Go my beloved, the Bride to meet, the face of Shabbat, let us greet …

  Here the line moves forward a few inches.

  Standing apart from the crowd, on the side of the steps toward the prison tower, is a young mother. It is unclear at first why she is standing there. Suddenly, she lifts a tightly swaddled infant over her head, as though presenting the child to the tower itself, offering her baby up to some remote mountain deity. The contrast is startling: the baby, limb-heavy and soft as wet cotton, hoisted up against the cold wind and a tower that bears down massively. It’s almost as though she’s trying to make a point about the overwhelming fragility of this creature in her hands. For a moment, I fear, irrationally, for the infant’s life, as if it’s about to be crushed by the tower.

  It is now dark. Inmates are visible in the building, floor by floor, moving about, the fluorescence of their cells matches the frigid light of the moon. I notice an inmate near the top of the tower, stirring. He stands as a distant silhouette in his window, one arm up in a sort of salute, as though skywriting in slow motion. From this distance, he seems almost as small as the baby, and as helpless against the weight of the tower. The silhouette man lowers his arm, which is the woman’s cue, I suppose, to lower their baby. She nestles the infant safely back into his warm nook. Covers him fussily. His kindergarten-aged sister leans, sleeping as she stands, wedged between her mother and the stroller.

  There are children everywhere in prison. Even before my first day of work, when I sat guiltily in the lobby, waiting to take my drug test, I’d noticed them playing, unaware of the adult solemnity of the surroundings. The children that day had been busy devising games, sporting events, entire Olympiads designed especially for that space. I watched as a little girl—whom I took as a prison lobby veteran—took the hand of another and showed her the best places to hide, initiating her as a member of the prison lobby gang. By now, she herself was probably a veteran.

  And since then, I’d seen hundreds more. And not just in the lobby, or waiting outside, but inside the prison itself. During my first month at work, a prison shrink cautioned me, casually over lunch in the staff cafeteria, to be aware of juvenile behavior among inmates. Regardless of their actual ages, she said, a surprising number of inmates were the emotional age of children. The result, she said, of a lifetime suffering abuse, physical, emotional, sexual—a profile that was so common among inmates, especially women, that it was almost the norm. I had been skeptical of the shrink’s mass diagnosis.

  But it was hard to ignore daily instances of stunted behavior. I learned that even a hardened criminal capable of murder was equally capable of dissolving into a terrified child under the slightest pressure. Although machismo veiled these impulses somewhat among the men, immature behaviors were present in a variety of small actions: childish pranks, fibbing, attention seeking, acting out. I recognized a childlike earnestness in the inmate, aged thirty-six, who pleaded with me to give him tape so that he could stick his name, which he had printed out in a colorful, calligraphic font, to his school folder.

  Play took on many different forms. Through a hallway window I once witnessed male inmates clutching dolls during a class. After the lesson was over and the inmates had dispersed, I popped my head into the classroom and asked the teacher, “What was that all about?”

  She’d borrowed the dolls from the prison’s parenting class, where they’re used for demonstrations. But in this class, the teacher told me, the dolls served no direct educational function.

  “They’re just there for the guys to play with,” she said, as if this made perfect sense.

  Apparently, some of the men simply liked holding the dolls, pretending to care for them, to change their diapers. They made a joke of it, used it as a way to flirt with her. But even after the joke was over, they’d keep the dolls in their laps as they worked on their school material. They handled the dolls with excessive care, she told me, and placed them gently onto the desk as though they were actual infants. The teacher believed that the inmates felt more comfortable engaging in this type of playacting around her, a woman.

  “I have to laugh about it,” said the teacher, shaking her head, “otherwise I’d definitely cry.”

  But with the women inmates, these kinds of revealing behaviors were not subtle at all. They were impossible to miss. Almost every night in the library, a woman inmate would demonstrate some variety of childlike behavior: crying helplessly when a problem with a simple solution arose; writing a note, riddled with misspellings, in big curly letters; talking in a toddler’s voice when she wanted me to do her a favor; painful shyness; hyperactivity; clumsy lying; squabbling over whose turn it was to talk to me. In the library, I saw a murderer suck her thumb. I broke up games of tag. And this was all reinforced by the structure of prison, where inmates have about as much control over their lives as children. And yet, almost all are parents.

  Many inmates, especially women, felt comfortable in the library, one of the least prison-like spaces in the facility—and, whether I liked it or not, their need for child play would manifest itself on my watch. This was yet another unexpected use of the library space.

