You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish

by Jimmy A. Lerner

  I was just worried about the Monster making an unpleasant appearance. So far our conversation had adeptly avoided any mention of that night in Denny's— Dwayne's Fifth Step was the proverbial elephant in the living room that we chose not to notice.

  Dwayne waved a hand dismissively when I rose to leave.

  "These plates are nothing— hang out with me for a while." To demonstrate his housekeeping system, Dwayne grabbed both plates and silverware and tossed them on top of the reeking pile in the sink.

  I followed him into the kitchen, planning a quick getaway, when, for the second time that evening, I felt an iron grip on the back of my arm.

  "Look, Jimmy, don't go just yet. I haven't really made many new friends since Caroline filed for divorce and left with the kids."

  "Caroline?"

  "My wife. Well, my ex-wife. Come on, let me show you something."

  Dwayne led me into a small bedroom that smelled even more mephitic than the living room. Bed unmade, more piles of dirty, stinking clothes on the floor, plastic prescription bottles on the bureau, the floor, the nightstand, and on top of his dirty clothes. Pills were scattered all over.

  There was a stale cooked smell to the air. In the corner beside a pair of stiffened socks was a bloody piece of cotton. With the Vicodin and Chivas and Soma warmly embracing in my brain, I thought of one of the signs you see in every A.A. meeting: LIVE AND LET LIVE— the recovery version of "judge not, that ye be not judged."

  Dwayne had one of those skillfully customized closets with a dozen small shelves for— who knows? Hatboxes? Shoes?

  Handguns of every make and model shone darkly from the shelves. Swords and hunting knives were mounted on the closet walls.

  "You wanted to show me your weapons collection?"

  "No. Anyway, this is nothing— the good stuff is in the garage. Wanna see?"

  "No thanks, I'm fine. I saw enough armor and artillery in the army."

  This disclosure of my martial history seemed to ignite Dwayne into a frenzy. "The fucking army? Me too, man! What did you do?" Dwayne was vibrating with pleasant anticipation inside his army-surplus jungle boots.

  "As little as possible," I said modestly. "What was your MOS?"

  "My what?"

  "Your MOS." Everyone who has ever been in the army knows, even decades later, his MOS— Military Occupational Specialty.

  Dwayne searched the closet ceiling for the correct answer to the MOS trick question. "I was with the Rangers, you know, Special Forces." With the instinctual gesture of the pathological liar, Dwayne stared directly into my eyes. Earlier today his eyes had been bright green. Now they were brown. How many tinted contacts did he own?

  "Oh, so you were a 12 Zebra MOS," I suggested, inventing a nonexistent specialty.

  Dwayne didn't even blink. "Exactly— but a lot of our MOSs were classified." A nice touch to the lie, that cagey qualification.

  "I can understand that," I humored him. I knew the Monster was close— just one wrong remark away— and his right hand was just a few inches from his Closets 'R' Us armory.

  "Jimmy, this is so great! Your being a veteran, like me. And also divorced. But I wanted to show you my Caroline and the kids."

  Dwayne circled around the cesspool of his bed. Stood staring at the glass-framed photos that covered the wall. I stepped over a burned teaspoon and stood beside him.

  A beautiful young woman, dark hair spilling down to her waist, reclined in a chaise lounge under a massive umbrella on a beach. Three small children in bathing suits, two boys and a girl, played with pails and shovels nearby. There was another photo of the same woman, this time on horseback. Another of her behind the wheel of a red sports car.

  There was no sign of Dwayne in any of the pictures.

  Tread lightly here, Jimmy-boy. You already pulled his covers on his bogus MOS. "She's beautiful, Dwayne. And those are your kids? You must be real proud."

  "Thanks, Jimmy— I am. I just wish I had been able to get custody. I haven't seen the kids in a long time."

  "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "Well, it's been real tough." Dwayne seemed to brighten at the thought of how tough it had been for him. Must be that stoical Ranger training. "But I'm not going to lay my problems on you— you just got divorced. I know the beginning is the most painful part."

  "Well, I'm hoping it gets better. Look, Dwayne, I have to run. I have a marketing presentation to the Board of Directors at eight in the morning and I have to review my notes."

  "Sure, guy— hey, I didn't mean to hold you up. I know how it is. I used to be an office grind myself. The old nine-to-five."

  "What do you do now, Dwayne? I remember you were a sales consultant or in computers?"

  "I was. Right now I'm on disability again— the shoulder is permanently damaged— but I have my own network marketing business. Health care products. I have about seven hundred guys in my downline now. MLM is the wave of the future."

  "MLM?"

  "Multilevel marketing."

  "Is that anything like a pyramid scheme?"

  "Not one bit— that's a common misconception. MLM is the most powerful sales distribution channel ever developed to move products. You don't sell a product, you sell a business opportunity!"

