“Oh, uh, essa fine.”
“What did you do today?”
“Um...” (long pause as he taps his finger on his chin) “Hmm... doe know.”
“Andrew, what did you do today?”
“Oh... pfff,” and he’ll put his square little hand on my cheek as if to say, Oh, Mom. You’re so blasé, which is why I have the notebook so I know what he’s been doing all day.
I’ll grab his hand and kiss the palm. “Sheesh, fine. Are you hungry?”
“Oh, yeah. Um, essa little pizza, whole bunch of peas. OH! Enna jams.” The first thing he does when he gets home, after I’m done bothering him, is put on his pajamas - boxers and a tee shirt - and pop in a DVD.
“Alright, sir,” I’ll say. “Love you, Bug.”
“Ayu you.”
Between school and developmental therapy, Andy has long days: seven a.m. to six p.m., and he loves it. If he didn’t, I certainly wouldn’t subject him to that kind of schedule. Long days make for short evenings, though, and after he’s done eating, it’s time for a shower and then about an hour of free time before bed.
I love that part of the day. It’s when I feel most like June Cleaver: uber-mom.
I never went anywhere from the time Andy came home until I tucked him in at bedtime. The only exception was if I had to go to the jail to write a bond, but that rarely happened. Most of the bonds I wrote were late at night or early in the morning: DUI’s, FTA’s (failure to appears) disturbing the peace, vandalism, urinating in public. They’re the crimes and misdemeanors that stem from too much alcohol.
Every night when I tucked him in, I sang Andy a song. A ritual of ours began when he was a baby in N.I.C.U. and I would sit beside his bed just babbling away so he could hear my voice. I made up this silly song. I don’t even know where the words came from. Like all the nicknames I have for him, they just came to me one day and I’ve been singing it to him ever since.
“I love you so much, I’ll sing you a song, that says: I love you, I love you, and I guess I’ll always love you. ‘Cause you’re cute, and you’re smart, and you’re funny, and you’re strong. Andy sing.”
“Ayu you, ayu you, seesh I ayu you. Essa cute, smart, funny, strong!”
“I love you, I love you, and I guess I’ll always love you. ‘Cause you’re cute and you’re smart and you’re funny and airplane!” I pretend to forget what comes next and he giggles with that raspy sound his throat makes. “Oh man! I forgot. Andy sing.”
“Ayu you, ayu you, seesh I ayu you. Are cute, smart, funny,” he thought for a second. “Orange!” He laughed as if this is the funniest damn thing anyone has ever said. “Momma do it.” It’s become part of the game and we go back and forth until I declare enough is enough.
After our song, I would kiss his cheeks and forehead and he’d wrap his skinny arms around my neck and do the same. Leaving his room, taking one last look at him curled up under the covers with his thumb in his mouth, I always felt a sweet sadness.
I still sometimes feel it when I tuck him in. It’s residual fear, from when he was a baby, that this may be the last time I see him alive. I know how macabre that sounds, but those days still haunt me. The difference is that now I allow myself to feel rather than numb the sadness with drugs or alcohol.
It’s not easy, but I’ve found a quiet dignity in acknowledging my feelings. To sit with pain and sadness, to be able to remind myself that what I’m feeling is not only normal, but also healthy and to have faith that the feelings will pass regardless of the outcome of the situation, takes true strength. I was raised to think of my emotions as weaknesses and because of that, I was afraid to feel. As I grew up and went through vicious bouts of depression related to my bi-polar disorder, I became terrified of my feelings. I was convinced that one day I would disappear into them and never be able to pull myself out, so it was easier to avoid feeling as much as possible.
This was, of course, impossible and the result was a cycle of futile desperation. I hated the way I felt, so I’d get high to numb myself, but like Novocain, the numbness wore off and not only did the pain return, but there was fresh sadness and hurt to add to it. So I’d smoke more and more meth, attempting to run away from myself, but at the end of every line I snorted or bowl I smoked, there I was, more wrecked and damaged than when I’d begun.
