The Lost Chapters

by Leslie Schwartz

  Why? Because my disease is spiritual in nature. Though I possess the genetics, there is no cure but one: finding a way to fill my God-sized hole. My mom told me I came out kicking and screaming. Looking back at my life, I never stopped kicking and screaming even when there was no visible target. My place in the world was always a place of warfare and antagonism. The more I drank and used drugs, the more bitter I grew and the uglier the world looked. Like in Kingston’s “No Name Woman,” the travesty of a life that defies integration is a story of screens and vapors, and ultimately incomprehensible demoralization. I was unable to accept life on its own terms. I couldn’t live in, let alone see, the truth.

  What those of us in recovery know is that few in society would be willing to believe we are sick, and even fewer would give a shit. Brain disorder or not, if we let it go long enough, addiction ultimately and often leads to criminal behavior, institutions, and death; all outcomes that inspire morality responses, not compassion or medical understanding, even, ironically, by most of those in the medical profession.

  * * *

  For Kingston the only way we don’t lie in memoir is to create a different standard of the so-called truth. This is why the book caused such a stir when it was published, particularly among the rigid types who preferred that writing adhere to standard Western ideas about memory and truth, and linear timelines.

  The Woman Warrior celebrates invention as a way to tell what “really” happened, and as a result, it resists categorization. Is it memoir? Is it a collection of short stories? Is it a collection of essays? Kingston seemed to be thrusting her middle finger into the contemporary literary ethos that likes its conditions about what truth is and isn’t, and how stories should be told. She simply told her story the way she understood it, not the way people wanted her to, and it pushed the boundaries of containment as a result.

  As I read it, surrounded by women—many of whom I considered warriors—I thought about how it is acutely and rigorously feminist to refuse categorization. I began to view the smart and fiercely independent women at Lynwood as too radical, too intelligent, too powerful for the mainstream. It would be ignorant to say that these women were here only because they were poor, uneducated women of color. Obviously that was a huge part of it. But in my opinion, they were also—at least among the women I fell in love with—way too smart for a world run by men, way too angry and defiant for the oppressive laws that men created, and not docile enough for a bully culture that enforces unjust laws.

  I think about Wynell, and how she was incarcerated for how she earned her money, the act of prostitution. Wynell was crushed by the institutionalization of racism; her access to help was limited by poverty and bureaucratic red tape. She was destroyed by illness and a patriarchy that allows fathers to rape their daughters, and scares mothers into disbelief and denial. Her life is a reaction to her circumstances. Yet she is stronger than anyone I know. There has to come a time when we realize that the poor are powerful in ways the privileged will never be. They face hurdles and survive in ways people of privilege can’t imagine. Wynell was in jail mostly because she was deemed “uncivilized” by the society that suppressed her.

  And if hers were really a crime, the men who paid for her services, including the cop who paid her for a blowjob at least once a week while in uniform, would also be locked up with the same frequency and duration. But it’s seldom the penises that go to jail in the prostitution scheme, only the vaginas and mouths. Who do you think made that up?

  * * *

  Before I went to county jail, I had been talking to that nun on the phone from the safety of my living room couch, the one who suggested I run for the bottom bunk. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, she gave me a warning: “Be friendly but don’t make friends. You don’t sound like the kind of person who normally goes to jail. So you don’t really want to get involved with those people.”

  A sick feeling washed over me when she said “those people.” I was “those people” now. What was she talking about? She also told me: “Don’t share any personal goods. They’ll take advantage of you.” Duckie kept my commissary sign-on the entire time and never once did she steal from me. Wynell was so proud, she refused my offer for commissary, so I would write down all the commissary items she loved (but had no money to buy) and every week I would order them for her. I had to practically force her to accept those salt-and-vinegar chips she loved and the body lotion she needed. I understood how hard it was for her, how profoundly and deeply she could not accept gifts, especially from a white woman. I got it. But I still insisted.

  I grew to pity that nun, especially for parroting the bully culture that lorded over her. How was it that she didn’t think I was one of them? Then again, she was inculcated by a male-dominated culture, so I tried to cut her some slack. But given that she was wrong—pretty much about everything, including that I should selfishly deprive another person of comfort by racing for the bottom bunk—always made me think she should go to jail for the crime of being a compassionless bitch.

  In The Woman Warrior, Kingston wrote that in an effort to make the Chinese care about each other outside the family, Chairman Mao urged people to pay respect to the spirits of brave soldiers and hard workers (not just ancestors) with origami replicas of houses and food.

  She wrote: “My aunt remains forever hungry. Goods are not distributed evenly among the dead.”

  What I saw at Lynwood is that goods were not delivered evenly among the living either. Health care, jobs, and education were reserved for the wealthy and the white. Justice, too. There were countless rape victims among me, none of whom have found redress for the crimes against their bodies. For immigrants with fancy British accents (not Mexican or Arabic ones), American gates are open. The rest are forced behind walls or are relegated to their corners of the inner city to starve, to beg for help, to die of simple illnesses that just a little more money could cure.

