The Lost Chapters

by Leslie Schwartz

  What my eyes saw was a truth that people either don’t want to believe or can’t. The incarceration of women for crimes of necessity—whether it’s stealing food for their babies or money for their addiction—is society’s dirty little secret. I met one woman who was sentenced to six months for stealing two pounds of turkey meat for her kids. Appalling. But in American culture, it’s just business as usual to keep women of color and the mentally ill (including addicts) from attaining their power by keeping them uneducated, underfed, and incarcerated.

  The mainstream, regardless of party affiliation, is complicit. Incarcerating those with addictions and mental illness doesn’t stop the cycle of addiction and criminal activity. Instead, incarceration perpetuates the revolving door of substance abuse and the crimes that accompany it. And it costs a lot of money; money that might be better spent on mental health solutions that will make a difference. But for some reason, the logic of this falls constantly, frustratingly on deaf ears. I can only speculate as to why.

  In Ethan Frome, Wharton definitively shows us the entrapment of women in a world that belonged to men. Sometimes it’s hard not to think that this paradigm still exists. The irony in choosing to name the book after the man in the story who consciously but unwittingly causes the problems is a scorching and unforgettable choice.

  I want to write a different book for us someday. The one that shows the world how unfettered our minds and hearts are, the one that shows our brilliance and our capacity for intellectualism, invention, creativity. The one that shows the Wynells and the Duckies and the Miss Browns of the world as they really are: powerful, intelligent, loving, and creative. In my world, we would break them out of a system that, without conscience or consideration, entraps their best qualities so that they remain forever invisible, crippled, and despised.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  EBI Module: Last Days

  He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.

  —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

  One day, when I had only a little more than a week left, Rose saw me sitting alone.

  “What’s up?”

  “Man, I am constipated.”

  “You and me both,” she said. “I don’t have any of those ex-lax left either, or I’d—“

  “No, it’s cool. You already helped out. I just want to get to the doctor.”

  You had to see a doctor to get the simplest things. Antacids and laxatives were coveted in jail.

  “Well, what’s stopping you?”

  “I put in a request two weeks ago.”

  She clucked her tongue. “C’mon, girl, you will never see a doctor if you do it by the rules.”

  She brought me up to the deputy’s desk. “This woman has waited”—she looked at me and I saw instantly where we were going—“how long, three weeks?”

  “Four,” I said.

  “Four weeks to see a doctor.”

  He looked at us with the usual blank stare.

  “How would you feel if your wife was sick and couldn’t see a doctor?” Rose said. “How about your daughter? What the hell is wrong with you? Look at her. She’s sick.”

  I did my best to look sick.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Rose said. “C’mon, man. She’s bleeding from her vagina. And it’s not her period.”

  “I think my ovaries are pussing over,” I said.

  He looked like we’d struck him with a burning spear. He quickly got a pen and signed an order. We could barely contain ourselves as we walked away.

  The next morning, I was popped from my cell at 7 a.m. and sent on my merry way to medical. As I left the dorm, one of the trustees said, “See you in about eight hours.”

  She wasn’t joking. Medical was like an ironman competition: long, grueling, sweaty, crowded, painful. Also, like everything in jail, it was a place where time came to a grinding halt. After a half-hour march through a labyrinth of hallways and elevator rides to pick up other inmates in various states of illness, we were brought to Waiting, until we were called. I sat with the others and let that familiar insane feeling descend, the one where it seemed like no one really knew I was there (invisible), that no one would ever call my name or booking number (abandoned), that eventually I’d be like a post in the snow that disappears when the snow piles up over it (forgotten).

  After about two hours, they called me and I walked around a corner where they took my blood pressure—85 over 50.

  “Holy shit, am I dead?” I asked. “And gone to hell?”

  Nothing. The cunty nurses and shithole doctors never speak to you except to abuse you. My blood pressure had always been low when I was clean and sober, but this was ridiculous. All I could think was that I was in a state of shock still. Maybe the machine was broken, which wouldn’t surprise me.

  After that, I sat for another hour and waited. Then at one point, I looked up and there was Wynell. She smiled slyly at me and waved as if us being there together was no surprise to her. Joy filled me. I waved back. She nodded and disappeared—limping, of course—into some other room.

  After that hour evaporated—it was sort of like waiting for a banana peel to decompose—I was marched to the official waiting room. This was a small area with a TV and about forty other inmates sitting around in school desks and chairs. Lunches were brought in. I gave mine away, except for the apple and the cookies, which I ate slowly. For me, food was a challenge. It was shockingly repulsive. The “meat,” which came only in the form of hot dogs and bologna, was inedible. Only once did I take a bite, and it tasted like an entire skunk had been thrown into a wood chipper and rolled into soy additives and textured vegetable protein. More like something you’d use to spackle a wall with than eat. There was no fresh food except apples, cabbage, and oranges and sometimes an ice-cold green banana that, if not eaten immediately, turned black within the hour. The apples were almost always soggy. One of the worst meals—the inmates called it Scary Yaki—was a bowl of something that looked like wet cat shit and smelled like underarms and penises. I never ate it. Wynell, who’d worked in the kitchen during a previous incarceration, told me that they kept the apples in the freezer, which explained why, by the time they defrosted, they were like bacterial soft rot. One of her jobs, which she ended up quitting, was cleaning out the dead rats behind the stoves, ovens, and freezers.

