Salvation on Death Row

by John T. Thorngren

  “Oh, you’re going to have so much fun. Meet new friends,” Mom said with a fluorescent green to her eyes that seemed to tell me she’d be glad to see me gone.

  “Joe,” she screamed, “have you seen my sedatives? I left them right here on the kitchen counter. Doesn’t anyone care that I’ve got to get some sleep before work tonight?”

  ***

  As I walked to school, I kept telling myself: You are pretty. You are pretty just like your mom. You have the same pretty skin, brown hair, and green eyes. You are going to have fun. And the first day was great, especially recess. I was standing near the jungle gym when two girls approached.

  “Hi,” I said. “Want to watch me hang by my knees?” They giggled as I flipped my legs over the bar, and my dress fell down over my head. “We saw your panties,” they laughed.

  “My name is Ginger, and this is Renee. What’s yours?”

  “I’m Pamela, but everyone calls me Pam. I live on Cortland. Where do you live?”

  “We both live on Duncan, right around the corner from you. We’ll come see you after school. What’s your address?” asked Ginger.

  “No, no, no…We can meet at Logo Park just down the street, or I’ll come see you.…What’s your address?”

  My house was visitors non grata. It was fall and the weather was cool. We had no heat other than the gas oven in the kitchen. And the place smelled; it always smelled of something wet, something mildewing, something dead. And the commode, gosh, what if they had to go to the bathroom and find it took a pitcher to flush?

  Renee and Ginger became my best friends at Lynwood, and I loved to go over to their homes and play. Renee even had a trampoline, but I sure didn’t want them at my house—yet it had to happen at some point.

  “I get to go first,” I said at school recess later that fall as I held the tetherball and wound up to smash it around the pole.

  “I get to play the winner,” yelled Renee. Ginger lost. I was good; in anything athletic, I was good. After I had beaten Renee, it was time to go back inside.

  “You’ve got oranges on the trees beside your house. I saw them on my walk to school this morning,” said Renee. “Can we come pick some?”

  “Oranges? Oh, we’ve got all kinds of trees. Yes, we’ve got two orange trees—sweet ones, nice and ripe. We’ve got peach, avocado, walnut, nectarine, lemon. Take your pick. You can come get some, uh…but you can’t come inside. My mom’s asleep. She works at night.”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie; she did sleep during the day and work at night, but it was in the morning that she slept. Around noon, she awoke, took her happy pill, and combed her hair.

  ***

  Winter was finally over, and the damp cold that permeated the house had evaporated into March. No more trying to stay warm from the oven in the kitchen. California is not always “the land of eternal sunshine.” Winter does get chilly. March and the season of spring–summer–fall began—a season that changes little until the beginning of the next winter. Peach trees were blooming, crocus and tulips were flowering, and dichondra ground cover was flourishing. The annual uplift to my innate morbidity had arrived.

  Mom had come home from work, fixed breakfast, and taken her sedative before closing herself in the bedroom. I was scrambling to get ready for school.

  “Come on, Joanne, I’ve got to pee. You’ve been in there an hour. Open the door,” I screamed.

  “Bug off,” she yelled back. Randy walked by and “frogged” me in the arm. “Ouch,” I cried, and then Mom’s bedroom door opened with a rush.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I pleaded. “Joanne won’t come out of the bathroom.”

  “Don’t you kids understand that I’ve got to get some sleep? Get out of there, Joanne. All of you, turn around.” A thrashing was eminent. Whatever was convenient—a belt, a broomstick, or a coat hanger—served as an instrument of passion. That day she chose a curtain rod. A curtain rod? Mom was not an old schoolteacher, but she thought in kind: If one of you is guilty, all of you are guilty.

  That evening, after Mom had taken her upper to go to work, Dad and the rest of us crammed into the little living area around the fishbowl-sized black-and-white TV. At Ginger’s and Renee’s houses were televisions that you could actually see while sitting in a chair several body lengths away.

  The opening theme of Bonanza filled the little room like the water we poured into the toilet.

