leo and mom

Here's one of my favorite pictures - Leo on his way to the prom, me on my way to go camping. I just think this picture captures the love my son has for me, and the pride and love I have for him.

Chicken Soup for the Cube

by Human Office Furniture (bondage reference intentional)

Like Sands in the Microsoft Hourglass

Sometimes it’s nearly tearful to pull up to work and turn off the car, killing your favorite song and leaving you alone with your dread. You stare at the building and crave a cigarette. You’re controlling your breathing and telling yourself it could be worse. You could be cleaning up after homicides. Or working at a meat-packing plant.

I turn the corner to face the painfully long hall with its painfully red carpeting. My cube is at the very end. Gulp. I repeat one thought in my head, "Please don't let anyone approach me." I used to refer to such acts of mental maintenance as "praying." But now, I'm a professional. I mean salaried.

I get smaller and weirder with each step on the insulting red carpet even though everyone's real nice. Even if they hate yer arse! Work! It's amazing! It's creepy but it’s really not that bad. I'M GRATEFUL FOR MY JOB. I'm grateful for my job i'm grateful for my job i hate my fucking job NO I DON'T I JUST HATE MY BOSS. No I don't hate my boss I just have a hard time subordinating myself to the Clueless if no sex is involved.

What I meant to say is that there are always conflicts in the workplace. NOTHING'S PERFECT. Except of course, my boss. Some people are such hard workers that they don't have to do anything! And by some management magic, the boss knows how you should do your job without the benefit of having done it him or herself.

Note to people who wants to kill their boss: Just sucker punch the bastard in the parking lot if you have to. Don't kill anyone. It's too much work.

After returning to my cube following another meeting about the CRM workflow, a customer calls to give me grief about how he can’t get onto the site and it’s somehow my fault he had the wrong URL. My favorite answer is, "In a perfect world, sir, the computer will be able to read your mind but until then, you'll have to type. I'm sorry." And I say that in my most helpful tone while grinding his dick in the dirt whew hew! I guess it ain't all bad.

The customers don't hate you, they’re just taking out their computer frustrations out on you. And who doesn't imagine giving a sleeping boss a swift kick? I mean it's really not that bad. Not once the second Xanax kicks in. So are the days of my job.

Skeletons in the Cube

How do you feel about what you just read? Do you agree with any of it or think it’s the stinking-thinking of whiner who should be lucky to have a job at all?

What you just read is the thinking of a woman in trouble: A woman who doesn’t love her job because she doesn’t love herself.

Your self-concept and job are linked. If you don’t like your job, I’m sorry, but the problem is you. You don’t like yourself and project it on to your job. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Your attitude determines everything and that we can fix. Before you know it, you’ll be among the half of the people in this country who say they’re satisfied with their jobs. It’s all in how you look at it.

Let’s say you look at your paycheck and think it reflects how important you are to your employer. Of course you're going to feel like shit! Sure you’d be happier making more money, but do you really need it? Just because you don’t earn what you feel you deserve doesn’t mean they don’t value your contribution. Just work harder this year and confront your greed issues.

Or perhaps your bosses give you lots of direction while talking to you like you’re retarded and/or lazy. It might feel like they’re exerting power on you over a petty issue to keep you in your place, but they’re just trying to help you. And remember, if you're in Tech Support, everyone is your boss.

Or let's say management just changed the latest set of rules they inflicted on you. It's frustrating but it’s just process improvement. And if they forget to tell you about the change and yell at you for not knowing, well everyone’s human. Just apologize for not knowing. It’s easy if you love yourself.

Some people are actually afraid of doing well because they think their bosses will resent them for it which causes bosses to start nasty rumors. But you wouldn’t think so negatively if trusted yourself. As long as you do a good job, you have nothing to worry about. Everyone will respect you for it. Even if you can’t tell.

That doesn’t mean you won’t get chided for things management does without being reprimanded. You simply need to be grateful for the chance to improve yourself with advice no one else is privy to. If you like yourself, everything is an opportunity to improve.

