by Jason Carney
The pad is a familiar comfort. I have written poetry on yellow legal pads since I was a kid. I find a particular brilliance to black ink written on the yellow hue of the paper. The way I can look at the page and see the words aligned before I write them is the most healing feeling in my life. The only daydreams I seek are poems. Just having the pad within reach calms me.
“I get it: don’t do drugs and be nice, keep my opinions to myself,” I say. “Can I go home now?”
“Drugs aren’t your problem; Jason is your problem.” She removes a fancy pen from her jacket, starts to write in the file, not even looking up as she speaks. I try to peer over the top of the file as it dangles diagonally off the table, resting at the top of her lap. I can’t see a thing.
“What home do you want to go to?” she asks. “The dysfunction of your grandparents’ house or do you want to continue to chase your mommy?” She sips her coffee. “It’s time to grow up, Jason.”
I can feel color blooming across my face. Dr. Judy knows what buttons to push. I have no response. I tune her out. My grandparents’ house, my choice, because I can flounder there doing whatever I feel like doing. I lived there the last couple of months of school. Laziness overcame my grandparents’ good sense. This way life wore them down. After my aunt Barbra died, it became easier not to look. I have always avoided responsibility, always held the belief I can get my shit together tomorrow.
I sit in the chair stewing, no compromise in my gaze. I know it is tomorrow already. Under the table, I shoot her the bird.
“I don’t care if you like what I have to say or not,” she says, finally looking up over her bifocals.
“I don’t,” I snap. “And I ain’t sharing a room with no queer.”
“I’m more concerned if he wants to share one with you,” she snaps back. “This is how this is going to work. Like it or not. You will attend all of your groups. If you aren’t contributing by the weekend, I’m dropping your level back down.”
She continues to write in my file, her hurried scrawls scratching the paper. I really dread being stuck on the unit again, losing the freedom of going to the cafeteria.
“Whatever.”
“If you have any further offensive outbursts, or show any further hostility to any of the other patients, you go to the safe room.” Her finger points across the table like a gun. The one true thing about Dr. Judy is that she will not fuck around with you.
I have never seen anyone go into the safe room, but other patients talk of how they come inject you with a sedative, place you in a straitjacket, and stick you in this padded room at the back of the unit. They leave you there for at least a day, strapped to a buckle in the wall. Closed spaces make me very uncomfortable, as do large crowds.
I want no part of the safe room.
“I expect an apology from you to the offended parties on the unit, at dinner. If you don’t do this you lose your privileges,” she continues. “I’ll be here to start your one-on-one session Monday morning, as long as you don’t fuck up. I can outwait you. I have all the time in the world.”
“Whatever,” I shrug.
“Whatever isn’t going very far anymore, mister,” she says. “For the next two hours, you are going to stay in here. Use the pad and pen to make a list of ten things you hate about homosexuals. Then write down why you feel that way. Share what you’ve written in group. You have until the end of the week.” She starts to arrange her files, closes her briefcase. “There is a colleague of mine coming in the morning, to administer some tests. I expect you to be civil and respectful to her. Answer the questions honestly. You only hurt yourself if you continue bullshitting your way through life, Jason.”
“Whatever.” I blow her off in my mind, lost in the scene of the foxhunt again. The serene stare of the fox, teeth bared though he is surrounded, grabs me.
“You start participating in group therapy and I’ll assign you to different therapies that aren’t on the unit,” she says, opening the door. “If you don’t start working, you’ll find the next four to six months goes by slower than you can imagine.” She shuts the door, walks away.
Four to six months, she must be out of her fucking mind.
I stare at the legal pad and dream poems about elegant hunts for smart-ass doctors.
PASSIVE
1980
I SIT IN THE OFFICE, on a large expensive couch, bored out of my mind. I cover my torso and lap with the plush green pillows.
My mom pays too much for this shit.
