The Graybar Hotel Read online

  I did. But how does it begin?

  * * *

  It’s a fucking assault on the Second Amendment, is what it is. If they can take away the Lone Ranger’s mask, they can, and will, take our guns. That doesn’t mean shit to you, but you might want to know what’s going on out here. I know a couple of militia types, and they are crazy. But Timothy McVeigh, he was framed, you know. A patsy.

  There was silence between us for a minute. I could hear a television commercial in the background: Drive a Ferrari like the rich and famous . . .

  And then he changed, like a station on TV.

  I’m going to come and get you, kid. I fucking swear to God. You’re in there thinking, How’s he going to do that? He don’t know where I lock, he don’t know my name. But I got ways. It’s easier than hell to get in there—you know that already. It’s getting out that’s hard.

  Here’s what I’ll do: at my niece’s fancy fucking communion, I’m going to punch the priest and get put in a cell with you, and then I’m going to eat you up like a greasy soup. And while I’m gobbling you up, I’ll tell you how I found you, Mr. Heyitsme. Just kidding, I won’t tell you shit. But I’ll be there next week. Or tomorrow. Body of Christ and all that. Body of you. Amen.

  * * *

  Who is this?

  Who is this?

  * * *

  They took Peanut to the nurse again. When he came back there was a cotton ball taped into the crook of his left arm. The next morning the cotton ball lay on the floor, a drop of blackened blood staring up like a pupil in a big white eye. No one picked it up—we didn’t want to catch what he had, whatever it was.

  Peanut started gagging and gurgling in between his whispering. Who is this? Who is this? And I figured out he probably wasn’t saying Who is this, but something like Do his bit, or Knew this shit, or, You missed it. After a while it started to infect my head, and to combat Peanut’s refrain, I would say to myself: malingering with intent, malingering with intent, malingering with intent.

  Peanut walked two or three circles around the table, then flopped to the floor and someone hit the panic button above the wall-mounted phone. The nurses came in blue scrubs and carried equipment in tackle boxes, looking as if they were on their way to a costume party at a fishing pond. Peanut held his stomach and lurched into and out of a fetal position. He stared vacantly at the wall while the nurses took his blood pressure, pulse rate, et cetera.

  I sat at the table watching. You never know when you might need malingering skills, and if Peanut was only malingering, he was really good at it. I was an understudy apprenticed to a master. They wheeled him away, leaving a quarter-size puddle of shiny drool on the floor, which I swept away with a swipe of my flip-flop. Before the streak was completely dry, Peanut walked in again.

  * * *

  I was on the phone trying to find Kitty-Kat when I heard the commercial on TV: Avoid disappointment and future regret—call today. I listened to the info, hung up, and dialed the toll-free number. It was some sort of gold commemorative buffalo coin.

  It rang twice, then stopped. American Majesty Keepsakes, she said, How can I help you?

  I’m in jail, I said.

  Yeah, I heard the machine. My brother’s in jail. I get this call pretty often, though not at work.

  I would like to see about getting the coin that prevents disappointment and future regret.

  It’s $19.95, payable by credit card or electronic check. Sorry, no CODs.

  That’s a pretty good deal for all it promises.

  The $19.95 includes shipping and handling. You can get a free one—actually, I’ll be honest, you have to get the free one—for extra shipping and handling. It ends up coming to about forty dollars.

  Forty? I can’t really afford that.

  Well, you can’t really order anything from jail, anyway. You might as well be on the moon.

  * * *

  For a few days, Peanut moaned and held his stomach. He told the deputy he was pregnant. The deputy walked away, talking on her noisy walkie-talkie, which squeaked and chirped at all hours like a caged monkey. Peanut sat at the table and rocked back and forth. He said he was having a miscarriage or something.

  Probably gas, Little D said, hopefully, as if by diagnosing the problem Peanut’s troubles would end and he would shut up and we could all quit wondering what sort of malingering nonsense we were going to have to listen to next.

  But in the corner of the cell, Little D confided quietly to me: He might really have something. Like rabies, or AIDS, or syphilis. You better think fast if he tries to bite you.

  I gave him a look of disbelief.

  I’m just saying, he said. Just kick at him—psychos don’t like to be kicked.

  * * *

  I hit a cold streak on the phone. Several days without a connection. I’d been desperate before and called lawyers—not lawyers exactly, but the receptionists—all of them cynically polite at first, until they determine whether or not you are going to make the firm any money. Usually I hear typing and voices in the background, the busy sounds of a bustling office. Once I said I was the victim of a drug company’s negligence, in jail because corporate goons had framed me.

  What medication were you on?

  Viagra, I said, which got me fast-tracked to a phone interview with an attorney.

  So, what happened with the Viagra? a male voice said.

  I got an erection, I said.

  That’s what’s supposed to happen.

  I hesitated a moment, and heard him sigh before hanging up.

