Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  Also: prosecutors, cops, and their kind were on the phone to some lawmen in Virginia who were trying to tether me to attempted murder charges as a result of my memoir “Antihero Agonistes,” but my appointed lawyer, Deidre Jenkins, was young and feisty, a lukewarm fan of my modest yarns. I looked forward to my daily meetings with Deidre the way a Svengali looks forward to duplicity. She waved a wand and some charges went poof—she knew everyone in Maine with a law degree or part of one; as it turns out, many Mainers are related by blood or by moose—plus she took advantage of the current blurred line between fiction and non and convinced apathetic judges that my essays were purely imaginative, as far from fact as skinheads are from Elvis Presley’s pompadour. Still, I had to squat behind bars for a while, hissed at and hooted on by certain family members. Deidre mailed me a study of the USA and its many guns by a bearded scholar: without a Detroit automobile and a firearm an American is just a Frenchman.

  Once they transferred me from county lockup to the detention that was to be my dwelling for the duration of my sentence, I discovered that most of what one learns about prison from Ted Turner is really not all that true for the gross majority of offenders. By which I mean that my jail—in the untouched middle of Maine, our nearest neighbor an elk with Epicurean inclinations (I spent many an afternoon watching it from my cell when I couldn’t slap two sentences together with spittle)—was no more than a onetime factory of some kind with bars bolted on the windows: spacious unlocked rooms instead of cells fit for spiders, weaponsless guards with nicknames such as Snowball and Grandpa. No aggrieved sentries in towers with cannons, or razor wire coiling atop chain fences. No groups of stunted Latino hooligans bellyaching about the tattooed KKK-sympathetic trailer trash, or dancing a bloody hootchy-koo with a steroided rabble of blacks fond of ditties by the rappers N.W.A and the metaphysics found therein. No, we were a forested outpost of middle-class white dudes, essentially nonviolent and semi-educated, with mothers in civilization (not mine) who sent us baked goods and wool socks, as well as a vest or two sporting multiple pockets. If you’re skeptical that such a prison could exist, I’ve beat you to it: I spent three months there and I’m skeptical still. But Maine is a special place: there’s something about untold acres of natural beauty in concert with an underachieving public school system that leads to deviations from the customary and commonsensical.

  Anyone who’s ever tried prison food, raise your hand. That’s what I thought, and I’m here to tell you: don’t believe the lies. For three months I chowed down like the guest of a flourishing nation: grilled chicken, prime rib, red potatoes, and, I swear, the occasional lobster. The chef was an obese fellow who went around by the name of Dinner, and if there’s one segment of society schooled in the minutiae of cooking and eating, it’s the diabetical obese. The inmates were fond of speaking about Dinner as if he were the governor himself, or else someone quite close to Christ and His penchant for messianic magic tricks. His meals could make you feel almost home again. A native Mainer, Dinner said he could have been a chef in Paris if only there had been an escape route from the wilderness west of Portland. Instead, he ate much and drank more, and despite his flab could aim a fishing pole or rifle with the best of them.

  Once, while strolling around dispersing hot buns to the men on Floor the First, Dinner said to me, “Charlie, you should have approached your Gillian with a just-made croissant instead of an automatic rifle and right now you’d be coddled in her arms.”

  “Dinner,” I said, “you underestimate the ardent fettle of a woman with means. Thanks for the bun.”

  The mere mention of Gillian’s name caused a wobble in me, a holler that forced my heart into a game of peek-a-boo with my brain. I think Tom Eliot from Missouri once asked, “Where is the Life we have lost in living?” and I thought: Exactly.

