Pain Killers (14 page)

“Not for long,” Rincin snickered.

“Okay,” I said, “joke’s over. For your information, I’m taking the stuff to prevent baldness.”

This was a gamble, but what wasn’t? I plowed on, pulling at a lock of my mouse-colored head fur.

“How do you think I got this crop right here? I was starting to find tufts on my pillow, so I tried, whatchamacallit…jeez, I’m blanking on the name of the stuff….”

“Great Day?”

“No, that’s a
dye.
” Was he trying to trick me? “I’m talking about the stuff that makes your hair grow back. See, the reason guys lose their hair is because of excess testosterone. So, you know, to counter the extra male hormones you take some female.”

“And get some nice fun bags,” Rincin chimed in, then saw the warden’s scowl and retracted it. “Sorry, boss!”

I kept my eyes on Rincin. I couldn’t tell if he was avoiding my eyes. Then I began to wonder. Was it me, or were his hips wider? Did that happen?

Rubbing his wrist where I’d grabbed him, the warden broke into my Rincin hip reverie. “The state makes every corrections officer take sensitivity training. Speaking personally, I don’t judge a man by what he is, I judge by what he does. We’ve all got demons. Hell, I used to drink myself silly. My concern is that you do your job and you don’t interfere with us doing ours.”

“Thank you,” I said, trying not to squirm too visibly.

Colfax gave me a supportive thumbs-up. Then Rincin turned his pocked face to mine. “One day at a time, right? I’m in OA myself. Chronic overeater.”

“That cruller count as a relapse?” the warden joked.

“I’m laughing on the outside,” said Rincin, locking his gaze on mine. Had he figured out I’d stolen his urine? Or did he think he’d met another future vagina owner?

The warden chose that moment to stand up. Colfax took my left hand and Rincin grabbed my right. His palm was soft as a newborn’s head. We completed the circle.

“Manny, would you like to kick off the serenity prayer?”

“Me? Uh, sure…God,” I began feebly, and then a klaxon blasted. Something was happening somewhere, but we kept praying. An attractive Latina with faintly black-haired legs and a juicy birthmark rushed in, then backed out as quickly as she’d entered.

The warden smiled. “It’s okay, Dulce’s seen me pray before. Bring it home, Officer Rincin.”

“…courage to change the things I can,” Rincin intoned, sneaking a meaningful glance in my direction. Who was I to doubt the power of prayer?

Until now, I had never contemplated the courage it must take to have your penis removed. Talk about faith! While we a-mened, I wrapped my mind around the fact that these three believed I was a woman trapped in a man’s body. I have to say, they were sterling about it. Not even a hint of behind-my-back smirks.

“I tried Jenny Craig,” Rincin confided when we dropped hands. “But I was still stuffing my feelings. I
needed
the program.” Maybe the hormones were making him emotional.

The klaxon sounded again and the warden clapped me on the back. “Looks like we have a situation,” he said. He headed for the door, then stopped. “Forgot to ask, Rupert, have you thought about a name?”

“A name? For what?”

“For the new you, when you make your transition to he-she, or guy-gal, or whatever you all call yourselves nowadays.”

“I believe the term is ‘transgendered,’” Rincin corrected him.

“Oops!”
said the warden pleasantly. “Just funnin’. Guess somebody needs to bone up on his sensitivity training. So what
are
you thinking, name-wise?”

“Mindy,” I lied, out of nowhere.

“Mindy’s cute.” He tapped a finger thoughtfully off his mega-jaw. “But since you started off as Manuel, why not think about Manaloa? It means ‘beautiful.’”

“In what language?”

“Honolulu,” he said, smiling big.

“Wow. That’s nice.”

“My gift to you,” he said.

“Thanks!”

The warden gave a little wave, and I caught a flicker in his eyes. Despite all this PC chitchat, I suspected he was deeply creeped—no doubt fearing I might break into a cancan or start stroking my nipples at any second. It was hugely embarrassing, and it took everything I had not to defuse the whole charade with a little honesty: “For Christ’s sake, guys, I have enough trouble living
with
a woman, let alone living
in
one!” But I’d gone too far down the road to turn back now. What mattered was my mission, not my image. If the head of San Quentin thought I was popping hormones and heading off for a lop job, I’d just have to live with it.

