Category: I Built This Prison memoir
Off the Cutting Room Floor of I Built This Prison: Clip #2: Why Are You Crying?
“My, as I call it, ‘crying in awe’ goes a little bit further than the conventional lacrimation with the divinity of the (oh, so appropriately named!) Requiem‘s installment – Lacrimosa. It’s hard not to cry together with 35-year-old Mozart over the heart-breaking truth of him being within hours from the grave and all his life’s struggles as well as our own sins and fears of the unknown punishments yet to come. Everyone with a soul, no matter how shrunken, weeps listening to that.
I, on the other hand, is known to commence the waterworks even when watching a ‘comedic’ act – if it’s brilliance manages to impact my aesthetic receptors. Like the first time I watched Bo Burnham’s ‘Make Happy’ on Netflix: twenty minutes in, the tears just started pouring out of my eyes in recognition of the boy’s astonishing talent. Stuff like that – in the movies, at plays, in the museums, over books…
And don’t even get me started on J.Ivy’s poetic contribution into Kanye West’s ‘Never Let Me Down’ – it’s profound beauty invariably triggers my tear ducts, every time I listen to the song…
Unfortunately, that’s not the bulk of my tears production. Genius is rare, desperation abound…
♦♦♦
…Even though they were the biggest contributors into all that wetness, it wouldn’t be fair to place the entire blame for it on my most prevalent pain bringers – my parents first and my employers later. Even in my personal safe heavens of academic institutions – the places where my abilities and efforts have always been singled out, appreciated, rewarded, and even lauded – once in a while, there would be somebody to trigger the tear ducts. This primarily goes back to my Soviet youth – the time when I was powerless to do anything about, for instance, a Philosophy Department Chair openly expressing his surprise about what he perceived as an incongruity between my wild Jewish hair and my deep knowledge of classical marxism. (Dude! I had straight A’s in everything – that’s just how I was.) And that’s the truth of it – sometimes random strangers can be as harmful as people who already know your soft spots. It’s funny how this type of small stuff sometimes ends up to be so devastating. It’s so difficult to shake off such pointless rudeness. Its emotional violence feels as if a metal-studded cat-o’-nine-tails landed between your shoulder blades. And then, your breath catches, and you lose control of your ducts…
And what else can you possibly do but go and let it all pour out? In secret, of course… What other quick and ready means you have for mitigating the impulses to throw punches and yell, for disarming the triggers that have a potential of sending you into scandalous fits. Effectively, it helps you to dissociate: Regardless of what was happening inside my mind and at the center of my soul, I still went to work every day and performed all my duties, attended meetings and functions; kept the bosses’ businesses and my own household running smoothly, without a single visible glitch. Never a fucking mess in public. With all the pain hidden so deeply that other people, affected by the same terribly hostile environments, would frequently marvel, “How the hell do you manage to stay so composed? How do you bear this? How do you keep yourself so calm?” And I would just smile in response, while letting the nuclear devastation scorching away my sanity… Years of control-building and the aforementioned secret crying – that’s how…
Yet, the bile’s buildup had to manifest itself on the surface in some ways…”
Deleted from I Built This Prison, Chapter 4 – Bucket of Tears… and Blood
On Columbia Campus or NYS Prison Camp, Antisemitism Is Inescapable: I Built This Prison Excerpt
Over and over again, I am consistently stunned by the political blindness of hate. It’s incomprehensible to me. How can people loathe all Catholics because they still worship the papal Christianity or all arabs because of 9/11 and ISIS? Or how pro-Palestinian convictions automatically translate into hostile animosity towards all Jews dispersed throughout the globe – many of whom are not religious whatsoever, have never been and don’t plan to go to Israel, and some (especially here, in the States) don’t even understand what the conflict over there is all about? Aren’t the haters at all concerned that their blanket enmity completely obscures the essential meaning of their political standpoints? Shouldn’t they be more focused and direct their efforts against the forces behind the territorial and largely economic conflicts? What can possibly be achieved by inciting violence against the students and the teaching staff of an educational institution 5700 miles away from the epicenter of the military actions? It’s truly bizarre!
On the other hand, I’m quite accustomed to the pervasive, persistent, and profuse plain-ass antisemitism no matter how many political, nationalistic, self-righteous, and morally confused shrouds anyone throws over it. Look, I was born in the most antisemitic country in the world – Soviet Russia, with its pre- and post-revolutionary history of oppressing my relatives and ancestors going back centuries. Thus, as the Soviet Jew I was raised to believe that antisemitism is simply written into the genetic code (my mother was among the first generation of Soviet physiology students to be taught genetics at universities in the 50s) of every non-Jew and there is nothing we can do about it: Whether openly or secretly, and with some even subconsciously, goyim will despise you. Live with that. Period.
