Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  If the counsellors are careful, we RAs are especially careful not to pull stuff out of a client. We’re allowed to listen if someone comes to us, but if something heavy comes up, we tell him to talk to his counsellor in the morning. And, of course, record it in the log. But, for reasons I mentioned earlier, I’m an easy guy to talk to. The guys who are into getting clean, and some of the guys who aren’t, come to me to talk. Sometimes they talk about nothing — girlfriends or wives or meetings or the shitty food. Sometimes they talk about prison, or their program, or wanting to use. More often than not it is that. Every minute, every second, these guys want to stick something in their arm or up their nose and just blow the world away like so much trash. Clients sit in the chair across from my desk and pick at track scabs on their arms or lick their lips or rub their noses. Anything — a sound, a smell, a TV program — can remind them of a time they got high and it was sweet and good. They fight it every second; if you haven’t seen struggle like that, when what’s killing you and beating you is inside you, you haven’t seen a struggle at all. I sit there with tears in my eyes listening to some skinny guy who is jonesing so bad he can taste it. This guy is nothing but a bag of bones with hollow cheeks and jaundiced, sallow skin from near liver failure and malnutrition and he can think of nothing but pumping more hot lead into his arms.

  Darrel, the ex-client who haunts me most, was like that. He had been in the centre a while — a cokehead. My age, but messed up. He’d been pretty once, and might have been again if he’d stayed straight. But at eleven months clean he was still underweight and his nose bled all the time. Eventually he was going to have to go in and have the inside of it cauterized. The cocaine had eroded the linings in the nasal passages. Happens all the time.

  Darrel walked around with a bloody Kleenex under his nose in the hallways. He had HIV, had been a gay hustler on the street for years, owed everyone and his dog money, had done a long stint in reform school in his teens and a little adult time in prison for Break and Enters (also known in treatment as B&Es — another addition to The Addict’s Alphabet). Anywhere else this guy would have been shunned like a leper. But not at the Sally Ann. The counsellors loved him. The RAs loved him. Hell, even the prison guys loved him, despite the fact that he was queer. I liked him because he reminded me of me. He even wrote in his entry journal, which all clients have to fill out when they come into the program, that he would have liked to be a writer, if things had worked out for him differently.

  Needless to say, though I’ll say it anyway, things didn’t.

  XLIV

  Darrel’s story was not much different from others I’d heard except that he had a retarded sister. She lived in a mental care facility uptown and he hadn’t seen her in years. He came from a small town a few hours north of the city — a couple of rivers, a few churches, lots of trees that change colour in the fall, and not much else. Came to the city right out of reform school. Took a parole job as a maintenance man in a hotel downtown. He’d always been fond of beer, and suddenly found himself more fond of it than ever. He had tried coke in reform school. “Just a little at first,” he wrote in his entry journal. “But ‘at first’ don’t last very long with that stuff. Man, that stuff drags you down fast.”

  Not fast enough apparently. Not so fast that Darrel didn’t have time to lose his job, hawk everything he owned, and end up on the street giving blow jobs for forty bucks a pop. When business was slow one night he held up a convenience store with a knife, got caught and spent two years at a Maximum Security up north. That stint in prison gave him the dreaded V.

  “Gay boys are popular there,” he wrote. “And I was one of the best.”

  In those days, nobody in prison used a condom. Safe sex was not getting caught by the guards.

  XLV

  I know most of this from Darrel’s files, and his entry journal. I sometimes read client files on shift when there is nothing else to do. I’m not allowed to do this. Only counsellors have access to client files beyond basic medical information.

  So sue me.

  XLVI

  Darrel got out eventually, and went back to sucking cock for a living. Got caught at that and got sent up again. Got out again and went back to work. Then one night he walked out on a bridge over the river and jumped. Simple as that.

  Luckily for Darrel, someone saw him do it.

  “And that’s when they brought me here,” he wrote in his journal.

  XLVII

  He did okay at first. Worked hard. Got a little happier. Went to meetings. But Darrel started getting quiet again. His counsellors noticed it. The other guys noticed it. Everyone tried to talk to him about it but he wouldn’t respond. At least he was coming home before curfew and never flunked the drug tests.

  XLVIII

  After it happened, I took Darrel’s file out each night once the guys were in bed and read through it. In the eleven months he was in treatment he told his counsellor a lot of heavy shit. Just about everything bad that could ever happen to a person had happened to this guy. All the outrage I’d ever felt as a result of any of the stories people told me was nothing compared to what I felt when I read Darrel’s file. All my pity and self-hatred couldn’t match what Darrel felt for himself. His father was a drunk who used to throw him against the fireplace for kicks when he was a kid. He told his counsellor about the kids in school who used to beat him up. Not just beat him up, but fucking brutalize him. Once a few of them held him down and carved his arm up with a rusty screw. He talked about his mother, who hanged herself in the bathroom of their little house when he was nine.

  Mythologizes mother and suicide, his counsellor had written in that session’s notes.

  No shit, Sherlock.

