Title: Ten Stories
Author: cgb (luberluber@yahoo.com.au)
Fandom: Oz
Category: Beecher/ Keller, pre-series finale
Rating: NC-17
Summary: "That story is true. The rest aren't."
*
I am twelve when I'm arrested for the first time. Auto
theft. I can't drive but Ricki can. He's fourteen and he's been stealing cars
for two years. He thinks it's time I learned.
We get caught because two kids behind the wheel of a
pickup isn't an everyday sight in any state. Ricki says we're going to drive
out to the country but we don't even get out of Queens.
At the police station they call my mom. She isn't
home. They ask me where she works and I tell them I haven't got a fucking clue
where she works or what she's doing. Three hours later grandma shows up: mom's
mom. I haven't seen her in a year.
"Where's mom?" I ask her.
"The police can't find her," grandma says.
I get released into the custody of my grandma. On the
way home she asks me when I last saw my mom.
"This morning," I lie. I saw her last night,
right before I went to sleep. She wasn't there in the morning. It wasn't
anything different. Sometimes she was there, sometimes she wasn't. On the
mornings she was there she made me go to school so I was kind of glad when she
wasn't around.
"Why aren't you in school?"
I shrug.
"Does your mom know you skip school?"
"She doesn't care," I say. It’s a lie but
grandma can’t say any different. Where’s she been anyway?
We go back to grandma's place and she gives me dinner
and a nice, clean bed with white sheets and two pillows. After dinner she says,
"Did you mom ever tell you about your father?"
"She said he went to jail," I say.
"Said he was trying to steal money to feed us." My mom said a lot of
things about my father. She'd say he was a pimp or a priest, depending on her
mood. I chose to believe the jail story because it sounded real. Most of the
kids on my street had dads in prison. It made me just another kid,
father-deprived by the system. "Is that true?" I ask, as an
afterthought.
Grandma looks out the window. It's night outside so I
don't know what she's looking for. She says, "Your mother wasn't a whore,
Chris. No matter what anyone tells you, your mother was no whore."
That story is true. The rest aren't.
*
Two days in Oz and I still haven't seen Schillinger. I
get word that he'll be in the gym today so I hang out by the weights, lifting,
watching Alvarez sweat. Alvarez catches me looking and sneers. I wink in
return.
Eventually Schillinger arrives and we pretend to hate
each other until the gym empties and he tells me about Beecher. He says,
"Make out like you're a sad case - like your father beat you or fucked you
or something."
"You're fucking perverted," I tell him.
He laughs. “Better than being a pervert fucker.”
Back in the pod, I look for an opening. Beecher is
non-responsive. He doesn't give a fuck where I've been or who's been fucking
me. I say things like, "So how does a guy like you end up in here?"
and he tells me to mind my own fucking business.
I hold up my hands and say, "Just trying to make
conversation," and I think about how he's not the pussy Schillinger
claimed he was.
It takes breaking a guy's nose to make Beecher sit up
and pay attention. One Aryan in the hospital wing and everything changes. I
find myself learning chess, pushing little statues around a checkers board like
it means something.
I tell this story over chess:
"So one night, my old man hits me and I go flying
- right up against the wall so hard the wind gets knocked out of me. I go down,
but I get up again fast, and I come at my dad, screaming and yelling like a
fucking psycho. I beat the crap out of him, leave him almost unconscious on the
floor. I take some money out of his wallet, get my jacket and get the fuck out
of there. Never looked back."
"Fuck," Beecher says. He rubs his chin,
looks down at the chessboard and says, "Fuck," again.
"How about you?" I say. "Your old man
ever hit you?"
"Nah." He shakes his head. "My old man
was good to me."
"Yeah?" Every guy I meet in prison tells me
a fucked up story about this father. Beecher doesn't know how lucky he is. I
tell him, "You’re lucky."
"Yeah," he says. "Guess so."
Later I tell him another story, one about my ex,
Bonnie. I tell him she's getting married again, that she's met some nice guy
where she works, someone who isn't in it for sport. It's sort of true. Bonnie met
a guy once - a brainy type who fixed the computers where she worked. She said
she wanted to get married and I told her I'd kill him. She said she didn't
believe me but three weeks later Bonnie is staying home on Friday nights and
there's no sign of computer boy. I told her I wanted her to be happy, I just
didn't want to share. She said that she understood and maybe she did. Bonnie
was there during my arraignment and my trial, always looking out for me for
reasons I can never figure out.
