This would not be true for the people I most damaged by my drinking and using. They remembered everything.
As I sit there, waiting, waiting, waiting to be processed, I try to hold onto the thought that at least I am sober. I am sober as they pull me out of the cell to take my mug shot. It will be my fourth one and, I know, my last. I understood then, after having my photo taken by police over and over again, why in some cultures it is believed that photographs steal your soul. After that, they fit my wrist with a band. It looks like an industrial-grade hospital band, but it is secured with unbreakable grommets. The deputy puts it on too tight. I am skin and bones, and it rubs my wrist, already torn and scarred by handcuffs, raw and bloody. The wristband contains my name and booking number and a barcode. I don’t know what the barcode is for until one day in my last module one of the deputies scans it with a handheld device and every piece of information you could ever want about me—age, criminal charges, release dates, etc.—pops up on his small portable screen.
To know that my identity has been reduced to a wristband pains me. I struggle against losing my freedom, against having these twenty-two-year-old deputies lord over me, as if I am nothing. They send me back to holding and now there are even more of us. It must be Saturday night, though who could tell? Time itself no longer exists. Only thoughts of time are alive. The time I am wasting is the most painful rumination; it haunts me. The time I am away from my husband and daughter is an unbearable notion. The time I am not writing or gardening. All these thoughts, yet I cannot gain a perspective of time. As Augustine of Hippo said, some sixteen hundred years ago about time, “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
I just know it must be later now, the animal hours of a Saturday night. The women seem drunker. Some are clearly tweaking. More prostitutes have arrived. It is a sea of black and brown faces. The white women are few and far between, maybe one or two who look like me. Housewives, college graduates, people who live near fancy coffee shops and wear Lululemon. When we catch each other’s eyes, we turn away, as if we know each other and are embarrassed to be caught seen in this place. Some of the women sleep sitting up. I can’t. I am pretty sure I won’t sleep for the next six weeks.
A few hours later, I am told to line up—for what, I don’t know. After about half an hour of standing there, I am ushered into a room where they take my X-ray. They are looking for TB. It is clear the technician hates being there. He just wants to go home.
“Hurry up,” he says to each and every one of us when he is done. “I don’t have all day.”
After about another hour—maybe five, though without clocks, it is difficult to tell—they finally call me. I am not a name anymore, but a number: 4261531. I am moving out of processing and into medical, the next step on the way to permanent housing. I line up with about twenty other women. Jail is confinement, but when it’s not confinement, it’s lining up along red stripes on the ground and then walking along the green line to the next place. They march us to a large bin where inmates in jail clothes different from the rest of us hand us our bedding. I learn these inmates are trustees who “work” in the modules. Our bedding consists of a thin, torn blanket. Rolled up inside I am supposed to find a sheet, a nightgown, thermals, and men’s tube socks. I don’t. There are no pillows and no pillowcases. No one gets those.
Holding my roll-up, I wait in line. Again. For god knows how long. Time has changed since I’ve been in here. It has slowed so far down it feels as if it’s stopped. What is my daughter doing now? My husband? My best friend, Anadel? Is anyone walking the dog? Is it daylight? Or is it dark? Einstein’s famous line comes to mind: “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” This has never been truer. The now that I live in isn’t anything like the now that my beloveds occupy. Theirs is different space. Time, as Einstein showed us, is relative. If my family and friends are locked into my experience by their empathy, the now they experience is swifter, kinder, freer. And what they experience of time, they do so wearing their own underwear.
* * *
Finally after another hour of standing, roll-up in arms, we are marched to medical. I do not know yet that in the thirty-seven days I will spend here out of my ninety-day sentence, once I am in “permanent housing” I will actually be moved five times. Movement is essential for control. It disrupts. It causes anxiety and fear. It limits the chances for friendships and alliances.
As I stand in medical, waiting to process to my first locked cell, I remember one piece of advice a nun I had spoken to gave me. She was the former chaplain at Lynwood, and someone I knew gave me her number.
“Take the bottom bunk if you can. The jail is colder than a meat locker. The top bunk is coldest.”
The icy refrigerator that is jail has lodged into the sinews of my 104-pound body. When I am assigned a cell, I make a fast walk of it for the bottom bunk, heeding the nun’s advice. The bunkie I will share this five-by-ten locked concrete cell with is right behind me. I can feel her breath. She, too, is racing for the bottom bunk. I get there first and claim the lower, warmer metal plank of the bed. But immediately I feel terrible that I have won this small victory because it comes at a cost to her. I lie there, guilty.
My bunkie is a beautiful twenty-year-old heroin addict who is kicking. Almost immediately she is shitting and throwing up. I am not upset by this. I have been there. I understand. I blame my addiction partly on my empathy, because empathy hurts. I always viewed my tenderness with unfriendliness. All my life, even as a kid, especially as a kid, I’d felt broken by a sixth sense that the world was hard, that people and animals suffered needlessly, that base human nature tended toward cruelty. My empathy seemed innate, as true to me as the color of my eyes. It was a total liability in life. Until I started really drinking and using drugs, I wasn’t capable of the toughness it seemed you needed to stay alive, to compete and win, win, win. My skin felt perennially inside out. But once I could hide out behind substances, I found merciful release. Only then was it easier not to care about other people, to play games and get along. But strangely, in jail I will learn that empathy is my greatest asset.
