Pain Killers (6 page)

“Dr. Josef Mengele,” I said.

“Right right right!”

The warden snapped his fingers again, causing Colfax to tighten his pincer grip on my trapezoids. I resolved not to cry out. I was an easy crier as a boy.

“The Doctor of Death,” he continued, heading for the door. “I saw a thing, on the History Channel.”

It was obvious he wanted to leave. I didn’t take it personally. There were important chow hall trazor incidents to adjudicate. Funding to nudge out of Sacramento. But I couldn’t just let him go without asking—even if it made me look desperate.

“Do
you
think it’s him?”

He stopped in the doorway, eyes narrowing as he made a snap decision to give up real information. “He’s a ninety-seven-year-old man who talks German to himself. You ever listen to German? It sounds like when you get glass in your garbage disposal. Even when he talks American, the old guy’s accent is so thick it sounds like he’s farting out of his mouth.”

“Nice. He say anything you remember?”

For one bad second I was sure he was going to order Colfax to go supermax on me. Leave me sobbing on the curb with a bus ticket in my mouth and a broken collarbone.

“Wernher von Braun. That’s the only thing comes to mind.”

“Wernher von Braun?”

“Do I have to repeat that for you? I have a penitentiary to run.”

He started out again, and before I could consider the consequences I heard myself plead,
“Wait!”
It came out more shrieky than I’d have liked.

The warden thrust his jaw back through the door. Even if he was under control, I was pretty sure his jaw wanted to kill me. “Did you have abandonment issues, son?”

“I just wanted to know, what is he in for?”

“Who?”

“The old man—I guess we don’t really know if he’s a doctor.”

“I’d say he was a man of science.”

“Why? What did he do?”

“Hit-and-run.”

“Hit-and-run? How’s that make him a scientist?”

“When they picked him up, he had his own little lab going. They don’t know what he was making, but he was making something. Any more questions, I suggest you ask Officer Rincin, and he’ll refer you to the proper individual.”

This time he didn’t say good-bye. Before he followed, Colfax unclenched my tendon and gave me a little hair-tussle. I wanted to believe the hair-muss was some traditional CO “Now you’re one of us” maneuver—like when mafiosi gang-kissed a newly made man or Skull and Bones lay naked in coffins while John Kerry urinated on them. But I suspected it meant I was a bitch.

Back in my snailback, I slapped the stack of intake files on the kitchen table—yellow for violent crimes, red for non, though it seemed like it should be the other way around. That’s how
I’d
have done it.

A lady police therapist once told me that control issues were really just fear of lack of control disguised as power. She interviewed me when I asked for a stress-related early pension, about a thousand years ago. She was very sincere. I asked if what she meant was that all strong people were weak. Was all power just fear of powerlessness in disguise?

Something I said must have moved her. Or else she was just lonely. Suddenly, she tiptoed around her desk, dropped to her knees and performed frantic, bristly fellatio while I studied the adorable kitten-tangled-in-yarn painting over her desk. In retrospect, I wondered if it was painted by a convict.
If I were a child molester,
I remember thinking when she put me in her mouth,
I’d paint kittens.
With that unwanted insight, my prospects shriveled, I showed the impulsive mental health professional the love and respect I felt for her by shrinking in her mouth. Sometimes women are as romantic as men. Beside the kitten, I noticed a black and white picture of Fabio. Signed. I couldn’t make out the inscription, but it looked meaningful. If the kittens hadn’t killed my erection, the sight of Fabio stomped on it with man sandals.

At the end of the session, the police therapist informed me that I had problems.

Two weeks later, I got the dread POP letter, the Police Officer Pension Board. They voted to deny. Citing, as a key factor, the therapist’s assessment that I was trying to “use the system.” All this happened before I actually quit the force—after I met Tina, nearly became a congressman, fucked things up and began my stellar career as an independent investigation professional on the West Coast.

Now I sat hunched in the sticky kitchenette, facing inmate files and breathing mold spores. I couldn’t tell what made the furniture sweat, if the moisture came from within, oozing out, or vice versa. Wherever I sat there was a sodden
thwop
and squish, like the sound a shoe makes stepping on a snail in a puddle.