  My cellmate Paul Fuss was a native Mainer, too, nearsighted and stringy, decidedly nonathletic, pale beyond apparition standards, a computer whiz who had defrauded his company of two mil and then spent the loot on seventeen-year-old massage specialists from the Orient. Fuss was part wanton, part rigmarole, with just a splash of Baptist decorum. He spent most days inspecting the jail’s ample library as if in those aisles stood Relief and supermodels to split it with. This I didn’t much mind except that he returned to our room each evening with a racket of facts stuffed up above his brow and the very eager need to quiz me. Did I know the name of the bone disease that bothered our darling President Lincoln? Isn’t it astounding that Newton was born on the very day Galileo died, a coincidence more beguiling than Jefferson and Adams dying only hours apart? Why did William James, otherwise so cerebral, put such stock in that charlatan spiritualist Maggie Fox? True or false: Edgar Allan Poe slept at the grave of his young cousin-bride, drunk beyond locomotion. And the most insistent: Did I know that Loch Ness mightn’t have the food supply to support a monster for a single day, never mind millennia?

  “Fuss,” I said one evening, “I have had my fill at the moment of deep sea creatures and the like. The topic incites me to parlous pondering.”

  At opposite ends of the room Fuss was at his desk and I was at mine, our heads down—not seeing each other and not wanting to. The notepad before me sat blanker than a list of Fuss’s willing girlfriends, the pencil sharp enough to slay.

  “But Charlie,” he said, “I’ve just read four books on Loch Ness. This is a subject that binds us: your passion for the giant squid and mine for the Loch Ness Monster.”

  His voice came out prepubescently, a grating squeak with hardly a note of manliness.

  “Correction,” I said, “the passion is not mine but my lady’s. Also, I don’t see why we need a subject in common, Fuss.”

  “Your lady? You sure about that?”

  He was a button-pusher atop his other talents; several times a week it took all my muster not to suffocate him.

  “Careful, now, Fuss,” I said, my eyes stretching over my left shoulder. “Very, very careful, now.”

  “You can talk to me about it, Charlie. I want you to know that. If you need to talk, I’m here for you.”

  I spun around in my wheeled Staples chair to face the back of him; his hair was aslant his skull like a cap that can’t fit, his face so close to the pages of a magazine he could have licked the pictures.

  “Fuss,” I told him, “I will not have my grief autopsied by the likes of you. My malady is beautiful, to paraphrase Mr. Tom Waits, folk balladeer, and I shalln’t have its beauty despoiled by a man barely brachiate.”

  “Hmm. Barely brachiate. I didn’t know it was an adjective, too, pronounced that way. Are you writing something now?”

  I swiveled around 360 degrees and on the way glanced at the blank, bewitched pages of my notebook. When I had been in county lockup for those few weeks, I had a cell to myself and thus was able to scrawl orgasm-like until all of “Witchy Woman” squirted out wet and clumpy. I mailed the ink-and pencil-smeared pages to my editor at New Nation Weekly— who spoke with a faux-British accent, like William F. Buckley, conservative Kimosabe: he pronounced “helicopter” heelicopter even though his mum squeezed him out and brought him up in Brooklyn, New York—and in response he clicked me an angry email about the costly time it would take his assistant to type out such an overlong and barely legible confession. You ass, I replied, I AM IN JAIL, which led to abject apologies and a fetid fruitcake via FedEx.

  “Actually, Fuss,” I said, “I’m trying to, but a noise is coming from the direction of your neck.”

  “You know, Charlie, I was a pretty good writer in high school. Got A’s in English. And I’ve always wanted to write a book. Maybe I will.”

  “I’ve always wanted to perform a bone marrow transplant. Maybe I will.”

  “Or journalism,” he said, “like what you do. I might want to move to Boston when I get out of here. Maybe write for the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.”

  “Fuss,” I said, “numbskull. Wanting to write for the Globe and the Herald is like wanting to fight for the Aust
rians and the French.”

  Through the bars of our window I could see the Epicurean elk and his antlers brushing by the branches of pine trees, his quiet pleasure consummate and the cause of my envy. Oh, to be an elk and not give a damn except about elk-related issues.

  “Or I’d like to be a cryptozoologist,” Fuss said. “Track the Loch Ness Monster and other supposedly extinct creatures. I have big plans for myself, Charlie.”

  “Right, Fuss. Cryptozoologist. You know what you need in order to qualify as a cryptozoologist? A mouth that can say: I am a cryptozoologist. It’s barely a job title, one for the uneducated or socially unlucky, and one step down from porn star. So good luck with that.”

