The Graybar Hotel Read online

  I wondered how Tom knew that the cook was a woman, and as always, Ricky came on cue. “How do you know a lady made it?”

  “Come on,” Tom said. “Because it’s softer, warmer. It’s obvious. You taste things like that when you slow it down a little.”

  “The fuck you mean slow it down?”

  “I mean really taste it,” Tom said. “Close your eyes if you have to. Nobody tastes anything anymore. They just shovel, shovel, shovel. But man, food is just like wine—hold it in your mouth and concentrate, you can seriously taste the terroir of the ingredients.”

  “Terr-what?” I asked.

  “The taste of the land where the ingredients were grown.”

  Ricky took a bite and smiled. “I taste something, all right. It tastes like a field and hay.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And a barn.”

  “I think you guys are really getting it,” said Tom.

  “And cows,” Ricky said. “At least what comes out of cows—very definitely some bullshit.”

  Tom smiled. “Seriously, though. Maybe you can’t, but I can taste all those things. I can taste the earth that grew it, and I can taste the prayers of the lady who made it for us.”

  The idea that someone might be praying for us shut us up and we ate. I tried to taste the softness Tom talked about, and prayers inside our sauce. Domino ate his quickly so he could go back to sleep.

  The guard took our trays and I guess Tom figured he had a good seven minutes to get it done. He took the top linen sheet off his bunk and began twisting it into a rope. “Well, fellas,” he said, “I’m checking out of the K’zoo motel. I’ve had enough of this county shit—a man needs a coffee and cigarette after a meal like that. So after that guard walks past again, I’m going to sling this sheet up and get myself back to the joint. Once I’m up there, just hit the panic button.”

  Tom sat shirtless on the picnic table bench and looped the end of the sheet onto itself. Karen Sharon moved and swayed as he worked; she seemed to gyrate with every pulse of his muscles as he tied the noose. Tom threw the sheet on his bunk. I felt nerves tingle in my hands and feet.

  “If you on parole, you’re going back in a month anyway,” said Ricky. “You ain’t got to pull this fool shit over a cigarette.”

  Tom either didn’t hear him or pretended not to hear. He glanced toward the bars and listened for the guard’s footsteps. I told myself the whole fake suicide would be just that and nothing more—it would go smoothly, and in just a few minutes, Tom would be gone and our cell would be peaceful again.

  The guard stepped past and barely glanced inside. Tom picked up the sheet from his bunk. “Nice knowing you guys,” he said. He stood on the edge of the bench and tied the free end of his sheet around one of the long, horizontal slats of steel. He climbed up to the third steel slat, put the noose around his neck, and held on with a hand behind his back. With the lights behind him, all his green tattoos became dark, muddied blotches, and even Karen Sharon looked instantly older. I could see her as she was, after years of alcohol abuse and living with her shallow soul.

  “Okay,” Tom said. “Hit it.”

  Ricky and I didn’t move. Domino sat up and looked. The heels of Tom’s jail-issued flip-flops were wedged between the bars. Tom tightened the noose, then looked at each of us and let go with the hand behind his back. The top half of his body inched away from the bars, the brunt of his weight still held by his heels. The noose tightened, and his face turned red.

  “Come on, you motherfuckers, hit the button.”

  One foot at a time, Tom kicked the flip-flops off. They each landed on the floor with a slap. He stepped off the flat steel that was holding his weight and began to die. The muscles in his chest convulsed and Karen began to dance again—ugly and desperate—an aging stripper, a whore. Tom’s struggling seemed to reveal her true self, shedding layers of beauty and falseness. I didn’t look away, though; I still wanted to touch her. I didn’t care what she was as long as she would touch me back. And she would, I knew—I saw it in her eyes, in the split second when her closed eye opened, then shut again in a wink meant only for me.

  I got off the bench, put my arms around Tom’s legs, and lifted him with my shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me,” he gasped.

  Ricky walked over and hit the panic button.

