The Lost Chapters

by Leslie Schwartz

  The next three books were When Things Fall Apart by Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön; Beautiful Ruins, a novel by Jess Walter, a writing instructor I knew from my MFA program; and My Life as a Foreign Country by Brian Turner. When Wynell saw them, she laughed at me again.

  “Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm,” she said. I picked up When Things Fall Apart and looked at the back cover. She saw the title and said, “Little too late for that, eh?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Maybe it should be ‘When Things Fell Apart.’”

  One day, when I was sitting around reading Beautiful Ruins, they called my name: “Schwartz, 531.” I looked at Wynell. Whenever they called my name, number, or combination of the two, I always believed I was being released.

  “Roll it up,” the deputy screamed.

  Wynell smiled. “Maybe you’re out.”

  But my hopes were dashed within a second of leaving the cell. Outside, I noticed all the others from my Life Skills class doing that slow, defiant jail walk, their roll-ups in one hand, their jail-issued yellow duffel bags in another. Standing around, standing around, standing around, doing what we always did in jail, waiting around, then lining up, marching, lining up, standing, marching, waiting . . . again. We were being moved.

  Once again, I was not the one who would be left behind. But I despaired of leaving Wynell. I despaired of moving again. I felt the pain of it in my chest and stomach, a tightening. A loud hum began to sound between my ears. And what would happen, I thought, if they learned I wasn’t really qualified for EBI? Would they extend my time to punish me? Would there be other consequences? And who would I bunk with? I saw two women I knew best from Life Skills class, Rose and Tiffany. Rose was a gorgeous Latina. She was very nice to everyone, mannerly and gentle and always smiling. Now she seemed agitated. I had never seen her like that before.

  “This is bullshit,” Rose said. “I’m sick-ass of moving around this shit fuck fucking shithole. God damn.”

  Beverly Hills Tiffany, with her yoga butt, Jackie O hairdo, and rich parents—she was in on DUI, but had previously served time in Florida for felony breaking and entering—said, “It’s so fucked. So fucking fucked.”

  We all laughed.

  “Hurry up, ladies. Let’s go. Put your personals out for bag check. Hurry up.”

  I looked up at the cell. Wynell was watching. She waved down forlornly. I looked at my feet. When I looked back up, she had gone inside.

  After a while of milling around, Wynell came downstairs. “You forgot this,” she said. She handed me my “razor,” which was jail-issued from commissary. Like most commissary hygiene products, it didn’t work and I had left it behind. She also handed me a few apples and her bran flakes. She knew I was constantly, chronically, painfully constipated from the copious amounts of lard in the food. I was touched by this gesture.

  “Wynell,” I said. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t.

  “See you around,” she said.

  We didn’t hug. There was so much chaos. She looked at me for a long time. I felt like, in some ways, I’d never had a closer friend in my life. We nodded our heads at each other. A tear fell down her cheek. I turned away first, because it hurt so much. The place was filled with women in various states of dress. Deputies screaming, “Hey, no shower shoes. Tuck in your shirt. Keep your mouths shut. Line up.”

  Duckie was there. She nodded, smiled.

  “Hey, sister,” she said.

  “You coming?”

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  Then she covered her hands with her mouth.

  “Oh shit,” she said.

  She tried to hide behind me, which was ridiculous since my entire body was the size of her left leg. She pointed at Rose and whispered, “I stabbed that girl’s dad on the streets.”

  I glanced up at our cell. For the first time since our water faucet broke, Wynell closed the door on her own accord. When you close the door, it locks automatically. She was putting herself back into that cage willingly. I experienced pain so acutely that I felt dizzy, like I needed to sit down. And, as was my usual response to every adverse moment in my life, I felt myself gearing up for a fight, fighting against all the fucking bullshit of that place.

  I fought hard every day to stay clean—there were so many drugs all around me all the time. I battled against time: stopped time, time vanishing, time passing me by. All day long, I shoved down the urge to tell the deputies to go fuck themselves. The painbody roared ceaselessly. Monochrome loneliness. And every moment of every day, I waged war against the enemy of all thoughts: that I got a raw deal, that I didn’t deserve this shit.

  My head was pounding. The grief, the loss, the fear, the loneliness just broke me open. And then, something happened. My body softened. The rigidity and dryness of my spine abated. My heart crashed open, reaching, not grasping but yearning, rising; my thoughts emptied out and I was still. The screaming, the chaos, the searching of my personal property, the haze of lights, the blue-clad bodies moving around, all of it stopped. Everything, silence. And I felt myself leaning in, like you would cradle a child, to all the hurt, all the regret, the shame, the emptiness, and the fear, leaning into the sight of Wynell folding, giving up, incarcerating herself. Leaning into the whole of my astonishing life. I yielded. I surrendered.

  I knew that from then on, I could never be hurt again, that I would let go of my clutching for hope. I would release my grip on pain and avoid attaching to the thoughts that seemed to lord over me and determine every action I took, every emotion I felt. I had surrendered. Fully and completely. All this time, I had believed that if I let go of the fight, they would win. But my entire life, I had been wrong. Surrender was the only win. I felt my power surging inside me. I understood that with surrender came the one single truth: They no longer had any power over me. I was free. It was my most radical act of resistance. And it would permanently and irrevocably change my life.

