Good Behavior Read online

  “No problem, dude,” I said. I flipped through the pages, which were covered with diagrams and symbols, listings of ranks and slang, lists of affiliated gangs and enemy gangs along with their colors and symbols. There was even a secret alphabet, and special numeric codes for giving orders, and code sounds, like birdcalls you could utter if you needed help from a brother or if you were announcing a beat-down (not to be confused with a beat-in).

  Occasionally Mo would lie in his bunk and dream about us riding high in a school bus with gang symbols spray-painted all over it, armed to the teeth with machine guns and rocket launchers, all the way out to the West Coast, where we’d hook up with the original gangsters, the hardest of the hard-core. We’d be doing real gangster shit, like drive-bys or crack dealing or running a stable of hos, or all three—rock-slinging, bitch-smacking, pimped-out badass motherfuckers blasting whole neighborhoods to rubble. I occasionally indulged in these fantasies with him, just to pass the time, just to make him happy, to keep him believing that I wasn’t just going to exploit the image of his beloved gang.

  A day or so after Mo initiated me, a guard spotted my bruises. Evans was a squat little middle-aged guard who had a mustache and never smiled. He took us to the showers, and when I took my shirt off, he asked, “Where’d you get all those bruises?”

  I said, “I fell down.”

  He nodded.

  Evans was a man who’d seen it all, so I asked him one day, “Do guys really get raped in prison?”

  “Sure, happens all the time,” he said. “But those guys are pussies. They’re afraid. You won’t get fucked, man. They want you to just give it up. You’ll fight. They’ll beat the shit out of you every day, but you won’t get fucked. You got heart.”

  [ EIGHTEEN ]

  David went out of state with my family one year to visit our relatives on Dad’s side of the family. I always loved going there, a small, economically depressed industrial city in the Appalachian hills. We’d go a couple times a year, and Mom and Dad would let me do anything I damn well pleased. At home they could be suffocating, but there, in Dad’s hometown, they took the leash off.

  I was probably fifteen, and I owned two leather jackets. One was your average black motorcycle jacket; the other was similar but made of cracked and peeling leather, and on the back was an image of a dagger with a bunch of roses wrapped around it. I gave David the one with roses on the back and I wore the other one. We wandered that town in style, strutted down the streets, talked about picking fights, picking up women, getting fucked up.

  I said to David, “Damn, we look good in these jackets. If we don’t get laid in these jackets, I’ll be surprised.”

  David shrugged.

  “I’m serious, dude.” I punched him on the shoulder. “We’re fucking badasses.”

  David was never as optimistic as me, not when it came to getting laid. He complained all day about how hot it was in his jacket. He’d say, “It’s ninety degrees out here. I’m fucking dying, man.”

  “It’s for pussy, dude. It’s worth the sacrifice.”

  It was indeed ninety degrees out and we looked like dumbasses, walking around in the dead of summer in leather jackets just to look cool. The inside of my jacket was soaked with sweat and I was starting to stink.

  “Maybe it is too hot,” I said, and David started to slip out of his jacket when we heard a voice from a second-story window. We were walking down the main drag, but there weren’t many people around. Above a music store, perched in an open window, was a young guy in his late teens wearing a white T-shirt and a baseball cap.

  He said, “Hey, dudes!”

  We stopped and looked up at him. “Where you from?” he asked.

  We both answered at the same time. “Indiana.”

  “Where in Indiana?”

  “Other side of Indianapolis,” I said.

  He nodded his head and took a hit from his cigarette. “You dudes look pretty cool. I like your jackets.”

  I felt a surge of pride. I grinned. I yelled, “Thanks, man!”

  The guy waved, I waved, David waved, and we walked on. We strutted on, and our jackets stayed right where they were.

  “See, man! We’re fucking cool!”

  “Yeah, dude,” David said. “I guess we are.”

  We lit cigarettes and cruised.

