Sweet Hell on Fire (4 page)

Holy Hell.

I drank way too much, but honestly, I’d needed it after the week I had.

My temples pounded like a bass drum and my eyes didn’t want to open. Christ, it was bright.

I thought about rolling over and going back to sleep. I hadn’t come in until after four. It was only eight. But today was kid day. I was taking them to the zoo.

One-hundred-degree heat, tired animals in cages licking their own nuts, and bad food. Just like work.

I rolled over and looked at my girls sleeping in the bed next to me. They were so sweet when they were asleep. Their narrow chests rose and fell slowly. The sweet baby curve to their cheeks was smooth in the bright sun. My oldest was nine and she’d lost the toddler chubbiness to her hands. Her fingers were splayed on the pillow and I petted each one softly, wondering what those hands were capable of doing. What she would do with her life, what she would become.

My youngest, her hands were still dimpled and soft. Her bow mouth had fallen open and she sounded like a baby bear; her light snores endeared her to me even more. This one was only a child when she slept. When she was awake, her very old soul was in the driver’s seat and she looked on everything with a very adult detachment and disdain. I wondered too what she would mold out of her life.

And I wondered when I’d get my own shit together. They deserved better than living in their grandparents’ house with a mom they hardly ever saw. The little one had told me she wanted to go live with her dad because there was more room and she missed him. I said yes and when she asked me if I was upset, I said no. I told her I’d miss her, but it was okay. Then I’d gone to take a shower and I bawled until the hot water ran out.

My oldest’s eyes popped open and she still looked like Boo from
Monsters,
Inc.
with her large, chocolate doe eyes. “Zoo!” she half-whispered.

I nodded with a grin, even though shaking my head like that made my eyeballs roll around my head and my stomach roiled.

Oh, what the hell? I ran to the bathroom and puked up the cupcakes I’d eaten yesterday in a pungent brew of Hostess and beer. I realized with horror I had a hangover. I’d spent my teen years drinking like a fish, I even drank some in my twenties, but it was like as soon as I hit thirty, someone flipped a switch and it was time to pay up. I’d never had a hangover before.

“You okay, Mommy?”

“We don’t have to go to the zoo if you don’t feel good. Are you sick?”

No, I’m not sick. I’m just an asshole. I wanted to lie back down and go back to sleep until my head stopped throbbing and my stomach stopped protesting, but I didn’t.

“No, babies. Get ready. How about breakfast at the Awful Waffle?”

They shrieked with joy, and I puked again as the sound echoed through my head.

I was sick again at the Awful Waffle, as we had come to call the local all-night waffle place. This time from the other end. It was so loud, I’m sure that the other patrons heard me. I’m sure that people on the interstate heard me.

I didn’t know then it would just get worse. I didn’t discover until two years later that I had celiac disease. I was allergic to wheat, barley, and oats. So those pitchers of Boulevard Wheat were literally killing me.

I’m sure the waffles didn’t help.

I spent more than I meant to after we got to the zoo. I never got to see my kids while I was working the second shift, two in the afternoon to ten at night. They were always asleep by the time I got home. We’d gotten more time because of the summer, but I knew when they went back to school I’d only see them on my days off.

Sometimes, when I think back to this time, I wonder how I ever got through it. How we ever got through it.

The husband and I staggered our days off so it was never an issue of who had them when. He was good about that too. He never ditched them, never forgot, never chose to do anything else than spend time with his kids when it was his turn. He never balked at taking them when it
wasn’t
his turn, like when I had to go to the hospital with my mother. No matter what was wrong between us, he tried to be a good father.

And I tried to be a good mother. We ate again at the zoo because they wanted funnel cake, corn dogs, and slushes. We did every little extra thing there was to do: we took the train, rode the carousel, and I bought them everything they looked at longingly with their big anime child eyes in the gift shop. Except for the live crabs. The husband had taken custody of the cat and my parents had a dog. The poor crabs would be harried until either the cat or the dog succeeded in getting to them. All the while, I made discreet stops in the bathrooms after every time I ate.

I swore I’d never drink again.

I spent a little bit of time online talking to friends who I didn’t seem to have a connection with anymore. One friend in particular though, I’ll call her Sunshine here, seemed to just accept me and the mess that was my life. She wanted to hear about it and I found myself talking. I didn’t open up the floodgates and dump on her, but I told her about the separation. She tried to be encouraging, had a lot of good things to share, but I wasn’t ready to hear them yet. Rather than be angry I wasn’t ready, she did what good friends do. She let me know she’d be there and she was ready to listen whenever I needed her. I thanked her, but I didn’t take her up on it. Not for a long time.

That’s part of The Job, as I’ve said. Isolation. We’re supposed to keep the gritty dark away from the outside world. We’re supposed to be two people. But it’s infinitely easier to be one. So, we tend to slowly sever our connections with people outside our world.

Not with any malice or intent; it just happens.

I had an email from a tower rat friend of mine who wanted me to go to the country bar with him and a few others that night. I hate country music, for the most part. I’m a metal head. But I was lonely and patently unhappy with my life. I thought maybe a little fun would help.

And I vowed I’d only have one beer.

I didn’t know Aqua Net could melt.

Of course, I knew it was flammable. When I was a kid, I used it and my mother’s lighter as a mosquito repellent. Flamethrower. Whatever.

