Deviant Behavior

by Mike Sager

  Salem stood before the sink in the bathroom of room 215, wearing comfortable jeans and an oversize Miami Dolphins sweatshirt. The door was locked; the exhaust fan rattled and squeaked. Leaning closer to the mirror, she applied a coat of lilac lipstick, a pleasant compliment to the blue-white tones of her skin. In the car the other day, as she was freshening her lips, Jamal had shared with her the fact that whenever he saw a lipstick tube, he thought of a dog’s erection. Now, every time she went to reapply … She smiled clownishly at herself in the mirror, crossed her eyes. Then she put her hands on her hips, gave herself a leveling stare: What have you got me into this time, bitch?

  Salem had been in residence at the Cap City for almost two weeks, since the night she met Jamal and decided to “get wit him,” as he’d put it, a privilege for which she had paid the customary five hundred dollars cash. When he mentioned the fee, she was incredulous. “You asking me for money?” There they were, in Georgetown, at Club Gemini—upscale, members only, catering to Arabs and other wealthy internationals. Salem was in her best dress; she’d left Miami with only a small roller bag. Jamal was wearing one of his Chinatown custom three-piece suits, the chocolate brown. Of course, both of them had scammed their way into the joint. They would laugh about it later, how both were running game—and how Jamal was obviously the more accomplished. That night at Gemini, he’d explained the whole deal with a good bit of charm: how the tricks paid the hos and the hos paid the pimps, the price for protection and love. Salem wasn’t much interested in the love part; as things stood, she’d had enough of love for the time being. But given her situation, the possibility that she was being followed, the possibility that her life was in imminent danger, she went ahead and paid Jamal the money. Protection was exactly what she needed. She couldn’t go to the cops. What else could she do? Who would ever think of looking for her here?

  As was his custom, at the conclusion of their first night together—a night of drinking and dancing—Jamal took his new girl to Denny’s, paid for her breakfast with some of the money she’d just given him. Then he brought her here, to the Cap City. As he had with breakfast, he paid for her first night’s lodgings, thirty-five dollars, with her money. Hereafter, he explained, she’d be responsible for her own motel tab. Though she was frugal by nature (and shrewd too, given to stashing at least 20 percent of her earnings, all of which were supposed to go to Jamal) she declined to take advantage of the weekly rate offered by the motel, even if it would have saved her five dollars a night—thirty-five dollars a week, almost the cost of a blow job. A week in advance, at this stage of her life, seemed exceedingly long range.

  It was only three years ago, after all, that Salem had been working at a popular nightspot in South Beach, rubbing shoulders with movie stars and fashion industry royalty, serving cocktails in a gold lamé bikini. Along the way she’d gathered around herself a number of gentleman suitors. They’d take her to dinner, buy her expensive things, give her gifts of cash from time to time. One of the men, a married dentist with real estate interests, set her up in a condo. Another, the owner of a large GMC dealership, gave her a Corvette. Eventually she dropped the waitressing entirely. It was an easy life, not at all unsatisfying, built around the trade of a commodity she possessed in ample supply. As she saw it, what she was doing wasn’t much different than other women she knew. Everyone said that marriage was a barter system. Why couldn’t dating be the same? When she was younger, living with her mom in a mobile home park in the shadow of Cape Kennedy, a bookish girl who kept scrapbooks on her favorite astronauts and never missed a space launch, there was an old redneck who lived in the trailer next door. A disgusting man with a deeply wrinkled neck, he was always saying that women had an unfair advantage in life. “They own half of the money and all of the pussy in the world,” he’d complain. Now that she was older, she could see his point. Maybe it was God’s little gift to women—an inexhaustable commodity that held its value for many years, a small bonus to offset the awesome responsibilities.

  About a week after she’d gotten with Jamal, he’d announced that he was moving into her room at the Cap City. With Debbie in jail awaiting trial, looking at ninety days, Jamal had gone ahead and sublet her apartment, where he usually stayed, a two-bedroom in a high-rise in Crystal City, Virginia, just across the Fourteenth Street Bridge, convenient to both the Metro and the Pentagon City Mall. Still very new in town and feeling vulnerable, Salem didn’t think she was in much of a position to argue. In truth, she missed her old life—her friends, her car, her condo, her beloved collection of designer shoes. She felt relieved when Jamal moved in. For the first time in years, she realized, she was going to sleep at night feeling totally safe. Jamal wasn’t so bad. She was even kind of starting to feel close to him in a friendly, brother/sister sort of way—if that’s possible when you’re having sex with someone. That was the other thing. After a steady diet of middle-aged dentists and car lot owners, Jamal was a treat—strong and trim and good-looking, all the silly pimp talk notwithstanding.

  As far as her deeper feelings—that was another subject. She tried not to deal too much with those. She knew she had some issues to work out. Clearly this was not a lasting career choice. She was biding her time, lying low, living this way out of necessity. She tried to see it as an enrichment experience, like an X-rated version of Outward Bound—a total immersion deal, fraught with personal hardships and yucky hygienic challenges, yet also full of valuable and clarifying life lessons. She was making money; the conditions were not the best but the work was not hard—all in all, her customers were a tame lot who presented themselves as shy and rather pitiful, like so many grown-up Oliver Twists: Please, miss, may I have a blow job? She just needed to stick it out a few more weeks, then she’d be off to the next chapter.

  Marginally satisfied with her appearance, Salem shut off the bathroom light, killing the annoying rattle of the fan. The tussle the night before with the ponytail guy had looked much worse than it actually was—she’d sustained only a scraped elbow and a bruise on her rear end. Even so Jamal had given her the rest of the night off; she’d actually gotten a good long sleep. Now she was due to meet her new friend Brenda for breakfast at the diner downstairs off the lobby.

  There was only one problem: since Jamal moved in, he’d become extremely possessive. He wanted to know what she was doing every minute; he wouldn’t let her come and go as she pleased—a request to perform a simple errand, like going across the street for cigarettes, could turn into a huge debate. Jamal had just returned to the room after being out all night and part of the morning. If she tried to sneak out, he’d wake up and start an inquisition. If she woke him to ask permission, he’d say no. This one called for a little finesse.

  She opened the bathroom door slowly and peeked out. Jamal’s large and well-formed ebony body, as dark as she was light, was sprawled across the king-size bed, his face buried in the pillow. He was wearing a plastic shower cap, protection for his hairdo and his pillow, each from the other.

  Salem sat down next to him. The room was soupy and overheated; the blanket was low around his waist, exposing the swelling foothills of his gluteal mass. She whispered into his ear, the same white-girl-talkin-black patois she’d been affecting ever since she’d met him, in all his glory, at Club Gemini—an accent she’d picked up from a fellow waitress back in South Beach, a girl from Liberty City. The whole accent thing seemed right at the time she’d met him. It gave her the feeling she was playing a role, starring in a movie that wasn’t really her life. Now she was stuck with it. “Jamal? Baby? Wake up.”

  A few seconds passed. She caressed his shoulder, tickled his ear. “Come on, baby,” she cooed. “I need to axe you somethin. Pleaaaase?”

  No response.

  Shaking him now: “Jamal. Wake uuupp.”

  “I’m sleepin,” he groaned into the pillow.

  “Why was you talkin to that ho last night?”

  His eyes popped open. “What you talkin about?”

  “Why was you ta
lkin to that ho last night?”

  Rolling over: “What ho?”

  “That ho outside Burger 7.”

  “Who?”

  “Flower.”

  “Flower?”

  “Big ass Flower! The Flower who you always say gotta make two trips to haul ass.”

  He propped himself against the headboard, adjusted the pillow behind him, half a smirk on his face. “What about her?”

  “Why was you talkin to her?”

  “We was just talkin.”

  “You was runnin game.”

  “That was not game.”

  “Then why you tell her you ain’t ate in three days?”

  Jamal looked at her like she was nuts. “When’s the last time you seen me eat?”

