Good Behavior Read online

  I dedicate this book to my dad (the rough edges and the soft parts of him), a man whom I respect and love, a man without whom I might have turned out to be something truly awful, or at least a lot less interesting—I might have become average and well-balanced, and nobody wants that.

  This memoir is based on the author’s recollection of past events. Select names, identifying characteristics, locations, and other details have been changed to protect the privacy of persons involved. The dialogue has been re-created from memory. Some conversations and events have been condensed, and some characters are composites of several individuals.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  [ ONE ]

  Limped in through Sallyport in handcuffs, clothes caked in dried mud—sat down, exhausted, answered a million pointless questions.

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Allergies?”

  “No.”

  “Physical handicaps?”

  “I’ve been attacked by a police dog. I have four holes in my thigh.”

  “Doesn’t count.”

  “But they let him chew on me for ten minutes.”

  “Still doesn’t count.” The guard looked up from his paperwork. “You know what a handicap is, right?” I nodded my head. “So aside from the holes in your thigh, do you have any?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  He was a black guy, the guard who processed me. He seemed three feet taller than me. He said his name was Dennis. He took my mug shot, let me take a shower, and gave me an orange jumpsuit and flip-flops. I moved through it all in a daze. I did what I was told.

  I’d thought Philip and I would be sent back to Indiana, to the juvenile detention center in Mercantile. Juvie wasn’t bad—I’d been there before. We could’ve sat around with the other losers and talked about what badasses we were. They would have worshipped us.

  But I was booked into a county jail in Illinois. A real jail, where they kept rapists and killers and cannibals locked up—a place where I was sure that guys like me, scrawny sixteen-year-old kids who thought they were hot shit on the outside, were regularly raped, killed, and eaten by real criminals.

  After Dennis snapped my photo I asked him, “How long could I get for this, man?”

  He said, “For armed robbery? Hmm …” He thought. “Fourteen years maybe.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” I almost fainted.

  He took me to a cell and held the door for me. I limped in and he shut it behind me, turned the keys, and locked it. I stopped in the center of the cell and looked around. Bunk, sink, toilet. Nothing else. I heard the guard walk away and I turned around, and there was the door, shut and locked. I knew it was locked, but I walked up to it and pushed on it anyway. The reality of it crushed me, the absolute fact of what had taken place and where I was now, the unalterable nature of it, the certainty of it just squeezed into me, and I sat down on my bunk and closed my eyes. I eventually lay down and fell asleep.

  Evening. Just before dark. My cell door opened. A guard, not Dennis but somebody else, an older, rounder white guy, said, “Detective’s gonna take you over to make a statement.”

  I stood up. “Okay.”

  The detective looked like he was straight out of a bad eighties crime drama. His tie even had a palm tree on it, and he had a powder blue sports coat on. He had a thick mustache and he wore bluesman sunglasses, and walked like he had the drop on the whole goddamn world. I shuffled behind him, barely able to keep up. He seemed to have forgotten that I was in shackles and handcuffs. And that my leg had been mauled by a German shepherd.

  We walked for ten minutes, past the courthouse, which was much more impressive, more imposing than any I’d ever seen—there was more brass, and the granite seemed somehow thicker, heavier than it should have been—to an administration building. He opened the door for me, but when I slipped on the stairs and struggled to get back up, he looked away and waited.

  We entered a room full of desks and chairs and people talking on phones and people shuffling papers around and cops that looked just like him with their feet on their desks picking their teeth with what I imagined to be human bones. Then I noticed, at a large conference table in the center of the room, seated, with his head down on one arm, his other arm dangling beside him, handcuffed to the chair, was Philip. He was asleep. The detective and I walked by Philip, and as we passed, I kicked his chair.

  “Wake up, fucker.” He looked up without seeming to recognize me. I smiled at him. Philip was fourteen years old, blond and slender, and looked like he’d spent the day having a confession tortured out of him. As it turned out, he was just exhausted.

  We went into another room, a smaller room, but this one was full of comfortable chairs, like a waiting room in a hospital—and everyone was there: my mom, my dad, my brother, Philip’s mom and dad. I was so surprised by this that all I could say was, “Mom, I got bit by a dog,” as I limped toward her.

  She stood and said, “I know.” Then she hugged me. Everyone else remained seated and silent. They watched me. They were disappointed, but not exactly shocked.

  The detective said, “Your parents have agreed to let you speak with me. So we’re going to have a conversation about what happened last night.”

  I looked around. My brother stared at me, no expression on his face, and Dad nodded his head. Dad said, kind of deadpan, “Go ahead and tell him what happened, Nate. Philip already talked.”

