The Lost Chapters

by Leslie Schwartz

  I nodded and skirted away and out of the deputy’s line of sight before my kiting landed me in the hole. I had my tree back, and my heart opened to Hitler and her place in the world. I thought it took moxie to admit, while incarcerated no less, that she was a liar and a bandit.

  Two weeks later, on the day of my release, I would pack up my tree and walk out of jail with it. I consulted a botanist about how to transplant and care for it, determined to keep it alive. I lovingly transplanted the tender sapling outside in the shade, as instructed, but an unexpected, punishing rain unleashed one night and drowned it. The tree died. Perhaps an institutionalized sapling was just too fragile to make it on the outs.

  I think again of the words of Pema:

  The only reason that we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.

  I understood then what Pema meant about turning inwardly with kindness, creating compassion toward ourselves as a road toward understanding our attachments and the blame and hurt we carry when the things we love are taken or lost. If I could forgive myself first—for hurting my family and friends, for the risks I took that might have hurt or killed another person, for straying from my own holiness—then wasn’t it easier to let go of all my cravings? My craving for material comforts, my craving for the ease of my suffering, my craving for love, for attention. My craving even for a tree that grew in jail. It made sense now that if I held myself with compassion for all my flawed humanness—including my attachment to things and ideas—then my heart would be open to forgiveness and compassion when others took from me those things that I loved the most.

  * * *

  With my tree safely back in my hands, I am ready to move on to the next book. The days are going fast now—I will be out in two weeks. A new calm has taken over, but it doesn’t last. Though I have adjusted to jail, a new panic sets in. What if they forget me on my release date? What if they decide, because they can, to keep me longer? I try to stay in the moment, to relax, but some days I feel an irrational, suffocating fear that I will be locked up forever. And there it is, that word again. “Forever.” “Always,” “never,” “everyone,” “no one.”

  I close the cover of When Things Fall Apart and gently place the book in my duffel. I try not to hold my breath, because my breath tells me I am alive. I learn to move slowly, to pause before I speak, to offer my tenderness to those around me. It is not always received, but I don’t give up. It is not always easy either, and sometimes I turn away and hold anger and rage inside me. In the panic that always follows my discomfort and my yearning, I do what Pema says. I lean into it. I live through it. I ask it, “What are you teaching me in this moment?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  EBI Module: Lockup

  The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one’s guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.

  —Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

  Tiffany was one of the singularly most selfish (and stinky) women I had ever met. She came from privilege and had more money than I did, or ever did growing up, but we both shared the advantages of being born white. She relied on her parents shamelessly for money and shelter. She was four years older than Wynell, but infinitely less mature.

  On the other hand, Tiffany made me laugh to hell and gone. She wasn’t funny, exactly, but there was something about her that made me laugh the way I did with my friends in high school after we smoked bong hits. But that young woman never showered, and her hair began to hang in greasy rungs from her head. She had read in Yoga Times or some goofy New Agey magazine that it was good to go greasy.

  “I’m not going to wash it the entire time because that way, when I get out, it will be restored to its natural wonder,” she would say. In return, I’d roll my eyes.

  The one good thing about Tiffany was that she fancied herself a writer, so we wrote poems together. I relied on an idea that I’d used on the high school kids I taught in East Los Angeles on a fellowship one year, saying that we should each write a sentence on a page, folding it down so the other couldn’t see it, over and over again until we had a poem that we would read out loud.

  Another night, I suggested we write a sentence or phrase on ten torn pieces of paper, fold them up, and drop them into a cup. Then we would take turns pulling these rolled-up sentences out one at a time, and each craft a poem around the phrase. Tiffany came up with the weird phrase “Bitches rattle trust no man,” but it inspired me to write a three-stanza poem about the women who had held me all the way to jail and would be there with open arms when I got out.

  Brave hearts, tougher than

  armies of men with guns.

  Those bitches rattle and trust no man.

  They rescued me from my

  bitterest self, replaced salt with

  fruit, blood with Band-Aids.

  They lifted me from the grave.

  In another poem, inspired by the phrase “Empty ifs and random buts,” I wrote about a long-ago love, someone I had practically forgotten about who I’d met another lifetime ago while at a writer’s residency in Wyoming. Jail was funny that way, the way it made you think of things you thought you’d forgotten.

  The land spoke in hushed whispers.

  Wind blazed through the cottonwoods

  and the night spoke of empty ifs and random buts.

  We sat on torn bar stools at the Red Arrow

  peering down the road to Ulm

  while the trains blew past through Clearmont

  and in the morning we could not find the pennies

  crushed along that cold, long metal rail.

  I’d hoped to bring them back to California

  and hide them somewhere,

  away from the loneliness

  that drove me to sudden quiet love

  along that tender creek.

  The good times with Tiffany were few and far between, especially compared to my other bunkies. Tiffany loved herself. She loved her stylish haircut and her pretty, angular face—smattered with jail acne—and her amazing body. She would work out in the cell, sending a stink of body odor that took forever to dissipate. The sight of the sweat pouring off her face made me gag. I put a stop to that.