“Okey-doke,” said the warden, waving again. “Duty calls.”

No sooner had his boss gone than Rincin sidled up and planted a hand on my back. “It’s good that we had this talk,” he said, slipping a card in my shirt pocket. “You need help, call me. Twenty-four seven.”

“Do I look like I need help?”

“You know anybody who doesn’t?”

I heard her voice before I got in the trailer. “What happened, they couldn’t find you anything in D Block?”

“Tina!”

My ex-wife was kneeling on the kitchenette counter in black fishnets and CDC jersey, backside protruding as she cleaned the windows over the sink. If her ass could talk it would have shouted “Run!”

Before it did, Tina squirmed around and faced me on the counter, idly spreading her legs. She tugged the fishnets tight over her crotch, hooked in a finger and ripped them, then eyed the damage. “Oh, gosh, look at that
nasty
hole!”

Thrilling as this was, it was hard to enjoy the show, on account of the mold fumes. I reached over her head and tried to jimmy the window. At first it wouldn’t budge, then the Plexiglas jerked free and flew out of the trailer. I didn’t care. I gulped in deep breaths of sea air as if saved from drowning. Tina grabbed my face and burst out laughing. “Can you quit the home repair and listen? You’re going to fucking
love
this!”

“If it’s about you and Bernstein, I doubt it.”

Tina boasted a fairly demented personal history. Which made for great stories. But until now, her true-life tales of tragic debauchery had involved people I didn’t know—unless you counted Leonard Cohen (when she was sixteen), whom I only knew
of,
and a Belgian performance artist named Zik who used to wear rubber and flog her. These days he managed a juice bar in West Hollywood. We ran into him once when we popped in for a smoothie. Back in the car, Tina told me about the floggings, his rubber suit and the chain he made her wear around her ankle so she couldn’t leave his loft. “It paid for the drugs, and he let me have friends over,” she’d explained, as if I were a pinhead for asking why she did it. “But the main thing,” she’d told me, sucking the last drops through her straw before crushing the cup, “he tipped big and he was kind of famous. That means something when you’re seventeen.” Somehow, now that he looked like a swollen Barry Manilow, whatever Zik made Tina do all those years ago didn’t matter. Which brought us back to Bernstein.

“Trust me, nothing happened,” she assured me. “The closest we got to sex, he showed me this photo of Golda Meir in seamed stockings. He kept it in a mahogany box, with a certificate of authenticity that looked forged. He wanted me to
look
at the photo with him.”

“Should I even ask if she was naked?”

“God no,” she replied, as if I was somehow sick for even asking. “But you could see a lot of leg.”

“I feel nauseous.”

I leaned on a cabinet for a second, then the wood gave and I cracked my knee on a corner of wall trying to break my fall.

“Oh shit!” Tina burst out laughing and covered her mouth. She had a huge heart that did not stop her from loving YouTube clips of drunks falling off camels or stumbling into traffic with their clothes off. “I’m sorry,” she managed as her giggles subsided, “are you okay? You should put some ice on it. Let me get some.”

“Tina,
NO
!”

Before I could stop her, she opened the fridge and choked. I kicked it shut.

“Not plugged in,” I gagged. “That’s where the stench comes from.” I grabbed a rusty corkscrew off the counter. “Open it up again and I’ll get it.” She reopened the fridge and, holding my breath, I stabbed what looked like a maggot football with the corkscrew and tossed the whole mess out the missing window.

“Fuck me,” I said. “I don’t even want to know what that was.”

When I turned around, the dead freezer was still open. Tina was staring in at the Technicolor fridge mold, reciting, “‘We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers’ wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are…prisoners still, though within larger walls.’”

Tina slammed the freezer door and said, “John Donne.” Then she plopped back on the counter, pulled her knees up and hugged them, facing me, so I couldn’t miss that pantyhose hole, the sliver of puffed-out cunt like a furry earlobe.

This is who we are,
I thought.
This is what we do.

“Hey, stress monster! What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Take a sniff. Things are perfect. I’m in a San Quentin snailback that smells like gangrene with an ex-wife I’m in love with. And by the way, thanks for the show last night.”

“Manny, would you try to listen?”

