Good Behavior Read online

  I was ten years old. Dad was in his shed building something out of wood—perhaps a little shelf or a reindeer. Mom was in there talking to him, and when I entered, I asked, “Dad, can I go out to David’s for a while?” David was my best friend, lived out in the country.

  Dad looked at me. He had a scowl on his face and he was dripping sweat. He was always sweating. He drank more ice water and sweated more during the summer than any man I’ve ever seen. “No,” he said. “I’ve already said yes to you too many times today.”

  “Oh, Hank,” Mom said, and he shot her a harsh look. She shut up and looked away.

  Dad turned around to face me fully. “Get down on your knees,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Do what I say. Get down on your knees and ask me if you can go to David’s.”

  I got down on my knees and said, “Can I go to David’s?”

  “No!” His eyes were wide and his face was contorted, instantly insane, the kind of expression you’d expect on a man who was about to split your head in two with an ax. “You don’t get down on your knees for nobody! Get back in the house.”

  I burst into tears and ran into the house and up the stairs. When I got to the top of the stairs, I picked up a cassette tape that I’d left on the floor earlier, and when I entered my bedroom, half blinded by rage, I flung it at the wall, only it didn’t hit the wall. It smashed through a pane of glass in my window and fell to the ground outside. I stopped. My rage turned instantly to panic. Now I was in a state of hysterics. I ran downstairs and found my mom in the living room.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. But I couldn’t stop to tell her. I ran outside to clean up the glass and get the tape. She followed me. She helped me clean up the glass and she hugged me. I slobbered on her blouse. I couldn’t get my breath. I was terrified that Dad was going to whip me. She said, “No, go tell him what happened and apologize.”

  “No!”

  “It’s okay. Go ahead, he’ll understand.”

  Five minutes later, Dad violently pushed me back into the house while struggling to undo his leather belt. “Get in the damn corner!” And he pushed me into it. I began to scream. “What are you yelling for? You want something to yell about?” And he lashed my ass with the belt.

  When I think about my dad, my ass stings. Years into my adulthood, I acquired this strange muscular memory of the many ass-whippings I’d received from him when I was a kid—unjust ass-whippings. He couldn’t contain himself, would laugh wildly while he swung the belt—a maniac, an insane man. I can still feel the sting. Not just a spot on one cheek, but multiple slashes on both cheeks. It’s like I’m being whipped all over again, every time I remember.

  [ SEVEN ]

  As the weeks passed, I adapted. At about three months, I was capable of imagining spending the rest of my life in jail. I had grown entirely accustomed to life on the inside. I no longer thought excessively about fast food or about having sex, about anything that wasn’t actually attainable. I jerked off all the time, but actually getting laid was like getting a cigarette—it just wasn’t going to happen. Once I got a handle on the routine, jail was not that bad. I was amazed by how quickly I became accustomed to it. Your expectations narrow, the scope of your world extends mostly to the area right around you—sometimes down to the shower and the rec yard.

  The routine was soothing.

  Monday was popcorn night. Every inmate got a bag of freshly popped popcorn. It was the best popcorn I’d ever had. The trustees would push the popcorn cart around the jail and hand out the bags. Trustees were adult inmates who, for whatever reason—because of either their good behavior or the low level of their crimes—were allowed to perform duties in the jail, like cleaning or distributing food. I asked one time if I could be a trustee since at least it was something to do, but they said I couldn’t because I was a juvenile.

  I was segregated, kept mainly out of contact with adult inmates, because I was a juvenile and hadn’t yet been convicted. I was awaiting trial. The second I was convicted, juvenile or not, I’d be thrown in with the adult population. I’d be just like any other inmate. I could maybe be a trustee then, but I was pretty sure I’d be more concerned with keeping my ass intact than with passing out popcorn.

  Tuesday was commissary day. Every inmate had an account with the jail. My mom made sure I had enough cash to get the things I desperately needed, like a week’s worth of Nutty Bars, pencils and pads for writing letters, a bag of foul-smelling powder that, when mixed with tap water, miraculously became fruit juice, and other necessities. I’d put in my order on Friday. On Tuesday, Mona, a mammoth lesbian guard who had a satisfying maternal quality, would deliver the merchandise straight to my cell door. She never spoke an extraneous word, but she was polite, and she never made a mistake with the commissary.

  Wednesday was library day. Belinda, the wonderful librarian, who was petite and had light brown hair, brought the cart by and I could check out as many books as I liked. If I made a list of books I’d like to read, she’d take it with her and return the next Wednesday with whatever I asked for, unless I asked for things like porn or bomb-making recipes.

  Thursday was laundry day. A trustee came by for my dirty laundry, and would return it on Friday. Even getting clean laundry back was an event. A garbage bag full of freshly starched white T-shirts, socks, and gray sweatpants was deposited next to my cell door. I’d spend half an hour folding them all, getting them just right. Again, it was something to do, something to make the time seem well used.

  Nothing happened on the weekends.