  Dad loved Westerns. At the commercial, I asked him, “Does everyone call you ‘Little Joe’ because of Little Joe Cartwright on TV? You don’t look like him. You’ve got slicked-back hair, and his is curly. But you always wear cowboy boots, blue jeans, and cowboy shirts. And your hair is brown like his. Is that the reason?”

  “No,” he said, smiling. “They’ve called me that ever since we lived in Iowa. I can’t remember where it came from, but all my friends have always called me that.”

  “I’ll call you Daddy Little Joe.”

  “Don’t. Just don’t.”

  I didn’t yet realize how different they were. In that moment, my father was not unlike the handsome Little Joe onscreen with the wide, white smile that every girl loved, the loyal Little Joe who couldn’t bring himself to hurt anyone.

  CHAPTER 2

  I was nine years old when Mom didn’t return from work. Dad had come home from his job, and she hadn’t been home all day. I remember him frantically calling all the local hospitals,

  “Do you have a Wuanita Walker listed there? Wuanita Tucker Walker…Yes, I’ll hold.”

  And he held on until she called two days later and told him she had run off with the cook at the restaurant where she worked.

  From that point, Dad crumbled.

  Perhaps Mom wanted more from life than living as the Old Lady in the Shoe who had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. Divorce came quickly, and I never saw her again after that. Maybe, in hopeful retrospect, she would have contacted us eventually, but she and her new husband died in a car wreck a year later somewhere in the Midwest—Missouri or Kansas. I understand it was a bad crash. Fiery, a real mess. I would like to think she would have wanted to see us. I know a mother’s bond with her children can go beyond flesh and bone. At the time, however, her absence only reinforced my poor self-image.

  Similar to Randy’s vendetta toward animals, Dad transferred his grief to revenge.

  His first retaliation: “All right, kids. I want you to help me go through this house and find everything that belonged to your mother. Anything she left behind. Combs, lipstick, whatever. And especially any pictures. Put it all on the dining table.”

  The pile grew, and then from another room I heard the grating of a metal garbage can sliding across the wooden floor, a handle banging meanly on its side like a door opening and closing in a harsh wind. I walked into the room; a housefly crawled from inside the empty can and took flight. A whiff of some former garbage mingled with the seemingly ever-increasing stagnant smell peculiar to the Lynwood house. Wham, thud—the larger objects first. Everything we would have had to remember our mother by is buried in some Southern California landfill.

  ***

  Mom and Dad were not heavy drinkers, but they sipped a few beers when they played Bingo at the Pike on Long Beach Pier. An outing to the Pike was like a breath of fresh, normal-family air. It seemed such a long way from Lynwood, maybe forty-five minutes, but an eternity when crammed in the back seat with four others—Randy forever punching me until I yelped and then Mother turning around to glare at me. Me, the cause of it all?

  The Pike was another world, a man-made world neither on land nor sea but on wood planks suspended above the Pacific Ocean with hundreds of rides and amusement machines, even a gigantic roller coaster that rose high above the water. Sometime before I was born, they changed the name to Nu-Pike, but nobody ever called it that, just “The Pike.” Mom and Dad would give us each an allotment of chang
e, and we would head for the rides and the penny arcade. Dinner became whatever nourishment we craved: cold drinks, cotton candy, ice cream—all sorts of treats.

  The ride back was always happy with recounts from everyone talking over the other, laughing.

  “I almost got that watch this time,” Randy crowed. “I had the tip of the giant claw right under the wrist band.”

  “That’s nothing,” said Dad. “I could have bought you a dozen of those kinda watches if I had just gotten a B6. One number! I had three ways to win, and the prize was fifty bucks.”

  “I got to ride the roller coaster in the front seat,” I laughed. “And I swear when we were over the water, I know I saw a shark.”

  “You’re such a ditz, Pam. It was probably just a dolphin,” said Joanne, laughing.

