Newjack (43 page)

Between the time I emerged from my study and let the babysitter go and the time my wife came home, I had about two hours. Two hours, it sometimes seemed, to get healthy, because the kids were pure and I was dirty. My daughter, one, and son, now three, would be thrilled to see me, and I treasured this time together. But it could also be the worst time of the day, because in a way, I’d been dealing with difficult children all day long.

That August evening on the day Cradle left, we played in the yard and, when it got dark, went inside and played with Lego blocks. One of the accessories we had inherited from a neighbor was a little jail. It came with a policeman (badge, cap with visor, uniform) and a bad guy (five o’clock shadow, eye mask, thug’s cap).

My son asked me about it. “Who goes in jail?”

“That burglar,” I said, pointing him out.

“Then what does the policeman do?”

“He puts him in jail.”

My son looked puzzled. “Then he’s the bad guy.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s the bad guy because he puts the other one in jail.”

“No, no,” I began, trying to explain. “The burglar has to go to jail because he did something bad first. The policeman puts him there to keep us safe.”

“Then the burglar’s bad, and the policeman’s bad.”

“No,” I said, “only the burglar’s bad.”

But my son didn’t quite get it. And by that time he wasn’t the only one.

As usual, playing with Lego lasted only so long. My son wanted to wrestle. His sister was tired. I gave them a bath. Then she was ready for bed, but my son still wanted to wrestle. “Why don’t we read a book instead?” I suggested.

His sister pooped out during the reading of
Horton Hears a Who
, and I laid her in her crib. But my son, too tired and too excited, began to act up. He knocked things over. He climbed onto the back of a chair. He grabbed for things—scissors—that he wasn’t supposed to have. As I took a phone call from Margot, who had to work late at her job in Manhattan, he announced that he was going to go wake up his sister.

“No you’re not,” I said.

“Yes I am!” he cried gleefully.

“A—, don’t do that,” I repeated.

“Okay!” he said, but he shot up the stairs toward her room.

Something in me sort of snapped. All day long I was disrespected by criminals; I felt that home should be different. I ran up the stairs and picked him up by his pajama tops outside her door. “When I say no, you will listen!” I whispered angrily, giving him a spank, surprising myself.

I had never done that before, and it surprised him, too. He burst into tears. This woke his sister. I was furious, and I ordered her to go back to sleep. She didn’t obey, either. The house filled with sobs. “Into your room,” I ordered my son, and carried him bodily when he “refused to comply.”

A use-of-force on my own son, I realized the moment after it happened. There were better ways to handle the situation, I knew, but none that I seemed capable of at the time. I asked him to lie down with me in his bed so I could read him another book, and eventually he did. Then he held on to my arm, kind of tight. I felt like crying into his shirt, breaking down, sobbing for a good hour. I turned my head and read the story.

That night started a trend. Margot and I had seen others take hours to get their kids to bed, and had vowed we’d be relatively firm about it: We would read a story, kiss them good night, turn off the light, and leave the room.

Only now, I’d started fudging. I’d read my son the book on his bed and then lie down next to him for a minute. I only had to do
it once or twice before he started requesting it. Then it became a part of our routine: my arm around him, his little hand on my arm, and soon his sonorous breathing. It was, truly, the sweetest thing in my day, and often I would fall asleep, too, out of exhaustion and the feeling of peace.

When I woke up and staggered into our bedroom, Margot, normally the more softhearted of the two of us, would look at me skeptically.

“I know, I know,” I’d say. “I really don’t mean to fall asleep in there, but I’m so tired.”

It was an excuse, an evasion, a way not to examine the fact that I’d never been meaner or more vulnerable.

The next morning, I listened to a news station on the car radio as I drove to work. It was still dark outside. There was a story about the murder of a New York City public school teacher, Jonathan Levin, by one or two former students who wanted money. Levin, like me, was a son of privilege (big privilege in his case; his father was the chairman of Time Warner), and evidently beloved by his students. The killers were two more fucked-up inner-city teenagers, who in a few months would be moving into a place like R-and-W gallery.

The story reminded me of another from just the week before: The emotionally disturbed grandson of Dr. Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, had been arrested and charged with setting the fire that engulfed her in the apartment they shared.

Young black men killing the people who loved them. I felt I’d never heard sadder stories in my life. And as a CO, I knew something the newspapers didn’t: the next step, the kinds of lives these boys would lead from here on in. I felt sad for them, sad for me, sad for the world.

I sat for a while in the Sing Sing parking lot to collect myself. You couldn’t walk into work this way, upset about things. It made you vulnerable. In the locker room I searched around for my game face, found it around the time I strapped the gear onto my belt: baton, latex-gloves holder, key clips—the tough stuff, the accoutrements of guard identity. They were a help, at times like this. I put the emotions away, and punched in.