And when I escaped Russia, the Soviet Union, though on its last legs, was still live and kicking, the communists were still in power (many of them still are – lightly disguised), and anti-Jewish state policies were still as prominent as the nationalistic hatred of the Russian populace. But, of course, decades of the subsequent NYC living… It lulls you with its ethnic diversity, and religious freedoms, and Jewish mayors, and Philip Roth, and Woody Allen, and Kubrick, and the overwhelming popularity of Seinfeld and Friends, and everybody eating lox on their bagels… And you (I mean me), a cultural non-observant Jew, start feeling… Well, I wouldn’t go as far as to say “free of the ethnic bias”, but you definitely push to the back of your Jewish kop the teachings of your grandparents – that if you ever forget that you are a Jew, there will be an antisemite nearby to remind you.
Of course, Ivy League schools, even those – like Columbia University – located in Manhattan, are nothing like NYC. Their student bodies, professorial staff, and administrations consist mostly of transient people from all over the world. Not just all fifty states of our own nation – most of them not nearly as diverse as our city, but from the foreign countries with their own socio-economic backgrounds as well. These people are here not because they belong, but because it’s good for their resumes – if I had to generalize. So, it shouldn’t be surprising at all that these educational institutions are prone to become fertile grounds for antisemitic protests.
And apparently the ones at Columbia earlier this week got so threatening, Jewish religious leaders urged students to STAY HOME (!!!) Here, IN NEW YORK CITY! And the university’s administration (as well as the law enforcement – let’s be honest) are so powerless in the face of these protests, the solution they offered is online classes! This is Columbia we’re talking about!
I don’t even know, though, why I’m so shocked. I mean, I’ve already got exposed in the fairly recent past to similar displays of open antisemitism and the passivity by “the powers that be”. Because, guess what? The New York State prison system is even further removed from NYC than the hodgepodge of Columbia campus. It’s staffed entirely with ethnically and culturally isolated upstate prison guards; and among the inmate population, there are plenty of multigenerational neo-Nazis – proud to display their various tattooed insignia and the compatible attitudes – as well as intellectually confused people.
From I Built This Prison, Part III – Impressions of Imprisonment, •The Jewish Thing•:
“…In Albion… I’ve got exposed to antisemitism of all stripes and colors – the white-bred upstate xenophobia, the ignorant multi-racial criminal-element loathing, the semi-religious misconfusion, and the pure Aryan “pride”.
Funny, how some naïve individuals sometimes ask how Russians always knew that I was a Jew without even checking my official documents. Well, my Albion experience has proved all over again that Russian, German, American, or of any other origin – an anti-Semite always knows. By simply looking at you. Even though you are secular and wear no other ethnic attributes than your own face.
***
I just couldn’t get used to this shit all over again. Even two years in, it was still hurting.
On the way from OMH meds, Sherri Ellis called me “old stinking Jew”, because she thought I looked at her funny. On previous occasions she called me a “nasty Jew” – she was definitely escalating. Oh, she kept her antisemitism in check when she asked for my help with her ASAT reinstatement after being kicked out for dirty urine. Now, this. Nobody had used that specific slur on me since the Soviet Union. And there was nothing I could do about it – not even talk back to her violent mug: if she lunged at me, both of us would’ve been sent to SHU.
Heather Mims was walking next to me. She was shocked: “What are you doing being Jewish?” was her question. That was easy to brush off, actually. She knew me for two years and didn’t realize I was Jewish. Hers was the antisemitism of geographical isolation not of consciousness. She was from a tiny village on the Canadian border.
I was more offended by Trish D: “I despise you because you are a Jew,” out of nowhere she spewed at me from across the messhall table. I was lost for words and I couldn’t just leave before a CO’s release… But several women at that table instantaneously joined forces in berating Trish for her unacceptable racism and un-Christian hatred. I felt as if a row of warriors was shielding me from the enemy.
***
Yet, most of the time you are unprotected, alone…
Did you know that not all Nazis that fled Germany at the end of WWII and escaped the justice, ended up in Latin America? Thousands of them were accepted in the United States and many ended up in upstate New York.
