Except we’re not called patients in here. We’re called inmates. If we were on the outside and sitting in an office with good ol’ Walcott, drinking our coffee, he might actually be a good doctor. But with mandatory treatment like this, people tend to be a little reticent. Obstructive. Unwilling to cooperate, if you will. I usually fall into the latter category, but today I’m being forced to sing a different song.
“So the appeals board has reviewed your case, as you’re aware.” Walcott flips over some paper inside my file, eyes nimbly scanning its contents while somehow still managing to keep one of them trained on me. “You’ve been advised that they originally rejected your lawyer’s request for early release right out of hand?”
“Yeah.” Charlie’s lawyer, the slick city boy with the immaculate hair, immaculate suit and immaculate shoes did tell me that. Not like I’d even hoped the appeal would go through, anyway. To be honest, I was surprised the judge had only given me ten years in the first place.
“Given the violent nature of your crime and your apparent lack of any remorse, they didn’t feel it appropriate that you be released until you serve at least half your sentence. Where are you at with that right now?”
“Two years served.”
“Well, you’ve got a long way to go then, Mayfair. At least another three years before any chance of parole unless we do this thing right.”
“Three years isn’t so bad,” I tell him, smirking. But of course it’s bad. Three years might as well be thirty in here. Anyone tells you they kicked back and did an easy stint in Chino, they’re a fucking liar. This place is hell on earth.
“But what if I were to say you could walk out of here in six months, Mayfair?”
“I’d say that sounds good.”
Walcott shakes his head, sighing, looking over my papers once more. “I really don’t know how he did it, to be honest. A deal like this frankly should not be on the table for you, Mayfair. Your lawyer must be playing golf with the right people.”
Fuck my lawyer playing golf with the right people. The deal the parole board cut me had more to do with Charlie’s boys paying a few visits to a few judges’ houses. No violence involved, of course. Just bricks of unmarked bills, a few bottles of single malt and a few choice words whispered into the right ears.
“And so this is where we find ourselves, Mayfair. If you work with me willingly, then we both win. I get to help you, and you get to leave. Do we have a deal?”
I feel like I’m giving something away when I reply, “Sure.”
He can tell I’m none too happy about it. “Great. Okay. Well customarily I’d start with the offence that landed you in here, but I think perhaps today we’ll go back to the beginning. Let’s start off with your childhood.” He sits back, the end of the black ballpoint he’s been turning over and over in his hand going into his mouth. He just fucking looks at me like he’s waiting for me to tell him something very terrible and specific that explains exactly why I am the way I am.
“I’m sorry, did you ask a question?” I growl.
“Your childhood, tell me about it.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Was it a happy one? Did you have many friends? Did you get on with your parents? You know, that sort of thing.”
Typical bullshit psychologist. My chair groans as I slouch back in my chair—I’ve stacked on a hundred pounds of muscle since I was dragged, cuffed, through the gates of this shithole. “It was fucking miserable. When I was four I went to live with my uncle in California. He was a drunk and he liked hurting little boys.” I suspect not everyone Walcott interviews is quite as blunt as I am. The man blanches.
“And when you say he hurt you, do you mean…” he trails off uncomfortably, gnawing on his pen again.
“No, I do not mean sexually. I mean with a baseball bat. I mean with his steel toecaps. I mean with his fists.”
Walcott writes that down. I can practically see it on the fucking paper now: Was beaten as a boy. Explains violent tendencies in adult life. An attempt to understand, to control what happened to him in his early years. An attempt to take back his perceived loss of power.
But even as a kid when my uncle was wailing on me and my still forming bones were snapping like kindling, I didn’t feel like I’d lost my power. I was just waiting. Waiting for the day when I was bigger and stronger than he was. Biding my time.
“And what about your parents? Why did they leave you with your uncle?”
“Because they died. My father had a headache. They were going out to a movie, left me with a babysitter. My mother said she’d drive but she was pregnant, ready to pop, so he wouldn’t let her. Doctors said he had a burst aneurism at the wheel and wrapped their Chevy around a street lamp.”
Talking about my parents isn’t something I like to do, but with that six month get out of jail free card on the table, I don’t really have much of a choice. I don’t tell Walcott about the important stuff, though. The few hazy, coveted recollections that kept them alive inside me—the smell of my mother’s perfume, sweet and light and floral; her dark, wavy hair that tickled my face when she kissed me good night; the booming, joy-filled laughter of my father; the thrum thrum thrumming of the baby’s heartbeat inside my mother’s tautly stretched, round belly. I’d sit for hours listening as the unknown creature flipped and kicked inside her, while my mother gently stroked my hair, telling me stories.