Like so much in my life at that time, I tried to keep everything separate, attempting to keep the drug world from tainting the purity of my life with Andy. But as I told my mother, “He has Down syndrome, he’s not an idiot.”
I knew that sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night to find me gone. I’d come home and find him awake, watching movies or sometimes just standing outside my bedroom.
The first six months that I was sober, when we lived with my parents, Andy slept with me. He refused to sleep alone and at night, he always kept some part of him connected with me: his foot on my leg, an arm on my back, fingers on my cheek. His expressive language is limited, but I know what he was doing. He was making sure I stayed home all night.
He still needs to be sure of my presence, and if he’s in bed and can’t hear me, he’ll call out, “Mom?”
“What, honey?”
“Um...innah bed.”
“I know you are, Bug.”
“Oh, nuffin, nevermind.”
And these exchanges, which are diminishing with time, break my heart, because I know that I did this to him. I took away his security. I know my nightly absences made him feel insecure when he needed me and I wasn’t there, and I hate myself for doing that to him.
Allan and I each had our own bedroom, but the only time he used his was when he had his son every other weekend. The rest of the time, we slept together in my room. We never discussed it, that’s just the way it was.
In the beginning, I only left at night when when someone called about bail. I liked being home. When Andy was asleep, we’d go to bed, watch movies and eat Ben and Jerry’s while he smoked pot and I got high. We had sex every night and most mornings. Great sex. Fabulous sex. Sometimes we watched porn, sometimes not. We were great in bed together. He never said, “I love you,” and I didn’t want to be the first. Somewhere deep inside, I knew that if I opened that door, I had to be prepared to deal with the consequences, and I didn’t want to know what they would be.
For me, sex was love. I’d given myself up enough in the past to understand that on a cognitive level, but knowing didn’t change anything. Love, to me, was all about the act of sex and physical contact. Even with the men I’d been with before who told me they loved me, I didn’t believe it unless I was being constantly held and touched. Without that, nothing else they said or did mattered. To me, it wasn’t love.
All of this, of course, was about self-worth. I wasn’t a person unless someone loved me, and without physicality, there could be no love. If no one wants me, I must not be worth wanting. If no one protects me, I must not be worth protecting. Protecting and loving myself didn’t make sense to me. Just the thought of providing myself with what I needed made me cringe. To do so felt selfish, narcissistic, greedy and wrong. I based my entire self as a person, woman and mother solely on the feedback I received from other people.
Even with Andy. Being a good mother was more important to me than anything else was, but I was never sure that I was good enough. Andy couldn’t tell me how he felt and I rarely heard it from anyone else. The couple of times I heard my mother say it, I could feel myself sucking the words in, trying to savor them and store them away. At times like that, I wanted to beg her to repeat it again and again. The request would be right there, in the back of my throat and on my tongue: please, please, please, tell me again. I was so empty inside that I took all my cues about who I was from other people.
So the fact that Allan wanted to have sex with me - and often - was all I needed to feel wanted, needed and loved. The feedback I got from him was that I was a Goddess in bed. To me, that meant I was a loved Goddess and I sure as hell wasn’t going to open a dialogue and r
isk hearing otherwise.
Chapter 12
Around the time we moved in with Allan, two significant things happened. The first was Garnett’s release from jail. He’d been there nearly three months, but he was worse than when he went in. With nowhere to go, he was forced to live with his parents, whom he despised, and he was furious with Kilo and me for what he saw as cutting him out of business. Kilo would still sell to him, but Garnett no longer had any customers. All his friends, even those he’d known since high school, decided to stay with me rather than put up with his craziness. I met with him to give him the key to the storage unit where all his belongings were stored, and let him know when and how the monthly rent was to be paid. All the money I made from selling the meth he had at the time of his arrest, I’d put toward his expenses while he was in jail, so he had no money, but he told me he’d take care of the storage bill. Other than that, he wouldn’t look at me and barely said a word. He never thanked me for anything I’d done for him, and as he walked away, I had an uneasy feeling.
