Pain Killers (4 page)

“An Orthodox Jew, an actual rabbi, in for domestic. What happened is, he got stuck in a cell with a shot-caller for the ALS. A real peckerwood. Zeke Mosher. Whole thing was somebody’s idea of a joke. But the rabbi, he’s so tortured by his celly, he keeps tryin’ to get himself reclassified as a nonwhite man. Claims he’s the victim of race baiting.”

He took a breath, guzzling between sentences. “They keep races together when they assign cells. Shouldn’t be that way, but TLIP—that’s life in prison. Anyway, the whole thing was like some kinda joke to the staff and the fellas on the tier. But it was no joke for the Jew! He’s got the whatchamacallem, the shylocks, growing outta his temple. He ties little boxes to his head with leather straps, the whole shmear.”

Rincin looked proud to have gotten the “shmear” thing in.

“Did the administration go for it?” I asked.

“Go for what?

“The reclassification. Did Kosher get to move out of the cell with Mosher?”

“Let me tell the story. What happened is, one day the peckerwood crossed the line. He ripped the prophylactic right off the rabbi’s arm while he was praying with it.”

“You mean the phylactery.”

Rincin snapped, still keeping his grin on, “Did I say I was an expert? The peckerwood, he cooks up a shot in a contraband spoon and says, ‘Know what I’m shootin’ up? I’m shootin’ up
pork juice
!’ Then he takes
his
phylaka-dakkies, this leather strap with wooden boxes attached, he ties off and fixes with it!”

“What happened?”

“You mean after?
Right
after? The rabbi had a little heart attack. The case went to the penal board, who heard experts talking about how Jews were a race, or they weren’t a race, they were a religion. One expert, from Alabama, said they were a cult. On the other hand, skin is skin. Nobody made a federal case when black Muslims shared cells with Baptists.”

“That makes sense.”

“Not to the rabbi’s representatives. All that mattered to them was that Nazi thought Jews were a virus. Ask any hard-core Aryan, he’ll tell you straight up. ‘They look white, that’s how they sneak into the mainstream and start polluting the race.’

“All this came up, but in the end the board decided white’s white, even with the dangly shylocks.”

“Payots,”
I said.

“Pay us for what?”

“
Payots.
That’s what that hair tuft is called, the sidelocks, on the Orthodox guys.”

“I’ll take your word on that, sir. But the board decided to put him back in the cell. Said it was a bad precedent. And, I gotta tell you, you’d walk by the cell, day or night, it was like watching a buffed-up Aryan cat and a little squeaky Jew mouse. Every day it was something, but the Aryan won’t come out and kill the rabbi. He’s having too much fun. I’m telling you, this was nothing nice. Poor Hebe was in hell—or whatever you people call it.”

“Dos Gehenem.”

“That some Jew word?”

“Yiddish for eternal jury duty.”

“I’ll take your word. I’m just saying, these guys were stuck with each other day in, day out. That’s when I realized it was perfect.”

“Perfect for what?”

“Sitcom.”

“That could work,” I said, just to say something.

“You’re telling me,” said Rincin. “Problem was I never met any Jews. I mean, if you’re gonna write, you gotta know your subject. So what happens, I finally get to know a Hebrew, and who is it? Bobby Bernstein.”

“I know the name, I just can’t…Wait, was that Son of Sam?”

“That was David Berkowitz.” He looked disappointed. “I’m surprised at you. Bobby Bernstein happens to be one of the baddest, meanest, toughest sonuvabitches in the ALS. And he happens to be a Semite.”

“Isn’t that like a black guy joining the Klan?”

“Apples and oranges,” he said. “You look at Bernstein. Shaved head. Ripped. Full carpet of white power ink.”

He made a fist, straightened his arms. Tapped his left wrist—“Star of David over here.” Then he tapped his right—“Swastika over
here.
Now, I don’t meet too many sons of Abraham in my line of work, but am I goin’ out on a limb if I say Bernstein isn’t typical?”

“No, he’s definitely not typical.”

We were halfway up the dirt road to my trailer. My stomach lurched and he elbowed me. Rincin was turning out to be an elbower. “So what are you sayin’? About my idea, I mean.”

“I’m saying, you want a sitcom, give it a twist. Forget the peckerwood. Put the Orthodox Jew in with the Jew who’s the Nazi. Mosher and Bernstein. Better yet, make them brothers.”

