Crystal Clean (14 page)

Chapter 1
4

Despite Larry’s best efforts, Kilo was sentenced to a year in prison. He asked me to take care of his dog, Puppet, until he got out. I owed him $2,500 dollars when he went in, so I sent him money periodically and gave some to his girlfriend whenever he asked me to. Occasionally he would ask me to send her flowers or order him a magazine. Once again, I broke all the rules by doing the right thing: I paid what I owed when not doing so was the custom.

That same loyalty led Kilo to pass me on to his connection, who turned out to be Craig. I knew he had connections in Mexico, but Craig was such an unassuming guy that I never guessed he was the man over Kilo. I was relieved, though. I knew him and we had a good relationship, so the transition went smoothly. It did not go as smooth with the boys or the Laotian community.

That Kilo turned his business over to a woman was bad enough. The fact that he had gone outside his own people only made things worse.

There’s always debt in drugs. The logic is simple: when people owe, they have to keep working. The trick is to find the right balance, and it’s different with everyone. Some people do well with high debt because they can pay quickly. Some do better with a lower balance and the privilege of having a little more time to pay. It varies from person to person, but that’s why I was in debt to Garnett and especially with Kilo. Every time I brought my account current, he’d front me more product.

Before Kilo went to jail, he gave me the names of the people I’d be selling to, all of whom I already knew. He arranged for people I didn’t know to buy from those I did, and he filled me in on everyone’s quirks so I’d know what to expect.

In the beginning, everyone ripped me off. I extended to them the same conditions Kilo had, and they took advantage of it. I’d front someone an ounce and they would come back with no money asking for more. “Swear to
God
I’ll have most of it for you next time, man.” It pissed me off. I knew they would have been more respectful if I was a man, and they sure as hell would have been more respectful if I were an Asian man. But I was an outsider on both counts. I was the substitute teacher assigned to detention class. So I took away their hall passes and made them lie with their heads on their desks.

I didn’t want to be their mother. I didn’t want to be an outsider, but I had no choice. I cut everyone off unless they came to me with cash, and I jacked their prices up until they paid me off. After that, I slowly started fronting them again, keeping them on a short leash.

I went to visit Kilo in prison to let him know what was going on, and I talked to Craig, because putting my foot down meant things would slow down for a while.

And they did, for a couple of weeks. They said they were sorry. They tried to bargain and finally, they got pissed off and said, “Fuck you, bitch! We’ll just go somewhere else to get our shit.”

So I waited, and they all came back just as they always do, just as I knew they would. I had quality product, my prices were fair and consistent, and I either weighed the meth in front of them, or let them weigh the package themselves so they knew they were getting what they paid for. I was also discreet with no crazy bullshit. Those are rare qualities in a drug dealer and, from what I know of, nearly impossible to find in one person.

Of course they came back.

It wasn’t as though I forgot that I was dealing meth, but the line between doing business and doing
illegal
business kept blurring. The deeper I got and the longer I did it, the easier it was for me to envision myself as an entrepreneur rather than a criminal. I often compared myself to a Tupperware sales woman, especially when people made comments about me carrying so much meth and paraphernalia with me at all times. “If I sold Tupperware,” I’d say, “no one would say a thing about me carrying my products around with me. Why should this be any different?”

I was beginning to feel invincible.

In 2004, Andy was fourteen years old and settling in as an eighth grader at his new school. At first, I thought things were going well, although his teachers weren’t doing much communicating in his daily notebook.

I got a call one morning, just before noon, from the school nurse telling me I needed to pick up Andy immediately because he’d had an accident. I didn’t need her to explain. I knew what “accident” meant with Andy. He had diarrhea in his pants. This had happened before at school, though infrequently, but strangely, never at home. The thing I could never make anyone understand was that Andy didn’t have diarrhea. He was constipated. To explain:

Since he was a baby, he’s had terrible problems with constipation. I have all too vivid memories of he and I, both in tears, trying to get him to move his bowels. He was so tiny. So tiny that his surgical scars were still angry red slashes. I could put his whole foot in just the palm of my hand.

He’d try. He’d try so hard to go, but he couldn’t and it hurt him, and that
killed
me. I could feel knots when I’d press on his tummy, massaging down his abdomen trying to get things moving. Jesus, the look on his face...he was terrified. He didn’t know what was happening. All he knew was that it hurt and Mommy wasn’t stopping it. His little face was red from crying so hard, and I’ll tell you this: Andy rarely cried. The only other times I’d seen him cry was when he had to have IV’s put in, or needed to be strapped to a flat board for a CAT scan or MRI. And the truly heartbreaking thing was that since he had almost no practice at it, he still cried like a newborn baby.

His eyes were full of terror and tears, and sweat beaded on his face soaking his baby-fine hair as he pleaded with me to help him. There was nothing I could do. I would put his feet in my palms, push them to his chest, let him wrap his fists around my thumbs and together we would sob our way through it.

There were times when I thought it would split him in two. It looked like the equivalent of giving birth, and most of the time the lower part of his mucosa
-
the inner lining of his colon
-
prolapsed, falling outside of his bottom. I would take a wet wipe and gently nudge it until it worked its way back into his rectum. Afterward, I would give him a sponge bath to clean away the hot sweat that covered him, then sit and rock him long after he was asleep.

His doctor and I tried everything to treat the constipation, but nothing ever worked. As Andy got older, I think he learned that going to the bathroom is (forgive me) a pretty shitty experience. So he would hold it as long as he could which, even in the best of circumstances, will lead to constipation that can manifest itself as diarrhea. His doctor compared it to a cork in a bottle. The cork is solid, but once it’s released, well, you know.

