Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  Example: 21:00. Walked the floors. Locked the TV room. All is quiet and secure.

  XXXII

  I rarely have problems on the evening shift. Most real problems occur during the day. Occasionally I have to break up a squabble in the smoking room or the TV room. More often than not guys fight over which channel to watch. My methods are simple — non-violent and non-confrontational. I stand between the guys who are shouting at each other and I sing. I sing whatever comes into my head. Mostly show tunes because, as much as I hate them, when I start singing anything without really thinking about it that’s what comes out. Nine times out of ten, I sing at the top of my lungs, “The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow” from the musical Annie. I have a truly horrible voice. No one wants to hear my voice. The teachers in grade school asked me to stop singing the national anthem because I was throwing the other students off. In church choir I was asked to just mouth the words to the hymns. But, after all these years of feeling like a musical failure, I have finally found a way to put my under-appreciated singing talent to use.

  However I struck on this idea in the first place — I don’t remember how I did — it works. The guys always stop shouting and look at me. If they start in again, I sing some more. Some of these guys are big men, some of them have spent years in prison and on the streets not caring what happens to them, and at least a few have killed before. But not one of them has ever witnessed a self-declared faggot singing “Tomorrow” in a flawed but arresting falsetto in the middle of their action. They don’t know what to do with me. When they finally stop screaming at each other and I have their full attention, I stop singing and tell them to turn the TV off, go have a smoke and cool down, and if they are really quiet I won’t write them up in the log. It works. It works so well my nickname in the centre is Annie. Even the counsellors call me Annie. And the big prison guys, who are here on condition that they don’t use or they go back to the slammer — they like me. I give them smokes and don’t talk down to them. I tell them that they are lucky to be here and sometimes I even mean it.

  XXXIII

  The Salvation Army Treatment Centre is laid out like this:

  1. First floor: RA office/Reception. Counselling rooms, Admin office, common room with Nautilus machine, bathroom (for staff only), storage and supplies closet, and first aid room.

  2. Second Floor: TV room, smoking room, storage and supplies closet, five ten-bed dorm rooms, ten single rooms (for guys who have made it to the last month of the program). A library (mostly Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, Army-sanctioned religious tracts, old Bibles and the occasional spy novel that has been checked and rechecked to make sure it contains no references to drugs or godlessness), a communal bathroom and a recreation room with a ping-pong table, shuffleboard, and dart board.

  My job is to check all these rooms on the hour and make sure all is quiet and secure. Most of the rooms on the first floor are supposed to be locked. I check to make sure they are, take one look inside each room through the square smoked-glass windows, and move upstairs. Any guy not in after eleven o’clock on weekdays or one o’clock on weekends I record in the log and lock the front door. If a guy comes back after that I am not supposed to let him back in even if he pounds with both fists on the glass. I am supposed to use the intercom and tell him to go next door to the shelter for the night then come and see his counsellor in the morning.

  Tough love.

  XXXIV

  Most of the guys who stay out past curfew don’t beg to be let back in. Most of these guys know they won’t get in if they’re late, so they’re never late. Most of these guys are like me. Punitive measures seem to do the trick. Those that stay out past curfew do so on purpose because they are out getting loaded. Once in a while one of these guys will change his mind, stagger to the front door, and plead to be let in. He’ll cry. He’ll tell me this is the only home he’s ever had. He’ll say he hasn’t had a thing to drink or smoke all night. Meanwhile he can hardly stand up and I know if I go out I’ll smell Scope on his breath or see fresh bleeding tracks in his arms.

  Nearly all of the guys who return past curfew are in the process of coming down and are starting to realize they’ve made a mistake. Sometimes, after they hear my nasal whine through the intercom, they’ll get violent. They’ll look for anything to break the glass so they can get in here and wring Annie’s scrawny faggotty neck seven different ways from Sunday. They look in vain. We live in a city. The Sally Ann sits on a busy city street next to a concrete market. Not a rock to be found, except for those made out of cocaine purified in kerosene and commonly known as crack.

  Sometimes they do find a pop bottle or beer bottle, a piece of wood or a discarded hubcap. They throw it and it bounces harmlessly off the window without leaving a mark. All the doors and windows facing the outside on the first floor are double-shielded Plexiglas. You can fire a gun into them and the outside layer will shatter inside its plastic sheathing but stay together and protect the two inside layers. This has, in fact, happened. Twice. The first time I was not yet hired and the second time I was off. Both times were courtesy of hard-up dealers looking for a hit and hunting down former clients who owed them money. The dealers didn’t hurt anybody and were arrested and sent to jail. Both former clients were here as the dealers suspected. No one ever told the clients who shot up the treatment centre. No one ever would. News like that could send a guy out of treatment and into a dark cave in the country in a hurry. Neither of the clients made it through the program. Both used again, and one of them ended up in the same jail as the dealer who shot at the treatment centre while looking for him.

  This client was shanked.