“You mean black guys?”

“What? No, no, I mean
real
brothers—so on visiting day their mother can come. A Jewish mother visiting her boys in jail—one’s a practicing Orthodox, one’s a big man in the ALS.”

I could sense him squinting at me under his reflector shades. Suspicious. “I write the thing you just said, it becomes
Two and a Half Jews
—it’s your word against mine.”

I clapped him on the back. “My gift to you. If it takes off and you want to give me a point, I wouldn’t say no.”

“Are you in show business?”

“Very peripherally.”

“Well, what you want to do is establish yourself as consultant. That’s what guys do. I give you a consultant credit, that’s money in the bank. Who knows, you might go full Bruckheimer.”

“A guy can dream,” I said. “So, you think the doctor’s the real thing?” I realized my blunder before it was out of my mouth. I’d been here five minutes and possibly blown my cover.

“The real thing? The doctor? He the real old German guy?”

He took a last swig of Coke, flattened the can and tossed it in the backseat with the others. We drove in silence across the main road where the ATM and the gift shop were. “Up here are the employee residences. Those are some nice little houses. You won’t be living in those.”

He swung the Chevy up a bumpy dirt road that curved around the nice houses, toward a gravel lot onto which a dozen double-wides had been dragged and dropped. We parked at the far end beside a fresh-scrubbed trailer, water still plinking from the roof.

Officer Rincin got out and tugged a ring of keys out from a pull string on his belt, then began flipping through them. He eyed me as he tried the first one on the door. As it turns out I wasn’t moving into the just-washed baby-blue double-wide. My new home was the wagon behind it. An old-time snailback, like something Lucy and Ricky would attach to the back of their sedan on a fishing trip.

“Who lived here before me, a hunchback?”

“Actually, the term is ‘scoliosis.’ My daughter is afflicted.” While I tried to swallow my tongue, he patted the trailer’s flank, waking a cloud of gnats. “I raised eleven children in this rust bucket.”

“Are you serious?”

He unlocked the door and let the key ring zip back to his belt, then gave me the elbow and burst out laughing. “Gotcha!”

Before this I didn’t know what fun was.

“Prison humor,” Rincin said, wiping his eyes. “Boy, you wanna make it in here, you gotta work on your bullshit filter. I thought you was edgy-cated.”

“Edgy-cated, that’s good.”

I chuckled along, big enough to have a little laugh at my own expense. I wasn’t thrilled about establishing my moron credentials so soon, but it was worth it if it meant he’d forget about the Mengele blunder.

Rincin kicked the door open hard and jumped back, as if expecting gunfire from within. It seemed as ludicrous as waving a hat on a stick. But then, this was his job.

Before we stepped inside he turned to me. “What did you mean before, about the doctor being the real thing?”

“I mean,” I said, making it up as I went along, “I heard the doctor might still be using. See, I really want to work with people who are serious.”

“You’re the serious type, is that it?”

When I’d taken this job, I’d figured the big problem would be not spooking Mengele: trying to ID the old man without getting him nervous and without getting anybody who might be after him nervous. What I did not anticipate was having to bivouac in a tin-can petri dish barely bigger than a handicapped stall.

On the plus side, I didn’t have a cell mate. And the ceiling was high enough so that I only had to lean slightly sideways to keep from scraping my scalp. The real challenge would be breathing. That smell. This wasn’t just a trailer, it was a biosphere. The site of what appeared to be an extended experiment on the interplay of mold and mammal discharge, with shag carpet, fold-down bed and kitchenette.

I knew certain spores could alter brain function.

“Excuse me,” said Officer Rincin, and squeezed past me close enough for his Taser to brush my genitals. It was an odd sensation. Odder when he reached toward me, arms extended. I was about to tell him I was a virgin when I realized he wasn’t going for a man clench but reaching for the two exposed screws above my head.

“Beg pardon. Handles are missing. Bed folds out like so.”

He pulled the single bunk down to eye level, then yanked down the built-in particleboard ladder. They say particleboard gives off peroxide, but they don’t say when. We both admired the efficient design. On impulse, I reached up and touched the sagging foam mattress. It was damp. Before this, I’d never even thought the word “soilage.” But there was something else. Teeth marks.

“Hang on,” I blurted. “The guy before me was a biter?”

