Good Behavior Read online

  Before jail, before the fire, my mom took me to see a counselor in Beckettstown. He was a Jewish guy named Herman with long, high frizzy hair and big, bushy sideburns. He thought if he acted and dressed hip, he’d have a better chance of connecting with the juvenile delinquents who came to see him, so he wore a biker wallet with a chain like mine, which contrasted nicely with his white shirt and necktie. He brought in a switchblade one day to show me. So I pulled mine out and we compared knives. He was really a decent guy, highly complimentary. He said he was impressed with my use of language. He said I was wonderfully noncommittal.

  I explained to him my philosophy of Satanism, which was really a very simple inversion of Christian ideology: “If you’re a God-fearing asshole and you do everything you can to please your little god, but you fuck up and piss him off, you’ll go to hell and it’ll suck. If you’re a Satanist and you’ve allied yourself with Satan, well, of course you’ll go to hell, but you will have earned Satan’s respect and then hell won’t be such a bad place at all—in fact it’ll probably be more like a paradise.”

  Herman tried very hard to get me to see where my self-destructive path would probably lead me, but it didn’t do much good. Eventually he referred me to a colleague, a middle-aged female counselor who let me smoke in her office. As you can imagine, I thought she was a real pal. I told her about the fights I’d had at school. Philip and I had recently figured out how to huff gas—how to inhale the fumes from a small container of gasoline to get high—and we’d started to do that a lot, so I told her about that. I told her I’d tried some diet pills I got from a kid at school, but all they did was make me irritable. She suggested to my parents that rehabilitation was what I needed.

  When my parents talked to me about it, I was all for it. Goddamn, a vacation from my fucking parents was indeed exactly what I needed.

  “How soon can I go?” I asked.

  “Two weeks,” Mom said. She looked like she was about to cry.

  A couple of days later I was sitting in school and thinking, “Jesus, I don’t know if I can take this for two more weeks,” when a brilliant idea occurred to me. Beat somebody’s ass and get a ten-day suspension. That should take me right up to when I’m supposed to go. I was sitting up on the bleachers in the gym with a group of hoods: Charlie Bender, Jared Hopkins, Mickey Bowen, Rich Bass, and Tommy James. But who am I going to beat up? Who deserves it most?

  Well, there was always Roger.

  Roger came to the doorway of the gym and leaned against the jamb, hands in his pockets, all nonchalant, all badass like he ran the fucking place—blue sweater, white turtleneck underneath, his hair finely sculpted into what looked like a diving board protruding from his forehead. Every time I saw the kid he lifted his hands and did a backward nod with his head, a nonverbal challenge—asking me if I want a piece. About half an hour before this in the cafeteria he gave me this little ritualized fuck you again. This was of course why he came to mind.

  I said to Tommy, “I’m about to kick Roger’s ass.”

  “Really? You are?” Tommy was not really a badass himself, but he hung out with the badasses, so the reputation sort of rubbed off on him.

  I told him to hold my jacket, I took off some bracelets, and when I saw the prick at the doorway, I started down the bleachers. I walked straight toward him, and as he got closer and closer, things began to get blurry—I disengaged from reality. I said nothing to him. I didn’t pause for a second. As soon as he was within reach, I let him have it as hard as I could on his left cheek. He clutched his face and doubled over to his right; I kicked him in the stomach, threw him around the hallway from wall to wall, landing punches every time I brought him to a stop, until Mr. Denoon grabbed me with both hands and threw me with shocking force away from Roger. I regained my balance and started back toward Roger, who was bleeding a little from his nose and whose face was puffing up. I yelled, “You got a fuckin’ problem, bitch?”

  Denoon dragged me down to the principal’s office. Ten-day vacation, and next time, Mr. Henry, we’re calling the police to charge you with assault.

  Thank you very much, Mr. Callander. That is perfectly acceptable.

