Pain Killers by Jerry Stahl Read Free Book Online Page B

tendon and gave me a little hair-tussle. I wanted to believe the hair-muss was some traditional CO “Now you’re one of us” maneuver—like when mafiosi gang-kissed a newly made man or Skull and Bones lay naked in coffins while John Kerry urinated on them. But I suspected it meant I was a bitch.
     
     
     

Chapter

5
     
     
Wine in a Box
     
     
    Back in my snailback, I slapped the stack of intake files on the kitchen table—yellow for violent crimes, red for non, though it seemed like it should be the other way around. That’s how
I’d
have done it.
    A lady police therapist once told me that control issues were really just fear of lack of control disguised as power. She interviewed me when I asked for a stress-related early pension, about a thousand years ago. She was very sincere. I asked if what she meant was that all strong people were weak. Was all power just fear of powerlessness in disguise?
    Something I said must have moved her. Or else she was just lonely. Suddenly, she tiptoed around her desk, dropped to her knees and performed frantic, bristly fellatio while I studied the adorable kitten-tangled-in-yarn painting over her desk. In retrospect, I wondered if it was painted by a convict.
If I were a child molester,
I remember thinking when she put me in her mouth,
I’d paint kittens.
With that unwanted insight, my prospects shriveled, I showed the impulsive mental health professional the love and respect I felt for her by shrinking in her mouth. Sometimes women are as romantic as men. Beside the kitten, I noticed a black and white picture of Fabio. Signed. I couldn’t make out the inscription, but it looked meaningful. If the kittens hadn’t killed my erection, the sight of Fabio stomped on it with man sandals.
    At the end of the session, the police therapist informed me that I had problems.
    Two weeks later, I got the dread POP letter, the Police Officer Pension Board. They voted to deny. Citing, as a key factor, the therapist’s assessment that I was trying to “use the system.” All this happened before I actually quit the force—after I met Tina, nearly became a congressman, fucked things up and began my stellar career as an independent investigation professional on the West Coast.
    Now I sat hunched in the sticky kitchenette, facing inmate files and breathing mold spores. I couldn’t tell what made the furniture sweat, if the moisture came from within, oozing out, or vice versa. Wherever I sat there was a sodden
thwop
and squish, like the sound a shoe makes stepping on a snail in a puddle.
    The first file I needed to see was Mengele’s. If it
was
Mengele. I reached for the stack—then stopped myself.
    Until now, I had focused on everything but the simple reality of sitting across from a real-life Josef Mengele. I suddenly realized my naïveté. You couldn’t just pull up a chair and start chatting with an evil legend.
    You had to prepare.
    But how
could
you prepare?
    I pushed the files away. Then pulled them back toward me again.
    I have never done a brave thing in my life when I had time to think about it first. And this moment was no exception. I didn’t know if I was more scared that the Butcher of Auschwitz would be here or that he wouldn’t. So, instead of bold action, I decided to kick back and give in to the ball sweat, palpitations and shortness of breath of a well-earned panic attack.
    I had put my trust in an old man who broke into my home, berated me, showed me some two-bit celebrity candids and beat me with his handicap appliance before offering me a job.
    But why obsess on past idiocies with the good times to come? What if I met Mengele and just lost it? Started to cry? Or what if all this was a front and I was actually being
delivered
to him? Like a lab animal. How did I know he still wasn’t doing experiments? Maybe my own shoe-leather liver—the third of three transplants, thanks for asking—would be used for some infernal, Mengele-esque purpose. They kept putting them in,