We go through the books she’s left behind: tawdry paperbacks, Bibles of every form and variety, pamphlets about addiction, and scrap heaps of court papers. Johnnie starts to rip up the court documents.
“Wait,” I say. “Maybe we should give them to her.”
“Who, Bubbles out there?”
I laugh. I will come to see that Johnnie gives everyone a nickname.
“She might want them.”
“She a dumb bitch.”
“That might be true, but still . . .”
She looks at me like what the hell? Then she shrugs.
“I ain’t giving ’em to her,” she says.
“I’ll do it.”
I get that raised eyebrow look again.
I take the papers, put them in my duffel. I will give them to Bubbles when I program, which could be a day away, two hours away, sixteen hours away, in the next five minutes. The “po-lice” lording over us don’t observe a schedule. It’s just another way of fucking with us. And if anyone acts out, we don’t program at all.
“Acting out,” to them, has many definitions. For instance—if an inmate presses the emergency button, that could cause a lockdown. You would think that might elicit concern rather than their ire, but deputies hate the emergency button because lots of women press it. Sometimes inmates press it just to mess things up, boredom and stifled rage being the predecessor to chaos. Sometimes, it’s an accident. The 911 button is located just above the toilet flush button and looks almost identical. On my first day, I accidentally pressed it after using the toilet. I thought it was the flush button. (Why the fuck did they put those two identical buttons one on top of the other? It made no sense. But then again, that’s jail.) Sometimes it is an emergency, but because they never checked on you when you pressed the emergency button, it could evolve into a full-blown crisis. I was told numerous times about the women who died or were seriously injured because a deputy did not respond to the emergency button. I saw that blatant disregard more than once. I remember one day, a young woman had a seizure during program. It took deputies an hour to mobilize. Eventually they tossed her on a furniture dolly and hauled her out like a broken desk.
Johnnie and I have put the cell back into order. I am relieved by increments. She still gives me that look, but at least I know she is, like me, uncharitable toward filth. And she doesn’t smell, a constant bunkie complaint in jail for obvious reasons. Duckie was no sachet pillow. Like me, Johnnie seems to value her hygiene in a place where staying clean is challenging. And she is beautiful. I love looking at her.
“How old are you?” I ask. I can’t tell. She is world-aged. She has seen the darkness. You can tell.
“Twenty-one.”
She hasn’t reciprocated much in our conversation thus far. But this time, she says, “You look pretty old.”
“Wow, those are some amazing friend skills you got there. Teach me your secrets.”
She looks at me. A beat . . . then we are laughing our heads off.
“I’m old enough to be your mother,” I say.
She makes a face. “Let’s get this shit out of here,” she says.
I am grateful the deputy hasn’t locked our door yet as we clean. So we take the towels gingerly and haul them downstairs.
“Don’t put those there,” the deputy says.
“Well then, what should we do with them?” Johnnie asks. She is insolent with her knife-throwing sweet voice. I am impressed. I would never talk like that to a deputy, never use that tone of voice. That’s partly why I ended up in here, after all.
“I don’t care what you do with them, just don’t put them there,” the deputy said with the usual disgust and hatred for us.
Johnnie and I look at each other. Once again, because of a deputy, a silent alliance has formed. If what they’re looking for is control, they are deluded. My new bunkie remembers our common enemy. We don’t roll our eyes, because we’ve both learned how to roll our eyes without rolling our eyes. We walk the moist MRSA-carrying towels and the bags of trash back upstairs and leave them outside our door.
“Close the door, forty-eight,” the deputy shouts.
“Bitch,” Johnnie says.
The door is closed, the lock clicks. It’s just me and the queen now.
* * *
I’m despairing of having nothing to read. One of the many anxieties that goes along with moving around the modules is that the mail gets hung up. Letters take a while to catch up. So do books. My husband says three more are on the way. But what if they never come? In jail I use words like “never,” “always,” “forever.” They pollute my vocabulary. And now with my mostly hostile bunkie, I have no means of escape. It will be hell forever and ever, I think. I will never get another book again and my pain will always be with me.