  [ THIRTY-FIVE ]

  P-21. Every day those crazies from the mental health block filed past my door on their way down to rec, and every day that guy Earl, the craziest of them, paused in front of my door and looked in at me. He leered, with this I-want-to-fuck-your-corpse grin on his face. After the second time he did this, I went up and stood right in front of the door and stared back. The fact that I was four inches from his face didn’t affect his expression.

  The next time he did it, I said, “Earl, what’s your fucking problem?”

  “I got no problem, inmate.”

  “How about I cut your fucking head off, Earl?”

  He smirked. “You think you can do that?”

  “Positive, cocksucker.”

  He smirked again and walked away. God, I wanted to beat his ass.

  I had to go inside the cell block for hot water. Once inside, nothing would separate me from Earl. He’d have no protection. Sure, he was bigger than me, but he was old and slow. I couldn’t be sure how slow. He probably wasn’t slow enough. As far as I knew, Earl could have been a true psychopath. He could very well truly be exactly what I was afraid I was becoming. Then I was terrified. What if he was planning on attacking me? And what if he had a real shank? Some little piece of handmade cutlery he’d been grinding away at for as long as he’d been here? Fuck. But I had to go in there. I needed hot water.

  I dropped a bar of soap down a sock and swung it against my bunk. There was a heavy thud. I’d rather have a piece of steel, but this might do. Well, if Earl was a threat, and he sure as shit looked like he was, then I’d have to take him out, and fast. If I could make it to the hot water spigot and fill my cup, I could scald his face first, then pound him with the soap sock.

  Next time he came by, I didn’t say anything to him. I just looked into his eyes when he came to my window and imagined smashing his face in. When they were all locked up in their cell block, I took my soap sock, hid it in my waistband, and called a guard. My heart was pounding. I was getting short of breath. I could feel my adrenaline amping up. I couldn’t tell if this felt good or not. It was familiar, though.

  Josh came to my door. “Hot water?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” And I showed him my cup.

  He opened my door and I went out. He opened the door to the cell block and I went in. He didn’t even follow me. He stayed in the doorway and talked to another inmate. Why would he watch me? I’d never given any of the guards any reason to worry. I scanned the dayroom. Earl was nowhere to be seen. I went to the hot water spigot and filled my cup. I looked around again. No Earl. Where the fuck was he?

  “Come on, Nate.” It was Josh. I turned to him. “I got rounds to do, man.”

  I left the cell block and went into my own cell. Then the insanity of it all nearly split me in half. I had less than three months to go, and I’d be out for good. Less than three months, and I’d already been inside for over nine months, and I was going to throw it all away, get my ass charged with assault with a deadly weapon, get my probation revoked, and get shipped straight to prison for six fucking years. What the fuck was wrong with me?

  “Josh,” I said, before he slammed my door.

  “What?”

  “I gotta get out of this cell. There’s no window to the outside. I never know what time it is. I’m going fucking crazy, man.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” He shut my door.

  “I’m serious, Josh. I’m losing it.”

  He nodded and walked away.

  From then on, whenever the guys in the cell block were taken to rec, I just placed a sheet of paper over the window to my cell door and waited for them to pass.

  [ THIRTY-SIX ]

  The rehab place was called the Charinton Institute for Behavioral Health. It was in a town called Charinton, fifty miles west of Brickville. The counselors
were all right, but they immediately drugged me. I was on three different kinds of medication from the moment I walked in the door. I couldn’t think. I knew where I was only after a bit of concentration. Usually I didn’t care where I was. I hated that fucking place, and I was afraid they were trying to kill me. I called Mom and told her I didn’t want to be there, but she said I had to stay. And I could smoke only six cigarettes a day. It was the worst place on earth.

  That was the first time I’d ever experienced real institutional control. Really the first time I faced the absolute indifference of people who could tell me what to do and punish me if I didn’t listen—who might have even been excited about the possibility of punishing me, without giving any damn about how I felt.

  At first I was resistant. “I don’t want to take the fucking meds. I want a cigarette.”