Oh. I forgot to mention that this approach requires mad amounts of Klonopin, Xanax, Valuim etc (tranquilizers). There’s a whole class of drags to calm America down. All created because we don’t love ourselves enough.

Does Size Matter?

When we were still a small company, I was an employee. After we became a new company, I became a “resource.” Now I’m human capital. Why not just call me office equipment?

Getting a job is like being taken hostage. You eventually love your abductor but never stop planning your escape. It’s just so quiet now that we're a big company. We used to have holiday grab bags and all worked together. We weren’t sure what our titles were. We just did what we had to. If I needed a developer, I went to him and not through three layers of management to get permission.

Then came the cost centers. Public companies have amazing billing laws and those numbers mean everything because of our precious stockholders. The Puritans thought it was sinful to make money from just having money instead of working for it. If god made us have to work to eat, why isn’t that punishment dealt equally?

Memories, like the corners of my cube

There was a day we decorated our cubes - I once got a note telling me not to mix the seasons. I had a Pilgrim couple and Santa and his wife that were made out of beer bottles. We didn’t get mad, we thought it was hilarious.

I considered the people I worked with my closest friends. Something about being down on the cube farm made us funnier. We got to wear whatever we wanted and took that as far as we could. We still can dress casually but … we all toned it down without being told. It’s just one of the unfelt changes of becoming World Class. In a small company, I felt loved. Now I feel used. But look at the bright side!

No. No I fucking won't.

Everything I needed to know about business, I never learned

Okay so I don’t trust corporations. They’re there to make a profit by any means necessary, which means taking advantage of any opportunity (like prison or child labor). Well I mean not any corporation you work for, of course.

I think it’s sad and amazing that the most solid common ground we Americas share is the simple fact that most of us would do anything to get out of our jobs. Most people aren’t making much money and they’re the ones who get treated the worst. But no one talks about it. We blame ourselves for not being some “self made man” while never realizing how “they system” needs us as cheap labor so the self made man can own five homes.

NO WONDER PEOPLE PLAY THE LOTTO. You have to have some hope that there’s going to be an end to your job while you’re young and healthy enough to do the things you sacrificed for your kids and the job they chained you to.

Business … I thought the goal was to create a product or service to be proud of. To provide jobs to people who became family. And you could be proud of spreading your good fortune around. Help those who help you make the car payment. Shouldn’t business values be the same as family values? I’ll never live to see that day.

No wonder the FBI and CIA are all fucked up. Was it a surprise to learn that those entrusted to protect us were more concerned with getting promotions than doing their jobs? It was to me. I’ve always been a dreamer. Thought that if you did a great job and were dependable, that you’d be rewarded for it. Golfing with the Alpha Employees. By the time you realize that’s only true for some, you’re too old to even care.

Dead woman working

Sometimes I walk in my cube with that, “Here’s Johnny!” look Jack Nicholson had in The Shining when he was busting through the bathroom door with the ax.

Other times I love my little cube and Hello Kitty calendar and the hum of my machines. It’s amazing what one can get used to. But not for long. So I’ll go buy some book about how to make peace with my cube. Or about how to use Machiavelli’s strategy to advance at work. Maybe buy a plant.

I know I’m some old school broad, but you used to take pride in your work. But now it seems the point of business is to destroy your pride so they can convince you that you’re worth nothing which explains your paycheck. Putting you down goes a long way and getting you to do what you’re told without question.

Do not go gently into that small cube

Nothing I’m saying here is unique or directly about my company or job (I had to say that). A job is a job is a job. Work. Even the Bible defines it as a curse. Punishment designed to cause us endless suffering. Every time I open Siebel, I’m convinced.

Work and the pain of childbirth were two punishments Adam and Eve caused from their curiosity. Genesis says God cursed the ground so Adam would have to work for food and would suffer every day for the rest of his life because of it. God can seriously hold a grudge, eh? God: The Ultimate Boss.

