Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  2. No gratuitous violence. Although sometimes difficult to define, this generally means no shootings, stabbings, fist fights that don’t end with the opponents shaking hands, explosives, prison rape scenes, non-prison rape scenes, child abuse, wife abuse, old people abuse, and animal abuse. Movies that fall into this category include: Speed, Casino, The Godfather I, II and III, and nearly anything with Harvey Keitel in it. Nothing with Harvey Keitel in it.

  3. No gratuitous sex. Not so difficult to define: this means no pornography. Movies that fall into this category are: Debbie Does Dallas, All Hands on Dick, Bi-Invaders, and Gay Muscle Men Latinos In Beverly Hills. (These last two were added by yours truly.)

  4. Nothing that propounds godlessness or carries a spiritually subversive message. Movies that would fall into this category include: The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus Christ Superstar, At Play in the Fields of the Lord and E.T.

  6. Movies with a recovery-oriented message, such as The Lost Weekend, Midnight Express, The Boost, and The Basketball Diaries may be excluded from the above criteria.

  As you can see, even when I send the guys to BIG BAD VIDEOS to pick up the weekend movies, the choice is pretty limited.

  XCVI

  Iroquois Pete went back out and used on Monday morning. Before he left he punched two clients in the face, threw a counsellor across the common room and stole $27.39 from his roommate’s dresser drawer. It was the $27.39 that started the whole thing in the first place. The roommate was a skinny little guy who wore Black Sabbath T-shirts and liked to play Dungeons and Dragons. (You aren’t allowed to play Dungeons and Dragons in the centre but he did anyway. Instrument of the devil and all that. Come to think of it, you aren’t supposed to wear Black Sabbath T-shirts either.) Anyway, the skinny addict noticed his money missing and he and his counsellor confronted everyone in Encounters the next morning.

  Encounters is the name of the half-hour first thing after breakfast. All the guys come into the common room, sit in cheap wooden chairs arranged in a circle, and deal with house issues. Not real issues. Not childhood abuse or twenty years spent in and out of prison or a father who threw you against the fireplace for kicks. That stuff was saved for group therapy in the afternoon. House issues were stuff like who left the basket of creamers out all night in the smoking room or who forgot to put on the coffee that morning or who was making farting noises in chapel Sunday night and disturbing the guys who really wanted to pray. The thing with addicts is that a discussion about who left out the creamers or who was pretending to fart in chapel can, if you’re not careful, turn into a discussion about childhood sexual abuse, and then into a full-fisted twenty-six-guy brawl with six little counsellors standing bravely in the middle. Addicts are addicts because they have no perspective. That’s what we try and give them, even us lowly RAs.

  Perspective.

  The counsellors are there to deflate things if they escalate. You have to admire the counsellors. Not one of them is over five-foot-eight, some of them wear glasses, and they stand up to guys like Iroquois Pete — guys who were born fighting and would do their best to die by it, who worked out for eight hours a day in prison and had biceps bigger than their legs. I saw one counsellor once — his name was John — stand up to this addict trouble-maker named Sam. Sam outweighed John by at least a hundred pounds and absolutely dwarfed him. But John stood his ground in Encounters. The two of them were toe to toe in the centre of the circle, the other guys all drawn back in their chairs, eyes glittering with fear and anticipation, waiting for a fight. John kept telling Sam, “This is treatment. Not a prison. This is treatment. Not a prison. You’ll solve your issues like everyone else. Through talk and group therapy. Not through violence.” If John had been scared, Sam would have put him through the nearest window. But John wasn’t scared. Everyone could see that. He would fight if he had to. He would lose, but he would fight. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Sam backed down and didn’t touch him. John went back to his seat and led the house in the serenity reading for the day in the calmest voice imaginable. You have to admire guts like that, especially in a little guy like John.