I told her some stories too. I try to remember them
when I'm in the hole. Some stories get better the more you tell them.
Beecher asks me about Bonnie and my father. It's the
day after I get out of the hole and he's drunk again. I'm impressed with how
quickly he scored moonshine when I wasn't around. He says, "Was anything
you told me true?"
I put my arm across my eyes. I should tell him to shut
the fuck up and go to sleep because it's late and I'm tired, but instead I'm
staring at the sag in the bunk above, thinking I could have him right now if I
wanted. "This is a fucking prison, Beecher. Nothing in here is true."
"I am," Beecher says.
"You're drunk."
"Nothing truer," he says, and then he
laughs. Or maybe he's crying. The noise is muffled, like he's face down on the
pillow. It sounds raw - like a wounded animal. I'm a perverted fuck so,
naturally, it makes me hard. I turn over and grind my erection into the
mattress, trying to come quietly. I don't really succeed but if Beecher notices
he doesn't say anything.
I hope I get to fuck him one day. I hope he makes that
sound.
*
I tell him the story about me and Schillinger right
before I break his arms. It goes something like this: I'm seventeen and in a
real prison for the first time. I've been in and out of juvie, learning how to
be a career criminal. Lardner is like nothing I've ever seen. Everyone is
dangerous, everyone's a potential killer. A young guy like me is an easy mark,
destined to be gang fucked as soon as the lights are out. And that happens, but
I survive. I get good at surviving and eventually I get to be on Schillinger's
gang rather than being fucked up the ass by them.
You get in with the Brotherhood and they got you by
the balls. You end up on their bad side and it's the white guys as well as the
blacks that want your ass.
Beecher gets the fast forward version of that story.
He's probably got a longer version going on in his head, one where I'm some
sad-ass kid looking to survive in a prison full of guys who only think of me
when they're thinking of how their dick is going to feel tucked into my pretty,
white ass.
Maybe that's how it went? I don't really remember. There's too many prison
stories in my head, and they're all just piling up, one on top of the other.
*
I read somewhere that you can fool a lie detector test
by curling your toes. When they ask you whether your name is your name, whether
you're birthday is your birthday, you curl your toes into your shoes and push
down like you're about to shoot your load.
No one ever made me take a lie detector test so I
never got to test that theory. But if it's thinking about sex that gets you
off, then I'm home free.
*
I don't tell Sister Pete my stories. I've had at least
twenty shrinks since juvie and none of them really cared about stories. They
say they want me to talk but then they tell me I'm not doing it right.
There was a blonde woman, younger than Pete but not by
much. She piled her hair on top of her head and clasped her hands and tried to
look serious. She asked me to tell her about my mother. I said, "My
mother's dead."
She said, "That's not true, Chris. You know
that's not true."
I was in Lardner. The second time. "She may as well be."
"Do you hate your mother?"
"No. What kind of asshole hates his mother?"
"The kind whose mother hates him."
I stood. I put my hands on the desk. "Listen
bitch, if you've got something to say, say it."
The shrink jerked backwards in surprise. There was a
guard outside but she didn't call. She put her hands on the edge of the desk, like
she was about to grab hold. "Your mother... she didn't look after you
properly, Chris. It's okay to hate her for that."
I slammed my hands on the desk and the shrink jumped
to her feet. "Shut the fuck up!" I said. "Shut the fuck
up!"
She called for the guard and they hauled me out of
there, screaming and carrying on all the way to the hole.
That didn't happen. Beecher loses his cool. Not me.
Shrinks don't want stories, they want answers. I let
Pete talk because she's got all the answers and I'm tired of trying to figure
them out. I let Pete talk because her stories are better than mine, if only
because they're true.
*
I get back with Beecher and we spend the first five
nights together fucking. The lights go out, the guard does a circuit and then
Beecher is scrambling down from the top bunk and into my bed, his hands
reaching for my boxers, while I pull his t-shirt over his head. I fuck him with
his knees bent back against his chest, a pillow under his ass to raise him up,
giving me a better angle. I bend over him when I come, muffling my mouth
against his. He comes between us and it's all hot and wet as we wind around
each other in afterglow.
