Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  I haven’t seen my daughter in over ten years. I call her on the phone about once a year; I used to call more but she told me to stop, so now we try to email about once a month. She’s limited me to once a month, and I can only send her funny things that I find on the Internet. I haven’t seen my son or spoken to him in over two years. Last time we spoke, he told me that he doesn’t have room in his life for negative people and negative relationships. Listen, I understand. I wouldn’t want to have me as a dad, either. My kids have their own lives, their own worries. I’m sure they’d rather not have to worry about me, too, and on the phone I’m bound to say something that makes them add me to their mental to-do list. So they keep me at arm’s distance. I’m a bit of a downer.

  But I like myself and how I do things, I guess. Life is easier now that I’ve accepted my disease. I can’t beat it, so I’ve adapted to it. The way I look at it, I have few regrets. I fulfilled my responsibilities as a husband and father. I went on a few adventures. Hey, I lived a full life.

  Now, I wait.

  Lucas, forty-one

  I was twenty-five years old when I went to prison and forty when I was released.

  I am one of five children. I grew up in a rough neighborhood and lived in the projects. My mother was college-educated, but her husband got her hooked on drugs. Ever since fourth grade, I’ve been trying to make money, go to school, and feed everyone. I’ve always known how to fend for myself.

  When I got arrested, I was working and going to school full-time. I had a four-year-old son. I was a first-time, nonviolent offender accused of interfering with a federal investigation. I worked for the housing authority, so I had access to when they’d be doing drug raids. The Feds accused me of leaking information and added on a conspiracy-to-sell-crack-cocaine charge; I guess the people allegedly benefiting from my insider information had a pretty extensive drug operation. The Feds pressured me to snitch—to give up whatever information I might have known about illegal activity in public housing. I didn’t refuse due to some misguided loyalty. I refused because I didn’t actually know anything. At trial, there was no evidence against me. They dismissed the charge for interfering with a federal investigation but convicted me of one count of conspiracy to sell crack cocaine. I’m a young black man from the projects, so the verdict came back in a heartbeat: a 240-month sentence in a federal prison. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a lifetime.

  The first two years in prison were really stressful. I was in denial. Prison life is really hard to adjust to—you have all this extra energy in the beginning, and nothing to do with it. You eat what they give you. You sleep when they tell you. You go only where you’re allowed. You’re basically cattle. It hadn’t clicked yet that this would be what the next twenty years of my life would look like. I developed high blood pressure and had several stress-related breakdowns. Over the years, I was transferred to seven different federal facilities. Twice, it was for disciplinary reasons. In some places, I was the one who was feared; in others, it was my turn to be afraid.

  When I was in Arizona, there were race riots. The Mexicans and the blacks didn’t get along. The guards had absolutely no control over the prisoners. In other prisons, the guards run the show—I’ve seen a lot of dirty guards, just people who go mad with the power bestowed on them. They pit the prisoners against each other for fun, just to see what happens. A lot of the guys took their time breaking up fights, but all it takes is a couple of seconds to shank someone to death. You find out the hard way, too, that it’s a small world. A lot of inmates end up doing time with people they might have had bad blood with on the outside.

  Other than the constant existential threat, prison life is really regimented: lights go out at 10:30 p.m. and on at 5:30 a.m. every day. Your bed needs to be made perfectly, and they have a little cartoon of what it should look like when you’re done. You get fed at 6:00 a.m. The food depends on the facility—the federal prison system has good meals, and sometimes you can even cook your own food. Then you have work call from 7:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. I got paid six cents an hour. Then you get to work out. You shower. You get ready for count at 4:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. In between, you can watch TV—they have basic cable, so you can watch ESPN and TV shows. The inmates control the TVs themselves based on seniority. There’s a recreational area, an arts and crafts room, and a library, too. And you learn a few tricks along the way—how to get kites (messages) out to people, how to make “pruno” or “juice” (alcohol), how to get things past the guards, how to barter commissary. Prisoners are creative, man. It takes a while, but you start to get comfortable. If you mind your business and behave, life is almost… pleasant. Basically, you’re on autopilot.

