Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  After a couple of months with Neil, I wasn’t just using, but had started to deal. My weight dropped precipitously to just over a hundred pounds on my five-seven frame, but I was no supermodel. My face got the hard, gaunt, sunken look of a habitual meth user, with the telltale giant black bags under my eyes. But the worst part was the sores.

  Meth addicts are notoriously obsessive when they’re high; they can’t leave things alone. I was obsessive to begin with, which made meth the absolute worst drug for me. As many addicts do, I picked at my own skin. At the beginning, that meant I had a welter of unhealed scabs all over my arms and legs, and I pulled my own hair out, leaving bald spots where there should have been healthy hair.

  But as my addiction got worse, I turned my attention to my face. I would sit in front of a mirror for hours, sometimes for days. I plucked all of my eyebrows out. During one binge, I worried away at my pores so relentlessly that when I was done, my entire face was nothing but a giant, raw layer of flayed skin. There’s no other way to say it: I basically peeled my own face off. I can still feel the pain, and the shock of stepping back and seeing my whole face in the mirror for the first time.

  The defense intensified their smear tactics. The newsmagazine 48 Hours did a piece on the case. We participated, but it was a terrible mistake and turned out to be another smear piece. To begin with, the segment was called “Eye of the Beholder,” which implied that different versions of the truth applied, depending on who you were talking to. Much was made of Seth’s “good, old-fashioned values.” I particularly enjoyed the shots of him doing his homework around the kitchen table with his dad.

  Meanwhile, my former friends were interviewed about my “flirtatiousness” and promiscuity. My hesitation to participate in the interview because of my trust issues was made to sound like paranoia and defensiveness. The piece mentioned my drug use and arrests, while remaining wistful about Seth’s “poor judgment” and concerns about his future. Is that what it’s called when you sexually abuse someone with a Snapple bottle? “Poor judgment”?

  In October 2004, Seth got into a car accident. The post-accident Breathalyzer revealed that he’d been drinking, and his bail was revoked.

  As for me, I had the drugs. Some days, meth was the only thing I could count on. After a while, my parents delivered an ultimatum: I could only stay at home if I was clean. So I did what someone who is completely desperate not to feel anything would do: I moved in with my abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend, Neil.

  I was getting high with Neil when my cell phone rang. Chuck Middleton was in the middle of intense preparations for the second trial, and there was a question he had to ask me. Even in my drugged-out state, I could hear that there was compassion in his voice when he spoke.

  “Alisa, I’m sorry to do this to you. But we think you need to watch the video.”

  The first jury had complained that I had appeared cold and unfeeling. Chuck felt that I’d seemed unemotional in part because I still didn’t know what had happened to me, except the barest outlines.

  Of course he was right. If I had been conscious for what happened to me—if the guys had had to pin me down and restrain me by force, if I’d been able to fight back, if I’d been conscious for what they did—I would have a completely different relationship with the incident. The terror and humiliation and powerlessness I had felt would have come across clearly to a jury, and I would have had much less difficulty convincing them to feel what I had felt.

  But I had been completely unconscious, and I hadn’t felt any of those things. That flatness and lack of affect had hurt my ability to convey to the jury what a horrifying effect the rape had had on me. The only way to get over that hurdle was for me to come face-to-face with what had happened that night. And Chuck knew, as sick as it must have made him to ask, that the only way I’d ever know would be to watch the video.

  My parents were vehemently opposed to the idea of me seeing it. They were furious at me for considering it and livid with Chuck for suggesting it. (Neither of them have ever watched it.) The case had taken an unreasonably long time to come to trial (I once heard a law professor call this tactic, which is often used in sexual assault cases, “victory by delay”), so I was eighteen by that point—an adult.

  My parents couldn’t legally prevent me from seeing the video. But they did not support the decision, and they refused to go with me to see it, in the hope that I would reconsider. I didn’t, of course.