  XCVII

  Sam was so covered in tattoos — arms, legs, chest, even his neck and face — that at first glance everyone thought he was black. If people looked a little closer they noticed that he was more blue than black. Sometimes guys played Spot the Dirty Word with Sam, if he was in a good enough mood to let them. He’d strip down to his underwear in the smoking room, let the guys pull their chairs up in a circle around his, and see if they could count how many dirty sayings he had tattooed on him. I saw this happen a couple of times. The underwear the Salvation Army gives guys who don’t have any are those cheap white jockey shorts with the Y-front. So there was Sam, swarming with blue tattoos over every inch of his skin and this white underwear drawn tight over his wide, muscular ass. Those drawers were so new and white against the indigo of his painted skin that it hurt your eyes, but man, you just had to look. I heard that his groin and penis were tattooed, but he never took off his underwear to show us. Supposedly, his penis said, “You were born to be a cocksucker.” Adrian told me this. I didn’t believe him.

  “How big would the guy’s fucking dick have to be?” I said.

  “It’s not all in a straight line, I heard. It’s kind of written all over. Starts at the top of his groin, goes down along the length of his dick, and finishes across his balls.”

  “He got his fucking balls tattooed?” I didn’t want to know any more. It was enough to see all those guys poring over Sam’s muscular blue body looking for words like “cunt” and “motherfucker” and “smegma” and “shit-eater.” Most of Sam’s tattoos were done in prison, not by professional tattoo artists. The lines were rough, the drawings crude and often indecipherable. Even some of the dirty words were misspelled. We had a down-on-his-luck, crack-addict, low-rated tennis pro in the centre who made the mistake of pointing out a misspelled word he found under Sam’s left armpit. “Look,” he said, laughing and turning in his seat to the other guys, still holding Sam’s arm up in the air, waving it about like it belonged to a catatonic doll and not to some 250-pound blue gorilla who ate tennis pros for breakfast. “They spelled cocksucker wrong. c-o-k-s-u-k-e-r,” he spelled excitedly. “Can you fucking believe it?”

  Slowly Sam reached over with his free arm and took the man by the throat. “I don’t know how to spell ‘shit-for-brains’ either,” Sam growled. “But that won’t stop me from throwing your miserable fucking melon up against the wall and seeing whether you really got any. Got it? You fucking goof!”

  Sam let go.

  The tennis pro, who was destined to be a star only when he overdosed and got a brief write up in the local daily as a player who had once shown promise, nodded while rubbing his throat. Only later, he said, did he notice the blue fingerprints on either side of his Adam’s apple. Supposedly, there was so much tattoo ink under Sam’s skin that it leaked out occasionally. The guys claimed that the water in the communal shower stall sometimes ran blue down the drains when Sam was in there with them.

  “Ink!” the tennis pro said to me later. “Jesus. Can you fucking believe this place?”

  Yes.

  I was there, sitting in a corner and watching like always, and I suppose I should have done something. But I’m not as brave as John the counsellor, and Sam didn’t like me as much as Iroquois Pete did. So I did the only thing I could do, the only thing I’m any good at. I went down and wrote the whole incident up, whiz-bang, in the ra log. I even spelled out the word that had caused all the problems. In the morning, the first counsellor in called me at home and asked me if that was really necessary.

  “Well, yes,” I told him. “I think it was. It’ll probably come up today in group.”

  The counsellor sighed over the phone. “I suppose you’re right. That’s all I need. Another day spent figuring out how to spell the word ‘cocksucker.’”

  Like I said, I admire these guys. For fundamental Christians and borderline I-hat
e-everything people, some of them are pretty damn cool.

  XCVIII

  When they confronted Iroquois Pete about the missing money in group, he tossed a counsellor around, punched his roommate and one of his friends, and left the centre with the money in his pockets. The counsellors knew he was using. It was only a matter of time before they matched the urine test with the correct drug and bingo. So he was out on the street, and because mandatory treatment was a condition of his early parole the cops were out looking for him. He would be back in jail before you could say The Last of the Mohicans.