  But if you sleep in and you miss your work detail too often, they put you in segregation or give you extra duties. If you do anything that’s considered an infraction of prison rules, you get a “shot.” A one-hundred-series shot is a big deal—maybe you jumped someone and seriously wounded him—and you would usually get transferred to a higher security prison, and it would go on your record and take about ten years to clear. A two-hundred-series shot is borderline; you get that if you get into a fight with someone, and it means you get commissary, phone, and visitation privileges taken away. A three-hundred-series shot is not serious; you’d get one for insolence, unauthorized contraband, or being late to work. Four-hundred-series shots are basically never given out. Just when you start to think that things aren’t so bad, the guards remind you where you are. They can make life hard, push you around, make you feel unsafe—they’re part of the problem.

  The people who make trouble are always the ones who have the shorter sentences. Prisoners with two or three life sentences are humble and respectful, in my experience. They’ve accepted their fates: they’re going to die in prison. I have no idea whether this is actually true, but prison lore has it that the sentencing computation or custody classification forms for the lifers just say “deceased” on them. For many of the prisoners, both lifers and short-term, though, prison life is better than being at home.

  My first day out, I had butterflies in my stomach and I felt nauseous. I ended up serving a little over fifteen years of my twenty-year sentence. I was happy and angry at the same time. The judge took forever to hand down the order of release. I missed my bus and ended up having to wait over twelve hours in a Greyhound station. I felt like the noise and commotion was going to swallow me up. It took me two full days to get where I needed to be. I kept looking around, wondering if an officer was going to come and take me back.

  When I finally got to my home state, two probation officers—a man and a woman—came and took me clothes shopping at a place called Forman Mills. It’s basically the cheapest store out there. I got a coat, some jeans, and a pair of slippers. I was ashamed when we were walking around the store because it was obvious that they were law enforcement. But the lady officer was actually really nice; she was very motherly toward me. She would put shirts up to my chest in their hangers, cock her head sideways, and look at me like she cared—like she really cared—if the $5 shirt looked good on me or not. You notice things like that after fifteen years of being nobody. They put me up in a motel for a few days, until I could get back on my feet. I signed with a staffing agency, but I haven’t had much luck.

  When you’re in prison for so long, you become accustomed to living without real responsibilities. You don’t pay rent or bills, and you’re provided with three meals a day. You pay commissary or whatever debt you may have caused, but that’s it. Also, it’s not as dangerous in prison as it is on the streets—at least, not for a black man. Most importantly, people have your back. You learn who to trust and count on, you learn who is reliable and keeps his mouth shut, you learn who’ll snitch. There’s prison justice, you know. People get theirs, eventually, and there’s something comforting about that. That’s what’s missing on the outside—the outside is cruel. It doesn’t care if you did the crime or you deserved your punishment, or you served your time. To them, you’re always
going to be a prisoner, no matter what. I get a little self-conscious about it; I feel like it’s written on my forehead, like everybody knows.

  While I was gone, my father and grandmother died. My son grew up seeing his father behind bars. He’s twenty years old now. He was four when I went in. When he was eighteen, he came to visit me in prison and we had a talk. I think as he’s gotten older, he understands the systemic issues behind my incarceration. But still: he has barely had me in his life, and because we live in separate states and I’m on probation, I can’t go to see him.

  I’m struggling to take care of myself, and I’m really lonely. I had become accustomed to sleeping in those narrow beds, facing a concrete wall. Now, there’s too much space, too much air around me. It’s suffocating. Sleep doesn’t come easy anymore. That’s one of the hardest adjustments.

