Pain Killers (7 page)

Now I remembered.

By the time I mustered the inner strength to stop reminiscing and go back to the files, it had gotten dark. My lower back was killing me, and my thighs itched where they had been in contact with whatever was soaking out of the seat cushions. I didn’t know where the light switches were. My lighter, for the cigarettes I no longer didn’t smoke, was in the pocket of a jacket I couldn’t see. It was amazing how fast things went to shit when you started drinking, after not drinking. An hour and a half after I’d begun to slurp from the wine carton, I was already reeling in the dark, cracking my knuckles and scratching myself, gripped by cellular torment and trembling at the notion of trying to make it through the next five minutes. What I really wanted to do was pour the sparkling rosé up my nose to kill the stench.

Instead, I began to sneeze. I tried to believe this was from trailer spores, but I knew it was the Windexy Gallo.

Just retasting the stuff resulted in testicle pain. I clamped a hand over my mouth and nostrils, but I could not escape the smell. I tried to imagine the man who’d occupied the trailer before me. I unclamped my nostrils and shut my eyes. Breathing in, I visualized a molting pile of sweat socks and frayed underpants. In the middle of that sat a naked fat man eating rotten meat out of a greasy paper bag, jerking off over the August ’99
Shaved Amputeens
. I could almost hear his sock-swaddled meat slapping off the face of the one-armed cover girl.
I know what you want, you little stump slut!

No doubt the snailback’s previous occupant had pleasured himself precisely where I was sitting. As if to back up my wine-box vision, the banquette gave a phantom squish.

One can only do so much damage in an alcoholic stupor (assuming one is not behind the wheel, like Movern). But, as hard as I tried, I never made it to unconscious. I bolted out of the breakfast nook, swiping the air in front of my face like it was trying to bite me. It took a while to find the door. I fumbled with the locks, convinced a cockroach had flown into my mouth.

Spitting and gasping, I forced the lock and hurled myself in the dirt beside the trailer, where I threw up with quiet dignity.

I remained in the dark, wondering if my performance had been recorded by the video cameras mounted on the prison walls. Perhaps they could run it for my drug awareness class, a sterling example of the kind of life they too could enjoy. The possibilities were endless.

The lights were on in the double-wide opposite the fence. This was what Rincin had called the “love shack.” A conjugal visit in progress.

I stood up and saw a face in the double-wide’s porthole window and dropped to the ground again.

It couldn’t be.

When I raised my head again, the face was gone.

It…could…not…be….

But it was.

The door opened and I saw Tina, naked. She stepped out of the trailer and lit a cigarette. Even if I couldn’t completely make out her face, her naked sway gave her away. Tina liked to light up naked outside at night. And she swayed when she smoked. The tip of what I knew by the waft of stale menthol was one of her bought-by-the-carton Newports glowed brighter orange. The sight was so familiar, I forgot I was watching and not remembering. Somebody else lurched out the door. In the moonlight I saw the shaved head, steroid bulk and full-body ink of a man who doesn’t work for Prudential Life Insurance. When the bullet-headed freak lunged for my ex-wife, I stood back up. Like I could do anything. Like I had to. If anybody could take care of herself it was Tina.

Tina turned, almost casually, and the moon went behind a cloud. In the darkness I could see the orange chaser of her lit cigarette moving fast. Then sparks. Then nothing. Just a muffled
“FUCK”
as the man staggered backward, clutching his arm, and stepped back into the open trailer. Tina stopped just long enough in the doorway to light another Newport and show me her body in silhouette.

We’d been married a year before I could finally decipher her body. Her left shoulder angled slightly higher than her right, due to a drunken stepfather’s penchant for swinging her around by her right arm when she was a baby. She claimed her earliest memory was flying sideways through the air, the centrifugal force so huge the stepfather got nosebleeds and her little-girl shoulder lurched permanently out of its socket. This lent her, from the front, the aspect of someone permanently shrugging off the world. It was subtle. But in profile, her skewed shoulders created the unsettling impression that whichever breast was further away was bigger. She once explained that this had to do with her tit lacuna and cited some law of Newton’s. Whatever the physics involved, Tina knew how to dress and assemble herself so as to look even. But naked, splashed with moonlight, the dipping collarbone and slightly off-kilter tits were on spectacular display. Even in the dark her nipples looked ironic. She couldn’t be anybody else. As though I’d been spun around myself, I rolled onto my back on the whirling earth and stared up at the impossibility of everything.

