\n\n\n\n
By\u00a0Adam Gopnik<\/a> — November 9, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDon\u2019t answer!<\/strong> When you come home and someone says, \u2018How ya doing?\u2019 it\u2019s not a question. You just say\u00a0fine<\/em>. Every New Yorker knows that. If someone says, \u2018How ya doing?\u2019 and you start telling someone how you are, you might as well be wearing a big sign saying \u2018I Have No Idea Where I Am.\u2019 So. How ya doing?\u201d Sam Rivera laughed, and his audience wasn\u2019t quite sure whether to laugh with him or not. It was six o\u2019clock on a Thursday evening last fall at the Castle, at 140th Street and Riverside Drive, and the weekly meeting was just beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Castle is the main residential wing of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit organization that has been helping people cope with the aftermath of incarceration since its founding, by the Broadway press agent David Rothenberg, more than fifty years ago. \u201cThursday meeting\u201d is a mandatory, semi-sacred gathering of the Castle\u2019s eighty or so residents, all of whom have been incarcerated, some as recently as earlier in the week, along with people who once lived there or who would like to live there. Various guests may appear, too, ranging from John Edward Wetzel, the secretary of corrections for the State of Pennsylvania, to Luann de Lesseps, the \u201cReal Housewives of New York\u201d star who once spent a night in jail. (Lesseps arranged a beauty day for the women of the Castle, which was broadcast on \u201cHousewives.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much of the language of the meeting is specific to the world of those who have been locked up. \u201cI\u2019m a reluctant veteran of the short bid,\u201d someone might say gloomily\u2014a short bid being a brief sentence. A language of elaborate indirection fills the room. \u201cJustice involved\u201d means that someone was arrested for or convicted of a crime; \u201cbeen upstate\u201d means imprisoned at northern-county places like Attica or Auburn (where license plates are made) or at Sing Sing (where the electric chair Old Sparky once stood). The catchall phrase for the totality is \u201clived experience,\u201d the term having migrated here to mean, simply, \u201cI\u2019ve done time.\u201d Either people have lived experience or they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Partly through the osmosis that teaches all of us our dialects\u2014nobody has to tell a quarterback to say \u201cIt was a team victory\u201d; he absorbs the words when he starts playing football\u2014the residents use many cautious voices and tenses to narrate their movement through a hostile world. \u201cI got involved in a bad situation\u201d or \u201cI found myself in a circumstance in which someone got hurt\u201d segues into the first-person active: \u201cI\u2019m putting my life together and reconnecting with my family now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sooner or later, though, the complicated language settles, for a newcomer, into a basic formula of introduction: \u201cI\u2019ve been away. I\u2019ve come home.\u201d At the Thursday meeting last fall, when a recent arrival said that he had been away\u2014perhaps for ten or twenty or thirty years\u2014there was a round of applause, and Rivera, officially the associate vice-president of housing at Fortune but in truth its resident guru and presiding demiurge, was there to say, gently, \u201cWelcome home, brother.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera is a big man. Of Native American and Puerto Rican parentage, he has the build of the fullback he once was. With a shaved head and an earring in each ear, he had led the meeting for about two years, with good humor and discipline\u2014like one\u2019s ideal of a staff sergeant, who creates maximum morale but with minimal opportunity for goofing off. As a young man, in the eighties, he was arrested on gun and drug charges, and acknowledges significant lived experience himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first-floor room where the Thursday meeting takes place is decorated with a plush rug and photographs of the Castle from back when it was a Catholic girls\u2019 school, and a poster-size Times<\/em> article about the Fortune kitchen, which has a reputation for seriously good cooking. Week after week, the same seats are almost always occupied by the same people. A longtime resident called E., a formidable Jamaican with the voice, and the authority, of Laurence Fishburne, sits in the far-left corner. (\u201cThe computer room is not a place to come to hang out,\u201d he announced as one meeting began. \u201cIf that\u2019s what you want, to hang out\u2014that\u2019s not the place for that.\u201d After E. speaks, it would be a brave visitor to the computer room who tried to make it the place for that.) To the right, a line of older residents, looking a little worn out and a little wise, fill the chairs. One Thursday, Shawnta Montgomery, who loves to tease Rivera for his sincerity and self-seriousness, was on the right, too, closer up. An older resident, Ervin Hunt, known to all as Easy, sat in the rear, to the left. Lined up beside Rivera at the front of the room, facing the residents and guests, were Stanley Richards, the Fortune Society\u2019s executive vice-president, and David Rothenberg, its eighty-seven-year-old founder. Upstairs, there are comfortable bedrooms for more than eighty residents, but at the moment they were, by the society\u2019s rule, empty. Everyone<\/em> has to come to the Thursday meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ostensible point of the meeting is to share announcements, discuss the events of the week, create new rules, and greet new arrivals. But its real point, Rivera confided, is \u201cto conduct a group-therapy session for seventy-five people, which they say you can\u2019t do.