* * *
My husband called my relapse the Great Unpleasantness. Years later, we no longer live daily in the realm of that era, but my family conducts itself every day as if informed by its message. For a long time afterward, we tiptoed through the days, memory at our backs. For them, the memories were all too real. For me, having little to no recollection of what transpired over those 414 days, the present was a minefield. It was uncertain which days I would step on and detonate the bomb of some past misdeed. We treaded carefully on the scorched earth of memory and forgiveness. Nothing felt more tenuous than my grip on what had happened and nothing more fragile than rebuilding what I had destroyed.
I know that somewhere in the middle of the Great Unpleasantness, I tried to find recovery. There were days, sometimes weeks, a month here or there, where I would claw my way through detox and stop the madness. But these attempts only seemed to make things worse. One time, three friends came to my door to conduct some kind of intervention. It was a disaster. I had been kicking for two days. Shameful and embarrassed after they left, I immediately bought a bottle. I love them fiercely for what they tried to do, but there was nothing they could do. The baffling irony of addiction is that you can recover only if you want to. Forcing compliance doesn’t work. It inspires retaliation and usually still more relapse. This is why rehabs and jails almost always don’t work. And yet, addiction itself keeps the addict enslaved, unable to want to stop. I am still in awe that I was granted that tiny window somewhere along the line and, even more baffling, that I slipped through it.
I did accomplish one period of sobriety during the yearlong relapse that lasted 117 days. I know this exactly because the documents I collected, ordered, read, and eventually filed away clearly revealed the day I quit drinking and the day I started up again.
I remember some of this clean time, too, though even without drugs and alcohol in my system, my memory was dwarfed by shadows, the brain festering and pickled. I do know that during that time, the house was clean, the dog was walked, breakfast was served, laundry washed and folded. There was furtive hope. I can still remember the way they watched me, from the corner of their eyes, treading lightly in their optimism.
I know this time because, on April 9, during this clean time, I read an article in the Los Angeles Times about an automobile-related death of a police officer. He had been killed four days earlier after a woman ran her car into him, gruesomely pinning him to the car in front of him. He was rushed to the hospital, put on life support for a few days, and then he died.
The driver’s name was Qaneak Shaney Cobb. She was thirty-three years old and had a few drug-related and theft convictions behind her. She was arrested on DUI and possession of narcotics. The following day she pleaded not guilty to one felony count each of attempted murder and gross vehicular manslaughter for hitting and injuring the officer. When he died, she was charged with second-degree murder. Ironically, the officer, Chris Cortijo, had dedicated his life to putting drunk drivers behind bars. During his twenty-six years on the force, he had made more than three hundred DUI arrests, the last one moments before Cobb ran into him.
I didn’t have to know too much about her to understand that Qaneak Cobb and I had nothing socially or culturally in common. But we shared one essential similarity: our addiction. She was fifteen years younger than me, black, and had been incarcerated numerous times. She had a DUI that had turned into a murder charge, with years of priors. When I read the article, I had not yet had a DUI, and her story was a reminder that I had been, up till then, very lucky.
Yet I remember with absolute clarity that after I read the article, I became obsessed with her. For whatever the reason, I began to pray for Qaneak Cobb every day. I felt like I knew her, that I loved her. But I also think that what happened under the influence of her addiction scared me, and that maybe in some small way I was praying for myself, hoping that this would never be my story. She would not stop haunting me. You might say that for a while her story nipped at the heels of my tenuous recovery. I remember being grateful I hadn’t killed anyone. And with that thought the word “yet” was the period at the end of that gratitude. I followed the case on television, on the Internet, in the papers. I wanted to know everything about her. I wanted to talk to her, to find her, to tell her that I commiserated with her. Most of all, I did not want to end up like her. I read the story as a warning.
The future did not exist. Before incarceration, I still erroneously believed, like only the free have the luxury to believe, that time marched only one way: ever forward. But those incarcerated by addiction, poverty, racial hatred, and jail know better. We know that history is the present, that the present predicts the future, and that time never marches only forward, but outward, backward, and sideways as well.
In the story about Qaneak, I also became obsessed with her victim and his family. Cortijo had children, an ex-wife, a life partner, and a plan for retirement. I was wrecked by the cruelty of his circumstances, that he would be killed by someone exactly like me. I felt the loss like it was my own. From all that I read about him, unlike the police who stepped on me and bruised my body, Cortijo seemed, in a city notorious for its scandalous police force, like a good cop, a great dad, husband, friend. A year or so later, I read many posts and comments from people once arrested by him, speaking to his kindness, and how his care was a major source forward on their journey to sobriety. It was a refreshing contrast to my experience and helped me along the way not to generalize about law enforcement just because my encounters involved abusive and violent cops.
