by Doug Weaver
There was no explicit timetable for Rick’s plan. It was just assumed that he’d tackle the task with his usual efficiency, which, to the administrators meant alacrity, but to Rick meant thoroughness. Rick, unbeknownst to his Cri-Life masters, allocated himself huge swaths of time to interrogate the residents whom he wanted to give the heave-ho to. It became common practice that his questioning of one resident could last for multiple days, which, in Rick’s mind not only guaranteed him steady and rewarding employment, but also scratched a heretofore unscratchable itch somewhere deep in his soul.
One happy (at least for Rick) byproduct of this bloated approach, was that it was rendered a process that was not unlike watching paint dry, or grass grow – or listening to the music of Philip Glass, or even that John Cage piece called ORGAN2/ASLP that had, to this point, been performed continuously for thirty-plus years in an abandoned cathedral in Germany somewhere, and was written to last 639 years, which rendered it the world’s only piece of music that necessarily placed appreciation of anything but mere fractions of its whole outside the capabilities of humankind – or any earthly life form outside the genus of redwood trees – or there’s that thousand-year-old olive tree, but that’s probably not really true because religion – because each change in the music – no matter how small – took place every six years: Rick’s questioning mechanism proceeded so slowly that it took the residents it was aimed at too long to discern its true intent. Once that line was crossed, however – once the correlation between being approached and questioned by Rick and the pursuant dismissal from the facility was discerned, wholesale, albeit whispered, panic set in among the most sinister and marginal of Cri-Life residents. When Rick approached you, you were a goner.
Because of Cri-Life’s naïve population – at least in terms of meeting Rick’s Inquisition, prayer and luck – or prayers for luck – became the favored means by which residents hoped to be spared, because they were mostly painfully aware that even though Cri-Life wasn’t perfect, and was often difficult, it at least gave them three squares and a daily shower and a clean bed, not to mention a chance to imagine a life not locked up, or a life that could come to its conclusion by natural, meaning unstabbed/unshot hopefully peaceful means. It became a common practice for the most hardened criminals to band together in their respective rooms late at night into earnest circles where they would pray for deliverance from Rick’s attention. But it was the Hispanic residents – the ones who put on Spread most nights – who carried this fate-laden heavenly solicitation process to its ultimate form. What these tattooed gang-bangers lacked in real world sophistication was indemnified with a generous reliance on superstition, handed down, probably, by this or that abuela from the old country south of the border. Shortly after Rick’s scheme was deduced by them, they began attaching talismans made up of collections of their pubic hair and toenails to the doorjambs of their rooms, objects with storied magical qualities which they hoped would help steer Rick away from seeing them as objects of his inquiries, much as Obi-Wan Kenobi used The Force to steer the scrutiny of various Imperial Storm Troopers from the likes of the lovable and adorable droids, R2D2 and C3PO.
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Leading this practice, though, were the females of the house who, rather than bundling tiny clumps of their hair or nails and attaching them to their rooms’ entrances, a strategy that the girls dismissed as being impoverished, provincial, and actually kind of quaint when compared to the magical powers of the Goddesses who ruled the earth in millennia past, les filles hispaniques et leur amies blanches et noires smeared spots of menstrual blood onto their doorjambs, a practice that imbued the ethos of the female floors with a certain feminine mystery so thick that not only the homosexual male staff members, but most of the overtly hetero ones too, began to secretly fear a necessary trip to a female floor, a task that came to be referred to as a dreaded journey to The Fallopian Jungle.