“Good eyes.” Rincin nodded, lapsing back to canned tour guide delivery. “Now, if a citizen sees this, his first thought is,
What made a man sink his teeth into rotting foam?
But a CO? First thing
he’s
thinking is,
Nobody just bites. Not to judge a fellow officer, what
else
did this perv do on Nibble Nights?
”

“Whatever it was, I can’t say I like the idea of sleeping in it.”

But smiling Corrections Officer Rincin was ready for that.

“Rubber sheets. Right now there’s a foam shortage. Good news is, we wrap her in rubber, you’ll be fine,” he said. “And we’ll get these handles fixed for you ASAP.”

I was impressed. He seemed unfazed by the eye-burning stench.

“Guy before you, name of Turk. Big fella. He drank a little…. His wife left him after he started as a guard. That happens. Administration got him this snailback. Then he drank a little more. Big Boy kept keeling over, grabbing the handles. Ripped ’em right out of the wood every time he fell. The investigators said that’s how it happened.”

“How what happened?”

I focused on keeping the fingers that had touched foam away from my face. That’s how you get staph infections.

“The accident.” Rincin kneeled and yanked up a chocolate-colored splotch of carpet, revealing a bloodstain beneath. “They cleaned ’er up pretty good.”

I didn’t ask any questions. The splotch, the bite marks, they pretty much explained it. The stench didn’t come from simple fungus. Or out of a cat. It was desperation. Left to ferment. Man fungus.

Rincin checked his watch. “What say you take fifteen to get squared away. Then we’ll meet the warden. I’ll be right outside.”

After he left, I thought I heard muffled heaving, but I wasn’t sure. The smell was so bad it affected my hearing.

I’d moved into a lot of places. It’s weird. The first thing I always do is open the drawers. Looking for clues. Not that any were necessary. It’s not like it’s hard to figure out the kind of person who would end up in this kind of place. Once you hit the ground, does it matter how many floors you fell?

I put down my bag, shoved the port-a-bed back into its slot and got to work.

The silverware drawer came out with a yank. Empty. A cabinet over the sink window hung by one hinge. For a second, I took in the view. A high fence separated my row of trailers from a trio of much nicer double-wides. My tin can was plopped on soiled dirt; grass grew between the trailers on the other side and a gravel pathway led from the road to each front door. Up the path to the first, a white guard walked behind a black couple—following as stately as the flower girl in a wedding. The convict was rail thin in prison denims, the woman in large sunglasses, tasseled red leather vest and Capri pants that clung to the dimpled pillars of her calves. They’d already started to split in the back.

They disappeared around a corner. I eased open the overhead cabinet, releasing an avalanche of magazines. Fat glossies bounced off the throbbing egg on my head, a souvenir of Zell’s walker. I glanced down at a picture of a doe-eyed Asian girl in traction. She pouted from her hospital bed, in a neck brace, one arm and both legs in traction, a sliver of white bush-shmushing panties peeping out between them. I closed the magazine, but there she was again—the Japanese victim-girl—beaming and damaged, legs drilled with metal pins, one eye black, an arm in a sling, from the glossy, waterlogged cover of June 2004’s
Broken Dolls.

I didn’t hear Rincin open the door. He tilted his head, glanced at the cover of the magazine, then straightened up and looked back at me. “Glad to see you’ve made yourself at home.”

I waited for him to say “Gotcha!”

When he didn’t I scooped a couple of magazines from the sink: back issues of
Moppets
and a well-thumbed
Clown Sex
catalogue. Rincin saw the things and raised his eyebrows. “Hey,” I said, “I didn’t bring these from home.”

By way of reply he grabbed a copy of
Pony Girls
featuring a big-thighed brunette pulling a bald man in a two-wheeled carriage on the cover.
“Yippy-ki-yay!”
he said with no enthusiasm.

“Moppets, clown whores and pony girls? No wonder the guy drank,” I said.

“Naw.” Rincin started scooping up the porno. “He didn’t drink ’cause he was a perv, he drank ’cause he was a perv who liked the taste of Schlitz. Besides which, he was probably selling these inside.” He opened an
Ebony She-Male
and eyed the glossy contents appraisingly. “You could get five bucks a page for this out on the yard. Six if they’re cherry.”

I didn’t ask what he planned to do with them. Maybe we each had something on each other. Maybe not.

“By the way,” said the sergeant, indicating the splendor around us, “this is just temporary. They’re hooking up the power on a new box, just for you.”