The Mars Room(38)

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The guys at Rampart referred to the Bulgarian girl as Doc’s mail-order bride, but no one from the outside ever understands about two people and why they get together. He was twenty-three years old, a rookie just out of the Police Academy. She asked him for directions on the street. He liked her dimples and how she could barely speak English. He gave her a ride where she was going and got her phone number. She was like an orphan in a huge unknown country. Doc adopted her, for a while, and she was good at cooking and cleaning. But she sulked a lot, and he realized quiet people can control you just as effectively as loud ones. They do it differently is all. He got tired of the sulking and crying and ended it.

He was divorced at age twenty-seven and planned never to marry again. He enjoyed women and had quite a few. Didn’t love any of them. Had not loved the mail-order bride. Ten years after his divorce, he met Betty LaFrance and fell for her. Fell hard, for this woman who neither cooked nor cleaned and made a great deal of noise when he fucked her, although it might have been theater, and what was the difference? In what way would such a difference matter? The point was to get off.

In a twisted way he misses Betty, even if he would love to have her murdered. He’s tried, but it seems impossible. She’s on death row and there is no way to get at her because women are too stupid to commit inspired acts of prison violence. In a men’s joint you can put a hit on anybody. People will do it for cup of noodle. They’ll kill for payment in bars of Irish Fucking Spring (smells good, makes a good jerk lather). But the only women who can get to Betty are the other sad psychos on death row, who probably lie around whining and crying, while the men exhibit resourceful qualities like filing a locker hinge to a chest-immolating point, or embedding a razor in a toothbrush handle so they can tomahawk someone’s face off.

Betty, though, was a can-do broad, unlike most broads. In a way it was why he’d liked her. If he needed to put out a hit, Betty would be the one female who might be capable of such a thing, but since she was the target it wasn’t an option.



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Betty used to nag him that his women issues were a mother issue. But what did Betty know about Doc’s mother? Doc himself knew little, since he’d only lived with his mother until age five. He remembered asking her what she did for her job because she was always bringing him to strange men’s homes and leaving him to sit on a couch by himself for what felt like small eternities. “Favors,” she’d told him. “I do favors.”

Betty had said she wanted his baby but it turned out her uterus was broken. Or maybe his cock was broken. He means it worked fine for fucking, but she didn’t get pregnant even though he aimed his scrizzle inside her plenty of times for the sake of a possible Doc junior. (Normally, Doc would prefer to ejaculate on a body, or, ideally, a face.)

Horse walks into a bar.

Horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”

Rub it one hundred times. The hilarity of that joke never dimmed for Doc, even though sometimes you wanted to do the rubbing all on your lonesome. In prison there’s little choice in whose hand beyond your own unless you want another man grabbing your cock. He once gave a hand job in here and if you’re a not-gay man and you’ve never done it, whoa are you in for a surprise. Another man’s erect cock to a straight guy feels like a root vegetable. Women are used to it and every guy knows the feel of his own hard cock, but with your own, you don’t feel it, you make it feel. When Doc touched someone else’s member, somewhat like his own, but not his own, it sent him into biofeedback brain-scramble. He pulled his hand away and did not go through with the act. It was one of those powder puff softball trannies. She was a pretty Latin honey, and he wanted her to beg and whimper and throw her head back like an actual lady might. It would be something different in a place where there is almost no variation from day to day, but then the chick had a huge erection in her pants and he doesn’t like to think about it, but sometimes he lets himself think about it, to remember not to do it again.

The only penis he touches is his own. He is touching it now. Most men whack off most days. Then you wipe away the tears, the evidence, and everyone knows, and no one knows, and the truth is, you actually cannot hear that kind of activity on a collective or choral scale in Doc’s unit. The stroking and jerking are just something Doc assumes, which is how many kinds of knowledge function: you don’t wait for the empirical evidence. In this case you don’t want it, either. You know. You just know.



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Betty had this way of challenging him to be a son of a bitch. She liked low-down dirty people and had a special thing for cops. She and Doc drank a lot, did a lot of cocaine. Betty liked to eat hers. He never had met anyone else who did that, ate cocaine; he himself preferred the efficiency of injecting it.

Coked up and in love, he had stupidly assured her he was the dirtiest of cops. It was how they related. It was pillow talk. Stupid words people say to each other in the sack, about various abuses of their power, shit they got away with, people they’d killed.

Betty, facing the death penalty, dredged forth everything Doc had ever told her. He was convicted for the killing of Betty’s original contract killer, and for another contract killing he’d been involved in years earlier, of the manager of a gentleman’s club. But there were two more people whom he’d wasted, although they had no proof on those, could not convict. One was a guy no one misses. The scumbag had just raped his own five-year-old son. A neighbor, fed up with the abuse, had called 911. Doc was the first officer to arrive on the scene, guy wasn’t even done zipping up his pants. Kid crying, bleeding from his anus. Doc told the suspect to relax, and as soon as he put his hands down Doc started firing.