Prison Baby: A Memoir (9 page)

HALFWAY DOWN THE boulevard a scrawny white guy flirts with me, unwanted attention, and no matter what I say, he won’t stop. The woman I’m with flashes a four-inch buck knife from inside her coat pocket and lurches towards the man. She plunges the blade into his stomach.

I turn to bolt out of there but my feet are glued to the asphalt. The guy clutches his bloody shirtfront, doubles over, and limps across the street. He disappears behind a building.

Never in a million years did I dream I’d cause anyone serious physical harm. My gun, my switchblade, they’re just for show. It’s not in my makeup to use them on anyone.

I stand there, frozen. A sickness fused with terror rises in my gut at how derailed I’ve become. Terrified, I decide then and there it’s time to ditch the bad life, while I still have a life.

Even before I learn from a friend that the local police and the FBI called her to find me, I flee Seattle. I grab my baby blue suitcases and toss in my leather jacket, a few pairs of Levis, some t-shirts, along with a few other clothes, and—because they boosted my confidence—my switchblade and gun. I fly to Minneapolis, praying that one of my uncles or aunt will take me in.

Uncle Peretz, one of my mother’s younger brothers and the one she’s closest to, agrees to let me stay with him. He’s single, in his sixties, and still calls me his “Little Debbie.” But now I’m even littler. He last saw me in my teens when I trained as a competitive swimmer and had a lean, athletic build. By the time I arrive on the run from the cops, he doesn’t let on how I’ve changed: bony and fragile, inside and out. The night I arrive in Minneapolis, my parents call me, relieved to hear that I’ve surfaced, but not so happy.

Dad bellows through the phone, “The FBI called. They’re looking for you.”

I shrug. “Yeah, I know.”

“Now you’ll never get a job!”

My dad slams the receiver, but I don’t care. Who needs a job? I need dope.

My uncle hires a lawyer for the investigation of my crimes in Seattle. His kindness warms my heart and hurts at the same time. Weeks and weeks pass, and somehow they never charge me. I spend those months on a white-knuckled ride, my way off drugs and the tremors and cold sweats sweep through my body. I fight back by heavy drinking with my uncle. He hits the bar every night with his friends and I join him to pour the alcohol in me. It’s not a beverage—it’s anesthesia.

AFTER A YEAR in my uncle’s house I moved into my own apartment in Minneapolis. My parents and I were cautious together and protected our fresh start. We never discussed my dark years or my childhood, and we never spoke about my disappearance after I quit college. But they warned me about drinking so much. “Maybe just a glass of water,” my mother would say when I’d ask for a third or fourth glass of wine.

EVEN THOUGH my bouncy brain still fights me, after several more stints at college, I return, still restless inside, still a rebel. I keep far from my parents’ field, literature, and earn a degree in economics. Not the best reason to choose a course of study, just to rebel against parents, but it is also because Karl Marx and the study of economy and social justice interest me. How can they not, with the influences of the 1960s and ’70s and “Power to the People” so strong in my childhood.

A degree doesn’t mean I understand how to settle down, though. Just because I take action to live a more traditional lifestyle doesn’t mean the unrest in my spirit settles. My outside and inside don’t match. I’m still a mess, still confused, packed with questions about where I’m from, what race I am.

Fact versus memory. If I keep on the move, maybe I can remake facts to create new memories and push the old ones out. Then there won’t be any room for old memories to haunt me.

I float through a series of short-term jobs. I staff a group home for court-adjudicated girls, model for print shots occasionally, and work to organize a meals-on-wheels program for seniors.

Along with quitting drugs, I also drop my criminal ways, give up everything cold turkey, more out of fear than from anything else. As the saying goes, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.

But I’m addicted to another drug, too—high-action adrenaline—and it drives me into a hard-partying crowd of dancers and theater people. Good thing I kept my pool-shark and party talents because I get to use them all over the Minneapolis nightlife and clubs. It’s a hazy time in my memory other than weaving through a series of romances and reckless sex with both men and women, where some turn into relationships for a few months, maybe a year or two but not much longer. Why would they? I don’t know how to commit. I never let myself join my own family, so a relationship commitment is next to impossible.