\u201d His goal was to get the people in the room, having come home, to stay<\/em> home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera can keep the room buoyant with a joke\u2014usually at the expense of Rothenberg, who, as the household saint, can afford to have a few jokes told at his expense (and whose aura is very different from Rivera\u2019s: small, high-strung, gay, and Jewish). Rivera and Rothenberg were like a couple who had been working in a hardware store for too many decades; they enjoyed each other and gibed at each other, and by now the enjoyment had become the gibing. \u201cDavid\u2019s idea of a whisper is putting his hands over his mouth and then yelling,\u201d Rivera said in the middle of a meeting, after Rothenberg, doing just that, had urged him to move on from some stalled subject. \u201cMy kids do that,\u201d Rivera said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera soberly restores order, often in response to an excess of \u201cpoetry\u201d that the meeting has allowed itself. (\u201cIf you call someone\u2019s bullshit \u2018poetry,\u2019 they won\u2019t be that offended, even if you\u2019re telling them you don\u2019t want to hear it.\u201d) On this evening, for instance, someone used a formula familiar from twelve-step programs: \u201cYou have to hit bottom before you can come back up.\u201d This sentiment went around the room with echoing fervor. But Rivera let twenty minutes or so pass before he intervened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou know, I just want to come back to something that the brother was saying before,\u201d he said. \u201cAbout how you have to hit bottom to come back up. Now, I don\u2019t believe that\u2019s true. What\u2019s bottom? Where\u2019s bottom? How do you know you\u2019ve hit bottom? There may be a bottom below the bottom you\u2019ve hit already! There may be a thousand<\/em> bottoms you could hit if you let yourself. So\u2014say that this<\/em>, wherever you are, is your bottom. You\u2019re going to declare that it\u2019s as low as you\u2019re going to let yourself go. Then come back up. Don\u2019t wait to hit bottom before you start working your way back up. Call this bottom the<\/em> bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The crowd, including the original speaker, laughed at Rivera\u2019s earnest repetition of \u201cbottom,\u201d but he had made his point: they couldn\u2019t afford the indulgence of self-dramatization. Creating a certain kind of double rhythm was essential to his work: a difficult truth was followed by self-deprecating laughter. A balloon filled with the helium of unrealistic hope was emptied, and then refilled with the warm air of actuality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On another occasion, Shawnta Montgomery mentioned meeting someone who had worked with Rivera in the past: \u201cHe said, \u2018Sam tried to fix me, but he couldn\u2019t.\u2019 But he sends his regards.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI couldn\u2019t fix him?\u201d Rivera said, with some vehemence. \u201cI can\u2019t fix him. I can\u2019t fix you. I can\u2019t fix anyone. Nobody fixes you but you. That\u2019s why I say, If you\u2019re going around me\u2014to smoke or get high or whatever\u2014you\u2019re not fooling me<\/em>. I\u2019ll accept you any way you are. The only person you\u2019re fooling is you.\u201d Rivera emphasizes that change happens only hour by hour and day by day\u2014and that, nonetheless, you can wake up one day and find that the hours of work have accumulated into months and then years. \u201cThat\u2019s the only way it happens. You\u2019re always coming home.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He has a favorite aphorism about those whom he always calls his \u201cclients,\u201d which on another afternoon he stressed more fiercely than his usually equable tone allows. \u201cThe quote is mine, so I\u2019m gonna own it,\u201d he said. \u201c \u2018The crime is not who you are, it\u2019s what you did.\u2019 David said once, to a journalist who asked, \u2018How can you work with these violent criminals?,\u2019 \u2018Well, how would you like to be identified for your entire life by the one worst thing you\u2019ve ever done? If your editor made you put at the top of every column you ever wrote, Written by Tom the Bed-Wetter. Or by Tom, Who Drove Under the Influence.\u2019 I\u2019ve worked in D.C., where people identify themselves by their degrees\u2014\u2018I went to this school\u2019\u2014and that\u2019s what it\u2019s about. And sometimes people of color introduce themselves that way\u2014\u2018I was in prison.\u2019 But that\u2019s not you! The crime is what you did. The crime is not who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like anyone who is naturally good at something, Sam Rivera got to be naturally good at his work by thinking constantly about his performance and being acutely aware of what he is doing as he does it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPart of what I have is the contradiction of my appearance,\u201d he explained one evening. \u201cI\u2019m a big man, and I can look intimidating.\u201d He crossed his arms and looked out at an imagined audience. \u201cSo, when I\u2019m there, like this\u201d\u2014he became the man he is in meetings, hands relaxed by his sides, a half smile on his face\u2014\u201cthen I\u2019m sending the message that you can be both, a tough guy who is open and not frightened. \u2018If Sam<\/em> is like that, then I can be like that.\u2019 It\u2019s about me taking control of what my own experience is. I had a mentor once, and I was telling him everything I was doing, and he said, \u2018Where is Sam in this?\u2019 That was hugely helpful to me. Seeing yourself from outside.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera was sitting over dinner at Trufa, an eclectic little restaurant at Broadway and 140th Street. The neighborhood, which had been poverty-stricken, filled with abandoned buildings, and therefore affordable when the Fortune Society salvaged the place, in the late nineteen-nineties, is now, as Columbia University pushes north and west, an ever more desirable area, dotted with restaurants and the inevitable espresso joints. The former convent school would be unaffordable now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere\u2019s an architecture of the room that I rely on\u2014E. being firm in the corner, Easy kibbitzing from the side,\u201d Rivera went on. What had seemed an accidental weekly arrangement was purposeful. \u201cYou can\u2019t emphasize enough things that may seem superficial. The look of a room, the kind of food we serve, which doesn\u2019t look or taste like institutional food. Remember, a lot of our residents are people who went from eating institutional food in school to eating institutional food in prison and that\u2019s all they know. No one\u2019s ever spoken to them empathetically. No one\u2019s ever asked them how they feel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera grew up on the Lower East Side. \u201cMy mother had me when she was fifteen,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we were always working poor. My parents always had jobs.\u201d He speaks with the ancient, \u201cr\u201d-less, broad-vowel speech of a New York working class. In prison, Rivera recalled, he helped care for sick inmates during the height of the aids<\/em> crisis, and he has done the same sort of work ever since. Rivera first visited Fortune as a client, in 1991, and then began a career in various post-prison and advocacy groups, including a long stint at Exponents, a leading drug-rehab organization in New York. Since then, he has been back and forth between Fortune and another nonprofit. \u201cI\u2019m a four-time recidivist here,\u201d he has joked. He lives in Teaneck, New Jersey, and has two teen-age sons and a daughter in her twenties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat you\u2019ve got to hit the rock-bottom moment?\u201d he said, reflectively. \u201cIt\u2019s something I\u2019ve been thinking about for a long time. I\u2019ve looked at programs that were created around recovery protocols, and the theory was: If there was ten per cent left of your rock bottom, they would intentionally bring you down to that zero, and then build you back up. My view is just the opposite. If you still have ten per cent after being through prison and abuse of many kinds, then we can\u00a0start<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo, I tell the story. I was with my boys, watching a show where they\u2019re imploding a casino, and I\u2019m kind of into it. It\u2019s all dramatic, and they hit the thing\u2014old school!\u2014you know, the box with the plunger? And at about the third floor it caved in and the guy said, \u2018Wow! With all the dynamite we used to destroy this building, the foundation was so strong that it wouldn\u2019t go down.\u2019 And I\u2019m, like, \u2018That\u2019s it!<\/em> \u2019 If we can find your foundation, you won\u2019t fall. You\u2019ll lean! You\u2019ll trip, but you won\u2019t fall. So that\u2019s<\/em> my work, finding the foundation that remains. Let\u2019s not make it about the dynamite. Let\u2019s work on your foundation\u2014what will keep you standing, even if you start to use drugs again, even if you went back to prison. So that\u2019s the only bottom I want to hit. That foundation that\u2019s still there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n David Rothenberg founded the Fortune Society almost by accident. In the late nineteen-sixties, at the peak of his career as an extremely successful Broadway publicist, working with the likes of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, he produced a Canadian play about rape in prison called \u201cFortune and Men\u2019s Eyes,\u201d and realized that the men who were most stirred by the play were ex-cons, as they were called then. Almost as an afterthought, he began a help line for such people\u2014\u201cReally, only an extra desk in the office\u201d\u2014and watched it blossom into a lifetime\u2019s work. Yet he remains spiritually on both sides of the doorway. This makes his conversation a singular braid of show-biz anecdotes and social-activist exhortations. Holding out his right arm, he might say, \u201cThis is the arm that Liz Taylor cried on at the opening night of Dick Burton\u2019s \u2018Hamlet\u2019 in 1964,\u201d and then avow, \u201cThe mistake you make is thinking that they\u2019re ever<\/em> honest about crime numbers. The city will bring them up and down as they want, according to the politics of the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The turning point, for him, took place on \u201cThe David Susskind Show,\u201d in 1968. \u201cEveryone watched Susskind on Sunday nights,\u201d Rothenberg recalled. \u201cThey always had six of a kind\u2014six ex-alcoholics or six prostitutes or whatever was coming in sixes that year. I called the producer and said, \u2018Have you ever had six former prisoners?\u2019 She said, \u2018I want \u2019em but I can\u2019t get \u2019em.\u2019 I said, \u2018I can.\u2019 So we went on, and the next morning, after the show, I got call after call after call. It was overwhelming! There was an endless line of men snaking up the stairs of this theatrical building. And I began to transition from full-time press agent and part-time prison activist to full-time prison activist and part-time press agent. Well, no-time press agent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rothenberg takes a late lunch or an early dinner most days at Trufa. \u201cThursday meetings are always essential\u2014we realized that if we had rooms and no services we were just a hotel,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat Sam does at the meeting is he gets people talking who are comfortable talking, but sometimes he\u2019ll say, \u2018Hey, Joe\u2014what\u2019s happening with you?