  The cold, cruel, unmovable response from the nurse was, “You will take this medication, one way or another.”

  I knew she was right. So almost immediately I accepted what I was up against—I was up against a machine that didn’t care how much I struggled; if I wanted to struggle, it would still have its way. This is the same thing I recognized and accepted when I went to jail. There is nothing to be gained by fighting something you can’t possibly beat.

  I got a cold as soon as I got there. I was congested. I couldn’t breathe. On top of that, the meds destroyed my ability to think. A few days later I was feeling slightly better, and by the end of the week I could function. I still felt removed from reality. I was slow to respond.

  There was a kid in the room next door to me who snuck cigarettes in. He asked me if I wanted to smoke one with him in the bathroom. If we got caught, we’d probably lose all our smoking privileges. I said, “Man, I just want to do my time and get the fuck outta here.” So that was what I did. I did my time.

  That same kid found out that if you tried to run, the counselors would chase you down and shoot you up with something that fucked you up for days. He wanted to find out if the stuff was any good, so one day when we were walking from one building to another in single file, he broke and ran like hell. Two big counselors tackled him before he got fifty feet away, and they dragged him inside. A couple of days later, I asked him what the shot was like.

  “It fucking sucked,” he said, looking like he wanted to puke.

  There was an insane girl in there, Cody, who had a nice body; in fact, she was damn near perfect. She got into the habit of rubbing my dick through my pants under the table we all sat around in group therapy. She wanted me to sneak down to her room after lights out and fuck her, but I didn’t have the energy for it. Besides, the meds I was on rendered my dick completely useless. She said I looked just like her boyfriend. She said she wanted to jam a pencil into the therapist’s neck and burn the whole place down.

  On the night Cody disappeared, I woke up in my bed and couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. It seemed like I lay there forever, terrified, thinking maybe this happened every night, maybe they put us into this state and did strange experiments on us. While I lay there, panicking, I thought I could hear Cody in the next room, throwing chairs against the walls, fighting off half a dozen orderlies. This was the most crazed, cornered-animal moment of Cody’s life; there were walls of fire all around the room one moment, and scorching fires inside her head the next. I felt that I was personally responsible for what was happening to her, that another innocent’s life was coming to an ugly end because of something I did or didn’t do. I eventually fell back asleep, but the next morning Cody didn’t show up in the smoking room, and she wasn’t in group. When I asked about her, they said she’d been discharged. I asked, “Was there some kind of fight last night?” I never got a straight answer out of them.

  There was another girl who wanted me to sneak into her room at night and fuck her. Her name was Lynelle. She had short dyed-red hair and blue eyes. They took us all in a bus to a skating rink, and she and I sat together in a booth the whole time, touching each other under the table. She was much saner than Cody, but not as good-looking. Cody was beautiful with a dangerous, wild-animal beauty while Lynelle was just pretty. She was smarter; she talked about how the therapists were trying to reprogram us, trying to rewire us into cooperative slaves. She said her plan was to agree with everything they said, to convince them that she was benefiting from their work, and then, when they let her go, she was going to shoot herself in the head with her father’s shotgun as soon as she got home. This was so sexy to me and I can’t tell you why.

  There was a dayroom with a television and a few sofas, where we could be entertained if we’d gotten enough work done, if we’d really shown a desire to get better. Our reward for the desire for self-betterment was two hours of trash talk shows and mindless comedy. Lynelle and I were in the dayroom alone—first time we’d been completely alone. We kissed. An orderly ran in and pulled her off me, literally lifted her into the air and threw her across the room, bruising her arm. It was unbelievable really, as if he were saving my life, as if a little kiss were the absolute worst thing that could happen to someone. So we were no longer allowed to be within fifteen feet of each other, Lynelle and I. They were saving us from each other.

  [ THIRTY-SEVEN ]

  I sat out in the hallway with Kline one night while he did his paperwork. It wasn’t all that uncommon for the guards to allow this—not with me anyway. I appreciated the time out of my cell, and they didn’t seem to mind the company.

