Here Is What You Do

by Chris Dennis

  You could put your hand over your eyes and see battlefields, crowded infirmaries, the torchlit corridors of Nubian pyramids.

  After that you were making appointments at the doctor’s office all the time, complaining of back pain, neck pain, chronic headaches, a burning sensation in your kneecaps. You’d take Lortab, Vicodin, Percocet, Percodan, Tylox. It was like learning a secret language. Some of the pills were more exciting than others. You saw three different doctors, had prescriptions filled at every drugstore in town, until finally Shirley Lynn Dobbs at Dobbs’ Drugstore started asking questions, making calls.

  It was maybe a week later that you saw the article about pharmaceuticals and drug laws in Newsweek—they mentioned Mexico, speedy clinics in the backs of grocery stores and novelty shops, prescriptions for anything a patient was willing to pay for in cash. You thought of nineteenth-century China, of the thriving opium trade and those covert smoking divans. It sounded like the most perfect retreat.

  It was the Thanksgiving holiday. You told Nanny you were going to Indianapolis to hear a seminar on the Miami Indians of the Midwest. You emptied your savings, cashed in a couple of bonds. You had enough pills to last three days. You got in Nanny’s car and drove. And drove. And drove. The sun and the moon came and went.

  The day before Thanksgiving, in Nuevo Laredo, you rented a room at the Red Roof Inn. You got lost two days in a row, ate too many cheap enchiladas, asked the wrong people the wrong questions in the wrong language until you finally decided that the back-door pharmacies were made up, were more like small invisible cities of El Dorado than the luxurious opium dens of China.

  On the last night, at the Chaser Lounge, you let Kenny Voglar from Carson City, Nevada, buy you too many strawberry margaritas. Kenny wore a lime-green tank top and a diamond ring. He claimed he was once the president of the Rod Stewart fan club. He had a soft spot for GHB and Xanax. He said he knew a man who had exactly what you were looking for. You could see your reflection in the mirror behind the bar. The Christmas lights strung around the alcohol bottles made little flashes of color across your face like so many blue and red stars blinking off and on.

  The man who had exactly what you were looking for was actually a seventeen-year-old Mexican kid in short-shorts with a Madonna tattoo. Kenny talked. The Mexican kid turned up “Like a Prayer” on the stereo and danced. Kenny watched. You stood by the door, pretending to read the ingredients on a package of gum. After the song was over the kid went into the bathroom, made some noise, brought out five cottage-cheese containers full of pills. He handed you one of the pills. You took it, and sat on the floor watching the Hispanic boy and Kenny Voglar snort something off the bedside table. They danced around to the music while you waited for the pill to do its stuff. After twenty minutes or so you decided you maybe liked Madonna. “Vogue” seemed like an interesting song. The Hispanic kid did a special dance for it. He seemed very talented. You gave him all of your money. He gave you all of his cottage-cheese containers.

  If you don’t answer Donald when he asks if you’re asleep, he says, “I see how it is. What? You mad at me? You got a problem, Ricky?” But you’re never mad at him. You’re just worried. You lie in your bed and fake the loud, steady breaths of deep sleep. You feel the bed start to shake, Donald furiously taking care of himself on the bunk beneath. He’s only touched your penis once, wrapped his hand around it and squeezed for a second. After he finishes in your mouth or on your back he quickly pulls up his pants and rolls over and you climb up to your bunk.

  Once, after he was finished fucking, you started to get up and he said, “Don’t move.” He put his arms around you, pressed his face into your back, touched you neatly on the spine with his nose. You might have stayed like that all night except Donald woke you up later, smacking you in the head, saying, “Go back to your own bed, faggot.” An inmate a couple of cells down was yelling, “It’s my stomach. I think it’s the pancreas! I need a doctor!”

  “Shut the hell up,” someone else yelled.

  “No shit,” Donald called back, “because you don’t even know what a pancreas is!”