\u2019 And Joe starts talking and doesn\u2019t shut up. He had never been given permission. Joe\u2019s never been asked how he is in his life!\u201d Rothenberg chuckled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou know \u2018The Green Pastures,\u2019 the movie?\u201d The 1936 film relates Bible stories as Black American folklore. \u201cYeah, there\u2019s a line, I think it\u2019s from there, that I always repeat. The Lord, who\u2019s represented as African-American, says to an angel, \u2018We have to take care of that planet, but don\u2019t forget the wing of the sparrow over there.\u2019 Sam is one of the people taking care of his portion of the planet by taking care of the wings of the sparrow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Housing programs for an offender\u2019s re\u00ebntry into the community usually involve a bewildering array of bureaucracies, and often result in former inmates being placed in halfway houses and homeless shelters that replicate the conditions of prison. Almost three-quarters of the released population are arrested again within three years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Castle began when we kept seeing that there was an urgent need for housing for people released who became homeless,\u201d JoAnne Page, the president and C.E.O. of the Fortune Society, explained from her office at the society\u2019s administrative headquarters, in Long Island City. \u201cMore than half the people coming out of state prison to New York City right now are being dumped in shelters. hud<\/em> defines people who are coming out of incarceration as not<\/em> homeless, so no hud<\/em>-funded program can take them in. They have to be sleeping under a bridge before they can officially be classed as homeless.\u201d In the late nineteen-nineties, Page came upon the empty Catholic girls\u2019 school. \u201cThe city took it from the nuns and left it vacant, with the idea that it would become a TB hospital, but they gave up on that idea, and instead it became a magnet for drug dealing.\u201d In 1998, Fortune bought it for $1.2 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Page emphasizes the society\u2019s \u201copen doors\u201d policy. \u201cWe\u2019re bound by laws about sexual offenders and proximity to schools,\u201d she said. But applicants are screened for \u201ccurrent risk of violence, not<\/em> a history of violence. We have some of the people with the worst records in New York City coming for active services, but no metal detectors. We offer people something they really want, and the condition is that they have to behave peaceably if they want it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Fortune Society holds most of its job-training and vocational-education programs at its Long Island City offices, with the Castle offering its own approach to social services. \u201cIt\u2019s valuable that Sam has lived experience,\u201d Page said. \u201cHe knows prison faces. He can tell the difference between someone who looks tough and someone who\u2019s a threat. And most of the people coming home will see somebody in that room they did time with. That changes everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The residents of the Castle admired Rivera for being as reliable about small things as he was about big ones. E., the longtime resident with the basso-profundo voice, put it bluntly: \u201cSam is the difference between leadership and leadershit. If you have leadershit, everything\u2019s going to be shit, and that\u2019s the primary reason why the shelters are such hellscapes. Sam watches the simple things that improve the outlook, improve the humanity.\u201d Hilton N. Webb, Jr., another long-term resident, sixtyish and intensely serious, who is studying for a master\u2019s degree in social work, and writing a memoir titled \u201cDancing in the Midst of Nothing,\u201d said, \u201cWhatever Sam says is going to happen, it\u2019s going to happen<\/em>. I remember when I was having problems with my roommate and I had to move to a single room. Sam said, \u2018You\u2019re going to have the same river view,\u2019 and, to make a long story short, it happened. The river view is a nice<\/em> view. That it was a little thing didn\u2019t mean he thought it was nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The residents recognized the difficulty of Rivera\u2019s role. \u201cI\u2019m aware of the stresses on him,\u201d Webb said. He described a man trying to get into the building, and screaming at Rivera. \u201cSam was talking back to him in this very mellow, in this Zen way,\u201d Webb went on, \u201cbut I noticed that he was holding a radio, and it was physically impossible that he could have tightened his hand on that radio any harder than he was. Knot-tight! I couldn\u2019t have stood there with this guy spitting in my face saying the things he was saying. Yet I know that Sam wasn\u2019t afraid, and he could have whipped this guy\u2019s ass. So he\u2019s, you know, the whole deal\u2014the warrior-monk kind of guy. Sun Tzu said if you know the outcome of the fight anyway, you have no need to fight. I know and you know, so why don\u2019t we pretend the fight is over and move on?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One critical part of transitioning is to help someone involved with the justice system get involved with the employment system. \u201cI got my job and my apartment\u201d is a motto of success. As the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in the nineteen-fifties, \u201cA status, a position, a social place, it is not a material thing to be possessed and displayed\u201d; it is \u201csomething to be enacted and portrayed.