  Before he went he left me a note. Don’t ask me when he had time to write it. I knew Pete well enough to know he didn’t stop to say goodbye after punching a few people out. Which makes me think that he had it all planned. He stole the money on purpose, and admitted to it right away in Encounters. That wouldn’t have been enough to get him kicked out. They would have had a hug-in or something and made it all up. He had to make sure he got kicked out. Pete also knew the system would go easier on him if it looked like he lost his temper and fucked up instead of just walking out the door to look for some coke, which is really what he was doing. I am convinced of this from the note and also because no one was hurt in the little scuffle.

  He delivered no more than a tap to the skinny guy. He didn’t even break his nose, just squashed it a little. The second guy had a black eye and the counsellor wasn’t even hurt.

  This was Pete the Shank.

  The guy who killed eleven men in prison without blinking an eye.

  No, my opinion was that Pete just used deductive reasoning to make it look like he was really pissed off. If you don’t live or work at a treatment centre, you won’t see how this could actually make any kind of sense, so I won’t bother to try and explain it.

  I would have run this little theory of mine by a counsellor, but then they would have asked to see the note and I would have had no choice but to show it to them. And I didn’t want anyone to see that note. He left it in the RA mail box, where the day shift sometimes leave us instructions about issues going on in the house and staff bowling events. It was in a sealed envelope with my name, my Sally Ann name, written in blue ink across the front. Nothing else. I opened it the night after Pete left, once I had done a bed check and found everything quiet and secure.

  “For Annie,” Pete had written on the envelope.

  Before I even read it I checked the entire thing over for spelling errors. Not a one. I felt good about this, for some reason. Pete was a smart guy, even if he did do things like kill people in prison.

  XCIX

  I guess you know by now that I’m out of here. I tried man. I tried. But I’ve been living my life a certain way so long that it’s hard to live it any other way, even if every goddamned parole board in the entire country orders me to. My only regret is not saying goodbye to you in person. You understand, man. You would have ratted me out, and I couldn’t take that chance. So I thought that this might be a way for us to wrap things up cool like. Capiche?

  Three things a man learns when he spends his life like I have:

  1) Never bite off more than you can chew unless you’re prepared to have someone else do your chewing for you, which I ain’t.

  2) Never look a man in the eye and lie to him unless you’re prepared to kill him at some point in the future.

  3) Never, ever, turn your back on a friend.

  Now I know this ain’t much of a philosophy, and the lack of a good philosophy has kept me out here all my life. But this is my way of sticking to that third rule. Annie, man, you’re in trouble. I don’t know what that trouble is, cause you ain’t talking. But even a dumb, fucked-up, coked-up Indian like me can see it. You gotta get your shit together man, or you’re gonna lose it. Guys like me, we can spend all our life on the street and in jail and we’ll survive. We might even get gunned down on the street one day cause we stole the wrong man’s wallet, but we still survive, or a part of us does anyway. Our warrior spirit. But guys like you, I dunno. I see guys like you in prison all the time and they never last long. They’re too soft for it. Or maybe soft is the wrong word. Maybe too fine is better. Not fine as in good, but as in the opposite of coarse. You know what I mean? Sometimes coarse is good. Sometimes coarse is stronger. Anyway, those guys like you I see in here always get fucked. They do themselves in, or they rat someone out because they’re scared and get shanked over it. Or maybe they just keep to themselves and manage to survive. But they only survive on the outside. Whatever is on the inside just keeps getting smaller and smaller until finally it disappears and then they’re finished. That fading look. I’ve seen it in you. Noticed it the first time I met you and see it getting worse all the time. Whatever’s wrong man, fix it. Cause you’re about to wink out of existence, my friend.

  ’Nuff said.

  Peace brother.

  Pete

  C

  I read Iroquois Pete’s letter three times. Three times before I figured out what he was trying to say. Not that he didn’t say it. But I didn’t understand it. Didn’t want to understand it.

