How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (19 page)

Two hours later a messenger arrives with the money. Cash. I give him a ten-dollar tip.

Saturday night Jeannie and Didi go out. Didi comes over wearing the same horrible surfer shirt she's been wearing all week and her slept-on, unwashed, really gross Rastafarian hair. But she's still incredibly beautiful, even after four days without sleep, and guys make total asses of themselves trying to pick her up. Her Swedish mother was this really big model in the fifties, and Didi was supposed to be the Revlon girl or something, but she didn't manage to wake up for the shoot. Jeannie's wearing my black cashmere sweater, her grandmother's pearls, jeans, and Maud Frizon pumps.

How do I look? she goes, checking herself out in the mirror.

Terrific, I say. You'll be lucky if you make it through cocktails without getting raped.

Can't rape the willing, she says, which is what we always say.

They try to get me to come along, but I'm doing my scene for Monday's class. They can't believe it. This shit won't last, they go. I say, this is my life, I'm like trying to do something constructive with it, you know? Jeannie and Didi think this is hilarious. They do this choirgirl thing where they both fold their hands like they're praying and hum “Amazing Grace,” which is what we do when somebody starts getting religious on us. Then, just to be complete assholes, they sing,
Alison, we know this world is killing you
, which is kind of like my theme song when I'm being a drag.

So I go,
They say you're nothing but party girls, just like a million more all over the world
.

They crack up.

After they finally leave I open up my script, but I'm having trouble concentrating, so I call up my little sister at home. Of course the line's busy and they don't have call waiting, so I call the operator and request an emergency breakthrough on the line. When the operator cuts in I hear Carol's voice, and then the operator says there's an emergency call from Vanna White in New York. Carol immediately says
Alison
in this moaning, grown-up voice, even though she's three years younger than me.

What's new? I go after she gets rid of the other call.

Same old stuff, she says. Mom's drunk. My car's in the shop. Mickey's out on bail. He's drunk, too.

Listen, do you know where Dad is? I go, and she says last she heard it was the Virgin Islands but she doesn't have a number either. So I explain about my school thing and then maybe because I'm feeling a little weird about it, I tell her about Skip, except I say $500 instead of $1,000, and she says it sounds like he totally deserved it. He's such a prick, I go, and Carol says, yeah, he sounds just like Dad. And I go, yeah, just like.

Jeannie comes back around nine on Sunday morning, a shivering wreck. I give her a Valium and put her to bed.

She lies in bed stiff as a mannequin and says, I'm so afraid, Alison. She is not a happy unit.

We're all afraid, I go.

In half an hour she's making these horrible chain-saw sleep noises.

Thanks to Skip, Monday morning I'm at school doing aerobics and voice. I'm feeling really great. Then sense-memory work. I sit down in class, and my teacher tells me I'm at a beach. She wants me to see the sand and the water and feel the sun on my bare skin. No problem. First I have to clear myself out. That's part of the process. All around me people are making strange noises, stretching, getting their ya-yas out, preparing for their own exercises. I don't know—I'm just letting myself go limp in the head, then I'm laughing hysterically, and the next thing I'm bawling like a baby, really out of control, falling out of my chair and thrashing all over the floor, a total basket case having some epileptic apocalypse, sobbing and flailing around, trying to take a bite out of the linoleum. They're used to some pretty radical emoting in here, but apparently this is way over the top. I don't really remember all of it. Anyway, they take me to the doctor, who says I'm overtired and tells me to go home and rest.

That night my old man finally calls. I'm like, I must be dreaming.

Pissed at you, I go, when he asks how I am.

I'm sorry, honey, he says about the tuition. I screwed up.

You're goddamn right you did, I say.

Oh, baby, I'm a mess.

You're telling me, I go.

She left me.

Don't come crying to me.

I'm so sad.

When are you going to grow up, for Christ's sake?

I bitch him out for a while, then tell him that I'm sorry, it's okay, he's well rid of her, there're lots of women who would love a sweet man like him. And his money. Story of his life. But I don't say that, of course. He's fifty-two and it's a little late to try and tell him the facts of life. From what I've seen, nobody changes much after a certain age. Like about four years old, maybe. Anyway, I hold his hand and cool him out and almost forget to hit him up for money.

