Running The Books : The Adventures Of An Accidental Prison Librarian Part 15

"No problem," he said, with a satisfied smile.

Frank balled up his paper and threw it into the trash. "I didn't know you wanted it to be exciting," exciting," he said. "I got to start over." he said. "I got to start over."

Suddenly Chudney stood up and said, "And another thing-you gotta learn how to hold that pencil, man."

He walked over to Dumayne and was about to manually correct his writing grip.

"Um, Chudney," I said, "sit down. Right now. Don't touch him."

You didn't touch someone else in prison unless you were asking for trouble. This was a basic rule. I noticed s.h.i.+zz, on the other side of the room, tighten his grip on his pencil. The last thing I needed in my cla.s.sroom was a fight.

But Chudney ignored me. "Ain't no thing," he said, grabbing Dumayne's writing hand and pulling his fingers into the correct posture. "This little man here's a friend of mine growing up," said Chudney. "I call him my little cousin."

And indeed, as Chudney aggressively set his hand straight, Dumayne wore the proverbial sulk of a compliant younger brother.

"Now that's that's how it's done, son," Chudney said, patting him on the back. how it's done, son," Chudney said, patting him on the back.

The men returned to their silent work. I noticed Dumayne struggling, in vain, to hold the pencil as Chudney had instructed him. I noticed other things, too. You can tell a lot about a person by the way he sits and writes. Fernando, who hadn't uttered a word yet in this cla.s.s, was a curious little man with an implausibly round head, an expressionless lampshade mustache, an autocratic pout. He sat with ironing-board-straight posture and scribbled decisively in florid Catholic-school penmans.h.i.+p, writing on his prison-issue loose-leaf paper as though he were drafting an armistice. He resembled a deposed but proud South American strongman. Perhaps he was.

I was pretty certain s.h.i.+zz was not a strongman. His pleading eyes were the only steady feature on a face that was in a state of constant and rapid flux: a mask of worry morphed into despair morphed into a wicked private joke morphed into self-flagellation. The overall effect being a troubled, ambivalent soul. His pencil, too, was in constant motion and never left the page, though he employed the eraser end as much as the business end, and did so emphatically and with elaborate displays of emotion.

Frank was more sedate when writing than speaking. And certainly more punctuated. I sensed he was out of his element with the written word. This was probably a good thing for everyone.

Too Sweet seemed distracted and wrote a word or two every few minutes. This was a man who sat in his cell and wrote dozens of meticulously handprinted pages a day. He was tired out. I got the strong impression he didn't want to be here, that he had signed up out of politeness to me. When he did write, though, he did so in bursts, like a Richter scale registering a distant tremor.

And then there was Chudney. Chudney was, it seemed, a noticer. He stared at the heavens, waiting for the words to drop right out of the troposphere, poised, ready to catch them before they hit the ground and smashed to pieces. Since there was no window to the outdoors-or penguin movie to watch-he was stuck gazing at the ceiling. He a.s.sumed two distinct poses: sitting perfectly still, elbows on the table, fingers linked, head bowed as though in prayer, pencil, out of his hands, sitting on paper-and then, perhaps ready to receive his answer, he'd pick up the pencil and raise his head to gaze at the ceiling. He frowned often and occasionally copied some words down onto the page.

I gazed at the ceiling, too, to see if I could see what he saw. All I could make out, though, was an aged water stain with a dark, wet brown border that was slowly expanding.

After twenty minutes, an officer swung by, leaned against a bookcase, and pointed to his watch. I collected the papers, thank yous were muttered by all. I gathered up the pencils and counted them. Seven for seven. Every potential weapon was accounted for. This was the basic metric of a successful cla.s.s in prison.

Later that night I read the short essays from the cla.s.s. s.h.i.+zz's was full of false starts, rhymes, plagiarized lyrics, extended metaphors, and other varieties of quasilyrical filler. It's hard to believe what a remarkable, tortured, smudgy mess a person can make of an innocent white sheet of paper in the span of twenty-five minutes. But there were some heartfelt and affecting moments in his account of a man trying, and failing, to catch a train. An appropriate subject for him, I thought.

