The Big Fix (12 page)

When I was in high school, my parents gave me one piece of advice for my future: Study law or business.

“What about psychology?” I had asked.

Their response was definitive. NO.

My parents had their own idea about what it meant to be successful in this world. They were not planning on wasting their hard-earned money on just any degree—they wanted me
to get one that would provide a return on their investment. My father had once told me about how, when he was in high school, he refused to drop out to get a job at the local grocery store, so my grandfather refused to go to his graduation, the first ever in the family. The lack of support and guidance at home was always a painful memory for my father. He had joined the Navy to get out of poverty. He worked hard to provide us with all the material things he thought we needed. As the one who paid for those material things, he felt he was also the person who should make the decisions. After his one (unsuccessful) trip to counseling for alcohol abuse, I suspect he felt strongly that counseling was a fairly useless profession.

Money—and the control that it gave my father—was always a point of contention in our house. He frequently belittled the work my mother performed. His ego never recovered from the fact that my mother chose to work rather than stay at home. She knew that having her own income would give her some independence. Both my parents wanted me to be successful for different reasons. My father wanted me to be successful because it would be an extension of his sacrifices; my mother knew economic freedom would allow me mobility. They were clear on one thing, though: no psychology degree for me. They would not allow it.

She adamantly declared, “With a business degree, you can do anything!”

I rolled my eyes in disapproval.

“You can major in psychology,” she told me. “We just won't pay for it.”

This was one of the few times I saw the two of them agree on anything.

I ended up taking some psychology classes with a business concentration. It seemed like a good compromise: I wanted to learn about what motivates people. I wanted to know what motivated me. Living my life as an outsider, I became excellent at reading people. At first it was for self-preservation. Later, it was because I was genuinely interested in what influenced various behaviors. Over the course of my life, I had tried retail, food service, and office work, but I knew these jobs would never make me happy. I had to find a job that challenged me every day. I had to take the steps to make that possible.

Even before I stopped sticking a needle in my arm, I knew I needed to find a way to go back to college. It was one of the dreams that kept me alive. School was the part of my life where I felt like I fit in—I felt important there. Before, I had used my body to survive. Now I wanted to use my mind. After years of heavy drug use, this would be no easy task. At times, it was hard for me to put a sentence together. The drugs, especially my years of heavy stimulant use, seemed to rob me of my short-term memory. But I was willing to try. I would certainly lose it—permanently—if I never tried to use it. School would be a way to restore what I had lost. I was ready to start the process to go back.

I met with counselors at rehab to start the long road back to school. They had good news for me: It had been so long since I had worked, my low income would allow me to get grants that would cover some form of higher education in California. This was the only time in my life when poverty had been an asset. I needed the help. Despite working full time, I had barely been able to afford the costs of moving out
into sober living. I had to fill out what seemed like a thousand forms to apply for financial aid; I didn't even bother to apply to schools until I had done that. Without aid, there would be no college. I knew this. As I slowly worked my way through the financial aid form, I saw “the box,” as I would again and again, on various forms throughout my recovery life: “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” Yes! Yes I had. Ouch. The counselor explained that because I had completed rehab there would be a follow-up question allowing me to explain, where I could essentially say, “Hey, I'm a felon—but I am a druggie who completed rehab! Yay!” No matter what I tried to do, I was constantly having to explain myself to strangers. I could see why people in recovery gave up.

Once I filled out the forms for financial aid, it was time to figure out where I could take classes. The whole process seemed like a comedy of errors. Each person I tried to get information from had only part of the story. In total, I met with six different people at three different places. The community college directed me to apply to San Francisco State University, since, given my prior course load, I was too far into a four-year degree to start there. I later learned this was not true. I could have saved myself $5,000 in grants and loans by taking classes at community college, then transferring to a four-year college. Instead, I would be jumping into the deep end of the pool. I felt like I was seventeen again. I was barely keeping my head above water.

After filling out
more
forms, I got a letter in the mail from SFSU to bring my transcripts to the new student orientation. My transcripts? Fuck—I hadn't even thought about that. They wouldn't take the word of a convicted felon? I
needed an official record of the work I had completed at the University of Cincinnati. I needed my mother to help me get my immunization records. I needed papers proving I had completed high school. These tasks were stacking up. I had lost every piece of my identity over the past ten years. I lost all my yearbooks, my class ring, all my pictures, all my writings, all my belongings, and most of my dignity. It was almost as if I did not exist between 1988 and 1998, then reappeared with the fears of a teenager and the problems of an addicted adult. With the exception of the documentary, there were no photographs of me. The only records of my existence were mugshots and my “rap sheet”—my criminal record.

When I received my transcripts, I braced myself for the damage as I ripped open the envelope. During that last semester alone, I had been shooting heroin, cocaine, and MDMA in between drinking binges. My cumulative GPA was much lower than I had expected: a solid C minus. This was for a person who had started nearly a year ahead of her peers. My last quarter:
Incomplete, Incomplete, D, B.
Hmm. I was surprised to see a B there. Maybe I wasn't the only person on drugs while I was in that school. Any teacher who would give me a B in that last quarter did not give a fuck about higher education. It was that bad.

As the night of the orientation at SF State approached, I started to get excited about my future. My shitty market research job paid the bills. I was grateful for that, but I knew it certainly was not a career. I didn't want to be that forty-year-old asshole who calls during dinner to try to get people to answer questions about their political opinions. I saw my future in that room. There was the fifty-plus-year-old alcoholic
who worked as Santa for cash at Christmas. There were drag queens, senior citizens, and more than a few people starting over like myself. There was the overweight ginger with the two-foot-long mullet. There was the punk rock burnout dude who worked here to pay the bills.

