Newjack (44 page)

One rainy September afternoon I was the officer escorting four R-gallery porters back from the Laundry Building. It was a sheets-and-towels day, and the loads were heavy; four porters really weren’t enough to carry it all. I walked at the end of the procession, as was customary, and could see that the last porter in the file, a slight jokester inmate known as Beezle, was barely making it. Beezle was hardly over a hundred pounds, and his enormous, unwieldy bundle of sheets and towels had to weigh fifty or sixty pounds.

One of the things I had learned at Sing Sing was, as it had been put to me, “an officer never helps an inmate carry his shit.” This rule was unwritten but hard and fast. An inmate moving from one cell to another often had big garbage bags full of property to carry; you didn’t help him with it. An inmate who had received your permission to swap his sagging bunk with a firmer one in the empty cell next door usually needed a hand, but it couldn’t be yours—it had to be that of another inmate. Officers who lent their strength to help an inmate were openly mocked.

Still, Beezle was seriously overmatched. He staggered under his load like an ant carrying a jelly bean. We had gone only fifty yards
and already the inmates in front of him had turned a corner and were waiting at the 5-Building gate; he and I were alone on the paved drive that led to the building. Still, I resisted the urge to help. I was an officer. I knew the rules.

From around a corner appeared a young black man in slacks and glasses, a civilian. He had probably come from the School Building; he looked like a teacher, maybe of one of the GED classes. As he approached, he glared at me.

“Why don’t you help the man?” he demanded angrily as he passed us.

I ignored him, but the remark stung. It was exactly what my conscience was asking. Once we turned the corner and he couldn’t see me, I caught up with Beezle and helped him support the teetering load.

Of course it was only about ten seconds before we passed an officer. “Get one of those other porters to carry that!” he chided.

“Their hands are full, too,” I answered, trying to look a little embarrassed.

Four more officers weighed in before we had made it back to B-block:

“He-e-ey,” in a disapproving tone.

“What, you need some exercise?”

“You shouldn’t be doing that.”

“Oh, how nice.”

Back at the Academy, more than one instructor had said it took four or five years to make a good CO. I had wondered why. There seemed to be no difficult concepts to master; the rules were all straightforward. In terms of civil service, you were only on probation for a year. The easiest way to get in trouble, everyone said, was to arrive at work late or call in sick too often. The four or five years thing had sounded like self-flattery.

But after five months at Sing Sing, I understood. Experience mattered. Or, more precisely, it took time (and confrontations) to decide (or to discover) what kind of person was going to be wearing your uniform. A hard-ass or a softie? Inmates’ friend or inmates’ enemy? Straight or crooked? A user of force or a writer of tickets? A strict overseer or a lender of hands? The job was full of discretionary power and the decisions about how to use it were often moral.

I envied my classmates who had been penciled-in to easy posts: patrolling the parking lot, guarding the sally port, perched atop a wall tower. With a job like that, you could go home with your peace of mind intact. But moving into the fall, with the end in sight, I wanted to squeeze as much of the four or five years it took to make a good CO into my single rookie year. I wanted to deepen my experience, achieve as much mastery as I could in the time I had. And with that end in mind, I did something that would have been unthinkable a short while before: I bid B-block. I would be there every day.

With my meager seniority, the choice of steady posts was limited. My first choice was V-gallery, the single gallery on the flats that Smith once had. I didn’t get it, but I did get my second pick—a regular rotation, every couple of days, between R-and-W, V-gallery, and escort. For better and worse, my daily fate was thenceforth sealed, and I was freed of the awful unpredictability of Sergeant Holmes.

Escort officer was, actually, a bit of a misnomer. On the day shift, an escort officer usually spent about half his day supervising in the mess hall, during breakfast and lunch. A relatively large number of officers—eight to a dozen—were assigned to each meal because of the prison mess hall’s well-known reputation as a place where inmates can “go off.” There was a variety of duties. The mess hall OIC stood on the bridge and decided when a gallery would be called to eat and when it would be excused. Another officer locked and unlocked the gates that controlled inmate movement off the galleries. Two or three others monitored the metal detector and pat-frisked inmates as they passed through the short tunnel between the mess hall and the bridge.

But the worst job, and the one I was usually assigned because I was new, was overseeing the steam table. At this post—one of the several spots in Sing Sing where sheer boredom and the potential for sudden mayhem existed side by side—your feet got tired and your authority was questioned constantly. Standing at the steam table, watching as the population of B-block shuffled by, each inmate receiving his plate from the servers, I always thought of an assembly line in a poorly run explosives factory. Tedium, tedium, tedium, then—
bang—
you’d be missing your hands.

And never did the stakes seem higher than on waffle day.
Waffle
day!
The news was passed to the knot of officers outside the mess hall by one who worked in the kitchen. It was a morning in October. Alcantara, the mess-hall OIC, got on the phone with the B-block OIC downstairs.

“Chilmark?” he said. “It’s waffle day. You got any extras to send me?” Extra officers, he meant, because waffle day presented an enforcement challenge on the food line. The inmates loved waffles and sometimes went to great lengths to acquire more than their share. It was not as bad as the situation on fried chicken day, but still it was bad—a little worse than, say, fish-stick day.