Chudney's was a short and oddly compelling inventory of the strange people you see at the train station (himself included, he admitted). Dumayne offered a spare description of the physical s.p.a.ce, floor to ceiling. Fernando's was incoherent; it was unclear whether he understood the a.s.signment. Or English. Too Sweet sketched out a sad encounter he once had there. And Frank, in his frank attempt to be "exciting," wrote a fast-paced thriller about a train robber and a group of cops engaged in a shootout during rush hour (the upshot: there was blood). This, he said, was "based on real events," though he didn't specify which. Jason had given up, erased the sentence or two he had written, and filled the page with gang graffiti.

I was satisfied with this start.

To the Princ.i.p.al's Office Word got back to me that Officer Chuzzlewit had submitted his incident report. He had, it turned out, conveniently omitted the detail about his chemical attack on the library. In turn, I submitted a report to my supervisor, Patti. She kicked it up to her supervisor. Within hours, I got a call informing me that the sheriff's deputies, Geoffrey Mullin and Jack Quinn, wanted a word with me.

Mullin and Quinn had different styles. There was a widely understood good cop/bad cop dynamic to their leaders.h.i.+p team. Mullin, the senior deputy, was an attorney. Wry, judicious, above the fray: the good cop. Quinn, on the other hand, had a touch of upstart to him. c.o.c.ky, six-foot-something, shaved-head. The bald, virile type. A former college women's basketball coach and relative newcomer to the administration, he flipped between two modes: charming or confrontational.

I followed Quinn into Mullin's office. Something about it seemed strange to me. Then it hit me, literally. Sunlight Sunlight. There was actual suns.h.i.+ne streaming into the office, which was on the first floor, on the edge of the yard. This was a courtside luxury box to inmate basketball games. As I entered the office, I heard the door close behind me and a languid voice, tinged with a mild case of Boston.

"Thanks for coming here, Avi."

It was Mullin. He'd materialized out of thin air.

"We're taking this matter very seriously," he said, gravely. I turned around to look at him.

He was standing behind his desk, wearing a New England Patriots jersey over his white dress s.h.i.+rt and tie. The Pats were set to play a big playoff game in two days. The absurd contrast between the football jersey and his grim police tone brought me perilously close to smiling. But I held it together, in deference to the sober subject of the meeting.

Quinn crossed his arms.

"There coulda been a riot," he said, abruptly.

I couldn't tell whether he was talking to me or to Mullin. But one thing was clear: he was outraged. For a second, it seemed he was blaming me.

"That's why we gotta look into this," replied Mullin, taking a seat behind his desk.

Both men were in war-room mode and didn't so much speak as debrief. I wondered if this was how they actually spoke to each other, or if it was some kind of act for my benefit. It was as though they wanted me to feel I was eavesdropping. I would have been perfectly happy to turn into vapor and slide out under the door.

Mullin looked at his watch, scribbled something down, and then looked at Quinn. "We should check his locker." This was part question, part statement.

Quinn, jaw clenching, didn't miss a beat. "We should check all all of their lockers." of their lockers."

I turned back to Mullin to see how he'd react to this sudden descent into Stalinism. I'd always wondered how much these men acted in concert and how much they actually clashed. But Mullin gave no response, nor any indication he'd heard the statement. Was this a form of consent? He took a few more moments to scribble, then looked up again.

"There could have been a riot over there," he said finally, echoing Quinn's earlier statement. "And that's how we have to treat this." Mullin was clearly talking to me now. "Do you understand why that is?"

"Yes," I said. And I did: as preposterous as the incident was, the inmates were genuinely angry about it. And rightly so.

But still, I was a bit surprised that they were "taking this seriously." Mostly because it was a fart bomb. But also because as management, Mullin and Quinn had strategic alliances to maintain-why would they want to get embroiled in a petty squabble between union members?

"Okay," said Mullin, leaning back in his seat. "We read the report, but tell us again what happened."

