Angry Pigs, Fishing Mishaps

By Kenneth Labich

This first novel, written by a veteran New York journalist, begins at The Barbara Bush Home for the Criminally Insane, a Federal institution plunked down like a lump of bacon fat on the great sizzling griddle that is west Texas, north of Abilene. There we meet Paul Bittner, a magazine writer turned murderer who is serving a life sentence. In the pages that follow, our narrator relates how he came to be a killer and find himself behind bars.
Its a tale set in Manhattan, in the bars and restaurants and private clubsas well as in the offices and cubicles and conference rooms of major national magazines. Its a story of backstabbing and betrayal, of revenge and retribution, of dysfunctional bosses and disillusioned workers, of mind-numbing bureaucracy and the quiet savagery of the workplaceall of it fueled by drugs and alcohol and random sexual encounters. In the end, its a story of how one man is consumed by fate and his own weakness--and how he then finds a strange brand of redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465319074

Kenneth Labich

Kenneth Labich has worked as a staff writer and editor for various magazines, including Newsweek and Fortune. He is the author of four previous novels—Angry Pigs, Fishing Mishaps (2008), Precious (2009), Moisture Management (2011), and Moving the Meat (2014).

Book preview

Prologue

Toad Hall

One night about ten years ago, I found myself in the Olympic Four Seasons in Seattle, riding up in an elevator with Russell (The Love Muscle) Greeley. I’d flown out there from New York to do some reporting for a story about the aircraft business and had run into Russell in the lobby bar. He’s a Magnum photographer I worked with during the first Iraq fiasco.

Now it was eight hours later and we had become closely involved with much tequila, four fat joints of Vachon Gold, and two sweet-natured nurses from Spokane. Russell is a short, slim man with a great mop of brown-blonde hair and a goatee. Because he spends much of his time in hot countries, making pictures of dark-skinned people and shimmering vistas, he’d acquired the habit of wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat. In the harsh light of the elevator, he looked very pale and the spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks had faded to pink.

Russell usually manages his intoxicants well, but the Gold had caused his natural paranoia to bloom. At that moment, he looked demented as he swayed slightly with his reddened eyes darting about. Neither of us had any idea what had happened to his hat.

I had been reading one of those harrowing prison memoirs, and I was thinking about the ordeals the poor author had endured when Russell let loose a thunderous fart, a real cannon shot. We both giggled a bit. You’re a virgin, I said after a while.

Russell looked stricken. Whaddaya mean? he mumbled.

In prison, virgins are the only ones who make noise when they fart, I said.

Russell’s eyes bulged, and he scurried off the elevator at his floor without looking back. From that moment on, he always acted spooked whenever he saw me, as if I were about to leap on him and bugger him blind.

Men—all men—harbor a secret dread of being locked up in prison and turned into someone’s sex toy. After being transformed from Paul Bittner, magazine writer, to Prisoner No. B532856, I can report that, for me at least, the whole sex thing wasn’t so scary. Of course, as the perpetrator of a crime that made many headlines, I spent most of my year on New York’s Rikers Island stuck in a one-man cell. At 42, I was also too old and too ugly to be high on the predators’ dance cards.

There was plenty of sex at Rikers, and sometimes very young or very effeminate guys were brutalized. I saw a transvestite, a sad-looking Puerto Rican kid who had mouthed off to the guards at admittance, get raped over and over again one weekend; they stuck a Playboy centerfold on his back with toothpaste and then lined up, chatting about the Knicks and Ja Rule as they waited their turn. Most of the sex seemed to be simply about pecking order, and sometimes you caught a glimpse of a coupling—bodies entwined in the back of a cell or down a darkened corridor—that seemed somehow tender. At Rikers, what really made me crazy was the noise, a high-pitched racket that never ceased night and day, and the odors; even fresh laundry smelled sour, like old vomit.

Because of all the drugs, there’s just about zero sex of any kind where I now live. It’s a Federal institution plunked down like a lump of bacon fat in the great sizzling griddle that is west Texas, just north of Abilene. It’s searingly hot for about six months of the year and just uncomfortable for most of the rest. The building itself, if you ignore the chain-link fence and razor wire all around it, resembles an outsized version of one of those faux Victorian McMansions that adorn the suburbs around Atlanta or Houston. It has a dozen gables and scores of fake shutters painted blue, and it’s covered in cream-colored vinyl siding. My lawyers insist that I was lucky to get assigned to the place, which is officially named The Barbara Bush Home for the Criminally Insane. Most inmates refer to it as Toad Hall, or just Toad. I’m scared, a guy will say. Toad is starting to feel like home.