Margot had agreed to my project almost as blindly as I had pursued it. Generously and supportively, she adjusted her schedule and cut back on other commitments to accommodate mine. We have a strong marriage that thrives on our mutual curiosity about the world. Even so, the strains grew. Our social life suffered, sometimes because of my schedule, sometimes because mentally I just couldn’t handle certain kinds of Manhattan parties or dinner dates after a day of work in the prison. Ambitious people, mannered people, neurotic people, high-society people—the kind of people who make life in the city so interesting—became unbearable to me. I was overwhelmed. I just wanted plain vanilla, down-to-earth.

The secrecy of my project took a different kind of toll on our relations with friends: Nobody knew about it; nobody could know. The world was too small, and both my safety and my livelihood were at stake.

Also—and this was probably a mistake—I didn’t want to tell Margot everything I knew or had seen. Back at the Academy, Sergeant Bloom had recommended that we all discuss with our families the possibility of being taken hostage. I didn’t want to scare her with that kind of stuff, didn’t want to alarm her any more than necessary. And in a different way, I didn’t want to sully the kitchen table with the kinds of things I’d seen and heard during the day; it just seemed best to keep it inside.

But inside is a bad place for stress. This is very obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t obvious on those nights after we got the kids to bed. I wouldn’t volunteer details of my day, and when she tried to update me on her life, often I would just tune her out. I found myself impatient in a way I couldn’t explain. I didn’t want to hear about the minutiae of her day. There wasn’t room in my brain for what seemed trivialities. Black moods would come from out of nowhere and envelop me. I tried to hide them by acting civil, but “civil” came off as chilly and robotic.

One day we were driving back to the city from a visit with friends upstate. I’d had the weekend off for a change—a chance to relax, be with Margot and the kids. But in the middle of the Saw Mill River Parkway, with all of them asleep, I was seized with the closest thing I’ve ever had to a panic attack. What if I got assigned to R-and-W tomorrow? I thought. The feeling of dread was a dense cloud that blocked my view of everything around me. I slowed down, tried to repress it. I’d been away from R-and-W for
a couple of weeks now. There was no reason Holmes would stick me over there again. The odds were ten to one, twenty to one. I turned on the radio, tried listening to the news.

It was a beautiful evening, and when we got home, Margot suggested that we all take a walk around the neighborhood. We put the baby in the stroller and set off. Relaxed, Margot started telling me about her friend’s visit to her sister in Colorado and her sister’s critiques of her and her friend’s critiques of the children and her mom chiming in and … and suddenly I couldn’t bear to listen to it right now, I thought—or did I say it out loud? I probably did; something had to give. Who cared about the friend when I might have to work R-and-W tomorrow? Margot got mad. I had no time or patience anymore for any of them, her or the kids, she charged. I had never been in a harder situation in my life, I responded. Couldn’t she see? There was no room in my head for it! You’re not just oblivious, she responded, you’re ridiculously rigid and prickly. And with that, I got hostile. You have no idea, I answered, no idea what this is like. And I thought, How dare she complain when I’m working so hard to hold myself together, to maintain a calm exterior?

Maybe that’s because you don’t tell me what it’s like! she shot back. Four more months, I answered, wearily. Can we just hang on four more months and then it will be over. Can you deal with it for that long?

Many mornings as I returned to Sing Sing—leaving home at the gate, in this direction—I asked myself the same question. Could I make it until the end of the year? Most often (though not always) the answer was yes. Despite the problems, work still intrigued me on many levels. There was the existential level: A young inmate’s bitter statement that he was going to be in here “till the sun burns out” got me wondering about the torture of time, the strange practice of “doing time.” There was the human-behavior level: The character played by Woody Allen in his current film said that whenever he met a woman, no matter how young or how old, somewhere in his mind he was thinking about having sex with her. My take on it, working in a place where physical confrontation was always possible, was that most men, meeting other men, instantly asked themselves: Could I beat him in a fight?

But also I had been assessing myself as a prison guard and was
bothered by my conclusions. Up in Albany, Nigro had given me an overall evaluation of excellent—rare in the Department, he assured me. Here at Sing Sing, I had dropped a notch—my first evaluation by the sergeants was “good.” No complaints offered; just nothing stellar.

What vexed me was that I knew it was true, that despite my exertions and desire to do well, despite my college degree, I wasn’t better at the actual job of being a guard than anybody else. Too often I lost my cool, wavered in emergencies, forgot details of the ninety-nine rules (how many magazines could they have in their cell?), failed to use force when it might have been a good idea to do so. Several officers around me—I thought of Miller, Smith, Stone, Singleton, Stickney—seemed much more effective. And I would have trouble in areas where they had no trouble at all.

A good example was the laundry run. A gallery’s laundry was done a couple of times a week. One day was sheets and towels; another was clothing. Volunteer porters went cell to cell in the morning collecting the dirty laundry, they carried it about a quarter mile through tunnels and down a prison drive to the Laundry Building, and later in the day, always escorted by an officer, they picked it up.