The Shining
I love shoveling snow in the wee-est hours. Unobserved, I stare all childlike as snow-laced wind sparkles in the pale-orange streetlight. I look up and let snowflakes land on my cheeks, melt on my eyelids. I love being reminded of the warmth of my face.
Something about it makes you want to twirl. Winter … it’s like God puts the world in a snow globe and shakes it occasionally, disguising every dirty thing with glistening whiteness. Sudden heaven. I owe it to the sky and myself to let it touch me.
But as with most pure things, it will soon accumulate a little ugliness. Get crusty with nasty black exhaust. The snow melts but the blackness hardens and holds on until it dissolves mud-brown. All the dog do-do and casual litter appear all soggy and foul. Potholes fill with greasy black water. AND I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE.
I want to jump out of a window – I mean open one. Go outside without a coat. Take in a fully belly of breath without coughing. Watch a flower open. If it weren’t for my new-found love of The Waltons, I’d go winter crazy.
Every day after work, I come into a freezing house, throw dinner in the microwave, clean up, go through the mail, clean the stupid cat’s litter box and feed the whore. By then my food’s done and the best hour of my day begins. I eat my suppah (Olivia accent) and watch my favorite television family.
The theme song has a tranquillizing but energizing effect – I hear it and become Olivia Walton.
Livvy Descending a Staircase
I wake before the sun’s climbed Walton’s Mountain. Lingering in violet light on a bed that my husband made with his lovin’ hands, I look around the room with its doilies and hand-stitched wisdom. I’m just about the luckiest lady every born.
A cool breeze unfurls the curtains as I relish the moments before I move into today … but I don’t want to tempt idleness! I face endless duties and demands and rarely lose my mind from the repetition. With seven growing children, no day is quite the same except in how much I love each one.
The change in my breathin’ is enough to pull John from dreamland. He smiles and kisses me the way he always does. Oh, I hear city folk complain about gettin’ bored in marriage and think they’d go crazy doing the same thing each day. But they’ll never know how beautiful the soul grows when it puts down roots in a home and a man’s heart.
John’s long gone before I’ve washed up and slipped on a cotton dress I’ve had for ten years. I twist my long blond hair out of the way, put on my shoes and head to the kitchen, tying a fresh apron around my waist as I descend the staircase – time to prepare breakfast for 11 people.
The supper table is huge with a bench on each side. It’s wearing a pale green gingham table cloth. There’s a white bowl brimming with the reddest apples that won’t be full for long.
John brings me some eggs and starts a fire in the stove. I mix pancake batter while the sun peaks through the pines. Morning touches everything with promise on Walton’s Mountain.
Livvy lights up at Christmas but is suspicious of anything novel. She’s not content unless she’s busy and is rarely in a bad mood, but she did go on strike once when she got fed up with the kids not doing their chores!
Of course she’s beautiful in the most wholesome way. But it’s the way she walks that makes me wish I was her – so humble yet important – determined. It’s the way she gets to hold up her head. Not too high, but with no shame to drag her eyes down.
I love imagining I’m an upright and attractive woman with a husband who simply adores her. I’d wear a hat and gloves to be able to walk with such respectable posture.
WHERE’S MY JOHN WALTON GOD DAMN IT? There’s no chance anyone reading this knows a farmer or logger looking for a wife with simple tastes, a foul mouth and a strong spine, eh? I’d even go to church – if I got a kiss when it was over.
Can you imagine the love in their eyes the first time John carried Livvy over the threshold of that life? “WHO DO YOU HAVE TO BLOW IN A FORMER LIFE TO BE OLIVIA WALTON? Oh wait, I’m supposed to be writing about The Waltons as a cure for the winter blues.
One time Elizabeth asked her daddy where she came from. He answered, “From behind one of your mama’s smiles.” IF THAT’S NOT ENOUGH TO WARM YOUR HEART, well I just pity you, then.
Going to Walton’s Mountain in My Mind
I remember Grandpa teaching Mary Ellen how to dance before her prom. Or Jason writing a song to the rhythm of Grandma ironing sheets. Their home is always immaculate despite the size of the family – I guess when you’re poor, you don’t have money for useless shit to leave laying around.
The Depression and Prohibition were a bad combination but inspired so many stories that make me feel better when I’m depressed. It’s nice to know things could be worse, but it’s Hope’s Imperative that one can imagine a time when people were made better by adversity. I don’t see a lot of that today.
Maybe what we need is a new Depression to make people honorable and kind again. Maybe that's the goal of "Family Values." Make us all poor to bring out the best in us. And George Bush is leading the way!
Or maybe nothing ever really changes – just the names and severity of the frailties that wear away our tender edges. But bitterness didn’t poison the Waltons.
Others cracked under the pressure of the Depression and then the wars. Hunger and hopelessness seep into the tiny cracks of broken dreams – over time they freeze and break them into bits. Not everyone gets a mountain to provide timber and food. The Waltons never forget that.
They never avoid a person broken with need – even circus freaks or bootleggers. They put the phrase, “Charity sees the need, not the cause” in motion.
They greet all the strangers and hitchhikers they pass on the road. They take in orphans, unemployed uncles, foundlings, refugees from the war. But the desperadoes rarely steal their chickens or refuse to make a bed. No one mistakes kindness for weakness with John Walton around.
But I can’t help think things have changed from “the good old days.” I see MTV and think the world has become what my grandparent’s predicted: A cesspool seething with gritty sex and glittery lies. All vanity and no pride. All sex and no love. All money and no wealth. Abundance devouring us.
I get so much sex spam that I haven’t had to have sex for years. Oh and love – it seems impossible. But Olivia and John’s dependence enhanced, not destroyed, their relationship. With so many mouths to feed, they needed each other so much and were never self-sufficient and smug enough to justify bailing during the bad times.
When I was in college all we heard about was the Industrial Revolution. If I my period was late, I blamed the Industrial Revolution. But before then, everyone did business with someone they knew. Ike Godsey just wanted a good life – not an empire. They wanted something to be proud of. To put their names, not faces, on.
Hard times didn’t allow for many mom and pop enterprises but back-breaking labor makes for a proud spine. You didn’t live in houses built by strangers. You knew highways were evil long before they were built. You knew there was no way to fix what wars break. I respect them for what they endured. But I love them because lean times never hardened them.
Good-Night, ya bastards
Winter winds rattle the storm windows and I imagine I’m eating angel food cake at night with Grandma and Jason, talking to the latest stranger to have appeared uninvited into our lives to challenge our souls and touch our hearts. Yum.
Does it matter that Walton’s Mountain never existed? That it was called Spenser’s Mountain in a ‘60s movie first? That they rolled two brothers into Ben and John-Boy’s name was Earl and he went on to create Falcon Crest? HOW DO YOU GO FROM WALTON’S MOUNTAIN TO FALCON CREST? Wait. I don’t want to know.
Myths eventually melt and get moving again, but it doesn’t change the feeling the theme song has over me. I know flowers rise from winter’s foulness. I can see moss where there was once ice.
Oh to live on Walton’s Mountain
With Ike Godsey and his General Store
You can be sinful on Walton’s Mountain
And they’re gonna love you even more.
Get the recipe for Livvy’s famous Applesauce Cake with Whiskey Frosting:
http://www.the-waltons.com/cake.html
Friday, February 25, 2005
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Rest In Prison: The Murder of Timmy
For most Pittsburghers, the news of Timothy Boris' death came in about five seconds on the TV news or in a two-inch story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Inmate, age 40, strangled."
Maybe you momentarily imagined the horror of being murdered in prison. More that likely you didn't think it was such a big deal. A dead convict doesn't inspire much sympathy.
I found out about Timmy's death when me and my roommate, Madge, were walking out the door to get a bus on the morning of Sept. 12. She mentioned that my sister left a message on the answering machine saying Timmy had been found strangled.
The news literally knocked me to my knees. I rocked back and forth on the floor, rolled up in a little ball, "no" ricocheting in my head while "I'm sorry" repeated in whispers.
My reaction stunned Madge. She hadn't expected me to take it so hard. I hadn't even seen Timmy for five years. She knew he and I had been engaged 17 years ago, that he was the man I went to jail with. She knew that I loved him, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. Until I heard of his death. Every ounce of love returned the second I realized I'd never see him again.
I'd started writing to him again this summer. I received a letter from him the week before asking me if I'd seen any good concerts or had any “good & wild sex,” asking me to send him pictures, telling me that I was always the crazy one...
I jumped up to call the prison. After getting a busy signal for 10 minutes, a spokesman at SCI-Pittsburgh confirmed the story and had nothing else to say.
Timmy was dead. It was the loneliest feeling, thinking no one cared about someone who had meant so much to me. Both his parents and one brother were dead. One brother's in federal prison. The other, he had no contact with. And he never had many friends. He'd been in trouble since he was 12 and spent most of his life in prison.
Besides, people who were friends with him for long ended up strung-out and in jail, too. Timmy had the addict's touch. It wasn't always golden, but it didn't always bruise.
Long drug's journey
In 1898, Friedrich Bayer and Co. introduced Heroin commercially. The pioneer pharmacologist Heinrich Dreser named it after the German word for "heroic." It had great potential for treating coughs and chest pains during a time when pneumonia and tuberculosis were two leading causes of death.
Narcotics were also prescribed to treat acute discomfort and stress. By 1900, there were an estimated 300,000 opiate-dependent persons in the United States. Older white women from the middle and upper classes constituted about two-thirds of them. Disabled Civil War veterans comprised most of the remaining one-third.
Both groups were treated with tolerance and kindness. Neither presented major social problems. Addiction was regarded as merely unfortunate. Doctors supplied drugs to these groups, and sanatoria were established for experimenting with questionable "cures."
However, the chronic nature of addiction was evident. Playwright Eugene O'Neill's mother, Mary Tyrone, depicted in the autobiographical drama, Long Day's Journey Into Night, was an addict. O'Neill's father understood addiction, the high relapse rate, which contributed to his refusal to send her to a sanitarium.
Doctors started using caution when writing prescriptions for narcotics. Incidence of addiction in both groups disappeared when they aged and died.
Drugstarved cowboys
It was a week night in July, 1979. I was routinely drinking down at Bob's Billboard Bar in Overbrook. I hadn't bothered putting make-up on.
I saw a group of strangers in the back room. I noticed Timmy, whose long, feathered hair was just like my therapist's. My friend Mike knew him ’cause his brother (dead, too) used to shoot dope with him. He introduced us, noting that Timmy had just gotten out of prison after two years, elbowing me in the side, saying he hadn't had a woman yet.
I looked over at Timmy, sitting back so relaxed and confident, smiling right through me like he knew I was going to change all that. I couldn't resist. We spent every night together after that. For as long as we could anyway.
Our third night together, he brought over some Percodan and a syringe. He put the yellow tablets in a shot glass and squirted warm water on them. Drew the liquid up through a tiny piece of cotton.
Even as I write this, I can feel that sickening warmth, the tight tingles. He stuck the needle in the skin on the back of my hand. I was finally a real drug addict.
Soon my nose itched incessantly. Soon my stomach ached, my skin paled and sweat until I finally gave in and vomited. I didn't really like it, but I loved Timmy. And he loved opiates.
Soon, we were traveling around the country, passing prescriptions for Dilaudid (a synthetic morphine) Timmy wrote on “scripts” he smuggled out of prison in a psychology book.
Soon I had to shoot dope so I wouldn't start going through withdrawal and throw up. Soon I was shooting dope in the middle of the night so I could go back sleep.
Soon, I was one jail cell away from Timmy with over 180 years worth of drug-related charges pressing against me. More than Manuel Noriega.
The wrong arm of the law
By the 1980s, there were an estimated 500,000 narcotics users in this country. While this estimate represents a 66-percent increase over the number of addicts in the late 19th century, the per capita rate was much higher then because the population has more than doubled.
And while addiction never changed, when the composition of the addicted population changed to poverty-stricken, largely nonwhite people, it became a social issue instead of a medical one.
In the Feb. 12 issue of The National Review, William. F. Buckley Jr. writes, "We are speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from consumers, is responsible for nearly 50 percent of the million Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50 percent of the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000 policemen — yet a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect."
U.S. correctional populations grew more than 2-1/2 times from 1980 to 1993. In 1993 about 2.6 percent of the U.S. population — 4.9 million adults — were on parole, on probation, or in jails or prisons, an increase of 3 million since 1980. State and local police made an estimated 1.1 million arrests for drug law violations in 1993.
The Federal drug control budget increased from $1.5 billion in fiscal 1981 to $13.2 billion in fiscal 1995. And yet, according to data from the 1993 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, 77 million Americans age 12 or older (37 percent of the population) admitted using an illicit drug at least once.
Drug legislation was never concerned with the addict. Beginning with the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, passed to fulfill U.S. obligations to uphold the international agreement of the 1912 Hague Convention designed to curtail the opium trade, increased legal pressure on addicts only increases the devastation of addiction.
The people who are really in denial about addiction are those in the recovery industry, concurrently damning addicts as being spiritually diseased while claiming to know how to save them. When addicts can't stay clean, we say they relapsed. In no other area of medical science do they place the failure of treatment on the patient with such zeal.
Cocaine addicts in Mexico participate in a treatment program where they have frontal lobotomies to have the pleasure center of their brains removed, as an experimental cure for their addiction.
They continued to relapse.
Higher love
The people who ran the Kansas jail I was in knew I wasn't a hardened criminal and were really nice. On Christmas day, church people brought gifts of citrus fruit and stacks of Readers Digest. The sheriff even ordered pizza for us.
Even doing such soft time, it was hard for me to keep it together. It's impossible to describe how it feels to be caged, to be arrested, strip searched, finger printed, photographed. It's the final stage of the complete depersonalization of an addict. I thought about suicide constantly.
The jailers decided to let Timmy ask me to marry him. On Valentine's day, 1980, I had to go to a psychiatric evaluation and would be in the county where Timmy was jailed. We got arrested with $400 so they let a jeweler visit him.
I hadn't seen him in months. Just wrote 10-page letters every day. Really bad poetry on pictures I would draw with colored pencils my mom sent. And not having seen him in so long, I was shaking. He had me sit on his lap and slipped the engagement ring on my finger without even asking.
I was released to a rehab. Lived with nuns in a halfway house for a month. I came back to Pittsburgh, was brutally attacked by a man who paid me to drop charges. I took it and bought a plane ticket back to Kansas to visit Timmy in the state prison he'd been moved to.
Just being caught in the state would be a violation of my probation, landing be back in jail for a 1-5 year sentence. But when he asked me to smuggle him in some Percs, I didn't object. I just wanted to make it easier on him.
By some strange fate, Timmy's lawyer had gotten him released, even despite his parole violations, to go to a rehab in St. Louis when I was there. We made love on the Greyhound bus. Couldn't stop kissing. We were together. I thought all our problems were over.
When we got to St. Louis, Timmy asked me to pass a script for some Percs. Up until then, I didn't understand addiction. I thought I was all he needed. The last time I ever kissed him was when I was boarding a bus back to Pittsburgh. He was back in jail within a month for passing bad scripts.
Ever since Timmy was killed, I keep wondering how I escaped his world. Mainly, I thought opiates and the people who did them were a drag. Junkies nodded off with books in their hands and called it reading. I shot dope and went to the mall. It was boring.
I never was dependent on the sub-culture for friends like Timmy. I was in and out in five months. I got out of jail and went back to my friends at the Billboard who liked to drink and listen to southern rock. Have fun. Smoke dope. Our drugs were acceptable.
I was also very lucky that most of my family were addicts (who are now in recovery) so they didn't shut me out.
But when I went to community college, I had my first dose of social acceptability. I was told I was bright and had a way with words. I found something to be good at and people to help me believe in my own abilities. Timmy just happened to be very good at doing drugs. But not getting them.
His final crime was robbing the Equibank in Brentwood, but did he deserve to die for it? Do we really live in a country that nods its tacit head in approval when a convict is murdered? Is a prison sentence supposed to be a death sentence?
I was so casual about when I'd go visit Timmy, when I’d finally see him after so many years. He wasn't due to get out of jail until 2012. Now I'll never see him again. A man everyone thought ruined my life. But no matter what, I knew he loved me. He never asked me to do anything he wasn't doing.
He was the first person who made me feel beautiful. To want to show me everything. And even in one of his final letters, he said he still felt the bond we had even after all these years. At least he knew I was still thinking about him.
On the day I heard of his death, it turned suddenly cold and rainy, but I kept finding myself at the kitchen door, looking up into the sky. Sometimes I felt like he was in every drop of rain landing so soft and cool on my face.
I saw a beautiful, bright orange butterfly. It was having a hard time flying in the rain but wouldn't go rest in the tree. I kept thinking, "Hey you stupid butterfly, go rest on a branch, the leaves will keep you dry," but it seemed to have some destination I couldn't see or understand.
Each drop of rain was so heavy on such delicate wings. I went back inside.
Timothy Boris was pronounced dead on Tuesday, Sept. 9 at 4:02 a.m. According to an SCI-Pittsburgh official, the Allegheny County Coroner ruled the cause of death was strangulation. Boris' brother, Dale, saw pictures of the body and said half his head and faced were caved in and that the cause of death appeared to be blunt trauma to the head. Timothy Boris' memorial service was held on Sept. 21, his birthday. He would have been 41.
The Killing Bus
After making my way through a crowded bus I step down into the stairwell of the center doors and see an alarming yellow and black sign that says, "To avoid physical injury, don't stand in step well. Doors may open unexpectedly." The industrial-disaster look of the sign makes me back up, but as I move towards the aisle packed with the unforgiving faces of those who don't want to make room for anyone, I figure I'll take my chances with the doors.
The bus picks up speed and wobbles through a bend. I grab the cold stainless steel railing and feel this strange clink under my hand. Oh yeah. I'm wearing the engagement ring Timmy gave me.
It's been weeks since he was murdered in Western Penitentiary. It's weird, but I can only wear the ring now that he's really gone. He just couldn't stay out of trouble. I never dared remembering how in love we'd been when he was still alive. It's all I think about lately. It seems so strange that the ring still fits, but I'll never take it off again.
Every time the bus hits a bump, I feel the same clinking traveling through me in tiny chills. I thought I already said good-bye to Timmy so many times, but that's when he was still alive, when there was still hope for ... well, I don't even know anymore. And part of me is so mad at him for providing me with yet another adventure in pain.
Oh man. He was beaten to death. My pain? Oh Timmy, I'm so sorry.
Shit. I said that out loud. No outbursts on a crowded bus. No room for sympathy. But it's just that I never got a chance to see him after we started writing again this summer. I just.
I just didn't want to visit him in prison again. I remember watching him be humiliated by guards who act like they think the "animals" do, but since they're being paid to do it, it's okay.
Then the visit would be over. I'd have to leave but Timmy couldn't. Outside again, I'd spend an hour staring at the prison, knowing he was just inside the walls, knowing there was nothing in the world I could do to free him. It was excruciating.
People yammer on with simpleminded shit about how you shouldn't do the crime if you can't do the time, but let's call a spade a spade, we're all guilty of something whether it's fudging numbers on an insurance claim or tax form, or drinking and driving (even on St. Patrick's day), or taking your wife's pain medicine or buying a little oral sex. I'd bet a million dollars that every American has committed a crime or is related to, has had sex with, has been arrested by or voted for someone who has.
Wait. Betting? I just proposed a crime. Gambling's illegal. Well unless it's run by a church or the state. Tricky business ... but vengeance is mine, saith the law. So I keep thinking I'm supposed to demand to know who murdered Timmy and have him subjected to the full weight of the law: death. But seeing someone else killed — I don't understand how that could bring anyone peace. And not because I don't want justice.
