On the Precipice of Something Precious

On the Precipice of Something Precious

While preparing for a move, back to Arizona, home, family, most of all, back to mom, I reflect upon her pure goodness. I think there comes a time in everyone’s life, no matter the extent of the damage of childhood that mom becomes the most important person in our lives again…this is that time for me. She is nearly 84, crippled with Osteoarthritis, Osteoporosis and who knows what else and this renders her in pain every day and it breaks my heart. She has never had much, and three out of her four marriages were brutal, or rather, she was treated brutally by ugly-minded men. Like so many, until I grew up-(emotionally), I blamed, resented and punished her for the things that she couldn’t have done any different –she did what her mother did, and her mother’s mother before her- I punished her with years of drug addled lunacy-let her watch me shoot a quarter million dollar inheritance into my veins while promising to buy her that house she would have never been able to afford (never did get that house). For at least the past ten years, I have longed to be with her, to spend time with her, to take care of her, and due to circumstances beyond my control, the housing market crash, my own battle with cancer, etc.; it has taken longer to get to her. Her name is Stephanie, Stevie for short….she is perfect in my eyes –she is the most tolerant, patient, and humble person I have ever known, at the age of 70-something, she out-danced everyone at our wedding and was a great joke teller. She loves to read herself to sleep most nights…likes Dancing with the Stars, Grays Anatomy, American Idol, and Ozzy Osborne, and loves Judge Judy. She’s slower now, sometimes it’s difficult for her to get the words out...or remember what she had for breakfast or if she saw American Idol last night. What I know is that she is precious and the thought of hanging out with her is just about one of the best things I could ever ask for in this life. So, if you still have your mom – cherish her – we only get one!

Stigma...Addicts....Women

The stigma attached to female addicts is vastly different than that for males, for a few reasons, the greatest being motherhood (or lack of it), prostitution, and abortion. (god, just look at the most recent republican efforts to ban abortion, birth control!!!). These are highly-charged emotional issues, rendering female addicts with far more shame and guilt than their male counterparts. Society is quick to single them out, judge, and persecute them rather than dig deeper and understand that an addict is an addict is an addict; and when people are addicted, their actions are involuntary. Their ability to choose is gone. Although they may commit despicable acts to feed their addiction, when one graduates from using to being addicted, his or her actions become a necessity versus a choice. This fact is lost on those outside the realm of drug and alcohol treatment, although, in recent years, there has been more education about addiction. One only need look as far as television, i.e. Intervention, Relapse, Dr. Drew Pinsky’s Celebrity Rehab, The Biggest Loser, and hundreds of other documentaries and popular movies. Even so, female addicts still face distorted and ill-conceived perceptions about their decency. In my experience, I have witnessed no guilt worse than that of a mother who has lost, abandoned, or hurt her children. Even when she begins to understand that while she was addicted, she was unable to make any other choices, the guilt consumes her.Working in prisons, both men’s and women’s prisons, was the most rewarding, profound work I have done. It was filled with heartbreak and miracles, reaching into vast realms of human emotion. My team and I worked in a place where we had to foster growth, warmth, and hope in an unwelcoming, harsh, ugly environment. We were witness to women coming to us with stories of male guards sneaking into their cells in the deep, dark night and raping them; women who had no voice, no power, no support. We were witness to women who started doing time on the wrong foot by perhaps saying yes to the wrong convict, and then becoming property - to be bought, sold, or traded for a pack of smokes. We were witness to the stories of women from all walks of life who had been beaten, broken, exploited, raped, and oppressed in places where they learned that to survive, one had to either oppress or be oppressed; there was no in-between. We were witness to the “black market” that came to be when smoking was banned in the California prisons, and tobacco was worth more than any drug on the yard. It created yet another context for the use of extortion, blackmail, and violence. One woman in the program had convinced a younger, weaker woman to get her mother to smuggle tobacco into the prison. The mother got scared and decided to stop. The one who had been getting and selling the tobacco had friends on the outside threaten the mother and the rest of the family unless she continued to bring it in. The mother called the prison authorities, prompting an investigation. Her daughter - the younger, weaker one - was attacked in her sleep with a lock inside a sock, after which she was in a coma for over a month.

Sometime around Winter, 1979

Dedicated to Sergeant Singh...and pot!

