MFA Thesis Final Draft

DOWN ON ALL FIVES

DANIEL J. CLEARY

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN ENGLISH

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

MAY 1995

MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

MAY 1997

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MILWAUKEE

MAY 2012

Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree

MASTER OF FINE ARTS IN CREATIVE WRITING

at the

NORTHEAST OHIO MFA

and

CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY

MAY 2015 We hereby approve this thesis

For

Daniel J. Cleary

Candidate for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree

Department of

English, the Northeast Ohio MFA Program

and

CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY’S

College of Graduate Studies

Professor Mohammad Imad Rahman

Department, Date

Professor Caryl Pagel

Department, Date

Professor Robert Pope

Department, Date

Student’s Date of Defense: March 31, 2015 DEDICATION

To MBC: my heart and soul

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Imad Rahman for helping this rhetorician become a fiction writer, and to Caryl Pagel and Robert Pope for serving on my thesis committee. Also, a thank-you to all of the professors and writers in the NEOMFA program for helping me become a better

writer and teacher of writing in all of its forms.

DOWN ON ALL FIVES

DANIEL J. CLEARY

ABSTRACT

Alcoholic and drug addict Linus Domanski checks into the Tom Fitzgerald Center, a halfway house and treatment center for indigent men, in order to avoid a four-year prison sentence for paralyzing a school crossing guard in a drunk-driving accident. Readers encounter important people from Linus’ past (e.g., an African American high school sweetheart, Linus’ mother and father, a girlfriend with whom he has an alternative sexual relationship) and people from his present at the Fitz (e.g., an Oberlin College graduate, an old drug-buddy from Linus’ youth, a street-tough gay man whose mother used to date

Linus’ father). When Linus’ transgressive ways get him and a friend kicked out of the

Fitz, and when they decide to try to control their drinking and using, Linus is set on a collision course that will end with him getting locked up, covered up, or sobered up—or some combination thereof.

Hold My Life

I made it up the gravel driveway, past the rusty U-Haul, and through the chain- link gate. A leathery blonde woman in her fifties looked up from a picnic table and squinted at me.

“Good morning,” she said in her pack-a-day voice. “Have you been drinking?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Folks usually called the Tom Fitzgerald Center simply the Fitz, but it earned its other nickname, The Last Stop, for a couple of reasons. For one, it occupied the final property on a dead-end street of boarded-up houses with sunken porches and abandoned lots overgrown with crabgrass. It was in the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland’s east side, with a pair of east- and westbound commercial railroad tracks directly in back.

It was also the last place anyone wanted to be.

I had no more tricks up my sleeve when I called the Fitz. The judge told me that I had two choices: stay sober or go to prison for four years.

I couldn’t do it on my own. I’d tried. I’d go half a day and then the old squirrel cage in my head would start spinning, and the sweats and the shakes would start up. A couple stiff ones would fix that, and then I’d be off and running again.

When I called the Fitz the week before I checked in, I told the woman I’d been averaging about a half-gallon of something eighty proof a day for the past two or three years.

“Have someone drop you off,” she said, “or take a cab. But we can’t pick up the fare. Whatever you do, don’t stop drinking till Monday, and don’t drive.”

“No problem there,” I laughed, half loaded at noon. “I wrecked my car.”

At the time I called the Fitz, I was actually doing alright. I wasn’t smoking rocks or shooting dope. But I needed a place to go. I wasn’t sure I could handle prison. I couldn’t imagine drying out behind bars, surrounded by animals who prey on weakness.

Fuck that. The one day and night I’d spent in the Justice Center right after the accident was bad enough. On that thin rubber mattress, I flopped back and forth like a trout, sweating out the booze, feeling the start of the DT’s. Next morning, I had to hold my right arm steady with my left hand just to sign the bondsman’s paperwork.

So I did as the lady on the phone said and stayed drunk until Monday morning, sleeping a little bit every now and then, knowing that the end was near, that pretty soon

I’d have to stop drinking, at least for a few years. I caught a four-year sentence for felony drunk driving and vehicular assault, but the judge suspended my sentence on the condition that I stay at the Fitz for at least a year and stay clean and sober until I was off probation. It was my first drunk-driving bust, but I’d crippled a crossing guard when my

Cutlass slid off the road in a rainstorm and ran over him.

I told my lawyer that I’d been drinking that morning, but I wasn’t drunk. In fact, I was on my way to get more to finish the job when I hit that puddle. But I guess the state has a different definition of drunk than I do. My lawyer told me to keep my mouth shut and not to bother arguing that I was actually pretty sober.

“A .16 BAC is less than a six-pack, for Christ’s sake!” I told him.

“That may be true,” he said. “The legal definition of intoxication is pretty strict in

Ohio, but I don’t think it’s wise to brag about your tolerance. And it’s not a good idea to make light of what happened. If anything, it’ll make you look like an asshole.”

So I kept my mouth shut and got a four-year suspended sentence.

My plan was to check in to the Fitz for year, dry out, start eating again, start feeling a little better, and do my best to keep my nose clean until I was off probation.

The Fitz had been rehabbing alkies and druggies since the seventies. Because they took no government money and offered no actual medical services, its employees didn’t have to notify cops, wives, or probation officers about its clients. The Fitz had a pile of money from its namesake, a big-shot local car dealer who had a very public drinking problem himself back in the day. With these funds and the contributions of its

“graduates,” the Fitz offered guys like me—broke, uninsured, unattached—a place to learn how to live without picking up a drink or a drug.

The place was built in the thirties or forties as a shelter for battered women, so it had an institutional quality about it: tile floors, tall ceilings, a large mess hall with a stage, an elevator that no longer worked. This tall, thin, sleave-tattooed guy we called

Penitentiary Rich said the place reminded him of the old Mansfield Reformatory.

“Just like The Castle,” he said. “They could’ve filmed Shawshank up in here.”

The Fitz charged no fees to the men who came through its gate looking for help.

When a man was able to go back to work, the Fitz asked for ten percent of his earnings while he was still a resident, whether he was bunking at the main halfway-house facility or staying in one of its three-quarter houses in the surrounding neighborhood.

“The only requirement for treatment is a desire to stay clean,” said the sign above the door.

I was cursed with a good memory. I rarely ever blacked out. But my recollection of checking into the Fitz is a little bit foggy. My downstairs neighbor dropped me off. I was loaded, but not loaded enough to not be scared. I remember seeing Billy Halahan, the head honcho of the place, standing outside, chewing on a cigarette as I approached the main door.

“Welcome to the Fitz-Carlton! We’ll take care of you.”

Billy was almost bald, and he always wore this drab windbreaker that made him look like a part-time driving instructor, which he used to be. He grabbed my bag, put his arm around me, and marched me through the door into a small room with a metal desk facing a wall, a standing plastic fan, and two unmatching chairs behind the desk. I remember him explaining some of the house rules to me while quickly scanning my body for red flags. He held my wrists, turned my palms up, and surveyed my arms for track marks.

“I can tell you don’t shoot dope—anymore. A guy will be here in a minute to take you to your bunk. Sit tight. Swallow this.” He poured two fingers of Old Grand-

Dad’s into a water glass and handed it to me.

“Guys like you, you’ll get one of these every four hours for the first few days.

Then we’ll taper you down to a shot every eight hours. Within a week, you’ll be ready for your last shot. We call that the Freedom Shot. For many men, it’s the last drink they ever take.”

I wasn’t really a bourbon man, but I took the generous shot down in one gulp.

“The junkies got to sweat it out,” Billy continued. “You can’t die coming off of heroin. And coke? Forget about it. It’s like quitting gum. Same with meth. We don’t know enough about those bath salts yet, though. Do you ever fuck around with any of those bath salts?”

“I’m too old for experiments,” I said.

“How are old you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Turned thirty-six last month,” I said. “How about you?”

“I’ll be sixty in January. And 12 years sober in November. You’re lucky you’re getting clean so young. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said.

Billy ignored me. “Oh, these guys think they’re gonna die from a heroin withdrawal, and some of them probably wish they would die, but they snap out of it in a few days, a week tops. But alcohol and benzos? Those are known killers. You got to wean off that shit.”

“In that case, can I take a Xanax every four hours, too?” I asked. “I’ve got some on me. I can leave the bottle with you.”

“Kid, you can’t bring benzos into a rehab center. That’s a threat to the sobriety of every man in here.”

“You just got done telling me that people have to wean off of benzos.”

Billy looked up from the intake paperwork and looked straight at me, “I’m glad you told me about those pills. When we found them—and we would have found them— we would’ve flushed them down the toilet and kicked you out on your ass. But since you

were straight up with me, I’ll tell you what: I’ll hang onto that bottle. I’ll see to it that you get three Xannies per day till Wednesday, two a day through the weekend, and one more to take with your Freedom Shot. How’s that sound?”

I told him that sounded ok.

We finished up the intake paperwork and Billy walked me to the next room down the hall. It was outfitted with a desk, a tv, a kneeler, a bookshelf with more pamphlets than books, and five metal bunks, each made up with rubber sheets and pillowcases, an office-sized steel garbage can on either side of each bunk.

“This is where the new guys hang out for their first few days until they feel human enough to join group and help out with chores. The guys’ll bring your meals to you in here. By the end of the week, you’ll be eating in the chow hall. For now, you’ve got the place to yourself because five guys just moved into the barracks, but that can change any minute. Enjoy the peace and quiet while you can. And, remember, as long as you do exactly what we tell you to do, everything’s gonna be ok. Ok?”

“Ok,” I said.

I Will Dare

I met Elyse through one of those fuckbuddy dating sites. Like mine, her bio had no picture, which typically meant I’d skip right over her. But her tag phrase said, “Gonna die in your dirty fuckin’ mind.” I figured if this chick knew the lyrics to some random

Buckcherry song, she was at least worth IM-ing.

We started out spending a few hours in the chat room. I was pounding down tall boys of Bud Ice and railroading my way through a twenty-piece rock. I was flying, typing like a whirlwind, putting on my charm. And she kept up with me. Even if she turned out to be some ugly broad or a guy in real life, it’s not like I had anything better to do.

She told me she was twenty. Ten years younger than me. But we had a lot in common. We both preferred the Replacements over REM, GN’R over Motley, and—to my surprise—Alice in Chains over Nirvana.

“Kurt Cobain was such a pussy,” she wrote. “He was all ‘I’m so sensitive.’

Layne Staley would’ve kicked his ass.”

That’s when I asked her for a pic.

“You first,” she wrote.

I sent her a picture of myself from the summer before, when I was doing a little grounds crew work for my dad over at the Browns’ training camp in Berea. I was tan and cut that summer, my brown hair sunkissed sandy, my arms just brown enough to mask the newness of the griffon tattoo on my right forearm. When she asked about it, which I knew she would, I typed, “Oh, I got that done a while ago, probably back in high school.”

Elyse wrote back, “A bad boy . . . . I just might have to do something about that.

;) Check your email.”

In my inbox was a picture of a young, thick strawberry blonde squeezed into a black leather corset, her enormous rack spilling out of the top. I almost blew my hit out of my mouth, but I held onto it and blew it away from the monitor, not letting my eyes off of that picture. I gave my head a quick shake and laughed. Three thoughts occurred to me: 1) her face looked sexy in that whorish makeup; 2) her meaty thighs looked amazing in those fishnets; and 3) I wanted to suck on the heels of those stilettos.

Elyse insisted that we have a “phone date” before finally meeting up. “It’ll be worth it,” she told me. “We can avoid all of that first-date bullshit because we already know each other. So don’t schedule anything else for Friday night, ok?”

That first night on the phone, we talked for eight hours. I went through a twenty- piece boulder and a thirty pack of Bud Ice. When she asked about my inhales and exhales, I told her I was hitting a bowl of weed while having a couple of cold ones.

“Yeah, I’m throwing back my ritual six-pack and hitting a J, myself,” she said.

About two hours into our phone date, I finally got around to asking her what I’d been dying to ask since our first time in the chat room.

“So, what’s the story behind that picture?”

“What picture?”

“The first one you sent me, the one of you dressed up like Lady Sonia.”

“Oh, that’s just how I dress sometimes when my friends and I get wasted and go down to The Chamber.”

“That goth joint in Lakewood next to the Phantasy? What’s it like down there?”

I really didn’t give a fuck what The Chamber was like. I pictured a bunch of suburban brats in pancake makeup and Hot Topic gear smoking clove cigarettes and listening to

Morrissey.

“It’s a riot! I should totally take you some time.”

I took a chance. “If you were wearing that outfit, Elyse, I’d follow you anywhere.”

“Really now,” she said, laughing. “Maybe I’ll wear it over to your place so you won’t have to follow me very far.” I could hear her take a hit from her joint.

“At least not any farther than the bedroom,” I ventured.

“Linus,” she said. She was serious all of a sudden.

“What? Did I go too far or something?”

“How do you know who Lady Sonia is?”

Raised in the City

I always lived behind something down there.

Lots of folks who call themselves Clevelanders have never even been to Slavic

Village. But they all know E. 55th Street’s northernmost point at Lake Erie. If they drove a few miles south on 55th from the marina and pier, past Euclid and Carnegie Avenues, past the Outhwaite projects, past the braiding salons and deep-fry kitchens, and past the hardscrabble brick and rust of the semi-abandoned factories and warehouses, they’d eventually pass under an iron railroad bridge and begin to see houses. Old houses left behind or falling apart: brick up-and-down duplexes with tacked-on, unpainted wooden porches and missing windows, massive houses that had been painted white at one time but were now covered in brownish blemishes. Then the might of E. 55th street would come to an end at Broadway Avenue.

Broadway serves as a rough, sloping northeastern border of Slavic Village.

Discount grocery stores, cash-checking operations, and fast food restaurants share a four- lane southeastward hill with century-old brick churches, brightly colored Eastern

European ethnic centers, and imposing stone banks from E. 55th to E. 79th Street. Fleet

Avenue serves as a sort of southern boundary marker, running east from I-77 until the street doglegs and meets Broadway. Within the confines of 55th, 79th, Broadway, and

Fleet are houses packed tight on pockmarked streets too narrow to permit two passing cars in addition to those parked along the sides. Power lines slink low from seasick poles. Adding to the claustrophobia is the abundance of what we called “back houses,” smaller two-story homes in back of the larger, porched homes in front. Rent for a back

house was cheap, and these houses were often split up into even smaller units. It was common for an entire floor of a back house to go for around two-hundred bucks a month.

That’s why I always rented back there.

Here Comes a Regular

I couldn’t eat or sleep for the first few days at the Fitz, and I was so shaky the guys started calling me Fox, as in Michael J. Fox. Only Billy and a couple guys who knew me called me Linus that first week.

But the Old Grand-Dad’s and Xanax were helping. I didn’t have the full-blown hallucinations that a half-gallon a day usually earns guys like me once they quit. Around lunchtime of my second day at the Fitz, when I passed on my fourth straight meal since arriving there, Billy helped me into his office and handed me a tumbler with a triple-shot of Old Grand-Dad’s, instead of the usual single. When my shakes almost forced me to wear the damn thing, Billy held it to my lips, and I took it down in two gulps. I ate fine after that.

I was chewing up the Xanax, which gave them a little extra punch at first, but then they weren’t lasting as long as they should’ve. Still, though, Billy was right: I started feeling human again within a few days.

Some time during my third day at the Fitz, the reality started to set in that I would have to spend at least four years sober—four Christmases, four birthdays, four St.

Paddy’s Days, four Super Bowls—without a drink, without even a little weed or anything. I was working the remains of a pill out of my teeth with my tongue when the idea of four years hit me. It didn’t seem fair. Vince Neil killed a guy driving drunk, and he didn’t get much more than a month in jail. The benzo was kicking in, and I was daydreaming about what Motley Crue would have been like without their pansy blonde singer. Would they have replaced him if he’d gone to prison? What would Vince have been like after doing hard time? Maybe he would have written amazing country songs

after that experience. The whole thing would have afforded him some much-needed credibility.

Reality hit me again: four years. I sat up, not nearly as calm as I should have been from the pill. I went out to the smoking porch, lit a cigarette off another resident’s cherry, and was drawing the smoke into my lungs when something else hit me: four years in which I would be smoking cigarettes without a beer or some other drink in my hand.

The unfairness of it all burned me. The wet road, the cops, Vince Neil. I should have asked for a jury trial. If there was one serious drinker in the bunch, I’d have gotten a fair punishment, a fitting one, like Vince did. A month in jail seemed fair. That guy learned his lesson about driving drunk, and he didn’t have to give up partying for four years of his life to do it.

I could appeal my conviction, I thought. That could take years. Or, I could skip town. But I knew I would live in constant fear of getting caught, which would ruin any enjoyment freedom offered. Plus, I knew myself: if I somehow managed to evade my probation officer for four years, I would wish I’d done my sober time and gotten it over with.

I stopped into Billy Halahan’s office to see if he’d give me another belt of Old

Grand-Dad’s.

“You’re on the eight-hour schedule now, Linus,” he told me. “This is day three.

You should be starting group tomorrow, and going to meetings by the weekend. Have you taken a solid dump yet?”

“I don’t think I’ve eaten enough yet. A shot might help me eat some more.”

He poured a single and set it on his desk.

“Sometimes I think I should just do the time,” I said. “It’d probably be easier to stay sober in prison than in Slavic Village.”

“You can get hooch in prison,” Billy said. “They make it from bread and fruit.

You’ve got to drink around the mold.”

He could see how I was eyeballing that shot, so he handed it to me.

“I know myself: I can’t dabble. If I don’t have access to a steady supply, it’s best if I just stay away from it. I can’t play that game where you get drunk one day, wait five days for the next batch. I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy, and for the next four years, it’s gonna be nothing.”

“Don’t think about four years,” he said. “Just take it one day at a time. Who knows? Maybe you’ll like sobriety so much you’ll stay clean the rest of your life.”

“What happened to one day at a time?” I smiled for the first time since walking through the Fitz’s gate.

Billy laughed, and I downed my shot. “You’ve been paying attention,” he said.

“That’s good.”

I was walking back toward the tv lounge when I saw two volunteers helping my old buddy Ape Neck into the Fitz.

Ape looked like shit. His hair was dark brown and greasy, and he was underweight, probably thirty pounds lighter than he should have been, wearing muddy blue jeans and a brown flannel shirt. A pair of aviator sunglasses covered his eyes and his open mouth revealed missing and discolored teeth. His thin, sporadically tattooed arms sprawled out onto the shoulders of the two men, one on either side of him, who carried him through the area that served as a cafeteria toward the barrack-style bunks.

“Jesus Christ, Karl, you look like a bag of assholes,” Billy said. “You were just here, what was it, two months ago? Did it get any better out there?”

Ape Neck didn’t say anything. One of the volunteers whispered something to

Billy, so Billy looked at his clipboard and told the men to put Ape in the bunk next to mine.

Till We’re Nude

Black families started moving into Slavic Village when I was in junior high.

There were always a few black families here and there, but the mid-eighties is when they really starting moving in.

When I was really young, I had this little black buddy, Freddy, who lived down the street from me. He used to come over sometimes. My mom adored him. My dad seemed to get a kick out of him, too. But when I was a freshman in high school, my dad started noticing that more and more black families were moving into the neighborhood.

He decided the two of us needed to have a little talk.

“Now, you know I never minded little Freddy when he used to come around, right? I always let him come in the front door, even let him stay over for supper and eat with us, at our table, a couple of times back when your mother was still with us. But, I just want to make myself clear: under no circumstances are you to ever, and I mean ever, start fucking around with one of those black girls. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah, I think I get what you’re saying,” I said. “Look, Christmas is coming up, so I’m wondering what size hood I should get you.”

“Don’t be a wise-ass, Linus. I’m serious.”

By the end of the week, I started dating Jonelle. She and her family had moved in from the Fairfax neighborhood, a part of town I’d never visited, for good reason.

Jonelle was fifteen, and I was fourteen. Being a little older and coming from

Fairfax, Jonelle moved faster than I did. The first time we made out on a Friday night after the Freshman-Sophomore dance, she let me fingerbang her.

Ape had poured a couple of ounces of each bottle of his old man’s liquor into an old plastic army canteen, making a concoction he called “The Boys.”

“It’s got Jim in there, and both the Jacks: Yukon and Daniel’s. It’s also got

Captain Morgan and his first mate Jose. And a buncha other shit too.”

Ape snuck The Boys into the dance in his underpants. We took turns going into the men’s room in twos and threes and taking searing pulls from the canteen. About halfway through the dance, at least seven of us were loaded.