I just feel like so many people killed him. Before he was a habitual criminal, he was a little kid in school with his desk pulled away from the others and stuck in a corner. He was treated like I was. Like my son was. Like my friend who ended up a crack whore was. We all had what medical science is calling AD/HD. Hyperactive disorder. And we all ended up in jail after continually being isolated by inept authority figures who didn't even have the ethical presence to admit they didn't know how to deal with us. I'm assuming that they cared. Maybe I'm assuming too much.
But, as always, those with the power to change or evade the law have a very privileged perspective from which they decide who deserves to rot or die in prison. They're oh-so civilized when discussing terminating people they've never known or loved or kissed, never heard crying in the middle or night begging for help.
Nothing will bring Timmy back. Or Robert Brown, a 37 year-old inmate who died in Western Penn only a week after Timmy. Prison officials said Brown hit his head playing basketball. Must've been some game.
Suing the prison might prevent future deaths, for which the warden is ultimately responsible. Discipline-addicted, capital-punishment proponents are fond of saying "an eye for an eye" and believe that punishing by killing them deters future killings. I know it's ludicrous to suggest electrocuting the warden, even though, if such a law were in effect, by their own logic, Timmy and Brown would still be alive ....
I see a little black bug on the bus window and smash it without even thinking. Gee. I must be learning.
Holy Shit
A man's bright blue eyes are suddenly inches from mine at the bus stop. I mean right in my face, he asks, "Have you been saved by the love of Jesus?"
At the bus stop? Is this a trick question?
I open my mouth to talk but nothing comes. To explain would take hours. The answer is yes, but not in a way he'd think was right. This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. But he seems like a nice enough man so I just smile, raise my eyebrows in some kind of apology, pat him on the shoulder and tell him there's no hope for me, that he's wasting his time.
He immediately believes me, which is kinda insulting but still a relief, and starts to move on. Then I hear a voice snarling in a tone tensing every muscle in my neck, "Get. Your. Hands. Off. My husband."
A woman's irate blue eyes are suddenly blaring within inches of mine. I guess witnessing for the Lord hardened her, but she picked the wrong day to start shit with this sinner. I stare right back. How dare she talk to me like I'm some whore just 'cause I don't want to hear their shit?
I answer her ugly accusation, "Oh, you got the love of Jesus in your heart, don't you? I mean you wouldn't hate me just because I don't believe in God the same way, right? Oh yeah, I can see the love of the Lord in you, sister."
She gives the classic holier-than-thou return, "I don't hate you, I feel sorry for you."
My voice tightens, "Because I'm not like you? Because the thought of billions of non-believers burning in hell doesn't bring me peace?"
The husband comes back, flapping his sacred prop at me like he wants to hit me with it, "The Bible is truth!"
I ain't afraid of no book. I get in his puckered and pulsing face: "Well if it's the truth, why are there so many versions of it? I mean are you really ignorant enough to believe that after 2,000 years, after being in the hands of so many political bodies, that it hasn't been changed?"
He answers, puttering: "It's been changed, oh it's changed but the truth doesn't. You need Jesus, lady."
My voice is trembling, louder, out of my blues I say, "A friend of mine was recently killed in prison, where was your Jesus for him?"
Quiet swallows every sound. The holy hasslers drop their heads and move along like they didn't even hear me.
When the going gets tough, they get going all right. No answers for why Timmy couldn't even die a free man, why so many lives amount to nothing because of assholes why think they have a right to tell others how to live. Who think they have the ultimate authority to decide who is valuable according to their tiny truths riddled with convenient contradictions, enough to justify unlimited amounts of brutality, even murder. And then they treat me like I'm decrepit because I won't go for it?
No, they're not getting away that easy. I feel like I've been waiting for this moment my whole life. Time to commit the ultimate sin. I look over at them and say, louder than I expected: "So just fuck you. Oops! I said "fuck you" to Christians. I'll burn for sure now."
A teen-aged girl sitting on top of the trash can says "I heard that."
Shit. That's all teen-agers ever hear.
My turn to drop my head. Arguing with Fundamentalists at the bus stop, Kathy Jo? That's a bad sign. And I still can't stop trembling. A bad sign. Even if I did amuse the hell out of a bunch of teen-agers. A bad sign.
But I don't know how to act. This whole thing with Timmy. I don't know. Where's the bus? I just want a bus.
I bury my chin in my chest, grateful that I can hide inside my long red hair. One thought repeats itself in my head: I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. The words are a mantra. Like if I say it enough, I'll be forgiven. And I'm sorry for so many things, I'm not even sure what I'm apologizing for anymore.
I spent the week in the excruciating process of trying to write an informative cover story about a tragedy I just can't understand. Can't even believe happened. I mean what I'm feeling isn't shit compared to what Timmy went through.
America, right now I hate you. I'm sorry. Oh, so here's a packed Carrick bus. Whatever. I'll just get on like the most spent bitch alive. Even the teen-agers seem scared of me. Good.
As I nudge by people to get to the back, I'm sure to mumble "excuse me." The cubby hole near the center doors is vacant. I step down in there, put my headphones on, look out the window and disappear into Timmy's favorite song, Gregg Allman's "Queen of Hearts."
I finally stop shaking even though I have a feeling it's going to be a long ride home.
Ashes to Ashes, Bus to Bus
I feel like I've been standing on the same bus for weeks. Like I'm never going to get home. Like I've been on the bus for years. Like I won't even recognize my house. Like my skin has grown a filmy new layer made from the sweat and breath of everyone on the bus — fragments of cigarettes, spearmint chewing gum, Arby's Horsy sauce cling to my face. Accumulating. I can't breathe. Overheated. Bones grinding against each other, kneecaps threatening to pop as I shift my weight. And yet, the closer I get to my stop, the heavier, not lighter I become.
If I looked like I felt, there'd be broken springs hanging from me, limbs dangling cracked. Fingers missing. Lay me down, my eyes clink shut. Pick me up, they open, stare straight ahead. Pick me up and shake me, hear the sound of brokenness. Drop me again. It's just that the rattling is so startling. And each time, it gets louder. But each time, the floor's the same.
Except I'm too smart and strong to suffer. And now that I've been off welfare for almost two years, now that I'm such a success well, survivors don't whine, right? It's just so fucked. The whole time I was on welfare, I thought if I could just get off it, that everything would change. Well, it did. I've never been so alone in my life.
Oh what is it about the bus that makes everything so dramatic? Well I guess it's just that other people can see me. So while I feel like my legs are going to give way, I have to stand here as if I got my shit together so severely I don't even have to hold on to a rail to keep my balance. I love myself for being able to pull it off. I hate the world for making me have to. For making me feel like I'm not entitled to my weaknesses. Like I'm a loser or liar for being so spent. Like I'm asking them for something.
I can't wait to get home where no one can see me. But I'm going to what is my very own apartment for the first time in my whole life. I've always dreamed of having my own place, but I thought it would happen after my son was in college, not after he was in jail and went to live with his father. And I never dreamed my wish would come true right after a man I had loved was murdered. Killed. Died. In prison. Timmy was always gone but I mean he's never coming back this time.
Gosh... and just three days after that, it was time for my roommate Madge to move on up to New York City. I have to keep telling myself that she didn't die because it's just so weird that she's suddenly gone. She was my bestest friend. I'd never have gotten through losing my son without her. But now she's gone. I did have Leo this summer, even went to get papers to keep him but sent him back out to the country again. And Timmy, I'd just found out where he was. All gone. Every night I sleep in the bed that was ours, thinking how enormous it is. How small I'm getting.
The bus continues up the hill, stopping often to let people off but it never seems to be any less crowded. I look out the window and get a serious case of car envy. I can't go through the drills that people in cars do. I see them screaming at no one, or losing their minds and beating on steering wheels, safely locked inside steel and glass. I wonder how many times a day they're tempted to drive off cliffs or head-on into other cars.
If I had a car tonight, well. I'd probably still be heading home to have a few cocktails. Even though they say if you drink alone, that you're an alcoholic. But what if you only drink when you're alone? And I can't believe I'm thinking this, but what does it matter anyway?
I feel so differently about dying. Like if Timmy can survive being beat to death and strangled in prison, well I mean he didn't survive but he was able to die. Just like Jack Nicholson said in that Ironweed movie, you die when you can. And now I feel like he died just so I would know it wasn't so bad, that I could do it.
Timmy hurt me so much and I don't hate him so how dare people that never knew him react with satisfaction to his killing? I don't hate criminals and I've been raped, robbed — man, twice in this past year, people that I've known have stolen money off me after I let them stay at my house. I just don't take it personally anymore.
The bus picks up speed, the aisles are clearing, I could even sit down. But even if I would have gotten a seat tonight, it wouldn't help the tiny aches keeping me awake. Besides, in my entire life on the bus, never once has it failed to not take me to my stop. And that thought restores my knees. Loosens my lungs. Yes... a breeze sneaks in under the center doors. My face cools and shrinks.
I'm all alone but almost home... ashes to ashes, bus to bus.
Maybe you momentarily imagined the horror of being murdered in prison. More that likely you didn't think it was such a big deal. A dead convict doesn't inspire much sympathy.
I found out about Timmy's death when me and my roommate, Madge, were walking out the door to get a bus on the morning of Sept. 12. She mentioned that my sister left a message on the answering machine saying Timmy had been found strangled.
The news literally knocked me to my knees. I rocked back and forth on the floor, rolled up in a little ball, "no" ricocheting in my head while "I'm sorry" repeated in whispers.
My reaction stunned Madge. She hadn't expected me to take it so hard. I hadn't even seen Timmy for five years. She knew he and I had been engaged 17 years ago, that he was the man I went to jail with. She knew that I loved him, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. Until I heard of his death. Every ounce of love returned the second I realized I'd never see him again.
I'd started writing to him again this summer. I received a letter from him the week before asking me if I'd seen any good concerts or had any “good & wild sex,” asking me to send him pictures, telling me that I was always the crazy one...
I jumped up to call the prison. After getting a busy signal for 10 minutes, a spokesman at SCI-Pittsburgh confirmed the story and had nothing else to say.
Timmy was dead. It was the loneliest feeling, thinking no one cared about someone who had meant so much to me. Both his parents and one brother were dead. One brother's in federal prison. The other, he had no contact with. And he never had many friends. He'd been in trouble since he was 12 and spent most of his life in prison.
Besides, people who were friends with him for long ended up strung-out and in jail, too. Timmy had the addict's touch. It wasn't always golden, but it didn't always bruise.
Long drug's journey
In 1898, Friedrich Bayer and Co. introduced Heroin commercially. The pioneer pharmacologist Heinrich Dreser named it after the German word for "heroic." It had great potential for treating coughs and chest pains during a time when pneumonia and tuberculosis were two leading causes of death.
Narcotics were also prescribed to treat acute discomfort and stress. By 1900, there were an estimated 300,000 opiate-dependent persons in the United States. Older white women from the middle and upper classes constituted about two-thirds of them. Disabled Civil War veterans comprised most of the remaining one-third.
Both groups were treated with tolerance and kindness. Neither presented major social problems. Addiction was regarded as merely unfortunate. Doctors supplied drugs to these groups, and sanatoria were established for experimenting with questionable "cures."
However, the chronic nature of addiction was evident. Playwright Eugene O'Neill's mother, Mary Tyrone, depicted in the autobiographical drama, Long Day's Journey Into Night, was an addict. O'Neill's father understood addiction, the high relapse rate, which contributed to his refusal to send her to a sanitarium.
Doctors started using caution when writing prescriptions for narcotics. Incidence of addiction in both groups disappeared when they aged and died.
Drugstarved cowboys
It was a week night in July, 1979. I was routinely drinking down at Bob's Billboard Bar in Overbrook. I hadn't bothered putting make-up on.
I saw a group of strangers in the back room. I noticed Timmy, whose long, feathered hair was just like my therapist's. My friend Mike knew him ’cause his brother (dead, too) used to shoot dope with him. He introduced us, noting that Timmy had just gotten out of prison after two years, elbowing me in the side, saying he hadn't had a woman yet.
I looked over at Timmy, sitting back so relaxed and confident, smiling right through me like he knew I was going to change all that. I couldn't resist. We spent every night together after that. For as long as we could anyway.
Our third night together, he brought over some Percodan and a syringe. He put the yellow tablets in a shot glass and squirted warm water on them. Drew the liquid up through a tiny piece of cotton.
Even as I write this, I can feel that sickening warmth, the tight tingles. He stuck the needle in the skin on the back of my hand. I was finally a real drug addict.
Soon my nose itched incessantly. Soon my stomach ached, my skin paled and sweat until I finally gave in and vomited. I didn't really like it, but I loved Timmy. And he loved opiates.
Soon, we were traveling around the country, passing prescriptions for Dilaudid (a synthetic morphine) Timmy wrote on “scripts” he smuggled out of prison in a psychology book.
Soon I had to shoot dope so I wouldn't start going through withdrawal and throw up. Soon I was shooting dope in the middle of the night so I could go back sleep.
Soon, I was one jail cell away from Timmy with over 180 years worth of drug-related charges pressing against me. More than Manuel Noriega.
The wrong arm of the law
By the 1980s, there were an estimated 500,000 narcotics users in this country. While this estimate represents a 66-percent increase over the number of addicts in the late 19th century, the per capita rate was much higher then because the population has more than doubled.
And while addiction never changed, when the composition of the addicted population changed to poverty-stricken, largely nonwhite people, it became a social issue instead of a medical one.
In the Feb. 12 issue of The National Review, William. F. Buckley Jr. writes, "We are speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from consumers, is responsible for nearly 50 percent of the million Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50 percent of the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000 policemen — yet a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect."
U.S. correctional populations grew more than 2-1/2 times from 1980 to 1993. In 1993 about 2.6 percent of the U.S. population — 4.9 million adults — were on parole, on probation, or in jails or prisons, an increase of 3 million since 1980. State and local police made an estimated 1.1 million arrests for drug law violations in 1993.
The Federal drug control budget increased from $1.5 billion in fiscal 1981 to $13.2 billion in fiscal 1995. And yet, according to data from the 1993 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, 77 million Americans age 12 or older (37 percent of the population) admitted using an illicit drug at least once.
Drug legislation was never concerned with the addict. Beginning with the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, passed to fulfill U.S. obligations to uphold the international agreement of the 1912 Hague Convention designed to curtail the opium trade, increased legal pressure on addicts only increases the devastation of addiction.
The people who are really in denial about addiction are those in the recovery industry, concurrently damning addicts as being spiritually diseased while claiming to know how to save them. When addicts can't stay clean, we say they relapsed. In no other area of medical science do they place the failure of treatment on the patient with such zeal.
Cocaine addicts in Mexico participate in a treatment program where they have frontal lobotomies to have the pleasure center of their brains removed, as an experimental cure for their addiction.
They continued to relapse.
Higher love
The people who ran the Kansas jail I was in knew I wasn't a hardened criminal and were really nice. On Christmas day, church people brought gifts of citrus fruit and stacks of Readers Digest. The sheriff even ordered pizza for us.
Even doing such soft time, it was hard for me to keep it together. It's impossible to describe how it feels to be caged, to be arrested, strip searched, finger printed, photographed. It's the final stage of the complete depersonalization of an addict. I thought about suicide constantly.
The jailers decided to let Timmy ask me to marry him. On Valentine's day, 1980, I had to go to a psychiatric evaluation and would be in the county where Timmy was jailed. We got arrested with $400 so they let a jeweler visit him.
I hadn't seen him in months. Just wrote 10-page letters every day. Really bad poetry on pictures I would draw with colored pencils my mom sent. And not having seen him in so long, I was shaking. He had me sit on his lap and slipped the engagement ring on my finger without even asking.
I was released to a rehab. Lived with nuns in a halfway house for a month. I came back to Pittsburgh, was brutally attacked by a man who paid me to drop charges. I took it and bought a plane ticket back to Kansas to visit Timmy in the state prison he'd been moved to.
Just being caught in the state would be a violation of my probation, landing be back in jail for a 1-5 year sentence. But when he asked me to smuggle him in some Percs, I didn't object. I just wanted to make it easier on him.
By some strange fate, Timmy's lawyer had gotten him released, even despite his parole violations, to go to a rehab in St. Louis when I was there. We made love on the Greyhound bus. Couldn't stop kissing. We were together. I thought all our problems were over.
When we got to St. Louis, Timmy asked me to pass a script for some Percs. Up until then, I didn't understand addiction. I thought I was all he needed. The last time I ever kissed him was when I was boarding a bus back to Pittsburgh. He was back in jail within a month for passing bad scripts.
Ever since Timmy was killed, I keep wondering how I escaped his world. Mainly, I thought opiates and the people who did them were a drag. Junkies nodded off with books in their hands and called it reading. I shot dope and went to the mall. It was boring.
I never was dependent on the sub-culture for friends like Timmy. I was in and out in five months. I got out of jail and went back to my friends at the Billboard who liked to drink and listen to southern rock. Have fun. Smoke dope. Our drugs were acceptable.
I was also very lucky that most of my family were addicts (who are now in recovery) so they didn't shut me out.
But when I went to community college, I had my first dose of social acceptability. I was told I was bright and had a way with words. I found something to be good at and people to help me believe in my own abilities. Timmy just happened to be very good at doing drugs. But not getting them.
His final crime was robbing the Equibank in Brentwood, but did he deserve to die for it? Do we really live in a country that nods its tacit head in approval when a convict is murdered? Is a prison sentence supposed to be a death sentence?
I was so casual about when I'd go visit Timmy, when I’d finally see him after so many years. He wasn't due to get out of jail until 2012. Now I'll never see him again. A man everyone thought ruined my life. But no matter what, I knew he loved me. He never asked me to do anything he wasn't doing.
He was the first person who made me feel beautiful. To want to show me everything. And even in one of his final letters, he said he still felt the bond we had even after all these years. At least he knew I was still thinking about him.
On the day I heard of his death, it turned suddenly cold and rainy, but I kept finding myself at the kitchen door, looking up into the sky. Sometimes I felt like he was in every drop of rain landing so soft and cool on my face.
I saw a beautiful, bright orange butterfly. It was having a hard time flying in the rain but wouldn't go rest in the tree. I kept thinking, "Hey you stupid butterfly, go rest on a branch, the leaves will keep you dry," but it seemed to have some destination I couldn't see or understand.
Each drop of rain was so heavy on such delicate wings. I went back inside.
Timothy Boris was pronounced dead on Tuesday, Sept. 9 at 4:02 a.m. According to an SCI-Pittsburgh official, the Allegheny County Coroner ruled the cause of death was strangulation. Boris' brother, Dale, saw pictures of the body and said half his head and faced were caved in and that the cause of death appeared to be blunt trauma to the head. Timothy Boris' memorial service was held on Sept. 21, his birthday. He would have been 41.
The Killing Bus
After making my way through a crowded bus I step down into the stairwell of the center doors and see an alarming yellow and black sign that says, "To avoid physical injury, don't stand in step well. Doors may open unexpectedly." The industrial-disaster look of the sign makes me back up, but as I move towards the aisle packed with the unforgiving faces of those who don't want to make room for anyone, I figure I'll take my chances with the doors.
The bus picks up speed and wobbles through a bend. I grab the cold stainless steel railing and feel this strange clink under my hand. Oh yeah. I'm wearing the engagement ring Timmy gave me.