In prison, I’ve discovered that a chunk of their offspring constitutes a sizable part of our state’s neo-Nazism movement: children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Quite a few of them wore the guards’ uniforms, far more – the state’s greens. Some with no other signs of the fascist distinction but their openly hateful attitude. Others – walking around with the swastikas, SS bolts, 88 (numerical code for HH – heil Hitler), 4/20 (Hitler’s birthday), etc. tattooed on their necks, chests, and arms…
But twenty-something Amanda in the fourth of my Albion’s residences had a huge flower arrangement on the back of her neck. She was tiny, very blond, cutely pixyish, terribly flirty – especially with young white officers. A very sociable kid, friendly with everyone. A cleanliness freak and a cleaning ace. She bore a tongue-breaking last name that started with W, which, together with her partiality towards German rock bands, left no doubt of her descent. She chirped at me and offered to do my chores for cigarettes. She lived in a row of cubicles that shared back walls with my row, two cubicles down.
You were not really allowed to wonder around the dorm and cube-visiting was strictly prohibited. But if you needed to get something from somebody and you asked for permission to do so, depending on the CO, you might’ve been granted a 2-3 minutes trip to someone else’s cubicle. My cooking time-slot was coming up and I needed to retrieve my Mrs. Dash from somebody who lived next to little Amanda.
As I was passing her entryway, my sideview caught something on her board that froze me on the spot. The picture was affixed right in the center – a cutout from some cheap-paper publication, an old black-and-white photographic portrait of SS Oberstumbannführer Adolf Eichmann – the architect of the Holocaust. The man who proposed that exterminating every Jewish child and adult would solve all German problems and then proceeded to manage the logistics of the mass slaughter.
She was in her cube, cleaning. I stepped in, “Why do you have this photo?”
“Do you know who he is?!” she exclaimed. Not in the way that she couldn’t believe that I recognized him, but in excited, starry-eyed, groupie way. “I’m obsessed with him… Do you want to see my books?” She started pulling hardcovers from her locker and shoving them at me one after another. Half of them were in German. I saw ‘Mein Kampf’ and something with the word “Aryan” on the cover… and then I stopped looking… She was chattering something about her dear great-grandfather, but I stopped listening… I walked out. I was nauseous…”
To continue: p. 428
The featured image:
© Marina Zosya, My Personal Nazi Brigade – Self-portrait in Mise-en-scene, ACF, 2019
De-Banking: It’s Very Personal to the Frustrated CFO
Sometimes I wonder about the kind of life, in which every single word your utter or mutter would be an instantaneous target of people’s analytical parsing, critiquing, and ridiculing… I mean, it’s hard enough to present to the public your written words – the ones that you’ve chosen meticulously, pored over a hundred times, edited, re-edited, and proof-read… (And I know, I know – most online and even in-print writers don’t do that anymore: the stupid, grammatically incorrect, unedited, shit you read sometimes even on the syndicated news! Yet, I still work like that.) But the unscripted and unabridged shit that just pops out of our mouths, even when we are debriefed and seemingly ready for anything… Brrr… Danger zone! Why do people want that kind of a life is an absolute mystery to me… But they do. And some of them self-delude and seemingly believe that they expose themselves for the sake of the “greater good”, but it’s all crap – the damage they cause to the nation, themselves, and their families is far greater than the sum of anything good they could possibly accomplish. It’s all fucking pride, and vanity, and over-confidence, and desire to hear themselves talk, which would be understandable if they were brilliant speakers, but the vast majority of them are far from it.
And so, there goes Mr. Trump – again… Clearly, it’s not enough for him to be ranked by many a poll among the three worst presidents of all times. (Those who know (1) my take on the Dumb Blonds and (2) that I spent most of Trump’s term in a medium security prison with no access to the mainstream information in any shape or form cannot possibly expect me to express my own opinion about his presidency. And this is not about my opinion. This is about the general public.) He wants another stab at it and he takes to the open mike on a speaking platform once again – in New Hampshire of all places. And, as these people frequently do, he stumbles on his words. He lets his thoughts run faster than his tongue and produces a statement that is not just confusing, it sounds practically unintelligible:
“We are going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to de-bank you from your… your political beliefs… What they do. They want to de-bank you. We’re going to de-bank… Think of this. They want to take away your country.”
I mean: WHAT???!!!
The thing is, though, there is a lot of garbled garbage coming out of famous, semi-notable, and random people’s mouths all over the place – multiple times a day, every day. And they don’t make national news. Yes, pundits react to it and political bloggers write about it, and I have no idea who the fuck reads all that. And believe you me and my personal experience of it: most of it (or everything, really) is written for the audience of one – the writer herself. And I myself is very selective with what I read beyond serious literature. Thus, I didn’t bother to know anything about Trump’s mentioning of de-banking until the media’s knees started jerking in response to the related SNL’s installment into their habitual dressing-down of Trump. In the sea of contemporary ignorance, they stood out with their allusions to Trump’s mental incapacity – as if he made up the “de-banking” term all on his own and, therefore, need to take “de-ambulance” and see “de-doctor” about it.
