The Contortionist's Handbook Read online

  “John Vincent,” says the cop standing in front of me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t yeah me. Yes, sir. No, sir. Now, John Vincent.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He smiled, leaned right into my face, all mustache, nose hair and chili breath, said I know your daddy.

  SEVEN

  Mom showed up twelve hours later with bail. My court date came three weeks after, Leap Day of 1972. The judge handed me twelve weeks of probation for a first offense, said Don’t show your face in my courtroom again.

  I’d spent only half a day in jail that first time, had all but walked away from spitting on a cop. I still hadn’t learned to be invisible. On my way home from school the following Monday, some high-school kids stopped me on a side street beside a vacant lot. They outnumbered me five to one. Three were on foot, two on bicycles, so none of them were any older than fifteen. They took their cues from a heavy kid a head taller than me, and they knew who I was.

  “Hey Johnny,” he said, “show us your hand.”

  I did, gave him the finger.

  “You just flip me off?” He stepped up to me, in my face and ready to fight, and all I could think was how much smaller he was than those cops.

  I shook my head.

  “I saw you give me the finger,” and he pushed me backwards but didn’t knock me over. Years of this, knowing what Dad would do, my heart didn’t even speed up.

  “How do you know it was the right finger?” I asked.

  When your nose breaks, you can hear a half-second cartilage creak like a dry branch breaking loose from its own weight, then a thousand fibrous snapping sounds in auto-fire succession. It echoes inside your ears like your whole skull coming loose. Then you’re on the ground, sidewalk impact making you momentarily blind and putting a lump on the back of your head. I’ve had my nose broken twice. No accidents, I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut. After a time, you get a feel for how people fight and why. He hadn’t expected to connect like he did, and he hadn’t expected my tolerance, either, hadn’t expected me to stand right back up with an empty glass bottle, hot in my fist from baking in the sun. They ran, and I went home bleeding down the front of my clothes.

  Doctors were always a last resort with Dad. Nothing pissed him off like spending money on a doctor to find out nothing. It’s going around. Lots of rest and fluids is best for this sort of thing. If it gets any worse, come on back. Shelly fell from a stepladder onto the kitchen floor, fell four and a half feet. She lay in bed for five weeks with ice packs and bootleg pills from Dad to kill her pain. She could finally walk with a limp and went back to school. The limp stayed for good. One month later she started bleeding nonstop, two weeks before her period. The doctor told her she couldn’t have any children. I think Dad’s drinking worsened when he realized that maybe he could have found help for Shelly sooner than he did, or Mom for that matter, two years later.

  But Dad was gone, so Mom took me to the hospital where they set my nose, and she never said anything to the school or the cops because I was still on probation and I would have gone straight back to jail.

  ———

  1974, I was fourteen and hanging out with Louis. Louis was at the tail end of a chain of kids who paid me for signatures or papers, a friend of a friend of a customer. Louis had dropped out of high school five years previous, cleaned swimming pools for a living, sold pills, and hung out with the high-school kids to whom he sold. Louis had a studio apartment full of beanbag chairs, monster stereo, and centerfold models pinned to the corkboard walls. Louis liked having me around, thought my hand was cool. He’d take a gurgling suck on a water pipe and pass it to a customer, some football jock or rich kid with his girlfriend. Louis would give them steep discounts and lots of samples, trying to get them both to pass out, but for different reasons.

  The guy would do a hit and Louis would say Johnny, lift up your hand, then to the guy, How many fingers you see? and spit smoke through his nose trying not to laugh. That’s some good shit, yeah? Every time. But Louis was the most painless way to unload whatever I was lifting from the record stores and everywhere else. He paid cash and didn’t ask questions. And hanging with him, the others left me alone.

  Louis was seeing some girl who was too young to drink, and he wanted me to fix her ID, so I did. I’d never done it before, but changing the birth date on her driver’s license was easy, so I started working on others, from scratch in the print shop after school. I matched a random string of first and last names out of the phone book, decided on Christopher Thorne and made him seventeen years old, with my face, my stats and a signature I’d composed out of thin air. There was no logic to the license number and the address was pure fiction, but the craftsmanship was flawless.