After I came out of the bathroom, I saw Jonelle. Probably because she wasn’t lightskinned or biracial like Rae Dawn Chong or Lisa Bonet, my buddies didn’t think

Jonelle was attractive in any conventional way. Her nose was broader and her forehead higher than any of the celebrities we called “halfro Americans.” But I dug that she had the hair and eyebrows of Jody Watley, and I liked how she rocked the curves of Kim

Coles from the 227 days.

I walked up to Jonelle and asked her to dance, after I all but forced Ape to dare me to do so. I thought she was cute, and I knew it would get a good chuckle from my friends. She was new at Central Catholic that year, and there weren’t that many black guys at the school, so it wasn’t all that ballsy a move on my part.

We slow danced to the second half of “When a Man Loves a Woman.” We talked a bit till after the dance. I told her I could show her around the school and make sure she got invited to all the right parties. She said maybe she’d take me up on that offer. We talked about music. I geeked out when I found out she was into Tina Turner.

“Phil Spector was her producer back when she was with Ike. I should let you listen to this Ramones record Spector produced.”

And she wasn’t stupid. She knew exactly what Ape was talking about when he said to me, with her in earshot, “Take her home to meet your old man,” after we were done making out and heavy-petting in the parking lot.

I caught up with her at school on Monday, and I walked her home from school.

She and her folks lived on E. 61st, two streets over from my folks’ house. Her parents were working till five, and her older brother wasn’t living with them at the time. We went into her room and started making out. After about ten minutes of fooling around, she walked over to her dresser, pulled out a cigar box, and took a condom out of one of those plastic coin purses you win as a shitty consolation prize from games at Cedar Point.

I’d never been laid before. When she handed the rubber to me, I put it on her nightstand and asked her, “Does your dad have any liquor around here? Let’s put a nice little buzz on, first.”

“We’re Christian,” she said, unzipping my jeans and kissing my neck. “We don’t keep alcohol in the house.”

“Oh. I thought you were Catholic,” I said. “Let’s walk down to the Broadway

Market and grab a six-pack, first, or a bottle of Mad Dog or something. It’ll make it even better.”

“Shut up, Linus,” she laughed. She straddled my lap and pushed me onto my back. She kissed me, and I kissed her back. She giggled. I giggled. She looked down at me with the confidence and regality that I imagined only a black girl can possess when she’s on top of a younger, less experienced white boy.

There was nothing I wanted at that moment more than to be inside of Jonelle.

Nothing except for one thing: I wanted to round off the sharp corners of the whole thing

just a bit. To throw a little shade on the piercing headlights of it all. It was just too much. And too real.

She tried, but she couldn’t get the rubber to stay on my half-limp dick.

“Shit, Linus, this is my last one.” But she was nice about it. She even snuggled up next to me for a minute before going into her kitchen and coming back with Zip-Lock bag.

“I’m not tossing this thing just yet,” she said, zipping up the unrolled condom.

“There’ll always be a next time, right?”

Happy Town

TOM FITZGERALD CENTER HOUSE RULES

1) You must stay sober to stay here. If you want to get drunk/high, pack your shit.

2) Wives and mothers can visit on Sundays in the chow hall. No girlfriends,

fiancées, or ‘baby mamas’.

3) Everyone must attend group, if you want to stay here. Don’t skip group.

4) New guys can’t use the pay phone for first two weeks. NO EXCEPTIONS!

5) Chores are listed on choreboard. If you don’t want to do your chores, pack your

shit.

6) Men who can’t afford cigarettes can roll their own from the house cans. Put a

buck in the basket on Saturdays if you use house tobacco/papers.

7) No food, candy, gum, fruit, etc. in dorm. Eat in the chow hall.

8) No fuck mags, TV’s, medicines, computers, glue or other things Billy says you

can’t have.

9) No smoking during group. Smoke only during breaks. All smoking is to be done

outside.

10) No gambling. This means everyone. Even cards.

11) Men will submit to piss tests at Billy’s discretion. If you refuse, pack your shit.

12) If you can’t live by these rules, pack your shit!

In shaky Sharpie handwriting:

-No cologne, mouthwash, or hair spray.

-If you want to go to Wendy’s you have to take another man with you. Ten minutes tops.

Eat it here. Sign out and sign back in.

-Cellphones belong in the office with Billy. He will keep them in the safe. If you want to call your sponsor, use the pay phone. Men can have cell phones back once they go three-quarter. You must have a job to go three-quarter.

-The library on Fleet is for books, not computers. No Facebook while living at the Fitz.

-No Spice, K2, Herbal Incense, Bath Salts or other synthetics. You’re not sober on this stuff. They are DRUGS! If you don’t want to be sober: PACK. YOUR. SHIT.

A giant wall scroll:

THE TWELVE STEPS OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become

unmanageable.

2) Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to

sanity.

3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we

understood Him.

4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact

nature of our wrongs.

6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make

amends to them all.

9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so

would injure them or others.

10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly

admitted it.

11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with

God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and

the power to carry that out.

12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry

this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Sixteen Blue

I was a sophomore at Cleveland Central Catholic High School the first time someone suggested I should do something about my drinking. I was on my way to

English class when Dr. Perkins, one of the theology teachers, called me into his office.

“Linus,” he said, “I think you should give up beer for Lent.”

“Why, Doc?”

“Because it’s one of the greatest gifts that God has given us. And you aren’t appreciating it.”

“I’m appreciating it every chance I can get, Doc.”

“That’s what I mean. I think you’re taking it for granted. You and your buddies are swilling it down without appreciating it. I think you’d appreciate it more if you took forty days off. I’ll tell you what: I’ll buy you a six-pack—of good beer, not that shit you guys drink—on Easter Sunday if you stay away from alcohol starting on Good Friday.”

“Deal,” I said.

Jonelle loved that I gave up beer for Lent.

“You’re like a total horndog nowadays, Linus,” she said. “A real freak.”

Doc Perkins held up his end of the bargain. On Easter Sunday, he met me in the school parking lot, where he pulled a sixer of Beck’s from the trunk, still cold in the April chill.

“I’m really proud of you Linus,” he said, and I could tell he meant it.

“Thanks, Doc,” I said. “It wasn’t hard or anything, but I think I’ll appreciate beer more now that I’ve taken some time off.” And I’d meant what I said: smoking weed without having a couple of beers was getting old.

I put the sixer into my backpack and rode my bike down into the Metroparks’

Garfield Reservation and found a spot in the woods. I peeled the foil off the neck of one of those Beck’s only to find out that it wasn’t a twist-off. I used my lighter to bend the cap’s teeth back and nudge the cap off its perch. I remember the Beck’s tasting skunky compared to the kinds of beer I was used to, skunky but sophisticated. I drank all six of them in about an hour and rode my bike home, enjoying the soft warmth I’d been missing for forty days and forty nights.

We’re Coming Out

“Everybody knows who Lady Sonia is,” I told Elyse, trying to balance my phone on my shoulder while holding my Bud Ice and sparking a Marb. “She’s the world’s most famous dominatrix. She’s like a household name.”

“Yeah, Linus,” she said calmly. “She’s a household name—for those of us involved in the scene. And we think she’s a joke, by the way.”

“What scene?” I asked.

“The scene. You know what I’m talking about . . . unless you aren’t really out yet.”

“You think I’m gay?” I could feel my face burning.

“No no no, sweetie,” she reassured me, “that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, you’re not really involved in the scene, just yet, are you? You’re just looking around, maybe checking out different websites at this stage, is that right?”

I swallowed hard and admitted that that was exactly what I’d been doing. Over the course of the next several hours, she educated me about D/s, which she described as her primary means of sexual expression.

“Not all power play is S&M,” she said. “I don’t get off on watching people get hurt. I’m not a sadist. I am a Domme. Besides, I can’t afford to buy all that leather and dungeon equipment.” I could hear her lighting a cigarette or joint, taking a drag, and exhaling. “And I also don’t want you to confuse D/s with B&D. I like tying a guy up, but I’m not about to spend my Saturday nights learning the difference between half-stitch and square knots.” She laughed. Her laugh was sexy, throaty. “D/s is more about psychological control and worship, really.”

Then she questioned me about my interests.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What you said sounds really, really cool.”

“Which part?”

“The worship part.” I felt this odd mix of guilt and arousal come upon me simultaneously. I could feel my heart pick up a bit and felt my face get warmer.

“Good,” she said. I could hear the spark of her lighter. “That’s my favorite part, too.”

By the end of that conversation, we had come to an agreement.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night, sweetie,” she said around four a.m.

“Tonight, actually.” I was starting to slur.

“Get some sleep, ok?” she said.

“Ok.”

“That’s not how we talk to our mistress, now is it?” If I weren’t too drunk to get a hard-on, that line would have done it.

“No, Mistress.”

“That’s better, but not quite there yet.”

“No, Mistress Elyse,” I said, a lump rising in my throat.

“That’s a good boy. Goodnight.” She hung up.

I had to do three shots of Rumple Minze and snort a half milligram of Klonopin just to fall asleep after that.

My Little Problem

I hadn’t really been in a lot of serious scrapes with the law before the accident with the crossing guard. I’d had some fallout from my habits, but my old man was always there to rescue me. When I was nineteen, I got into a scrape at work when my boss at the Hi Life found my works hidden in the dropped ceiling of the men’s room. I was coming off a rough breakup caused by my drinking, so I was trying to subtract alcohol through the addition of heroin. My boss was trying to splice a cable line for a tv he wanted to put above the jukebox, which required the removal of several ceiling tiles, when he found a Subway bag with a rig and two bags of dope inside.

Between the combination of Alice in Chains on the discman and the noise of the pressure nozzle, I didn’t even hear Paulie come into the kitchen. I was hosing wing sauce off a plate, mouthing Layne Staley’s vocals, and the next thing I knew I was on my back on the kitchen floor, Paulie’s knees on the crooks of my elbows. I don’t think I’d ever been that close to him before, and having his crotch in my face wasn’t my idea of a good time. He stunk like a combination of asshole, Scotch, and sweatsocks.

“What the fuck is this, Linus?”

“What the fuck’s going on, Paulie?”

“No one else eats at Subway.” He had me there.

“Yeah, it’s mine, ok. Just get off of me.” I was surprised to hear myself cop to it.

He got off me, offered me a hand and pulled me up. He opened the back door and threw the rig into the dumpster. Then he put the two bags of dope in his front pocket.

“A) I’m keeping this. I bet Preacher’s old lady will give me at least a handjob for it. B) You’re fired. I don’t need this shit around my bar. C) I’m telling your old man.”

Paulie knew my dad from his days as a regular at the Hi Life, back when he was still dating Sammy’s mom and a couple years after that. In fact, my dad was the one who got me the job washing dishes at the Hi Life.

“If Paulie likes you, he might ask you to tend bar once you turn twenty-one,” he told me before my first day. “And, if he does, you’ll say to him . . . ?”

“’Thanks, but no thanks, Paulie. The bartender too often becomes his own best customer’.”

“That’s right. Remember that.”

He used to pick me up from the bar after my shift, sometimes staying for a couple of minutes to talk a bit to the regulars. These were guys he used to drink with, guys he came up with.

“Why don’t you pull up a stool, Petey?” they’d offer. “Just a beer and a belt, for old time’s sake?”

“That would just make me thirsty,” he’d laugh. “But, here, let me buy you guys a round.”

When he came to pick me up after I got fired for the dope, though, it was like he didn’t even see his old buddies sitting at the bar. I was sitting, shamefaced, in the back corner behind the pool table. Paulie must have told him exactly where I was because he walked straight over to me, threw my jacket at me, and said, “Get in the goddam car.”

I’d only been dabbling with smack, and for only about a year, so it really wasn’t that hard to quit. My old man locked me in the basement for about a week, only letting me upstairs to shit and shower a couple of times. He was six years sober in AA by this point, and he didn’t want me to go down the same road he did.

“We’ve got to nip this thing in the bud,” he kept telling me. “If nothing changes, nothing changes.”

He was a sweet man that week, a saint. He brought me wet rags when I was sweaty and blankets when I was shivering. He even massaged my legs when I was going through the jimmies on days four and five. “It’s gonna be ok,” he’d tell me. “We’re gonna get you well.”

I stayed away from junk for a long time after that, but I didn’t quite stay out of trouble. My dad had to bail me out of a few more scrapes after that, but the final straw came when I was in my twenties and I almost caught my first felony case. I’d come to him, crying, telling him I needed help. He sent me to talk to his buddy, a lawyer named

Paddy Quinn. He wrote down directions and when he handed them to me, then he made me look him in the eyes.

“This is the last time, Linus. The last time. I’m only doing this because I’d hate for you to have a felony on your record. Not even thirty, and you’ll be a marked man for life. You won’t even be able to work at McDonald’s. Go see Paddy. He’ll take care of it. But, never, never ask me to get you out of a jackpot again, got it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I got it. Can I have a couple bucks for gas?”

The building that housed Paddy Quinn’s law office used to be a small bank and, from the outside, you could tell. It was on the west side over on Lorain Road, a five-lane stretch of bars, motels, and fast-food joints. Paddy had bricked over the bank’s drive-up window, but he left the arched brick awning intact to serve as a carport for the Jaguar he bought, used, after he passed the bar exam on his second try. He converted the empty

bank into his place of business shortly after graduating from law school and discovering that no one wanted to hire an attorney with drug convictions.

“Take a seat,” Paddy said when his secretary showed me to his office. He put down his sports page and unwrapped a ham-and-cheese sandwich from a CVS bag.

I sank down into the large leather armchair facing Paddy’s desk and felt swallowed by the chair’s enormity, the stretching of the leather unbearably loud in my ears. After settling in and realizing that Paddy was taking his sweet time, I started picking at one of the large brass studs lining the seams of the chair’s arms. I accidentally pulled one of the tacks out, replaced it quickly, then folded my hands in my lap.

Paddy popped the last bit of sandwich into his mouth, looked up, and said, through his chews, “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“That’s no problem Pat—Mr. Quinn.”

He interrupted, “Paddy. I’m not a ‘Pat.’ It’s Padraig. It’s Gaelic. And only judges call me ‘Mr. Quinn’.” He smiled.

“Okay, Paddy, thanks for seeing me.”

“Your dad called me at home last night. He’s a good man, your dad. Said there were some cops down to see you. I called a buddy of mine down at the second district.

He says they’re making moves on a search warrant. I need to ask you something, and I need you to be straight with me. Can you be straight with me, Linus?”

“Yes, sir, I think so.”

“Good, ‘cause I don’t want you dicking me around. Tell me something: If I walk into that apartment, what am I going to find?”

“What are you going to find?”

“What am I going to find.” This last remark was not a question.

“We’ve been drinking—a lot—down there, and using—drugs. We’ve been partying, you know. There’s stuff like that down there.”

“You said ‘we.’ Who is ‘we’? Who’ve you been ‘partying’ with?” Paddy had the habit of using his fingers to mimic quotation marks when using other people’s words.

“Guys I used to go to school with, some guys from the neighborhood. Friends of mine.”

“Are any of these ‘friends’ there now?” He walked from behind the wooden desk and sat on its front, leaning in so that his face was only a few feet from mine.

“No, they’re gone. As soon as everyone found out the place was hot, they took off.”

“Some friends. So what’s left? Is there still dope there? Are there any weapons?

Anything else dangerous or illegal that I need to know about before I go in there?”

“Go in there?” I was confused. I had shown up at my old man’s house a few hours before, in a panic, after my neighbors had warned me that the police were on their way, that they were tired of people like me making our neighborhood a haven for drugs.

My old man told me that he would take care of it. He called Paddy, and Paddy told my dad to send me over.

“I’m going in there to take care of it,” Paddy continued. “I’d do anything for your father, you know that? He’s worried that the cops are gonna find something that’ll land you a felony—that’s his big worry, that you’ll catch a felony case—and then your life is over. I told him I would take care of it. So, what all I am going to find? What do I need to clean up?”

“There’s no guns or anything like that. It’s just—messy. It’s a mess. Cans, bottles, baggies, a couple pipes…”

Paddy jumped on these last two items. “Baggies and pipes, ok. How many?

Where are they? Here,” he reached behind him and brought out a yellow legal pad and a black pen from a top drawer, handed them to me and said, “Draw me a map of your apartment.”

He leaned back on the desk.

“The whole thing,” he said. “Label the rooms. Draw x’s anywhere there could possibly be any baggies, stems, or other paraphernalia, ok?”

I had never drawn a map before. I’d never studied blueprints or even looked at floor plans for more than a few seconds. I held the pen and stared at the blank yellow sheet. Paddy returned to the seat behind his desk and looked at me.

“I’m going to assume your apartment is square. But is it a square square, or more like a rectangle? Is it wide or long, or the same all around? Draw the shape, then start with the door. Move on from there.”

I flipped over the top sheet of the legal pad and drew a rectangle across page two.

I marked a spot for the outside door. I started to imagine what my apartment would look like if the police helicopter that circled overhead every few nights had x-ray vision and could look right in. I prayed that it couldn’t. I drew compact horizontal lines to indicate the small set of stairs leading from the driveway to the kitchen. I estimated locations of walls and cordoned off sections of the rectangle to represent my bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room. I drew x’s across various spots in the living room, kitchen and bedroom. When I was finished, I jotted down the address underneath the schematic, as

Paddy instructed, and let out a relieved sigh when Paddy approved of the sketch after taking back the legal pad.

“Ok. It’s gonna take the cops at least a couple more hours to get that warrant. I can be in and out of there in an hour, tops. I’ve got an intern coming down here in a half hour—second year law student, sober five years, ready to sink his teeth into something juicy. This oughtta be enough excitement for him.”

He leaned back in his chair and placed his pen against his chin.

“Let me ask you a question. Are there gonna be needles in that apartment? If I reach into that couch, am I gonna get stuck with a needle? I’ve got a kid, you know.”

“No needles. We were just smoking. Rock, mostly. A little pot.”

“Good,” Paddy interrupted. “I don’t need the AIDS at this point in my life.

That’s why I never shot smack.” He lifted an autographed baseball from a brass stand and leaned back in his chair. He gripped the seams of the ball with his first two fingers and thumb. Then he looked at me.

“Let me ask you something, Linus: Why don’t you wise up and quit fuckin’ around?”

We Know the Night

About three years before the accident, I started setting my alarm for the middle of the night so I could wake up and drink more.

Sometimes I’d overshoot my mark and pass out about eleven o’clock or so. But, if I set my alarm for one a.m. and drank for a couple more hours, I wouldn’t wake up at five craving booze. And whenever I started drinking again at five, there was no way on earth I was making it to work. As long as I made sure I passed out around three nice and loaded, I could make sure I’d gotten enough in to keep me knocked out till morning, when I’d only have time for an eye opener or two before running off to whatever shitty job I wasn’t yet fired from that week.

Within Your Reach

My old man worked at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. He was a foreman on the grounds crew.

When I was in second grade, my dad was taking us to a ballgame on his day off.

It was one of those Employee Appreciation Days. He had no problem getting us these fantastic seats on the third-base line, right along the visiting team’s dugout, because the

Stadium seated over 70,000 people and typically seated around 5,000 back in those days.

We were getting ready to go. My mom was already in the car. My dad was finishing his Seven and Seven in the kitchen. I ran into the garage to get my mitt, and my old man saw me through the kitchen screen door.

“What do you need that for?” he barked.

“In case a ball comes our way. So I can catch it.”

“Pfft,” he said, putting down the glass. “Jackass. You think you’re gonna catch a goddamn ball? Put that mitt back in the bin and get in the car with your mom.”

In the third inning, when my mom asked me why I didn’t bring my mitt to the game—“All the other little boys have their mitts”—I started blubbering and ratted out my dad.

My mom knocked my dad’s half-full plastic beer cup out of his hand.

“Jesus Christ, Peter. He’s a little boy. I don’t care if wants to bring a goddamn teddy bear to the game, you let him.”

Color Me Impressed

My fourth day at the Fitz, Billy decided I was well enough to go to group. He was right. I was feeling better, and I’d even started eating. I was absolutely raving for sugar. My first breakfast in the chow hall, I covered my powdered eggs with so much ketchup they disappeared. I put five sugar packets into my coffee. I was reaching for a second bear claw when I heard a half-laugh, half-wheeze come from behind me. I spun around in my seat and looked at what must have been the oldest man in the world.

“That’s the way, kid. Alcohol is nothing but sugar.”

I went back to the pile of day-old pastries that one of the Fitz’s alumni dutifully dropped off every morning as a thank-you for being able to continue fucking his wife.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that somewhere before,” I said to the old guy.

“You can always tell a new guy. He’s always after the sugar,” he said. “Just do what the folks hear tell you to do, and you’ll be just fine.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that, too.”

After breakfast, that old man got up on the stage at the front of the chow hall, sat down on a wooden chair, and led group.

“My name is Chuck Allen, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Chuck,” the men boomed in unison. There must have been eighty guys in that room.