It's been weeks since he was murdered in Western Penitentiary. It's weird, but I can only wear the ring now that he's really gone. He just couldn't stay out of trouble. I never dared remembering how in love we'd been when he was still alive. It's all I think about lately. It seems so strange that the ring still fits, but I'll never take it off again.
Every time the bus hits a bump, I feel the same clinking traveling through me in tiny chills. I thought I already said good-bye to Timmy so many times, but that's when he was still alive, when there was still hope for ... well, I don't even know anymore. And part of me is so mad at him for providing me with yet another adventure in pain.
Oh man. He was beaten to death. My pain? Oh Timmy, I'm so sorry.
Shit. I said that out loud. No outbursts on a crowded bus. No room for sympathy. But it's just that I never got a chance to see him after we started writing again this summer. I just.
I just didn't want to visit him in prison again. I remember watching him be humiliated by guards who act like they think the "animals" do, but since they're being paid to do it, it's okay.
Then the visit would be over. I'd have to leave but Timmy couldn't. Outside again, I'd spend an hour staring at the prison, knowing he was just inside the walls, knowing there was nothing in the world I could do to free him. It was excruciating.
People yammer on with simpleminded shit about how you shouldn't do the crime if you can't do the time, but let's call a spade a spade, we're all guilty of something whether it's fudging numbers on an insurance claim or tax form, or drinking and driving (even on St. Patrick's day), or taking your wife's pain medicine or buying a little oral sex. I'd bet a million dollars that every American has committed a crime or is related to, has had sex with, has been arrested by or voted for someone who has.
Wait. Betting? I just proposed a crime. Gambling's illegal. Well unless it's run by a church or the state. Tricky business ... but vengeance is mine, saith the law. So I keep thinking I'm supposed to demand to know who murdered Timmy and have him subjected to the full weight of the law: death. But seeing someone else killed — I don't understand how that could bring anyone peace. And not because I don't want justice.
I just feel like so many people killed him. Before he was a habitual criminal, he was a little kid in school with his desk pulled away from the others and stuck in a corner. He was treated like I was. Like my son was. Like my friend who ended up a crack whore was. We all had what medical science is calling AD/HD. Hyperactive disorder. And we all ended up in jail after continually being isolated by inept authority figures who didn't even have the ethical presence to admit they didn't know how to deal with us. I'm assuming that they cared. Maybe I'm assuming too much.
But, as always, those with the power to change or evade the law have a very privileged perspective from which they decide who deserves to rot or die in prison. They're oh-so civilized when discussing terminating people they've never known or loved or kissed, never heard crying in the middle or night begging for help.
Nothing will bring Timmy back. Or Robert Brown, a 37 year-old inmate who died in Western Penn only a week after Timmy. Prison officials said Brown hit his head playing basketball. Must've been some game.
Suing the prison might prevent future deaths, for which the warden is ultimately responsible. Discipline-addicted, capital-punishment proponents are fond of saying "an eye for an eye" and believe that punishing by killing them deters future killings. I know it's ludicrous to suggest electrocuting the warden, even though, if such a law were in effect, by their own logic, Timmy and Brown would still be alive ....
I see a little black bug on the bus window and smash it without even thinking. Gee. I must be learning.
Holy Shit
A man's bright blue eyes are suddenly inches from mine at the bus stop. I mean right in my face, he asks, "Have you been saved by the love of Jesus?"
At the bus stop? Is this a trick question?
I open my mouth to talk but nothing comes. To explain would take hours. The answer is yes, but not in a way he'd think was right. This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. But he seems like a nice enough man so I just smile, raise my eyebrows in some kind of apology, pat him on the shoulder and tell him there's no hope for me, that he's wasting his time.
He immediately believes me, which is kinda insulting but still a relief, and starts to move on. Then I hear a voice snarling in a tone tensing every muscle in my neck, "Get. Your. Hands. Off. My husband."
A woman's irate blue eyes are suddenly blaring within inches of mine. I guess witnessing for the Lord hardened her, but she picked the wrong day to start shit with this sinner. I stare right back. How dare she talk to me like I'm some whore just 'cause I don't want to hear their shit?
I answer her ugly accusation, "Oh, you got the love of Jesus in your heart, don't you? I mean you wouldn't hate me just because I don't believe in God the same way, right? Oh yeah, I can see the love of the Lord in you, sister."
She gives the classic holier-than-thou return, "I don't hate you, I feel sorry for you."
My voice tightens, "Because I'm not like you? Because the thought of billions of non-believers burning in hell doesn't bring me peace?"
The husband comes back, flapping his sacred prop at me like he wants to hit me with it, "The Bible is truth!"
I ain't afraid of no book. I get in his puckered and pulsing face: "Well if it's the truth, why are there so many versions of it? I mean are you really ignorant enough to believe that after 2,000 years, after being in the hands of so many political bodies, that it hasn't been changed?"
He answers, puttering: "It's been changed, oh it's changed but the truth doesn't. You need Jesus, lady."
My voice is trembling, louder, out of my blues I say, "A friend of mine was recently killed in prison, where was your Jesus for him?"
Quiet swallows every sound. The holy hasslers drop their heads and move along like they didn't even hear me.
When the going gets tough, they get going all right. No answers for why Timmy couldn't even die a free man, why so many lives amount to nothing because of assholes why think they have a right to tell others how to live. Who think they have the ultimate authority to decide who is valuable according to their tiny truths riddled with convenient contradictions, enough to justify unlimited amounts of brutality, even murder. And then they treat me like I'm decrepit because I won't go for it?
No, they're not getting away that easy. I feel like I've been waiting for this moment my whole life. Time to commit the ultimate sin. I look over at them and say, louder than I expected: "So just fuck you. Oops! I said "fuck you" to Christians. I'll burn for sure now."
A teen-aged girl sitting on top of the trash can says "I heard that."
Shit. That's all teen-agers ever hear.
My turn to drop my head. Arguing with Fundamentalists at the bus stop, Kathy Jo? That's a bad sign. And I still can't stop trembling. A bad sign. Even if I did amuse the hell out of a bunch of teen-agers. A bad sign.
But I don't know how to act. This whole thing with Timmy. I don't know. Where's the bus? I just want a bus.
I bury my chin in my chest, grateful that I can hide inside my long red hair. One thought repeats itself in my head: I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. The words are a mantra. Like if I say it enough, I'll be forgiven. And I'm sorry for so many things, I'm not even sure what I'm apologizing for anymore.
I spent the week in the excruciating process of trying to write an informative cover story about a tragedy I just can't understand. Can't even believe happened. I mean what I'm feeling isn't shit compared to what Timmy went through.
America, right now I hate you. I'm sorry. Oh, so here's a packed Carrick bus. Whatever. I'll just get on like the most spent bitch alive. Even the teen-agers seem scared of me. Good.
As I nudge by people to get to the back, I'm sure to mumble "excuse me." The cubby hole near the center doors is vacant. I step down in there, put my headphones on, look out the window and disappear into Timmy's favorite song, Gregg Allman's "Queen of Hearts."
I finally stop shaking even though I have a feeling it's going to be a long ride home.
Ashes to Ashes, Bus to Bus
I feel like I've been standing on the same bus for weeks. Like I'm never going to get home. Like I've been on the bus for years. Like I won't even recognize my house. Like my skin has grown a filmy new layer made from the sweat and breath of everyone on the bus — fragments of cigarettes, spearmint chewing gum, Arby's Horsy sauce cling to my face. Accumulating. I can't breathe. Overheated. Bones grinding against each other, kneecaps threatening to pop as I shift my weight. And yet, the closer I get to my stop, the heavier, not lighter I become.
If I looked like I felt, there'd be broken springs hanging from me, limbs dangling cracked. Fingers missing. Lay me down, my eyes clink shut. Pick me up, they open, stare straight ahead. Pick me up and shake me, hear the sound of brokenness. Drop me again. It's just that the rattling is so startling. And each time, it gets louder. But each time, the floor's the same.
Except I'm too smart and strong to suffer. And now that I've been off welfare for almost two years, now that I'm such a success well, survivors don't whine, right? It's just so fucked. The whole time I was on welfare, I thought if I could just get off it, that everything would change. Well, it did. I've never been so alone in my life.
Oh what is it about the bus that makes everything so dramatic? Well I guess it's just that other people can see me. So while I feel like my legs are going to give way, I have to stand here as if I got my shit together so severely I don't even have to hold on to a rail to keep my balance. I love myself for being able to pull it off. I hate the world for making me have to. For making me feel like I'm not entitled to my weaknesses. Like I'm a loser or liar for being so spent. Like I'm asking them for something.
I can't wait to get home where no one can see me. But I'm going to what is my very own apartment for the first time in my whole life. I've always dreamed of having my own place, but I thought it would happen after my son was in college, not after he was in jail and went to live with his father. And I never dreamed my wish would come true right after a man I had loved was murdered. Killed. Died. In prison. Timmy was always gone but I mean he's never coming back this time.
Gosh... and just three days after that, it was time for my roommate Madge to move on up to New York City. I have to keep telling myself that she didn't die because it's just so weird that she's suddenly gone. She was my bestest friend. I'd never have gotten through losing my son without her. But now she's gone. I did have Leo this summer, even went to get papers to keep him but sent him back out to the country again. And Timmy, I'd just found out where he was. All gone. Every night I sleep in the bed that was ours, thinking how enormous it is. How small I'm getting.
The bus continues up the hill, stopping often to let people off but it never seems to be any less crowded. I look out the window and get a serious case of car envy. I can't go through the drills that people in cars do. I see them screaming at no one, or losing their minds and beating on steering wheels, safely locked inside steel and glass. I wonder how many times a day they're tempted to drive off cliffs or head-on into other cars.
If I had a car tonight, well. I'd probably still be heading home to have a few cocktails. Even though they say if you drink alone, that you're an alcoholic. But what if you only drink when you're alone? And I can't believe I'm thinking this, but what does it matter anyway?
I feel so differently about dying. Like if Timmy can survive being beat to death and strangled in prison, well I mean he didn't survive but he was able to die. Just like Jack Nicholson said in that Ironweed movie, you die when you can. And now I feel like he died just so I would know it wasn't so bad, that I could do it.
Timmy hurt me so much and I don't hate him so how dare people that never knew him react with satisfaction to his killing? I don't hate criminals and I've been raped, robbed — man, twice in this past year, people that I've known have stolen money off me after I let them stay at my house. I just don't take it personally anymore.
The bus picks up speed, the aisles are clearing, I could even sit down. But even if I would have gotten a seat tonight, it wouldn't help the tiny aches keeping me awake. Besides, in my entire life on the bus, never once has it failed to not take me to my stop. And that thought restores my knees. Loosens my lungs. Yes... a breeze sneaks in under the center doors. My face cools and shrinks.
I'm all alone but almost home... ashes to ashes, bus to bus.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Rock Bottom:The Rise of a Crack Whore
I watched the frail blue sky lose to another night through the window of a quiet Carrick bus. Tired, sitting next to my groceries, I just wanted to get home. Just minding my own business when someone lands in the seat in front of me. It was a young woman I've known since I was a kid.
Her pretty blond hair was pulled up on the top of her head in an irritating pony tail that swung wildly, hitting her face, sticking in the corners of her mouth. She sat with her basck to the window, feet up on the seat. Her eyes were thin and suspicious, scanning the bus.
She spoke in a flurry of words as she pulled her knees tightly to her chest. Her ankles were marred with thick, purple scabs. She told me what happened to them before I had a chance to ask. She said that five men jumped her while she was in Robinson Courts, a Pittsburgh housing project, to get crack. She told them her money was in her shoe. They held her down, dug in her socks, gouging her skin. When they didn't find anything, they let her go.
She looked at me with a secret but powerful satisfaction and said: "Ha. My money was in my pocket."
I sat stunned, trying not to stare at her ankles. I looked out the window only to find my own reflection. In the sudden dark, I realized how much trouble she was in. Being attacked by five men was something she could smile about — it was worth the twenty dollars in her pocket. Twenty bucks. Five men. Multiple wounds. All for a few rocks?
I heard rumors that she was selling herself to smoke crack but didn't believe them. I knew she was prone to "exaggerate." She had lived with me on and off for years during the '80s when her mother couldn’t deal with her. I figured she spent a night smoking crack with someone she had sex with and told people she was a crack whore.
I couldn't believe I'd been so flippant about the rumors. How could I have underestimated how severe her problems were? Did I ignore what I heard just to negate my own responsibility — the most common form of denial? But as I stared at her tender ankles, I knew I'd never accuse her of exaggerating again.
I felt like such a know-it-all idiot watching her, which I think is precisely what she wanted. As if she delighted in knowing she was destroying herself in a way even I never had. In the '70s, I had spent months in a Kansas jail for writing my own prescriptions for Dilaudid, a synthetic morphine, and spent two weeks in the hospital draining an abscess I got shooting dope. But watching her on the bus, I knew crack was unlike anything I'd ever done. Selfish as it may seem, my first reaction was thinking how lucky I was that it wasn't around when I was her age.
When I was 19, I did every drug I could. I didn't have to prostitute myself but I did have a variety of "boyfriends." It took years of therapy to deal with the consequences. Now I'm considered a success story. I did the seemingly-impossible and got off hard drugs. But I had never smoked rock.
What was I supposed to do? Give her the standard lecture about how she could change her life like I had — the former-offender cum journalist? Was I supposed to tell her that it's never too late to change when watching her made me feel like she had crossed into a place of no return?
She continued talking, told me how, just the day before, a man put a gun to her head and asked her for money. She said she just stood there thinking that he could kill her, but he wasn't getting her money. So she said "fuck you" to him and he just hit her on the back of the head. She said she wasn't too scared cause they don’t want to kill a white girl. They don't want to get a life sentence.
Her voice was loud, her tone deliberate, even confrontational, like she was bragging or daring the few other people on the bus to hear. No, not daring them. Forcing them to hear her, punishing them. For what, I bet she didn't even know. But I did. I was 12 years older than she and had spent those years figuring it out. Well, I'd thought I had it figured out until that night.
She rummaged through her purse for Chap Stick as she continued talking. Her lips were peeling and nervous. She said she'd been turning tricks and smoking crack with no food or sleep, what she called "chasing it," for three days. When she was too tired to continue, she went to her boyfriend's house but he wouldn't let her in. Her family did the same. No where else to go, she said she was headed back into town to "get money." Said it was a good thing she still had a couple bucks left for busfare and "supplies" at Condom-Nation.
She smiled the entire time she spoke.
I was stiffened by the chilling nonchalance she used to describe the most desperate lifestyle I could imagine — going from the danger and degradation of having sex with strangers in parking lots to the chaos of crack districts.
I couldn't imagine. I asked if she was afraid that someone would hurt her. She looked at me like I was stupid and said, "No, I expect it."
Change of subject. I tried getting her to come home with me, told her I'd make Rice A Roni, joked about how skinny she was. She stopped smiling. She wasn't coming.
All talk seemed small after that. Still, we spoke as politely as strangers until my stop. Right before I got off the bus, I again asked her to come home with me. She shrugged her shoulders, "Maybe." Then she looked up and said, "Let me move in with you."
"No" thundered through my head as a million memories collided. My last attempt to help her ended with me holding her on the floor so she'd stop hitting me. She reached up and bit my left breast. I smacked her across the face but not as hard as I wanted to. But she had braces and when I saw her mouth bleeding, I knew I was no good for her anymore. This was after months of her lying and stealing and destroying everything she touched. Considering she was so much like I was, I should've been more patient but her teeth marked the end of that attempt.
How tempting it seemed to tell myself that I couldn't become — to use the current jargon surrounding the addicted — an enabler, to just walk away until she hit bottom. A bottom lower than having a gun put to her head?
I had to do something but was terrified of letting her move in. I told her to come home with me so we could talk about it. Which meant "no" and she knew it. She said she'd hook up with me later and stopped talking. The stifling silence that followed gradually gave way to the rise and fall of the bus's engine. Then came the startling squeal of brakes at my stop.
But my answer wasn't really a "no." And at least she knew she had somewhere to go. Besides, she was tired. I'd see her again real soon.
That's how I calmed myself. Truth is, I stopped trying to get her to come home with me because I didn't think I stood a chance against the crack. And I didn't want her addiction to ruin my life. Not another word was said.
I got up to get off the bus. I stood there trying to balance with my grocery bags. I'm sorry, but I was grateful to be holding them so I didn't I have to hug her. She told me where she had been, you know? But I loved her so much. And yet I could barely look at her as I said good-bye. I'm sorry, but I was somehow just so relieved to get off that bus.
I stood on the curb and watched her through the window. Seeing her in the eerie green glow of the bus, I wondered if I'd ever talk to her again. I would've waved if she would've been watching, but I was already long gone from her thoughts. I watched the bus pull away and promised God, myself, whoever, that if I could see her again, if she could just make it through one more night, I'd let her move in. Even if I doubted it would do any good. Even if I would regret it again.
One of her most destructive traits is how she systematically eliminates everyone who tries to help. She takes advantage of trust. She makes it a liability to care. But the only way she can confront the world that never accepted her is to self-destruct while they watch.
What's so tragic is the degree of punishment she subjects herself to in order to make "them" hurt for her, care about her. And in the process, she alienates the only people who ever did care. She pushes every limit, assuring that no one will ever love her enough.
I couldn't imagine what her family was going through.
Donna is a 19-year-old, white, suburban female. Her parents were pursuing religious careers when they met and, um, had to get married. Dad drank. Mom started teaching school. After a full day in a classroom, she had to be the housecleaner, laundry-doer, authority figure, nurturer etc., who also had to worry about an alcoholic husband. And after teaching all day, she had little patience left for her own children.
Donna was the baby of the family, the last born, arriving after any dream of a "normal" family remained. And she was a big baby. I used to baby-sit and everyone laughed about how much formula she drank. And vomited. But she was the fussy baby of a tired mom who fed her whenever she cried and ignored her the rest of the time.
Her father drank. Her mother was busy. Doesn't seem so horrific, doesn't seem to warrant Donna's extreme behavior. She was neither culturally nor economically disadvantaged. She wore clean socks everyday, clothes from Gimbles, went to a Catholic school. She'd get whacked on the back of her legs with a baton here and there, but no serious abuse.
But she was always too much: too smart, too strong-willed, too loud, too fat and too needy for her environment. She’s been in psychiatric hospitals, shelters, rehabs and jail since she was ten years old, starting the year after she came home from being forced to live with her grandmother to lose weight. She had to lose two pounds a week in order to call her family. When she was home again, she ate with a vengeance to gain it all back. She showed them.
It's excruciating to watch her wield her self-destructiveness upon her family. One night her mother sent her to her room after hogging all the attention at a sister’s party, so she poured some Drano into her Mello Yello soda and drank it. End of party. When the paramedics arrived, they were appalled at her mother’s anger and lack of concern. Only 14 at the time, Donna had already stolen and totaled one of her mom's cars despite thousands of dollars worth of therapy.
I decided to call her mother and find out what had been happening. She said: “I tell her that she’s going to end up dead, but she never listens. Everything I try to do is just a con. I’ve done everything. I can’t think about it anymore.” She had Donna arrested for stealing her car and got a court order prohibiting her from her home.
Since then, I was told she's totaled several cars and has stolen from everyone in her family. She charged thousands of dollars on a variety of credit cards and her mother is also still paying hospital bills from years ago. And Donna had two windshields, one driver's side window and one back window, busted out in her mom’s car as well as two more windshields in other relatives' cars. Crack dealers throw bricks when she won't buy counterfeit drugs.