Glass windows line the far wall. I stare out at the pale blue sky, listening for the sound of the traffic ten floors below. I can hear only the annoying voices of my mom and her doctor. Her shrink, to be more precise. She says the experience of talking with someone about your problems leads to a more fulfilled existence. From what I have seen, these sessions lead only to more self-doubt and a dependence on someone else’s opinions.
“Deborah, how are the writing exercises coming along?” Dr. Judy asks.
“I enjoy the affirmations, do them every morning,” my mom answers with a smile.
Bullshit! I have seen her write her affirmations, but only when her boyfriend and she get into a fight: You are a strong person. You are a strong person. You are a strong person.
What a load.
Dr. Judy is headstrong. She intimidates my mother, which is not easy. My mother runs under a full head of steam most days, yet around Dr. Judy she tends to be meek. A well-educated woman, Judy Cook is a single mother and very attractive. She has stunning blond hair. Several years older than my mom, Dr. Judy is the kind of woman that my mom dreams of becoming. I do like her, but do not like being in these sessions. What fourth grader would?
“How are the headaches, Jason?” she asks me.
“What?” I say, wondering, What she is talking about?
“The headaches? You’ve been going to the nurse’s office every day complaining about severe headaches, your mother tells me.” She stares at me, wanting an answer. “She even said you went to Dr. Muncy, who prescribed you Tylenol 3 with codeine. Why would you give a nine-year-old codeine?” she says, glancing at my mom.
“They come and go,” I answer, face hidden behind a pillow.
“Tell me about these headaches; how often do you get them?”
I say nothing. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelf behind Dr. Judy’s desk intrigues me.
So much knowledge crammed onto those shelves. You have to be really smart to read all of those. Mostly medical texts, there are a few novels and some biographies. I love biographies. History has always caught me, mainly because remembering things is so easy.
“Well, what part of your head hurts when you get these headaches?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know?”
“I can’t remember. Have you read all those books?”
My mother bites her fingernails. She seems unsure of where all this is going. I’m not. This is an ambush. Dr. Judy, with all her ornately framed degrees on the wall, does not ask stupid questions. My mother doesn’t realize she is closing in for the kill. I hate coming here. The conversation always shifts to me, as if I am willingly going to participate in this absurdity. I don’t need a shrink. I need a mother who is stable and sane.
“The nurse called your mother last week,” Dr. Judy tries to get my attention. “She told your mother that you have taken most of the bottle at school. That you come in complaining midmorning, take a pill, then nap for a couple of hours. She doesn’t believe your head hurts at all.”
I don’t say anything. Under the pillows, I flip her off with both hands. My fingers lock in place with the ferocity of a Doberman grabbing a piece of meat.
Fuck you and your degrees.
“Quite frankly, I don’t think your head hurts either,” she adds.
“We’re worried about you, Jason,” my mom says. “If there is anything you want to talk about, this is a safe place to do it. I love you, sweetie, how can we make you better?”
Make yourself better.
> I see my mom as weak sometimes, cowering around the fragility of her scars. We all have scars. Some of us did not ask for them. My red face clinches, swells like a man playing a trumpet. The bird is still waving off my hands.
“Debbie, don’t baby him,” Dr. Judy responds. “Well, mister, what do you have to say about this? There is obviously a problem. You tell us what’s eating at you.”
My mom’s suicide attempts my family calls accidental. My father, who I have not seen in two or three years, has a new family. Another new school; I’ve moved five times in the past year. The bad dreams at night I do not understand. The kids who beat me up at recess after lunch. My mother goes out more than she stays home. Her boyfriend, who treats her as an afterthought. The frogs I kill with firecrackers at the creek. Sneaking out of the house at night and stealing money from my mom and her roommate. I love the way the pills make me feel just before I fall asleep.
I click my shoes together in frustration. I cannot think of a way to get out of this conversation. My resentments jumble; I don’t know where to begin.
How can my mother do this to me? If she would have just said something to me, I could have lied and we both would have felt better.