Melissa and I are exactly the same height and weight and coincidentally live in the same neighborhood “on the outs.” She is second-generation Cuban, thirty-three years younger than me. I will be the minority in jail, both because I am white and because I am older.
As I lie on my metal slab, shivering, I pray even though at this point I have no faith. Prayer is habit, from an earlier time, before God vanished during strip search. Please show me that this gets better. Please. All I can see is the halo of those horrible orange jail lights shining grimly outside on the concrete building. At least the lights tell me it is night—but of what day, I no longer know. I have never felt more alone, more devastated in my entire life. Never before. Never after. Not even in the worst part of my addiction, when I was isolated and dying, did I feel this alone.
Both Melissa and I are shivering. She has the added burden of being dope sick. She has to get up repeatedly and vomit. Between these episodes we talk. I am needy. To feel real, I must talk to someone. Anyone. I would have talked to Vlad the Impaler if he were my bunkie. “What is it about the quality of blood you most admire?” I might have asked.
“Are you an addict?” she asks.
“Six months clean and sober,” I say. I feel the unblunted cut of this sobriety as if I am being eviscerated from the inside out. Everything is too bright, too loud, too frightening, yet I am determined to walk through this without drugs or alcohol. Before, I would have picked up over a broken shoelace.
“I’m sorry for the . . .” She points to the toilet, where she has just had diarrhea.
“Oh no . . . I’ve been there . . .”
“Yeah,” she says. It is hard not to hear a world in that word. Longing. Regret.
She is the sweetest woman
with the tiniest voice. She is soft-spoken in a way that makes me think she had long ago learned not to make too much space for herself in the world. I need to keep talking to her, to alleviate the bleak sense of isolation. She tells me she is here on a warrant, that she hopes to go to court the next day and be released. She prays that they don’t make her spend the weekend in jail before she can see the judge. We both know they will.
We are silent for a long time. Then I break the silence.
“I’m afraid they will call you first and I will be alone.”
“Don’t be afraid,” she says. Years later, I still hear her voice exactly as it was.
But the fear of being alone with my thoughts is unshakeable and will follow me throughout my incarceration. The loneliness is palpable. A center-in-your-stomach loneliness, a motherless loneliness, one made worse because like all of me, it, too, is shackled. It can’t take a walk. It can’t be soothed by love. It is there to fend for itself.
I lie on my back on the one-inch-thick plastic mattress and gaze through the tiny window at the orange lights shining in the mist over the concrete exterior of the jail. I have never seen anything as depressing. It is as if despair built the walls of this place. My back burns with pain. Six months before my incarceration, after my last arrest in which I was charged with DUI, driving on a suspended license, and resisting arrest, I woke up in a rehab in New Mexico with the imprint of my arresting officer’s boot on my back. My wrists were bloodied from the handcuffs, there was a bruise on my right cheek, my lip was swollen. They beat me after I’d made the mistake of fighting the handcuffs, yelling at them, telling them to go fuck themselves.
It was initially a DUI arrest, but later, the prosecutor decided to change the resisting-arrest charge and bump it up to battery of an officer. I had heard about this LAPD strategy: when they beat you up, law enforcement charges you with battery, hoping, I guess, you are dissuaded from filing suit. Before it happened to me, I always thought it was a paranoid idea, a conspiracy theory, a way to shunt the blame. I now see how naive I was. When you obey laws, as I had done for more than fifty years until my relapse, you have no idea what really goes on. There were a lot of things I didn’t think were true. Now I know the truth. And believe me, it is a painful awakening.
Of course I didn’t sue them. I was afraid of them. Any time I thought about that night, my breathing would be caught short, my heart would race, and that spot on my back would pulse, as if it had been lit on fire. I was a hundred pounds soaking wet at the time of my arrest, in handcuffs, in the back of a police cruiser, thrown there after I’d called the officers names and blamed them for arresting me. This was scandalous crazy-lady behavior; I take and hold that responsibility. But those officers were six foot one, about 250 pounds each, which would mean that if it were true that I had “battered” them, I would have miraculously “battered” 500 pounds and twelve feet of men carrying guns and tasers from the back seat of a police car, while handcuffed. They lied and I didn’t have the heart to stand up for myself. I took their plea. Both my husband, Greg, and I, and even my attorney who said as much, understood that they add charges because they can. They know for most of us the thought of a trial is nauseating and repulsive. They know we are terrified. We submit. We just want it to end.
