Ben's note: I recorded Rory's introduction recently, when I asked him how he wanted to introduce himself and his work. The introduction is followed by two pieces previously dictated by Rory.

Rory's Own Introduction

I don’t even know where to start, man. How about right here, then. 63 days left to live. Gotta tell people things before the floodwaters reach the rafters and drown me in the attic of my mind. The figure 63 sticks in my mind. I am not conscious of from whence it came. But that’s how many days I have to get all this heartbreak, memory and wit and wisdom out of my brain for you. So, I’ll start anywhere. I was once a lawyer. Did criminal work and finally the big league stuff: Death penalty work. I’m disbarred now. I tried to quit a couple of years before I got disbarred, but it didn’t work. They wouldn’t let me. I really needed to, see. And partly for the reasons that I stated in my letter of resignation. I’m gonna read that letter to you real soon. I gotta find it. It's in my stuff somewhere. You’ll find it unusual. I know I’ve never seen another like it. Gonna tell you a little story about the court clerk who wrote the disbarment letter to me, also. I remember her from San Francisco a few years ago.

I’m also an artist. No, really, by American terms, even. I’ve sold shit. You’re gonna put some of that shit on my website, right Ben? But that’s only one type of thing I did.

I represented a chimpanzee. Probably that’s the highlight of my law career. That’s a whole story in itself. The authorities were gonna kill her. Gotta tell you a little about Billy Ray. That was her name. The chimp. Female. Cross-dresser. Not by her choice, mind you. She sold used cars. Helped anyway.

Like I said, I did human death penalty defense work too. Wrote a little story from a closed eye daydream where I said what I had to say about the fucking death penalty from the gas chamber of my mind. Speaking of gas chambers I remember a guy who was just remembering the hideousness of the gas chamber deaths he’d seen, a chaplain ... I’ve seen his face run with tears like he’d been gassed ... just remembering the choking, veins trying to burst, tiny vessels in the suffocating bugeyes bursting. Excuse the brief semi-digression, but that’s how I am. Lack of mental/verbal discipline. Love it or leave it alone, I guess. Anyway I’m gonna share that published in Germany death penalty story with you too. There’s a good sized anti-death penalty movement in Germany, from what I understand. Some Germans even correspond with people on death row in Texas.

Now, maybe I should tell some of why I quit law. Yeah, I say I "quit." It was more like you can't quit, we're gonna fire you, with the disbarment thing, from my point of view. I mean I was fuckin' good. Had strings of acquittals that went into the frickin' dozens at stretches. But it's a hard business for a sensitive soul. Know what I mean?

I once represented a shizoid pervert who shaved his scrotum, then raped, sodomized and beat a man’s daughter to death. I represented a man who still wonders what she did to make him shove a luggage rack leg up her vagina and strangle her in motel room. And a man who beat three generations to death in one house, a little kid in summer jammies, whose skull had compression fractures, his grandmother and his great grandmother nearly 90 years old. He fucked the little boy’s grandmother on the floor while the boy whimpered with his first head wound and the shit left the woman’s anus like a mortally wounded snake and her blood soaked the carpet. Now, that is fucked up. I didn't see it actually happen but the crime scene and the pictures are memories I can't escape. Living with the wreckage of things like that spears your soul and makes it thrash in a secret bag like a damaged serpent. Hey maybe I’ll even tell you of the innocent, the provably absolutely innocent ruined by false accusations with whom I’ve crossed paths and helped.

But my life isn't all about death penalty cases and art. I’ve traveled the thrift shops of northeast Kansas, the flea markets in abandoned amusement parks in Topeka, the rural strip clubs where pierced nippled girls with crescent moon scars under their stretch mark K-mart silicone bag breasts serve warm beer in cans and have bikers hurl handfulls of change onto the plywood stage of their lives ... with a blind retarded man I’ve traveled these places because he wanted to go, nobody would ever take him, and I was his prosthetic volition enabling device. Traveled with a blind retarded man named Galen who called me “Milkshake,” like the pet parakeet he named with the same name and hugged so hard he killed her. I’ll tell you a little more about those times. Galen's whims sent us like cottonwood seeds in a breeze.