While the original Inquisitions of medieval Europe (and seventeenth century Massachusetts) relied, for the most part, on convincing suspected heretics to implicate their friends, families and neighbors in service of keeping their own asses a safe distance from the gallows or the fires, Rick, because of Cri-Life’s really tiny (in comparison) population, was able to completely disregard (for the most part) any similar strategy. He didn’t need snitches to achieve his goals. He knew whom he wanted to get rid of. But because of pesky state regulations designed to trace cause and effect – and ultimate indemnification from the ubiquitous lawsuits that have rendered California a society that more closely resembles one from the island of Japan where citizens are maniacally protected from every imagined obstacle to complete safety: If the Grand Canyon were somehow located in Japan rather than Arizona, it would make perfect sense that the entire canyon’s perimeter would be – due to an unquestioned penchant to protect sightseers – lined with probably several thousand state-paid – all wearing freshly pressed blue skirts and white gloves – “safety personnel” to serve as a smiling and impossibly polite barrier and who would hold hands because of the fear that people just might jump off the edge if left to their own devices in order to protect themselves from gravity and free will, Rick was bound to elicit connections, be they real or imagined, between George P. and those whose next stop was Victory Boulevard. Rick’s lengthy questioning amounted to nothing more than an elaborate pantomime. Even though there were fewer than a dozen residents who actually got high with George, Rick was easily able to get residents to implicate their best friends and acquaintances, usually with promises of preferred treatment (which never really materialized): “If you tell me who you know for a fact helped George get his drugs into the facility, things will go easier for you.”
As in the aforementioned Spanish Q&A, the Cri-Life pogroms had virtually the same effect, as premature, meaning before brains were completely washed and cured, ejection from the program, and actually equaled a modern-day version of Auto-de-Fe, which landed residents of the program out into the unprotected ether of society, where they were about as inconspicuous as a suspected Jew being burned at the stake before crowds of blood-thirsty Catholics, and ultimately proved to be just as lethal, since the preferred destination for most of the de-housed Cri-Life population amounted to anyplace with a baggie and a spoon, and resulted in either a mercifully quick overdose, or being reported to the authorities who quickly dispensed the prolonged torture of being returned to confinement in the state prison system.
Several residents and staff members who were kicked out of the facility and the surrounding circumstances:
1. Shoshanna. The decision to give Shoshanna the boot came before George’s heroin scheme blew up. It was deduced that she’d violated the non-com rule, even though no firsthand evidence was ever presented. During high level meetings of the pre George P. debacle where various residents were evaluated for either retention or kicked-outedness, Rick suggested that no one really knew Shoshanna nor her intentions regarding faithfully following the House rules nor her post Cri-Life intentions as they pertained to following the funnel back into society, especially whether or not she really wanted to stop using drugs, if not for the rest of her life, then for the State-prescribed length of five years, a codified interval that spelled “success” in terms of recovery, and which added to the viability quotient of the facility, which was used in determining whether or not to award large chunks of tax-payer cash that kept the Cri-Life wheels turning from one fiscal year to the next. Rick posited – although he never admitted to having any evidence – that Shoshanna had freely and with malice aforethought communicated with Rogarth during one of their many visits to the AIDS Clinic. It was, after all, her overt enthusiasm at volunteering at every opportunity that sealed her fate, said enthusiasm having caused tongues to wag, gazes to narrow and judgments to sprout, basically taking on the patina of too-good-to-be-true, which has just about no place in the taxonomy of Cri-Life levels of recovery. After only a bit of necessary head
shaking and teeth sucking, the staff voted to send Shoshanna packing, which meant, of course, a speedy ride directly to state prison, which was a shame really because there is little in life that’s as magnificent as driving down Victory Boulevard at ten in the morning or two in the afternoon and seeing one of the hardcore Cri-Life bitches on foot in front of the facility, whether she’d been kicked out or not, and making her way down the sidewalk – when it seems pretty obvious that being out in public during daylight hours is not only a novelty for most of them, they don’t even try to fit in. They’re as aware as anyone else on earth that their mere presence in the course of normal affairs amounts to a giant fuck you, whether it’s the way their hair falls down their backs, their overt sexuality, their collections of tattoos and/or track marks. It’s certainly all of the these, but more than anything it’s the gait – the tempo and rhythm of how they walk – it’s like maybe seeing a grand cruise ship that, for some reason, had found itself out of the water, and who instinctively knows that trying to fit in would be futile, so onward it moves, making its way back to water or nighttime or whatever. Even someone so misshapen as Shoshanna would be a wonder to behold if she’d been given a chance to make her way down the boulevard free from the protective Cri-Life umbra.