  The detective took me by the arm and walked me down a hall and into a tiny interrogation room with one table, two chairs, and a tape recorder. The walls were soundproof and there was a two-way mirror on one wall. He gestured for me to sit, so I sat.

  “Let’s talk about last night,” he said as he took a seat and flipped the tape recorder on. He leaned back, threw his hands behind his head, and settled in.

  The statement took
a long time to record—about an hour—and I told him almost everything that had happened that night. Why not? I was already fucked. When we left the interrogation chamber, my parents were gone. We walked back over to the jail, and I was once again locked in.

  P-1: private cell number one down on the first floor of the Paradise County Jail. It was a bit larger than the other cells, because it was designed to house two inmates. The main difference was its size and the number of bunks. There were also two steel shelves, about eight by twelve inches, bolted to the wall five feet off the floor between the bunks and the toilet; in a single cell there was only one. Everything else was the same. Blue paint on the floor and up the walls to about four feet, and then white from there to the ceiling, which was also white. The paint was high gloss, and there was a fluorescent light on the wall, two long rods brighter than the sun, encased in unbreakable Plexiglas. There were no shadows. There was one small window, three feet high and four inches wide—unbreakable two-inch-thick riot glass.

  I looked through this thin slit of a window and watched people pass on the sidewalk twenty feet away. I felt like a caged freak. I was shocked that people didn’t actually approach the glass and look in at me, tap on the window to get my attention, hope that I’d do something disgusting to amuse them, like masturbate wildly or eat my own feces.

  No one gathered outside my window. No one gawked. No one was curious. They all just walked on by, and I was invisible.

  [ TWO ]

  Trick or treat night. I was seven years old. We were driving home from begging for candy in another town, and I was in the front seat sitting between my parents, exhausted from trekking around all night, with a big bag of candy on my lap. Dad was screaming at Mom. I don’t know what the argument was about. It probably wasn’t even an argument, just my dad screaming. It seems like he did that a lot, fabricated conflict just to clear his lungs. At some point Mom lost her temper—astonishing because Mom never lost her temper—and she slammed on the brakes as hard as she could. I almost flew through the windshield, but Dad slammed his right palm against the dash and his other palm against my chest and held me back against the seat. My brother smashed into the back of our seat. I couldn’t breathe. A wave of terror froze me as I watched my bag of candy explode. The candy went everywhere.

  Dad yelled, “What the fuck is wrong with you? I’m not riding in this goddamn car.” And he threw open his door and got out. “I’m fucking walking home.”

  Mom didn’t drive immediately. We sat there for a minute and watched Dad walk away, on the shoulder of the road, half in the gravel and half on the pavement, illuminated by our headlights. Just an hour before, we’d been rushing from house to house, filling our bags with booty, and I’d been mad with excitement, intoxicated with it, and it seemed to me, even though it surely wasn’t the case, that Mom and Dad had felt that too. And now this. Dad had a limp because one of his legs was half an inch shorter than the other, but now he limped like it was half a foot shorter. It was comical how pathetic he looked, pissed off, walking a country road alone in the middle of nowhere after dark. I was afraid that Mom was going to run him over. I’d seen this in so many movies—Dad let me watch the worst fucking movies: gangster movies, Hells Angels movies, vigilante movies, serial killer movies.

  I said, “Mom, you gonna run him over?”

  She squeezed my leg. “No, Natey, but I should.”

  Instead of killing him, she drove up slowly beside him.

  “Get in, Hank,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  He didn’t even look in the car. He was defying us. “Fuck you!” he yelled, as if we were a hundred yards away, out in the middle of one of those soybean fields.

  Mom slammed her foot down on the accelerator and we drove off.

  After a few moments, I asked her, “You really gonna let him walk, Mom?”

  “That’s what he wants.” And she shrugged a little.

  Dad finally got home three or four hours later, completely exhausted, collapsed on the couch, and fell asleep. Dad always slept with his legs curled up and his hands together under his cheek like a little kid, like that stereotypical way angelic little kids are supposed to look when they sleep. It always astounded me. What a crazy son of a bitch—that’s the way he sleeps? You’d think he’d doze lightly on his back with a .357 Magnum in his hand. Like that scene in Bonnie and Clyde where the cops all file into the bedroom after a big shoot-out, find a guy lying on a bed with a sheet over him. They’ve got about fifteen guns on him, and they slowly peel back the sheet. The guy’s awake, fully clothed, with a tommy gun in each hand stretched out along each of his legs. That’s how I imagined Dad should’ve slept.

  My mom was the Buddha. She never killed a thing in her life. In all my greatest moods, those too-brief shining moments of serenity when I am cognizant of certain wisdoms that are normally beyond my reach, I am reminded of the kinds of things that my mom has always said.

