When I arrive, only Susan is present. Where are the rest, I wonder? But I don't bother asking: Susan isn't much for chit chat. She calls herself War Child, but the counselor insists she be addressed by her legal name. Help penetrate her wall of denial, he says. Practice tough love, by refusing to indulge her grandiosity.

Susan is young for this type place. Dresses in punk styles, Goth. Spiked Mohawk, pierced eyelid, dark purple eye shadow, tattoo of a snake devouring a mouse covering her left forearm. Solid black blouse and skirt, with navy blue tights for stockings. She might be pretty, with a full head of hair and less freakish garb. Maybe. Her eyes are soft, delicate, in contrast to the street-tough attire.

She's here for speed, a meth head. Stuck a lethal dose in her boyfriend's arm, then slit her wrists in grief. After six months of residential treatment she was sent to the halfway house, where you go when you're halfway better, but still halfway fucked-in-the-head. I don't see the improvement in Susan, myself. Six months of therapy behind her, and she only speaks of one thing: over and over she recounts the death of her old man, the look on his face, the way his eyes rolled back in his head as she pulled the needle from his arm and watched him die. Six months. Damn, woman, get over it already. Shit happens. Nobody twisted his arm and made him take that shot. Pardon the expression: nobody "twisted his arm." Suppress a chuckle. My wit runs to morbid these days. Did it always? Have I always savored gallows humor, even prior to my own collapse? Hard to recall…

Suddenly I realize that Sammy is standing in the doorway, watching me watch Susan. Maybe he thinks I want to do her. Do I? I don't think so. I mean, sure, it'd be nice to brandish the scalp of a twenty-year-old. But beyond that, she doesn't do much for me. Like I say, give her a wig and a pressed miniskirt, some black lace stockings in place of those moth-eaten tights, and then check back with me. But as she sits, between the medieval fashions and her pathological obsession with killing that guy, she creeps me out.

But the more important question is, do I care if Sammy thinks I want to do her? I don't believe that's true, either. Sammy's an older fellow, long hair, wears leather and chains. Hasn't been on a bike in years, maybe decades, but still dresses the part. No, his opinion is not important in my world. That's the problem with these rehabs, see, with spending so much time in therapy: after a while, I start thinking like a shrink. Always second-guessing myself, questioning my own motives. Makes me crazier than the day I came in.

But I admit, though I have no desire to impress Sammy, I am frightened of him. The same gut fear you experience passing a derelict on the sidewalk, who talks to himself. Because Sammy is really and truly nuts like that.

He's here for pain meds, opiates. Percocet, Lortab, Oxycontin, that sort of thing. Seemed like a sissy addiction to me, when first I heard it. I mean, if I was to get strung on opiates, I'd shoot heroin, or at least morphine, instead if dicking around swallowing handfuls of pills. So I used to have an attitude about Sammy, like he was a lightweight. Then one night in group, he rolls up a pant leg and shows us a scar. Big jagged cut, clear across the back of his calf. Said he took a goddam hack saw blade and raked it across his leg, back and forth, until his boot was filled with blood. Then he walked the last block-and-a-half to the emergency room, for a fix. I mean to say that he cut himself, deep and wide, for pain medication. Jesus. The man has needs, serious needs. So I don't scoff at Sammy anymore.

"Good evening, ladies and germs."

"Evening, Sammy," I reply, as Susan continues to stare at the floor. "Come in, grab a chair, make yourself at home." After a moment's pause. "Tell us about your feelings."

Sammy rolls his eyes. "Oh, there'll be time for that later, I'm sure." His eyes settle intently on a hole in the thigh portion of Susan's tights. He wants to stick her, I can tell. Christ, the man is even sicker than I thought. What do you call it? Necrophilia, that's it. Humping corpses. I suppose that description would apply to any sex act that occurs within the confines of a rehab. We are the living dead, mwa ha ha, our hearts continuing to beat long after our souls have been extinguished. Come, Susan beckons, let me wrap my decaying limbs about yours in a desperate attempt to squeeze the last morsel of life from your body, and into mine. To replace that which I have lost.

Jerry rolls his sleeve up, displaying his arm. Scars burned into his left bicep form block letters an inch-and-a-half tall, that spell "Elvis." During his most recent binge, he went camping. Heated a large screwdriver with a propane torch, and gave himself a tattoo. "I just figured, you know, I'm into Elvis, so why not claim him loud and proud? Seemed like a good idea at the time."

His grin is wide and friendly, his passion seared into his arm for the world to see. Jerry is my roommate. We share a small bedroom, in an apartment housing four.