2. El Ocho. Even though his drug tests came up clean, El Ocho (referred to during staff meetings as Bernardo Guzman) was kicked out because he was neither silent nor effusive during his treatment. Cri-Life funding: the State of California’s Department of Corrections…about 1/6th of the money paid by private insurance or family fortunes. El Ocho had been able to turn down the inevitable offer of Ryan White funding, which was even less than that from the State…obvious reasons. Connection to George P.: close, because that’s how Rick wanted it to be.
3. Eric P. Part of the HIV/AIDS cohort; Ryan White funding. Connection to George P., minimal. Arrived at Cri-Life because of his status of Failed Alumnus of LA’s only 100 percent homosexual recovery facility: Van Nuys Recovery House. To Eric’s credit, he stood up to the VNRH’s full-time and storied Mistress, Bethie Blatt, who runs the place with a muscular infallibility, an iron fist inside a titanium glove. Unlike Rick’s ad hoc system of rooting out undesirables from Cri-Life’s ranks, Ms. Blatt was – and has always been within anyone’s memory – a full-time Seer, Confessor and Inquisitor. She alone decides whether any given addict can stay or leave, a position of power she jealously and maniacally protects. Eric did last for a respectable 2.5 months inside the walls of the House of Van Nuys, and while there he dutifully snitched on himself and others and immediately rang the “horny bell” whenever he (or she, depending on the available plumbing) began to have amorous thoughts about another resident of the House, two of the most basic components of an unimpeded, meaning Blatt-less stay in the facility. Ms. Blatt dismissed him from residency after stating that she was simply unconvinced as to the purity of Eric’s intentions, or the quality of his honesty. Fortunately for Eric, Cri-Life decided to take him in with a minimum of being “wait listed,” which kept Eric’s probation for drug trafficking from being violated, one of the stipulations of which was uninterrupted treatment at a recovery house…”uninterrupted” being a fairly fluid term when interpreted by overworked prosecutors in courtrooms in the City of Angels. Unfortunately, though, he arrived at Cri-Life while burdened with a healthy dose of VNRH ethos/vernacular, two examples of which go something like this: Claiming transitive verbal properties for the word “incest,” a detail that grew from living for a period of time within a certain tribe which placed uncommon value on the act of confession, whether it was true or not, and which it was believed added salience to the cause side of the cause-effect equation when asked the question: Why do you think you want to use drugs in the first place, the answer to which could be anything under the sun, but somehow clutched on to the reprehensible act of incest, a noun, which was allowed – and even encouraged behind VNRH walls – to traverse the linguistic gulf dividing parts of speech so that it came to be accepted as a verb: I was incested, a revealed detail that almost always elicited generous amounts of downcast gazes, shaking heads and sympathy, and which absolved the speaker of any responsibility at all for the state of his/her crumbling life. The second unfortunate vestige of VN influence was claiming verb-hood (another verb – what’s the deal with verbs anyway?) for the first part of the noun transistor when describing the graduation process from the Van Nuys Recovery House itself, the non-word transist, which, one can only imagine, was an idea hatched by some Jurassic pervert who’d come to reason in a certain decade – at least someone who should have known better, given the quality of education as it pertained to grammar instruction in California public schools in the 1960s and ‘70s, so he/she was probably not listening in class or was challenged somehow, which is fine and dandy, but really, stay on your side of the street, please, and stop making up words because even though transist seems like it would, on a good day, suggest movement or matriculation or graduation or whatever, from one thing to another, because it almost rhymes with transit, but it’s just the base of the word transistor, which was a word ubiquitous in the 1960s because they were the life’s blood of tiny radios (I got a transistor radio for Christmas!) and great-grandfatherly computers the size of box cars, and is defined as an electronic component to be used to either switch the path of electrical power or amplify it. Transist was an invented word pressed into service to describe the process of completing the Van Nuys Recovery House program: I’m transisting on Friday. Please come, I’d love to see you there! a ceremony festooned with freshly printed Certificates of Completion (all 8.5 X 11 for some weird reason) and are dripping with momentous moments and grateful gratitude, and was actually, whether it was designed for this or not, a vehicle with which to beg for a measly number of square feet of some sober older homo’s couch where the freshly minted, sober graduate might park his out-of-work ass for a few weeks while he sorts things out. At least, as a verb, transist was stripped of its transitive properties, which somehow endowed it with less vitality than maybe a word like murder when used as a verb. Whether it was explicitly stated or not, these two VNRH details had a tough time finding any bedrock of acceptance or even tolerance at Cri-Life, because – who knows why – but they nevertheless made Rick’s job just that much easier.
