Crystal Clean (12 page)

“You keep batting those fucking eyelashes at me,” I told him, “and I’ll jack your price up. That shit doesn’t work on me, so quit flirting and give me my money.”

“Awww, Kim. Don’t be like that.”

Josh had a plan. He told me about it one day, as I was weighing a quarter pound of meth for him. He wanted to take over Boise.

“What the hell are you talking about, Josh?”

“I’m talking about taking over. You know, like one day you’ll retire and maybe I can meet your guy. Then I’m going to undercut everyone else out there until I’m the only one left. I’ll be the man!”

I thought he was joking until I studied his eyes and realized the jackass was serious. “Josh, you’re a fucking idiot. You’re kidding, right? You know that’ll never happen.”

“Why not? I’m good at this. That’s my dream. I want to be the man.”

“Yeah, but Josh, you’re
not
the man. You’re a fucking idiot.”

He started pouting, batting those damn eyelashes at me. “Don’t say that. I’m totally going to do it. You just watch.”

I’d had it.
“
God
damn it, Josh!”
I slapped the Blue Tooth out of his ear. “Pull up your pants, tie your fucking shoes, sit up and pay attention!” He leaned over and, looking wounded, picked up the earpiece for his phone. “Do you know why there are several bail bond companies in this town? Do you ever stop to think that there is more than one phone company?” He was sitting there, looking offended, as if I’d hurt his feelings, and that only pissed me off more. “It is IMPOSSIBLE for you to be the only asshole selling meth ANYWHERE, let alone Boise. Who the fuck do you think you are? Get this straight. When and IF I ‘retire,’ I won’t be passing any torches on to you, so get that out of your head right now.”

“Why not? I’m a good worker.”

“Because, Josh, you’re reckless and not particularly street smart. You’re a shit for brains kid with visions of sugarplums in your head. Sure, you know people you can sell quantity to, but that doesn’t qualify you for anything. You think the guys who work at Best Buy are all scheming to knock Bill Gates off his pedestal? Maybe they dream about it, but they sure as shit aren’t serious. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because they know their place, Josh! There are
banks
, not bank. There are grocery
stores
, not grocery store. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“I understand, but you wait and see. I have a plan. It’ll work.” He was pouting as he put his Blue Tooth back in his ear. “Why wouldn’t you give me to your guy when you retire?”

“Because,” I said. “There are a lot of reasons. For one thing, you’re dangerous. You’ve got a different girl with you every time I see you, and even though I’ve told you I don’t want them around, you still have them drop you off.”

“I have them park down the street,” he interrupted. I glared at him.

“It’s not even that, Josh. You run around with these skeezy chicks, get them high and start bragging to them about your big plan. And don’t tell me you don’t talk about it, because I know you. I’ve told all you guys: women will always fuck shit up. They are your Achilles’ heel, and you will fail because you’re stupid. You just don’t talk about shit, Josh, except that you do because your fucking ego is so out of control. And as for me retiring? Fuck you. Right now all
you need to be concerned with is that I’m
your
man and you need to know your place.”

He pouted some, but didn’t mention his plan to dominate the drug world much after that. He knew what my opinion was, but every now and then, he’d make a comment about his grand plan. Mostly, I saw Josh as a kid with stars in his eyes who needed to be put in his place once in a while. It was worth it, though. He made me a lot of money.

It’s accepted as fact in the drug world that women are trouble. Loyalty went a long way toward securing my position and I took pride in that. I also knew how rare it was for a female to command any kind of respect in the meth world, let alone be successful. Women will rat you out if you piss them off. If caught, women will flip rather than do jail time because they can’t handle it. Women are “cop-callers,” calling the police anytime they feel like complicating your life. Women are more likely to flip (work with the police when caught) if they have kids...

Then again, most CI’s (citizen informants) I’ve known have been men, but I wasn’t about to concede that to Josh.

I was a completely different person with the people I worked with. I wasn’t a mother and I wasn’t a co-dependent woman desperately seeking love. I kept my worlds separate and there was a different Kim for each. It wasn’t acting as much as it was accessing pieces of me that I normally kept hidden. I think everyone has facets of themselves they never explore. There’s good and bad in all humans. My behavior in the drug world had a lot to do with acting out rage from my past. There was so much hurt and confusion inside me, and I was afraid of those feelings. Being more aggressive, and sometimes downright bitchy, was how I vented my anger and feelings of helplessness. The power I felt, and the control I had over people
-
especially men
-
was as reinforcing to me as the drugs were.

In the book
Drinking: A Love Story
, Caroline Knapp writes, “...the problem with self-transformation is that after a while, you don’t know which version of yourself to believe in, which one is true. I was the hardened, cynical version of me when I was with (some people) and I was the connected, intimate version of me when I was with (another.)”

That’s how it was for me, except that I knew I was two different people.

