Good Behavior Page 9

  I gave it a lot of thought and I just could not find an adequate reason to hate gays for being gay. When I thought about their gayness, I still felt a little sick, but I was trying to get over it. Feeling sick was not a good enough reason in itself.

  So I was a more enlightened man when I met Dicky. And though Dicky disgusted me in a lot of ways, it was not necessarily his effeminacy that made me want, on more than one occasion, to smash his face.

  He was a failure of a human being all the way to his core. Socially inept, needy, sheltered. And he was always trying to correct me when I misused a word. He was such a nag that I finally almost beat his ass one night, but just before I punched him, I glanced up and there was Josh, looking in our window. I said, “Josh, get me the fuck out of here or, so help me, I’m gonna kill this fucking faggot.”

  So I was back to P-13 once again.

  [ TWENTY-EIGHT ]

  I still had not been laid, and this was supremely important. It was a huge problem. How badass can you be if you’re a virgin? But I had come close.

  I met Lauren at a fishing pond fifteen miles outside of town. David, Philip, and I would camp there some weekends. It was a members-only fishing spot, so it was never too crowded. One night we met a girl who was around fifteen. I was fifteen too by this point, and I was desperate to find a girlfriend.

  I’d tried at school to seduce girls, but my reputation had destroyed all chance. There was an Italian girl in particular with massive breasts. Her name was Jennifer D’Nozzio and she had two little mean-ass brothers who were apparently the new tough kids in school. I got along with them all right—I mean, they’d nod at me in the hallways. I figured if they were ever in a scrap, I’d help out. So I asked Jennifer if she wanted to go out. She said yes, to my total amazement, but by the end of the day she’d been warned by other people at the school that I was a pariah, and I was accosted by her two brothers in the hallway. They thought they were mafia.

  “Scumbag, leave my sister alone,” one of them said, as he stuck a finger in my chest.

  “Fuck you.” I knocked his hand aside.

  Both brothers moved in closer, just like real thugs, real hired muscle, and I realized that I’d never be able to kick both their asses.

  “What’d you say?” one of them said.

  I considered fighting them, even though I’d surely end up smeared on the floor, but at least I’d have taken a stand. But the principle of it demoralized me. Jennifer obviously didn’t want me, and I just felt sad.

  “Fine.” I turned around and walked away.

  Back to the pond. Lauren was a crazy girl from Plantation, seemed up for anything. Philip told her out of the blue, for no real apparent reason, “Yeah, Nate’s gonna bend you over good!”

  She replied, “Cool, I’d let him if my dad wasn’t here.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. I was going to get laid after all! So I made a date with her for the next weekend. My mom’s family still lived in Plantation and she visited all the time. I’d go with her next week and meet up with Lauren.

  Everything went as planned, sort of, and I met up with her. All we did was walk around. I had no idea what to do. I’m sure she really was up for anything, but I was at a total loss. We just sort of walked around and that was it—we didn’t even hold hands. I didn’t try to kiss her until I was leaving, and then all I did was peck her on the cheek.

  We talked on the phone after that, and it turned out that she had an extra ticket for the Guns N’ Roses and Skid Row show that was coming up in a week. It just so happened that these were my two absolute favorite bands in the world and I would’ve done anything to see them live. Lauren offered me the ticket, and my mom actually said I could go and then spend the night at Lauren’s house. I couldn’t imagine anything better. See Guns N’ Roses and Skid Row and definitely get laid. I would never have dreamed such things were possible. But when the night of the concert finally came, I couldn’t get ahold of her. I called a dozen times and waited all night to hear from her, but she didn’t call.

  She didn’t call all that week. By the time the weekend rolled around, I went to Plantation with my mom and walked to her house, decked out in a jean jacket with the sleeves cut off and a bandanna on my head. I knocked on her door. Her mom answered and sent me upstairs to Lauren’s room. She didn’t seem surprised to see me. She was practically naked, in panties and a bra, standing in front of her mirror brushing her wet hair. I sat on her bed and chain-smoked.

  “You go to that concert?” I asked.

  She looked at my reflection in the mirror and said, “It was fucking awesome.”

