Reggie joined AA just so he could get up in front of a bunch of guys and tell the story about all the blowjobs he got from Andy McGowan’s sister.  

He wasn’t even an alcoholic. Everyone knows how many lies go down in meetings.  Guys will build up grandiose tales of how bad their years of using were before they wound up in the joint: I was jacked on Hawaiian Ice, climbed a light post, got in a shootout with the cops. When they shot me down, I had a real moment of clarity before I hit the pavement. I am a grateful addict-slash-alcoholic, prison saved my life – blah blah, crap like that. They deliver it in a humble tone but what they’re really saying is check me out, I’m Audie fucking Murphy.

Reggie was different though. You could tell his story was mostly true because it was so preposterous from the get go. Short of going to a professional with very low standards, there’s no way a guy with his level of acne – which was like barnacles on the Exxon Valdez – getting a hummer from anybody, not even some blind chick. Who would want to listen to a story like that?  The visual you’d get would be enough to make you sterile. But there’s not as much sex in prison as some people think. When you’ve been locked down with a bunch of dudes for twelve years with no prospect of a conjugal visit or even a horny Skype session, you’d listen to your own mother’s blowjob stories. 

There’s this Wednesday night meeting here in the prison called Thugs Not Drugs. It’s a closed meeting. That’s a 12 step joke. Reggie would get up there as often as possible at the behest of the crowd and tell this story over and over again until everyone had memorized it. They say what goes on in those meetings stays in those meetings, but let’s be real. Everything in prison—including the stories—wants to get out. Reggie’s going to be in here for-fucking-ever but I figure his story should get credit for time served and get sprung now.   

Reggie made it pretty clear from the start that he was nobody. Twenty some years old, had never left North Hollywood. Lived with his mom in a little apartment up by the Von’s supermarket at Coldwater and Ventura. They got by on some kind of public assistance because she was a garden variety nutcase and he was her caretaker. He only left once. That was to go to Oklahoma to his dad’s funeral which he said was quote a complete waste of time unquote.  

Ugly or no, he did have a few women who gave him attention. The drag queens from the Queen Mary just up Ventura for instance. It sounds like they just loved him. Don’t even laugh. Have you seen the men of the Queen Mary? I don’t care what your sexual bent is, those guys could raise the pecker on a jellyfish. They were kind to him, patted his hand, asked him how he was, listened while he stuttered and blushed, blew him kisses – and meant it! – when he’d walk by on his way to get mom a pack of Newports.  

It was one of them that put the whole romantic notion of seeing the world in his head.  Two of them, actually: Holly Mackerel and Tess Tosterone. These girls had seen him up at the Walgreen’s at the magazine rack reading Conan the Barbarian and Prince Valiant reprints. I can just see it. They could tell from the way his lips moved when he read and how he stood there entranced by each issue, how the greeter probably would have had to tap him on the shoulder three times to draw his attention to the sign that said “purchase the magazines before reading”—well, that’s how they knew for sure he was made for greater stuff.

So they pulled him in the back door one night, did their own version of an intervention: baptized him with Fuzzy Navels after last call. Holly was the one who waxed all poetic with the Edna St. Vincent Millay thing: Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost, but climb. Tess dropped cold truth: little man, your mama’s crazy as a cut snake and if you don’t get your thick greezy behind up out of here, you’re gonna wind up just like her.  

When he saw that Penny Saver ad about building houses up here on the last frontier it spoke to him like a burning bush.  What had he done with his whole life up to that point except breathe his mom’s second hand smoke, get her pills, wrangle her when she got loose, promise the neighbors she wouldn’t get in their closet again?  Explain to her time and again that if the guy who lived under the sink was really going to kill her he would’ve done so a long time ago? And why did he drop out of high school except to fix her baloney sandwiches, do her laundry, scrub out her bathroom, keep her pickled, make sure she had a handle or two of Popov within reach. If she was tanked on vodka and Zyprexa at least she’d sit still and stop smacking her lips and doing that wormy thing with her arms quite so much. 

You can’t blame a person for being schizophrenic. He truly didn’t. However, you can blame them for all the years before their break with reality that they beat you with the Maplewood spoon or used every single word they uttered to convince you that you were a bag of shit.  
 
