The Moth (30 page)

I’d never thought of what my mother went through, because she never showed me her pain or vulnerability for one second. I can’t imagine the guilt she felt. The responsibility of taking care of someone else’s child, and then it all going horribly wrong.

But she showed nothing but love, and things were going to be just fine while she was braiding my hair, and reading me stories, and driving me to ballet.

And my dad really was a pillar of strength. And him offering me that present was his own genius way of trying to give an eight-year-old a reason to live, something to look forward to.

I wasn’t really the strong one;
they
were the strong ones, because they had carefully led me to this place where I could live like an absolutely normal sixteen-year-old kid.

And Adrienne was never gonna be sixteen. It hit me hard, staring at the handwriting of her mourning father. And I couldn’t run off to my Barbie Dreamhouse.

And for the first time, I sat down at that dining room table, and I cried.

Ophira Eisenberg
is a stand-up comic, writer, and host of NPR’s new weekly trivia, puzzle, and game show,
Ask Me Another
. She has appeared on
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
, Comedy Central, and VH-1. She is also a regular host with The Moth, and her debut comedic memoir is
Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy
. She would like to dedicate this story to the memory of Adrienne, and her dad.

TED CONOVER

T
his time of year in Sing Sing prison it gets very hot in the cellblocks. Cellblocks are huge buildings where inmates live. They’re like warehouses for human beings. It gets so hot that when inmates come out of their cells to exercise in the yard or the gym, they often aren’t wearing shirts and you get to see some surprising things. You see a lot of scars, because a lot of inmates have been stabbed and shot, and you see a lot of tattoos. They’re not tattoos as you’d see in the Village so much as jailhouse tattoos, which are cruder, homemade, and often self-inflicted. And they’re often kind of, well, they’re not artful.

On this one day in July of 1997, an inmate I knew a little bit named Delacruz came out of his cell, and I learned for the first time that he had emblazoned across his chest the word “ASSASSIN” in three-inch letters, which didn’t surprise me. That’s not an unusual thing to see in Sing Sing prison. But as he walked away and I followed him, I saw that his entire back was covered in tattooed script. He had a big back—he was in excellent bodybuilding shape, like a lot of inmates in Sing Sing—and
every single inch was covered in script, and from what I could see—I just caught a brief glimpse—it was in Spanish.

When he came back in, I said, “Hey, Delacruz, what is that on your back?”

He said, “Oh that? Conover, that’s a poem, man.”

I said, “A poem? What poem is it?”

He goes, “Nothing. You wouldn’t know about it, Conover.”

I said, “Try me.”

He says, “It’s nothing,” and goes into his cell.

Delacruz was a guy who interested me a lot because within a week of arriving on the floor where I worked, he was put on disciplinary restriction. He had tried to extort money from another inmate in the commissary, which surprised me, because he seemed like an intelligent and calm and reasonable guy, and this was before we knew each other. I said, “Hey man, what’s this about? Nobody gets a ticket so soon.”

He said, “Conover”—no, he said “C.O.” because he didn’t know my name then—so he said, “C.O., you gotta do what you gotta do.” C.O. means correction officer or prison guard in the most direct language.

Every day I traveled as a prison guard, about thirty miles north of here, to Ossining. Sing Sing Prison has been there for a hundred and seventy-five years. The passage of inmates from Manhattan to Sing Sing gave rise to the phrase “up the river,” which describes the way they got there. They went in boats up the river to Sing Sing. This is also where the phrase “the big house” originated, because the first cellblock in Sing Sing was massive. It held over a thousand inmates. In the forties, two more cellblocks were built: A Block and B Block, which hold 650 and about 500 inmates each. These are two of the biggest
cellblocks in the world. They’re out of date. Prisons don’t work when they’re this big. They’re chaotic, they’re impersonal, and they’re harmful in all kinds of ways, but Sing Sing still has them.

I worked in B Block, and that’s where Delacruz was. I wanted to get to know this guy. Often the guys on restriction are the ones you get to know because they’re stuck in their cells twenty-three hours a day. They’re not let out. One day when I saw him sitting there sort of pensively, I said, “Hey, Delacruz, what’s on your mind, what are you thinking?”

He said, “Conover,” and he looked like he wasn’t sure if he should tell me, he said, “I’m not going to lie to you. I’m thinking about my next job.”

I thought,
Wow, this is good. He’s thinking about the work he’s going to get when he gets out.
He says, “No, no. I mean the job I’m gonna pull, man.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “That’s the reason I’m here. It’s ’cause I didn’t think out the last job. Next time it’s gonna go right, man. It’s all planned. I know it’s not a positive thing, but I’m not going to lie to you. That’s what I’m doing. I’ve got plenty of time to do it, and if I do it well enough, I won’t be back in here again.”

Delacruz was a man in his late twenties. This was his third felony sentence. His first one had been in Virginia, where he’d entered a prison known as “the Wall” at age sixteen, because he’d come from Puerto Rico on a birth certificate that belonged to his dead brother who was two years older. His mother had brought him over on that birth certificate, so the state thought he was eighteen when he was only sixteen. He told me how scared he was that day. It’s hard to get inmates to tell you things like this, but he was unusual, and I think he knew that I would respect what he was telling me.

I asked him about a week later, “Delacruz, what’s on your back?”

He said, “Oh that poem, C.O.? You never heard of it, man. It was by this Jewish girl during World War II, man. She got trapped by the Nazis in her house. She wrote this book.”