I made a vow that I would go to Cortijo’s funeral, but that I would also find Qaneak and tell her that I loved her and that I empathized with her. She was held on $1 million bail. She would likely do twenty-five to life because she’d made one stupid choice. How many times in my relapse had I drunk my way into a blackout only to turn the key in the ignition of my car? Hadn’t I risked my daughter’s life by putting her in the car and driving high on drink and drugs? That day, after reading Qaneak Cobb’s story, I believed the future was mine. I would mend my ways. I would not do what she had done. Wasn’t I better than all that?
But yet—I drank again before they buried Cortijo. And again and again. I never made it to his funeral. I remained so tanked, I forgot all about Qaneak. Pandemonium ensued. Five months later, the siege would end, leaving behind an exploding debris field, littered with the corpses of memory and hope.
* * *
There is a place in Russia called Tuva. The people there, the Tuvans, are famous for being throat singers. Throat singing is rooted in the sounds of nature. The singer produces a pitch and, simultaneously, one or more pitches over that. The Canadian throat singer Tanya Tagaq says you have to be willing to hang out with your dog and sound like him to learn how to sing that way. Throat singing involves in-breathing and out-breathing, as in yoga. The breath is about the life between what is about to happen and what just did. In Tuvan, the word for “future” (songgaar) means literally “to go back” and the word for “the past” (burungaar) means to “go forward.” Like its music, which is based on breath-making sound, the Tuvans’ language is predicated on the idea that the past is ahead and the future behind.
One Hundred Years of Solitude similarly erases the boundaries of time. For the people of the fictional town of Macondo, time is a yielding door, a verb that allows for the fluid movement of befores and afters. And of course, master that he is, Márquez makes the contract with us from the very first sentence: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Every storytelling tradition broken in a first sentence. Time is warped from the start. The end of the story is the beginning. Even the verb construction “was to remember” is a signal for readers to strap themselves in for the ride. And of course ice—cold, wet, relief—is magic in a land of sultry dense air, heat, trees, and thirst.
All the way through, Márquez forces the reader to move between the past, future, and present. Even at the end this is true, when one of the characters finds the history of his family as it was recorded on parchment “one hundred years ahead of time” by a gypsy. This old gypsy had “not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.”
Such distortions of memory—you could even call them inventions of time—are so fluid that of course the magical, the hypnagogic, and the dreamlike are not only possible but commonplace, and therefore normal. Simply recapping the plot would be an injustice to the complexity and dynamic of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Like Ozeki’s book, One Hundred Years of Solitude is about many things. Big themes: family, education and wisdom, the intersection of fate and free will, love, sex, and death. It’s about the value of persistence, of never giving up in spite of the losses, a theme that appeals to me.
But it’s also about the amazing details, myriad and memorable. There’s the woman who eats dirt, and the girl who is lifted into the sky by her laundry. The thunderstorm of yellow flowers and a plague of insomnia. I could relate to the latter; I was lucky if I slept more than three hours at a time in jail. One of the most powerful details was the rain that lasted for five years. There was one moment of eerie prescience that stopped me in my tracks: “‘Science has eliminated distance,’ Melquíades proclaimed. ‘In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.’” This was published in 1967. How did Márquez know? His prediction from a world that barely had television sets was spooky.
And let’s not also forget the long sentences. In one chapter, there is a sentence that goes on for three pages. This “uncontained, unchained torrent . . . like the monotonous drone of a guitar” is the anthem to womanhood and our suffering. It was not unfamiliar to me in terms of its depth or breadth given the women I met in jail. It seemed to me, in fact, that the greatest act of love that I could give was to listen to the similar cascade of rage and disappointment of my fellow inmates. It’s an amazing sentence with 1,473 words, give or take. I counted it. Naturally.
As I read the book for the second time in Lynwood, I remembered how a few years earlier, I had read a mammoth biography on Gabriel García Márquez. One time, Márquez was on a bus when a deer walked on board. That, he explained, is where his magical realism, a genre that Márquez made famous, comes from. In an interview with William Kennedy published in the Atlantic in 1973, Márquez told this story: “One day in Barcelona, my wife and I were asleep and the doorbell rings. I open the door and a man says to me, ‘I came to fix the ironing cord.’ My wife, from the bed, says, ‘We don’t have anything wrong with the iron here.’ The man asks, ‘Is this apartment two?’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘upstairs.’ Later, my wife went to the iron and plugged it in and it burned up. This was a reversal. The man came before we knew it had to be fixed. This type of thing happens all the time.”
For Márquez, “surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.” It is not something disguised as reality. The surreal is the reality.
That is why Americans, or anyone from a first-world country, can’t write magical realism. Because our lives are too literal. Wealth, good fortune, and peace diminish our capacity to experience the magical. When something strange happens, we call it a “coincidence.” We don’t accept the surreal as a matter of course. Instead we dismiss it as a trick, an anomaly in our normally realistic perspectives. In the West, we measure phenomena; we put them in beakers and actuarial tables. We strip the miracle out of things.