Well, enough general ramblings. Let's give 'em Any Last Words and Brain Damaged Cabbie like we talked about. Good as anything to start with, I guess. Also, Ben, I'd like to tell people out there that sometimes you have told my stories as your own and I don't think that's right. Let's get on with it, now.

Puppetmaster Ben's note: I deny telling Rory's stories with anything but the purest of intentions and for the benefit of Rory Shock himself.

"Any Last Words?"

State of Texas killed a disbarred law school classmate of mine with the needle. Even though he’d had the capital, he got the punishment. They told him his last words to the public could only last 5 minutes or they’d slap a gag on him. But they allowed a tiny recording device to be placed next to his mouth as he lay, strapped motionless, before death. The recording is in my custody, as he willed his last and perhaps most valuable possession to me. I feel it is my duty to share his words. They were transcribed some time ago and I'm afraid the pages were not numbered and the tape is lost. I've done my best to put them in order. -- Rory Shock

Last smelled lilacs in May 12 years ago. Walking down the street. Police car pulled up alongside me. Both cops jumped out. Masterson and Boyd. Drew guns. I stopped. Thought they were gonna run past me. One put the muzzle of his gun up against my temple so hard it left a circular bruise I found later. The other pushed me hard against a shop window. I was scared I was gonna be shoved through it and cut up. I don’t think that would scare me now. They kicked at my ankles. Hurt the knobs of the bones.

I said, “Shit.”

They pushed me harder against the window and told me, “Shut the fuck up! Don’t resist! Stop resisting!”

My smooshed face became the display for those inside the frame shop. I didn’t appreciate the irony of that right at the moment, though.

You know how cops call their clubs “batons,” right? But they don’t twirl them and they don’t hand them off in relay races. A baton came down hard on the side of my knee.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed. No answer.

They snapped handcuffs hard on my right wrist, twisted, pulled it up behind my back. My other hand, they twisted my thumb and pulled it behind me. Put the cuffs on so tightly they cut my wrists. My left hand is still partly numb. Pinky tingles all the time. Guess it doesn’t matter now.

Officer Masterson shoved me into the car with the end of the club, er excuse me, "baton." You know the judge actually ordered me not to say the word "club" during a hearing we had. Said it was "inflammatory." No shit. Told me he'd remove me from the courtroom if I didn't follow his order to call it "the baton." Anyway, the rib he shoved with the baton was sore for weeks. "Just bruised," the jail nurse told me. Saw her two weeks after I put in the request.

So, back at the scene, a second cop car drove by slowly. That's the one had the eyewitness in it, you see. The eyewitness who saw me shoot a man down, in cold blood in the parking lot of a so-called convenience store. Turned out the dead guy was the Governor's wife's cousin. Shot three times. Once in the head. "Execution style," they said. What the fuck do they mean by that? Leaving aside the fact that I didn't kill him, I sure as shit didn't keep him waiting for years, strap him down, poison him or cook him with electricity, or offer him a last fucking meal. Execution style.

I didn't do it. I bet you don't even believe me when I say that. That's because every fucker on death row, well an overwhelming majority anyway, says that they are fucking innocent. That's because they don't want to die. But see what happens then is that the 10 percent of us, or whatever, that are actually innocent, we get fucked. Nobody believes us unless we can prove we are innocent beyond any doubt in a way that makes the papers. And if you don't have fucking "DNA" forget it. One famous lawyer I tried to get help from told me, "Sorry, I could help you if there was some DNA evidence to work with." How the fuck are you supposed to come up with DNA evidence in a shooting in a parking lot of a convenience store? Sorry, I guess the killer didn't jack off onto the body and become what the crime lab people call a "donor."

No donations in my case. Problem is, there are too many of us now and people don't want to listen. Well, they don't mind listening but the system doesn't let us tell them much. Technicalities keep us out of court. People are getting tired of all this innocence talk. So what if some of us really are innocent. That story is old now. Last week's news. Innocence doesn't sell papers anymore one reporter told me. Has to be another hook along with innocence. Of course, he was a TV tabloid reporter, so what the fuck he knows about selling papers, I'm not sure.