The original word for “work” meant pain, then sorrow. But if God wanted to continue punishing us for what went wrong in Paradise, work is a great way to go. But if I keep writing stuff about my job, I guess I won't have to worry about it for long.

Once Upon a Needle Chapter 1

Pharmaceutically ever after

The more dope Timmy plunged into his veins, the more romantic he became. It was storybook beautiful and newspaper tragic. The more he wanted to show how much he loved me, the less he could.

So he was pretty much like every other man I'd been with but at least with Timmy, the Dilaudid sometimes led to immortal moments of slow-motion magic. We could swallow the world in a drug-dried kiss of synthetic bliss - taken far beyond love on the wings of a snow white drug.

We usually shot dope in the kitchen and except for the first time, he always went first. It was like this manly rule or something. And he earned it. His tolerance for pain was most impressive, even inspiring. He had to repeatedly jab the needle into his arm to puncture scar tissue and keep his veins from rolling. I couldn't be a punk - couldn't flinch when he aimed the syringe at me.

Oh how easily the needle sank in me. It slid effortlessly through my fresh, pink flesh into unsuspecting veins. The drug squeezed me from the inside out, slowly letting go as Timmy loosened the old leather belt on my arm. Instantly everything was ... easy. The drug brought the world down to size. Made me feel like I was on top of it instead of it being on top of me.

I'd glide into the living room of our tiny Pittsburgh apartment and sit on the first couch I ever owned. Something about sinking into all that softness made me feel so ... mature. Self-satisfied. I crossed my legs, noting how tightly I could pull them to me because I'd lost 15 pounds on the opiate diet. My almost-slimness made the room just that much cleaner.

I wasn't some sloppy non-bathing junky. I ironed my clothes and put make-up on to get high. Everything in our apartment was brand-new and well-kept. We were profitable addicts. The 1979 décor was all cream colors and earth tones. Glass-topped tables. Ferns. Brand-new TV and an excellent stereo. Fireplace at one end of the room and a hardwood bar at the other. It all looked like love to me.

Home.

Meanwhile, Timmy stayed in the kitchen rinsing the syringe and securing the stash for what seemed like too long. "Securing the stash" meant putting a prescription bottle in his sock. And even if he was too high, it still only took a minute to rinse the syringe. I think he snuck another shot of the Dilaudid but I never checked on him. It wasn't like I could do anything about it. And it wasn't like we didn't have enough drugs.

I tried telling him that I didn't care how many Ds he did, but he'd just squint with suspicion, trying to be as menacing as possible while barely able to stand. He thought I was setting him up to confess and denied it. I was just trying to save him from repeatedly sticking himself. But getting over on me was part of his good time.

He came out of the kitchen like he was playing the part of someone who has his shit severly together - every move drenched in urgency and importance but drowned in the drug's ambition to render him useless.

He'd stumble toward me, always mumbling something. He'd crack a shin on the coffee table and start swearing at it. If he was really high, he'd apologize. Or he'd knock the antenna off the TV with a stray elbow. Or walk headfirst into a houseplant like a cartoon loser.

It was hard to watch even when I was opiated, but if I looked away, he'd see my eyes dropped in pity and my forehead cringing with disgust. And not disgust in a judgmental way, but the kind that makes you gag. That makes your stomach want to empty itself to make room for the dose of powerlessness looking at him forced down your throat.

He leaned into me with soft crusty lips that chilled me with a quick junkie kiss. I'd cradle his face in my hands, trying to keep his body steady. Grateful, he'd tell me how beautiful I was while staring at me with eyes safely shut.

Then, in a fit of determination, he'd head to the stereo to play his favorite song. It took several attempts for him to get the needle on the record by hand. All he had to do was push the "cue" button, but he didn't want to hear the first song. I've got to run to keep from hiding. He thought it was a tired cliché.

I cringed when I heard the scratchy blasts of music from when he dropped the needle until it finally found the right groove of Gregg Allman's "Queen of Hearts." It opens with soft horns and a lonely guitar. Allman's beautiful broken voice follows: "Once I was glad, always happy, never sad. And every day seemed like Sunday." I don't think Timmy ever had a Sunday.