  “Shit,” Louis said later, “you’re good.”

  We’d gone out for burgers one night, drove for an hour before the first stop so the places and faces were new to me. Louis was hitting arcades and drive-ins, making rounds with his customers. This is Chris, he’d say.

  And the first time he introduced me that way, I slid into a booth by some pinball machines with a group of his friends and customers all two or three years older than me, sat right down like I belonged because they didn’t know John Vincent, the eleven-fingered kid who used to be in Special Ed, they only knew Chris Thorne. Being somebody else, only in name, was like wearing a mask at a party—I could do anything and nobody would know it was me.

  Saturday, everyone’s on the nod at Louis’s place. Again, I’m eyeing the cheap lockbox on his shelf (32R-17L-26R) wondering how much is in there. But I couldn’t do it. He’d always done right by me. Among his loose cash and anonymous phone numbers was a prescription slip, carbon triplicates with a red-white zigzag pattern on the back, made out to a woman with Louis’s last name—his mother—for Dilaudid.

  “Can you do it?” Louis asked me. He’d stolen it from his mother’s house, said something vague about her chronic illness, and that he wanted to get it back that afternoon and would pay me well if I could do it quickly. I said I’d try. I kept stencils, razors, glue and correction tape at his place because I wouldn’t be able to stash them at home. Dad had propped a sheet of drywall between loose cinderblocks to cut the bedroom in half so that Shelly and I could share it. I got the side with the door, she got an extra twelve feet square. My half of the room was scarcely bigger than my mattress on the floor, with enough extra space for a milk crate of books and two trash bags of laundry, clean and dirty.

  The turntable dropped the next record—I’d put on Iggy and the Stooges, Raw Power—while everyone slept, smoked, stared at the ceiling or off-key strummed one of the Telecasters Louis owned that I never saw him play. I started on the stolen prescription, line by line, layer by layer, my head contracting into that zone where I’m not hiding my fingers or wondering if someone’s staring at me or standing confounded by an obvious question in front of class. I finished four altogether, between knocks at the door, Louis shaking hands and holding muffled conversations with visitors who never came in.

  Lettering took the longest. Years later, I’d assemble my own supply of vintage typewriters, ribbons, paper samples, laminating machines, custom inks, rubber stamps, and bootleg watermarking and embossing tools. But back then, I had to settle on transfer letters that I retouched with a mechanical pencil.

  “Perfect.” Louis held up the replica to his face.

  “No, it’s not,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I took the specimen, started pointing out minutiae with the corner of a razorblade.

  “I need to better match these typefaces,” I said, “and this serial number, I just made it up. I’ve got no idea how the sequence works. I don’t have the tools to create the perforation or the watermark, and these registration marks are way off.” I could tell that I’d already lost him.

  “I’ll put the original back,” he said, “and we can still use these.”

  “No, we cannot still use these,” I said.
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  Louis pleaded, argued, bartered, then capitulated, helping me clean up every paper scrap and specimen, burned them all on a sheet of foil.

  ———

  September 1974, I was fifteen, starting the tenth grade. I’d boosted a bottle of bourbon for Louis and me, and he let me drive his car as part of the deal. Deep-sea blue GTO, liquid-shiny with an idle that felt like a cold boil moving through your bones. I was black-out drunk and sidewinder weaving across four lanes, Louis laughing in the passenger seat.

  My memory jump-cuts to the breakdown lane with the bone-boiling engine off, window down, hands on the wheel, light in my face. License and registration. Too drunk to know better, I handed over my Christopher Thorne ID. It looked legit, but didn’t hold up when the number was called in. Two years had passed, but the judge had a good memory. My second juvenile offense got me thirty days in the Hall and twelve months of probation.

  Those thirty days were a crash course that sank halfway in. I learned that you came from a gang or joined one, and fast, or faded into the background if you valued your skin. If you didn’t fade out or join up, you’d be singled out for a sport beating or to do courier work for the gangs’ contraband traffic and shanked if you came up short or didn’t cooperate at all. I learned that guards did not like to repeat themselves and had the patience of mad dogs, that protesting made your life worse than cooperating, which made your life hell, and that any expression other than bravado would get you stomped, especially any expression of fear or sadness.