  “What’s the problem?” the woman’s voice asked.

  “Some fool’s trying to hang hisself.”

  Italian Tom pissed his orange pants and the warmth covered my shoulder. In a matter of seconds, the door slammed open and several guards entered. A female guard climbed the bars and cut the sheet with industrial scissors. Tom and I fell to the floor and the breath left my chest as my head struck the metal edge of the picnic table, then the concrete floor. She cut the noose from around his neck, and I heard his gasp for breath and could feel it as if it were my own. I could feel his sad life on top of me and it was suffocating.

  The guards worked to stabilize Tom’s neck as I lay there feeling the cold floor growing warmer with the wetness flowing from my head. I felt myself softening, sinking into the hot springs beneath Kalamazoo.

  I tried to sit up but the female officer put her hand gently on my forehead to keep me down. She kneeled in front of me, close enough that I could smell her herbal shampoo. I looked at her name tag, “Lillie.” I wanted to ask if that was her first or last name. I wanted to ask her: Do you like to watch snow come down late at night? When did your parents divorce? What’s your favorite movie? Do you cry when you don’t get mail for a long time? Would you want to be president? Are you happy? Do you hate the news? Does the sight of a jet slicing through the cold, thin air break your heart?

  But I couldn’t speak. I was afraid that if I spoke, she’d take her hands from my body. So I lay there and looked at Lillie as the water began to boil and the horses started to run.

  A HUMAN NUMBER

  * * *

  The first person I talked to was Kitty-Kat. Kitty-Kat didn’t sound like a Kitty-Kat though, he sounded old and gruff, as if he’d drunk whiskey like water for fifty years. I wrote his number near the dozens of others on the wall next to the phone, but when I woke from a nap the walls were covered with a fresh layer of paint, a pale green over the original orange—like an old bruise or gangrenous flesh.

  After Kitty-Kat it was a week before I could get anyone else. I started writing down the numbers in the phone book, on a big ad in the yellow pages for Ritter’s Family Photos. There was no family in the ad, just a house in a valley and a windmill on a hill and a sheep grazing in the front pasture. I wrote the numbers in the open sky above the windmill.

  Who is this?

  Hey, it’s me, I say. You’re supposed to record your name, so when the person picks up, the generic computer operator asks if you will accept a call from so-and-so from jail. Mine says, Hey, it’s me. Just something I came up with. Not many people know someone with my name, but everyone knows a me.

  Heyitsme could be anyone. Some long-missing son, a forgotten uncle, your addict cousin written off as hopeless.

  Who is this?

  Who is this?

  They have to press 1 to accept the charges, spending $2.40 for the first minute, and $0.27 every minute after that, up to fifteen minutes total. Six eighteen is just enough money that during a dead stretch, I worry that no one might answer again.

  * * *

  She read for a long time from Revelation, an old lady with a soft, slow voice: Then I looked, and behold, a Lamb . . . And I heard a voice from heaven . . . These are the ones who were not defiled with women . . . And I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven . . . And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever . . . Whoever receives the mark of his name . . . and behold, a white cloud . . . And something like a sea of glass mingled with fire . . . Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number . . . I stood on the sand of the sea and saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten h
orns . . . The beast I saw was . . .

  I could barely hear her over the two men at our stainless-steel table talking about the inventions that would make them rich when they got out:

  1. A desire-transfusion machine that trades an imminent suicide’s wish to die with a terminally ill person’s desire to live. They believed it might be as easy as switching the two people’s blood.

  2. Home simple-surgery kits.

  3. Anti-tornado bombs.

  Little D said from the shower, Thems the dumbest ideas I ever heard.

  But I don’t know.

  * * *

  Who is this?

  Hey, it’s me.

  I don’t know nobody in prison.

  I’m not in prison yet. I’m in jail. The two are very different, but people think they’re the same.

  Why’d you call?

  I’m bored.

  So am I. I don’t know what to do with myself since I retired.

  What did you retire from?