  I sat down and prepared to wait for another ungodly stretch. I had no idea what time it was—I’d seen one clock, but it had stopped at 4:13. I guessed, since lunch had arrived, it was around 11 a.m. That meant I’d been sitting for four hours and done nothing much except find out that, according to my blood pressure, I was practically in a coma. Then the door opened and in sauntered the queen. She had that smile on her face—the one that told me she’d “fallen” again and was “badly injured.”

  “Wynell!” I said. I got up to hug her. I was way too uncool in my enthusiasm and joy. She never wanted anyone to see us demonstrating affection.

  “What the fuck?” I said.

  “Denise told KRS-One you were here. And KRS-One told me, “‘Hey, girl, you’re ex-bunkie is down in medical.’ So . . .” She suddenly limped and then we both laughed.

  KRS-One, as was Wynell’s style, was the nickname she’d given a trustee who did bear a striking resemblance to the rapper of the same name. I was moved that Wynell faked an injury to spend time with me in medical. We had four hours together. It was one of the best days of my time there. She told me what had been happening next door in Exit Dorm. I asked her about her “ho” friend Princess, who’d one day been dragged over to our dorm and handcuffed to a chair outside.

  “We had to go on lockdown because of that bitch,” I said.

  “Yeah, she stupid,” Wynell said. “She got into it with Cookie.”

  She had a few days left. I had a few days and a week left.

  “Promise me you’ll call me
when I get out,” I said.

  “April 10th. I remember. I promise.”

  When I was called in to see the doctor, I said, “Okay, then.”

  “Go on. I’m sure I’ll still be here when you get back.”

  When I saw the doctor, time sped up. All those hours of waiting for what I remember as maybe three mostly abusive minutes with the doctor.

  “Why are you constipated?” she asked with that accusatory tone I had become accustomed to by this point of my time served. As if it were my fault that all we ate was lard, hard-boiled eggs, and peanut butter. One thing I noticed: as they were abusing us with their accusations and insults, they did so as if we were forcing them to be assholes. Couldn’t we see how exhausting it was for them to treat us like shit?

  After a few more brusque questions, she said she’d get the prescription and that I should go to pill call that night and collect my laxative. I figured there would be a hitch—there always was—and that I’d end up getting my laxative on the day I left. Still, I was glad to hope, and I was happy I’d get to see Wynell on my way out. But when I returned to the waiting room, she was gone.

  The following day, during program, Denise called me over.

  “You teaching yoga today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. There’s a new girl here. Is it okay if she—”

  “Of course.”

  As she spoke, she slipped me something. I didn’t look to see what it was, but it felt like a card. If a trustee got caught kiting messages, it was far worse than if we did. I stuffed whatever it was in my gigantic pockets and gave her a hug.

  “When are you starting class?” she asked.

  “Five minutes.”

  By now, there were sometimes upward of twenty women torturing themselves into poses. It was quite a sight. Beautiful really. Women of all colors and shapes, grunting it out. One woman, a large gang girl with permanent eyebrows and lip liner, and her baby daddy’s name tattooed on her chest, said, “Damn, why the fuck this be so damn hard? It ain’t like we joggin’ or some shit like that.”

  As I helped the squirming blue-clad yogis—I always asked first if I could touch them and no one ever said no—and threw in a couple of poses to stretch my perennial aching back, the kited message burned a hole in my pocket. When we were sent back to our cells and locked down, I opened the card.

  It was a green Easter card with blushy pink hibiscus flowers on the cover. They looked exactly like the hibiscus that fluttered around the meditation corner in the back garden of my house.

  I opened the card and recognized Wynell’s neat, beautiful writing.

  Dear Leslie,

  Today is March 31st. I have one more day in here and you are right behind me. I pray all is well with you. I still pray for you. ☺ I miss the only other intelligent person in Lynwood. ☺

  Praying for you as always—

  Wynell

  It was just like her not to use the word “love.” She also enclosed a half sheet of paper, adorned with drawings of flowers and musical quotes, an elephant, a giant sun and hearts. It was titled: “Things to Try and Remember,” and she listed all the hilarious things we laughed about and discussed. Read Vagina Monologues—FUNNY SHIT! Watch Ashly Williams perform “I Will Always [Heart] You” on X-Factor. Purchase the book “Psalm 91.” This was followed by a drawing of a book with that title, a peace symbol, and the words “great psalm.” The list went on.

  She also included two Bible passages. The first was Psalm 4:8, “In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”

  And John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”

  Wynell’s heart was always unsettled by fear. That was why she loved any Bible verse, like her favorite, Psalm 91, that promised safety. I remembered how she would stand at the door every day and stretch and say, “I am at peace because I choose to be at peace.”