  I looked at her breasts. I looked at her panties. I should’ve been horny as fuck, but I felt nauseous. I’d been chain-smoking, and the way she so casually fucked me out of the greatest night of my life got to me in a bad way.

  “Awesome, huh?”

  She nodded.

  I had a Pepsi can in my hand that I’d been using for an ashtray. The nausea got worse, and I knew I was going to vomit. Then it happened. I tried to direct the puke into the Pepsi can, but some of it splashed out around the can and onto the floor. I got to my feet and wiped my mouth.

  She turned around from the mirror, looking disgusted.

  “God!” she said.

  I dropped the can on the floor.

  “I don’t want to see you again,” I said.

  As I ran down the stairs I could hear her respond with: “That’s all right with me, psycho!”

  [ TWENTY-NINE ]

  Josh came by my door and asked me if I wanted to go to rec. It was raining, so it would be inside. I wondered if Dicky the Grandma Slayer would be there. He hadn’t been around yesterday. I thought, “Maybe somebody finally shanked his ass. If he’s around, we’ll play Ping-Pong, and if he isn’t, I guess I’ll look out the window and watch the street.” It’s about the only room in the building from which you can see a street that’s very busy at all.

  Josh said he’d be back in a minute. There might have been a fight down in C-18, the cell block at the end of the hall. I’d heard a bunch of noise earlier from that direction, around six thirty, and several of the guards had run past my door. That’s where Josh was headed. He was pushing the mop bucket, had rubber gloves on—probably going to clean up some blood. Where the hell were the trustees? They normally did that kind of nasty shit.

  Josh was a nice guy, but I always had the impression that the other guards took a shit on him. He wasn’t cut out for high-stress work. He got this look on his face when he was pushed too far, like he was going to snap emotionally and he didn’t know what to do with himself. I never thought he was capable of being violent, though. I thought he would throw something or kick something, like a desk or a door.

  He had a Harley apparently, a Heritage Classic—big fucking bike. He showed me a picture of it. Black with a lot of chrome. If he ever went to biker rallies, the other bikers probably picked on him, made him buy their beer, and he’d probably go off to get their beer with that same irate spastic look on his face he got in the jail when things got too stressful. But who knows? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Josh was a hard-ass after all. Maybe that look was the look he got when he tried to control his violent temper, and if he ever let the dark side take over, there’d be bodies all over the place.

  He finally came back and took me to the rec room.

  Dicky didn’t come down, so I watched the street and hoped girls with nice asses would walk by so at night I could try to remember what they looked like while I jerked off. But, like I said, it was raining, so no hot girls walked by. Nobody walked by.

  I hated to admit it, but I felt a little lonely without Dicky. At least we could have played some Ping-Pong.

  [ THIRTY ]

  In Brickville, Charlie Bender was king of the hoods. I idolized the kid, not just because he had a reputation as the baddest dude around, but because he was a genuinely respectable human being. He could carry on conversations with adults, and seemed perfectly comfortable, in charge of himself, r
easonable. The adults would nod while he talked, and consider what he said. Charlie wore a leather motorcycle jacket and a denim sleeveless jacket over top of that. He had straight black hair down to his ass. He was only five feet two inches tall, but he commanded the world. He walked with his head held high and no one ever challenged his authority.

  I had two groups of friends by the time I was fifteen. I had David and Philip, who lived out on the farm, and then there was the gang of hoods in Brickville. When I decided that I wanted to join their hierarchy, I started out by lingering around the edge of the group and slowly worked my way to Charlie’s side. This was a kind of social climbing for me. Charlie was at the top, and I couldn’t settle for being a hanger-on. I had to be tight with the guy at the top—or be the guy at the top—or I wouldn’t be a part of it at all.

  I sat beside Charlie in math class, back before he got kicked out. The math teacher was a timid Christian woman who, after she saw me reading the Satanic bible in class, began wearing a giant crucifix around her neck. With almost no provocation one day, Charlie challenged her.

  “Why do you keep kicking us around?” he said. As far as I had seen, she hadn’t kicked anyone around, but if Charlie felt like harassing a teacher, more power to him.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “What, just because we’re poor, you think you can treat us like scum?”

