Newjack (47 page)

“Okay, man. Don’t worry. I won’t.”

After that, he never looked at me again.

R-and-W was my adrenaline challenge and stress test; V-gallery, by virtue of being half the size, was a place where I could be a better officer and have more of a chance of feeling, at shift’s end, that some of the inmates were actually human. Though inmates still tested and tried to intimidate me on V, they did so without knowing that after the pressures of working R-and-W, I felt almost impervious to their lesser demands. I caught more glimpses of the humanity of inmates on V-gallery than anywhere else at Sing Sing.

Perch struck me as the kind of guy who probably had acted badly since he was about nine. He was an unfortunate combination of mental disability (my guess) and rage. And he was also big and strong enough to do real damage. Though keeplocked, he got a special escort to the psych floor twice a day to take his meds. I was surprised the morning I saw him, unescorted, walking by me on the flats with a group of inmates headed for the gym. I had figured he was keeplocked for a good long time.

That afternoon—it was early in my experience on V-gallery—I was using my go-round sheet as a guide for pulling the brake to release the runs. When the OIC called out, “Law library,” for example, I would check the sheet to see if anyone had put down law library when the officer doing the go-round came by his cell. If nobody had, I wouldn’t pull the brake. If three had, I would pull the brake and count off the three. If four came out, I’d know who was out of place. Most officers didn’t use the sheets for this, but I saw no reason not to.

The OIC called for the hospital run. I checked. Nobody on
V-north had put down hospital. Two on V-south had, so I let them out, closed the brake, then walked into my office to answer the phone.

When I came out, someone down on V-north was waving his arm madly out of his bars. I walked down to see what he wanted and heard the voice of the OIC as I did, announcing that the run to the hospital building had been “terminated”—it had left the block, in other words. The arms belonged to Perch.

“CO, I been waving to you for five minutes!” he shouted, greatly agitated. “Why the fuck you don’t let me out for hospital? Let me out now!” He shook his door.

I checked the list. “I didn’t let you out because you didn’t put down for hospital,” I said, showing him. “You put down for yard.”

“CO, I don’t know what the fuck I put down. I just know I got an appointment in the hospital! Let me out!”

“Hospital run’s over,” I told him. “That’s what the go-round’s for—to let us know where you’re going.”

“What? You telling me I can’t go to the hospital?” he cried.

“Right.”

The OIC was calling another run, but over Perch’s yelling I couldn’t hear what he said. I began to walk back toward my office. “CO, come back here!” His shouting continued. A couple of inmates advised me that Perch really did need to go to the hospital, that I should find a way. I saw Smith passing by.

“You were right not to let him out, technically, but this guy’s a bug,” he said. We noticed that Perch was now in the process of trashing his cell and was throwing things—clothing, paper, toiletries—across the flats. “Let me see if I can find somebody to escort him to the hospital.”

Perch showed no signs of recognizing me the next time I worked the gallery. He had gotten keeplocked again, and I made a point of treating him courteously. It was keeplock shower day. I gave him the second shower. A keeplock officer appeared and asked me to let out another inmate just as Perch told me he was done.

“Hang on a sec,” I told Perch. “I’ve got to let this other guy out.”

Perch flipped. I heard him yelling at me from the shower cell as I went to unlock the other inmate. He was angrier than ever when I came back.

“You pussy-ass motherfucker!” he shouted. “Let me out of here now, you cocksucker!”

Though Perch was no doubt imagining how he’d like to tear me limb from limb, I felt strangely calm, fatalistic. I went through the center-stairway passage and asked another officer to accompany me while I unlocked Perch’s shower cell. Perch didn’t stop cursing me as he walked to his cell, but he didn’t swing at me, either. I locked him in and breathed a sigh of relief.

Weeks went by. Perch appeared to have forgiven or forgotten me. Then a sergeant came by and asked me to do a psych referral on a new inmate on V-gallery and paused to check his notepad for the cell number.

“V-forty-eight?” I asked. I already knew the one. He was next door to Perch, a toothless old guy who had asked me to read his commissary account statement for him so that he could learn whether he had enough money to buy “grease,” by which he meant Chapstick—his lips were cracked, and he kept touching them when I asked what he meant.

“Sorry,” I had explained. “You’ve only got four cents.”