\u201d That idea is profoundly relevant to the work of the Fortune Society. Coming home means learning the language and the rituals shared by the society outside prison walls. Weekly workshops at Fortune prepare clients for job interviews, and, particularly, help them address the obvious question: Where have you been for the past four or five (or thirty) years? It is against the law in New York City to ask a job candidate about his or her criminal record, but it is legal, after a job has been offered, to run a search on the prospective hire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People who have just come home meet interviewers in mock interviews. What is your greatest strength in a work situation? (The right answer is: \u201cI love to work with others.\u201d) What\u2019s your greatest weakness. (\u201cUh, my greatest weakness? Females,\u201d one newcomer says, a candid but very wrong answer. The right answer is Clintonesque: \u201cI try too hard to get it right.\u201d) A young man who wants to be a restaurant cook is guided through an interview in which it becomes apparent that he doesn\u2019t know much about cooking. (\u201cYou get in the good habit of bullshitting white people,\u201d Rivera remarked later. \u201cAnd you start bullshitting yourself.\u201d) Interviewers like detail: about work programs upstate, about roofing or custodial work or how to operate a forklift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Near the end of one mock interview, the questioner said, \u201cYou seem like a fine candidate for the job. I\u2019d like to offer it to you. But, of course, I\u2019ll run a background check on you. Tell me, if I do will anything come up?\u201d The candidate, trained in previous classes, struggled to recall the ideal answer, which is something like: \u201cYes, when I was younger and behaving stupidly, an unfortunate situation occurred and someone got badly hurt. This led to my becoming involved in the criminal-justice system. But I studied hard and attended several programs while I was in jail. That person I was is not who I am now.\u201d That, the interviewer explained, is a version of the perfect answer, which the residents work to adapt. Among the central skills that the Fortune Society teaches is how, in a job interview, to tell the truth while putting the best face on a previous failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of us, of course, have to learn to navigate the waters of such interviews by telling the truth while putting the best face on previous failures. (\u201cI did get a C on that Spanish test, but it was the result of some issues in my personal life and, as you can see, I pulled it right up in the following term\u201d is what a kid raised with good fortune learns to say.) The broader task, as Rivera sees it, is to instill new habits of response among the formerly incarcerated. \u201cYou have to relearn all your reflexes,\u201d Rivera said. \u201cWhen you feel threatened, don\u2019t react. If I find myself threatened by the possibility of a confrontation on the street\u2014just a car-cutoff thing, you know; happens every day\u2014I\u2019ve found myself literally running in the other direction to remove myself from those reflexes and that risk.\u201d The aim is to learn a new language of performance in order to have a new chance at life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The theatrical side of the Castle is self-evident to its sharper-eyed residents. \u201cThe Fortune face\u2014that\u2019s what I call what you see in the Thursday-night performance space,\u201d E. explained. \u201cI don\u2019t say that in a disparaging way, but that\u2019s what it is\u2014people are auditioning for acceptance into the program and they\u2019re bringing their A-game to be accepted. And then you get to know the person, as opposed to the audition. Sometimes it\u2019s the same person. With some people, it was just a fa\u00e7ade, a performance to get in. And those people really don\u2019t last that long. They shouldn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some more radical-minded social-justice advocates don\u2019t like the idea that people who were incarcerated should be taught how to blend in with middle-class rituals and mores. Rivera considers this view the kind of luxury that only people who are not struggling to \u201cstay home\u201d can indulge in. \u201cObviously, we have to reform the system and end the problems, and put fewer people in prison,\u201d he said. \u201cObviously. But my job is saving lives now<\/em>. If I wait for the world to be better, then the whole society would have to change, and I don\u2019t have a long enough life to wait for that to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At a Thursday meeting a couple of weeks later, a recent home-comer praised another Castle client for gently urging him away from a confrontation with someone who pushed him\u2014or whom he perceived to have pushed him\u2014on the subway. \u201cI almost lost it,\u201d the home-comer recounted. \u201cI was ready to do something about it, but he told me, \u2018Just let it go,\u2019 and I did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera seized the moment: \u201cWhat do we mean when we say we\u2019re going to lose it? I realize I hear it often, \u2018I was gonna lose it on this guy.\u2019 What\u2019s it mean for you?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLose control,\u201d one person said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cRage,\u201d another said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cRage!