  Late afternoon on January 28, 2005, the police came to pick me up at Neil’s house. They would take me to the police station where I would watch the video. In preparation, I got as high as I possibly could.

  Shirley was there to support me, along with another investigator, but they turned their backs to the screen to give me some privacy. Then I sat there and watched as all the shadowy details I’d been struggling for three years to reconcile resolved on the screen in front of me into cold, hard facts.

  I’d said over and over again that I wanted to know, but as soon as my brain could make sense of the images on the screen, I knew I’d been wrong. The truth was much, much worse than anything I could have imagined. Finally, I understood the way all those cops had looked at me, and that last juror’s outrage. About ten minutes into the viewing, I realized that the inside of my mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow—my jaw had been hanging open in shock and disgust. But I didn’t know how to stop the video, or where in the police station to go for water, and I couldn’t get it together enough to ask for help. So I stayed where I was, my mouth gummy and parched, and watched.

  The video is twenty-one minutes long, although the assault took longer than that; we’ll never learn what happened when the taping was paused. When it begins, Seth is trying to pull my shirt up. I push his hands away and say, “No.” My words are badly slurred, and I’m slumped over, barely able to sit up. I say, “Seth, I feel ill.” Then, thirty seconds later, I slur, “I’m so [expletive] up.”

  Those are the last words you hear me say.

  Loud rap music plays as the boys ham it up for the camera, laughing, dancing, smoking cigarettes. Seth screams, “Put it down for the militia, [expletive]!” There I am, naked, first on the couch, then on the pool table. I don’t move. The three of them drag me around, have intercourse with me, slap and pinch me. At one point they drop me so hard you can hear the thudding sound of my head hitting the floor. I don’t react at all. Then they penetrate me vaginally and anally with a Snapple bottle, a juice can, a lit cigarette, and the thick end of a pool cue. I never move, or even flinch.

  Twenty-one minutes is a long, long time. I didn’t watch all of the tape. I never moved from my seat, but the television was set up in front of a window and the sun was going down outside—a real Southern California sunset, a riot of glorious pinks and oranges and blues. Every once in a while, I’d give myself a break by taking my eyes off the screen and looking out over the top of the television, to where the sun was going down.

  For instance, the part where Seth and Brian are pressing down on the outside of my abdomen, so that they can feel where the pool cue is inside me, through my belly, until they hit my bladder and I urinate all over myself—I didn’t watch that part, but let my gaze drift out to the horizon, where the giant, fiery sun was making its descent.

  Susan Schroeder was the chief of staff at the District Attorney’s office. She was another amazing ally on our team, the most ferocious tiger you could possibly want in your corner. Susan has seen some truly terrible stuff over the course of her career (including the video of my rape), and she made a comment that stuck with me.

  She said, “Seeing something like that video is like pulling a nail out of a piece of wood. It leaves a hole.”

  She was right—not only about the video, but about the whole experience. My happy childhood and the love of my parents had given me a sturdy scaffolding. But in the middle, where solid footing should have been—my self-esteem, ordinary development, my hopes and dreams and goals for the future—there was nothing, a gigantic
emptiness. Always, there was the threat that I’d lose my balance and fall right in to the engulfing blackness, never to be seen again. I threw everything I could think of into the hole to plug it up: I did drugs and alcohol, and hopped from bad boyfriend to worse. But I didn’t know that the chasm itself wouldn’t go anywhere until I found something of true substance to fill it.

  My parents had been right: Seeing the video took a tremendous toll. I was already in pretty bad shape, but that afternoon at the police station nearly broke me. It became clear that the drugs would be how I lived and died, and, frankly, that was fine with me.

  The constant access to drugs meant that my connection to reality became more and more tenuous. I stayed up on one binge that lasted thirteen days. Neil’s mom had raked the leaves in the yard, and when I opened the door, I saw the pile of swirling leaves turn into twenty snarling, slavering Doberman pinschers, snarling and attacking the door. I was losing my mind.