  You met with your drug counselor for the first time and he told you your official release date. May 14. It is now the fifth of April. He said he was proud of you, which was odd since you’d only met with him once. Still, it was nice to hear. You asked when you would have to appear before the parole board. He said, “This is a kind of parole hearing right now. You’ve done everything right. Good job, Ricky.”

  You come back into the cell and tell Donald that things went great with the counselor. Donald is sitting on the floor, shuffling the cards. “Where’s Rainbow Six?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “My new Clancy book, idiot. Where the fuck is it?”

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  Donald holds up the deck of cards with one hand, presses them between his thumb and index finger so that the cards go flying. There’s something in his mouth. He looks up at you while the cards fly. He spits hard across the room, hitting you, perfectly, on the mouth. He says, “Don’t think you’re better than anyone else in here! You fucking drug addict. If you get out you’ll be back on drugs in no time. Then you’ll be dead.”

  You stand with his spit running down your chin. You want to say something but the spit clings. You don’t wipe it away. Just stare at the wall with your mouth closed tight. You think about the Korean War. Think about President Harry S. Truman or picture old Douglas MacArthur standing on the grassy banks of the Nakdong River, polishing his sunglasses with a handkerchief. Wait for Donald to look away and then use your shirtsleeve to wipe away the spit. You go and put your mouth under the spigot. You wonder how much tobacco it must have taken General MacArthur to fill his gigantic pipe. Think about your counselor. Think: Good job, Ricky. Good job.

  Nanny is your mother, or she might as well be. There has never been anyone else, at least not that you can remember. You remember a day years ago, before the pills, right after you moved home from college. You were in the living room with Nanny. The dogs, Ashley and Lyle, were asleep under the coffee table, their noses at Nanny’s feet. She sat her Dr Pepper down on the china saucer she used for a coaster. You loved the sound it made after each drink, when she returned the can to the saucer, the warbled ping of aluminum to china. “You know, honey, to me Dr Pepper tastes like vanilla extract. And you know what else? I think you have always been this way. You have always been like you are now, even as a little boy. A criminal mind, some people call it, but I think you could be a minister. Your great-grandfather was insane. He used to choke rabbits to death in the shed. He enjoyed it. You remind me of him.” You were flattered, even though it was clearly one of her less coherent days and you weren’t entirely sure what she meant. She kept calling you Larry, who was maybe an old friend of hers. She’d go through a short list of names—her grandfather, distant cousins—before she called you by the right one. It made you proud to know you reminded her of a dangerous person. You only wished you were the sort of person who could choke a bunny. You wonder if Nanny somehow knew this was coming.

  The day after Donald spat in your face the two of you sit on the floor and play spades as if none of it happened. Donald has a tattoo of a black knife surrounded by a spiral of thorns directly over his Adam’s apple. You stare at his throat, not at the tattoo, but at the thick apex of bone there. It reminds you of something. A pill. A tree. An erection.

  “One time I choked a rabbit to death,” you tell him.

  “My lawyer fucked me over, really did a number on me,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just did, man. Just did.”

  This isn’t good enough. You want the history. The timeline of events. You want the body count. But before you can ask him, Donald reaches into his pants and takes out an oatmeal cookie. “I saved it from lunch. It’s all yours.” It’s against the rules to leave the mainline with food, and you don’t like
oatmeal cookies. But you eat it anyway. Donald says, “Ricky, I was trying to help you. That’s why I spit on you. Every motherfucker in here is going to try and spit in your face, or worse. They don’t give a shit whether you live or die. You’re not free yet, man. You’re still an inmate. I just want you to be prepared. I just really care about you. I take care of me and mine.”

  During the last few weeks you keep your hands clean. Shave every day. When you shower, you always use more soap on the parts of you Donald pays most attention to: hands, butt, hands.