The name has nothing to do with Wind in the Willows, that old children’s book. It came about some years ago after several inmates who were watching a nature documentary in the television lounge became agitated by a swarm of brightly-colored Guatemalen marsh toads that appeared on the screen. Within a week, half of the population was regularly hallucinating about toads—toads on the ceilings, toads in their dreams. Four staff shrinks raced to publish the first Journal of Abnormal Psychology article about the phenomenon.

Like the former First Lady/First Mom for whom it is named, this place presents a benign face to the world but is malevolent to the core. The focus is on maintaining order, which is largely accomplished with massive doses of potent drugs. Less than an hour after I arrived at Toad on an early December morning, I was handed a paper cup containing three pink pills—all the pills are pink at this place no matter what nostrum they contain—and instructed to swallow them. The attendant who handed them to me, a tall, rotund black man called Ruben, watched intently to be sure they all went down. That was just the beginning. For the first week, as I underwent brain scans, Rohrshach tests, word association tests and on and on, I was required to swallow at least a half-dozen pills each day. Some days, I felt dizzy. Some days, my temperature soared. I gained about ten pounds, even though the food was classically institutional—greasy pasta, mushy vegetables, powdered eggs in the morning.

At the end of the week, Ruben came to my cell and escorted me to a conference room with beige walls on the top floor. Three staff shrinks wearing their white coats were grouped around the far end of the long table—a youngish Asian woman, who had told me her name was Karen and had administered most of my tests, and two older men, one of whom wore a full gray beard and spoke up in a high, squeaky voice as soon as I sat down. Mr. Bittner, Paul, this is your official welcome to the Bush Home, he said. We go by first names here. You know Karen, I believe, and I’m Bernard. He gestured toward the other male shrink at the table, a short, chubby fellow with thinning brown hair and a maroon-and-gold bow tie. And this is Carlton, he said. Carlton will be in charge of your pharmaceutical schedule, which we consider integral to our program here.

The stuff you’ve got me on now is making dizzy and fat, I said. I also think I’ve got a fever going.

Carlton gave me a shrink stare. We now know a lot about you, Paul, he said, a bit of gravel in his voice. You are an educated man, so we do not intend to try to trick you. On the basis of our testing, we have concluded that you have some compromised activity in the left hemisphere of your brain, some abnormalities in your hippocampus relating to memory disturbance, and general disorganized symptoms associated with schizophrenia.

I shifted in my chair a bit and took a hit off the water bottle on the table in front of me. Gotta say that I don’t feel even close to that crazy, I said.

The three of them gave me a collective shrink stare. We have been treating your condition with some traditional antipsychotics called phenothiazines, mainly Thorazine and Prolixin, said Carlton. Those side effects you describe are to be expected. Of more concern is a rather dramatic drop in your white cell count.

Carlton looked at me like he was waiting for a comment; I was speechless. We now propose to shift into into a, uh, more aggressive schedule using some newer treatments such as, uh, Clozapin and, perhaps, Abilify, he said.

He paused again. Hey, guys, I said, anybody ever show up here who turned out not to be crazy after all?

The three of them stood up and began gathering together their manila folders. Bernard glanced toward me. This is not that sort of institution, he said, and a small smile seemed to develop beneath all the fur on the lower half of his face.

So the pink pills went down day after day, and, though the dizziness and fever subsided, it didn’t seem to me that my hippocampus was getting any more normal or my general symptoms were getting any more organized. I told this to Karen and Carlton at our meetings every other day, but they didn’t seem interested.

What they were interested in was my progress at group. Life at Toad, along with all the drugs, revolved around a three-hour, six-day-a-week group meeting with several other inmates. Your entire life at the place, all the privileges you might hope to gain and all the small freedoms you might seek to earn, depended on whether or not you seemed to be explaining yourself with an open heart at these little gabfests. It reminded me a bit of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when all the professors and bureaucrats and artists had to confess their sins before being accepted into the new society. I didn’t share that insight with anyone.

My group consisted of seven troubled souls, myself included, and was presided over by Karen, who often seemed agitated during the meetings. She would scribble furiously on her clipboard and constantly shove her black-framed glasses up onto her nose. The sessions took place in an oblong room with unadorned white walls and a parquet floor. A large mirror was set along one wall, and I think all of us presumed we were being watched or taped or both at all times.

There were seven inmates in my group, five men and two women. All of us, it turned out, were murderers. The older of the women, who was a stout redhead of about 35 or so, seemed extremely protective of the younger one, a fragile-looking blonde who looked about 18 years old.

