Pain Killers (17 page)

I wheeled around, flailing. A forearm jammed across my windpipe.
Hairy,
I thought stupidly, so I knew it wasn’t Tina. First suspect is always next of kin.

I tried to kick and banged my toe on what felt like a lead pipe, wearing a shoe and wedged against the seat in front for leverage.

I started to scream again. “Ti—”

I heard the top of my head crack before I felt it. Thought
peanut brittle.
My eyes blinked into scalding white. Runny faces floated over me, features contorted, as if enduring savage g-forces. One face loomed close. I flashed on a mustache made of worms. Swinging blind, I connected with a crunch. Blood-spray wet my cheek, so I couldn’t see what I’d hit. Maybe a tomato with bones.

Then I
was
the tomato. Squeezed in a can. Everything dark, cramped. The ringing stopped. Say what you will about vegetables, they’re calm.

I came to, my face wedged under a sink, hands cuffed behind me, in a room too small for me to extend my legs. I tried to move and my mouth scraped cold rust. A slit of light leaked over the top of a door. The ringing in my ears made thinking painful. I focused on the last things I remembered: that white, diseased-liver moon…the minivan…talking in the dark with Tina. But this dark was different. Only the fetid smell placed me. And the slime on my arms. Trailer scum. I was home!
Yeccch.
When I wriggled, it felt like I’d been dipped in rotten Vaseline. Almost accidentally, my left wrist slipped out of the old-school handcuff. It took more effort to liberate my right. Either they’d clamped it tighter, or I had a case of fat arm. I had to claw off a layer of wall ooze, smear it around the metal, then twist it back and forth. And the bracelet still scraped a layer of knuckle skin coming off.

Free at last, I rolled over and spotted a ball of light through a hole in the floor. I pressed my back to the wall in case the light strayed upward. But somehow my shirt had gotten shoved up to my shoulders, and where my skin hit the slimy wall it puckered, making a sound like someone smacking their lips.

I froze. Then something banged against the trailer floor, bouncing my head off the metal toilet. The blow left me facedown on the marinated linoleum. The stench was hallucinogenic. I came to seeing rotten yellow stars and hearing voices.

“Why’d they stick the shit in old Red Cross boxes?”

“’Cause they were already here, dumbfuck…”

The second man spoke in a crusty whisper I knew I should identify. Only I could not focus. Between the screaming fire alarm in my skull and the struggle not to gag, I had to fight the urge to just break off a table leg and beat myself in the face for the sheer relief of keeling over. I wanted to pray—but for what? My earlier nausea was like a happy memory. Until this moment, I’d never really known what people meant when they said their “gorge” was rising. But now my gorge—whatever it was—was accelerating north, swelling with every breath to some kind of acrid-tasting tsunami of bile and fear. I felt a bird’s nest of ganglia pulsing at my left temple, terrified that the strain of trying to gulp back the rising tide would amplify the throb until my head simply exploded like an overpumped tire from cerebral pressure.

The man with the crusty whisper kept talking, but the words went in and out. “During World War One, convicts”—
wah, wah, wah
—“made these Red Cross boxes…. War ended”—
wah-wah
—“Contractors”—
wah-wah-wah-wah
—“storeroom next to dungeon.”

I bit my lip until I tasted blood, but the fire alarm only stopped temporarily.

“Or maybe,” another voice chimed in, this one older sounding,
“the poor fucks in the dungeon required a lot of first aid.”

Suddenly I had to sneeze—and I was a loud sneezer. I pinched my nose to stifle the volume. And, still pinching, sneezed again, even harder, the pressure searing my eardrums. By the fifth sneeze, I thought my eyeballs were going to pop out of their sockets like bloody comets. After the eleventh, they stopped. But I kept the squeeze on my nostrils, sucking small blasts of air into my mouth, to mitigate the tang of piss and mildew and sixteen breeds of decay moldering beneath me. When I was upright, I’d just had to inhale the stench. Now, on the trailer floor, I was basted with it, like some kind of hell-glazed ham. Worse, I realized when I looked through the rust hole in the floor that there was no tank under the toilet. It emptied straight onto the ground. And stayed there. One more ingredient in the potpourri that made the snailback such a festival of stank.