I've had this dream, like to tell you about, every night since I was locked up. I am naked. I am strapped spread-eagled to two boards, a cross, that is. Just like the gurney's a cross if you look at it. Balanced on the edge of a cliff. Even though it's behind me in the dream, I can see what's below. Rocks, skeletons, junk, gulls, garbage, burning piles of legal documents, judges in clown make-up juggling syringes. I am balanced on the edge -- the bottom edge of the cross right on the edge of the precipice. It starts to fall backwards over the cliff. Sort of a hard core Nestea plunge. Yeah, I had TV, on death row. Even saw the coverage they had of Gary Graham's execution a while back. Fucking saw Geraldo Rivera cry. Not too many people crying for me. There's something else going on this week, I guess. Anyway, I'm falling backwards, I open my mouth to scream, but I retch instead. 100 yards away, at the end of a fucking "level playing field," one of my judge's favorite legal terms at my trial, stands a row of people in suits and robes. I want their help. But I can't make them hear me. Then I wake up from that afterimage of the nightmare I'm living.

Anyway, so the cops read me my rights. They took me to a room. It smelled a little like disinfectant. A little like roach spray. A little like Taco Bell lunch waste. I refused to talk, even though they told me I'd get the death penalty if I didn't confess. Man I was surprised to find out that as far as the law was concerned, I had confessed. I never even got to witness my own confession.

I found out I confessed the first time I met my lawyer. He met me in visitation. Gold chain on his right wrist and too much Aramis. It's barely 'howdy do' and he starts with this "You are fucked" speech. It went something like this:

"You are fucked. We got an eyewitness. And she's sure it was you. To top it off, she's a probation officer. Pretty credible, you know? And they got your confession. And besides that you're a lawyer. Nobody likes a lawyer. Lemme see if we can nip this in the bud and get you life without parole."

"What? I never confessed. What are you talking about?"

"Look. Don't bullshit me. I'm your lawyer, okay? I can't help you if you bullshit me. I don't have time for it, okay? The assistant D.A. in this, name of Peter Stool, he told me you gave a detailed confession to Detective Diniper. Now Stool, he's a straight shooter. Diniper has good credibility in court, too."

"They're both fucking lying," I say.

"Come on, what reason do they have to lie? You don't have to bullshit me. This is confidential here. You know, nobody is going to believe you over Diniper. They're gonna kill you if you don't take a deal. You know in death penalty cases they do what's called capital qualifying a jury. They get rid of all the jurors who might have qualms about sentencing someone to death. They are more conviction prone, too. Studies have shown that."

"I didn't do it and I didn't confess."

"Save your life man. Stool almost always will give life without parole. He's Catholic. His priest gives him shit every time he gets someone sentenced to death. We're talking about the governor's wife's cousin here, but I still think I can get you the deal."

"I guess they'll be killin' the wrong man, because I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life in prison for something I didn't do. Fuck, you're making it harder than they did to keep from confessing to something I didn't do," I told him. But then I did wind up spending the rest of my life in prison for something I didn't do.

That's how the attorney-client relationship got started and it pretty much stayed the same.

I felt about as lost as a stray molecule in deep, dark, cold space. I puked right in the visitation room. I fucking failed. I cried all night like a little kid crying for a dead mommy. I started talking suicide then. But I figured I could win. I mean the truth is I didn't do it. I didn't kill the guy. Later it was too late for suicide. They watch you on death row 24 hours a day. The government will take no con before his time. Did you read about the condemned guy tried to O.D. Never mind how he got the shit. But they saved him. Life flighted him to the hospital. Stabilized him and then life flighted him right back for his execution.

