Newjack (27 page)

Morales slept almost the entire shift, rising near the end only to ask for a cigarette. He even slept through the day’s only excitement, when an inmate down the hall managed to cut both his wrists with the blade from a disposable razor he’d somehow smuggled in. The officer observing him called a nurse and the sergeant. The nurse, noting that the slashes were only superficial, just had the inmate stick his arms out through the bars so she could clean them up and put on antiseptic and bandages. The sergeant, annoyed
to have been called up for nothing, advised the inmate, “Next time, cut the long way. It works a lot better.”

By the next day, I’d learned more about Morales. Some of his earlier stays in the PSU had been recorded in this same logbook. He’d frequently been suicidal, and was prone to self-mutilation. A female officer had logged an entry about him masturbating openly. Another officer must have remarked on it to him, she wrote, because when she came back on duty, the next day he was “irate” that she had written it down. Poor guy. He had been observed singing “White Christmas” and dragging a plastic disposable cup top around his cell with a string, calling it his “car.” Less benignly, he had pried up and swallowed three pieces of floor tile, and used another shard of the tile to make cuts across his leg and wrist and, apparently, “a blood-filled hole in chest.”

I watched the indistinct form of the forty-something Puerto Rican through the screen as he turned in bed and sat up on his mattress. I could tell he had a beard and mustache and a bit of a belly, but all I could really see unobstructed were his feet and pale, thin calves. I didn’t know what incident had caused him to be moved from the fourth floor of 5-Building (the psych floor) over to here, but usually it was a suicide attempt. He confirmed this after lunch, when he ran out of matches and I offered him a light. He bent down near the bars to show me the slashes across his right forearm that he had made with a tin-can top. They looked deeper than most. Later, he even lay on the floor so that I could see, below the screen, the still-red scars of previous self-inflicted wounds—a gash near the jugular made with another piece of floor tile, and the now-healed hole in his chest.

It was the pressure of prison, Morales told me, that caused him to hurt himself. Gangs were especially hard on him—they took advantage of the mentally ill by sending them on risky assignments. If they got caught by the COs, their mental status was a kind of indemnity. He said he’d do whatever it took to get out of Sing Sing.

“Including acting crazy?”

“It ain’t hard to act crazy when you are crazy, CO,” he said.

“Hmm.”

“Hey, it wasn’t my choice to be here. The guy I killed, you’d probably want to kill him, too. He beat up women. ’Course I was fucked-up at the time.”

“What do you mean—on drugs?”

“Drugs and alcohol. But I took the ASAT [Alcohol and Substance
Abuse Treatment] course, which I think will help me stay off. You know what I really want, though? Chinese food. Chinese or Thai. I want some fried rice. What I’d do for fried rice.”

Two days earlier, according to the logbook, Morales had told his guard that the only way out was to kill himself. There was no way to go home or to see his family. They wanted him to kill himself and even said so, now that his mother had died. He was laughing out loud “for no apparent reason,” hitting himself in the head with an open palm.

But sometime between then and now, he’d been told something miraculous: He would be shipped to Marcy in two days. That had calmed him down considerably. During the second-degree murder bid that had started in 1984 and also taken him to Attica and Wende, he’d already been to Marcy four times, he said. It was good there: no gangs, a movie every day, four-man rooms with the doors unlocked during the day, no COs per se. There were punishments—they’d put you in restraints or “stick you in the ass” with a tranquilizing injection—but it was freer there.

“But aren’t there only bugs to talk to?” I asked.

No, he said, and he knew a lot of guys there.

He showed me his “inmate accounts” statement—on which inmates keep track of how much they can spend in the commissary—and told me he bet I’d never seen one like this. And I hadn’t. He had a negative balance of more than a hundred dollars.

“How can you have a negative balance?” I asked. “They gave you credit?”

“No, man. It’s my tickets. I had twenty-three Tier Two and Tier Three tickets in the last year.” Each of these serious infractions, regardless of the disposition, resulted in a five-dollar charge to the inmate’s account.

“For what?”