  [ EIGHT ]

  I talk about my dad so much because he was the ground that I grew out of, and the ideal vision he had of himself as a young badass was the same ideal vision that I eventually adopted for myself. But Dad was not like anyone else’s dad. Other dads seemed rock solid; they were vaults. They stood firm like buildings and they were closed off and they made no spontaneous sounds. My dad filled the room with whatever he was. He didn’t hold anything back. My dad was insane. He was complicated. He had a past that was twisted and scary and his mind was twisted and scary, but he was a boy who had never found it very easy to behave like he had shit under control. He never had anything under control, the way I’ve never had anything under control. Just an eternal what-the-fuck? kind of feeling about everything.

  What is it? I still struggle with a mystified half-grasp of the complexities of human motivation. I mean, there’s always something more there. … I’ve never been able to just toss something into a recognizable category of behavior and say, “Well, all right, that’s just the way it goes.” I’ve never been able to pretend that it’s not all really, truly, deep down and always, completely fucking astonishing in its ultimate and inescapable weirdness.

  So there’s something there. How many kids grow up with homicide as a constant topic of humor and conversation in their house? I mean constant. How many kids grow up with a thick, sickening paranoia snuffing out their natural pleasure and excitement for life?

  My dad was always, always talking about what he’d do if somebody broke into the house while we were sleeping, always talking about why he kept a bunch of guns by the bed. I mean, I grew up assuming it was inevitable that somebody would break into the house at night to kill us. The world was full of people who wanted to kill or mutilate us.

  He said, “All right, Nate, we’re going to this store over here in town. Now, not too long ago a little kid like you ran off by himself and went to the bathroom alone, and some guy was in there, some fucking pervert, and you know what he did? You know what he did?”

  “No.”

  “He took a knife and cut that boy’s peepee off. He just cut it right off.”

  This was my first depression. I remember it. How old could I have been? Five? This was my first experience of psychotic paranoia. Sick fear. Because that was real, it was not hypothetical—little boys get their peepees cut off in this world. It could happen to me. It could happen to anybody.

  Fear
dominated my dad’s sense of life. The foundation of my dad’s worldview is a horror, a sick trembling in the face of overwhelming cruelty.

  This he gave to me.

  And we know what happens to people who are afraid, people who are scared to death, who maybe aren’t able to recognize their fears, who maybe can’t do anything at all about their fears. … They get frustrated, and eventually that frustration comes out as anger. They realize on some unconscious level that in a world where overwhelming cruelty looms constant, it’ll take a pretty mean son of a bitch to come out on top. If the threat’s that powerful, your response had better be at least as powerful.

  So as I grew up I developed a fetish for weapons, just like my dad had. I collected knives and guns, brass knuckles, lead pipes, swords … anything that could kill or maim. I’d seen films where guys had arsenals in their homes, and I tried to create my own.

  My dad had an arsenal. I’d stand in his arsenal, surrounded by all those guns and knives, and you know how I’d feel?

  Safe.

  To be safe meant being capable of doing violence, but at first this primitive understanding wasn’t clearly conscious.

  There was a spot in the creek that ran by our house where a huge metal pipe coated with tar ran from one bank to another. It was about a foot above the water, at the deepest point in the creek. This is where everyone swam. We referred to the spot as the Black Pipe. There was a train trestle on the other side of town, past the park where the ball diamonds were, which we always referred to as the Black Bridge. It was a sad day when it was finally removed. From then on, the spot was referred to as the Place Where the Black Bridge Used to Be. By that time, I’d ride my bike out to that spot and smoke cigarettes.

  Once my friend Philip and I took Dad’s .32 derringer out there and shot up a storm, pretended we were gangsters and tried to formulate some plan for taking over the town, extorting the businesses and so on. But long before this, when I was probably eight or nine, I was wandering around the bank by the Black Pipe and saw a bird playing in the sand by the edge of the water. Without thinking, I picked up a large rock and flung it at the bird. It hit it squarely in the back, probably snapped its spine, and the bird began to flop around, flap its wings, and twitch its legs. I was overcome by a feeling of dread, a sickness, and I panicked and ran away. I don’t remember how long it took for me to recover from it, probably an afternoon, but an image of that poor bird, broken, flopping around in the sand, used to come back to me at times—it used to strike me for no discernable reason and bring back the sickness, the utter drenched-in-misery despair I’d felt when it happened.

  In third grade I chased another boy, and as we rounded one of those huge concrete pipes we liked to climb on, I shoved him as hard as I could. He slid on the gravel and his face hit a concrete slab pretty hard—blood spread out around his face. I thought he was dead. I stood over him, mystified, horrified. I felt just like I did after I broke the bird’s back. After a teacher had carried him into the school, I saw shavings of bloody skin stuck to the slab of concrete, as if it had been sanded off his face.

  I went to see him in the nurse’s office to tell him I was sorry, but all I could do was cry. He lay there with a bandage covering half his face, and he looked up at me as if to say, “How could you do this?”

  I don’t know how I could do it. I just did it.

  But more killing would come, more violence, more animosity, and there was no stopping it. Kids do what they want before they know they want to, or more importantly why they want to, and almost always after it’s too late—this is why some kids end up blind and maimed or in a persistent vegetative state. Just having a little fun, that’s all. Childhood is a long dream of blood and rape, as far as I have seen, about the setting of land mines in the unconscious, the planting of fantastic future mushroom clouds, the creation and living out of insane earth religions: primitive, brutal, and simple. Innocence is a total lack of impulse control. Innocence, or the ability to stop doubting ourselves, is what we adults still long for.