But I kept going, like a dog hunting the pain. “You must have known I could see from here. You’re not a coincidence person. I mean, what the fuck?”

“Are you done?”

“No. Give me a year and a half to punch myself in the forehead.”

“There’s melodrama and there’s Manny-drama.”

Tina plunged a hand in her purse and pulled out a dark prescription bottle of Hycodan, hydrocodone cough syrup, and guzzled. Just what I needed.

“What are you, a Houston rapper?” I asked. “Hitting the purple drank now?”

“Okay, so I’ve crossed over,” she said, tipping one back. “How about you?”

“Clean and loving it,” I lied.

“Of course,” said Tina, “I start to enjoy myself, and you go all gym teacher.”

“Did you fuck him? The Jew Gestapo-wannabe?”

“I already told you. I didn’t.”

I touched the top of my head. It still hurt. Twice as much since I had passed out under the rotting trailer.

“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” I said.

She screwed the lid back on the bottle. “You really want to hear this?”

“Absolutely not. So don’t leave anything out.”

Tina shrugged. “He said his daddy told him about Vietcong B girls who kept razor blades up their snatches. GI sticks his dick in.
Chop-chop.
I said, ‘Vietcong? Your daddy told you not to have sex ’cause of something that happened to guys in Vietnam? That was a long time ago, honey.’ I mean, the guy worked so hard for that badass front, but I could see what was under it.” She stopped, took another guzzle of syrup, and kept going. “Guys like that, you just have to stick it to them. I was like, ‘What else did Daddy warn you about? Panty ’fros? Not that
you’d
know anything about panty ’fros.’ ‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’ So I said, ‘Son, have you been race mixing?’ As soon as you call one of these hard cases ‘son,’ you’re their mother. Even if you’re younger than they are. So he got all serious, like, ‘Ma’am, I would
never
! I seen pictures. That’s how I know.’ I’m like, ‘Know what?’ And Bernstein—he’s like a little boy—Bernstein says, ‘No,
I can’t
!’”

Tina stopped again, pulled out her Newports, grabbed one and ripped off the filter and lit up. Just remembering, she burst out laughing through a gust of Newport smoke. Though it might have been the cough medicine. “So Bernstein…Ah, my God, Manny, you’d have loved it. So Bernstein…” She tried to continue but broke herself up again. Finally, waving her hand, she managed to finish the story. “So Bernstein says, ‘That’s how I know you got some Negroid in
you
! ’Cause I know you’re part Negroid.’ Can you believe that? ‘Part
Negroid
’!”

“But you
are
a quarter black. He was right.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t, you asshole.” She punched the Newport out on the counter and threw it out the window. I half expected an explosion. “I know what I am,” she said, her mirth turning to annoyance. “I’m just saying, nobody ever called me
Negroid.
It sounds like a gland.”

She reached in her purse for another cigarette and muttered, “See, this is what I forget when I think I miss you. What’s happening
right now.
The
bickering.
”

“I’m just saying,” I said.

She threw the cigarette at me. “You should stop
just saying
shit and fucking
say
it.”

“Tina…”

She shook me off. Then she reached between her legs. “You ever think about how we met?”

“What do you think?”

I watched her touch herself and thought about praying mantises. Name the thing that makes male mantises fiend for females; they must know what’s going to happen, but they still do it. There had to be rumors.
Hey, man, did you hear about that guy, got his head bit off while he was fucking?
They knew. But they climbed on anyway. That’s what it means to fiend for something…. You need it more than you care that it’s going to kill you….

Tina idly stroked herself. “I haven’t done
anything,
baby. Even though I
could,
since we’re not together. I hate to disappoint you, but nothing happened.” I didn’t say anything, which always drove her crazy. “For Christ’s sake, Manny, what are you thinking? You know you’re the best lay in the world. You fuck like you want to kill death.”

“Ferlinghetti? Oh, come on….”

“No, me.” She pouted for a second, then snapped back. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking about praying mantises.”

Being known was an uncomfortable aphrodisiac. “For a second,” I admitted, “yeah. I was thinking about mantis sex. But before that I was thinking about those GIs in Saigon. How many of
them
do you think planned on saying ‘Nothing happened’? Until they ended up with chipped ham in their pants. It’s hard to lie with a bloody package.”