Look, I personally started growing cold towards SNL ever since Tina Fey became its head writer, which was like 25 years ago, believe it or not. And then stopped watching it entirely after the twists of Fortune gave us an opportunity to appreciate Kristine Wiig’s talent elsewhere. So, I’m not really up on the show’s current level of quality comedy, but from what I hear and read – mostly from the news – it doesn’t seem very high. And that’s very disappointing. I mean, the whole point of SNL has always been the wittiness, as in smart, intellectual – not gag – humor. It was the reason why so many of SNL alumni and alumnae have become household names with gigantic careers – Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, etc, etc, etc. Smart and brilliant, not just funny, they came up with the jokes and created the characters that made them relevant, impactful, and unforgettable. Meanwhile, the latest comedian I remember by name from that show is Andy Samberg – and it’s been a dozen years since he departed. And then what? As this Trump incident confirms, all traces of intellectualism are now gone. How else can we explain that not a single person in the entire writing, producing, acting, and supporting staff knew about “de-banking”, bothered to check it out (I mean, where were there iPhones?), or understood the seriousness of the matter. And I don’t really hold it against Lorne Michaels personally, but maybe – just maybe – at 79, it’s time to take an honorary Chairman (or something) position and hire a hands-on herder to manage these poorly qualified, lazy “entertainment” team.
When the news of this skit finally rolled to me, I firstly got really insulted by the fact that the majority of the responders have dismissed this faux pas as “woke smugness”. How is anything about assuming that every “de” in front of a word in English language is a replacement for article “the” – whether in vernacular reality or with a mocking intention- is woke? You know, there are 5868 actively used words in English language that start with “de”. Quite a few of them are words we borrowed from Latin (e.g. decide), but in many the prefix “de” carries the notion of separation (e.g. depart), negation (e.g. derange), descent (e.g. degrading), or reversal (e.g. detract). So, what are these people telling me that using these words constitute “cultural appropriation”? My answer to that is that such notion is degrading and these commentators are deranged, and the world around us would be better if they decided to first detract their statements and then depart, as in go away.
Naturally, far more reasonable conjectures have been made about the impulses behind Trump’s de-banking outburst. It all came down to one quite obscure piece of information that seemingly democratic internet-grown financial institutions like PayPal, its subsidiary Venmo, GoFundMe, and such got into habit of kicking out, i.e. de-banking, some far-right activists due to their political standing… In fact, it’s so obscure that some commentators wrote: that this de-banking thing “must’ve completely flown under the radar of those people who are not glued to the internet…”
Well, it’s true – I had no idea that the online entrepreneurship of payment-processing persuasion got so misconfused about the foundation of equality that they started acting on the reactionary principles of “you want to infringe, we’ll infringe you back”. However, I have always known of the de-banking policies implemented in the majority of our financial institutions. And, while this is the first time I heard of it being used as a tool of pure discrimination on political grounds, I knew very well that banks have been throwing people out on account of what they perceive to be risks factor – financial, legal, but mainly to their reputation – like forever.
And guess what? I PERSONALLY GOT DE-BANKED by Chase while I was out on bail during my court proceedings (all depicted in great detail in my “I Built This Prison”). After 28 years of me faithfully depositing with them all my earnings; giving them all of my savings, retirement, auto-financing, and commercial business; referring to them my parents, my daughter, my son-in-law, both of their businesses – all it took is one request from the office of Manhattan DA for statements of my – not even personal, but business – account for the preceding sixty months. Next thing I knew I’ve got a letter from them that they were closing all of my accounts with them. And five days after the stated date, I’ve received cashiers checks – one for every account I held there, including all IRA’s and SEP’s. I was months away from pleading or being found guilty of my crime. But as far as Chase was concerned – they didn’t want to have anything to do with me. And there is nothing you can do about it. Let me tell you, even on the background of the ongoing criminal and civil lawsuits, it was an incredibly distressing event.
But wait! That’s not the end of it. Forward to April of 2023: I was watching the season 3 finale of The Mandalorian on Disney+ – elated by the the prevailing of all that’s good (Spoilers Alert!!! [but seriously – if you haven’t watched it by now, ten months later, it means nothing to you]): the distraction of the Darksaber and (!) Gideon, the heart-melting adoption, and the sunny adorableness of the new dwellings – when I was presented with a post-credits ad, offering to apply for Chase Disney Card. Which I would totally ignore because I didn’t really need another credit credit card, except that one of the “personalized” fronts of the possible cards you can get was that one – the one pictured above. Who can possibly resist the very idea of having a credit card with baby Yoda in his pod? I couldn’t. But it’s Chase! I don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore. Well, I can overcome that for Grogu. Do they want to have anything to do with me, though? I mean, by then nearly six years have passed since my de-banking. I’ve served my time and all that… Let the power be with me… Takes about two minutes – I was instantly approved for a $6K line. Ten days later the pleasingly adorable card was in my hands….