  At some point, we crossed a little bridge and David suggested we go down underneath and see if we could find frogs. I thought this was a dumb idea, but I followed him anyway. I wasn’t tooling around in a black leather jacket on a hot summer day to kill frogs—I was looking to get laid. The bridge crossed a wide, shallow creek, and when we got underneath, David began to wade into the water, flipping over rocks, skipping stones, generally exploring. I sat down on the sandy shore and smoked a cigarette. We were not allowed to smoke yet, so we had to sneak them. The smoke we’d had on the main drag, the totally exposed broad daylight smoke, was for the benefit of our second-story admirer, and if any of my relatives had driven by just then, we’d have been screwed.

  I looked around and spotted something tucked up in the girders beneath the bridge—it was brown, and looked to be made of cloth. “David, what’s that?” I pointed and he investigated.

  “It’s a duffel bag,” he said as he pulled it down. “It’s heavy, too.” He laid it on the ground between us and unzipped it. “Oh, my God!” he screamed.

  “Holy shit!” I yelled. My heart almost stopped; then it began to beat like a .50 caliber machine gun. “Porn!” It was completely full of hard-core porn magazines. It was unbelievable. We couldn’t have stumbled on a better find. We sat under there for two hours, examined every single page in every single magazine, and when we came up from under the bridge, we could barely walk.

  “Jesus,” he said. “This is a great town.”

  “I know. It’s the greatest fucking town in the world.”

  We put our jackets back on and stumbled forward.

  Then: “Hey!” It was a chick’s voice. We looked around. Up the hill and just inside an apartment complex was a group of girls, teenage girls. They were hanging around on someone’s porch. Finally, I thought, we’re going to get laid.

  I started toward them, but David said, “Dude, wait a minute.”

  One of the girls, a fat one, yelled, “You guys are stupid!”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. What did she just say?

  She yelled it again. “You guys are stupid! Only fucking geeks would wear leather jackets on a day like this. You’re just trying to look cool! Faggots!”

  David had already begun to walk away, quickly.

  I gave the bitches the finger and a “Fuck you!” as loud as I could and caught up to David.

  “We are goddamn geeks,” he said. He took off his jacket and threw it at me. “I hate that jacket anyway.” And he walked faster.

  “Fuck those bitches,” I said. But I was just as humiliated. I was nauseated. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than what had just happened to us. The day was ruined. Our lives were ruined.

  “I hate this town,” David said, and I silently agreed with him.

  [ NINETEEN ]

  There was a needle-and-ink tattoo on Mo’s outer thigh that said PUSSY in huge block lettering, which he’d had a friend do when he was fourteen. When he wore shorts or got ready for a shower, it was the most glaringly obvious thing in the world.

  Mo pulled the eraser out of a pencil, squeezed the metal end together, and scraped it on the floor until it was practically razor sharp. I looked up from my book occasionally and watched his progress.

  When he was finished, he said, “I want you to do me a favor.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I want you to cut this fucking tattoo out of me.” He pulled up the leg of his shorts and showed me the PUSSY tattoo. “I go to prison with a tattoo that says PUSSY, and I’m fucked, man.”

  I stared at him for a minute. Of course I recognized what a messy job this was going to be, and the pain was just going to be too much
for him to bear.

  “All right,” I said, and sat up. He sat down on my bunk beside me and handed me the pencil. He stared straight ahead, gritting his teeth, preparing himself. I started to scrape. Every time I scraped, the metal went in a few millimeters deeper. He winced, and pretty soon the blood was flowing down his leg onto the bunk. It was pretty clear to him and me both that if we actually succeeded in erasing the tattoo, his leg would have to be amputated.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “Never mind.” He got a wad of toilet paper, held it against the bleeding gash. He shook his head, terribly disappointed. “Fucking PUSSY,” he said. “What was I thinking?”

  Not long after this attempt at jailhouse plastic surgery, Mo was bailed out. Just before he left, he gave me a powerful hug and said, “So long, brother.”