Except in jail. This is where dogs roam free and lie on plusher beds than their human counterparts. Or where you can throw the apple seeds from your soggy, rotten apple into a Dixie cup and actually grow a tree from a bed of jail-issued toilet paper. Or where a pregnant angel appears out of nowhere to hand you, starved for reading material, a book that is exactly what you would have picked on your own. A place where a toothless drug dealer finds you underwear that’s never been worn, and where the school-play Hitler steals your tree—you being possibly the only Jew in jail—only to return it with remorse and gratitude. It’s in jail where twenty women of every color, wearing baggy XXL blues, contort themselves into yoga poses without self-consciousness, without cruelty, and with love in their hearts. Where birds appear and flutter in the Dayroom rafters. Or where a prostitute who calls herself Princess is dragged from her palace under the stairs and chained to a plastic chair.
Jail is the surreal land of the unbelievable becoming real. Like this:
The day before my release, I rise as usual, brush my teeth, brush my hair, put on my shoes, and head to typing class. I’m not sure how many words a minute I type, but in junior high school, while the boys took shop, we girls sat in front of typewriters and learned to type, preparing ourselves for our careers as secretaries. They were IBM Selectrics, and we typed the same thing over and over again: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” The sentence is what’s called a pangram. It contains all the letters of the alphabet. In the late 1800s, the Boston Journal claimed, perhaps coining the word “pangram,” that the sentence is “A favorite copy set by writing teachers for their pupils.”
Typing class, like everything else, had its comeuppance. I’m fairly sure they don’t teach it in school anymore, since according to the latest scientific research, fetuses today are now already sending Instagram messages from the womb. In jail typing class, they use a computer program. After I turn on the computer, a vivid color screen comes up. The typing program is designed around what appears to be a vacation concept. You sign in with your booking number and start the practice.
Several exotic destinations—Australia, Bali, Paris—are depicted on the screen, each one representing an increasingly more difficult typing test. I click on the easiest, Australia, and begin typing. Fast. And freely. LaRue, sitting at my table, is, as usual, talking fast and loud about nothing. I type and type and type, trying in vain not to simply ignore her droning voice, but to make it go away.
There are 150 other women performing assorted typing functions or engaging in the various stages of sleep. At each table we have to share, among ten students, three computers. As I wait for my turn again, I notice a woman at the table next to me who has a book called AA in Prison.
At Lynwood the effort to bring recovery into jail is mostly hypothetical, so I was intrigued.
“Where did you get that book?” I ask.
“You want one?”
“Sure,” I say.
She disappears for a minute. I watch her make her way to the “library,” and in a minute, she returns with a copy of the book. It is brand-new. I am touched.
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ve only been to one AA meeting since I’ve been here. But the deputies shut it down after about ten minutes.”
“Classic jail mentality,” she says.
The computer makes its way back to me. This time I choose Bali and begin to type my way through exotic beaches. The ladies at the table next to mine are watching me. They can’t believe how fast I can type.
“Go on, girl,” one of them says. Another calls the teacher over.
“Miss,” she says, “look at her type.”
Miss, the typing teacher, watches me type. I am in a zone. Typing straightens out my brain waves. With suspicion, Miss stops me and says, “What are you doing here?”
I am not sure what she means. Does she mean in jail generally or typing class specifically? I shrug.
“Here,” she says. “Take this test.”
She sets me up for a typing test and, no surprise, I test out of Typing IV or whatever the last section is.
“You can be my assistant,” the teacher says.
“Okay,” I say.
“Go around and help the others with thei
r tests.”
“Okay.”
She leaves the table. I look at the woman who had given me the AA in Prison book. I say, “No way in hell I’m going to be her assistant.”
The woman laughs.
There is an open seat next to her. Tired of LaRue and her incessant chatter, I figure I can move over to her table and pretend to be actively “helping” the teacher.
“Mind if I sit next to you?” I ask the woman with the book.
“No, c’mon.” She smiles back. She has a beautiful smile and big brown eyes and the smoothest skin. Most of us suffer from the iron-rich, chlorine-infused water, which renders our skin dry and crackly. But hers looks young and supple. I want to ask her what her secret is.
“I am not going to teach you how to type,” I say, using finger quotes around the word “teach.”
She understands that there is no way I am going to lord over my fellow inmates by acting like a teacher to them. That would be gross. I sit next to the woman with the beautiful skin, and side by side with our matching books we exist peacefully in companionable silence.
“Thanks again for the book,” I say after a while.
“Sure,” she says.
Silence, then she asks, “What are you in for?”
“DUI,” I say. “And battery of an officer.”
She looks me up and down and says, “Battery? Little itty-bitty you? Good Lord, what did you do, beat him with your invisible baseball bat?”
The Lost Chapters Page 17