  Had my own auto body shop. Insurance work. Paint and detailing. Or I’d buy totaled cars real cheap and then go and straighten the frame, rebuild it from scratch, basically—pretty good money in that, taking them to the auction. But I had a heart attack and a bypass, so I sold it. Now my wife and me breed these fancy chickens that lay blue eggs.

  That sounds nice.

  I guess. We’re starting to hate each other. My wife and me. About as much as I hate those friggin’ chickens. I told her, if I can’t work no more then she’s gonna have to get a job, get out of the house during the day. Or I might end up right there with you.

  He went on like that for the length of the call, as if we were old friends and he was catching me up on the things I’d missed. He confided that he was thinking about taking up smoking again, despite, or because of, his heart. Either that, or grow roses. Before the line disconnected, I heard his wife enter the room.

  Who you talking to? she said.

  I have no idear, he said. You want to talk to him? Tell him about your goddamn designer chickens?

  I heard the phone move away from his mouth and the silence as he held it out to his wife, just before our time was up and the line clicked dead.

  * * *

  People love to talk—that’s why they answer. I try to listen past their voice and into their home, to the world around them. What TV show is playing? What pets are running around? I once heard a parakeet squawking, “He’s buried in the sandbox.” I listen for the traffic outside, a neighbor playing piano. Once, in a senior assisted-living building, I heard a xylophone being hammered in expert scales. Countless layers of sound make up the world, and I hear it all: voices; vacuuming; traffic through an open window; the hum of washers, dryers, refrigerators, all so slight the sound is barely perceptible.

  * * *

  Kitty-Kat had a busted knee. He said he answered my call because he’d once spent a weekend right where I was—he was drunk and took a swing at his brother-in-law, missed him and coldcocked his sister. What was I there for? he wondered, but never asked me outright. Mostly, he just went on about the right way to roof a house since energy costs were skyrocketing.

  He was on Vicodin for the knee, which he hadn’t busted on a roofing job like everyone assumed, but getting out of his Dodge Ram outside his house. He just stepped off the curb and twisted his ankle, which ended up internally screwing up that shit knee. He kept calling it that—that shit knee, like a foreign word he’d learned at war.

  He didn’t know the name of the surgery he’d had on that shit knee, but it was done with wires thinner than human hair. And under the local anesthetic he could hear the lasers hum and watch them flicker red, like police strobes glinting off the polished silver of the surgical light. He wondered if he should have been wearing some sort of welder’s goggles, or at least sunglasses or something, you know, for eye protection. Well guess what, he said, he was going to keep an eye out (ha ha) for any future problems with his sight, and then sue those big-shot bastards into the Stone Age.

  Had I ever seen The Six Million Dollar Man? You know, with Lee Majors? He’d told people that with all the lasers and the tiny titanium additions, and the round of cortico-what-have-you-steroids, he was part bionic. Not six million dollars bionic, but about ten grand bionic.

  He’d said to call back anytime. But his number was gone under that sickly green. This was before I got my pen, a jail-approved ballpoint given to us by the Gideons. The pen was a slender, ink-filled insert wrapped in a thin tube, flexible, so you couldn’t stab anyone with it. We called them “broke dicks.”

  I’ve always felt guilty for not calling Kitty-Kat again, like I’ve hurt his feelings. I try it every day, 349-something.

  349-1234: The person at the number you dialed did not accept, or the call was received by an automated answering device.

  349-1235: The person at the number you dialed did not . . .

  349-1236: The number you dialed is a nonworking number.

  I don’t have certain numbers to call, you see. I have every number.

  349-1238: The number you dialed is a nonworking number.

  349-1239: The number you dialed is a nonworking number.

  Tomorrow I’ll start with 1240.

  * * *

  Oh, I’m so glad you called. I was just thinking of you. Now where were we— After these things I looked, and behold the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony was opened in heaven . . . and she did not repent . . . I will kill her children with death . . . I will give to each one of you according to your works— Oh, wait just a minute, son, my pie is done.