The sergeant told me that the man had been found wandering in A-block, having signed up for law library (you would get in trouble for this if you were sane); that he had arrived back in B-block holding his dick, he had to pee so badly; and that he had told the gate officer that his cell was the little cage we used for monitoring telephone use. I said I’d be happy to do the psych referral.

The psych-referral form required me to get the old man’s responses to some simple questions.

“Do you know what prison this is?”

The man paused for a moment. “Downstate, right?”

“Do you know what day it is?”

At this point, Perch started to heckle me. “Stop asking him that shit, man!”

I tried to continue. “Do you know your name?”

The man looked confused. Perch, meanwhile, was working himself up into a lather equal to his previous ones.

“Fuck you, man! Leave that motherfucker alone! Can’t you see he’s crazy?”

With that last question, I stopped trying to conduct my interview. I turned and looked at Perch. I was glad to see he recognized insanity and could appreciate, on some level, his hostility toward my amateur psych-testing. What could we really do for this guy, anyway? Even after I submitted the report, the only thing that appeared
to change for the old man was that he got transferred, for reasons unknown, to a cell upstairs on R-gallery.

Crazier than Perch or the old man, however, was the day a woman from the Department of Parole came to interview Perch. I stood next to her as she talked to him—standard procedure when a civilian was on the gallery. Perch, to my amazement, was to be released on Friday. “Did you know he’s still keeplocked?” I asked her, disbelieving, as I walked her back to the gate.

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. He’s still getting out.”

“I’ve got to tell you, that seems like a big mistake,” I said, trying to imagine what would happen on the first day Perch forgot to take his meds and somebody bumped into him on the subway.

“Don’t worry. They all come back,” she said offhandedly.

“Run, Forrest, run!”

Inmate Nolen enjoyed calling that out whenever I walked by, particularly when I was in a hurry. I reminded inmates of many different actors and the characters they played in movies, but he was the first one to see a resemblance to Forrest Gump. At first it didn’t bother me, but then I saw the movie. Forrest had some kind of disability in his legs and looked foolish running. Nolen yelled it for weeks, and finally I asked him to stop.

“Sure, Forrest, why not?” he said, grinning. But he didn’t stop. He did it more. He was just that kind of person: annoying, exasperating—you wanted to pop him in the mouth. The closest I ever got was one day when he was escorted down from the mess hall after an argument with the disputatious Officer Colon, who was always stirring things up. Nolen was loudly announcing that he was going to charge her with sexual harassment and that he wouldn’t go into his cell until he could speak with “at least a captain.” The officers all thought that was hilarious. Even Sergeant Murray, who watched three of us form a threatening ring around Nolen, which finally induced him to enter his cell, later commented to Colon, “Tell Nolen if you wanted a stupid white man, you’d find one who made more than fifty-three cents a day.”

Apparently, he had been a plumber on the outside. For a while he was keeplocked, but it was the most ineffectual keeplock I ever witnessed. Sergeants and OICs kept getting him out, to deal with one of B-block’s chronically overflowing toilets or stuck basin valves or nonfunctioning showers.

The only other white man on V-south at the time was Elliot Markowitz, a decaying old murderer who smoked too much, got pushed around by young gangsters, and was prone to depression. He was sallow and overweight and had a style of kvetching that got under the skin of many officers. But I kind of liked Elliot. I called him by his first name and could persuade him to do things when other officers failed.

Nolen apparently noticed this. One day he told me that I should read some of Elliot’s poetry, that it was “really good.” Elliot sorted through a deep box full of pages and passed me a few with his yellowed fingertips. I sat down at one of the picnic tables on the flats outside his cell and read. The first one was entitled “Seagulls”:

Another one I liked was called “Singing in the Shower”:

Nolen, out of his cell and supposedly doing work as a plumber, saw me with the papers, came by, and tried to grab them. I would have sooner died than have Nolen reading my poetry, but Elliot said, “Okay, sure.”

“Singing in the Shower” didn’t interest Nolen much. But he fixated on “Seagulls” and mocked it loudly, declaiming it in his pseudo-retard voice. An hour later, on his way to chow, Nolen was still chortling about it and cracking himself up.

“‘Waiting to see,’” he chanted, “‘the flying seagulls.’”