The Prison Book Club (10 page)

I asked him how the book club compared to the other correctional programs in the prison. I knew that inmates who had not completed grade twelve were required to attend the prison school and that other correctional programs focused on changing behaviours. “The correctional programs are useful in helping people identify their triggers and there are statistics on that that suggest they do lower recidivism rates,” he said. He spoke like a criminologist, not a criminal. “But a lot of people going in are hostile because they don't want to be in those programs. And there's no immunity there or even in a psychologist appointment if you say something that links you to a crime. But the book club is a voluntary thing. And I think it teaches people to open up and communicate with others.”

“Like a sanctuary?”

“It's a relief.”

Then he put on his ambassador's hat and suggested we should consider moving future meetings out of the chapel. “Prison is a place where people want to appear as tough guys and there's guys who won't go to the chapel for anything.” He knew because he'd been one of those guys and had held off for a year before joining because of the potential taint.

Before I said goodbye to Graham I gave him a hardcover journal that I'd bought at an office supply store in which to write further thoughts to share with me on the books we were reading. The journal had cleared the X-ray machine and been checked and approved by the chaplain. I had chosen one with a plain navy cover, guessing that the other diaries on offer, which had flowers, maps or glitter on the cover, wouldn't survive in a men's cellblock. He accepted it and we shook hands, my hand dwarfed by his.

When Frank took Graham's place in the orange chair, he told me some of his life story. The child of Italian immigrants, he was three years old when his parents moved to Canada, bringing Frank, a brother and sister and two half-brothers. He had always liked reading, particularly the Classics Illustrated comic versions of
The Iliad
and
Mutiny on the Bounty
. But school was a problem because he hated sitting in class. “I didn't want to sit still and my mother used to make me wear those wool long johns and I'd be scratching all day,” he said. “I guess she didn't realize I was actually feeling tortured.”

By grade seven or eight he started skipping school and he said his parents placed a greater emphasis on work than school. He persevered, though, and completed high school. At sixteen he was convicted of assault in an incident that he claims was not his fault and spent ten days in an adult jail. After starting university, he quit when he failed to get into the pharmacy program. There was a theft charge when he was working for a trucking company in his twenties, then a drug charge in his thirties, a cocaine addiction that took over for a while, a marriage that began and ended. He had spent some years boxing, like a character in a Harold Robbins novel that he'd read and loved,
A Stone for Danny Fisher
. Now he was in his sixties.

“Why did you like
A Stone for Danny Fisher
?” I asked.

“I always went with the underdog, with the person that was hopeless,” he said, smiling in a way that made the dimple in his left cheek appear. “This book was about a Jewish boxer in New York City. His parents died young. They had a hard life. Then he ended up working for the Mob.”

We talked some more and then it was time for Count and he had to go. Frank hadn't told me anything about his current sentence, but I learned later that he was serving time following a gun incident in a restaurant in Toronto's Little Italy. He gladly accepted a journal and agreed to note observations about the books and the changing seasons. I was stunned that both men had been so open about their history. I realized that I still had things to ask them about
Such a Long Journey
. I didn't know it then, but that would be my last day to see Graham and Frank at Collins Bay.

I made another stab at getting together with Ben and Dread three weeks later, hoping that the inmate work strike was over. I left Toronto at 5:45 on the morning of July 19, in the middle of a forty-degree-Celsius heat wave, to travel to Kingston. It had been days without rain or relief from the heat. Before me, above the highway, the sun rose as a pale red orb in a red-tinted sky. Within five minutes it was an orange fireball, then yellow and blinding.

