Good Behavior Page 5

  [ FOURTEEN ]

  I was thirteen. I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my mom and dad’s room admiring myself. I wore all camouflage, combat boots, black face paint; I had a long knife hanging at my side. I had pistols shoved into my belt and a rifle in each hand. I was a mercenary. I was a soldier of fortune. I had seen action in all the remotest and deadliest parts of the world. I’d seen horrors and perpetrated atrocities that would cause a normal civilian to puke. I’d decapitated villagers. I’d seen my buddies tied to mules and pulled limb from limb, urged on by our sadistic enemies. I had endured torture. I had been to hell and back, and had the scars to prove it. An AK-47 round had gone clean through my left thigh. My right arm had nearly been severed by the blast of a land mine. My right eye squinted constantly due to a head injury sustained in a chopper crash in Cambodia. My torso was peppered with tiny round scars from a shotgun blast at close range. I had endured the worst anyone can imagine, and lived. I was so tough now, I could kill a man with my pinky toe. I was the hardest motherfucker who had ever lived.

  I swooned inside at how powerful I looked. Right now, armed like this, dressed like this, I looked like Death. I looked like I owned the world.

  David and Philip and I would suit up in our paramilitary uniforms, our faces painted green and black, and carry out missions in Brickville and the surrounding area. We’d hike into town in the dead of night, belly-crawl through ditches, and move breathless in the shadows, behind hedges, and between parked cars. These missions mostly consisted of busting out windows or slashing tires or shooting out streetlamps with pellet guns. They were weak and ineffective and brought us no glory.

  Long before I set the school on fire and long before Philip and I robbed that place and made our desperate run from the cops, we were laying the foundations for such extravagance—of course, as it always is, our fantasies far exceeded reality.

  The missions we had planned for the future were something else entirely. These could at least more accurately be called terrorism. There was a girl at school with wealthy parents, and we all hated her. So we made extensive plans to kidnap her and hold her for ransom, then possibly execute her.

  “I say we take the money and blow her fucking head off anyway,” I said.

  Philip got excited. “Let’s kill her parents too!”

  “No,” David intervened. “Murder rap’s too heavy,” he said. “Let’s stick with the ransom plan.”

  Grudgingly, we agreed.

  We had plans to attack our school and slaughter our fellow students. The media seems so surprised that kids are actually doing this these days. It’s surprising to me that Columbine didn’t happen sooner.

  Our group, our American defense/terrorist organization, was called the Black Hawks. There were three hard-core members—myself, Philip, and David. We had a few reserve members, but none of them ever went on real missions. They were mostly involved in building forts and strongholds, or they took part in our drills (pellet-gun fights) and practice maneuvers.

  Everything we did was a Black Hawks mission, from beating up a kid at school to stealing a pack of cigarettes to breaking into the house down the road. During its heyday our organization consumed about 99 percent of our mental and 75 percent of our physical activity.

  We had a manual, written by yours truly, the Supreme Commander of Operations. It detailed our purpose, our code of conduct, how a member might advance in rank, etc. We spent most of our spare time conducting drills in the woods and fields around the farmhouse, learning how to maneuver through the rough without being detected, how to ambush, how to attack without warning, how to tolerate lying facedown in the mud or sitting in great discomfort at the top of a tree for hours. We were dedicated. We were obsessed. We were making ourselves into soldiers, into killing machines.

  [ FIFTEEN ]

  In the middle of the night, my cell door opened and a guard, Kline, said, “You want a butt buddy, Henry? I mean, a cellmate?”

  I put down my coffee and my copy of In Cold Blood and sat up on my bunk.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Burglary,” Kline said, and shrugged. “Pissant.”

  “Okay,” I said. So I put all my things in my big gray plastic tub, rolled up my plastic-coated mattress and sheets and thin blanket, and put it all in the shopping cart the guard had in the hallway. And off we were, back to P-1.