So I knew Andy didn’t have diarrhea, and he wasn’t sick, but this was the first time he’d had an accident at his new school and I understood their concern. I explained the situation to the school nurse and his teacher, and I got the same look I’d grown accustomed to over the years:
You poor stupid woman. How can you be so
cavalier about your son’s health
? I’d seen it in the eyes of strangers as I shopped with Andy strapped to my chest, wheeling his oxygen tank with one hand and a grocery cart with the other. I’d seen it from people when he would cough, causing his trachea to collapse and make a wretched barking sound that I’d grown so accustomed to, I barely noticed it.

I’d seen the look from doctors, too.

When Andy was about eighteen months old, he began having what looked like seizures. He would suddenly go stiff, turn blue and lose consciousness. After a few trips to the emergency room, courtesy of Ada County paramedics, his pediatrician referred us to a neurologist who diagnosed Andy with epilepsy. “There are three choices of medication,” he told me. “Take this literature home, read it and let me know what course of action you want to take. We’ll need to start treatment immediately to prevent any permanent damage.”

I spoke with his pediatrician, who agreed with the diagnosis.

“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s epilepsy.”

“Let me explain it to you,” he said. (Long explanation complete with sketches.)

“I’m sorry, but something just doesn’t seem right. It sounds to me like diagnosis by default.”

(Heavy sigh.) “Let’s go over this again...“

But I knew Andy didn’t have epilepsy. I didn’t have to be a doctor, I didn’t need to see the EKG results again, I just knew.

And I was right.

I called his surgeon and spoke with him about the situation, and after some discussion and an x-ray, he determined the cause of the problems. The surgery that connected Andy’s esophagus to his stomach, allowing him to eat, was stricturing. Food was unable to pass normally, became backed up and the pressure from the esophagus against his lungs prevented sufficient oxygen. He would lose consciousness, which allowed the food to work its way into the stomach. Pressure against the lungs eased and consciousness regained.

His surgeon took care of the problem and I never put Andy on anti-seizure medication. It was never discussed again among the neurologist or the pediatrician and me.

So I was familiar with the look I saw in the nurse’s eyes the day I picked Andy up from school. But familiarity does not equate comfort. I always felt people judged me about the decisions I made
for him or the services and programs I fought for. I always knew in my heart that I what I was doing was right, but that knowledge was deep inside beneath stacks of insecurity. The looks, comments and resistance I faced from teachers, strangers, neighbors and other kids came without warning. In real life, there’s no rehearsal
-
no time to access inner resources. Not for me. Not back then. It’s like that stunned feeling you get when a person says something that blows your mind and you have the perfect comeback...four hours later.

He was in the nurse’s office wearing the change of clothes I sent with him on his first day. Every year Andy’s teachers requested that parents send a change of clothes to keep at school in case of emergencies.

The nurse came in looking quite serious and explaining to me that their policy was that children with diarrhea not return to school until they’d gone twenty-four hours after their last episode. I nodded and listened, as a good parent should, then asked where he was when it happened. She wasn’t certain, so I talked to his teacher. Andy had the accident in his mainstream P.E. class.

All I wanted to do was get my son out of there as fast as possible. The incident was bad enough, but it happened in front of his typical peers. My worst nightmare for him, aside from his medical issues, was to see him shamed or humiliated in front of people, and especially other kids. It shredded the fiber that made me his mother to think of him in that situation, helpless and stinking while other kids laughed and made fun.

His teacher told me there was an aide with him and she got him out of there as quickly as possible. She didn’t think anyone else was aware of what was going on.

I couldn’t speak for the sobs in my throat, and I couldn’t make eye contact with her because the tears were already betraying me. I just nodded, scooped up Andy’s things and hurried him out of the office, through the front doors and into the parking lot.

I said nothing as I pulled out of the lot and parked on the side of the road less than a block away. My teeth were clenched to keep my jaw from quivering, but when the tears started pouring, the sobs lurched out in an,
uhhn
sound that made my chest hurt. Andy sat very still and quiet.

“
God
damn
it, Andy! You can
not
do this. Do you understand?”

“I sorwy.”

“You are a big boy. You do
not
poop in your underwear!”

“I sorwy.” He sat, frozen while I shook and bawled like a child.

“Why didn’t you ask to go to the bathroom?”

“I sorwy. Enna trwy again.” I didn’t say anything. I just sat there looking at him feeling helpless and hopeless. “Sorwy, Mom. Enna trwy again tomorrow, ‘k? Enna trwy again.”

And the thing is, I wasn’t mad at him. I wasn’t mad at all. I felt helpless and frustrated and I wished for the umpteenth time, not that he didn’t have Down syndrome, but that things could just be
easier
for him. More normal. It was the way I felt when I saw boys his age skateboarding or riding bikes. I bought Andy a tricycle for his fifth birthday and tried to teach him to ride it. Other people, his grandparents and therapists, have tried over the years to teach him to ride a bike, but he doesn’t get it.

I’d watch other kids do all the things kids are supposed to do, and I’d secretly resent them. I’ve never cared about the Down syndrome. I just wanted him to have a normal, happy childhood.

And he did. He had a normal childhood, Andy-style. He never rode a bike, not even with training wheels, but he rode a horse with a little help from his second cousin. He never ice or roller-skated, but he tried. He never played an instrument, but he was in honor choir every year in junior high and high school. (Okay, he’s totally monotone, but one of his aides in grade school taught him to lip synch, and he looked great in the robes!) He never learned to read for pleasure, but he steals all my catalogues, Rolling Stones and Cosmos so he can look at scantily clad women. (Nuff said.)