Mom, here’s the truth of the truth of the truth: There ain’t an expectation these walls can’t change, not a one, though truthbe-told a nigger should be steeled against this grief, should, since I’m seasons and seasons into my set, have spent days and days and days gazing through cyclone fence, spent months of wake-ups and lights-out and chow time and count time and (a time or two) hole-time. Everywhere inside this place is flaking fish-colored paint, which is proof the white boys in charge would give not a shit if we died from breathing lead. And believe me, sometimes it’s as if I could die here, fall comatose on a mattress so thin, it takes prayer for a wink of sleep. Weeks and weeks go by with no more than the Wednesday transport to get me through, the tiny comfort of seeing dudes more inconsolable than me slug off a bus dressed in a dingy one-piece and the orange plastic slippers that chafe your feet to bleeding.
It’s no wonder why years later this year could mean more yearning—at least for me.
But hey, Mom, there’s a chance you’ll find love—the suckers might be right. And hey, let’s take heart, you’re sober, off-paper, working—swelled with what gets you, me, a human through.
Look around. See the room bathed in borrowed light, couples whispering across tables, intractable-ass kids darting between the seats, hear the vending machines ejecting snacks and coins, the kitchen crew knocking pots behind the rolltop gate, an officer or two snickering under his breath.
This is what we have, Mom, what we made, and we must make do.
So we reach out, the two of us, you and your eldest young bastard, and hold one another for a time that flouts the limit of allowed contact.
De Paul Drug Treatment Center
DIVERSION CONTRACT
Name:____________________________________Case No:___________________
I here by agree to enter the diversion program. By doing so I understand I must adhere to its obligations and responsibilities as mandated by the judge, program manager, field supervisor, and other approved treatment providers.
CLIENT RESPONSIBILITIES
1. I must tell the truth
2. I must attend all court sessions as ordered
3. I must follow the treatment plan mandated by program personnel
4. I must not violate the law. (If I engage in any criminal act, I may be prosecuted for the charges pending against me)
5. I must obtain gainful employment within 90 days of release into phase two
6. I must tell my field supervisor within 48 hours of a change of address or telephone number or change of employment
7. I must get permission from my field supervisor before I leave the state of Oregon
8. I must submit urine samples upon request
9. I must complete at least 40 hours of community service or pay $500
10. The program is at least 12 months and I will pay a monthly fee of $50.00. I must have a zero balance in order to move on to complete the program.
11. If restitution is owed, I must pay the amount in full as ordered by the court.
12. I must follow the directives given to me and remain drug free. If I fail to do so, the judge may impose one or more of the following therapeutic or punitive responses:
A. Additional community service
B. A period of incarceration in Mult. County jail
C. Extra individual counseling sessions
D. Extra AA / NA meetings
E. 48 hour intensive relapse intervention program.
F. Program termination
CLIENT RIGHTS AND BENEFITS:
1. During the time that I am in enrolled in the program the prosecution of the criminal charge(s) against me will be stayed.
2. If I successfully complete the program, the criminal charges against me will be dismissed and I can never be convicted for those charges:
3. I can quit the program at any time, but if I so choose, I will be prosecuted on my pending charges
4. If I quit the program or I am terminated, anything I have said concerning my drug use while in the program cannot be used against me in court.
5. If I am terminated from the program my conduct while in the program may be considered by the judge at sentencing
Client signature
Date
WHITE / CLIENT
YELLOW/CASE WORKER
PINK / PROGRAM
Chapter 1
Had them planned, changed them, and
changed the changed ones.
—Grace
The days. Our days.