  My new cellmate’s name was Mo. He was seventeen, with hairy arms and lines on his face that at first glance looked like wrinkles, but it turned out they were scars from a pipe bomb that had blown up in his face years ago. So for a paranoid moment, I wondered if Kline had just thrown me in with a forty-year-old, set me up to be somebody’s bitch, but the fear passed quickly. Mo was slightly shorter than me but stocky—powerfully built. He got up and shook my hand. I could tell that, in spite of his appearance of strength and his crude features, he was nervous.

  “It’s not that fucking bad in here, man,” I said. “You get used to it.”

  He nodded and sat back down. “Yeah,” he said. “You always get used to it.”

  I got my shit set up, the bed rolled out and made, my books spread around, my laundry under the bunk. I looked at Mo. He was sitting on his bunk, elbows on his knees, and when I turned, I saw him look up from the floor.

  “How long you been in here?” he asked.

  I thought for a second. “Fifty-nine days.”

  He nodded his head.

  Mo ended up being a decent enough guy. We traded stories.

  He’d carried a gun almost everywhere he went on the outside. He said he was just lucky when he got caught—it was one of the rare days when he didn’t have it with him.

  I asked, “What kind of gun?”

  He said, “I don’t know, man, a little .32. I had a Glock once but I traded it for four grams of speed.”

  What a fucking waste, I thought. Mo didn’t love guns, obviously. Too crude to appreciate a fine piece of machinery.

  “Four bags of dope for a motherfucking Glock,” I said, and lay down on my bunk. “You should’ve stuck the guy up, taken his fucking dope, and still had your Glock.”

  Mo shook his head. “He was a friend of mine, man.”

  As I’ve said, my dad always had a lot of guns around. He even managed, at one time, to get his hands on a sawed-off rifle of some kind, all the markings and serial numbers filed off. He showed it to his friends and called it his mafia gun. Because Dad knew a lot of shady characters in Plantation, and because those shady characters knew a lot of other shady characters in Indianapolis, which was only a twenty-minute drive away, Dad got into trading guns. He didn’t do anything illegal. He didn’t do it to make money. He did it because he loved guns. Guns and porn, those were my dad’s two great passions.

  Dad had tons of pornography. Although I do remember him buying it occasionally—he’d take me to the porn shops with him—he seems to have amassed his collection by picking up magazines from the road. Hundreds of times while driving on country roads, he’d see something out of the corner of his eye, lock up the brakes and leap out, get back in with a porn magazine that someone had discarded.

  “Son,” he told me, “there’s a lot of pussy-whipped weasels out there whose wives won’t let them have this shit, so they buy it after work, jerk off on their drive home, and toss it to the birds. It’s good for us—we get free porn, but I don’t ever want to see you turn into a pussy-whipped weasel like that. You ever let a woman walk all over you and I’ll shoot you myself.”

  Yes, an odd thing to tell your child.

  I used to break into Dad’s den to get to those magazines. I learned how to pick locks specifically for that purpose. He had millions of them but never gave me any, not until years later. He had a photo album that contained cutouts of all his favorite naked women, and it was a foot thick, a massive tome like one of the Great Books of human history, like the Bible. When I opened it, I heard trumpets and felt the kisses of pale blond seraphim upon my ears.

  Now, lying on m
y bunk waiting for Mo to fall asleep, I often recalled that tome of Dad’s with longing. I missed the solitary days of P-13 when I could jerk off any damned time I wanted. The only porn I had now was a swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated, and given my starvation, that was one hell of a find. I treasured that thing. It always surprises me how secretive guys can be about masturbating. I never once heard any of my cellmates doing it and I’m fairly certain that none of them ever heard me, but Mo was a pretty quiet guy anyway.

  After Arnold, I bunked with no more crazies. This was not out of choice—I didn’t screen potential cellmates with personality tests, although that would have been helpful. No, after you’ve been alone for a couple of months, no matter how tolerable, or even sometimes enjoyable, the solitude might be, the change-up of getting a cellmate is always exciting. To be honest, the kids I met in the joint (other segregated juveniles) were generally no different than any of the other kids I’d known before, except for their chronic tendency to commit felonies. At the very least, what separated us from those kids on the outside was our misfortune in getting caught.