\u201d Rivera echoed. \u201cBut you\u2019re<\/em> gonna lose it. You\u2019re gonna lose your housing. You\u2019re gonna lose your freedom. What causes it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One man tried to explain his suspicion that a bunkmate in a homeless shelter had taken money from his backpack. \u201cIt\u2019s hard coming from doing a whole lot of time. You\u2019re bunked with someone and you know you\u2019re getting robbed,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s hard, because, if you were upstate or in another situation, you would have acted in another way. We live in our own minds. Man is mind<\/em>. We first get out\u2014we\u2019re getting that comfortability back\u2014and it\u2019s hard to lose it, because you live in a room with it. I spent more of my life in prison than free. It\u2019s hard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera grew gentler: \u201cCan I talk about that? Your voice changed. I heard it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard having something taken from you. My life style\u2014I\u2019m not proud of it\u2014but I was a stickup kid my whole life. I\u2019m not used to having anyone take anything from me. There\u2019s nothing you could do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHere\u2019s the deal,\u201d Rivera said. \u201cThere\u2019s something you could do and you chose not to. Don\u2019t dismiss that, man! You should be, like, this should be a celebration<\/em>, man. Like, for real\u2014\u2018I did that, and I didn\u2019t do what I would normally do.\u2019 We all know what we could do. Many of us have done it. Take the power\u2014I chose not to do that this time<\/em>.\u201d He glided into the next thought. \u201cWas anyone around this week when I got stepped to?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen you got what<\/em>?\u201d Rothenberg asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDavid needs help\u2014what is \u2018step to\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSomeone came at him very aggressive,\u201d one person explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe had a brick!\u201d someone else added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When a client had confronted him, Rivera hugged the man, literally, until the confrontation ended. The possibility of violence in the building had shaken everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera hadn\u2019t seen the brick, and was startled to learn about it: \u201cHe pulled out a brick<\/em>? For real? Let\u2019s hold that, because I definitely<\/em> want to know about this brick. But I want to come back to you, brother. Sometimes doing nothing is the best decision we can make, right? Someone says to me, very glum, \u2018I didn\u2019t do anything.\u2019 No! You did<\/em> . . . nothing. That\u2019s an action<\/em>. You chose to handle it. Doing nothing is doing something. Ignoring someone is reacting to them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Afterward, Rivera looked bemused. \u201cI\u2019m interested in this brick. Nobody told me about the brick.\u201d He paused. \u201cI\u2019m glad<\/em> I didn\u2019t know about the brick.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The coronavirus pandemic hit the Castle hard. Rivera was like a captain approaching a storm, battening down the boat while planning to take the waves broadside. Several residents contracted covid<\/em>-19, and the decision was made to stop accepting new residents\u2014a painful departure from long-standing Fortune Society practice\u2014and to shelter the entire population in place, with the positive cases self-quarantining. The Thursday meeting was moved to Zoom. To attend remotely was oddly reassuring in those first panic-stricken weeks of the pandemic in New York; having been through so much worse, and accustomed to enforced isolation, the Fortune community had a kind of unfazed gaiety unique among the difficult interactions of the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, in late May, after the standard announcements of a Thursday meeting, Rivera said, as smoothly as he could, \u201cSo, I<\/em> have an announcement. I submitted my resignation today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a brief pause. \u201cResignation not accepted!\u201d E. called out, cutting through his usual cool with obvious pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cResignation not accepted!\u201d Easy called out, in turn. And the cry went around the gallery: \u201cResignation not accepted!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera tried to quiet them. \u201cNow listen to me, it\u2019s a decision I\u2019ve made.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n E. was insistent: \u201cYou can\u2019t just say this. You got to explain<\/em> this shit, man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera told them that he was leaving to become the executive director of a \u201charm reduction\u201d group, an organization that promotes health among drug addicts and sex workers, providing condoms, clean syringes, training in overdose reversal, and the like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, the residents surrendered, and began to congratulate him. \u201cI\u2019m grateful for all you have done to help me see the world more clearly,\u201d one said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera was privately equivocal about the reasons for his departure. Although he disavowed any internal conflict, there clearly had been complicated feelings between him and some of the top people at the Fortune headquarters. \u201cI would have loved to stay at Fortune,\u201d he said in early June. He was at home, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and sitting in front of a picture of the Buddha\u2014an accidental but telling juxtaposition. \u201cBut our values just aren\u2019t well aligned anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera cited the society\u2019s response to the protests in New York and across the country. \u201cIn organizations, you have to be careful not to take a political stand\u2014but this isn\u2019t political. And Fortune froze.