DePaul Center rehab days: Breakfast at 6A, group counseling at 8A, one-on-ones at 10A. We take lunch at noon, and we can eat or not with what seems most mornings as no matter to them. Afterwards it’s another required group: either NA or AA, though neither of which are any anonymous. At 2P or 3P depending, it’s our last afternoon group, then lo and behold a bit of free time after that—what amounts to a few of us in the TV room and/or our room and/or wandering halls and/or sitting outside enjoying a smoke. Two or three hours to do as we please, save their long list of rules, before we’re back once again on their clock. Dinnertime’s at 5P, and a girl—when am I not one?—should get something in her stomach if she hopes to survive. The after-dinner meeting is optional, though if we’re lucky or blessed or what-haveyou, it’s forsaken for a visit, which, by the way, they arrange by letters: A–J on Mondays and Wednesdays and K–Z on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
But this or that week, Sunday to Sunday, sunup to all hours, what you’ll find here are experts—or else a bunch of them that make the claim. As in my sweet neighbor, who just reached the halfway, who can name almost any sixties slow tune. As in the former debutante always stitching or crocheting. As in the handsome guy from the top floor who swears he can name most any car trouble just by listening. It seems forever I’ve been an expert at reading people, and, like everyone else here, the here being a place we call by another name, I’ve also been an expert at other things, the worst of which is lying—to others, to myself.
In this city, it rains, rains so much you best get to liking the rain, so much I’ve come to love fixing my face to the sound of the rain, love to draw my brows and paint my lips and glue my lashes and, day by day, dot a mole on my cheek—my beauty mark. Most of these females act like just cause we’re here, how we look don’t count, but I got news for them, program or no, inpatient or out, looking good is a full-time occupation. And it ain’t no days off!
No time off if you’re smart from reading people either, which is a skill, a talent white folks have stamped with fancy names: rapid cognition or off stage thought or automatic processing, though I call it what my grandmother—God bless her soul—Mama Liza did, which is your first mind, and like Mama Liza would say, we all got a first mind; it’s just some of us are too fool to follow ours.
I flow past chattering TVs and trilling alarm clocks, past rooms swelled with whispers or troubled breath, flow past posters of quotes, past a boldface placard of the center’s rules, skip right on down to Girlfriend’s room. Girlfriend’s got her door swung wide while she fusses over a closet of what must be hand-me-downs from a shaky stool. Really and truly, she’s always straightening this or that or sweeping or running a rag along dusty sills or hand-mopping her floors or tucking her bunk with corners made for hospitals, or an army base.
By the way, your first mind comes to you in seconds—or less. If you’re listening, it tells you how much you’ll like a person, if you can trust them, it tells you where to rank them; with your first mind you figure how old, how smart, whether they keep a bank balance or specialize in bounced checks.
Girlfriend, who holds her weight—who don’t?—in the wrong places, quakes off the stool. Hurray, she says. Hurray. This time next week. This time next week and you’re on your way.
What she means is I’ve almost reached the end of this stint, which, so help me, is my everlasting last.
She scans a letter from the pile that sits beside a framed five-by-seven of her boys, letters sliced along the edges and crayoned, which, if m
y mind serves me right, was what got me and her to speaking. Before that you couldn’t get her to open her mouth, couldn’t nobody ply a single word from her till the day we happened upon each other in the hall, she hurrying with her mail and me lugging an armload of books to my room. That day we exchanged hellos and, for reasons neither of us could name, we chatted through both morning groups, through free time, blathered right through lunch. Next thing we knew we were taking all of our meals together, sitting through Sunday services, and swapping stories well past the time everyone else was asleep. Come to find out we were both raised Baptist, lost our mothers as young girls, and have the habit, excuse me, had the habit, of choosing work-allergic roguish men.
Try to split us apart now and you can’t, but who knows beyond my stay what will become of our bond?
Who knows but how could we, how could any one of us, when this life is not that life? When we’ve spent this long dissembling. How could we, though those that know us best or maybe don’t know the risk coax our truest truths into view: that we have problems accepting love, that we don’t know how to let go, that we’re not so good in judging who or what should be kept, that on our worst days, it’s tough to find reasons?