About two months later, the storage company called to tell me I had five days to pay the past due rent or they were going to lock me out of the unit and sell my things. They were also pissed off that there was a chain and lock on the unit, which were expressly forbidden according to the contract. I told them I would be in to see them later that day, and went to find Garnett.
He wouldn’t answer my calls, so I drove around until I saw his van parked in front of a friend’s house. The friend was at work, but Garnett was there...in bed with the wife of a man he’d known since junior high.
I pounded on the door, yelling that I knew he was in there and I needed to talk to him, and he eventually opened it, pulling on his pants while the woman hopped up and down behind him putting her socks on.
He was smirking at me, which was the first thing that pissed me off. “The storage place called and said you haven’t paid any rent.”
He giggled. “So?”
“So? You need to pay that rent. They also said you put some kind of lock and chain on the unit. What’s that about?” He pushed by me and headed for his van. I followed him. “Did you hear me? You need to pay that or they’ll auction off all your stuff.” I put a hand on his arm as he was opening the driver’s side door.
He shook himself like a wet dog. “So fucking what? It’s your problem, Kiiiimberly. Not mine.” He started giggling again. “Did you forget whose name the unit is in? I’ll get around to it when I feel like it. IF I feel like it.”
“But Gar...”
“Fuck you! Fuck you and all your monkey friends! I know what you’re doing.” Still with the monkeys?
“And you and Aaallllllan better watch out. And that ugly fucking retarded kid of yours, too!”
Sorry?
Now he was in the van with the door closed, sneering and giggling at me. “That’s right. Leave it to an ugly bitch like you to fart out a stinking mongoloid piece of afterbirth and call it a kid. Jesus Christ! How can you stand to look at the little fucker? He’s so fucking ugly.” He let his tongue fall out of his mouth, rolled his eyes up in his head and made moaning noises. “Way to go, Kimbo. Why don’t you go home to that UGLY FUCKING RETARD? HA HA HA HA HA HA!” His tires screeched as he jerked his van down the street. I could still hear him laughing and moaning.
I felt a cold calm wash over me and in that instant, I knew what I was going to do. I took just a second to check for any feelings of guilt I might have had, and found none. He could have done anything. He could have said anything...except for what he did say. I don’t know if it was temporary insanity and he didn’t know what he was doing, or if he simply didn’t see me as a threat. Either way, it didn’t matter.
I drove to the storage place, paid the past rent and explained the situation: that I let a friend store his things there and he was supposed to pay the bill. So sorry for all this confusion. What’s the typical procedure if someone doesn’t pay their bill? Oh, really? Well, how about we just speed things up a little, what do you say?
So I terminated my contract on the unit, and they used bolt cutters to cut the lock and chain. Rather than waiting and selling the contents at an auction, which is what they typically do, or donating everything to Goodwill, which is another option, they took one look, declared the contents to be junk and hauled everything to the city dump the following morning.
Everything he owned: every book, yearbook, guitar, photograph and stick of furniture. All of it. Thirty-some-odd years of memories, gone.
When I told Allan, he was stunned. He couldn’t believe what I’d done. “Holy shit, Kim! He’s going to go nuts. You probably shouldn’t have done that.”
When word got around, people used words like, “gutsy,” “ballsy” and even “crazy.” Not one of them used the word “retarded.”
The other major event that coincided with Andy and I moving in with Allan was Kilo’s arrest.
He had just left my house and was going to make a drop to someone else when the police pulled him over. The reason for the stop was that he didn’t wait until his rear wheel was completely across the line before turning off his signal when he switched lanes. The police had probable cause to search him because he had a warrant. They found a quarter pound of meth as well as marijuana.
