THE MANIFESTATION

When the electronic gate clanked open yesterday morning, a second teacher joined me in emptying his pockets and walking through the metal detector. While I was reclaiming my personal items—car keys, loose change, wrist-watch, computer disk, and eye glasses, I said to the senior officer, “Hey, he’s got a gate manifest, have her look at his.” Prior to my suggestion, the rookie officer wanted to know whether I could bring reading material into the prison, and if so, whether I needed a gate manifest.

The second teacher, who is definitely not a morning person, looked at me rather irritably and yanked his wallet out of his back pocket and found his gate manifest. “So,” the rookie officer observed, “he’s allowed to bring reading material into the prison.” Then she turned to me and asked, “Where’s yours?”

The second teacher chimed in, “Yeah, where’s yours?” He knew I didn’t have one.

I went through my usual you-should-be-greatful-that-I-helped-you-learn-something-about-the-prison-system routine, which, by the way, worked. Both of us were permitted to enter the facility. My coworker looked at me incredulously, “Man, you’re something else.”

“I was trying to help them out,” I said.

“No you weren’t,” he argued. Although crabby in the morning, he was definitely alert.

Not to be evasive, but the book I was bringing into the prison wasn’t technically a book—it was a journal, an inaugural issue of “Murdaland.” I’ve been reading, discussing, and studying the stories in it. I’ve been reworking my nonfiction piece, “Kenny’s Got a Toad,” extending the storyline, making it nonfiction (there has to be a murder) and prepping it for the editor.

Not to be the one to have the last word, but if I’m confronted about reading material again, here’s my answer: “Unlike the other teacher, who is a vocational teacher, I do not need a gate manifest because I am an academic teacher.”