August 15, 2002

• I came down
  hard off the speed after the first few hours in the drunk tank, where
  they stuck me because, they said, they couldn’t be sure if what I had
  was contagious. The pair of single isolation cells with a narrow steel
  corridor outside their barred doors had a nice echoing reverb effect on
  my voice. I had an old sad song in my head, So Lonesome I Could Cry. I
  sang it. A few weeks later, when the doc cleared me to move to the dorm
  with everyone else, I heard about that. Mournful is the nicest of the
  words I heard about my off-key late night singing in the drunk tank
  next door. I asked them why, since they could hear me and presumably I
  could have heard them, no one had told me to shut up. They said I
  sounded so damn sad they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, and besides,
  for all they knew I was drunk, and yelling at me would only have made
  me start yelling back. I knew what they meant. There had been a few
  drunks coming and going in the other isolation cell next to mine. One
  of them had been Char.

  Flashback: before the arrest, and I think after the beating… yes,
  probably a gesture, a “gift” from Hulk to cheer me up, to make amends.
  Hulk picked up Char, a cute bisexual hooker about our age, blonde, with
  lots of street smarts and a filthy mouth, probably from associating
  with GIs or bikers, or maybe she had brothers. He brought her home to
  me, for a threesome. He paid her in speed, I suppose. She loved the
  bubble bath and we all three were giggly and very high by the time we
  got to the bed. We did each other while Hulk watched, then we all three
  did each other some more. I will never forget my first same-sex
  experience, but Char didn’t even remember me at all when we met in jail
  a few weeks later. As soon as she was conscious the next morning she
  was out of there. Maybe she flashed on me later, eh? Char’s another one
  I’d stalk if I had a clue.

  At my arrest, I weighed 95 pounds, the first time I’d been under 100
  pounds since about age 11. I’d been at about 135 or so when I started
  shooting speed, and that’s slender for me. The medical profession has a
  cute phrase for some of the easiest diagnostic signs for hepatitis:
  “coffee and clay.” Urine comes out looking like strong black coffee,
  and feces come out gray like clay. Symptoms include nausea, sleep
  disturbances (either can’t sleep or can’t stay awake), pain, loss of
  appetite, weakness, incoordination and blurred vision. I had all of
  that, along with the depression from coming down off speed and the fear
  that surrounded being in jail with no foreseeable way out. And I
  couldn’t stomach the smell of my own sick body. No showers in the
  isolation area, only cold water in the cell. Steel rack with thin foam
  pad covered in Naugahyde (jillions of naugas died to furnish that jail)
  and one gray wool army blanket was it, no sheet, towel, just cold water
  standup rinse and drip dry. If there are any old jailbirds among my
  readers, they’re saying, “yeah, so what?” None of that is unusually
  harsh, and many jails are harsher.

  The walls were covered with graffiti. Yeah, a few names and brief
  phrases like graffiti you see on the streets, but mostly long
  autobiographical essays, how inmate X was in there because of asshole Y
  and vowed vengeance forever; or how inmates m and n, she up in this
  hole while her man was downstairs in the big jail and she vowed her
  eternal fidelity, then went on to say to hell with all of that the
  cowardly bastard had ratted her out. You have a lot of time to write on
  the wall in jail. I wish I could recall what I wrote. That’s something
  for the next time I go down the rabbit hole.

  I am so very glad that I’m done with that speed freak segment.
  Retrieving those state bound memories has been hell on my system. I’m
  ready for a break. Jail gave me the break I needed to get off speed.
  That and some social things occurring after I got out that time. More
  on that later… remind me if I space it.

  A couple of weeks into my stay there, I realized I knew what was for
  breakfast the next day. Breakfast always rotated the same way: pancakes
  then oatmeal then a fried egg then cold cereal and back to pancakes
  again. It took a lot less time than that for me to figure out that
  ground venison patty (the jail got all roadkill and anything
  confiscated from poachers) and green beans for dinner would mean
  venison and green bean soup next day for lunch. I suppose just to keep
  us on our toes, we never knew whether it would be bologna or peanut
  butter on the white bread at lunch, nor could we predict the flavor of
  Kool-Aid from day to day. One constant was coffee in the morning. The
  other was the grape jelly, the only flavor ever on the PBJ.

  Hulk called a lawyer and paid him all the money we had. The lawyer got
  our cases severed so he’d only be representing Hulk. I got a public
  defender. That move made sense, since Hulk had more of a record than I
  did and was on probation already. He ended up having to serve the time
  required on that probation, which I think was seven months, but the
  lawyer got him off clean on the new possession of marijuana charge.

  My public defender told me my best course would be to plead guilty. He
  said he could get me a deal so that I’d get probation and no time
  beyond what I had already served by then, about a month and a half. I
  went to court, pled guilty to possession of about ten grams of
  marijuana (a felony at that time in Oregon) and was released on my own
  recognizance pending a presentence investigation.