Singh Singh Revisited
The morning began routinely enough. We were rousted out of bed in the usual rude and loud manner. “BREAKFAST,” blared over the loudspeaker. They had made all meals mandatory at this new prison to keep better track of us. After a brisk walk in the cool morning mist to the dining room, then lining up for cold waffles over which butter refused to melt, we just drank coffee and went back to our house. By this time it had begun to rain, and Sergeant Singh was escorting us cattle-style, looking more and more like an enormous, floppy whale as the rain drenched her huge body. Suddenly, she snatched Michelle and me out of the line and whisked us off to the Security Control office, where she ordered us to sit quietly and wait. Mystified, we asked another officer what was going on, but he told us to sit, keep quiet, and wait until the “fat lady” came back.
When Sergeant Singh returned, she grabbed another officer and headed with him to our house, while Michelle and I, still groggy with sleep, trailed behind. She fumbled with the lock for several minutes when she reached our house, so we finally opened the door for her. Once inside, she made straight for the bathroom – focused, surefooted, and determined – to where a spider plant nurturing a baby pot plant in the same pot hung in stillness in front of the tiny window. She snatched the plant, declaring dramatically that she was confiscating it. Michelle and I had to bite our lips to keep from laughing out loud – all of this hysteria over a baby pot plant?
Sergeant Singh informed us she was writing us up, then commanded us to leave and get to work. The 115 would be processed and served later. After getting ready for work in our house, we returned to the Control office for passes to the recreation office. On this second trip to Control that morning, we discovered that the fat lady had been busy. There she sat at a desk, eating, looking very smug and satisfied. Surrounding her were six or seven other baby plants that had obviously been confiscated from various houses.
Immediately we saw how easy it would be to rescue the sprouts. Within an hour, a few of us managed to get all the baby shoots out of Control, back to our houses, and in water until we found their rightful owners; Sergeant Singh’s evidence for the 115’s was gone. When she found out, she looked like she was having a coronary malfunction, screaming at the two guards who let the plants slip right out from under them. How disappointing it must have been. All that great investigative police work for nothing.
With the evidence gone, we knew they had no reason to keep our spider plant, so we asked for it back. We were told they were keeping it for thirty days for observation. What? No way were they going to kill our plant! We waited until mail call, stole it back, and hid it in another room to ensure its safety from greasy, fat kidnappers. An hour later, Singh came running out of Control, screaming once again and demanding the plant back. We told her we had no idea what she was talking about, and if our plant was gone, it was her fault!

The heart will heal, tho it may have turned to stone.

Before prison and the chance circumstance of being regarded as a convict, I had mostly been a victim. Honestly, I don’t know which did more damage to my soul, being a victim or a victimizer. But in prison there was no in-between. You were one or the other. I got schooled quickly and almost too easily became victimizer.
My transformation to convict was most evidenced by a situation involving an inmate named Josie. There were one or two major dope connections on the yard – meaning anywhere in the prison, not necessarily just in the outside yard. Judi, Josie, I, and a few select others were privy to when there was dope on the yard, which was most typically on visiting days. During one such weekend, Josie made the mistake of letting either too many or the wrong people know who was holding the bag, and her punishment came swiftly and severely.
My role was to help pin while two other women tied Josie, using her own long hair, to the hot water faucet of a deep laundry sink outside dorm one. The women then turned on the hot water and left it running. I stood with the others, silent and unmoved, while the hot water scorched Josie’s face and neck, resulting in second degree burns. Her hair had to be cut off to free her from the faucet.
This and many other abhorrent events took me far away from myself, and my heart eventually turned to stone. It was at this point that I began to record my life on paper. I don’t think the reality of my five-year term hit me until about two years into it, but certainly, those tests that secured my convict status made it real. The tests would continue, I knew, but I was growing confident that I could pass them. Doing time was sometimes glorious, other times horrific, always intense. Strangely though, it was also like coming home, in the best sense of the word. My childhood had been mostly chaotic, violent, oppressive, and confusing; and as I adjusted to this bizarre place, it began to fit. To some extent, my time in juvenile prison for a year at age seventeen, as well as being on the streets doing drugs - a period of over ten years by then - had primed me for prison. For years when I spoke about prison, I recounted only the most entertaining vignettes and glamorized my time there. The harrowing details came out much later, as I had buried them deep in some remote corner of my mind, along with all the monsters of my childhood dreams.