\u201d He was frustrated that, even though the staff was almost fifty per cent Black, it took weeks for its leaders to speak out. (\u201cI didn\u2019t realize how important it was to make a statement because I thought our actions spoke for themselves,\u201d Page said. \u201cAnd that was a lesson learned. We\u2019re now making statements.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, Rivera admitted that he had decided to leave long before the protests started. Conversations with others in the organization suggest that the issue was a familiar one, especially within nonprofits. Sam Rivera, the charismatic center of the operation, had little executive power within it, and over the years this had created some rubbed-raw feelings between him and the people who did. The same rule that holds in a small regional theatre holds in a nonprofit devoted to post-incarceration transitions: the charismatic figure wins the allegiance of his clientele, at the risk of alienating his colleagues, who, without any malice or even conscious envy, become mindful of what they see as his managerial deficits. Tension grows between the charismatic person and the administrators, who have a clear idea of the dogged and unglamorous work required to sustain the institutional structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Page insists that the organization will go on more or less intact. Angela Scott, an eight-year veteran of the society, has replaced Rivera. \u201cI ran Thursday meeting for years, and then Stanley did\u201d\u2014the Fortune vice-president\u2014\u201cand then Sam,\u201d Page said. \u201cNow it\u2019s Angela\u2019s turn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As with anyone who has left an organization to which he was devoted, Rivera became more aware of Fortune\u2019s flaws and fissures in retrospect. \u201cWe came across as participating in the punishment,\u201d he said. \u201cOur line was: If you smoke weed, and keep doing it, we\u2019re going to discharge you. I\u2019m not going to expel someone for smoking marijuana. I\u2019ve never met anyone who O.D.\u2019d on marijuana.\u201d (Page said that Fortune would never force a client out just for smoking marijuana.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera returned to an image that haunted him. \u201cI was driving by a playground once, near where I grew up. And I was with one of my mentors, watching these great little kids playing in this playground. And he said, flatly, \u2018Sixty per cent of those kids are going to prison.\u2019 We\u2019re still not fixing the problem or even addressing it. What we\u2019re doing now with policing, it\u2019s as if we deliberately set buildings on fire, and then installed a fire station across the street. The thing is not to let the fires get started.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n David Rothenberg, who knew Rivera best, wondered if the coping mechanisms that had enabled Rivera to remake his life had been disabling to him in moments of professional friction. \u201cSam has gotten so adept at avoiding conflict that he avoids conflict when he needs to engage in it,\u201d he said. \u201cI keep telling him that\u2014you just have to accept that, wherever you go, there will be friction between you and the people you work with, and you have to work through it. It reminds me of when I was in group therapy, years ago, and I strongly disliked another member of the group. \u2018That\u2019s the one who will do you the most good!\u2019 the therapist said. And he was right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In early July, Rivera paid the Castle and its residents a final visit. \u201cI want to say goodbye,\u201d he said. He and Rothenberg drove together from Rothenberg\u2019s apartment in the Village up to 140th Street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo, one night Miss Peggy Lee called me at midnight and said, \u2018I want to do a show of Frank Loesser\u2019s music,\u2019 \u201d Rothenberg was saying in the car. \u201c \u2018And you\u2019re calling me at midnight about this because?\u2019 I said. \u2018Because I need the sheet music,\u2019 she said. So I called the Loesser estate. God, she was good!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He got no response. \u201cYou know who Peggy Lee is?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera furrowed his brow, as one who, knowing exactly who Peggy Lee was, was disinclined to admit it at just that moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the car pulled up to the Castle, a group of residents, all masked, were waiting on the steps. But, where in the movie version the returning local hero would be surrounded by a crowd, Rivera quickly sought out one-on-one encounters. Hilton Webb was there, and, with the stoicism that betokens great pride in accomplishment, he narrated to Sam the sequence of certificates he was pursuing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of congratulating him, Rivera exclaimed, \u201cYou gotta accept that getting one degree is enough.\u201d He reminded Webb that the point of the Castle was to get out of the Castle, and that the choice of when to leave would not always be left to the resident. \u201cOne of the issues for you is that you\u2019re a brilliant motherfucker\u2014no, no, you are!\u2014but you have to be more than that. I never in my life thought that I\u2019d think that ignorance is bliss. And now I totally respect it, because there are elements in my life right now that I wish I didn\u2019t understand. There are Puerto Ricans in my life who are pro-Trump\u2014I wish I didn\u2019t understand them.\u201d Webb was laughing. \u201cSo what I\u2019m saying to you,\u201d he added, more softly, \u201cis that your intellect\u2019s your intellect\u2014you\u2019ll always have it\u2014but you only need one degree. And then you need to move and live.