Sometimes I wonder which I was more addicted to: the drugs or the life. Obviously, it was meth, but the drug world itself was a very close second and all of it served a greater purpose for me that I didn’t understand at the time. In that world, I was important. I had status and people respected me. Around my boys, I felt smart, sexy and self-assured.

I started getting high so that I could get more done. Call it the Superwoman syndrome. But I continued getting high as a way to escape the feelings I didn’t want to feel. It wasn’t long before getting high was the only way I could function. I’d become entangled in a web of my own creation, and I couldn’t see a way out. If I quit using, I’d have to deal with the depression and bi-polar disorder, and that scared the hell out of me. I would crash and be non-functional for who knew how many days. If I quit selling, Allan would lose the house, and if that happened, he wouldn’t need me anymore.

I was starting to feel trapped.

Chapter 1
1

After Christmas, we settled in to our new house and my days, much like my life, were compartmentalized. I was Mommy in the morning, drug dealer during the day, and at five o’clock, I transferred the bond company’s phone line from whoever was on shift during the day to the cell Jill gave me to use for work. I was on-call five or six nights a week, five p.m. to six a.m., but I didn’t have to sit in the office, which was nice because there were a lot of nights when I would only write three or four bonds. On a good night, I might write eight or ten. I received a flat fee per bond, so the more I wrote, the more I made.

Whatever I’d been doing during the day, when Andy came home, I was Mommy again. We’d go through our usual coming home routine before I made him dinner.

He would come through the front door and announce his arrival. “Oh, hi Mom. It’s me. I’m home.” He still does the same thing and it makes me smile every time I hear it. He’s so deadpan about it, like he’s on the five ‘o clock news reporting something extremely important. To me, he is.

“Hey, Bug! How was your day?”

I used to get a lot of flack from people, mostly my mother, about all the nicknames I have for him: Andy-bug, bug-butt, bug in a boy suit (there’s a pattern there, I know) Mr. Monster, palooka-butt...

The names were just there. I never thought about them, they just came out. Mom would tell me he was never going to know his real name if I kept confusing him by calling him by different ones, but I disagreed.

“Mom,” I would say. “He has Down syndrome, he’s not an idiot.” Sure enough, Andy knows his name.

He’s had a communication log between the school and me every year since he was three, and I still have every one of them. So he comes home and shows me his notebook with his teacher’s comments for the day or some project he’s been working on at school. And everyday, we have basically the same conversation when I ask about his day.

“Oh, uh, essa fine.”

“What did you do today?”

“Um...” (long pause as he taps his finger on his chin) “Hmm... doe know.”

“Andrew, what did you do today?”

“Oh... pfff,” and he’ll put his square little hand on my cheek as if to say,
Oh, Mom. You’re so blasé
, which is why I have the notebook so I know what he’s been doing all day.

I’ll grab his hand and kiss the palm. “Sheesh, fine. Are you hungry?”

“Oh, yeah. Um, essa little pizza, whole bunch of peas. OH! Enna jams.” The first thing he does when he gets home, after I’m done bothering him, is put on his pajamas
-
boxers and a tee shirt
-
and pop in a DVD.

“Alright, sir,” I’ll say. “Love you, Bug.”

“Ayu you.”

Between school and developmental therapy, Andy has long days: seven a.m. to six p.m., and he loves it. If he didn’t, I certainly wouldn’t subject him to that kind of schedule. Long days make for short evenings, though, and after he’s done eating, it’s time for a shower and then about an hour of free time before bed.

I love that part of the day. It’s when I feel most like June Cleaver: uber-mom. 

I never went anywhere from the time Andy came home until I tucked him in at bedtime. The only exception was if I had to go to the jail to write a bond, but that rarely happened. Most of the bonds I wrote were late at night or early in the morning: DUI’s, FTA’s (failure to appears) disturbing the peace, vandalism, urinating in public. They’re the crimes and misdemeanors that stem from too much alcohol.

Every night when I tucked him in, I sang Andy a song. A ritual of ours began when he was a baby in N.I.C.U. and I would sit beside his bed just babbling away so he could hear my voice. I made up this silly song. I don’t even know where the words came from. Like all the nicknames I have for him, they just came to me one day and I’ve been singing it to him ever since.

“I love you so much, I’ll sing you a song, that says: I love you, I love you, and I guess I’ll always love you. ‘Cause you’re cute, and you’re smart, and you’re funny, and you’re strong. Andy sing.”

“Ayu you, ayu you, seesh I ayu you. Essa cute, smart, funny, strong!”

“I love you, I love you, and I guess I’ll always love you. ‘Cause you’re cute and you’re smart and you’re funny and airplane!” I pretend to forget what comes next and he giggles with that raspy sound his throat makes. “Oh man! I forgot. Andy sing.”