Two months later it stopped working… No warnings. No courtesy letters or emails. I looked it up online – it said that the account was closed. I called… Well, now you know: (A) It takes 60 days for the underwriting bank to run all of their checks and establish that, even though your credit is good, you remain undesirable to the bank for the reasons they never disclosed to you in the first place. (B) Six years is not enough time for a financial institution such as Chase to forgive you for… doing nothing wrong with respect to their operations per se, as far as I know. Once de-banked, you stay de-banked.
And, as it frequently happens with such entities, they just have to add an insult to the injury: sporadically they still send me an email informing me that “my” Disney credit card account’s statement is ready, balance zero, payment due zero… So heartless… And then a week ago, I received an envelope with Chase logo in the mail. Eight months after shutting down my Grogu account they were informing me that I was due points I managed to earn through the couple of times I did use the card. They’ve enclosed a cashier’s check for $1.65…
That did it. My heart bled for the the paper, the ink, the diesel fuel, etc. that went into production and delivery of that glob mucus into my face. And what else can I do but to write about it?
I Built This Prison: Excerpt: Once More On Looking (or Rather Not Looking) the Part
From I Built This Prison, Chapter 2. Aspirations, Hopes, and Dreams
“Here is an interesting thing to consider: I never was of the correct shape and texture to fit the typical idea of a cutthroat corporate mover and shaker. Anywhere. In the same way probably as Julia Child was not considered an acceptable choice as standard TV personality in her time. First of all, it wasn’t just the creative pursuits and liberal-arts education – which included journalism, languages, art history, theater and cinema studies, to make a short list – that were barred by the antisemitism in the Communist Russia. Any and all “executive prospects”, such as they were, were also closed for even the most persistent, academically overachieving Jews. The only thing that mattered there was that I looked Semitic and that my “Nationality”, as ethnically defined on the fifth line of a Russian passport, was “Jewish”.
I bless the moment I was accepted to America as a political refugee over three decades ago. Yet, the pertinent truth is that, even after 25 years of professional experience in NYC and the addition of MBA to the list of my degrees, I was still not recognized as a perfectly fitting executive peg here either. Ethnically looking immigrant with an accent; no Ivy-League tokens on my resume or any nepotistic cards up my sleeve – I had to break a lot of barriers to attain my positions even in the private entities, for which I worked.
Big-time HR managers and headhunters will never admit to it, but, in spite of my verifiable knowledge and expertise, they could never visually match me with formal demands and expectations of their illustrious employers/clients for the targeted positions. It’s only when I had a chance to speak with a functional key person from the hiring company directly my qualification usually prevailed over everything else, which only happened in smaller, privately held companies…
We cannot deny the simple fact that opticals play an instrumental role for all American occupations. It’s like what Aaron Sorkin wrote in his 1995 script for ‘The American President’…: “If there had been a TV in every living room sixty years ago, this country doesn’t elect a man in a wheelchair.”
Visually, people like me look most appropriate in the seclusion of labs with Bunsen burners and glass retorts, research libraries with old books and microfiche, at the desks with typewriters, at the various lecture podiums addressing a blurred audience… Not at large-scale corporate events, schmoozing, in a constant search of best-connected targets like a self-propelled torpedo… I cannot stand shellacked hair and none of my business skirts are pencil-shaped. I prefer pantsuits.
I recently mentioned this “suitable look” issue to my daughter who, God bless her, is able to look and act right in any environment imaginable. And she said very simply, “It’s unfortunate, yes. But, Mom, you never even tried to straighten your hair…” How heartbreaking is that? This is what we need to consider in order to succeed in this world? What kind of aspirations we are talking about?
Let me remind you that I am referring here only to the external perception, not the actual competence, abilities, skills, expertise. Everyone knows about a book and its cover, and still no one is willing to read. Yet, looks are truly deceiving, you know, for both covering up the rot and concealing the superpowers. A person may look like an Orthodox-Christian priest but be one of the most important hip-hop, heavy metal, and alternative rock producers of all times (This, by no means, is an abstract example – I specifically have Rick Rubin in mind. I knew who he was long before I saw his photo for the first time. It surprised me.)“
The Frustrated CFO 