Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  I went days without sleeping or eating. I weighed eighty-five pounds. I was shrinking; I was being consumed. And it felt right, as if this were the destruction my life had been heading toward all along. So I pledged myself to cocaine, gave all the love I had to it. I worked as a stripper on the Block in Baltimore for it. I hocked almost everything in my apartment for it. I scammed for it. I unsuccessfully tried to break into a neighbor’s apartment with a butter knife for it. I slept with men I wouldn’t want to admit to knowing for it. And even after accidentally overdosing—after falling unconscious into a fit of seizures on my kitchen floor—I woke still wanting it.

  I was nearly dead when I finally put the needle down. I’d lost my apartment and was living with a fellow junkie named Kevin in a rodent-infested house in the middle of nowhere. We slept on a bed without any sheets, and at night I could hear the mice scratching in the nightstand next to my head. One day it had started to rain. Kevin had taken a mouthful of pills and had systematically and inexplicably begun to move what few belongings I had left out onto the lawn. Raindrops were beading up on my stereo, which I struggled to lug back toward the house. I begged him to stop, but by then even my voice was weak. The rain picked up, made a rustling sound like a forest of old leaves waking to wind. Kevin didn’t speak. And he didn’t stop. His eyes looked past me, disconnected, inhuman.

  Seeing that look in his eyes, I knew then that I’d become exactly like the people in those N.A. meetings I’d attended when I was at the Jackson Unit, the people whose lives I couldn’t fathom back when I was flirting with Dallas and watching the sun set over the mountains. I remembered what they’d said about addicts having to “hit rock bottom” in order to stop getting high, and how for many addicts that bottom is death. Maybe it was the ghostly way Kevin was standing there, almost transparent, pulling out the last little scraps of my life into the rain. Maybe it was the rain, its impenetrable gray, the way it was collecting on my stereo. Maybe it was how Kevin was holding my box of record albums, tilting them forward, aiming them for the grave.

  Maybe it was that for the first time in my life, I was too weak to run.

  What I knew was that I was as low as I was going to get. Any lower would have been in the ground.

  Knowing this, I managed to summon one last flicker from my spirit—the same spirit that first sent me running out the door of my father’s house with an answer I would later forget that I had: No. No, I had not wanted my parents’ violence. No, I had not wanted to spend my teenage years institutionalized for a crime I didn’t commit. No, I did not want to have loveless sex, and I did not want to mistake sex for love. No, I did not want this corpse of a man killing my music. I did not want death.

  I corralled what traces of strength I had left and pulled my box of records from Kevin’s hands. He resisted at first, and his eyes, for a second, flared, but then like a monster that pops out of a 3-D movie, he quickly receded, and I left him standing there in that overgrown grass in the rain. I called a friend, and we filled her car with what we could and left the rest to the rodents.

  After I drove away from Kevin’s that day—after I dropped to my knees and cried every kind of cry I could cry and begged any God who would listen to let me keep my life in exchange for a vow I would keep all of the years after: I would never get high again—I asked my grandparents for three hundred bucks and got a tiny apartment on the top floor of an old Victorian. And slowly, slowly, I began to heal.

  I didn’t have much in the way of internal reserves—there hadn’t been a lot of love in my life, and my confidence was as creaky as my living room floor—but I had a belief stubborn enough to weather any bomb: the belief that there was beauty to be had in this world. There was love. And thanks to the Jackson Unit, my sanctuary in the mountains, I’d been given enough love to carry me through the darkness still to come. So I took that love, that wonder, into my new days. I noticed things like dandelions sprouting up in sidewalk cracks, and the way it felt to go for a walk and know I had a place to come home to, and stars. Sometimes life felt vast and unknowable, and sometimes a terror fished through my heart so intensely that I was left gasping. But I kept walking, kept looking, kept writing in notebooks about what I saw. And the pages added up—the days added up—to something.

