Pain Killers (12 page)

Movern did his faux call-and-response again. “Tell it, Roscoe. Country strung out on bein’ strung out.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said Cranky.

“Or what, bitch?”

Movern smiled. This was just casual chat to them.

“Fellas.” I banged the table. “You can listen to your own bullshit anytime—right now you listen to me!”

The room went quiet. Even Rincin stiffened. If I’d gone too far, there was nothing for it now but to keep going. “Definition of a junkie,” I blurted, “guy who steals your wallet, then spends an hour helping you find it…”

I felt their eyes on me. Realized I was sweating profusely. I wiped my face on my sleeve. Sensed my mouth going in one direction and my brain in another. The fluorescents hissed like they knew something. Somewhere far away a metal door clanked shut. Suddenly it was hard to breathe as though someone were pressed against me, preventing my lungs from expanding. Like a hundred naked strangers were crammed in a room made for twenty-five. It was a panic attack—except what had me panicked had happened already, and not to me. When vapor wafted from the floor vents, it drifted so slowly that there was time to watch. The mist carpeted the room, floated lazily upward. People tried to climb on top of one another, to escape the rising poison. That’s why bodies were found in a pile.

I blinked into the faces before me, realizing that Mengele had probably made the drug, and made it psychoactive or psychedelic. The last thing I remember saying was, “Who’s got a success story?”

When I came around my lips were moving and I was still standing in front of the Quentin drug class. I seemed to have had some kind of out-of-body experience—or else I’d blacked out and just kept talking. As mentioned, the lush high from my first aid kit had died before I made it from the trailer to Rincin’s Crown Vic. But I kept getting residual mini-rushes. Random pleasure shudders. Who knew what kind of residual opiate drift was still in store? Stuff happens when you’re your own guinea pig. While I would never experiment on another human, I had a history of injecting bad science projects in my arm.

“Here’s the thing,” I heard myself announcing. “They want you to be loaded!”

Cranky rolled his eyes. “Who the fuck are they?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it!”

My insight was met with the blank stares it deserved. Rincin slowly inflated and deflated his purple bubble gum. Who was I kidding?

I badly needed to take a stress pee, but Rincin managed not to catch my plaintive gaze. He blew a bubble gum bubble the size of a baby’s head. Suddenly the door flew open and the bubble burst in his face. A white bodybuilder, flashing ALS ink from neck to leg irons, shouldered into the room as though facing a strong wind. Two guards in full riot gear trailed him, which accounted for the into-the-wind illusion. The guards had flipped down their protective masks, hiding their faces with SRP. Shit-resistant Plexiglas. No one breathed.

“Bernstein,” Movern whispered.

“
That’s
Bernstein?”

The white-power Jew was a ferociously cut five-nine, with a taut, owlish face framed by black-rimmed state eyeglasses and a perfectly maintained goatee. He might have been pale five years ago. Now even the skin on top of his shaved head shone a translucent, creamy gray. (One benefit of not seeing the sun for years at a stretch was all the UV rays a prisoner avoided—though the baby-smooth faces of aging serial killers could be disconcerting.)

Bernstein turned immediately in my direction, and Movern muttered behind his hand, “Kill you later, son.”

The white guard shot me a concerned expression but the black one scowled. Both tightened their grip on his belly chain. The black steel ran through a metal ring over Bernstein’s beef-slab stomach and dangled between his legs, locking to his leg-irons.

Gritting his teeth, Bernstein strained into every step. If you squinted, it was almost like he was pulling the guards in an invisible chariot. Like Charlton Heston in
Ben-Hur,
if Heston had played a horse.

Here was someone I did not want to piss off: a chained Semite so savage he had managed to maul his way to the top of a gang that existed to exterminate him—along with all his relatives. To my relief, Bernstein began to scan the room. He stopped when he saw Mengele and offered a heartfelt
“Sieg Heil!”
Then, dragging the helmeted guards behind like vassals, he clanked closer. It was like watching some kind of medieval pageant.

“Doctor, it’s an honor. I have come a long way to shake your hand.” Bernstein spoke with formal solemnity. “All Aryan honors!”

