That was a bad experience. I've had others—unpleasant experiences of a long duration. I've always shaken them off and felt strong for it.
But I've never felt the kind of pain I felt when I thought I'd lost you. I couldn't shake that off—I only wanted you back, that's all I knew. I stayed at your house a few nites, and it was so lonely. Nicole. I was depressed. I'd walk those rooms and wonder where you were. When you called me that Thursday at work to tell me you were moving I felt my heart breaking. Really. It's a physical pain—it's not just in the mind. It was something I could feel. And it felt bad. Friday I looked for you but I didn't know where to look. Your mother wouldn't tell.
I felt so alone and depressed. Like I was a void. And it didn't lessen any. I had lost the only thing of real value I'd ever had or known.
My life had lost meaning, it had become a gulf, empty and void but for the shadows and the ever-present ghosts who have followed me for so long.
I don't ever want to feel that pain again. I am so completely in love with you, Nicole. I miss you so much, Baby. When I read your two letters and picture your pretty face the darkness rolls back and I know that I am loved. And that's a beautiful thing. The hurt stops. We were together for only two months but it's the fullest two months I've known in this life. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Just two months but I believe that I have known you, that we've known each other, for so much longer—a thousand, two thousand years?—I don't know what we were to each other before, I will know, as you will also when it becomes ultimately clear one day—but I feel we were always lovers. I knew this when I saw you that first nite, May 13th, Thursday, at Sterlings. There are some things you just know. And it went so deep so fast—it was a recognition, a re-newal, a reunion. Me and you Nicole, from a long time ago. I have always loved you Angel. Let's don't ever hurt each other again.
Cliff Bonnors was great because he always brought his mood around to meet hers. They could travel through the same sad thoughts never saying a word. Tom, she liked, for opposite reasons. Tom was always happy or full of sorrow, and his feelings were so strong he would take her out of her own mood. He wasn't dynamite but a bear full of grease. Always smelled full of hamburgers and french fries. He and Cliff were beautiful. She could like them and never have to worry about loving them one bit. In fact, she enjoyed it like a chocolate bar. Never thought of Gary when making love to them, almost never.
It certainly wasn't like sex had been with Gary. The moment something good happened with him, when it did, why it traveled to her heart and started to build, as if she was some goof-ass bird making a nest. When she went to visit Gary, therefore, she never thought of Tom or Cliff, or Barrett, or any incidental party. One life on Earth, another on Mars.
It wouldn't have been the worst way to live if not for those horrible depressions. Sometimes it would get real what she had done to Gary, and what he had done. Whenever she let herself think of the death penalty, everything started to get unreal.
Death would sit in her thoughts. Except it was more as if she was sitting in death, and it was a big armchair. She could sit back. The chair would begin to go upside-down, but slowly, until she felt the kind of nausea you get on one of those twisty carnival rides where you can't tell if you're excited or ready to throw up. Even when the thoughts stopped, she still felt as if she was spinning.
Sure I miss the sunlite and the air! I'm already losing my tan. Before long I'll be paler than a ghost. In fact, before long, I may be a ghost.
After a couple of weeks, they began to move Gary back and forth from the jail to the mental hospital. It was a two-mile transfer. He would be taken from the west end of town up Center Street past the hardware stores and clothing stores, and ice-cream parlors, to the east end, where you got nearer to the mountain, and the road came to an end in those foothills in which Nicole had run naked in the grass. Now he was at her old nuthouse, Utah State Hospital. A different ward, of course.
One thing was better there. They could have contact visits. Not the way it was at the jail, where he was taken to a little room and she stood on the other side, trying to see him through a thick mesh tough enough to keep minks and raccoons from breaking out. Their fingertips could hardly touch through the tough mean little holes. All the while they were talking, every noise of the jail was going on behind her. She would stand right out in the dirty old entrance with guards and trustees and delivery men and what-all yelling back and forth, straining to hear Gary's voice, a loud radio or TV always on. One prisoner or another was usually shouting in the main tank. It was like you had to fight for what you could hear.
At the hospital, it was different. They were in a little room together. She would sit on his lap and he would grip her, and they would kiss for five minutes, far out on the other side of sex, as if it was her soul taking the trip rather than any juice starting to flow. They were kissing from one heart to the other—not sex, but love. Right on the wing.
Then they would land. They were in a bare room, cement-brick walls painted yellow, four inmates looking at them. Trying not to look at them. That was the posse, Gary would explain. He would say it in a clear voice, his snottiest voice, clear enough for the inmates to hear, say that they had put him among a flock of sheep who were hell-bent on policing each other. "A herd mentality," he would say. "The posse can't even talk to you unless there's two of them around. One to snitch on what the other just said."
The four fellows in the posse took it different ways. One might grin like an asshole, another would look as if he was measuring Gary for some lumps, the third was depressed, and the fourth real eager, like he wanted to explain to Nicole how the patient program worked in this hospital.
She picked up on that bit by bit. There was a crazy system. Different from when she was here. They called it the program. A bunch of dudes were facing prison sentences, and were mixed in with real psychos and zombies. These kids, right out of prison and Reform School, had been put together with the true nuts, and they all wrote a constitution and had elections and a patient-run government.