  For all of Wynell’s bluster and bravado, she yearned for peace and safety. It was all she ever wanted, but it was the one thing that always eluded her. She would, at the time of this writing, be back inside Lynwood two more times, for four to six weeks each. And I guessed, unless something gave, her life would continue like that. All that talent, all that intelligence, all that beauty. Wasted by incest, denial, drugs and alcohol, and violence, diminished by secrets and the shame that kept them burning.

  * * *

  It’s probably true that most avid readers have read One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s probably also true that it’s on most college and university reading lists, that a lot of people don’t like it, that a lot of other people would make love to it if they could, and that, as an example of “magical realism,” it’s probably one of the most imitated and discussed books in fiction. I wasn’t sure that I could add anything new to the dialogue about this book, and about its creator, so I almost chose to leave it out of this account. But then I thought, why not try to write a synopsis of the story. It was that frustrating endeavor that led me to see that, one more time, I was dealing with—and had chosen without thinking about it—a nonlinear story, one about time, memory, and forgetting.

  If every great book is both public and personal, I began to realize during my second reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, locked up behind bars, that the personal had become universal once again. Even in Ethan Frome, a book that in tone, content, and meaning couldn’t be further from Márquez’s masterpiece, Wharton chose to tell the story in both present time and flashback. It became ever more apparent as my time doing time went on and neared its end that the now is always too weak a space to hold all of our joy and all of our losses. The past is there, always informing the present, the future, and indeed itself.

  Nonlinear structure might appeal to me because as an addict and a drunk, nothing in my life seems to have forward momentum. Even as a kid, being raised in a wildly capricious alcoholic home meant time and momentum, memory and history were excessively warped. Truth could never be understood, because the story was always changing, and it went back to generations of family members ruined by addiction. Both my father and mother were impacted by the mental illness, cruelty, and alcoholism of their elders. The endowment of suffering and confusion was a caustic influence on the way I experienced my world and the world around me. I was not someone who touched people, because we never touched each other in my family. Reality was contorted—other people’s parents didn’t yell when they were mad. Other people’s parents weren’t drunk day and night. In my growing-up years, hurtful words were normal. And as I grew older and began to have boyfriends, I chose people just like my parents and like me. Feral and childish. Selfish. Greg was such a nice man—the absolute opposite of my previous boyfriends—but still it took me a long time after we became a couple to realize that you didn’t call people names when you were mad at them. You didn’t yell. I’m embarrassed to admit this was a complete surprise to me. It was as if other people who were calm and kind were the weirdos, not me. But you only know what you know, until, if you’re lucky enough, you unlearn the old ways and learn the new ones.

  But it is also safe to say that such an unhinged upbringing influenced me to respond to my life in creative and unusual ways, collecting and organizing magic to mitigate a puzzling world. The intervals of love and rage were how I told time, but they influenced how I spent it, too.

  My addiction story, my recovery story, my relapse, and my return can only be told in parts, looking back and then forward, then in the space between. Each relapse, each drink, each moment of checking out is only informed by history. Recovery’s story depends on the past. Understanding it requires the future. I can’t locate myself in so many of the narratives of my life, not only because that batshit-crazy woman isn’t me, but because I have no memory of the events. Nor, for many years, could I acquire any so
rt of perspective or extract meaning even after I capitulated to the truth: that I would not be free until I learned the details of what happened. I remember telling a friend that I was investigating my own 414-day blackout and she said, quite plainly, “Are you crazy?”

  Yes, and no. I felt crazy not knowing what happened, and I acted crazy during the two years it took to collect the data and hear the stories. I don’t feel crazy now. But then, I walked around in a low-level depression, aghast at the power of my addiction to destroy everything in its path. I saw the addiction as something separate from me, or rather like the alien that took over Sigourney Weaver’s body. A fungus growing monstrous the more I fed it. All I knew to be true before I started was that after 414 days of blackout, I woke up one day in a rehab in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with the impression of an LAPD cop’s boot clearly visible on my back. What I discovered when I was done with my investigation was that truth is malleable in the retelling and that in the end I had hurt a lot of people. The details mattered to them. Amends were compulsory.

  I might be able to conclude that my passion for nonlinear storytelling is about knowing, as Ozeki showed me, that time in its clock-on-a-wall form, and story as linear, like a yardstick, is often the least truthful way to talk about or understand its passage. All stories can only be re-created by collapsing the past, the present, and the future. We are not what we do, like a résumé. Jail, for all its insidious horror, its odious dehumanization, its dependence on the momentum of days, of counting along the agonizing progress of calendars facing ever forward, is really a place that embraces no time, for which there is no clear understanding of its movement. In jail, time moves backward and forward. It is without symmetry, a starfish with five arms and no central brain. We are not, it turns out, simply our crimes or our release dates. We are where we came from. We are how we change. We are what we remember, and what we don’t remember. We are the moments that pass, and also the moments that stand still. Time is not our enemy but our puppet. Memory is prophecy and what we think is real is just an illusion.