One day I receive a letter from Duckie. Obviously there’s no “inter-jail mail,” but evidently they don’t mind if you send a letter through regular means. I imagine the letter’s journey. It starts in the jail mailroom, where they open and read every letter. When it passes muster they stamp the word “Inspected” on the outside, then slap a piece of tape over the once-sealed envelope. The letter that originated from Duckie then departs for the nearby US Postal Service processing center, where it is separated, barcoded, and sorted by size and zip code. I imagine it after that on the truck, with all the other bundles of mail, heading for the local post office, where it is sorted again, placed in another mailbag with thousands of other pieces of mail, and sent back to Lynwood. Once at Lynwood, it’s taken to the jail processing station, opened, read, stamped “Inspected” again, then sorted and sent to me. All of this, and she is just one floor above me.
My first thought when I look at the envelope, torn open twice and double stamped, sloppily taped, a near ruination of a letter, is that Duckie used one of her precious stamps to send it to me. It is then that I fully understand her. Why she did what she did for me: the brand-new underwear, arranging my release for church with the trustees, the ibuprofens, the blanket, the duffel bag. Duckie’s soul—her basic self—is a generous self. A loving self. To her very core, Duckie is a charitable and bighearted woman. I try to imagine what her life would have been like had she not been rendered into her condition by the poverty, neglect, and violence that fueled her addiction. What gifts would she have given to the world?
I read the letter slowly, trying my best to make it last.
My new friend, Leslie . . . don’t worry about the past, just handle life one day at a time and know there is a God and he has your plan all worked out already.
How I wished I could believe that. How I wished I had her faith.
Bless your heart and bless you always . . . I’m here and don’t know how to get back on track because I was robbed of my babies.
I realized that the loss of her children, who were wrested from her not by the county, but the Mafia way, was the thing that finally destroyed her. I knew Duckie had huge plans for her release: sobriety, new teeth, a job. But I feared that the hole inside her was too big. Once delivered to the streets without money or housing or clean clothes, no food, no education, and a fierce addict nature, I saw the reality of the odds stacked against her.
One foot in front of the other, she wrote, and go do your thing like only you can!!! Shine. I’ll be waiting to hear from you. Thank you for everything. God be with you in all you do. I love your life, Love and respect, Vanessa.
* * *
The books arrive on Tuesday: Unbroken, One Hundred Years of Solitude, A History of Loneliness. The titles alone are like a three-line poem about my life. Johnnie looks at them.
“Are you depressed or something?”
“What?” I say. “You’re not?”
I had already read Márquez’s masterpiece, but it had been a long time. And the book wasn’t depressing in the least. A History of Loneliness was about a priest in Ireland, the sex scandal. I w
as curious about shame at the time. I never finished it. As for Unbroken, I never wanted to read it. That’s why it made the list. I figured boredom would force me to capitulate. My choices struck me as curious. Why, I wondered, these books? With all the books in the world, why these? I try to remember what my thinking was when I put the list together for Greg. I know there were books I wanted to read, and some I wanted to read again. Maybe some of them were recommended to me, but those days before Lynwood are almost like a blackout. I can see myself writing the list, scratching books out, adding others, retyping it. But there seems to be no logic to my choices. What I know is that the books are beginning to show up when I need them. Each one the most important temporal lesson I need, just when I need it. It is as if a hand juts through the jailhouse roof above over and over again, to dispense every book, even the ones that seem weirdly chosen, exactly when I need them.