Was this on the record or off? I wondered. I didn't want to ask, fearing that it would sound suspicious. But I had nothing to hide. I wondered. I didn't want to ask, fearing that it would sound suspicious. But I had nothing to hide.

I told them all that had happened, including certain morsels that had been beyond the concern of my report. "And here's another piece," I added, leaning in. "This same thing, this business with the fart spray, apparently also happened the day before, on Forest's s.h.i.+ft."

Mullin and Quinn exchanged a glance and a nod, a gesture familiar to me from cop shows. It said, We got our guy We got our guy.

Feeling confident, I leaned back in my seat and offered up a modest proposal. "I think he should attend our cla.s.s next week and apologize to the inmates."

The deputies exchanged another knowing look.

"Absolutely not," said Quinn, as Mullin muttered something about how this would endanger the officer.

I had figured I'd give my opinion even though I knew they wouldn't go for it. I knew the rules. Staff, especially officers, don't apologize to inmates. Such an action would undermine the power dynamic.

Quinn changed the subject. And he got to the point of why I was there. They wanted more names. As the deputies started flipping through officer photos-asking me, "Was this guy there? What about this guy...how about this guy?"-I got the sinking feeling that they were using this incident to settle some other scores. They seemed to have some people they wanted to nail.

Although other officers had been in on the mischief, I'd omitted their names from my report. I didn't want this to s...o...b..ll. But when Quinn asked me point-blank if anyone else was there, I told the truth. I hadn't gone out of my way to indict any officer-not even Chuzzlewit himself-but I certainly wasn't going out of my way to cover for them. And some questions could not be avoided. For example, just where was the officer who was actually on duty at that post, whose job it was to protect protect the library? The answer: he had been standing right there, watching the incident unfold and smiling like a ninny. the library? The answer: he had been standing right there, watching the incident unfold and smiling like a ninny.

I would have been happy to see this thing die. But the department actually seemed to be taking the incident seriously, as Mullin, in his football jersey, had promised. I was called in to speak with the prison's secret police, the SID. In a small windowless room, with a camcorder on a tripod staring me in the face, I answered minute questions for over an hour (with a break for water) from two investigators: a chatty, diminutive Italian American fellow and his unsmiling foxy partner, who said little but asked the tougher questions. Forest and an a.s.sortment of officers and inmates were likewise shaken down for answers.

During my water break, when the camera was off, the Italian American investigator confided in a near whisper that, "when I first saw these reports on my desk I thought, 'C'mon we're gonna spend our time solving the Case of the Fart Spray? We got better things to do.' But when I started reading through everything I thought, 'So these guys wanna bring in unauthorized HAZMAT into a correctional facility, which could be a felony, by the way, and then fudge the truth? These guys want to play it like that? Okay, fine, we can play like that, too.'

"Some officers think they can run around here doing whatever they want. Know what I mean?"

I got the feeling he was laying some bait for me, trying to catch me with my guard down, to coax more information out of me, or get me to reveal some personal bias against the officers. I just smiled and nodded politely. This whole thing was getting sillier by the moment.

Game Tight The story begins in Manhattan. A harried and anxious wannabe young pimp named C.C. Too Sweet is driving a car full of prost.i.tutes. The front seat is vacant, saved for the captain of his s.e.x-for-hire squad. His most trusted ho. Although referred to by the t.i.tle "bottom b.i.t.c.h," she is the top prost.i.tute on this team, privileged to sit in the front.

After picking her up, he plays the women off of each other, making their night's earnings into a compet.i.tion. Nothing is good enough. Each could do better. Predictably, the bottom b.i.t.c.h has brought in the biggest cash return and Too Sweet, after heaping abuse on the others, holds her up as a s.h.i.+ning example. In so doing, he has proven that he's not all bad, that he appreciates and rewards good work. This gives the less experienced prost.i.tutes something to strive for, while at the same time instilling in them a requisite sense of worthlessness.

