Eric Boyd
Issue No. 21 • Spring 2020
“Do you think I’m fuckin’ stupid?” The lieutenant looked disgusted. He always did—I never understood who would want to work with inmates every day if they couldn’t stand being around them—but today something was worse. It was about 8am, we were unloading pallets of pink slime, the meat product used for the jail’s spaghetti. I was halfway down the ramp with the pallet jack as Sarge asked the question.
“What are you talking ab—”
“You’re fired, get the fuck out of here.”
This wasn’t possible. I’d been on this gig at the jail for about six months, probably the best job in the building. I felt a fear I hadn’t experienced since getting dragged into the jail in the first place. I’d carved out a niche for myself: keep your head down, work hard, stay busy. As comfortable as someone can get in County, I’d gotten. Now it was over. Fuck.
Street Gang. The shit even sounded kinda cool. I mean, no job in a jail is cool or good—and we can even argue on the systematic hierarchy of accepting a job in a jail at all—but if you did work in a jail, would you rather wear a dingy white Kitchen uniform or a dark green one that said Street Gang? No contest.
We were in charge of inventory for items like shoes and jumpsuits, toiletries, and tools that needed lended out throughout the building. The warehouse we worked in was large, like something you’d see in a Lowe’s or something. Rows and rows, probably thirty foot high, maybe more. It was large enough to make pruno in the upper shelves, where someone like the lieutenant, an old codger who’d been out of work for the past several weeks with a knee replacement, could never hope to reach. It was cold, but since we had access to all the clothes we’d just bundle up in layers of uniforms. There was a TV and a fridge; we had clippers to trim our own hair.
Beyond inventory and unloading trucks, we were the only job that went outside. You can imagine how huge this was. We did trash pickup, which included outside garbage around the perimeter of the jail. Pittsburgh is one the cloudiest cities in America, if not the world, but to feel even a single ray of sun on your skin while standing outside was enough to keep from going insane. Again, it’s far from ideal to allow yourself to work for the jail, especially when we would be brought in to do free labor for them. It was one thing to drive us to the North Side to pick up extra mattresses due to overcrowding. That made sense, it was for the jail. But there was no reason to have us scraping metal at the recently closed Allegheny County morgue. One of us got hurt doing so, and the guys who were hired by the County didn’t want us there, but you know what? It is impossible to overstate how fucking good it felt to leave that place, even if it was to be surrounded by rude-ass yinzers, rusty gurneys, and old polaroids of corpses. The dirtiest jobs took on the sheen of polished gold when they were outside of the jail.
I was lucky to have my girlfriend sending letters and visiting. That gave me strength, knowing she was out there, helping me and loving me when I couldn’t love myself. But those visits are never long enough. The calls end so soon. The letters could be fifty pages long and they never feel long enough, no matter how slowly they are read. Street Gang was the only thing on the inside that kept me going. I didn’t make friends on the pod that easily because to be on 1B you either worked or were about to get out, so anyone I met there was either working, which meant we were never hanging out, or they were gonna leave in a couple weeks anyhow. The gym was only open at certain times of the day and handball gets old. I never learned how to play pinochle and I didn’t have enough shit to gamble anyway. I listened to baseball but that still wasn’t every day. Work was the only constant within the jail. Wake up, work until about 3pm, wait for the nightly trash run and get the leftover CO food from dinner. Sometimes we’d even get woken up in the middle of the night to mop up floods, which sounds awful unless you’ve experienced the kind of nightmares incarceration conjures on a nightly basis.
The lieutenant had just taken all of that away. And to answer his question, yes. Yes I did think he was stupid. I had no idea he’d be wise to the fact I’d been smuggling books into the pod.
…
The lieutenant, whose name I’ve honestly forgotten, was a cruel man. He resembled Hank Hill, but a little fatter and with white hair. He spoke in an angry staccato and rarely laughed unless it was at our crew’s expense. When one of us would run our foot over with the pallet jack or have a garbage bag rip open on us it was met with a hearty guffaw. My theory on the lieutenant was that he got hit on the head while watching Cool Hand Luke as a child and started rooting for the wrong character. Basically he was a sonofabitch.
When I first joined Street Gang, the lieutenant seemed like a short-tempered guy, but he was also getting ready to leave with the knee replacement, which left him in enough discomfort that he was a nonentity, languished to an office, peering at us through diamond-wired glass like Danny DeVito in Taxi. When he left, his role was filled in by the sergeant COs who worked under him. Each of them had their hang-ups but none were as bad to work for by a long shot. The main sarge who watched us was a cheerful meathead whose biceps were bigger than my head. He was a good dude for a CO, found a lot of busy work to keep me occupied. I think he felt sorry for me, and I accepted this pity in the form of trips outside of the jail for menial tasks where my presence wasn’t realistically required. Did Sarge need to bring me to the County print shop to pick up one single box of printer paper? No, but it’s not like I was getting paid, so nobody cared.
However, most of the time the work was hard. Unloading trucks and washing cars could be exhausting, but the most persistently draining job was feeding the trash compactor. I’d say I spent ninety percent of my workday at the compactor, emptying gigantic wheeled carts of garbage bags one by one. More than once I’d pricked myself with needles and razor blades and had those wounds covered in garbage juice. I was around that compactor so often I could look inside the panel where its buttons were housed and get the thing working again if it was on the fritz. Being near trash so long every day probably didn’t leave me smelling too good, but I was allowed an extra three minute shower when I got back to my pod every day. The work was tiring in a satisfying way. Most days when I got back to my cell I slept until dinner, at which point I would be called to do a nightly trash run. For this I would take one or two of the large carts I emptied throughout the day and collect every floor’s garbage from throughout the day. At eight floors and a basement, that was hell of a lot of trash. At the end of it I was allowed to go into the kitchen and take as much CO food as I could carry. The idea of bringing five or ten pounds of meatballs to your cell doesn’t sound possible, but I found out that bags for bread or potato chips hold many, many meatballs. If something that big wasn’t available, we always had normal-sized brown paper bags. As long as you could get them to your cell without them ripping, they could hold a good amount of food.
These nightly trash runs were always overseen by Dotty, a talkative, empathic sarge who looked like Mimi from The Drew Carey Show. Dotty was always cheerful and helpful; instead of being stuck by the putrid compactor for longer than she had to be, she’d assist me in tossing bags of trash into the compactor. “The sooner we’re done the sooner we can both rest,” she’d say.
Though chucking trash was the most physically tiring job, the worst job—the one that emptied my entire spirit—was dismantling the jail’s library. Being my first (and knock hard as hell on wood only) time inside, my understanding of prison libraries was confined to what I saw in films and television. I thought a small, pleasant old man went around with a cart full of books for fellow inmates to look at. Maybe it was even that way shortly I was incarcerated, but during my time there was no library. Instead, every pod had an electronic tablet mounted to a wall which was loaded with a law encyclopedia. Legally, this was all that the state had to provide— and it didn’t matter that the tablet was broke half the time and occupied the other half by people ordering their weekly commissary, which was the only other program loaded onto the tablet. I had to help tear down the library’s old shelves and throw everything away. I don’t remember getting rid of any library books, but there were audio cassettes and even VHS tapes. Perhaps inmates could request to visit the library and check out these materials. I’m not sure. Just knowing such a place had been in the jail made me sick. Why was this being torn apart? If the jail had money to let a sergeant pick up single boxes of paper with a county car, surely they could keep the lights on a library, which I’d understood to be volunteer run anyway, just like most of the education programs.
The only books I knew of were handed out through the chaplain’s office. Donations of books were allowed to come through the Street Gang loading dock, where we would sort through everything and eventually deliver the boxes to the chaplain. Donations didn’t come that often, but it was always a good thing when they did. I would let people on my pod know new stuff had come in, and they would send notes to the chaplain requesting specific titles I’d mentioned. They got their stuff faster that way than by saying, “I’d like a mystery book”. I always felt good helping folks out that way, especially since the library was no more.
One morning I was getting ready to help unload the day’s milk delivery. Instead the lieutenant, newly returned with a new knee and worse attitude, pulled me aside.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was something he’d stepped in. “Got some donations dropped off for the chaplain down at the officer’s entrance. Go pick ‘em up.”
I wondered if I should say something like “Sure thing” but decided on a quick nod. The lieutenant didn’t want spoken to by the likes of me, though I considered what a salute might do for him. He’d probably know I was making fun of him…
The officer’s entrance was on the other side of the jail, I often had to go there to pick up cigarette butts outside. The donation was a large cardboard box full of books left at the door, a guard/receptionist called us to pick it up. It may have been a random citizen left the books, I don’t know; it couldn’t have been someone who’d donated before because the protocol was for all deliveries to be left at our dock, which meant you had to be buzzed through a gate. It wasn’t a big deal though, the box was huge but I could still carry it.
When I got back to the Street Gang warehouse I set the box down on a bench and began looking through the books. I never took anything when a donation delivery came, but I was always searching for anything I might want to request. And holy shit was this a good box. If it was a random citizen who dropped this off, they must have known I was here.
William S. Burroughs, Margaret Atwood, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Wright, Anthony Burgess, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, and Ernest Hemingway. When the average book donation was Lee Child, Stephen King, and the bible… Com’on. This was a goldmine.
“The fuck you doin’?” The lieutenant asked as I rummaged through the box.
“Just… Just seeing what’s in this chaplain box.”
“Yeah,” the beefy daytime sarge, the one who always found me busy work, chimed in, “they look to look through the boxes, see if there’s anything they might wanna request later.”
“Request?” The lieutenant’s nostrils flared. “That shit’s getting thrown away.”
I couldn’t believe this. “Wait, what?”
“You fucking heard me. Donations come through us. They fucked up, their shit’s getting tossed.”
“Woah, hey,” the sarge said. “It’s here either way now, might as well—”
“Nope.” the lieutenant cut the sarge off. Then, looking at me, said, “Toss it.”
The sarge shrugged and walked away. Saying anything at all to his boss was something, but he wasn’t about to fight any harder than that. The lieutenant was pleased with himself as he hobbled away, back to his glass office.
I carried the box to the trash compactor and picked out the best books I could find. Beloved. A Clockwork Orange. Black Water. A Moveable Feast. Naked Lunch. Howl. Very few books deserve to end up in a landfill, and these ones were not among them. The trash compactor’s panel box had no back, it was hollow. Aside from one of two wires connecting to the buttons, this box was empty. I quickly stacked as many books into the back of the panel as possible, looking out toward the office every few seconds. I packed the books in and pushed them as flush as possible in case anyone would look around there for any reason. My heart was racing. I tried to control my breath, as it was cold enough to see it.
I was able to save maybe twenty books, half of which I wanted to read and half of which I thought other people might like. The rest, sadly, were thrown into the compactor. You never realize how important a book can be until they aren’t around anymore, when your entire existence is centered around all of the things you cannot have. Of all things taken from you in jail—family, friends, lovers, livelihood, freedom—a book seems so minor, and that’s what makes it hurt the worst. Laws are built around denying people the big things in life, but it is malice that would deny a small thing to someone.
The rest of the day went normally. I went up to the pod and walked laps on the second tier, called my girlfriend and talked until we had to go back to our cells and do a count before dinner. I told my cellie, Mickey, what had happened at work.
“Shittt,”he said. “Just don’t fuck up our food. I don’t know if I can go back to sardine chi-chis.”
We both laughed. Mickey continued flipping through his worn copy of Jenna Jameson’s autobiography. Man, we really needed more books.
The doors unlocked for dinner, I put my Street Gang shirt on and head down. Outside the pod, I see Dotty at the elevator with a cart. We start on the eighth floor and go down, collecting the garbage from each. When we reached the basement, I wheeled the cart to the compactor and tell Dotty I want to run to the kitchen and see what’s for dinner real quick. “Okay,” she said, “but hurry up. Wish I had a cigarette. Stinks back here.”
I go into the kitchen and find a brown paper bag, large enough to fit most of the books I’ve stored away. I tucked the bag into my pants and went back to the compactor, where Dotty is practically holding her nose. “Thank God, I’m going to go sit out there,” she began walking to the bench near the Street Gang office.
The moment she was out of sight, I took the bag from my pants and started pulling books from the back of the compactor’s button panel. Stacked into the bag, only two books peeked past the top of the bag, and only one was too large to fit at all. I considered putting them back inside of the panel, but I was too scared of them getting found. This was a one-shot. Unfortunately, I had to throw those books away. I do, as well as all the trash from the night, and tell Dotty I’m ready.
“You already grabbed food?” She looked at my bag, immediately seeing the books. “Oh…” I thought she was cool, right? I felt my stomach tighten. Dotty rolled her eyes. “I guess I missed that.”
Phew.
I got back to the pod and unloaded the books. Mickey’s eyes lit up. He grabbed Black Water by Oates. I took A Moveable Feast by Papa. As Hemingway wrote about eating well and cheaply, drinking and sleeping and staying warm, I felt comfort in words that I hadn’t seen any relation to in seven months. I was experiencing the exact opposite of everything he described. There was no charm in my eating stale bread or rolling cigarettes with napkins. The attractiveness of his bohemian escapades was so foreign to me, yet I felt tenderness in reading about it. That was the power of words, that they could make give someone everything they didn’t have. To read about that lost generation, the expatriate writers and artists of Paris, that gave me strength. How could this place not have a library? What in the fuck was wrong with the world? I’d never know, but at least I’d have these books right now.
…
The lieutenant nearly spat as I began to walk away. “Better pack up your shit,” he said. “You’re done. You can’t stay on the work pod.”
On the ride on the elevator, I was sick. Could I really get beamed for this? People had been booted for less. A recent shakedown ended with a dude having a sex doll made of pillows and trash bags and going into solitary. That’s weird or whatever, but it was harmless. Indeed, my incident was more distasteful; the jail seemed to hate books and I’d gone to extreme measures to smuggle them into population. I was fucked.
The pod was on lockdown when I got back, but when I entered my cell, the door did not lock behind me.
“Alright, bring your uniform down,” the CO on the block said through the squawk-box in my cell.
“Okay.”
The squawk-box did not turn off. After a few moments of static, the CO said, “And the books. All of them. There was a red one with a yellow title, looks like a dark one with a guy screaming on it? Something like that. All of them.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the lieutenant’s continued and pointed cruelty, but I was. Before I let myself get too upset, I realized how little they must have seen. So there was some video that caught a couple of the books, but not much. Sadly I’d have to turn in Beloved and A Clockwork Orange. However, there was no mention of a cover with a painting of a footbridge, no green cover with a diagram of an alien-humanoid head. The lieutenant was going to get his two books, but he was also going to get a bunch of bullshit I’d either read three times already or never wanted to read in the first place. Sure, he could keep my beat-up copy of Christine. That was fine.
I gathered up the books, my uniform wrapped around them to keep it all from tumbling over as I descended the steps and met the CO at his desk. I was hoping I’d get to stay in the pod till lunch, at least get enough time to pack everything up. This was going to be a long day, but for the words I’d gotten to read even just the night before, it would be worth it.
I put the bundle down onto the desk. The CO looked at me with a sly grin. These fuckers got much joy from this, didn’t they? It was the only fun they had. They should play handball in the gym or something instead of fucking us over.
“How long do I have?” I asked.
He chuckled. “You still have friends down there,” he said. “Since you don’t have much time left here anyway, you can stay.”
I hoped lockdown would end soon because I needed Mickey to get out of the cell. I was going to puke. Sarge must have fought harder than he had yesterday. For a guy in jail, I was fairly lucky.
I returned to my cell and to Paris. I read and read and lost myself and felt so good that when I hit the line about belonging to the pencil and the notebook, I stopped reading and sat down at the table in my cell. I looked through the half-inch of clear window If the jail didn’t want me to read books, I decided, maybe I’d start writing them instead.
Eric Boyd is a winner of the PEN Prison Writing Award and Slice Magazine's Bridging the Gap Award. His writing has appeared in Joyland, Hobart, Guernica, and The Offing, as well as the anthologies Prison Noir (Akashic Books) and Words Without Walls (Trinity University Press). He is the editor of The Pittsburgh Anthology (Belt Publishing). He studied at Maharishi International University before receiving an MFA from The Writer's Foundry. Boyd currently teaches a community workshop, sponsored by Chatham University, for recently incarcerated writers.
He is working on a novel.