“I have not found it necessary to take a drink since May 4, 1970. For those of you trying to do the math, I’ll save you the trouble. I have been sober for a little over forty years, but I will always need to remember what brought me to recovery.”

Chuck didn’t look at us. He stared at the back wall as if he’d been hypnotized.

“The last day that I drank, and I remember it well, I sat in that front room. I was no longer able to get out of the house. I had a fifth of whisky, I had a fifth of brandy.

Maryann went out and got me a quart of twenty percent port wine and a dozen bottles of

Carling’s ale. And I worked at it very seriously, all day long. And, sometime in the early evening, the wine was gone, there was three bottles of Carling’s ale left, the brandy was gone, and there was three ounces—maybe four, tops—of whiskey left in the bottle. And

I hadn’t reached the point where I could go out. “

He pointed at his temple with his finger.

“I couldn’t stop this damn thing here. I couldn’t stop it. It was like a hamster on one of those wheels in a cage, just running, running. And I couldn’t stop it. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, if I could just black out.’ I went in and laid down on the bed and took, involuntarily, for the first time in my life, an honest look at Chuck Williams.”

He pointed at his head again. “This thing didn’t want to stop. And I don’t know, because I don’t remember too much, but as I think back on it, I yelled, ‘Oh my God.’

Just out of pain. And I think that meant something. Maryann came in and laid down on the bed beside me and, very quietly, said, ‘Chuck, why don’t you do something about it?’

And I don’t know what happened, I haven’t the slightest idea, but it was like something exploded inside of me. I reared up out of that bed, and I said, ‘I’m going to.’ And I believe that that was God speaking through me.”

At that point, I stopped listening and starting counting the ceiling tiles. I had nothing in common with Chuck. Sure, we both drank too much, but this guy was ancient.

Port wine, Carling’s ale—please. What’s next, bathtub gin from the local speakeasy?

Besides, he was talking about God. I believed there was a God, but I also believed that

He wanted nothing more to do with me.

I didn’t foresee any miraculous conversion. I’d hit a crossing guard because the roads were slick. And guys like me have to stay sober for four years just for hurting someone when a rich douche like Vince Neil gets off Scot free after killing someone. I started getting pissed off. Old Chuck wasn’t exactly telling my story up there.

Shooting Dirty Pool

I don’t know if Jonelle told anyone about what happened, but I told all my idiot friends at school that I fucked her, that we sixty-nined, that she blew me.

“And when we were all done, she came back to her bed and brought me one of her papa’s ice cold beers from the fridge.”

“I call bullshit,” one of the guys said. “What’s his brand?”

“Colt .45,” I answered.

“Maybe he’s not shitting us.”

“What’s black pussy taste like, Linus?” Ape wanted to know.

“Like Guinness,” I said.

“Really?”

“No, dumbass,” I said, “it tastes like pussy. Like a chick’s pussy.”

“Oh,” he said. He went back to his bologna sandwich.

“Like the best fucking pussy in the entire universe!” I said. All eyes were back on me.

“And she fucked like a goddamn pro. Nothing like these white girls I’ve been tapping lately.”

Another guy said, “So, is it true: ‘Once you go black, you’ll never go back’?”

“Nah,” I said. “That’s bullshit. There’s too much good pussy in the world to stick to only one kind. That’s why I might not even see her anymore. I wanna pull some

Puerto Rican trim, next. Head on over to the west side and pick up a little chiquita.”

“But Jonelle’s a sure thing,” Ape protested. “A real woman’s body, too.”

“Yeah, but I’m afraid my old man might cut my dick off,” I said. And there could be no objections to that.

Dope Smokin’ Moron

I remember one time hanging out in Ape’s basement back when he had that place on Fullerton. We were passing around a joint, crushing tall boys, and hitting some rock through a glass-rose stem. Ape had just taken a real bellringer, and he was getting ready to exhale into a toilet paper tube so I could shotgun it to make the rock last longer. I had the joint in one hand, a beer in the other, and a Marb burning down in the ashtray. As I leaned in to suck down Ape’s exhaust, I remember thinking, “I just don’t have enough mouths.”

When it Began

Elyse came over Saturday night, the night after our phone date. She brought a twelve pack of Labatt’s Blue and a sack of pine-smelling weed with little red hairs in it.

She wasn’t wearing the outfit from the picture. Instead, she wore a tight pair of faded bellbottom jeans and one of those low-cut peasant tops. She wasn’t thick—she was fat, with a huge ass and massive titties. After a few hours, once she’d decided that she felt safe enough with me to spend the night, she sent me out to her car to get a suitcase.

“The outfit you like is in there, along with a few other goodies,” she said.

We drank a bit more, smoked a little more grass, and flipped through the cable channels. When we couldn’t find anything worth watching, she polished off a beer, turned to me, and said, “Well, are you ready to start playing?”

I finished my beer and smiled. “Yeah, I’m up for anything.”

“What did I tell you last night about the proper way of addressing your mistress?”

She leaned toward me with her elbows on her knees, giving me an eyeful of her knockers.

“Um, yes Mistress Elyse,” I said meekly. I swallowed hard.

“Good boy, she said, “Now, get undressed.”

Two hours later, she was kind enough to take her strap-on dildo to the bathtub and rinse it off because it was stinking up my bedroom. She’d used the smallest one she had, and she’d used plenty of lube, but I must have had a round in the chamber. It smelled like someone had taken a dump on the floor, and it was killing the mood.

“What should we do now, Mistress Elyse?” I asked when she came back. I was hoping that if I kept playing my part she might still want to mess around.

She reached behind me and pinched both of my nipples hard. She said, “I have an idea,” I heard the click of her stilettos on the floor as she walked toward the front of the bed.

She pulled off her heels, detached her corset through the loops in front, and unrolled her fishnets. As she sprawled her fat naked body across my bed she said, “Now come on up here and make love to me, sweetie.”

“Are we done, mistress?” I asked, trying to look as pathetic as I could.

“No, sweetie, I want to you to fuck me now. Don’t you want to fuck me?”

I began kissing her pudgy feet. “I want whatever my mistress wants.”

“Well, boy, your mistress wants you to fuck her.”

I scooted up and moved fistfuls of upper-thigh to the sides to reveal her sweaty box. I could tell she’d just shaved because the skin around her lips was raw with angry little bumps. “Isn’t that more boyfriend-girlfriend than Domme/sub?” I asked, gazing at the little light-brown Hitler ’stache above her pussy.

“And what do you want to do, Linus?”

“I don’t know. I could eat your pussy and your ass for a while, and then maybe you could jerk me off into your hand and order me to lick it up?”

She pushed my head away and sat up. “Let’s get one thing straight, Linus. I’m not a lifestyle domme, so I don’t expect any of this power shit to play out outside of our sexual relationship. I don’t want to control your life. But I’m also not a pro, so I’ll tell what I definitely won’t be: your fucking slave.”

“What are you talking about, Elyse?”

“Stop trying to top me from the bottom,” she said.

“What?”

“If you ever want to play with me again, you will have to knock off the manipulative bullshit. When I say ‘fuck me,’ you better fuck me, ok?”

Here was this fat chick, in my apartment, on my bed, telling me what to do—and not letting me shoot any angles on her. I had a hard-on. Then I heard myself say, “You get me.”

“What, Linus?” she asked.

“I said, ‘You get me,’ Mistress Elyse.” I put my head down and started to sob.

“There there, boy,” she said, putting her arm around me, pushing my face into her doughy cleavage. “I get you alright. I’m in charge when we play from now on. This is only for your best interests. We will establish a safeword in case things get too intense, but I promise you, if you let me run the show in the bedroom, I will show you that you are capable of things beyond your imagination.”

I wiped my eyes and nodded yes.

“Now, I’m gonna let you stick your little dick in me. And since I know how much you enjoy it, I might let you clean me up afterwards.”

Kids Don’t Follow

If there was one thing Billy Halahan couldn’t stand, it was nicknames. I grew up with three guys in the Fitz, calling them almost exclusively by their nicknames for two decades, and suddenly I’ve got to call them by their first names. In front of Billy, at least.

I went to high school with Ape Neck. He was a fuckup. Got his nickname in the gym locker room. Coach Bzdafka was teeing off on me for pretending to take a shower by splashing some water on myself.

“No French showers, Domanski,” he said to me.

We all knew he only enforced the shower rules because he enjoyed the free show.

I was sticking to my story that I’d taken a real shower, even going so far as pretending to dry my hair with a towel, when Coach’s eyes caught the nametag on Ape’s locker in the big mirror behind me. He pointed at it, his chest pumping up and down so much I thought he was going to shit himself.

“Ape neck,” he said. “Cenepa’s name backwards is “Ape Neck. Holy shit! ‘K.

Cenepa’ is Ape fucking Neck backwards.” The name stuck.

Surly Bonds got his name the day after the Challenger blew up. We were in middle school. President Reagan had just told the nation that the astronauts had “slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God.” I remember sitting in the tv room with my dad when Reagan said that. I’d only heard “bonds” as a last name before, so that phrase stuck out. Next day on the playground, I called Raymond Bonds “Surly,” and it seemed to take. It got to the point that even Ray’s mom called him Surly. Suddenly

Billy wanted us to call him Ray or Raymond again. It just didn’t sound right.

We had four guys named Rich when I was at the Fitz. Penitentiary Rich,

Crackhead Rich, Jailhouse Rich (basically a younger version of Penitentiary Rich), and

Westside Rich. Billy told us we could call them by their last names, but we couldn’t remember any of them, so they were all just Rich when Billy was around.

Coney got his name because he had a cone head. Chickenwing had a gimp arm.

Some of the guys knew Friday from County Jail. He had a job and a family, so the judge told him he could serve his 60 days on weekends, checking in on Friday nights after chow and going home Sunday evenings before chow. It took him almost a full year of weekends to finish off those 60 days.

“Fox” became “Foxy” for me, but only for about a week or so. I was only Linus to the guys I grew up with, like Ape and Surly, or when Billy was around, until the shakes finally left me. “Foxy” was not to be confused with “a foxy,” a microwaved drink made from coffee, Kool-Aid, sugar, Atomic Fireballs, and Jolly Ranchers. The guys who’d spent too much time in prison loved foxies. They got hooked on that shit in the joint. I tried to acquire the taste but couldn’t. Some of the guys, like Pen Rich, even told me he didn’t think I’d “jail well” because I couldn’t get used to foxies. That pissed me off. And it scared me into thinking about putting a little bit of effort into sobriety.

Besides nicknames, there was one other thing that would get Billy all bent out of shape: referring to your dad as your “old man.”

“If I catch one more ungrateful little prick saying, ‘My old man’ this, or ‘my old man’ that, he might as well pack his shit and get the fuck out of this facility. Show some respect, and call your father your father.”

He was directing this comment at Surly, who turned to me two seconds after Billy slammed the door to his office, saying, “If my old man ever heard me call him ‘father,’ I think he’d beat the shit out of me.”

Dose of Thunder

Some of the guys, mostly the methheads and speedfreaks, used to put insanely hot sauce on everything they ate. One of the three-quarter guys had a job at the West Side

Market, and every few days he’d bring in a new bottle of some extra spicy shit from

Vietnam or India or Oregon. I think it was a way to get their blood pumping how they liked it. They’d sweat and cry and cough and laugh and turn red, but Billy tolerated it.

“At least you knuckleheads can feel something nowadays. Ain’t that a blessing?” he’d say.

Someone Take the Wheel

I didn’t know what my car had hit at first. I thought maybe it was a deer because the Cutlass’s passenger-side front tires lurched suddenly up then down about a second after I hit that puddle in front of Holy Name Elementary School. I slammed on the breaks, put the car in park, and stepped out into the rain. My first realization was that the car was partially on the sidewalk. Then I heard some lady screaming.

“You ran right over him,” she said. “You jumped the curb and ran right over him.”

I looked under my smashed front-passenger headlight and saw a bright crossing guard’s vest behind the tire. My mouth filled with stale vodka puke, and I swallowed it.

“Do you have a cellphone?” the lady said as a group of black schoolkids started converging on the scene. “Someone needs to call 911.”

I have no clue how quickly thoughts travel, but my feet were carrying me down

Broadway, away from Harvard Road, as quickly as they could. I’d remembered seeing an episode of one of the Law & Order series in which a woman ran into a bar after hitting someone while driving drunk: she bought a bottle and immediately started pounding it down before the cops could arrest her. That way, they wouldn’t be able to prove whether she’d had the drinks that made her legally intoxicated before or after the accident.

I was running, making my way to Bum’s Saloon, a beer-and-shot-and-misogyny dump a few blocks down the street—the closest bar I could think of—but the cops caught up with me when I was about fifty yards from the bar. I’m surprised they didn’t throw a fleeing-the-scene onto the list of my charges.

I sat in the backseat of that cop car, listening to the rain pinging the roof. I had only one thought: I don’t think my old man is gonna get me out of this one.

Nobody

Every day, after Chuck’s group, we read from the AA Big Book together as a group for an hour and a half. It’s a corny book, full of outdated language and old-timey stories. Personally, I had no idea how this book was supposed to help people stay sober, but some of the guys who’d been there a while, especially the religious ones, really seemed to like it.

“It’s amazing: the answer to every single question I have in life is in that blue book,” my old lawyer Paddy Quinn told us one day when he was leading the Big Book group.

Sometimes we had a Fitz alumnus lead the group, sometimes we listened to a tape of two old guys named Joe and Charley talk about the book, and sometimes we just read together as a group. That was always a hoot. Half the guys in there were basically illiterate. Because I’d graduated from high school—and a Catholic high school, at that—

Billy told me that he wanted me to start tutoring in the Fitz’s GED program after a month or two. I guess I was good at helping some of the other guys pronounce some of the big words in that book.

About my tenth day at the Fitz, we were sitting around jawing after Chuck’s group, waiting for Big Book group to start, when Billy walked onto the chow hall’s stage smoking a cigarette. None of us had ever seen anyone smoking inside the Fitz except for when they were in Billy’s office.

“Men, we’re having a shakedown. Me and the house fathers are gonna go through all your shit, every last item, and confiscate any contraband items we find. What

we’re really looking for is a black marker, like the kind that did this,” he held up a copy of the Big Book with thick, black lines covering up most of the words. It looked like a classified government document or a letter from a hostage. “So, if by the end of the day you don’t have any more fuck mags or candy or cellphones left in your lockers after the search, you’ve got the asshole who did this shit to this book to thank for it.

“Men, this book saves lives. I assume that the person who did this to one of my beloved Big Books just thought he was having a few shits, but I’m deeply offended that someone would turn a book that has saved millions of lives into something he calls The

Devil’s Big Book. It makes me sick to think that people would choose, actually choose, to live in the problem rather than the solution.”

Billy dropped the book into the big yellow trashcan next to his office door. “And when we find out whose marker did this, he’s out on his ass.”

That night, I had fire watch with Coney. When Coney went to take a dump around three a.m., I fished The Devil’s Big Book out of the trashcan and took a look at it.

Billy and the house fathers found a lot of contraband when they searched the

Center, but they never found a marker. Three guys got kicked out for having drugs, but no one knew who redacted the book. Even though I could never get him to cop to it, I had my money on Westside Rich. He had gone to Oberlin College, had a degree in art or literature or something, and listened to Bjork. It was him, alright. Who else could’ve come up with the idea of getting rid of every mention of alcohol in the Big Book and turning it into a porno?

I only had a few minutes to look at it, but I thought what West did with “Bill’s

Story” was masterful. He had turned the AA co-founder’s life story into a manic sex narrative. He’d reduced all of pages five and six to something like this:

I began to eat my mother-in-law and became ill Then I had to come and

my cock rose I was writhing again I was hard for my wife’s slender

poison I burst I suddenly came

I thought there was something very poetic about that.

I Don’t Know

My mom could drink like a Polack, two-fisted with a Camel Light dangling from her bottom lip, every Friday and Saturday night. She was no stranger to Slivovitz. On

Saturday mornings, it was sometimes a little tough for her to make it to her seven a.m. shift as a taxi dispatcher, but she never had any trouble digging me out of bed and getting me dressed and ready for the ten a.m. Polish mass at St. Stan’s on Sunday mornings.

My old man was the same way. He drank to get drunk every single night until he finally got sober when I was in junior high, but he was always able to make it down to the

Stadium every morning to oversee the men on the grounds crew.

I’d think about that when I had trouble making it to my four p.m. delivery job.

“Something must by seriously wrong with me,” I’d say.

Darlin’ One

I was fourteen years old when my old man got me my first after-school job with the Cleveland Stadium Corporation. I worked for either a stadium (Cleveland Stadium,

Jacobs Field), the Browns, or the Indians for the next twenty years, on and off. For that first job, I overheard him talking on the phone to one of the vice-presidents of the company.

“Can’t you put him in the luxury suites or the parking lot? He’s too candy for the grounds crew.”

Shutup

It was the same thing every fucking morning: Coney would walk into the chow hall at the Fitz and shout, “What day is it today?” Jailhouse Rich would shout back, “The best day there is: today!” Coney would reply, “And what makes today so great?” Then both would say, in unison, “‘Cause I ain’t dope-sick, strung out, or hung over!” Then came the high-fives.

Every fucking morning.

Don’t Ask Why

When my mom died, it was the quickest thing in the world. One Saturday afternoon, she left the taxi depot early and came home, saying she felt weak and sweaty.

We didn’t go to Mass on Sunday morning. She just stayed in bed all day. When she passed out in the kitchen trying to get a drink of water Monday morning, my old man took her down to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

Leukemia, the doctors told us. Three days later, she was dead. Then it was just me and my old man for a couple of years, until he met Sammy’s mom down at the Hi

Life.

Customer

The day after Ape arrived at the Fitz, I saw Sammy checking in. I’d known

Sammy since we were kids. And even back then, everyone knew Sammy was queer.

The blonde highlights and skinny jeans he was rocking when he checked in to the Fitz pretty much confirmed that nothing had changed.

I hung around with Sammy out of necessity when our parents dated, and as an adult I saw him around the neighborhood bars every so often, but we weren’t exactly friends. In our neighborhood, you got a reputation based on the people you drank with, and Sammy didn’t exactly have the rep I was shooting for. I didn’t drink with Sammy, but I saw him around.

Back when his mom and my dad would be out closing the bars, Sammy and I would stay at his mom’s house on our own, making up dirty alternate plotlines to the

Brady Bunch with the sound turned down, or writing even dirtier lyrics to Motley Crue songs. His version of “Home Sweet Home” could make a goddam Navy SEAL blush.

That boy had an imagination and vocabulary no ten-year-old boy has a right to possess.

These days, Sammy was smoking too much ice and borrowing too much money from the neighborhood girls to support his habit, which pissed off some of the guys.

None of them said boo about it to Sammy’s face, though, because he was not afraid to throw down, and none of the guys I knew wanted word spread around that he’d had his ass handed to him by a faggot.

Billy noticed me sitting at a table in the chow hall doing nothing, so he told me to help Sammy get settled into the detox room.

“Been a while, Linus,” Sammy said. “You still dating that fat chick?”

“No. Haven’t seen her in a few years.”

“That long? How long’ve you been here?”

“About a week.”

“Anyone else we know here?”

“Ape came in a few days ago. Surly’s been here three months, doing alright, about to go three-quarter. Don’t call him Surly, though. Call him ‘Ray.’ And call Ape

‘Karl’.”

“Gotcha. Hey Linus, are there a bunch of closet cases in here that I’m gonna have to worry about? I ain’t up for fighting much.”

“Just sit with me and Ape till you feel better, ok?”

“Ok. I’m gonna try to sleep. It’s been days.”

Favorite Thing

A few days after walking Jonelle home for the first time, a short little black girl with cornrows and big, round glasses grabbed my arm while I was talking to Ape and the guys after school by my locker. It took me a second to process that it was Emma,

Jonelle’s sidekick.

“Come with me,” she said. She walked fast despite stubby legs. It was a struggle to keep up with her. She ended up dragging me outside.

“The sisters can’t get enough of you this week, Linus!” Ape said.

“Shut up, idiot,” Emma shouted over her shoulder.

She walked me over to a car in the parking lot where a group of black girls and white girls was standing. My buddies, of course, followed.

“Alright, Sheila, tell her what you heard,” Emma announced as we were approaching.

“Jonelle,” said Sheila, a white girl whose love of rap, dancing, and casual sex earned her the nickname Sheila Eazy E., “I’ve got something to tell you: Linus has been telling all of his buddies that you two had a real fuckfest at your place on Monday after school.”

Jonelle looked at me. My friends were losing their shit with laughter and howling in disbelief.