This can't be happening, right? This is not me strapped down to this gurney. It's not my thigh they cut open to put a line in my vein. Just a minor procedure. The warden told me it's "not designed to cause undue discomfort." Had to cut into my thigh because the veins in my arms were not good enough targets for the prison guards they trained in the procedure. "Procedure." It's all been about the fucking procedures. When the governor turned down my clemency application, he said, "This man has had 20 court procedures to review his case. The last man executed only had 17." So it's all about how many hands your paperwork passes through before they kill you. Got nothing to do with whether they do anything meaningful with it. Yeah, I'm bitter. Forgiveness for these people -- and I guess by "these people" I mean all those who labor to create the appearance of a fair system -- forgiveness is bullshit. Bunch of procedure stylists. Speaking of which, fucking prison chaplain tried to tell me not to be consumed by anger. Fuck that. Let the anger eat me alive if it wants too. Let it take away the fullness of my life. After all I can count my minutes for sure. Let one of you wake up with my face in your consciousness, from a nightmare, some day, brought on by your fucking belief in an afterlife where you wear white robes or fly around like a ghost in a cheap movie. Some of you morons will believe I can haunt you, so I will. By the way, when I say "you" I don't mean you.

Anyway, they used guards trained as medics to put in the poison lines, because they couldn't find a doctor who would kill me. Although there was one on the jury. A fucking psychiatrist, born in Mamaroneck, New York, who went to med school in Mexico. My lawyer said he'd be good. Fucking shrink told the jurors I'd always be dangerous because my affect was inappropriate for someone who had killed someone. Showed a lack of remorse. But he probably never thought he was a hypocrite about his hypocratic oath. He was just one finger on the trigger of a gun that fired a bullet that has been traveling toward my life for 12 years now.

Under the sheet, my shirt is half soaked with blood from all the times they've tried to stick me trying to put the poison line in. These fuckers actually tried to stick the backup line in my neck. But the Warden finally told them to forget it, they'd go without backup. Just like they did with Bennie Demps down in Florida after they cut his leg up.

You can't move when they get you to this point. Everything is strapped down. There's even a strap across your forehead. Can't turn your head. Can just look out the corner of your eye. You can roll your eyes up like your are looking at the ceiling, only you are looking at the painted cinder block wall. When you relax and look straight ahead, you are looking at the ceiling. Mercury vapor lights. Bright. Candles would have been nice. Incense. Music. You fuckers have no sense of aesthetics.

My view is not even as nice as what you see when you're sitting in the dentist's chair. And to think that I had dental phobia right up until last week, when they wanted to give me a cleaning because it was on the schedule. Being executed like this is sort of like being all strapped down in a dentist's chair with several tall, overweight guys in khaki uniforms shoving needles into you and cussing you because they can't get them into you right, and you know the dentist is getting ready to kill you. It's terrifying not only because you know you are going to die, but because you figure they are going to fuck it up. Get the poisons in the wrong order. I made the mistake of reading my last lawyer's brief on all the things that can go wrong when they kill you with the needle. This professor named Radelet keeps track of all these things and writes them up. Like John Wayne Gacy. They put the chemicals in wrong and they turned solid in the tube before they killed him, so it took a long time. One guy, the needle came out and sprayed poison all over the room. Hell, maybe that was Gacy, I don't know. One guy they put it in his neck wrong. Another guy they got the order wrong. He bucked and gagged on the gurney. Or maybe he was the one they put the needle in facing away from the heart. Anyway, you think about these things. You really feel like it would be a shame for your last minutes to be even more fucked up. Gagging, retching, bucking, feeling your heart grabbed and twisted, suffocating while conscious of a bunch of cops and family members of the person you didn't kill getting off on your death. I guess there's no-one selling t-shirts outside the prison for me like they did for Gacy, though. "No Tears for the Clown," you remember that?