When I pulled up to the prison more than two hours later, my air conditioning blasting, paramedics were loading a stretcher into an ambulance. The staff at reception asked me to stand aside. I could smell their fear. Perspiring corrections officers, some with their stab-proof vests partly askew, stood with spray cans, presumably pepper spray, behind their backs, and batons at the ready. I wondered if they were concealing the spray canisters so that the inmates wouldn't try to grab them. A line of hulking men with thick tattooed necks and smashed-in noses—men with a brutish appearance I had never seen among members of the book group— filed past the guards from the west wing of the main building.Those were guys from the “pill parade” someone told me, men receiving methadone and insulin from the clinic. And then I realized that the person on the stretcher was a guard. “The whacker,” a staffer told me, was a lifer who had struck the guard from behind. He had used a wooden cribbage board, then stabbed the guard in the neck with a pencil. According to another inmate whom I spoke to much later, it was not a premeditated attack. He claimed a relatively new guard had ill-advisedly walked into an inmate's cell without backup. He'd seized the inmate's prized cooking pot—a sort of 1970s-style slow cooker that the authorities were attempting to eliminate throughout the prison. But the inmate was a Muslim and was attached to his pot for preparing halal dishes. And it had all happened on Unit 4, where Dread and Ben had their cells. I felt sorry for everyone. I would not be allowed to enter the prison that day and I had no option but to return to Toronto.

As I drove west along the highway, past the roadside drifts of nodding blue chicory and blousy Queen Anne's lace, a variation on the old mariners' saying occurred to me: “Red sky at morning, jailers take warning.”

6

SUMMER READING

I
LATER GOT THREE DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES on what happened that day in July when the inmate on Unit 4 attacked the guard. Ben recalled that it was early in the morning, and he'd just stepped out of the shower. Hearing screaming, he looked down from his upper-level range to see a commotion and a melee of guards. “I thought, wow, this is it,” he said. As for Winston, he just smiled slyly at me and said, “Yeah, the guard slipped. Got attacked by a floor. The floors are violent around here.” Winston was serving life for second-degree murder. Dread just changed the subject. What happens in Unit 4 stays in Unit 4. It was only much later that Graham filled me in on how even pepper spray didn't quell the attacker. It took a female guard who knew the inmate to talk him down so that he would release the fallen guard.

What they did bend my ear about, though, was the lockdown that followed. “During the hottest week known to man,” said Winston. “They didn't give us no showers. We were trapped in our cells for eight days. I thought, like, I was going to have a heart attack.”

A rare “heat dome” over Southern Ontario had made it suffocatingly hot and humid during those weeks in July, feeling in some cities like fifty degrees Celsius, given the humidity. It was so hot, Ben told me, that he couldn't lie down on his bed or sit on his chair—the skin contact was too uncomfortable. “It was brutal you know, Miss,” he said, sucking his teeth. “It was just sticky and gross and you're sweating. You couldn't even keep your clothes on. And I have no fan and no breeze and nothing cold to drink. My cases of water are at room temperature.”Worse, his window was a few metres from the cafeteria garbage bins, which produced a high stench every two days when the garbage trucks emptied them. One way to get through the heat, said Ben, was knowing that the guy who attacked the guard had it worse in solitary confinement. “The guy who beat up the guard—he's having a rougher time than me, so I have to just bear with this and push on,” he told me. “That's where I get lost in my books. I just decide, a hundred pages a day and I'll be all right.”

August was usually holiday month for the Collins Bay Book Club, but Carol had scheduled a get-together to give the men a chance to talk about their summer reading. At the beginning of the summer, Carol had donated to the prison library some three hundred used books that she'd rounded up from our Toronto book club members and other friends—books intended to be good recreational reading for the hot months. Like any other book club, this was a chance for the members to recommend good books to each other.

I was uncertain how the book club would look in late summer. Graham and Frank had already been transferred to Beaver Creek, a minimum-security prison north of Toronto. With those two important contributors gone, I wondered whether our discussions could possibly be the same. Funny how in five short months I'd grown attached to these guys. I had no idea then how circumstances would bring us back together.

The first group of book club members arrived from their cells with sweat beading on their faces and their arms covered in a sheen of perspiration. Now that they had shed their cool-weather long-sleeved waffle-weave shirts in favour of short-sleeved T-shirts, I could see that some arms were alive with tattooed images of coiling snakes, yowling skulls, spiderwebs and Gothic crosses—some faded and some seemingly fresh. A few of the men squeezed into the chaplain's offices for relief from the heat before the meeting. The offices were air-conditioned, while the cells and other common spaces like the chapel were not.