Her mom wished me luck. Her dad called five minutes later, threatening to come and drag "that slut" out of my house. I told him I'd have him arrested if he came near my apartment.
She hadn't even arrived yet.
At 6:00 a.m. I heard her pounding on my bedroom window, "Jo, open the fucking door." She'd been knocking and was livid that I hadn't answered immediately. At first I was mad but only because I'd forgotten what she told me on the bus. After the shock of being woken passed, I was so relieved to see her.
When I let her in, she became very sweet and apologetic, said she had to use the bathroom really bad. After a few minutes, I noticed how strangely quiet she had become and knew she was up to something. I pushed the bathroom door open and found her smoking crack.
The pipe was a glass tube with a piece of copper netting in one end. The lighter was turned up so high I heard a muffled roar. She hit the pipe so hard, her head trembled as she watched thin spirals of thick smoke rise with crossed eyes. Her body seized, remaining perfectly still except for a series of small spasms. As she let out her hit, her mind seized. She spoke in fragments. How everyone was going to pay. How she knew what people were about. How she had to stop smoking crack.
She rambled about her night. She said she'd seen her boyfriend, Jimmy. He let her use his car so she could go to a trick's house who was going to tie her up for $350. But when he untied her, he wouldn't pay. She started crying. Not because that man could've killed her. Or because he slapped her around. But because he didn't pay her.
I had no idea what to do. Of course I thought about telling her she couldn't smoke crack in my house. Then what? I just wanted her there, where I could see her. Where I knew she was okay until I figured something out. And after what she had just told me, all I could do was watch her.
I don't know how much crack she had but it was gone quickly. It's called "crack" because of the sound it makes when smoked. Seemed more like sizzling to hear and watch. She kept mumbling about the trick. How he was going to pay. Then she got up and started undressing, asked me if she could borrow a clean pair of underwear. I gave her a whole new set of clothes. She left hers on the floor.
Picking them up almost made me gag. I used the very tips of my fingers to put them in a plastic bag and threw it down the cellar stairs.
She apologized for leaving her clothes on the floor and asked me if she could have something to eat as she rummaged through my kitchen. She was trying to be nice. Still, she spilled Jell-O on the couch, spaghetti sauce on the jeans I leant her, smoked all my cigarettes, burned two holes in the jeans, ate three bowls of ice cream and almost a whole box of cereal.
How do you feed someone who doesn't stop eating until all the food is gone? How do you help someone who makes you regret trying? Who has no respect for your efforts? But how could I blame her for not caring about something stupid like jeans when she treated her body with such utter disrespect, almost contempt? How could she be expected to care about anything?
So why would she care about my home? What would my VCR or microwave be worth to her? A couple rocks? I looked around my apartment, saw stains on the rug from spills she hadn't bother to clean up years ago. And her pounding on my bedroom window at 6 a.m.? I wondered what my neighbors thought of that.
And I wasn't foolish enough to think that my small act of kindness was going to make her stop doing crack. In many ways, it would make things easier. I didn't know what I was going to accomplish besides letting her ruin my life. The more I thought about it, the more aggravated I became. Until I noticed that she had fallen asleep on the couch.
It was hard to look at her in such a vulnerable position. Almost dead. And yet still so young. I couldn't imagine how she got involved with crack and prostitution. I wanted to know because I wanted some kind of revenge. Why do we live in a world that only asks questions when it's too late? So we don't have to do anything?
I hurried into my room and pulled the blanket off my bed. I covered her gently, like even my softest gesture might bruise her while knowing nothing could wake her. Slowly tucking her in, for a wishful minute, I was sealing her in a magic cocoon. She'd be transported back in time, long before she smoked crack, long before she surrendered what was most beautiful about her to a drug that confuses madness and revenge with euphoria.
Staring at her sleeping, I felt a sad frustration, just like when she was a baby and I couldn't make her stop crying.
How easy it is to lose sight of who's doing the suffering — I'd let her stay. No, I'd insist on it.
The Fall
Donna called turning tricks and smoking crack "chasing it." But it was chasing her. Even into her sleep, where it finally seemed to catch up. I don't know how long I sat staring at her, fast asleep, but it couldn't have been more than 10 minutes. It was exhausting.
I gasped each time she leapt off my couch, her body somehow turning itself over with one sudden spasm. I flinched each time she tossed her pretty blond ponytail, now a mass of knots, side to side. Each time she twitched, yelped, grumbled. Each time she almost cried in her dream.
Sitting there, I felt like I was watching her from behind a thick pane of unbreakable glass. Like if I tried to reach through and touch her, I'd shatter the hundreds of tiny bones in my hands. Frustration tingled in my fingertips while the rest of my body went limp.
Powerlessness begins with a calm resignation that's mistaken for relief. I started into my daily routine. But I couldn't stop thinking about her. There were too many questions always ending with, "What am I going to do?"
There was one thing I was sure of — after I knew her story, with her consent, I was going to tell it. I wanted everyone to see what they had done to the little girl with curly yellow hair and mischievous, sparkling eyes. Because I knew she couldn't possibly have ended up like that on her own.
As a child, Donna displayed the classic symptoms of a hyperactive/attention deficit disorder. She talked out in class and had trouble sitting still. But unruly young ladies were not tolerated in school. Girls won't be boys. She was given the usual loss of privileges with an added dose of humiliation for being female. She reacted by being more disruptive.
Not one teacher questioned the fact that those methods weren't working. As she became more incorrigible, it reinforced their original perception Donna was bad. No one was willing to ask for help or admit that they didn't know what to do.
By second grade, she was smoking in the girl's room. When she was 11, she started buying joints with her paper route money. She'd get high behind the gas station, eat, go home and fall sleep.
Alcohol proved to be the perfect fuel for her impulsiveness. One night when she was 14, Donna stole her mother's car after getting drunk with her only friend. The joyride ended in a head-on collision with a tree. Neither were hurt.
Donna's problems were evident long before she started getting high, but drugs gave them a whole new expression. And suddenly, they were treated as the source of her problems. It's a good thing a booming addiction industry waited — it was the only alternative to the law that already had its eye on her.
When she went to rehab, Donna's mom bought new socks and underwear for her and went to all the family groups, even when she had to miss work. Still, she was silently condemned for Donna's behavior. The doctors would never admit that they blamed her, but I saw it in their abrupt smiles and impatient eyes. Sure, Donna "behaved" amid an entire staff. But as a single mother working full-time, her mom just didn't have the time or energy to follow her around with a clipboard.
Donna returned home between institutions. But nothing changed because the experts weren't able to tell her mom exactly what it was that she had done wrong or how to fix it. They were professionals. They did not raise questions they couldn't answer.
For Donna, therapists were just teachers who didn't yell. Of course they cared about her but not enough to make eye contact except when giving orders. Not enough to admit that they didn't have all the answers even though it seemed so obvious in their lack of solutions. And they certainly couldn't care enough to risk a personal involvement. No one wants that. And that's why we have therapists.
The bottom line is that mental health professionals are not paid to care. God knows, we couldn't afford it if they were.
But they did teach her the subtle art of manipulation. I was amazed at how quickly she learned that it was easier to tell them what they wanted to hear than tell them how she really felt and risk their ignorance. Or was it indifference? She called them "clock watchers."
I spent years in treatment including detox, a couple rehab's and a variety of programs. But I found a therapist who was there to help me, not to prove that he was the type of person who wanted to help others. And because he cared, he extended himself beyond his own experience to really understand what I was doing. I was lucky.
Donna went from rehab to the psych hospital to group homes. Each trip into "the system" taught her how to be a better addict. Although marijuana is considered a gateway drug, the people she met in recovery were the ultimate gateway into the drug culture.
At 17, her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, a man who was supposed to be her spiritual guide into sobriety, taught her how to prostitute herself, beginning with him. Shortly after, she met a 36-year-old married man who I'll call Jimmy. They smoked crack at a party. It was her first. She asked how she would know when she was high. Her host answered, "When you want more."
Donna didn't become addicted until her second exposure. She spent a weekend with Jimmy. He spent $3,000. She started spending a lot of time in the alleys of the soon-to-be-cultural district of downtown Pittsburgh, selling oral sex to middle-class, married men and proudly taking her earnings to Jimmy. She was in love.
She woke up when I was cooking dinner and immediately started getting ready to leave. After an hour's worth of negotiations, she agreed to stay. We spent the night talking and she agreed to be profiled. She thought it was funny that anyone would want to read about her.
I thought it was anything but funny. Next time she went chasing crack, I was going with her.
The Never Ending
"The only angels who see us now watch through each other's eyes."
Ricki Lee Jones
I wanted to see exactly how a crack whore lived — no Pretty Woman version of prostitution and polo. I thought I could go into Donna's world and come back with something that didn't sound like a made-for-TV movie. I would be a magician, make my words so perfect they'd drag every reader kicking and screaming into her reality. Then people would understand what she was doing to herself and would, well, just for a second become willing to see that addiction is more than a disease, it's a symptom of larger problems we're all a part of creating.
I sat on my pink fuzzy toilet seat watching her put on makeup. She made jokes about telling a trick that he had to give her $20 to kiss her, $10 to touch her breasts. She looked at me, smiled and said, "And I meant $10 for each one. Fucker. I make them pay."
She told me to wait by the hotel across from the Greyhound Station. She went about her business while I sat there imagining the worst, wondering what it was going to take to stop her. Then one man after another propositioned me.
It made me sick. Scared. I wanted to scream for a cop. Instead I smiled and said I was waiting for someone.
One guy got mad and said, "You think you're too good for me, whore?" I knew to keep my head down and mouth shut.
Whore. What a handy yet offensive term. We are treated like whores our whole lives and yet we're not even allowed to speak the word. That night, I felt like I was 14 again, wearing bright blue eye-shadow and streaks of blush, waiting to meet boys only to be humped on in church parking lots by fellows who told me they "liked" me but would spit in my hair in front of their friends. I didn't say "no" to them because I didn't think I was allowed.
I sadly admit that when Donna hopped out of yet another Jeep Cherokee or Bronco sporting Penguin bumper stickers, a part of me was terribly glad that at least she was making them pay. But I realized it would cost her dearly. It was going to take her years to forgive herself for selling the precious secrets of her body. If she survived.
She made $150 in a little over an hour. Time to get crack. I drove a car she borrowed up to Robinson Courts. She got out and walked into a pitch dark parking lot and came back with three men. Suddenly a gun is six inches in front of my face, stuffed in the pants of a man saying "give me your money." Another was pulling Donna out of the car by her hair. She screamed at me to drive away but the engine wouldn't turn over. The car finally started and we got away.
That was a rush unlike any drug I'd ever done or wanted to do. No more. She insisted on going back. I pleaded with her to come home but she just sat there staring straight ahead. I got out of the car on Robinson Street and headed down to Fifth Avenue. In 15 minutes, she came back and asked me to drive. She immediately started smoking crack.
And on and on and on. She lived with me for about a month before her mother let her move back home to care for her father who was ill. I let her go 'cause I couldn't take it. Couldn't stand watching "tricks" treat her better than any boyfriend I ever had. Couldn't stand listening to her talk about getting off the rock 'cause she only talked that shit when she was on it. Couldn't stand being so helpless, caring so much while she cared so little.
I tried to love her in the clearest possible language. But I didn't save her. I just wanted her to know I cared. That's all. That's all we need to recover from the self-loathing assaulting us daily. Self-loathing — the core of every addiction and the source of a healthy economy.
Who do I feel is responsible for Donna's self-destruction? The parents of every child who made fun of her for being fat. The teachers who refused to acknowledge her disruptive behavior as treatable instead of a symbol of her "badness" thus aggravating her problems. The therapists and counselors in every rehab, hospital and group home she had been to who never cared enough to break out of their paradigms and really listen to her. Corporate America that thrives on filling us with wants they'll never let us fully sate before we find ourselves needing something new.
Yes, let's thank everyone who confuses the issues of addiction for their convenience. Members of Congress who refuse to acknowledge they know nothing about drugs but defend policy that has never worked except to fill our prisons and line their pockets. Now CIA agents are finally being indicted for bringing hundreds of pounds of cocaine into the country, bought and shipped with tax dollars. And don't forget the federal, state and local police officers who Donna said she "tricked."
And finally, I hold every person personally responsible who ever murmured the usual bullshit about personal responsibility to negate their own duty to help those who need it most.
Did I miss anyone?
Her pretty blond hair was pulled up on the top of her head in an irritating pony tail that swung wildly, hitting her face, sticking in the corners of her mouth. She sat with her basck to the window, feet up on the seat. Her eyes were thin and suspicious, scanning the bus.
She spoke in a flurry of words as she pulled her knees tightly to her chest. Her ankles were marred with thick, purple scabs. She told me what happened to them before I had a chance to ask. She said that five men jumped her while she was in Robinson Courts, a Pittsburgh housing project, to get crack. She told them her money was in her shoe. They held her down, dug in her socks, gouging her skin. When they didn't find anything, they let her go.
She looked at me with a secret but powerful satisfaction and said: "Ha. My money was in my pocket."
I sat stunned, trying not to stare at her ankles. I looked out the window only to find my own reflection. In the sudden dark, I realized how much trouble she was in. Being attacked by five men was something she could smile about — it was worth the twenty dollars in her pocket. Twenty bucks. Five men. Multiple wounds. All for a few rocks?
I heard rumors that she was selling herself to smoke crack but didn't believe them. I knew she was prone to "exaggerate." She had lived with me on and off for years during the '80s when her mother couldn’t deal with her. I figured she spent a night smoking crack with someone she had sex with and told people she was a crack whore.
I couldn't believe I'd been so flippant about the rumors. How could I have underestimated how severe her problems were? Did I ignore what I heard just to negate my own responsibility — the most common form of denial? But as I stared at her tender ankles, I knew I'd never accuse her of exaggerating again.
I felt like such a know-it-all idiot watching her, which I think is precisely what she wanted. As if she delighted in knowing she was destroying herself in a way even I never had. In the '70s, I had spent months in a Kansas jail for writing my own prescriptions for Dilaudid, a synthetic morphine, and spent two weeks in the hospital draining an abscess I got shooting dope. But watching her on the bus, I knew crack was unlike anything I'd ever done. Selfish as it may seem, my first reaction was thinking how lucky I was that it wasn't around when I was her age.
When I was 19, I did every drug I could. I didn't have to prostitute myself but I did have a variety of "boyfriends." It took years of therapy to deal with the consequences. Now I'm considered a success story. I did the seemingly-impossible and got off hard drugs. But I had never smoked rock.
What was I supposed to do? Give her the standard lecture about how she could change her life like I had — the former-offender cum journalist? Was I supposed to tell her that it's never too late to change when watching her made me feel like she had crossed into a place of no return?
She continued talking, told me how, just the day before, a man put a gun to her head and asked her for money. She said she just stood there thinking that he could kill her, but he wasn't getting her money. So she said "fuck you" to him and he just hit her on the back of the head. She said she wasn't too scared cause they don’t want to kill a white girl. They don't want to get a life sentence.
Her voice was loud, her tone deliberate, even confrontational, like she was bragging or daring the few other people on the bus to hear. No, not daring them. Forcing them to hear her, punishing them. For what, I bet she didn't even know. But I did. I was 12 years older than she and had spent those years figuring it out. Well, I'd thought I had it figured out until that night.
She rummaged through her purse for Chap Stick as she continued talking. Her lips were peeling and nervous. She said she'd been turning tricks and smoking crack with no food or sleep, what she called "chasing it," for three days. When she was too tired to continue, she went to her boyfriend's house but he wouldn't let her in. Her family did the same. No where else to go, she said she was headed back into town to "get money." Said it was a good thing she still had a couple bucks left for busfare and "supplies" at Condom-Nation.
She smiled the entire time she spoke.
I was stiffened by the chilling nonchalance she used to describe the most desperate lifestyle I could imagine — going from the danger and degradation of having sex with strangers in parking lots to the chaos of crack districts.
I couldn't imagine. I asked if she was afraid that someone would hurt her. She looked at me like I was stupid and said, "No, I expect it."
Change of subject. I tried getting her to come home with me, told her I'd make Rice A Roni, joked about how skinny she was. She stopped smiling. She wasn't coming.
All talk seemed small after that. Still, we spoke as politely as strangers until my stop. Right before I got off the bus, I again asked her to come home with me. She shrugged her shoulders, "Maybe." Then she looked up and said, "Let me move in with you."
"No" thundered through my head as a million memories collided. My last attempt to help her ended with me holding her on the floor so she'd stop hitting me. She reached up and bit my left breast. I smacked her across the face but not as hard as I wanted to. But she had braces and when I saw her mouth bleeding, I knew I was no good for her anymore. This was after months of her lying and stealing and destroying everything she touched. Considering she was so much like I was, I should've been more patient but her teeth marked the end of that attempt.
How tempting it seemed to tell myself that I couldn't become — to use the current jargon surrounding the addicted — an enabler, to just walk away until she hit bottom. A bottom lower than having a gun put to her head?
I had to do something but was terrified of letting her move in. I told her to come home with me so we could talk about it. Which meant "no" and she knew it. She said she'd hook up with me later and stopped talking. The stifling silence that followed gradually gave way to the rise and fall of the bus's engine. Then came the startling squeal of brakes at my stop.
But my answer wasn't really a "no." And at least she knew she had somewhere to go. Besides, she was tired. I'd see her again real soon.
That's how I calmed myself. Truth is, I stopped trying to get her to come home with me because I didn't think I stood a chance against the crack. And I didn't want her addiction to ruin my life. Not another word was said.
I got up to get off the bus. I stood there trying to balance with my grocery bags. I'm sorry, but I was grateful to be holding them so I didn't I have to hug her. She told me where she had been, you know? But I loved her so much. And yet I could barely look at her as I said good-bye. I'm sorry, but I was somehow just so relieved to get off that bus.
I stood on the curb and watched her through the window. Seeing her in the eerie green glow of the bus, I wondered if I'd ever talk to her again. I would've waved if she would've been watching, but I was already long gone from her thoughts. I watched the bus pull away and promised God, myself, whoever, that if I could see her again, if she could just make it through one more night, I'd let her move in. Even if I doubted it would do any good. Even if I would regret it again.
One of her most destructive traits is how she systematically eliminates everyone who tries to help. She takes advantage of trust. She makes it a liability to care. But the only way she can confront the world that never accepted her is to self-destruct while they watch.
What's so tragic is the degree of punishment she subjects herself to in order to make "them" hurt for her, care about her. And in the process, she alienates the only people who ever did care. She pushes every limit, assuring that no one will ever love her enough.
I couldn't imagine what her family was going through.
Donna is a 19-year-old, white, suburban female. Her parents were pursuing religious careers when they met and, um, had to get married. Dad drank. Mom started teaching school. After a full day in a classroom, she had to be the housecleaner, laundry-doer, authority figure, nurturer etc., who also had to worry about an alcoholic husband. And after teaching all day, she had little patience left for her own children.
Donna was the baby of the family, the last born, arriving after any dream of a "normal" family remained. And she was a big baby. I used to baby-sit and everyone laughed about how much formula she drank. And vomited. But she was the fussy baby of a tired mom who fed her whenever she cried and ignored her the rest of the time.
Her father drank. Her mother was busy. Doesn't seem so horrific, doesn't seem to warrant Donna's extreme behavior. She was neither culturally nor economically disadvantaged. She wore clean socks everyday, clothes from Gimbles, went to a Catholic school. She'd get whacked on the back of her legs with a baton here and there, but no serious abuse.
