Habit-Forming
by Hth


Dear Sister Pete,
	Of all the people who come to you for drug counseling, or rather, 
of all the people who took your advice re: this journaling/letter 
writing exercise, who do you think it's going to help?  There are two 
kinds of morons in Oz: the ones who've never taken two minutes to know 
the insides of their own skulls, and nothing can come out of you if you 
don't put something in first, and the ones like me, who find this self-
analysis bullshit all too easy, and therefore dangerous.
	
You ask me to put pen to paper, and I start writing my opening 
arguments.  That's just how I am.  Too many years as a lawyer, I guess, 
or maybe the reason I became a lawyer in the first place.
	
Now, do you see how I did that?  That sentence wrapped up neatly, with 
a nice, round sense of closure and inevitability.  Even though what it 
really said was, Here's one fact, here's another fact, and fuck me up 
the ass if I know what they have to do with each other.  Are you buying 
any of this?  Do you think I'm *intelligent* now?

Of course I am.  Fucking smart as a whip, and black words on white 
paper made me that way.  Assignment to essay to grade, research to 
brief to verdict, and then there's my alcoholism.  Here's one fact, 
here's another.  But this time, what if I said Fuck you?

I don't and I won't.  This writing thing, this is coming easier than I 
expected.  It puts everything into rows, doesn't it?  These forms, 
formalities, turning every memory I have into an optical illusion, 
making the chaos seem like a pattern, like twenty-six single and 
separate things that climb all over themselves to line right up like 
good little factoids.

Don't you wish it were true?   Of course you do.  You and I, we 
understand each other.  We want the same things out of life.  Reason 
and meaning and structure and wisdom and Chris Keller.

Chris Keller Chris Keller Chris Keller Chris Keller

Just for you, Pete.  Since you'll never see this, and you don't like to 
hear me talk about him, then this all works out just fine, doesn't it?

Here's the brilliant self-analysis you were hoping for.  I'm needy.  I 
need attention.  Most lawyers are like that.  And people have their own 
problems in Oz, and finding someone else who gives two fucks about you, 
long enough to attend to your problems instead of theirs even for a 
little while, is next to impossible.  You sure as hell don't say Fuck 
you to them when you do.

That's what friendship means in my world now.

And let me enlighten you just a little bit while we're on the subject: 
it's one hell of a lot more than friendship ever meant in Chris' world.

This is the part where I get in touch with my emotions.  Ready?

I'm angry, too.  I'm angry all the goddamn motherfucking fucking time.  
Because even you, even my *good friend* Sister Pete, even you look at 
me and you see me as something just a little bit less than a man.  Just 
an inmate, and you consider yourself pretty fucking generous, thinking 
like you do that once I get released, you'll have no problem accepting 
that I'm real again.  Served my time, paid my debt.  If you and I ever 
meet on the outside, you'll never look at me and say Stay where you 
are, Tobias.

Sit, stay, no.  NO?  Sister, you disappoint me.  You talk to me like an 
equal sometimes.  And then this.  Over him.  Naturally.

If I existed anymore, if I were real and not just a prisoner, we might 
have been able to talk about  this.  I could tell you what I know about 
him, the way he looks blank all the way to the core when you use words 
like trust and faith and hope.   What I don't think I can tell you, 
even if you wanted to hear it, is how it kills me to think about that, 
what the letters look like when they line up on Chris' page.  If you 
see where I'm going with this.  What makes sense to people like you and 
me, it's a foreign language to Chris.

You probably took a class about it once.  Low self-esteem.  
Objectification, maybe.  But I don't think you or I can really know 
what it's like to grow up like this.  In places like Oz, where you only 
get what your currency can buy you.  It's a pure meritocracy, in its 
sick fucking way.  You want a life, you want something good to call 
your own?  Well, whaddaya got to trade for it, bitch?  And Chris, hey, 
Sister, you know what Chris had to trade for it.  Not just the sex, 
because that's too cheap to use as coin in this world, but that lazy, 
leonine Chris fucking Keller charm.  That way he has of making you 
*matter* when he looks at you.  That's what's rare.  That's more 
precious than rubies, Book of Proverbs, as I recall.

