Free Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg

talking, do you?” she said, in what I believe was a joke.
    She also informed me, in praise of her friend, that “hoes make the best librarians.” Why? “Because they know how to be sweet but they will bust yo’ ass if you get out of line.” I agreed that this profile fit the qualifications of an effective librarian. Overhearing this conversation, Momma D, however, demurred. Madams are the best librarians, she argued. They know how to “run an operation.” It all sounded plausible to me.
    The men’s library detail was also already in place when I began working. Coolidge—veteran thief, flimflam man, and law clerk—was the self-appointed elder statesman of the group. He helped me steer the ship at the beginning. Coolidge was a large-scale talker and four-time religious convert. He’d alternated between various streams of Christianity and Islam. He was an autodidact and prison diploma holder. The staff member who actually ran legal affairs, a certified lawyer, told me that Coolidge truly did maintain an impressive grasp of the law. Coolidge’s vocabulary was extensive, though he often stretched it beyond its limits. In conversations, he quickly turned bully. But I enjoyed talking to him—at first.
    His knowledge of the library and of the prison was indispensable. He knew more than my bosses about the actual, day-to-day operation of the library, and he took the time and interest to explain things to me. As a result, I was slightly under the sway of his paranoid delusions.
    “Everyone’s gonna want a piece of you in here,” he warned me. “Watch yourself.”
    When I asked him what he meant, he just said, “You’ll see.”
    In addition to his current sentence, Coolidge was facing another robbery charge that could tack on a few decades to his countless years as an adult in captivity. He was busy preparing a vigorous, full-scale legal defense.
    “It’s not a legal defense, Avi,” he said, as we waited for a legal brief to print. “It’s a legal offense . I will be taking umbrage, you understand? It’s gonna be like Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, except I’m gonna win.”
    I wasn’t sure what a Napoleon-complex would look like in a man over six feet tall, but was confident I would find out.
    Coolidge’s focus on his own legal matters kept him removed from the rest of the detail, an arrangement that seemed to suit everyone. He’d set up shop in the back room, the computer room. Other inmates were not to interfere with him back there. He was magnanimous, though, and held office hours to help inmates with their legal questions.
    Fat Kat was over ten years younger than Coolidge, but probably a generation or so removed. He was a child of the chaos of 1980s Boston, the first generation to run serious drugs and guns on the streets. He and his buddies had been rounded up in the nineties by the Feds, in a historic sweep of Boston’s street gangs (meanwhile, Irish Southie mob boss and FBI double agent, Whitey Bulger, continued running his rackets miraculously unabated). Many of Kat’s friends had done or were doing serious time. Some of them were beginning to hit the streets again. Kat had a couple of years left.
    Coolidge and Kat got tight and bonded over a shared passion for case law. Coolidge once told me that he viewed Kat as a son. It wasn’t clear to me that Kat saw it this way.
    Cherubic and clever in equal measure, Fat Kat never boasted, but also never bothered to conceal his large aspirations. He could tell you which boutique designed which NBA players’ plus-sized custom-tailored leather tailcoats. He could expound upon the logic of each cut, button, and stud, could make the structural argument for fusible interfacing, for the need of contrast stitching. Kat’s collection of couture sneakers went into the hundreds of pairs. He could talk shop about yachts. But, touched by the curse of self-awareness, his flourishes of connoisseurship always amounted to sorrow.
    “I grew up poor,” he told me,