I spent summers in Minnesota, and their state bird is the mosquito. Loved visiting my grandma, but at night, when I had the window open and a swarm of them that looked like something out of a Japanese horror movie clung to the screen, I had my doubts about if the screen would keep them out. Or if it did, I was sure their long suckers could squeeze through the little holes in the screen and suck me dry. So I toasted them all. They crackled like Rice Krispies.

On a bastard summer day when I volunteered to get some more experience in Segregation, I suddenly knew what they felt like. The temperature roasted at one hundred degrees outside, and inside, it was twenty degrees hotter. I didn’t do much to my hair for work. I put it up in a bun or used a jaw-clip so it was off my collar, but I did curl my bangs. I secured them so even a tornado wouldn’t ruffle my appearance.

That took a lot of Aqua Net.

Which promptly melted from my bangs and slid down into my eyes.

My eyes started burning worse than when we’d had to get sprayed with CS gas and take a shot of pepper spray to the face in training. Tears are your eyes’ self-defense mechanism, so they just started pouring down my cheeks.

It looked for all the world like I was bawling.

“What’s wrong, Sarge? Somebody hurt your feelings?”

“Look at the girl crying on the tier,” another inmate hooted.

“Shut the fuck up. I got hair spray melting in my eye,” I growled.

“Sure you do. We understand. Even a hardass like you has to take a day off.” Laughing ensued.

“Hey, don’t rile her up. It’s too hot for this shit.”

“No shit. Why don’t you guys grieve this?” I asked them, referring to their complaint process. They would grieve anything as “cruel and unusual,” up to and including their incarceration if the state would let them. I’d say slowly baking to death in high summer in this kind of heat was cruel and unusual. Not just for them, but for me too. The prison was more than a hundred years old. It was made out of brick. Summer time turned it into a big oven.

I’d seen an inmate grieve standard operating procedure that’s there for his safety—and win. But I’d seen reasonable grievances fail. Like one inmate who was allergic to fish and soy. All he got every single day, every meal, was peanut butter and lettuce. That’s not a reasonable diet, which he is entitled to, but he lost. Or the practicing Satanist denied his right to freedom of religion. The prison pastor argued it was a hate group and not a real religion. No matter that most of the religious groups in prison are fronts for sex, dealing and trading, gang activity…this guy only wanted to be free to have a Baphomet icon in his cell. He wasn’t asking to hold a religious callout or any special treatment. He just wanted to be able to order religious paraphernalia like any other group.

But this rejection was from the same bastard who refused to show Harry Potter on the prison TV channel, not because it might incite the pedophiles but because he deemed it anti-Christian. Hey, where’s the separation of church and state? Not seeing it here. If I was an inmate, you can bet I’d grieve the violation of my religious freedom. You lose a lot of rights when you go to prison, but your freedom of religion isn’t supposed to be one of them.

Further, where was the damn air-conditioning?

Heat makes people angry. It’s a proven fact crimes of passion go up in the summer time. Yeah, so let’s throw three hundred criminals together in an enclosed place and turn up the heat. That’s bright.

“If anyone wants a grievance, I’ll be passing them out with chow.”

In Seg, we had to pass chow around since they didn’t get to come out to eat. Not only did I have Aqua Net in my eye, I was also sweating like a hog. I don’t mean a little sweaty, I mean it poured off me like I just got out of a pool. Only it wasn’t chlorinated water, it was body filth. I was embarrassed by it, and I even felt sorry that I served their food.

Of course a few commented on it. How they wouldn’t eat anything from a fat, sweaty hog like me, and I had to agree. I wouldn’t either. I could have written them up, but it was the truth. Skinny, fat, average, it didn’t matter. It was gross no matter who did it.

The end of the day in Seg was the worst, after chow had been passed, trays had been collected, and showers had been completed. Inmates weren’t allowed out of their cells to dump their trash, so they just threw it out on the run and the inmate workers had to clean it up.

In the summer, the prison always stank, but Seg in the summer was especially horrible. It stank like bad breath, body funk, and rotten garbage with a hint of MSG from the ramen they made in their cells. The guys were only mandated to wash once a week, so there was the regular dirty body stench plus whatever they had fermenting. The guy who pissed all over his cell? That wasn’t especially out of the ordinary. Some would empty out toothpaste tubes and keep their feces in it for special times when they needed a shit gun. Those were especially effective. Or they’d try to hoard leftovers from meals and it would spoil. Some used their toilets like refrigerators, putting their containers of milk down in the water in hopes it would keep it cool. And some were just dirty and didn’t want to wash.

When we finished that night, I was ready to go home. Completely exhausted. I felt like I’d done a good job, that the OIC would see I was an asset.

But one of my friends had called during shift. His wife had left him. She didn’t even do him the courtesy of telling him she was going. She just took the car, leaving him stranded at work, and drove a few hundred miles to her mother’s. She’d also taken their daughter with no explanation and no mention of when he could see her.

He said he was happy to see the bitch go, but fuck her if she was going to take his kid away.

And he said he really needed a drink.

So I went.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming him. I chose to go. If I just wanted to be supportive, I could have gone with him and stuck to my decision not to drink myself into oblivion. I chose to go, I chose to drink, and I chose not to stop after I’d obviously had enough.

But at least I didn’t lie to myself in the morning and say I wasn’t going to do it again.