  A passage of silence here as Fuss mulled over his options on the earth. The elk moved on out of sight and I returned to my desk to sulk.

  “Well,” he said, “I can’t stop thinking that there’s something in that loch, Charlie. Are you telling me that all those eyewitnesses over the decades have been mistaken?”

  I heard him using Scotch tape on something.

  Deep inhale, deep exhale.

  “Fuss,” I said, “I am telling you nothing. But if you must know, then yes: eyewitnesses at Loch Ness are hokum-makers trying to sandbag you and lonely others like you. If your lizard lives in that lake, then I hope you go fish it out one day and then smile for the camera. All I’m saying is this: I don’t care either way.”

  “You should.”

  “And why should I, Fuss?”

  “Because the monster hunters of the world must unite. Marx said that.”

  “Fuss,” I rejoined, “the giant squid is the business of science, while that lizard in Loch Ness is the business of bartenders. I find you hidebound and homespun, more spunk than smarts. Please refrain from talking to me.”

  “We should ask Dinner about this.”

  “We should not. Please quiet your strange self lest harm come to you.”

  So instead of prattle he taped to our walls nineteen photos of the Loch Ness Monster and then began making little newspaper-and-glue models to situate here and there and there around us. Other times he used his Internet hours to research up-to-date info on Nessie and the mushroom-eaters who swam after her, very often leaving on my pillow black-and-white printouts of blurs supposed to be a monster. I had my own fata morgana to brood on—Gillian cavorting I knew not where, my thoughts in agony—and tried to ignore Fuss’s growing fascination with a creature he himself admitted did not have the food supply to subsist a single day. I wished he would reacquire his lust for teenage Cambodians.

  Among Fuss’s other singularities of character was one I had never before encountered in a fellow humanoid and shall not soon forget: his dislike of music. And I don’t mean his dislike of a certain kind of music, but of all music, any la-di-da produced with an instrument. For example, I myself do not care for the nitwit twangy platitudes and silly hats of country-western—and this despite the Garth Brooks always on rotation in Groot’s vehicle—but I’d suffer welts and lesions without certain R&B singers and, say, David Bowie circa Ziggy Stardust. Who does not require Bruce Springsteen—they don’t call him the Boss for nothing—snarling about a road called Thunder and how to get to where it goes? Or Dylan gargling, bringin’ it all back home? Neil Young and his thrasher? But my cellmate: the mutant nearly had a conniption when I’d tune our radio in to the folk station to sing along with love-torn acoustic guitars. You tell me: what kind of person doesn’t appreciate a salty piano ballad with lyrics sung through smoke? Precisely my point: a mutated one.

  “Fuss,” I said, “your dislike of music makes you part possum. I believe you shall die from it, in which case I wish you’d hurry up. This is the exact reason we need a matriarchy, a goddess culture of fertility instead of this Yahweh, warrior-god culture currently in fashion. Because women can dance, are in touch with their Wicca insides.”

  “I miss the earth,” he said, and did not elaborate.

  DEIDRE JENKINS, my erstwhile attorney, had been all along mailing me packages and semi-amorous missives, which I thought half strange, since her public-defending of me was finished—genuine billets-doux that mentioned the “sheen” of my locks, the “bite” of my prose, my love-life alternatives now that Gillian was “lost” to the squid, what I would do upon my “glorious” release—make a home in Maine, maybe?—and I replied with many thanks and a gentleman’s Christian naïveté, since indeed I was intensely grateful that her weeks of exertion had won me only three months in the slammer and not, as some had been smacked with, three years. There hadn’t been a trial, only my admitted wrong, a courtroom meeting with glasses of cold water and a pile of paper to scribble signatures on. Then she began visiting me when I was transferred from county lockup: once under the pretense of various stray documents that awaited my Hancock, once to deliver me a pizza pie with pepperoni even though Dinner was serving prime rib that day. (Have you ever been forced by gratitude to eat pepperoni when others in the area are having prime rib? It’s a truly demoralizing adventure.) I found out later that Margaret Welsh, wardeness of our prison—our prison had a wardeness—had been Deidre’s onetime elementary schoolmarm and was now a trusted ally of the Jenkins familia, the mother and father of which were medium-powered Maine attorneys themselves and the grandfather a still-sitting judge with cataracts and a dour disposition on the human spectacle.

