“That would be a mistake,” he said grimly. “Refusing to work is a punishable offense, Mr. Irving.”
“Hey, Mr. Grzgorek, I’m not threatening anything. I’m just giving you my opinion based on what I hear around the campus. No more, no less.”
Sunday, with no change in the situation, each house and cell block met and voted to strike.
Monday morning was a cold, overcast day. At 8 a.m., when the work buzzer went off, only about twenty men passed through the gate toward the two factories. Then the yard was deserted. It looked strange out there: forlorn. The way it really is. Dead. The hacks came round. “You men going to work or not?” Everyone shrugged. The hacks locked all our outside doors. Those big key rings really jangle.
An hour later the goon squad came around, six hacks led by a lieutenant. Work, or off to the hole. They were serious and we could tell it. We looked out the windows and saw a dozen men from Maine House being marched off, then about the same number from Boston. They got to us in Hartford and the lieutenant reached the door of my cell.
“Irving, you’ve got some influence around here. You’re chairman of the Inmate Committee. Now don’t be a fool, don’t jeopardize your parole. Are you going to work or not?”
“Not,” I said. I wasn’t going to make a speech.
He had two of the hacks march me out of the dorm. To get to the hole, which has the pastoral name of New Hampshire East, I had to pass by the big dorms, Providence and Vermont. They were mostly black. I’d lived in Providence seven months and had friends there and the men were hanging out the windows, watching. They saw me being hauled off — “that dude just got paroled, man, and he’s goin! Right on!” — and they began to cheer and stomp. I thought, thanks, you dumb fucks, that’s just what I need. I’m not the hero of this little drama. This was supposed to be a group show.
I should have figured it out when they put me in a cell in the hole all by myself and then ten minutes later marched Riley in there with me, and then two other members of the Inmate Committee. The hole began to fill up. The cells were meant for two men at the most; even two’s a crowd. They were shoving four and five in each cell. There were three tiers of twelve cells each; on the other side of the block, New Hampshire West, usually reserved for homosexuals, rats, old men, sick men, freaks, they emptied those twelve cells and began filling them with more strikers.
The men filed in and there was no keeping them quiet. They cheered and laughed and then hollered, and pretty soon it was bedlam. It was a scene from an old George Raft/James Cagney movie. I’d thought that was all Hollywood, but now I realized they must have had some good technical advisers. Men stripped the metal mirrors off the wall, then the taps from the sinks; they began to rattle them on the bars, back and forth. More men kept filing in — Riley reckoned we were close to four hundred when the hacks finally got it through their heads that they couldn’t squeeze any more in without bloodshed and we heard later that men in the other houses were yelling and demanding now to join us in the hole but Grzgorek wisely kept them locked up where they were. Then they began tearing up the pillows in the cells and tossing the loads of feathers out into the corridors, over the catwalks, so that they floated down like snow. The snowstorm lasted an hour. They gave us tomato soup for lunch and the men threw that out of their cells, too, so that the floor soon looked as if chickens had been slaughtered there. And they screamed and sneezed and shouted abuse at the hacks and kept rattling the metal mirrors against the bars. “Don’t you think this is fuckin counter-productive?” Riley asked me, and I said oh yes.
“Hey, you guys,” he yelled. “Knock it off! We ain’t animals! They ain’t gonna respect us, ain’t gonna give us what we want if we act like fuckin lunatics!”