When we had all moved to the circle of chairs in the chapel, Carol asked who wanted to start off the meeting with a book recommendation. Ben stepped up first, while some of the others fanned their faces.

“I was reading
Six Suspects
by Vikas Swarup,” he said. “He's the author of
Slumdog Millionaire
, eh? It's about a murder that takes place and six suspects that they're trying to investigate and it happens in India. Basically showing that the political system is a bit corrupted from high officials to the slums. It's hard to get by over there. It's a really good story.”

Carol turned to Gaston and asked him whether he had a summer read to recommend.

Gaston said he'd read
Of Mice and Men
over the summer because he knew the book club was scheduled to read another Steinbeck novel in the fall,
The Grapes of Wrath
. I remembered that Lawrence Hill had also recommended Steinbeck to Gaston when he signed his book. “It's a good short book, easy to read,” he said. “This story is back in Southern times in the 1940s or '50s. If you're easily offended by the racism in those times, I wouldn't recommend reading it, because of the slang they use, but it's an interesting story.” He had also read Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
that summer. “It's the book that Aminata was reading in
The Book of Negroes
. I just wanted to see what she was reading. It's almost like a fairy tale with giants and midgets.” I loved how his curiosity guided his book selections. It was how I often chose my own reading material.

“
Gulliver's Travels
is a hard read,” said Carol.

“Yeah, I had to stop figuring out the purpose of it,” he admitted. “I was overthinking it.”

Dread, who was wearing his wool tam over his dreads despite the heat, gave Stieg Larsson's bestselling mystery novel
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
a rave review. “It's extremely entertaining,” he said. “The entire story is extremely twisted and well thought out.”

“Lisbeth's a wonderful character,” said Derek, referring to the girl of the book's title.

And Winston recommended both of the books he had read:
Blink
by Malcolm Gladwell, and the novel
The Cellist of Sarajevo
by Steven Galloway. “I liked
The Cellist
,” he said. “It had four or five perspectives on the war in Sarajevo and the way the author wrote it was a little different from anything I'd ever read before, following different people simultaneously.”The name on Winston's name tag had changed from the previous month, when he'd used his middle name, Dorian. I was getting used to that in the prison. Some men identified by their last name and prison number, which was standard prison protocol. Others used first names, middle names, aliases, prison nicknames or other monikers. The most accurate identifier was their tattoos.

Stan said he'd read Bret Easton Ellis's
Less Than Zero
, and ranked it as “more twisted than the movie.”

No one had come to the meeting expecting to pitch books to their peers, and none of them had been compelled to select books from the donated summer reading material. They could have slacked off and watched TV all summer or fallen back on pulpier books. But it seemed that the hunger for good reading material was growing.

At the end of the meeting, several of the men streamed by to shake hands with me and say goodbye until next month. As I said goodbye to Dread, I extended my hand for what I assumed would be a conventional handshake, but he deked his hand sideways and gave me an elaborate “brother handshake” instead
.
He smiled broadly as he did so, making me feel I had entered some inner circle of acceptance. Before he left, we made plans to talk at the prison the following day.

On the ferry ride back to Amherst Island after the book club discussion, Carol, Derek and I found seats together on the upper deck, where a warm, dry wind was blowing. Carol applied some lipstick without looking in a mirror, a skill that I watched with admiration. She was wearing a scarf to protect her hair from the sun, “so it doesn't turn brassy,” she informed me. I pulled at a strand of my own hair and saw that the colour had indeed bleached out over the summer. It wasn't something that mattered to me much, though. All I cared about at that moment, after that day's session in the stale air of the prison, was spending a moment with my head thrown back, eyes closed, enjoying the breeze on my face and being on the water, feeling gratitude that I was free to step outside the prison walls.