The first file I needed to see was Mengele’s. If it
was
Mengele. I reached for the stack—then stopped myself.

Until now, I had focused on everything but the simple reality of sitting across from a real-life Josef Mengele. I suddenly realized my naïveté. You couldn’t just pull up a chair and start chatting with an evil legend.

You had to prepare.

But how
could
you prepare?

I pushed the files away. Then pulled them back toward me again.

I have never done a brave thing in my life when I had time to think about it first. And this moment was no exception. I didn’t know if I was more scared that the Butcher of Auschwitz would be here or that he wouldn’t. So, instead of bold action, I decided to kick back and give in to the ball sweat, palpitations and shortness of breath of a well-earned panic attack.

I had put my trust in an old man who broke into my home, berated me, showed me some two-bit celebrity candids and beat me with his handicap appliance before offering me a job.

But why obsess on past idiocies with the good times to come? What if I met Mengele and just lost it? Started to cry? Or what if all this was a front and I was actually being
delivered
to him? Like a lab animal. How did I know he still wasn’t doing experiments? Maybe my own shoe-leather liver—the third of three transplants, thanks for asking—would be used for some infernal, Mengele-esque purpose. They kept putting them in, and they kept going bad. If the doctor were still in the camps, he could transplant the severely hep C–infected organ into the body of a twelve-year-old Gypsy. Just to see if it made the young Romany scream at his family, then short out and spiral into a hate-nap.

Which is where I was headed. Until, with three brain cells still awake, I landed on a way to actually do the job I was so scared of.

I wouldn’t run away from my quarry—but I wouldn’t run toward him either. Instead of riffling through the prisoner files, scoping out a ninety-seven-year-old’s mug shot and yelling “Bingo” when I found it, I’d pluck files out of the pile at random. Leave it to the penal gods.

Surprise required less preparation.

I started with a yellow file. Holding my breath—I was ready—I opened to a photocopied mug shot of Prisoner C-099419. A delicate, sleepy-eyed young felon with long hair and a face as flat and expressionless as a Mayan king’s. Definitely not Mengele material.

ERNESTO NEGRANTE, 24, AKA CRANKY H [Hispanic] Four counts of assault with a deadly weapon. 18th Street gang member, L.A.

The file rambled. As if somebody had sat down and read a bunch of other files and scribbled up highlights—or left out some details.

CO NOTES: Inmate jumped into La Eme 11/06.
ARRESTING OFFICER HECTOR DELGADO: Perp in vehicle with his brother TITO NEGRANTE AKA JOKER KGA [known gang associate] when Tito was shot. Perp claimed brother picked him up on the way home from school. QUOTE: How’m I supposed to know Joker was so dusted he’d start shootin’ outside the cop shop? UNQUOTE

I skipped ahead…. Cranky was a one-eight. Eighteenth Street. He was seventeen. His mug shot showed the face of a frail youngster. Seventeen going on twelve. Sentenced as an adult to ten years in Quentin. Now he was a soldier in the Mexican mafia. Which explained why he’d signed up for drug class. I’d read, in the L.A.
Times
“California Section” crime page, that La Eme had issued an edict that members inside get off meth. Or face the consequences.

I gave Cranky an approving tap.
At least you’ll be motivated.

Next, a red file. Why not?

MOVERN DINKLE, 39. African-American. Eleven months, parole violation. ARP [alcohol related parole violation].
Subject released 1.27.08 at approximately 1100. Returned to facility 1.27.081700.

Free for six hours? My fucking hero! Something about luck that bad gives a man hope. I couldn’t explain it, but I already liked him.

Subj. prev. served 97 months of 144 mo. sentence. Five counts, involuntary manslaughter…

Five? A large coffee stain blotted the rest of that page, up to:

…
completed alcohol education program.

Paper-clipped to the file was a small scissored-out newspaper article: “Under the influence, Mr. Dinkle had a head-on collision with a van full of Cub Scouts. Four scouts were killed on impact. The scoutmaster, a high school track star, Iraq vet, Sunday school teacher and dad-to-be, was left a quadriplegic before succumbing to viral pneumonia….”