  Ultimately, there was no one thing that lifted me from the muck of my past. But there was my first real boyfriend, who was free-spirited and funny, who gave me crystals he’d mined in Arkansas and who taught me that sex with a man could actually feel good. There was a beautiful friend—a fairy with long red hair—who brought me chocolate cake and poems, who sang to me, who was compassionate and generous and true. There was an older man who rode a Harley and who introduced me to the ocean and Joni Mitchell and beurre blanc sauce, who gave me a haven for five years in which I could heal. During that time, there were hikes deep into the woods, explorations into unmarked caves, sublime moments swimming with stingrays in the sea. There were the books I devoured, the ones I should have read in high school—Steinbeck, Salinger, Plath. There was the poetry of Mary Oliver, who put into words a peace I carry with me still. There was the day I walked into a room that seemed as big as a baseball field, holding two No. 2 pencils and that same stubborn hope—the one that almost killed me, the one that saved my life—that I could keep moving forward. There was the day I learned that I’d passed my high school equivalency test. And there was the day I went to my first college class—on a campus where I would later teach—ready to learn.

  I was one of the lucky ones.

  Major Kohler and I run into two other guardsmen who greet him with a salute. I know they’re curious about me and why I’m there, walking around with Major Kohler. In the parking lot, we lean up against Major Kohler’s pickup, and I tell them briefly about my time there. They listen, while the sun drops and swells and the air begins to cool.

  One of them says he’s heard ghost stories about Montrose.

  “Really?” I ask. “Like what?”

  He shoots a glance at Major Kohler, then at his friend, then finally to me. “A lot of guys here say they’ve heard a girl crying.” He turns his head and points. “Word is she hung herself right back there in that building.”

  The officer beside him nods slowly. “I’ve never seen her before, myself, but one of my buddies swears he actually saw her one night. Looked right at her!” He motions with his hand by gliding it forward in my direction. “Probably wasn’t any farther than you are from me.”

  I’m jolted by the memory of that story and how even now, twenty years later, it still lives.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  The tornado ended up skirting the edge of the pastures, far enough not to damage us, close enough to roar. Claret pushed his nose into my hand, and I held his head and stroked his neck and spoke to him, such soft things, and it wasn’t long until the rain stopped, and the clouds dissipated, and I walked Claret out to the wet grass so he could eat, while a cluster of starlings rushed up from a fence rail and dove down all around us. Claret and I shared a bond I’d felt building all my life, from my earliest memories, from the earliest sounds of hoofbeats storming through me, and I knew he was not happy.

  One of the ways he’d begun to express his unhappiness was through what had become a regular habit of headshaking. Sometimes he’d randomly start tossing his head up and down violently while he was being ridden, as if a bee had flown into his nose. Because there was no way to predict when he might do this, it almost always startled me. Then the two of us would flail in unison as I struggled, and usually failed, to hang on to the reins.

  “I think his body is uncomfortable,” I told Laura one day while she was on him.

  “I think it’s his mind that’s the problem,” she said. And then he bucked her.

  I had a vet come out to examine him anyway. “Yup,” he said, “horses don’t lie.” He diagnosed Claret with chronic allergic rhinitis and put him on antihistamines, but the headshaking only got worse. And
so did Laura’s frustration with it. Meanwhile, Claret, who I was coming to believe was all heart, had changed his attitude toward Laura after she bullied him in the wash stall. He’d become defensive, less willing to do what she asked, which made her ask more forcefully, which made him say no more forcefully, until they’d firmly entered a pattern I recognized well. Within weeks, their relationship deteriorated to pure combat: whenever she attempted to ride him, he bucked, kicked, backed into things, or simply refused to move. I could see the anger reddening her cheeks. It’s because he doesn’t trust her, I thought.