Gary explained, right in that yellow room, with these four dudes monitoring Gary's hand every time it touched her tit, he spoke out on this hospital system where the doctors let the patients control everything, why they could even elect their own President of all the patients. It was the hottest kind of horseshit. That was what the patients controlled. The horseshit.
Gary had always told her stories about prison, but now he got into the nitty-gritty. Spoke of the way prison was supposed to work. It was a war. It was supposed to be a war. Convicts might do a job on other convicts, convicts might even kill other convicts, but they were on the same side. They were against the guards. It was a war where there was nothing worse than a snitch.
The guards and the Warden did everything they could to build an intelligence system. So they depended, for what they knew, on snitches. A snitch, said Gary, would even suck your cock and then run to the Warden with what you said. So the convicts did all they could to wipe out such inmates. In a good prison where the convicts had it down, there weren't too many snitches. Prison, after all, was a city where convicts lived, and had the real control. Guards just passed through for eight-hour shifts. That was the way it should work.
Here they had it inside out. There were no guards. Just a few aides. The inmates supposedly had the power. But the inmates who got elected to the posse became the new guards. They worked for the doctors. "They are in the throes of brainwash," said Gary, pointing at the posse. She wanted to giggle at the way he told them off right to their faces. "Self-seeking snitches," he said. "Not a spark of life in them. Nobody looks at anybody. They just have agenda meetings."
He would say this while she sat on his lap, say it while he was feeling her, and the four dudes were looking, boiling, hurting, from what he said. Then he and she would just hold each other and whisper and talk of other things. He would want to know how Sunny and Peabody were getting along. He would speak of how sorry he was that he used to yell at them and let them
get on his nerves. In fact, they were remarkable children. Right in front of the posse they talked.
Then he would get mad again. The way they worked this hospital, he said, was worse than student government. Everybody was always taking everything up at a meeting. Committees for everything. A committee to sweep the hall. A committee to pick up straws from the brooms of the fuck-up committee who swept the hall. Each committee ran around snitching on the other committee for doing a bad job. A punk could go into a real prison, Gary announced, and if he had balls, he could come out a convict. In this hospital, men came in as convicts, and got released as punks. "This place sucks. I've never seen the like." The posse listened.
After a few visits, Gary gave up riding them. It was as if the hour was too valuable for such talk. They would sit and hold hands and be silent. They would think of places they used to go to, and live in the breath that went back and forth. Sorrow would visit from one to the other. Not a flood of waters, not the way she would cry on Tom Dynamite's naked shoulder for what she had done to Gary, or cry with Cliff because the high-school sweetheart he had married wouldn't even let Cliff's son talk to him now, no, sorrow lifted out of her heart and passed into Gary's chest and returned with the breath of his sorrow. It was as if they stood on a ledge and sorrow was as light as all the air below the fall.
Then they would feel loving again and he would grope her until she wouldn't have minded taking off a thing or two. Something new for the posse! Then, time up, feeling truly horny for Gary, she would get ready to go out in the street and start the long walk down to a part of town where she could hitch a ride.
Sometimes, the doctor who seemed to be the head guy around the ward, a fellow named Dr. Woods, would ask her into his office. He would talk about her feeling that she was to blame for Gary's acts. Nicole would wonder if the posse had reported what she said to Gary. Anyway, Woods would try to tell her that she didn't have to keep that thought in her head. Gary was a complex individual, and not the sort to say, I care for Nicole, so I'm going to kill somebody.
Nicole would listen. Dr. Woods had the power to say Gary was insane, and then they wouldn't give him the death penalty. In fact, if Gary could get to a mental hospital, he might be able to escape. So she wasn't going to insult the doctor. Still, he was the weirdest for a psychiatrist. He was tall and very well built, and looked like Robert Redford in Downhill Racer, except he was maybe better looking and maybe even bigger—he was one of the best-looking men Nicole had ever seen. Yet she thought he was kind of wimpy in his manner and never came down hard on one side or the other. She certainly felt funny talking to handsome Dr. Woods, when she was horny as hell from being with Gary and the posse.
She would leave John Woods's office and hitch a ride, and the World that was outside Gary and herself would come slowly back to her, and she would feel a little less like a space ship, and begin to think of supper for the kids, and annoyance that her car was on the blink, and Barrett had not yet fixed it. Her problems would start living again, and so by the time she got home, it would be truly weird to find a letter from Gary describing the very nuthouse she had just seen him at. It was like waking up from a dream to answer a knock on the door but the knock came from the person you had just kissed in the dream.
August 10
A posse member's supervising me because I have a pencil—they broke it in half then tore the eraser out—I asked them what the fuck that was for and they told me so that I wouldn't stab anybody. Unbelievable! . . .
Nicole, what the fuck kind of journey am I on?