“Oh, for drinking paint, for tearing my sink out of the wall, for hurting myself. They’re not fair, man. You shouldn’t get charged when you’re sick in the head.”

Drinking paint? Even if you did it with the conscious goal of getting yourself away from the general population, you really did have to be sick to drink paint or swallow shards of floor tile.

I told Morales about the death, the night before, of Princess Diana and about the new MetroCards that were taking the place of tokens on the New York City subways. He asked me for lights for his cigarettes, and when my matches ran low, he showed me
how to tear them carefully up the middle, making two matches out of one. Finally, he suggested that we play chess. I found the painted Masonite board and a box of plastic pieces in the lounge; we balanced the board carefully on the cell’s food slot, near the floor.

Morales was a competent chess player. We each won a game and then, in excitement, because I was ahead in the third, I bumped the board and tipped it over. Whoops. Birch dropped by, warning me that many sergeants objected to officers playing games with inmates. But then he offered to warn me by rapping on the window if anyone approached. Morales assured me that when he heard the rapping, he’d take the chessboard off the bars and place it under his bunk. I heard a tapping on the window after lunch and told Morales the moment had come. It took a moment for it to register, though, and when it did,
he
tipped the pieces all over the floor of the cell—an instant before Sergeant Holmes rounded the corner. Fortunately, the screen obstructed Holmes’s view of the mess. He initialed the logbook and was gone.

Our subsequent games were constantly interrupted by inmate Auguste, in the next cell down. Auguste was a thin black man who greeted every officer that passed, no matter what time of day, with “Top of the morning to you, sir!” In one of the more macabre tableaux I witnessed in the prison, he would stand in the middle of his cell, arms outstretched, head back, singing favorite lines from “New York, New York”: “‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.’” Another time, sounding like one of the homeless men in Manhattan who wait outside fancy restaurants late at night and flatter emerging patrons before asking for a handout, he had told me, “You look like Robert Redford!” To the nurse, I heard him say, “You’re a combination of Grace Kelly and Princess Diana!”

Another time, though, I saw Auguste stop singing as though suddenly possessed and then begin to mime savagely beating someone on the floor, as though with a hammer or hatchet. So much for the sweet old nutcase.

Today he was singing, “O beautiful for spacious skies,” again and again, until Morales hollered, “Knock it off! Will you fuckin’ knock it off?” A long silence followed, while Auguste’s brain rebooted. When it came back on-line, he was singing the sixties pop hit “Sugar, Sugar.” Then I noticed he was out of his cell. Inmates whom the shrinks judged to be making progress were allowed out for a few hours a day; this was called rec. Auguste came to watch our game.

“The Archies, right?” I asked as he hummed near me.

“Yes, sir. I was their bass player.”

Morales tried to cadge some tobacco off Auguste, who obliged, but in return he began to lecture Morales about Egypt and the Pharaohs and how the white man rules but the black man is really in charge because Jesus was black and—

“Stop that bullshit!”
screamed Morales.

“Yes, Master, yes,” said Auguste, and hurried away.

I wished Morales luck and we knocked knuckles, the way inmates did with each other. I could do it because he was out of there, bound for Marcy, and I’d never see him again.

It was easy to forget when you worked at Sing Sing that all the inmates there were, essentially, missing from someplace else. Outside the walls, however, they were still fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands—mainly of poor people from New York City. In being sent to prison, they had no doubt let people down; some who loved them no longer wanted to see them. But they were missed by many others, and every day of the week these people found their way to the prison via bus, car, train, and taxi. They submitted to searches of their person and property and subjected themselves to long waits in order to spend a short time in Sing Sing’s Visit Room.

The Visit Room constituted a sort of breach in the wall between the hermetic world of the prison and the universe outside. In it, an inmate could try to reconnect to the real world and prior life, could try to salve the wound of imprisonment. A visitor could contemplate, with more perspective than any prison employee, the effects of incarceration and the prospects of life after it. The Visit Room was about catching up, reconnecting, and looking ahead, about a woman’s touch and a child’s chatter.