"So, what's your story, Barry?" Stares into my eyes.

"Ah, pretty much like I said in group. Working Joe. Used to fix air conditioners and refrigerators. Took to drinking too much. Got some DUI's, lost my job, until my wife had me committed."

"Yeah, yeah. I know all that. We're all drunkies and junkies. But what makes you tick? I mean, what do you care about so much it makes you ache? I feel like I know that, about everybody in the group except you. What you hiding?"

Pause. "What makes you think I'm hiding something?"

"Aw, come on, man. This is the nut house. Susan killed a fellow with a shot of dope. Sammy tried to saw his leg off, for a fix. You know I'm a space case: got the homemade tattoo to prove it. But you're going to sit her and say, 'Oh, I'm just a working stiff, happens to like the sauce too well.' Give me a break. Folks like that don't fall this far. Maybe detox, one time. But not this far."

I don't respond. "Come on, baby," he prods. "'Don't be cruel.' Talk to me."

I stare in disbelief, then chortle. My roommate thinks he's the King of Rock and Roll, for crying out loud. What a character. But for some reason, I trust this corny whack job with the crooner shtick. Why? Intuition? Perhaps. Or maybe I don't trust him at all. Maybe I just need to talk, and he happens to be in the room. Whatever the case, I begin to unload my bags.

"It's like this, Elvis." (Well, what else you going to call the man?) "What I say is true, as far as it goes. I used to repair stuff: supermarket refrigerators, cooking equipment and the like. And I always did like to drink. But that's just the beginning of my story. After a while, I got tired of working my fingers to the bone for peanuts. Tried changing jobs. But wherever I went was the same: some kid fresh out of college, kicking the ass of the guys who did the work. I got so sick of it, one day I snatched my boss up by the collar, and held him against the wall. Spit in his girly face, before I put him down. I'll never forget the terror in his eyes. Most beautiful thing I ever seen…"

"Where was I? Oh yeah. Well, of course that job was spent. So I went home and got in front of the TV, and started drinking. That might have been the end. I might have sat and drank till it killed me. But after a few weeks, a fellow come by. Said he heard what happened. Said his union needed an organizer with spunk, somebody with fire in his gut who wasn't scared to piss the bosses off, or go to jail if need be. Oh, he had me, brother. He had me right there. I put a lid on the bottle, packed my bag, and left that night. Just left my old lady standing, wondering what the hell happened to the man she married. Two kids and a mortgage, and I toss my shit in the suitcase, and hit the road."

"Wow."

"Yeah. Union work was the only thing that ever made me feel alive, like I mattered. So I put in long hours: I'd be at the job site before daybreak, slapping backs and passing out pins; when the sun set, I'd be on somebody's porch hammering the knocker, wanting to talk about the union; and in between, I'd be doing paperwork, reporting back to the local, sitting in meetings, planning strategy. All day, every day. Fighting the good fight." Sigh.

"Barry?"

"Hmm? Oh, I'm sorry. So yeah, that's it. That's what lights my fire. All power to the workers. Rah rah."

"Sounds like a happy ending to me. You were doing something you loved. How did you wind up here?"

Hesitation. I hate telling this part...

Must be time for group therapy: through the window I spy Raymond, our facilitator, negotiating the icy walk. Or I should say, I spy Raymond, our "counselor". Our therapist. I tend to call Raymond a facilitator, as though he were someone who simply referees a discussion between equals, rather than someone with a minor degree in psychobabble who lords it over his minions, in a futile effort to direct the halting progress of the fundamentally flawed. Saying "facilitator" is an old habit of mine, a knee-jerk effort to steer meetings in an egalitarian direction. It harks back to my days as a rabble rouser. I never talk about those days here. Not to anyone but Elvis.

Our fearless leader enters the meeting room. "Hello, Raymond. Good evening," we each murmur in turn, gingerly, the superficial warmth and fluff barely concealing a shallow, subterranean dread. We are wards of the court. Raymond's good humor is all that stands between each of us, and a one-way ticket back to the pokey. How are you, Raymond? Yes, it is indeed chilly out this evening. Me? Oh, I'm fine. Why yes, you're so right, I did forget that "fine" is an acronym for Feelings I'm Not Expressing. How clever you are, you miserable mincing cocksucker. In the future I will strive to be more, um, expressive? Is that correct? In the meantime, may I clean your office? Rub your back? Suck your dick?

