Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

Betty had said she wanted his baby but it turned out her uterus was broken. Or maybe his cock was broken. He means it worked fine for fucking, but she didn’t get pregnant even though he aimed his scrizzle inside her plenty of times for the sake of a possible Doc junior. (Normally, Doc would prefer to ejaculate on a body, or, ideally, a face.)

Horse walks into a bar.

Horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”

Rub it one hundred times. The hilarity of that joke never dimmed for Doc, even though sometimes you wanted to do the rubbing all on your lonesome. In prison there’s little choice in whose hand beyond your own unless you want another man grabbing your cock. He once gave a hand job in here and if you’re a not-gay man and you’ve never done it, whoa are you in for a surprise. Another man’s erect cock to a straight guy feels like a root vegetable. Women are used to it and every guy knows the feel of his own hard cock, but with your own, you don’t feel it , you make it feel. When Doc touched someone else’s member, somewhat like his own, but not his own, it sent him into biofeedback brain-scramble. He pulled his hand away and did not go through with the act. It was one of those powder puff softball trannies. She was a pretty Latin honey, and he wanted her to beg and whimper and throw her head back like an actual lady might. It would be something different in a place where there is almost no variation from day to day, but then the chick had a huge erection in her pants and he doesn’t like to think about it, but sometimes he lets himself think about it, to remember not to do it again.

The only penis he touches is his own. He is touching it now. Most men whack off most days. Then you wipe away the tears, the evidence, and everyone knows, and no one knows, and the truth is, you actually cannot hear that kind of activity on a collective or choral scale in Doc’s unit. The stroking and jerking are just something Doc assumes, which is how many kinds of knowledge function: you don’t wait for the empirical evidence. In this case you don’t want it, either. You know. You just know.

Betty had this way of challenging him to be a son of a bitch. She liked low-down dirty people and had a special thing for cops. She and Doc drank a lot, did a lot of cocaine. Betty liked to eat hers. He never had met anyone else who did that, ate cocaine; he himself preferred the efficiency of injecting it.

Coked up and in love, he had stupidly assured her he was the dirtiest of cops. It was how they related. It was pillow talk. Stupid words people say to each other in the sack, about various abuses of their power, shit they got away with, people they’d killed.

Betty, facing the death penalty, dredged forth everything Doc had ever told her. He was convicted for the killing of Betty’s original contract killer, and for another contract killing he’d been involved in years earlier, of the manager of a gentleman’s club. But there were two more people whom he’d wasted, although they had no proof on those, could not convict. One was a guy no one misses. The scumbag had just raped his own five-year-old son. A neighbor, fed up with the abuse, had called 911. Doc was the first officer to arrive on the scene, guy wasn’t even done zipping up his pants. Kid crying, bleeding from his anus. Doc told the suspect to relax, and as soon as he put his hands down Doc started firing.

The joke about Linda and Richard was actually Doc’s own. His story. But when he told it, people always thought he was kidding. He was in high school when that happened. It was a single experience but his whole adolescence, the life of Richard Lyn Richards, aka Doc, could be summarized in that moment of humiliation by a girl named Linda at the soda fountain on Magnolia Street in Burbank. You could fit his life story on the head of a pin. I’m not Linda.

Floyd and Lloyd were real people. Brothers who were married to Doc’s two great-aunts. One of Doc’s few recollections of those unfriendly old women and their brother-husbands was a joke he sometimes tried to tell. Floyd had a peach and took a bite. He turned to Lloyd and said, “This peach tastes like pussy. It’s incredible.” The juice rolled down Floyd’s chin. He handed the peach to Lloyd, who took a bite himself, but spit it in the grass. “Tastes like shit,” Lloyd said. Floyd told Lloyd he had to turn the peach around, that he’d bit the wrong side. Doc gets confused. The joke has to be told like a scene but it’s not a real scene that he witnessed as a boy. Floyd and Lloyd, his uncles by marriage, never spoke to each other. They were men of zero words to anyone, ever. They were men who lay watching TV, making women and children feel skittish and in trouble for existing. Plus, another thing, and everyone knows this, it is not about Doc’s tragic family, it is universal: peaches are delicious, truly delicious, and they do not, he repeats, do not taste like shit.

My cellie Romy got transferred but I didn’t know where. Big Daddy refused to tell me. “Mind your own business, Fernandez,” he kept saying.

I was alone now. Another lady on ad seg claimed they’d moved Romy to suicide watch. I didn’t believe her. Ad seg is a big rumor mill of people locked away and shouting through their door. Big Daddy would not do me any favors. I couldn’t even get any books to read. He was just, “No passing, Fernandez. Nuh uh.” Probably he was trying to get promoted.

One year I read eight Danielle Steel novels in ad seg. She did a prison novel that is straight-up killer. Everybody was reading it. We tore the book into sections for passing under cell doors, and it was all people talked about. It blew through the prison like a forest fire. It never occurred to me it was odd women in prison would want to read about other women in prison. You want to read about a world you know, not just ones you don’t know.

I had nothing to do, and no one to talk to. I was tired of Betty LaFrance shouting up the vent. I was eighteen years old when I met her, and she’d impressed the hell out of me. She was rich and called everyone “darling.” Taught manners to women at the county jail. But that was decades ago and you get sick of people. I’ll always love Betty because she’s part of my history, and she’s just too trippy and weird not to like. But sometimes you want her to quiet down.

She kept yelling up through the air vent about her latest plans. She said she was finally going to get back at the rat-faced cop. I told her to hush. But she can’t. That’s Betty. She started rambling about the Bible. When I was young and stupid, Betty had me convinced the Book of Daniel is really about aliens coming to Earth. She spooked the hell out of me. This time, her ramble was all about Judges. “Hey, Sammy. What’s sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion?” She kept asking me that through the vent pipe. “Sweeter than honey, and stronger than a lion?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. She’s better when it’s just about money, or her legs that are insured for millions.

“The lion is killed by Samson,” she said. “He opens the lion’s body and there’s a beehive inside. Bees make honey , see?” She said “honey” like it was the key to her riddle, and now I was supposed to understand everything. Like honey was some kind of code.

“There’s honey in the carcass. Sweet honey,” she said. “But you don’t get it unless you kill the lion. First, you have to kill the lion. I put a hit on him. I got him cornered.”

She started talking about the war, but I had tuned her out.

“Are you even aware we are at war?” she asked, after I’d stopped responding.