  “I’ve never treated you like scum.”

  “You think just because I’m poor, and because I dress like this, I must be on drugs, right?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, go ahead and ask me. Ask me if I’m on drugs.”

  She looked at him with a faint smile.

  “Come on, ask me.”

  “Are you on drugs?”

  “Fuck yeah, I’m on drugs. I’m always on drugs.”

  Charlie was eventually kicked out of school for throwing a chair at another teacher. He had also been locked up for a while. We’d all seen him fight. He was fast and mean. All it took to make a rep for yourself was audacious action like kicking the hell out of someone in front of the whole school, or telling a teacher to go fuck themselves, and I was becoming pretty good at both of those. In no time I was regarded by almost all the kids in the school as a vicious fighter, the kind of guy who was likely to do anything. Other guys might sneak cigarettes between classes, talk a lot of trash about how they were going to beat somebody’s ass, but when I said I was going to beat somebody’s ass, I did it, right in front of everybody. I stood out. While the teacher gave a lecture, I wandered around the classroom, passed notes blatantly, walked out of the room without permission, went outside for smoke breaks.

  The headquarters for the hoods was the pizza shop, which was right in the center of town, right on the only intersection with a stoplight. There were tables and chairs up front, some video games, and a back room with a pool table. At any given time you could find eight or nine hoods hanging around the place.

  Because my parents wouldn’t let me hang out openly at the pizza shop, I’d have to make surreptitious appearances. I’d tell Mom and Dad I was going up to the post office to check the mail and I’d stop in for a smoke, chat a minute with the guys, and then head back home. This was really all that was necessary.

  I was walking down an alley with Charlie Bender. It was on one of the days that I skipped school. I skipped all the time. I’d leave the house in the morning, call the school from a pay phone, and tell the secretary, “Hello, this is Mr. Henry. Nathan won’t be at school today because he doesn’t feel well.”

  “Okay,” the secretary would say. “Just have him bring a note.”

  It worked every time, but I never took a note. One day my parents got a letter in the mail stating that I’d be failing that year because I had missed thirty-five days. They knew about two.

  I’d hang up the pay phone and walk down to Charlie’s house. His mom would let me in and I’d lay down on the floor of Charlie’s room, pull a blanket on me, and go back to sleep.

  I told Charlie, “I hate this town, man. I’m about ready to leave for good. Do some crazy shit.”

  “Like what?” He took a pack of Marlboro Reds out of his vest pocket, shook one out and lit it.

  “I don’t know.” We kept walking. “Kill some motherfuckers, rob some places, go on a fucking rampage.”

  He shook his head. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I don’t know.” I was ashamed suddenly, shamed by Charlie Bender.

  “You keep fucking around and you’re going to end up like me, or worse. Kicked out of school. I’ve been to JDC too many times to count. And it ain’t no fucking fun.”

  “I can’t wait until I get kicked out of school.”

  “I ain’t got nothing, man. I ain’t got shit.” He took a long drag off his cigarette and looked sad.

  “Dude,” I said. “You’ve made a mark on that place.”

  “What mark? Nobody’s gonna remember me next year. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It always matters,” I said. “Fucking up the system always matters.”

  “But you’re not an idiot, Nate. You can do anything you want. You can fuck with the system in ways that don’t ruin you.”

  I stopped and lit a smoke. I laughed. “Are you counseling me?”

  He looked around and got a mischievous look in his eye. “All right. Whatever. Let’s go find somebody to kick the shit out of.”

  [ THIRTY-ONE ]

  The coldest cell in the jail was on the third floor, just outside cell block eighteen. P-21 had no windows, so I never knew whether it was day or night, and my sleep cycles were completely out of whack. The assholes from the cell block would kick my door when they walked by sometimes, jolting me out of sleep. It was the perfect environment for a psychological breakthrough or breakdown, both of which I had, sort of, after about three weeks in that hole.