  My old friend Beka got in touch with me around then. She wanted to apologize for deserting me and to find out how I was doing. Of course, all I wanted to do was to get high. “Come out with me,” I wheedled. Misery loves company; maybe I’d feel less bad about the drugs I was doing if I could get Beka to do them with me. Maybe she’d even pay for them.

  Once it became clear to her how far gone I was, she once again told me that she couldn’t talk to me or see me. “You’re not Alisa anymore,” she told me, and I could hear the tears. “I don’t want to be around you high. I don’t want to be around meth, period. Call me if you ever clean up.”

  When you get clean, you make amends for the things you did when you were high. But there isn’t any way to easily make amends for the things you do when you’re a drug addict. I lied, I cheated, I stole. I sold drugs to kids; I got my friends addicted and then lied and cheated and stole from them. I will spend the rest of my life coming to terms with the things I did during those years. And while I do feel that my drug use was a response to the rape and its aftermath, I take full responsibility for everything I did in those years when I was on drugs. I have to.

  Shirley, my victim’s advocate, could see exactly what was happening. She was furious with me, but she didn’t withdraw. “I’m not giving up on you. Better than anyone, I know your potential,” she told me. It meant a great deal that she never stopped fighting for me—even when the person she was fighting was me.

  One day, she took a stand. My parents and I had been called down for an appointment at the district attorney’s office. I was living with Neil, and I remember making them wait outside for me in the car for a long time because I wasn’t high enough to leave the house yet.

  We met first in Shirley’s office. Shirley is petite with a pretty face, surprisingly spiked short white hair, and loving, compassionate eyes. She’s the best listener I’ve ever met; she looks deep into your very soul to make you feel she has all the time in the world to hear and understand and appreciate what you’re saying, and I had never met anyone so quick with a hug.

  When she has to defend one of her victims, though, the Mama Bear side of her comes out. Suddenly, she’s clipped, professional, and no-nonsense—completely unafraid to take it to the mat and willing to fight to the death to protect her client. I’d only seen that side of her with others, though, so it was a little shocking to me to see how coldly she was looking at me that day in her office.

  My long blond hair had always been my pride and joy. I had always made sure it was clean and shiny—neatly trimmed, blow-dried, and well brushed. Before I started doing meth, I was the kind of person whose shoes and eyeshadows matched her bag, and most days, I’d choose a piece of jewelry that picked up the colors in both.

  It had been a long time since I’d cared about any of that, and it showed.

  Shirley’s experienced gaze took in my stringy, greasy hair and my broken, filthy fingernails. I became uncomfortably aware of the way the stained clothes I was wearing hung off my body.

  “Did you take that coat out of the trash?” she finally said.

  I bristled. What kind of a thing was that to say to someone? But the truth was, I didn’t have the slightest idea where I’d gotten the grimy red coat I was wearing.

  Coldness radiated off Shirley as she went with us to the meeting at the DA’s office, where I alternated between apathy and belligerence. My own lawyer screamed at me, telling me I was sabotaging my own case. He was right, of course, but I didn’t care. Afterward, Shirley asked my parents if we wanted to go have lunch. My parents said yes, and I said no. What did I want with food? All that eating and talking was a waste of time, getting in the way of the only thing I passionately wanted to do, which was to get high again.

  Shirley said, “Fine. No lunch. But you’re not going home. You’re coming with me.” Her mouth set in a tight, hard, line, she sent my parents back to their car. “Turn the radio on and get comfortable,” she told them. “We might be a while.”

  It was a cold, gray, rainy day, but Shirley didn’t seem to notice the weather as she marched me down the street. A couple of blocks away from the courthouse where the DA’s office is, there’s a Skid Row populated by drug addicts and the homeless. That’s where Shirley took me.

  I was raised in a nice middle-class suburb; I’d never seen anything like this. There was filth and trash everywhere. Graffiti covered the walls. Newspapers and wrappers and food debris were scattered all over the sidewalks, and we stepped over piles of excrement, at least some of which was human. The smell shocked me.