The first night I let him fuck me. He gave me a
blowjob against the far wall of the cell. After I came, I stripped myself down
to nothing and lay face down on the bunk. I said, "Go on - what are you
waiting for?" and he settled between my legs, his fingers trailing down
the cleft of my ass.
He said, "Are you sure?"
I said, "Fuck, yes." I sounded kind of
desperate. It surprised me.
I'd done it before; I'd told him that. I'd done it
with guys who treated me a whole lot better than Schillinger did. I'd done it
with guys who made if feel like fucking your way into heaven.
With Beecher it was cautious. From the moment he
nudged my ass with his cock, ready to retreat at the first sign of resistance,
to the moment he edged that last inch in, the moment where he was buried deep
inside me and making that raw sound again, like he was crying.
We fuck with abandon after that. Me on top, him on
top, my mouth around his cock and my fingers in his ass while he does the same
to me at the other end of the bed. Beecher likes giving as well as getting and
sex is something I do better than most people so together we make for some of
the best fucking I've had in my life.
We get brave as the nights pass and we get caught once
or twice, but it's a lockdown and the 'no fucking' policy isn't applied with
its usual force. What else are we going to do?
There are times when we're lying there on our backs,
covered in sweat and semen, breathing hard, Beecher nuzzling my shoulder
because he likes the contact, that I think the arrangement is damn near
perfect. Nothing but Beecher, a bed and our meals delivered.
Beecher's not so comfortable. He rests his hands
against the glass and eyes the hacks as they walk past slowly, making rounds,
like he's daring them to make something happen.
"How did you end up back here?" he says to
me.
"This is my first time in Oz."
"I mean prison," he says. "Did you ever
stop in the middle of committing a crime and think, 'I don't want to do time
again, maybe I should give this guy back his money and go straight.'''
"Yeah, sure," I say. "Right before I
start thinking about how I should get a real job and a family and a house in
the suburbs."
"Seriously, Chris," he says, turning away
from the glass. "What did you do on the outside that kept landing you back
in jail?"
I tell him two stories:
The first is about working for Ronnie's uncle, a guy
with a landscape gardening business. Ronnie worked for his uncle as a cover
while he made small time deals on the side. He hid stolen goods temporarily,
stashed them in bags of manure and gravel. He looked and sounded stupid so
nobody thought to suspect him when his name came up in wiretaps and undercover
operations.
"I used to shovel shit," I tell Beecher.
"Good, honest work and the pay was regular but in the end I was shoveling
shit and there wasn't much more to it. So one day I'm shoveling and spreading
shit over some rich guy's lawn, when the guy's wife rolls up in her BMW
convertible and starts screaming and carrying on over the job I'm doing.
Eventually she calls my boss and it turns out I'm shoveling shit onto the
tennis court. The boss goes postal and tells me I screwed up and he's not
paying me for the day's work. I think, why the fuck am I taking this? I shovel
shit for fuck's sake. I'm not doing anything anyone cares about. So I come back
two weeks later and rob the fuckers. Tell me they didn't fucking deserve
it."
I got fired more times than I can count, never for
something so innocent. I fucked a customer's wife, I fucked a customer's son.
One time I got Angelique to meet me at the address where I was working so we
could fuck in a waterbed. Good, honest work is fine but I figure I only have so
many hours between living and dying and I'm choosy about how I spend them.
"Maybe they did," Beecher says. "But
you can't tell me you'd rather be in here."
I shrug.
"It's not so bad," I say. "I got you, haven't I?"
"Yeah," he says. He smiles as he sits down
on the end of the bed. "Yeah, you have."
I've made honest money in my time. I've poured drinks,
poured cement, poured oil into car engines and went home with an extra dollar
or two in my pocket for my troubles. Bonnie wanted me to go straight so she was
always finding jobs for me to do. She was good at it too. That girl had so many
contacts she could start her own employment agency.
