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Princeton, New Jersey. December 16, 1983. The last day of seminary classes for the semester. Penny, my first wife, and I would drive 11 hours to Holland, Michigan the next day to spend Christmas holidays with her family. I was reticent to spend all the holiday time with my in-laws. Because I had entered seminary and was now a budding professional clergy, they expected me to give a religious devotional thought and deliver a profound grace before every meal.
At 24, I wasn’t confident I was up to the task of playing family spiritual leader. I wasn’t sure about my young marriage, either. Penny got immobilizing migraines and laid low when I was ready to soar. She became debilitated in perfect timing with each of my big moments—when we arrived at Princeton to take our first tour of the lovely campus, at the formal welcome dinner with faculty for incoming seminarians, at commencement, at the married student housing picnic, on my birthday, hours before I had to deliver my first sermon for homiletics class. We clandestinely attended marriage counseling near campus—secret because she didn’t think our troubles warranted therapy in the first place, but hidden also because, if we were in trouble, she didn’t want anyone to know.
My unease regarding the next two weeks with her family was overshadowed by the immediate task of my final visitation to Trenton State Penitentiary for the semester. It was the last visit about halfway through my year-long internship as a seminarian chaplain at the locked Unit for the Criminally Insane, located in a separate, secure campus within the main penitentiary. The high, windowless, sandstone walls made the building look like a cross between a medieval castle and an electrical power station. In the unit where I worked, prisoners were never in the presence of another human without bars between them. They took showers by themselves, were given rec by themselves. My visits were supposed to provide human contact, conversation, and spiritual comfort, but at three feet away from the bars of the inmate’s cell. I broke these rules sometimes, out of naive solidarity with the inmates, by leaning on the bars, my arms thrust into the cells.
“One last time,” I told myself. “Just buck up and get the prison visit over with. And you will be rewarded with two glorious weeks off!”
I put on the only clergy’s black shirt I owned and inserted the white plastic clerical tab into the collar. I felt the same foreboding whenever I got into my old Datsun 200 to head south on New Jersey Route #1 towards Trenton. I was leaving comfortable, verdant, privileged Princeton with its rolling hills, parks and old beautiful buildings, moving towards Trenton, one of the most blighted cities in America. As I entered Trenton city limits, my dread increased.
When I arrived in the vast parking lot of the prison and parked, I paused to collect myself. With the car door slightly ajar and one foot on the pavement, I sat in the driver’s seat conspiring how short I could make this visit. For the two previous visits, I had been on the upper tiers of the locked units—Tier A and B, with long, wide hallways that had windows on one side, 20 cells lining the other side. Today, it was my turn to visit The Hole. The Hole was the name for the cells in the basement that had no windows, the cells where prisoners were sent to be “disciplined,” rumor had it, by guards who punished prisoners for assaulting fellow correction officers (COs). In The Hole, a prison within a prison, the prisoners were stripped of everything—they were either naked or wearing paper gowns. They were angry, from their beatings and their deprivation. They always seemed defiant, seething.
The Hole had to be regularly hosed down because correction officers—or anyone who walked by the cells—might be shitted. On my first day in The Hole, in September, a guard planted me at the start of the gauntlet and told me not to move. He then jerkily but jauntily raced down the hall demonstrating to me how to dodge being shitted by severely changing pace to throw off the inmate’s timing. He looked like a combination between a boxer and a tap-dancer, the way he gracefully moved down the flesh-colored tile hall. When he returned, free from being shitted, he said, almost mockingly, “Your turn. Good luck, Father!” I was exceedingly afraid to pass down the hall. I tried not to show my panic as I advanced. I only talked to the inmates in the first two cells that day.
The Hole was where inmate Holman White, with his vacant stare, seemed to live permanently. He never put on his paper gown but just stood hulking and naked, facing the bars, as one passed in front of his cell, Cell 3. He seemed confused but I couldn’t tell whether or not he was harmless. The year before, White killed a corrections officer by jamming a stainless-steel serving spoon as long as a man’s arm down the CO’s throat. After that, off-the-books beatings by the deceased’s fellow guards left White’s face slightly concave on his right temple and permanently asymmetrical. The Hole was a convenient place to keep him, windowless and visitorless, except for a few sanctioned do-gooders like me. White never talked to me. I always wondered if he even could speak.
