There he is. His smile kills me. Greg is singularly handsome, his face an angel face. Strangers on the street think he’s a movie star. One thing my daughter always tells me—the two of them butt heads because they are so similar, so I am my daughter’s confidant—is how much she loves the ever-present smile on his face.
When things went bad during my relapse, Greg took our daughter out of the house. I was too wasted at the time to know where they went. I remember that I could not sleep anymore. I lay in the darkness, alone in the bed Greg and I once shared, waiting for light so I could replenish my well. It seemed that no matter how hard I tried to leave enough vodka for the morning to stave off the DTs and the wasteland of my life, I often failed, and would rise in darkness and wait through the hours until 6 a.m. when I could buy a drink, usually in the form of a bottle from Vons, CVS, or Ralphs. These hours were the worst kind of loneliness and I often thought how much better it might be to die. Once I drank again, the memory of my family’s goneness was obliterated.
When I got clean, Greg said, “Make no mistake; if you ever touch a substance again, I will be gone so fast you won’t see me leaving.”
It was probably the best thing anyone ever said to me. He meant it. Such words might sound harsh, but sometimes the only thing you can do to help a drunk is leave them lying in the gutter in order to save your own life. Ironically, doing so often saves the addict’s life as well.
Now he looks sad and joyful all at once behind the plastic bulletproof barrier, the imprint of kissing lips and hands from those on both sides trying to make a connection creating shadows on his skin.
His face is filled with love. It shatters me.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
I have nothing to say, so I spew my rage. Instead of sparing my beloved any more agony than he is already going through, I tell him I wish I were dead. I tell him how bad it is. I rage and rage. He sits there, helpless. I am unable to ask him about our daughter or the dog or my friends because to mention what I yearn for is like a fire in my throat. The only way I can do my isolation is to stay that way, allow nothing from out there in here.
We have thirty agonizing minutes together. When the visit ends I tell him not to come back. The visit is a source of such extreme pain that it takes me the rest of the day and most of the next day to stop the thrumming sorrow in my body.
“Please,” I tell him on the phone. “Don’t come.”
I don’t want him to see what I have become. But he comes back, repeatedly, and offers what love he can behind the glass. When I ask him once why he stayed with me through the relapse, he says, “Because when I married you I took a vow to honor you in sickness and in health.”
At my request, he never brings our daughter. I make arrangements to have no other visitors, though there is a list at home of twenty or more friends who want to come.
“No,” I say, the one time I call Anadel. “This is no place for anyone.”
I don’t call anyone except Greg and our daughter, and once, my friend Kim; only two times did I call Anadel, the one person, besides my husband, who did not even consider leaving me alone as I struggled with early sobriety and the prospect of jail. But I don’t want to see them. I have nothing to say. Jail steals time. It also stole my voice. And the people I loved.
In A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth lies in bed with her husband, Oliver. She thinks, “What does separation look like? A wall? A wave? A body of water? A ripple of light or a shimmer of subatomic particles, parting?”
Or does it look like this: A locked steel door? A black eye? Addiction? A gun and a uniform? A mind that places a wall between you and the divine?
After Greg’s visit, I am depleted. I return to the cell. The deputy makes me wait while he takes his time unlocking it. When he pops the door, I step inside and Duckie says with no preamble, “God, there are so many hos in this place, screaming all over the place, ‘My daddy this, my daddy that.’ The girl in here before you was a ho, she stank. She wouldn’t shut up.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, exhausted but too agitated to rest.
“Was there an election or something?” Duckie asked.
Come to think of it there was. Two days before I went in there were midterm elections in LA County. “Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”
“They always round up the hos when there’s an election or the president is coming to town or shit like that. Get the trash off the streets.”
She sounded simultaneously disgusted with the prostitutes—would that include herself?—and the world at large that would treat people like eyesores and garbage.
About ten days into my sentence in Pregnant Dorm, I was called to the deputy’s desk and was told I would be moving to Exit Dorm. Duckie had procured me a duffel bag, some extra thermals, and a couple more ibuprofen for my back pain, along with paper, a pencil, and her booking number so we could write when I got out. She also gave me her children’s phone numbers.
“Call them,” she said, crying. “Tell them I love them.”
She sent me with her apples and her bran cereal—because she didn’t eat anything that might be construed as healthy. She hugged me.
“Wait,” she said. She reached under the bunk I slept in and pulled out one of her duffels. Inside was a brand-new blanket.
“Here,” she said.
“I couldn’t.”
“I hear you shivering at night. I got this extra tire on me keeping me warm. Take it.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t cry,” she said.
Miss Jones gathered up two extra lunches.
“Here, baby, take these. You may be going home. But you may not be going for a while. So take the food. No telling when you’ll eat again.”
I was afraid. I didn’t want to leave. What would happen to me? Who would I bunk with? Exit Dorm was general population: murderers, thieves, prostitutes, batterers, drunks, and addicts. And I loved Duckie. I loved Miss Jones. I had found safety there among the pregnant women and the few of us who had mysteriously landed there without being pregnant.