The first night we spent together, Tina had sworn that she would quit smoking when she could hold a cigarette under her breasts. Ten years later, she was still smoking. The gift was genetic, she said. Her grandmother grew up on a tobacco farm.
“Nobody ever talks about white sharecroppers.”
Her natal mother, who also picked the leaf as a child, was the model for the “Mud Flap Girl,” the kneeling, long-haired, buxom female silhouette made popular by long-haul truckers in the seventies. As far as I knew, she never collected royalties. I doubted it was true, but then, what was?

I lifted my head, considered some kind of rescue—at least a call for help—then let myself fall back in the dirt. What did I owe some muscle-bound con? He married her. If she maimed him with a lit cigarette, it was his fault. I hoped she didn’t blind him.

Now I was glad I was drunk—or at least sweating and nauseated, a close second. Without the antifreeze, the import of what I’d just seen would have had me chewing mud. But Gallo in cardboard could only do so much. The stars loomed like threats. The stone walls hummed. Why had I agreed to go to prison and pass myself off as sober and capable? Was it to forget that Tina had left me? That maybe I’d made her leave?

I didn’t know how love worked. But I was an expert on how it didn’t. Once the worst thing I could imagine happening happened, the only thing that could take my mind off it was something worse. Sometimes I had to really work to find it. But now I was lucky.

I obsessed about what she and the wide white felon were doing on their conjugal visit. I had a peep-show booth lodged in my brain, and I could not stop feeding it quarters. What were the odds my newly ex wife would marry an incarcerated muscle-head and have trailer sex in a San Quentin love hut—the very night I arrived in San Quentin?

One thing about Tina, she always had good stories.

The night before she left, after nine years of marriage, Tina told me she was four months abstinent.

My first thought was,
If you’re abstinent, then who have I been having sex with?

I’d just rolled off her, pleased with myself. The memory inspired a retro-cringe.

She said it wasn’t that kind of abstinence. She meant abstinent—as in not binging, not purging. She confessed that she’d been making herself throw up since she was nine. I didn’t have to ask why. Her father was still doing time. I was all set to say something supportive when she announced that, working her Overeaters Anonymous program, she’d realized that I was the reason she’d been throwing up. My moods made me hard to tolerate; she had to get numb. I wasn’t doing well in the private investigation business. Worse, I took my work home with me. “How can I be the reason,” I asked, more defensive than I’d intended, “if you started when you were nine?”

“You’re the reason I’m doing it now. You’re so angry.”

I had hurt a man in traffic that same evening. I ran him off the road, yanked him out of his car and threw him against the side of his baby-blue Honda Civic. He’d given me the finger trying to get on the 110 South. I hadn’t expected anybody so large to be in a Civic. Hadn’t expected him to come out swinging. I’m not a great fighter, but I know enough to jab somebody in the neck before they get a punch off. Lucky for me he crumbled. That happens if you crunch a windpipe. Which I did, with a smile on my face, so quickly that I was able to get down on my knees and act like I’d stopped to help a man having a heart attack. Before taking his license I whispered that I’d find out where he lived and eat his heart if he tried to do anything. Then I got back in the Lincoln, where Tina waited with a face like a death mask, and we drove home in silence.

“So what am I supposed to do?” I asked when she made her announcement.

“Deal with your anger. Or don’t. What I have to do is leave.”

“Why?”

“I just told you. If I don’t stop I’m going to burn out my esophagus and die. The stomach acid has already eaten half my teeth. I don’t want our child doing it.”

“What child?”

“If we ever have one. Just thinking about it makes me want to die. That I could do damage…”

I was shaken at my cluelessness. How could I have been living and sleeping with her and not known? It was like finding out you were a collaborator—when you didn’t know there was a war going on. Tina had had a lifetime of pain and weirdness before our paths crossed, before she hooked up with me—but the thought that I caused this was too much. I wanted to rip my own heart out with a claw hammer.