  XXXV

  Shanked is a prison term for a stabbing. To get shanked is to be stabbed and injured by a handmade weapon, usually a stainless steel soup spoon filed down to a triangular wedge, sharpened on the business end, and administered to the victim in the yard or in the shower or in the dining hall. It doesn’t have to be a spoon. You could use an actual knife, if you could get your hands on one, or a fork, or the sawed-off wooden end of a broom handle whittled to a sharp point. Prison officials over the years have learned by trial and error what a destructive thing human nature can be. Prisons don’t use wooden broom handles anymore. They buy plastic hollow broom handles that break into harmless flimsy shards if you try to cut them in half and file the ends down. Prisoners are not given metal utensils to eat with, but plastic forks, spoons, and knives which aren’t as effective when you want to stab someone (though if you tape, say, ten or twelve plastic knives together and file the ends down on them collectively, this can overcome the flimsiness of your weapon).

  So shanking still happens, even without metal forks and knives and wooden broom handles. Someone knows someone in the kitchen who owes him a favor. Someone knows someone who has a sawed-off length of wooden hockey stick shoved up his ass for a rainy day. Someone knows someone who ... You get the idea. No matter what precautions we come up with, the destructive human spirit will find a way.

  It always does.

  XXXVI

  I’ve never been to prison, but most of our clients have and they spend hours explaining to me the intricacies of committing murder in jail. I am supposed to record all this in the log, which I do. The guys know I do. It doesn’t matter anyway, because they never did any of this. It was always someone else. They just saw it.

  “I ain’t never killed anyone,” they tell me, and the skin around their eyes crinkles up tight against the enormity of the lie. They think I can’t record that in the log. None of these bozos realize that, despite my lack of success as a writer, I have enough skill to record a visual nuance in the log. I practise recording visual nuances every day, for Christ’s sake.

  But I don’t write them up. The counsellors know anyway. If they stay clean, these things will out eventually. Everybody has at least one secret that has to come out before he can stay clean.

  The counsellors just wait until that secret comes out or the guy goes and uses again. If the
secret does come out the counsellors won’t turn the guy in either. The rules are different here. Counsellors don’t care how many people their clients have killed. They care only that their client stays clean so he doesn’t have to kill anymore.

  There’s nothing as painful as a person finally telling the truth, even when, as the wise old scribes at the Sally Ann Treatment Centre sometimes say, it can only set you free.

  XXXVII

  You’re probably wondering what a gay guy is doing working in a fundamentalist Christian organization. I’ve wondered that myself a few times. The truth is, I simply applied and got the job. I didn’t lie to them either. I told them I was gay straight off and they still hired me. They thought that it might help some of their clients to have a gay RA, because they did occasionally get gays in there. Because of the nature of the work, the treatment centre is exempted from the basic morality of the Salvation Army as long as it gets someone clean. You can worry about converting him later.

  As far as the counsellors go, Annie is cool. In fact, nobody bothers me, not even the old Army major who is the chaplain of the shelter next door. He just doesn’t discuss it with me. Once I asked one of the counsellors, who was an officer in the Church Army, what the basic position of the Sally Ann was on homosexuality.

  “Why?” he asked me.

  “I’m curious,” I answered.

  “Will it affect your work here if you don’t like the answer?”

  “No,” I told him. “I don’t think it will.”

  He went to his office and came back with a little red-and-white booklet — positional statements on sticky questions of modern-day morality that the Army might have to deal with occasionally. Abortion. Euthanasia. That kind of thing. The counsellor threw the booklet on the desk in front of me.

  “Page twelve,” he said. “Everyone here already looked at it the moment you were hired.”

  XXXVIII

  On Homosexuality

  by Sally Ann

  Because the Old Testament says that homosexuality is wrong, the Army does not condone the practice in any of its forms. However, because the condition is not fully understood by scientists and theologians alike, the Army does not wish to universally condemn the state of homosexuality, and does not propose to practise conversion of homosexuals to heterosexuals as a part of its regular mission. Therefore, any member of the Army who wishes to become an Officer of the Faith cannot be refused based on an open admission of homosexuality. He or she must, however, practise the rules of the faith to the best of his/her ability. Since all officers of the Salvation Army are asked to remain celibate until marriage, and a homosexual cannot be married in the eyes of either God or man, an Officer of the Church who openly admits his or her homosexuality must practise celibacy as long as he/she wishes to remain an officer in the Church of the Salvation Army of God.

  I know. Another female cat.

  Hallelujah!

  XXXIX

  My favorite ex-con in treatment right now is Pete. Pete is the goddamned biggest Indian you ever saw — two hundred and twenty pounds if he’s an ounce and built like a brick teepee. In prison, Pete spent all of his time working out on the free weights. In treatment we don’t have free weights, because one of the guys might drop them and they could go through the floor, which, unlike prison, is not designed to keep people from digging through it but simply to hold people up. Pete, and guys like him, use the Nautilus machine, which sits in a corner of the first-floor common room. It used to be kept upstairs in the recreation room but guys fought over it too much. So they moved it downstairs. Now you have to sign up for it ahead of time and sign in and out with the ra when it’s your turn. Up to two guys can work out at the same time, because most guys like to exercise in pairs. Pete works out alone. Afterwards, he always comes into the office and has a chat with me. He keeps his shirt off; I think he knows that the sight of his pumped, sweaty body drives me crazy. Pete doesn’t mind gays.