  [ NINE ]

  Not long before the robbery, I had seen the Oliver Stone film The Doors. I had always, in a way, been into writing: horror when I was young, then rock lyrics when I got older. There was something about the poetry in that film that stuck with me, and so when one Wednesday I noticed a biography of Jim Morrison on the library cart, I checked it out. Before that, I’d been reading Stephen King, Clive Barker, some fantasy, but nothing heavy. Not to say that a bio of Morrison is heavy, but what it led to is another matter entirely.

  Up until this point the only counterculture figures I had ever encountered or thought I understood were bikers, gang members, mobsters, and assassins. My world didn’t contain intellectual rebels. My world didn’t contain intellectuals, period. Granted, whether or not Morrison can actually be considered an intellectual is debatable, but he was an artist and he did read a lot, did a lot of drugs, had a lot of sex. This looked like a pretty goddamned good life to me. The most important thing the Morrison bios did for me (I read four of them) was to list the writers who had influenced him. I wrote down every one of those writers and handed the list to Belinda, who would always smile and say something like, “Good choice.” Soon the greats were flowing into my cell, and I was eating them up as fast as they came. Kerouac’s On the Road, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, Ginsberg’s Howl.

  I read all the Kerouac books Belinda could find. I copied Howl by hand onto yellow legal paper so that I could reread it again and again. Something was happening; a new world was opening up for me. I could see suddenly that a great conversation was going on, had been going on since human beings began to write, and I wanted to be a part of it. And the conversation wasn’t just about what kind of jobs people had or what kind of vacations they might take, but about every aspect of human experience. These men were revolutionaries in a way that I could never have conceived before. The world was becoming deeper; whole universes of possibilities and questions were exposing themselves to me. I didn’t understand Nietzsche—I could barely read him then—but I knew he was important. These were murmurings, which were becoming clamorings, of a whole reality that neither I, nor indeed anyone I had ever known, had ever even imagined. It was the beginning of thought. It was the beginning of questioning.

  It was a slow process. At first, the books taught me that I should try a lot of drugs, rush about frantically looking for something indefinable, and then fall into an intolerable depression for a long time. This was what it seemed intellectuals did. But you begin asking questions for fun, and then the questions grow into you, and they take over. You don’t even know it’s happening.

  No longer would I be capable of taking anything for granted, accepting just anything, believing that there weren’t alternatives. There were always alternatives. Factory job? Wife and kids? Living and dying in a small Indiana town? No, there were opium dens and whorehouses on the other side of the world. There were parlors where geniuses smoked pipes and debated the course of history, and there were French girls in Paris who took mushrooms and saw the secret of the universe. I wanted nothing more than to be there with them.

  [ TEN ]

  I met David in fourth grade on a field trip to Indianapolis. He asked me if he could sit with me on the bus, and a week later I was out at his house in the country for the night, running through the woods and discovering the insides of wild animals, which in the beginning made me quite sick. I remember the first time David took a groundhog under the blade. He did it with such kid pride in destruction and gritty country know-how, gleefully sickening me, a boy from the city. Not that Brickville was much of a city. There were maybe a thousand people living there, but to David and all the kids out on the farm, it was a fucking metropolis.

  The Turner farm consisted of a moderately dilapidated two-story peaked-roof house with a front porch that had a swing on it, one ancient wooden barn with peeling red paint near the driveway that functioned as a garage, and a larger, newer, gray sheet-
metal horse barn next to a pasture. The house sat on a small hill, which sloped down into the horse pasture.

  One snowy winter day David and I were crouched at the top of the hill. I was all wrapped in winter clothes, sitting on a plastic sled. David laid the dead animal out on the snow and, with his pocketknife, sliced its front side open from groin to mouth, exposing steaming entrails. I was nauseated, and I slid off down the hill to escape the horror.

  But soon enough I was converted, and I was killing and dissecting my own beasts, gutting them, or field-dressing them, as it is called by hunters. David has always and with much pride claimed responsibility for turning me into a bloodthirsty killer. Killing made us more a part of the wilderness: killing animals was not to us anything to be ashamed of, and it was not a sport—it was a natural function.

  They had a bunch of chickens out there at David’s farm, and every once in a while Gladine, his mother, a God-fearing matriarch whose mouth and mind were further from the gutter than anyone I know, would tell us to go kill a chicken for dinner. How we relished this duty—it’s amazing how much blood is in a chicken and how messy this job is.

  We’d tie one rope to the chicken’s legs and another to its neck and stretch the neck over a stump. David would belt out some kind of ninja hi-ya! and bring an ax down with all his might. He could usually sever the neck in one swing, and the blood would spray in every direction as the decapitated bird flopped around, not going anywhere because its legs were tied. It would be a summer day and we’d have been swimming in the creek or horseback riding, barefoot and shirtless and wearing damp shorts. Droplets of hot blood speckled our chests and reddened our feet.