He didn’t waste any time calling on the Penny Saver ad. The lady from the Alaska State Housing Authority said just get here; we’ll put you to work. He went to the bank and withdrew everything he’d shaved off the government salami over the years.  Then he went home and gave his mom her last Zyprexa. He figured he’d be long gone by the time it wore off, and when it did, she’d just have to wander up the street and make herself somebody else’s problem. Then he caught a cab to LAX and bought a standby ticket to the last frontier.

Six connections and twenty hours of flying later he was in Bethel, Alaska. Anybody doesn’t know where that is, it’s about six hundred miles deep in the bush. Or as some old timers say, well you just go to straight to Hell and Gone and then turn left. Four thousand people mostly native, most of them alcoholics, or more accurately Sterno-holics because alcohol is illegal up there. Twelve thousand dogs. And two million dollars worth of ASHA funding. It was boom times for shoddy housing, the men who built it, and the bootleggers who served them. The first two foreign words you learn are gussuq – white man – and oosik -- the term for a walrus’s penis bone. You get called one or the other by the locals.

Reggie was told that somebody, the ASHA project foreman, would meet him at the terminal. Sure enough, after he sat there for an hour or two here comes this fiercely handsome black Irish fellow who looked like a cross between Colin Ferrel and Lucifer. Strode right up to him, says, “You Reggie? I’m Andy McGowan.”  Second thing he says is, “Goddamn boy. Did your mom fuck a pizza?” Reggie guessed that meant they were pals. When he saw Andy take a handful of beef sticks from the snack cart in the terminal without paying for them, he knew he for sure that he had allied himself with a man of purpose and consequence.

As they drove into town, Andy explained to Reggie what he could expect from the job—lots of simple, mindless work, just don’t fuck up and hammer your thumb—and what he could expect from Bethel—sandwiches that cost fifteen bucks and zero poontang. He elaborated on the last part by explaining that the ratio of men to women in Alaska was cruelly inverse. Women pretty much had their pick of whoever they wanted. “You don’t lose your girlfriend up here,” Andy said, “you just lose your turn.” Andy spoke of the tundra like it was his enemy.

On the approach to the airstrip, Reggie had seen the tundra: a vast sponge of mosses that extended off the edge of the horizon. He’d soon learn that to walk on it was like walking on the moon—you moved in big squishy bounces—and that it was absolute crap to try to build anything on. You had to put down a sand pad first, and then drive pilings down through the pad, the tundra, and the permafrost. Then you prop a house up on it and hope the pilings didn’t melt the permafrost and send the whole business ass over oosik into the mud.  It was not beyond possible that you might see a house fall off its pilings, or worse still, have one fall apart underneath you. 

Andy dropped Reggie off at the labor barracks, a couple temporary housing units parked side by side. They’re those things with wheels that look like travel trailers with way too many doors on one side. Each room in there was about the size of a monk’s cell. There was a mess truck, too, and a public shower somewhere that would give you ten minutes of hot water for five bucks. Better still it had flush toilets which were a luxury not all of the houses out there had. Most people out there were still doing their filthy business in chamber pots that they’d dubbed “honey buckets”. All told it was pretty Spartan, but to Reggie it was freaking Nirvana. On his first night there, a June night that was nothing more than a long twilight, he stepped away from the barracks and right up to the edge of the tundra. He leaned on a four foot breaker bar like it was a nine foot Claymore, and took in all that glory like he owned it. 

Next day he rolled out to the work site with Andy and found out all he’s gonna do all day is tack soffits up under these shitty ASHA houses that they’re putting on sand pads. Average ASHA house is about 400 square feet or the size of a standard American living room. You gotta lay on your back under one of these things with a nail gun and just bam bam bam bam all day long.  You don’t put soffits under these sumbitches, the fifty below winter wind comes in between the piling and the bottom of the house and freezes the shit out of you, your honey bucket, the cat, the toddler and anything the hell else that comes in contact with the floor. It’s necessary work, but as boring snail fuck. That’s the term Andy used to describe it, anyway. Not that any of us have actually seen snails fucking, but if you’ve nailed soffits then you’ve witnessed it by proxy.
  
