Strengthen What Remains: A Novel of Recovery

By Jeremy Stevens

Brian Christopher Dildy is in prison, repaying his debt to society for an alcohol-related tragedy that shocked a community. His multilayered challengeresuming his program of recovery, fending off the demons surrounding his crime, surviving prison lifecauses feelings of resentment, bitterness, and fear that see Brian withdrawing into himself, somewhat brainwashed by his bunkmate into not only abandoning the idea of God, but condemning it. Upon his release, Brian is an angry young man, and he very soon finds himself traveling down the darkest path he has ever known, alone and unarmed. It is only through the unconditional love of a friend, and Brians absolute letting go, that he is able to begin a rebuilding, a strengthening of what remains. This third installment of The Devil Speaks Louder trilogy is a gripping story of one mans rags-to-spiritual-riches journey, a testimony that there is a better life, after alcohol, or any debilitating stronghold.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524623463

Jeremy Stevens

Jeremy Stevens, a public middle school teacher and former principal, is an alcoholic in recovery who freely uses his harrowing personal story to alter opinions and save lives. He lives in Wilson, North Carolina, with his fish, and in privileged proximity to his three boys: Andrew, Samuel, and Jack. His own spiritual journey can be found on his blog site, YoungDrunks.com, and on “The Devil Speaks Louder” Facebook page.

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PART ONE

Sentient Beings

Why are we here?

Because we’re here.

-Roll the Bones, Rush

1.

I’d been in-country thirteen days, a Vietnam War expression I’d heard others use for prison time, and it was at what they called supper that I finally met the one they called New York; the adverb, finally, not as in anticipation, like waiting for the circus to come to town, but inevitably, because he’d been circling me ever since I arrived.

The meal that evening was a delicate fare of turkey cutlet with gravy, mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, three slices of bread, two pats of margarine, a fresh orange and a kosher beverage. This is what the menu read.

But not to worry about complexities. It was either square, or liquid. If it began as meat it was quickly mealed by the pureed-rest, and much easier it would have been just to pick up the tray and slurp except I’d heard men had been sent to the hole for such ill-bred behavior. Better to save those black marks for more quality-of-life assurances, like a good ass beating to secure rank.

A great ice-breaker, food, for there was no weather to discuss, no so how was your day? catch-up. I was in a completely tactless environment, and one wouldn’t call chow-talk a discussion. More a word-volley; more, a space-filler.

–––-

So anyhow, Gorgeous.

That was how he began, as if continuing from where we’d left off. He sidled in across from me, from somewhere; he just sort of appeared, his prison spoon an intermediary between his face and his soupy tray. The top of his young-Bruce Willis-head looked like a salt map of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Have you ever had the satisfaction of stepping on a really fat grub? I’m talking one that went on the lam, ventured out to the driveway. The pop is really specTACULAR. The head bounced with each slurp. The satisfaction comes from a slow depression, though. And, you really should be wearing loafers, preferably without socks. There was no face. Just a bouncing, balding, dehydrated head.

New York was loud, his voice bitingly resonant, the higher exasperated pitch of the recently choked. If his prison name came from his speech, that alone was the reason. New Yawk didin tawk like dozsh on da S’pranos. He didn’t drop R sounds—mawning—or add R sounds—ideer—and, as I would later learn, he wasn’t from LawnGUYland. New York was just a coarse, loud white boy.

Fran Drescher, but without the –isms and far less whiney, meets Gilbert Godfrey, but far less Gilbert. Anyhow.

Back in the day, Discovery Channel and NatGeo television had given mindless, kick-back-and-be-grateful relativity for how good I really had it, providing good conscience: that this shit really happens, to them.

However, in the months prior to the clanging of the gates, I’d been traveling through purgatory. I’d hospitalized a girl, and for a very brief time she existed on a machine. My days as a free man were finite. Trying to stomach the fact that I would, inevitably, become them, I put the remote down—the visual would be provided soon enough—and did some research, exercising my mind through internet blogs from inmates.

Prison Rule #1

Don’t speak before it’s time; don’t stare as you listen. Staring is a sign of either confrontation, or homosexuality.

As New York spoke, I remained mute, staring down and stirring my dinner paste. "Equally spectacular would be the erupting zit. There’s an art to it, knowing when it’s ripe and what pressure to apply, ’specially if you pre-serve and catalogue the specimens like I do."

New York now had my full, indirect attention.

"See, in no particular order, you’ve got your blackhead. This appears exACTLY as its name would imply. It comes out like a yellow splinter though, best I can describe it. Sometimes it will leave a permanent little crater, like this one here I got just the other day."

