Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Everyone knew the adolescents were scarier than any grown man.

The fear method spares courthouse time. Every brother lands in Building 6 swearing to request a jury trial this time, vowing never to plea out again. Can’t abide another conviction on the record- Anyway, yo, I’m innocent! Then, after six months of dodging homies slicing on each other in the commissary line, your court-appointed mentions a deal. Felony parole and time served, or one-to-five upstate, and you take it. The risk of a dime-to-life, a Rockefeller bid, is too much. Surprise: you’re busted down again.

Nothing serves the system more than the system frying out of control around the edges.

Touring the island from every vantage, Dose has seen its works, like a clock pried open. When crackheads first get inside, they aim for a bunk and nobody lets them settle. Reeking, skinny, they’ll never get over, never convince anyone of anything. Older hard cases or young studs, anyone says the same thing: Damn, motherfucker, you stink!

Get with them derelicts, boy, don’t sleep here!

You’ve been the one carrying your blanket to the derelict quadrant, exiled to Riker’s own Bowery to bunk with the leather-scabbed, finger-split winos. Crushed men, eyes flickery from decades of cringing.

Next you get the whole Horatio Alger bit. Guys taking interest in their appearance for the first time-they’ve never before had an hour to themselves, never gotten clean, never went a day without drugs. Walk in howling for a hit of rock, but it’s not coming. That first lockup is a glimpse in the mirror. The older men have ways, ideologies-jailhouse lawyer, Muslim, player or pimp, or the national gangs, Latin Kings, Nietas, Bloods-and every soul’s got a rap, talking endlessly about respect. Nobody’s without a hustle or an affiliation, even as they speak of self-preservation by relying on nobody. Maintaining your space, staying out of debt. No arrears to anyone, that’s the universal principle. So naturally everyone’s trying to loan you cigarettes the first day, two-to-one interest: that’s arrears, son.

Every body’s got a layer of muscle too. Then there’s you, scrawny freak from the street, ninety pounds once you beat the cold turkey.

You’re thinking no arrears but the Riker’s barber gives you a good haircut and then whispers You owe me half a pack, brother , and you don’t even argue, you’re just grateful, because you looked so screwed up before he fixed you.

Rikers provides the first audition: What’s your hustle to be? Watches? Faggots? Drugs? Or just broker advice and cigarettes, narrate stories that don’t ever finish, Jailhouse Scheherazade?

This island’s best scam Dose stumbled into, though, his first time, between sentencing and transfer upstate. That September, with a nod to Senior’s ghost, Dose had checked Hebrew on his intake form. The CO didn’t blink, just told him when and where services were held. Dose forgot it completely until the winter holidays, when he was issued a box of kosher matzo at dinner and allowed to take it back into the dorms. Some rabbinical authority must have leaned hard to get this perk grandfathered in-whatever the source, the matzo’s an absurd windfall, each day a full box that could keep him snacking a week.

Dose’s bunkmate that December was a hard-ass he knew from the neighborhood, a cat he used to see looming around the Albee Square Mall, selling cakes and pushing pamphlets, dressed like Malcolm X. Just a bullshit Five Percenter out on the street, the dude had actually taken to the study of Islam when he got inside: every five in the morning he and his homies are in the dayroom going Allah, Allah on their knees. Now it’s Ramadan, and the motherfucker is starving, since during festival week the Muslims can’t eat before sundown. At Riker’s this means missing all three meals, sitting on your bunk while everyone else is taken out for the five o’clock dinner. So Dose slips him a box of the matzo, and then another for his friends-he’s got a supply under his bunk by now-which wins those cats over quick. He doesn’t even ask for packs in return, figuring he’ll have the Nation watching his back from now on. So a fake black Jew plays Santa Claus to a bunch of famished Muslims: Riker’s logic.

Elmira.

Each institution carries previous incarnations, like sluggish rivers with another century’s silt at their bottoms. Correctional reforms, innovations in prisonology tested and discarded, all these old uses for the same walls leave vibes. Everyone knows Sing Sing’s the juice house, home of the chair, even when capital punishment was abolished the place just has death-row radiation in its steel. Auburn and Philadelphia’s Eastern State are the birthplaces of solitary, stone tombs for driving men into self-hells-though the new supermaxes are working to make Auburn look silly.

Attica’s just bat shit, like Apocalypse Now .

Elmira was once juvenile detention, and though it’s officially phased out, they still lean to the young there, like they’re doing you a favor. More lately it’s replaced Sing Sing as the state’s reception center, where you’re tested and classified for placement elsewhere. Your educational level, plus your score on a gross aptitude test, determines what you’ll be paid the entire time you’re employed inside-forty cents, seventy cents an hour. You might be a janitor or trusty, hand out the soap on the block, for ten years, based on an hour’s scrutiny here. Then, having been scoured for hints of gang colors, you’re scattered to the far corners, away from any suspected homeboys. Men serve whole terms at Elmira, not uncommonly; nevertheless, this presumption of just passing through, combined with an air of boys’ prison, makes Elmira You-Ain’t-Seen-Nothing-Yet House. There’s an undertone of Shut up, boy, count yourself lucky you here. As though it could get any worse.

Dose spent four years inside Elmira’s walls, like turning the pockets of his youthful self inside out. As on Dean Street, he made himself an old hand, an inside-track man, overnight. He was extravagant with lore, goofy with it, telling men twice his age how to operate the system he’d hardly seen firsthand. All Dose needed to know, really, he learned his first day on Elmira’s yard, at the bench, when he found the free weights fused to the crossbar, so they couldn’t be stolen or used to crush a skull. In other words, you’d best have gotten pumped quickly at Riker’s or you wouldn’t even be able to budge the set here. Plus if you weren’t already a certain size the dudes around the bench won’t let you near it. So much for the illusion your fate was yet untold. Any forking path was further behind you on your journey, further back than you dared guess.

Career.

At Elmira Dose turned himself into a jailhouse artist. Like Riker matzos, the career was a thing he stumbled into. At a table in the dayroom, he’d been curled in an introspective shell around a series of notebook pages, sketching, in blue ballpoint, elaborately rendered designs for train cars of the mind, in blazing colors supplied only by the mind. He’d been working the hardest at a top-to-bottom with a Valentine’s theme: goopy bulging hearts speared by feathered arrows, shot by a Porky Pig cherub in Nike high-tops.

A stony-eyed brother in net muscle shirt and doo-rag, one Dose had so far assiduously avoided, suddenly lurched at his shoulder, startling him. The brother pushed a forefinger at the Valentine page.

“Yo, that shit’s nice .”

“Thanks.”

“You could do me something like that? For my girl?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Put me and her name together. From Raf to Junebug.”

“Sure.”

“Put it around the edge of a paper, man. So I can write inside.”