  Outside, during my dinner break that Friday night, the line of visitors is calm. The prison is about to change its visiting policy from an open first come, first served policy to a policy of advance reservations made only by certain designated people. Each inmate will be allowed visits from a list of three people, plus attorneys. This is to help curb long lines and to ensure that children aren’t hanging around prison after bedtime, like tonight. But mostly it’s aimed at ending the era of fistfights in the lobby between women visitors who hold conflic
ting claims of wifey-hood or babymom-dom to a particular man.

  The service in the synagogues is wrapping up with the kiddush: And on the seventh day He completed His work. Somewhere in town, my friend Yoni is having a beer with friends, celebrating the completion of his contract working in prison. The woman in front of the tower with the stroller is gone. The toddler space explorer is asleep in his mother’s arms, next in line to enter the prison.

  That’s where I am headed, too. Time to go back into the library and greet the women inmates from the tower. I pin my badge back to my shirt, cut the giant line of tired refugees, pass through the lobby, wink at Sully, the prison night guard, slip through the metal detector, and wait for the heavy door to roll open.

  The Church

  “It took me years to realize what I did to Chrissy.”

  Jessica leaned over the library counter and whispered to me. The escort officers had just arrived.

  For some reason she always began major conversations with only minutes to go before the end of her library period. Perhaps this was a deliberate effort to unburden herself without having to go through with a conversation.

  A week earlier she’d come to me with a minute left and told me about the first time she went to court. She’d been a precocious seventeen-year-old with a fake ID. She’d turned a few tricks to earn the two hundred bucks necessary to buy a certain dress. “Took me one night to get the money,” she said. “I was a fucking retard, though, you know? I wanted to see if I had the guts to do it. It was in New York. Fleet Week. I figured, what the fuck, I’ll probably end up with one of them guys anyways. That’s why I was going down there. Might as well make a little on the side.” Because it was Fleet Week, the police were cracking down.

  In jail, she began perseverating, obsessing over the question of how to address the judge.

  “So,” she said, “I’m in this holding cell, right, going fuckin’ nuts. I’ve never been in this much trouble. And for soliciting! Holy shit. I was a kid who hung out with the wrong people, mouthed off. Shoplifted a little. Was into some really bad drugs. But this was a new one for me. And so far away from home.” She kept fixating on the question of what to call the judge.

  Sir?

  Judge?

  Do I use his name?

  Isn’t there another one I’m not thinking of?

  There is. Fuck.

  She’d heard it on the People’s Court once. She’d never watched that much TV. Television was corny, the street was much more entertaining. But now she couldn’t remember what they called that old judge guy. She fell asleep and had anxiety dreams about her teeth getting yanked with a wrench. When she woke up she asked an older woman inmate what to call the judge. The other woman laughed at her. Don’t call him an asshole. They don’t like it. But when she saw the girl was distressed, she gave her a break.

  “ ‘Your Honor,’ hon, call the judge, ‘Your Honor.’ ”

  “What if he’s a chick,” Jessica recalls asking.

  “Whatever’s up there, wearing a robe? You call, Your Honor. Your Honor. Just say that and you’ll be fine.”

  When Jessica got into the court she was shaking so hard it was difficult to stand. She was asked to plead. This was the moment. She hesitated for a long painful second. And then another. Everyone stopped to stare. The court stenographer shot her a glance. She’d forgotten what to call the judge.

  Wait, no. She remembered.

  “Your Highness, I …”

  The court erupted in laughter. She heard her court-appointed defender mutter, “He wishes.” The judge’s face softened into a sympathetic smile. She’d messed up—that was clear. But she was too distraught to stop. Again, she tried.

  “Your Highness, I …”

  That was more than anyone could handle. “The judge almost had to clear the court,” recalls Jessica, “there was so much laughing. The cops, the lawyers, the typing lady, the tranny hookers, the fuckin’ dopefiends, okay, all fuckin’ laughing their asses off.” Later, she’d slipped and called him “Your Highness” again. But that time, she’d quickly corrected herself.

  “But, tell you what,” Jessica said to me, “it was the best defense I ever had. I got off with a warning.”

  That had been the comic version of her experience with crime and punishment. That night, with two minutes to go in the library period, she wanted to tell the other version.

  With Chris, there’d been warnings, she told me. One Friday night, when she was rolling on any pill she could get her hands on, plus some Jameson to make it interesting, she’d left the boy with a babysitter, a girl her age whom she had met in a court-mandated NA meeting. One problem: the babysitter herself was fucked up that night. So fucked up she didn’t notice the toddler run out of the house. Didn’t notice his absence until 3 a.m., when he’d already been gone hours. A neighbor found Chris crouching at the side of a street. The boy was mute. After he calmed down, Chris asked for “Mumum.” Jessica returned at about 11 a.m. The neighbor didn’t report her. But she’d got the message.