  Nanny sends many cards. The last one: Life is well in Pike County. Ashley is eight! Lyle has been injured! Those crazy people down the street with the camouflage golf cart! Ashley whines at your bedroom door. Lyle always thought so much of you. You didn’t forget about him, did you? He would always follow you around when you killed the flies so he could eat up the dead ones! Went to lunch at Long John Silver’s with my sister. She’s been coming over to walk the dogs. I might get tired of her soon! Been thinking of you. Been thinking of you so much. Submitted your name to the prayer chain at church.

  Climb into bed. Get back up. Read the last chapter in all of Donald’s books. Write a letter to Nanny. Drink water from the sink. Wet your hair. Comb it straight back. Look at yourself in the metal of the sink and think: Not bad, Ricky.

  You like the black guys but sometimes they throw pieces of food at each other during dinner. They make a mess. They ask you what you’re looking at and you offer them your fruit cup. One of them comes and takes it. “Thank you,” he says. Apparently he doesn’t like the pear chunks, because he spends the rest of the time throwing them back at you every time the guard looks away. Finally Donald comes in and sits down, sees the pear chunks on the table, a piece stuck to the front of your jumpsuit. He looks over at the black dudes but they’re looking at their food, pushing it around with their spoons. “What the fuck?” Donald says. Eventually someone lifts his head. Donald points at him, picks up some of the pear, throws it and hits him right on the forehead. They both stand up.

  “Fuck no,” Donald says. “Sit right back down.” When the guy doesn’t sit down, you say to Donald, “Don’t. Just forget about it. I don’t care about the pears,” but Donald is walking over with his tray in his hands and breaking it over the guy’s head. One swift crack against the man’s face and the guards are dragging Donald out of the mainline. You’re just standing there, not saying a word, with fruit still stuck on your jumpsuit.

  Donald’s skin is tan and tough from years of working in the sun. He was a laborer. He roofed hotels in Cleveland, worked as a garbage man in Louisville, did other things in Chicago. “You go where the work is,” he always says.

  He is gone for over a week. In solitary confinement. You can only wonder what is happening to him. Sometimes men will spend months in the hole. No television. No books. No one to talk to. Donald came on you the night before he hit the guy in the face with the food tray. You don’t take a bath while he’s gone. You keep the smell on you. Put your hands on your back, between your legs, up to your nose. It is the smell of something old, something unclean and sour and terribly personal. This is what it’s like with him.

  Several inmates approach you in the yard. They enclose you, dark and scary as a basement. They want to know if you’re looking for anything. One of them gets right up in your face. He says, “You’re fair game now that your dude is gone.”

  He tells you, “This way, buddy. Walk over here.” But one of the senior guards, Clint maybe, or Gary, comes and stands between the two of you.

  He says, “Come on, Ricky. That’s enough. Let’s go.” He takes you through the gymnasium, and all the way back to your cell. “You need to get your shit together,” he says. He wants to know how a kid like you ended up in Woodville.

  “Drugs,” you tell him.

  He laughs at that. “What else,” he says. It’s not a question.

  You lie in bed the rest of the time smelling yourself and thinking about Donald: how he only sleeps on his back; how the blood pools in the sink after he brushes his teeth; how he always cleans under his fingernails with an envelope, how his semen tastes, how it sprays over you in varying arcs—the distance it goes, the sheer and warm amount of it shooting across your body.

  When he finally comes back you’re in the recreation room sitting in your chair by the window, reading a magazine. You watch him walk in. He’s freshly shaven. His hair is pulled back, combed and wet. You’re not sure if you should smile. You know you pay too much attention to him in front of other people. He stands on the other side of the room talking to some of the other men from your block. He looks so clean, just back from the showers. You’re still dirty. You walk over and stand next to him. You don’t speak. It takes him a minute. “What’s up?” he says, like he hardly knows you. You have to keep your hands tucked into your waistband to keep from reaching out and stroking his ponytail. Here you are, like Hephaestion standing in the court of Alexander the Great, pretending to listen to the strategies but instead thinking of how he’s going to make you feel after the troops disperse.

  When you’re both back in the cell Donald says, “They’ll put someone else in here as soon as you’re gone. I wonder who it will be? I hope they’re cool.”