After the song started, he'd stand too fast and wobble. He was in a hurry to stagger back and sing to me which meant it took twice as long. But then he'd romance my hands with a compelling grip, caressing and capturing them, needing their support to navigate the difficulties of kneeling in front of me, the whole time faintly repeating "I'm okay" to himself.

He sang to me from bended knee, his face struggling for perfect expression. His voice clinging to every note. His lips slurring every word but not from lack of effort.

When he sang his favorite line, his eyelids came up and he'd stare hard at me: "See the fact is more or less, you're gambling with your own happiness and most of your would-be friends turn out so phony." He was constantly checking to see if I was a would-be friend. Bastard.

Even with his eyes open, I never knew what he was looking at. When he was three years old, he got hit upside the head with a pipe and it permanently jarred his eye. The more drugs he did, the less control he had over the lazy eye.

It rolled to the outside corner, literally looking over his shoulder. I knew it wasn't his fault, but I hated that eye. A part of him was always sneaking away. Always off planning his next scam. Always lost.

But the good eye focused entirely on me throughout his serenade: "Oh but times they change and I'm through the rains. And I'm seein' the Queen of Hearts. Don't know where to start. Or how to stop."

Sometimes there were tears and he'd keep singing after Gregg stopped. The higher he was, the more liberties he took with the lyrics. But I was his Queen of Hearts. All doily white and construction paper pink. It was so brutally beautiful.

After the singing stopped, a sax flickered across the room and the song moved us into a heavy-headed kiss. Time to move him to the bedroom. On the nights we wanted to make love even after the fumbling exaustion of getting undressed, we'd give it our best shot, sometimes going for hours with no hope of orgasm. But we'd get so close so many times that we didn't care.

If we wanted to climax, we'd have to let the Dilaudid leave our blood long enough for our nerve endings to work again. By then we'd feel how raw we'd worn each other the night before and wouldn't want to do it anyway.

There is however, something to be said for having sex while nearly anesthetized. The same word slips from your lips: HARDER. Eyes don't open. Knees don't burn. Mouths don't taste. Noises don't matter. A perfect absence of embarrassment yields a rare, wreckless pleasure.

He'd thrust so hard from behind that he'd fuck me clear across the room until we hit a wall or furniture. I could hear my head bang bang bang against paneling but couldn't feel anything except my back arching deeper, dropping from hands to elbows, anything to get him further inside of me. When you're feeling no pain, anything goes ... and goes and goes ... .

It was superb when our tolerance for the drug was at its lowest, when we were still splitting pills, when we still tingled. I loved his newly-released-from-prison physique despite his damp, hairy skin. I loved his stories even if half of what he said was bullshit. I loved how he was always sneaking his fingers inside of me or pinching my nipples. Okay so sometimes he nodded out while going down on me. It's the thought that counts.

There was one thing he did with spectacular skill: With his bare hands and clever mouth, he made me feel sexy and smart even though I was a slightly overweight, 18 year-old high-school dropout. He told me what I wanted to hear before I even knew what that was. But where his love lacked content, it excelled in drama. How was I supposed to know the difference?

Addicts rarely rest even though narcotics make for a soft bed. We didn't stop making love so much as we just ... stopped ... moving. I'd suck my thumb while Timmy forced his back against my stomach. My mind was so deeply drug-dreaming that it seemed I never slept, just watched. My eyelids were black-velvet movie screens bejeweled with stained-glass dreams that disappeared at dawn. The instant I tried to remember them, they vanished. You don't get to keep those dreams. But you can't help but want to see as much of them as possible.

The stereo played all night while we slept, the damaged needle scraping the record's tender grooves, wearing away the highest notes long after we stopped listening - notes we'd never hear again. I never thought to turn it off. Everything seemed so ... replacable.

Innocence is the first casuality of love.

Oh, To Live On Walton's Mountain

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

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.

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?

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

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.