Excerpt from The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Tom's chest looked like a page from an artist's sketchpad—a couple old cars, a lion, Mickey Mouse, cell bars with tears spilling out, a green blob of something that may have been the Earth, or a ship, or a basketball, or the moon, and the full-body portrait of a woman Tom would later call Karen.

Karen was not a prison tattoo. She began over his heart and was clean and sharp with full, red lips. Her right eye closed in a wink, but the left iris was light green under long lashes. Her hair seemed blown by a wind up over Tom's left shoulder and neck, ending in wispy strands on his collarbone. She was nude, of course, with large breasts and wide hips straddling his sternum. Tom had a hairy Italian chest but had kept it shaved smooth and clean, everywhere except for Karen's pubic area, with its immaculately trimmed little triangle of hair.

The Price Is Right came and went but I could barely pay attention. I was watching the tattoo of Karen and wanting to touch her Sicilian olive skin. It felt awkward to stare at the chest of a man and fantasize about warmth and contact, but her light green eye and long, swirling hair seemed to speak to me, to have come down through the years since it was inked to grant me a moment's peace and connection to the human race.

The cell door opened and we were back up to six men. In walked a middle-aged, light-skinned black man with a misshapen afro and a patchy beard. Even in a fresh orange Kalamazoo County Jail jumpsuit he reeked of alcohol. "Ain't right. It ain't right," he said. "Mind my own business, cops come in and Taser my ass. That ain't right." He unbuttoned his jumpsuit halfway and rubbed at the two swollen marks from the Taser prongs, like a fresh snakebite. "And I'm hungry too, goddammit. That ain't right."

He was loud enough to wake Domino. The man paced the length of the cell, carrying on about the Taser sting until he saw Tom and his scar. "Damn, man!" he said.

"What happened to you? You get shot or something?"

"I got hit by a Caddy doing sixty."

"You look like Frankenstein, man. You should be dead."

"I did die—twice," said Tom, "but they shocked me back to life." He knocked again on the metal plates in his forehead. "This is all steel."

"Then you is Frankenstein!" the man said, and went back to pacing and complaining about his hunger and police brutality.

Tom's face and shoulders sank, like whoever had been pulling his strings had just dropped them. He looked at the drunk for a second, then looked down, and it was amazing to see a man so big hurt by something so small. But in here you can't just shoot down a man and his story, lie or not. What's more, he'd called Tom a monster, and even Frankenstein has feelings.

"You know," Tom said, "if you're hungry you can get something to eat."

"Yeah, how?"

"Go push that button up there on the wall and order a pizza."

The man walked over to the corner of the cell. "It says 'Emergency Only.'"

"If hunger's not an emergency, man, I don't know what is."

"Yeah, okay!" said the drunk. "What you guys want on it? I'll share." He put his finger on the button. "Man, they don't do shit like this in the Kent County."

A woman's voice came over the intercom: "What's the problem?"

"I'm hungry," the drunk said. "I want to order a pizza."

"Hold on," she said.

He looked back at us, giddy, like a would-be big shot handing out money not his own. "So you guys like pepperoni?"

All of us nodded in our own slight ways. Then the lock of the heavy steel door slid open and five guards stepped straight for him.

"Okay, smart-ass, we'll get you your pizza," said a bald guard with a mustache. The drunk was handcuffed and dragged out of the cell before he even had time to grasp what was happening. He looked puzzled as he left, as if he was still expecting them to ask what toppings he wanted.

Excerpted from The Graybar Hotel: Stories, by Curtis Dawkins. Copyright © 2017 by Curtis Dawkins. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc