How Not To
Page 15
“This court, having reviewed the evidence, finds you guilty of possession in the amount of three grams of crack cocaine.”
What? My attention flies to the judge as she reads out my verdict. Cries ring out in the courtroom and my dad reaches over to me and places his hand on my shoulder. This isn’t happening.
“The court summons you to serve two years in a state prison penitentiary…” That’s it. That’s the whole case.
“…with opportunity for early release dependent on good behavior."
Tears run from my eyes. The bailiff comes to take me to the jail. I hug my dad for the first time in years, and he’s hesitant to let go when I finally pull back. I see him wipe at his eyes. I never even saw him cry when mom left. I turn around and do the same to Gavin. Both their eyes are red, but we are all attempting to be strong.
“We’ll come visit as soon as possible,” Gavin promises, and I nod my head. The nearest penitentiary is a forty-five-minute drive from Layton. I’ll be lucky to see them on weekends. Maybe they will take turns visiting so I have someone to see each week. The bailiff handcuffs me according to protocol and he begins to lead me from the room when I see my blonde haired angel with her face in her hands still sitting on the bench. Her face is wracked with grief. Her eyes lift to mine and I want so badly to comfort her, but the bailiff hasn’t slowed even the slightest bit as he walks me through the courtroom. My body feels heavy like it should turn to stone here in this courtroom and refuse to move. I mouth the words “I’m sorry” to her, but this only causes her to cry harder. The last thing I see before I’m forced to exit the room is Gavin sitting down next to her attempting to comfort her and share their grief.
This is rock bottom. I’ve never felt lower. The bailiff takes me down to a van that will take me to the prison, and when I finally sit down, the worst of it hits me. I haven’t had Ari for the last five weeks and today she shows up. I pray to God that means something. My life is spiraling out of control, quickly. Everything with Ari is destroyed, at least put on hold. I haven’t even considered that I will be spending the next two years in a state prison, probably because I don’t even know what that means outside of the movies. Strict schedules, terrible food, grey walls, no freedom. I punch at the seat in front of me with cuffed hands and the correctional officer standing outside the van hollers at me to keep my shit together or I’ll regret it once we arrive. I’m not trying to find any more trouble. I’m just trying not to fucking fall apart, and anger seems a much better way to walk into prison than fear.
8 years later
Chapter 16
Torren
I use sex as a tool. At least that’s what my counselor, Laurie, has told me. When I was nearing my release for good behavior after a year in prison, they set me up with a mandatory visit with a counselor to review job opportunities, healthy lifestyles, and adjustment tips when returning to society. I quickly let her know I had a job with my brother’s business waiting for me back home and I didn’t need her help, but when she offered to help in any personal concerns, I spilled my guts like a fucking teenage girl about Ari, our entire story, how we started, the chemistry I felt. I told her that I had loved Ari, at least- I had thought it was love, I wasn’t sure. Looking back, my behavior is laughable. Ari had made it clear that I shouldn’t bother finding her. She never came to see me, not that I expected her to pine away for me on the other side of a dirty plexiglass wall. She was embarrassed and ashamed of me. I wasn’t. I didn’t like the consequences per se, but I’d done what I did for reasons of my own accord. Reasons she would never know or relate to because she would never have to see the world through my eyes.
Nonetheless, Laurie humored me, she was kind and caring, one of those people who truly believes people are still good at the root of all their flaws. She explained that whether it was love or not wasn’t necessarily the problem or the focus in a situation like mine.
“Your whole world exploded before coming in here, and all you’ve had to do around here is focus on those problems and your mistakes. You can’t fix those things while you’re confined to these walls. It’s part of the purpose of prison, but it’s also enough to destroy you or at least send you to the crazy house. Go learn who you are again and if in six months if you still feel that way, then go find her.”
A year later I ran into Laurie again while Christmas shopping. She asked about Ari, if I had gone to find her and again, I spilled my guts. I wasn’t sure why it was always her. Maybe because she’s the only person who ever asked. That was the first time I had realized she was attractive, with long golden-brown hair, and kind eyes that made me feel warm when they looked at me, a few years older than me but that didn’t matter when you looked like she did. She cared…that’s all it really took. I offered to buy her a coffee, then drinks, then ended up in bed with her after a night out. I was so grateful for the way she had humored me, how she had listened and treated my problems as real concerns. I only knew one way to show her my gratitude.
Naturally, the next morning, she kept prodding about Ari and how I was coping. I told her how it had all gone down. I had gone back to Layton to work with my brother at the shop after my release, but all I knew is she had left town to go to school, her friends and family not willing to share any further information. I left it at that. I knew I wasn’t good enough for her. I spent a year of my life in uncontrolled fear that I had lost her, that this was going to be the straw that broke the camel’s back in our relationship. And why shouldn’t it have been? I WAS IN JAIL. Not away at fucking summer camp. But I lived that nightmare even more when I got out and she was nowhere to be found.