Three nuts are having an argument outside my door because one of them emptied my urinal an hour ago and forgot to chart it. The first loony is accusing the second loony of gross negligence and dereliction of duty in his failure to properly chart on the log hanging outside my door the time of day that he emptied my urinal. The third loony is bouncing from foot to foot trying to get a word in edgewise. The second loony is becoming quite excited and is trying to appeal to me to settle this national disaster. I don't know what the fuck to say but I'd hate to see this poor buffoon lose his T.V. privileges or something—he' s the same chap who sat so patiently outside my door the other day while I wrote a letter—so I tell 'em "Hey, it's okay man, everything is really cool, this guy is on the ball. Didn't spill a drop and brought that urinal back clean as a whistle!" Now they don't know what to say but it appears to have settled the argument. They're getting a pen to make the required chart entry.
Oh, Nicole, I'm so lonesome. I miss the life we had. I miss being in the same bed with you, holding your pretty face in my hands looking into your charming alarming eyes. Coming home to you at nite—how slowly the days went when I was at work!
God, Nicole! You're the most important person in the world.
I remember one time when we were fucking and we were really bucking up against each other. Hard. Wild. How I'd love to do that.
August 14
The drinking fountain is across from my cell and it is really funny the way some of these guys drink water. This one dude sucks up the water for 2 or 3 minutes at a time! He 'bout got in a fight cause of it yesterday—this other cat got impatient, pushed him and said, "You don't need to drink so long." Another dude really slurps, I've never heard anything like it, he sounds like a sump pump. A truly startling noise.
What a bum life.
There's a one man band parading up and down the hall making strange tuneless lip farts.
August 17
Man, I'm sitting here really feeling like an idiot! It's about 7:30 in the morning. I missed a nice opportunity yesterday, didn't I?
Would you believe that it just now became clear to me? I missed a swell chance to touch you on your sweet little cunt. You said something like 'you won't get another chance' but I didn't quite hear you, like I sometimes don't. Now this morning it fell into place—the fucking posse had momentarily turned their heads and I just sat there like a bump on a log. God, Baby, my mind was elsewhere . . .
I'm really kicking myself in the ass right now. I'm so dumb.
August 18
There's a guy washing his face in the drinking fountain—I hope nobody sees him, I'm sure that must be some kind of offense. A couple women from the ladies side just came over to the office here asking for a plunger. This one dude told 'em, "I got a plunger, pucker up." I thought that was pretty cute.
August 19
These are some of the most silent days I've ever spent.
August 20
What a bunch of punks. I'll bet I could take any one of them posse punks and fuck him in the ass and then make him lick my dick clean.
I was interviewed by a couple of psychiatrists today. They wanted lurid details . . . crazy.
Chapter 21
THE SILVER SWORD
After the accident, early in August, Nicole's car was a mess. First, it would only go in one gear, then something slipped into place again and she had all three forward gears operating, but reverse was out. Sometimes, none of the gears would shift. The clutch was acting crazy.
She had stopped sleeping with Barrett about the time of this accident. Barrett never said a word but moved up to Wyoming, and came back every week or so to the room he kept in Springville. Once in a while, he would drop around and ask if she needed any help. If he had money, he sure wasn't showing it, but one day he did offer to fix the car. Considering she still wouldn't go to bed with him, he couldn't have been nicer about it. So she did give him something that night.
Next day when she came back from visiting Gary, the car was gone. Barrett had towed it away. His rooming house wasn't that far from her place in Springville, so she walked over, and there he was working on the car in the back lot with friends. She kind of had fun helping get it up on the blocks. Then progress stopped. There was something, the bell housing, or whatever he called it, that was welded together from her driving it too hot. Then, after Barrett got the transmission out, sitting on the ground, he discovered she needed a new main clutch plate. There was no money fo
r that. It was a problem she could resolve, but she did not like to think about how.
Nicole went and saw Albert Johnson who was the manager of a food store in the area. He was about twice her age, just a pleasant-looking family man, and she used to shop at his store a couple of years ago and buy a couple of things she would pay for, while shoplifting with the other hand.
One day they stopped her out front. She was caught with a pound of margarine and some jars of baby food in her purse. When they brought her up to the office, she said she was stealing 'cause her kids were hungry, but he let her think he was going to call the police, anyway. She sat and sweated it out, and got scared real good, began to cry. She had been picked up on something like that a year before in another store. This time she thought for sure they would send her away.
After fifteen minutes, however, of hearing her story, Johnson told her she was a nice young girl, with all kinds of bad breaks, and that she'd never had an opportunity really to climb the ladder. He was going to let her go. They got friendlier and he explained to her that his store might look like a shoplifter's paradise because it was long and narrow with short aisles across, but the losses got so big, they had put a walkway up in the attic with one-way mirrors looking down. Tell her friends to beware.
He talked quite a bit. He noticed, he said, she was on food stamps, and he told her he wasn't always that fond of such people. He thought food-stamp people were extravagant and didn't shop the bargains. The guy that had to earn the dollar was going to look for the steak on sale, but kids like herself just picked up the $2.79 cut, and ate too many convenience foods, potato chips, soda pop. Then they'd get irate and damn the government if their welfare checks didn't come in on time one week. He liked her, however, he said, and went out of his way to explain he had a daughter her age and could understand her problem. If she ever needed anything, let him know.