Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg Page B

unfortunate turn of events, as the satchel stashed in the trunk, the one embroidered with a zebra-skin map of Africa, contained enough homegrown to qualify for “intent to sell,” a class D felony.
    Did it matter that Yoni had committed no crime? That the bag, along with the intent to sell its contents, belonged to his new friend, the man sitting in the passenger seat, a fiftysomething ex–Black Panther/out-of-work teacher/subsistence farmer? Of course it didn’t matter. That was for a judge to decide. Cops have a different way of doing things. As the old Southern folksong says,
The sheriff’ll grab ya and the boys will bring you down the next thing you know, son, you’re prison bound .
    After the arrest, the holding cell, and the arraignment, after bond was posted, after a sleepless summer facing possible jail time, up to a year, Yoni had finally gotten justice. It wasn’t simple. For the events of Yoni’s life tend to unfold on an Old Testament scale; his god is an Angry God. It took driving his jalopy to court directly through Hurricane Katrina, through sideways rain that gave the impression of operating underwater, but his record was finally wiped clean, his mug shot expunged. His name cleared. Again.
    Yoni’s name had been cleared more times than a table at Big Boy—and each time, ready for the next greasy feast. The man was a glutton for trouble. While living in the Mississippi Delta, where he taught high school English, he had tried his hand at the Southern hospitality thing. When a rifle-toting cowboy drifter, wandering next to the Mississippi River, asked him if there was “anything fun to do in town,” Yoni immediately invited the man home for a platonic dinner. The meal ended with the irate, sexually frustrated cowboy exposing himself to Yoni. During his own travels, Yoni saved money by sleeping on park benches instead of in hostels.
    And then there was the kind of trouble that hadn’t happened yet, the evil seed that might one day yield a poison fruit: writing on a housing application for graduate student housing, for example, that he had a problem with nocturnal enuresis , a.k.a. bedwetting. While this lie achieved his immediate objective, securing a rare single room, he still wonders if one day, down the road, this bedwetting document will somehow end up in the wrong hands. Perhaps a tenure committee, perhaps a congressional committee. When that day comes, he’ll need to clear his name once again.
    Yoni has lived much of his life under the shadow of false accusations. His slovenly and peculiar ways led a college administrator to interrogate him over the (completely false) charges that he was a heroin addict. On a separate occasion, Yoni was summoned to this same administrator’s office, this time accused of a hate crime—again, a terrible misunderstanding. True he’d yelled, in his booming voice, out of his window and into a crowded courtyard of a college dorm, “Hey, Avi, you fucking Jew!” But it had been a joke, a Jewish thing, he explained to the administrator. Even at the biological level, Yoni stood falsely accused: he once tested positive, falsely, for syphilis.
    But Yoni was the master of underdog brio. As an overweight Little Leaguer, his record of striking out over twenty times in a row did not prevent him from stepping up to the plate and, like Babe Ruth, grandly pointing to the outfield fence, calling his imminent home run. Years later, after reading an article on Donald Trump in an in-flight magazine, he decided to heed the great man’s advice and always wear a tie in professional settings. Yoni was a stalwart optimist.
    His great moment would arrive on Jeopardy , in front of nine million viewers. After two rounds the studio audience hadn’t exactly turned on him, but they’d undoubtedly written him off. Yoni’s goof-ball antics—blowing a lewd kiss and winking into the camera during his introduction, his funny voices, his fist-pumping enthusiasm, his lime-beige plaid