He promises to send me the tuition and the rent and something extra.

He sends the check but then completely forgets my birthday. Not even a phone call. His secretary claims he's in Europe on business. My sister tells me he's in Cancún with a new bimbo. At this point my period's already three weeks late. And if that's not, like, ironic enough, I see Skip Pendleton one night. He's with some anorectic Click model and pretends not to know me. I'm trying to work out dates and guys, and I figure that if I'm pregnant it could actually be his.

Of course with my luck it turns out I actually am pregnant. The rabbit dies, so I have to visit the clinic for real. I can't believe it. I use the check Dad sends for the month's tuition. They give me some Demerol—not nearly enough. I try to tell them I have this monster tolerance, but they say this is the dosage for your height and weight, and afterward it hurts like hell. While I'm getting my insides hoovered out, I swear off the so-called withdrawal method forever.

After it's over we have a party to celebrate, me and Didi and Jeannie and a bunch of other people. We start out at home, but it gets too small so we go over to Didi's place on Fifty-seventh, this zillion-dollar duplex that looks and smells like the city dump, but after a while nobody can smell anything anyway. No problem. The party goes on for three days. Some of the others go to sleep eventually, but not me. On the fourth day they call my father and he sends a doctor over to the apartment, and now I'm in a place in Minnesota under sedation, dreaming white dreams about snow falling endlessly in the North Country, making the landscape disappear, dreaming about long white rails of cocaine that disappear over the horizon like railroad tracks to the stars. Like when I used to ride and was anorectic and was starving myself and all I would ever dream about was food. There are horses at the far end of the pasture outside my window. I watch them through the bars.

Toward the end of the endless party that landed me here I was telling somebody the story of Dick Tracy. I had eight horses at one point, but he was the best. I traveled all over the country jumping and showing, and when I first saw Dick, I knew he was like no other horse. He was like a human being—so spirited and nasty he'd jump twenty feet in the air to avoid the trainer's bamboo, then stop dead or hang a leg up on a jump he could easily make, just for spite. He had perfect conformation, like a statue of a horse done by Michelangelo. My father bought him for me and he cost a fortune. Back then my father bought anything for me. I was his sweet thing.

I loved that horse. No one else could get near him, he'd try to kill them, but I used to sleep in his stall, spend hours with him every day. When he was poisoned, I went into shock. They kept me on tranquilizers for a week. There was an investigation, though nothing ever came of it. The insurance company paid off in full, but I quit riding. A few months later Dad came into my bedroom one night. I was like uh-oh, not this again. He buried his face in my shoulder. His cheek was wet and he smelled of booze. I'm sorry about Dick Tracy, he said. Tell me you forgive me. The business was in trouble, he goes. Then he passed out on top of me, so I had to go and get Mom.

After a week in the hatch they let me use the phone. I call my dad. How are you? he says.

I don't know why, it's probably bullshit, but I've been trapped in this place with a bunch of shrink types for a week. So just for the hell of it I say, Dad, sometimes I think it would've been cheaper if you'd let me keep that horse.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Dick Tracy, I go, you remember that night you told me.

He goes, I didn't tell you anything.

So, okay, maybe I dreamed it. I was in bed, after all, and he woke me up. Not for the first time. But right now, with these tranqs they've got me on, I feel like I'm sleepwalking anyway and can almost believe it never really happened. Maybe I dreamed a lot of stuff. Stuff I thought happened in my life. Stuff I thought I did. Stuff that was done to me. Wouldn't that be great? I'd love to think that ninety percent of it was just dreaming.

1987

Con Doctor

They've come for you at last. Outside your cell door, gathered like a storm. Each man holds a pendant sock and in the sock is a heavy steel combination lock that he has removed from the locker in his own cell. You feel them out there, every predatory one of them, and still they wait. They have found you. Finally they crowd open the cell door and pour in, flailing at you like mad drummers on amphetamines, their cats’ eyes glowing yellow in the dark, hammering at the recalcitrant bones of your face and the tender regions of your prone carcass, the soft tattoo of blows interwoven with grunts of exertion. It's the old lock' n' sock. You should have known. As you wait for the end, you think that it could've been worse. It has been worse. Christ, what they do to you some nights.…

In the morning, over seven-grain cereal and skim milk, Terri says, “The grass looks sick.”