Now as I lie there, the battery charge is like a boil on that spot where he stepped on me, lanced and painful and bloody. It is this, not the time for DUI and driving while suspended, that makes me wish I were dead. The thought crosses my mind that even if I had battered them, driving while intoxicated was a far worse crime. I find little consolation in the fact that God saw fit to keep people out of my way. Maybe the battery charge was some karmic trade-off for the heinousness of driving drunk, but the dereliction and wrongness of it causes me so much grief. As I lie there, I am polluted by regret and rage. I can’t imagine how I will live in a cage for thirty-seven days while my friends and family, depressed and anxious, wait for me to come home safely. One thing I know now: it is not the other inmates I need to fear. It is the uniforms.
Astonishingly, in that moment when I really wonder if I will be able to live one more second, I hear Melissa. Her sweet, tender voice calls out to me: “Can I come down and get under the covers with you?” I hear her fear of my possible rejection as she asks. “I’m so cold. I’ll put my head at your feet. I’m just so cold and sick and scared.”
I need no convincing. My relief is so intense that it feels like air filling up inside me. Such intimacy is against the rules—and I suspect such an act of kinship, too—but we are two small, lost people in a cold place, so I say yes. And it is like I’ve just averted death, as if a piano falling from the sky just landed an inch to the left of me.
She crawls in beside me, and with the presence of another human being, my suffering is lifted enough that I am warm and not wishing for death for the first time in days. I sleep. She does, too. Her body next to mine; between us, our shared sadness. But there is also something else. Something I don’t recognize. It is impossible to name it because the word “hope” can’t find its way through this morass of pain. But it is there, small and white, and it will grow.
What feels like a moment later, they call my name and send me out to whatever next hellish place I’m headed. I never see her again. Yet, for that brief moment when Melissa was asleep beside me, I understood what “holy” meant. I didn’t really comprehend, until a long time later and far removed from that place, that the God who I believed had abandoned me was still there and was not only answering my prayers but saying them for me, too.
* * *
We line up again. Behind me is Shondra, a woman with whom I spent three hours outside the jail while we waited to be called in to start serving our sentences. It was a gift, her presence then. We laughed nervously together about the craziness of making us wait to serve time. The absurdity of us sticking around. She was beautiful, with smooth black skin, a convivial and animated woman, the perfect person to be with while you waited hours for your incarceration to start. She was sentenced to two weeks for not paying her parking tickets. Because she couldn’t afford to pay, like indentured servants of the Chesapeake Colonies and former slaves, she had to do time. She was five months’ pregnant with her first child. She only had parking tickets. For at least two reasons, I tell myself, I deserved to be here. But really, what wrong did she do? Be poor?
Now, days later, I see how bedraggled she looks. Her hair is tangled and messy. I must have looked as bad. We know better than to say a word to each other. It is here that I learn how to say entire sentences with my eyes. She speaks back to me with hers. Our shared shock and outrage is clear. We wait for at least another hour, standing there, holding our roll-ups. I can’t imagine what it must be like to stand like that, holding linens, knowing it is your poverty that enslaves you here, all while carrying a child.
All of this standing around doing nothing gives me ample time to think about what happened, over and over and over again. And then some more. I suspect this waiting around, this standing around, this slowing down of clocks, is by design. No one likes to wait, but waiting to be locked up, not knowing what comes next for hours, is perfect torture.
I think. I think and think. I think more. I remember when I came out of it, not knowing what the hell had happened. There were some things I remembered; that moment especially in the cruiser before I was transported to city jail when the officer turned around and karate chopped me in the neck because I was crying too loudly. I don’t remember much after that because his maneuver caused me to pass out. But I do remember coming to and hearing the other one say, “Shouldn’t we check on her? She’s been quiet for a long time.”
For the most part, though, I didn’t know the details of what I had done during that year-plus. Those days appeared to me as ghost days, inhabited by phantoms and shadows. I knew I’d lost pretty much everything that mattered to me. I chased my family away. I destroyed my career. I nearly died twice from an
overdose of liquor and pills. The second, more serious time I was in the ICU, I was placed on a telemetry ward at risk for “hypotensive crisis” (dangerously low blood pressure). There were two 5150 psych holds. I was arrested four times, mostly for driving-related offenses. My license was revoked for two years. I went to seven detoxes and rehabs. I crashed two cars and lost most of my money. All that damage in just a year and forty-nine days.
I had never been in trouble with the law before. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had a parking ticket. Maybe this was why my judge was considerate and humane to me. The judge saw my half a century of civil behavior. He saw that I was a person who, until this strange blip on the radar screen of my life, lived in concert with the laws of my community.
I believe, to this day, that out of all of them, including my own attorney, my judge was the only one who understood the Jekyll and Hyde of addiction. Among his many kindnesses, he allowed me six weeks from the time of sentencing to compliance because I was working on a book project with a deadline. He also, I realized later, did not command me to turn myself in in court and be transported in handcuffs on a sheriff’s bus like most people. I voluntarily complied at the jail. This was a reprieve I appreciated only later. I’d heard the horrors of that particular ride: men in chains and locked in cages in the back, women in the front handcuffed to seats, ogled, harassed by them. Lascivious laughter at the woman’s expense, the words “fuck” and “pussy” and “suck” filtering up to them.
The Lost Chapters Page 2