So it's been a bad goddamn day, and I'm angry, and I hate that this 
angry feeling is starting to feel normal, too.  Take your manipulative 
and your fucking sociopathic and choke on it, all right?  All right?  
You wanted him to be on the up and up, to lay himself wide open for 
you, just come right out and say I need something and you're the only 
tool I have at my disposal right now, so do a guy a favor, huh?  Come 
down to Oz and say that.  See how long you last.  Needing is a crime, 
begging is an invitation to be shanked in the back.

He's a good man, Sister Pete.  I swear to you that he is.  He was 
trying to offer you a fair trade, you know?  He can feel what you need, 
trust me, I say this because I *know* this, he always senses it, smells 
it on you.  And he'll give it to you if he can.  He gives, he gets in 
return.  He's not a goddamn sociopath.  He's exactly like every one of 
us who lasts down here.

And you have to know that, some little part of you has to have known 
all along.  But I don't blame you for blocking it out.  We really are a 
lot alike, I think.  It probably scared the shit out of you.  Feeling 
something crazy when he was around, sure it couldn't have come from 
inside you because it was so new, so surprising, so tied to his moods, 
his vibes, his smiles.  It could only come from Chris.  Through Chris.  
And you wanted him, because he was your dealer, hooking you up with 
that warm, slow buzz.  The attention.  The interest.  The *care,* and 
the way that it made you feel proud of something that you just were 
instead of something that you've done in the past.

Believe me, I understand.  I was fucking terrified.  And I was 
addicted.  Am addicted.  Need him, want him, fiend for him.   Hate 
everything that gets between us.  That cunt hack who wouldn't let me 
take his hand.  Emerald City's version of the criminal code.  Your 
stupid, meaningless jealousy, the way you get cold and holy when it 
comes back to you that my jones for Chris Keller's special brand of 
smack is different from yours because he wants whatever it is that I'm 
dealing just as badly.

But then, I killed a little girl.  Maybe the people have a right to 
their revenge.  Hey, this is prison, right?  It's supposed to fucking 
suck.  I'm supposed to hate it, isn't that how it works?  God bless 
America, because I sure do.  I hate it.  I wish everything about it 
were different.

I wish I'd been able to wrap my fingers around his wrist and put my 
lips in the hollow of his hand.  I wish I'd gotten to crack that cunt's 
head in half with my thumbs and see the inside like red, pulpy 
cantaloupe, and I guess I wish I could go back to the days when I never 
had thoughts like that.  I wish I didn't live every day with the 
knowledge that Vern never got sent to solitary for getting his dick 
sucked, but Chris might, even though he's my best friend and not my 
fucking rapist.  I wish you didn't turn on me with those loud silences 
every time his name leaves my mouth.  I wish I could take him camping, 
the way I used to take Gen and the kids, and lay in his arms under the 
stars.  Wouldn't that be a kick?  I can just see Keller, taking to the 
great outdoors like a cat to a tidal wave, muttering darkly and digging 
in his heels, hating it and loving that he can give it to me.

If wishes were fishes, we'd walk on the sea, isn't that right, Sister?  
But in this world, back in reality, I'm stuck in Oz with nothing better 
to do than some grade-school writing exercise, and the person I love in 
ways that only God could ever explain to any of us (assuming he would 
so fucking deign) is in the building with me and the best I can do is 
signal him behind my back as I walk away.  What kind of life is this, 
where we just so happen to have a signal for those times when we need 
to say Hey, baby, I'm yours, you're mine?  There are so many things 
that can't be said at so many times in so many places.  Does that make 
me a liar, too?

Have I put any order to any of it with these rows of words?  Does it 
make sense now, how I love him every time I look at him, even the times 
when I was hating him, too?  Have I learned something about why I'm an 
addict, what I'm hoping to find inside every altered state?  Is this 
going to bridge this gap between us?

Words are easy, and I'm smart enough to make them march.  I know all 
those things already, and so all this is just so much mental 
masturbation.

That's the tricky thing about the word.  It can play so many games with 
the past that it puts Hoyle to shame, but it fades away to nothing when 
you try to put even one single word onto the future.  I can't write out 
my future.  I can't say it, what I hope for, what I see coming.  There 
are no words.  There's just the quest for the perfect high - alcohol's 
manic invulnerability, heroin's unbordered serenity, Chris' cynical 
sweetness, comforting cruelty, Chris Keller's canny, graceful, 
*lyrical* fucking satisfaction.

And I'm an addict, baby, and a convict and a killer.  You better keep a 
close eye on me, or I might start heaping insult upon injury to decent 
people everywhere, and keep right on being happy.