The men quieted down for a few minutes and then the lieutenant came in and passed by the lower tier, stopping at each cell to ask which men wanted to stay in the hole and get a shot and go before the Adjustment Committee, a kangaroo court, and which men wanted to go quietly back to work with no reprisals and no black marks in their records. At about this time some dudes on the third, top tier had a brilliant idea. Spare lockers were stored up there on the catwalk. They could reach out of their cells, through the bars, and shove the lockers over the catwalk, and maybe kill a lieutenant and a few hacks; so they probably thought, well, what the fuck, we ain’t had this much fun in years, and that’s what they did. Those big green lockers flew by our eyes, thundering off the concrete floor and it sounded like Hanoi under a B-52 raid. The lockers bounced, boomed and caromed in all directions, metal smashing and clanging against metal. I was close to it and my eardrums hurt. The lieutenant ran to safety and shouted shrilly, “Who did that?” He was scared, rightly so. And someone on the second tier yelled, “Fuck you, faggot!” And then someone else yelled, “Fuck the warden!” and that soon changed to “Kill the warden!” Riley and I tried to shout against that tide but it was useless and in a few minutes we gave up and sat down on the upper bunk together, our legs dangling. I began to tell him how beautiful it would be soon in Spain when the almond trees began to blossom whitely and the most beautiful girls in the world came south from London, Stockholm and all of Germany to get laid on the shores of the blue antique Mediterranean. “You’d like it there, Riley,” I said, while the lockers kept falling and the men kept hollering.
“They ain’t never gonna let me go,” he said — “and not you, either, now” — and I felt a clutch around my heart, as if the flow of blood had suddenly passed through an icepack.
By evening the administration had won the battle, if battle it ever was. There was some vague talk of a more liberal Christmas furlough policy and the cells in the hole began emptying like a leaking gas balloon as the men said yes, yes, sure, they’d go to work on Tuesday morning. Riley and I shrugged. Nothing we could do. “I don’t give a fuck,” Riley said. “I ain’t goin to work.”
“I am,” I said.
“Well, you got parole. These other chickenshit dudes don’t. What the hell you want to be a martyr for?”
The lieutenant stopped outside our cell. “You ready to go back to work, Irving?”
“Yes, I am,” I said.
“Riley?”
“No, sir.”
The lieutenant walked on. “Hey, lieutenant,” I called after him. “I just said I was ready.”
He looked over his shoulder and smiled at me and then kept walking.
I didn’t sleep well. In the early morning Suitcase Smith, who was sweeping up the mess of tomato soup and feathers, told me there were only 55 men left in the hole. By noon someone else told me the count had dropped to 32. Of that number, he said, about half were members of the Inmate Committee.
Now, about 4 p.m., the lieutenant came by again and before I could say anything handed me a piece of flimsy paper. It’s pink, 8 x 11, a carbon copy of an incident report: an accusation, a shot. It was filed by a hack named James Sherwood. I know him only slightly, by sight, and I remember he was prowling around the catwalks during the worst of the rioting. He has a mustache, long hair, long sideburns; if he wasn’t a hack you might take him for some hip dude in the East Village. Sick! Sherwood says he was standing outside our cell last night and yesterday afternoon and heard Riley and me chanting, “Kill the warden,” and then we incited the other men to chant. He also heard Riley confess that he was the active leader of the uprising and heard him say to me, “You’re the brains behind this riot, Irving, you have to control it.” The lieutenant passed a copy of the same shot to Riley and looked at me with a slight lift of the eyebrows.
I said quietly, “Lieutenant, this man isn’t telling the truth. He hasn’t got the brains to make it up, so someone told him to do it.”
He didn’t smile, he just walked away.
Now I’m sitting here in shit up to my ears. If I don’t do something it’s goodbye to parole, it’s a loss of all accumulated good time; and, as my friend Riley points out, it’s also an indictable offense — incitement to riot in a federal prison. On my side, I ha
ve paper and a stubby pencil.
December 14
This morning they took Riley away to a separate cell. The other two men were already gone. They’re splitting us up. Only twenty men left. I’ve heard they’re going to bus us out to one of the penitentiaries — Atlanta, says Suitcase.
Riley had somehow arranged a noon meeting with a visiting professor from Yale Law School (I think it had been set up a week ago, long before this happened) and just before they took him away I scribbled a note. It had the telephone number of Maury Nessen, my lawyer in New York. I said, “Ask the man to call Maury and tell him what’s happening. Tell him I’m being framed.” God, how melodramatic! A bad movie again; but it’s a fact. Riley gave me back the paper and said he could remember the number and the message. Oh, Jesus.