“You want the lawn doctor,” McClarty says. “I'm the con doctor.”

“I wish you'd go back to private practice. I can't believe you didn't report that inmate who threatened to kill you.” McClarty now feels guilty that he told Terri about this little incident—a con named Lesko, who made the threat after McClarty cut back his Valium—in the spirit of stoking her sexual ardor. His mention of the threat, his exploitation of it, have had the unintended effect of making it seem more real.

“The association is supposed to take care of the grass,” Terri says. They live in a community called Live Oakes Manor, two- to four-bedroom homes behind an eight-foot brick wall, with four tennis courts, a small clubhouse and a duck pond. This is the way we live now—on culs-de-sac in false communities. Bradford Arms, Ridgeview Farms, Tudor Crescent, Wedgewood Heights, Oakdale Manor, Olde Towne Estates—these capricious appellations with their diminutive suggestion of the baronial, their faux Anglo-pastoral allusiveness. Terri's two-bedroom unit with sundeck and Jacuzzi is described in the literature as “contemporary Georgian.”

McClarty thinks about how, back in the days of pills and needles, of Percodan and Dilaudid and finally fentanyl, he didn't have these damn nightmares. In fact, he didn't have any dreams. Now when he's not dreaming about the prison, he dreams about the pills and also about the powders and the deliquescent Demerol mingling in the barrel of the syringe with his own brilliant blood. He dreams that he can see it glowing green beneath the skin like a radioactive isotope as it moves up the vein, warming everything in its path until it blossoms in his brain stem. Maybe, he thinks, I should go to a meeting.

“I'm going to call this morning,” Terri continues, “and have them check the gutters while they're at it.” She will, too. Her remarkable sense of economy and organization, which might have seemed comical or even obnoxious, is touching to McClarty, who sees it as a function of her recovering alcoholic's battle against chaos. He admires this. And he likes the fact that she knows how to get the oil in the cars changed or wangle free upgrades when they fly to Saint Thomas. Outside of the examining room, McClarty still feels bereft of competence and will.

She kisses his widow's peak on her way out and reminds him about dinner with the Clausens, whoever they might be. Perversely, McClarty actually likes this instant new life. Just subtract narcotics and vodka, and stir. He feels like a character actor who, given a cameo in a sitcom, finds himself written into the series as a regular. He moved to this southeastern city less than a year ago, after graduating from rehab in Atlanta, and lived in an apartment without furniture until he moved in with Terri.

McClarty met her at a Mexican restaurant and was charmed by her air of independence and unshakable self-assurance. She leaned across the bar and said, “Fresh jalapeños are a lot better. They have them, but you have to ask.” She waved her peach-colored nails at the bartender. “Carlos, bring the gentleman some fresh peppers.” Then she turned back to her conversation with a girlfriend, her mission apparently complete.

A few minutes later, sipping his Perrier, McClarty couldn't help overhearing her say to her girlfriend, “Ask
before
you go down on him, silly. Not after.”

McClarty admires Terri's ruthless efficiency. Basically she has it all wired. She owns a clothing store, drives an Acura, has breasts shaped like mangoes around an implanted core of saline.
“Not
silicone,” she announced virtuously the first night he touched them. If asked, she can review the merits of the top plastic surgeons in town. “Dr. Milton's really lost it,” she'll say. “Since he started fucking his secretary and going to Aspen, his brow lifts are getting scary. He cuts way too much and makes everybody look frightened or surprised.” At forty, with his own history of psychological reconstruction, McClarty doesn't hold a few nips and tucks against a girl—particularly when the results are so exceptionally pleasing to the eye.

