The Castle.(The Talk of the Town)(Fortune Academy)

Not long ago, Roland Woods got an urgent call on his cell phone ("Yo, Ro!") from one of the residents of 630 Riverside Drive, where he works as a kind of super. The caller, who had recently been in prison, had paid a surprise Valentine's Day visit to his girlfriend's apartment, equipped with a bouquet of roses, and found her entertaining another suitor. He was standing outside her door, enraged and beginning to panic. "Welcome back to the real world," Woods told him. "Now put down the flowers and come back home, and we'll talk."

Home, for the Valentine's caller and about sixty other men (plus the occasional woman), is the Fortune Academy, or, as it's familiarly known, the Castle, a five-story Gothic fortress on the corner of Riverside and 140th Street, which serves as dormlike living quarters for parolees and ex-cons. Woods, a former convict himself, is a residential supervisor there. Every Thursday evening, the Castle dwellers assemble in a conference room on the ground floor and discuss the difficulties of adjusting to life on the outside. Their odds aren't good--two out of three former convicts are arrested again within three years of their release--and so they keep talking their problems through.

At a recent meeting, a tightly wound forty-eight-year-old named John introduced himself. He'd arrived at the Castle the previous week, fresh from what he called a "small bid"--ninety days on Rikers Island--that had proved to be more destabilizing than either of his bigger bids (four and seven years, respectively). "I went to Social Security to get a card," he said. "They told me to go to Medicaid. Well, Medicaid says you need a Social Security card. Then I go to Vital Records to get a birth certificate--they won't give it to me because I don't have an I.D." He went on, "One plus one is two, two plus two is four, four plus four is eight," continuing the sequence until he reached five hundred and twelve. "They don't realize, when they release people, you have to have one."

Across the table, another man shook his head and said, "I got the same story."

A man wearing a skullcap, clam ...