Pain Killers Read Online Free PDF Page A

tragedy, isn’t it? When your own people forget.”
    A blue and white sailboat floated out in the bay, in some shimmering world that had nothing to do with this one. The outs. I wondered if the sailboat people knew that they were half a mile from the Hillside Strangler and 317 other killers with nicknames, professional and recreational.
    It would probably be scorching later, but right now the temperature was perfect. The CO handed me another preopened can of Coke. Somehow knowing I’d finished my first.
    “So who
was
Mosher?” I asked, since it seemed expected.
    “An Orthodox Jew, an actual rabbi, in for domestic. What happened is, he got stuck in a cell with a shot-caller for the ALS. A real peckerwood. Zeke Mosher. Whole thing was somebody’s idea of a joke. But the rabbi, he’s so tortured by his celly, he keeps tryin’ to get himself reclassified as a nonwhite man. Claims he’s the victim of race baiting.”
    He took a breath, guzzling between sentences. “They keep races together when they assign cells. Shouldn’t be that way, but TLIP—that’s life in prison. Anyway, the whole thing was like some kinda joke to the staff and the fellas on the tier. But it was no joke for the Jew! He’s got the whatchamacallem, the shylocks, growing outta his temple. He ties little boxes to his head with leather straps, the whole shmear.”
    Rincin looked proud to have gotten the “shmear” thing in.
    “Did the administration go for it?” I asked.
    “Go for what?
    “The reclassification. Did Kosher get to move out of the cell with Mosher?”
    “Let me tell the story. What happened is, one day the peckerwood crossed the line. He ripped the prophylactic right off the rabbi’s arm while he was praying with it.”
    “You mean the phylactery.”
    Rincin snapped, still keeping his grin on, “Did I say I was an expert? The peckerwood, he cooks up a shot in a contraband spoon and says, ‘Know what I’m shootin’ up? I’m shootin’ up
pork juice
!’ Then he takes
his
phylaka-dakkies, this leather strap with wooden boxes attached, he ties off and fixes with it!”
    “What happened?”
    “You mean after?
Right
after? The rabbi had a little heart attack. The case went to the penal board, who heard experts talking about how Jews were a race, or they weren’t a race, they were a religion. One expert, from Alabama, said they were a cult. On the other hand, skin is skin. Nobody made a federal case when black Muslims shared cells with Baptists.”
    “That makes sense.”
    “Not to the rabbi’s representatives. All that mattered to them was that Nazi thought Jews were a virus. Ask any hard-core Aryan, he’ll tell you straight up. ‘They look white, that’s how they sneak into the mainstream and start polluting the race.’
    “All this came up, but in the end the board decided white’s white, even with the dangly shylocks.”
    “Payots,”
I said.
    “Pay us for what?”
    “
Payots.
That’s what that hair tuft is called, the sidelocks, on the Orthodox guys.”
    “I’ll take your word on that, sir. But the board decided to put him back in the cell. Said it was a bad precedent. And, I gotta tell you, you’d walk by the cell, day or night, it was like watching a buffed-up Aryan cat and a little squeaky Jew mouse. Every day it was something, but the Aryan won’t come out and kill the rabbi. He’s having too much fun. I’m telling you, this was nothing nice. Poor Hebe was in hell—or whatever you people call it.”
    “Dos Gehenem.”
    “That some Jew word?”
    “Yiddish for eternal jury duty.”
    “I’ll take your word. I’m just saying, these guys were stuck with each other day in, day out. That’s when I realized it was perfect.”
    “Perfect for what?”
    “Sitcom.”
    “That could work,” I said, just to say something.
    “You’re telling me,” said Rincin. “Problem was I never met any Jews. I mean, if you’re gonna write, you gotta know your subject. So what happens, I finally get to know a