I scan the top of the shelves for something to catch my attention; a bottle of aspirin is out of place on the third shelf. The brown-and-gold label is half torn, as if someone got anxious.
“I’m getting a headache. Can I go to the bathroom?” I ask.
SO CLOSE
1988
THE FAG ROOMMATE does not know I am in the room. I cannot take my eyes off him. He faces the far wall, asleep. I absorb the stench of his slumber. His ease and comfort irritate me.
Why should this faggot get to rest?
His exhales invade my space. Rough streams of air gurgle over the mucus lodged in his throat. I am uncomfortable in this situation.
Sick-ass homo.
The seven feet between us might as well be seven inches. Seventy yards would be enough to ease my mind. I can smell him; baby powder and vapor rub intermingle in a pasty concoction. I have not seen his face, just a small glimpse of the back of his head. Long yellow stands of hair string out of the top of his blanket, shimmering in the half-light from the bathroom. I imagine him as the foulest creature. His eyes beady slits, his hands claws, not fingers, his yellow nails filed to knife points. I imagine they puncture and hold me in place while he sucks the life out of me. There must be rancid sores, coarse hair, and scabs all over his body.
Something horrible is going to happen.
I lie flat on my bed, expecting him to levitate out of his sleep and lunge at my bare skin. I tense up like an animal afraid of something bigger out in the darkness. The same fear falls over me that held me against the wall in the porn store. I flinch with thoughts of the man in green, the secret of his sandpaper tongue and the abrasions it left on me. My skin crawls.
He does not move.
Can I catch this shit by breathing his tainted air?
I pull the covers up to my nose and tuck the blankets under every square inch of me. A cotton and polyester fortress, a moat of white sheet stretched along the mattress surrounds the walls of my paranoia. I breathe into the covers. I do not feel safe.
Self-pity consumes me. The man in the green shirt had eyes so much like my father’s. I do not understand why I am comparing them. I feel trapped. In this room, in this hospital, in my life a constant whirl of wrong choices.
I don’t care anymore.
My arms pressed against my sides, I am stiff as a corpse under the sheet, locked inside a morgue’s freezer. I am too scared to take my gaze away from him.
This is not a fair punishment.
His back is to me, the mound of his body resembles a small woman. His feet shuffle under the sheet; the wrinkles of fabric snag and pull against his toenails. A hiss across the threads.
I catch myself in drifts. I feel like everything is on top of me. Too much to handle at one time, I know I belong in this place, though I will not admit it. I don’t know consciously why. An answer that I seek to a question I do not yet know I am going to ask lurks under my skin. There is something about him, his close proximity to me, the fear of the man in green, abstract thoughts of my father convulsing in my muscles; I get scared that it’s all interconnected. My life in shambles, I do not understand how I am to pick up the pieces and move on.
Why am I surrounded with this sickness?
I reach for the yellow pad on the nightstand. These are the first words I write about faggots: Someone slides his hands under the darkness, laughs in lustful ways.
I stare at the ceiling and wait. The lights will come on at six; I only have four hours left.
7:47 P.M.—07:23
THE NIGHT IS STILL. The air outside my window feels like the end of June more than the start of April. I carve through the current of warm air. My car hurls over the asphalt in a spasm of fiberglass and steel, driving unmanned toward East Dallas. I am a blank daydream humming in unison with the song blaring over the radio. I care for the safety of no one, not even myself. The orange buzz of the streetlights floats above the highway. Without thinking, I change lanes into the exit. The ramp pours onto the service road, curves around a tree line. The orange lights above drown in the white haze of the car dealership at the stop sign. I turn right onto Buckner.
Buckner runs four lanes in each direction, from one side of Interstate 30 to Ferguson Road. For as far as the eye can see on the other side are crack-house apartments. Decent hard-working neighborhoods trapped in the shade of the complexes. The innocent bystanders who own houses and raise families on these streets are engulfed in warfare, not of their making. Because they are poor. Congested with traffic on foot and wheels, from sunup to sunup, this street holds darkness like a desperate con.