“Ayu you, ayu you, seesh I ayu you. Are cute, smart, funny,” he thought for a second. “Orange!” He laughed as if this is the funniest damn thing anyone has ever said. “Momma do it.” It’s become part of the game and we go back and forth until I declare enough is enough.

After our song, I would kiss his cheeks and forehead and he’d wrap his skinny arms around my neck and do the same. Leaving his room, taking one last look at him curled up under the covers with his thumb in his mouth, I always felt a sweet sadness.

I still sometimes feel it when I tuck him in. It’s residual fear, from when he was a baby, that this may be the last time I see him alive. I know how macabre that sounds, but those days still haunt me. The difference is that now I allow myself to
feel
rather than numb the sadness with drugs or alcohol.

It’s not easy, but I’ve found a quiet dignity in acknowledging my feelings. To sit with pain and sadness, to be able to remind myself that what I’m feeling is not only normal, but also healthy and to have faith that the feelings will pass regardless of the outcome of the situation, takes true strength. I was raised to think of my emotions as weaknesses and because of that, I was afraid to feel. As I grew up and went through vicious bouts of depression related to my bi-polar disorder, I became terrified of my feelings. I was convinced that one day I would disappear into them and never be able to pull myself out, so it was easier to avoid feeling as much as possible.

This was, of course, impossible and the result was a cycle of futile desperation. I hated the way I felt, so I’d get high to numb myself, but like Novocain, the numbness wore off and not only did the pain return, but there was fresh sadness and hurt to add to it. So I’d smoke more and more meth, attempting to run away from myself, but at the end of every line I snorted or bowl I smoked, there I was, more wrecked and damaged than when I’d begun.

Like so much in my life at that time, I tried to keep everything separate, attempting to keep the drug world from
tainting the purity of my life with Andy. But as I told my mother, “He has Down syndrome, he’s not an idiot.”

I knew that sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night to find me gone. I’d come home and find him awake, watching movies or sometimes just standing outside my bedroom.

The first six months that I was sober, when we lived with my parents, Andy slept with me. He refused to sleep alone and at night, he always kept some part of him connected with me: his foot on my leg, an arm on my back, fingers on my cheek. His expressive language is limited, but I know what he was doing. He was making sure I stayed home all night.

He still needs to be sure of my presence, and if he’s in bed and can’t hear me, he’ll call out, “Mom?”

“What, honey?”

“Um...innah bed.”

“I know you are, Bug.”

“Oh, nuffin, nevermind.”

And these exchanges, which are diminishing with time, break my heart, because I know that I did this to him. I took away his security. I know my nightly absences made him feel insecure when he needed me and I wasn’t there, and I hate myself for doing that to him.

Allan and I each had our own bedroom, but the only time he used his was when he had his son every other weekend. The rest of the time, we slept together in my room. We never discussed it, that’s just the way it was.

In the beginning, I only left at night when when someone called about bail. I liked being home. When Andy was asleep, we’d go to bed, watch movies and eat Ben and Jerry’s while he smoked pot and I got high. We had sex every night and most mornings. Great sex. Fabulous sex. Sometimes we watched porn, sometimes not. We were great in bed together. He never said, “I love you,” and I didn’t want to be the first. Somewhere deep inside, I knew that if I opened that door, I had to be prepared to deal with the consequences, and I didn’t want to know what they would be.

For me, sex
was
love. I’d given myself up enough in the past to understand that on a cognitive level, but knowing didn’t change anything. Love, to me, was all about the act of sex and physical contact. Even with the men I’d been with before who told me they loved me, I didn’t believe it unless I was being constantly held and
touched. Without that, nothing else they said or did mattered. To me, it wasn’t love.

All of this, of course, was about self-worth. I wasn’t a person unless someone loved me, and without physicality, there could be no love.
If no one wants me, I must not be worth wanting. If no one protects me, I must not be worth protecting
. Protecting and loving myself didn’t make sense to me. Just the thought of providing myself with what I needed made me cringe. To do so felt selfish, narcissistic, greedy and wrong. I based my entire self as a person, woman and mother solely on the feedback I received from other people.

Even with Andy. Being a good mother was more important to me than anything else was, but I was never sure that I was good enough. Andy couldn’t tell me how he felt and I rarely heard it from anyone else. The couple of times I heard my mother say it, I could feel myself sucking the words in, trying to savor them and store them away. At times like that, I wanted to beg her to repeat it again and again. The request would be right there, in the back of my throat and on my tongue:
please, please, please, tell me again
. I was so empty inside that I took all my cues about who I was from other people.

So the fact that Allan wanted to have sex with me
-
and often
-
was all I needed to feel wanted, needed and loved. The feedback I got from him was that I was a
God
dess in bed. To me, that meant I was a
loved
God
dess and I sure as hell wasn’t going to open a dialogue and risk hearing otherwise.