  Figures wearing rags hunched together against the cold and rain. Others slept on collapsed cardboard boxes, their possessions in the ratty plastic bags under their heads. Some of the people we passed looked up, their eyes dull and lifeless, but many of them were too far gone to notice that we were there. I leapt straight up into the air when a giant pile of garbage piled up against a building rolled over, startling me. It wasn’t trash at all, as I had thought, but a person.

  Shirley’s face was grim as she said, “You better look around and get used to what you see, because this is where you’re going to land if you don’t get clean. You see these people? If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up living down here.”

  As alarming as I found the scene, I had no intention of revealing my revulsion to Shirley. I rolled my eyes at her.

  “Do me a favor and spare me the Scared Straight crap, okay?”

  “Fine,” Shirley said, pointing to one guy in particularly bad shape, passed out near a puddle of vomit. “That guy? You’re going to be his girlfriend.”

  At that, I snapped. “Look at these people! Look how horrible they look. They look like bums. I don’t look like a bum. I look like I have a place to live, because I do.”

  Shirley shouted right back, “No, you don’t. You might have a place to live, but you still look like trash. You’re disgusting. You think you look better than these people, but the truth is that you’d fit right in down here.”

  I hadn’t had the best attitude about our little excursion from the beginning. But when Shirley told me I looked homeless, I got extremely defensive. I probably hadn’t taken a proper shower in a few days, but the idea that I looked like a street person made me completely furious. (Shirley must have known that my vanity was the best way to get through to me.) It was a testament of how tremendous my sense of denial was that I could not see any connection between those poor people and myself. There’s always a line that a drug addict thinks she’ll never cross.

  I turned my back on Shirley and started to march back to where my parents were waiting in the car. Before we got there, though, she caught up with me, put her hand on my shoulder, and spun me around.

  “Alisa, honey,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “You’re such a smart, beautiful girl. I know this has been hard, and you didn’t ask for a bit of it, but you’ve got everything in the world to live for. I’m begging you to let me help you. Why are you doing this to yourself?”

  I told her the truth, my words so sharp I hoped they’d cut
her. “Because I like the way the meth makes me feel.”

  For the first time in months, I’d told someone the truth. Except maybe it wasn’t the complete truth after all. The real answer was that I liked doing meth because it made me feel like I didn’t have any feelings at all.

  Shirley let her hand drop from my shoulder and watched silently as I got back into my parents’ car. I was so furious, I didn’t even say goodbye.

  On the drive back to Neil’s house, I told my parents that I had no intention of ever speaking to Shirley again. “I want a new victim’s advocate,” I told them. My mother, who had become extremely close to Shirley and saw her almost as a sister, tried to make me see reason: “If Shirley didn’t truly care about you on a personal level, would she bring you down here? This isn’t her job. Whether you can see it or not, people do love and care about you. All we’re trying to do is to keep you safe. We don’t want you to end up like those people living on the street.”

  I told my parents what I’d told Shirley: that I knew what I was doing, that I’d never let it get so bad that I’d have to live down there, and that I could take care of myself. Then I refused to talk to them the rest of the way back to Neil’s.

  Shirley thought she’d wasted her time. I didn’t have the courage to tell her how lonely and broken I felt. Whether she knew it or not, though, she had planted a seed in me. Sometimes that’s the best you can do. Even if you don’t know when that seed will sprout—or if it will at all—planting a seed is always worth doing.

  During the first trial, Shirley had introduced my mom to the concept of tough love, the idea that I’d never get clean while my parents were supporting me financially and otherwise. Still, for more than a year, my parents had kept coming and picking me up whenever I called. I’d tell them I wanted to get clean; I’d swear to it, outlining all the ways that this time would be different. Then I’d eat everything they had in the house, watch their cable, and sleep in my childhood room under freshly laundered, sweet-smelling sheets.