The truth was Kilo was on their radar. The police already suspected him of dealing meth. He had connections to people who were already in the system on drug charges, and he had an outstanding warrant related to his previous criminal history. Once you catch the attention of the authorities, it’s only a matter of time before you go down.
His arraignment was the following morning. Jill had to write the actual bond because of the amount: $125,000. For a bond that large, someone had to have property to put up as collateral, as well as $12,500 in cash. I arranged for his cousin to put up his house, and I came up with the down payment for the cash. Kilo paid me back when he was released, and paid off the balance to Jill sooner than she required. He was a model client, checking in with her weekly, as she required, and attending all his court dates. She was thrilled.
I hired an attorney I’d heard about over the years from different people. Word around the campfire was that Larry originally wanted to be a doctor before switching to law. In the era when Ken Kesey was forced to hide out in Mexico to escape prosecution for possession of two joints, Larry felt that the “heads” needed one of their own to represent them. Whether the legend was true or not, I admired the idea of a man with such integrity and idealism. I took Kilo to Larry.
I also hired Larry to handle Allan’s case. He was sentenced to one year of probation, weekly drug classes and one hundred hours of picking up garbage on the side of the road. He didn’t work for more than six months, and when he wasn’t fulfilling his court ordered obligations, we spent our days together at home playing games on the computer and listening to music. He’d play his guitar for me and sometimes people would stop by, but mostly we got high. All day, every day, we would get high and have sex, and to me it felt like bonding. I didn’t care that he wasn’t working. In fact, I liked that he was home all the time with me. In my meth soaked mind, I thought I was living a dream. I was with the man I loved twenty-four hours a day, had all the drugs I wanted and didn’t have to worry about money.
I didn’t live like the drug dealers you see in movies like Scarface or Blow, but I was doing well and we wanted for nothing. I was bringing in six to eight thousand dollars a month, which was more money than I’d ever made in the legitimate world, and was spending it just as fast as it came in.
I didn’t see an end. Part of me knew that it wouldn’t last forever, but I didn’t let myself think about that. Kilo sometimes talked about getting out - about saving some money and going legit - and had spoken of it more often since his arrest. But I honestly never thought much beyond the here and now.
It wasn’t always that way. I planned on going to graduate school for applied behavior analysis. I wanted to do clinical work with people who had developmental disabil
ities. It was a dream I’d had since before Andy was born. But, his medical condition was serious and I was having flashbacks during classes. As I got older, my depression became harder to control and when I started self-medicating with drugs, all my dreams vanished in a cloud of smoke.
The jobs I had between my stints at school always ended in disaster. Keeping my depression a secret, my mood swings and meltdowns were unexplainable. I’d forget my meds and crash. The doctors would adjust my medication, but it would take time for them to work. I’d cry at work, excusing myself to the bathroom where I’d sob uncontrollably for too long, only to return with red, puffy eyes. Feeling like a freak, I’d become withdrawn and anti-social, and eventually, I’d lose the job.
When I started dealing meth, my moods didn’t matter. There was no clocking in or out, no consequences for being late because I could barely function and no building in which I was trapped all day, hiding in the bathroom trying to stop my tears. I felt like my dreams were unattainable because of my mental illness, and I felt better excelling on the fringes of society rather than failing inside of it.
I thought about the future as far as knowing I wanted Andy to graduate from the local high school, which meant staying in the house for the next five years. Allan and I talked about it and that’s what I thought was going to happen. We would stay in the house until Andy graduated and then...but we never talked about what would happen after that. If I were sober, I probably would have seen that as a warning sign, but I wasn’t, and I didn’t. We never talked about the future in any serious way. Allan always said that one day he’d pay me back. “Just keep track of everything,” he told me. “It will all come back to you. Don’t worry.”
There are only two ways out of the drug life: prison or death. I’ve never known anyone who saved enough money to retire and live happily ever after. There’s no gold watch at the end of this gig, no pension plan, no retirement party or 401K.
Crystal Clean Page 12