  I wasn’t moved from P-13 to P-21 arbitrarily. I asked for it. P-21 was just outside the mental health and substance abuse block, where the craziest born-again suck-asses in the whole jail were housed. They were a meek and sinister bunch. I don’t know why I thought it’d be a good idea to try to get into that area. I thought maybe it’d make the last few months of my stay easier, but it was actually an awful idea.

  Adela, a petite and seemingly compassionate female guard, ran the block. She supervised the group therapy sessions and the AA meetings. It was a normal cell block in most regards except it had been painted more like a rehab center, with rainbows and, under them, stick figures with their joyous hands in the air, and posters urging the inmates that only the sky is the limit, etc. I asked Adela one day if I might be allowed to join the block, since it was obviously not full of murderous ass-rapists, and she said it was a possibility if my parents thought it was all right. Strange, but reasonable, I guess. Even though I was charged as an adult, would face trial as an adult, and was housed in an adult jail, they were still reluctant to stick me in with adults. I talked to Mom and Dad and they thought it was a decent enough idea, so Adela set up a meeting for me to introduce myself to the group. This is when they moved me to P-21. Maybe to see how I interacted with the weasels through the little window in my cell door before I actually faced them.

  I moved into the dungeon with no window. Every time the group would leave for rec or come back from rec, I’d stand up by the door and nod at them, see if any of them seemed reasonable. They hated me. There was one guy in particular, a squinting psychopath who’d stare at me with his arms folded, and no matter what I said to him, like “What’s up?” or “How’s it going?” I got no response. Just a sneer. By the time I went into their cell block with Adela for the actual meeting, I already hated this gang of wackos. But they had a TV, a pretty snazzy cell block, and a phone they could use all the time, so I wanted to give it a shot.

  Everyone sat in a circle and stared at me.

  Adela said, “How could you benefit from being in the group?”

  I said, “Well, it just looks
like a pretty helpful environment.”

  “You know,” she said, “everyone here is totally committed to getting through whatever problems they have. Totally committed. Are you?”

  “Oh, yeah. Definitely.”

  She squinted at me. “I want to see how committed you are. Earl, will you hand Nate our charter?”

  Earl, a mildly retarded-looking older guy with glasses and gray hair, got up and handed me a sheet of laminated paper. I looked at it. The first line was something about allowing our spirits to flow with charity and love. This is ridiculous, I thought.

  “This is good stuff,” I said.

  Then she said, “Would you stand up and sing it for us?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Would you stand up and sing it for us?”

  “Uh.” I stood up. “You want me to sing it for you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Just sing it.”

  So I sung the first line. It was not musical. My voice was shaking. It was ugly.

  “Now,” she said, “would you dance while you sing it to us?”

  “What? You want me to dance while I sing this to you?”

  Everyone stared at me. Adela squinted. So I sort of shuffled my feet a little and sort of sung the thing. I was humiliated. I sat back down. I wanted to kill all those fuckers, especially Adela.

  “That wasn’t very enthusiastic,” she said. “Earl, why don’t you show Nate what I mean.”

  Earl reached over and grabbed the sheet out of my hand with insane enthusiasm, danced up a storm, and belted those words out like he was some kind of crazed hermaphroditic diva. I was horrified. I looked from him to Adela, who had an expression on her face that was hard to pin down. It was a sort of smug satisfaction. No—it was power. It was pleasure. I hated her.

  There were a couple more questions that I barely answered before I was sent back to my cell. I sat on my bunk, confused and disgusted. I didn’t ever want to see any of those people again. I expected to then be transferred back to P-13, back home, back to where things were as they should be. But I wasn’t. They left me there, in that little cell with no window, with those weirdos glaring in at me every time they came and went. Adela eventually told me the group decided I was not committed enough. No, I wasn’t committed—I didn’t know what Adela had expected from me. What were the weirdos committed to? What was Earl all about—with his nutless little song and dance? Maybe they were just scared, scared of doing more time, scared of being thrown into a real cell block. Or maybe they weren’t scared at all. Maybe they were just playing along, giving Adela a constant load of shit for extra privileges, Adela licking it all up for her own reasons. It was a transaction. This struck me as maybe a key to people, to relationships. I thought about it for a long time.