  “If you want to work out, do it out there,” I said, pointing past our locked door.

  And one day, when her vagina smell overwhelmed me, I said, “You need to take a damned shower. Every day. From now on.” She did, but it didn’t seem to matter, because amazingly even when she showered, she still smelled like underarms and pungent lady bits.

  She was one of those young women who flirted with the deputies and made and used jailhouse fake-up. She obsessed about her boyfriends, telling me the same dreary stories about them over and over again, and the stories always included the money, the sex, the drugs.

  Not surprisingly, she didn’t like to do chores. I didn’t know that the kapos made the inmates clean the showers, one cell of two inmates at a time. A few days after we’d moved, our turn was up. I didn’t mind at all. In fact, I was grateful for the chance to get out of my cell and do something that would take up some time. I liked to work. I had been working since I was fifteen. I loved housekeeping. I loved gardening. I loved teaching. I loved work that required organization. So I was grateful for any chance to get myself out of my cell, even if it meant cleaning showers. As a reward for cleaning the showers, we also got to take an extra shower after we were done, which seemed like a gift.

  But when Tiffany found out, she threw a fit.

  “Are you serious? I have to clean the shower?”

  At first I thought she was joking.

  “Yes,” said Miss Mouse, the trustee who’d
chopped up her drug dealer. “Get to work.”

  “I’m not cleaning the fucking showers,” she snarled.

  “Yes. You are. They don’t get clean by themselves,” Miss Mouse said.

  As they went back and forth, I was laughing to myself. I had not seen such petulance for years, not since I’d asked my preteen daughter to pick up her room. Tiffany was standing there, hands on hips, whiny voiced, in a fit of miff, spoiled rotten. After Miss Mouse scarily stared her down, Tiffany went to work on one set of showers, and I on the other. But it was clear Tiffany hadn’t done much cleaning in her lifetime. She used the mops that were normally reserved for cleaning the floors on the tile walls, and the rags used to clean the toilet on the faucet fixtures. So Miss Mouse made her do it again.

  The huffier Tiffany grew, the more mistakes she made, and the more mistakes she made, the more she had to do it over. I laughed hysterically at the show, like slapstick comedy unfolding on a stage. At one point, she was so crazed she stomped down the stairs, lost her footing, and wiped out. Not seriously, but enough to cause Miss Mouse to put her hands on her own hips and say, “Girl, you done lost your rabbit-ass mind. You keep that up, I’ma teach you what you don’t know, you hear me?” This only made me laugh even harder as Tiffany’s puffed-up angry face turned bright red. I could hear the inmates in Dayroom snickering. The entire episode was better than anything on TV.

  Like me, Tiffany had a master’s degree in something—I think it was geology—and she, too, was a reader. In one of those mystifying jail coincidences, she found a copy of Beautiful Ruins in the “library”of Exit Dorm. This was so strange to me. Beautiful Ruins was a bestseller for a minute but not that well known, and it was also on my own list. How weird that she would find such an obscure book on the shelves of Lynwood’s “library.” I wondered who had left it behind. I would guess a white woman, maybe someone like me or Tiffany. But in jail, it was impossible to stereotype. Everything I thought I knew about what and who people supposedly were was forever stripped from me. Another one of the greatest blessings in my life.

  In time, I would read Beautiful Ruins. It, too, had an amazing cover, very similar to All the Light We Cannot See, and Tiffany and I would trade stories about what it might be like to live in the cliffs above the sea in Italy. We talked a lot about that book and read passages to each other that we liked. The writing was good. Funny and smart. The theme was a monument to love and love’s disappointment. Definitely not my world: I have been lucky in love. One of the things I liked most about it was that the innkeeper of the only pension on the rocky island kept everyone loaded on wine and stories. It made me feel good that I could still enjoy vicarious drunkenness, that I didn’t need to get loaded to appreciate why it works so well for regular people who can, from time to time, bliss out of reality with a little wine or, these days, marijuana.

  * * *

  On March 21, I realize I have been clean for exactly six months. So I take my golf pencil, and on the slightly brown, recycled commissary paper that I paid four dollars for, I draw a circle and then draw a triangle in the circle. On the sides of the triangle I write the words “unity,” “recovery,” and “service.” In the center I write “six months.” I cut the circle out by making tiny holes around it with my pencil and ripping it carefully. (Later I will have it laminated and will carry it around with me in my wallet.)

  “Look,” I say to Tiffany. “This is my six-month chip.”

  “Congratulations. I’m about to be four months.”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s always about you, I think.

  I stand up and say, “Does anyone in this cell want to take a chip for six months of sobriety?”

  I turn around and raise my hand, “I do,” I say.

  I turn back to the first side where I stood before. “Here you go.”

  I turn again, acting out both parts, and take the chip. “Thank you,” I say.

  Tiffany laughs. “You’re a lunatic.”

  “Yes, I am,” I say, happily.

  I realize it’s okay to be ridiculous sometimes.