  Also, Mom and Dad never drank much at home. Maybe a few beers when friends came over for poker. But after Mom ran off, Dad took solace in the spirits, and certainly not holy ones. Little Joe would come home from work and set up his private bar in the dining room. Resembling a slow metamorphosis between Jekyll and Hyde, he’d cocoon himself in silence, staring out the front window while methodically imbibing red wine and inhaling Phillip Morris Commanders. I’d walk through occasionally to check on his progress. When sufficiently transformed, he’d mumble and laugh maniacally.

  “Pamellas, sees if shum beer in the fridge…this shepo wine’s burnin’ my belly. Alls I c’n afford. Your mom’s n’longer payin’ her shhares.”

  And he chorused with a familiar, slushy laugh. The warning was out: “Avoid the dining room.”

  Almost overnight, the family went dysfunctional. Mom put the “dys” in it—walked away from us without a word and left a hidden hurt deep within me. Randy and Joanne tried to maintain the “function” that was left—and what Little Joe wasn’t further eroding with his drinking. They did their best to look after the younger ones and maintain some semblance of order.

  Relatives tried to help when they could, especially my maternal Aunt DeeDee. I wasn’t there on the storied day she dropped by unannounced, but I heard about it. If I had been the worn-out fly on the wall, I think this is what I would have seen and heard: Little Joe was sitting on the sofa in the living room with Joanne on his lap. Aunt DeeDee walked through the front door without knocking just as Joe was fondling Joanne.

  “What! What are you doing, Joe? You stop that right this instant.”

  “I…I wasn’t…I wasn’t doing anything.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Joe Walker. I saw what you were doing. Joanne, go to your room and pack your belongings. I’m not letting you stay in this house for another minute, and as for you, Joe Walker, just be glad I don’t call the police!”

  “But…I wasn’t…I wasn’t doing anything…”

  Aunt DeeDee and Joanne left for Kansas that same afternoon. Aunt DeeDee never returned to Lynwood.

  ***

  By the time I was ten, Little Joe must have realized that he needed a sitter to look after the younger ones and me. He hired a woman named Helen.

  I presume that Joanne’s absence was the reason for me to become next in line for molestation. I was taking a nap one afternoon when I awoke to see Little Joe sitting next to me on the bed with a weird grin on his face.

  “Stop,” I screamed when I felt his hand between my legs.

  I jerked away, ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Tears came quickly.

  “Pam,” he said softly through the door, “I promise I won’t do it again.”

  “Cross your heart?” I sobbed.

  “Yes!” But he lied. Shortly thereafter, he did it again.

  Too much. It was too much on top of a mother’s desertion and Joanne’s departure. I felt totally betrayed, utterly unwanted by both my mom and dad. I had to confide in someone, so I told my girlfriend, Renee. She, in turn, told her mother, who reported it to someone at the PTA meeting later that week. This was the lead domino, the cue ball, the stirring stick in a man-made whirlpool. I was playing outside with my friends during the PTA meeting when I saw Little Joe and Randy drive into the parking lot, and I instinctively knew the story had come full circle. I ran between the classroom buildings and crouched down in the shadows on a blanket of ground cover, in what little green would grow there without sun. Randy found me.

  “It’s true,” I cried. “He was touching me while I was sleeping.”

  “It must have been a dream, Pam. You said you were sleeping. Had to be a bad dream.”

  “No, I got up and locked myself in the bathroom. I couldn’t have done that if I was dreaming.”

  “No, it didn’t happen. Couldn’t have. It was all just a bad dream,” he said while shaking his head from side to side.

  Perhaps the police agreed with the bad-dream theory. Although Little Joe was taken in for questioning, nothing happened. The molestation continued.(3)

  ***

  Enough. It was enough to have suffered so many emotional upheavals and then to be treated this way by my father. I ran away. Anything had to be better. But I didn’t last long as a runaway; the police picked me up and sent me to Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, California, about six miles from Lynwood.

  In Juvenile Hall, at age ten, I learned there was a way out. A large girl, a little older than I, asked me, “Have you ever done weed or drugs?”

  “No,” I replied quizzically.