4. Garrett. Hunky, corn-fed (wholesome looking) one-legged guy in his mid-twenties who’d earned the title of resident tech shortly after he reached the ninety-day mark of his stay at Cri-Life. State of California prison funding. Unlimited energy and enthusiasm; unflagging adherence to the House rules and their spirit. If you met Garrett on the street, he could easily be pegged as a Mormon missionary, albeit one with a prosthetic leg, a handicap he bore with unusual good cheer. Garrett has often inspired profound disappointment in many of the homos of a certain age inside the facility because his genuine altruism for All People of All Stripes has been mistaken for an urge for intimacy of the cock-sucking variety. Once it became apparent that his appetites were Jesus fueled instead of queer curious, most of the homos (at least the ones with enfeebled imaginations) gathered their balls and stomped off the playground. Some of the more savvy fags, though, nevertheless still tried to engage Garrett, as they had a sneaking suspicion that he’d dangled his organic non-plastic toes into the steamy waters of Lake Homo at one or several times in his young life. His plastic leg hardly slows him down at all, as, on a daily basis – oftentimes multiple times per day, he bounds up and down the stairs leading to floors two and three at the facility where he is tasked to deliver important messages to the residents or procure the presence of someone or other so that Cri-Life justice can be meted out. One remarkable bit of dissonance that defines Garrett is the way his presenting demeanor contrasts so severely with the story of how he’d lost his leg. It was in a dope deal. Not the kind of dope deal that most of us are familiar with, the kind that consist of amounts of money less than $100 and dope amounts in increments measured in grams or maybe a bit more. The kind of do
pe deal that got Garrett’s leg blown off with the blast of a sawed-off shot gun was the kind measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars and multiple pounds of product. And it doesn’t matter who shot whom and for what – suffice it to say that Garrett found himself on the wrong end of the barrel, and has, since that afternoon in the back of that van, been scarred for life.
5. Balthozar Allendé. Flush with cash from an impossibly privileged family headed by male progenitors who’ve been a staple in the United States Diplomatic Corps for generations. Balthozar presents as asexual, not because he’s not sexy or anything – he’s simply uninterested – in anything. Nothing – at least nothing within the walls of the facility – arouses his curiosity. He seems to meet life with an overly complete repertoire of yawns. When pressed to participate, it becomes clear that, being a bona fide heroin addict, he’s escaped the effects of the legal transgressions that any addict, regardless of funding sources, at several times now and then, take part in, due to dope sickness, which is the ultimate motivator, not only because his family has been there to bail him out, but also blind fucking luck. He’s been arrested numerous times, but never convicted of anything more serious than trespassing, which seems to be the “go-to” infraction of choice for offenders who can afford private counsel, no matter what the underlying offense really is – short of maybe murder or something like that, though. And he’s polite. His stay at Cri-Life represents the tiniest of draws on the petty cash drawer of his family’s substantial coffers. One way that describes Balthozar’s demeanor consists of imagining him the director of gospel choir at a Black church, and who in his progress through endless days of potent ennui, instead of rehearsing and performing a blindingly rousing rendition of the gospel staple “O Happy Day!,” which is the musical embodiment of the ultimate acceptance of God’s joyful deliverance and redemption from the costs of sin, Balthozar would have chosen as part of the choir’s repertoire an anthem titled “O Acceptable Day…,” (elipses included so that there can be no question as to his intentions, which are meandering and pointless at best.) More than anyone at Cri-Life, Balthozar Allendé represents the greatest threat to the primacy of Rick, at least as it might erode his pretention to royalty. Balthozar’s probably rimmed (and been rimmed) by more legitimate kings and queens than Rick can imagine, which renders Rick’s Queen Jadwida story pretty flaccid in comparison, so in Rick’s mind he had to go.