  One of the traps that people fall into is that they spend a lot of time imagining what life is going to be like when they’re free, and then they’re not only disappointed, but they’re disappointed to the extent that they start missing being locked up. Without some sort of cornerstone for life on the outside, it’s really easy to get lost, really easy to feel overwhelmed. I don’t have a very good support system out here. My sisters came down to visit me from Ohio right after I was released, and it was nice to see them, but what can they do? They have their own lives, their kids, their responsibilities. They don’t have time for me.

  I need to make money to live, and I can’t do that if nobody will employ me. This is why so many people end up back behind bars: if the choice is between survival and crime, most people would pick crime. Now that I am back on the bottom, I’m afraid I won’t be able to dig myself out. What I’m most afraid of is the little voice in the back of my head that tells me it wouldn’t be so bad if I landed back in prison, after all. I think: What would I do for security? And food, and work, and ESPN? And sometimes I think: What could I do—what can I get into so that I can go back? Funny enough, it’s an escape fantasy.

  It’s hard to believe that I’m a free man now. Because there’s a difference between free and freed. I don’t really feel free. I still get out of bed at the same time every morning and eat at the same time as when I was inside. I make up my bed the same way I used to, too. I catch myself looking above the headboard for the cartoon instructions. Sometimes you just need a little validation that you’re doing the right thing, even if it’s just making the bed.

  Sarah, midforties

  I was going to let it go on until it killed me. From the time I woke up to the moment I went to sleep, it’s all I thought about. Every single thing I did was for one purpose alone: getting a fix. You know those stories that people always tell about some person they once knew who has the craziest stories? It always happens to the other guy, but I feel like I’ve been through it all. I am the other guy.

  I started getting high and drinking with my mom’s third husband. He would ply me with booze and weed because it made me more submissive—easier to control when he molested me. I knew that what he was doing was wrong, but he threatened to hurt my younger sister whenever I resisted. So, in my mind, I was sacrificing myself for her sake. I’ll never forget the moment, years later, when she told me that she used to be jealous of all the time that “Daddy” spent with me. She had no idea, and I never directly told her.

  My real father was drunk when he died. He must have been in his early twenties, and I was barely three. Both sets of grandparents had substance-abuse issues, too. My mom was clean, though. Her whole life, she held down several jobs to keep her kids fed, dressed, and in school. But we all turned out a mess in our own ways. Addiction definitely ran in the family. They say that it’s a disease—like cancer. Well, this was a cancer that was growing inside me ever since I was born. I feel like I don’t remember a life in which alcohol and drugs weren’t everywhere.

  I had two kids in the 1980s, but even then my addiction showed no signs of slowing down. The guy I was dating back then—we used together. We stole and pawned things off to support our habit. We had a dealer who would pick out things from the Macy’s catalog—back in those days, Tommy Hilfiger was having a moment. We would boost whatever he wanted from the store, and he would pay us in dope. We just needed enough money for the fix, and on good days, we made enough to sleep indoors.

  We had a usual spot—a filthy motel room that only cost us a few bucks because we knew the owner. I think he felt bad for the kids. One night, we had just gotten the dope, and I was getting ready to shoot. This was my addiction at its worst—my veins were all dead, and I was bleeding from infected sores on my arms, my feet, my legs, my stomach, and my chest. I was having trouble finding a good vein; I got a flash, but then I lost the vein and couldn’t find it again. I wasted the dope.

  I got so frenzied. I started panicking, screaming, pacing, and jumping on things. I didn’t know what to do. And then I caught a glimpse of myself in the hotel mirror, and it was horrific. I remember thinking—that’s not me; that doesn’t even look like me. And even now when I think back on this moment, it feels like it happened to someone else and I witnessed it. It helps me to think of it that way, because if I felt everything, I would crumble.