This was a prompt, I felt, and I looked up with a passive curiosity. A cracked, yellowed, and brittle nail, seriously mineral deficient or fungal or both, jutted from his finger like a magnified petrified sample of the blackhead smegma he’d just described, and it pointed to a cheekbone that screamed hockey. His whole face was beaten, not recently contused from a recent scrap but molded by years of pucks and fists and sticks. And mined blackheads.

It was purebred streetkid, one scrappy little badass.

A bit more exciting, he resumed, with more fever to his smack now, "is the snake, or the squiggle, much thinner than the splinter, and whiter. I’ve got one almost an INCH long, in my archives, right next to the finale, the pièce de résistance if you speaka-das-French: the Holy Mary Full of Grace. This is the FUCKING Mount St. Helens, baby. The mirror labeler."

It was time, now, to speak. I focused on my voice being one of sincere interest, with zero hint of sarcasm, a terrific opportunity to practice an important survival skill.

Prison Rule #2

Respect, to be respected.

My silence might have been interpreted as indifference, even arrogance: a former trait of the nasty prisonbitch until he was taught deference in the horrifying ways you’d learned about on NatGeo, or The Discovery Channel.

Did you save that one too?

Prison Rule #3

Show no emotion. You will be manipulated.

I felt New York was assessing me.

Or, maybe he was from New York, where, I’d heard, everyone speaks their minds, which on a psychologist’s couch helps level sanity. Maybe he was simply telling me about his day, getting it out. Shit, the man spoke French. So, he wanted to share his pus collection. So what.

This was growth material. I was in no position to judge.

The Mother Mary’s not bred for captivity, given her consistency. She needs an embalming agent. But she’s in the mem’ries book too. Whether it was mere stream of consciousness or an actual response to the question, I could not tell, but still: I showed no expression, and I displayed no emotion. I appeared neutral, though on the inside I was just pleased to have been acknowledged as a sentient being in this emotional vacuum.

Having done what he could with the turkey cutlet and gravy, New York pushed his tray aside and, for the first time, squared me dead center, folding his fingers on the table and gunning his pointers at me. His eyes, they were greenish; his teeth, I now noticed, were perfectly dentured and Creststrip-white. My tray seemed just fine where it was.

I sat up straight in my chair. That’s a good boy.

"That nigger counselor wants to tell me my fascination with my zits is obviously emblematic of my desire to break free." Nigger was just as lubeless and pronounced as the rant I’d just experienced. New York had no filter. "Which is a load of happy bullshit, I told her, because I’ve popped pimples since I was a boy.

"And the niggress says, NO, not break free from these walls, but from the prison of my miiiind." He widened his eyes and pointed at his nodding head as he mimicked the nigger counselor’s words.

"Fa-get-abat it," he New-Yorked. There it was.

I’d heard all the same psychobabble too from a counselor I’d seen, merely a mitigating factor for court, and I groaned at the assessment. New York smiled broadly. His teeth really were too white for prison.

Do you think I’m crazy, Gorgeous?

No, New York, I don’t think you’re crazy. I think this is the necessary catharsis of your repressed inner-child. Wrong.

Fuck yes I think you’re crazy. That was a conditioned response. I knew the answer; my hand shot up. My receptors had no time to deliberate prison rules. Crazy as a shitbird in winter. But that’s your defense. People don’t fuck with crazy.

So you’re saying I’m weak.

I’m saying you’re white, and you got a real pretty mouth. I West-Virginiaed real pretty mouth. Great save.

Prison rule #4

Regardless of your affiliation on the streets or your cultural beliefs, show strict allegiance to your own race.

He held out his fist to knuckle-bump. I met it and made to explode mine. New York looked around, met my eyes again, and shook his head. Too far, Gorgeous.

2.

My bunkmate met me with a yoyo sup sagging head-hand jive that reeked wiggerperp, a cracker-assed motherfucker who was trouble, straight up, and not only by your mama’s calculations. He was the sample question on the test, the easiest to answer, the gimme: you see, you turn, ’less you wanna get offed, or branded as well.

You knew to suck on the nipple the first time it was offered, you knew this. It didn’t take street cred to figure it out.

Yoyo sup, yo, E-Trace, yo, and he shook my hand like he was performing a magic trick or playing a string game, weaving a Jacob’s Ladder and ending with a snap, yo.

In this place, whatever street cred I had was gone straight to hell. My people were not here. I was pure white, and though I voted for the black man, that had no place here. I had a percentage to fill. I intuitively knew my place. E-Trace, however, he was obviously conflicted, doggie-paddling in the sea between DNA and pop culture. In pigment, he was whiter than me; in action, he was fulfilling a dare, equally brazen as a Ty’Quavion at a Klan rally. If E-Trace voted, he voted Democratic, but only to bolster his cred through his amplified support of the Black Man Rising.

E-Trace had done three, two-year bids for multiple DWI, DWLR, and Evading and Alluding. He was in this time for up to forty-eight months for one count of possession of a stolen vehicle and one count possession of methamphetamine. (They never linked him to the manufacturing, which would have most likely gone to the Federal level and would have seen him with well over a decade in maximum.)

E-Trace, or Easy E as his circle widened, had worked for a crooked towing impound company. He and his two childhood friends would scope out the higher-end cars—Audis, BMWs, Mercedes— and tow them to illegal parking places, where they’d take pictures as evidence, then impound them. They strategically canvassed the city, operating at different points of location but preferring the airport’s long-term parking, the vehicle having been gone long before the owner’s return.

After forty-five days unclaimed, most cars written-off as stolen, his boss would assume the title, and would in turn sell the cars to Easy and Associates for the price of the impound, maybe $260.

Easy would re-sell the car, the parts of which, he assumed, would be extracted by plasma cutters, grossing maybe 250K annually, all of which was deposited in the ever-dwindling meth account.

With the drug he had his map: anything was possible, and he was scaling walls 24/7, snortingeatinginjecting but preferably smoking the product from a speed pipe, fucking and stealing and smoking. He was seldom still, his eyes bouncing and his teeth grinding and his fingers picking; his paranoia ran rampant, and he heard and saw screams and faces that forewarned a conviction years in advance. He ate very little, and nothing of the C- and B-complex vitamins his unbrushed teeth needed, the roots of which, and the gums, having long since rotted from the lye, acetone, and Coleman fuel vapors, and from the furious grinding.

Easy E, or E-Trace, did not have a real pretty mouth.

–––-

Handles come about in different ways.

They are assigned (see New York) based on origin or physical traits or the like, and they can give the owner a sense of acceptance. My name is Brian Dildy, known also as Bri or B- or Dilbert; or even, esoterically, as Dildo, because it is funny.

They are self-designated to preserve anonymity or singularity. In gangster Blood, for example, T-Blade might be a Tyrone whose preferred weapon is a knife. Maybe. The only one who should know T-Blade’s birth name, however, outside of his immediate blood kin, is T-Blade.

Handles are also the product of the conflicted mind. Sybil Dorsett, for instance, was allegedly Victoria Scharleau and Peggy Baldwin; Mary, Marcia, Vanessa, and Mike.

It didn’t take E-Trace long to inform me that he was an Edward, whose victims vanished without a trace, and that it was real conveenent that his last name was Trace. It all fit real nice. My bunkie was trying to be real scary. The various grease pencil sketches I’d found during my first few weeks in-country, laid conspicuously on my cot or tucked carefully beneath my pillow, drawn—very well, at that—by the local artiste’, of fish and phalluses, forebodings of bad things to come, were planted by E-Trace. I knew this because They’d circled him a few times, on the yard, nodding my way.

And he sorta told me, when he’d jive and sign didju find anything unusual on your bed today? He always spoke with his hands, yo, like I was deaf or something.

In minimum security, we were housed dormitory style; my space, the periphery around the bunk, was shared with Edward Trace. I did not feel at all safe in this space, with him and his brief yet adjectival dossier of idiot Blood life. Even though E-Trace was a harmless gangsta-wannabe punk, there was the last Prison Rule—show strict allegiance to your own race—and, therefore, my association with the Perp Lifestyle by default.

I felt my prison term looked grim with E-Trace as a bunkie.

3.

I was in the Yard, spaced metrically-apart from the other misfits who also knew their place, foot planted firmly against the prison wall, working on my apathetic cool while looking like a hopeful at the Sadie Hawkins dance, squinting at my snowy UHF tinfoil-wrapped reception of netless hoops and neighborhood gym; gesticulations here and pantomimes there, from loners and dreamers to quiet tribal circles to gaggles breaking into sudden clamor like ducks flapping wings over stolen pondscrap. It was all as if drama class had recessed to the playground for independent study, the players rehearsing for the upcoming premier of Spike Lee Goes Broadway.

It was a week or so after our communion at supper—perhaps three weeks in, and I’d not seen much of him except on the periphery, sort of floating around—when New York just sort of sidled up. He seemed like that