“Listen,” Crusty Whisper Man declared, “the wrecking ball swings tomorrow on the original lockup, and they threw this stuff out with everything else. On the off chance somebody finds it, they’re gonna think it just looks like a bunch of old medicine. I hear the Kraut antiqued the dope. Anybody bothers to run it through the lab, the shit’ll test out a hundred years old.”

I heard that, and my first thought was
I’ve been shooting up good drugs!
My second was,
Why the fuck didn’t I grab more?
That’s what happens when your junkie muscle goes slack. You lose vigilance. Though I knew, from years of research, that it didn’t take much to morph back to full-blown junkiedom. I also knew that after the first shot or three, all the time you’d spent on the straight and narrow might as well never have happened. One day you’ve got it all together, the next you’re in a stinking bathroom, living the dream.

“What I hear, shit’s somethin’ special,” said the first guy I’d heard, who I suspected was the youngest. “What I hear, the old fuck makes some kinda Nazi skag that’s stronger than street shit.”

I heard a smack and then that familiar but still unplaceable crusty whisper. “What I hear, you fuck, is I catch you tryin’ to pinch off a taste, you’re gonna end up with a rig full of battery acid in your neck so you don’t do it again.”

That was it. I nosed a flap of dank linoleum to the side and peeked through the rust hole. I needed to see who was talking. But I needed to use my nose, because my hands were still useless from the cuffs. Numb, but not tingly numb.
Meat
numb—hanging like skinned animals from my wrists. I’d have to make do until feeling came back. But maybe feeling was overrated.

All I could see was a set of white hands, some work boots. The men grunted, venting muffled curses when the footlocker banged against the rotting trailer bottom. With each bump I shuddered. My big fear was that a corner would catch on my fist-sized peephole, peeling the rusted-out metal I was sprawled on like the lid of an upside-down sardine can, sending me face-first into the outhouse gumbo below. I flexed every muscle, trying to levitate. But they dragged the locker way out with no undue damage.

I leaned closer to the hole in the floor. Not just to sneak a peek—I suspected, for some reason, that the men were guards—but to take in a breath. I’d just maneuvered close enough to breathe when one of them said, “Fuck it, dawg!” and dumped a shovel-full of muck back in the hole. Something awful splashed up onto my lip, and I jerked backward.

“Fuck it, dawg. This place stinks worse than a crack ho’s panties.”

“You oughta know, you did your mother’s laundry!”

After this bon mot, they bailed. I heard the crunching gravel as they walked off, trying to wipe whatever’d splashed on my lip. A second later a car started, rolling slowly, almost soundlessly off. I waited a minute, quickly uncurled myself, maneuvered my way upright and tried to work the door handle with my meathands. By now I could kind of flutter my fingers. But it didn’t help much, so I kicked the door open. Peeked outside to see if anyone was waiting to brain me again, then tumbled and gulped the air like it was nectar.

Freed from trailer fumes, my head cleared halfway up, enabling me to panic rationally. As I started to breathe normally again, I wondered,
Where is Tina? How is Mengele involved? What else did they stash beside drugs?
And, just out of morbid curiosity,
Who was in that minivan? And why the fuck did they windpipe me and cuff me to the sink?

More or less refreshed, I staggered back inside to consider my situation. Weaving over the kitchenette sink, I turned on the tap and splashed water onto my face. I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling the not unpleasant burn of industrial solvents and PCBs tightening my pores as they ate through them.

Feeling my body sag, I remembered something Roscoe’d said in class:
“When shit gets bad, you gotta find one thing to be grateful for. One thing
.
Otherwise you go minimal….”

I wasn’t sure what going minimal was, but I had a feeling it was already happening. When life shrank to nonstop calculation about how to make it through the next five minutes, that had to be minimal. Normally I steer clear of affirmations. But this one came from a convicted cop killer with no hope of parole and more serenity than Buddha on Xanax.

Absent immediate danger, the adrenaline drained off and the effect of all the abuse my body and nervous system had taken since signing for Mengele duty began to make itself known. Thankfully, the one mirror on the premises had been shattered before I showed up. So I could only feel the damage, as opposed to having to look at myself.