  I wanted to be a good mom, and I tried. The love I have for my children is more powerful than anything I’ve ever encountered, except my addiction. My addiction made me feel like I was always behind the eight ball, always playing catch-up, always fixing something I’d messed up with the kids. I wanted to stay clean, but something inevitably went wrong, and I didn’t have healthy coping mechanisms or a support network, and getting high was the escape. I felt that I’d already messed up so much—hey, what’s another time? One last time. That’s why they call it a “fix”—you’re chasing an alternate reality, a world in which whatever happened to fuck you up is erased, fixed.

  On bad days—and yes, it got worse—we slept in parking lots. I remember one night we had the kids with us, and we had just settled in a Babies R Us parking lot. My youngest child was very ill, and it started pouring rain outside. I started to get us all under that big blue awning, but I couldn’t move very well because I had open sores on my feet. My youngest was clutching on to my hand, and then all of a sudden he dropped to the ground and started having a seizure. I didn’t know what to do—I just stood there, crying, screaming at God.

  What scares me is that even that wasn’t enough for me to quit. I was in and out of jail, in and out of rehab, in and out of hospitals—probably more times than I can count on all my fingers and toes. The last time I was admitted to a hospital, the doctor took a look at my toxicology report and told me that there was “a little bit of blood in my drug stream.” He told me I was going to die, and I believed him.

  I met my now-husband when I was working nights as a stocker at a big grocery store. I bummed a cigarette from him—and eventually we started using together. Finally, almost a decade ago today, he came up to me and told me he was getting clean or he was dying, and that if I wanted to be with him, I had to help him live. Who would have thought it, huh, that a great love story could be behind all of this? But that’s what we have: a great love. He is always supportive of me, always good to me, even when I don’t deserve it. And we keep each other up; we keep each other going every day. When he has bad days, I am strong for him. When I have bad days, he is strong for me.

  You’d think that after almost ten years, it gets easier. You’d think that the draw fades a little bit, that your brain starts to forget how good it felt to float away—to be vacant, forget the past, forget the ugly—for a few hours. But it’s still difficult. I think it will always be difficult, even when I’m gray and old and the scars have blended in with the wrinkles. I have to remind myself every single day that I don’t want to throw away a decade of sobriety.

  The hardest part is my relationship with my children. I’m very close with the oldest, but the youngest and I aren’t on the best terms. They spent most of their childhoods with their grandmother, who provided them with stability an
d a roof over their heads. Their memories of me aren’t exactly good. My oldest told me a few days ago that he remembers me showing up to his birthday party and throwing up in the bushes in front of his friends.

  I remember that a strong midday sun illuminated the backyard and the kids were swarming around loudly, chasing one another in and out of the house. It was summer in the 1980s. The kids were staying with their grandmother on a semipermanent basis at that point, but I went over to visit when I could. I started to feel sick, like the sun was burning off my skin and I was overheating. I felt like I might pass out, but I was trying to hold it together for the sake of the kids. I’d been trying to get clean, so I hadn’t used that morning.

  My timing really couldn’t have been any worse. My mom was bringing out the cake and everyone started singing “Happy Birthday.” I lunged out of my chair and went headfirst into the bushes. It was all I could do to keep myself from throwing up on the table, in front of all the children. My mom kicked me out after that—and I went to shoot up.

  I had completely forgotten about this particular incident until he brought it up, but my son remembered it like it was yesterday. I can only imagine what else I did, how else I scarred my kids, what else they’ve seen. How can I make amends for something when I can’t remember such a big part of it? I don’t blame them if they want nothing to do with me. It’s hard to ever feel clean after everything I’ve done. Some things you can’t forget—no matter how many drugs you’re on. Sometimes, I feel like I’m being punished. But I can’t hold it against my children, because I also feel that I deserve the punishment.

  I wanted my kids to have what I didn’t have—a safe childhood, opportunities, a steady job, and parents who love them. I’ve probably played the biggest role in them not getting that. They’re both so smart, so brilliant, so kind, but they are these things in spite of me. And I am afraid—every single day—that I passed my disease on to them. I would never forgive myself.