  The bail bondsmen you can actually talk to. Or their secretaries if they have one. But more often than not bondsmen are depressing, one-man operations. They’ll listen awhile because technically I could be bailed out, if I had collateral or someone to put collateral up. Or maybe they listen because bail bondspeople are low down on the justice system totem pole, one step above security guards. They never aspired to get accused criminals out on bail. Life didn’t work out somehow, and the failure translates to a willingness to listen a few minutes, even chat a little. They’ll ask where you’re locked, how long you’ve been there, how it’s going. They pretend to care long after it’s obvious there’s no money to be had in you.

  * * *

  Who is this?

  Retired men are the most likely to answer, followed by elderly widows. Followed by former inmates, then their family members.

  Do I know you? they sometimes ask. I know you, don’t I?

  I tell them, It depends on what you mean by know.

  * * *

  A voice came over the intercom—not unlike the generic, computer-voiced, Global Tel Link operator: I had a visitor. Who? I said. Marvin Newhouse, she said.

  I didn’t know any Marvin, but I was thinking maybe Kitty-Kat found me, or the guy crashing his niece’s first communion. I buttoned up my orange jumpsuit. I combed my hair. Peanut was on the toilet, moaning. Little D said he was pooping out his baby. I left the cell and followed the deputy to the visitation room, six partitioned windows with phones where you stand to talk.

  It’s a long, narrow room that’s always hot from the previous inmates’ body heat, and it smells like a rotting garden hose. I stood at the far window and cleaned the black phone receiver with the front of my jumpsuit. The visitors filed in: middle-aged women with breasts bulging from their button-up shirts like dough rising; a man with a Bible; two younger ladies with the same rising loaves, this time over the sides of their jeans.

  Marvin, whoever he was, never showed. I stood there in my own chest-high cubicle with the phone up to my ear wondering who was supposed to be standing in front of me. Whoever it was, at that moment, was walking across the parking lot to their car, putting the key in the ignition, driving away with one last look, like the place was a national monument.

  I listened to the mingled hum of the voices on my side of the room and studied my partial reflection in the smudged glass. I could see cloudy outlines of hands and lips, all getting smaller in size farther down
the window. I was looking at myself, of course, a transparent portrait brushstroked in greasy smears, but I imagined my friend, Kitty-Kat.

  I laughed a good laugh, glad to see him. His knee was doing a lot better, he said, but now he thought he might be addicted to Vicodin.

  I laughed again, then apologized, because addiction’s nothing to laugh at. I told him about the madman who was going to crash his niece’s communion, how I had been watching the local news expecting to hear about some dustup at a Catholic church.

  I laughed it off, but Kitty-Kat grew worried. He said he would talk to a deputy, an old high school buddy of his, and maybe get some extra protection for me. I was a worthwhile person, he said. I wasn’t damaged, or diminished or anything just for the mistakes I’d made, and seemed to keep making. What would happen is this: in certain people, failure could turn into an asset. Failure could make you a better person. It could turn into success.

  We stared in silence a moment through the bulletproof glass. I brought up a new subject to wipe away the silence: Peanut, and his constant antics, about him on the toilet getting rid of his baby. I talked about the inventions those guys at the table had come up with. He said I would really have some stories to tell someday, and all I needed was a stable home and steady job like roofing to really flourish. I felt like he was going to ask me to come and live with him when I got out, help him around the house while his knee healed. But the deputy came in and said time was up, we had to head back. I laughed one last time before following the others out of the hot, narrow room, adding my echoes to the millions already there—thicker and thicker with each new gangrened layer.

  * * *

  On my way back, I had a number in my mind. I could see it as clearly as if it had appeared in the smudged window, written in dull, oily numerals, as if Kitty-Kat had said it out loud, and I repeated it over and over, making sure not to forget it before I could write it down.

  I got that broke dick pen and wrote down the number on my mattress, in a little space on the end that my sheet didn’t cover. 349-1568. I mumbled it to myself even afterward, hoping I would never forget it again.

  Little D said, You gonna start with that psycho shit now that he’s gone?

  What?

  You notice anything different?

  I looked around the cell.

  Peanut’s gone, I said. What happened?

  I told you he had something, didn’t I?

  It hadn’t been rabies, or anything like that. Peanut really had been pregnant. She was a woman impersonating a man. She was wanted, as a woman, for a long list of nationwide financial crimes involving an Internet charity kidney transplant scam. The nurse told Little D that the pregnancy was probably an echo-something, something where the egg gets caught in the Philippine tube.

  Can you fucking believe that? said Little D.

  I bet those deputies feel like idiots.

  They’re used to it by now.

  It was all too much. Too much at once, I thought. I had to tell someone. I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear, still warm from the visiting room. Press 0 for a collect call, the operator said. I pressed 0, then the number I had visualized. I waited.

  I was going to tell him about Marvin Newhouse, how I knew it was him. I would tell him about Peanut, and I’d tell him that this time I had saved the number on the end of my mattress, and tomorrow when I called, he wouldn’t ask Who is it? He’d say, Hey, I know you.

  I know you, he’ll say, and we’ll talk about Vicodin and roofing. We’ll talk about shit knees and madmen, first communions and the end of the world. I have a lot to say. But first he has to answer.

  Answer, I whispered into the phone. Answer.