Soon after I clean up, my first passion, dance, shoots to the surface and I pick up where I’d left off in my childhood classes. My stocky build is better for modern dance, not ballet, and at last I make my first serious career choice since drug running. Day and night I follow a dream and train to audition for a dance company. I’ve never before held a dream for myself other than to find out where I’d come from. I follow my dance dream to London, where my parents have moved for another of my father’s sabbatical years so he can work on one of his books. I share their flat and stay in the spare bedroom. It’s the first time we’ve lived together since my teens. For a long summer of dance training, when I’m not in the studio, I’m in every small theater I can afford tickets to and attend the Royal Albert Hall summer dance performance series. A dream does everything it’s meant to do: gives hope, purpose, and a reason to live.

When a dream means everything, even more than life itself, and then it’s gone, that’s a problem. Back in Minneapolis after the summer, excitement and nerves bubble in my stomach for a week before an audition. Then one day in the studio, I land from a leap on my right foot, but . . . but I still feel airborne. Something’s not right. I know my bare feet have landed on the hardwood floor, I know I’m not in the air, and yet I feel airy. When I look down, my right kneecap has swiveled behind my knee joint. Behind it! I can’t believe what I’m looking at—a concave scoop where my kneecap used to be. I also can’t believe the pain coursing through my every cell, like nothing I’d ever experienced. I went into shock and remember only that paramedics carried me down the narrow stairs from the top floor of the warehouse studio, into the ambulance, and off to the hospital. Even with the Demerol IV for pain, nothing can mask the pain when the doctor grips my kneecap and swivels it around front where it belongs. A dislocated knee takes months to heal, and for some reason, mine even longer. I end up in a cast from crotch to ankle for almost ten months. My first night home from the hospital, I ask a friend to bring me a bottle of Jim Beam.

BOOZE AND COCAINE HELP SQUASH THE physical pain and drown the despair about my dream lost. Almost a year imprisoned in a cast and, once again, I’m an addict. It takes a special kind of stamina to chase a dream, and even more to accept its demise. I didn’t have it in me to face the crash.

A YEAR LATER, at a house party with empty cases of Freixenet black-bottled champagne strewn about and a glass coffee table covered with coke, I join a dare with a handful of women to take chemical-dependency tests. No reason other than it’s a dare, maybe to taunt the system. But no one else follows through except me. The results at the outpatient Hazelden Women’s Clinic are not what I wanted to hear. In fact, it disturbs me, but I’m not surprised. They assess me as a full-blown addict.

She gestures for me to sit in the plastic chair beside hers. I’m frozen with fear about the truth. “Deborah, you should check in as soon as possible, in-patient.”

I lean back, shake my head, and hide behind my orange bangs. I’m letting the fuchsia side of my hair grow out.

She’s wrong.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

I sling my bag over my shoulder and flounce out of there. Over the next month I traipse around town for tests at five other agencies. The woman at the second place helps me feel safe with her gentle smile. I like her until she speaks.

“You need treatment, Deborah. Immediately.”

I storm out of her office and those of counselors at the other agencies, too, all of whom seem obsessed with treatment. Tendrils of panic and hopelessness try to latch onto my brain but I shake them away. I don’t need treatment. I don’t need anybody.

But do I want to end up like my prison mom? Anyway, it’s not true, I’m not addicted. I can quit any time I want
. I’ll quit on my own. Even though I’ve tried before, it’s never worked.
I’ll quit on Friday
, I’d tell myself. Or,
No drugs and drinking on the weekend
. Or,
Okay, next Tuesday
,
this is it
.

This time I do quit, on a terror ride with no safety straps and no thrills. Cold turkey sends me into one hundred percent fright. Day one, my body drains of strength. Same on days two and three, and the cold sweats ruin not one set of sheets but also the mattress, which I struggle to turn soaked-side down so I can sleep on dry sheets. On and on for days—cold sweats, nausea, and sometimes a hot, dizzy confusion. I can’t tell if it’s the alcohol, the coke, the Quaaludes a friend gives me, or the mushrooms another friend brings over to smoke with me. By week two, I continue to retch, my body exhausted as my stomach tries to heal.