  I learned to keep to myself, stay in my cell and practice my moves with a deck of cards I’d bought from the commissary, do crunches and push-ups to burn off the cabin fever.

  I learned that predators don’t intentionally choose the weak or old or sick. They kill what they can, which means the slow members of the pack. Thus, they strengthen the very gene pool they’re feeding from. The threshold for what is weak, old or sick gets raised, and the strength, speed and instincts of new generations of hunters grow. A beautiful, self-perpetuating system where evolution is the antithesis of entropy.

  My first day, I remember being hit by the noise, the concrete cacophony rebounding off metal, tile and rock inside the main gallery—radios, televisions, shouting matches over card games, domino games or shower passes all trying to be heard over each other. It was the same background noise I’d heard whenever Dad called home when I was younger, that I thought was the noise of gold miners.

  County Youth Authority sequestered nonviolent offenders in a separate block. Most were plenty more street-smart than I but didn’t have the brains God gave a tree stump. Jeremy had the lower bunk in my assigned cell, where I’d been sentenced for the next thirty days before entering my probation. Shorter than I was but much heavier, Jeremy wore his hair in a sandy mop cut that hung over his eyes. I couldn’t tell their color, narrow slits surrounded by puffy lids like he’d spent his life squinting through security peepholes in his own face. If the Hall was a microsystem of predators and prey, then Jeremy was a mollusk, fixed in place and squinting suspicious, mute, at any initiated conversation. He ignored me if I spoke, face buried in a comic book, so much so that he startled me whenever he said anything. I never found out what he was in for.

  “Can I borrow that when you’re finished?” I asked.

  No response, he kept turning pages, returned his comics to whatever envelope they’d been mailed in (by whom, I never knew), kept those under his mattress.

  “You done yet?” was the first thing he ever said to me, while I was brushing my teeth at the sink. I held up a finger, just a minute, finished up, said, “I’ve got plenty of toothpaste, if you need any.”

  He said nothing else, no response to my offer. He removed his own toothbrush and toothpaste from a rolled-up brown paper sack sealed with tape that had been tucked inside his pillow. He brushed his teeth, returned his toiletries to the paper sack, carefully reaffixed the tape and placed them back inside his pillow. He left for the mess hall without a word. That was Jeremy.

  I passed the time dealing Twenty One to a blank wall, practiced memorizing up cards, running high-low count in my head. With four weeks of time on my hands and an antisocial cell mate, I got good, and I was getting better at reading people. Not intuitively, I don’t have that. But if I watched them long enough, I could number their actions and words, work out equations for them.

  A person’s life story is equal to what they have plus what they want most in the world, minus what they’re actually willing to sacrifice for it. You find out those things about someone and you’ll know almost everything. The fractional numbers are their headshakes, facial tics or finger movements they don’t realize they’re doing, and they all add up if you can spot them.

  I made just enough off the other kids in my block for an extra soda or candy bar or magazine. No point in winning too much, the gang kids would take it. They hung out near the commissary during yard time to see how much you were spending. You had to pay to get through them if you wanted anything. I did, they left me alone. I practiced one-handed cuts and shuffles, bottom deals and the rest in my cell, so I wouldn’t end up practicing in the infirmary, and rat-holed extra scrip in my sock for when I got out. And aside from the card games, I worked hard not to be noticed. Maybe that’s all Jeremy was trying to do, not be noticed, be invisible.

  Gen. Pop. mixed in the gallery, the ground level of the Hall’s atrium of cells and catwalks: gymnasium chairs, card tables, ping-pong tables and television. We lined up there for morning roll call, cell inspections and chore assignments. I was short-time, so I got assigned library duty. I spent mornings shelving returns and cleaning—it got inspected daily before noon. Morning chores followed breakfast. Then lunch, mail call and free time.

  I had a game running one afternoon. Jeremy sat by himself in a chair at the far edge of the television viewing area, reading a white sheet from a white envelope, both typed, so far as I could see. No seal or letterhead, and by his reaction I could tell it was personal, bad news from home. He set the letter onto an empty chair beside him, dug the heels of his palms into his eyes, just once.