Every day it’s the same routine. Andy picks Reggie up at the barracks, runs him out to the site, bam bam bam bam, brings him home after the job. After about a dozen long-ass days of doing this, they’re getting pretty tight. Andy’s got Reggie in the truck every day, amazing the boy with his exploits on the last frontier. One night on the ride home he says hey, I gotta stop by this guy’s house, this guy Larry Williams, because this motherfucker owes me money. And Reggie’s like okay, because what else is he gonna do, right? Andy goes up and bangs on this freezer van with a door that Larry Williams is using for a house. No answer. Andy comes back to the truck and says get the breaker bar out the back. Reggie gives it to him. Andy walks right up to the house and pop pop pop! Takes the door right off the hinges. Walks in the house and comes back out with like a half rack of Four Roses. Hollers at Reggie, says “Help me with this.” Reggie walks up and sees that the house is filled floor to ceiling with cases of booze. It’s staggering. Reggie dutifully helps him unload just about the whole thing except four or five cases. Andy tells him to leave those, says that it’ll prove Williams had more than he needed for personal use, but Reggie doesn’t even understand why that’s important. Then they take the haul and drive it out to an unfinished ASHA house and commence doing something that Reggie had never done before and that is get shit-hammered. They laugh like pirates. “Who’s he gonna tell?” Andy howls. Reggie howls right along with him. I bet he didn’t even know why. 

On the drive out to the site the next morning, Andy says “I got a sister. She’s coming into town tonight.” Says, “I think she might like you. Why’n’t you come over for dinner?” Of course Reggie hadn’t really planned on anything except maybe heating some Chef Boyardee over a can of Sterno and eating it with a spork, but now—goddamn! He’s gonna meet an actual girl. And not just any girl, the ruggedly handsome boss man’s sister. There’s only one way you prepare for an event as marvelous as that: with a fifteen dollar shower and a whole tube of fleshtone Clearasil. He covered his poor, wretched hide with so much of that stuff that he damn near looked like a mannequin. Then Andy called to tell him that he was gonna be twenty minutes late picking him up. Poor Reggie, the Clearasil’s starting to harden to the point where he’s afraid to move his mouth, he says, “I don’t know. I can’t look this good for that long.” 

So Andy eventually brings the truck around and gets Reggie who by this point is terrified of moving his head at all for fear of having his face flake off. Quick note: All of the roads in Bethel have the texture of a World War One battlefield. So as they drive to Andy’s, the truck is jerking and humping over the landscape while Reggie is trying to hold his head in the full rigor position and failing miserably. Chips were starting to fly away. It must’ve looked from the outside of the truck like Andy was transporting a life-sized GI Joe that had come down with a wicked case of leprosy.

They made it to Andy’s house without having Reggie lose too much of his face, and they walk into the living room and sitting there with her back to them is Andy’s sister. Andy, with a sweeping gesture toward her, says, “Reggie, this is my sister.” And she turns around, and when he sees her, bless his heart, he is smitten. His face blooms red under all that spackle. His heart swells with boldness and purpose and desire. A dream dares to drive pilings into the sand pad of his soul and erect a tiny ASHA house where the two of them might someday live. Although his being is possessed with this vision of this woman, he’s still somehow able to extend a firm hand to her, a grasp which she gladly returns. And he says to her, “Hello, I’m Reginald.” And then his chin falls off.   

Spoiler: Chin or no, she fucked him anyway. There was all this bad porn dialogue—not from him, from her, according to the way he tells it—sometime after Andy had excused himself from the room. Yeah sure she allegedly told him, “There’s more where this came from, big boy” and could lick her own nipples—this was before he even crossed the room to join her on the couch – but let’s not even talk about that. The important part is where her arms locked around him afterwards and her face crushed into the upper left part of his chest and she hung there like a sloth baby and slept. The other part is where he didn’t take a shower for two days after even though he could afford it and he snuck a smell of her every chance he got between nail gun salvos.

That’s how it started. Andy didn’t even bother taking Reggie back to the work barracks any more. Just brought Reggie home with him and dropped him off. Didn’t even bother coming in the house. Just let Reggie out and went somewhere else.  Reggie would walk through the door, she’d say “Hi honey, how was your day” and the next thing he knew she’d be working away down there, her little head hammering in and out like Woody goddamn Woodpecker.

Where it got really sweet is where they started holding hands in addition to all the knob gobbling. Andy started giving Reggie the truck so he’d take her here and there, wherever. Weren’t too many places to go but they got to all of them: the dump, the airport, Lousetown, Honeybucket Lake, and the whole time the two of them just there in the cab, post-fellatio, taking in the glory, mooning away, saying nothing. Reggie never even asked her name. He was Conan. She had to be Valeria. 