  Yes, sometime soon after we had met, several weeks earlier, Deidre had begun to fancy me, titillated by my offhand reactions to loss and love, tickled by my willingness to be berserk in service of the heart, made moist by my memoirs she called art but others mostly called crap, the exact point at which mumbo meets jumbo. Apparently the men she had known weren’t in the habit of ricocheting through their own lives; they were dullards with nothing to wrestle for, no bonfire in them, not even a flint. A Maine lady needs impulse and oratorio, loathes the lymphatic and lame. So you see, my labors were admired after all—albeit by the wrong woman. But Deidre’s want of my man parts and desire to make herself my spanking new muse were the reasons she had pulled all the pullable strings with her parents, her granddaddy judge, Wardeness Margaret Welsh, and the devil knows who else. Couldn’t I return a little lovey-dovey, if only by mail?

  I tried. And maybe I tried with too much mettle—my lines might have mentioned the “Latin gusto” of her calves and hips in motion, and how the small blond hairs of her nape quelled my fear of becoming a “noncrooning castrato”—because not four days after I posted the letter she arrived at the prison wearing an orange autumn dress, the strapless kind that could reverse a vasectomy. The tubby guard Grandpa appeared at our cell with sweat all over him and a look that said something was about as up as you can get.

  “You have a visitor, Charlie,” he told me, his breathing that of a fat man terrified. The whole way to the visiting room, his waddle the wonder child of cheeseburgers, he kept glancing at me like I was just then on the converse of death row, and when I saw Deidre—in that fabric aglow, standing next to the Coke machine, her toenails a shade identical to the dress, and in her handbag no doubt a rose-petal net to ensnare me in—I knew the name of death row’s opposite: sex row.

  “Good God in the morning,” I muttered, and Grandpa said, “God got nothing to do with this. Have fun, Charlie,” and he left us alone in the visiting room, the sofas a summons for limbs akimbo.

  “Umm, hello there, Deidre,” I think I said. “You’re looking very…orange today.”

  She embraced me, her fruity earrings and necklace in a clatter, and I could smell the citrus perfume. She was a multi-sensory advertisement for Tropicana.

  “I got your letter, Charlie,” she said, holding me at arm’s length, searching my face, including, I guess, my eyes, which would not lift from the over-round bosoms painstakingly packed into the top of that elastic dress.

  “Oh,” I said. “That.”

  Her own eyes announced: I’m here. I’ve come for you.

  I said, “Where is everyone else today? Why is the visiti
ng room empty?”

  “I had Margaret arrange a private visit for us,” and here her brows bounced once as if to say, Oh, yeah!

  Our wardeness privy to this seduction, a coconspirator in my sullying? Through the barless windows I thought I could see the Epicurean elk mocking me from the pine scrub, wanting to say, Do not mail letters you do not mean.

  “Is it true what you wrote?” she asked.

  Her hands were still clutching my deltoids, her eyes still doing that buggy thing.

  “True what? True how?”

  “You wrote—I have it memorized—your gorgeous galore gives insomnia to the dead.”

  “Hmm. I wrote that? Just like that? With gorgeous as a noun?”

  “Just like that,” she confirmed. “Here, let’s move to the couch,” and she slipped out of her sandals, then unbunned her hair the way porno librarians like to do, all the while grasping my hand as if the helium in me might cause liftoff.

  “Listen, Deidre, about that letter,” I began.

  “Plus,” she said, “I thought you could use some real cheering up today.”

  Plunging backward into the sofa, I asked, “Why? What’s today?”

  Those were her panties, yes: white with tangerine polka dots, a plumpish mound at the center of them. South of my navel some long-clogged gears creaked to life.

  Deidre eyeballed me with doubt. “Today’s May eleventh,” she said. “Your wedding day. You forgot?”