  She put the phone down, I imagined, on the kitchen table, and I heard the oven door open and heard her praising the pie’s flakiness and aroma, the simple perfection of it. And through the phone I could smell the hot, sticky blackberries and the golden crust. I heard the song of a grandfather clock and a semi rumbling past. I closed my eyes and sat at the table in the kitchen of this old lady who loved to tell me about the end of the world in her sweet old-lady voice.

  I think she forgot about me, which was perfect. I listened to her hum some tunes I didn’t recognize, and she talked to her blackberry pie as if it was a small child or a puppy: “Oh, you are a nice little yummy thing, aren’t you. You are just perfect . . .”

  The computer-voiced operator cut in—you have one minute remaining. Sometimes that minute seems long and drawn-out, and sometimes it is over much too quickly. “You are a little golden circle of sunshine, aren’t you—” and the connection ended.

  I hung up just as a skinny, black, effeminate man called Peanut came into the cell, looked around, then fell to the floor and had a seizure. The deputies rolled him in a wheelchair down to the nurse. He returned about an hour later and we were all nervous, thinking every noise was Peanut falling to the floor again. Little D said we were all seizure-shy, like a nervous dog forever jumping at loud noises. I took my seat at the phone.

  This call is from Heyitsme at the Kalamazoo County Jail. It is subject to monitoring and recording. Thank you for using Global Tel Link.

  Who is this? Fuck it—never mind. Lone Ranger’s on. You ever watch this shit? This geezer channel shows ’em every goddamn afternoon. The original one. The black-and-white one, not the later bullshit ones. You know those ones where he wasn’t allowed to wear his goddamned mask? He had to wear sunglasses because the mask is trademarked or some shit. You believe that fucking political correctness nowadays? Everybody’s feelings—turning us into a nation of pussies.

  It’s probably a legal issue, I said. Trademarks and stuff.

  No, it’s all bullshit, man. We’re a nation of pussies, mired in bullshit.

  A lot of people here watch that station, if that tells you anything.

  Who does? The police or the jailbirds? Fuck that anyway. Listen—I’m going to my niece’s first communion at Saint Jude’s this weekend, even though they didn’t invite me. Bunch of bastards. Body of Christ. That priest has always had it out for me. She’s in the second grade, my nie
ce.

  What’s your phone number there?

  Why? You’re the one who called me.

  I know, but I keep forgetting to write down the numbers. Most of these numbers don’t work, and when they do work I get wrapped up in talking, then forget.

  Fine. 349-1302. Did you write it down? Just don’t call me all the time, dude. But call sometimes. Next time I’ll tell you how I knew Lance Armstrong was doping because he had cancer in his balls. Just common sense, man.

  I will.

  Now listen—I’ve been waiting to tell this to someone and you called right on time. I’m at the mall, right? I’m at the bus stop outside Ruby Tuesday’s at Crossroads mall and this fat, old, bearded guy sits next to me, making small talk about what brought me to the mall, the gorgeous weather, the Tigers’ prospects, and the high cost of gas and whatever. So, what do you do for fun? he says.

  And I tell him, I like to hunt.

  Oh, wonderful, he says. What do you hunt—dove, rabbit, deer?

  And I look right at him and say: Fat, white, bearded bastards.

  * * *

  Peanut walked around our cell in a sort of daze that one of the deputies said was malingering with the intent of getting sent to the hospital. He would Malinger With Intent around our four-man cell saying what people say when they answer a call from the county jail. Who is this? he would say. Who is this?

  I was jealous that Peanut was said to be Malingering With Intent. It really sounded like something to be.

  * * *

  For the time is at hand! He who is unjust, let him be unjust still; he who is filthy, let him be filthy still; he who is righteous, let him be righteous still; he who is holy . . . I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last . . . The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. And that, my friend, is the end of the Bible. It’s like the whole thing is a very long prayer, how it ends with Amen. You get that?