  Arnold did serve his purpose. I used him as a high-water mark for judging the sanity of anyone I met for years to come. I have since been widely educated in the extremes of mental instability, but the Arnold Standard still holds true—whether it’s about some guy at a party, a drug dealer, or a friend of a relative. Mo, for instance, was infinitely saner than Arnold. He was thoughtful—uneducated, but thoughtful. What little he did know about the world made an impression on him. He had, I suppose, something like what I had, and my brother has: the framework, the machinery for great intelligence. I don’t mean common sense. That’s nothing more than a human being’s basic capacity to remember painful experiences and, to some degree, avoid them in the future.

  I thought about Arnold, how he’d get by with his brutal common sense. Not long after Arnold and I were separated, he turned eighteen and was sent to a cell block. I’d watched him out in the rec yard a few times, playing with the other grown-up apes. He fit right in, I thought, except for his ridiculous blond Afro.

  [ SIXTEEN ]

  All day we Black Hawks roamed the woods and killed animals, dressed in camouflage, our rogue paramilitary uniforms mismatched from garage sales, flea markets, and surplus stores, our weapons either hatchets, brass knuckles, hunting knives, or pellet guns. When we meant business, when the day called for real blood, mass quantities of blood, and the black clouds rumbled for the sacrifice of whole populations of innocent creatures, we had .22 rifles. Mine had a scope and a ten-shot magazine, bolt action. Philip’s was a single-shot bolt action or a pearl-handled pistol—the pistol he later took with us on the night of the robbery—and David joined us with his giant, brutal, murderous 20-gauge pump shotgun.

  After a day like that, we’d pay a visit to the crazy girls from up the road—they’d in variably be hanging out in their barn, engaging in whatever weird rituals they engaged in. We’d storm the barn and attack them. We’d invade with war cries and secret, not very innocent, barely realized lust. We pointed our guns at the girls’ heads menacingly, spitting and ordering with such aggression—the very village-burning aggression we’d seen in those Vietnam War movies.

  “Get down on the floor! Up against the wall! Don’t fucking move! Don’t move or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

  And the girls cowered and trembled and sometimes called our bluff by smacking us, so we’d have to harshly bring down upon them the full force of our intentions. We pushed the gun barrels all the more roughly into their scalps. We tightened our grips on handfuls of hair, jerking them back as emphatic silencers—and generally it worked. Only when they had become thoroughly convinced that we were not role-playing, that we were not just pretending—only when they fully accepted and understood that since the time they had last seen us we had in fact become enemy soldiers and they were now, whether it was fair or not, whether it pleased them or not, our prisoners, and we owned them—only then would we let go. We’d kiss them, smack them on their asses, and laugh. Then we’d go back to the Turner house, up to the boys’ bedroom, and change back into civilians.

  The girls teased us all the time. It was an elaborate sadomasochistic drama. They came around constantly. They sought us out. They fucked with us.

  We were in the doorway of the horse barn smoking cigarettes Philip had stolen from his dad when suddenly the crazy girls were all out in the front yard, about a hundred feet away, lined up and yelling at us.

  “What the fuck are they doing?” I asked.

  Philip shrugged. David spat.

  “Being cunts,” David said.

  We could see them clearly from where we were, and they were lifting their shirts, showing us their breasts. Their ages ranged from eight to fourteen, so the breasts ranged from nonexistent to almost fully developed. We were shocked. None of us knew what to do.

  “They’re fucking insane,” David said.

  I couldn’t take it. This was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. Swept up in a powerful surge, I rushed out in front of the other boys and dropped my pants, a pair of baggy blue jeans that were too large for me anyway. They fell down around my ankles. I flashed them, jumped up and down, and grabbed my balls, then ran back into the barn. The girls were going crazy, laughing and screaming. Annette, twelve and a half years old, got out in front of the group and mooned us. Then the other girls noticed and pulled her back out of sight.