C.C., the narrator of this story, now antic.i.p.ates the sensitivities of his reader. A prost.i.tute, he explains, expects abuse. If she doesn't get it, she won't respect you nor will she trust that you can protect her. Eventually she'll leave and find protection elsewhere. The women call him Daddy, and he has indeed become the abusive father figure they have come to expect. Through the abuse, Too Sweet has also formed a hierarchy that places the bottom b.i.t.c.h at the helm, a kind of middle manager, and makes her a crucial female ally.

C.C. emphasizes that a good pimp must know and understand women in order to control them. This requires psychological astuteness, a finely calibrated intuition. He has to possess a natural understanding of the female mind. To be a sort of sensitive guy.

After reading this, I'd asked him to elaborate. He thought for a moment and then said, "You ever heard of 'emotional intelligence'?"

I nodded.

"The best pimp's got great emotional intelligence. No bulls.h.i.+t. And," he added, "C.C. Too Sweet's got some real skills in that department."

Too Sweet had a theory. When it comes to rhetoric, the pimp is king, Too Sweet claims. He asked me to consider Malcolm X. "Check it out," he said. "How does a man like Malcolm learn to move people, large crowds? He's got talent, right, and in prison, he gets knowledge from books. But where did he get the courage, the ability to stand up and chop it up like that? When I see old tapes of Malcolm speaking-and I'm talking about Malcolm with his clean-cut preacher's s.h.i.+rt and tie-when I see Malcolm talking, I say, d.a.m.n, that man is a pimp." pimp."

This comment draws mixed reactions from some of the inmates in the vicinity.

Later he elaborated. "It's like this," he said. "I'm reading this book about jazz, right? Dude says that a lot of the best musicians, right, are cla.s.sically trained. Like to play Mozart, right? That's how it was with Malcolm. That man was cla.s.sically trained in the street swagger. And you gotta understand, man, this s.h.i.+t is ancient skills. There was mad pimps in ancient Egypt, wearing their togas and s.h.i.+t. It wasn't invented yesterday. Once he mastered it, got that cla.s.sical training, see, then he picked up all that book knowledge and discipline, that man was ready to take over the world."

There was certainly something true in what Too Sweet said. Malcolm X's transformative experience occurred in prison, when his mentor, a fellow inmate, showed him, as he wrote in his autobiography, how to "command total respect...with words." Too Sweet abided by this. It was a belief that conferred some credibility to his behavior. He respected words because words bestowed respect onto him.

And this was where emotional intelligence-based on Too Sweet's extensive reading in pop psych-came into play. He had a theory that the most powerful men speak the language of women. It's much easier for a man to speak the language of men, he explained. But if he knows how to also move women, he is king. I noticed that Too Sweet's handwriting was curiously feminine. Or, to be more precise, its carefully wrought curly letters and circles over i i's resembled a seventh-grade girl's handwriting.

As a narrator, Too Sweet was good at antic.i.p.ating his listeners' biases. Just as his unrelenting descriptions of a night in the life of a pimp were growing too malicious to keep me reading, he changed gears completely. As he'd promised: "before they can say 'd.a.m.n,' I'm gonna back up and start from the beginning."

Until the age of ten, C.C. had had a happy childhood. His mother hailed from Tuskegee, Alabama; his father had been a U.S. paratrooper and ran a successful cleaning business. The family lived a happy middle-cla.s.s existence in the Mattapan section of Boston. It was father, mother, C.C., his two older brothers, and the family dog. Family photos showed C.C. as a child, running around, playing, smiling, and hugging his mother.

One day C.C. came home to piles of shattered gla.s.s. His brothers were distressed. His mother, furious over his father's liaisons-or as C.C. put it, "his tricky d.i.c.k for young p.u.s.s.y"-had smashed every window of the family home. These windows were never repaired. The family split. C.C.'s father, the family's provider, left.

At age ten, C.C. entered a universe of crime and violence from which he never returned. His mother relocated the family to Roxbury, to the projects right around the corner from where Malcolm Little had grown into a hustler and pimp before his rebirth as Malcolm X.

