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

Afternoons, during soap operas, we would mute the TV and read, write letters, do whatever it took to pass the four hours until dinner.

Tom made his bed, then sat at the picnic table to draw. I lay on my mat in the corner and watched the silent soap opera figures on the television screen. There was a ransom plot going on that week—a gorgeous blonde tied to a chair in a storage facility. Without ever hearing the words the characters spoke, I'd noticed a dark trend toward kidnapping that month on daytime drama.

At the table, Tom hummed, tapped his pen, and drew. I got up and sat across from him. The edges of the page he worked on were adorned with roses, thorny stems, and leaves, and the middle looked to have a poem or song printed on it.

"Thought I'd see what you were working on," I said.

"It's my hustle back in the joint." His was a common one for artistic types who get locked up—selling drawings and poems for others to send home.

"But here's the deal, right?" said Tom. "Here's my new angle—gay, erotic rap songs. Don't get me wrong, I ain't gay or nothing, but I can't wait to get back to prison. I'm gonna clean up. It's an untapped market."

"So who's the lady?" I asked, nodding to the tattoo on his chest.

"Karen," he said. "Karen Sharon. She was my girl a long time ago, back before Cadillac. I used to have a lot of girls before that shit."

Tom looked down at his page and nodded his head to the beat of his tapping pen. He continued drawing and I stared at the little details that made up Karen Sharon: her red lips, the long, clean neck, the slight rib lines below her breasts, then the wide, soft hips. There was that small patch of pubic hair, her knees, calves, and finally her thin ankles and dainty feet. The long hair that wrapped around Tom's neck seemed curlier up close, less like a flowing river. Again, I felt the urge to reach across the table and touch her. She seemed so alive, like if I jabbed my finger at her open eye, she might reflexively close it.

She must have been a shallow woman to leave him after the accident. Then again, he probably wasn't a model boyfriend either. I could have been projecting, though. Like all of us who'd wasted our time out there, he'd no doubt taken his life and relationships for granted. Now he was a man who couldn't wait to get back to prison and make a killing in the gay rap market.

The soap opera—I think it was the one with the big hourglass—was ending. The kidnapped lady in the storage facility was about to die from a fire deliberately set by some contraption involving gasoline, dirty rags, and an alarm clock. The scene faded from a close-up of the ticking clock to a handsome couple toasting each other with champagne in a hotel bar. Then the credits rolled, and the sand slid through the hourglass again.



The next day I woke to Tom tapping his pen in some rhythm, occasionally looking up at the TV as if searching for rhymes for his gay rap. Volunteers from a nearby church brought by the squeaky book cart. Ricky picked an ancient-looking paperback and began reading it on his bunk. Domino woke up for a minute only to try to call someone on the phone.

I spent the morning waiting for the soap opera to come back on. And of course, the kidnapped lady left for certain death did not die. I knew she wouldn't, so few of them ever do. It was the means of her escape I was waiting for. And at the last minute, she cut away the ropes with the prongs of her wedding ring, then ran out of the storage facility just seconds before the place was engulfed in flame. The beautiful couple in the hotel bar was arrested; the victim led the cops right to them and she smiled as they were cuffed. Through it all, she had only a dark smudge of soot on her cheek.

On the whole, it was a good day on TV. Earlier, a blue-haired old lady won thirty grand playing Plinko on The Price Is Right then went on to win both showcases. At four o'clock, Oprah came on. Domino slept, but Tom, Ricky, and I watched Tracey Gold, former television star, recount her harrowing drunk-driving accident and arrest. "I didn't even know I was drunk," she said.

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