Denis Johnson: Angels

“There was nothing regular about that,” Jamie said. “I just took every opportunity that came along to get as ripped as possible.”

“How are you feeling today?” the Welfare lady asked.

“Nervous,” Jamie said.

Nervous was the wrong word. She could see that instantly.

“I mean, I have my problems,” she said, “but I don’t think this is the Empire State Building, or anything like that.”

They shifted in their seats.

“You’re just nervous about being here,” Dr. Wrigley said. “You got it,” Jamie said.

Everybody nodded. When she said the wrong thing, the bodies shifted. When she said the right thing, the heads went up and down.

Dr. Wrigley wasn’t the only man with a chart. There was another, Dr. Benvenuto, who flipped his pages and said, “Jamie, what do you see yourself doing ten years from now?”

She closed her eyes and it came before her like a vision. “I’ll be watching a color TV and smoking a Winston-brand cigaret.”

That made their heads go up and down wildly. They loved that one.

“My two girls, they’ll be right in the next room. Miranda’ll be going on sixteen, she’d probably be talking on the phone. Got a boyfriend on the other end.” She was definitely putting it all in the proper slot now — four happy faces surrounded her. “Ellen would be ten, right? She’s — playing the piano. Practicing on a few tunes for the big debut thing, I guess. The recital.” She looked into their smiles, and beyond their smiles, she looked into their homes. “That’s what I want. A piano, a vase with flowers inside of it. A little economy car. A regular kind of life.”

She lit a cigaret. “Everything would be organized into monthly payments.”

Oops.

“I mean, all my current debts and stuff.”

“We understand,” Dr. Wrigley said, and the other guy, Dr. Benvenuto of the Outpatient Program, actually laughed.

Back in the Express Lane. She backed up a space in her head and saw the room as one sheer piece, all of itself. Actually, they were all on her side here. They were all giving her the signals: This Way Out.

When the Welfare lady and the lady doctor with the tennis shoes had gone, Dr. Wrigley stayed behind and introduced her to Dr. Benvenuto. “I think you belong in the Drug and Alcohol Rehab program,” Dr. Benvenuto said right away.

“On an outpatient basis,” Dr. Wrigley said.

“Out,” she said. “I love the sound of that word.”

“You’ve got a long way to go — I hope you understand that,” Dr. Benvenuto said.

“I’ll take it on an inch-by-inch basis,” Jamie said.

“Are you willing to do whatever’s necessary to stay away from chemicals?”

“You could cut off my arms and legs.”

“We don’t have to go quite that far. Would you be willing to live in a halfway house, and go to a daily therapy group? Would you agree to a urinalysis every three days?”

“I’ll do anything. Where do I sign?”

“It doesn’t involve signing,” Dr. Benvenuto said. “It involves living. That’s a little tougher.”

Jamie read the message several times. It was hard to get a fix on it with Dr. Wrigley standing by the bed. It was her first communication of a personal nature from the outside world — although actually it had come from another Inside World.

She felt that her reaction would be important. Dr. Wrigley had come to deliver it to her himself.

“How far back in the summer was it, when he wrote this?” she asked him.

“I believe it was right after his arrest. Sorry it took so long, but I guess you can understand.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “No problem. I was just wondering.” She read it again:

Seperation is painfull. I still think of you everyday. There was a flood here it was on the 2nd day after they got me — Later everybody found out it was 2 cooks — they did it on purpose & screwed up the drains in the kitchen — Hey I hope you get a chance to tell everybody Im sorry. This is beng delivered by Freddy my lawyer. Im glad James didn’t die

I have feelings for you you know its hard to say — Tell Burris no hard feelings, it could of been anybody.

Seperation is painfull. But who knows of hopes of tomorrow? Maybe we’ll meet again some sunny day Jamey.

Love

Wm Houston Jr

Tell Burris hell still be my brother

“He says, ‘Tell Burris he’ll still be my brother.’”

“Well — if that’s what he says,” Dr. Wrigley said.

She gave it a little thought. “I think that would be just lovely.”

When Brian came back from his supper, he was lugging a stack of newspapers and was accompanied by the two guards from CB-6. They had Richard Clay Wilson in tow. Everybody was silent. This person had killed children. There was no kidding around, and nobody offered him a try in the gas chamber’s bulky chair.

Wilson took up residence in the adjoining cell with self-conscious efficiency, putting a large battery-operated stereophonic radio on his shelf space, turning it up full blast, and staring at Bill Houston with innocent menace through the noise and through the bars that separated their quarters. Bill Houston’s short stay on CB-6 had given him no opportunity of meeting Wilson, but he looked hardly different from the youthful pictures Houston had seen in the papers years before. He was skinny and black, but not very black — half Jamaican and half white — with an extremely wide, flat nose and a terrible complexion: freckles and blackheads across his nose and cheeks, and irritated pores where he shaved. He threw his blue workshirt on his bunk, standing with his hands on his hips and staring them all down — casually administered gestures designed to establish him as an entity rather than a punk. Superimposed over each of his nipples he wore a tattooed cross, with lines indicating light radiating from them. He had been on Death Row, and then its successor CB-6, for a little more than thirteen years. He was thirty-one years old.

They introduced themselves to each other as Richard Clay Wilson and William H. Houston, Jr. These were the names they’d been given by the newspapers.

“We might as well get along,” Bill Houston said.

“We might as well,” Richard said, and gratefully plugged in a set of earphones and placed them over his head.

“Never saw nobody come down to the gas-house so fast,” Richard told him, as they taped up pages of old newspapers to shield themselves from each other.

“My lawyer told me it’s a new era we’re entering,” Bill Houston said.

“Nobody been down here for six year. I was never down here before.”

“Who came over?”

“A white biker gentleman name Mavis. He got back home to CB-6 in two days.”

“They want my ass. They want yours, too,” Bill Houston said.

“I am the oldest and you are the youngest on CB-6,” Richard said. He seemed to have a habit of suddenly puffing himself up, like a lecturer.

Bill Houston thought the man was a fool. He started to put up the paper faster. “Well, we’re going to go up the pipe,” he insisted.

“You for real, boy? Nobody go up that pipe no more. That pipe don’t work. Shit.”

“This time it’s different,” Bill Houston promised him. “I can feel it.”

“You can’t feel nothing. You just a baby.”

“I’m a damn sight older than you are, Richard.”

“Shit. This my home. You just a baby in my home.”

“ CROSSVADER! ”

Bill Houston came up out of a dream of fields. Right; three AM.

“ CROSSVADERRRRRRR! ”

The guard — Houston didn’t know him, had been sleeping at shift-change — was nobody; just the moving circle of a flashlight like ice in his eyes. “Next door,” Houston said to the light.