But she was always too much: too smart, too strong-willed, too loud, too fat and too needy for her environment. She’s been in psychiatric hospitals, shelters, rehabs and jail since she was ten years old, starting the year after she came home from being forced to live with her grandmother to lose weight. She had to lose two pounds a week in order to call her family. When she was home again, she ate with a vengeance to gain it all back. She showed them.
It's excruciating to watch her wield her self-destructiveness upon her family. One night her mother sent her to her room after hogging all the attention at a sister’s party, so she poured some Drano into her Mello Yello soda and drank it. End of party. When the paramedics arrived, they were appalled at her mother’s anger and lack of concern. Only 14 at the time, Donna had already stolen and totaled one of her mom's cars despite thousands of dollars worth of therapy.
I decided to call her mother and find out what had been happening. She said: “I tell her that she’s going to end up dead, but she never listens. Everything I try to do is just a con. I’ve done everything. I can’t think about it anymore.” She had Donna arrested for stealing her car and got a court order prohibiting her from her home.
Since then, I was told she's totaled several cars and has stolen from everyone in her family. She charged thousands of dollars on a variety of credit cards and her mother is also still paying hospital bills from years ago. And Donna had two windshields, one driver's side window and one back window, busted out in her mom’s car as well as two more windshields in other relatives' cars. Crack dealers throw bricks when she won't buy counterfeit drugs.
Her mom wished me luck. Her dad called five minutes later, threatening to come and drag "that slut" out of my house. I told him I'd have him arrested if he came near my apartment.
She hadn't even arrived yet.
At 6:00 a.m. I heard her pounding on my bedroom window, "Jo, open the fucking door." She'd been knocking and was livid that I hadn't answered immediately. At first I was mad but only because I'd forgotten what she told me on the bus. After the shock of being woken passed, I was so relieved to see her.
When I let her in, she became very sweet and apologetic, said she had to use the bathroom really bad. After a few minutes, I noticed how strangely quiet she had become and knew she was up to something. I pushed the bathroom door open and found her smoking crack.
The pipe was a glass tube with a piece of copper netting in one end. The lighter was turned up so high I heard a muffled roar. She hit the pipe so hard, her head trembled as she watched thin spirals of thick smoke rise with crossed eyes. Her body seized, remaining perfectly still except for a series of small spasms. As she let out her hit, her mind seized. She spoke in fragments. How everyone was going to pay. How she knew what people were about. How she had to stop smoking crack.
She rambled about her night. She said she'd seen her boyfriend, Jimmy. He let her use his car so she could go to a trick's house who was going to tie her up for $350. But when he untied her, he wouldn't pay. She started crying. Not because that man could've killed her. Or because he slapped her around. But because he didn't pay her.
I had no idea what to do. Of course I thought about telling her she couldn't smoke crack in my house. Then what? I just wanted her there, where I could see her. Where I knew she was okay until I figured something out. And after what she had just told me, all I could do was watch her.
I don't know how much crack she had but it was gone quickly. It's called "crack" because of the sound it makes when smoked. Seemed more like sizzling to hear and watch. She kept mumbling about the trick. How he was going to pay. Then she got up and started undressing, asked me if she could borrow a clean pair of underwear. I gave her a whole new set of clothes. She left hers on the floor.
Picking them up almost made me gag. I used the very tips of my fingers to put them in a plastic bag and threw it down the cellar stairs.
She apologized for leaving her clothes on the floor and asked me if she could have something to eat as she rummaged through my kitchen. She was trying to be nice. Still, she spilled Jell-O on the couch, spaghetti sauce on the jeans I leant her, smoked all my cigarettes, burned two holes in the jeans, ate three bowls of ice cream and almost a whole box of cereal.
How do you feed someone who doesn't stop eating until all the food is gone? How do you help someone who makes you regret trying? Who has no respect for your efforts? But how could I blame her for not caring about something stupid like jeans when she treated her body with such utter disrespect, almost contempt? How could she be expected to care about anything?
So why would she care about my home? What would my VCR or microwave be worth to her? A couple rocks? I looked around my apartment, saw stains on the rug from spills she hadn't bother to clean up years ago. And her pounding on my bedroom window at 6 a.m.? I wondered what my neighbors thought of that.
And I wasn't foolish enough to think that my small act of kindness was going to make her stop doing crack. In many ways, it would make things easier. I didn't know what I was going to accomplish besides letting her ruin my life. The more I thought about it, the more aggravated I became. Until I noticed that she had fallen asleep on the couch.
It was hard to look at her in such a vulnerable position. Almost dead. And yet still so young. I couldn't imagine how she got involved with crack and prostitution. I wanted to know because I wanted some kind of revenge. Why do we live in a world that only asks questions when it's too late? So we don't have to do anything?
I hurried into my room and pulled the blanket off my bed. I covered her gently, like even my softest gesture might bruise her while knowing nothing could wake her. Slowly tucking her in, for a wishful minute, I was sealing her in a magic cocoon. She'd be transported back in time, long before she smoked crack, long before she surrendered what was most beautiful about her to a drug that confuses madness and revenge with euphoria.
Staring at her sleeping, I felt a sad frustration, just like when she was a baby and I couldn't make her stop crying.
How easy it is to lose sight of who's doing the suffering — I'd let her stay. No, I'd insist on it.
The Fall
Donna called turning tricks and smoking crack "chasing it." But it was chasing her. Even into her sleep, where it finally seemed to catch up. I don't know how long I sat staring at her, fast asleep, but it couldn't have been more than 10 minutes. It was exhausting.
I gasped each time she leapt off my couch, her body somehow turning itself over with one sudden spasm. I flinched each time she tossed her pretty blond ponytail, now a mass of knots, side to side. Each time she twitched, yelped, grumbled. Each time she almost cried in her dream.
Sitting there, I felt like I was watching her from behind a thick pane of unbreakable glass. Like if I tried to reach through and touch her, I'd shatter the hundreds of tiny bones in my hands. Frustration tingled in my fingertips while the rest of my body went limp.
Powerlessness begins with a calm resignation that's mistaken for relief. I started into my daily routine. But I couldn't stop thinking about her. There were too many questions always ending with, "What am I going to do?"
There was one thing I was sure of — after I knew her story, with her consent, I was going to tell it. I wanted everyone to see what they had done to the little girl with curly yellow hair and mischievous, sparkling eyes. Because I knew she couldn't possibly have ended up like that on her own.
As a child, Donna displayed the classic symptoms of a hyperactive/attention deficit disorder. She talked out in class and had trouble sitting still. But unruly young ladies were not tolerated in school. Girls won't be boys. She was given the usual loss of privileges with an added dose of humiliation for being female. She reacted by being more disruptive.
Not one teacher questioned the fact that those methods weren't working. As she became more incorrigible, it reinforced their original perception Donna was bad. No one was willing to ask for help or admit that they didn't know what to do.
By second grade, she was smoking in the girl's room. When she was 11, she started buying joints with her paper route money. She'd get high behind the gas station, eat, go home and fall sleep.
Alcohol proved to be the perfect fuel for her impulsiveness. One night when she was 14, Donna stole her mother's car after getting drunk with her only friend. The joyride ended in a head-on collision with a tree. Neither were hurt.
Donna's problems were evident long before she started getting high, but drugs gave them a whole new expression. And suddenly, they were treated as the source of her problems. It's a good thing a booming addiction industry waited — it was the only alternative to the law that already had its eye on her.
When she went to rehab, Donna's mom bought new socks and underwear for her and went to all the family groups, even when she had to miss work. Still, she was silently condemned for Donna's behavior. The doctors would never admit that they blamed her, but I saw it in their abrupt smiles and impatient eyes. Sure, Donna "behaved" amid an entire staff. But as a single mother working full-time, her mom just didn't have the time or energy to follow her around with a clipboard.
Donna returned home between institutions. But nothing changed because the experts weren't able to tell her mom exactly what it was that she had done wrong or how to fix it. They were professionals. They did not raise questions they couldn't answer.
For Donna, therapists were just teachers who didn't yell. Of course they cared about her but not enough to make eye contact except when giving orders. Not enough to admit that they didn't have all the answers even though it seemed so obvious in their lack of solutions. And they certainly couldn't care enough to risk a personal involvement. No one wants that. And that's why we have therapists.
The bottom line is that mental health professionals are not paid to care. God knows, we couldn't afford it if they were.
But they did teach her the subtle art of manipulation. I was amazed at how quickly she learned that it was easier to tell them what they wanted to hear than tell them how she really felt and risk their ignorance. Or was it indifference? She called them "clock watchers."
I spent years in treatment including detox, a couple rehab's and a variety of programs. But I found a therapist who was there to help me, not to prove that he was the type of person who wanted to help others. And because he cared, he extended himself beyond his own experience to really understand what I was doing. I was lucky.
Donna went from rehab to the psych hospital to group homes. Each trip into "the system" taught her how to be a better addict. Although marijuana is considered a gateway drug, the people she met in recovery were the ultimate gateway into the drug culture.
At 17, her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, a man who was supposed to be her spiritual guide into sobriety, taught her how to prostitute herself, beginning with him. Shortly after, she met a 36-year-old married man who I'll call Jimmy. They smoked crack at a party. It was her first. She asked how she would know when she was high. Her host answered, "When you want more."
Donna didn't become addicted until her second exposure. She spent a weekend with Jimmy. He spent $3,000. She started spending a lot of time in the alleys of the soon-to-be-cultural district of downtown Pittsburgh, selling oral sex to middle-class, married men and proudly taking her earnings to Jimmy. She was in love.
She woke up when I was cooking dinner and immediately started getting ready to leave. After an hour's worth of negotiations, she agreed to stay. We spent the night talking and she agreed to be profiled. She thought it was funny that anyone would want to read about her.
I thought it was anything but funny. Next time she went chasing crack, I was going with her.
The Never Ending
"The only angels who see us now watch through each other's eyes."
Ricki Lee Jones
I wanted to see exactly how a crack whore lived — no Pretty Woman version of prostitution and polo. I thought I could go into Donna's world and come back with something that didn't sound like a made-for-TV movie. I would be a magician, make my words so perfect they'd drag every reader kicking and screaming into her reality. Then people would understand what she was doing to herself and would, well, just for a second become willing to see that addiction is more than a disease, it's a symptom of larger problems we're all a part of creating.
I sat on my pink fuzzy toilet seat watching her put on makeup. She made jokes about telling a trick that he had to give her $20 to kiss her, $10 to touch her breasts. She looked at me, smiled and said, "And I meant $10 for each one. Fucker. I make them pay."
She told me to wait by the hotel across from the Greyhound Station. She went about her business while I sat there imagining the worst, wondering what it was going to take to stop her. Then one man after another propositioned me.
It made me sick. Scared. I wanted to scream for a cop. Instead I smiled and said I was waiting for someone.
One guy got mad and said, "You think you're too good for me, whore?" I knew to keep my head down and mouth shut.
Whore. What a handy yet offensive term. We are treated like whores our whole lives and yet we're not even allowed to speak the word. That night, I felt like I was 14 again, wearing bright blue eye-shadow and streaks of blush, waiting to meet boys only to be humped on in church parking lots by fellows who told me they "liked" me but would spit in my hair in front of their friends. I didn't say "no" to them because I didn't think I was allowed.
I sadly admit that when Donna hopped out of yet another Jeep Cherokee or Bronco sporting Penguin bumper stickers, a part of me was terribly glad that at least she was making them pay. But I realized it would cost her dearly. It was going to take her years to forgive herself for selling the precious secrets of her body. If she survived.
She made $150 in a little over an hour. Time to get crack. I drove a car she borrowed up to Robinson Courts. She got out and walked into a pitch dark parking lot and came back with three men. Suddenly a gun is six inches in front of my face, stuffed in the pants of a man saying "give me your money." Another was pulling Donna out of the car by her hair. She screamed at me to drive away but the engine wouldn't turn over. The car finally started and we got away.
That was a rush unlike any drug I'd ever done or wanted to do. No more. She insisted on going back. I pleaded with her to come home but she just sat there staring straight ahead. I got out of the car on Robinson Street and headed down to Fifth Avenue. In 15 minutes, she came back and asked me to drive. She immediately started smoking crack.
And on and on and on. She lived with me for about a month before her mother let her move back home to care for her father who was ill. I let her go 'cause I couldn't take it. Couldn't stand watching "tricks" treat her better than any boyfriend I ever had. Couldn't stand listening to her talk about getting off the rock 'cause she only talked that shit when she was on it. Couldn't stand being so helpless, caring so much while she cared so little.
I tried to love her in the clearest possible language. But I didn't save her. I just wanted her to know I cared. That's all. That's all we need to recover from the self-loathing assaulting us daily. Self-loathing — the core of every addiction and the source of a healthy economy.
Who do I feel is responsible for Donna's self-destruction? The parents of every child who made fun of her for being fat. The teachers who refused to acknowledge her disruptive behavior as treatable instead of a symbol of her "badness" thus aggravating her problems. The therapists and counselors in every rehab, hospital and group home she had been to who never cared enough to break out of their paradigms and really listen to her. Corporate America that thrives on filling us with wants they'll never let us fully sate before we find ourselves needing something new.
Yes, let's thank everyone who confuses the issues of addiction for their convenience. Members of Congress who refuse to acknowledge they know nothing about drugs but defend policy that has never worked except to fill our prisons and line their pockets. Now CIA agents are finally being indicted for bringing hundreds of pounds of cocaine into the country, bought and shipped with tax dollars. And don't forget the federal, state and local police officers who Donna said she "tricked."
And finally, I hold every person personally responsible who ever murmured the usual bullshit about personal responsibility to negate their own duty to help those who need it most.
Did I miss anyone?
Dining Review (I'm serious)
NightFeeding
Confessions of a nocturnal feeder
"I've been feeding you to see what form you'd take ... I just wanted to free your shape." The Tragically UnFit
You've been drinking again. You're surrounded by micro-beer drinking, date-raping weight lifters with perfect skin. Petite chicks with perpetual pouts push by with hair that bruises. And not an "excuse me" all night. Why are the physically perfect so rude? Because they have to look at the rest of us?
Back to ClubPsuedo. You've been trying to keep your hands to yourself but each wine cooler takes you closer to the edge of Spankville. But drinking as an alternative to sex is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. Desire bludgeons your blazing loins as Madonna's "Borderline" plays. Why, why is there always Madonna?
You have two choices, humiliate yourself into some sex or just walk the hell away. The lowest road outta there is what the Secret Order of the Chronically Single recommend: NightFeeding. Eating as an alternative to sex is like putting out a fire with milk.
But please, please keep these late-night feederies to yourselves. If word of this PostGrunge ritual gets out, everyone's gonna want to gain 50 pounds in search of the perfect midnight smack. I mean snack.
10-ish. You're driving through the filthy drizzle of an October night in Pittsburgh. You can't remember when you've ever been so hungry but the feeling seems familiar.
Your eyes scurry up and down Liberty Avenue in the heart of Bloomfield. Your mind seizes amid the confusing choice of eateries. Perogies at the BBT or pasta at the Pleasure Bar? You keep driving. You're craving protein.
You spot a soft pink glow buzzing just ahead. The awning of a new place? Couldn't be more than a few months old. It's name? MOJO BAY — written right above a little sun. Tears fill your eyes. You'll never be alone again.
Everyone at the bar seems to know each other but there are too many people for that to be possible. Friendly bartenders can do that to a place. You order a Jack Daniels and Coke without thinking. Oops. Well, you won't order an appetizer.
That thought disappears once you look at the menu. Two striking choices: smoked salmon chowder served in a sourdough Tuscan loaf and the oysters baked with a garlic almond butter, served on a bed of sea salt.
Your waitress comes. You ask her what's available at such a late hour. She tells you they'll prepare anything, even full dinners until 2 a.m. You think you're hallucinating until the food arrives. Then you're sure of it.
Man, the colors in the Cobb Salad — perfectly placed rows of chicken, bleu cheese, minced bacon, diced tomatoes and egg are lovingly laid on a bed of mixed greens you can't even see. And on the side, a lite raspberry vinaigrette.
You're munching and crunching innocently when the waitress brings another plate. You see it staring up at you, spread wide open. It's the famed Muffaletta sandwich — layers of baked ham, Genoa salami, prosciutto, provolone and mozzarella overwhelm a bun the size of a bus.
You bite into the bitch. Again and again. Soon your head feels heavy, your neck, weak. The room's spinning. You're not the NightFeeder you thought you were, eh? Loosen that belt. Stop your whining and order desert damn it. How about some white chocolate cheese cake with a raspberry swirl? Or a Peanut Butter Dream — chocolate brownie crust topped with a peanut butter melt-a-way, smothered in a peanut butter mousse, finished with whipped topping and drizzled with chocolate sauce? Oh, the verbs.
You know you're not worth it. You eat it anyway. All of it. Your personality disorder kicks in. You know what you have to do, where you're headed next. MAD MEX. You want food that's gonna bite back. And with their late-night, half-price special, it won't take a bite out of your wallet.
11-ish. You think you're a cliché factory but that's just what happens driving out McKnight Road. You keep your eyes peeled for the striking green light of the psychedelic-southwestern sign. Your innerfeeder taunts you, "Are we there yet, huh, huh?"
The Rolling Stones' "Let It Bleed" plays as you walk in the door, "I'm a seething, feeding monkey, all my friends are hunkies." And on an excellent stereo, no less. The place is dark but not depressing: seductive. The sharp edges of steel sculptures capture your eyes. Bare bulbs trapped in green jars hang from ropes above the bar. You sit in a corner and need a cigarette just to touch the branded leather menu cover.
You sink into an adult-sized Kiwi Margarita made from fresh fruit. Their bartenders have to come into work an hour early just to squeeze lemons and limes. After only one, you want to eat with your hands. You want to lick your fingers. You want to burn your mouth, your lips, your tongue. A fine sweat overcomes your brow as you read descriptions of food even healthy people would love.
You order wings. They come in three flavors: mild, wild and insane. The San Franciscans are covered with honey mustard, garlic and a red pepper flake sauce. You bite into a wild one. The sauce tingles your lips. You want to touch yourself. Yes...it's time for squid. The calamari is excellent, kinda like oceanic onion rings. You dip them, one after another after another, into thick white sauce that slides down your throat like a million secret wishes.
When you think you can't take it anymore, the waitress brings your Nachos Grande. Red, white, blue and yellow corn chips are piled helplessly on a plate, no, on a platter and are smothered with Monterey Jack, salsa, jalapeños, black beans, sour cream and the only guacamole you've ever actually liked, made fresh everyday.
You're biting your fingers in the frenzy of a feedfest. You're drawing blood. And stares. Time to go. Doesn't matter. You got what you came for. You leave a big, juicy tip for the waitress.
12-ish. You're sitting in your car with no particular place to go. The windshield wipers slap slap slap slap. The Meat Puppets play on the radio, "Where do fat folks go when they die? They don't go to heaven cause they're too fat to fly." Why, why does there have to be fat? You think you hear someone laugh at you. You check the floors of your car. And what do you find but a so-happy cigarette.
La la-la. Silky smoke softens the edges of everything. The Innocence Mission plays, "I've come to the end of me again." You're suddenly William Blake in a station wagon returning from the road of excess. You head downtown to the CLUB JOY, a new dance club and late-night restaurant next to the Chinatown Inn.
Up to the second floor. Chinese videos play while people sing karaoke. No one's speaking English. The waitress comes, dressed in a white satin gown. She serves tea in cute little cups. You add four packs of sugar and get your second wind. You order wanton noodle soup. You chew languidly on shrimp-filled wantons, slurp slowly the wonderful noodles and savor the pungent broth.