  But for Kingston it’s the ghost of her aunt that holds power and sway over her. It’s the scraping from below and the howling from the grave that teaches her, and all women who don’t want to die with shame, to grasp our dignity while we are still breathing, to fight for our place in the world, to never ever give into the silence those in power want from us.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  EBI Module: Lockup

  Ahead of them, a long way off, a range of hills stained by mottlings of black forest flowed away in round white curves against the sky. The lane passed into a pine-wood with boles reddening in the afternoon sun and delicate blue shadows on the snow. As they entered it the breeze fell and a warm stillness seemed to drop from the branches with the dropping needles. Here the snow was so pure that the tiny tracks of wood-animals had left on it intricate lace-like patterns, and the bluish cones caught in its surface stood out like ornaments of bronze.

  — Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

  The deputies had their rules for jail and I had mine. My first was never get used to anything about jail. Think of everything as savagery and obscenity. Take a shower every day no matter how gross the showers are or how clean you think you might be. Mop the cell floor, clean and sterilize the sink and toilet daily. Call home every day. Yoga, every day. Never call your “cell” your “room.” You have a room back home. It’s got a fireplace and French doors with beveled glass looking out onto the garden you designed and planted. Your room has the bed you share with your beloved, and sometimes the kid and the dog. The family pictures adorn the walls, as does your wedding ketubah, repaired and rehung. This cell is not your room. Also, never raise your voice. Don’t have fun. Never, ever, ever enjoy any part of incarceration.

  The only rule I violated was the last one. I had fun with Wynell. She made me laugh. Her brain was searing, intellectual, and perceptive. We enjoyed many a scathing conversation about race, identity, our femaleness, our place in the world. With her, I felt ease and comfort. Anywhere that there is love, there is calm.

 
When I moved in with Tiffany, I can’t say I had “fun,” but for some reason, we laughed a lot. She wasn’t very smart. She was too selfish for that, too self-absorbed. When you viewed the world entirely from the lens of self, you missed a lot of things. I can speak to that from personal experience.

  As I rounded the corner on twelve days left to go, I had found women in EBI that I liked, so I had people to talk to during program. Denise, one of the trustees, was a favorite of mine. She had joined my yoga class because she was determined to get her blood pressure down so she could get out of her AB 109 jail status and transfer to the prison fire crew. She was in for insurance fraud and her circumstances vividly depressed her. In some ways, she was like me—she was a mom with a high school–age daughter, educated, with a good job. She might have received a tougher sentence because she was black, but I don’t know. It was a first-time offense. According to her, she’d been an accessory, not one of the two key perpetrators. But one thing I noticed about Denise was she hadn’t yet been able to surrender to the fact that she broke the law. It seemed like it was everyone else’s fault that she did what she did. I didn’t feel any antipathy for her. I understood; I had been there. She was kind, but she lived darkly under the weight of her crime. That kind of suffering was all too familiar.

  It took effort and time to realize that the only way to move on was to admit my wrongs, make them right where I could, and live an honest, sober life. Jail got in the way of that for a long time. It is axiomatic that incarceration manufactures bitterness and shame. As I learned from Ruth Ozeki, bitterness and shame stand in the way of humility, acceptance, and transformation. Change is only possible through self-forgiveness. For me, an addict and a drunk, I had to remain emotionally and spiritually diligent. I knew I had to work harder than most people to live with integrity because my genes held the marker for alcoholism, and that biological microorganism was my kryptonite.

  From a moral standpoint—meaning nurture rather than nature—my greatest defects of character were in the category of selfishness and fear. I was an utterly self-absorbed and frightened individual, but I wasn’t mean. And I knew that sanity meant I had to stop blaming everyone for the fury of my addiction and its consequences.

  I have no idea what a “criminal mind” is, but I know that I don’t have one of those. I haven’t willfully hurt anyone. Once, when I was a kid, I stole a tin of cherry Sucrets and got caught. I loved those things. (When I told my husband about it, he laughed. “It wasn’t even candy,” he said.) Getting caught that day cured me of stealing. And later, when I was about ten, I told my dad that I wanted to rob a bank because “it was a victimless crime.” He took pains to explain to me the costs of stealing, not just financially, but to my humanity and the natural state of its goodness. He likened it to the pebble you throw into the still lake. Every wrong choice sends out ever-widening ripples. I took his lessons to heart and lived my life accordingly. Until, that is, drugs and alcohol stripped me of my true self.

  I admit that I take some comfort knowing I was being punished for breaking the law not while sober but under duress of blackout and addiction. But I also knew—admittedly this took me a while—that it didn’t excuse me. Though I am 100 percent certain that had I stayed sober, none of this would have happened, the law is the law. I did break two laws. And our laws don’t make room for mental illness. So I paid for my mistakes.