  That trust was further tested when Laura left Claret tied alone in the wash stall for two hours. She did it when I wasn’t there, but I found out about it later when I asked her how his halter had gotten broken. That’s when she explained that she was trying to teach him “to deal” by leaving him alone in the wash stall until he could get past his fear and relax, but eventually, instead of relaxing, he broke the crossties again, and this time his halter, too. Hearing this, I had a sinking, queasy feeling. I understood what she was doing—it wasn’t much different from CBT, from the running in place I’d done over and over to the measure of a doctor’s stopwatch—but I knew by then that Claret, like me, needed something more, something with a little heart.

  After that, it was nearly impossible to take Claret into the wash stall. And he continued to become more and more anxious, until I could no longer predict what would cause him to jump—a bird, a flower bending in a breeze, a person in the distance, a trash can, a chair. It seemed there was nothing that couldn’t potentially terrify him.

  My horse, simply put, was panicking.

  Then one day Claret decided that he wasn’t going down to the far end of the arena at all. It turned out that in addition to all the other things he was afraid of, Claret was also afraid of cows, and through the windows at that end he could see the two new cows that had come to live across the farm. Every time Laura asked him to venture toward them, Claret refused vehemently. She put her leg on him, and he kicked out sharply from behind with his own. She tugged on the reins, and he spun around madly. She smacked him on his flank, and he backed her into the wall with a bang. No matter what Laura did, she could not get him to walk to the other end. He must have backed her into the wall five times before she finally got off and “ground-schooled” him right there in the middle of the ring. She raised the whip to him, and he reared up, away from her, his eyes bulging, his mouth peeled back in a kind of grimace. But she had his reins and wasn’t letting go. “When I touch you,” she told him, “you move away. You fucking move away!” She smacked him on his flank with the whip, and he darted away.

  I had been told many times by many riders that there is nothing we can do to a horse that can compare to the roughness with which they treat each other in the herd: it’s perfectly normal for horses to bite and kick each other to establish their position in the hierarchy, and I had to remind myself of this as I watched. Laura was merely establishing her position as alpha mare, which was a natural thing to do, and crucial to our safety as riders. But the more I watched, the more my heart disagreed. Sometimes when a thing feels wrong, no amount of logic can make it right.

  After about five minutes of ground school, Claret began to submit, and Laura got back on him. He was marginally calmer, but she still could not make him go down to that far end. This was a rider who had climbed far up the ranks of dressage, who had taught many riders and ridden countless horses over the years, who commanded the respect of all the other horses at the barn, and yet she could not make my horse walk from one end of an arena he’d been in a hundred times to the other. Claret had spirit, and despite the trauma of his ground schooling, I was proud that he’d come through with his spirit intact, as if to say, “What part of no don’t you understand?”

  When she was finished with him, the fur over his eyes and under his ears had darkened with his sweat. I walked him back into his stall and put some hay down for him. “You’re a good boy,” I told him, and he answered by touching his nose to my hand. I unbuckled his girth, then scratched the wet fur beneath it. Once his saddle and bridle were off, I sponged him down with a cool bucket of water (I wasn’t about to take him back to the wash stall again). And when I came around to sponge his right side, what I saw sucked my breath away. He was bleeding. One of Laura’s strikes with the whip had left an inch-long slice in his flank.

  I bit back tears and kissed him gently, just next to the cut. “I’m so sorry.” I kissed him again. “I’m so sorry.” I said it over and over, until it became a kind of mantra. Claret arched his head around so that I was embraced between his shoulder and his neck, and I kissed his face, then wrapped my arms around him, and we stood there for a period of time that felt nothing like time.

  “I’m thinking of sending him to a horse whisperer,” I told Laura the next day.

  “Don’t waste your money,” she said. “All they do is run the horses around all day until they’re tired.”

  I looked at her and thought about the good life she’d had. And yet, it hadn’t made her a better person. It hadn’t filled her with love. Sometimes I think we’re born with all our love already in our hearts, the way we’re born with a certain amount of intelligence or eyelashes or the ability to dance.

  It takes a certain kind of power to lead a horse, and after three trainers, I could see how sometimes that power grows malignant, like the blackish things Larry pulls out of people’s brains. There is no question that horses can transform us, but only those of us whose hearts are open.