That voice! I knew it! I’d heard that voice the night before, barking at my naked ex outside the conjugal visit trailer. So this was the white power fireplug Tina’d shacked up with? I still couldn’t swallow the idea. Tina was not one of those women who liked bad boys, let alone violent bad boys. She had, on more than one occasion, explained her thinking on the subject: only good girls found so-called bad boys interesting, and then only because they were getting back at Daddy. In her opinion, the worst fucks in the world were bikers. All the beer. So why would she wed the white power shot-caller now hijacking my bogus drug class?

Bernstein lowered his shaved head and proffered his twin sleeves of white power tattoos to Mengele. He might have been like a diplomat showing his credentials: runic SS symbols; lightning bolts; the 88 (8 for “H,” the eighth letter of the alphabet, as in
H
eil
H
itler); the Nordic warrior with his fair-haired woman, in his and hers horned Viking helmets…A Moon Pie–sized swastika graced the top of his right forearm; a matching Star of David showed proudly in the same spot on the left.

Chaos makes sense in chaos.

Mengele pressed his thin lips together. Silent. Bernstein raised his eyes and, gulping back emotion, paid almost cringe-worthy respect. “You, my liege, are the last living link.” He pointed two fingers upward, squeezing his eyebrows together to highlight the Gothic number “14” inked on his forehead. “The fourteen words,” he intoned, and proceeded to recite the pledge. “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

I might have appreciated the theater of it, if not for the fact that my ex-wife had been late-night intermission. I tried to see what Tina saw in the guy. Sure, Bernstein was a level-four white supremacist overlord whose “KOS” status brought Crips and Bloods together in rare unity. But a Jew was a Jew. Somewhere, between the sword-wielding Valkyrie riding his chest and the flaming 666 stamped on his back, his heart pumped blood that flowed all the way back to the shtetl. I knew Tina had a taste for the sons of Moses, but I still couldn’t picture her with Chaim McSwastika.

Mengele studied his acolyte for a minute. Finally he spoke. “The first thing we did to vermin in the camps was shave their heads. The next was give them a tattoo. We branded them. And do you know why? No? Well let me tell you.
Because they were slaves.
And yet, you brand yourself
voluntarily.
” The old man’s chest rose and fell with mounting indignation. “And you dare to call yourself a Nazi? You dare to wear the swastika of the Reich?”

Bernstein’s expression was a pressure cooker of rage and cool.

Rincin had filled me in on the white power Jew. Four years ago, somebody’d slipped him a trazor and handcuff key on the way to the shower. He poked a hole in one correction officer’s aorta and skewered another one’s Adam’s apple. Since then he’d spent twenty-three hours a day locked down in the adjustment center. The
Hole.
Even if he was never going to get out, he had major juice, enough to buy a walk from isolation to the furniture factory classroom.

Whatever it cost Bernstein, he hadn’t shelled it out to be disrespected. Not by a bottle-blond ninety-seven-year-old. He canted his head toward a guard, who reached over and slid Bernstein’s black glasses up his nose for him. He shifted his neutral gaze at Mengele, breathing slowly. Then he suddenly lunged forward in his chains, yanking the guard on the left to his knees. “You’re in my house, old man!”

Mengele’s tongue darted over his lip hair. In the flesh he was less Jack Lemmon than James Mason with a fetid taste in his mouth. He observed the Nazi Jew the way he might have observed an albino dwarf. In genetic work, anomaly was always valuable. “My life’s work,” declared Mengele, “is to preserve the race!”

“I
am
the race now, motherfucker!” Bernstein shouted as the guards lifted him off the floor. “You’re just a has-been with a scalpel!”

Two more guards grabbed Bernstein’s Popeye arms. Rincin ambled over and, almost affectionately, Tasered him. Enduring the voltage, Bernstein kept his jaw clamped, fists clenched, so it looked like Rincin was not so much shocking as
recharging
him. Then he cracked Bernstein across the shin, bringing him to one knee.

I was watching a generational struggle. The far-flung fallout of history. Aryan Jew Godzilla versus King Kong Master Race Doctor. It should have been on pay-per-view.

“I smell dead sauerkraut,” Bernstein hissed, spitting the words out like razor blades.
“I run this prison!”

For the first time Mengele smiled, revealing the gapped teeth I’d seen in the photo on my dresser. “You run it? Good! Then get me a key.” He nibbled his mustache, delighted, as Bernstein, now horizontal, thrashed like a fresh-caught marlin. Mengele swept his arm at the hooting inmates. His smile did not so much light up the room as make you want to back out of it slowly. “Get us all keys! The purpose of the race is to multiply. If you have found a way to propagate with the hind end of your brothers, please show me. As a scientist, I would like to study baby-making sodomy.”