I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me—Anne Frank?”

And he looked at me like,
You know Anne Frank?
Because this would be a very strange thing for an inmate. Most hadn’t appreciated an officer who not only read but knew things you read in high school—poetry, important social documents,
The Diary of a Young Girl
.

I said, “Yeah, I know that. I know that diary. So what does the tattoo say?”

He says, “Oh no, never mind, C.O.”

A couple of days later I got a day off, and I went home and read it cover to cover, looking for a poem. There’s no poem in
Diary of a Young Girl
.

I came back and I said, “Hey Delacruz, there’s no poem in there, man. You’re confused.”

He said, “I’m not confused! You think I’d put a poem on my back, and I don’t know what book it comes out of? You think I’d translate it from English to Spanish and have some asshole tattoo it on my back, which took a month, and not know what it came from? It’s from Anne Frank.”

I went back and checked it again. It’s not there.

I go to Delacruz, “Hey, you want to read that book again?”

He goes, “You got it?”

And I said, “Yeah.”

It’s against the rules for an officer to bring a book to an inmate. It’s contraband. It has to go through channels, but I said
I’d bring it to him. He spent the next two days in his cell glued to that book.

On the third day I said, “Well, how was it?”

He goes, “Man, it’s the best book I have ever read. I cried the whole way through. It is the best book I ever read.”

I said, “So what does it say on your back?”

He said, “Get out of here, Conover. Get lost, man.”

And that was that. Delacruz got transferred upstate, and I left the state service. But a couple months later, I wrote him a letter and asked if he remembered me. He said he did.

I wrote him again, and I said, “What did that poem say on your back?”

So he wrote it down in Spanish for me. He transcribed his tattoo. And with renewed vigor I went to the New York Public Library. I figured there was an edition of this book that had the poem. There are like, fifty editions of the book, and I checked out twenty-five of them. No poem. I called up a woman in Woodstock who’d written a one-woman play about Anne Frank; I said, “Do you know of any poems written by Anne Frank?”

She said, “She wrote a couple. They’re not in the diary. Most people have never seen them.”

I read her what the poem basically said and she said, “No, nothing like that.”

I thought,
Shit.
I thought I’d done everything I could. I read the whole book one more time. I got to the last page, I got to the last sentence, and there it was. It was the last sentence of
Diary of a Young Girl
, and this is what it says:

And at that moment, I understood a little bit more about Delacruz, and I understood a lot more about officers—officers who don’t want to talk to inmates, officers who don’t want to find out about inmates, officers who, I think, at the end of the day, couldn’t bear the sadness of what they’d find.

Ted Conover
’s
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
describes the ten months he spent working undercover as a guard at the famous prison. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award,
Newjack
was initially banned by the state and now is censored before inmates are allowed to see it. Conover’s writings are frequently based on firsthand participation: He is also the author of
Rolling Nowhere
, an account of riding the rails with modern-day hoboes;
Whiteout: Lost in Aspen; Coyotes
, a classic tale of life among Mexican migrants; and most recently
The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World
. He contributes to
The New York Times Magazine
and other publications and is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

MATTHEW MCGOUGH

I
grew up a huge fan of the New York Yankees. When I was very small, I’d go to games maybe once a year with my father and watch Reggie Jackson. When I was a little bit older, we’d watch Dave Winfield. And then when I came into my teens, Don Mattingly, who was my absolute favorite player.

I went to high school in New York, and it was a big moment when I started going to Yankee games by myself. It was at one of these games, sitting in the bleachers in the fall of 1991, that I noticed for the first time this kid in right field wearing a Yankee uniform playing catch with the right fielder.

I’d been to Yankee Stadium so many times, but I had never noticed the batboy before.

And this kid could not play catch for his life. He was throwing the ball over Jesse Barfield’s head, or he was one-hopping him. And I was like,
I’m not a great athlete, but I can play catch at least as well as this kid can. I don’t understand why he has that job, and I’m sitting in the bleachers.

So I went home that night, and I tore a page out of the program that listed all the different Yankee executives. I wrote a handwritten letter to everyone from Steinbrenner on down to Stump Merrill, who was the manager at that point, and basically said, “My name is Matt, and I’m 16 years old, and I’m a huge fan of the Yankees. I don’t know if you can apply for this batboy position, but if you can, I really would like an application. And I’m so excited to hear from you that if I don’t hear from you soon, I’m going to follow up with a phone call.”

I sent these off. And after two weeks I hadn’t heard anything, so I picked up the phone and called the Yankees switchboard number.

The secretary answered the phone, “Hello. New York Yankees.”

I said, “Hi, this is Matt McGough. I sent a letter in a couple weeks ago about applying for a batboy position. Nobody got back to me.”

So she’s like, “Okay, well, I’ll take your name and number down, and I’ll have somebody get back to you.”

Another week goes by, and I don’t hear anything. So I pick up the phone again, and I call and this woman answers the phone, “Hello. New York Yankees.”

I say, “Hi. This is Matt. I’ve sent some letters in about the batboy position, and I called last week and somebody was supposed to call me back.”

I thought it was kind of rude that they hadn’t.

And she laughed, and asked me, “How old are you?”

I said, “Sixteen.” And she laughed some more. I didn’t really understand what she was laughing at, but she took down my name and number.

She said, “I’ll make sure that somebody gets back to you.”