  Then one morning Jessica woke up, unsure that she’d been asleep. Her consciousness was often so hazy it was hard to tell. She was still high from the night before, and the day before that, and the night before that. She didn’t remember going to sleep. But she remembers waking up and knowing, Today is the day.

  On the back of a used piece of gift-wrapping, she scrawled a note. Laid out the facts in brief, without dwelling on emotions. I’m a junkie, she wrote. That’s not going to change. She was eighteen, barely in touch with her family. They didn’t even know about the kid. She loved her son, but it wasn’t enough for him. He’s a good boy, she wrote, Please give him a good home. God bless. She didn’t sign it in any form.

  She and Chris took the T to a rich neighborhood on the other side of town. They went for a walk. Played on a jungle gym. Rode down the slide together. The boy got tired. And that was the idea. She slipped into a church and took a seat in the back. She laid the sleeping child on a pew, with the note slipped into his pocket.

  Within half an hour, she was waiting to board a bus at South Station. She bought a Greyhound ticket with the little money she’d scraped together—she had been planning this for weeks. By nightfall, she was in New York. By daybreak, she was in Tallahassee. She wanted a whole new landscape, new trees, new architecture, new accents. Never wanted to see New England again, wanted to pretend it didn’t exist, had never existed.

  “I was so fucked up and confused,” she told me, “I felt I was abandoned. I really did.”

  Months later, in a moment of lucidity, it finally sunk in: What happened in the church that day didn’t happen to her, it happened to him. It wasn’t she who was abandoned. When this finally occurred to her, she stopped feeling sorry and began instead to hate herself. She almost jumped off a bridge in Tampa. Her sense of victimhood had been the only thing keeping her alive. She’d committed many crimes already in her life. But abandoning her child was by far the worst—and it was the only one she hadn’t been punished for. Of course, this itself was a form of punishment.

  “There’s no forgiveness for endangering a kid and then leaving him,” she told me. “I kept thinking, his skin, his skin, his skin. His skin was so soft. I imagined, I imagined bad things happening to that soft skin, his chubby little hands, how I wasn’t there to protect him. Nothing’s gonna make that right.”

  The officer entered the library. “That’s a wrap,” he shouted. Our conversation was over. I watched Jessica get into line. As the officers started their count, the other inmates chatted loudly, joked, bawled each other out. On the concrete, steel, and linoleum of the hall outside of the library, the din of their voices was almost deafening.

  Inmates are counted repeatedly throughout the day. Sometimes an officer does his count gently, almost tenderly. But some do their count with a frustration that verges on rage—not necessarily at the inmates, but at the interminable nature of the count itself.

  On that night the officer counted the inmates with undis
guised hostility. And while most inmates deflected it, tuned it out, Jessica stood in line, silently absorbing the hatred. She didn’t speak to anybody, nobody spoke to her. She wouldn’t have a relationship with anyone around her—this would require her to divert her focus from the past, and this was impossible. She would remain alone and unforgiven.

  The closest she got to a friend was her cellmate, a tiny Vietnamese woman who spoke not a word of English. The inability to communicate was essential to their relationship. They’d play cards silently for hours, she told me. Occasionally, accidentally, they’d exchange a shy smile.

  The officer finished his count. Shut. Up. I could hear him shout from behind the library door. The women fell silent. The train rolled down the hall, through the yard, back to the 1-Building, and then up to the tower.

  The Flowers Bring the Dogs

  I recognized Chris from the time Jessica had pointed him out. He was not a library regular. The one time he’d visited, to pick up a legal form, he’d been awkward, almost reverent. Like he was holding his breath the entire time. He was no prison nerd. The shelves of books spooked him. In the library, he was nothing like the guy’s guy of the prison yard.

  Occasionally I’d walk past him out there. From up close I could see certain details not evident from up on the eleventh floor. The pained concentration in his face when he played basketball, as though his life depended on how well he shot the ball. There was little enjoyment in it. He’d labor hard to run up and down the court. He’d get winded, rest his hands heavily on his hips during breaks. And was brutal with himself if he missed a play. He took the game more seriously, more personally, than most of the other inmates.

  When he wasn’t playing, he’d goof off aggressively, systematically, with whomever would tolerate him. A small gesture spoke volumes: two fellow inmates exchanged a knowing look after he’d left off chatting with them—one leaning in and whispering something to the other. Were Chris’s efforts at socializing making him as many enemies as friends? He was trying too hard to fit in.