  “Remember when you bought me that steak and cheese sub? You bought you a breakfast.”

  “That was three days ago.”

  “That was not.”

  “Was so.”

  “Was not and you know it.”

  Jamal grinned again, abashed. “Flower didn’t know it.”

  “But I knowed it.”

  “You gonna tell her?”

  She crossed her arms dismissively. “You wasn’t doing nothing but runnin game.”

  As if to shield himself from the charges, he pulled the lightweight polyester blanket up to his chin. “Why does you care, anyway?”

  “What woman ain’t fed her man in three days? You make me look like a nonpayin ho.”

  “How can I make you look like something when your actions speak for theyselves?”

  Irate: “My actions do speak for theyselves, and you eat every motherfuckin day. If my man go tellin some bitch that I ain’t fed him in three motherfuckin days—”

  “Then that makes me out a liar because they know my actions speak for theyselves too,” he said, laying it out for her. “They know that, hey, this girl Salem is about her business. If this man ain’t ate in three days, it’s cause he done doped up the money or smoked it up or shot it up or somethin.” He snapped his fingers, elementary. “You know what I’m sayin?”

  She stuck out her bottom lip, a droopy lilac petal. “I’m hungry, Jamal. I wanna go git somethin to eat.”

  “Call room service.”

  “I don’t want no room service. I’m sicka room service.”

  “Well I ain’t going nowhere. I just got in the bed”—he checked the clock radio—“two hours ago.”

  “I’ll jus go down to the diner.”

  He shook his head, definitely not.

  “It’s only in the lobby. What could happen?”

  “You know I don’t like you goin down there by yourself. It’s a bad neighborhood.”

  “Awww, baby,” she cooed seductively. “That’s so sweet you care about me so much. Is there somewhere else you’d rather have me go down to?”

  With that, she grabbed a handful of his blanket, began pulling it slowly toward her.

  He offered no resistance.

  20

  The Pope of Pot was slumped on a concrete bench in a holding cell at the DC Central Jail, his eyelids at half-mast. His breathing was labored, his skin was an unhealthy reddish pink. There was a dark patch on his trouser leg where he’d wet himself—lately he was peeing all the time; it seemed to happen without warning. If he wasn’t so sick he might have felt sorry for himself, for the passage of time and youth and health. But he was the Pope. Somebody had to believe.

  The cell was humid and oppressively small, ten by twelve feet with a low ceiling. Three of the walls were constructed of cinder block, painted industrial gray. The fourth wall featured a glass viewing window and a sliding metal door, bright blue. There were dozens of similar holding cells of various sizes on the first two floors of the DCCJ. Known as the tanks, they brought to mind a science-fiction movie—a series of secure enclosures in which to display human specimens.

  The concrete floor inside the cell sloped downward to a large central drain, allowing for easy hose-down. Littered about were remnants of jail-issue bag lunches—wadded balls of coarse brown paper, deconstructed baloney sandwiches, stunted yellow oranges that looked as if they’d been picked from someone’s backyard tree. In one corner was an aluminum sink and toilet combo, the commode lacking a proper seat, standard now in all modern prisons, another tidy fortune secured by a private contractor, trickle-down from the drug war. Over the last five years, the war on drugs had become a kind of drug itself—a powerful economic stimulant that had everyone hooked, from the politicians standing smugly upon their can’t-miss law-and-order platforms to the jail guards in their baseball-style caps with gold-embossed bills, the most expensive head covering offered in the prison supply catalog, chosen by the warden’s second wife as she soaked in a heart-shaped tub in a Catskills resort on a five-day seminar for law enforcement officials, all expenses paid by federal grants.

  Across from the Pope’s bench was an identical bench. Hanging above it were two telephones—a blue one for free local calls, a black one for collect long distance. The steel cords that connected the handsets to the bases were only eight inches long—an experiment by prison officials, who were hoping to diminish the efficacy of using the handsets as weapons or instruments of suicide. As you would imagine, this modification made phone use somewhat awkward. At the moment, a young black man was using the blue handset. To talk comfortably, he was squatting on his haunches atop the bench, a rather simian-looking position familiar to prisons and most of the Third World, owing to a lack of proper chairs. He was wearing a pair of Timberland boots with the merchandise tags still dangling from the eyelets; per jail procedure, the laces had been confiscated by the guards.