Ah, the last of our number arrives, ambling in the door like he owns the place, rather than arriving late for the third time this week, treading within a hair's breadth of jail: Ricky. His bald head gleams, even in the dim evening light of the meeting space. Like Sammy, Ricky wears leather and chains. But Ricky is never heard to mourn the loss of that precious pan-head he totaled twenty years ago. He is pure poseur, a costume biker. Nevertheless, he appears menacing. Why? Perhaps because he shaves his head. Or maybe, because I know that Ricky's tattoos and bald pate mark him as a member of the Hammer Skin Nation, a neo-Nazi group lately in vogue among the young hoodlum set. Virulently racist, and violent. A "political" group, whose every "party official" has served hard time. A deadly gang of thugs, whose politics justify the mayhem they would commit anyhow. Ricky, and his ties to these latter-day fascists, are why I play my cards close to my vest. If Ricky finds out where I come from, one of us will have to kill the other.

My roommate, Elvis, is perched on the corner of an unmade bed, brushing the remainder of some brown, stringy hair across the shoulders of a dingy leather vest. "There's one thing I don't get, man. If you were so all fired happy about fighting the bosses, what happened? I mean, how did you wind up here?"

I take a deep breath. Sigh. Open my mouth to prevaricate. Then answer, honestly. "I was working a campaign, trying to organize a construction site. Forty percent of the guys were wearing union pins. Rule of thumb says for every pin openly displayed, two others are sympathetic, but scared to show it. So no way we were gonna lose the certification vote."

"Well?"

"We lost anyway. Which means the fix was in. We were sold out. One sellout was the government monitor, the bureaucrat from the National Labor Relations Board. No surprise there, right? But the law says one of our guys gets to monitor, as well. A union suit. He sold us out, too: he must have, there was no other way."

"So I screamed bloody murder, back to the union hall. They called me a 'sore loser'. Said if I'd worked harder, I'd have won the vote. Finally told me to shut up and follow orders, and keep cashing my paychecks. I started wondering how high the sellout went. The top of the local? Higher? All the way up to the by-god AFL-CIO?"

"Next thing you know, the boots on the job site walk off. Pulled an illegal strike, unauthorized by the union, just ballsy as hell! The boss man at the union hall ordered me to pull up stakes and come home. Course I didn't. I mean, I couldn't, you know? Had to support the wildcats. But it cost me my job."

"Then...?" Elvis implores, his hairbrush idle now atop rumpled bedclothes, open palms spread wide.

"That's when I went from fighting the corporate bosses, to fighting all the bosses. Including the union bosses. That's when I went from being a run-of-the-mill union organizer, to being the editor of a Trotskyite magazine. In other words, I became a communist."

"A Trotskyite, you say. Hmm."

"Yeah. You have heard of Leon Trotsky?"

"Well, no. Actually I haven't."

"Course not. And that was the problem. I devolved into an esoteric, intellectual sideshow. Irrelevant. Until I got three or four shots into a bottle, anyway. Then I was no longer the silly ass editor of a cult magazine, I was a martyr. As righteous as any nineteenth century evangelical manning a station on the Underground Railroad."

"And when you'd sober up…"

"When I'd sober up, I was more irrelevant than ever. So I'd start drinking again."

"Ah, the vicious circle."

"Yes. Vicious. Quite so."

Silence. Then, "Damn."

"Yeah."

"Well. I guess that explains you and Ricky, anyway. The commie and the nazi. Mortal enemies. Jeez. That could get nasty."

"Yeah. It could get plenty nasty."

Elvis is lying atop his bedcovers now, stripped to a pair of lime green boxers that glow in the dim light filtering through the tiny, rectangular window above and between us. He rolls over and pulls a blanket across him. I assume he is already asleep, when he startles me with a final comment. "You know something, Barry? You're weird, man. You just plain weird."

"Thanks," I reply, giggling. "Coming from you, Elvis, that means a lot."

I wake with a start in the darkness, terrified, holding my breath. Upon hearing Elvis snore, I relax, and allow myself to breathe again. I thought I was… where? Back in prison? No. In the instant of awakening I was on the floor of a barroom, being savagely beaten.

The Seaman's Chantey was a neighborhood dive where skinheads gathered to shoot stick and talk shit. I was undercover, posing as a fascist. My comrades were not preparing an offensive, it was just routine monitoring. Hang out, keep my ears open, give a heads up when the fash plan something.

I needed to piss something terrible, but forced myself to finish my beer. Recon 101: never leave a drink unattended in a skinhead bar. Hurrying towards a stall, I brushed past a bonehead. Not a collision or even a bump, but I touched him, got into his space. Careless on my part, but I had to go real bad. And I was a little drunk. (Recon 101: drink only beer, and sip that. I always found the last part difficult).