  “So long,” I said.

  He threw up a gang sign and I did the same.

  “Take care, my man.”

  “You too.” And I never saw him again.

  Back to P-13, back to my books, my coffee, and my solitude.

  [ TWENTY ]

  In the great pursuit of women, of love, of the only thing that matters to a young guy—sex—there will be failure. Nobody starts out a stud, and if they do, they’re a freak. Born studs are psychopathic freaks of nature, hated and envied by the rest of us. I think I saw a statistic once that said 90 percent of the single women in the world are fucked by 2 percent of the single men. I believe it. There are guys to whom this comes naturally. But to the rest of us, females are black holes of mind-crushing unpredictability, with an infinite capacity for cruelty—a necessity and a disease.

  When I was thirteen or fourteen, I became obsessed with Amy, the oldest of the crazy girls from down the road.

  Amy was my first addiction—I’d twist around in bed at night, a writhing junkie, unable to sleep, consumed by a need for her. Amy, the brown-eyed farm girl, never wore makeup or stockings or anything but jeans and T-shirts and tennis shoes, her dirty blond hair cut short and styled sexy, wavy, with bangs. I’m on my knees, subjugated to her—she dominates my entire world between the ages of thirteen and fifteen.

  Amy would talk to me about her family, and then later about some guy she’d met who had a van … and what they’d do in that van. All the while I’d be wondering if she was enjoying hurting me. Of course she was. She was fifteen and had nice little tits. David and Philip and I would grab her tits, yell “Fried green tomatoes!” and run away before she smacked us.

  I never made love to Amy—she kissed me once, just to make sure that I didn’t stop thinking I needed her. It was my first kiss, my first sinking into another human being, with tongue and all, and for a moment—for two or three seconds—I lost myself entirely. It was my first real drug experience. But it never happened again with her.

  In the creek, after a rain, a major rain, when the water got about eight feet deep down under the train trestle, the spot where it was easiest to enter the water, we were floating around and I was holding on to her and her cheek was pressed against mine. Her wet cheek, her wet hair—my God, I would’ve done anything to make love to her, to pull her off into the woods, behind a tree or into some deep grass and take that bathing suit off her. The bathing suit had some animal print on it, not a leopard print, maybe yellow tiger, a one-piece suit.

  Eventually all the crazy girls moved—their dad had found work in another state, or something like that, and it just happened one day—they were gone. So that’s how my first addiction ended—cold turkey.

  [ TWENTY-ONE ]

  A couple of preachers came to my cell one evening and asked if they could speak with me about the Word. Apparently it was their mission to save sinners like myself, so I let them come in and have a seat on my bunk while I leaned against my sink. I spent a lot of time leaning against my sink, whether someone was in my cell or not. I had to wear sweatpants all the time, and they had no pockets, so my hands would invariably find their way inside my pants, where they would lazily and soothingly fondle my balls. I found myself doing this while one of the preachers was in the middle of some sermon about why Jesus liked criminals, and why he was down with losers, whores, and poor people in general. He stopped and looked down at my pants.

  I said, “I don’t have any pockets. Go on.”

  The preacher was a young guy, maybe thirty-five, with pasty, oily, fishy-looking skin and big glasses and thin hair. His partner was just as repugnant. It seemed to me that religion often sucks these losers in and gives them a sense of purpose. I asked the preacher why, if God was all-powerful and all-knowing, did he allow any of this horror in the world to happen. It’s an old question, but I liked watching them squirm. None of these weasels ever have a real answer for this. Eventually I told them I had to get back to my reading, and so they left. I’m sure they felt that if they’d just tried a little harder, they could have saved me.

  I remember one time when we were pretty young, maybe nine or ten, Philip and David and I were waiting for some friends of their family, Kenny and Percella, to show up at their house. We were all going to the beach and they were running late. We were dying to go to the beach, and so we were all petrified that they weren’t going to show and we were going to get fucked out of a day of aquatic pleasure. David suggested we pray.