So it made sense on that later day at the court house when Reggie was cuffed up and on his way down to this place, when I saw what must’ve been her out in the hallway holding hands with her brother, looking happier than she prolly oughtta been, that she asked him that very thing as he walked by. What’s my name? This I heard her say myself while I was waiting for my own arraignment and didn’t know Reggie from anything. 

But all of us in here can tell you what’s real in the story, though, because every one of us has done it. It was Andy McGowan and that guy that Andy and Reggie ripped off, that Larry Williams. Williams wound up on Andy’s crew along with Reggie through one of those accidents that the universe can only make in the corners where it’s very goddamn narrow, like out in the bush. Andy signed up to take on work release types like Larry, and lo – Larry got busted for bootlegging sure as hell. That meant nights at the jail and days on work release, tapping soffits under ASHA houses for Andy. Wasn’t like Larry didn’t know that Andy was the guy who ripped him off. Larry was smart, even if he was from Mississippi. Hell, all the guys in here know that when Andy wasn’t on a government job he was bootlegging. Every day when Andy picked him up from the jail, Larry must’ve felt like he was being ferried by the devil himself. What Larry didn’t know was that he was now on his back side by side every day tapping soffits with Andy’s bag man.

When they talked, they talked about girls. Reggie talked about one girl. Larry talked about a lot of girls. According to his own humble admission, Larry had fucked everything on God’s green Earth. After trolling out a list of names (a process that took a day and a half), he went back over each entry in order and added detail. This one he called the Sweet Cookie, that one the Pain Train. Met her in a bar in Tupelo, had her in an exit between innings at a Marlin’s game. She had vast, jug-like bosoms; she had proclivities oral and rectal. Somehow food figured in: catfish, collards, sweet potato pie. One had breath that smelled like green apple Jolly Ranchers. Then he went back to the beginning again and stitched all these women together into one grand saga, embroidering the hero’s role for himself in a greasy southern tapestry of fucking and sucking. 

That done, he asked Reggie, “So what’s this girl of yours?” Reggie answered him with a line of poetry that would’ve blown Neruda’s ball cap off, and all Larry could say was, “Well goddamn.”

That’s where I stop believing Reggie’s story, right after that. I mean, you can’t possibly buy the thing he says next about how all that talk of Larry’s disgusted him and he was so overcome with conscience and noble purpose that in an attempt to defend womankind, he up and pulled out one of the house jacks and crushed Larry flat. Here’s what’s more likely, and anybody in the joint will back this up:

Andy McGowan and Larry Williams had a beef. Andy McGowan called Reggie out from under the house after he tied the chain to the house jack. Then he goosed the truck, pulled the house jack out, and eliminated his competition.

Reggie tells it like they were on the job by themselves and it was all his idea. But anybody in Thugs Not Drugs knows that sorry pizza face sumbitch couldn’t do anything of the sort. 

Here’s how we imagine it, though: Reggie comes home after Andy’s been taken into custody. Not everybody likes or fears Andy. While ASHA houses are a pretty sketchy deal, nobody gets one dropped on them that squarely unless they’re a witch and live in Oz.  

So Reggie comes home and his girl is hysterical because her whole life, her own brother, is going away forever. It’s also the only day Reggie doesn’t get a blowjob. 

But this is the moment. She’s all on the floor in the same position she would be if she was about to deliver, but this time she’s begging for her brother’s life, her little face all screwed up and snotty. It’s like a photograph from My Lai. This thing swells in his chest, like some comic book destiny. And he’s like, I’ll do this. I’ll take this rap for Andy and save my girl. 

God, if we all had a back that mighty we could lift the roof off this place. 

Of course don’t ask him about this because inside he’s a straight-up killer. Drop a house on a motherfucker, get a life sentence. It’s the law. 

I know what’s true, though, because like I said I was in the hall waiting for my own hearing when they took him out. I saw the bailiff leading that boy down the hall right past Andy and his sister. I will never forget what that woman looked like. She had a puff of hair like a safety-orange Brillo pad sticking out from her head in angles that mathematicians can’t describe and a rheumy little pecker nose that barely kept her piggy little eyes separated. I saw her smile when Reggie came out of the courtroom. That just made it worse. She had double rows of teeth of every shape and description. She was holding Andy’s hand, fierce and happy, taunting Reggie as he walked by, going, “What’s my name, hero? What’s my name?”

You ask him about her though, he’s gonna say that same line he read up at the comic book stand all those years ago, just like he said to Larry Williams: She is the fountain of my joy, my one true destiny, and my hope of heaven. 

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