“Is that true, Linus?” Jonelle asked. A fleck of spittle flew from her mouth and she wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

“No, I never said that. I might have made some jokes about walking you home, but I didn’t tell anyone anything.”

Sheila said, “You didn’t tell anyone that you fucked her, that you sixty-nined, that she swallowed your load?”

“Jonelle, listen,” I said. “I can explain.” Ape pounded my back with an open fist.

One of the guys imitated a corny porno-music guitar and hi-hat.

“Explain what, Linus?” She paused. She had tears in her eyes already and her lower lip was starting to tremble.

“Just let me explain,” I said. I walked over and reached for her hands, but she batted them away.

“What do you want to explain, Linus?” she said. Then she looked up at me and said, loud enough so everyone could hear, “That you don’t know how to keep a fucking secret?”

The guys quieted down. I saw Emma’s jaw drop.

“Oh my god, Jonelle—is this true?” Sheila asked.

“Yeah. We got it on. So what?” She shoved my shoulders. “But I didn’t give him permission to tell all his idiot friends!”

“Jonelle,” I said.

“Jonelle,” Emma said.

“Ooh, girl, you’re a freak. I knew we’d get along,” Sheila Eazy E. said.

Jonelle reached out and smacked me across the face. I don’t think a hydrogen bomb could have cleared the parking lot faster than that smack. No one wanted to be a third wheel in this lovers’ quarrel.

“I’m sorry, Jonelle,” I said when everyone was gone. I sat down on one of the cement parking blocks. “I’m really, really sorry.”

“I know you’re sorry, Linus. You’re a sorry sack of shit.”

I rubbed my cheek. “Yeah. I am.”

“What would have happened if I’d told the truth,” she asked. “What do you suppose would have happened if I’d have told everyone here that you couldn’t even get it up?”

I just shook my head and looked at the ground.

“Look at me, Linus,” Jonelle said. She stuck her pointer finger under my chin and brought my eyes up to meet hers. I bit my lips.

“You owe me one,” she said. “Walk me home. Asshole.”

Jonelle left her backpack on the ground and starting walking toward the St. Stan’s parking lot. I sat there for a minute and watched her before grabbing her bag and catching up with her as she turned left from Baxter onto E. 65th Street.

“What did you have for lunch?” I asked when I came up behind her.

“The special. Why?”

“Because those soyburgers they feed us are shit,” I said. “Let’s stop at Red

Chimney and get some real food. I’ll buy.”

At the corner of E. 65th and Fleet was what had to be one of the world’s oldest restaurants. Rumor had it when Moses Cleaveland sailed down the Cuyahoga River to settle the Western Reserve, the Native Americans took him to the Red Chimney. A wood-paneled, upper-porched monstrosity with an overhanging, wood-shingled roof, the

Chimney served up the nasty European food that folks like my Bohemian mom and my

Polish dad liked to eat after an all-nighter. The Chimney opened at 5:30 am, which made

it a perfect spot for the insomniacs, shift workers, and immigrants that filled its cozy booths.

A quarter to four on a Thursday afternoon, though, saw the place mostly empty.

The Greek owner took a skeptical look at us and tried steering us toward a booth in the back until I told him we’d rather sit at the counter.

“What’s good here?” Jonelle asked, scanning the menu.

“My old man likes the stuffed cabbage and pierogies,” I said. “And the city chicken. I usually get breakfast here.”

“I can do breakfast,” she said.

We ate scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage links, and hash browns. It was a feast. I think we used half a squeeze-bottle of ketchup and a full bottle of Frank’s Red Hot.

While we were eating, some old bag pointed in our direction and started excitedly talking to her husband in the language of the old country.

“What’s up with her?” I said.

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s rude, is what I think.”

“Is that Polish?”

“No. My mom used to take me to the Polish Mass. That’s Czech. That’s what my mom’s folks spoke.”

“It’s an ugly language,” Jonelle said, taking another bite of her eggs.

“She’s an ugly old lady. Watch this,” I said and planted a peck on Jonelle’s lips.

She started giggling and the old bag started whispering to her husband.

“At least we quieted her down,” I said. Jonelle was laughing so hard I thought hash browns would start coming out of her nose. The Greek owner diffused the situation by running over and refilling the Czech couple’s coffee.

“Don’t do that again,” Jonelle said. “I’m serious.” I leaned in to kiss her again but she stuck the palm of her hand against my forehead. When I pulled away, I could see that she wasn’t smiling anymore. “I’m serious, Linus,” she said.

“Ok.”

On the walk home, I turned to Jonelle and said, “I bet you catch people staring at you all the time.”

“Why, because I’m a black girl in this white neighborhood?”

“No, because you’re gorgeous,” I said. “I think Miss Prague 1902 back there wanted to bump donuts with you.”

Jonelle fake-punched me on the shoulder. She was smiling again.

“Why did you lie for me back there?” I said.

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” she said. “Maybe it’s because I believe in second chances.”

She unlocked the door to her house and let me in. We sat in her parents’ kitchen and drank glasses of stale Pepsi from a two-liter bottle.

“I know what your problem is, Linus,” she said after a lull in the conversation.

“What’s that?” I said. I wanted to know.

“You don’t pay any attention to things. You’re always off somewhere else.”

“Maybe. What do you mean?”

“What color dress was I wearing last Friday at the dance?”

“I’m colorblind. But I remember what it looked like.”

“Describe it then. Without color.”

“Ok. Let’s see. It didn’t have arms. And it came a little bit above your knee.

And there was a little sort of frilly thing up top.”

“That’s not bad,” she said. “And what was my hair like?”

“It was down. And it was in little braids.”

“Twists,” she said. “They’re called twists. Braids are something different.”

“Ok, twists. But that’s not too bad, is it?”

“What did my bedroom look like?” she asked.

I had no idea. Not a clue. I remembered a bed, obviously, and a lamp on some sort of nightstand. A dresser that had a cigar box with a condom in it. Other than that, though, I was blank.

“I won’t ask you what color the wallpaper was, but do you remember what it looked like? Did it have carpet? Were there any posters on the wall? Did I have lots of pillows on my bed?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“That’s my point,” she said. “You figured you’d already won me, and you were already on to the next thing, like getting drunk. You weren’t in the moment.”

“In the moment?” I asked.

“Last year, I read this novel about Buddha for school.”

“I didn’t know people read books at the public schools.” I poured some more pop for both of us.

“Some of us did. And this book was amazing. So I got all into Buddhism last year. I learned about mindfulness. Being in the moment.”

“Teach me,” I said.

She told me what she knew about mindfulness, about being present in one’s own body, about awareness of one’s own surroundings, and even one’s own breath. She brought out a meditation tape and she tried teaching me to meditate right there on the floor of her parents’ living room, but I kept cracking up at the bells and finger-cymbals. I couldn’t concentrate. I was starting to get into the groove once, but all that pop made me want to piss. When I came back, she tried guided imagery with me.

“Imagine you’re in your favorite place.”

“Ok.”

“What does it look like? Describe it in exact detail.”

“It looks exactly like your bedroom.”

She sighed and told me to open my eyes. She took my hand and led me to her bedroom.

“I told you I believe in second chances,” she said. She opened the door. “Be here, in the moment, in my bedroom with me. What do you see?”

“I can see you like Bobby Brown,” I said, pointing to a poster. “And Salt-N-

Pepa.”

“What else?”

“No carpet for you. Hardwood floors.”

“What else?” She was laughing. She sat on the bed and unbuttoned her white

Catholic schoolgirl blouse. I told her I could see her utilitarian beige bra. When she kicked off her shoes, I told her I could see her thighs as her checkered skirt rose. “That’s good,” She said. “Tell me everything you see.”

Out loud, I made a catalogue of everything I saw, from the way her bra unhooked to the soft spot between her breasts that was lighter than the rest of her skin, almost as light as the palms of her hands. I documented the freckle to the left of her belly button. I noted the triangle of soft, woolen spirals of hair just above her box.

“Do you trim this?” I asked. I kissed it and rested my cheek against it.

She started to giggle. “No, why?”

“Because it’s so short.”

“How long is it supposed to be?” she said, laughing harder now.

“I don’t know. This is the first one I’ve ever seen one in person. But it’s perfect.”

She ran her fingers through my hair when I told her how soft it felt against my cheek. I took the risk of freaking her out: I told her that I wanted to use her muff as a pillow and fall asleep between her thighs.

“Someday you will,” was all she said. Then she pulled my face up to kiss me, and she told me to tell her everything I was seeing and everything I was feeling and to be in my body and to focus on my breathing. She had no trouble getting that unrolled condom back on me. I lost my virginity to Jonelle in a frenzy of visual and tactile descriptions.

By the time she huffed out her last, “And what do you feel now?” my brain had already been rewired and there was no one, absolutely no one, for me except Jonelle.

Shiftless When Idle

The leathery blonde woman I met when I first stumbled up to the Fitz was named

Florence. She was a counselor who typically only dealt with guys after they were ready to start looking for a job and going three-quarter.

She was in her late sixties, with yellowish white hair that probably used to be a more legitimate blonde, spectacles on a thin chain around her neck.

They only took us to men’s meetings outside the Fitz, but there were contraband fuck mags floating around among the guys. The problem was, there was absolutely no privacy in the place. It was nearly impossible to jerk off. We only had gang showers, and there were no doors on the toilet stalls. Billy didn’t want anyone to have a chance to shoot up or pop pills or sneak any drinks at the place. I made a habit of quickly beating off in the locked men’s room at Wendy’s while Ape and I were getting Frosteys.

The tension got so bad that guys would even talk about nailing Florence.

“I’d definitely do her,” Jailhouse said.

“Me too,” Friday agreed.

“I bet she ain’t been laid in ages, man,” chimed in Coney. “She’d be grateful.”

West was about to lose his shit. “And when was the last time you got some action, Coney?”

Coney thought about it for a few seconds. “I don’t know. Does doing a shot of gin out of some guy’s bellybutton for a drink count as action? If so, I got action a little over thirty days ago.”

Bastards of Young

In grade school, Sammy had a dirty nickname for every member of the Indians starting lineup. Brett Butler was Wet Butthole, Joe Carter was Blow Farter, Mel Hall was

Smell Balls. In fifth or sixth grade, when rumor started going around the playground that the Tribe had signed Tony Bernazard, one of the kids decided to challenge Sammy.

“Let’s see what you can do with that name,” the kid said.

Sammy thought for about two seconds. “Tony . . . Tony . . . Tony’s Boner’s

Hard.”

He was that quick.

Willpower

Surly left the Fitz in the middle of the night. The guys on fire watch must have been busy playing cards or watching tv.

The day before, he kept telling everyone how grateful he was to be clean and sober. It was almost like he was trying to convince himself.

“Don’t got to wait on the dope man today,” he said. “Liquor store ain’t taking all my money today.”

Surly didn’t talk with people. He talked at people. He was a gifted talker, but he didn’t know how to have a conversation. It was like he was off in his head all the time.

There was this recovering-alcoholic neurologist who used to come in and do group sometimes.

“We’ve got a three-pound universe up here,” he’d tell us, pointing to his head.

“Everything we experience is filtered through our brains. It’s no wonder we have a hard time empathizing and relating to others. We need to figure a way to get out of our own heads.”

He recommended helping others as a way to stop this innate human selfishness.

I never saw Surly helping people very often. He was nice to the new guy, but he didn’t exactly go out of his way to make him feel welcome.

After the neurologist’s group, Billy said, “Maybe Raymond needed to go back out there for a while and get beat up a little more. It might make him a little more willing to listen to other people’s suggestions.”

“Don’t you think that’s a bit harsh?” I asked him. “If you let me have my cellphone back for a couple minutes, I can call him and see if he’ll come back.”

Billy shrugged his shoulders and said, “Who are we to stand in the way of his

God-given bottom?”

Answering Machine

When I worked the loges at the Indians games, I’d sometimes sneak Jonelle into the games with me. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, she’d sit barefoot, her strong brown legs in cut-off jeans shorts slung over the seat in front of her in the near-empty

Stadium, just close enough to the end of my ramp for me to talk to her, but not near enough for me to get busted. I introduced her to all of the catering girls, and they’d sneak us out soft pretzels and nacho plates whenever they could.

There was this one Rain Man in his thirties or forties who came to every single

Indians game. I think his mom dropped him off and picked him up. Andy was there even before the early loge shift arrived. His hair was improbably greasy. He wore the same flimsy, ballgame-giveaway Tribe jacket every day, and I don’t think he quite understood the concept of bathing.

He’d say the strangest things to me whenever I worked the ramp nearest his seat.

“It’s ok to cry, isn’t it, Linus?”

“As long as you’ve got a reason, sure it is, Andy.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Normally, you couldn’t shut Andy up.

“It’s the middle of the second, so the first song they’ll play will be ‘Invisible

Touch’ by Genesis: Phil Collins, Michael Rutherford, and Tony Banks.”

“And what comes after that, Andy?”

“‘Time Won’t Let Me’ by the Outsiders. Then ‘Long Cool Woman’ by the

Hollies. Then the announcer will talk about purchasing Tribe season tickets.”

But one time, one of the handful of black loge attendants, an engineering major and basketball player from Case Western Reserve University, came and sat down at the end of my ramp while he was on his break. The Oakland A’s were in town. I tried introducing Clayton to Andy, but Andy just clammed up and wouldn’t even acknowledge his presence. Clayton shook it off, and we continued chatting about which of the

Henderson twins was going to give us a bigger headache during this particular homestand.

When Clayton left, I asked Andy why he got so shy all of a sudden.

“Those boogies,” he said, shaking his head left to right, “they’re tough. My mom says if you put them and the Italians together, it’s like fireworks.” He put his hands under his thighs and started rocking.

I felt it was my duty to cure Andy of his innocent racism. The next time Jonelle snuck into a Friday night game with me, I made sure to get myself assigned to Andy’s ramp. When I told Andy that Jonelle was my girlfriend and tried to introduce them, he started crying and hitting his head on the hard plastic back of the chair in front of him. I was afraid he was going to start bleeding, so I ran up the ramp to try to call security, and

Jonelle ran down and tried to throw her blanket over the back of the chair in front of

Andy, but Andy screeched “Go away, boogie” and batted her away with the back of his hand. She ran and flagged down an usher with a walkie-talkie, and security was there with a paramedic in a minute.

When I let slip that I requested Andy’s ramp that day, Jonelle didn’t speak to me, or even look at me, for over a week. That entire week, I felt like I was falling. Literally falling. My eyes knew I wasn’t, but the rest of my body felt as though it were falling

backwards, like that feeling you get when you’ve leaned too far back in a chair and it’s about to tip over. It was like that 24-7. If I closed my eyes for even a second or two, the experience of plummeting backwards would become so intense that a reflex would pop open my eyes in a panic. When the Indians were out of town the following Friday, she let me take her to a movie, and I finally felt grounded again. I could breathe.

Can’t Hardly Wait

AA, NA, and those groups all have the same Twelve Steps. Billy didn’t want any guy in the Fitz going past Step Three while he was still living in the center’s main halfway house.

“Step Four is a rough process.” Billy told us in group. “It involves looking back at your whole life, looking at the havoc you’ve created for those around you and the misery you’ve brought upon yourself, and writing it all down. I’d rather not have men carrying shit like that around with them in my house. They can do that when they go three-quarter.”

After group, West said, “And Step Five makes you tell someone else all that shit you wrote down. I’m not so sure about that one.”

Ape said, “Let me guess: you’re a Protestant.”

“Presbyterian,” West told him.

“Figured,” Ape said. “Us Catholics, we’re used to confession. It’s one of our sacraments. We start doing it in second grade.” He turned to me. “Right, Linus?”

“That’s true,” I said. “But some of us haven’t received that particular sacrament in a couple of decades.”

The Last

I stopped going to confession when I was a freshman at Central Catholic. One of the theology teachers took us over to St. Stan’s, where a bunch of priests were ready to hear our sins and forgive us.

I made the mistake of telling some old fart priest that I’d been watching porno and jerking off to it.

“Son, the gift of sexuality is something to be shared only between couples, within the bonds of holy matrimony, for the act of procreation,” the old priest said. “Why would you want to cheapen this beautiful act through such deviant behavior?”

I didn’t know how to answer that.

“The women in those films are people’s loved ones. They are daughters, sisters, cousins. Some of them are even mothers. How would you feel if that was your sister or your mother in one of those pornographic films?”

“I don’t have a sister, and my mother died when I was little,” I told him.

“I’m very sorry to hear that. Tell me, son: How do you think your mother feels, watching over her son from heaven and seeing him abusing his procreative gifts?”

I started to cry. He gave me some Kleenex. He told me that God would forgive me if I said ten Hail Marys, three Our Fathers, and a Glory Be.

I never said those prayers, and I never went to confession again. I walked right out of that confessional and walked straight down the street to South High, where I knew

I could find a couple of my old classmates from St. Stan’s who were now public-school burnouts. They were always pretty good about sharing their weed and their Wild Irish

Rose with me.

I could only imagine what would have happened if I’d told that priest everything.

I’m in Trouble

Westside Rich didn’t quite belong at the Fitz. He was a junkie alright, a hopeless drug addict like the rest of us, but he was just out of place. He belonged at a fancy rehab facility, like Glenbeigh or Laurelwood or Hazelden, and he knew it. And I could tell that it was starting to bug him.

This new guy was talking about how he was so dope-sick the week before that he was shooting out diarrhea and puke simultaneously.

“It got to the point where all I could do was lay on my side in the bathtub and just let it come out both ends,” he said.

West’s eyebrows peaked. “You mean to tell me you just wallowed in your own shit and vomit?”

“I was dope-sick, man. What did you expect me to do?”

“You think I’ve never been dope-sick?” West countered. “I’m in the Fitz, aren’t

I? Of course I’ve been dope-sick. But at least I had the common sense to sit on the toilet and grab a trash can to puke into.”

“I didn’t have no trash can,” the new guy said in his defense.

“Yeah, well unless your bathtub has a goddamn garbage disposal, you were gonna have to clean up both shit and puke later on. If you’d sat on the fucking toilet, at least you’d only have to clean up one of those things.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” the new guy said and hung his head.

Then West did something that’s unforgiveable at the Fitz: he looked down at a new guy without offering a hand to pick him back up.

He said, “Didn’t you want to get at least one of them into the toilet?”

I Won’t

I was twelve or thirteen when I molested my nine-year-old cousin.

My old man took me to visit his brother in Pennsylvania. My dad had gotten clean about nine months before, when the folks at the Stadium said he’d be immediately shit-canned if he ever showed up to work with even one beer on his breath. In his early sobriety, he’d been reconnecting with his family. He told me he had an amends to make with his brother, Paul. During my Christmas break from school, we drove the snowy

Ohio Turnpike to Pennsylvania.

Uncle Paul lived near Harrisburg, in a cramped, brick townhouse on a dead-end street. He and his wife, Aunt Mavis, came out into the snow to greet us when they saw our car pull up alongside the curb. Paul looked a lot like my dad, only older and fatter.

He had darker hair than my dad and glasses. Mavis reminded me of Mrs. Roper from

Three’s Company: her hair wasn’t as curly, but I never saw her wearing anything but ratty caftans.

When we got inside, they introduced us to their daughter, Chelsea.

“You didn’t know you had a cousin, did you?” my uncle said to her.

“Hi,” she said. She offered me an exaggerated wave and bounced on her feet.

We had meatloaf that first night. Uncle Peter asked my dad if it was alright with him if he had a beer and Mavis had a glass of wine with dinner.

“I insist,” my dad said. “Just because I wasn’t very talented when it came to drinking doesn’t mean other people can’t enjoy themselves.”

My dad and his brother argued about sports while Aunt Mavis picked on me about my general ignorance.

“What do you mean you don’t know about the food pyramid?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know about it.”

“Peter, you have got to get this boy to eat more veggies.”

“You’re right about that, Mavis. Eat those green beans, Linus.”

“Which ones are the green beans?”

“He’s colorblind, too. Sorry.” He turned to me. “Just eat everything on your plate, ok?”

My uncle’s wife was at work the next afternoon when my dad and his brother decided they wanted to see a movie. Chelsea and I wanted to see ¡Three Amigos!, but they had other plans.

“Linus is old enough to watch Platoon,” my old man said. “He can cover

Chelsea’s eyes if there’s anything too gruesome.”

“Mavis would bore me new cornhole,” Uncle Paul said.

“How about if Linus babysits?”

Uncle Paul told me to put Annie into the VCR as soon as they left. “That movie seems like it must be at least eight hours long, but that might just be me. If Annie is done before we get home, put Mary Poppins in there. We’ll definitely be home before that one’s over.”

The events aren’t entirely clear to me. I’m not exactly sure how it all went down.

