He would have bunked with one no problem. Instead he got housed with an unsavory character who had raped his own daughter. The guy said she was a stepdaughter, when Doc demanded the new cellmate’s paperwork, a custom that was mandatory on sensitive yards. Okay, we all have our stories. Doc talked openly about being raped himself, as a child, by his foster father. He didn’t hassle his roommate. This is prison. No one is friends. You don’t need to deal with their feelings. You make rules for the cell and stay out of each other’s way. Doc’s rules were mostly cleaning protocols. A lot of the guys on Sensitive Needs at New Folsom had cleaning protocols. The concrete in the common area gleamed like glass, it was so polished and repolished; it was just layers of clean and gleam and perfection. The smell of Cell Block 64 brand cleaning solution in Doc’s unit was overpowering. It moved beyond an omnipresent scent to a totalizing sensation, smell as the means of breathing, thinking, being. Doc, a porter on the block, had access. He had his own personal supply of Cell Block 64. He might have used it as cologne but Doc had money on his books and used actual cologne and not Old Fucking Spice, either. Good cologne by an Italian name-brand designer he can never remember. But then he remembers: Cesare Paciotti. It always takes him a minute to retrieve that name. The Cell Block 64 was strictly for keeping dust and dirt off his personal stuff, meaning his contraband. Any property in your cell, if they do a raid or extraction, and you didn’t buy it and have the records to prove it, you will lose. Anything in your cell not explicitly allowed by the CDC, the California Department of Corrections, is contraband. Excuse them, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, a word they added just this year. But there is no new programming. There is just this bullshit letter—R.
Doc lies on his bunk going through his files to find a good image. There’s no pornography allowed. They don’t have the internet, of course. The mind is where you stash your stroke material. Doc flips through the images he keeps in store. He steps by a wide margin over the memory of the last woman he had sex with, Betty LaFrance, who put him here. He focuses on the era before she hung him out to dry.
He sees himself cruising the streets in an unmarked car. If he can get into his old life, he can jump-start a good scenario.
There was that button-nosed cocktail waitress. The bar in Eagle Rock he liked to go to, place called Toppers.
Plainclothes cop walks into a bar.
He never could remember any follow-through on that joke.
Plainclothes cop walks into a bar. Nothing more. It didn’t go anywhere.
There was the night the cocktail waitress at Toppers was so drunk and high she did not take offense when Doc slipped a two-dollar Canadian bill—worth less even than two American dollars—into the side of her panties. Ha ha ha. Why was a cocktail waitress wearing nothing but panties? It was part of the mystery of Toppers. It was the only mystery of Toppers. He cracked the mystery, brought her back to his unmarked car. Pulled down the panties and put his hand against her crotch. She had used hair remover or wax and felt like a child down there, which was unacceptable to Doc, who was a protector and defender of children. The sensation of her hairless pussy alarmed him and he’d had to pull his hand away; he’d forgotten that part when he selected this file from the mental Rolodex. He’d thrown a crumpled twenty-dollar bill at her and told her to get out of his car. Now his mind is creeping into the territory of bad men and innocent children and instead of conjuring some sexy striptease thing or a woman begging him to put his cock in her mouth, he is dreaming about painting the landscape with an Uzi. Painting the whole huge landscape of child molesters.
Uzis. There was that kid in tiny, Sweet Tart–pink shorts who nicked off her instructor in Las Vegas. Everyone watched the news story on their personal TV, tens of thousands of men all over the state doing life without parole, like Doc, lying back with cheap tinny headphones connected to their world-machine, hoping to get a glimpse of the moment this child in the candy-color shorts guns down a grown man with an Uzi. The news showed her engagement, then a pause, and the instructor gives an encouraging “All right!” Like, Way to go, this kid’s okay. And then she goes back to blasting but the news cuts away before she clips him. They never show it, but everyone on Sensitive Needs keeps watching that segment, hoping they will. As if by watching the segment, each time it replays, they produce the possibility that the news footage might, just might, by some fluke of technology, some glitch of the universe, lead straight into where it is not supposed to go, the part where she fragments her instructor’s brain to meat and shards.
Doc gently steers himself away from that. He can have anything he wants. It is important to remember this when you are flipping through your storehouse. But sometimes too many choices is a tyranny.
The tyranny of choice, that’s not exactly what people think of as the number one problem in prison. And yet Doc cannot settle on an image right now. His roommate will be gone until the door pops on schedule and he’d like to use this time productively.
Back to when he was still a detective, cruising undetected, up to his mischief on a balmy night. Doc had become a great connoisseur of the bars in Los Angeles where prostitution took place in a frank and natural manner. The Polished Knob on Wilshire in Koreatown, a medieval-themed restaurant with a dungeon in the basement. Bobby London on Beverly and Western, which catered only to Korean men and LAPD, and only LAPD as bribery, and only Doc of the LAPD, and technically it wasn’t bribery it was blackmail.
Cop walks into a brothel.
He could never remember that one, either.
There was Las Brisas on a rangily barren stretch of Sunset Boulevard near Dodger Stadium, where cars went seventy miles an hour. You could have sex with the bartender in the stockroom of Las Brisas, and she was gentle and maternal-sensual. She smelled of beef tamales and Fabuloso, a floral-oily fragrance that was not unlike the smell of Cell Block 64, come to think of it. His visits to Las Brisas started out with tight embraces and groin-to-groin hugs with various ladies who hookered at that establishment, but the visits always finished in the stockroom with the bartender who smelled like Cell Block 64. She squirted it in her hand and oiled Doc and herself and then they did the slippery in-out standing up, Doc pinning her against a stack of cases of canned beer. Generous lady always acted happy, like Doc’s orgasm was her pride, he was her big baby boy bringing her a dozen long-stemmed red roses by coming all over the insides of her thighs.