This move was more than geographic; it was a distinct and dramatic drop in economic cla.s.s, C.C. wrote, a sudden fall from middle cla.s.s stability into a chasm of poverty. It was the early 1980s. Young C.C. suddenly inhabited a world of urban decay: garbage-lined streets, empty lots, graffiti, rampant crime and homelessness, guns, gangs, junkies, rotting tenements, bombed-out neighborhoods. In order to get to school, he had to step over pa.s.sed-out bodies lying in his building's hallway and in the streets.

A decade of race wars had left Boston as racially polarized as ever. n.o.body-white or black-dared cross the clearly delineated borders into the Other's neighborhood. And if you did, you were, in C.C.'s words, "subject to a serious a.s.s whipping." The worst-the crack and AIDS epidemics, the proliferation of automatic weapons-was right around the corner.

But the worst was what happened at home. C.C.'s mother, embittered by her husband's flight, by her heavy burden and her sudden poverty, struck out at her children in rage.

When his mother was at work cleaning homes C.C. was left alone to wander his new surroundings. He didn't have to go far to find trouble.

My first lesson in understanding the street swagger was when I would come home from school and spend the rest of my afternoon hanging out in the hallway listening to the local thugs talk about everything from p.u.s.s.y to robberies. My hallway was The Spot.I used to sit in the hallway, listening to those exciting stories, watching the thugs roll their weed, load their pistols, grab their crotches, and flicking their noses in between sentences. All of it had me fascinated.

Unable to endure his mother's beatings and abuse, C.C. ran away again and again. His mother would hire local thugs to retrieve him and then she would beat him mercilessly. One of these beatings, a savage attack in which she used whatever she could find lying around-an extension cord, a chair, a lamp-left scars all over his body and turned C.C. to the street for good. He would squat in crack houses, stairwells, roofs, abandoned cars. He would lie on a cold floor staring at the ceiling, cursing his mother and wis.h.i.+ng she would take him back with love.

He had a terrifying recurring dream: a rabid black dog chased him, but his legs were too heavy to move. He was never able to put any distance between him and it.

One day his luck changed: I laid on the floor and fell asleep and started dreaming about the big black dog chasing me when suddenly I was awoken cold, sweating and trembling. When I looked up someone was standing over me. For a minute my eyes couldn't get focused because of the bright light that was in back of the person's head.As soon as my eyes cleared all I could see was a tall pretty lady standing over me with a sparkling beautiful smile. I thought I was dreaming and she was an angel that came to take me away from the pain and misery of my life. I extended my arms so she could pick me up and fly off into the sky like in the movies.She kneeled down, hugged me and said, "Hey little man, why you sleeping in the hallway?"Once she spoke I realized she was a real person.I softly responded, "'Cause if I go home, my mama gonna beat me.""Why she gonna do that?""I don't know why, she mean, I hate her."The lady sat on the grimy hallway floor with me and we talked for a while. She lived on the same floor where I was staying, she stumbled across me while taking out the trash through the back hallway. The lady took me inside her apartment and made me something warm to eat. Her name was s.h.i.+rley and she lived in a very clean two-bedroom apartment with her man, Otis.s.h.i.+rley was 26 years old, tall, cinnamon brown skin, thin, with a beautiful Diana Ross mane that flowed past her shoulders to the middle of her back. She was a prost.i.tute; Otis was her pimp. Both were heroin addicts.Otis was a 260 lb. gorilla-looking n.i.g.g.a, but the slickest-talking, sharpest-dressing cat that I had ever met. Otis liked me right away and treated me like his son. He told me I could stay with them as long as I take the trash out and do ch.o.r.es around the house. I didn't mind because I didn't want to go home and get beaten. I stayed there and was happy. They made me feel appreciated.s.h.i.+rley would go out every night and work the street, come home every morning with big piles of money and toss it on the living room table before she went and took her morning shower. That was her routine every morning.Otis would sometimes call me into the living room to help him count the money and he would say, Lil n.i.g.g.a there ain't no money like ho money.Otis owned two Cadillacs, a motorcycle-I never seen so much money before. I thought Otis was the richest n.i.g.g.a on the planet. I later learned that Otis was a minor player in the game and what he had was only scratching the surface of what a pimp could acquire by peddling p.u.s.s.y. I was only 12 years old then and I didn't understand anything about pimping, let alone s.e.x. I thought that men would pick her up and give her money because she was so pretty.