  “You need to try it.”

  “Yeah,” another girl chimed in, “when you’re high, your problems disappear. It’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

  And so the seeds of thistle and rows of thorns were planted in soil ready to receive them and prepared to bear their bitter fruit.

  Child Protective Services released me back into the custody of my father, and I returned to school. There, I approached the lower element, the older ones, those with a none-too-nice reputation, those reportedly doing drugs. Mary Swisher, who was already into the culture, became my best friend. And on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in the fall, at Mary’s house, I had my first drug encounter.

  “You sure your parents won’t catch us?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied. “It’s past noon; Mom is so boozed up, she wouldn’t wake up even if the Russians dropped the A-bomb, and Dad is away on business. He’s always away on business.”

  “Always away on business? Wow, I wish I had that kinda deal.”

  “Here, try a joint. It will get you in the mood. The boys are coming over shortly.”

  We both lit up. I was no stranger to cigarettes, and the girls at Juvenile Hall had instructed me on how to deep-drag and inhale it until you were about to pop. I overdid it and coughed. The room started rotating fast and then slowed. Dizzy and coughing and then giggle-silly. Everything Mary said was hilarious.

  Later, after the party ratcheted into high gear, Mary offered me a red pill. I eagerly accepted it, and within thirty minutes I was flying. I could say anything; I could do anything; I was the life of the party and wonderfully in my element with older adolescents. I felt older and was eager to forget the childhood I never wanted. I would always gravitate toward older people.

  With the abuse at home, I frequently ran away, only to have the police pick me up and send me back to Juvenile Hall. California Social Services eventually recommended that I become a ward of the state and be removed from home. By then, Little Joe had married Helen, our sitter. From that point until 1967 when I was twelve, I went from one foster home to another—eight altogether. All but two were abusive, and the two where I would have liked to have stayed were not acceptable to Social Services because I had become “emotionally attached.” That was a no-no for a ward of the state who is not legally adoptable. (To my knowledge, my dad had not released his parental rights, nor had the state terminated them.)

  The worst was the foster home in Paramount, California, which is another suburb of LA about six miles
from Lynwood. You pee that bed again and I’m gonna blister your behind. I can still hear her threats through the halls of a bad dream, and not just threats but the sting of reality. And for a whole term of school, all she ever bought me were two dresses. Finally, I convinced the social worker to get me out. Whenever I couldn’t get Social Services to find another “home,” I ran away, got picked up, and was sent back to Juvenile.

  Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey became my home away from home, my sanctuary between horrors. The employees were like family. Mr. Step taught me guitar, and a lady in the kitchen, Ms. Jones, taught me how to knit and crochet. I had no idea what wonderful gifts these would be someday. I went to school there, and the science teacher let me take care of the iguana, a snake that ate goldfish, frogs, and lizards. A bizarre menagerie of creatures, but perhaps my chores satisfied a need to care for something when Little Joe and a dead mother apparently didn’t care for me. I later wondered what the world would be like if God hadn’t made animals, just humans and vegetation. In His wisdom that is beyond our comprehension, perhaps He made some of the animals just for our affection and comfort.

  All the counselors and employees were my friends, and Super Chicken was one of my favorites. At the time, I didn’t know why they called her Super Chicken, but looking back, it must have come from the Bible: “…how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings…”(4)

  “Pam, I know you haven’t got anyone to visit you this weekend,” said Super Chicken with a compassionate smile, “but I’ll come and talk to you whenever I get a chance today.”

  She left a small sack of candy on the table next to my bed. The weekend visitors for the other children always bought little sacks of candy for them. Super Chicken knew hurt; knowing what I know now, she must have had some bad hurts in her life as well.(5)

  Next I went to an all-black foster home in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert some eighty miles from Lynwood. The distance from my former home to a new foster home was increasing; perhaps the state was running out of choices. A memorable experience: I was sick with tonsillitis but would not lie down to sleep. The house mom came in and asked, “What’s the matter, dear? Why don’t you go to bed?”