  "That sounds great," I said, wading over and through the Suck! debris and dirty clothes in the living room. Get the door open. Must have fresh air. Behind me Dwayne called out, "Hey, Jimmy, want to do this again tomorrow night? I really enjoy your company. I think we have a lot in common."

  "Thanks, Dwayne, I'm busy tomorrow night," I called out from the safety of my stone walkway.

  "How about Wednesday night?" Dwayne yelled.

  "I'll call you if that works for me, Dwayne. Thanks again."

  "Night, buddy."

  "Good night, Dwayne."

  Of course, the Monster called me.

  * * *

  After escaping relatively intact from the Monster's putrescent parlor, I attacked the last of the boxes stacked in the living room. Beneath a pillow and some cans of tuna fish the F.W. had thoughtfully packed for me, I uncovered the ivory chess set. The F.W. had bought it for me on our tenth anniversary and I loved it. The chess set and the piano were the only two items I had wanted from the accumulated debris of a fifteen-year marriage.

  I decided against calling the girls— too late— made my bed, locking the sheets down tight with hospital corners the way my drill sergeant had taught me long ago. I took a Trazodone and a Restoril and was sleeping when the phone rang.

  "Jimmy? Hey, guy, hope I didn't wake you." I glanced at the lighted alarm clock on my nightstand— two in the morning.

  "Dwayne?"

  "Yeah, buddy, look… I'm just calling to see if you want to be my guest at the Yankee-A's game on Saturday. I got two box seat tickets behind home plate and I thought we could really have some fun." The Monster was clearly shifting pharmaceutical gears now— he was slurring.

  "Dwayne, it's two in the morning. I have to be up for work in a few hours."

  "Yeah, well— sorry, buddy. I just wanted to offer a ticket to you first before one of my other buddies grabbed it."

  "I appreciate that, Dwayne, but I spend the weekends with my daughters." Then it struck me that my new phone number had just been activated this afternoon. I hadn't yet given it to anyone except my girls. It wouldn't be listed in directory assistance's database for at least three more days.

  "Dwayne, how did you get my phone number?"

  A long silence. I imagined the Monster was accessing a mental file named Mendacity— probably the entire subdirectory.

  "Uh… got it from information, how else?" The lie came across something like, gofith fromasion, howse?"

  "Good night, Dwayne." I hung up and punched 411. Gave my name and address to the operator. A moment later she came back on the line.

  "Sorry, sir, we have no listing for that name."

  "Well, it's a new listing."

  "As of when, sir?"

  "As of today."
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  "Then it won't be in the database for at least three days."

  Sometimes I am so tired of being right about certain things that I make myself sick. Directory assistance operators are overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated by our corporate finance folks, who are forever looking to fire them all and replace them with interactive voice mail.

  "Thank you for your help," I tell the operator.

  "Thank you for choosing…"

  I went into the living room, picked up the receiver, and there was my new number, hastily scribbled in by the installer. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I spent the rest of that night reviewing my viewgraphs and notes for the morning.

  At five in the morning I logged onto AOL to check my e-mails— maybe the girls had sent a message last night. There was the usual spam, nothing from Rachel or Alana, but the last message was from an unfamiliar screen name: GDNAYBR.

  I clicked open the message— sent at 4:52 A.M.

  "Hey, buddy, sorry I woke you. I forget sometimes, having my own business, that you office drones go to work in the morning." This was followed by the little smiley face that is supposed to convey cyberhumor. "Anyway, please accept my apology and let me know if you want to go out for breakfast at Denny's before you go to work." And another smiley face.

  I deleted the message.

  How did he get my screen name?

  * * *

  At 6:30 in the morning I placed a briefcase full of viewgraphs and my proposed "vision statements" on the passenger seat of my trusty Camry wagon. I had wanted an SUV or at least a minivan, but the F.W. showed me an article in one of her consumer magazines disclosing the increased risk of these vehicles flipping or rolling over. We went with the old-fashioned, earth-hugging station wagon.

  I looked forward to my presentation. I had happily suckled at the titty of AT&T— the original Ma Bell— for years, and I was no less devoted to draining the bloated bureaucratic bosom of her California offspring, Baby Bell of the West. Although I didn't want to alarm the phone installer yesterday, it was common knowledge to much of management that our more aggressive (and profitable) sibling Baby Bell of the South was in the final stages of swallowing us up. Our public relations people euphemistically referred to our predaceous sister as a "viable merger candidate."

  This was a merger in the way that democracy is asking six foxes and one chicken to vote on what they want for dinner.

  However, we tried to be good soldiers— at least for a few days. We all parroted this official party line with varying degrees of virtual enthusiasm. Here and there, however, at the water coolers, the cafeteria, the T-word was whispered: takeover. The latest mission of my anxious corporate tribe— Strategic Planning and Market Assessment— was meant to ennoble the imminent staff firings with a Delphic spin designed to comfort shareholders and confound employees. We were already talking about "identifying redundancies and duplicative, non-value-added functions."