Ruben told me that the older woman, who was called Cheryl, had been a hooker who did away with various customers and the younger one, Ariel, had butchered her entire family, including pets. The other four men in the group seemed to be your garden-variety sickos; each of them had apparently been grossly abused by one or more parents and had progressed from torturing small animals to slaughtering friends and acquaintances.

As the newbie in the group, I wasn’t required to speak for the first few weeks. So I listened as each of my fellow miscreants—except for Ariel, who merely watched the proceedings with a kind of feverish intensity—described their harrowing descent into madness. It was a bizarre way to spend one’s mornings, and the drugs made the whole thing seem sort of dream-like. The group room was the only place where music played at Toad, presumably to fill awkward silences, and it was a strange kind of Muzack, a tuneless melange of strings and snatches of popular melodies. You could hear a couple phrases from the Beatles’ Yesterday, then what seemed like some Herb Alpert muted brass, then what sounded something like Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl—all within thirty seconds. I have no idea what the shrinks were up to with the cacophony, but it provided the background sound as my group partners talked about fathers who raped them and mothers who didn’t care, children they maimed, and strangers they strangled.

The day finally came when Karen looked at me and said it was my turn. Something that sounded a bit like Do You Know the Way to San Jose? was playing over the intercom as I began to tell my story.

Chapter 1

Vunderful

The chopped-liver Statue of Liberty was a blatant sign that something was amiss at this particular New York cocktail party, a roiling, crowded mess of an event in a penthouse office space high above Park Avenue. The rest of the buffet table was standard—a mound of shrimp, caviar and sour cream wrapped in tiny crepes and tied with strands of chive, hard and soft cheeses, melons and strawberries. The bar was acceptable as well, stocked with top-shelf brands and manned by a florid-faced Irishman wearing a white jacket. But that gray-brown figure of Lady Liberty holding aloft her meat torch was just wrong, and the writers and editors and agents and various hangers-on who patrolled the premises cast uneasy glances at the thing. No one seemed inclined to stick a cracker in it, so it remained intact, staring out at the party while the rest of the spread was demolished.

I probably should have taken that statue as a portent of horrors to come and fled the place immediately, but this was the launch party for a new magazine that I had joined as a staff writer and editor just days before. Hope springs eternal at such moments.

The idea that had brought us all to this walnut-panelled, glass-walled office wasn’t completely idiotic. Axel & Weidlich, the extremely successful Frankfurt-based publisher of newspapers and magazines in Europe, had a couple years before launched a German-language edition of a glossy monthly called Welt. Each issue had a bright green cover framing a picture and featured pages and pages of elaborate photos, many of them depicting wild animals and sumptuous landscapes in exotic locations, accompanied by 2,000-3,000 word articles. The magazine was already making money in Europe, and now the Germans had decided to invade the U.S. and put together an English-language edition called World. They were telling anyone who would listen that to break even they needed only to reach about ten percent of the folks who already subscribed to the ancient U.S. monthly with a yellow border on the cover that explored much of the same turf.

Whether or not the project succeeded over the long run made little difference to the crew at that evening’s gathering. The heady scent of freshly-minted euros was in the air, and there was a floorful of folks eager to get a piece of the action. There were literary agents sniffing around for rich paydays for their big-name authors who were between books. There were executive headhunters strolling nonchalantly along the halls to see how many offices still waited to be filled.

There were about 30 photographers, a loud bunch that collected in a corner of the room and chatted among themselves. At least half of them, men and women, were wearing baggy cargo pants and vests with multiple pockets; they looked like they were proceeding directly from the party to begin a six-month safari. There were various newspaper and trade magazine reporters, covering the launch for their publications. The dean of this group was R.J. (Buddy) Seinfeld, a balding fellow with a reddish chin beard who covered the magazine and newspaper business for the Hertz of all American newspapers down on 43rd St. He could be seen hovering near the bar, pounding down Absoluts and grinning maniacally. And there was a swarm of freelance writers, some of whom were already clutching contracts and expense checks for one outlandish assignment or another. One of this crowd, a semi-famous novelist and former Socialist candidate for mayor, showed up with his daughter, an angelic child of about 12. He and the girl disappeared inside a corner office briefly. He reappeared, contract and check in hand, and, grabbing the kid’s hand, moved swiftly toward the exit. Come, Francesca, I heard him say. Off to the phone company.