“Probably like to watch too,” Cranky said.

Rincin buckled a muzzle over Bernstein’s mouth like you would a rabid pit bull. He emitted snarled curses as a paramedic in tinted shades rushed in to jam a syringe in his neck. By the time they got the living legend out the door, he was slack faced, unconscious. I was almost jealous.

Rincin rattled into his walkie-talkie and a young, jug-eared guard ran in. He spun Mengele’s wheelchair around.

Mengele chose this moment to zero in. “Enjoying yourself, Mr. Rupert?”

“I’m gonna need an incident statement,” Rincin sighed to the ancient but surprisingly wiry and vigorous German. “You know I have to write this up.”

“You want a statement? Fine.” Mengele did everything but click his heels. Face forward, shoulders back, he recited, “I am a eugenics scientist. I believed in improvement of the species, preserved and strengthened by applied biology.”

Roscoe raised his hand and waved the CO quiet. “Applied biology?” His calm demeanor belied the intensity of his words. “I look that up in a German dictionary, am I gonna see ‘genocide’?”

Mengele’s gaze went feral. “If a man finds vermin in his family home and poisons them, does that makes him a mass murderer—or a man who takes care of his family?”

“There it is,” said Roscoe. “Definition of political power—who gets to decide who the vermin is—”

“Oh no!” the reverend interrupted. “Huh-uh!” He shook his head vigorously. “Now you gettin’ into what they call a real slippery slope. And I ain’t talkin’ ’bout no lubed-up Chinese ho. I’m talkin’ ’bout this here. ’Cause this here is some sick-cookie
bullshit
!”

Mengele shrugged. “Maybe so, but the Nazis didn’t bake it.”

“Fuck that s’posed to mean?” Now it was Cranky’s turn to be agitated. “I thought we were supposed to be talkin’ how to not get high.”

Mengele dismissed him. “You wouldn’t have to get high if you weren’t ignorant. Your whole country is ignorant.”

“We back to the cookie thing?” The reverend was not impressed. “You kinda jumpin’ around. I’m thinkin’ maybe you got a little bit o’ that Altzheiny, Doc. You know what I’m sayin’? Maybe you’re sick. What I hear, Hitler was a one-balled lunatic.”

Before I could jump in and play peacemaker, Mengele slammed his hand on his armrest. “I will ignore the uniball remark. But lunatic? No. I want you to listen to something.”

Mengele closed his eyes and raised his arm like an orchestra conductor waving an invisible baton. “‘It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.’” He dropped the invisible baton and opened his eyes, cupping his hand over his heart to convey his deep emotion.

“No disrespect,” said the reverend, “but that shit is sick.”

“That shit,” hissed Mengele, “is from an opinion by your Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in nineteen twenty-seven.
Bell versus Buck.
The issue was forced sterilization. Should I keep going?”

“Oh, please do,” I said.

‘“The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.’ Is this not poetry?”

“Don’t rhyme,” said Jimmy.

Mengele ignored him. “Where do you think Hitler got the idea that subhumans—drunks, syphilitics, Jews—were a disease, to be wiped out?”

Mengele raised himself up. Decades of perceived wrong infused his words with self-righteous fury, almost enough to hide the self-pity underneath. “You inspired us! America inspired us. Don’t you see! I
wanted
to go to Auschwitz. To conduct research, and preserve the race, in a new way. At Auschwitz, we were able to destroy more than a million germs!”

Mengele’s face colored with passion. “Eugenics was the future.” He tried to smile. “It was the—how do you say?—like your Silicon Valley in the nineties…”

Jimmy the white Rasta covered his mouth and giggled. “Right on. Eugenics was the go-go industry.”

“Go-go? Like go-go boots.” Reverend D rubbed himself through his pants. “Chicks in go-go boots! The reverend get his bone on just
sayin’
that. No lie!”

“Okay,” I said. “We’re getting a little far afield. We’re here to talk about why we use drugs and alcohol. What do they do for you? What did they do to you? We all need to get used to talking about stuff that a lot of us got loaded to keep from thinking about. One way to do that is to see everybody’s secrets are the same….”