I was lined up with several other women also going to Exit Dorm. The deputy searched my duffel. He took my extra lunches that Miss Jones had given me and threw them away. He paused and looked at the books I had in my bag.
“These yours?”
I nodded.
“Why you wasting your time draggin’ this shit around?”
I shrugged. Keep quiet, I whispered to myself. Let him say what he wants. You are not what he thinks you are.
“Go on,” the deputy said as if disgusted that I had taken his time up with my books. As if reading insulted him. Remember, I told myself, those in power despise knowledge. “Hurry up. Get in line.”
I started to walk away.
“Hurry. Jesus, you’re slow. Hurry up.”
I didn’t look back to say good-bye to Duckie. I could hear Miss Jones crying. As I was marched along the red line to Exit Dorm, I remembered a passage in A Tale for the Time Being when Nao begins to understand the beauty of living:
A single moment is all we need to establish our human will and attain truth. . . . Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.
CHAPTER FOUR
Exit Module
Louie was furious at the sharks. He thought that they had an understanding: The men would stay out of the shark’s turf—the water—and the sharks would stay off theirs—the raft. He stewed all night, scowled hatefully at the sharks all day, and eventually made a
decision. If the sharks were going to try to eat him, he was going to try to eat the sharks.
—Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken
Exit Dorm is all shadow and darkness when I arrive. I am lined up with fourteen other women in front of the deputy’s desk. I am not afraid, but I don’t feel as if I am in my body. Later, someone suggests I was disassociating. I don’t know. I know that my addiction was an attempt to achieve a state of numbness, because I had, my entire life, felt everything so acutely. I remember as a little girl thinking I could feel the blood flow through my veins. I remember tasting noise. Even beautiful music hurt my skin. And I felt the weight of the world’s suffering. I couldn’t even watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a favorite of my alcoholic dad’s in the 1970s, because animals had to kill each other to eat.
As my addiction progressed, from drinking and smoking weed on the weekends to every day at lunch in high school, then as much as possible in college, and so on, so, too, did the demoralization. The worse I felt about myself, the more I drank and used drugs to distance my heart from both the person I was becoming and the increasingly scary circumstances I placed myself in, from the hurts and abuses that I subjected myself to because of drink, risking my life and my dignity.
Now, standing in my fog of emptiness, my body floats above me. The deputy is taking her time. She is mean, meaner than the “po-lice” in Pregnant Dorm. Even though every module looks the same, the feeling of every module is different. Here I sense disorder. Crazy is in the air. I have twenty-seven days to go. My attorney told me I’d be out in four days. His promises to that effect, unmet and now, I realize, callously made, have ruined me. Duckie said I’d probably do 10 percent of my time. But now my hope that I will be a “10 percenter” has faded.
The deputy finally gets to me.
“Upper tier, forty-eight.”
I now know where that is, so I take my roll-up and my duffel and head up the stairs. The women in Dayroom are moving around, watching, but most are asleep. I don’t know what time it is, but it must be around 3 or 4 a.m. I climb the stairs and hear the door to Cell 48 pop. I walk inside and am immediately freaked out.
The cell is a pigsty. There are soiled towels on the ground. The tiny window is covered with paper. Both bunks are loaded down with crap. Clothing hangs everywhere. Books line the little desk and across the sill near the window. It stinks to high heaven. A dodgy, skin-and-bones meth addict stands up. I will learn later that the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) has taken her kids. While she is here, she will lose custody of them and they will be adopted out.
Something about her—I don’t like her on sight. Why do I reserve my compassion for only those I deem worthy of it?
I stand there. Then I say, “There’s no way I’m living in this shit.”
She looks mean, but for whatever reason, she is cowed by me. She must be afraid now of losing her privacy. Barely anyone gets a cell to herself, and I can see why she doesn’t have a bunkie. Her sloth is manifest. My heart is beating fast.
“You need to uncover that window,” I say. “And get those books off the desk. And what the fuck is with these wet rags on the ground? It’s a cesspool in here.”
She has been sleeping on the bottom bunk.
“And I’m restricted to bottom bunk,” I say. “So you’re gonna need to move that pile of shit to the top.”
It’s my fear turning me into a convict, I tell myself. This isn’t you.
She starts to take the books down.
The methhead is white. Her hair is white. Her rabbit eyes look pink. Her eyebrows are white. I long for Duckie and her El Eme tats, her big ass, her pickles and eggs. I want to hear her sing. I’d even take the snoring over this.
I stand there, still holding my roll-up. I don’t want to put it down anywhere. MRSA, a staph infection, is rampant in jails. I am afraid of contracting it, though when I saw my doctor before coming to Lynwood, he told me not to worry. If I contracted it, it was easily treatable.
“Not in a jail,” I told him. “They don’t treat you in jail.”
“You’ll be home soon, Leslie,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
The methhead is moving around, taking things off the walls. I can’t believe the stuff is even on the walls. Why has this lesion been allowed to fester? In Pregnant Dorm, one woman got the hole for not removing a poster from her wall. Unlike this woman, she was African American.