“You use sex as a tool, Torren. That’s not a healthy coping skill.” She said this as she dressed. I wasn’t sure if this was her clinical impression or just a personal one of me. It’s something I probably knew already, I had always used it with girls before Ari.
“Not her. We, uh, we never had sex.” Admitting that felt traitorous.
“Did you ever do anything together intimately?”
“Yeah, we did… other things.” I feel childish unable to say the acts we created together, but it feels private and here I am telling another woman everything about my relationship with her.
“It’s still sex, Torren. You were still using it to serve a purpose. To get something you wanted.” My face heats with embarrassment. I don’t want to be that guy.
She left after that. Out the door without another word. What she didn’t tell me was how to fix that. I was angry for the way she called me out, for the way she made me trust her, then question myself. Two weeks later, Gavin took a loan out in his name and gave me the money to start up my own business. Banks don’t take well to previous criminals, surprise, surprise. I left and drove east to Houston. It felt like a new start. I was going to find myself, and find my purpose. All that Eat, Pray, Love shit but like a very manly version.
~
I drive around with no particular destination in mind. I do this every Friday following my phone call with Dad. Family dinners aren’t happening anymore, so we make do with phone calls in their place. The driving is just cathartic for me, getting me out of my zone. Spending your free time alone in a city of two point three million people can be a bit stifling and overwhelming. It’s not really meditating. There’s a truck involved, but it does give me a second to slow down and organize my thoughts. I’ve built a semi-successful business in the past seven years. I wanted to start something meaningful, so when I left Layton, I tracked down someone I prayed I would never see again. Grady McAllister was a guard at the prison and I needed him to start over. Now I’m the owner of Safe Keeping, a security company that offers bodyguards or trained security at high profile events. I, myself, am not trained, because as a felon, I don’t ever get to own a gun again, but Grady helped me shape the business. He’s my lead security. I make the business deals and he leads the security detail at the events. We’ve built a team of guys in addition to Grady and me, and we are slowly up and coming around the Houston ar
ea where we get detailed to celebrity or Fortune 500 companies for protection purposes. The pressure of running a business others depend on to feed their families is stressful. I constantly worry about booking them new jobs or finding steady contracts we can work so they never worry about meeting their hours. So, on Fridays when the deal-making is done, I call Dad and drive to clear my head.
I’ve learned that’s important over the years. I also have a therapist that I see, just as needed now, although it wasn’t always that way. I needed a lot more time with my therapist the first couple years I arrived in Houston. I like her alright. I liked it even more that she’s in her sixties and I didn’t want to fuck this one. Barbara, or Barbie, as she prefers, has had me process a lot of things about my past. I’m not sure that I believe any of it, but I do believe that just going allows me an outlet I probably needed long ago. She’s always addressing my “cognitive distortions,” how we can change my actions and behaviors based on these thoughts to make better life choices. I had brought up what my counselor from prison told me after I slept with her, about using sex. Barbie didn’t seem to judge my actions and she processed concepts of using sex, asking me to identify trends in my past. Barbie is a native New Yorker whose accent is thick and heavy from the many years she spent there. Her voice is loud and domineering and she takes no shit from her clients. So, when I told her my history of fucking my therapists, I wasn’t quite prepared for just how fucking uncomfortable that shit was going to make me.
“So, Torren, if you feel she was onto something, why don’t you tell me a little bit about some of your sexual relationships from the past. We can dissect the truth together.” Her heady accented voice prompting me to answer the most intimate personal questions including if I “dressed for success” which was her way of asking if we used protection, will haunt me for all eternity.
I fucking hated that session. It was like talking to your mom about your sex life. Of course, I hadn’t had a mom, so I could only assume that is the closest it will get for me. Like karma, biting me in the ass, saying ‘oh by the way you don’t get all the loving memories, but by all means, have this uncomfortable talk about sex and motives.’ Barbie, in her all-knowing psychobabble, thinks the pressure I feel to lighten other’s strife is based on a variety of things in my past, things I hadn’t realized I was carrying around with me. I had never known my mom, so I never felt I lost her, but Gavin had and when she ran for the door not long after I mastered talking, I never grieved her loss the way my brother had to, so I find myself throwing myself into the midst of other’s pain to lighten their load. It had spun out of control those months leading up to my prison stay. Trying to protect Gavin and the company he loved. I had wanted to do it for Jeff too, I had wanted to remove him from the pain I could see him suffering through. When Gavin came to see me my first week in prison, he told me what Ari had talked to him about the day after the court hearing. She showed him all of the documents she had been reviewing and how all the pay periods that money didn’t add up, Jeff had also been working. Gavin confronted him, and he owned up to it, and then promptly punched him and broke his nose.