These are the things I know for sure: Chelsea was sitting Indian style on the floor watching Annie. I was thumbing through a pile of Aunt Mavis’ Cosmopolitan magazines, reading the sex tips and looking at the cleavage. I remember vividly the issue

with Paulina Porizkova on the cover: her left tit was bulging up over the back of one of her crossed hands. I had an instant, raging hard-on the second I saw it. I remember keeping the Paulina issue face-up on the table while I read about how to “drive your man wild” in a different issue. “Run the tips of your fingers along his frenulum,” it said, “the little band of skin on the bottom of his glans.” I reached my hand into my pants. I remember Chelsea standing up to do one of the dances. I’m not sure if it was my idea for her to sit on my lap or hers, but I remember rubbing against her through my jeans while we rocked in time to the music. And I wish I could forget how she frowned and winced when I took her hand and stuck it down my jeans. I probably knew it was wrong, too, but it took me seeing her face to realize just how wrong it was.

I picked her up by her armpits and sat her back down on the ground. I turned up the volume on Annie and was somehow able to convince her to go back to singing and dancing along with the movie. I went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. I felt a lump rise in my throat, so I splashed cold water on my neck. I dropped my pants, ran a hand towel under cold water, and put it on my dick until the hard-on went away. I cried. I punched myself on the thighs, wailed on them with my knuckles until black welts began to form. I pulled up my pants, looked in the mirror, pointed at myself and said, “You. You are a fucking monster.”

When I came back out, I went to the fridge and got a can of Coke. I gave it to

Chelsea, along with a couple of cookies from a jar shaped like a gingerbread house.

When she was nice and wired up with sugar, I turned the movie back on and began to dance along with her to “It’s the Hard-Knock Life.” I took her arms and moved her into the kitchen, where we continued dancing. I told her to close her eyes, and I spun her

around with one hand while I grabbed the cookie jar with the other and threw it to the floor.

Chelsea’s eyes popped open. “Uh oh,” I said and ran into the family room to hit pause on the VCR.

“What happened?” she said.

“You spun around so hard that you knocked the cookie jar over.”

“But I didn’t feel it.”

“That’s because you were spinning so hard.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh no.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, I’ll take the blame for this, ok? I’m older than you, so

I’ll just say I dropped it when I was trying to get a cookie, ok?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’ll take the blame for it. But you’ll have to keep everything a secret, ok?

You can’t tell anyone about the singing or the dancing or the Coke or the cookies or anything else that happened here today, ok?”

“Ok.”

“As long as you tell everyone that we just sat here and quietly watched the movie and that nothing else happened, I promise you won’t get into any trouble. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Kiss Me on the Bus

First day of Christmas Break my freshman year, Jonelle and I went downtown to

Public Square. She wanted to buy presents for her parents and for her brother who was in the military.

“You should buy something for your dad,” she said.

“Why?” I said.

“Because he’s your dad.”

“Any idiot can be a dad. It takes intelligence to use a rubber.”

She opened her mouth in fake shock just before sticking her foot out in front of my calf, causing me to miss a half-step.

“You better watch it,” I said.

“Or what?”

I put my arm around her. “That’s what I thought,” she said, and she pecked me on the cheek.

We did a loop around all the floors of the Tower City Mall, then circled back around so she could get what she wanted: a knit tie for her dad, a Chia Tree for her mom, and a book for her brother. She debated about whether he’d prefer something religious, what with his being so far away from home and all, or whether he’d want something manly, what with his being in the military and all. I told her she didn’t want to turn her soldier into a peacenik, so she bought him a biography of the guy who founded the Army

Air Corps.

We decided to take the long way home, so we took the bus down to E. 79th and

Carnegie. Hot Sauce Williams, one of the most famous barbecue and soulfood spots in

town. It was a place I’d always heard about, but was always too afraid to go into. But with Jonelle, I felt like I had an invitation. Come to think of it, I felt better going anywhere with Jonelle by my side. Anywhere at all. The idea that this beautiful, brilliant, hilarious woman was with me was almost unbearable at times, and I loved seeing how others reacted to the sight of us.

As soon as we walked in, I have to admit I felt a little better when I saw that about a quarter of the people in a line stretching almost to the door were nurses from the nearby

Cleveland Clinic.

“Girls, Linus,” Jonelle said, nudging me in the side and motioning toward them with her head. “They must not have been too scared to come in.”

We got ribs, mac and cheese, chicken, and fries. She even got me to try a bite of her Polish Boy, which—even though I was both Polish and a boy—I’d never even heard of before. I told her it was alright, but that I’d let her wolf down the Polish sausage so I could dig into some dark meat. She laughed so hard a piece of corn flew onto the table.

“That’s not even funny,” she said. Then she started laughing again.

I pointed out the motel in back of the Lancer Steakhouse next door. “They rent by the hour,” I said.

“We can probably do it four times, then,” she said. This time I was the one with food flying out of my mouth.

I told her how I’d heard that Mike Tyson’s promoter Don King had once stomped a man to death outside the Lancer Steakhouse for a couple hundred bucks back in the sixties.

“I hear Mike Tyson and Robin Givens own a big mansion out in the eastern suburbs, somewhere,” she said. “I’ll borrow my mom’s car and we can go look for it after I get my license next semester.”

About halfway through the meal, I nudged Jonelle and asked her if she’d noticed that every single one of the white customers except for me had taken their food orders to- go.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” she said. She wiped a drop of the tangy-sweet barbecue sauce from my cheek and said, “Is this the first time you’ve ever been the only white person in a room?”

“I’ve never thought of it. Yeah, probably. Even when I work JazzFest down at the Stadium, there’s cops and other white people working.”

“Does it make you feel weird, being the only white person?”

“Not really. It’s not like anyone’s staring at me or anything.”

“Exactly,” she said. She wiped off her hands with a napkin. “Let me tell you something, Linus: every single day, when I walk through Slavic Village, people stare at me. It’s like I constantly have to defend my right to exist in my own neighborhood. You know that lady who lives in the house with the rusted-out car on blocks in front?”

“Mrs. Adamczak,” I said, taking another bite of chicken.

“Yes, her. You know what she said to me?”

“No.”

“She said, ‘What are you doing around here? Are you lost or something.”

I put down my food. I looked at Jonelle. Her face was matter of fact. I’m sure mine was a mix of sadness and rage. I could feel my chin starting to twitch.

She said, “Every black neighborhood has one or two crazy old white dudes walking around, and there’s always white cops or white junkies or white social workers or white johns cruising around our neighborhoods. You all ain’t exotic to us. We just think, ‘Oh, there goes a cop’ or ‘Oh, there goes a fiend.’ But white folks see us and think, ‘Oh no, here comes a thief’ and ‘Oh no, here comes a murderer.’ It just wears on you, is all.”

We finished our food and got on the bus back to Broadway as dusk approached. I put my arm around Jonelle, and she laid her head on my shoulder. I promised myself that

I would protect this girl. And I promised myself that Ape and I would bust a couple of

Mrs. Adamczak’s windows before week’s end.

The Ledge

I was probably eight years old when one of my old man’s friends first started doing pervy shit to me.

In the first couple years after my mom died, my old man drank. A lot. He drank a lot with Sammy’s mom after they met too, but nothing like those first couple years.

To say he was mourning would be inaccurate. The man was broken.

He went to work, though. Before work, every single day, he filled up a water glass with bourbon. He drank this, filled up one of those Chief Wahoo plastic travel mugs with vodka, and went to work. On the kitchen counter every morning, before I walked to school, were two cans of Pepsi and two snack-sized bags of Doritos. This was my lunch. There would also be three dollars for something to eat after school, usually at

The Chimney. This was our routine. He never forgot about my lunch or my dinner money. Not once.

Whenever there was a break in his work because the Indians or Browns were out of town and there weren’t any concerts or festivals at the Stadium, my old man really went nuts. He’d stay up two or three nights straight, his nose red and runny from what I now realize was a fuck-ton of cocaine. The guy was like a bad country song.

He started hanging out with these guys, these lunatics really, who wore motorcycle jackets and carried switchblades and pistols. On a lot of nights, our house became an after-hours joint. My dad would sometimes take most of the food out of the fridge so he could fit a half-barrel in there. This meant that the parties could go indefinitely.

Before leaving for work, he’d say, “Linus, I want you go to the fridge and pump that keg a couple of times when you get home from school, alright? I don’t want that shit going stale on us.”

I never thought to drink the beer when I was that young. But I did sometimes fill up the slop bucket with beer and dump it out in the backyard over and over again just so the keg would go quicker. If there was less beer around, I knew there would be fewer people around.

It was a typical night: my dad came home from the bars around 3:00 am after a

Browns game and brought a bunch of morons home with him.

“Wake up, Linus. We need someone to fetch beers for us.”

My dad must’ve been out of coke, because he was passed out within an hour.

Most of the people cleared out when they saw that the host was out cold in the La-Z-Boy, but a couple of people, a man and a woman, stuck around. The guy looked like a seventies biker from Central Casting, complete with shaggy hair, a mustache, and a paunch. The lady had wiry hair, a flat chest, and wide hips. I asked them to leave so I could go to bed.

“We should head out. Let this poor little guy get back to sleep. Got anywhere to go?” the lady said.

“We can go back to my place. I’ve got a case of Goebel and a sack of green that’ll knock you on your ass.” His voice sounded like gravel.

“Let me use the ladies room first.”

When that lady went to the bathroom, the guy turned to me. “Hey little guy. You know what it means to get laid?”

I shook my head. He leaned over from the couch and stretched open my pajama bottoms.

“Pube check,” he said. “All clear. Not a feather on this bird.” He snickered.

With his other hand, he flicked the head of my penis like it was a fly and let the elastic slap back against my belly. When he laughed, I could see that his upper teeth were brown and had started to rot.

The lady came back from the bathroom and they left. I locked the doors and threw a blanket over my old man. I went into my bedroom and got under the covers. I took out my GI Joe flashlight and pointed it down my pants to see if the guy had bruised me. There wasn’t a bruise, but it stung.

A few weeks later, it was the same thing: my old man came home late with a bunch of drunks. It’s hard to describe the feeling I got when my dad introduced me to the man who had inspected me for pubic hair and flicked the head of my penis just a few weeks before. It was a sort of generalized, non-specific anxiety and fear mixed with a fast heartbeat and Catholic shame.

“This is my good friend Mark,” my dad slurred. “Call him Uncle Marky.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t look at him, so I looked out the window at another car pulling into the driveway.

“What’s wrong, Linus? Say hi to your Uncle Marky.”

“Hi,” I said, hoping there were some sane people in that car who would take me somewhere else.

“I met this little guy last time I was here. How’s it going, Linus? You named after the Peanuts character?”

“No,” I said. “The second pope.”

“His mom was a real old-school Catholic. A good woman. Want a beer?”

“You know I do.”

That night, nothing happened, probably because my dad did enough blow to kill a bull elephant, but when they came back for an after-hours party again the next night, sleep finally caught up with my old man because he passed out in the middle of telling a story about how one of the guys on his crew once hocked a loogie into George Brett’s coffee in the visiting team’s dugout.

My old man was asleep for two hours before everybody left except for Uncle

Marky. He filled up a mug of beer, gave me a sip, and gave me another pube check.

Then he did something he called a “boner check.”

“That worked,” he said laughing. “Houston, we have liftoff.” Then he did something he called a “taste test.”

“Kid, when you’re older, you’re gonna like this even more.”

After he left that night, I curled up into a ball in my bed. I screamed and punched the mattress. I asked God to forgive me. I asked my mom to help me. I asked God to protect me. I asked my mom to forgive me. I didn’t want to enjoy what Uncle Marky had done, but I had. And I didn’t want him to ever do it again, but I knew I wanted it done again. I cried myself hoarse, but my old man slept right through it.

This kind of stuff went on for about three years. I eventually got used to it, and then I actually started looking forward to it. I mean, it felt good. I couldn’t help but feel awful directly afterwards, though.

Sometimes, Uncle Marky would stop by on a Sunday when he knew my dad would be working an Indians day game and take me to a movie or to get ice cream down at Daisy’s. Sometimes he’d fool around with me, and sometimes he wouldn’t. One time, he took me to see The Empire Strikes Back, and he had me sneak some beers into the theater for him in my school backpack. I remember thinking that the scene in the white dining room where Darth Vader magically disarmed Han Solo was the coolest thing in the world, way more impressive than the ships flying through space and all the space creatures.

Uncle Marky must have been really drunk that afternoon, because he was asleep for most of the movie. I had to wake him up after the credits were over. On the way home, he popped open one of the leftover, room-temperature beers from my backpack while he was driving, and just as we were exiting that little curvy stretch where Warner

Road connects Broadway to Turney, the motorcycle in front of us stopped at the yellow light. Uncle Marky’s reaction was slow, and his car ended up coming to a screech and bumping right into the back of the motorcycle. If that bike were just a couple feet further ahead, we wouldn’t have hit him. If that bike were a car, it would have been just a fender bender. But the bike lurched forward upon impact, skidding out sideways several feet into the intersection. I remember seeing the helmetless biker crying out for help. He was injured and trapped under the still-roaring bike. The traffic down Broadway stopped, and

I saw people getting out of their cars just as Uncle Marky backed up and spun the car around in a u-turn and headed back towards Turney.

Uncle Marky took some long-ass way home that somehow ended up with us approaching my house from the complete opposite direction. I was still crying when we pulled into the driveway of my house. He told me that the biker would be just fine, that those other people were better equipped to take care of him than we were. He offered me twenty bucks and asked me to keep his secret. I wiped the snot from my nose, took the money, and walked into the house about a half hour before my dad got home. When he asked me why I looked as though I’d been crying, I told him I saw something sad on tv.

“Sometimes I worry about you, Linus,” he said, drawing himself a beer from the keg in the fridge and topping it off with a healthy pour of Jim Beam. “Want hot dogs for dinner again?”

Sammy’s mom came into the picture a couple years later. The kegs in the fridge were gone and the after-hours partying became exclusive to the two of them. Abruptly,

Uncle Marky stopped visiting the house, and I never saw him again. But I thought about that biker every time I took that short stretch of Warner Road between Broadway and

Turney.

I never told my old man anything about what went on between me and Uncle

Marky. I knew he’d blame me for my part in it. And I was certain that he’d kill Uncle

Marky.

I’ll Buy

There was a corner near Broadway and Union, one of the numbered streets, with a

Popeye’s across the street from a KFC and a Church’s. We called it the corner of

Broadway and Chicken. One winter Sunday morning, I was hanging out with this old guy from the neighborhood, Preacher, who got his name from the multiple Jesus tattoos he got in the joint. Preacher and I were desperate to keep the party going. We had a bunch of beer in the fridge, but we wouldn’t be able to drink it all unless we had something to smoke with it.

“You fly, I’ll buy,” he told me through his skinny, yellow teeth.

He gave me sixty bucks to get more rock. So I did the fiend walk, pacing the numbered streets between Broadway and Fleet, 55th to 71st, looking for a dope boy.

Winter. Sunday morning. 5 a.m. No dope boys.

I was approaching the corner of Broadway and Chicken again, about to head back toward Preacher’s place, when a little black kid, couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, came out from between two houses. He reached his thumb and index finger into his mouth and pulled a baggy from between his cheek and gum.

“How much you need?” he asked me.

“How old are you?” I asked him.

“How much you need?” he asked again.

“Look, I don’t want to buy dope from a kid.”

He pulled out four beautiful stones that could easily have passed for forties from a more imposing dealer.

“I’ve got thirties that I’m giving away for twenty ‘cause I want to go to bed.”

I thought about what I was up to when I was twelve. I was a fuckup—drinking a bit, smoking reefer already—but at least I wasn’t slinging dope. I thought about this kid’s future. I pictured him in juvie within a year, graduating to real prison as soon as he got popped as an adult.

Then I thought about those rocks. Those little off-white pearls that meant at least another twelve hours of fuzz and blur. And I thought about the half a case of beer still in the fridge back at Preacher’s place. And I thought about the fact that Sunoco would start selling beer again in a couple of hours. And I knew Preacher would buy if I would fly.

Especially if we had scored a few boulders.

I stood there, in the shadow of Broadway and Chicken, and told this kid, “Give me three.”

Achin’ to Be

I had constructed a time machine. The sole catch was that it only moved forward.

Booze and dope could speed things up, blur me past the days and nights, make everything run together in fast-motion. Sometimes it was like hitting the skip button. Months went by like minutes. I could’ve sworn I paid the electric bill in the past three months. Fuck it, I’ll call tomorrow and pay the stupid fee to have it turned back on.

I had also discovered an invisibility formula. Shitfaced, wasted, I was positive that people couldn’t see what I doing. Or, at the very least, I thought they saw it as fuzzy as I saw it. And if they did somehow see what I was doing in some foggy way, they probably didn’t really care, right? No one at Mary G.’s saw me pull my dick through my zipper and piss on the side of the bar while standing up to order a drink, right? If they did, no one said anything about it.

How else to explain how no one notices two grown men smoking crack in the dugout of the little league diamond at noon on a Monday? And, if someone had seen us, how could someone explain why that person didn’t care enough to do anything about it?

Lay it Down Clown

Because Sammy had stayed at the Fitz before, he started strutting around the place like he owned it as soon as he started feeling a little bit better. I could tell he was ready to scrap again when he put on a pair of Capri pants before group.

“Feeling better now, Sammy?” I said.

“A little bit,” he said. “Starting to get my appetite back. And you know what I want?”

“What?”

“A Vanilla Frosty.”

“Ape and I go over to Wendy’s every night after chow, before the meeting,” I said. “You can walk over there with us if you want. If you’ve got any cash, that is.”

“I’ll go with you guys,” he said. “But you’ll be treating.”

“What’s that?” I laughed.

“You’ll be buying me Frosteys,” he said. He pulled a v-neck sweater over his bare chest and straightened it out. He looked at himself in the mirror. “And if I want a little head, maybe you can help me out with that, too.”

“I’m a week sober, Sammy,” I said. “I might be able to take you.”

“You might. You also might not. Either way, if you don’t start giving me what I want, I’ll tell every man in here about your little dick-sucking escapades. I’m sure they’d just love to hear all about it.”

“They’ll believe me over you.”

“Not when they see the pics.” He was pretending to file his nails with a Bic pen he’d picked up off a footlocker.

“You don’t have any pics.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t have any pictures of you on that fat chick’s leash sucking guys’ dicks in a room with red carpet, red leather booths, and disco lighting after the Fetish Ball a couple years ago.”

“You fucking faggot.”

“Takes one to know one.” He put his fist up to his mouth and gave me the blow- job gesture, sticking his tongue in his cheek and thrusting his hand back and forth.

“They’re in my Dropbox account. I can print them off over at the Fleet library anytime I want.”

Little Mascara

Elyse finally talked me into doing ecstasy while I was hammered and coked up.

She gave it to me with a fifty-milligram Viagra pill.

Ecstasy made everything vivid and sensory. I felt whole and free. Everything tingled.

She was testing my limits that night, trying to bring out my feminine side, seeing how far she could push me. She’d had me go two weeks without jizzing, teasing me the entire time, and now she wanted to see if she could make me come without anything touching my cock.

She was on top, leaning over me, lovingly doing me with the strap-on, the flab of her moist belly rubbing against my cock. She’d put some of her makeup on me at the beginning of the session, and she held our coke mirror up to my face so I could see myself. She pinched and twisted my nipples and offered me words of encouragement.

“I love you, Linus,” she said. “You are so beautiful.”

The E was making me even more oral than usual, so I started sucking on one of the dildos that was on the floor beside me.

“You like sucking that cock, fag-boy?” she cooed.

“Mmhm” I tried to reply. I was like a drunk baby, slobbering all over the thing.

I was getting close. She had me edging, but I wasn’t quite there yet. Eventually, she got tired and pulled out of my ass, got us a couple of beers, and sat me down on a towel on the floor.

“You just might not be ready for a no-touch prostate orgasm right now, but there’s definite potential here,” she said.

“Linus, I know you’re a little fucked up right now. So am I. But I really think this is an amazing opportunity for us to explore your capabilities and open up some new horizons for you sexually.”

She handed me the dildo and told me to alternate between sucking on it and drinking my beer.

“Linus, do you want to suck a real cock?”

I nodded yes. I was floating. I felt beautiful and sexy and part of everything. I was pure androgyny and hormones. I was air.

“Do you know anyone whose dick you can suck?”

I Hate Music

Jonelle and I were dating for two months before I brought her home to meet my old man.

“When am I going to meet this girlfriend of yours?” he said.

I was eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, reading the back of the box for the fiftieth time. I looked up at him and didn’t say a thing.

“I’ve been hearing all about her from your friends’ parents, from the neighbors, from the folks at The Chimney.”

“Then why are you asking? If you know all about her, why on earth would you want me to bring her here.”