An hour ago — 5 p.m. — I was taken out of my cell and led up to a sealed bare room just off the second tier. Maury was waiting for me, sitting on a little chair. He’d received a phone call after lunch, he wasn’t even sure from whom, and he’d driven up here. He looked around him with big eyes. Very few lawyers ever see a prison, and fewer get to see the hole.
He looked worried. “What the hell have you done now?”
“Listen to me, Maury. I’ve never lied to you, you know that.” I told him the story, in detail but quickly, because I didn’t know how much time they’d allow us.
“I’ll go talk to them,” he said, relieved. “I’ve already spoken to this man Steve Grzgorek. He’s friendly. And he seems like a reasonable man.”
“Maury, listen to me. You can’t talk to them. You don’t understand these people. You’re a great lawyer but you don’t know what you’re up against now.” I was pleading with him, and I broke out in a sweat. “These people aren’t like you and me,” I said. “Their heads are more fucked up than any of the inmates in here. They may seem reasonable and friendly but they’re evil.” I waved Sherwood’s pink sheet at him. “Here’s polygraph. They’ll shit. Say you can get a court order — “
“But I’m not sure the court — “
“They’re not sure, either. Maury, please. I know these people. You don’t. Threaten them and yell. Pick up a phone in the Warden’s office and call the Danbury paper and then the Times.”
He thought a while. Then the hack appeared to say that time was up. “All right,” Maury said quietly. He shook hands with me. Then he embraced me and left. He used to say he treated me more like a brother than a client. Brother, I need you. I wasn’t just sweating, I was shivering when I got back to the cell.
December 15
Yesterday evening, after I wrote that last paragraph, they came for me and took me out to a room near Control. They had called a special meeting of the Adjustment Committee, comprising the captain, a lieutenant other than the one who’d handed me the shot, and the new Chief Caseworker, Mr. Edwards. The air was smoky and the ashtrays were full; they’d been in there a while before I arrived. Their expressions were stony and I thought that was a good sign — if they had been smiling I would have thought, I’m dead. The captain did most of the talking. He asked for my version of the events of the past few days. I recited them calmly, trying to keep to the facts I was sure of.
“Are you saying the Inmate Committee — in particular, you and Riley — had no leadership role in this work stoppage?”
“None,” I said. “The Committee was a conduit for information. We told the A.W. what we believed the men were going to do.”
He lectured me on how dangerous a work stoppage could be, how it could lead to a full-scale riot, how a lieutenant was almost crushed by a falling locker. He handed me Sherwood’s incident report. “What about this, Mr. Irving?”
I had debated with myself about that for a long time and I had an answer carefully prepared. I said, “It’s inaccurate. There was a lot of noise. Mr. Sherwood may have misheard. I prefer to think that’s what happened. There were several other hacks on our tier that afternoon and there were two other men in the cell with Riley and me. I’d like to bring them before this committee as witnesses and ask them what they heard or didn’t hear us say.”
“The rules of this Adjustment Committee don’t allow you to bring any witnesses, Irving,” the captain said. “Go outside. We’ll call you.”
I went out for fifteen minutes and chewed my nails and got ready to make a speech telling them what swine they were and how I was going to nail them to the wall with a polygraph, and then Edwards called me in. He did the talking now. He explained that a careful study of Mr. Sherwood’s incident report had revealed to the committee that Mr. Sherwood was not actually accusing me of anything, but only quoting Inmate Riley’s statements relevant to my alleged leadership of the strike, and the Adjustment Committee was not prepared to prosecute one inmate because of statements made about his activities by another inmate. He didn’t say anything about Sherwood’s having heard me chanting against the warden and inciting the other men to do it, too. I was acquitted. I was to return to the hole, get my belongings, and then return to my room in Hartford House. No punishment.