The soothing pink and delicate blue decor dissolves your dysfunctional defenses. The truth behind your need to feed ripples through your thighs. You're in love with Adam Duritz, the lead singer of the Eating Crow. Quit calling him a whiner and admit it. And there's only one thing that will ease that ache, Mr. Jones — a trip to PEPPI'S in the Strip District. You're headed back into the underbelly of your obsession.
1-ish. Bright lights, big hoagie. You drink a Stewart's orange cream soda that's a liquid dream while you read the menu. Maybe you'll have a vegetarian sub called the Shady Side. You'd rather eat boiled Birkenstocks. You decide on the Big Wheeler. It's served on a roll from Mancini's bakery that's stuffed with a steak and sausage mix, grilled onions and melted provolone.
You begin with a huge plate of Cajun fries and some slushy lemonade that puckers your lips. You pinch yourself. You dip crispy fries in the Marzetti ranch dressing served with it. Your eyes roll back in your head when you realize how perfectly they blend together.
Your sandwich arrives. With the first bite, you realize that you’ve never had a real steak sub until now. And no wonder. At Peppi’s, they shave their own steaks daily. The difference is incredible. Time stands still while you chew. You have to remind yourself to breathe. Then, like waking to a nightmare, you look down and find an empty plate. You don't know how long you stare, wondering where it all went. Life is like that. Time to move on.
2-ish. They say you always return the scene of your first feed. You're parked across the street from TOM'S DINER in Dormont. Their large gyros and fried mushrooms spoiled you for all others. Your mouth waters as memories flood your mind.
You don't want to deal with the crowd waiting to get in but know you have to. You're about to get out of your car when you see a young couple in line sucking face. How quickly you'd forgotten that food isn't really what you want.
But a little breakfast seems pretty harmless.
3-ish. MIKE’S LUNCH on Brownsville Road, next to the St. Vincent De Paul Store in Mt. Oliver, has been in business for over 70 years. The decor is circa ‘69 — burnt orange vinyl stools, striped wallpaper to match. An old Dolly Madison sign hangs in the back.
John the cook is cute, tattooed and hilarious. His mother’s working the late shift with him. His grandmother’s been employed there for 25 years. The dishwasher, for three hours. They’re open from 6 a.m. ‘till 4 a.m.
Yinzers abound, but you didn’t go there to stare at them like insensitive pseudo-hipsters might. If you’re throwing the right vibe, if you have nothing to prove, you’re in for a real treat. These strangers love to talk.
You order coffee. Smoke a cigarette, watch John cook your breakfast with an amusing precision. He's not a cook, he's a performer. A friend of his stumbles in mumbling, "My wife is going to kill me." Classic.
At least he has someone. What you wouldn't give to be taking someone home tonight. What you wouldn't give — exactly.
Sure, NightFeeding's not as fun as having sex but when you wake up tomorrow, you'll only owe yourself an apology. Which is more to be proud of than you know.
Published by a paper that fired me and went out of business
Confessions of a nocturnal feeder
"I've been feeding you to see what form you'd take ... I just wanted to free your shape." The Tragically UnFit
You've been drinking again. You're surrounded by micro-beer drinking, date-raping weight lifters with perfect skin. Petite chicks with perpetual pouts push by with hair that bruises. And not an "excuse me" all night. Why are the physically perfect so rude? Because they have to look at the rest of us?
Back to ClubPsuedo. You've been trying to keep your hands to yourself but each wine cooler takes you closer to the edge of Spankville. But drinking as an alternative to sex is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. Desire bludgeons your blazing loins as Madonna's "Borderline" plays. Why, why is there always Madonna?
You have two choices, humiliate yourself into some sex or just walk the hell away. The lowest road outta there is what the Secret Order of the Chronically Single recommend: NightFeeding. Eating as an alternative to sex is like putting out a fire with milk.
But please, please keep these late-night feederies to yourselves. If word of this PostGrunge ritual gets out, everyone's gonna want to gain 50 pounds in search of the perfect midnight smack. I mean snack.
10-ish. You're driving through the filthy drizzle of an October night in Pittsburgh. You can't remember when you've ever been so hungry but the feeling seems familiar.
Your eyes scurry up and down Liberty Avenue in the heart of Bloomfield. Your mind seizes amid the confusing choice of eateries. Perogies at the BBT or pasta at the Pleasure Bar? You keep driving. You're craving protein.
You spot a soft pink glow buzzing just ahead. The awning of a new place? Couldn't be more than a few months old. It's name? MOJO BAY — written right above a little sun. Tears fill your eyes. You'll never be alone again.
Everyone at the bar seems to know each other but there are too many people for that to be possible. Friendly bartenders can do that to a place. You order a Jack Daniels and Coke without thinking. Oops. Well, you won't order an appetizer.
That thought disappears once you look at the menu. Two striking choices: smoked salmon chowder served in a sourdough Tuscan loaf and the oysters baked with a garlic almond butter, served on a bed of sea salt.
Your waitress comes. You ask her what's available at such a late hour. She tells you they'll prepare anything, even full dinners until 2 a.m. You think you're hallucinating until the food arrives. Then you're sure of it.
Man, the colors in the Cobb Salad — perfectly placed rows of chicken, bleu cheese, minced bacon, diced tomatoes and egg are lovingly laid on a bed of mixed greens you can't even see. And on the side, a lite raspberry vinaigrette.
You're munching and crunching innocently when the waitress brings another plate. You see it staring up at you, spread wide open. It's the famed Muffaletta sandwich — layers of baked ham, Genoa salami, prosciutto, provolone and mozzarella overwhelm a bun the size of a bus.
You bite into the bitch. Again and again. Soon your head feels heavy, your neck, weak. The room's spinning. You're not the NightFeeder you thought you were, eh? Loosen that belt. Stop your whining and order desert damn it. How about some white chocolate cheese cake with a raspberry swirl? Or a Peanut Butter Dream — chocolate brownie crust topped with a peanut butter melt-a-way, smothered in a peanut butter mousse, finished with whipped topping and drizzled with chocolate sauce? Oh, the verbs.
You know you're not worth it. You eat it anyway. All of it. Your personality disorder kicks in. You know what you have to do, where you're headed next. MAD MEX. You want food that's gonna bite back. And with their late-night, half-price special, it won't take a bite out of your wallet.
11-ish. You think you're a cliché factory but that's just what happens driving out McKnight Road. You keep your eyes peeled for the striking green light of the psychedelic-southwestern sign. Your innerfeeder taunts you, "Are we there yet, huh, huh?"
The Rolling Stones' "Let It Bleed" plays as you walk in the door, "I'm a seething, feeding monkey, all my friends are hunkies." And on an excellent stereo, no less. The place is dark but not depressing: seductive. The sharp edges of steel sculptures capture your eyes. Bare bulbs trapped in green jars hang from ropes above the bar. You sit in a corner and need a cigarette just to touch the branded leather menu cover.
You sink into an adult-sized Kiwi Margarita made from fresh fruit. Their bartenders have to come into work an hour early just to squeeze lemons and limes. After only one, you want to eat with your hands. You want to lick your fingers. You want to burn your mouth, your lips, your tongue. A fine sweat overcomes your brow as you read descriptions of food even healthy people would love.
You order wings. They come in three flavors: mild, wild and insane. The San Franciscans are covered with honey mustard, garlic and a red pepper flake sauce. You bite into a wild one. The sauce tingles your lips. You want to touch yourself. Yes...it's time for squid. The calamari is excellent, kinda like oceanic onion rings. You dip them, one after another after another, into thick white sauce that slides down your throat like a million secret wishes.
When you think you can't take it anymore, the waitress brings your Nachos Grande. Red, white, blue and yellow corn chips are piled helplessly on a plate, no, on a platter and are smothered with Monterey Jack, salsa, jalapeños, black beans, sour cream and the only guacamole you've ever actually liked, made fresh everyday.
You're biting your fingers in the frenzy of a feedfest. You're drawing blood. And stares. Time to go. Doesn't matter. You got what you came for. You leave a big, juicy tip for the waitress.
12-ish. You're sitting in your car with no particular place to go. The windshield wipers slap slap slap slap. The Meat Puppets play on the radio, "Where do fat folks go when they die? They don't go to heaven cause they're too fat to fly." Why, why does there have to be fat? You think you hear someone laugh at you. You check the floors of your car. And what do you find but a so-happy cigarette.
La la-la. Silky smoke softens the edges of everything. The Innocence Mission plays, "I've come to the end of me again." You're suddenly William Blake in a station wagon returning from the road of excess. You head downtown to the CLUB JOY, a new dance club and late-night restaurant next to the Chinatown Inn.
Up to the second floor. Chinese videos play while people sing karaoke. No one's speaking English. The waitress comes, dressed in a white satin gown. She serves tea in cute little cups. You add four packs of sugar and get your second wind. You order wanton noodle soup. You chew languidly on shrimp-filled wantons, slurp slowly the wonderful noodles and savor the pungent broth.
The soothing pink and delicate blue decor dissolves your dysfunctional defenses. The truth behind your need to feed ripples through your thighs. You're in love with Adam Duritz, the lead singer of the Eating Crow. Quit calling him a whiner and admit it. And there's only one thing that will ease that ache, Mr. Jones — a trip to PEPPI'S in the Strip District. You're headed back into the underbelly of your obsession.
1-ish. Bright lights, big hoagie. You drink a Stewart's orange cream soda that's a liquid dream while you read the menu. Maybe you'll have a vegetarian sub called the Shady Side. You'd rather eat boiled Birkenstocks. You decide on the Big Wheeler. It's served on a roll from Mancini's bakery that's stuffed with a steak and sausage mix, grilled onions and melted provolone.
You begin with a huge plate of Cajun fries and some slushy lemonade that puckers your lips. You pinch yourself. You dip crispy fries in the Marzetti ranch dressing served with it. Your eyes roll back in your head when you realize how perfectly they blend together.
Your sandwich arrives. With the first bite, you realize that you’ve never had a real steak sub until now. And no wonder. At Peppi’s, they shave their own steaks daily. The difference is incredible. Time stands still while you chew. You have to remind yourself to breathe. Then, like waking to a nightmare, you look down and find an empty plate. You don't know how long you stare, wondering where it all went. Life is like that. Time to move on.
2-ish. They say you always return the scene of your first feed. You're parked across the street from TOM'S DINER in Dormont. Their large gyros and fried mushrooms spoiled you for all others. Your mouth waters as memories flood your mind.
You don't want to deal with the crowd waiting to get in but know you have to. You're about to get out of your car when you see a young couple in line sucking face. How quickly you'd forgotten that food isn't really what you want.
But a little breakfast seems pretty harmless.
3-ish. MIKE’S LUNCH on Brownsville Road, next to the St. Vincent De Paul Store in Mt. Oliver, has been in business for over 70 years. The decor is circa ‘69 — burnt orange vinyl stools, striped wallpaper to match. An old Dolly Madison sign hangs in the back.
John the cook is cute, tattooed and hilarious. His mother’s working the late shift with him. His grandmother’s been employed there for 25 years. The dishwasher, for three hours. They’re open from 6 a.m. ‘till 4 a.m.
Yinzers abound, but you didn’t go there to stare at them like insensitive pseudo-hipsters might. If you’re throwing the right vibe, if you have nothing to prove, you’re in for a real treat. These strangers love to talk.
You order coffee. Smoke a cigarette, watch John cook your breakfast with an amusing precision. He's not a cook, he's a performer. A friend of his stumbles in mumbling, "My wife is going to kill me." Classic.
At least he has someone. What you wouldn't give to be taking someone home tonight. What you wouldn't give — exactly.
Sure, NightFeeding's not as fun as having sex but when you wake up tomorrow, you'll only owe yourself an apology. Which is more to be proud of than you know.
Published by a paper that fired me and went out of business
Saturday, February 12, 2005
All that trickles is not gold
Dew, like diamonds, sparkles on the lawn of contentment … June-green grass vibrates against the bluest dawn. The rising sun plays peek-a-boo with bouquets of clouds. Flowers bend under the weight of their blooms as I inhale my immaculate yard from the hammock of my hard work.
Oh to be Middle Class - where girls and boys dance without exchanging body fluids and there’s never a hair in the bathroom sink. The food is delicious, attractive and healthy, served on several layers of plates placed perfectly on gleaming tables. Plentiful leftovers are stored in the latest food-saving technology from Tupperware. The refrigerator is so clean you can’t help but stand with the door open, staring. It seems to stock itself!
Bacteria doesn’t stand a chance against such perfect organization. Such calm acceptability and abundance. Grout grows no mildew and carpeting won’t accept stains. Freshly Febrezed furniture and Swiffered floors. Ah …
You never run out of anything – there’s a can of cleanser for the bathroom and one for the kitchen. There’s plenty of paper towels and toilet paper and endless detergents and stain sticks.
And all of your coat hangers match!
You sure do have to bathe a lot but it’s not so bad with a huge-arse Cascadia shower head that sounds like spring rain, and of course you need shower rings with ball-bearings that elicit the zippy sound of success when stepping from the shower with a plush towel – white and warm – into a fog of accomplishment.
(Drum roll) … after 12 years of scraping the bottom of the social bucket (welfare mother) (I’LL NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT AND I’LL NEVER APOLOGIZE) - after 12 years of being the Rich Man’s scapegoat and the Common Man’s whipping post, I’m living the good life. YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK!
Now I can be a dick like the rest of ya.
Priceless
Supermarket cashiers would get all indignant when I accidentally put more stuff in my cart than I could afford. They’d be all pissed for having to do a little extra work for the lazy welfare mother. OH THE HUMANITY. And there was the Giant Eagle cashier in Brentwood who asked for my welfare ID every time I got in her line. Just because she could. Because she hated her job. Because she was spent enough to think it was my fault she wasn’t making shit for money.
In the late seventies, I had a friend who was a union cashier at the Giant Eagle and was making something like $9 an hour back when the minimum wage was $2.65. Giant Eagle briefly closed their doors to put an end to that, but go ahead and blame your paltry paycheck on women who wouldn’t need welfare if they where making union wages.
I used to fantasize about getting even with every cashier and customer support person who felt entitled to treat me like trash when I was poor. Part of their job is taking it from customers, too, eh? I imagined throwing fits about how they bagged the bread with the milk. Call the manager if they give me any attitude. NOT SO SMUG NOW, EH?
I finally get my big chance to be bitchy but feel so guilty about my good fortune that I can’t even look cashiers in the eye. I’m just another docile tax-payer who turned a whiter shade of pale for a paycheck.
I was at Foodland and saw this old biker dude I used to know, still wearing a Harley headband and the whole uniform. I wanted to walk right up to him and go, “Hey Mr. Harley Man, I’m still cool but have kids to take care of so don’t even look at me like some citizen, ya bastard!” I was a biker legend and made it into Easy Rider magazine on several occasions.
Now I’m so boring you could stick pins in my eyeballs and I wouldn’t notice. The only time I don’t feel completely dead is when I listen to the Tragically Hip in the car or my cube. (Gordon Downie wears a shirt we sent him from the South Side Goodwill in the “My Music @ Work” video – I shit you not). Rock and Roll never lets me forget there’s more to me than a debit card and student loans.
Yet a personality is a small sacrifice to enable me to pay my son’s fraternity dues and make sure he has the hippest cell phone and mall clothes. He’ll never have to feel as small as I have. And yes, Dear God, I am more grateful for that than anything.
The days of checks and food stamps
Knowing my life has improved while others’ have gotten worse doesn’t feel worth celebrating.Hey I’m doing great – sorry about the rest of yinz who had work limits imposed on you while the country lost over a million jobs! I can’t believe what the government has taken in just twenty years. What will be left after in another twenty? Social Security?
I made my comeback before the $85 monthly bus pass. Before Columbia Gas could shut off your heat in the middle of winter. Before limits that would have not given me enough time to recover from my addiction and go on to develop my talents. I mean that is the hope of America, right? Free to go as far as your dreams will take you, RIGHT? Well unless you have mouths to feed and no husband to help or fucked-up young. Or both.
I graduated from CMU before we passed laws to destroy addicts’ access to education by
denying them financial aid for drug convictions – I mean think about it – what kind of addict is trying to go to school? One in recovery who knows only an education will provide the golden rope to escape the despondent existence of the chemically tainted. And how can this law provide a deterrent when hardcore addicts don’t know about it or consider any future beyond the next hit?
Most American families have at least one addict and/or welfare recipient to liven up holiday conversation. But you’d rather see your cousin or grandmother get screwed by welfare or Medicaid just to punish the archetypal welfare mother in a Cadillac. You ignore the women with kids you see at rainy bus stops. You believe what you want. What’s easiest. And it’s easiest not to care. But newsflash: It doesn’t make you superior. Just a dick.
You never think about the archetypal welfare child who grows up to cost you tons more money in prison. You turn your back on innocent children and the result of your neglect costs far more than welfare and yet you think you’re morally and fiscally responsible? ARE YOU F’N KIDDING ME?
Oh, and I didn’t get my IT job because of my QPA at CMU. I Never could understand why
parents were willing to spend so much money to send their kids to that school. Until I started looking for a job.
I thought putting my CMU dual-degrees at the top of my resume would separate me from other applicants. But it had no impact. It was only through my friend, Madge, that I was able to get my job. She knew someone who knew someone etc. Now I know what your tuition buys you – connections.
Fairytales Ending
Thomas Jefferson said, “There is no law that can save a man from himself.” But there used to be laws that still regarded all people – even the fallen – with dignity. America used to be cool. Now we’re just scared stupid.
It’s hard to be grateful for the help I received knowing most of the country would prefer to see me in some low wage job for the rest of my life – regardless of the consequences to my son. It’s hard to be grateful and still remember how much boot-licking I had to do. It’s hard to be grateful when I feel guilty for merely being born when this country still gave you a second chance. No one gets through life without ever needing help or making a mistake. Let those without sin blow me.
But I’m so lucky! I have drawers stuffed with clean socks and underthings – an entire collection of bras and a washer and dryer that don’t require quarters or travel. There’s my Denon home theater system and Digital cable. And why pay 90 bucks a month for all those programs if you don’t get Tivo to record them and never have to be insulted by another commercial?
Ah … being Middle Class. Everything looks better. Smells better. You even dream better from Egyptian cotton sheets and down pillows. Such softness. Such absence of discomfort and temptation. What more could you want?
Well … I guess we never run out of things to want.
Or hate.
Fuck it. I gotta work.
Oh to be Middle Class - where girls and boys dance without exchanging body fluids and there’s never a hair in the bathroom sink. The food is delicious, attractive and healthy, served on several layers of plates placed perfectly on gleaming tables. Plentiful leftovers are stored in the latest food-saving technology from Tupperware. The refrigerator is so clean you can’t help but stand with the door open, staring. It seems to stock itself!
Bacteria doesn’t stand a chance against such perfect organization. Such calm acceptability and abundance. Grout grows no mildew and carpeting won’t accept stains. Freshly Febrezed furniture and Swiffered floors. Ah …
You never run out of anything – there’s a can of cleanser for the bathroom and one for the kitchen. There’s plenty of paper towels and toilet paper and endless detergents and stain sticks.
And all of your coat hangers match!
You sure do have to bathe a lot but it’s not so bad with a huge-arse Cascadia shower head that sounds like spring rain, and of course you need shower rings with ball-bearings that elicit the zippy sound of success when stepping from the shower with a plush towel – white and warm – into a fog of accomplishment.