I touched a finger to the top of my head, expecting bloody peanut brittle. Instead, there was only a minor-league knob. No blood. Right there—something to be grateful for. My bruised windpipe made swallowing painful. So of course I could not stop swallowing. My left temple still throbbed. Here and there my skin burned, courtesy of the chemical gelatin coating my trailer’s innards. Something else hurt, farther down, under my right rib cage. My liver. But that didn’t worry me. The pain was like an old friend that wanted to kill me.

Without meaning to, I sat down at the dinette and passed out. When my watch alarm went off at noon, I was still sitting up. Drug class kicked off at one fifteen.

I had about ten minutes to try to clean up. Sniffing myself, I nearly keeled over. But I found some Clinton-era Right Guard under the sink and sprayed it under the arms of my shirt, the front and back of my pants and up and down my legs. My first choice, needless to say, would have been dry cleaning and a hot shower. But in this life you work with what you have.

I scanned my attire for visible stains and contemplated my next move. I could of course have just sneaked off and gotten as far away from this weirdness as I could. But, having run away too much early on, my tendency in my wobbly thirties was to stay too long. So, as originally intended, I decided to hit the classroom.

It took a few minutes to find my briefcase and copies of the inmate files. When I grabbed them, a scrunched up, slightly soiled napkin floated out of the pile. On it, by sheer chance, was the writing assignment I’d thought up and promptly forgotten: “HAVE YOU EVER MADE A BAD DECISION UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF DRUGS? DESCRIBE.”

Who has the time?

Through the twin sets of admitting doors, I stepped toward the lower yard with a new wariness. I didn’t know if going back to drug class was the best move after getting knocked out and abducted by someone with doll hands in a minivan. It was, if nothing else, definitely the least likely. Which is sometimes better. People were always trying to be smart. Sometimes stupid got you more.

I held the door open for a long-lashed young guardette with a beehive while she signed in triplicate. The process took her longer than I’d expected. I didn’t know whether to just let the door go, which felt rude, or stay there and wait, which felt uncomfortable—would she think I was trying to pick her up?—and could take hours.

I began to wonder if I was drawing attention to myself. Though I realized my perceptions were skewed. Whatever narco-treat had been in my Red Cross box, it had launched me into short-lived euphoria, directly on to mild disorientation, semidepression and itchy nose. Then again…

On one level, since checking into Quentin, I’d managed to roll into my fetid guest trailer and reenact my own low-end, mini–Joe Campbell hero-goes-to-hell-and-claws-his-way-back-again routine. On another, I had already fucked up so badly I’d be lucky if I didn’t end up getting mail here for the next ten years.

All I really wanted to do was stare at that Ronettes do. Was it a retro thing or had time stopped at San Quentin, fashion-wise, in 1967? I had seen plenty of sixty-and seventy-year-old James Dean–era juvenile delinquents. They strolled the yard, working pompadours, butch-waxed crew cuts and Chicago boxcars—brushed high on the sides, flat down the middle to a perfect spit curl. My guess was the bouffant behind me read “rockabilly” more than “female peckerwood.”

I was so enthralled by the big hair that I committed one of the cardinal sins in a penitentiary—I collided with another convict. In this case, a Pacific Islander, in a baseball hat and a cut-off sweatshirt that exposed his side-of-ham arms from the shoulder down. The right one was festooned with swaying palm trees on an island. Above which were letters that swayed just like the tattooed palms: 100 TONGAN.

“Jesus, sorry,” I mumbled, hyperalert for the glint of a shiv. But the mountain of Tonga did not even look at me. He just moved on.

I didn’t notice the note in my hand till I checked my skull egg, a few steps later, to make sure it still hurt. The paper had been folded several times, down to postage stamp size. Opened, it revealed four words: “VISITING ROOM” and “BRING CANTEEN.”

The note seemed written in two different hands. I studied it while pretending to retie my tie—a last-minute wardrobe addition. The right accessory can cancel out the effects of chemical depravity. (I’d have to write that down and put it in
The Addict’s Way.
In the chapter on clothes.
“As an addict, your life depends on continual evasion—so dress accordingly!”
)

I had no idea how to get to the visiting room. And in a place like this, you didn’t want to get lost. By chance, I happened to look behind me and saw the Samoan. He nodded faintly. And, keeping his hands down at his waist, he pointed both forefingers east. Toward the condemned unit? Back to administration? He did it again, then took off when he saw that I’d reversed course.