Prison Baby: A Memoir (7 page)

“The cow mainly moos as she chooses to moo / and she chooses to moo as she chooses.” She reads the whole poem, all four stanzas, two lines each, twice. Then I ask her to repeat it, over and over several times, the way I read it under my covers.

“Keep the flashlight, Pet,” she says and tucks me in. She doesn’t recognize that I stole it. My stomach’s in a knot from guilt. Even my constant nail biting doesn’t help, a habit I carry long past high school.

MANY NIGHTS AS a girl I’d cry at night, imagining my mother gone, dead, far away from me, and yet I hated her close most often, hated her very touch, and at the same time, just the thought of her leaving terrified me. I was scared she’d abandon me like all the rest. Still, I’d wake from nightmares where I pushed Mother off a cliff and she’d tumble a mile down but as soon as my hand pressed into her back, I’d panic and try to save her. Too late. She plummets down, her body in a slow twirl through the air.

I’d wake up guilt-ridden and sweaty, my pillow soaked with tears. I was scared of myself, horrified about the bad in me with these dreams, but also frightened I’d end up without a mother again.

LIFE GETS BETTER with a little chemical help. In seventh grade, I meet an older boy behind the gym after school. He hands me two crystal meth tablets. His eyes widen when I throw my head back, open my mouth, and toss them down.

Within an hour I’m a 500-volt bulb, my every cell alive and at peace for the first time. I need this forever. At last I feel at home in my light-brown-yellow, don’t-know-what-race-I-am skin, my adopted-into-a-Jewish-family skin, my prison-born skin. Deep down, though, I still can’t stand myself and am filled with hate for everyone. This rage and hate drive me to plan murder. Just in passing, but I give it more than a thought, and one afternoon in school, I sketch a plot with an older boy to off my parents. I plan to snake a hose from the furnace into their bedroom and gas them in the night.
But if I kill them, where will I live?

Selfishness, not compassion, stops me. I’m afraid I’ll go back into foster care even though I’m not conscious of my few years there. It feels like a stigma, whether I got this impression from other kids or from something on television, I don’t know. Even today, for most people, foster care brings up images of neglect and unwanted kids even though it’s not true.

Mother and Dad, who never learn about my plot, decide my dark moods call for urgent help. And just for me, not for our family, which is what we need.

I’m mute in the cushy leather chairs of psychiatrists and psychologists where I don’t utter one word because I’m convinced my parents got it wrong:
they
need help. I find my one power, in silence, the one thing I can control: whether I speak or not. In the one session I remember, maybe the only time I speak to the psychiatrist, I tell him I think my parents might be racist and I talk about the name-calling and bullying I meet—at school, the swim club, at the beach. After he responds,
Well, some people are
, I clam up even more. I need a better answer.

MEANWHILE, THE COUNTRY’S in a civil rights upheaval, and I’m waging my own revolution at home. One day my mother and I argue about whatever daily conflict our relationship brought forth. Again. I don’t remember about what. I’m in my senior year of high school at one of Seattle’s all-girls Episcopalian prep schools, and it’s either this, where my parents send me in ninth grade, or reform school, because I’ve already been caught stealing from drug stores. My parents must’ve accepted the fact that the school held chapel assembly every Wednesday, even though the school is nondenominational.

In high school I write my name as “Debi,” with a big circle to dot the “i.” I also cover social justice issues for the school newspaper: race, and fishing rights for Native Americans in Seattle. The school requires wool uniforms, royal blue skirts, and jackets with top-button-better-be-buttoned white shirts and stand up for the teachers when they enter the classroom. Lunchtime meant formal training in etiquette and meals served in a white-tablecloth dining room. My graduating class consists of twenty girls. Because I stand out in my all-white class, there’s no way to disappear into the school crowd and hide my trouble-making.

Every molecule in me is packed with rage. One day at home, I face my mother in the hall outside my bedroom, my body so close to hers, her back presses against the wall. We’re the same height by now, but I’m lean and muscular and more athletic than her soft, petite frame, just under five feet. A few summers before, I trained in the butterfly and breast stroke and raced on a swim team, so the workouts shaped me with broad shoulders and strong back muscles.

