“Thought I’d see what you were working on,” I said.
“It’s my hustle back in the joint.” His was a common one for artistic types who get locked up—selling drawings and poems for others to send home.
“But here’s the deal, right?” said Tom. “Here’s my new angle—gay, erotic rap songs. Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t gay or nothing, but I can’t wait to get back to prison. I’m gonna clean up. It’s an untapped market.”
“So who’s the lady?” I asked, nodding to the tattoo on his chest.
“Karen,” he said. “Karen Sharon. She was my girl a long time ago, back before Cadillac. I used to have a lot of girls before that shit.”
Tom looked down at his page and nodded his head to the beat of his tapping pen. He continued drawing and I stared at the little details that made up Karen Sharon: her red lips, the long, clean neck, the slight rib lines below her breasts, then the wide, soft hips. There was that small patch of pubic hair, her knees, calves, and finally her thin ankles and dainty feet. The long hair that wrapped around Tom’s neck seemed curlier up close, less like a flowing river. Again, I felt the urge to reach across the table and touch her. She seemed so alive, like if I jabbed my finger at her open eye, she might reflexively close it.
She must have been a shallow woman to leave him after the accident. Then again, he probably wasn’t a model boyfriend either. I could have been projecting, though. Like all of us who’d wasted our time out there, he’d no doubt taken his life and relationships for granted. Now he was a man who couldn’t wait to get back to prison and make a killing in the gay rap market.
The soap opera—I think it was the one with the big hourglass—was ending. The kidnapped lady in the storage facility was about to die from a fire deliberately set by some contraption involving gasoline, dirty rags, and an alarm clock. The scene faded from a close-up of the ticking clock to a handsome couple toasting each other with champagne in a hotel bar. Then the credits rolled, and the sand slid through the hourglass again.
The next day I woke to Tom tapping his pen in some rhythm, occasionally looking up at the TV as if searching for rhymes for his gay rap. Volunteers from a nearby church brought by the squeaky book cart. Ricky picked an ancient-looking paperback and began reading it on his bunk. Domino woke up for a minute only to try to call someone on the phone.
I spent the morning waiting for the soap opera to come back on. And of course, the kidnapped lady left for certain death did not die. I knew she wouldn’t, so few of them ever do. It was the means of her escape I was waiting for. And at the last minute, she cut away the ropes with the prongs of her wedding ring, then ran out of the storage facility just seconds before the place was engulfed in flame. The beautiful couple in the hotel bar was arrested; the victim led the cops right to them and she smiled as they were cuffed. Through it all, she had only a dark smudge of soot on her cheek.
On the whole, it was a good day on TV. Earlier, a blue-haired old lady won thirty grand playing Plinko on The Price Is Right, then went on to win both showcases. At four o’clock, Oprah came on. Domino slept, but Tom, Ricky, and I watched Tracey Gold, former television star, recount her harrowing drunk-driving accident and arrest. “I didn’t even know I was drunk,” she said.
“Me neither,” said Ricky. “Let me out.”
In a later segment Oprah showed her audience that the one glass of wine they might have while playing cards at a friend’s house was actually equivalent to three shots of whiskey—because the glass of wine was filled to the top. “So watch out,” Oprah warned.
“Shit,” said Ricky. “Drunk-ass Tracey Gold damn near kills her kids in that wreck, and all I did was smoke a rock. I should be on Oprah, not in fucking jail.”
“Ain’t that some shit?” Tom said. We all nodded in agreement. It was some shit all right, though I’m sure we all had different ideas about what exactly that shit was.
The food in jail was usually good, and that night we enjoyed the best Kalamazoo County had to offer: chunks of dark-meat turkey stir-fried with vegetables in a soy sauce gravy. I watched Tom stir the tip of his spoon in the sauce, like he was mixing oil paint for a portrait. First he sniffed it, then he dabbed some on his tongue. “This cook really knows what she’s doing,” Tom said. “Just enough garlic and allspice.”
I wondered how Tom knew that the cook was a woman, and as always, Ricky came on cue. “How do you know a lady made it?”
“Come on,” Tom said. “Because it’s softer, warmer. It’s obvious. You taste things like that when you slow it down a little.”
“The fuck you mean slow it down?”
“I mean really taste it,” Tom said. “Close your eyes if you have to. Nobody tastes anything anymore. They just shovel, shovel, shovel. But man, food is just like wine—hold it in your mouth and concentrate, you can seriously taste the terroir of the ingredients.”
“Terr-what?” I asked.
“The taste of the land where the ingredients were grown.”
Ricky took a bite and smiled. “I taste something, all right. It tastes like a field and hay.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And a barn.”
“I think you guys are really getting it,” said Tom.
“And cows,” Ricky said. “At least what comes out of cows—very definitely some bullshit.”
Tom smiled. “Seriously, though. Maybe you can’t, but I can taste all those things. I can taste the earth that grew it, and I can taste the prayers of the lady who made it for us.”
The idea that someone might be praying for us shut us up and we ate. I tried to taste the softness Tom talked about, and prayers inside our sauce. Domino ate his quickly so he could go back to sleep.
The guard took our trays and I guess Tom figured he had a good seven minutes to get it done. He took the top linen sheet off his bunk and began twisting it into a rope. “Well, fellas,” he said, “I’m checking out of the K’zoo motel. I’ve had enough of this county shit—a man needs a coffee and cigarette after a meal like that. So after that guard walks past again, I’m going to sling this sheet up and get myself back to the joint. Once I’m up there, just hit the panic button.”
Tom sat shirtless on the picnic table bench and looped the end of the sheet onto itself. Karen Sharon moved and swayed as he worked; she seemed to gyrate with every pulse of his muscles as he tied the noose. Tom threw the sheet on his bunk. I felt nerves tingle in my hands and feet.
“If you on parole, you’re going back in a month anyway,” said Ricky. “You ain’t got to pull this fool shit over a cigarette.”
Tom either didn’t hear him or pretended not to hear. He glanced toward the bars and listened for the guard’s footsteps. I told myself the whole fake suicide would be just that and nothing more—it would go smoothly, and in just a few minutes, Tom would be gone and our cell would be peaceful again.
The guard stepped past and barely glanced inside. Tom picked up the sheet from his bunk. “Nice knowing you guys,” he said. He stood on the edge of the bench and tied the free end of his sheet around one of the long, horizontal slats of steel. He climbed up to the third steel slat, put the noose around his neck, and held on with a hand behind his back. With the lights behind him, all his green tattoos became dark, muddied blotches, and even Karen Sharon looked instantly older. I could see her as she was, after years of alcohol abuse and living with her shallow soul.
“Okay,” Tom said. “Hit it.”
Ricky and I didn’t move. Domino sat up and looked. The heels of Tom’s jail-issued flip-flops were wedged between the bars. Tom tightened the noose, then looked at each of us and let go with the hand behind his back. The top half of his body inched