August 17, 2002

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  I’ve probably left an inaccurate impression that I was wisely ready to stay straight when I got out of jail around the end of 1969. Jail got me clean, but staying that way wasn’t all my doing. I tried to score speed, but several factors were working against me. Money was scarce for me, so I would have needed to find someone willing to turn me on for free, or to front me a quantity so I could sell part of it to pay for my hit. That wasn’t happening.

  
  

  Steve was apparently gone. No one I talked to knew what happened to him. I never saw or heard anything from him again after that. The speed in town mostly came from the bikers. There was a small group of people that had sometimes had speed for sale before I got busted, four of five of them that always hung around together at the coffeehouse. I talked to one of them and he told me they weren’t doing speed any more: “Too much bad karma in it.” Who knows if that was true. Most dopers were avoiding me because I’d been in jail and therefore might have been turned into a snitch. Getting out of jail can be seen as an act of betrayal in that culture. How dare I?!

  
  

  My needle tracks were healing and they itched. The itch reminded me of how I’d gotten the tracks, and I craved more. I decided to get my mind off the itches and the cravings while pursuing some of my new interests and continuing some earlier studies. The library’s collections were deficient in metaphysics, but local bookstores were user friendly. After I got my room upstairs over the travel agency, I shoplifted a variety of books. I stole Steal this Book that winter, a handbook for urban underground survival. I also boosted, read and passed along to the coffeehouse crowd a few paperbacks on Edgar Cayce, Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard, Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, and The Book of the Hopi.

  
  

  I liked staying home alone and reading sometimes, and late at night when there was plenty of hot water, I’d slip into the communal bath with my bubble stuff. But there were guys around, too. There was “Mush” (he lived in a mushroom), who had been around the bikers and dopers even before I came to town. Rhys started coming up to my room sometimes, too.

  
  

  I missed Hulk. Sometimes, in the first few weeks I was out of jail, at the library I’d go into a stairwell or public restroom just to have a private warm place to cry. Then I’d distract myself with a book or study the help-wanted ads, or just go from one business to the next, asking if they needed any help.

  
  

  All that was before Rhys read the cards for me, I talked the man at the taco joint into hiring me, and got a room to stay in. A place of my own felt good. I didn’t feel so much like crying all the time. Now I could check books out of the library and take them home, I had an address, a message phone in the office downstairs, and a very interesting job. That old guy in the taco place had mementos, portfolios of publicity stills, scrapbooks of press clippings. Sometimes, between lunch and dinner shifts, we’d just hang around there with him, get cooking lessons and look at his souvenirs. After he got us into our “uniforms” of babydoll pajamas, the job, which had always been more fun than work, became a million laughs. Neither my roomie nor the old guy nor I thought much of nudity and the pjs were well within legal bounds, but the reactions of guys who would drive by slow, then cruise through the lot gawking before parking and coming in and buying a bag of burritos were priceless. When they’d leave, the two of us would giggle, and the old guy would wink and say, “I told you so.”

  
  

  After I’d worked a few days and had some money from tips and had had a lot of time to think about Rhys’s Tarot card reading for me, I went back to him. I wanted him to do another reading for me, but he refused. He just told me to learn to do it myself. So I shoplifted a deck of Tarot cards and a book on how to read them. That first deck was the Marseilles deck. I could read them only with the help of the book, and I found a few people at the coffeehouse who would let me read for them. It was slow going, with me looking things up in the book as I went along, but the readings seemed to impress them. The cards and the way they always seemed to make sense impressed me.

  
  

  Then I found a deck I liked better: Book of T: the new Tarot for the Aquarian Age. Very different in appearance from the Mediaeval decks, with different symbols for the four suits and a new set of Major cards that used symbolism that came naturally to me. They were easy to read without consulting the book. People started coming to me to ask for readings instead of my having to ask them if I could practice on them.