(Drum roll) … after 12 years of scraping the bottom of the social bucket (welfare mother) (I’LL NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT AND I’LL NEVER APOLOGIZE) - after 12 years of being the Rich Man’s scapegoat and the Common Man’s whipping post, I’m living the good life. YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK!
Now I can be a dick like the rest of ya.
Priceless
Supermarket cashiers would get all indignant when I accidentally put more stuff in my cart than I could afford. They’d be all pissed for having to do a little extra work for the lazy welfare mother. OH THE HUMANITY. And there was the Giant Eagle cashier in Brentwood who asked for my welfare ID every time I got in her line. Just because she could. Because she hated her job. Because she was spent enough to think it was my fault she wasn’t making shit for money.
In the late seventies, I had a friend who was a union cashier at the Giant Eagle and was making something like $9 an hour back when the minimum wage was $2.65. Giant Eagle briefly closed their doors to put an end to that, but go ahead and blame your paltry paycheck on women who wouldn’t need welfare if they where making union wages.
I used to fantasize about getting even with every cashier and customer support person who felt entitled to treat me like trash when I was poor. Part of their job is taking it from customers, too, eh? I imagined throwing fits about how they bagged the bread with the milk. Call the manager if they give me any attitude. NOT SO SMUG NOW, EH?
I finally get my big chance to be bitchy but feel so guilty about my good fortune that I can’t even look cashiers in the eye. I’m just another docile tax-payer who turned a whiter shade of pale for a paycheck.
I was at Foodland and saw this old biker dude I used to know, still wearing a Harley headband and the whole uniform. I wanted to walk right up to him and go, “Hey Mr. Harley Man, I’m still cool but have kids to take care of so don’t even look at me like some citizen, ya bastard!” I was a biker legend and made it into Easy Rider magazine on several occasions.
Now I’m so boring you could stick pins in my eyeballs and I wouldn’t notice. The only time I don’t feel completely dead is when I listen to the Tragically Hip in the car or my cube. (Gordon Downie wears a shirt we sent him from the South Side Goodwill in the “My Music @ Work” video – I shit you not). Rock and Roll never lets me forget there’s more to me than a debit card and student loans.
Yet a personality is a small sacrifice to enable me to pay my son’s fraternity dues and make sure he has the hippest cell phone and mall clothes. He’ll never have to feel as small as I have. And yes, Dear God, I am more grateful for that than anything.
The days of checks and food stamps
Knowing my life has improved while others’ have gotten worse doesn’t feel worth celebrating.Hey I’m doing great – sorry about the rest of yinz who had work limits imposed on you while the country lost over a million jobs! I can’t believe what the government has taken in just twenty years. What will be left after in another twenty? Social Security?
I made my comeback before the $85 monthly bus pass. Before Columbia Gas could shut off your heat in the middle of winter. Before limits that would have not given me enough time to recover from my addiction and go on to develop my talents. I mean that is the hope of America, right? Free to go as far as your dreams will take you, RIGHT? Well unless you have mouths to feed and no husband to help or fucked-up young. Or both.
I graduated from CMU before we passed laws to destroy addicts’ access to education by
denying them financial aid for drug convictions – I mean think about it – what kind of addict is trying to go to school? One in recovery who knows only an education will provide the golden rope to escape the despondent existence of the chemically tainted. And how can this law provide a deterrent when hardcore addicts don’t know about it or consider any future beyond the next hit?
Most American families have at least one addict and/or welfare recipient to liven up holiday conversation. But you’d rather see your cousin or grandmother get screwed by welfare or Medicaid just to punish the archetypal welfare mother in a Cadillac. You ignore the women with kids you see at rainy bus stops. You believe what you want. What’s easiest. And it’s easiest not to care. But newsflash: It doesn’t make you superior. Just a dick.
You never think about the archetypal welfare child who grows up to cost you tons more money in prison. You turn your back on innocent children and the result of your neglect costs far more than welfare and yet you think you’re morally and fiscally responsible? ARE YOU F’N KIDDING ME?
Oh, and I didn’t get my IT job because of my QPA at CMU. I Never could understand why
parents were willing to spend so much money to send their kids to that school. Until I started looking for a job.
I thought putting my CMU dual-degrees at the top of my resume would separate me from other applicants. But it had no impact. It was only through my friend, Madge, that I was able to get my job. She knew someone who knew someone etc. Now I know what your tuition buys you – connections.
Fairytales Ending
Thomas Jefferson said, “There is no law that can save a man from himself.” But there used to be laws that still regarded all people – even the fallen – with dignity. America used to be cool. Now we’re just scared stupid.
It’s hard to be grateful for the help I received knowing most of the country would prefer to see me in some low wage job for the rest of my life – regardless of the consequences to my son. It’s hard to be grateful and still remember how much boot-licking I had to do. It’s hard to be grateful when I feel guilty for merely being born when this country still gave you a second chance. No one gets through life without ever needing help or making a mistake. Let those without sin blow me.
But I’m so lucky! I have drawers stuffed with clean socks and underthings – an entire collection of bras and a washer and dryer that don’t require quarters or travel. There’s my Denon home theater system and Digital cable. And why pay 90 bucks a month for all those programs if you don’t get Tivo to record them and never have to be insulted by another commercial?
Ah … being Middle Class. Everything looks better. Smells better. You even dream better from Egyptian cotton sheets and down pillows. Such softness. Such absence of discomfort and temptation. What more could you want?
Well … I guess we never run out of things to want.
Or hate.
Fuck it. I gotta work.
The Love Bus
Three teen-aged girls sit across the bus from me. Their fingers twirl hair, poke at holes in tennis shoes, pull chewing gum into long strings to wrap around the tips of tongues.
The bus squeals to a stop. Without warning, a cute boy gets on and walks toward us with a smile that loosens the duct tape on my heart. As if on cue, all three girls start talking at once; and somehow, through an ancient intuition known only to teen-agers on the Carrick bus, they each know what the others are saying.
When I almost get used to that, they whisper in a huddle and suddenly tremble with shrieking giggles that make him jump. They accuse each other of liking him while calling each other queer. The mere mention of the word makes him sweat testosterone.
He thinks they're jagging him. Sadly enough, he'll never know they're acting like that because he is so cute. Love makes idiots of us all — like a young man who sees his beloved's sweater bouncing towards him and tries to impress her by spitting but ends up dribbling on himself.
It's easier to dribble on someone else. In ten years, he'll know some eyelash-batting piece of bitch isn't worth it. He'll drink yards of beer at Mario's and wiggle his tongue at women who will drop condoms on the bar as delicately as hankies — women who can even fake blushing. They'll learn that getting sex in a bar is kinda like laughing at your own joke in a large, empty room. But lust has no memory.
Ah, yes. Nothing like some teen-agers acting like I did, to bring out the cynic in me. I'm in severe need of tunes. I'll put Melissa Etheridge's tape, Yes I Am, in my headphones, her first release after she told the world she was a lesbian.
I still can't believe she's singing about women, not men, tearing her heart up. I guess there will never be equals in love. Whoever loves most loses regardless of gender. Funny. When I'm attracted to a man, I can't pull off the independent woman of the '90s facade they find so comforting.
I attended a local college where the most attractive man I've ever seen works. I'd start hyperventilating as I stepped off the bus; but as I walked up to school, I felt perfect Freudian happiness — being near him but having all that mystic distance in which the illusion of perfect love luxuriated.
I daydreamed about running into him, literally, first meeting and touching him in the same instant. We'd pause too long in each other's arms and stutter apologies. I'd be quick-witted but vulnerable — he'd be attentive but strong, like a couple in a Dan Fogelberg song. We'd speak briefly, staring at our feet, ashamed of the ridiculous smiles on our faces and say, "See you later, sorry." But that night, on separate porches, we'd feel each other at the end of every breeze that brushed our faces.
And it happened, I smashed into him. His blue eyes were as bright as cracked marbles and sparked against his silver hair. I can still feel the shock of my hands on his shoulders. Maybe that's why I bolted. Didn't even say "excuse me."
It was easy to imagine the certain embarrassment I avoided by not speaking. I would've sounded worse than a busload of cheerleaders. But I'd never been so scared of anyone. A coward dies a thousand deaths, indeed. That night, I wandered around Foodland so weak I wasn't even capable of a "no" to a free-sample lady with cocktail wieners. And my mouth was already so dry. I would've given anything to hear him call me psychotic just once....
The bus rattles through Mt. Oliver, where even the bars burn down. The cute young man's getting ready to get off the bus. The instant the center doors open, the girls bust out in a window-rattling chorus of giggles that makes me want to backhand them. But at least they waited 'till he could run out the door.
Melissa's song, "Talking To My Angel" plays. Is there anyone who isn't waiting to be completely understood by a perfect being? It may be unrealistic, but compromise is a risky business. It's easier to be with someone who isn't your dream-come-true than to feel the desperation and drive of obsessive love. But it's not fair to your lover because in the back of your head, you're still looking. You say things like "I need my space."
I believe in love at first sight. Pretty scary notion to have on the bus. Luckily it doesn't happen often. My therapist urged me to "date" instead of doing high-dives into the souls of madmen. "Dating" sounded like going out with people you're not wild about so you don't have sex at first. You eat food and see movies which provide the perfect opportunity for discourse consisting solely of strategic hints about what kind of person you want your date to think you are.
This could go on for years. I'd rather go to Catfish Hill in South Park, blast tunes and tell him horrible things about myself. I'll only have enough time to tell a fraction of the story and if he can't handle that, well, at least he'll be gone before I get used to sex again.
My therapist said I needed to know a man for awhile before I could love him. But the longer you know someone, the harder it is. He thought I trusted people too quickly to prove they weren't trustworthy. It always seemed to work, though. I love while I can — it's the only thing that makes me trust a man without making him earn it. But then I can't trust myself....
Almost at my stop, I turn off my headphones and say "excuse me" to the man sitting next to me. He unfolds his arms, exposing a "no muff too tuff" t-shirt. I step over him and don't look back so I don't have to watch him check out my ass.
No wonder I never forgot the man with voltage in his eyes. But he was a captivating man that I saw at an all-girl's school I went to so I wouldn't have to see men. It pissed me off. I refused to even look at him until I'd see his eyes and couldn't look away.
I have to believe he's married — the thought of him spending his nights alone drives me wild. It doesn't matter though, I don't need a man to define my existence. I'm busy discovering my bliss and reading The Road Less Traveled and The Prophet. I spend time nurturing myself, repeatedly telling myself that I'm alone by choice, that I'm better for it.
Loneliness has an irreversible quality to it — like the further you go out, even if you want to come back, you'll never be as close to the world as when you started. I guess it's this tragic quality that makes it feel somehow heroic.
No wonder the road is less traveled. Everyone on it is alone.
The bus squeals to a stop. Without warning, a cute boy gets on and walks toward us with a smile that loosens the duct tape on my heart. As if on cue, all three girls start talking at once; and somehow, through an ancient intuition known only to teen-agers on the Carrick bus, they each know what the others are saying.
When I almost get used to that, they whisper in a huddle and suddenly tremble with shrieking giggles that make him jump. They accuse each other of liking him while calling each other queer. The mere mention of the word makes him sweat testosterone.
He thinks they're jagging him. Sadly enough, he'll never know they're acting like that because he is so cute. Love makes idiots of us all — like a young man who sees his beloved's sweater bouncing towards him and tries to impress her by spitting but ends up dribbling on himself.
It's easier to dribble on someone else. In ten years, he'll know some eyelash-batting piece of bitch isn't worth it. He'll drink yards of beer at Mario's and wiggle his tongue at women who will drop condoms on the bar as delicately as hankies — women who can even fake blushing. They'll learn that getting sex in a bar is kinda like laughing at your own joke in a large, empty room. But lust has no memory.
Ah, yes. Nothing like some teen-agers acting like I did, to bring out the cynic in me. I'm in severe need of tunes. I'll put Melissa Etheridge's tape, Yes I Am, in my headphones, her first release after she told the world she was a lesbian.
I still can't believe she's singing about women, not men, tearing her heart up. I guess there will never be equals in love. Whoever loves most loses regardless of gender. Funny. When I'm attracted to a man, I can't pull off the independent woman of the '90s facade they find so comforting.
I attended a local college where the most attractive man I've ever seen works. I'd start hyperventilating as I stepped off the bus; but as I walked up to school, I felt perfect Freudian happiness — being near him but having all that mystic distance in which the illusion of perfect love luxuriated.
I daydreamed about running into him, literally, first meeting and touching him in the same instant. We'd pause too long in each other's arms and stutter apologies. I'd be quick-witted but vulnerable — he'd be attentive but strong, like a couple in a Dan Fogelberg song. We'd speak briefly, staring at our feet, ashamed of the ridiculous smiles on our faces and say, "See you later, sorry." But that night, on separate porches, we'd feel each other at the end of every breeze that brushed our faces.
And it happened, I smashed into him. His blue eyes were as bright as cracked marbles and sparked against his silver hair. I can still feel the shock of my hands on his shoulders. Maybe that's why I bolted. Didn't even say "excuse me."
It was easy to imagine the certain embarrassment I avoided by not speaking. I would've sounded worse than a busload of cheerleaders. But I'd never been so scared of anyone. A coward dies a thousand deaths, indeed. That night, I wandered around Foodland so weak I wasn't even capable of a "no" to a free-sample lady with cocktail wieners. And my mouth was already so dry. I would've given anything to hear him call me psychotic just once....
The bus rattles through Mt. Oliver, where even the bars burn down. The cute young man's getting ready to get off the bus. The instant the center doors open, the girls bust out in a window-rattling chorus of giggles that makes me want to backhand them. But at least they waited 'till he could run out the door.
Melissa's song, "Talking To My Angel" plays. Is there anyone who isn't waiting to be completely understood by a perfect being? It may be unrealistic, but compromise is a risky business. It's easier to be with someone who isn't your dream-come-true than to feel the desperation and drive of obsessive love. But it's not fair to your lover because in the back of your head, you're still looking. You say things like "I need my space."
I believe in love at first sight. Pretty scary notion to have on the bus. Luckily it doesn't happen often. My therapist urged me to "date" instead of doing high-dives into the souls of madmen. "Dating" sounded like going out with people you're not wild about so you don't have sex at first. You eat food and see movies which provide the perfect opportunity for discourse consisting solely of strategic hints about what kind of person you want your date to think you are.
This could go on for years. I'd rather go to Catfish Hill in South Park, blast tunes and tell him horrible things about myself. I'll only have enough time to tell a fraction of the story and if he can't handle that, well, at least he'll be gone before I get used to sex again.
My therapist said I needed to know a man for awhile before I could love him. But the longer you know someone, the harder it is. He thought I trusted people too quickly to prove they weren't trustworthy. It always seemed to work, though. I love while I can — it's the only thing that makes me trust a man without making him earn it. But then I can't trust myself....
Almost at my stop, I turn off my headphones and say "excuse me" to the man sitting next to me. He unfolds his arms, exposing a "no muff too tuff" t-shirt. I step over him and don't look back so I don't have to watch him check out my ass.
No wonder I never forgot the man with voltage in his eyes. But he was a captivating man that I saw at an all-girl's school I went to so I wouldn't have to see men. It pissed me off. I refused to even look at him until I'd see his eyes and couldn't look away.
I have to believe he's married — the thought of him spending his nights alone drives me wild. It doesn't matter though, I don't need a man to define my existence. I'm busy discovering my bliss and reading The Road Less Traveled and The Prophet. I spend time nurturing myself, repeatedly telling myself that I'm alone by choice, that I'm better for it.
Loneliness has an irreversible quality to it — like the further you go out, even if you want to come back, you'll never be as close to the world as when you started. I guess it's this tragic quality that makes it feel somehow heroic.
No wonder the road is less traveled. Everyone on it is alone.
Fat Like Me
Fat Like Me
Published Feb., 1996
It was Alternet's #2 story for the month so there!
Fatties Fatale
The night I learned what it meant to be fat, I was 14 years old and 15 pounds overweight. I watched my best friend, who was the fattest person I'd ever seen, giving head to a 22 year-old man who was driving us home from a party. I had never seen anyone put so much of anything into a mouth. Gulp. I completely understood my future.
Her fat made her look old enough to get served at the liquor store. And it made her bold. She'd call random men on the phone, lie about her age, promise oral sex and we'd go meet them. She'd do as many as eight a night, until her teeth wore blisters inside her lips.
I already had full breasts and was only marginally fat. Men wanted more than oral sex from me. Each time I was date-raped, well, I didn't consider it rape to have sex with men who made me feel sick to my stomach. I was a fat chick. I had no right to say "no." Thin girls who never carried their own books, did. I was tortured at Brentwood high school and quit as soon as legally possible. I was ripe to be a welfare mother.
I found out I was pregnant in a drug rehab and went on to gain 75 pounds. I was officially fat and didn't care because I thought when people saw me with a baby, they wouldn't look at me like a whore anymore. I would be a mother.
Boy was I wrong. A few years ago, I talked to the fat chick who had been bobbing in the car that night. I told her about how I ended up as an honor student at Carnegie Mellon University. But when I admitted that I was on welfare, she said, "Don't you have any pride?"
I told her I didn't need pride, I was getting an education.
The Meek Shall Inherit the Girth
After a nice, big dinner, why do people need desert? And if sugar is a source of energy, why serve coffee with it? Oh, how refined America's tastes are ....
For centuries after sugar was brought to Europe, it was only sold in apothecaries. Average consumption by the eighteenth century was about four pounds a year per person. Now it's over a hundred pounds, even close to two hundred for many.
Around 7000 B.C., Neolithic man began to cultivate grains and roots because they could be stored. Now we sacrifice nutrition for shelf-life. Wheat is degerminated and bleached until it's so sterile even micro-organisms can't live on it. Let alone human beings.
Sugar and flour are staples because they're cheap to produce and store. When combined in donuts, pastries and cereals, the combination produces a narcotic effect. Sugar and white flour are the only things Overeater's Anonymous asks members to abstain from. They're the simplest carbohydrates, refined starch, instantly converted into blood sugar (glucose) providing a short rush of energy, of good feelings.
But for some, the spike of glucose causes a hyper-release of insulin, which is used to process it. So much insulin is released, gobbling up the glucose to store as fat, that there is less energy, less glucose available in the blood than before eating. The result: intense cravings for carbohydrates.
Vacillations between blood sugar levels may even trigger violence, a fight or feed response. The deluge of refined carbohydrates in this country could be the source of several behavior problems and even mental illness; however, budget constraints force institutions such as schools, hospitals and jails, to provide a diet of them.
Poor people (single mothers) are also limited to buying cheap foods for their families. Poverty is a major source of anxiety which itself causes the pancreas to hyper-release insulin. The more common response to low blood sugar is weight gain and a low-level lethargy, depression, aggression, fatigue, intense hunger. Which describes the mood of America.
An American Indian tribe in Ohio was brought to ruin when corn was introduced into their diet. They did nothing except farm and eat corn. Their teeth rotted away, their life expectancy dropped. All artistic endeavors like mound building and pottery making disappeared. Their entire life revolved around the production of the corn that was killing them.
Do you ever see a McDonald’s go out of business? No, they're busy adding playplaces for children who will grow up and blame their moms for being fat.
Fed Up
I wanted to go to a frat party before I graduated from Carnegie Mellon. I was really excited, started drinking early, met my friend Tracy and off we went.
It was early, the first floor of the frat house was empty. We heard a band in the basement and went down, looking for some high-class fun.