We’re forehead to forehead. Then, right behind my eyes, an electric thread ignites, rearranges my cells inside. It’s as if I’m plugged into a high voltage outlet and fueled by seventeen years of fury and adrenaline. I power up to strike and aim my right fist for Mother’s face. At the last minute, when my knuckles almost graze her cheekbone, I divert my punch.

My hand pierces the sheetrock wall behind her, my fist a nuclear ball on fire. I can’t remember what my mother does other than duck. I retract my arm from the hole in the wall, my knuckles collapsed. From the nail of my baby finger down to my wrist, the outside half of my hand folds into my palm. The anger, still ablaze in me, blocks the pain at first but my hand soon begins to throb and then turns into a purple-black, mangled mass.

After three days, my mother hands me her car keys to drive myself to the hospital. “Tell them you rough-housed with your brother.”

Jonathan’s off at college, so that’s a flat-out untruth. I’ve never known my mother to lie, but she would skirt facts to protect the family image. She’d never want to admit my violence and let the world in on our problems. Big problems.

I’d just passed my driver’s test but we hadn’t been taught how to drive to a hospital with a swollen hand in the lap. My hand and arm throb all the way, my bones already set into a distorted form. I don’t feel a thing when the doctor wraps my hand in gauze and then, with what looks like a shiny hammer, rebreaks the bones before he casts my hand. No pain, no more anger, nothing but a frozen inside. I don’t even feel alone, though I’m by myself in the hospital.

When head and heart disconnect, the one thing left is total lockdown into a world of only two choices: adapt, or crash and fall. More often it’s thought of as fight, flight, or freeze. I’m living in this zone full-time.

SOMETIME AFTER THE disaster of my hand, I downed a handful of aspirin to end it all. I’d had enough, couldn’t take it anymore. My weak attempt at suicide failed and I awoke the next morning unscathed. The amount I’d gulped wasn’t serious enough to kill me but more about how helpless and hopeless I felt, maxed out and fed up with life. After this, the only road I traveled to kill myself was the self-destructive one—emotional suicide.

LEAVE HOME. That’s when I think everything will improve, the day I move out, the very second I step out the door for good. Life will change, I’m sure, and then every bit of rage and confusion and hate will dissolve into nothing but bliss. Grief will flutter away and joy will bounce right in front of me the minute I sail out the front door of my parents’ house at last with my bags packed and ready for the good life. And when I turn eighteen, then for sure life will turn golden. When I when I when I . . . What will make me better is always something outside of myself.

Why not college? I head off to Ohio because my mother has friends there who teach in the state and . . . what else can I do? I’m too broke to live on my own for long, and my dad’s university job covers our tuition, no matter where we attend.

But it doesn’t pan out. My second day on campus, I head to my dorm room after dinner, and my side of the room is empty, all my belongings gone. Come to find out, the resident advisor moved me upstairs to the floor for Black students. The school is unofficially segregated, as so many are even now. When the Black Student Union asks me to join, I figure why not, and attend a few meetings where I make friends right away. The Union is the catchall group for anyone non-white, even though I don’t fit into any race categories—I am nothing and everything, neither Hispanic nor Caucasian nor African American nor Asian/Pacific Islander but, rather, some unknown blend.

ADOPTION RESEARCH SURVEYS indicate that not until the 1970s did more than a thousand white families include adopted children of color. My pioneering parents stretched beyond the margins to adopt me. But whenever I asked my mother about my caramel-colored skin and button nose, about the hint of an almond shape to my eyes, she’d tell me she loved me and that I was one of the family. I was too scared to eke out even one word to her in response, to tell her I didn’t feel part of anything.

In truth, there was no love big enough to cover the stigma and shame I carried about my prison roots or about my ambiguous racial whatever-ness. By the time my parents adopted me, no love could repair the trauma I’d already lived or the traumas that would follow.

WITHIN WEEKS OF the “eviction” from my dorm room, I round up a few other girls from the BSU and we roam the halls in search of white girls’ rooms so we can torch terror into them. We stack newspapers against their doors, then toss a match onto the piles. I’m into fire again, just like I was in elementary school. One college escapade after another, always fueled by cheap Thunderbird pint bottles and opium or weed. College was the first time I smoked opium, and since I’d heard about poets and artists in days past getting all creative on opium highs, I felt sort of artsy instead of druggy. What isn’t artsy is the plot I scheme to heist an armored car with a classmate in my economics course. We hunch together in the student union cafeteria over coffee and cigarettes and sketch a detailed diagram to intercept an armored car he knew of that traveled across the plains of central Ohio. But we never get further than an elaborate map and doodle, and a lot of drug highs.