  On every floor in the main hallway there was a giant steel office desk and two wheeled chairs, one in front of the desk and one beside it, its back facing the wall. I sat in the one with the back to the wall.

  “Kline, how many homicidal maniacs have you had in here?”

  Kline leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and gazed up at the wall. “Let’s see.” He squinted. Finally, he just said, “A few. Why?”

  “Were they all obviously insane? I mean, could you have a conversation with them?”

  “By ‘homicidal maniac,’ what exactly do you mean?”

  “I mean torture killers. Not these fucks that rob people and blow their brains out. I mean sadistic motherfuckers, like serial killers. The sons of bitches that like it.”

  “We haven’t had many of those. There was one guy who killed some kids. He was an all right guy. Never had any trouble out of him.”

  “Was he bright?”

  “Sure, bright enough.”

  “Was he interesting?”

  Kline looked at me, turned skeptical. “Why are you asking these things?”

  I threw up a hand and let it fall in my lap. “Just curious. Been reading about serial killers.”

  After that conversation with Dicky, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. He’d gotten to me. Halfway there? I’m practically a killer? That’s what he was saying. Was he right? Was I more fucked up than I thought? Was it inevitable that I would someday snap, go completely nuts, slaughter people? This terrified me. I mean, maybe after everything, after all this, coupled with whatever the hell was already in me …

  Billy the Kid is one thing; Jeffrey Dahmer is another.

  “Well, look, Nate. From what I’ve seen, there’s no way to tell. You can’t call a man as a baby killer from ten feet away any quicker than you can call a man as a garbage collector. It’s just not that simple. Not even after talking to them for a while. Maybe if you were a trained psychologist or something, and even then I don’t think it’s possible.”

  So there was no way to know. I could be a psychotic bastard, the kind of psychotic bastard who’d cut open his own mother and sniff her intestines—and I wouldn’t even know. It could just come out of me one day, a brand-new personality trait, intact and ready for action, before there was anything I could do about it. Maybe that’s what was happening. Maybe it was coming out now.

  I sat in my cell with thoughts of murder creeping into me every ten minutes. I’d try to read, and suddenly in the middle of an engaging paragraph I’d have this vision of myself driv
ing a knife into somebody’s forehead, scraping it around and scrambling brains. I’d start to sweat. Fuck, I really didn’t want to be one of those sick bastards. Rampage killers, assassins, gangsters—those are all right. A total degenerate who can’t help himself is another thing entirely. I had to get ahold of myself.

  [ THIRTY-EIGHT ]

  On Christmas Day in the early morning Dad picked me up at rehab, Charinton, the nuthouse. I wasn’t being released for good, but I was allowed to leave for the day. Dad was happy to see me. He brought me a bottle of apple juice, had it in the cooler full of pop he always carried with him. The apple juice made me sick. It looked like urine. I couldn’t stop thinking of drinking urine. I was still feeling dopey. I was still slow, but Dad talked a lot and I didn’t mind listening.

  “I’ve been working on the lawn mower,” he said. “Got it running. It was a bad carburetor.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You remember that trash can I made last year? The wooden one with the lid on hinges? I think I’m gonna make some more and try to sell them. Maybe twenty-five, thirty bucks each.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You remember Jake? Owns that gas station out by Shoshone? He’ll let me sell them there.”

  “Hmm. Yeah. Sounds good.”

  When we got home Dad set up the video camera and made us get down in front of the tree on our knees. He handed us presents and directed us on how we should open them in a cinematically pleasing way. It was annoying because Dad wasn’t sure how he wanted it to look. He kept moving the tree, made Mom hold up a white sheet behind us blocking out the tree, even made us rewrap some of the presents to do them over again because we’d fucked it up the first time. Due to my drugged state, I was pretty docile, but my brother was infuriated. Finally he blew up.