I have always been an avid reader, ever since I can remember. I was one of those kids who chose long afternoons in my bedroom reading, over the hot summer days of fun and play. To my mom’s credit—she had a lot of problems—but that woman, bless her, brought my two brothers and me to the library every two weeks when we were kids. Going to the library was like having a birthday twice a month. Borrowing books? Who ever heard of such an idea? It was the best idea anyone had ever come up with as far as I was concerned. When we got home, I would take the books—you could check out only three at a time—and lay them out on my bed. The choice of where to start was blissful agony. The best hurt in the world. Once the choice was made, I’d devour them. Two weeks couldn’t come quick enough. Books were fickle, like love. They were my early boyfriends. They created in my brain the same rush that sex and drugs and music did later. I loved holding them in my hands before reading them. And later when I started amassing and collecting books, I never lent them to people. I am not generally selfish with my stuff—in fact, my tendency is to be generous to a fault, most especially with my time; for students, alcoholics, and addicts who need help, my friends and family. I am also free with my money. To the consternation of many, I hand it out to homeless people frequently, most often to the worst drunks and addicts. “They’re just going to use it for alcohol” is the snarky refrain I hear repeatedly. “So?” I answer back. But books; those are the one thing no one gets. I just build more shelves in my house to store them.
I laid the three books out on my metal slab. I had read that Laura Hillenbrand, author of Unbroken, suffered from chronic fatigue, and it manifested in dizziness. She told the New York Times that she always felt like she was on a ship, rolling around. After she had to leave college because of the disease, she lost contact with all her friends. People didn’t believe her, even her own mother.
“When almost everyone in your world is looking down on you and condemning you for bad behavior, it’s very hard not to let that point of view envelop you, until you start to feel terrible about yourself. I just began to feel such deep shame, because I was the target of so much contempt,” she told the reporter at the Times.
I never forgot that. It was the main reason I wanted to read the book: not because it was a bestseller, not because one day it would be a movie, not because everyone loved it. It was the author and her struggle that made me want to read it. She was sick, and people didn’t believe she had a “real” disease. I related to that and to her battles with a disease that even her closest allies thought she should have had the moral toughness to “get over.” Because people told me, like they did her, if I just used my will, if I was just stronger, better, nicer, calmer, etc., I’d get “over” my addiction. I understood her shame. But more than that, she wrote this amazing book in spite of being dizzy all the time. I had to see how she did it under that duress.
In jail, you think the weirdest thoughts. I remember thinking I would rather be in jail for thirty-seven days than be dizzy all the time. I still think this. Which makes me admire Hillenbrand even more. I can put the symptoms of addiction—using and drinking and going to jail—into remission. She has to live with her condition every day. All the time.
The story of Unbroken is pretty straightforward. As a boy, Louis “Louie” Zamperini is a chronic troublemaker. His older brother steps in and encourages him to channel all that raw energy into running. It turns out Louis is a good runner. He later qualifies for the 1936 Olympics. When World War II breaks out, Louie, like almost everyone, enlists in the military. His plane crashes in the Pacific and amazingly he survives forty-seven days adrift in a raft, until his capture by the Japanese navy. Being a prisoner is in no way better than starving to death on a raft. Louie becomes the favorite target of a particularly vicious prison commander and nearly starves to death. His time in the POW camp is unparalleled for its intense cruelty. If I could sum the book up in a word, I’d say it was about survival: mental, spiritual, and physical.
Two things about Louie Zamperini. First, he survived six weeks and five days in shark-infested waters with cunning and a human fortitude I’d never before read about. Forty-seven days. I only had thirty-seven days locked up, and it was a lot easier. For instance, even if it was barely edible, I still had food, and even though it had holes in it, I still had a blanket. Two, actually, thanks to Duckie’s generosity. And, second, unlike Louie, I had already done my battle with death, having been revived two separate times during my relapse. My sharks were just men and women in sausage-skin sheriff’s uniforms, and not very smart ones at that. Louie’s sharks wanted to eat him.
In one scene, which I will never forget as long as I live, the men who survived the plane crash over the Pacific and ended up on the raft—Louie, Mac, and Phil—were drifting close to death when Louie noticed the sharks were gone. This was odd.