I worked the Visit Room with Colton, wearing the dress blues that officers had to put on for any post that brought them into contact with the general public. We sat behind a wide desk on a raised platform and surveyed the expansive, cafeterialike space. The back of the room was lined with vending machines, and between those and us were carefully aligned rows of tables and chairs, identified by letters that hung from the ceiling. To our left was an enclosed play area for kids. Behind it were small offices for
an inmate photographer, who snapped keepsake Polaroid pictures, and a counselor who could help with matters such as weddings. (Inmates were allowed to get married in prison, with the permission of the superintendent, and thereby qualify for an eventual conjugal visit.) The wall to our right was a series of picture windows—perhaps intended to offer a commanding view of the Hudson River, but now marred by a blue heat-reflective film applied to the glass to keep afternoon sun from overheating the room. Beyond, coils of concertina wire topping a mesh fence further obscured the vista.

To our immediate right was the door through which visitors entered after presenting I.D., checking their belongings, and passing through a metal detector. We pointed toward their choice of seating—either the tables, which were surrounded by four plastic chairs, or rows of chairs near the window, where they could sit next to an inmate. Inmates arrived through a separate door, to our immediate left. Once they had checked in with us, we pointed them to their visitor. If a visitor was still waiting after an hour—this was common—we would call the blocks to learn the reason for the holdup. Occasionally, it was an officer’s fault: The gallery officer might have failed to find the inmate and then forgotten to follow up, or someone might have forgotten to notify the gallery officer. But often the problem was with the inmates—they could take forever with showering, shaving, and coiffing, trying to get together the perfect self-presentation.

Colton was in a rotten mood, hardly talking, clearly homesick and hating Sing Sing. “How’s it going?” I asked anyway. “I could live without it,” he replied. He seemed uninterested in and even averse to the dramas unfolding before us, but I was fascinated. If you’d ever wondered about inmates’ lives outside prison, here were some of the missing pieces.

I watched a young woman who came in, found her table, put her head down, and went to sleep while awaiting her beau. He awakened her with a kiss—Prince Charming—and I wondered whether they always did it that way. Then there was another couple whose visit started icily. She practically put an arm up to keep him from hugging her, he settled for a squeeze of the hand, then the two retired to the side-by-side seats in the back of the room. Three hours later, I noticed, they were kissing passionately, the freeze having thawed.

On the other side of the room sat an aging couple, there to
see … a son? Almost every visit began with an embrace, but some beginnings were shy or tentative. The son and his parents touched only arms, not chests; he might have given his mother the briefest of kisses. Or was she a foster mother? Was he a stepdad?

One inmate was thronged by three little kids the moment he left our desk. They jumped around him and held on to his legs as he made his way toward their mother—his wife? or was it his sister?—who tried to clear a space for him at the table amidst the crayons and coloring books. It made you happy, this sight, but also very, very sad.

Several regular officers worked the room with us. Since Colton was incommunicado, I began chatting with a regular named Eveillard, who was born in Haiti, he said. Eveillard, balding and with a dirty shirt, had been deflecting the barbs of some of the American-born officers, with limited success. He seemed glad to talk to someone who wasn’t going to make fun of him. As he was sealing an envelope, he told me the story behind it. He had just returned from a vacation in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. I had never met anyone who vacationed in Santo Domingo, I said. Got to go! he said enthusiastically. He had met a beautiful woman there and had fallen in love. He spoke some Spanish, and that was how they had communicated, but he could not write Spanish. Fortunately, a porter—he gestured toward a young inmate cleaning the children’s play area—had written a love letter for him in Spanish.

Eveillard had me walk around the room with him. A boy was about to follow his father into the inmates’ bathroom. “Sorry, that’s not allowed,” Eveillard told them. You had to keep an eye on them, he emphasized. Though visitors were screened with a metal detector, they could not be pat-frisked unless there was reason to suspect them, and this was one way drugs came into the facility. A woman could have some dope in a packet in her bra, the man could swallow it, and—voilà. And there were lesser scams, too.