After only a few minutes, the band started a song that consisted of one line: "Hey fat chick, suck my dick." Two guitarists hesitated. They were fat. But I could see the exact moment that the group mentality kicked in. The fat boys jammed hardest, sang loudest.
I had just lost 80 pounds and wasn't really fat. I was hidden among the elite. All the thin girls were doing the head-bobbing thing, the almost-dance of the perfect. I couldn't believe they didn't even wince. Don't you have to at least pretend you're a feminist until you're married? But it was like they were proud. They were thin. And they would never suck dick.
I thought about bursting through the crowd and telling them how brutal they were. I imagined going in the middle of the dance floor and singing along, dancing and throwing karate kicks and punches I learned following my last almost-rape in 1985.
I was a 32-year-old honor student and a tattooed welfare mother. At first, I stared at pictures of the same men, dressed in maroon ties and navy blue sports coats, on the wall. All they had to do was be college students and they were treated with respect; and yet they still had to rip on fat chicks, who they'd never have to fuck, anyway.
Tracy stood frozen, her eyes huge and fixed on me, wondering what I was going to do, hoping it wouldn't be too embarrassing.
I left without saying a word.
The Fat Rolls For Thee
Obesity is now represented in the Americans With Disabilities Act. The statistics of how many of us are overweight varies from 3 out of 4 (tabloids); to 33 percent (Pharmaceutical Information Associates, Ltd.), to 3 percent for women and 3.4 percent for men aged 18-22 (N England J Med: 1993).
But the $33 billion spent on diet products over the past year suggest that large numbers of people are trying to lose weight. Ironically, since 1990, low-fat dieters gained an average of eight pounds.
According to the New York Times (4-25-93), Dr. Michael F. Oliver of the National Heart and Lung Institute in London, presented evidence at the First International Conference of Fats and Oils and Human Disease, that even when low-fat (30 percent) diets were followed, they had no effect on lowering rates of heart disease.
He said: "Two decades [of large, clinical trials] have failed to demonstrate that the national goal [of a low-fat diet] has any effect on heart disease rates."
In one group, deaths from heart disease increased.
Oliver also discussed new evidence suggesting that the body will convert carbohydrates into saturated (the worst for the heart) fat for its needs when their isn't enough in the diet. When it comes to fat, doctors are finding that what happens in Petri dishes may be irrelevant compared to what goes on inside a patient. Heart disease remains our number one killer and bathroom scales are on the rise.
Another obvious failure of low-fat diets is that people can't, don't, won't stay on them. "While it is possible to lose weight by eating less and exercising, consciously overriding one's homeostatic control mechanisms requires constant attention and vigilance, which takes time away from other duties." writes Dr. Robert Yeas, who is an obese physician.
A nutrition exhibit at the Carnegie Science Center lists protein (low-carb) products as energy foods, good for breakfast, and high carbohydrate foods for the evening because they slowed the metabolism down — the exact opposite of those who claim that high carbs are energy foods.
On a low-fat diet, 6-8 servings of starch are recommended, the exact foods that cause cravings in as many as 75 percent of the population who are thought to be hyperinsulemic (carbohydrate-sensitive). Expecting them to live on low-fat diets might be akin to screaming at someone in a wheelchair to just get up and walk.
The Road Less Swallowed
I slowly peeled back the cheap pantyhose, slightly lifting my chaffed inner-thighs worn raw. I could see where each strand of nylon had sliced into my skin. I had been walking as part of my exercise program and wore pantyhose that were too small because they made me look thinner. By the time I realized what was happening, I was pretty far from home. I had no choice but to walk back— each step burning the nylon deeper into my skin. Health hurt.
This was the late '80s. I was a clean and sober, born-again welfare mother and full-time student at community college. After a year's sobriety, I decided to take control of my life again and went to Weight Watchers. I exercised, drank the water and wouldn't even lick the back of measuring spoon. I followed my plan perfectly.
After six weeks, I was having such intense food cravings that I'd cry hysterically, crawl on my hands and knees begging for strength, thinking it was Satan, screaming "I rebuke thee in the name of Jesus Christ." I knew my neighbors could hear.
I'd tell myself "one day at a time," over and over, guzzle water and drink tea until bedtime. I thanked the Lord for getting me through the day and then I'd spend the night dreaming about cakes and pastries and my teeth falling out. I'd wake-up starving, start crying and curse God. I'd start eating fistfuls of Frosted Flakes, guzzling milk from the carton, thinking about a Cosmo cover model who said her main form of exercise was walking across the street to get pastrami sandwiches.
I kept trying. I was either gaining or losing weight. At least the carbs calmed me down. But I smoked and drank coffee all day to stay awake. Donuts, cigarettes, coffee: the 12 step diet.
I started eating in the middle of the night — I once drank pancake syrup when it was the only sugar in the house. I didn't remember 'till I smelled it in my hair. I blew my diet even when I was unconscious. It challenged the psychological reasons I attributed for my overeating. In the middle of the night, I wasn't bored or feeling deprived or unloved or fat, I was asleep. I woke up because my body craved carbs. I complied and would slip right back into visions of sugarplums dancing in my head.
There's more to than this than meets the thigh.
Chins up!
Humans are natural omnivores. Early hominids lived on the meat of lean animals and random berries and roots they'd gather. There were no refined starches so they lived a low-carbohydrate (about 15 grams/day.) existence. Nothing near the almost 300 grams recommended on food nutrition labels today.
Low-carb diets' popularity suggests that they reduce appetite, renew energy, increase sexual potency, clear-headedness, strength, all the things that come from a general sense of well-being. Too good to be true?
In Dr.'s Richard and Rachel Heller's book, Healthy for Life, "Syndrome X" is defined as the affliction that causes the over-production of insulin after eating starchy food. But the low-carb concept started in 1973 when Dr. Robert C. Atkins published his Diet Revolution that has sold over six million copies.
Low-carb diets are treated like a dangerous fad. But the low-fat approach failed to do much except increase the ingestion of cheap carbs so people gained weight. The issue isn't what or how much one eats, but what the body does with it. And that will vary. Nothing is perfect for everyone.
The Atkins plan was faulted for causing "starvation." After a few days, the metabolism is forced to burn fat for energy. Glucose levels stabilize and the appetite disappears. The experts call this a dangerous side effect.
Think about it: A doctor discovers a diet that suppresses your appetite without drugs, and the medical community faults it.
A spoonful of medicine helps the sugar go down.
Cellulite Hero
Eating and sex, two basic and essential acts for sustaining life, have become the source of disease and misery to millions of people, including me. So why am I fat if I know so much?
Why do I stand at the bus stop rubbing my round belly when an attractive man with a side part stares at me in lust and disgust? I feel like I'm rubbing a magic lamp thinking ,"this is all mine, bastard." Can't spank this.
Fat is supposed to mean that we're not doing what we're told, we're not working hard enough, we're fat and lazy. We have no self-control. We don’t care about ourselves. So why should anyone else?
But am I really supposed to jog my fatness up and down public streets and starve until I'm in tears just so I can earn the privilege of being with the kind of men who hate fat chicks? Will someone please just tell me how much weight I have to gain to get men to leave me alone?
I'm not hugely fat or unhealthy. People say I'm not fat enough to write about being fat (I wrote that so you wouldn't think I'm too fat). And of course I'm not fat on purpose. I didn't say, "Hey God, make me fat so I can grow up and write about what a victim I am." I've always been "chubby." I prefer "chunky" because it's more visually accurate.
Oh, enough. I'm exhausted with this rebellious fat business. I hate myself, okay? I wake up with swollen eyes, my mouth completely dry. I have to stop poisoning my body with refined starch.
And someday, I will wake up thin — the sun will peek into my window, loosening my eyelids; but the warmth, the warmth will hold my tiny body in perfect rapture. My eyes open in one smooth smile, no slamming back shut when seeing the first rays of a new day.
But, in the meantime, pass me a Pepsi. Because fat is my way of saying I'd rather eat than date. It's a bold fashion statement that few women have the stomach for. With God as my witness, I will never be hungry again.
Published Feb., 1996
It was Alternet's #2 story for the month so there!
Fatties Fatale
The night I learned what it meant to be fat, I was 14 years old and 15 pounds overweight. I watched my best friend, who was the fattest person I'd ever seen, giving head to a 22 year-old man who was driving us home from a party. I had never seen anyone put so much of anything into a mouth. Gulp. I completely understood my future.
Her fat made her look old enough to get served at the liquor store. And it made her bold. She'd call random men on the phone, lie about her age, promise oral sex and we'd go meet them. She'd do as many as eight a night, until her teeth wore blisters inside her lips.
I already had full breasts and was only marginally fat. Men wanted more than oral sex from me. Each time I was date-raped, well, I didn't consider it rape to have sex with men who made me feel sick to my stomach. I was a fat chick. I had no right to say "no." Thin girls who never carried their own books, did. I was tortured at Brentwood high school and quit as soon as legally possible. I was ripe to be a welfare mother.
I found out I was pregnant in a drug rehab and went on to gain 75 pounds. I was officially fat and didn't care because I thought when people saw me with a baby, they wouldn't look at me like a whore anymore. I would be a mother.
Boy was I wrong. A few years ago, I talked to the fat chick who had been bobbing in the car that night. I told her about how I ended up as an honor student at Carnegie Mellon University. But when I admitted that I was on welfare, she said, "Don't you have any pride?"
I told her I didn't need pride, I was getting an education.
The Meek Shall Inherit the Girth
After a nice, big dinner, why do people need desert? And if sugar is a source of energy, why serve coffee with it? Oh, how refined America's tastes are ....
For centuries after sugar was brought to Europe, it was only sold in apothecaries. Average consumption by the eighteenth century was about four pounds a year per person. Now it's over a hundred pounds, even close to two hundred for many.
Around 7000 B.C., Neolithic man began to cultivate grains and roots because they could be stored. Now we sacrifice nutrition for shelf-life. Wheat is degerminated and bleached until it's so sterile even micro-organisms can't live on it. Let alone human beings.
Sugar and flour are staples because they're cheap to produce and store. When combined in donuts, pastries and cereals, the combination produces a narcotic effect. Sugar and white flour are the only things Overeater's Anonymous asks members to abstain from. They're the simplest carbohydrates, refined starch, instantly converted into blood sugar (glucose) providing a short rush of energy, of good feelings.
But for some, the spike of glucose causes a hyper-release of insulin, which is used to process it. So much insulin is released, gobbling up the glucose to store as fat, that there is less energy, less glucose available in the blood than before eating. The result: intense cravings for carbohydrates.
Vacillations between blood sugar levels may even trigger violence, a fight or feed response. The deluge of refined carbohydrates in this country could be the source of several behavior problems and even mental illness; however, budget constraints force institutions such as schools, hospitals and jails, to provide a diet of them.
Poor people (single mothers) are also limited to buying cheap foods for their families. Poverty is a major source of anxiety which itself causes the pancreas to hyper-release insulin. The more common response to low blood sugar is weight gain and a low-level lethargy, depression, aggression, fatigue, intense hunger. Which describes the mood of America.
An American Indian tribe in Ohio was brought to ruin when corn was introduced into their diet. They did nothing except farm and eat corn. Their teeth rotted away, their life expectancy dropped. All artistic endeavors like mound building and pottery making disappeared. Their entire life revolved around the production of the corn that was killing them.
Do you ever see a McDonald’s go out of business? No, they're busy adding playplaces for children who will grow up and blame their moms for being fat.
Fed Up
I wanted to go to a frat party before I graduated from Carnegie Mellon. I was really excited, started drinking early, met my friend Tracy and off we went.
It was early, the first floor of the frat house was empty. We heard a band in the basement and went down, looking for some high-class fun.
After only a few minutes, the band started a song that consisted of one line: "Hey fat chick, suck my dick." Two guitarists hesitated. They were fat. But I could see the exact moment that the group mentality kicked in. The fat boys jammed hardest, sang loudest.
I had just lost 80 pounds and wasn't really fat. I was hidden among the elite. All the thin girls were doing the head-bobbing thing, the almost-dance of the perfect. I couldn't believe they didn't even wince. Don't you have to at least pretend you're a feminist until you're married? But it was like they were proud. They were thin. And they would never suck dick.
I thought about bursting through the crowd and telling them how brutal they were. I imagined going in the middle of the dance floor and singing along, dancing and throwing karate kicks and punches I learned following my last almost-rape in 1985.
I was a 32-year-old honor student and a tattooed welfare mother. At first, I stared at pictures of the same men, dressed in maroon ties and navy blue sports coats, on the wall. All they had to do was be college students and they were treated with respect; and yet they still had to rip on fat chicks, who they'd never have to fuck, anyway.
Tracy stood frozen, her eyes huge and fixed on me, wondering what I was going to do, hoping it wouldn't be too embarrassing.
I left without saying a word.
The Fat Rolls For Thee
Obesity is now represented in the Americans With Disabilities Act. The statistics of how many of us are overweight varies from 3 out of 4 (tabloids); to 33 percent (Pharmaceutical Information Associates, Ltd.), to 3 percent for women and 3.4 percent for men aged 18-22 (N England J Med: 1993).
But the $33 billion spent on diet products over the past year suggest that large numbers of people are trying to lose weight. Ironically, since 1990, low-fat dieters gained an average of eight pounds.
According to the New York Times (4-25-93), Dr. Michael F. Oliver of the National Heart and Lung Institute in London, presented evidence at the First International Conference of Fats and Oils and Human Disease, that even when low-fat (30 percent) diets were followed, they had no effect on lowering rates of heart disease.
He said: "Two decades [of large, clinical trials] have failed to demonstrate that the national goal [of a low-fat diet] has any effect on heart disease rates."
In one group, deaths from heart disease increased.
Oliver also discussed new evidence suggesting that the body will convert carbohydrates into saturated (the worst for the heart) fat for its needs when their isn't enough in the diet. When it comes to fat, doctors are finding that what happens in Petri dishes may be irrelevant compared to what goes on inside a patient. Heart disease remains our number one killer and bathroom scales are on the rise.
Another obvious failure of low-fat diets is that people can't, don't, won't stay on them. "While it is possible to lose weight by eating less and exercising, consciously overriding one's homeostatic control mechanisms requires constant attention and vigilance, which takes time away from other duties." writes Dr. Robert Yeas, who is an obese physician.
A nutrition exhibit at the Carnegie Science Center lists protein (low-carb) products as energy foods, good for breakfast, and high carbohydrate foods for the evening because they slowed the metabolism down — the exact opposite of those who claim that high carbs are energy foods.
On a low-fat diet, 6-8 servings of starch are recommended, the exact foods that cause cravings in as many as 75 percent of the population who are thought to be hyperinsulemic (carbohydrate-sensitive). Expecting them to live on low-fat diets might be akin to screaming at someone in a wheelchair to just get up and walk.
The Road Less Swallowed
I slowly peeled back the cheap pantyhose, slightly lifting my chaffed inner-thighs worn raw. I could see where each strand of nylon had sliced into my skin. I had been walking as part of my exercise program and wore pantyhose that were too small because they made me look thinner. By the time I realized what was happening, I was pretty far from home. I had no choice but to walk back— each step burning the nylon deeper into my skin. Health hurt.
This was the late '80s. I was a clean and sober, born-again welfare mother and full-time student at community college. After a year's sobriety, I decided to take control of my life again and went to Weight Watchers. I exercised, drank the water and wouldn't even lick the back of measuring spoon. I followed my plan perfectly.
After six weeks, I was having such intense food cravings that I'd cry hysterically, crawl on my hands and knees begging for strength, thinking it was Satan, screaming "I rebuke thee in the name of Jesus Christ." I knew my neighbors could hear.
I'd tell myself "one day at a time," over and over, guzzle water and drink tea until bedtime. I thanked the Lord for getting me through the day and then I'd spend the night dreaming about cakes and pastries and my teeth falling out. I'd wake-up starving, start crying and curse God. I'd start eating fistfuls of Frosted Flakes, guzzling milk from the carton, thinking about a Cosmo cover model who said her main form of exercise was walking across the street to get pastrami sandwiches.
I kept trying. I was either gaining or losing weight. At least the carbs calmed me down. But I smoked and drank coffee all day to stay awake. Donuts, cigarettes, coffee: the 12 step diet.
I started eating in the middle of the night — I once drank pancake syrup when it was the only sugar in the house. I didn't remember 'till I smelled it in my hair. I blew my diet even when I was unconscious. It challenged the psychological reasons I attributed for my overeating. In the middle of the night, I wasn't bored or feeling deprived or unloved or fat, I was asleep. I woke up because my body craved carbs. I complied and would slip right back into visions of sugarplums dancing in my head.
There's more to than this than meets the thigh.
Chins up!
Humans are natural omnivores. Early hominids lived on the meat of lean animals and random berries and roots they'd gather. There were no refined starches so they lived a low-carbohydrate (about 15 grams/day.) existence. Nothing near the almost 300 grams recommended on food nutrition labels today.
Low-carb diets' popularity suggests that they reduce appetite, renew energy, increase sexual potency, clear-headedness, strength, all the things that come from a general sense of well-being. Too good to be true?
In Dr.'s Richard and Rachel Heller's book, Healthy for Life, "Syndrome X" is defined as the affliction that causes the over-production of insulin after eating starchy food. But the low-carb concept started in 1973 when Dr. Robert C. Atkins published his Diet Revolution that has sold over six million copies.
Low-carb diets are treated like a dangerous fad. But the low-fat approach failed to do much except increase the ingestion of cheap carbs so people gained weight. The issue isn't what or how much one eats, but what the body does with it. And that will vary. Nothing is perfect for everyone.
The Atkins plan was faulted for causing "starvation." After a few days, the metabolism is forced to burn fat for energy. Glucose levels stabilize and the appetite disappears. The experts call this a dangerous side effect.
Think about it: A doctor discovers a diet that suppresses your appetite without drugs, and the medical community faults it.
A spoonful of medicine helps the sugar go down.
Cellulite Hero
Eating and sex, two basic and essential acts for sustaining life, have become the source of disease and misery to millions of people, including me. So why am I fat if I know so much?
Why do I stand at the bus stop rubbing my round belly when an attractive man with a side part stares at me in lust and disgust? I feel like I'm rubbing a magic lamp thinking ,"this is all mine, bastard." Can't spank this.
Fat is supposed to mean that we're not doing what we're told, we're not working hard enough, we're fat and lazy. We have no self-control. We don’t care about ourselves. So why should anyone else?
But am I really supposed to jog my fatness up and down public streets and starve until I'm in tears just so I can earn the privilege of being with the kind of men who hate fat chicks? Will someone please just tell me how much weight I have to gain to get men to leave me alone?
I'm not hugely fat or unhealthy. People say I'm not fat enough to write about being fat (I wrote that so you wouldn't think I'm too fat). And of course I'm not fat on purpose. I didn't say, "Hey God, make me fat so I can grow up and write about what a victim I am." I've always been "chubby." I prefer "chunky" because it's more visually accurate.
Oh, enough. I'm exhausted with this rebellious fat business. I hate myself, okay? I wake up with swollen eyes, my mouth completely dry. I have to stop poisoning my body with refined starch.
And someday, I will wake up thin — the sun will peek into my window, loosening my eyelids; but the warmth, the warmth will hold my tiny body in perfect rapture. My eyes open in one smooth smile, no slamming back shut when seeing the first rays of a new day.
But, in the meantime, pass me a Pepsi. Because fat is my way of saying I'd rather eat than date. It's a bold fashion statement that few women have the stomach for. With God as my witness, I will never be hungry again.
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