  “In prison,” he told me once, “fags are an accepted part of the population. They’ve got something to offer a guy who hasn’t seen a woman in ten years. After a while a warm hole is a warm hole, no matter which way you gotta flip a person to get at it.”

  Pete smiled and winked at me. He knew I would not record this in the log. He knew that I never record any of our conversations in the log. Pete has spent most of his adult life in prison and there is nothing he hates more than a rat.

  “I know,” he told me when we first started talking, “that you’re hired to be a rat. And this is not a prison. It’s a treatment centre, and we’re supposed to tell on each other to help us get better. But goddamn it, Annie, if I hear one word of what we say to each other thrown back at me by my counsellor tomorrow, I’ll come in here tomorrow night, tear your arms off your shoulders and write your name on the wall in duplicate with the bleeding stumps. Got that?”

  I don’t take Pete’s threats seriously. Most likely, Pete wouldn’t be able to control himself long enough to wait around for me. Most likely he’d punch somebody, go flying out of the front door, and have a half gram of coke coursing through his bloodstream before you could say Chief Detroit Lost at the Potomac. Pete has been known to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation, which is why he has spent so much time in prison. Pete has “seen” guys get shanked eleven times, and not one of them recovered. Even knowing all this, I don’t record anything in the log. Not because I’m afraid of Pete. (I am afraid of Pete. Christ, even the counsellors are afraid of Pete.) I don’t record it because I like Pete, and I trust him. This is pretty strange to say about someone who has killed eleven people, but it’s true. If truth be told, I even love him a little.

  XL

  So I let Pete talk. He tells me the words to avoid using around prison guys.

  Goof. My Merriam-Webster — perhaps the world’s worst dictionary but the only one I happen to have in my apartment — defines the word thus: /gu:f/ n (infml) 1. a silly or stupid person 2. a stupid mistake e.g.: Sorry, that was a bit of a goof on my part!

  Merriam-Webster, as usual, missed the point.

  XLI

  According to Pete, this is the worst word you can use around prison guys. (I mention it in case you’re ever in a shank-like situation and you’re skimming this bit for the important stuff.) To call a guy “goof” is to issue a death threat — yours or his, depending on who happens to be stronger or has the nicest eating utensils. Guys will fight to the death to remove the residue of this word from themselves, and if you use it, you’d better be sure it’s warranted. Not even your friends will back you up in prison if you call a guy a goof who didn’t deserve it. Not even if the guy is a total, complete, crazy, sister-raping, asshole fuckhead — Pete’s words — would you call him a goof unless he deserved it.

  “What would he have to do to deserve it?” I asked Pete once.

  “Imagine,” Pete said, “the worst thing that has ever been done to you. The thing you hate a guy the most for, and that you’ve always wanted to get back at him for. You dream about this guy at night, and you smile when you imagine his brains leaking all over the pavement and stinking under a hot sun.”

  “Okay,” I said. I thought of these guys I knew from school who used to beat me up when I was a kid. I hadn’t thought about them in years, but all of a sudden I closed my eyes and I could picture them. I imagined them exactly as Pete said, lying dead on the pavement, their heads spilt open, their grey-green liquid brains leaking out under a burning noonday sun.

  “You got it?” Pete said.

  “I got it.”

  “Now,” said Pete softly, “imagine that guy had done something really bad, a million times worse than he done, and then maybe, just maybe, he deserves to be called goof.”

  XLII

  Some of the guys in the centre are not ordered in from prison. Some of them are here because their lives got so fucked-up on the outside — from booze, coke, heroin, or even boxes and boxes of Tylenol — that they came looking for help. The Sally Ann takes them in, all of the
m, offers them a warm bed, a place to get clean, advice on how to get a job if they want it and think they can keep it. Most guys don’t take advantage of it. Of all the guys who come to the centre to get clean, only one in ten ever makes it through the program. And nine out of ten of those are messed up on drugs less than a week after they get out. With the guys who have the most to lose, the guys in on court order or who get an early release from prison if they agree to a four-month stint in treatment, the odds are slimmer. Their survival rate is about one in fifty. But once in a while, you get a guy you just know is going to do it. He admits himself. He works hard. He never gets into a fight. He tells the truth all the time in group. He is never out past curfew. He goes to lots of meetings. These are the guys I like. Hell, these are the guys everyone likes, even the counsellors. These guys make the job easy. These are the guys who are beginning to realize they are losers, and want to do something about it.

  These guys have the best stories.

  XLIII

  Don’t get the idea that I run around asking everyone what they’ve been doing all their lives. First of all, you aren’t allowed to do that. Just like in prison where you don’t ask what a guy is in for, in treatment you don’t go trying to pull a guy’s stuff out of him. That is the counsellors’ job, and even the counsellors know you have to be careful. Pull too much stuff out of a guy too soon, make him talk about something too early — a memory of getting fucked by his uncle in the back of his parents’ house when he was nine, say — and he’s gone. He’ll be back out on the street before you can say THC.