  The thing about working in treatment centres and befriending drug addicts is you never have your friends for very long.

  They die.

  They disappear.

  They go to prison.

  They get better and start a new life.

  Same thing goes for everybody, I suppose, but the cycle of loss in a treatment centre is much shorter. I read Pete’s letter three times, and then noticed that some of the ink was starting to run, like the blue water swirling down the drain during Tattoo Sam’s showers.

  The clear water of my reluctant tears mixing with Pete’s blue, blue ink.

  Everyone and everything I’d ever known had gone down that drain — like Darrel Greene, like Iroquois Pete.

  The Hand

  of Judas

  After his death Judas Iscariot,

  with the characteristic gall of his type,

  presented himself at the gates of heaven

  and was refused admission by the angel at the gate.

  “Why can’t I come in?” inquired Judas.

  “Well, you know you betrayed the saviour for

  thirty pieces of silver,” replied the angel.

  “Good heavens,” said Judas Iscariot.

  “Have you no sense of humour?”

  — INSCRIPTION ON THE GRAVE OF LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS IN THE FRANCISCAN MONASTERY IN CRAWLEY, ENGLAND

  CI

  In Grade Eight our class took a day trip to the city from the small town I lived in to visit the Modern Art Museum. We took a lot of these trips when I was in school. They were an excuse for barely reined-in chaos. The boys sat in the rear of the bus forcing farts and laughing and passing around pin-ups someone stole from that month’s issue of his dad’s Playboy. The girls sat in the front rows, talking to the teacher/chaperone and sneaking glances behind them to see what the “pigs” were up to. I always sat in the middle, reading a book, crouched down in my seat as far as I could so the back of my head wouldn’t be exposed to any flying projectiles from behind me, wadded-up spit balls or dried pieces of orange peel shot out of the end of a pen that had its ink cartridge removed.

  Even then, my interest in girls was minimal. I already knew that there would never be room for a best actress award in my feature film. Someone would inevitably pass me the folded-over pin-up of Miss October and tell me to “Get a load a the tits on that, would ya?” I would take the page wordlessly, unfold it, stare at it for a minute with feigned interest, fold it up neatly again, and hand it back. “Nice,” was all I could ever manage to say.

  Even then, they knew and I knew.

  Even then, none of us could say what was really on our minds.

  To call a guy that in those days was to issue a challenge. (These were the days, remember, before gay was cool, before an actor announcing to the world that he was bisexual earned him at least a role in one of those dying-by-the-water AIDS tearjerkers that Hollywood has become so fond
of.) Even if the guy was like me and couldn’t fight, even if he turned down every Playmate Bunny of the Month because her tits were too big or she had stretch marks, you didn’t call him that unless you were sure. Calling a guy “queer” in school was a bit like calling a guy “goof” in prison: even if you were sure that’s what he was, you wanted to be goddamned careful when and where you said it. Whenever Iroquois Pete talked about his prison days, all I had to do was picture myself in grade school again and I could identify.

  Anyway.

  The reason I remember this trip above all others was because it was the day I first decided I wanted to be a writer.

  CII

  I had always read a lot. I was reading almost before I was speaking. The first adult book I ever read from cover to cover by myself was The Call of the Wild. I read that book so much the pages began to fall out. I had entire passages memorized. When my father came home drunk three hours after work and started shouting that the house was a goddamned mess and I’d better clean it up if I knew what was good for me, I would wash the dishes or clean up the living room and quote parts of that book in my head while he lay passed out snoring on the sofa. I’d whisper softly to myself:

  Buck remembered the man in the red sweater, and retreated slowly; nor did he attempt to charge in when Solleks was once more brought forward. But he circled just beyond the range of the club, snarling with bitterness and rage; and while he circled he watched the club so as to dodge it if thrown by François, for he was become wise in the way of clubs.