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later, sitting with Rothenberg for lunch outdoors at Trufa, Rivera said, \u201cAnything can be an addiction, or a crutch. You can get addicted to education. You can even get addicted to recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A man careered down the street, obviously high. Rivera discreetly pointed him out to Rothenberg. \u201cRemember him? He used to come to Fortune.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe looks bad,\u201d Rothenberg said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Recently, controversy had arisen about the release of long-term prisoners guilty of notoriously violent crimes, and Rivera and Rothenberg began discussing the difficulties of reconciling the work at Fortune with their sense of moral order. At the Castle, you never ask anyone about the reason for his imprisonment. But no one, as Rothenberg says, goes away for thirty years for jumping a turnstile, and many people at the Castle have been away for thirty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard, I get it,\u201d Rothenberg said. \u201cThere was this wonderful arts editor at the Times<\/em>, who was always kind to me, helped me understand what worked and what didn\u2019t. He was killed by a drunk driver on New Year\u2019s Eve. Years later, I\u2019m at Fortune, and someone introduces me to a woman. She had just come home after doing years for a D.U.I. \u2018I think she killed some editor from the Times<\/em>,\u2019 they said.\u201d He swallowed hard and said, \u201cThat was the moral test for me. Could I work with her? And, of course, I did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rivera mentioned a friend of his who had seemed in good shape, and then suddenly committed a violent act against a former girlfriend and her new lover. \u201cWe hadn\u2019t addressed his trauma adequately,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re all transitioning. You keep coming home. It\u2019s like\u2014you know, I\u2019ve been thinking a lot lately about diets. Everyone has a diet. Monday\u2019s O.K., you eat your soup and salad. Then Tuesday goes better than you hope, but then Wednesday is really hard\u2014you\u2019re hungry. Then on Thursday you go over to Mom\u2019s and she makes fried chicken, and how can you say no? It\u2019s Mom. So then you always say, \u2018Well, I blew it, so I\u2019ll start again on Monday.\u2019 And you spend the weekend enjoying yourself. That\u2019s the trick. You have to start again on Friday. That\u2019s all it is. Everyone backslides or has a bad day. The key is going back on the diet on Friday, after you screw up on Thursday, and not to wait till Monday to start again.\u201d He paused and waited for his food to arrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDid I ever tell you about the time Edward Albee came to the Castle on a Thursday?\u201d Rothenberg said, brightening the silence. \u201cAnd one arrogant woman running for office who was there watching came up to me and said, \u2018What was that old con in for?\u2019 I said, \u2018I don\u2019t know, I guess for winning three Pulitzer Prizes?\u2019 \u201d He smiled. \u201cI told her, \u2018Never assume<\/em>.\u2019 That\u2019s a line from the Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy movie \u2018Desk Set.\u2019 \u201d Rothenberg paused. \u201cPeople say Hepburn and Tracy. Actually, Shirley Booth did the play on Broadway.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later that day, Hilton Webb texted Rivera, saying that he would begin to think less about education and more about independence. \u201cI think I may have been delaying things because it\u2019s been almost fifty years since I last lived by myself,\u201d Webb explained. \u201cScary.\u201d Rivera forwarded the text to a friend and added a comment: \u201cThis is why I do what I do.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n @adamgopnik<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0since 1986. During his tenure at the magazine, he has written fiction, humor, book reviews, profiles, and reported pieces from abroad. He was the magazine\u2019s art critic from 1987 to 1995 and the Paris correspondent from 1995 to 2000. From 2000 to 2005, he wrote a journal about New York life. His books, ranging from essay collections about Paris and food to children\u2019s novels, include \u201cParis to the Moon<\/a>,\u201d \u201cThe King in the Window<\/a>,\u201d \u201cThrough the Children\u2019s Gate: A Home in New York<\/a>,\u201d \u201cAngels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life<\/a>,\u201d \u201cThe Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food<\/a>,\u201d \u201cWinter: Five Windows on the Season<\/a>,\u201d \u201cAt the Strangers\u2019 Gate: Arrivals in New York<\/a>,\u201d and, most recently, \u201cA Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism<\/a>.\u201d Gopnik has won three National Magazine Awards, for essays and for criticism, and also the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March of 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. He lectures widely, and, in 2011, delivered the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation\u2019s Massey Lectures. His first musical, \u201cThe Most Beautiful Room in New York,\u201d opened in 2017, at the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For those navigating the challenges of re\u00ebntry, it can help to have a tough-minded guide with lived experience. By\u00a0Adam Gopnik — November 9, 2020 \u201cDon\u2019t answer! When you come home and someone says, \u2018How ya doing?\u2019 it\u2019s not a question. … Continue reading
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\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/CastleFortune-819x1024.jpg\")
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\n\n\n\nAdam Gopnik<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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