  It was all too much. We were completely out of our minds—our raging adolescent hard-ons wanted to stab the world to death.

  Philip was screaming, “I’m gonna fuck every last one of you bitches!”

  Now they were growing even braver, thanks to Annette. They were all mooning us by pulling their pants down, some leaving their panties on and some not, and shaking their butts at us.

  When the tension became unbearable, the girls seemed to sense it, and they ran from the yard as fast as they could. We knew instinctively that a chase was not what they wanted. They were not attempting to lure us—they never intended for us to pursue. They were just playing.

  It didn’t matter.

  I didn’t care. I didn’t know what to do. So when the front door to the house slammed shut behind the last little ass, I fell back into the barn. I ignored the other boys, and I just went to jerking off, feverishly, like I was working myself to death to hold on to something that would be gone forever if I waited one second too long.

  [ SEVENTEEN ]

  My new cellmate, it turned out, was a member of a gang. A fairly well-known national gang, in fact. Mo had joined up while serving six months in a boys’ reformatory in Chicago. He was well versed in the lore of the gang, knew all the signs and symbols, all the ranks, who the founders were.

  I’ve always been fascinated by gangs. What interested me about joining a gang, and the only reason I would actually do so, was the idea of scheming my way to the top and running the whole show. I wasn’t interested in being anybody’s patsy or bitch.

  The more I talked to Mo about this, the more I was tempted to join up. He said he knew only a few guys, three or four, in Thompsonville—the city our jail was in—who were members. He said there were a lot in Chicago, but his only connections were with the kids he’d met in the boys’ reformatory. These gangs were like franchises, like small mafia crews that shook down a specific locale and sometimes had to kick a cut up to a more powerful crew. This is what I gathered. For the handful of white boys who actually joined these gangs, learned all the lingo, and went back home to fly their colors in rinky-dink little Midwestern towns, there wasn’t much association at all with the larger, more serious, more vicious chapters in bigger cities.

  You could, if you were ambitious enough, join up and appropriate all the knowledge you gained from the one who initiated you—because this information is passed along purely by word of mouth, and, believe me, the consistency of accuracy is astounding—then take the whole institution home with you and recruit a bunch of your own
thugs. What a cinch. The gang has plenty of name recognition—every thug has heard of it—and the rules and protocols are so esoteric and idiosyncratic that no single individual could just make the shit up, so you’ve automatically got enough legitimacy to throw together, in a matter of months, a fully functional organized-crime ring. I was sold. My youthful dreams of power, of rulership, might just come true after all. I could be a fucking godfather.

  So Mo explained the joining up process to me. It was not a pleasant prospect, but what the hell. I’d have to be beaten in—he’d punch me in the chest fifty times, as hard as he could, and I’d have to stand straight with my hands behind my back and take every single blow as fast as he could deliver them, without my backing off or falling down.

  When you’re in jail—I feel that I have to stress this point from time to time—you really have nothing to do, so no matter how idiotic an idea might actually be, it’ll probably sound pretty good. Any diversion is welcome. So I said, “All right, let’s do it.”

  I stood up against the wall with my hands behind my back. He stood in front of me, his feet firmly planted, and, with ceremonial solemnity, proceeded to pummel the shit out of me. He didn’t hold anything back. Every time a fist crashed into me, a bit of breath was pushed out of my lungs. He got tired halfway through and had to take a break. The bruises were already starting to form. By the time he was done, I couldn’t breathe, and neither could he.

  He panted and said, “All right, brother, you’re in now.” He hugged me. “Welcome to the family.”

  I managed to wheeze something that sounded like, “Okay, thanks.” I lay down on my bunk, crossed my arms over my chest, and waited for my heart to start beating again.

  After the brutal beat-in, Mo presented me with a stack of college-ruled notebook paper bound by the cover of a National Geographic magazine. This was, as he put it, the Bible.

  When he handed it to me, he said, “That’s yours, brother, but if you ever show that thing to a civilian, you’re a dead motherfucker.”