You know how people are always joking about the men in the white coats? Guess what-sometimes it’s not a joke. Somewhere around Bonny Doon, Epstein pulled up to a pair of high wrought-iron gates set into a stone wall that stretched off into the deep, dark woods in either direction as far as the eye could see. MEADOWS ROAD, read the sign affixed to the wall.
Next to the gate was a square stone cottage. A uniformed guard leaned out the window, Epstein gave him our names, and the gates swung open. We followed a winding driveway uphill to an ivy-covered three-story brick building with green awnings and a white portico.
From the front it looked like a very nice retirement home, the kind rich folks wouldn’t feel bad about sending their aged parents to. But we didn’t go in through the front, we drove around to the back of the building, where the windows had security grilles an anorexic hamster couldn’t have crawled through, except on the third floor, where they were bricked up entirely.
That was when I made the acquaintance of the men in the white coats. Two of them. One white, one black, both big. They came around to the passenger door. Epstein leaned over and unlocked my handcuffs. It felt strange, having my hands free. The door opened. I unhooked my own seat belt, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to step out of the car. I think I must have been waiting for Epstein to say something. Nice meeting you, good luck, something like that. But he said nothing, just gave me a big phony wink. Then one of the orderlies, the white one, grabbed me by the arm, and yanked me roughly out of the car, sending me sprawling across the hard concrete.
I went absolutely apeshit, so apeshit I don’t know how long it lasted, or what happened in what order. My memory of that time is more like a shoe box full of random, black-and-white snapshots. Some are blurred and some are dark and some are shot from crazy angles. This one was taken from the ground, looking up, and that one from above, looking down. Another one’s kind of surreal. Is it a trench? Is it a…canyon? No, it’s an extreme close-up of the nose of the white man in the white coat, which was split wide open down the middle. Then there’s a picture, kind of streaky and overexposed around the edges like it’s from the end of the roll, of a hypodermic syringe sticking out of a blue-jeaned thigh. My blue-jeaned thigh.
And at the bottom of the imaginary shoe box there’s one last, dim snapshot of the traitor Epstein waving good-bye as they drag me away. On his face is a sickly grin; in his waving hand is a sheet of paper he had one of the whitecoats sign. It’s a receipt for the delivery of yours truly. A receipt he can bring back to show my grandparents in order to claim his thirty pieces of silver. A receipt that earns him a privileged spot on my all-time fantasy revenge list.
Oh, and one more thing. The date on the receipt? It would have been October 31, 1985. Halloween, of course.