Whether on rails, on trails, or in jails, Ted Conover has come away with a story to tell

The term “gonzo journalist” is one of mixed connotations. On the one hand, one thinks of uproarious, irreverent behind-the-scenes reporting by a character who participates in the action.

On the other hand, one expects a drunken, unshaven boor who during a public appearance would use a curse word in every sentence, if not every other word. Not someone you would want to introduce to your mother.

Author Ted Conover, most recently author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, was billed as a “gonzo journalist” for his Jan. 25 appearance at Inkberry in North Adams.

Conover noted the billing and said if he was in fact a gonzo journalist he would have showed up drunk. He was not in fact drunk and exhibited an engaging, guy-next-door manner.

However, Conover does know the king of the gonzo journalists, Hunter S. Thompson. He recalled asking Thompson why he never wrote about his home of Aspen, Colorado — one of Conover’s four books is about Aspen — and Thompson said in effect he didn’t want to mess in his own nest. “Mess” wasn’t the word he used, however.

Conover met a different kind of journalistic model at age 15 when he and a friend were taking a bicycle tour through New England. For a couple of days they stayed in North Adams with then-North Adams Transcript editor Lew Cuyler, a college friend of Conover’s father.

Before a full house at Inkberry’s long, narrow space on Main Street in North Adams, Conover read selections from each of his four books: Rolling Nowhere, an account of several months spent riding the rails with modern-day hoboes; Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of America’s Illegal Aliens, which recounts his travels in Mexico, the United States, and across the border with those who perform America’s menial labor; and Whiteout: Lost in Aspen, in which the author explored the collision of small-town life with the culture of celebrity by driving a cab and working as a reporter in Colorado’s elite ski enclave. Last he read from his greatest critical and economic success, Newjack.

Newjack — a new jack being slang for rookie guard, or corrections officer, “C.O.” in prison parlance — describes Conover’s rookie year as a corrections officer inside Sing Sing prison in New York.

Newjack won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Conover said that among other things the success of Newjack was sufficient to bring his first three books back into print.

Reading from Coyotes, Conover described the lives and attitudes of the men who cross the desert from Mexico. A poignant moment came when he describes a young woman who comes to meet her boyfriend before they begin their arduous trek to the U.S. — a man who already has two children by two different women. She has noticeably dressed up, because America is a nice place and she wanted to look nice. Aware of the pathos and irony involved, Conover noted that the man’s third child was likely to be born after the couple reached their destination in the U.S.

After Conover rode the rails for Rolling Nowhere and traveled across the border with immigrants for Coyotes, a friend commented that Conover had “made a living sleeping on the ground.” This led him to the more sedate and privileged location of Aspen, the elite ski enclave, which resulted in Whiteout, a book he describes on his website as “an ethnography of hedonism.”

Despite the great differences of income one can find among those who live and work there, there is a sort of overarching democratic ethos, where the rich take it as a point of pride to be on a first-name basis with such help as the bartender, he said.

For Newjack, he spent almost a year as an officer to experience what prison is really like. The idea came to him after the New York Department of Correctional Services refused to let him visit their training academy to do a magazine profile of a recruit as he passed through. He later took the officer exam himself — apparently no one in the department noticed he was the same person who was refused permission to do a profile — and two years later he entered the prison as a newjack.

Once among his fellow guards, no one asked questions about his past because it was assumed that if he had other options he would not be training to be a prison guard. Even so, Conover suffered constant anxiety that he would be found out.

One fellow C.O., his roommate at the training academy — Conover described him as a misogynist, gun-toting, redneck — had suspicions about him. One inmate had doubts about him, too.

After going to a fancy wedding one night, Conover reported to work very early the next morning, was walking past some cells, and the inmate with suspicions looked at him from within his cell and commented that Conover was walking along as if he should be wearing a tuxedo. Conover replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” but needless to say, he was chilled by the experience.

Conover read extensively from his book about another inmate, who had “Assassin” tattooed on his chest and lines purportedly from a poem in The Diary of Anne Frank tattooed on his back. Conover made a sustained effort to get to know this inmate and to find a poem in the book, with more success at the former than the latter. At one point Conover tells the inmate that he has read the book and in fact visited the apartment in Holland where the Frank family hid from the Nazis. The inmate does not respond enthusiastically. Conover wonders lightly if the prisoner has been put off by a prison guard who is into Anne Frank and has been to Holland.

It eventually turns out that the poem tattooed on the inmate’s back is actually a prose section from the book: the theme is confinement.

During a question-and-answer session, a woman who said she teaches in a correctional institution asked Conover why the guards have such a negative and profane attitude. He said he had been asked the same question 50 times, and gave a detailed and nuanced explanation the mentality of guards and why they resent people who teach or otherwise volunteer in prison.

He noted that C.O.’s today spend most of their time on security and very little on corrections. If officers who had something to teach inmates had the opportunity to do so, then their attitude toward inmates might be more positive.

In response to another question, Conover did say that the one aspect of his personality that seems to have permanently changed after his prison guard experience is that he is less likely to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Conover said his reporting and research have frequently brought him into contact with people with whom he has little in common. Currently researching an article about the Muslim community in Lackawana, N.Y., he has found making such human connections there particularly difficult, though he has an entree into the community he didn’t specify during his talk. Several men, U.S.citizens of Arab and Muslim backgrounds from Lackawana, have been arrested on charges related to illegally traveling to Afghanistan to train at an Al-Qaeda camp.