After a while, the methhead goes out to the catwalk, the balcony surrounding upper tier.
“Miss,” she shouts down. “Deputy, this girl is harassing me. I’m afraid of her. She is threatening to hurt me.”
“You little bitch,” I say.
“She’s calling me names.”
I can’t believe this is happening. I’m gonna end up in the hole. They’ll extend my sentence. They can do this. I have a release date and an extended release date, just in case I fuck up. Shit. Shit.
But it doesn’t happen. All of sudden, the methhead is packing up. She’s leaving.
“Bitch,” she says to me. “Lucky for me, I got Dayroom because you’re such a cunt.”
“Fine, leave, get out.”
She packs up and leaves. The cell is still putrid. Obviously, the windows don’t open in jail so I’m not sure what to do about the smell. She has left her wet towels on the floor. Trash is everywhere, and I am stuck cleaning it up. But at last there is no one to bother me. Relief swells. Then comes fear. Who will I talk to? I can’t be alone. When I’m alone, there is only time. I’ve already read all four books that I’ve received.
That’s when Johnnie shows up, holding her roll-up. She is a tall, beautiful woman. I can imagine her walking around with a crown on her head, like a queen. But she has a scowl of hatred on her face. I notice that most of the black women in jail look at me with a scowl on their faces. There’s not a lot of racial politics in Lynwood—in a way it feels harder to get along amid the anger on the streets of Los Angeles than in Lynwood—but it doesn’t mean you don’t feel it sometimes. This woman’s scowl seems to be related to the cell. I can tell she thinks I’m the one who turned the space into a toxic landfill. She looks at me with disgust.
See, I say to myself, your Karma is quick. Only moments ago, you did the same to that poor, childless methhead.
“Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm,” she says, melodically. She shakes her head. She is already done with me.
“I didn’t do this shit,” I say.
She gazes at me as if I am nothing.
“I just moved into this,” I say. “It’s that blond methhead down there.”
Nothing. Just a look that wants me dead. But it doesn’t even land. I have only two fears: The Death of Time and Being Alone. Everything else—gravy.
“Fine. You can stand there staring at me or you can help me clean this up,” I say.
“I don’t want to put my roll-up down anywhere.”
“Welcome to the club,” I say.
We start to clean the mess. I am so disgusted I want to puke. I keep thinking, This is the moment I contract MRSA.
“What’s your name?” I say.
“Johnnie.”
“I’m Leslie.”
“Hmmph.”
Okaaay, I think. Fun, fun, fun.
* * *
So far, four books have arrived: Alcoholics Anonymous, The Collected Poems of Mary Oliver, A Tale for the Time Being, and All the Light We Cannot See. All the Light We Cannot See is gloriously long. This should take a week at least, I think with glee.
And indeed, I read it as if I were counting snowflakes. Slowly, with a luxuriousness that bathed me. The book made me feel weightless. It almost ruined my eyes. At night, the deputies turned down the lights—never off, just down—but I had a galactic case of insomnia so I read the book beneath the brown wash of haze that filtered from the dimmed nightlights above. I kept telling myself as I r
ead it, Slow down, slow down. To make it last, I would often close the book and gaze longingly at that beautiful cover. Sometimes I could hear the tide swell and close in on little Saint-Malo. The book, the cover, the dreams and yearning it inspired in me, turned down the prattle in my head, the constant screaming deputies, the sounds of countless toilets flushing over and over and over again. Sometimes my experience with it was so bittersweet that I’d have to put it aside, to ease my melancholy and my yearning. When I saw that Doerr’s masterpiece was moving too fast, I would get scared. What will I do when it’s over? Should I skip parts so that I am forced to read it again? But alas, in two days, I was finished.
I was furious at Greg for sending the AA Big Book. I implored him when he dropped me off not to send it because as I waited and waited to surrender, I saw a woman dragging a cart of books into the jail that contained Bibles and Big Books exclusively. He sent it anyway, possibly afraid I might relapse. Anyone who knows anything about jail knows that drugs are available. Lynwood, I will learn, is no exception. I would rather die than relapse, I told him. But I had said those words to him a thousand times before and always relapsed.
I only understood his choice later. Fearful I’d slip, the book must have felt to him like insurance against disaster. In my cell, staring at the book, I fumed. A wasted book in my three-a-week allotment. It made me think of that Twilight Zone episode where the end of the world has come. Only one man survives. He’s a nerd who loves to read. He finds himself on the steps of the New York City Public Library, gleeful and happy. All those millions of books to read. He can’t believe his luck.
Then he breaks his glasses.
I remember placing the Big Book tenderly into my duffel but feeling, at the same time, that awful alcoholicky, selfishy frustration of not getting my way.
* * *
My new bunkie and I throw the towels outside the cell. (Inmates call their cells their “rooms,” something I refuse to do.) We rip down the paper that the tweaker put up over the window. I have a view this time; not of other windows of other cells, but of the 105 Freeway and the projects across the street.
The Lost Chapters Page 7