We stroll to the kitchen, my heels clicking and her flats whisking along. If you’ve seen one cafeteria, you’ve pretty much seen them all: a windowless room with soft white walls and gray tile and workers—stone-faced new residents themselves—who at mealtimes serve just enough to keep us alive and no more, which must be why a good few residents look the victim of third world hunger. We are victims of the morning’s longest line, heirs of cooled oats, shriveled links, and shallow juice in cups the size they use for urinalysis.
We find seats and right off she asks me if I heard about the girl who got out last week and relapsed so fast she was back by morning group the next day—sad, sad, yes, but not outside our fates. We come and go. We come and go: the timid ones, the stubborn ones, the worried. Girlfriend sips at what’s left in her cup, which, as I said, wasn’t much to start.
Your boys. You must be about to bust, she says.
Explode. Yes, I say.
Now’s the time for those plans, she says.
That’s the thing, I say. I’ve had them, changed them, and changed the ones I changed.
We watch the latecomers drag in—their eyes full of blood and hair tight-napped at the neck or spun around their head—and catch the last scrapes from the pots and pans. She and I don’t say much else. We are not the last to leave but close, and she walks me to my room. There’s a note under my door that says for me to report to the nurse.
Should’ve known they’d hit you with that last UA, she says. I’ll leave you to it.
What they won’t say here is how we can never know, when we get this close to leaving, if someone would rather see us stay. What they won’t say is what they’ll do to keep you if they choose: botch exit papers, switch UA results, quiz you to tears on a false report from the staff. They keep secret the ploys they use to stretch your days into months, tricks that will send us to places we escaped to serve suspended time, to serve new time, reason why when you reach the end it’s nerves, nerves, nerves.
The UA line stretches far down the hall and I shuffle to the end of it behind a girl from my floor with gobs of white glue caked between the tracks of her weave. You can hear someone curse inside the restroom—what might be a scheme gone bad which wouldn’t surprise me. I once saw a so-called slickster’s balloon of prepackaged urine fall from his armpit, burst, and soak a fussy nurse’s brand new white shoes. Down the line the counselor gapes at us from her office—the wall of champions looming behind her—while the nurse moseys out bearing gifts: twist-cap prelabeled sample cups, and here and there packets of pills.
Which of us experts believes themself a bootleg chemist? Who’s ready to bet against the odds, will hedge against the time it takes to pee clean; against whether they test our urine, or our hair, or our blood.
The counselor slinks out, a wrist noisy from a sleeve of gold bracelets rubbed half-silver. She works her way along the wall frisking us each with just her gaze, waiting for an eye to rove, for a nerve to spark in someone’s balled fist or leg. She reaches me and takes my hand in her hand till my heart slows. Come see me, she says. You be sure to come see me soon.
My turn comes and I hover over the toilet and catch a weak stream in the cup and twist the cap tight. I stand in the dank for a time, braced against the sink, listening to the voices float in through the door. When I come out, I see a new resident, too young for this life, carrying her intake issue—blankets, sheets, a flat pillow—with arms so thin you could rub them for fire. Below bangs hacked to a slant across her face she gives me meek eye-to-eye and slugs up a flight of stairs. She could be me years back my first time in a place like this, though let’s hope she arrives at the truth sooner than I:
It’s no use trying to fool ourselves.
Sometimes fooling ourselves is the only strength that counts.
Chapter 2
But time has taught me my options (who knows about the
next man’s?), my options, are full of fast-twitch muscles.
—Champ
Here comes a woman, no coat, with her wet hair matted. Closer, she looks about Mom’s age and, like Mom, makes you wonder if she’s lived a hard-knock life or not. My mother will be out soon, and I can predict the promises she’ll make, a script after years I can recite verbatim, speeches she may believe, but maybe doesn’t. But that matters not. Whatever plans Mom has this time, grand or small, starry-eyed or dull, my plans will be under her plans holding them up.
OneverythingIlove. We. Won’t. Lose.
