wide-brimmed hats and leather boots, their pants tucked in at the top. They looked like something out of a southern-chain-gang movie. The inmates kept their eyes down as they did the scut work, emptying ashtrays and wiping the urine from toilets. Never talk to them, we were ordered. Do not engage them in any way. So we recruits ignored these inmates, tried to treat them as if they didn’t exist. It was an odd way to begin a job that supposedly depended upon communication techniques. When, at training’s end, I suggested in a feedback session that some inmates be brought in to talk to us, maybe to participate in IPC workshops, everybody looked at me as if I were nuts.
Every few days we were subjected to a surprise inspection by Sergeant Bloom, who would march us out of the classroom and into a corridor and then review us—first from behind and then from the front—while we stood at strict attention. He was particularly interested in the shine of our shoes, but he could find something wrong with just about anything else: a name tag infinitesimally askew, hair touching the ears, a spot missed while shaving, an inadequate crease. If enough recruits disappointed him, he’d make us all do twenty or forty push-ups, right there in the hall. If we continued to disappoint him, he warned us, we’d be put on restriction and forbidden to leave the Academy at night.
Similarly, Bloom trolled the halls of the dorm floor every morning looking for anything out of place. My room was written up one day because there was still a scrap of paper at the bottom of the trash can after it had been emptied; another time, we had left on the tiny light over the sink. Records of these transgressions, Bloom warned us grimly, went straight into our personnel folders.
Therefore it was always a relief, every afternoon, to march out the Academy’s back door and across a dirt parking lot to the gym for Physical Training. Those who had trouble completing the unimaginative, unvaried course of calisthenics did not always agree, but I was ready for any break from the tedium of the classroom. And after calisthenics, there was always a run of a mile ortwo, consisting of laps around the Academy. As we ran, some of the instructors would chant military songs adapted to corrections, and we would call back every line:
I’ve got a dog, his name is Blue
Blue wants to be a CO, too
.
Or
We’re mentally able and we’re physically fit
If you ain’t corrections, you ain’t it!
Just to make sure there was an easy way to get in trouble during Physical Training, too, the authorities had forbidden us to wear watches. In our haste to change out of our uniforms and into exercise gear and get over to the gym by the specified time, it was easy to forget this rule. Usually, roommates noticed and warned each other; one day I caught my own watch transgression as we marched into the gym. There being no other place to hide it, I dropped it into my briefs. I said a prayer of thanks when, at afternoon’s end, I found it still there.
Felix Chavez was not so lucky. Chavez, the former assistant building superintendent, was one of my favorite classmates. He lived with his wife and kids in the nongentrified part of Park Slope, Brooklyn. There was something dashing about Chavez, with his small mustache; he said he hadn’t been bothered at all when Speros nicknamed him Zorro. He was very upbeat, optimistic, and excited about being there, and he wanted to do a good job. But he could never remember to take off his watch. The first time they noticed it, the PT instructors gave him a warning—wear it again and not only will you suffer; your whole session will suffer. We stopped the forgetful Chavez a couple of times after that on the threshold of the gym. But one day during an unusual PT morning session, nobody noticed. The instructor—an especially humorless, muscle-bound type—stopped all 128 of us mid-jumping jack when he spotted Chavez’s watch. Instead of chewing us all out
Every few days we were subjected to a surprise inspection by Sergeant Bloom, who would march us out of the classroom and into a corridor and then review us—first from behind and then from the front—while we stood at strict attention. He was particularly interested in the shine of our shoes, but he could find something wrong with just about anything else: a name tag infinitesimally askew, hair touching the ears, a spot missed while shaving, an inadequate crease. If enough recruits disappointed him, he’d make us all do twenty or forty push-ups, right there in the hall. If we continued to disappoint him, he warned us, we’d be put on restriction and forbidden to leave the Academy at night.
Similarly, Bloom trolled the halls of the dorm floor every morning looking for anything out of place. My room was written up one day because there was still a scrap of paper at the bottom of the trash can after it had been emptied; another time, we had left on the tiny light over the sink. Records of these transgressions, Bloom warned us grimly, went straight into our personnel folders.
Therefore it was always a relief, every afternoon, to march out the Academy’s back door and across a dirt parking lot to the gym for Physical Training. Those who had trouble completing the unimaginative, unvaried course of calisthenics did not always agree, but I was ready for any break from the tedium of the classroom. And after calisthenics, there was always a run of a mile ortwo, consisting of laps around the Academy. As we ran, some of the instructors would chant military songs adapted to corrections, and we would call back every line:
I’ve got a dog, his name is Blue
Blue wants to be a CO, too
.
Or
We’re mentally able and we’re physically fit
If you ain’t corrections, you ain’t it!
Just to make sure there was an easy way to get in trouble during Physical Training, too, the authorities had forbidden us to wear watches. In our haste to change out of our uniforms and into exercise gear and get over to the gym by the specified time, it was easy to forget this rule. Usually, roommates noticed and warned each other; one day I caught my own watch transgression as we marched into the gym. There being no other place to hide it, I dropped it into my briefs. I said a prayer of thanks when, at afternoon’s end, I found it still there.
Felix Chavez was not so lucky. Chavez, the former assistant building superintendent, was one of my favorite classmates. He lived with his wife and kids in the nongentrified part of Park Slope, Brooklyn. There was something dashing about Chavez, with his small mustache; he said he hadn’t been bothered at all when Speros nicknamed him Zorro. He was very upbeat, optimistic, and excited about being there, and he wanted to do a good job. But he could never remember to take off his watch. The first time they noticed it, the PT instructors gave him a warning—wear it again and not only will you suffer; your whole session will suffer. We stopped the forgetful Chavez a couple of times after that on the threshold of the gym. But one day during an unusual PT morning session, nobody noticed. The instructor—an especially humorless, muscle-bound type—stopped all 128 of us mid-jumping jack when he spotted Chavez’s watch. Instead of chewing us all out
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