  I sensed I was a non-value-added function. It's not a feeling conducive to enhancing one's self-esteem (which is what Bay Area living is all about).

  As Peon Spinmaster, I was selected (not unlike that lamb of old) to dazzle the Board of the West with sparkling scenarios of future synergistic suckling on both titties of the newly "merged" company.

  I placed my suit jacket on top of the briefcase, adjusted the Windsor knot my father had taught me to tie long ago. My father was now retired in Florida after many years of practicing medicine in Brooklyn. His office on 320 Empire Boulevard (just a few shouts from the old Brooklyn Dodgers' Ebbets Field) stubbornly remained open in the midst of an increasingly blighted neighborhood that grew more dangerous every year.

  An old-fashioned "general practitioner," my father made house calls on any day or night of the week. To anywhere. Year after year, as neighborhood businesses boarded up their storefronts and all the professionals fled, my father hung on. All around him the lights were going out. He just kept showing up at his office every day, kept making house calls in the middle of the night. If a patient didn't have the money to pay, that was all right. He could pay when he could.

  For my father the practice of medicine— being a doctor— was a privilege. A sacred trust. Despite graduating from college summa cum laude, he was turned down by every single medical school in the United States that he applied to. A few of the more forthright schools expressed regret but explained that they had already filled their "Jewish quota" for the year. He once showed me some of the rejection letters he kept in a file.

  The letters were all dated 1942.

  Undeterred, my father went to medical school in Montreal. He became fluent in French. He returned to Brooklyn to open his own practice.

  And he never forgot the letters or the thinking behind them.

  He stubbornly refused to join the "white flight" to Long Island or Westchester County. He and my mother were liberals before the term became a pejorative. Liberals of the activist variety, particularly my mother, whose father (my grandfather George) had left newly Bolshevik Russia as a young man and taken with him a lifelong admiration for Lenin and communism. My mother's commitments went beyond the membership in SANE or the subscriptions to I. F. Stone's Weekly newsletter, the New Republic, and later, that radical new upstart, Ramparts magazine.

  My mother marched with Martin Luther King and was there whenever Dr. Benjamin Spock rallied the faithful (usually with Peter, Paul and Mary inspiring the crowd) against war and injustice. She organized interracial neighborhood action committees, and our house became an informal headquarters for left-wing causes.

  She recovered from her disappointment over Adlai Stevenson's loss to Ike in time to become an enthusiastic volunteer for Eugene McCarthy and then George McGovern. (I don't recall her ever supporting a politician that actually won an election.)

  Even when my father's office was burglarized three times in five months, he still refused to relocate. "The people in this neighborhood have a right to medical care beyond the hospital emergency room."

  It took a couple of neighborhood junkies in search of narcotics to change his mind. They broke into the office one afternoon when my father was out on a house call. They stabbed his nurse, Judy, before fleeing with the drugs.

  Judy recovered but the practice did not. My father had seen enough. He closed the office and a few months later was in Florida with my mother. He quickly became busier than ever, finding new challenges in local government and environmental issues.

  My father, a nonobservant Jew, whom I don't recall ever attending synagogue, liked to say that "a man can preach a better sermon with his life than with his lips."

  I looked in the Camry's rearview mirror and fixed the Windsor knot the way my father had shown me.

  The Monster was in the mirror.

  Maybe thirty yards distant, he was busy scooping up the morning newspaper that had just been deposited on the front doormat of a town house across the street. The Monster had on yesterday's jungle warfare costume, perfect for suburban newspaper pilferage.

  I managed to accelerate down Maple Street before Dwayne could intercept me with whatever morning demons were dancing inside the safari hat. In five minutes I was at my— the F.W.'s— house to pick up the girls for school. Since my commute to work was only a few minutes, I was glad I would get to continue the long-standing routine of taking the girls to school in the morning. I liked the idea of seeing them both every day. The F.W. had already left for her job in San Francisco when I pulled up to the house.

  The girls acted like my arrival was routine, carrying on in the backseat with their usual spirited insults.

  "You're so lame, Rachel— you're such an idiot!"

  "Daaad, Alana called me an idiot."

  "Because she is! She's trying to—"

  "Girls, please, I'm trying to drive here. Can you please kill each other after you're out of the car?"

  "But, Da-ad!"

  "But nothing. Hey, did you know that a pig's butt is made of pork?"

  "Dad, that's so stupid."


  "Now you know how you both sound. Listen, just try to get along for five minutes."

  "Whatever."

  At the board meeting I showed my viewgraphs full of little bubbles and arrows and converging markets. A team of hit men consultants flown in from Boston facilitated the meeting to ensure we had a "rich interaction relative to structural opportunities and value-adds in the new empowered Corporate Culture."

  Usually I resonate to this type of talk. Except when it might culminate in my department's destruction and scattering to the winds of leveraged opportunity. Mergers are tricky— one empty suit's "value" is another's "redundancy."