“You're a
doctor?”
Instead of saying, “Yes, but just barely,” he nodded. Perched as she was on a stool that first night, her breasts seemed to rise on the swell of this information. Checking her out when he first sat down, Dr. Kevin McClarty thought she looked like someone who would be dating a pro athlete, or a guy with a new Ferrari who owned a chain of fitness centers. She is almost certainly a little too brassy and provocative to be the consort of a doctor, which is one of the things that excite Kevin about her; making love to her, he feels simultaneously that he is slumming and sleeping above his economic station. Best of all, she is in the program, too. When he heard her order a virgin margarita, he decided to go for it. A week after the jalapeños, he moved in with her.

The uniformed guard says, “Good morning, Dr. McClarty” as he drives out the gate on his way to work. Even after all these years, he gets a kick out of hearing the title attached to his own name. He grew up even more in awe of doctors than most mortals because his mother, a nurse, told him that his father was one, though she refused all further entreaties for information. Raised in the bottom half of a narrow, chilly duplex in Evanston, Illinois, he still doesn't quite believe in the reality of this new life—the sunshine, the walled and gated community, the smiling guard who calls him “Dr.” Perversely, he believes in the dream, which is far more realistic than all this blue sky and imperturbable siding. He doesn't tell Terri, though. He never tells her about the dreams.

Driving to his office, he thinks about Terri's breasts. They're splendid, of course. But he finds it curious that she will tell nearly anybody that they are, as we say, surgically enhanced. Last time he was in the dating pool, back in the Pleistocene era, he never encountered anything but natural mammary glands. Then he got married and, ten years later, he's suddenly back in circulation and every woman he meets has gorgeous tits, but whenever he reaches for them, he hears, “Maybe I should mention that, they're, you know …” And inevitably, later: “Listen, you're a doctor, do you think—I mean, there's been a lot of negative publicity and stuff.…” It got so he avoided saying he was a doctor, not knowing whether they were genuinely interested or just hoping to get an opinion on this weird lump under the arm:
Right here, see?
Despite all the years of medical school and all the sleepless hours of his internship, he never really believed he was a doctor; he felt like a pretender, although he eventually discovered that he felt like less of a pretender on one hundred milligrams of Seconal.

The weather, according to the radio, is hot and hotting up. Kevin has the windows up and the climate control at sixty-eight. High between ninety-five and ninety-eight. Which is about as predictable as “Stairway to Heaven” on Rock 101, the station that plays all “Stairway,” only “Stairway,” twenty-four hours a day—a song that one of the M.D. junkies in rehab insisted was about dope, but to a junkie, everything is about dope. Now the song makes McClarty think of Terri marching righteously on her StairMaster.

After a lifetime in Chicago, he likes the hot summers and temperate winters, and he likes the ur-American suburban sprawl of franchises and housing developments with an affection all the greater for being self-conscious. As a bright, fatherless child, he'd always felt alien and isolated. Later, as a doctor, he felt even further removed from the general populace—it was like being a cop—and that alienation was only enhanced when he also became a drug addict and de facto criminal. He wanted to be part of the stream, an unconscious member of the larger community, but all the morphine in the pharmacy couldn't produce the desired result. When he first came out of rehab, after years of escalating numbness, the sight of a Burger King or a familiar television show could bring him to tears, could make him feel, for the first time, like a real
American
.

He turns into the drive marked
MIDSTATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
. It's no accident that you can't see the buildings from the road. With homes worth half a million within a quarter of a mile, construction was discreet. No hearings, since the land belonged to the state, which was happy to skip the expense of a new prison and instead board its high-security criminals with the corporation that employs Dr. Kevin McClarty. He drives along the east flank of chain-link fence and triple-coiled concertina wire.

These guards, too, greet him by name and title when he signs in. Looking through the bulletproof Plexi, he sees the enlarged photo of an Air Jordan sneaker a visitor just happened to be wearing when he hit the metal detector, its sole sliced open to show a .25-caliber Beretta nesting snug as a fetus in the exposed cavity.
Hey, it musta come from the factory that way, man, like those screws and syringes and shit that got inside the Pepsi cans. I ain't never seen that piece before. What is that shit, a twenty-five? I wouldn't be caught dead with no twenty-five, man. You can't stop a roach with that fuckin’ popgun
.