I’d held her while she cried. It was windy outside, and I stared out the window of our bedroom at a walnut tree that seemed to be wagging its finger at me. Tina recovered fast, as if she’d never even cried. She eyed me almost sympathetically.

“So you’re bulimic,” I said, hearing the words come out wrong before I even uttered them, “and that’s my fault?”

“Until you can get rid of the buttons, you have to get rid of the button pushers.”

“Is that why you got rid of Marvin?”

When she gets angry, Tina’s cheekbones sharpen up like Faye Dunaway’s, but more feral. I watched her transformation from grief to rage, in awe of her peculiar beauty. Even with cleavage so unapologetically asymmetric, she
had
something. I breathed in and out, determined not to react, to just listen.

“Collateral damage. You want to know how many obese women roll over on their babies every year? It’s a disease, honey. Like alcoholism. Just as fatal to the people around it as to the people who have it.”

“I guess I’m lucky to be alive,” I said, attempting to inject some humor into the dialogue. “I like it when you roll on top of me.”

She placed her hand on my cheek. “Why couldn’t you have been this sweet before now?”

“You know me,” I said, “the sweet gene’s recessive.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “Marvin was sweet. And he was also a repellent idiot.”

“Well, you showed him!”

Marvin, for the record, was her husband. The one I found dead after she’d Dranoed his Lucky Charms. I was the homicide detective. We were in a small town outside Pittsburgh. I threw the tainted cereal in the garbage disposal before the evidence techs showed up. They called it an accident. It was not what Hollywood would call a “meet cute.”

I knew she was guilty. But I fell in love on the spot. Insane as it sounds, the situation made me feel protective and safe at the same time. But now she had reached the point where she had to puke herself numb just to tolerate my company. Being born a Jew, guilt stuck to me like lint to Velcro. On top of which, it now looked like the real reason we split was so she could free herself up for a studly convict. An Aryan brother she could bone in a prison pump-wagon…Love!

I’m leaving out some details. I had a sixteen-year-old daughter from an earlier marriage. Lola wrote occasionally to ask for money in her mother’s handwriting. She lived with my ex-wife, Donna, who did public relations for pharmaceutical firms. I was in love with her samples. Donna caught me riffling her bags for painkillers on our honeymoon. That was before I cleaned up. I talked my way out of it by saying I needed a Kleenex. Then she caught me again, stealing sample packs she was supposed to distribute to doctors. After that she changed the locks, had the marriage annulled and still refers to me as “He who shall not be mentioned.” I’d made my peace with that. Though it was hard knowing I didn’t see my child as often as I wanted to. Her thinking was, “Just because you love her doesn’t mean it’s good for her to have you around.” Needless to say, things didn’t get better once Tina came on the scene.

Until our divorce—my second—Tina and I lived together in a small house in Los Angeles. I’d made a semi-decent living dividing my time between being a private investigation professional and a consultant on television shows and movies that wanted to sound “authentic.” There was, like Rincin said, a whole industry of ex–law enforcement, ex-criminal, ex-gangbanger, ex-anybody-who’d-lived-on-either-side-of-“crime” types who were able to capitalize on the entertainment industry’s appetite. A studio executive would pay money just to sit in a room with somebody who once sat in a room with somebody real. I was a double threat, an erstwhile cop and erstwhile dope fiend. It happens. Not to brag.

To my surprise, there was an investigation into the handling of Marvin’s death. They decided that I had tainted the crime scene. I confessed, pleading narcotic inebriation. I was “self-medicating.” I was remanded to a twenty-eight-day spin-dry: hospital withdrawal followed by rehabilitation. The real problem was that I fell in love with the perp.

Why forget the good times?

I was still in touch with the doctor. He was an “addictionologist.”

While in rehab, I caught him fixing in the handicap restroom. Which, at four in the morning, he’d forgotten to lock. Afterward, it was our little secret. I didn’t extort much: painkiller scripts whenever I wanted them, sleeping pills as needed for Tina and progesterone for her cat, who had feline osteoporosis. I later found out the hormones were for her. After hoarking the calcium out of her system for thirty years, Tina had the bone density of an eighty-year-old. But she was still hot.