Gone fishin': You Got Nothing Coming is the not-so-sentimental education of a `prison fish.'

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 1, 2002 | by Rex Roberts

In 1981, Jack Henry Abbott published In the Belly of the Beast, a memoir of his life in prison that became a cause celebre, a symbol of America's barbaric approach to penology. Unfortunately, Abbott was no sooner free (Norman Mailer helped him gain parole) than he stabbed a waiter outside a Manhattan restaurant. He found himself back behind bars, the poster boy for the folly of rehabilitation. Last month, he committed suicide in his cell in a New York state prison.

With Abbott gone, the crown of convict literature passes to Jimmy A. Lerner, author of You Got Nothing Coming (Broadway Books, $24.95, 397 pp), a prison memoir that brings sardonic humor to this mordant genre. A nice Jewish boy with an M.B.A, a lovely family and a house in the suburbs, the 47-year-old marketing executive was poised to make millions as a dot-com entrepreneur. Instead, he found himself sharing digs with skinhead Nazi sympathizers, sociopathic homeboys from the 'hood and stupid, sadistic prison guards -- the usual suspects, to be sure, but always entertaining.

If Abbott was a jailbird philosopher, Lerner is prison fish with a gift for parody ("fish" being a term of art for new boys on the cell block). His story may be a harrowing, cautionary tale about a man who had everything except self-control, but he filters it through screens of black humor, ridicule and derision, some of it directed at himself. Think Quentin Tarantino in the confessional mode, leavened with a bit of Joseph Heller (there are some funny Catch-22 riffs) and a touch of Scott Adams (Lerner actually worked in a cubicle adjacent to the creator of Dilbert). He has an ear for prison dialect, an expletive-laden patois sprinkled with "wolf tickets" (insults and threats) and sixties cliches.

"Right on, dawg," says Kansas, Lerner's skinhead cellie, who besides proffering wisdom gleaned from Aryan literature tries to teach the new fish survival skills. "I'll get a tat gun and hook you up with some righteous artwork on your scrawny-ass chest. You might be doin' some serious time, O.G. Don't wanna look like a fish."

You Got Nothing Coming is the not-so-sentimental education of O.G., Lerner's prison moniker (short for "original gangsta" because he wore a suit to jail). The book begins with Lerner in solitary in a Nevada county jail, proceeds through his first year in a state pen, then jumps backward in time to recount the events that got him into his living hell -- if possible, an even more sordid story than his jail narrative. On the surface, Lerner led an ordinary middle-class life, a soccer father toiling away in the Strategic Planning and Market Assessment department of Baby Bell west. In reality, he was struggling with alcoholism and an attitude problem, a victim of self-abuse and self-aggrandizement.

To reveal more would ruin a good read, and You Got Nothing Coming reads better than most fictional thrillers. While Lerner insists the events in the book are true, he admits in an author's note that he has "occasionally created a composite scene based on actual events I participated in or observed" -- a practice that recently embarrassed the New York Times Magazine. You Got Nothing Coming seems real the way Mailer's Executioner's Song, his "true-life" novel about killer Garry Gilmore, is real. Whether "it's all good," as O.G's prison pals would put it, You Got Nothing Coming convincingly conveys the violence and anger, the anomie and narcissism, that characterizes contemporary American culture, inside families and corporations as well as prisons.

REX ROBERTS IS THE NEW YORK CORRESPONDENTS FOR Insight.