Never in four weeks had the sharks left. Louie got up on his knees and leaned out over the water, looking as far down as he could, puzzled.
He was kneeling there, perched over the edge of the raft, when one of the sharks that he had touched leapt from the water at terrific speed, mouth wide open, lunging straight at his head.
What follows is two paragraphs of a heart-stopping epic battle where Mac and Louie use their oars to fight the sharks back. The way I read it, it seemed like the sharks that had been circling them for a month decided they had to figure out a better strategy for eating Louie and his two companions. I remember picturing them under the ocean, sitting at a card table, bottles of whiskey littered about, cigarettes burning in ashtrays. (No, none of this makes sense, but stay with me.) They talk it out, their shark voices super gangster. Then they come up with their plan. They will take turns jumping out of the water and grabbing the men one by one and eating them.
The one thing the sharks didn’t count on was that these men had a primal urge to live. They were resilient. They wanted to go home, to breathe the air of the places where they grew up, to see their parents, their girlfriends. They weren’t trying to be heroes. They were trying to save their lives.
How many times had I tried to save my life? The count is excessive. And yet I could never do it. My addiction had a hold on me. Then something happened. Somehow I made it to a rehab in Santa Fe, New Mexico, five days after my last arrest. I arrived out of my mind and was secured in Cabin 10, the detox cabin. It was not willpower that stopped me. If I had willpower, I wouldn’t have relapsed in the first place. I wouldn’t have used drugs and alcohol at all, starting as a child. What non-addicts simply do not understand—and it’s reasonable that they don’t—is that no human power, not mine, not the police’s, not the doctor’s, not the rehab “specialist’s,” could stop me. Only surrender could stop me. That split second of grace. One time post-Lynwood, I explained my experience of this gift to a room of sober people. “It was like a window that opened, but would only stay open for a millisecond,” I said. “And a random puff of wind blew me through it.”
Cabin 10 was notorious. It was the place they put the incorrigible and deathly ill, the suicide risks and the patients on the list for coding
out. I met all four criteria and was assigned a minder who sat with me 24-7 for forty-eight hours. Susan, a wrinkled, kind lady—think Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffith Show—attended me. That was her job. The entire time, I couldn’t believe anyone would take a job like that. She was so nice and she drove me so crazy. She talked nonstop, stories about her daughter and her dog and her sister and her house. Today, I see her ceaseless rambling for what it really was—an act of love. Anything to keep me distracted from the seizure-like DTs, the hallucinations, and the sickness. Nevertheless, for those two days, I wanted nothing more than for her to shut up. To just let me die. I didn’t know at that point the degree to which I had destroyed my life, only that I was very sick and likely in big trouble.
That I stayed sober surprised almost everyone. When I left Life Healing Center, my favorite caregiver there, a woman I called Commando because she wore fatigues and combat boots (and did prison time), couldn’t even say good-bye to me. She was skeptical of my sobriety and had someone send me a note that said, “If I see you, I’ll cry. I will pray for you every day.” I loved her fiercely. She had an incontrovertible part in saving my life.
When I called her two years after I’d been released from jail to ask her about what I had been like in rehab, she said, “To be honest, I am shocked you’re still clean. You did not want to get sober. When you left us, you were not ready to deal with the inside stuff. I didn’t think you would make it.”
“Well, here I am, calling you, sober,” I said.
I could hear her weeping. “Hold on a sec,” she said. “I’m having a Hallmark moment.”
What she didn’t know, and in a way, I didn’t know either until much later, was that at that rehab I had a profound, fundamental change. One night, I woke up out of two days and nights of hallucinations and looked out the window to see a crescent moon in the sky surrounded by stars. Susan was sitting there quietly watching me as I labored through the potentially fatal occupation of detoxing liquor and drugs. I distinctly remember her silhouette in the darkness against what felt like an overly bright shaft of moonlight.
The Lost Chapters Page 8