Some days I still ask myself if he deserved it for what he did to me and my family, I should have sold him out, but behind his shit for brains actions, I still wanted to protect the bastard. I still want to protect others, I started a damn security business making a job of the loss of control I felt around me. Barbie is teaching me how to manage these things though, and I like that most about the sessions… now that the uncomfortable part is out of the way. Sometimes I see her when I feel lost and overwhelmed at work. I’ll take the caseloads and business deals paperwork, contracts and all into her office and she jumbles my brain into something that can process it, she leads me to answers I didn’t know I had. I haven’t seen her in about four weeks, but I have a large account I am meeting with come Monday and I knew I would need to process these things with her, so I make a mental note to call and schedule something after my initial interview.
Sunday evening, I head to grab a drink with Grady. He helps me to review all proposals and contracts ahead of time and discuss if it’s a job we can take on and if it’s one we even want to take on. We meet at our usual place, a quiet dive bar just outside Houston since it’s closer to my place. I sit at the bar and order a Budweiser from the bartender behind the counter who looks to be wearing every type of makeup they carry in those department stores. As I study her, I wonder what she actually looks like under all the makeup, it’s too hard to tell. I’ve seen those videos on social media where someone can make themselves look like a completely different person. It’s some kind of voodoo trickery if you ask me.
A pat on my back makes me jump and disturbs my thoughts and I look behind me to see Grady taking a seat. He alerts the bartender of his presence and orders a Shiner Bock.
“Hey man, how was your break?” he asks as he takes his beer from the bartender and cracks it open. We took a full three days off following Thanksgiving. The rest of our crew has a few more days while I line up this next meeting and schedule us for December holiday celebrations.
“It was okay. I stayed here. What about you?” Grady over the years has become my best friend. It’s not the same as it was with Jeff but I think that’s a good thing. I don’t feel responsible for Grady. He has his shit together more than I do so for once, I can just worry about myself and not someone else’s shit.
“I went home. Spent the day with my brother and sister-in-law but came back last night.” Grady is a bit of a loner. A loner that spends a lot of time in bed with other strangers, but that’s his business. The guy has mad game and I’m constantly entertaining “the ugly friend” while he makes his move. It means I get laid…rarely, to say the least.
“Alright. What do we know about this company?” he asks.
“Not much. I got an email from the CEO, John, about a month ago setting up this meeting. They’ve decided to quit working with their last security detail due to being unable to fulfill the demand around the holidays. I guess they are some kind of event planning company for a bunch of big name companies in the area and need a security detail that can work with their schedule.”
“Can we meet their demand?” he asks skeptically. “We aren’t the largest security company in the area.”
I wish I knew the answer to this. I’ve been asking myself a thousand times why they reached out to us or how they found us, but if I’ve learned one thing over the years is that you never ask why.
“I guess that’s what I’ll find out tomorrow. Will probably be a rough few weeks, but most of our guys don’t have families or aren’t close to them so I’m hoping we can get by. If we have to hire a couple guys on for temp work, we can.”
“Alright. Well, sounds like you’ve taken all things into consideration. I’ll group text the guys this evening and tell them to keep their Christmas schedules cleared.”
I nod my head to him. Grady gets it. He wants the company to succeed as much as me and he doesn’t have anyone to go home to at the end of the night. Most of the guys that work for us are that way. The nature of the job is that most events occur in the evening, so the guys work a lot of nights. Night jobs aren’t really designed for family life. I’m the only one who doesn’t have to work those shifts as most contracts are made during day shifts, but the truth is I like being at the events with the guys.
We both spin our stools away from the bar and watch the young kid who couldn’t be older than twenty-two on the small stage. He pours out lyrics of love songs like he just had his heart stomped on and I find it comical that someone that young has felt that much pain. It’s only then that I remember I was a mere nineteen when I suffered through a whole lot more than heartbreak. Prison changes you. Not for the worse, per se, but not for the better. It just…changes you.
“Come on, let me whoop your ass at a game of pool again tonight,” Grady says, smacking me on the shoulder again.
“You never beat me at pool,” I deadpan a reminder to him.
“Fine, but I only have time for a few games. I have to meet John early tomorrow.”
~
I straighten my tie, pressing it flat against my chest and torso, and walk past the grand glass doors into a buzzing office building. The receptionist at the front takes my name and I tell her I have a meeting with John to discuss a contract and she sends me back to the conference room. My breathing shallows, I have a lot riding on this contract. They are looking to book a company for the entirety of their holiday season which would mean a solid month’s worth of work for every single one of my guys with holiday bonuses. When I reach the door I was directed to, it’s shut, but I knock lightly noting the deep voice I can hear behind the wall. When the door swings open, I am greeted by a large man that appears to be somewhere in his sixties and reminds me of Santa Clause without the beard. His presence is warm, and I feel a little more at ease than I did just a few moments prior. A smile lights his face as he sees me and he sticks his hand out for me to shake.