  
  

  The library had nothing on Tarot, very little on metaphysical or “occult” subjects. (I don’t like that word. It’s obsolete, came into usage when such things had to be hidden from Inquisitors, but later acquired a connotation suggesting hermetic or secret knowledge. Lies can be kept secret, but knowledge, true knowledge, is there in the collective consciousness and can’t be hidden.) Enough ranting, back to remembering.

  
  

  A man named Bill Baker, who struck me as a sort of mellowed-out beatnik, was often in the coffeehouse in the morning. When we met there, we’d discuss Tarot and metaphysics in general, philosophy, cosmology, and life. I read for him several times and he gave great feedback. He and Esther Leinbach, a professional astrologer and author on astrology who also hung out in there, usually in the afternoon, helped me perfect my techniques with readings, through their feedback. It was invaluable. Their telling me what I was doing right gave me confidence, and their criticism showed me where I needed more work.

  
  

  I did readings for Rhys and Mush, too, and everyone who came around. I did readings for myself. Some people say you “can’t” do that, or that you shouldn’t. It’s okay if you’re honest with yourself. Most people tend to read their hopes and/or fears into it. I enjoy having someone else around to consult an oracle for me sometimes, and lots of times we will trade reading for reading, but I can do it for myself, too. No prob, just pay attention to every detail and be objective… my strong suits.

  
  

  It got ridiculous that winter. Our circle of friends had started remarking on the synchronicites that began when we started using I Ching about a year earlier. People were coming up to me in the coffeehouse and reporting on the way my readings related to what had happened afterward. It blew them away. And I wasn’t having any surprises any more. I was so into oracles, meditation, prophecy and divination that real life was all deja vu. It was unsettling. It was absurd. So I had a little talk with my spirit guides and with their help I worked out this arrangement where I’m content to get by on logic and intuition on an everyday basis and they let me know if something critical is coming up around the corner. Our arrangement has been renegotiated a few times, upgraded and updated, and it still works just fine.

  
  

  The taco job came to a quick sad end when the old guy had a heart attack. His daughter let us know that the place would be sold. My roomie and I were not getting along. The facilitator at the NA therapy group suggested that What’s-her-name found me a challenge to her femininity, whatever that means. Whatever it meant, what’s-her-name agreed that that was the problem. She went on to say that whenever guys were around, they were all over me and ignoring her. Anyhow, it was time to move out and move on.

  
  

  I found a live-in child care and housekeeping job. A man and five kids in a big old house with very little furniture. Nobody wanted to talk about mom. Mom was gone. They went to church on Sunday at the Salvation Army. The dad worked at some blue-collar job and the budget he gave me for food would barely keep us all on oatmeal and beans. That’s only a slight exaggeration. The whole family was malnourished. The kids were hungry. I started shoplifting the occasional extra nutrition. Eventually, the guy caught on, noticed that we were eating better than we should be. He fired me and the kids all cried. They had started calling me their human encyclopedia. They liked trying to find questions to stump me. Doing homework with them was kinda fun but frustrating. They were dim, but not nearly as dim as their dad.

  
  

  While I was there that spring and summer, at night in my little room at the quiet end of the house, I had been getting into astral travel. That’s where I had my first non-traumatic out of body experience. It’s also where I had one of this life’s most embarrassing moments, when I did something so stupid that I dislike telling it on myself. I was still having needle-cravings. I still couldn’t get any speed, but I did get some weed. I couldn’t smoke it there in my employer’s house, so I made tea tea and took it intravenously. SICK!! You can’t imagine. First I was afraid I’d die, then I was afraid I wouldn’t. Oooogh. *shudder*.

  
  

  While I was working for that family, my court date came up, I was sentenced to three years in prison, suspended pending successful completion of probation. I met my probation officer, an enormous obese blonde. I saw two people get off an elevator in her office building, when she got on–because she got on. I was thankful that she had a big caseload and not much time or attention to spare for me. We set a date for my monthly reports to her office and I scrammed out of there. From the amount of attention she paid to me, I didn’t think she’d recognize me if we met on the street. See how wrong I can be.