  I hadn’t begun to read Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, partly because Wynell never let up on the joke. But I put Beautiful Ruins down and picked up Pema as I sat on the hard concrete ground waiting for the police to decide how to dispatch us. And, just like every book that I had chosen for my incarceration, this book was material to exactly what I was experiencing right at the moment I needed it.

  Reaching our limit is not some kind of punishment. It’s actually a sign of health that, when we meet the place where we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling . . . we don’t become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it’s time to stop struggling and look directly at what’s threatening us.

  I had to laugh. In fact, I laughed out loud, surprising myself.

  “Why you laughing, güera?” an inmate holding court with her homegirls asked.

  I didn’t say anything. But I knew this: we are born with our fists closed; we die with our hands open. I had died to myself, alone, but also under the eyes of something ferocious and divine.

  “Here,” she said, handing me some personal pictures that I hadn’t asked to see. “This is my husband. He’s doing twenty-five to life. These are my kids. They’re with their abuela. I miss my babies.”

  I looked at the pictures. The other women were gathered around, including Rose, who would abruptly stand up, wander around, then sit down again, repeatedly, like a tic. What was wrong with her? She was normally so calm and settled. Everyone else had that glazed look I was so familiar with by then.

  “Wow,” I said. “Nice.”

  The woman with the picture nodded and appraised me. She winked at me.

  I went back to Pema and sunk back into the sense that the books I had chosen were stalking me. They seemed to have legs and volition. Later, when I was home and I told Greg how strange it was that every book seemed to divinely refer to my experiences in lockup, he said, “You chose them. You must have known something.”

  I did
choose them, but there was no intended design on my part. I didn’t know, for instance, that I would need Pema when she came. That was the strange part of it. I chose them because they were books I had wanted to read, or reread, and I had not been able to find the time to do it in my regular life. I chose them because I was terrified of time and boredom. But the books had ESP. Not me. They arrived the way the people did: Melissa, Duckie, Wynell—to soften the hell. As if they knew.

  Pema writes:

  The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just keep moving. Usually, when we reach our limit, we . . . freeze in terror. Our bodies freeze and so do our minds.

  But I had not frozen. All the layers of who I once was were being stripped away. Every couple weeks I would die to myself and then come back a different person. I used the words “always” and “never” less. I began to stop hating myself. I even began to think that I had no “self,” that I was just living every day in the moment I was given, without judgment, neither hating it nor loving it. I didn’t think less of myself, but I began to think of myself less often. Some days, I clearly understood how I had blown it, but I also thought maybe that relapse was strategically, divinely created for some express purpose that had yet to be revealed. I began to realize that it didn’t matter that I was incarcerated—I had broken the law, and if they felt I needed to be punished, then so be it. In a way, that wasn’t the most important epiphany of the moment. What I felt in my bones was this: I truly didn’t care what anyone thought of me. If people wanted to judge me, I was fine being judged. That was a freedom I never thought I’d experience. I knew my own bravery, but I didn’t need to prove it to anyone. My mettle became my joyful secret.

  “Stand up,” a deputy screamed. “Hurry up, ladies. We don’t have all day.”

  As if we hadn’t been sitting around all day. The woman beside me who had shown me the pictures of her man and her kids helped me up. Her name was 18th Street, for her gang affiliation.

  “Okay, güera,” she said to me, “let’s pray for Dayroom.”

  * * *

  Pema Chödrön was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown. She was the youngest of three kids, born into a Catholic family in New Jersey. She was well schooled—a very prestigious prep school in Connecticut and then, later, Sarah Lawrence College. She married a lawyer and had a daughter and a son. Her family moved to California and she went to UC Berkeley, graduating with a master’s degree in education. She and her husband divorced. She remarried and moved with her new husband to New Mexico. There she taught school, as she had done in the Bay Area, and raised her children. One day she was sitting out back when her husband came home and told her he was having an affair and wanted a divorce. She writes:

  I remember the sky and how huge it was. I remember the sound of the river and the steam rising up from my tea. There was no time, no thought, there was nothing—just the light and a profound, limitless stillness. Then I regrouped and picked up a stone and threw it at him.

  What’s not to love about that? Later she pinned a sign up on her wall. It is one of my favorite bits of wisdom: “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

  This resonated with me. It spoke to me of the horror and seeming endlessness of my addiction, the way I still had not stopped dying. I remembered one day, waking up in rehab and understanding that within me was a small flame, that last bit of wick that had not been extinguished by my addiction, though I had sorely tried to blow it out. I remembered thinking that that fragile light was where God resided.