  You imagine another man in the cell. You imagine the lights going out, the room quiet for a few minutes before Donald asks this other man if he’s asleep. You wonder what Donald means by “cool.”

  At lights-out you take all of your clothes off and wait for him to ask you. After maybe half an hour has passed and he hasn’t said anything you climb down and get into his bed. For the first time, you kiss him. Maybe you shouldn’t but you want to try.

  “What the hell?” he says, jerking back, like he doesn’t understand. “I’m not your fucking boyfriend.” He grabs your head, pushes you down toward his crotch. “Do me a favor,” he says.

  For the rest of the week, after lights-out, Donald says nothing or else he just comes up to your bunk. He says, “Turn over.” He presses his fist against the small of your back and whispers in your ear. He says, “You like it now, don’t you? You love it. You want me to own it.” He says, “You like it when it hurts?”

  You tell him you like it when it hurts. You tell him you want him to own you.

  You talk to Nanny on the phone. You tell her you need a way to get back to Indiana. You tell her the car was impounded, you don’t have the car, she’ll have to pick it up.

  Nanny is upset. “Ricky, you’ve got a good job there in Pittsburgh. It’s a friendly city. I don’t know why you’re quitting. This is nonsense.” So many times you’ve explained to Nanny. It was easier to go along at first, but now you realize the problem with that.

  You tell her it’s the end of the school year and you might go back in the fall but you’re not sure yet. You say there’s been some conflict among the faculty members over trash in the classrooms. “I don’t know what to do,” you say. You ask for money to buy a plane ticket. You tell her she can send it to the same address she sends the letters. She says she has to get the dog off her lap. “I have an ink pen right here,” she says. You’ve given her the address four other times, but you tell her again. She says, “Why on earth would I mail a check to someplace in Texas, Ricky? That doesn’t make any sense to me.” You get the dreadful feeling that maybe she chooses her moments of sanity. Nanny says that Ashley is going crazy over something in the kitchen, probably a mouse behind the refrigerator. She has to get off the phone to see what the ruckus is about. “I can’t have her hurting herself. They’re all I’ve got, Ricky. These sweet little dogs.” She hangs up and for a while you keep the receiver to your ear, listening to the droning static of the open line until the guard taps on the door to say your time is up.

  After dinner you and Donald play cards and drink milk, sharing the same Styrofoam cup, taking little sips so that there is always another drink left. You always do it this way when you have milk
before bed, and there is always one last sip. Even before the lights are turned off you put your hands down the front of Donald’s underwear. You hold his penis. Donald punches you in the arm and then puts his hand in your underwear too. He tries jacking you off. You each hold the other’s penis. Donald doesn’t know what he’s doing. He gets too rough. You think he’s trying to make it hurt. You don’t say it hurts though and, eventually, it starts to feel good.

  The lights go out before you’re done.

  “Stay here,” he says.

  “Where?”

  “Here, idiot. With me.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Then do something,” he says, smiling.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I already said.”

  You get in Donald’s bed. He puts his head under the cover. Puts you in his mouth. He bites you. You’re wishing you knew how to help him. You’re wishing he knew what he was doing, that he meant it. His teeth get in the way. He’s going too fast.

  “Are you close?” he says.

  “I think so,” you say.

  He moves around for a few minutes. He presses his thumbs into your thighs. Eventually he gives up, slides back onto the pillow and props his head on an arm. He uses his other hand on you. He stares at you while he does it. He’s never let you be this close to his face but after a minute he is finally putting his lips close to yours, easing his tongue in your mouth. He opens too wide and breathes across your teeth until you are running out over his knuckles and down onto your stomach. He’s right there in front of you and you can feel his mouth widening into a smile. Something shifts, spreads through your body like a vivid fluid crowding out your limbs.

  “You don’t want to leave,” he says. “I’ve got fifteen more years of this fucking place. Think about that.”

  “Eleven,” you say. “You’ve got eleven more years.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Eleven. That’s what I meant.”