  I had spent Halloween and Thanksgiving in jail, got out in early
  December, I think. I didn’t find many people I knew, at first; found
  none of my close associates or old friends. I hadn’t seen Mardy since a
  single visit she paid to our alley hideaway to say goodbye as she and
  Loose Lew were headed out of town. She had been pissed off at him,
  bitching that his goddam fucking boozing and doping and living in
  Disneyland had lost her three girls already and she was fed up. The
  rant makes a lot more sense now that I know what she didn’t tell me at
  the time. She was pregnant.

  One of my first missions when I got out of jail was to walk across town
  to our last home and see if anything I owned was still there. A desk of
  mine was out on the front porch with a few papers and pictures in it.
  That was all. The house was locked and empty.

  Later on, I ran into one of the Crow Farmers, Fred. He had my I Ching!
  I was delighted. I had used the ancient Chinese oracle since being
  introduced to it by Carol and had kept marginal notes of every oracle
  reading I had done for self or others. It had been the first oracle I’d
  consciously used. I had flipped coins (numismancy?) before, and my
  mother had taught me bibliomancy (but not the word for it): ask a
  question and open the Bible, dictionary, etc., to read the answer. I
  Ching ratcheted the oracle thing up a notch.

  Fred said that the night we were busted, our housemates had cleared
  their things out. Jeanne had gone back to her parents. Tree, who was
  from the Midwest somewhere, had gone home. I hope they got free from
  speed. I’d be using the web to search for them if I knew their full
  names and had any clues. That goes for a lot of people, some of whom I
  am sure would be glad if they knew they don’t have me around to remind
  them of old times because I simply can’t remember their names.

  Fred had picked up the I ching the next day or soon after we were
  arrested. Many of our friends had scavenged things from our place. I
  heard that Jeanne took the stoneware I’d bought in Japan. I hope so.
  Surfer’s sister had come with a pickup truck and got my LP collection
  and the cedar under-bed storage chest I’d been using as a coffee table
  with floor pillows in my last four homes. The autographs, the Hells
  Angels, Merry Pranksters and Bay Area musicians’ names carved in that
  old cedar chest are probably worth a fortune. As soon as I found out
  where the stuff was, I got Surfer to take me to his sister’s house. I
  took an armload of my favorite LPs and she gave me what I considered
  fair considering it was all she had at the time, for the chest and the
  rest of the records. Surfer also gave me a little box of other things
  he’d just grabbed for safekeeping, not all of which had belonged to me,
  but most of which had significant value. Surfer had an eye for quality.
  But I wouldn’t find Surfer for weeks yet, when I first got out of jail.

  The first friend I found was Glenn Vaughn. He had quit doing speed,
  helped along by seeing what it had done to me. He was getting into
  herbal medicine, and he got me started studying that. He was sharing a
  house with some jock-type college students for whom he scored drugs.
  These boys liked injecting LSD. Swallowing it is fine, folks. Nobody
  really needs to stick it in a vein. The onset is faster. Other than
  that, I don’t think there’s a difference. I shot some acid with the
  jocks and did something shamanic. Does “shamanic” there make it sound
  special? **DEEP heavy sigh!** (little injoke there–the shamans among
  you are snickering… and if you’re not, you will be. Read on.)

  Decades later I learned that in many shamanic cultures an initiate into
  shamanism has to go through a death and rebirth experience. Some
  ritualize it and others dramatize it while still other cultures do it
  with entheogenic and psychedelic drugs. Later, I would learn that.

  That first night I was out of jail, after these boys shot me up with
  LSD and then told me to make myself at home when they left, I didn’t
  know anything at all about shamanism. Well, maybe I would have
  correctly associated rattles and drums with a medicine-man shaman, but
  I had no idea what the drums and rattles did. Glenn went to sleep, but
  the acid wouldn’t let me sleep. The bright cheery kitchen was bumming
  me out, and the living room with foosball table and dumbells was no
  better. I wandered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. As I
  stood there I saw myself age. I died, fell to the floor and rotted
  away. My bones turned to dust and blew away on the wind. Then a
  whirlwind turned up and left a new me behind.

  I suppose the new me was a lot more optimistic than the old one. The
  old me would have known that it wouldn’t work, but the new me was
  convinced that I needed to be with Hulk so badly that the jailers would
  just have to let me in. I walked across town and knocked at the door of
  the Lane County Jail. The jailer who opened the little door over the
  peephole in the big door said I’d have to come back during visiting
  hours. Whew! I mean that whew now. At the time, I was crushed. But
  before I yielded to the impulse to throw myself onto the concrete step
  and start wailing and banging on the door, I yielded to the one or two
  rational brain cells I had left. I walked back across town and sat
  there with the barbells until daylight.