Soon after, in the middle of my freshman year, my parents receive a letter from the dean with instructions that I should “find a college better suited for my needs.” I’m asked to leave, and it’s perfect, because I’m more than ready to switch majors from liberal arts to street drugs.

I dive into the fast life back in Seattle and travel at two speeds, either invisible or belligerent, both in high gear as I start my slippery slide downhill.

The first time I load a spoon of dope, I go straight to the top of the class and cook up a speedball—heroin and coke. The afternoon I first shoot up, I cinch a belt around my bicep, pull the strap between my teeth, and give my vein a two-finger slap. I register—draw a little blood first before plunging. My palms sweat and my heart races, a horse inside pounding the track to the finish line. It’s divine. The coke and heroin flood through me, a chemical orgasm, part birth and part death. It’s all a gift, and I’m home!

I’m nineteen and prowl the streets with a boyfriend I’ve met at some party. Seattle’s my city now, not my family’s. Jonathan is engaged and getting his MFA in Bloomington, Indiana, and my father’s accepted an offer from Johns Hopkins University, so my parents move to Baltimore. While my dad goes more Ivy League, I dive further off the edge.

MY FATHER TAUGHT me smuggling by example on one of his sabbaticals when I was eight. He drove our rented Fiat and approached the Swiss-French border, Mother beside him and my brother and I in the back, where our Dad had stashed his banned Cuban cigars under our seat. Dad pulled over when the border patrol waved him aside.

“Pretend you’re sleeping,” my dad said. We obeyed my father’s commands in the car because if something annoyed him, his backhand swat could reach all the way back to our seats. We learned this early on because he always drove small foreign cars.

At the border, right away my adrenaline surged inside. I didn’t understand what it was, other than a feeling I’d grow addicted to: fear and excitement at the same time.

My brother and I slid down in our seats, closed our eyes, and flopped onto one another. The border control waved Dad across, with his two “actor” kids sitting on top of his smuggled cargo.

A DECADE LATER, with three cocaine-filled balloons shoved into my vagina, I turn my body into a drug-smuggling vessel wherever and however I can, and traffic across the border into Canada. My parents—or the cops—certainly wouldn’t approve of my methods or cargo. I also carve out the inside of tampons, fill them with plastic-wrapped coke, and push as many as possible inside me to smuggle the snow across the border. If one of those balloons pops or the plastic in the tampons leaks, I’ll absorb enough coke to overdose in under a minute.

When Bobby—boyfriend number four—ends up thirty miles outside Seattle in the Monroe Correctional Complex, we go into business. By now, drugs aren’t just a lifestyle—they’re a living. With a coke-filled balloon stuffed in my mouth, I swagger into the visiting room with a pout, sit down with Bobby and wink. A spark flickers in his eyes. He leans towards me.

I GRAB BOBBY BY THE BACK OF THE neck and spread his lips open with mine. My tongue thrusts the drug-filled balloon from my mouth to his. When our visit ends, I saunter out of there with the same swagger, proud of myself, relieved I’m not the one who swallows, then needs to dig it out the other end.

We split the money from sales, one of the first times the entrepreneur in me comes alive. Risk and uncertainty: I’m good at living with these feelings now, always ready in my gut to step over the edge, ready for the world to shift and tremble under my feet.

WITH THE TOP down and a trunkload of three suitcases stuffed full of weed and coke, I rip up the fast lane on Highway 101 out of San Diego in my green British convertible MG Midget headed towards Seattle. One of my recent drug deals paid for this sweet machine with seventeen hundred dollars, the cash rubber-banded in stacks of twenties. Two baby-blue suitcases with nine kilos of dope, vacuum-sealed in shrink-wrap, nestle below in a false bottom in the trunk. The leather on the top suitcase is torn from abundant use, so I face it gouge-side-down in the trunk, its raw ripped edges pressed against the dope inside worth thousands of dollars on the street.