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By Root 4095 0

Cheever explained that writing was an exercise “in making sense of one's life by putting down one's experiences on a piece of paper.” A Black Panther with one tooth in his head responded by writing and reciting a long, caustic manifesto against white society. “I find the place depressing,” Cheever reflected, “not for sinister reasons, but because of boredom.” Most of his students agreed, and soon he was down to a total of six. Since even these diehards had almost never cracked a book, Cheever decided to donate the Boyers’ set of Harvard Classics to the prison, which proved a more intricate business than he'd expected. When he and Federico carted the boxes into the processing room, a guard detained them for half an hour until the gift could be properly inspected. At first Cheever was haughty (Now see here, my good man), then furious when the guard refused to let him retrieve some cigarettes from his car: he demanded to see the warden, the education director, someone in authority, by God, while his son begged him not to make a scene. “I think there was a level of incredulity about whether in fact the inmates were going to gain a lot from Charles Eliot's bookshelf,” said Federico, though it appears Cheever was able to coax a few of them into reading (or at least listening to) the odd passage. Gleefully he reported that one of his “murderers, bank robbers, [and] drug-pushers” had exclaimed, “Oh what a cool motherfucker was that Machiavelli.”

Even if Sing Sing hadn't resulted in Falconer, it would have served to replenish Cheever's fund of anecdotes. “I had hoped to do something like Camus,” he wrote Gottlieb after that first year, “but the raw material—misery and death—is disconcertingly farcical.” Three students in particular seemed to endear themselves to Cheever, and each was colorful in his own way. A Puerto Rican named Stacy had blown a man's head off with a Luger, though like most inmates he claimed to be innocent (“It went off by accident”); the real reason they'd locked him up, he said, was the power he wielded as “the biggest pimp in New York.” One of his notable compositions was about a family man who ends up raping a teenage boy, and sometimes he'd get a sudden donnée and drop it in the mail to Cheever (“Stacy writes a letter in which he describes threatening to break a whore's legs backwards, that sage and gentle man”). Stacy and his wife, a Jewish prostitute, had sired two sons who lived in a local orphanage, and one day Cheever took them out for lunch and bowling. Another student—easily his most talented—was a black man named David, whose most memorable work in Cheever's class was something called “The Pit-Wig Papers,” about a man who develops Afro wigs for armpits; David also wrote about a woman who got a sexual charge out of being pelted with tangerines.*

By far Cheever's most abiding relationship was with Donald Lang—a pale, emaciated white man and “serious loser” (Federico) who'd spent half of his thirty-one years behind bars for armed robbery. At Sing Sing, Lang had been working as a clerk for Reverend Kandle, who thought Cheever's class would go nicely with a correspondence course Lang was taking in rhetoric and composition. As Lang saw it, a proper man of letters was someone like Hemingway; he didn't know what to make of this runty guy with the faggoty accent who said things like One expects (“I thought, ‘One what … ?’ “). Lang pegged his teacher as a showoff, a phony who came to Sing Sing because it gave him something to chat about at cocktail parties. Cheever, for his part, thought Lang was insane: “He repeats himself, repeats his name and is deeply suspicious,” he wrote in his journal. “I give him two magazines and he asks darkly: what is your motive.” Even during class Lang was sometimes rabidly hostile (“Donald mentions an undercover faggot and I jump in my seat”), until Cheever earned a measure of respect during the Attica uprising in September. As at Attica, the majority of inmates at Sing Sing were black, and prison officials felt certain they'd riot, too, if given half a chance to organize. “You'd