  “Listen,” she said, “he’s the wrong horse for you. He’s too dangerous. You got duped when you bought him.”

  “He wasn’t always like this,” I said. “He wasn’t like this when I brought him here. I think he’s just really sensitive.”

  “He’s an asshole,” she said. “He’s like a bad boyfriend, and I, for one, am finished with him. You should sell him for a dollar and move on with your life.”

  She spoke these words with such certainty that I began to wonder if they were true. I was an amateur rider after all, and Claret did kick, did buck, did back into things. By then I’d stopped riding him altogether. “Maybe next week,” Laura had been saying. “Maybe then he’ll get his shit together and be safe enough to ride.” But now Claret and I were two trainers to the wind, and he was a lot of horse, and he was out of control, and I didn’t know how to help him.

  All that was true, yet still I believed in Claret—as I’d once believed in a better life, as I believed I could reach the other side of panic. I believed in my first moments with him—the way he frisked my pockets the day we met, the way he followed me eagerly on the day I brought him home, then shared those breaths with me as I stood with a child’s trust in his stall—moments that felt truer than almost anything else I knew. I believed in his trust in me, in his gentle gaze, in the love I felt when I stood facing him and he reached his head over my shoulder and pressed me to his chest with the underside of his face. And I believed in his physical ability, that when he was feeling good, he enjoyed teaching me to ride. So after Laura walked away from me disgusted and I stood dazed in the doorway for enough minutes to lose count of, I slipped into Claret’s stall and wept quietly into his neck. And he stood quietly in return, allowing me to soak and sniffle into his fur, until I faced what I already knew: though my horse was out of control and I had no immediate answers, I was going to stand by him.

  How I would do this was much less clear, but I decided to start by leading him to his scariest places, as I’d done for myself when I’d been afraid to leave the house but left anyway. I thought back to his eagerness on that day I brought him home, as I led him from thing to thing and, with curiosity and willingness, he put his nose on it all. Let it be like that, I thought.

  Our first destination was the wash stall. As I led him in, I walked confidently, my back straight, and I spoke to him. “We’re just going in and out. You’ll be fine.” I kept m
y voice soft but firm, my hand steady on his lead rope, and he followed me in. “Good boy,” I told him, handing him a cookie. “This is your wash stall.” We stood there while he ate his cookie, and when he was finished I walked him back out. We repeated this until it became a kind of game and he followed me into the wash stall happily, ready for his cookie. With slow but steady steps, I walked him to the big yellow snowplow on the ground, the one he always tried to dart away from, and when we got there, he leaned down and put his nose on it. “Good boy!” I squealed. And we went like that from thing to thing—“this is your white plastic chair that sometimes blows over in the wind,” “this is your potted plant,” “this is your bench piled with stuff in the corner”—and after a few days, he seemed to look forward to putting his nose on the scary things, and to the cookies that came after.

  The one place I didn’t lead him was to the far end of the arena.

  In trusting my instincts, I’d begun to help Claret, but I knew I still couldn’t do it all alone. Fortunately, there are people who are kind, who are willing to take a few steps alongside us when the road gets rough. One of those people was Sal, the massage therapist who massaged some of the most fancy horses in the world and who always seemed to be around at exactly the right moment. “I know you love Claret,” he said, “and I know he’s a good horse.” He put his arm around me and told me he knew someone who could help me. Then he gave me the phone number of a well-known Grand Prix dressage trainer—an Olympic hopeful—who competed internationally and had a reputation for being fearless. She would ride anything. And she was going to come ride Claret.

  When Jane Hannigan arrived, I was expecting a strapping hulk of a lady, not the thin, fine-featured woman who was standing in front of me with a bouncy blond ponytail. “So this is Claret,” she said, giving his forehead a rub. Claret and I checked her out. She wore tall boots and a sea-colored silk scarf. She was gorgeous.