I think it was a lot more humane the way they did Jesus. And fuck all that Mel Gibson phony flesh flying off crap from that movie. I mean, at least Jesus died outside. Maybe he could hear birds. I'm never gonna hear another bird. Maybe he could smell earth. At least they stood him up so he could look out in front of himself. At least he could turn his head. True, they apparently nailed him to boards. But here they cut open your thigh and pull apart the flesh to stick a needle in a big blood vessel. They stick you 20, 30 times in the arms trying to get a vein. They poke you in the neck. You're strapped down so tight. One time they strapped a guy so tight that the poison wasn't traveling too fast. He was awake and going real slowly. The doctor who was there to pronounce him dead pointed that out after about 15 minutes. They've got a doctor hidden somewhere nearby. They say he speaks no English and he has no medical license. Mainly he likes to check inmates "for testicular cancer, if you know what I mean, and hand out Tylenol," one of the guards told me. I've never met him myself. He avoids the living on death row.

The last meal. They love to talk about the last meal. Like you really are going to have a nice experience that they can give you before they kill you. Or, it's just custom, tradition. But they won't give you drugs or alcohol. Guess what. I figured that my last act of defiance would be shitting all over everything. So I planned my last meal accordingly. I requested baked beans, General Tso's chicken with extra MSG. MSG has always given me stabbing gut pains and fire-hose diarrhea. I asked for a dozen boiled eggs, hoping for a sulfurous, hellish odor. But they only gave me 4. I asked for raw hot dogs and sauerkraut, which they gave me. They refused me beer. "Alcohol is not allowed on death row." Might render the place unwholesome, encourage vice. I recall that they had banned alcohol in strip clubs in the town where I lived. I think the reason I thought of this is that I heard some of the guards who strapped me down talking about heading to a strip club before they headed home. That speaks well of the dignity of this procedure, doesn't it?

I spent my last hours with a purpose. I fought the urge to unleash the furies raging in my bowel. I focused my mind on a task. I'll go out in a brown burst of artistic expression. My inner critic...Sorry, forget about that term. For comic relief, I've been reading self-help books from the death row library. My favorite is called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The guards are required to read it during training. Anyway, my inner critic says this is not a very noble or dignified way to go. I say it is more dignified than allowing their gurney to stay clean. Makes me feel more like a highly effective person. And one of those books said somewhere that I must have the courage to fail. Hell if I don't have the courage to fail while I'm dying, when will I? I was afraid they would shove wadding up my ass like they used to do to guys they were electrocuting so they wouldn't spray super-heated shit all over the chair. They'll probably do it to the next guy, though. Wouldn't want to open the floodgates to shitigation in prison.

Oh yeah, I remembered something else the Governor said when he turned down my clemency: "He was found guilty by a jury of his peers. The Supreme Court turned down his last request for a stay. As Justice Thomas wrote in his order, and I quote: 'Enough is enough. The Court was summoned from an important social event to consider this application which is nothing more than an abuse of the writ and a bald-faced attempt to buy more time. As my brother Rehnquist previously noted in the Herrera case, nothing would be more disruptive of our Federal system than allowing the litigation of free standing claims of innocence.'"

It all goes back to my trial. The Judge instructed the jury that they could consider the certainty expressed by the eyewitness in deciding how much weight to give her testimony. Well, we tried to get him to allow an expert to explain to the jury that certainty has no relationship to accuracy in the circumstances of a case like mine. That's the scientific, unrefuted truth, believe it or not. The witness had been coached. But we weren't allowed to get into that. The judge said we weren't going to turn it into a trial on "collateral issues." I guess he meant like whether I really did it. And the Judge turned down our request for the expert. Said the jury could use its common sense, not muddied up by some scientist telling them what to think about. By the way, I want my friend Rory to have my copy of the book, Convicting the Innocent.

Later, the State Appeals Court had said the judge was wrong not to let me have that expert, but my lawyer had not objected at the point where the judge read the instructions to the jury. He'd only complained in the chambers when the court reporter wasn't there, so the issue was "waived." So was my life. Just like that. Talk about a legal technicality. I still can't really believe that I am going to get killed for something I didn't do because this ceremonial error.. But they say it happens all the time. I guess this is the price of freedom, huh?