The second story is about my job as a doorman for
Bonnie’s brother's club:
"So I'm just standing there, trying to look all scary in case someone
tries to start some trouble, and this guy comes out of nowhere and punches me
in the face. I'm so blown away I don't even think about reacting. I just
stagger back against the wall, holding my face like a fucking idiot. The guy
says, 'stay the fuck away from my wife' and I don't even recognise him. Turns
out his wife is one of the bitches behind the bar. She’s trying to lose him so
she told him she met someone at the club. She figured a doorman would be tough
enough to take anything her husband could dish out. I just wish she'd filled me
in on the story - I know a thing or two about breaking up a marriage."
Beecher laughs. "So why did you lose that
job?"
"Bonnie made me give it up," I say.
"She didn't like me working where I could get myself punched in the face.
She said she liked me looking all pretty and making her girlfriends
jealous." That part at least is true. Bonnie said she didn't want a meathead
for a husband. The club wasn't supposed to be the type to attract thugs so she
thought I'd be safe. What can I tell you? Shit just follows me around.
I left out the part where I fucked the bitch behind
the bar in the club bathroom. And the part where her husband knocked me to the
ground with his first punch and kicked me in the balls while I was down.
Details confuse people. I’m a purist.
The thing about a lockdown is you got nothing but
time. So you can take it slow, whether it's sex or telling stories. You can get
creative.
So I'm stretched out on top of Beecher, and he's face
down on the bed, legs spread and hands holding the bed frame. I'm wearing a wife beater and boxers that
are half way down my thighs. Beecher's naked. I'm working my cock against his
ass cheeks, just sliding along the crevice, taking it slow. I press my face
into his hair, just above his neck. He smells salty, musty.
"What are you doing?" he says.
"Shh," I say. My hands run down his sides,
feeling his ribs. I tuck my fingers under his chest and feel his nipples, hard
and pointed. I slide one hand further down until I'm circling the tip of his
cock, just gliding a finger over the hood, easy as I can.
He says, "Mmmm..." into the pillow, lets his
breath out slow.
Fucking Beecher is different and I'm not sure what
that's about because I've been in love often enough and I've fucked guys before
so maybe it's just Oz and this whole lockdown thing that's screwing with my
head. Maybe it's Beecher and the way he thinks only bad guys go to prison and
that he doesn't really belong and how he loves me anyway. If Beecher loves me
there must be something good about me, right?
I think I should tell him this, only it sounds stupid
when I hear it in my head, something you hear in the movies or on Oprah.
Instead, I reach for the grease: petroleum jelly.
Nothing it can't do. I work it around Beecher's ass and on the tip of my cock.
Beecher lifts his hips, impatiently, shifts his ass
against my groin. "For god's sake, Chris. What the fuck are you waiting
for?"
I'm enjoying making him squirm but it turns out I want
to be inside him just as much as he wants me in there. I slide in nice and
easy. Beecher makes an, "Ahhh," noise and his cheeks clench around
me. I fuck him nice and slow.
"Hey, Chris," he says, between breaths.
"Your first time - getting fucked in the ass - was it in jail?"
"Yeah," I say.
"Was it Schillinger?"
"Yeah." I push forward. Beecher raises his
hips up to meet me. I press my forehead to his back while I shift my position,
move my hips so my cock is in just the right spot. "But it was different.
I pretended I bought all that Aryan shit, made out like I looked up to him. He
wasn't such a big deal back then so he liked having a fan club."
"He treated you better."
"He treated me like a groupie."
"For how long?"
Schillinger stopped fucking me long before I'd
finished with him. I had plans to set
him up on a rape charge. I wanted to get caught in the act, though. No
squealing. I thought a rape would look good when it came for my parole. A
couple of sessions in rape counseling, a little crying over the consistency of
abuse in my life and there'd be some poor shrink giving evidence to the parole
committee about how much progress I'd made.
"Dunno," I say. "He found someone else
eventually. Of course I was deep in the brotherhood by then. I guess
Schillinger thought that was out of loyalty to the cause."
"Did it hurt? The first time?"
It always hurts the first time. Of course by the time I got to Schillinger I'd
fucked everything and anything so Schillinger didn't do me damage. That story
was a lie. Completely and totally. But it's what Beecher wants to hear, that we
have Schillinger in common, and we do because Schillinger burned his shit onto
me the same way he burned that swastika on Beecher's ass. It's just not the
kind of poetry Beecher is looking for.