  Incarceration, and then getting out of jail, is almost always, for
  anyone, a transformative experience. When I was going to jail,
  extraordinary numbers of Americans were going to jail. Aw, hell, it’s
  still going on, dammit! For most of the people who go in and out of
  jail it’s destructive to their careers, families, their whole lives.
  Doing things backwards, as usual, I was helped by it, saved, actually,
  but kicking and screaming, dragging my heels all the way. You’d have to
  be a lot weirder than I am to enjoy going through the jail experience,
  and anyone who’s been all the way through it will admit that one of the
  hardest parts is getting back into life when you’re back on the streets.

  Weekdays were all right. Public libraries are one of my favorite places
  to be, always have been. I’ve gone to the library to escape Mama and a
  string of step-fathers, and several husbands, and to entertain myself
  and my daughter when we were flat broke. That winter in Eugene, I
  stayed there to escape the cold wind on the streets. The reading I did
  then was some of the most important, seminal, empowering work of my
  career. I read physics and math, did comparative study of various
  translations of the Christian Bible, devoured Hayakawa and Chomsky then
  exhausted the library’s collection on semantics and semiotic. I started
  asking questions of the reference librarian and got introduced to some
  early collections of myths from various cultures that were kept in the
  stacks, out of general circulation because of age, fragility or value.
  And I fell in love with the works of J. Frank Dobie, myth and folklore
  of the American Southwest. It all felt so familiar, so meaningful, so
  true. Now I know why.

  Where was I? ADD… I’ve mentioned before that our entire family has
  ADD. ADHD, but in our case, all three of us have hyperactivity of the
  mind. Our bodies are mousepotatoes. No, ADD is not where I was, it was
  just my feeble stab at justifiying the digression. Now I recall, I was
  relating some of the difficulties in getting back on the streets after
  jail.

  The library was all the luxury in my life that winter. When it closed,
  I headed for the coffeehouse. I panhandled on the streets: “Spare
  change?” With some tea and a scone and if the streets had been
  generous, a little cup of yogurt, I’d start asking around for a place
  to crash for the night. “One night stand” would be a polite but
  hypocritical way to characterize some of the crash places I found. I
  don’t think any of the guys had any illusions of ongoing relationships
  and I know I didn’t expect anything of that sort. What I most wanted
  was a warm place to sleep. Orgasms were frosting on the cake, and a
  shower in the morning was whipped cream and a cherry on top. If one had
  laundry facilities, even better. Sometimes it was even safe sex,
  something fairly unusual at the time. I learned a lot after the library
  closed at night, too.

  I wasn’t getting anywhere with my job search. One usually needs an
  address, phone number, transportation, clothing, and such, to find a
  job and I more or less needed a job to get any of those things. When
  the library closed, I joined the afterwork crowd at the coffeehouse to
  try and find a new angle to play.

  That’s how I got steered to the head shop down the street where Rhys
  Court sold bongs, posters and underground comix. And on the glass
  counter over a display of glass hash pipes, he laid out the Rider-Waite
  Tarot in a Celtic Cross spread and told me what was going on in my
  life. I’m sure he was anticipating the future card as much as I was by
  the time he got to it. He told me I needed all the wits and wisdom at
  my disposal and some help from my family to get through this crisis. My
  crisis he had been describing to me without knowing anything about me.
  Wow.

  The man who owned the new taco joint was new to Eugene. He was retired
  from a career in TV in Vegas, I think. His name is another one I’d love
  to be able to drop, if I could only remember…. The retirement cum
  taco business wasn’t doing too well. He was trying to run a mom and pop
  business by himself. He needed help. I convinced him that he could
  afford to feed me twice a day for my help during his lunch and dinner
  rushes.

  Then, he liked the arrangement so well that he gave the same deal to
  another young woman I’d met in the coffeehouse, homeless after
  hospitalization and detox. My mom had sent me the crucial twelve US
  dollars, all she could spare, to get a room for a whole week, and tips
  from the taco joint extended it. It was a sleeping room and I used an
  iron upended on two coffee mugs to heat a pan of water for tea or
  Lipton’s soup and the rest of the time I ate tacos and burritos and
  learned to cook them fast and tasty.

  Then what’s-her-name… think it has a B in it… Barbara… I
  dunno…. so frustrating. Oh, well, we helped our boss’s business take
  off, we brought in business and he decided to help that process along
  by getting us in there in lingerie in the evening, and it did extend
  the day’s business and the bottom line in his till and our tips. Then
  we found a little house behind a bigger house a few blocks away and
  became roomies. I went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings with her. A lot
  of what I know about spilling my guts I learned from that NA therapy
  group. I do wish I could remember her name, and what’s with this
  chaotically spotty memory stuff anyhow?

  Enough of what I can’t remember. Next time I’ll get into what I do recall.

  • 1:10 pm
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