  I was growing stronger every day. I felt something shift in myself, and it was, ironically, in jail that I learned the difference between compliance and surrender. I did not “surrender” to my sentence, I complied. In the world of addiction, you tell an addict to do something but they rarely will, and they sure as hell don’t surrender. The ego of the drunkard is way too big an asshole for that. But slowly, of my own volition, I began to raise the white flag to my addiction and to make peace with the damages the disease had caused. But there was a meaningful distinction to me between the idea that I had merely complied with orders regarding jail, and that I had surrendered to grace regarding my disease. And the one had nothing to do with the other.

  I had found a solution that would safeguard me forever. That I was finally indestructible. Courage seemed to light from within. I didn’t think I could be hurt again. And to this day, I can say that while I have suffered many disappointments and life events, even the death of loved ones, I don’t feel hurt. I feel practical. This is life: hard, sad, disappointing at times, even as it is simultaneously sublime, gorgeous, and good.

  I was assigned a bed in Dayroom. I couldn’t believe my luck. In Dayroom, you weren’t locked in a cell. Due to overcrowding, three-tiered bunks were lined along the perimeter of the room set aside for eating dinner and program. So you had the illusion of freedom and sometimes you could talk to other people while you sat on your chair in front of your bunk. You saw and heard things that you would normally be in the dark about. Dayroom versus a cell was like the difference between an aisle seat and the middle seat on a plane.

  18th Street was assigned the bunk above me, so my luck came with a price. She was loud and obnoxious. I remember that at the one AA meeting I was allowed to attend—and only because Wynell used her sway with the trustees to let me out and go—18th Street talked all the way through. Her behavior with her homegirls was so unpleasant that one of the deputies closed the meeting down early. But later we found out that was just an excuse—the deputies had a birthday party they needed to get to. They wanted us locked down for their convenience.

  18th Street carried around piles of shit. Bags and bags of litter and scrap. She had more dross than anyone I had ever seen: more clothes, blankets, toilet paper, spoons (we never got forks or knives, only plastic spoons), sanitary pads (no tampons in jail), pencils, commissary goods, hygiene, salt, coffee, tea, and cups all came with her.

  “Hey, flaca, how much time you got?” she asked me.

  “I have two weeks left.”

  “Why you here?”

  “DUI, suspended license, battery of an officer.”

  She laughed. “What’d ya do, call him a meanie-pants?”

  “Something like that.”

  It still made me rage, recalling this abuse of power. But in jail, I grasped a bigger truth, a more painful reality. Now I understood that much of the time, especially where addicts and the mentally ill and the poor are concerned, justice isn’t justice, it’s personal. This explained a lot about why 99 percent of the people inside are people of color. The realization sliced me open. Sometimes knowledge is like being carved in half.

  * * *

  Meth made its way into jail via two vaginal routes. The first route along the royal highway was by subterfuge and smuggling. An inmate, either processing through or returning from court for a hearing on their case—someone with very strong Kegel muscles—had to elude the deputies when asked to squat on the ground and cough while a flashlight was shone up her vagina and ass. In cases like this, the meth or heroin stayed inside the body and was tugged out later for use or sale. The second method for getting drugs into jail was by an inmate offering her vagina (or mouth) to a deputy in exchange for him bringing meth inside.

  Rose had been acting so weird the day we moved because she was high. She’d managed to get her hands on vagina meth, purchasing it from someone who’d fucked it in. She was flying.

  Being in Dayroom, I was grateful for the incremental improvements: I could walk to the faucet and get hot water for coffee. I could sneak a phone call in. Or, when certain deputies were busy with a female inmate in the officers’ toilet, I could grab a Diet Coke out of vending.

  I slept on the bottom of my three-woman bunk.
All day, all I seemed to hear was 18th Street rustling through her plastic bags. She was someone who liked to cook in jail. “Cooking” meant ordering things from commissary—salsa, tortillas, canned meats—and making burritos. Often it involved throwing a bunch of wet, gooey stuff into a plastic bag, shaking the bag up and, voilà, a meal! Once, 18th Street made banana crème pie this way and offered me a bite.

  “Have some,” she said.

  “Umm.” I couldn’t imagine eating something that had been shaken up in a plastic bag, then rolled out on the tables we ate off of by hands probably infected with MRSA. But if I didn’t . . . well . . . that would be rude.

  “Mmm,” I said. “Very good.”

  I gagged it down.

  “Have some more.”

  “Thanks. I think I’ll save it for later. Yum.” I nodded my head, as if amazed at the culinary magic of jailhouse cooking.

  Our three-tiered bunk was right next to the cell where Rose was locked up with a woman named LaRue. LaRue had bad ADHD and a loud voice. She had a temper, too, that would switch on and off. With Rose on crystal meth and LaRue without her ADHD medication, I felt like I was watching two cats with their tails cut off, in heat, in a cage.

  LaRue, who was also a hard-core meth addict missing most of her teeth, had just been blazed by the Lord. Induced by the euphoria of the meth, Rose, normally an earthy Catholic type, had succumbed to LaRue’s evangelizing. For the three days she was high, she was born again.

  I liked Rose. I didn’t fault an addict like her for seizing the opportunity to get high in jail. If I hadn’t been struck clean and sober myself, I would have traded all my commissary fireballs and Keefe coffee for a few hits.