"Of course it fucking hurt," I say.
"But it's over now, huh? Just you and me now, baby."
I lean back onto my knees, taking hold of Beecher's
hips and lifting him so that he's on his knees too. I fuck him hard and fast
now, finishing myself off in him while I wrap a hand around his cock and finish
him off too.
When it's done we fall onto the bed in a heap, Beecher
on his stomach watching the flashlights sweep past. "They're coming,"
he says.
"Fuck 'em," I say.
The hacks pass, don't even shine a light inside. The
entire sweep takes less than five minutes.
"This lockdown has to end soon," Beecher
says.
"Yeah," I say. I rest the back of my hand
against his face. I have a feeling things won't be the same after lockdown. But
I'm used to living for the moment so I don't think about it much.
*
The last story is one Beecher tells. It's after
everything. After he's back in jail, after I've begged him to take me back, after
I've struck a bargain with Schillinger to take Beecher down again, for old
times sake. It worked so well the first time after all.
I find him in the library. I sit down next to him,
look over his shoulder to see what he's reading. He's got his hand across the
top of the page, holding his place. "What do you want?" he says,
without looking up.
"What are you reading?"
"None of your fucking business."
"Come on, Toby," I say. I look toward the
door where two homeboys are leaning against the shelves, watching us. I lower
my voice. "You're not buying this alliance with Schillinger, are you? You
know I'm just playing him - for both of us."
Beecher closes his book. "Yeah? And how do I know
that? How do I know you're not playing me right now?"
"Why the fuck would I choose Schillinger over you?"
He laughs. "How the fuck should I know, Chris?
You haven’t told me anything true since we met."
"Toby…"
"I got a story for you," he says. He leans
forward a little, smiles like he knows a dirty secret. "When I was working
on your case, I did some research. I found your mom."
I feel the room go cold, like they turned off the
heating. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Your mom's in a psychiatric institution, Chris.
You know that because you used to visit her when you were young. You haven't
been there recently, but there are still people who remember you. Your
grandmother signed her in when you were twelve. Apparently she used to
disappear from home for days and then she'd come back like nothing had
happened. They next time she disappeared they found her near Thompson Street
where the hookers work the strip. They said she was a regular, although here's
the thing: she wasn't asking for money. She was giving it away, to anyone and
everyone."
"That's not true," I say. I clench my hands
together so tight I can feel my fingers tingling.
"She had psychotic episodes. She was fine for a
while when you were younger, but she got worse..."
"That's not fucking true! Who the fuck told you this crap?" I’m yelling.
The library hack starts over.
Beecher holds up his hands. “It’s okay,” he says.
“We’ll keep it down.”
The hack gives us a warning look and backs off.
Beecher looks sorry for a moment. His voice changes a
little. "You gave your previous counsel access to your juvenile records.
It's all in your file. Your grandmother gave evidence about your mother in
Children's Court."
I laugh bitterly. "My grandmother hated my
mother. She’d say anything to fuck her over."
Beecher gets up, tucks the book under his arm. "You told me your father
beat you. There's no father listed on your birth record."
"I had a stepfather."
"Your mother..." He looks me in the eye.
"Your mother got pregnant with you during a breakdown similar to the one
she had when you were twelve. She didn't know who your father was. You'll
probably never know who your father was."
He waits for me to say something. I don't look away.
He says, "Was anything you told me true?"
Does it matter? What's the truth ever done for anyone?
What's truth got that's so great? Maybe we believe lies because lies make sense
out of things that don't.
"I love you," I say. That part's true.
He shakes his head. "You don't even know what
that means." He walks away, leaves me alone while the two homeboys whisper
to each other near the door. They laugh and make lewd comments as Beecher
passes.
I sit a while amongst the books, thinking about how I
never read much. I wonder what would have happened if I'd read a book every now
and then, whether I would have learned something different to what I know now.
They say you get to a certain age where no one can teach you anything so I
figure it's too late to start.
I get up, leave the homeboys to the books and go back
to my pod.
When I tell this story, it ends here.
(End)