How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,76
of cookies, a GooGoo Cluster and two MoonPies under the bed. I think maybe we should tell the commissary to stop selling him this junk. Yesterday his blood sugar was four hundred.”
Dr. McClarty tells Donnie that they can't tell the commissary any such thing; that would be a restriction of Peters's liberty—cruel and unusual punishment. He'd fill out a complaint, and they'd spend four hours in court downtown, where the judge would eventually deliver a lecture, thirdhand Rousseau, on the natural rights of man.
Then there's Caruthers from G, who had a seizure and claims he needs to up his dose of Klonopin. Ah, yes, Mr. Caruthers, we'd all like to up that and file the edges right off our day. In McClarty's case, from zero milligrams a day to about thirty, with a little Demerol and maybe a Dilaudid thrown into the mix just to secure the perimeter. Or, fuck it, go straight for the fentanyl. No—he mustn't think this way. Like those “impure thoughts” the priests used to warn us about, these pharmaceutical fantasies must be stamped out at all costs. He should call his sponsor, catch a meeting on the way home.
The first patient, Cribbs, a skinny little white kid, has a bloody black eye, which, on examination, proves to be an orbital fracture. That is, his eye socket has been smashed in. And while McClarty has never seen Cribbs before, the swollen face is familiar; he saw it last night in his sleep. “Lock and sock?” he asks.
The kid nods and then winces at the pain.
“They just come in the middle of the night, maybe five of them, and started whaling on me. I was just lying there minding my own business.” Obviously new, he doesn't even know the code yet—not to tell nobody nothing. He is a sniveler, a fish, an obvious target. Now, away from his peers and tormentors, he seems ready to cry. But he suddenly wipes his nose and grins, shows McClarty the bloody teeth marks on his arm. “One of the sons of bitches bit me,” he says, looking incongruously pleased.
“You enjoyed that part, did you, Mr. Cribbs?” Then, suddenly, McClarty guesses.
“That'll fix his fucking wagon,” says Cribbs, smiling hideously, pink gums showing above his twisted yellow teeth. “I got something he don't want. I got the HIV.”
After McClarty cleans up the eye, he writes up a hospital transfer and orders a blood test.
“They won't be messing with me no more,” Cribbs says in parting. In fact, in McClarty's experience, there are two approaches to AIDS cases among the inmate population. Many are indeed given a wide berth. Or else they are killed, quickly and efficiently and without malice, in their sleep.
Next is a surly, muscled black prisoner with a broken hand. Mr. Brown claims to have smashed, accidentally, into the wall of the recreation yard. “Yeah, playing handball, you know?” Amazing how many guys hurt themselves in the yard. Brown doesn't even try to make this story sound convincing; rather, he turns up his lip and fixes McClarty with a look that dares him to doubt it.
So far, in the eleven months he has worked here, McClarty has been attacked only in his dreams. But he has been threatened several times, most recently by Lesko. A big pear-shaped redneck in for aggravated assault, he took a knife to a bartender who turned him away at closing time. The bartender was stabbed fifteen times before the bouncer hit Lesko with a bat. And while Lesko did threaten to kill McClarty, fortunately it wasn't in front of the other prisoners, in which case he would feel that his honor, as well as his buzz, was at stake. Still, McClarty makes a note to check up on Lesko; he'll ask Santiago, the guard over on D, to get a reading on his general mood and comportment.
Dr. McClarty makes the first official phone call of the day, to a pompous ass of a psychopharmacologist to get an opinion on Caruthers's medication—not that McClarty doesn't have an opinion himself, but he is required to consult a so-called expert. McClarty thinks Peganone would stave off the seizures just as effectively and more cheaply—which, after all, is his employer's chief concern—whereas Caruthers's chief concern, quite apart from his seizures, is catching that Klonopin buzz. Dr. Withers, who has already talked to Caruthers's lawyer, keeps McClarty on hold for ten minutes, then condescendingly explains the purpose and methodology of double-blind studies, until McClarty is finally forced to remind the