  
  

  In jail, I’d met two women my age who became fast, close friends: Johanna and Miriam. They were out before I was, but Johanna gave me her street address. It happened to be only a few blocks from the home of the dim daddy and his kids. I was at her house a lot that summer. She was Wapato Indian and one of the fun things we shared was love of cooking. Between Glenn’s lessons on medicinal herbs and hers, plus a lot of walks where we foraged for edible plants for the stew pot, I got the foundations of my wildforaging skills at that time.

  
  

  One day that stands out in memory was a visit to the jail to see Hulk. It was my 26th birthday. Leaving there without him was always hard. I was scuffing along, head down, headed toward Johanna’s place for a planned party. Right there on the sidewalk, I saw a little ball of foil. I picked it up and unwrapped it and found a sticky ball inside, about 2 grams of black hashish. Johanna had a hash pipe, and they sat me down on the floor in the middle of a figure 8 “circle” so that I got the pipe coming and going. When I stood up, after the hash was gone and we’d smoked some of someone else’s weed, I went down again. Visually, everything had gone a bright turquoise blue similar to what I see when our VCR is off the channel. I heard a whooshing noise and then I was looking up into a circle of concerned faces. Odd, some of the things one remembers.

  
  

  When I got fired from my live-in job, I moved into a crash pad at a different apartment from the one I’d stayed at before, in the same fourplex. This one was upstairs over the place where the Black Ravens had taken me when they grabbed me at the Alice Cooper concert. The yellow dog was still around, and she slept with her head on me all the time. Then Hulk got out of jail.

  
  

  We hadn’t been sure of his release date because it varied according to the “good time” he’d be allowed. I found out a day or two ahead of time because Fred, the former Crow Farmer, light-show artist extraordinaire and sweet, sweet lover, had seen Hulk in a work crew raking leaves in a city park. Fred came and relayed the message from Hulk and said it would be sad for him when my old man got out. I consoled him a bit, but couldn’t conceal my excitement.

  
  

  While I had been in jail, one of the other women there had given me the benefit of her prior experience of the effects that probation and its various rules could have on relationships. “Fall partners,” co-defendants are never supposed to be allowed to associate with each other, and forget about cohabitation. My probation prohibited me from seeing Hulk. My visits to the jail to see him were risky, but I managed to get away with them simply by signing in as his wife. It got sticky only once, when his ex-wife, mother of his two kids was there when I arrived, and had also signed in as “wife”. She straightened it out, though, and I still got to see him.

  
  

  The woman I’d met when they let me out of isolation and into the dorm, had solved her problems by getting married to her fall partner. She said that made it impossible for the authorities to keep her and her man apart. One of the first things Hulk and I did after he got out was to hitchhike across the line to Washington to avoid the waiting period. Hulk was highly amused at the Justice of the Peace who intoned our vows. He called him a “bass buffoon.” I think he was more a baritone, but the buffoon part fit to a T. Self-important, droning, patronizing… he got no tip from us.

  
  

  The school year at U of O started out with street demonstrations against the Vietnam war. I was right there at one of the barricades on campus one night. So were the TV news cameras. My PO saw me at the barricade, fist in the air, chanting my heart out. She immediately revoked my probation and had a warrant issued for me. It took them a while to find me, since I was no longer at my last known address. She added my failure to notify her of change of address to the eventual list of ten violations, which included crossing state lines and entering into a legal (marriage) contract without her consent.

  
  

  I think Hulk and I had spent about two weeks or so together after he got out, before the PO spotted me again, going into the job service office, and called the cops to pick me up. After a few days back in the dorm at Lane County Jail, I was transported with four other women to Salem and locked up in OWCC–Oregon Women’s Correctional Center, a little cross-shaped cinderblock building surrounded by a high chainlink fence topped with razor wire, in the shadow of the tall wall surrounding the old stone and concrete men’s prison, OSP.

  
  

  Edited for faster loading–all that’s gone is a string of quiz boxes.

  • 2:42 pm
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