  Say what? someone shouted. Check it! Whoops and jeers took flight like a flock of startled crows, then spit wads and clapping from a circle of inmates surrounding Jeremy in an instant. Two COs broke up the taunting, sent Jeremy back to his cell. My cell. His eyes were wet, I saw them for the first time when he looked my way before hiding behind his moppy hair. They were brown. I ducked back to the shit hand—pair of sevens—I’d been dealt.

  Hey, a CO stopped him. Here, and handed Jeremy the letter he’d left behind. The catcalls and jeers chased him all the way up to our deck.

  The following afternoon, I left the library early with a shower pass, on my way to check out a towel and shaving kit. The library had one of the biggest blinds between it and the gallery. Because so few kids ever wanted to read, it was a low security priority. I rounded a corner into the blind, saw a tight ring of kids from the other blocks. Some had their orange coveralls open, hanging off their shoulders or undone to the waist. It took me a second to read it, then I caught a flicker of Jeremy’s face, nosebleed mixing with hot tears, then the gap in the ring closed. Keep walking, one of them said to me, and I did.

  Showered, back in my cell, I stared at an astronomy book for seventy minutes and never read a word. Jeremy stayed gone. The same pictures of nebulae bounced off my eyes while an ice block sat in my stomach. Jeremy was moved to the infirmary that afternoon, and I didn’t see him after that. A CO tapped the bars, said Warden wants to see you.

  “Sit down, Johnny,” said the Warden. I’d never met the Warden. Only Mom and Dad called me Johnny.

  “I spoke with your father earlier.” He relaxed in a high-backed leather chair, held a thin gold pen between both thumbs and forefingers like some delicate appetizer.

  “He tells me your mother has cancer. The doctors have removed it, but still need to find out if it’s spread. That’s all I know.” A nod to his office door summoned a CO to
escort me back.

  “Your father said he’d come visit on Thursday and tell you everything.”

  I shaved that Thursday morning, put on my clean coveralls that I’d pressed under my mattress overnight. I practiced my cuts, cuffs, palms and clips—some of the moves that got me jailed to begin with—waiting for Dad. He never showed up, and I didn’t see him until I got out.

  Twenty days later, in cuffs, my toes on the yellow tape three feet in front of an acrylic security window, I signed a property slip through the one-by-six cutout. House key, wallet (minus Chris Thorne’s license), watch—Stole this, didn’t you?—sunglasses, and pack of gum. My scrip, redeemed at fifty cents on the dollar, came to thirty-eight bucks. The Property Officer slid a brown envelope through a bank teller window, buzzed me through another door. Follow the yellow line. A stone box of a room, two COs gargoyle-perched in the corners while I changed back into my street clothes that were folded on a locker room bench—stovepipe jeans, canvas running shoes, New York Dolls T-shirt, and my windbreaker. Cuffed once again—holding out my wrists was reflex at this point—they lead me through two more buzz-locked security doors, calling my name into an intercom both times.

  “Vincent, John Dolan.”

  “Vincent, John Dolan,” repeated the intercom.

  At the second door, they uncuffed me, and I stepped through it with free hands into the waiting room—cops, plastic chairs, soda and cigarette machines, waiting families. Dad wasn’t there.

  “See ya real soon,” they said, closed the door behind me.

  EIGHT

  I walked outside, heard a car horn. The October morning shone bright but cold, the sky a luminous blue, and the wind froze my ears and fingertips and the sun bounced off puddles in the pocked asphalt outside. The car honked again, it was Dad. He didn’t like being there.

  He drove a brown Ranchero that I hadn’t seen before, the passenger-side door buckled from a collision—whether Dad’s or the previous owner’s was even money—idling with the uneven rumble of a machine about to die. I’d gone longer, much longer, than thirty-day stretches without seeing Dad, but this was the first time he looked truly unfamiliar to me. I remembered pieces—greasy black hair, green-blue spider webs, eagles, flags, HD, and skulls staining his forearms, and the inscription 131/2 on the back of his left hand. I never wanted tattoos, never wanted any more distinguishing marks than what I’d been born with.