Like most people, I had stumbled into my career without really knowing what I was getting into. I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, only son of a happy homemaker and a man who described himself, often, as the only Gentile jeweler in Shaker Heights. My sister, five years older, and I would cringe every time he said it.

My father ran a small shop in an upscale strip mall near downtown. Most of the business consisted of changing watch batteries, moving the occasional wedding set, and selling cheap lockets to teenage Lotharios and various piercing items to the local punk crowd. But my dad largely ignored the regular foot traffic, hiring a series of store managers to run the front counter. He spent most of his days in a cluttered workshop in the back of the store, crafting ornate rings, earrings, and necklaces from white gold, platinum, and precious stones. After working on several pieces over months, he would display them in the front window for a week or so, then melt them all down and start over again. Once, when an elderly woman demanded to buy a platinum-and-ruby broach she spotted passing by, my father claimed it was spoken for and refused to sell it to her. He was a superb dancer, a talent he did not pass on to me. I did inherit from him blue-green eyes, a thin crop of dark brown hair, a long, wide nose, and an aversion to all sea food except for canned tuna. He wore a thick black mustache, and I have maintained a hairy upper lip since age 23 in his honor.

My dad died when I was in the eighth grade. He got up from the breakfast table one morning, took a step, and collapsed to the floor dead from a heart attack as we all watched. My mother, who was a goddess in many ways, tried to make a go of the store, but one incompetent and dishonest manager after another sucked dollars out the door. There was enough insurance money to keep the house and pay the bills, but no more. My sister left her private college in Connecticut after freshman year and went to the state university. By the time I entered high school, it was clear that my educational future was in my own hands.

Just one of the results of having a parent die when you are still young is that you have to face facts earlier than you might like. For the first time in my 13-year-old life, I took a hard look at myself. I was getting mostly Bs in school and not getting into too much trouble at home. I was okay at sports, not an All-Star, and I had friends. A honey-haired girl who wore pink sweaters and sat two seats in front of me in my English class had told someone who told me she thought I was cute. All in all, I was unexceptional, a regular kid.

But by then I already knew that wasn’t good enough to get a free ticket to some college without an agriculture major. I needed a talent, a gimmick, something to make me special. Then, on a bitter cold Thursday afternoon in November, I found it. I was walking by the football field behind the high school on my way to a friend’s house and stopped to watch the team practice. I had played one year of Pop Warner without distinction and had already dismissed the notion of a football scholarship. As I watched the team running through its paces—linemen slamming into tackling dummies, backs running around obstacles, coaches screaming and blowing whistles—I noticed two slender guys in practice uniforms standing along the sidelines. They were doing some leg exercises, bending and stretching, but mostly they seemed to be telling each other jokes and generally screwing around. They were the only people out there who seemed to be having any fun at all. They were the kickers, I soon determined. One guy did the place-kicking, field goals and kickoffs; the other guy punted.

I wasn’t a particularly adept kicker; my single season on a kiddie soccer team had been a dismal experience. But I asked around and found out that the kid who did the punting was a senior. All that fall and winter I spent every free moment strengthening my legs with ankle weights and teaching myself how to kick, mashing baskets full of footballs across the public park near my house. By the time spring practice came in April I could send the ball on a tight spiral 30-35 yards on a regular basis. I became the junior-varsity punter as a sophomore, then moved up to the varsity junior year. I never got much better, but I was good enough to get some interest from small college coaches in Ohio and neighboring states. I accepted an offer from a pretty good liberal arts school nestled in a tiny town 60 miles south of Columbus, and I got mostly Bs, fell in and out of love with a Tri-Delt, and graduated in four years.

I finished college in 1985, and I was more or less unemployable. I had become a history major after taking a course about Barbarians sophomore year. For some reason, I just couldn’t get enough of fun folks like Alaric the Goth and Genseric, the Vandal king. This fascination and my new degree, it was clear, had not prepared me for the real world. The summer after I graduated, I worked a few hours each morning on a town sanitation truck, then laid around the house reading about the Huns and the Visigoths and trying to figure out what to do with my life. My mother saved me, as she so often did. One Saturday morning, she handed me a slip of paper with a phone number on it. It’s your Uncle Jeffrey, she said. He has something he wants to talk to you about.

My Uncle Jeff, my mother’s oldest brother, was a tall, somber man with an ever-present Winston hanging from the corner of his mouth. I had scarcely ever spoken to him. When I got him on the phone, he told me to come downtown to his office at Cleveland’s biggest morning newspaper. He was, it turned out, a mid-level advertising executive at the paper, and he had enough juice at the place to get me a spot as a copy boy in the