Like so many subsequent father figures Otis was a mixed character: part role model, part cautionary tale. He was slick and successful-showing C.C. around the strip, s...o...b..ating at the sw.a.n.ky Sugar Shack club in the South End-but he was also a miserable heroin addict who would leave C.C. in his Caddy while he went into a shooting gallery to get his fix. The presence of the child in the car, Otis believed, would deter potential thieves. He'd return two hours later smelling "as though he ate a bowl of s.h.i.+t, from vomiting, which happens when the dope enters the system." Cadillacs aside, Otis was a wretched mess.

C.C.'s narrative was a series of vignettes of such men: role models with deadly flaws. Men of talent and energy, and principle, who ended up broken, penniless, addicted. And worst of all, powerless and compromised. Pimps who had become the prost.i.tutes of their own vices-and then of the system. He vowed never to be like that. But these were the people who had educated him, who loved and accepted him, who had taken him in when he was weak. To them he owed his allegiance. His fate was linked to theirs.

And then there were the women of his narrative. They ranged from the abusive mother to the saintly prost.i.tute s.h.i.+rley. These two women were the poles of C.C.'s world.

It was no wonder that C.C.'s early career in boosting (shoplifting) and drug dealing didn't satisfy him. Or that he avoided drugs and guns. He had had a burning desire to be a pimp. It wasn't just a way to make money, but a way of seeing the world, a way of being seen in the world. Or as C.C. Too Sweet-steeped in pop psych jargon-might say: to be appreciated for who he is who he is.

An Island of Deer My attempts at teaching nature writing met with some resistance. I realized that some of the inmate students had barely any experience in backcountry woods, on desolate beaches, in deserts, in the middle of seas. Almost none had ever beheld the night sky in its full glory; to them, the Milky Way was nothing but a second-rate candy bar. Nature bored them because they couldn't relate. So I was told.

I decided to demonstrate that they actually had experienced nature and that, after all, they lived in nature, that the human city was as much a part of nature as an ant colony or a beehive. So I forced the cla.s.s to write about their observations of nature in the city.

The responses to the a.s.signment were interesting, as always.

True to his experiences on the mean streets, Too Sweet spoke of nature in the city in the starkest terms.

In the city nature is harsh.If you took a camera and made a National Geographic movie about the city it would look like a movie about life in the jungle, except with cars, lights, cigarettes and Armani suits. But otherwise everything else would be the same. The strong kill the weak, the smart survive, and the smartest live like kings. But there time comes too cause theres always someone smarter and younger. Someone with a short fuse and nothin to lose. Don't get me wrong now. There are moments where things look beautiful. You'll see a bird fly way up the sky early in the morning after a long night and you weren't expecting it, or the snow fall really clean before people get it dirty.But Nature in the city is not really beautiful. The beautiful things are only accidents. There mostly kids stuff. Truth is there is something wrong with humans. There different from other animals. It is there fatal flaw. That thing is vice. Let me give you an example. A mother bear protects her young, no matter what. She kills for her young. So does a human mother. Except sometimes. Sometimes a human mother puts her own desires before her children. She might even harm the child, beat him or leave him defenseless. This is called vice. Only humans do it.But if you want to talk about nature in the city, think about this. Just like nature, the city don't never sleep. There are some animals that live by day and some that live by night. The more dangerous ones live at night. That's life in the city and the jungle. That's how it always was and always will be. The jungle is open 24/7 and so is the city.

Frank wrote an oddly touching description of his Christ-like dog, Paul. Justifying his interpretation on the topic of "nature in the city," Frank explained that "a lady giving birth is part of nature, even if it happens in a hospital. Well, my lady and I couldn't have a child so we adopted Paul. Paul was our dog but he was like our child."