Chilmark said he’d see what he could find but that in the meantime Alcantara had better get started. Running the ten galleries of B-block through the 226-seat mess hall sometimes took nearly two hours.

“Okay, send me Q-and-V,” said Alcantara. There was a pause of a few seconds and then we heard, echoing through the cavern of B-block, the voice of Chilmark bellowing over the PA system.

“Q-and-V galleries, on the chow!” he cried. “X on standby!”

In a minute or two the inmates from the flats would be streaming up the stairs, over the third-floor bridge, and into the mess hall. It was important for us to assume our posts first.

Alcantara made the assignments. “Ruane, you got the north-end gates? Bailey on the split. Baker, Smith, Singleton on the pat-frisk.” He paused to see who remained. “Conover, steam table. Goldman, you take the other steam table.”

The mess-hall building, in the shape of a plus sign, is centrally situated; A-block, B-block, 5-Building, and the Sing Sing storehouse each back up to one of its four sides. There is a central kitchen, and a separate mess hall for each of the three cellblocks; the busy crossroads between them all is known as Times Square. The officer doing the “split” divides incoming inmates into two contingents that line up on either side of the room’s periphery and wait their turn on the serving line. The three mess halls vary only slightly in size and configuration. All have tall barred windows on two sides, with loud exhaust fans at the top. All have long steel tables with stools bolted to the floor in pairs and an aisle down the middle. The rooms are loud, with no decoration. Steel I-beams span the ceiling. White-clad mess-hall workers mill around the steam tables, walk back and forth wiping off the tables with rags, tie up bags of garbage, and mop up spills.

Security precautions are fairly elaborate. The two heavy gates
that block the route between the B-block shell and the mess hall proper, for example, are locked whenever a gallery has passed in or out; every officer inside knows that if rioting erupts, the gate officers are instructed to lock us in with all the inmates so that the riot is contained. (During the hostage crisis of 1983, inmates broke down the single gate that then separated the mess hall from B-block and might have spread the riot to the rest of Sing Sing if they hadn’t been stopped at Times Square.) Newer maximums and mediums and many older ones have ceiling-mounted chemical agent dispensers in case of riot, and often an officer in an observation booth who can activate them. Sing Sing, for reasons no one could ever explain to me, has never been retrofitted with gas.

The tunnel between the two gates is the pat-frisk area. If an inmate misbehaves in the mess hall, every newjack learns, you don’t take him to task in the mess hall itself: That could inflame his friends and start a riot. Instead, you notify the officers in the tunnel. They’ll pull the inmate aside when his gallery leaves and talk to him when his friends are far beyond the locked gates.

Waffle day. I said hello to the two inmate servers behind the steam table, as usual; one nodded in response. I thought the best position for me was four or five feet behind them and slightly to the side. This gave me a view of their area, where they passed out the three allotted toaster-size waffles, syrup, butter, and bacon, as well as of the juice dispenser, where inmates were supposed to help themselves to one small plastic cupful. The server who hadn’t acknowledged me had a round, shaved head and, like many food workers, had grown a bit pudgy from the practically unlimited opportunity he had to filch food.

I watched as he gave four waffles apiece to two inmates in a row. My first test.

“Excuse me,” I said. “It’s three, right?”

He turned and glared at me before placing three waffles on the next plate. It seemed only a few minutes later that he passed a large fistful of sugar packets to another friend of his, instead of the prescribed six.

“Hey,” I said, this time stepping up next to him. “Are we going to have trouble today?”

He took a step away from my disagreeable presence. “What—you gay, right, CO? That’s why you paying so much attention to me?”

“You flatter yourself,” I said. “Just do the job you’re supposed to.”

He muttered as he went back to serving. “Motherfucker’s gay,” I heard him say to the next inmate in line. It was an unfortunate way to start the day, since sometimes one inmate’s hostility seemed to spread, through a form of osmosis, to those who hadn’t even witnessed any altercation.

And on a waffle day, of all things. Like pieces of fried chicken, waffles found ways to fly out of the serving pan and into the hands and pockets of inmates. Only the most obsessive surveillance could prevent this. During the exit frisks, we’d find waffles stuffed inside pants and shirts. Servers would sometimes tuck a couple into the loose disposable serving gloves they wore and slide them around the edge of the steam table to friends on the other side. If the servers lined up just so—which my two occasionally did—they would obstruct my view so I couldn’t see their hands. Once, when I saw this alignment about to occur again, I shifted suddenly to the side and caught the servers in the act of waffle-gloving. I grabbed the glove and lofted it into the trash without comment.

Cueball gave me a look of pure hatred. “Anyone ever tell you you look like Mark Fuhrman?” he asked. “No,” I said.

An hour or so later, when I made an inmate return an extra helping of bacon that Cueball had bestowed, he glared at me anew and pointed at the inmate I had stopped.

“On the street, you probably wouldn’t even
look
at that brother,” he charged. “You probably afraid he gonna rob you or something.”

So now I was a racist homosexual who feared all young black men. In this case, though, the fear would have been justified—the man, after all, was a violent con.

I smiled, then grinned. “He probably
would
be about to rob me,” I said. The more I thought about that, the funnier it seemed.

“Shut up, man!” he said. “You look better when you ain’t talking.”