  * * *

  One day I looked out at Dayroom and saw a dog wandering around. It was the saddest dog I’d ever seen. Cowed, tail between its legs, it seemed to bear the weight of all the noise and chaos in jail. But unlike the human inmates, the dog had a lot of freedom to roam around. It was touched and hugged and allowed to stay out on the patio whenever it wanted to. I watched the dog for a couple of days from my teeny cell window, and in the evenings, I noticed a big, manly-looking two-striped sergeant taking it out then returning it again in the morning. Unlike most of us, the dog apparently had been sentenced to some kind of work-release program.

  The next time I was freed from my cell, I made a beeline for it when we were popped for program. The dog was stationed next to a Dayroom bunk and a large, sullen Latina inmate.

  “What’s with the dog?” I asked her. She looked all of twenty, and she was clearly exhausted from being asked the same question over and over again.

  “We have a program here where we adopt dogs from the pound. Usually they’ve been abused or something, and we train them.”

  “What happens to them after you train them?”

  “They’re adopted out to a home.”

  “Wow, that’s cool.”

  She nodded, clearly bored. But then she said, “One time the deputy in charge of the program adopted one of the dogs.”

  I thought of that butch sergeant who I’d noticed taking the dog out every night. Early on, I’d seen her in Pregnant Dorm berate an inmate into tears, her macho, stentorian voice like a one-ton TNT bomb. The pregnant woman sobbed, holding her belly. The sergeant grabbed her by the arm and dragged her off somewhere.

  “The sergeant who adopted the dog,” I said. “Was it the big ugly one?”

  “Yeah,” the woman said, looking sadly at her own meager charge.

  “Poor thing,” I said of the dog that now had to live its life with a “po-lice” who thought nothing of humiliating a pregnant inmate in front of God and everyone.

  “Exactly,” the woman said.

  * * *

  The fear that they will not come for me on my release date, April 10, grows exponentially larger as each of the twelve days left falls away. This fear is like a vine overtaking the oak tree. I believe my thoughts. I live in fear.

  I remember one day, while this meaty, red-faced Pentecostal minister went on and on and on about the fires of hell awaiting us when we die, I stood up. I couldn’t take it. My body went into fear mode. Hell wasn’t waiting for me. I was living in it every day. It felt like a buzz saw had gone off in my bloodstream. For whatever reason, I just knew they weren’t going to let me out. It was irrational and unsubstantiated by all the evidence I’d seen so far where releases were concerned, but the certainty had become a full-body experience.

  I saw Denise over by the vending machine, devoid now for weeks of my favorites: Milky Ways and Diet Cokes. She was talking quietly with Miss Brown. Miss Brown was in for dealing weed. She was hysterically funny. Somehow she managed to get her wig into the jail. It was black, with a red streak down the side. She loved that wig. She knew it made her beautiful. Whenever she walked to and fro, she patted it, petted it, brushed it, coiffed and fussed with it. That wig was everything to her.

  Miss Brown lived in her own world, but she was never mean or hurtful. She had her own way that I found lovely. She would dance alone in a corner if they played music during class. And she talked like a southern belle. She was a lesbian and said she went down for her girlfriend, who was the dealer. She loved Jesus. But every time she went to the Protestant services, her face would reveal a world of hurt when the inevitable gay hatred rant would begin, as if she didn’t remember it from the last time, and the time before that. She told me that she was gearing up for her transfer to prison. There was some story about how she was just going upstate for a psych eval, and that she’d be back or released. But it made no sense. They wouldn’t send anyone upstate who hadn’t been convicted. I knew she was not coming back to Lynwood.

  Once in Life Skills class, she took the teacher to task for making a blanket statement about “you people.” I can’t recall the exact details, but I was amazed. She was fearless, empowered, and in the end, she was right. I remember being wholly impressed not just by her locution and the logic of her arguments, but her power and her fearlessness. I thought she would have made a great lawyer.

  After the anxiety episode triggered by the hateful Protestant minister, I walked over to Denise and Miss Brown, knowing at some point I would be the target of the deputy’s wrath for getting up and le
aving church. I didn’t care.

  “I’m afraid they won’t let me out,” I said. Tears began to stream down my cheeks, silent, no-crying tears.

  Miss Brown wasted no time. She took me in her arms and said, “Oh baby. Oh baby. Don’t you worry about a thing. You gon’ be all right. They don’t got no right to keep you even one minute over your date. Don’t you worry. I know you is feeling some type of way, but you got to trust God.”

  Her words calmed me. I was soothed by her certainty. I said, “Are you sure?”

  “Oh yes, baby. Don’t you worry. You’ll be home in no time. They ain’t got no right to keep you. You done your time. You go on and trust God.”

  I did not return to the service that day. Instead, I asked the deputy if I could sit on the back patio. I told her I was not feeling well. The deputy, to my surprise, said yes. I must have looked pretty bad. The dog was out there on a cozy bed. I noticed how nice and thick his mattress was. There was a bowl of food next to him. And toys. And lots of water. The dog was miserable, though. I snuggled up next to him.

  “Hello, baby, baby, baby,” I said.

  He wagged his tail forlornly.