“What about Riley?”
“Get out, Irving,” the captain said.
And now I’m sitting on my bed in Hartford House, in my little cell, and it’s midnight. The man could hardly believe that I was freed, that they’d taken away none of my privileges or good time. A few of them, I think, are wondering if somehow I ratted on Riley and those who are still left in the hole, but I had a word with Riley before I left and he’ll get the word out that it’s not true.
“You one lucky motherfucker,” Shorty Bigshoes said to me.
Amen.
December 18
Riley’s out of the hole, locked up in the hospital on a hunger strike. They want to ship him out to a state joint in Massachusetts. I spoke to him for a minute and he said, “I’ll go. It’s better there.”
Later, my caseworker, Lefebvre, called me in and told me I’d been turned down by the Bureau of Prisons for CTC Halfway House in New York. Why? “We’re not required to give you a reason, Mr. Irving,” he said calmly.
Christmas Day
The hack did me a favor and left the Clothing Room office open yesterday and I spent all day typing my writ, in the form of a 26-page petition to U.S. District Court Judge Robert Zampano in New Haven, requesting that the court order the government to show cause why I shouldn’t be granted immediate parole or else transferred to CTC in New York to be near my kids. I claimed blatant discrimination and reprisal for my alleged role in the strike. I asked both my lawyers to do this for me but they said it would be a waste of time. I don’t agree. Their time, maybe. Not mine.
I posted the writ this evening, with a copy to the Bureau of Prisons in Washington, the parole board, and the warden here. I’m exhausted now, but I can’t sleep.
December 30
An instructive incident. Fritz, a pleasant 27-year-old German doing time here on a drug smuggling charge, went to his caseworker and then the A.W., he says, with a complaint. Fritz lived in Providence House, my former home. He was gay. Made no secret of it, either. He related this to the caseworker and the A.W. and then explained that the blacks in Providence had made some overt threats. They were going to fuck his Nazi ass and make him suck every black rod in Danbury until he choked. “I’m a homosexual,” Fritz said casually, “but I believe in freedom of choice for us, too.” And he requested a transfer to New Hampshire West, the other side of the hole, where he would have a cell of his own and be relatively safe from molestation. Request denied. Such cells are usually reserved for malefactors, rats who need to be protected from population, crackpots, or men who had physical defects such as a bad heart or one leg. A homosexual could get in there only if he was a threat.
Fritz, troubled, asked advice from a few other inmates. We wanted to take it up at the Inmate Committee meeting (this was before the strike) but the administration said no, it was an individual problem, not a general problem. So Fritz sat down and wrote a polite letter to a federal judge in New York who had a r
ecord of sympathetic understanding toward incarcerated men. The judge did his thing and wrote to the Danbury officials, I’m told, ordering that Fritz be placed in preventive detention in a private cell.
The brass here must have decided that this was a bad precedent to set, and before taking any action on the order they wrote to the judge to explain their side of the story, why prisoners can’t be mollycoddled and how some unscrupulous, scheming inmates might go so far as to conjure up a rape threat in order to get out of the overcrowded dorms and into the comfort of a windowless 8 x 10 cell in New Hampshire West. During this exchange of lunatic correspondence, one night when the hacks were spotted on the far side of the yard, towels were wound around Fritz’s eyes and stuffed into his mouth and he was taken into the shower, struggling, and raped four times. They hurt him. Sonny, who wasn’t part of it, confirms the story. He’s talking about his brothers and he wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.
Fritz spent a few days in the prison infirmary. Then he was transferred to West Street, the Federal Detention Center in Manhattan. We heard today from some kid who just arrived from West Street that Fritz was paroled last week — set free! — but deported to Germany: a simple solution of what might have become a complicated and embarrassing problem. On the other hand, I wonder if they’re capable of being embarrassed.
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