  SUNSHINE

  * * *

  George had come back from the visiting room where his girlfriend, Sunshine, just told him she had cancer. He couldn’t touch her or hold her, of course, through the phone, through the glass. He said he almost tried to smash through the thick, shatterproof pane, but he figured he’d be tackled long before he ever got to comfort her. He looked around at us with the anger still in his eyes, as if expecting praise for his restraint from trying something that would have been impossible to begin with.

  Just down the hall was a cell of suicidal women who wrote dirty notes on little bars of soap, then slid them down to our cell, like illicit Olympic curlers. No matter the gender, all the suicide cases were lumped in this one small section of the jail. We never laid eyes on the women, only heard them and read their notes. The men in general population probably would have loved to be so close to women, but it was frustrating and meaningless, and I would’ve traded them ten times over for a better TV to replace ours, which was slowly dying up on the wall. Half the time there was only a black screen and the voices inside, or an occasional haunting thump from the speaker.

  No one died on the suicide watch wing when I was there. A man did commit suicide over in the jail, but he wasn’t on A North, he was in segregation. My wife came to visit on the same day jail officials gave his personal belongings to his grieving sister in the waiting room. My wife didn’t go into detail about it; she was shaken and I didn’t press. But in my mind I’ve played that scene over and over again. I imagine a sibling, someone I love and grew up with, who goes to jail—which is bad enough—but then the personal demons set in and I never see them alive again. I clutch a paper bag of their things that doesn’t seem to weigh enough.

  On A North, no one died. None of us, at least. But George’s girlfriend had cancer and we all felt horrible about it. When you’re separated from the people you know and love, every emotion is multiplied. Your mind becomes a very clear prism, into which every feeling enters, then becomes seven or eight different shades. We were all responsible for being there, of course—none of us were innocent. But that only makes you feel worse when you’re the one in jail.

  We were sad about Sunshine, and we were worried about George, who was a surly kid who would fight anyone at the drop of a hat. Finding out about the cancer didn’t help his already touchy mood. I had been making chess pieces from wet toilet paper, and was just about finished with the bishops, which strongly resembled the pawns. George sat on his bunk and said, Her hair was falling out. And then he started to cry. I mean he really cried. Sobbing.

  How long has she had cancer? one of us asked.

  She just—sob—found out—sob—today.

  And of course, being the resident know-it-all, I explained to George that something was strange about Sunshine’s cancer story. No one’s hair falls out the same day they’re diagnosed with cancer.

  That’s the chemo, I said. And if they just found it, she couldn’t have started chemo yet.

  George always had a problem with violence—it was the first thing he said when he became the fifth man in our cell. He said his father used to set up fights between him and his drinking buddies’ kids. They would place bets, like the kids were roosters or dogs. I expected to be punched after I’d basically called Sunshine a liar. But I wasn’t punched. I just kept adding my wet wads of toilet paper to build up the bishops.

  George stopped sobbing. He lay back on his bunk and listened to the black TV as if he could see what was happening there.

  I always assumed it was Sunshine who was the liar—that she’d been diagnosed months earlier but had to work up the nerve to tell him face-to-face. But years after I was on A North with George, it occurred to me that it was probably him who had made the whole story up. For sympathy, or something like it.

  He lay there watching the black screen and seemed to really enjoy the soap opera that was going on. It was like a radio play, or eavesdropping, as if the action were taking place just on the other side of our cinder-block wall. There was a hostage situation—some nut with a Southern accent demanding a couple million in ransom. We could hear that the hostage was a regular character, so we knew no permanent damage would be done. She might think she was going to die, but there was no way she would. In fact, the situation might do the spoiled twerp some go
od. It might deepen her shallow soul. Then there was a loud thump from the speaker and a wisp of smoke rose from the back of the TV. And that was it. The television died a slightly smoky death.

  We never learned how the hostage situation turned out, if it affected the soap opera’s character or not. I imagine it gave her nightmares, as proximity to death is wont to do, and like me she wakes up in a paper bag, waiting on someone to pick them up.

  DAYTIME DRAMA

  * * *

  Arthur wore a cape in the county jail. He fashioned it from the dark gray wool blanket given to each inmate, and the knot from the tied corners rested on his Adam’s apple. November was a cold one in the jail and the cape kept him warm, plus the dark, brooding superhero effect was not lost on Arthur. He looked at himself in the dull, scratched metal mirror above the stainless-steel toilet, flashed a toothless grin, then turned around with a swoop and sat at the steel picnic table bolted to the floor of our cell.

  The other three men slept. The television on the wall was dark, silent, and dusty. There was a thick, dingy window to the left of the TV, and the first rays of the day cut a shaft of light through the cell, lighting the corner.

  He wanted to do some push-ups. He could feel one of the guys watching him, so it was a show of primal strength that, despite some extra pounds, he was much stronger than the average man. Not in the middle of the room, though—too obvious that he was putting on a show. In the space between the bench seat and the wall instead. It was a tight fit, but he would make it work. He closed his eyes and thought a moment. He thought of the strength running through his blood, his veins, rushing through his chest and arms. He wondered why they took his fucking false teeth. Fucking fuckers. That was good. Rage was good. Watch this.