  When I was a racist teenager, I’d say things like, “I hate niggers, Mom. They’re mud people. I hate gooks and spics and faggots and old people and babies and women, except for you, Mom. I love you. But the rest of them should burn!”

  She’d lay a saintly smile on me and say, “Nate, you don’t even know those people. They’re just trying to live their lives and find happiness. You shouldn’t hate so much—it’s not good for you.”

  My dad, on the other hand, was practically a serial killer. “Nate,” he’d say, “just imagine, you could have your pick. Just go out in a van and find one you like, take her home, and put her in your basement. Just think how great that would be.” Or, “Women are all the same, Nate. Chop their heads off and they all look alike.”

  [ THREE ]

  Early the next morning, I was taken to the courthouse for my arraignment. My parents were there. The place was packed with people, and I was disoriented. I was ushered up to a podium in front of the judge, who said to me, “Mr. Henry, you’re being charged, as an adult, with armed robbery, a first-degree felony. Do you understand the charge?”

  “Yes,” I said. I didn’t understand. I wasn’t exactly clear on what an arraignment was, and I had just been jarred from deep sleep into a reality that completely stunned me.

  “Do you wish to enter a plea?”

  “I’m guilty, I guess.”

  The judge looked down at me. He sort of sighed and leaned forward. “I’m going to enter a not-guilty plea for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “The prosecutor and your attorney will work out a deal that way, but if you enter a plea of guilty right now, I’ll have to sentence you, and I don’t think you want that yet.”

  “No, sir. I don’t.”

  “Okay, then we’ll enter a not-guilty plea.”

  At the time I didn’t realize how astonishingly lucky I was to have such a reasonable and considerate judge. Only years later would I see what an oddly singular action this was. How many judges pounce on ignorant, confused guilty pleas? It could have been the end of me right then.

  After the arraignment, I stood outside of the courtroom with the guard who had taken me there. My parents stood close to me.

  After the robbery that night, after the chase and everything, when I’d stood in the cornfield with the gun, considering whether or not to rush out and open fire on the cops, I remember all I really wanted to do was call Mom and tell her how sorry I was. You hear all those stories about soldiers and criminals yelling for their mothers as they die, which always sounded strange to me, but that’s just what I wanted when I was facing possible death. I wanted my mom.

  “Mom,” I said, “I was talking to this guard who booked me yesterday, and he said I could get fourteen years.”

  She smiled a very painful smile and ran her hand through my hair. “Don’t think about that, honey.”

  “You’ll be all right, Nate,” Dad said.

  I couldn’t speak. I wanted to cry.

  “Come on, Henry,” the guard said. “Time to go back.”

  Mom hugged me and
I was led off back to the jail in my shackles and handcuffs, certain I was doomed.

  For the first couple of weeks that I was in jail, I was in a strange form of shock. I wasn’t allowed to smoke, so a good deal of this shock must have been due to nicotine withdrawal. Everyone I saw seemed familiar to me, as if I had met them before in a dream. Everyone—all the guards, all the inmates—seemed nostalgically connected to my past, an ancient past of which my current incarnation was unaware. I dreamed of smoking cigarettes, of Joan and Philip, and I awoke every day surprised to find myself still there in jail, still locked in a concrete cell.

  I got a cellmate not long after I arrived. I remember the moment he bounced into my cell behind a grocery cart containing his mattress and a gray plastic tub full of his belongings. He did seem to bounce. He was an overwhelming presence, dark skin, olive, and a big blond Afro atop his head the diameter of a small automobile tire. He was much bigger than me, dressed in a white T-shirt and sweatpants, and he had muscular arms. The way he moved, the way his hair bobbed around, he was like a cartoon character.

  Arnold, seventeen years old. I think he was in for burglary, but as with all my later cellmates, he told me stories, plenty of stories, of other crimes he wasn’t caught for, some of them pretty fucking scary. Arnold’s parents were Southern Baptist fanatics, and by the time I met him he had reembraced the faith of his youth.

  So Arnold was all aflush with Jesus and the good news. He asked his parents to bring me a Bible, which they did, and which I read lazily. I hadn’t caught on to the routine yet, so I wasn’t aware that a library cart circulated once a week, pushed around the entire jail, from cell to cell, by a little librarian from the city library who could get you almost any book you asked for. She would later become very important to me.

  For now, I discussed religion with Arnold. I told him I’d been a Satanist for a couple of years, but wasn’t sure what any of it really meant.

  He said, “My God will forgive you. What’s your worst sin?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  “Did you ever blaspheme the Holy Spirit?”