After weeks of a white-knuckled hell, I take one last slam of Johnnie Walker Red. It throws me into more tremors, brings me to my knees on the bathroom floor, bent over the toilet . . . and I long for Mother. The memory tears me apart, how she’d thread her fingers through my bangs to wipe them off my fever-hot forehead, her other hand with a cool washcloth pressed against my face. Mother. I hadn’t thought much about her tenderness before. I survive the weeks of cold turkey with downed gallons of water, and bags of butterscotch candy, chocolate bars, and chewing gum to relieve my sugar craving, so intense I often spend ten dollars a day on hard candy. But I make it. Clean. And I keep it for a year.

Then one night I go to a party. Music thumps, and I stare across the living room at the gorgeous white mountain of coke on the coffee table. The guests fade from my sight and the vision of white powder grabs me by the solar plexus and drags me over, every nerve on alert. A pile of coke—free for all guests. A little voice warns me from some part of my brain, but I wave it away. My body craves the high. Besides, nothing good happened the year I stayed clean, so what was the point? I’ve lived more of my life doped up than not. I need the high more than I need to stay clean. This is my destiny, and it takes me to my knees.

By the end of the month, I’m on cocaine drug runs between Minneapolis and New York every other weekend with my roommate, Ann. She’s also the woman who seduces me after one of our all-night dance-cocaine-champagne parties.

IN THE MIDDLE of a deep sleep, after everyone has left the house, I awake with her perched on the edge of my bed.
Maybe she wants to talk?
I’m too sleepy to roll over, but I turn for a moment. Her breasts press against the long white t-shirt she wears for a nightgown. She unsnaps the clip in her ponytail and a bundle of blonde brown hair falls over the front of her shoulders. She peels back the covers and crawls in, slides behind me, her body pressed against my back. Her perfume mingled with her sweet sweat washes over me and a surge of warmth swells inside. She reaches around and laces her fingers into mine. “You’re a beautiful woman, Deb,” she whispers.

It’s the start of my entry into a new world. But on our fifth trip to New York, something goes wrong.

A MIDNIGHT RUN for a corned-beef sandwich near Times Square turns into a nightmare. I clutch my neck, struggle to breathe. My throat starts to close. My dope’s been cut with something bad.

Ann grabs my arms, then releases me. “Damn. Damn,” she says and flags a cab.

The cabbie presses his foot to the floor and my head hits the headrest. We screech alongside a drugstore. Ann springs from the car then pulls me out. I gasp for air. Fear pumps through my blood.
I’m gonna die in the street
.

Someone screams at me. It’s Ann. We’re outside the drugstore and she’s leaned me against the pane glass display window. She rips open a box of Benadryl, opens my mouth between her thumb and forefinger, and throws one capsule down my throat. But I can’t swallow. I fight her. Spit it out. She cocks my neck back, forces in another, and seals my lips with her fingers. I swallow, choke on the gel cap but manage to swallow the next one on my own. Soon, my air passages reopen.

Tears stream down my face. “I can’t do this anymore,” I say.

“Sure you can,” Ann says. “You just took a bad hit.” She glances at me, the residue of panic flickers in her eyes.

ALMOST EVERYONE ELSE in my world, my peers, has made plans for marriage or lost themselves in relationships or started careers and businesses, signed up on mortgages, and purchased homes. They’ve invested and saved money, some are now parents. And, emotionally, I’m just twelve years old.

Every other attempt I’ve made to quit sprouted from a voice inside, a whisper of “I’ve had it. I’m done.” All addicts and alcoholics say this at one time or another to themselves. Whether we listen to this murmur, whether we change and evolve or not, all depends on how much fierce self-honesty we muster. Deep inside, we all meet our own demons, whether we acknowledge them or not. I’d done everything I could to make mine go away and look what had happened. Everything got worse.

FEAR STRIKES ME back home in Minneapolis two days later. Something clicks and I realize I need help. I could’ve died right on the street. I grab the phone and call a chemical-dependency counselor to arrange a session. One session turns into months of them.

I listen more than talk and answer her intake questions with one-word replies. The counselor suggests that my behavior and escapades have been my way to return to the place I first felt safe: prison. “You’ve taunted the world to send you back where you first felt love,” she says.

It’s hard for me to really believe this, but it sounds logical, even though the whole experience lives outside logic. She explains how what looked on the surface like bravado when I was a girl stems from a lack of impulse control, a problem that extended into adulthood because of developmental delays I experienced as an infant. She details how heroin babies go through withdrawal symptoms at birth, and they’re bad, she says: convulsions, tremors, fever, sleep abnormalities, diarrhea.