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GOT NOTHING COMING- Notes From A Prison Fish by Jimmy Lerner (Broadway
Books) Memoir, 2002. 397 Pages. This is the darkly hilarious yet sad (yet
not-too-sad) tale of Mr. Jimmy Lerner, a middle-aged, middle-class
corporate cube drone who suddenly finds himself in a maximum-security
Nevada prison for voluntary manslaughter. After killing (in self-defense,
he claims) someone who for most of the book is only mysteriously referred
to as the Monster, Jimmy’s life is slammed full force into the nightmare
that is the American prison system. Early
on he gets put into a cell with Kansas, a huge, muscle-bound skinhead with
a large swastika tattooed on his neck. As it turns out, ol’ Kansas just
happens to be the main shot caller for the penitentiary’s white
supremacists. The fact that
Lerner is Jewish is initially lost on Kansas, but when the big sumbitch
eventually questions him about his name, Jimmy responds by telling him
it’s just like that solid old German standby Werner, only it’s spelled
with an “L” instead of a “W.”
Kansas is down with that, and they end up forming a strange but
solid, slightly touching friendship as time goes on.
Months pass and Jimmy, who has been facetiously
dubbed O.G. (short for Original Gangsta) by the other cons, learns the dos
and don’ts of prison life, and his association with Kansas actually
helps him avoid some serious physical harm and humiliation.
Some of the funniest parts of this book occur when Lerner tries to
apply the various corporate seminar strategies that he learned while
working for the phone company to the madness of prison life, getting a
variety of results. As time
passes he becomes a righteous con (i.e. respected), keeping his sense of
humor and hope but still having some of his soul destroyed by the daily
grind of prison life. The last part of the book details the specifics of his
pre-prison existence and how he came to meet, like, loathe and eventually
kill the Monster. This part
of the story is also pretty interesting.
Lerner, who was incarcerated throughout
the writing of this book but has since been paroled, is a natural
storyteller, and he’s one funny muthafucka.
While much of the time I really felt bad for him (and sometimes
horrified for him), I found myself seriously laughing out loud every page
or two. He also has a GREAT gift for dialogue and capturing the
unique language of the prison, which is essentially Ebonics meets
Hillbilly. He writes it in
such a way that I found myself starting to say some of the most oft
repeated phrases in my own conversations, completely baffling the hell out
of whoever I happened to be talking to at the time.
Bottom line is that I really had a hard
time putting this book down. In
fact, it’s the best thing I’ve read this year. –Ben Hunter
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