ARRESTING OFFICER: At approximately 1300 perp cited for urinating in muffin case at Starbucks
.

“Starbucks? Movern, listen!” I leaned down close so Movern’s mug shot could hear me better. “Nobody drinks at Starbucks. What do they teach you in alcohol education, anyway?”

No doubt, with my help and expertise in the field, the next time Movern got sprung, he might make it twenty-four hours before getting sloppy drunk and exposing himself again.

The next file was written by hand on carbon paper. Quaint.

INMATE D-7664C2 ROSCOE BENTON, 55. African-American.

Beside Roscoe’s prints and mug shot was a more recent photo, from the
Bay Guardian.
“Inmate Doing Life Helps Others Live.” The young Roscoe glared like Miles Davis and the old one, down thirty-six years, stared back like Buddha, if Buddha’d been a lanky, locked-down brother with a soul patch, a beanie and eyes that did not take the same things seriously that you did. I stared into those eyes for a minute and felt mysteriously better before reading how Benton got life for killing a plainclothes cop while holding up a dry cleaner. The officer, in fact, was there
to pick up his uniform.

What are the odds?

It didn’t seem fair. How was Roscoe supposed to know the man was police if his blues were on a hanger?

Roscoe, I learned, founded the Black Guerilla Fighters prison gang—the BGF—at San Quentin in 1971 with George Jackson, his fellow Panther. The late George Jackson. Then something happened. In his forties, Roscoe’d earned a GED, BA and masters in comparative religion. Now he ran inmate meditation classes and the “Living with Hep C and HIV Inside” support group. I placed my hand on the file like it had the power to heal. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to hear my own tiny whisper.

“I need some fucking help, Roscoe!”

I myself had dodged AIDS, back in my needle jockey days, but not that hepatitis C. My liver had gone New Media, fully viral, and not even nine months of rage-inducing interferon shots in my belly fat had been able to cure it. The stuff powered the viral load to under twenty million, down from a bloated seventy mil but still high enough for my liver to function as efficiently as a paperweight.

Hep C was like having an old-fashioned anarchist’s bomb implanted in your liver, waiting for the fuse to burn down and blow you into full-blown cirrhosis, then over the finish line to cancer. You just never knew how long the fuse was. But nothing, as any hepatotoxicologist could tell you, got it burning faster than alcohol. This made for some regret over my decision to start drinking again. Then again, I was getting tired of organ number three. Time for fresh meat!

I’d found the box of wine under the sink when I looked for something to poison the roaches. If they even were roaches. From the sound they made skittering in the cabinets they might have been small farm animals.

I hadn’t planned on drinking the stuff. I’d just wanted to see how it tasted. Wine in a box! Gallo Sparkling Rosé. It tickled the palate like melted-down hospital gloves and Splenda. The stuff probably would have killed the roaches, or at least disoriented them, but I didn’t want to share. There weren’t any glasses, so I drank straight from the box, out of a plastic pop-up nozzle that scratched the inside of my mouth. I had, I confess, a checkered history of oral hygiene. I fell out of the habit of dental visits when I had a habit of heroin. After Tina left, I developed a burning urge for root canal, generally followed by a prescription or two for Percocet. (Or one of its loving cousins.)

Now my gums bled when I said hello. Which meant easy access for any strain of hell canker that the last social climber who slurped out of the nozzle had left there. Along with fatigue and brain fog, the hypotenuse of the hep C triangle was a compromised immune system. “Compromised” meant that if someone had a fever in Cleveland, I caught the flu. But I wouldn’t die from it. And even if I did, I’d probably be too confused and logy to notice.

I tamped the blood off my lip with the back of my wrist. Took another sip, careful not to spill any on the files, which I had sworn to give back to the warden. I couldn’t tell if I had a buzz or a migraine and stared out the window of my trailer, trying to decide.

I rarely drank, even before the five years I stopped taking anything that affected me “from the neck up.” And now I remembered why. Alcohol never made me happy—it just made unhappiness embarrassing and sloppy. For a professional drug addict, alcohol was what you got when you couldn’t get what you needed. And you always needed something.