The woman from a few seconds ago, she’s hocus pocus in my rearview—poof. Vanishes, and when I swivel to see where to, there’s an unmarked patrol car idling at the crosswalk. Your boy keeps cool at first (clean records create reckless confidence), but when they start towards me, I push the sack in my boxer briefs, hop out my ride, and shuffle towards the nearest house, a place that favors our old house on Sixth—home. Two sets of stairs to reach the front door, and I climb each one slow. As if I’m cursed with early arthritis, a janky hip, a trick knee. Truth be told, I’m giving the kind officers time to get busy with another call, to find more pressing work elsewhere, anywhere but here, but wouldn’t you know it, there must be nothing pumping in Northeast, nada, and since it ain’t, I’m the object of the officers’ affection, their one and only true love, and right about now they’re sending their amore through a searchlight, stabbing it all inside my ride, which, Ibullshityounot, bucks my eyes the size of silver dollars, and buries my breath down deep where it’s hard to find.
And peoples, trust me, you’d be breathless too, or worse, if you knew what I know about the Feds’ famous math: 100 to 1—a.k.a. the Bias Effect, à la Len Bias, the former college star who overdosed himself into old glory’s cocaine demigod.
What I see: a porch junked with trash bags big as boulders, old bike parts, rusted tools, busted cardboard boxes, a mound of soggy clothes. What I feel: my heart stall, a vein in my neck grab. When my heart gets to pumping again, I pound at the door. No—my bad. There I go being a hype man for myself. On the forreals, it’s a feathery-ass knock, but I’m ready to strike a convo with whoever answers.
Hello, sir, I don’t mean—
Excuse me, miss, I know it’s late, but—
Hey, lil man, let me holler at—
But see here’s the problem: Through the thin curtain covering the window the whole house is black. Ain’t enough light in there to make a shadow. In a nimbus I harvest my cell and make a Broadway show of dialing my homeboy Half Man. No lie, it sounds as if someone installed an amp in my earpiece. Wouldn’t be surprised if the whole block heard it ringing over and over, heard me calling my homeboy to no avail, which shouldn’t be no big old surprise since dude could make a career of being absentee: Gayle “Half Man” Kent: the CEO of Mr.-Never-There-When-Need-Be, Inc.
A car splashes past, bass
turning its trunk into a booty music live show. Soon after I lay a second round of heavy-ass knocks on the door, pounding that sets (sans self-hype this time) my knuckles afire and ratchets my pulse to the sound of a siren. And peoples, let’s call that siren freedom’s theme song cause that’s what it is, trust and believe, cause the ones who disbelieve are either doing time or indicted.
Police pan the light across the yard, the house, then relentless again on me, and meanwhile, I’m glancing this way and that, and feeling the sack crawl down my crotch towards the loose elastic of my boxer briefs. Any second they’ll order me off the porch with my hands held high. Another second and they’ll trap my wrists too tight behind my back. And right between these fates sits the crossroads.
Run or stay?
Toss or keep?
Felony or misdemeanor?
Life has options! This is what they preached to us in my old youth program, what I tell my bellicose brothers whenever they’ll listen, which ain’t if ever often enough.
Options. Options. Calling Kim, my sweet thing, is on the list. My girl don’t sleep sound at all, so she says, unless we’re lying side by side which means she’s likely up, but since she’s also a first-rate worrier, it probably ain’t worth the trouble. The trouble of lying. Of inventing an excuse for why I’m breaking my embargo on hitting licks this late, a rule I let her impose in the first place. Not to be no sucker, never that, but Kim is special, so special. Yeah, most, if they could, would choose the chick of their dreams, but if you ask me, fantasy girls are never seen in full. My girl’s the girl you’d pick if you were wide awake with time to think, and though, between you and me, I may here and there indulge in a shot of ancillary pussy, I ain’t in earnest down with risking our good thing.
The Residue Years Page 2