“Because I want to be a part of your life, Linus. If she is a part of your life, then she’s a part of my life.” He was very calm. I could tell he’d practiced this talk in his head.

“What about that racist advice you gave me about staying away from black girls?”

“It wasn’t racist. It was practical. Listen, Linus: We both know I’ve made my fair share of mistakes in life. But they were my mistakes. And I had to make them myself. I couldn’t learn from anyone else’s mistakes. And you seem an awful lot like me.” This was definitely rehearsed. He’d probably been talking to his sponsor, Hank, about this.

“So you’re calling Jonelle a mistake?”

“She has a name! Jonelle. Very nice. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a mistake for you to date her. I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll be wrong again. But, regardless, I would like to meet her.”

100

“Are you admitting that you gave me shitty advice?”

“I’m admitting that I’m human. Linus, I’ve been sober for a couple of years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that I’m powerless over other people. If someone is hell- bent on doing something, they’re gonna do it.” Yeah, his sponsor was definitely behind this whole thing.

“If this is an amends, it’s the worst amends in the history of the world.”

I brought Jonelle over for dinner on a Saturday, before Central Catholic’s football game against St. Peter Chanel. Despite the chill, my dad was grilling steaks on the

Weber grill out back.

I brought Jonelle into the house and gave her a tour of the first floor.

“This place is in desperate need of a woman’s touch,” she whispered to me, looking at the sunken middle of the living room couch.

“So is my old man.”

I brought her out the kitchen door to where my dad was grilling. He put down his tongs, wiped his hands on his Browns sweatshirt, and shook Jonelle’s hand.

“You must be Jonelle. Peter Domanski. Pleasure to meet you.”

“Thank you Mr. Domanski.”

“Why don’t the two of you head back inside and watch tv for a few minutes while

I finish up out here.” He picked up the tongs and started flipping the New York strips as they sizzled in the flames. “How do you like your steak, Jonelle?”

“Medium or medium-well is fine.”

“They’ll be done shortly.”

101

We sat in the living room and turned on the tv.

“We have to use the VCR remote, because this tv isn’t cable ready,” I said.

“That doesn’t seem to be a big deal.”

“It is when you want to turn the volume up or down.”

When dinner was ready, we sat at the kitchen table. We’d never had a dining room table, not even when my mom was around. What some would call a dining room was more like a throughway between the kitchen and the family room with a couple of chairs and a rug thrown in for good measure.

“So, Jonelle, how long have you lived in Slavic Village?” my dad asked.

“Just since August,” she said. “I’m a sophomore, but I feel like the new kid again.”

“What parish did you grow up in?”

“I’m not really sure. I think the nearest Catholic church is St. Adalbert’s.”

“Not everyone is Catholic, dad,” I said.

“I sometimes forget that, growing up around here. What denomination were you brought up?”

“Baptist,” Jonelle said as politely as she could manage with a mouthful of steak.

“Ok. Interesting. Who founded the Baptist church? Wesley? Calvin?”

“Dad, can we stop with the inquisition?”

“I don’t mind, Linus,” Jonelle said.

“No, Linus is right. I might be acting a little nosy.”

“It’s not nosy,” Jonelle said.

102

“She’s being polite,” I said. “Maybe we can talk about something other than religion.”

“No problem,” my old man said. He sawed a hunk of fat off his steak and said,

“So, where does your dad work.”

It took even longer for me to meet Jonelle’s parents. Her brother, who was in the

Air Force, was able to come home from Germany over Christmastime, and she figured it would be best if I met her entire immediate and extended family in one go. I didn’t even have the advantage of meeting them on the familiar turf of her parents’ house. Jonelle’s brother drove her mom’s car, and the three of us met everyone else at some AME church hall over near her old neighborhood.

Jonelle’s brother was cool but cautious. When I got in the back seat, he reached his hand back.

“Alexander,” he said.

“Hey Alexander. Linus.”

As we drove down 55th and hung a right at East Tech, Jonelle and Alexander were arguing over what to listen to: Jonelle kept popping her brother’s copy of Public Enemy’s

Fear of a Black Planet out of the car’s tape deck and putting in her cassette-single of

“Hold On” by En Vogue.

“Why don’t we let Linus decide,” Alexander said.

Jonelle looked back at me and smiled. “Alright. Linus, you decide.”

Alexander was eying me through the rearview mirror while Jonelle was turned sideways, staring right at me.

103

“I’ve got to go with P.E.,” I said.

“Done,” Alexander said.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Linus?” Jonelle said. She didn’t look at me for the rest of the ride.

“Language,” Alexander said.

When we got to the hall, Alexander told Jonelle to get the gifts he’d brought from

Germany for their parents from the trunk of the car. While she was outside, he turned sideways in his seat and looked directly at me.

“Wrong call, bro,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I just wanted you to like me.”

“I’m not the important one,” he said. “And neither is the rest of our family. You just be good to Jonelle, alright?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

It was a smart move for Jonelle to introduce me to her family this way. They were all too focused on catching up with one another and welcoming Alexander back home to pay too much attention to me. Jonelle seemed to have forgiven my poor judgment in the car, because she made sure I had food and pop and napkins and dessert. I spent more time talking to Jonelle’s mom than her dad. Her dad just shook my hand, asked me if I was baptized, told me to get a haircut, said he was only joking, and went back to talking to a group of his male relatives. Jonelle’s mom was a sweet woman, an older, plumper version of Jonelle, which I found somehow comforting. She wore this

104

perfume that reminded me of my second grade teacher, Miss Sutton, and she rocked this white church hat at such an impossible angle that I thought it would fall right off at any second.

“You’re over on 63rd?” she said. “My friend Collette and her husband live on

Heisley over by 63rd. The Hoopers.”

“Really? Which house?”

“It’s got a nice big porch out front, sort of a bluish grey, green shutters.”

“Linus is colorblind, Ma,” Jonelle said.

“Oh, you poor dear. It’s straight across from the place with the Polish pastries and sausages.”

“I know the exact house. It used to belong to the Pulaskis.”

“It still does belong to the Pulaskis. The Hoopers are just renters.”

I was surprised to hear that word come from her mouth. Around my white neighbors, the word “renter” was synonymous with “nigger.” Example: “This used to be a safe place to live until these damn renters moved in,” and “I can’t find a spot to park on the street because the stupid renters next door to me have about fifty piece-of-shit cars.”

“I don’t think I’ve met the Hoopers yet,” I said.

105

I must have spent at least an hour a day just pissing.

106

Gimme Noise

Jonelle knew absolutely nothing about white music when I met her. I mean nothing. I always made a point of watching Yo! MTV Raps and at least stopping by BET every now and then, but it was like she had no interest at all in how the other half lived.

Some kids at school turned me on to Public Enemy and NWA. I spent an entire summer overdosing on the Geto Boys. But it was like rock and roll didn’t even exist for her.

“What were you doing all night? I tried calling you,” she said one time at school.

“I was in my basement trying to learn ‘Fool in the Rain’.”

“What’s that?”

“A Led Zeppelin song.”

“Who’s he?”

“He?”

I closed my locker and turned around to look at her.

“Are you really telling me you have no idea who Led Zeppelin is?”

“I’ve seen his name scratched into a couple of desks. But that’s about it.”

I had a lot of explaining to do. She wasn’t all that interested, but she humored me. It felt like I was teaching a one-student master class in the history of rock and roll.

Or, at least the kind of rock and roll that I liked.

The first time I showed her a Van Halen video, she pointed at David Lee Roth.

“He’s gay, right?”

“The jury’s still out. But he’ll be the last to know.”

“He looks gross. Like he has a lot of diseases.”

“He probably does.”

107

When I decided to do her a favor and play her Appetite for Destruction, she heard the opening chords to “Welcome to the Jungle” and said, “Oh, I know this song.”

“You know Guns N’ Roses?”

“Yeah.” She nodded her head. “This is a good song.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. It’s got a good beat. And it’s fierce.”

“No, I mean how do you know Guns N’ Roses?”

“It’s the second song on the Lean on Me soundtrack,” she said.

Every now and then, a pop-culture bridge would present itself to us. Lean on Me was one of them. Disdain for white rappers was another. We couldn’t decide who was more laughable, Vanilla Ice or Third Bass. But by the time Jungle Fever came out in the theaters two years later, Jonelle was already getting ready to dump me. She was fed up with my drinking, and she was heading off to Bowling Green for college in the fall anyway. It was the last movie we saw together.

“Why not just wait until you leave,” I asked her. “`We’ve got a couple more months.”

“For what?” she asked. “For us to screw around in my parents’ house before they get home from work?”

“We do more than that,” I said. “We can get a room at the Lancer Motel again.”

“No thanks. I think I still have fleas from that night.”

“The room wasn’t that bad.”

108

“I wasn’t talking about the room, Linus. You’re nasty. You’ve become a nasty man. You need a haircut. You need to clean your ass. And you need to trim your toenails. And you need to quit getting shitface drunk every night.”

I would see her around the neighborhood every so often when she came home from Bowling Green for school breaks, but it was never the same. She started dating a guy from one of the black fraternities at BG right off the rip, so I never even got to screw around with her again. She got all into Afrocentrism and dressed like an African hippie for a while there. She gained a little weight, but she carried it well. Told me she was taking Swahili classes. Grew her hair into the cutest, roundest little Afro I’d ever seen.

After college, she became a CPA and moved out to the western suburbs. By the time we were in our thirties, she was the only one in the neighborhood who still waved hello to my old man, some crazy old white guy living on a mostly black block, whenever she’d drive over to visit her parents on the weekends.

109

You Lose

West said Coney might be the stupidest person he’d ever met.

West and I were on laundry duty when Coney came huffing down the hall and slammed a book onto the top of the shelf of donated books outside the laundry room.

“Damn, you picked up that book this morning. You knock it out already?” I asked.

“Nah, I’m putting it back,” he said. “It ain’t about what I thought it was about.”

West picked it up. “A Single Shard,” he said. “Looks like a kid’s book. What is it about, then?”

“As far as I can tell,” Coney said, “it’s about some gook orphan with a fucked up name who hangs around with a bunch of other fucked up homeless gooks.”

“And what did you think it was about?” West asked.

“I must’ve read title wrong. I thought it was about a shart. Something like that.

Like a guy who sharted himself.”

West’s brows narrowed. “Sharted?”

“A shit-fart,” I told him.

“When you think you gotta fart, but you shit your pants,” Coney agreed.

“I get it, ok. And you thought this book would be about that? About people sharting themselves?” West asked.

“Well, I figured at least one guy would shart himself,” Coney said. “You know,

A single shart.”

When West started going off on Coney, asking him how on earth a writer could get an entire book out of a single fart gone wrong, asking why anyone would even want

110

to read a book about someone shitting their pants in the first place, Coney just shrugged his shoulders and started scanning the pile of books again.

“There’s gotta be something in here worth reading about,” he said.

111

Hootenanny

“Linus, just let me know if you want to use your safeword,” Elyse said. “Are you ready to open up your sexual horizons and suck a real cock?”

Ecstasy and Elyse had me. I nodded my head yes, so she brought Sammy into the apartment. He looked at me, shook his head a bit, and ran his fingers through his greasy hair.

It was three a.m., so Sammy had probably just smoked a little ice after closing the bars and was looking for something to do when he ran into Elyse out on Fleet.

Sammy took his muddy shoes off. Elyse handed Sammy a beer and told him to follow her. I remember Elyse whispering erotic reassurances to me as Sammy walked over and Elyse unzipped his dirty jeans. His crotch smelled like the men’s locker room at

Central Catholic. She kept up the whispering and put him in my mouth. His dick tasted like a dry clit at first, but after a while it just tasted like my spit. She gently used her hand on me the whole time as I bobbed up and down on him. She was an expert. She said all the right things. I looked into her eyes while I blew Sammy. I was sucking her dick. Elyse orchestrated everything so Sammy and I both finished at the same time.

When it was done, she stopped whispering in my ear, walked over to her purse, got a couple of bills from her wallet, and handed them to Sammy. Sammy pocketed the bills, put his shoes on, took the final sip of his beer, and left without looking at me.

I stared at the carpet. No one was whispering to me anymore, telling me how beautiful I was, what potential I had.

“How much did you give him,” I asked, still staring at the carpet, holding my head with both hands.

112

“Forty bucks. Why?”

“He charged for it?”

She sat down next to me and started petting my hair. “It wasn’t like that. I was just giving him a few bucks to help him out. It was a beautiful thing, it really was.”

“You really think so?”

“Yes, Linus. You should have seen how hot and dirty you looked.” She reached over and gave my cheek a pat. “So, what do you think? Did you enjoy your first time sucking dick?”

“I enjoyed serving you, Mistress Elyse.”

“Linus, I’m breaking character now. Did you like sucking cock?”

My shoulders dropped and I looked her in the eyes, smiled, and said, “For you, yes.”

113

Attitude

Nothing ever fazed Billy Halahan.

When I was two weeks sober, Pen Rich decided he needed to teach me the proper way to lift weights.

“The goal ain’t to get huge,” he said. “Everyone who’s ever been to the joint knows that a little guy who knows how to fight can kick the ass of a musclehead who doesn’t know how to fight any day. And a guy who knows how to make weapons doesn’t need to worry about shit. Watch this.” He took a cigarette butt out of the ashtray on the metal picnic table outside the garage that served as a weight room, peeled away the brown paper, held his Zippo up to the filter until it caught flame, blew out the flame, then pressed the hot filter tight between the Zippo and the top of the picnic table.

“You gotta hold it nice and tight,” he said. “You’ll have to use a mushfake lighter in the joint, though.”

“Mushfake?”

“It’s when make do with what you’ve got. Inside, you can find mushfake lighters, mushfake tattoo guns, mushfake hotplates. Some of the dudes in there even call the guys they’re fucking their mushfake girlfriends.”

After about thirty seconds he walked me back into the Fitz, over to the payphone.

He took the phonebook out from underneath the phone and quickly sliced the cover straight down the middle with the flattened-sharp cigarette filter.

“Holy shit,” I said. “I bet it won’t go very deep, though.”

“You don’t want to kill no one anyway. But people sure freak out at the sight of blood. They don’t know what you cut them with, and they back the fuck off.”

114

“But you can’t even smoke in prison anymore,” I said.

“Not legally, anyway,” he said. “That’s all the more reason you want to get wiry, not big.”

“So it’s not like the movies, with guys just sitting in the weight room all day getting huge?” I asked.

“Those guys are in there. We call them peacocks. They’re just doing it to show off. But it ain’t like any of the female guards is gonna fuck them. Sure, the women CO’s will tease a guy a bit, and some of them out-and-out flirt with guys, but there’s no way they’re gonna fuck an inmate. Not the female CO’s. The peacocks are mostly a bunch of fags. They’re either trying to impress another guy or scare a new guy into being his wife.”

Pen led me through a set of exercises intended to build lean muscle, the kind he said I needed in order to fight in case I ended up going to prison: four sets of lateral raises: arms straight, I sat on the bench and raised a five-pound dumbbell in each hand out from my body until my elbows were the same height as my shoulders, five times; three sets of bench presses: ten-pound dumbbell in each hand, straight up, ten times; two sets of incline bench presses: same as regular bench presses, but with the head of the bench elevated, ten times; and twenty-five military-style pushups to top it all off.

We went at it. Pen was able to do more weight and more reps than I was able to do, but it felt good knowing that I could finish the beginner’s routine he’d suggested, if only barely. By the time we were done, my arms felt like rubber, and we were both soaked through our t-shirts and raving for something to drink.

115

We walked from the garage into the chow hall, and Pen took a pitcher of lemonade off one of the tables and started chugging from it. When what must have been a mammoth ice cube got lodged in his throat, he dropped the pitcher and looked at me panicked, eyes bugging. Then he put both of his hands on his neck.

I started freaking and called some of the other guys over. No one knew what to do. West tried giving him the Heimlich, but Pen must not have wanted anyone grabbing him from behind because he slapped him away.

Ape had the common sense to yell for Billy. Billy strode over quickly, grabbing a coffee pot off the burner on his way. He sat Pen down on a bench, tilted his head back, and started pouring the scalding hot coffee straight down his throat. Pen involuntarily closed his mouth and lurched up, but the hot coffee had done its job and he started coughing violently. Billy patted him on the back.

“A little trick my grandma taught me,” he laughed. “That crazy old bird drank two quarts of white wine a day, and she lived to be eighty-seven. God bless her.”

116

I. O. U.

At a couple weeks sober, I remembered that my mom and I were at St. Stan’s when they dedicated the statue of St. Maximilian Kolbe. She told me his story, about how he gave up his life for that of another prisoner at Auschwitz.

“The Nazis tried starving him to death, but weeks went by, and there he was—in his cell, praying and singing to the Virgin Mary. They finally killed him with an injection. He’s the only saint to die of an overdose. That’s really something, isn’t it?”

She gave me a little prayer card that I kept in my sock drawer for years. It had a black-and-white photograph of a man in wire-rim glasses in a prison camp uniform. At the top, it read, “Maximilian Kolbe, Patron Saint of Prisoners and Drug Addicts.”

117

They’re Blind

Chickenwing only had one fully formed arm. The other one’s forearm just hung sort of sideways off his thin upper arm.

After he’d just checked in to the Fitz, he disappeared somewhere and Billy told me to go look for him. I stopped in the chow hall and asked some of the guys if they’d seen him.

“New guy, short black hair, big nose, Italian-looking,” I said.

“Nope, haven’t seen him,” Ape said.

“That could be, like, ten guys in here,” Friday said.

“Kind of a withered arm,” I continued.

“Oh, yeah, him.” Suddenly everybody knew him.

“Chickenwing. He’s out back having a smoke.”

Waiting in line at chow later that day, Sammy came up to me and said, “I don’t know if ‘withered’ was the best word to use to describe Chickenwing’s arm.”

“And ‘Chickenwing’ is a nice thing to call him?”

“It’s not about nice or not nice. It’s about accuracy. It’s not as though his arm was once healthy and thriving and then it started to rot and wither away. He was probably just born that way.”

“The next time I refer to Chickenwing’s arm,” I said, “I’ll try to use a word like

‘undeveloped’ or ‘gimp.’ Would that make you happier?”

Sammy smiled. “Say ‘gimp’—and, yes, it would make me a lot happier.”

118

Rock ‘n’ Roll Ghost

After two weeks at the Fitz, I realized that I had I always thought I was a worthless piece of shit.

This tall, muscular guy named Brian was leading group, and he told us, “You guys are doing the right thing now. You’re at the Fitz. You’re living in the solution, not the problem. So don’t beat yourselves up about what you did in the past. Try to look in the mirror every morning and say to yourself, ‘I’m worthy.’ Try it. You’ll feel better about yourself.”

I tried it the next morning when I was shaving. I could get myself to say the words, but I didn’t believe them. And I couldn’t look in the mirror.

119

We’ll Inherit the Earth

My mom was crazy about the Catholic Church. She had a hard-on for

Franciscans, with a particular fetish for Polish Franciscans. Living in St. Stanislaus parish was her dream come true. She was a St. John Nepomucene girl growing up, but moving a quarter mile up the street after marrying my dad meant that she could join St. Stan’s. She would take me up there every Sunday while my dad was at the bars on Fleet.

My old man was named Peter, so she named me Linus. Toward the end of my second grade year, in her hospital bed the day before she died, she told me the story behind my name.

“I wanted to start a family tradition. We’ll name all the first-born males in each generation in the order of the popes. First there was Peter. Jesus gave him the job. Then Linus led the Church. And I’m hoping you will name your son Anacletus.”

The Dukes of Hazzard was big at the time, so I asked her, “Can I call him

Cletus?” Cletus was a nice-enough dope, seemed to like the Duke Boys more than he liked his uncle, Boss Hogg, and I thought for sure he’d end up with Daisy some day.

“You can call him whatever you’d like,” my mom said. “And ask him to name his son Clement.”

“Can I call him Clem?” my dad asked.

“Please do,” she said. “And give him a kiss for me and tell him his great- grandma loves him and is watching over him.”

120

Who Knows

Despite all the ironic homoeroticism at the Fitz (“If I don’t get some tail soon, I might have to put a bag over Billy’s head and bend him over the picnic table”), the guys were lukewarm about Sammy. Until he started cracking some of them up.

“How do you know that story about Rod Stewart getting his stomach pumped is true?” Chickenwing asked.

“Because I fucked a guy who fucked Rod Stewart,” Sammy answered.

It got a little quiet and awkward for a few seconds in the room.

Sammy said, “And Rod Stewart also fucked a chick who fucked Elvis. That means I’m only two dicks and one pussy away from fucking The King.”

And from their laughs, Sammy knew which guys were okay and which ones weren’t.