  The Pope had been in the cell with him now for almost fifteen minutes, but Kwan had so far pretended he didn’t exist—a social strategy that generally worked well during incarceration. Rule number one: keep your eyeballs to yourself. But Kwan was generally a sociable person; he wasn’t used to being alone—over the course of his life he’d never had much of a chance to be alone. He’d grown up in his grandma’s crowded household, people coming and going at all hours—he still stayed there most of the time. Likewise, he never rolled without a partner. Out in the streets there was a war in progress, a war against the police, a war against rival gangs. It wasn’t prudent to venture out alone. Until the Pope was brought in, Kwan had been in this holding cell by himself for nearly six hours. He’d spent most of that time on the blue phone, talking to his baby momma. Now he let his fawn-colored eyes drift upward, ventured a look at his cell mate.

  Kwan’s face lit with recognition. “You dat marijuana mothafucka!”

  The Pope raised his hands weakly, an attempt at the official papal greeting. “The Pope of Pot at your service, toots.”

  “You the dude gave out dem blunts at Halloween.”

  “The sacrament, my son.”

  “That shit primo. You gotta hook me up!” He spoke into the telephone: “Guess who wit me in the tank?”

  Although he didn’t smoke his own product, Kwan smoked nearly half an ounce of marijuana a day, usually in cigar-size joints, rolled in tobacco-leaf cigar papers, which were available under the counter in most Korean markets around the city. That he bought his pot from his crack source left him perpetually in debt—like the old mining ditty, he owed his soul to the company store. You could probably say that it was his pot habit that had got him arrested late last evening. He’d smoked a big blunt and nodded out—while parked at the curb outside 7-Eleven, waiting for his homey to return with a stash of munchies, window down, vehicle reeking. At which time a cop strolled past, on his way into the store. A fruit too ripe not too pluck, even on a coffee break.

  Just then an alarm sounded, a metallic ring like a high school bell. The blue cell door slid open with an automated shush.

  In filed Waylon, followed by Louie and Beta Max. Like the Pope and Kwan, they were all three wearing plastic wristbands—last name, first name, date of birth, charges. As it happened, all of them had been charged with the sam
e crime: possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. There was only one difference. The Pope and his people were arrested for possessing powder cocaine; Kwan was arrested for crack. To buy powder coke, a customer usually telephoned a beeper number to arrange pickup or delivery; others bought powder in neighborhood bars or trendy clubs. Powder coke was sold by the gram, for about a hundred dollars; you could usually get an eight ball, three and one-half grams, for $150, enough to snort all night with several friends. In contrast, crack was sold on street corners. Most of the users lived within stumbling distance of the supply. The average unit was a five-dollar rock, a little less than one-tenth of a gram. The high part of the high lasts upward of two minutes; the manic, jittery part lasts four hours. At night you could sometimes buy a five dollar rock for two dollars, but getting that kind of bargain usually necessitated a lot of bowing and scraping and pleading; the dealer might well make you bend over so he could kick you in your ass in front of all the other crackheads and dealers. For an ounce of powder cocaine—whether planted by the cops or not—the Pope and his merry men faced mandatory minimum sentences of fifty years. For an ounce of rock cocaine that the police had found in his SUV, Kwan faced a mandatory minimum sentence of life without possibility of parole. Some people insisted that the difference in prison time had been legislated because powder coke was the drug of choice of the upper class and rock coke was the drug of the poor. Nobody disagreed.

  Waylon sat down next to the Pope on the bench, shrugged off his Burberry raincoat, placed it over the wet spot on the Pope’s trouser leg. He touched the Pope’s forehead gently with the back of his hand. “You didn’t remember to bring your meds, did you? I should have reminded you. There was so much happening. I wish I could have—”