The dog, as it turns out, had only three legs to begin with, so when the white SUV came gunning up the street, he had no chance to escape. He almost died. Indeed the people at the animal hospital said there was no hope, and that they should euthanize the dog. Frank's wife, Tracie, refused. After the dog was stabilized, it was determined that it was paralyzed. Again, the vets insisted on putting him down. And again, Tracie refused. She took the dog home.

Frank acknowledged that this was a strange thing to do, but insisted that this dog's survival had been a miracle. Tracie had lost too much in her life and wasn't ready to let the animal go. Frank fas.h.i.+oned a little bed, a converted coffee table, and attached wheels to it. They would wheel the wounded creature from room to room. When they cooked knocks and beans, he was there; when they watched Everybody Loves Raymond Everybody Loves Raymond, he was there; and when they had friends over for poker, there he lay, on his makes.h.i.+ft gurney, always staring straight ahead.

Frank worried that the dog was suffering. He himself knew about trauma from Vietnam and hated to think that poor Paul was constantly reliving the accident. Tracie would sit next to the paralyzed dog for hours, petting him, and whispering secrets into his ear.

Frank concluded his touching, utterly bizarre story by saying that this was nature because a dog is part of nature and so are humans and so is a mother's love for her child, even if this mother is human and the child is a sick dog. It was a counterpoint to Too Sweet's cynical view of human motherhood.

There was only a minute or so left in the cla.s.s. I decided to wrap things up and push off the remaining essays until the next session. Dumayne's hand shot up. It gave me boundless joy that he raised his hand in cla.s.s. He was the only inmate in the cla.s.s who did this, and he did it often, regardless of how many times I'd told him it wasn't necessary. But I would have been disappointed if he had stopped.

"Yes, Dumayne," I said.

"Chudney wants to read his joint. You should let him."

Chudney seemed a little annoyed that his young friend was speaking on his behalf, but didn't contradict him.

"Okay, fine," I said, "make it quick."

Chudney did exactly that; he read way too quickly. I couldn't really understand him and I was already distracted by the officer outside, pointing to his watch. I told him that it was good, even though I hadn't really heard it. And then I collected the notebooks and pencils.

Later, I had a chance to actually look at it. I read his essay on the elevator going up the prison tower to deliver books. It caused me to miss my floor.

One morning when I was ten I was up real early. I don't know why. Maybe I was just done sleeping for the night but I was up and atom right after the sun came up. I looked out my window and what did I see. A deer eating some gra.s.s in the lot across the way! Like it wasn't nothing at all. Then he got scared of a garbage truck. He ran up the street and stopped. After that he ran away just like that. I don't know about you but this don't happen to me everyday. I never seen a deer in my life and mos def not in the city with broken gla.s.s all over and cars parked all up on the side of the street. Even at the time I knew it was something special. Like a sign or something. I still wonder where it came from and where it went. I wonder if anyone else seen it.Now I know your probably gonna ask me to DESCRIBE what I seen, cause you always do.

I smiled when I read that.

Not much tell you the truth. But I remember it like yesterday. The way it moved. Jumping and running like at the same time. I never seen that before. I also remember the sun coming up gold splitting through blue. I remember the deer's big black eyes. I remember his little white tail waving as he disappeared into the city.C.C. the Author C.C. dropped out of my cla.s.s. He had other work to do. I didn't hold it against him. It's hard to hold a grudge against a macho guy who reads self-help books and talks earnestly about wanting to "boost my self-esteem." He wasn't ashamed to tell the story of the time a prison psychologist asked him to look in a mirror and describe what he saw. He had replied: "a balding guy who's too short."

He was working studiously to write his book. I encouraged him to read a pa.s.sage of his book-in-progress at a poetry reading that I held in the library. He strutted up to the front of the room, full of bravado, and prefaced his reading by saying that he was "keepin' it strictly street!" strictly street!" He went on to boast that, "I am currently entertaining a few book offers." This latter claim was a complete lie, of course, and the former, about keepin' it street, was, as his audience was about to find out, highly debatable. He went on to boast that, "I am currently entertaining a few book offers." This latter claim was a complete lie, of course, and the former, about keepin' it street, was, as his audience was about to find out, highly debatable.