121

Careless

I took pretty much every drug out there when I was a teenager, a lot. But I stayed away from ecstasy.

I was so in love with Jonelle that I even sat, sober, through multiple Thursday night episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210. In one of the episodes, Brandon somehow ended up taking a drug called euphoria, a clever way for the show’s writers to have him take ecstasy without getting shit from the censors. By the end of the episode, Brandon had taken his shirt off and was dancing all sexy and faggoty to shitty techno music.

Growing up in Slavic Village, I’d seen junkies, drunks, crackheads, speeders, and freaks all my life, and none of that shit scared me away from anything. But I definitely didn’t want to end up like Brandon in that episode. He just had no dignity parading around like that.

122

Talent Show

Elyse never met my old man. She never met anyone in my family. And I never met anyone in her family.

We moved in together after two weeks of dating and lived together for almost three years, but neither of us saw anything odd about never being fully integrated into one another’s lives. We shared the most intimate of acts with one another, but we almost never shared a meal together. I knew what her armpits tasted like, but I didn’t know if she preferred ranch or Italian. I could pick her anus out of a lineup, but I couldn’t tell you what her father looked like. She could say the same things about me.

In our D/s relationship, she pushed me into uncomfortable territory until it became comfortable. Then she pushed even further. I think the only time I ever really pushed back was when she wanted us to spend fifty bucks on a glass coffee table from a consignment shop in Lakewood. We used to go into Lakewood so she could check out the fetish shops on Madison Avenue and get new ideas. We rarely ever bought anything, because she was a minimum-wage, part-time worker and a college student while I was holding down two part-time jobs at just above minimum wage. But we could often approximate what the stores had. For instance, we ran a shoelace between two of Elyse’s small binder clips instead of buying an expensive set of nipple clamps, and we poked a hole into the toe of one of my black dress socks and ran the other shoelace through it instead of buying a fur-lined blindfold.

“With the leather shoelaces, they smell like sex,” she said.

123

Elyse only had the one corset, which was vinyl, and she bought a lot of secondhand shoes and outfits from Ebay. Because we had to be so frugal, she was almost fanatical about making sure that her stockings never got torn.

“I’m stepping out of character now, Linus. We’re going to have to stop playing if you don’t stop biting my fishnets, ok?”

But she was ready to spend some money when she saw this old coffee table.

“Let’s buy it, Linus.” She was so excited. It was cute to see her so enthusiastic.

“What for?”

She lowered her voice. “We can use it to do the Glass-Bottom Boat.”

“What the hell is the Glass-Bottom Boat?”

She looked around, got close to my face, and whispered, “It’s where the sub lies down on his back underneath a glass coffee table and watches his Domme take a shit on it.”

I involuntarily gagged a little bit. I told her I was going outside to smoke a cigarette, and she followed me.

“There is absolutely no way I’m having anything to do with any Glass-Bottom

Boat,” I said with a cigarette in my mouth, trying to get my near-empty lighter to spark up. “I have to draw the line at shit. There is nothing sexy about shit.”

Elyse handed me her lighter. “It’s not about the shit, stupid. It’s about the mistress. It’s about one’s mistress being so enchanting and goddess-like that even watching her take a dump is a transcendent experience.”

“Can you please just let me draw the line on this one?” I gave her lighter back to her.

124

She lit a cigarette, walked up to me, put her finger under my chin and said,

“Linus, if I had you pumped full of Viagra with your hands tied behind your back and a plug inside your boy-pussy, I’d bet you’d cave in two seconds when I told you we were going to do the Glass-Bottom Boat.”

“Elyse, you know how you love telling your girlfriends that I’ve never used my safeword?”

“You never have.”

“And that I’m so obedient to you that I never object to anything?”

“Yes, I love that about you.”

“Maybe we should respect that streak, ok?”

The very first night Elyse and I played, she told me I needed to come up with a safeword.

“You know, something you can yell out if things get too intense or if you feel uncomfortable. That way, I’ll stop whatever it is I’m doing. It’s all about consent, after all.”

“Yes, consent,” I said.

“So what’s gonna be your safeword?”

“How about Annie.”

“It shouldn’t be a person’s name. Names can be sexy. It should be something completely non-sexy.”

“Ok. How about ‘cousin.’?

She laughed. “Ok.”

125

I chose that safeword knowing I’d never use it. Nothing anyone could do to me would ever make up for what I’d done to little Chelsea, just as nothing could ever redeem

Uncle Marky for what he’d done to me.

Elyse was right. If she would have brought up the Glass-Bottom Boat in the context of a session, I wouldn’t have used my safeword to get out of it. Outside that store on Madison Avenue, I was drawing a line in theory. In practice, there were no lines. I would have watched. I would have learned to get into it. The Glass-Bottom Boat would come to be a staple of our repertoire. Then she would have upped the ante. And I’m not even sure if God knows what comes after the Glass-Bottom Boat.

126

White and Lazy

Florence pulled me into her office at the Fitz for a counseling session.

“Linus, sometimes we have to put people into three-quarter housing early because we need to free up the beds in the Center. If that’s the case, you might be out at one of the Houses on Union or this new one we have on Spafford. Would you be able to go back to your job?”

“I was fired from my last three jobs.”

“That’s not unusual around here. What did you do?”

“I worked the suites at the Jake, the parking lot at Browns Stadium, and I was a gopher for the Browns organization.”

“Gopher?”

“‘Go fer this, go fer that’.”

“Cute. Do you think you could paint or move furniture?”

“I’m feeling a little bit better. I could probably paint.”

“You think you can paint, but you don’t think you can move furniture?”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t move furniture. I said I could probably paint.”

127

Androgynous

Elyse was an Indians freak, and she had this love/hate thing going for Jim Thome.

“I’m serious, Linus. You need to tell him to switch back to his old stance.” She was watching the Indians game on TV, strapping on an eight-inch dildo with a joint in her mouth. “He’s batting like .100 over the past twelve games.”

“I don’t even know the guy,” I said, finishing a beer and putting binder clips on my nipples. “And I’m not even positive that he’s switched his stance. The only time I’ve ever met him, a bunch of us were in the clubhouse trying to help Omar Vizquel find his passport so he could make the flight to Toronto. Thome seemed nice enough. Helped us all look for it.”

“He needs to tuck in that elbow.” She pulled the final buckle through the harness and looked at me. She held up a small pink bottle. “Are you gonna need more lube than this?”

I shook my head no.

“Turn the sound down, but leave the game on,” she said.

Elyse was behind me. I felt the cold flab of her gut against my ass cheeks. She lifted up her belly to rest it on top of my ass in order to make way for her strap-on. Now

I could feel the warmth and moisture from her underbelly against my ass cheeks. Her hands felt at home just above my hips.

“Are you ready, boy?”

“Yes, Mistress Elyse.”

The lube on the dildo was cold at first, but it was the kind that got hot pretty fast.

By now, I could handle a good-sized dildo like a champ. Once she’d wiggled the head

128

inside of me, she rammed it to the hilt and I felt a hot rush of discomfort followed by fullness. The human body’s first reaction to the appearance of foreign substances and objects is to expel them. If, after some time, it is found that the substances and objects fulfill some vital role—say, providing nutrition or filling a perceived emptiness—the body makes adjustments. Introduce a foreign substance or object long enough, and the body actually starts to miss the thing it that it formerly went so long without, to crave something it wasn’t even born with.

Elyse’s hands snaked around my abdomen and found the binder clips. She tugged on them and twisted them about forty-five degrees, then she leaned onto me with all of her weight and whispered into my ear, “You’re mine now, fag-boy.”

Elyse didn’t need to give me Viagra all the time anymore. We still used it sometimes, when she wanted to tease me into a level of extra-special agony. The torment it could bring to a tease-and-denial session was extraordinary. But I’d been able to get off crack and cut down on my booze intake significantly, which helped with my erectile issues. We still took molly every now and then, but it was for what she called “spiritual purposes,” and which typically involved Elyse leading me through a very thorough public humiliation session in a group setting.

She once wrapped a hundred milligrams of pure molly powder in a Zig-Zag and told me to swallow it with my vodka tonic. An hour and a half later, I was on my knees, the only naked person at a house party in what looked like a nice suburban home in

Brecksville, sucking Elyse’s toes in front of a crowd of cheering people. Everyone there

129

was older than us, men and women in their forties and fifties. At twenty-one, Elyse was definitely the youngest one there. But she was the star of the show.

Another time, she had me snort two half caps of molly before the Fetish Ball, a semi-annual event usually held out at one of the goth/industrial bars on Madison Avenue in Lakewood. She knew I always had to be drugged to be in an atmosphere of such grating music all night. A person can only handle so much Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn

Manson. The first Fetish Ball was fun. She sat at a tall table all night while I kneeled shirtless at her feet, hard as a rock and turned on beyond belief, nibbling mixed drinks off her fingers. She met a lot of people and exchanged ideas with them, so she was really ready when the next Fetish Ball came around. This time, she had me in nothing but a pair of black vinyl boy shorts she’d gotten off eBay and a collar with a leash that she held all night. She’d also had me snort two half caps of molly and lick another two, so I was really rolling. Everything I encountered was prickly-heat sexual energy, and I was a part of it all.

She met some people at the Ball who invited us to some after-hours spot about twenty minutes away. I was blindfolded on the way there, but the visuals I was getting from the molly were intense: fireworks of concentric circles and explosions of thin beams of light. When she took of the blindfold, I was in a basement that had been converted into a retro bar. It looked and felt like I’d been transported to Studio 54.

About twenty people were there, a mix of men and women, but I wasn’t the only one naked this time. Elyse got me all worked up, running her fingers along my body, telling me how beautiful and sexy and uninhibited I was. Even before the first guy stuck his dick in my mouth, I was willing to do anything. Before the night was over, I’d blown

130

four different guys. At one point, I was doing my best to blow them all at the same time.

It was a blur of wrong and free. Elyse was by my side the entire time, holding the leash around my neck and encouraging me.

“You’re a dirty boy, Linus,” she said. “I’ve never seen you more beautiful.”

Later on, at least two of the guys fucked Elyse while she held my leash and made me watch. “You wish that was you fucking me,” she panted. “I know you do. Is your little prick aching yet?” It was an evening of arousal, frustration, humiliation, and degradation. It was hot.

No matter how intense and frequent such sessions became, though, Elyse was true to her word: never once did she bring the D/s aspects of our sex life into our normal, day- to-day relationship. She didn’t like that I smoked rock, but she never gave me any shit about it. Instead, she found a much more effective way to get me to quit: by the power of example, she taught me about the benefits of The Formula.

“I limit myself to a six-pack a day,” she said. “But you can probably do eight or nine, since you’re a guy. I never, ever drink or smoke weed before 7:00 pm. If I feel like drinking or smoking before then, I pop a Xanax or a Klonopin. But I never go over two milligrams in a day. After my second beer, I snort twenty milligrams of Oxy, then smoke half a jay. After the fourth beer, 10 more mils of Oxy. Finish the other half of the J and the last two beers, hit the sack before midnight. No hangover, no withdrawals, no coughing up a lung, not tired all day.”

“You’ve got this thing down to a science,” I said.

131

“I’m carrying a 4.0 in college and working 30 hours a week at the Hallmark Store.

I couldn’t do that shit if I was awake for seventy-two hours straight on a crack binge. But you do what you want, Linus.”

And I did. I did what I wanted, and I got what I got. One night, I’d smoked so much crack that I was hallucinating bad. Full-scale visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations. I thought I was breathing fire, like a dragon, only except for fire, it was fire mixed with liquid fog, and unlike a dragon, I was also breathing it back in. I could feel the cold, hot, burning, wet shit moving into and out of my lungs, and I could see it as well. I heard the whoosh and slosh with each breath. I woke up Elyse to see if she could see it.

“You did too much of that shit again, Linus,” she said.

“You sure you don’t see anything?”

“Look what you did to yourself.”

“Listen, I really need to come down. Can I have a couple benzos?”

“I need them so I can work tomorrow,” she said. “Go into the living room and drink it off. If you want to dance, you gotta pay the piper.” She rolled over and went back to sleep.

I tried getting a beer to go down, but it just wouldn’t. There was too much fire and liquid fog much coming out of my mouth. I tried a shot of vodka from the freezer, but it made me puke fiery liquid fog all over the kitchen counter. I ended up just lying in the fetal position for the next five hours, sweating and shivering, watching the impossible, disturbing breaths moving in and out of my lungs.

When Elyse woke up for work in the morning, she heard me praying.

132

“Maybe you should do something about this, Linus,” she said.

“Do you want to drive me to the hospital?” I said.

“I can’t. I have to go to work. Why don’t you go to St. Stan’s and pray there?

You won’t be sleeping for a while.”

We lived less than two blocks away from the church, but I had her drop me off on her way to work. It was the first time I’d darkened the door of a church in over a decade.

I blessed myself with holy water. The coolness comforted me. I had forgotten just how ornate this church was. Every inch of it was art. I remembered that one of our theology teachers in high school had said he’d never been in a more beautiful church in his life, and he’d been to Europe. “Rome doesn’t have as many statues as St. Stan’s,” he said. I walked right over to the statue of St. Maximilian Kolbe, patron saint of prisoners and drug addicts, and said a simple prayer.

“God, please help me to never smoke crack again.”

I sat in the pew nearest the statue of St. Maximilian. I said a prayer to the Virgin

Mary. After a while, the sun started coming through the stained-glass windows, and I could hear the birds outside. I felt a peace begin to stir within me, and I started feeling sleepy. I smiled. I realized that I’d overdosed but not passed out. I’d lived through it, and I would be forced to remember this thing forever. I pulled down the kneeler, knelt down, and thanked God for sparing my life. I knew that things would be different from now on. The urge to smoke crack had left me.

I made it back home and slept like a baby. That night, I told Elyse to teach me about The Formula.

133

“Like I said, you can probably do just a bit more of any of these things, since you’re a guy, but I promise you that this will change your life.”

She was right. I started waking up earlier, showing up to work on time more often, shaking less. I stopped sweating when I had to walk up a flight of stairs. My head felt clearer. I ate more but I lost weight. I was thirty years old and paying my bills on time for the first time. I’d gone from over thirty drinks a day to less than ten—sometimes only six. I had more energy than I had when I was eighteen. I’d traded rock cocaine and all-day drinking for pills and night drinking. All in all, it was a trade up. And I was ready for much more, in the sexual department. Elyse had pushed my limits before, but now things were getting really interesting.

But this was just an average night. By the time we were done with our session, the Tribe was leading the Twins 3-2 in the bottom of the 8th. Elyse was running the dildo under the kitchen sink when she said, “How long do you think you’ve had submissive tendencies?”

“Forever,” I said. “Since I was a kid.”

“Wow, a true sub. I’m lucky. How did you know?” She stuck the dildo in the drying rack.

“We had this children’s illustrated Bible that my mom used to read to me,” I said,

“and I used to get a chubby from reading about Samson and Delilah.”

“That’s a hot Bible story,” she said. “Let me guess: was it the part about Delilah being able to bring the world’s strongest man to his knees through her feminine charms?”

134

I finished wiping my ass and got up to get us each a beer. “Yeah, I always thought that was hot,” I said. “Plus, there was this one picture that always did it for me:

Samson had a blindfold over his eyes, because he’d been blinded you know, and he was tied spread-eagled between two pillars in front of the temple.”

“I didn’t think you went in much for bondage, Linus,” she said. “Am I going to have to start practicing my ropesmanship?”

“It wasn’t so much the bondage as it was the humiliation,” I said. “I mean,

Samson is standing there, naked except for a loincloth, in front of the whole town, and everyone is pointing at him and laughing, tossing rocks at him and shit, and there’s nothing he can do about it. The guy was absolutely helpless. It doesn’t get much hotter than that.”

“You’re right about that,” she said. “Want to hit this joint?”

135

Love You Till Friday

On Monday, September 10, 2001, I watched the Indians get the shit kicked out of them by the White Sox. It was a thrashing, a 7-1 loss that sounds closer than it actually was. I had the late loge shift at the Jake, so I met up with Ape at Mary G.’s around midnight. I’d loaded my fridge with several cases of MGD in anticipation of the Indians’ upcoming trip to Kansas City. I was getting some much-needed time off from that shit job. Ape had picked up some rock, and we were already planning a seventy-two-hour bender: all of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This was a couple of years before I met Elyse.

A crack high is a fucking trip, a quick turnaround of numbed-out bliss followed by a craving for more, but Ape and I mostly smoked rock so we could drink more. It was that simple. I don’t know about Ape, but I know that I never once smoked crack without drinking before, during, and after. My old buddy preacher used to say to me, “You know you’re a goner once you put down the bottle and just start hitting that stem.” I hadn’t gotten that far, but Preacher ended up doing just that a few years later.

Ape and I were up all night, of course. He was working at a garden center and he’d taken a few days off for this jag. We’d been burning for only about nine hours when

I got a call from my dad, who told me to turn on the tv because something terrible had happened in New York. I got off the phone, switched off the music, and turned the tv on just in time for me and Ape to see the second plane crash into the South Tower of the

World Trade Center live.

Neither of us could believe what we were seeing. We got pretty freaked out.

We’d just blown through a nice-sized boulder, and we were pretty tweaked. I got the

136

bottle of vodka out of the freezer and poured us each a couple of shots to chase with our beers and calm us down. When the tv showed what happened at the Pentagon, and when we saw the burning towers start to collapse, I called my dad back and asked him if this was real. He knew I was high as soon as I said that.

“Linus, there’s a real world out there. People are dying. This is like Pearl Harbor times three. How can you party at a time like this?”

“It’s not like I knew this was going to happen,” I said.

He hung up on me.

Ape and I ended up binge-watching CNN for the next two and half days, until we ran out of crack, booze, and energy. Throughout the entire run, we kept commenting to one another about how this run was the lousiest we’d ever embarked upon. We almost aborted the mission a couple of times, too. But we kept putting rocks into the stem, and we stayed with it till Thursday night, watching sadness and terror unfold on my television in my shitty little apartment on Chambers Street, smoking crack and Marlboros, drinking

MGD.

137

I’ll be You

The summer between eighth grade and freshman year, the English department at our high school gave us a list of Summer Reading books. I could breeze through stuff like The Old Man and the Sea and The Crucible during a single, near-empty Indians game when I worked the luxury suites at Municipal. But the other stuff, the more contemporary, longer novels, sometimes took a full homestand to get through. I read

Michael Crichton’s Congo during a Blue Jays series, in between punching tickets to the loges. I remember trying to read despite the din of the brassy pre-recorded instrumental of “O Canada” piping in over the Stadium’s transistor-radio sound system, when an old man with a thin, grey beard started talking to me after I punched his ticket.

“What’s that you’re reading?” He folded his ticket and put it into his back pocket.

“Something about a gorilla that knows sign language. Summer Reading for

Central Catholic.”

“I remember Summer Reading. I went to Ignatius.”

“I won’t hold that against you,” I said, going back to the book.

The old guy laughed. “I remember high school well. The best days of your life, right?”

I rolled my eyes. “I know,” I said, “I need to enjoy them while I can.”

“That’s bullshit,” he said. “Total fucking bullshit.”

I put the book face down on the ledge of the ramp.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you have a car?”

“No.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

138

“No.”

“Do you have a curfew?”

“Unless there’s extra innings, yes, I do.”

“Then how can these be the best days of your life? Of anyone’s life?”

“Thank you!” I said. Finally, the truth. I told my coworker to cover the ramp while I walked the old guy down to his suite. “When does it get good?”

“For me,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “right now. I retired last year. I’ve got a pension, my wife was kind enough to leave me, and I’ve got nobody telling me what to do after this game tonight, or ever. And I’ve got a cherry ’69 Chevelle out in the lot.”

“I wouldn’t trust it in the lot out here. The guy who runs it is nuts.”

“So, what’s the worst that happens? It gets stolen? I’ll report it, get a shit-ton of insurance money for it, buy a two-thousand-dollar piece of shit to get around town, and get shitfaced with the rest of the money.”

“You’re my fucking hero,” I said, unlocking the door to the suite.

“I’m my fucking hero too, kid. Hang in there. It gets better. I promise.”

He was right. The next summer they made us read The Day of the Jackal. In this book, a guy is hired to kill the prime minister of France. In order to get a fake passport, he goes to a cemetery and finds the grave of a baby who, had it lived, would have been around the same age as he was. He goes and gets the birth certificate for this kid, then gets some other documents, and before you know it, he’s got himself a real fake passport.