  XLIX

  There’s always a suicide watch on in the centre. Some of these guys, they really want to get better, but they know the odds. They know the likelihood of being ten percent of ten percent. And when they feel themselves slipping, see themselves out there again grubbing and scamming for money, doing anything to get high, some of them opt for that other option. It seems better than using again, but anybody who isn’t craving knows that it’s not. Any counsellor worth his salt would rather see a guy get high again than take the other route. You can always try to get clean again if you go out and get high. No one ever recovers from the alternative.

  Darrel chose the alternative. He waited until he knew that Adrian, the RA on duty that night, would be asleep. (Everyone knew that Adrian slept on the night shift, but no one had ever done anything about it.) He got up and crept out of the dorm room, still in his underwear, his belt in his hand. There is one utility closet on the whole floor, where the janitor keeps his supplies. It is supposed to be locked. Darrel knew it wasn’t.

  He’d put some gum in the locking mechanism that afternoon when the janitor had it open. You don’t spend all those years doing what Darrel did without picking up a few tricks. He went into the closet and hanged himself with his belt from the water pipes running exposed just below the ceiling.

  L

  I know, I know. I’ve worked here long enough. I’ve been on the planet long enough. We can’t really help anybody. Hell, we can’t even help ourselves. The only thing we can do is make up a good epitaph once the whole mess is over.

  This is my epitaph for Darrel Greene, short and sweet, like everything else about him: Darrel G. Finally, and at what cost, all is quiet and secure.

  LI

  Not so for the rest of us.

  The Sisters

  Who Gave

  Good Hope

  Where ignorance is bliss

  ’Tis folly to be wise.

  — THOMAS GRAY

  LII

  After the writers’ group on Thursday, Dagnia approached me in the self-improvement and well-being aisle of BIG BAD BOOKS where I was browsing for information on home sleep remedies. I saw her standing indecisively at the head of the aisle, wondering if she should talk to me, but I ignored her and kept checking out the spines on the shelf: Tai Chi fo
r Dummies, Feng Shui for Dummies, Taoism for Dummies and One Hundred and One Ways to Put the Excitement Back In Your Relationship. (What relationship?)

  I wasn’t in the best of moods. I still wasn’t over Darrel’s death and to top it off every morning for the past two weeks Dan or Dean the Penis had been practicing his piano starting at nine o’clock in the morning and pulling me out of an already fitful sleep. The last thing I wanted was to talk about the contract.

  But she wouldn’t go away. She just stood there, watching me. Finally, when she realized that I wasn’t going to acknowledge her, she took the plunge and came up to me.

  “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  I found what I was looking for and slid it neatly out of its slot on the shelf. Start Sleeping Better! And Tips for Improving the Sleep You Do Get. I flipped through it, pretending Dagnia hadn’t even spoken. Nothing hurts a writer more than being ignored. I knew. I was a writer, and had been ignored effectively and often.

  “I know you can hear me,” she said. “You don’t have to be hostile.”

  Without looking up, I asked what she wanted.

  “I want to talk.”

  “Talk then.”

  “Not here,” she said. “And not while you’re reading that stupid book. You’re not going to buy it anyway, so put it down for a minute, will you?”

  I sighed, and slid the book back into its slot, leaving the spine jutting out past the others just enough that I’d know where to look for it again but not enough to draw anyone else’s attention to it. I turned to Dagnia.

  “What? Have I broken the contract again?”

  “You always break the contract,” she said. “I’ve given up holding you to it, you jerk.”

  Something about her was different. Calling me a jerk was nothing new. She called me that all the time. She whispered it at the coffee machine during break or on our way out of the room. It was the way she said it this time, as if she didn’t mean it at all. She seemed distracted, almost desperate, eager to please. I wasn’t buying it. A black widow and a praying mantis are also eager to please when they want to get you into the right position to inject you with their venom or twist your head off.

  “Come on,” Dagnia said. “I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  I followed her out of self-help, through business and home-improvement, autobiography, sociology and war history, right up to Wordsworth Classics and beyond. I didn’t drink coffee in the store because you couldn’t smoke. I am constitutionally incapable of having coffee without a cigarette. But I have to admit I was intrigued. I half-suspected what she wanted. I could hardly believe it but I couldn’t think of any other explanation for her behaviour. In some groups (I’ve been to others, where I’ve been just as unpopular) even the best writers will get unnerved by my constant passing. Even published writers are an inch away from utter despair ninety-nine percent of the time, just like the rest of us. They’re no more secure about their work than anyone else, although they often pretend to be. As that bearded old lush Hemingway said, some time before he gave into his own despair and blew his head off, “We’re all amateurs.”

  What I thought, what I was stupid enough to think, when I sat down at a fake-wood-grained table in BIG BAD COFFEE was that Dagnia was finally going to ask what I thought of her work. She didn’t even wait for the waitress to come and take our order before she disabused me of the notion.

  “I know you don’t like me,” she said. “I also know you don’t like my work. That’s beside the point. I wouldn’t be asking you to do this if I wasn’t as desperate as a woman could be. I hope you know that.”

