Pain Killers by Jerry Stahl Page A

not take the same things seriously that you did. I stared into those eyes for a minute and felt mysteriously better before reading how Benton got life for killing a plainclothes cop while holding up a dry cleaner. The officer, in fact, was there
to pick up his uniform.
    What are the odds?
    It didn’t seem fair. How was Roscoe supposed to know the man was police if his blues were on a hanger?
    Roscoe, I learned, founded the Black Guerilla Fighters prison gang—the BGF—at San Quentin in 1971 with George Jackson, his fellow Panther. The late George Jackson. Then something happened. In his forties, Roscoe’d earned a GED, BA and masters in comparative religion. Now he ran inmate meditation classes and the “Living with Hep C and HIV Inside” support group. I placed my hand on the file like it had the power to heal. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to hear my own tiny whisper.
    “I need some fucking help, Roscoe!”
    I myself had dodged AIDS, back in my needle jockey days, but not that hepatitis C. My liver had gone New Media, fully viral, and not even nine months of rage-inducing interferon shots in my belly fat had been able to cure it. The stuff powered the viral load to under twenty million, down from a bloated seventy mil but still high enough for my liver to function as efficiently as a paperweight.
    Hep C was like having an old-fashioned anarchist’s bomb implanted in your liver, waiting for the fuse to burn down and blow you into full-blown cirrhosis, then over the finish line to cancer. You just never knew how long the fuse was. But nothing, as any hepatotoxicologist could tell you, got it burning faster than alcohol. This made for some regret over my decision to start drinking again. Then again, I was getting tired of organ number three. Time for fresh meat!
    I’d found the box of wine under the sink when I looked for something to poison the roaches. If they even were roaches. From the sound they made skittering in the cabinets they might have been small farm animals.
    I hadn’t planned on drinking the stuff. I’d just wanted to see how it tasted. Wine in a box! Gallo Sparkling Rosé. It tickled the palate like melted-down hospital gloves and Splenda. The stuff probably would have killed the roaches, or at least disoriented them, but I didn’t want to share. There weren’t any glasses, so I drank straight from the box, out of a plastic pop-up nozzle that scratched the inside of my mouth. I had, I confess, a checkered history of oral hygiene. I fell out of the habit of dental visits when I had a habit of heroin. After Tina left, I developed a burning urge for root canal, generally followed by a prescription or two for Percocet. (Or one of its loving cousins.)
    Now my gums bled when I said hello. Which meant easy access for any strain of hell canker that the last social climber who slurped out of the nozzle had left there. Along with fatigue and brain fog, the hypotenuse of the hep C triangle was a compromised immune system. “Compromised” meant that if someone had a fever in Cleveland, I caught the flu. But I wouldn’t die from it. And even if I did, I’d probably be too confused and logy to notice.
    I tamped the blood off my lip with the back of my wrist. Took another sip, careful not to spill any on the files, which I had sworn to give back to the warden. I couldn’t tell if I had a buzz or a migraine and stared out the window of my trailer, trying to decide.
    I rarely drank, even before the five years I stopped taking anything that affected me “from the neck up.” And now I remembered why. Alcohol never made me happy—it just made unhappiness embarrassing and sloppy. For a professional drug addict, alcohol was what you got when you couldn’t get what you needed. And you always needed something.
    Now I remembered.
    By the time I mustered the inner strength to stop reminiscing and go back to the files, it had gotten dark. My lower back was killing me, and my thighs itched where they had been