Dr. McClarty is buzzed through the first door and, once it closes behind him, through the second. Inside, he can sense it, the malevolent funk of the prison air, the dread ambience of the dream. The varnished concrete floor of the long white hall is as shiny as ice.

Emma, the fat nurse, buzzes him into the medical ward.

“How many signed up today?” he asks.

“Twelve so far.”

McClarty retreats to his office, where Donnie, the head nurse, is talking on the phone. “I surely do appreciate that.… Thank you kindly.…” Donnie's perennially sunny manner stands out even in this region of pandemic cheerfulness. He says, “Good morning,” with the accent on the first word, then runs down coming attractions. “A kid beat up in D last night. He's waiting. And you know Peters from K block, the diabetic who's been bitching about the kitchen food? Saying the food's running his blood sugar up? Well, this morning they searched his cell and found three bags of cookies, a GooGoo Cluster and two MoonPies under the bed. I think maybe we should tell the commissary to stop selling him this junk. Yesterday his blood sugar was four hundred.”

Dr. McClarty tells Donnie that they can't tell the commissary any such thing; that would be a restriction of Peters's liberty—cruel and unusual punishment. He'd fill out a complaint, and they'd spend four hours in court downtown, where the judge would eventually deliver a lecture, thirdhand Rousseau, on the natural rights of man.

Then there's Caruthers from G, who had a seizure and claims he needs to up his dose of Klonopin. Ah, yes, Mr. Caruthers, we'd
all
like to up
that
and file the edges right off our day. In McClarty's case, from zero milligrams a day to about thirty, with a little Demerol and maybe a Dilaudid thrown into the mix just to secure the perimeter. Or, fuck it, go straight for the fentanyl. No—he mustn't think this way. Like those “impure thoughts” the priests used to warn us about, these pharmaceutical fantasies must be stamped out at all costs. He should call his sponsor, catch a meeting on the way home.

The first patient, Cribbs, a skinny little white kid, has a bloody black eye, which, on examination, proves to be an orbital fracture. That is, his eye socket has been smashed in. And while McClarty has never seen Cribbs before, the swollen face is familiar; he saw it last night in his sleep. “Lock and sock?” he asks.

The kid nods and then winces at the pain.

“They just come in the middle of the night, maybe five of them, and started whaling on me. I was just lying there minding my own business.” Obviously new, he doesn't even know the code yet—not to tell nobody nothing. He is a sniveler, a fish, an obvious target. Now, away from his peers and tormentors, he seems ready to cry. But he suddenly wipes his nose and grins, shows McClarty the bloody teeth marks on his arm. “One of the sons of bitches bit me,” he says, looking incongruously pleased.

“You enjoyed that part, did you, Mr. Cribbs?” Then, suddenly, McClarty guesses.

“That'll fix his fucking wagon,” says Cribbs, smiling hideously, pink gums showing above his twisted yellow teeth. “I got something he don't want. I got the HIV.”

After McClarty cleans up the eye, he writes up a hospital transfer and orders a blood test.

“They won't be messing with me no more,” Cribbs says in parting. In fact, in McClarty's experience, there are two approaches to AIDS cases among the inmate population. Many are indeed given a wide berth. Or else they are killed, quickly and efficiently and without malice, in their sleep.

Next is a surly, muscled black prisoner with a broken hand. Mr. Brown claims to have smashed, accidentally, into the wall of the recreation yard. “Yeah, playing handball, you know?” Amazing how many guys hurt themselves in the yard. Brown doesn't even try to make this story sound convincing; rather, he turns up his lip and fixes McClarty with a look that dares him to doubt it.

So far, in the eleven months he has worked here, McClarty has been attacked only in his dreams. But he has been threatened several times, most recently by Lesko. A big pear-shaped redneck in for aggravated assault, he took a knife to a bartender who turned him away at closing time. The bartender was stabbed fifteen times before the bouncer hit Lesko with a bat. And while Lesko did threaten to kill McClarty, fortunately it wasn't in front of the other prisoners, in which case he would feel that his honor, as well as his buzz, was at stake. Still, McClarty makes a note to check up on Lesko; he'll ask Santiago, the guard over on D, to get a reading on his general mood and comportment.