  I nodded. I knew this was no time to make friends, especially with a woman who professed to hate my guts, but I had to disabuse her of a notion or two myself. I never, ever say a writer’s work is bad because I don’t like him or her or because I’m jealous. I’m a loser who knows he’s a loser, remember, and we have some remarkably strong principles about certain things. I told her I liked her work very much, but the first part of the supposition was true. She waved me away impatiently. “That’s beside the point too. I need your help.”

  A teenaged girl with ample attitude and a corporate logo stamped on her stiff green apron came to take our order. Dagnia ordered a decaf. I ordered an Italian soda, having principles that would not allow me to drink the coffee of that particular franchise. As soon as she was gone I turned back to Dagnia.

  “So,” I said. “What do you need my help with?”

  Dagnia looked out the window at the sea of black umbrellas floating by in the unseasonable late-December rain. She was asking me for help, and she couldn’t look at me while she did. “What do you know about spying on someone?”

  Of all the questions the Black Widow could ask, I never expected her to ask this one. I knew a lot about spying. So did she. She was a writer, and a pretty good one at that. But I had written an entire series of articles about spying for a city magazine. This magazine had not paid in cat-box liner, but in cold hard cash. Not much of it, five cents per word, but I padded a bit and it went into three issues and I did okay. The thing that bothered me was, Matt Harding wrote that story, not me.

  I could have played dumb. I was good at playing dumb. I had written that series of articles on a whim. I chose someone out of a crowd of people on the street one day and started following him around. My initial impulse was to do it because he was cute, but I had to make up another reason quickly when I found myself standing outside his ground-floor apartment in the rain, peeking in the windows. I justified my pathetic behavior by telling myself I was working on a story, my most common excuse for all my vices, idiosyncrasies, and out-of-control compulsions. But the idea grew. Before long I knew when he got up, what time he went to bed, where he worked, what he ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, who he was screwing and who he wasn’t, what kind of liquor he drank, what his mother looked like, when would be the best time to rob him, when would be the worst. I had no difficulty convincing the editor that a pseudonym was in order for this one. A magazine, and a writer, could get in a lot of trouble for violating a person’s privacy like that. We took care to make sure the man couldn’t identify himself if he happened to pick up the magazine. What started out as one article turned into three. I’ll never forget what the editor said when he called me up to continue the story.

  “People just love a good sleazy saga,” he said. “They love to bedroom peep. I’ve had a few nice letters from people who want to know how big his dick is. Can you find that out?”

  “I already know,” I said. “It’s average soft, below average hard. I’d say six inches at most.”

  “Six inches is below average?” said the editor. He was straight, and didn’t have a lot to compare to, I guess. I felt sorry for him. All this time, thinking that he was average when he wasn’t. I could have made him feel better by telling him about my five miserable inches, but I don’t tell that to anyone, even editors I want to feel better about their own proportions.

  But how did Dagnia even know I was Matt Harding? Obviously she did know. She was studying me with a smug, pure Dagnia look on her face.

  “The editor,” she said. “I know him. He got drunk at a party and told me your real name, in between trying to take my tits home as a souvenir.”

  “Why would he tell you the real name of a writer you didn’t know?” I said.

  “Because I read the articles.”

  “You read that magazine?”

  Dagnia took a sip of her decaf, shook her head. “Not usually. But I had a doctor’s appointment and there was nothing else nearby worth looking at.”

  “Thanks loads.”

  Again Dagnia waved my objections aside. “The thing is that I know. I recognized your real name as soon as I came to the group. And I need a favour.”

  In fact, the whole thing was a little more complicated, a little more Machiavellian, than that.

  But I didn’t know that then. I asked Dagnia what she wanted. She made no bones about it, I’ll give her that, though it m
ust have been hard for her. “I want you to spy on someone for me. I want you to tell me what he’s doing and where he’s going and who he’s with. I’ll pay, and I’ll pay well. My stuff doesn’t sell too badly, you know.”

  I thought about it for a while. I had no qualms about spying for money. Hell, I had even done it a couple of times for free. But I wasn’t sure if wanted to get chummy-chummy all of a sudden with Dagnia Daley, the Black Widow. “Why me?” I asked finally.

  “Because you’ve done it once. You can do it again. You’re experienced.”

  It was all she could do to keep the contempt out of her voice that time. I gave her an E for Effort and chose not to get offended. “Why not a security agency or something? A private eye? There’s people who do this sort of thing, you know.”

  “I know,” Dagnia said. “But I want you. Will you do it? No articles this time, just weekly reports to me — typewritten, double-spaced for comments.”

  Jesus! It was like she was starting her own magazine. The Black Widow Review. “Maybe,” I said, stalling. “I’m not sure. Where does he live? Is this an old boyfriend or something?”

  Dagnia abruptly held up her hand. “No questions. Just weekly written reports and a hundred dollars each time. Will you do it?”

  “I have to know who it is first,” I told her.

  “Why?” she asked. “You won’t know him, so what does it matter?”

  “What if you’re planning on killing him?”