I wanted to be able to give someone my organs. But the Secretary of Corrections got the the law changed last year and said that prisoners were not "appropriate organ donors." Used to be able to leave your organs. I guess he is basing his opinion on one of those sci-fi films where the dead killer's hand can't stop killing, or the transplanted heart makes the recipient into a homicidal maniac. Does the term "mortmain" mean anything to you? Cause I think the dead hand of the past has everyone by the balls here. I just noticed that there isn't a single female involved in killing me. Well, except for some of the jurors.

Couldn't even give away a kidney. I wasn't sure if it was the poison that would fuck up the organs, make this prisoner inappropriate. So I filed a motion asking to be shot in the back of the head instead of poisoned. They refused that. Said it was not in keeping with American standards of decency. The Assistant Attorney General actually said in Court that my request was "barbaric and shocking and it should not be entertained for one moment by the Court." The Judge agreed, telling me that I thought shooting people was just fine, apparently, the government did not "think it the appropriate procedure under the circumstances." The nerve of some people. They say a shot to the head is the quickest and most painless way to go.

So it's time for the last of the last words. You get a last meal and some last words.

His voice rose to address others now.

I love you my dear. As for the rest of you: Fuck You! You are murdering an innocent man and no one gives a rat's ass because you have followed your procedures. You've shot the elephant. That's George Orwell. A story. Most of you morons probably don't even know who George Orwell is. Hell according to Gallup Polls some of you believe in ghosts, most of you believe in angels, 20% of you think the sun orbits the earth. I will fucking haunt you. I just want you to know that. According to Gallup Polls, 23% of you will actually be haunted by me. You know, you've shot the elephant, because things started happening and there were expectations, and even though it was not so good to shoot the elephant...

Guess I better wrap it up. Here's what you can say about this and this is on the fucking record: Just before the poisons began to flow, the condemned man let loose the loudest, most sulfurous, foulest smelling blasts of intestinal brimstone ever expressed by human asshole as was befitting the dignity of the occasion. Then his chest stopped moving. He could not breath. Chemically paralyzed. His body tried to buck against the straps. Then he didn't move at all. One more gone. One mind less. One world less. Justice done. Again. In the Biblical sense.


Brain Damaged Cabbie

As told by Rory Shock to his puppetmaster Ben:

I represented a brain damaged cabbie, by the name of Carl Allen Castor. He’d formerly been a carny, last employed as the Octopus attendant, skilled in the art of ticket taking, lever pulling, and early morning beer drinking. Carny: that’s what had led to his brain damage, more or less, I guess. Got shot three times by the boyfriend of a woman he’d been fucking half on the shelf bed of his travel trailer. Name of Roberta. She was 6 inches taller and 117 pounds heavier than he. Big boned gal. Pretty smile, though, he told me. She ran the ring toss. Not that her job duties matter at all to this story in any obvious way, other than my client failing to see the humor in it. Well, her husband had two first names, which is always trouble in some way, Rodney Dean Wilson. “Rodneydean” to his wife and friends. He made real good funnel cakes.

“Well, Mr. Shock, he pretty much knew me and Roberta, that’s her name, wuz gettin’ busy pretty reg’lar. So he hid in the harmer,” Carl Allen told me. By "harmer," I took him to mean “armoire,” knowing that in red neck rentafurniture facilities the “armoire” is a popular item, albeit one that many rentees cannot spell.

“We wuz goin’ at it real good. I was ridin’ her like she was a prize bull.”

This was one of those statements that requires some cultural translation in the mind of one used to making one’s living with the residue of the King’s English that survives in the courtroom. You see, I had to think to myself, odds are this guy is homophobic, or at least would want to be perceived as such, but here he is talking about fucking a bull.” Then I have to think to myself, “well, this is just conversation. The closest thing he could think of to the motion and zest of banging a sweaty, 312 pound carny was bull riding.”

So Roberta’s husband, Rodney Dean, was in the armoire with a .22 revolver, single action. He lets them go for a minute, then breaks through the cardboard door, gun in hand. Client turns and looks back at him. “Pow,” he’s shot in the head. A little chunk of frontal lobe destroyed. Not usin’ it much anyway.