I felt sullied outside in the prison parking lot, but wanted to get this visit over with so my vacation could commence. I slammed the car door with determination, and as I headed through the parking lot I passed two women, older than me, who were returning from a visit with an inmate—their husband? brother? They giggled as they passed me, as though they had discovered how preposterous I was with my priest’s collar, my fear and my inexperience. “Hi Father!” they mocked in unison. I walked down a path lined on both sides by the fence with concertina razor wire running atop it. My dread rose as I faced the first big, steel doors.
“How ya doin’ this fine day, Father?” the grey uniformed Corrections Officer said cheerfully when I held up my dangling passes to his guard booth window. I wasn’t sure if I detected a note of sarcasm. He pressed the button that let out the startling sound that opened the huge, steel doors.
Just getting to The Hole took 15 minutes of negotiating long passageways and the opening and closing of the heavy, steel doors. At each door, I showed my pass. I had never gotten used to the jarring, loud noise as each steel door slammed and locked shut. My nerves jangled by the time I started work.
When I got to The Hole’s CO’s office, three burly COs were laughing. They said they had just hosed down the hall and White’s cell with him in it.
“He doesn’t even know where the toilet is!” said one, and they all laughed uproariously.
They showed me a list of inmates in the cells and one man said, “Twitchy might want to talk to you today, Father. He’s in cell 4.” I had talked to Twitchy on Tier B before and wondered what he had done to land himself in The Hole. Probably assault or disrespecting a guard. He was a small, wiry man, with a carefully groomed Fu Manchu mustache. He seemed explosive—his darting eyes and intense nervousness made his name fitting. He constantly fingered and twisted the long sidebars of his Fu Manchu.
The guards let me through the gate out onto the gauntlet. I walked quickly past White, standing still and naked, to Cell 4, and stood in front of the bars. Twitchy wore his paper gown. He rose and greeted me, then reached through the bars in an offer to shake my hand. I shook his hand.
He then sat on his bed as if inviting me to relax and settle into conversation with him. I asked him how it was down here. He smiled, looked down and fingered his mustache. “It’s all sunshine, Father,” he sneered.
His neighbor in Cell 5, listening in, howled. I felt embarrassed at my question and moved in closer to Twitchy.
He looked at my clerical collar skeptically and asked, “Are you really a priest?”
“No, not yet anyway,” I replied. “I am studying to be a Protestant minister at the seminary up in Princeton. Where are you from?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.
“Asbury Park. Know it?”
“Isn’t that where Bruce Springsteen is from?” I answered, trying to show solidarity, finding a commonality.
“You got it,” he said.
I relaxed a little and leaned in, resting my forearms on the bars, projecting my arms into his cell. Twitchy quickly rose off his bed and grabbed my left hand and arm that were sticking into his cell, as if to shake my hand. Gripping my hand and arm firmly, he said, “I want to ask you something, Father. Do you trust me?”
“Sure, I trust you,” I replied, trying to mask the nervousness in my voice.
Twitchy tightened his grasp, then said, “No, Father, I want to ask you again. Do you really trust me?”
“I do,” I said, weakly.
“Father, this is a game of trust. I want you to trust me. Because if I wanted to right now, I could break your arm off.”
I could only try to swallow the rising dry lump of fear in my throat. One of his hands was “hand-shaking” my left hand. His other hand was vice-locked onto my wrist.
“Are you still trusting me, Father?” he said sneering, looking into my eyes, demanding an answer.
I eked out a thin, “Yes.”
“Because we are going to take your trust to a new level. Relax your hand!” I did as he told me and he took hold of my wedding ring. I clenched my hand again, knowing what he was going to do.
His face clouded. He said, “Father, if you don’t relax your hand, I could break your arm off.” I knew he was right. “This is a game of trust, remember!”
I felt defeated, deflated, and relaxed my hand. He slipped off my wedding band and put it in his mouth.
Immediately, he let go of my hand and arm. “See—trust! I didn’t break your arm off. But Father, if you tell the guards, you will be responsible for my beating and anyway, you will never get your ring back because you will have to pick through my shit to get it. Thanks for stopping by, Father!” Twitchy opened his mouth slightly to show the glint of gold on his tongue, taunting me.
His neighbor chuckled. I stepped back from the bars and stared at him. I said softly, “Merry Christmas,” and walked slowly back up to the gate of bars that exited The Hole. A CO said, “That was a short visit, Father. You okay?” I replied I was fine. The Hole door slammed shut. I winced, then walked slowly and heavily down a long passageway, wondering what to tell Penny. I rubbed my finger where the ring used to be, and thought I could get used to its absence.
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Photo credit: Getty Images