  Now, Gladine, their mom, was an incredibly religious woman, a wonderful woman in all other respects but still very religious. For a long time she forced her kids to go to church with her—and she attended some kind of horrifyingly primitive Baptist church where suddenly, for no apparent reason, people in the room would leap to their feet and start spewing nonsense, I mean literal non-sense, word salad, grunts and squeals and blubbering. They called this speaking in tongues. They believed that this was the voice of the Holy Spirit channeled through their bodies. First time I went with them, it scared the piss out of me. I mean, these were grown adults, acting like retarded children throwing tantrums. So Gladine was serious about her Jesus, and when we were very young, so was David, for at least a little while. I accepted what he told me about it, but it’s this specific instance on the beach day that really sticks in my mind as the moment I first very clearly questioned the logic and sanity of prayer.

  David said, “Okay, now get down on your knees and put your hands together and close your eyes.”

  We all did it, right out there in the driveway. If Gladine saw us from the living room window, she probably wept with pride.

  David went on. “Now make sure you ask God for forgiveness of your sins first, or it won’t work.”

  So I did that. I thought, “God, forgive me of my sins.”

  “Now,” David said, “ask Him to make Kenny and Percella get here soon.”

  I thought, “God, please make Kenny and Percella get here soon.” And I imagined it happening. I imagined opening my eyes and seeing them pull into the driveway. I imagined God performing a miracle. I imagined that if we had not prayed, they’d still be fifty miles away, stuck in traffic, surrounded by other cars. Then they’d disappear from the traffic and rematerialize in the driveway. I imagined that all the people they were stuck in traffic with would have to have their memories wiped clean, because after all they had just witnessed the inexplicable vanishing of an automobile. Kenny and Percella would have to have their memories wiped clean too. And the vehicle, transported through time and space like that—would it affect the atoms in the air, among other things? How would you transport something like that with people in it instantaneously? How could that happen? How could you do something like that? And why would he do it for us? Just because three kids want to go to the beach. There are billions of people in the world who need things more than we need to go to the beach. If he did this for us, I’d have to assume that he was doing it for everybody else all over the world. So this sort of fluxing and fading in and out of existence, this mutation would almost have to be the constant state of the world.

  Well … either it was all magic, unreliable and intangible, or it was all real and solid, and it worked
the way it always seemed to work. Kenny and Percella were either fifty miles away or they weren’t. They were either almost here and we’d go to the beach, or they weren’t and we might not. I dropped it. I didn’t mention this to David or Philip; I just hoped we’d get to go to the beach.

  As it turned out, they didn’t show up for another hour.

  Later, when I got into witchcraft and Satanism, it wasn’t much of a leap. Magic is magic, after all. It didn’t matter who your God was, what colors he wore, what gang he ran. What mattered, ultimately, was how much of a hassle he was. Satan wasn’t much of a hassle; he offered just as much free magical assistance as the other guy, and he came through just as often—about 50 percent of the time, I supposed. About the same odds as pure chance. At least Satan didn’t pretend to give a shit about innocent people and then not come through when they were pleading for him to save their lives.

  Preachers were always circulating through the jail. A couple of weeks later another one came in, looking pretty much just like the other ones: pasty, dead-eyed, and poorly dressed. This one was hard to get rid of. He started out all right enough, asked me some general questions about why I thought I was there. Then he began to try to convert me aggressively.

  “Robbery, man. I know why I’m here.”

  “But don’t you think maybe there’s another reason?”

  “No. I robbed somebody. That’s pretty much enough.”

  “Maybe it’s because God wasn’t in your life.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. I didn’t feel like talking. I’d let him in only to be nice. “Look,” I said, “I think I’m gonna take a nap.”

  “Well, let me read you something,” he said, and opened his Bible.

  “No, that’s all right.”

  He started reading anyway.

  “Look,” I said, “I told you I wanted to take a nap, all right?”