My needs were less grand. I needed a fake ID to buy booze. But I liked how the

Jackal handled himself. I needed to find the grave of a baby born in 1967. Slavic Village had plenty of local cemeteries, but I needed to make sure that the dead kid wasn’t known

139

to any of the people around here. With my luck, I’d pop into the Convenient for a sixer and end up getting shot by the kid’s still-mourning father. I could take the bus north to one of the many large cemeteries off 71st or 79th, but I’d risk going to the Bureau of Vital

Statistics and wasting twelve bucks and a trip downtown just to end up getting the birth certificate of a dead black kid. I wasn’t sure whether Ohio birth certificates had race on them, but I wanted to cover my bases.

Ape, who was still going by Karl at the time, had just gotten his license despite being an incoming sophomore. He’d flunked kindergarten. Twice. How the fuck someone flunks kindergarten, I have no idea. Doing it twice must take some real doing.

But he had access to his old man’s Caprice, and he was up for the caper.

“This is a pretty cold-blooded idea, Linus. You actually read that book?”

“Almost done,” I said.

“I don’t know. We’ll go to juvie for sure if we get pinched. And it’s not that hard to get beer.”

“But it’s hard to get liquor. For everybody. Which means we can make a fortune selling the hard stuff to everyone else at school.” He liked this idea.

“We need to go into, like, Parma or some shit,” he said. “My grandma’s buried in a humongous cemetery on Brookpark. From the looks of the place, I doubt there’s any black kids buried in there. And we passed a couple of other cemeteries on the ride over there. And some nudie joints,” he said.

“By the time we’re done with this job, we’ll be drinking in those nudie joints,” I said.

140

“Yes,” he said. “But some of those places are juice bars because the chicks are fully nude. Apparently, you can’t serve alcohol and show monkey at the same time in

Ohio.”

“We’ll stick to the titty bars,” I said, “and hit the juice bars after we’re good and loaded.”

We woke up early and drove west. Brookpark Road was a foreign land. Five lanes of gas stations, motels, strip joints, and cemeteries. I started clapping and Karl turned up the GN’R when we drove past Pinky’s. “Tonight: Three-girl revue. Happy hour 3-7.” We drove past the cemetery on purpose just so we could see everything

Brookpark Road had to offer. By the time we got to the airport, we’d deduced that a place like Juicy Lucy’s must be fully nude while places like the Crazy Horse had to serve booze.

When we pulled into Holy Cross cemetery, the visual noise of Brookpark Road went silent. We were suddenly in an atmosphere of solemnity and understatement. I guess I’d been expecting an ornate, gothic graveyard, like the one my mom was in, but this cemetery looked like golf courses I’d seen on TV, but with rows of white stone tablets raising uniformly just a few inches above the ground. It wasn’t like the cemeteries around Slavic Village at all: no vertical grey headstones in a variety of shapes and sizes.

Just curvy rows of the same white, flat rectangles marking perfectly manicured graves.

Some had flowers, but otherwise, they were identical.

“How are we gonna know if it’s a kid?” Karl asked. “There’s no little angel statues or engravings that say ‘Beloved Baby’ or any of that shit.”

“I guess we just have to look,” I said.

141

We spent over four hours in the cemetery. After an hour and a half, Karl found

“Kevin Michael O’Connor / March 24, 1968 – March 26, 1968.”

“Think I can pass for Irish?” he asked as he wrote down the info on the back of his box of Camel lights.

“You’ve got freckles,” I said, “and you drink like a fucking Mick.”

“Thanks, Linus,” he said, without a note of insincerity.

A couple of hours and a couple of sunburns later, we found another one for me.

“Neal P. Hopkins / September 28, 1967 – September 28, 1967.”

“Poor kid never even had a chance,” Karl said.

“Then I need to do some living for him.” I lit a cigarette after writing Neal’s info on my cigarette pack.

“You afraid he’s too old?” Karl said. “You just turned fifteen, and you’re gonna have to pass for twenty-three in a few months.”

“It’s a valid, legal state ID,” I said. “I’ll be able to show it bartenders. I’ll be able to use it at the State Store. If they don’t believe it’s me, I’ll tell them to call the fucking cops. According to the State of Ohio, I’ll be Neal P. Hopkins.”

“And I’ll be Kevin O’Connor. I just hope I never have to show it to any cop.”

“Quit worrying. Let’s go down to City Hall.”

Cleveland’s city hall was the most official-looking place in the world. An old stone giant of columns and arches, it screamed government. Inside, marble pillars and floors and a vaulted ceiling housed Greater Cleveland’s bureaucratic machine. The line at Vital Stats was short. Since Ohio is an open records state, anyone can ask for and receive anyone else’s birth certificate whenever they want. It’s public record. Karl and I

142

got our new birth certificates and headed straight over to the Celebreeze Federal

Building. As we were about to enter the more modern, sanitary, steel-and-glass building, which would have meant going through a metal detector outside of Cleveland Stadium for the first time, I channeled the Jackal.

“This is the risky part,” I said. “Only one of us should go in there today. One of us needs to go in there without any other identification and show his birth certificate to the person at the desk. Tell them that his folks never set up a Social Security account for him, and that he needs to get one. They’ll probably have a bunch of forms to fill out.

Whoever goes in there just needs to say that he’s in a hurry and that he’ll take the paperwork home. He should ask for duplicates and say it’s because his brother never got put into the system either.”

“What if they ask why our parents never signed us up for Social Security?” Karl was getting nervous.

“We can just say they were hippies or in a cult or something. I bet stuff like this happens all the time.”

We decided that, since the cards would probably have to be mailed to us, I would have mine sent to the vacant Grabowski house, two doors down from mine. Ape would have his sent to his aunt’s house, since she worked at a deli till close.

Then came the tricky part, deciding which one of us would be the first one to go up to the Social Security office. Unbelievably, up to this point, we hadn’t done anything illegal. Yet. It may have been creepy as fuck, but what we had done was technically not illegal. Filing for a fake Social, on the other hand . . . .

“Fuck it,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

143

I left everything except for Neal’s birth certificate in Karl’s dad’s Caprice. I walked through those metal detectors, got beeped, put my belt in a plastic bin, and got through. I looked at the registry on the wall, got on the elevator, went into the office, and told my story.

“Very well, Mr. Hopkins,” a mustached man with a lisp said. “Take as many forms as you like. You can mail them back or you can drop them off next time you’re downtown.”

My card came three weeks later, on a Monday. Karl’s came that Thursday. On

Friday, Karl drove us to the BMV on 55th. He went in at eleven.

“You only want a state ID,” I reminded him. “Not a driver’s license. You don’t want to have to take the test.”

“Ok,” he said. “State ID.”

Forty minutes later, he came out with a perfectly valid Ohio state identification card. The blue background behind his photo meant that most people didn’t even need to look at his birth date. The dot-matrix printing, the gold state seal in the background, along with the blue seal and blue signature overlapping the image of Karl and the rest of the license: these details represented the state of the art in forgery prevention. These were the first things people looked at when trying to discredit an Ohio ID. There was no discrediting this one.

“Holy shit.” Karl’s hands were trembling. “It’s real. I should’ve gone for a driver’s license. That way I could pin all my tickets on Kevin.”

“No, this is better,” I said. “They put the driver’s license info into computers now. This is way safer.”

144

“If anyone asks me, I’ll tell them I can’t drive because I have too many DUI’s.”

“There you go,” I said.

We drove around the neighborhood for an hour or so, rolling through the

Outhwaite projects listening to NWA, nodding at the homeboys. Then we went back to the BMV for my turn. An overweight black woman with an updo that looked like a pile of grapes took my two forms of ID and processed my request. I tried to rein in my smile when she took my picture in front of the blue curtain. Ten minutes later, she took the ID out of the laminator.

“Here you go sweetie.” She was about to hand me the card when she called one of the other workers over. She hadn’t made eye contact with me throughout this entire transaction, but something made her look at my picture. The other woman, an older, thinner black woman with flat hair and an abundance of tiny moles on her cheeks, lowered her glasses and looked at it.

“Who’s he look like?” Grapes said.

“He sure is smiling. I don’t know.” She looked at me, then looked back at the

ID.

“The boy from the movie, the one we saw at Severance. Boy with the boombox up over his head. With the song. Outside the girl’s window.”

“Oh, lord,” Flat Hair said. “Lloyd Dobler.”

“Mmm hmm,” Grapes said. “Looks just him. Lloyd Dobler. John What’s-his- name.”

“Cusack,” I said. My pits were sweating, and I could feel my right eye beginning

145

to twitch. “John Cusack. I get that all the time. He’s much older than the characters he plays.”

“Just like him,” Grapes said. She was holding the card again now and they both were looking at it and looking at me.

“Can I?” I hadn’t crapped my pants since I got beat up by some public school kids in third grade, but I was beginning to think I wouldn’t make it out of there without breaking my streak.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Grapes said. They both looked at me and smiled. “Here you go, sweetie,” the fat one said.

I put the ID card in my pocket without looking at it.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you both.” I have no idea what possessed me— maybe her smile reminded me of Jonelle’s mom’s smile—but I grabbed Grapes’ hand and began raising it to my lips as I bent towards it.

“Uh-uh, Lloyd Dobler,” she said, pulling her hand up to her shoulder. “I only liked you in the movie.” The two women laughed like a couple of playground brats and I walked out to Karl’s dad’s car, confident in my ability to never have to go a day without beer or a bottle Night Train or whatever the hell else I wanted ever again. No more

Saturday night shoulder-taps outside the Broadway Market. It was on.

146

Takin’ a Ride

Once Billy figured I was thoroughly detoxed and defogged, I had to start going to outside meetings. Alumni of the Fitz would show up with their pickup trucks, minivans, cargo vans, SUVs, and station wagons to take guys on a tour of Cleveland’s church basements.

“You can look at pussy when you go three-quarter,” Billy used to say. “But the halfway-house guys are stuck with men’s meetings.”

There were over a thousand AA meetings in the Greater Cleveland area, more per capita than anywhere else in the world, but Billy didn’t trust us to go to just any old men’s meetings. With a list officially vetted by Billy, the week would shake out like this:

Monday, 8:15 pm: Lakewood Men, St. Paul’s, Lakewood

Tuesday, 8:30 pm: Hope for Men, St. Augustine’s, Tremont

Wednesday, 8:30 pm: Doan Men, Holy Name, Broadway/Harvard

alternate: 8:15 pm: Westpark Men, St. Mark’s, Westpark

Thursday, 8:00 pm: Thursday Men, Our Lady of Good Counsel, Old Brooklyn

Friday, 7:00 pm: Who Do You Know, St. Mel’s, Westpark

Saturday, 7:30 pm: Fitz Men, St. Stanislaus, Slavic Village

Sunday, 8:00 pm: East Side Men, St. John of the Cross, Euclid

alternate: 7:30 pm, Fire Fighters, St. Patrick’s, Ohio City

Of the men’s meetings, my favorite was Doan Men’s. This was the home group to most of the people who helped my old man get sober, and these oldtimers always gave me smokes or a couple bucks for Frosteys. Plus, this meeting served hot dogs afterwards.

Two hundred men formed a single-file line immediately after the meeting, not a second

147

before. If you got an early spot, you might be able to sneak back in line and get a second hot dog, if they had extras.

Many of these churches were in the inner city, some in heavily black or Hispanic neighborhoods, but the crowds at each of these meetings were overwhelmingly white. It seemed that recovery, like so much of the rest of Cleveland, was segregated.

“I don’t know why, Linus. It ain’t like it’s done on purpose,” Billy said.

“They’ve got their meetings, and we’ve got ours.”

Of the eighty or so guys at the Fitz when I was there, only one was black and one was Hispanic, and both were in their fifties. Moving to Sobriety, a predominantly black recovery house half a block away from the Fitz, and Su Casa, a center for Hispanic men in recovery, didn’t fit the bill for Roger and Carlos.

“I’m too old for Moving to Sobriety,” Roger told me. “It’s more peaceful over here. There’s more serenity, and not so many gangbangers.” But Billy told me that Ken

Norton, the retired Ford worker who ran Moving to Sobriety, had kicked Roger out of that place too many times.

“Old Roger is a chronic relapser,” Billy said. “And a liar.”

“And what’s Carlos’ story?”

“He cheats at chess. The amigos at Su Casa don’t want him the fuck around there anymore.”

“You don’t care about that?”

“Nobody here plays chess, except Rich Bishop,” Billy said, referring to Westside

Rich. “He already knows Carlos cheats.”

148

One Wink at a Time

Florence, the counselor at the Fitz, would sometimes lead group when one of the volunteers couldn’t make it. She was in recovery from something, but we didn’t know the details. Rather than sitting down on that stage and telling her sordid war stories to a bunch of guys, she would talk to us about being better men.

“Women addicts have to deal with issues that you men don’t. A guy can talk about sleeping with anonymous women in blackouts and be high-fived by his bros. I think we all know what a woman who did the same thing would be called.”

The guys laughed.

“We call that a double standard,” she continued. “Also, you guys can’t get pregnant. And men are rarely get raped outside of prison. The vulnerability that men fear so much about being prison is what many women in the world feel on a day-to-day basis. Remember that.”

She would play with an unlit cigarette, tapping it against its case.

“After you leave our halfway house and go to one of the Fitz’s three-quarter houses, you’ll be allowed to go to mixed meetings. If you see a woman who’s new in recovery, leave her alone. Let the women in the meetings take care of her. Give her a year to get her head back on straight.

“And, men,” she always said when she closed one of her talks. “Try your best to be the man God spared you to be.”

149

God Damn Job

In the spring of 1992, it seemed like everyone in my class at Central Catholic knew where they would be going to college in the fall. I, on the other hand, hadn’t even filled out an application. I took the SAT, because it was covered by our tuition and because the school counselors made us, but I took it hungover after a late Friday night and zero preparation. I even guessed on half of the math questions.

I got an 1100, which I didn’t know was a halfway decent score because the only people who talked about their SAT score at Central Catholic had scored a lot higher than

1100. There were people talking about 1300s and 1400s, so I thought I’d bombed the thing. It didn’t matter, though, because I liked my jobs with the Browns, the Indians, and the Stadium.

My old man, though, had other ideas.

“You have to go to college, Linus.”

“I don’t have to go to college. This isn’t Russia. Is this Russia?” I’d been watching Caddyshack a lot.

“Cut the shit. If fall rolls around and you aren’t enrolled in a college somewhere,

I’ll make sure you get fired from your jobs. Again.”

His “again” was a reference to the fact that I’d been fired from all three of my employers at least once in the past few years but managed to get back into their good graces, usually with his assistance.

I first got fired from the Stadium when the douchebag in charge of the loges, some wrestling coach from a Cleveland public school, caught me chugging a can of

Coors under the ramp to the luxury suites, a couple of crushed empties at my feet. He

150

asked me where I got the beer, and I told him I took it from the fridge in one of the suites.

He told me to get changed and go home.

I told him to fuck off.

He said something into his walkie, and security was there in about four seconds.

In my polyester navy blue blazer and houndstooth slacks, I found myself locked up in one of the Stadium’s “jails” for rowdy fans: four walls of chain-link fence on the lower concourse over by Gate A. We had to endure thousands of drunken Browns fans taunting us, yelling at us, even spitting on us through the fence. One guy wasted an entire three- dollar sixteen-ounce beer when he hurled the paper cup at the fence and it exploded all over us.

When a judge came down to arraign us on the concourse after the game, my ex- boss had stuck around after the game long enough to tell the judge just what a lousy punk

I’d been under his employ. I eventually got my job back, but I was given much shittier assignments, like rounding up the feral cats from behind the bleachers so we could get them spayed.

“Why can’t someone just kill them?” I asked the psychopath in charge of this expedition.

“Because we need the cats to kill all the rats. You should’ve seen this place before we brought the cats in.” He handed me a pair of beekeepers gloves and a burlap pillowcase.

The Indians first fired me when I let the battery on Julio Franco’s girlfriend’s car run out and got her arrested. She was always such a twat, driving right past me at the entrance to the players’-family parking lot, after I’d clearly signaled her to stop so I could

151

check her pass. So, when a drunk fan accidentally brushed against her car and set off the alarm in the bottom of the first against the Mariners, I just let the alarm swirl, beep, honk, tweet, and wail for the entire game until the noises started sounding lethargic and seasick.

By the time she strutted out in her high heels and miniskirt after the game, the thing sounded like a bloated, dying squid. She ran over and started yelling at me in Spanish, so

I borrowed a play from my ex-boss at the Stadium and got on my walkie and told security that some drunk Puerto Rican hooker was causing a disturbance in the parking lot. She got hauled off, the car got towed, and Julio got pissed. I got my job back a month later after some politicking on my dad’s end, but I could never work the parking lot for Indians games again because everyone knew Julio’s mamacita would run my ass over if she ever saw me again.

The firing from the Browns was a doozy. My best work ever. I was working as a gopher for the Browns’ PR Director, so I had access to the administrative offices after they moved out of Municipal and into their Berea headquarters. About a month or two after Bill Bellichick, the new head coach, had moved into his office, I was dicking around there one night late after an errand run when I noticed his rolodex sitting on his desk. I’d thumbed through Art Modell’s rolodex before, so I knew how to get a hold of Art

Rooney if I ever wanted to, but Bellichick’s rolodex had a fucking gem in there—filed under “B”: Bon Jovi, Jon (Home).

This was just perfect. Almost too good to be true. It took me about two seconds to jot that number down. I sat on it for a week, telling nobody. Then, from a pay phone outside Taco Bell on my lunch break, I made the call.

“Hello,” the singer’s voice sounded a little gruff, but friendly.

152

“Hi, Jon?”

“Yeah, this is Jon. Who’s this?” Still friendly.

“This is Neal P. Hopkins from Bill Bellichick’s office in Cleveland.”

“Oh, hey. How’s Bill doing?”

“Coach Bellichick is well. He’s getting settled in to his new role here with the

Browns organization, and he looks forward to having you out here for a golf weekend.”

“That would be cool, yeah.”

“Yeah. So, the reason I’m really calling: Mr. Bellichick would like you to sing the national anthem at our season opener against the Cowboys on September 1. And he’d love to have Bon Jovi to play for 80,000 screaming Browns fans after the game.” I had jammed two straws together so they could snake down to the bottom of the forty of Bud in the backpack on my chest, and I was taking sips as I talked, watching the Berea traffic pass by.

“Man, I’d love to do something like that. Is this Bill’s idea?”

“Yes it is. Can you be here for a strategy session with Coach Bellichick and Mr.

Modell tomorrow afternoon?”

“I can be on the first plane out there tomorrow morning,” he said. Nice guy.

Shitty musician, but very nice.

I wasn’t there when Jon Bon Jovi arrived at the Browns’ headquarters around noon the next day, but I heard that he wasn’t so nice when he found out that no one from the Browns had called him. Bellichick assured him that he was very glad to see him, and

I think they did end up going golfing the next day, but everyone in the office told me how angry, then disappointed, then angry Jon Bon Jovi was. It was a good thing the PR

153

director kept a stash of expensive red wine in his office. Apparently, it took three bottles of two-hundred-dollar wine to settle the guy down.

As a result of my little prank, all non-salaried employees who’d had access to

Bellichick’s office since his arrival ended up getting suspended. We had to earn our jobs back one at a time by signing confidentiality agreements and sitting down with Modell’s bitchy executive secretary to ensure her that we weren’t the ones responsible for the prank. So, I guess I wasn’t technically fired that time, but I should’ve been. If it weren’t for my old man’s insistence that I wasn’t intelligent enough to conceive of a project like this, I probably would’ve ended up like the other grunts and been shit out of a job.

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. So when my old man told me he’d see to it that I lost all of the jobs he gotten me if I didn’t go to college straight out of high school, I arranged a tour at Tri-C that afternoon.

The tour guide was a petite black girl with short hair like Toni Braxton, and the

Metro campus was teaming with beautiful, young black women, so I was sold. I think, in the back of my mind, I thought I’d have a similar sort of connection with all black women since Jonelle and I had hit it off so well a few years before.

I came home and told my dad I’d be going to Tri-C in the fall.

“That’s a ’tard school,” he said. “I don’t want my son going to some ’tard school.

Why don’t you go to John Carroll or Case?”

“Dad, those schools are incredibly expensive, and hard to get into. I would’ve had to apply last year, and I still probably wouldn’t have gotten in.”

“What about Cleveland State?”

“What about Cleveland State?” I said. “I like Tri-C.”

154

“Does it cost a lot? Is it hard to get into?” he said.

It dawned on me that my old man—a grownup who’d held steady employment for over twenty years, a man with a mortgage and two cars in his name, a man who had buried a wife and raised a son and beaten an addiction to alcohol—didn’t know whether or not our regional, state university was expensive or selective. This fact broke my heart a little bit. So I went down to CSU for a tour. Long story short: more and even better- looking black girls at CSU. It was a no-brainer.

155