I do not need crack.
Why am I here?
I don’t know the answer. The truth is that I just need to talk with someone. I decide to pull over at the gas station to buy a drink.
People trade themselves at discounted rates to find crack’s exhilaration. When the sun goes down, the gas station is a hustler’s paradise. The usual gaggles of folks mingle in the parking lot: panhandlers who ask me for me change as I exit, the homeless crackheads who offer to pump my gas and wash my windshield for a couple of bucks, and a loud woman weighing less than her lost teeth who asks if she can suck me off out back. The middlemen smokers, who detest any form of work, try to separate me from my money with offers of straight drop—the best dope. They never have any drugs. They take victims down the street and disappear into the darkness with the funds. Gas station dwellers are an army of half-dead zombies conjuring rocks from coins. I am quickly finding my place among them.
“What’s up, J?” Easy asks. “Let me pump your gas. I got a card.”
I’ve known Easy for a while now. He was the only witness to a wreck I had on Thanksgiving. A car made an illegal turn, all five of the occupants said the accident was my fault. Only Eric said anything different. He stuck around to make sure he was on the police report. Every time I see him, I try to help him and his wife with a couple of bucks, a ride, or a pack of smokes. Little things to me are large gifts to him.
“Sounds good, let’s do twenty.”
This is a common hustle, popular among intermediaries. The person with the stolen or borrowed credit card offers to buy gas at discounted rates. I hand Easy the cash, make my way inside looking over the parking lot.
I buy three packs of smokes to go with the six I have, an orange juice, a Coke, and a bottle of vitamin water. I am not that thirsty. Walking back to the car, I notice a couple in the shadow of the trees along the sidewalk. There’s something familiar about them. I look up and they are gone. I do not give them a second thought.
“Thanks,” I say to Easy, handing him a five for his troubles.
“You need to score tonight, J?”
“No thanks, I got it.”
“Let me hold a smoke,” he says.
I hand hi
m one of the packs in my hand. “Where’s your wife at?”
“She’s around someplace. You know us, we always getting our hustle on.” He reaches out to shake my hand, his next customer in sight already. “Be good.”
“Y’all be safe tonight,” I say, climbing back into my vehicle.
I head out of the parking lot back toward the highway. As I reach the first stop sign on the bridge, perspiration seeps out of my hairline, the craving for a hit comes over me. There are slabs in my room. I decide to run by C’s house anyway.
You can never have too much.
I turn at the entrance ramp and head back the way I came. Something off to the left catches my eye. Eerie whispers run through my head, up my spine. A man and a woman covered in dirty moonlight walk under the bridge. I decide to turn around at the second stop sign. It is the same couple from the gas station. They move in and out of the darkness with a constant ease. Their movements look familiar. I do another U-turn to pull up behind them. I met them before.
The girl approached me the other night, getting gas. I was less than thrilled about talking with her since I thought she was going to offer sex. She only wanted to bum a smoke. I gave her a few and said good night. The way she walked away from my kindness was heartbreaking.
I roll down the passenger window as I come up behind them. “Y’all need a ride?”
They look at each other, never saying a word. They climb in, she in the back, him up front. We pull forward. No one says a word. I flip a U, head over the bridge down the long stretch of Buckner away from C’s house. I plan to hold them hostage with crack. They can smoke my dope free of charge, as long as they are good company. I hope their plans are no more sinister than my own. I look into the rearview, the girl is hard to find, small, sunken into the backseat.
“What y’all out doing?” I ask.
“Getting our hustle on,” the man says. “Do you need to score?”
I laugh. When you smoke crack, you learn early on that intermediaries are never a good thing. Do not buy crack from people who smoke the stuff as well. They will fuck you. Your twenty-dollar rock becomes ten. Most times, what you get is crumbled leftovers of what they impatiently shoved into their stem as they made their slow way back to your car. Your money feeds someone else’s addiction while yours starves.