  The funniest part about this is that it’s not until I collect all my medical reports that I see my sober date was actually September 23, not September 21. And even funnier is that, before I knew this, one day after I was home, I watched workers replace a cement panel in the sidewalk. After they left, I got a stick and wrote “9/21” into the still-wet cement. Every time I see it, which is every fucking day, I crack up that I memorialized the wrong clean-and-sober date. It doesn’t matter, though. As the books I’ve read so far have taught me, it’s pretty clear that every one of us has only one day to live at a time, and even that much is never certain.

  * * *

  The books continue to arrive, to my great surprise and pleasure. My next batch included The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. That I had never read that book startled me: Kingston and I were both from the Bay Area, and we had both attended UC Berkeley. The Woman Warrior was practically a manifesto at Berkeley, and I was an English/rhetoric major so I read almost every book in the canon of fiction and nonfiction. How did this one get by, especially since the Modern Language Association claims it as the most commonly taught text in modern university education? I think it was a little bit of guilt that gave me the impetus to add it to my list. I remember going to a show at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles on Chinese immigration in California and seeing a beautifully curated exhibit that included Maxine Hong Kingston’s seminal work. I realized, because I had not read her book, that I had missed some of the value of the show. I suppose this was my reason for adding it to the list. Regret is always a great motivator.

  The Woman Warrior is one of those books you really needed a good chair for, and endless cups of coffee or tea. And preferably, it would be raining outside and a fire would be crackling in the hearth. None of those things were currently available to me in my situation. For someone like me, where any noise, even soft music, was like an anvil in my brain, it was exceptionally hard to focus, once again reminding me that I used drugs and drank myself senseless because I was hypersensitive to just about fucking everything.

  The Woman Warrior was not so much a revelation, though it was, as it was a triumph. To have finished a book as complex and meaningful, and understand it in that place, felt like victory. And it made me think about the self-esteem–building that reading provides. Not giving up on a difficult text, plowing through, dictionary in one hand, aspirin in the other, always filled me with the elation of triumph. As I had felt for Mary Oliver, Laura Hillenbrand, and Pema Chödrön when I finished their books, I experienced incredible love, maybe even devotion, for Maxine Hong Kingston.

  There are two things I like about this book. The first is, quite simply, its absolute gorgeousness. Divided into five chapters, each story conveys the rich tradition of Chinese folktale, memoir, and fiction. Kingston appeared to be floating words effortlessly across the page, but she used words that caused me to pause. Sometimes it would take me half an hour to understand what she meant by certain turns of phrase. The book was a symphony, complex and difficult but beautiful. Kingston’s book taught me more about my commitment as a writer than anyone ever had, including my teachers. As I read The Woman Warrior while confined behind bars, I made a vow to return to my writerly endeavors, in spite of the ever-present vexation of my failures, to attempt to claim beauty again through words.

  But the second and most exciting aspect of Kingston’s book was that it not only defies genre, it refuses genre. She blurs storylines. Overlapping narratives rely on fallible memory, fiction, and myth. Without going into too much MFA speak, what Kingston does is what every MFA teacher tells you not to do, which is to adhere to a different standard of truth than “reality” or “facts,” neither of which are ever really verifiable anyway. Kingston seems to tell the reader, through the book, that the only way to be true to one’s story is to invent and blur the lines of what “really” happened and what yo
u imagined happened. Police do that all the time, too. My arrest reports are a clear indication of mysteriously shifting “facts.”

  But when Kingston does it, this complicated version of the truth becomes an offering of relief and forgiveness. My own life was a series of contradictions. I had published novels with big New York publishing houses. I had a fabulous New York agent, huge advances, a film adaptation, dozens of translations. I had a gorgeous daughter, an amazingly handsome husband, the world’s most beautiful dog. A fine house on a hill, with breathtaking downtown and mountain views that I bought with my own money. I had friends who would die for me.

  And yet I was a drug addict and a vodka-swilling drunk and now a jailbird. I broke laws. I broke treasured possessions during incomprehensible rages. I threw my wedding ketubah across the room, smashing the glass and the frame, and mowed down my husband’s motorcycle. On purpose. I lost those friends who would die for me. I betrayed my family. I might as well have burned my money, given how I lost it to my addiction. I lived in a state of fury that had evolved over time—out of a childhood that baffled and wounded me, and later, in college, via an attack one night by a stranger in my house, a source of anxiety and trauma that held me hostage for two decades.

  It is incomprehensible to me, and at the same time, it makes perfect sense why I fell so far. On the one hand, I was compelled by my addiction to not just blur, but obliterate the lines of my story. I was not an integrated human from out the gate. And what I came to understand, in fact the key to my recovery, was that as an alcoholic and a drug addict, I should expect no sympathy for this condition of mine. On the contrary, I learned that addicts like me should assume no such understanding, nor should we seek it. Long before brain and genetic discoveries had proven beyond doubt that our DNA can signal the likelihood of contracting diseases like cancer, addiction, and Alzheimer’s, I knew intuitively that the science of alcoholism and addiction would never matter. Such knowledge wouldn’t help me find recovery, and it wouldn’t help others find understanding or patience for those of us mired in the disease.