“Good,” I responded, deciding I would take a nap. “Wake me up with your mouth in, like, two hours.” I chuckled when I heard Cal howl with laughter beyond the wall.

When the phone rang, I thought it was a part of a dream. I turned over on my stomach, hoping the shift would refocus my mind on its next reel of fantasies. The sound of crying that followed was the beginning of a nightmare we would never wake up from. One that would change our lives forever.

26

July 1936

In June, a prisoner in Alcatraz had stabbed Al Capone with a pair of scissors while the mobster was working in the facility’s barber shop. Upon hearing the news, my first thought was how stupid it was that dangerous criminals had access to sharp objects and my second was how apropos it was that Capone was stuck in the back, considering how carefully I’d had to watch mine when he ran the streets. The blade hadn’t gone deep enough to cause significant injury, which was lucky for Capone, but not so great for the perpetrator who probably would have preferred his subsequent trip to segregation yield more long-lasting effects than a flesh wound. After my initial, more surface, responses, I allowed myself to think the thoughts I hadn’t wanted to think about, the thoughts that were too painful to consider.

I knew Rosie wasn’t in a place like Alcatraz, but the fact that he was being held in any place other than Cal’s arms didn’t sit right with me. It was difficult to visualize Rosie doing well in a fruitcake factory on his own. Instead of being sent to prison after he was arrested for sodomy and deemed a “sexual psychopath,” Rosie was sentenced to five months in an asylum for the state to rehabilitate him of his “disease.” Cal and I had asked some of our Towertown contacts if they had any idea what kind of rehabilitation went on in the facilities and what we heard was worrisome to say the least. Supposedly, doctors used electroshock therapy, corrective rape, castration, and an array of other inhumane methods to cure patients of their homosexuality.