The guy was a bruiser, a real pig. Ragged denim vest with swastika patches, teardrops tattooed on his cheek, teeth an eerie, phosphorescent green in the blacklit bar. He was drunk too, more so than myself. As I peed, I heard him sputter behind me, "You!" When I turned around, his hulking frame had trapped me in the stall.

Perhaps he was only angry because I brushed him. Perhaps I could have walked past him, or talked myself out of it. Or maybe "You!" implied that he had previously made me for a Red, and intended to take me out. Maybe. I'll never know for certain, because I slipped a knife from my boot- posing as a nazi, a weapon is part of the getup- and gored him. A couple of inches lower and I'd have struck his hipbone, and likely died in that stinking pisshole. Instead I found a sweet spot in his lower abdomen, sunk the blade deep into an organ, twisted the grip, and left him groaning on the nasty floor.

I started for the door, walking purposefully, looking neither left nor right. Halfway to the exit, someone shouted from the bathroom door and I broke into a sprint. But I never made the door. A disembodied hand snatched the collar of my jacket, the butt end of a pool stick broke several ribs, and I was prostrate on the floor, at the mercy of the class enemy. The blunt toe of a motorcycle boot loosened several teeth, and I thrilled to the taste of my own blood before losing consciousness.

I killed one of theirs, but they only kicked me where I lay, until the law arrived. Pussies. Fascists aren't the badasses they pretend to be.

Elvis is late for group therapy. When he arrives, he busily arranges his notebook and twelve step literature, before taking a seat.

Raymond, the counselor, studies him intently. "Where have you been, Jerry?" (Only Raymond calls Elvis by his given name.)

"Tupelo, Mississippi, baby. Graceland."

A short titter from Sammy, but no one else laughs. War Child, Susan, stares at the floor. Raymond lays his own notebook aside. "Look at me, Jerry."

Elvis stops shuffling papers but remains frozen, staring at the seat where he was about to alight.

Again, "Look at me, Jerry."

Elvis looks up. His eyes are glassy, his lower lip trembling. The session has just begun, but Raymond dismisses us, then dolefully instructs Elvis to report to his office for a breath test and a whiz quiz.

All rise and prepare to depart, gathering books and papers, donning gloves and scarves and overcoats, murmuring about Elvis' plight. All save Ricky. The nazi bastard remains fixed in his seat, staring at me through narrow slits, his lips parted slightly, his breath turning to hoary wisps as the door beside him opens. He knows something. I don't know how, or how much. But he knows something.

I cross the room. My gloved hand fumbles with the doorknob. Then I escape into the night.

Reclining in my bedroom on a Saturday afternoon. Elvis is back in jail, poor fellow. I am disappointed, but hardly fault him: I suffer from the same insatiable thirst. Hell, none of us last forever. We all get high again, someday. "Rehabilitation" just means delaying the inevitable.

I would be home now, but for a bottle of bootleg prison hooch that scuttled my plans for parole. A week before the final hearing, a guard found me unconscious on the rec room floor, near dead with alcohol poisoning. So instead of paroling out, I was transported to the nuthouse. From there, to the halfway-nuts house.

With Elvis gone, my new roommate is black, a crack head. He's gone "down on the corner" at the moment. Went after snatch or rock, I figure. He won't last long. I only hope he stays long enough to provoke Ricky, the nazi, to the point of getting them both kicked out.

I rise from the bed, and step into the nearby bathroom. Open the mirrored door on the medicine cabinet. Goodness. My new rommie must not have read the rules regarding contraband. Some interesting items, that he has stocked.

I shut the cabinet with a soft click. Start back towards my bedroom. Change my mind, and descend the stairs. At such portentous moments, one's steps should echo distinctly into the night. But instead, I pad silently down carpeted stairs in bare feet on a weekend afternoon. Entering the kitchen, I remove a large glass from the cabinet. A highball glass, as a matter of fact. (Some nurse's aid probably found them on sale at Wal-Mart, and had no idea they were whiskey glasses.)

I fill the glass with ice. Ascend the stairway, with silent steps. Return to the bathroom, and lay the glass on the rim of the sink. An ice cube crackles unexpectedly; the hair on my arm stands up, but I don't jump. Intent upon my task, I reach to open the mirrored medicine cabinet once again. I speak aloud: "So, what will it be today, Barry? A jigger of Listerine? Or a razor gash down the length of your wrist?" Perhaps both. I suppose Ricky wins. The war in Spain revisited. Another victory for the fascists.