First day in my office when he’s sent in by his employer who'd heard I was a good lawyer and who gave him a modest advance to hire me, he told me his story. I had asked him to tell me about himself. He took off his Kansas State baseball cap and above the tan and dirt line of the forehead and about an inch and a half above the indented hair of the scraggly fringe below his white, bald, freckled pate, you could see a dent and a scar in his head.

He pointed at it with a spatulate finger with dirty nail and said, “That’s where it got me. I was always a little onry after that.”

Sounded like he was doing a French accent: “A little Henri, after that.”

I noticed he had a pin of Lenin on his hat. I asked him what that was about.

He said a fellow he gave a ride in his cab had given it to him. “I’m not sure who this feller is, but I kinda like the way it looks.”

He was charged with rape, it turns out. Seems that there had been a bachelor party for one of the local college baseball stars. A 20-year-old coed, Lana, completely besotted, stumbled into his cab. She was wearing a short, tight, black skirt and slurring her words. She climbed into the front seat. She began to rub his thigh.

The 36-year-old red neck cabdriver with spatulate fingers, halitosis, greasy locks staining his collar, a dark tan on his left forearm and the left side of his face, a bald head with a few angry lesions, a skull dented from a bullet wound, and a frontal lobe reduced in size, was having the first sexual contact with another human that he had experienced since the day he mounted the 312 pound ring toss carny.

Due to the aforementioned unscheduled brain surgery, it didn’t take much for Carl Allen's executive functions to shut down to a similar extent as had the 110 pound young woman’s due to the 9 double gin and tonics she’d consumed. She was nodding, eyes fluttering, hand on his tallywacker.

He had not showered in 3 days because the water in his mobile home had been turned off for lack of payment of the bill. As had the electricity.

He asked her where she wanted to go.

She said, “Your place,” according to him and “I don’t remember,” according to her testimony.

He said, are you sure?

She said she was, according to him.

They went to his place.

She removed her own clothing, dropping her little black dress atop his dirty sock pile next to his bed, unaware that he had used some of the socks as jiz rags during his ongoing masturbatory remembrances of ring toss Roberta. He lit the kerosene lamp in the kitchen after pushing the pile of empty cans and plates enameled with the sauce of canned beans and franks out of the way. He made his way to bed and soon had mounted. In his mind he was riding her like a prize bull. Only it really didn't look much like that at all, I wouldn't think -- his paunch, his pale, hairy and flaccid white ass fitfully clenching and unclenching, while his breath whistled over his deviated septum. Some call it love.

Lana woke with her head on a bare, stained mattress. Dried vomitus on the lower corner of her mouth. A puddle of puke on the floor by his dirty socks and some skid-marked tighty-whities. Hardly the kind of collage most would choose to view in life's gallery.

Beside Lana, Carl Allen was snoring and passing nostril-burning gas. But she shook him awake. He smiled, revealing an absence of incisors that further horrified her.

"Did we ... ?"

Carl Allen, said, "No, ma'am." He could see she was upset and he was a gentleman. But they both knew he was lying, even though only he had any sort of memory of their coupling.

At her request, he drove her home.

Later that day, she reported that she had been raped. The next morning two detectives arrested Carl Allen. He readily confessed to having sex. He told the police it was "consenshul," a word he probably picked up from them, and that he repeated many times during the hours I spent with him.

When he finally had his day in court, the Judge, Harriet Smith, dismissed the charges, after I asked a few questions of Lana like these at the preliminary hearing:

"You took off your own dress didn't you?"

"I don't know."

"You helped Carl Allen out of his pants, didn't you?"

'I don't know."

"You stroked his penis, didn't you?"

"I don't know."

You get the picture. I didn't feel good about any of it. Can't say that Carl Allen is admirable. Far from it. A better man would have taken the young woman home, to her mother, to a safe place, protected her. But Carl Allen wasn't a better man. He was pretty fucking stupid, actually. And the invisible hand of 9 gin and tonics shoved Lana stumbling through the broken-hinged swinging portal to Carl Allen's grim little reality. That is pretty much how that shit works sometimes and it all goes on.