Men in rehab seemed to have more luck than women. They got into jobs in the trades—most of these started at nearly double the minimum wage—often before they had even finished rehab. Over and over again, I saw men in the program get hired despite lengthy criminal records. Women seemed to fall into retail or service jobs, which made it much more difficult to obtain stable housing without working two jobs. And the men had mentors. There were social clubs for men in recovery, breakfast meetings, and special groups set aside to address their needs for reentry into society. From my perspective, it seemed like society wasn't prepared to deal with women with substance abuse issues. Since men were seen as breadwinners, everything was geared toward getting them back to work, yet women were frequently the sole supporters of their children and family members. If the best way to get a job was to know someone, the women certainly fell behind before they even got started back into the world. School would give me a new set of advantages. I needed to get in before I got lost.

I boarded the packed train that would take me out to the university for orientation on a cold January evening. It seemed like everyone on the train was a student. In that moment, I felt like I belonged there. I was going to school! There was a feeling in the pit of my stomach, like butterflies. I felt like I was going on a first date. I really, really hoped
they would like me. As I walked across the campus, I felt a spring in my step. I had bought a shiny new backpack for the occasion, a nice one that wouldn't feel too heavy when I loaded it down with fifty pounds of books. I planned on taking classes part time while working full time. My commute to and from work would only be ten minutes, so I could use the extra time to study. I wanted to start off slowly, and I had browsed the course catalog to select classes that would allow me to do that. The three months of forms and appointments had prepared me for this evening.

Inside, I took my seat at one of the round tables. The orientation quickly breezed through the things I needed to know to graduate. I liked the fact that I was able to take a few classes I wanted before I had to decide on a major. SF State used a semester system, unlike my last school, which was on a quarter system. This left room for some (though not many) electives. I was picturing myself here. I was much older than most of the students, yet I still saw a few people my age in the room. I heard my name called. It was time to see the advisor.

As I walked up to the table, I felt myself burst with pride.

“Name, please,” said the man. He had a nondescript face and a cheap sweater.

The computers were lined up against the wall. Five advisors per five students in a row of tables.

“Tracey Lynne Helton,” I told him.

I saw my name printed on a stack of papers. He checked my name off his list.

He asked briskly, “Did you bring your transcript to complete your file?”

I sheepishly handed him my transcripts. He flipped through them a few times.

Immediately, I saw there was a problem. He handed them back to me.

“You don't meet the minimum requirements,” he told me in a matter-of-fact tone. “You need to have a GPA of 2.5 or higher to transfer here.”

I felt the color draining out of my face. The world was in slow motion. I saw people lining up for their tour of the campus. They were all laughing at me. While they'd been going to community college, I was busy sucking dick for heroin. I was standing there in front of all those fucking people, being told I was completely worthless. I shoved my papers in my bag. He was trying to explain other things to me, things I couldn't hear. I couldn't hear anything except indistinct talking sounds.
They must be saying I'm plugging up the line,
I thought. Any of those normal people could have been in my place.

As I turned away, I felt my face getting hot and wet. I wasn't sure what it was at first. I was so angry with myself. It took a minute to realize those were tears. This was the first time I had cried since I stopped using heroin. The last time was over a spilled hit of dope. The cooker got too hot. It started to burn my friend's hand. He wasn't tough enough to hold the burning metal. He let it go and most of my drugs spilled into the gutter. All of my hopes and dreams had been inside that cooker. I was sick. He spilled my drugs on top of piss and garbage. The brown liquid evaporated like my soul leaving my body. I felt the tears explode from my eyes. I had felt so miserable that day. Just like how I felt right now.

I was incredibly embarrassed. I had that feeling when you say something so stupid you want to rip off your mouth and shove it in your pocket. I was hurt. I was the kind of hurt that made me want to break something. I was so tired of fighting to be just as good as everyone else. I could not stop crying, snot and tears rushing down my face. I had to walk fifteen minutes across the campus, wait fifteen minutes for the train, and spend twenty more minutes riding to my stop. Something was released inside me. I could not hold back the tears. I gave people a look, daring them to say something to me. I didn't have the strength to hold down my feelings for one second longer. I had finally imploded with a rush of emotions. The loss of heroin had left a huge hole in my life. Heroin had provided the complete suspension of reality I needed. Without it, life seemed like an impossible task. Back then, when I had woken up every morning, I knew heroin was my purpose. I needed to get the drugs that would make me feel better. Now, I was drifting in an unfamiliar ocean. I was clean, yes, but I was not cured. I still wanted the feeling drugs gave me. The people in the meetings must have been brainwashed. Could they actually be happy without ever taking a drug again? Why was life so hard? I didn't remember it being this hard. When I thought back to my life with my shopping cart, the world had had rounder edges. Now I was stuck between two worlds: the using one and the “normal” one. I had a job, true, but it was based on my experience as an addict. And yes, I had a place to live, but it was a few feet away from people smoking crack in the doorway. I looked like every other person, except I had six years of living on and off the streets of San
Francisco to remind me that I was a degenerate dope fiend. This reality was never farther away than the collapsed veins on my arms that reminded me daily that I was different. The pain seemed to never end.

       
I could not cry at the death of friends.

       
I could not cry at the shame of my past.

       
I could not cry at the scars on my body.

       
I could not cry at the loss of my youth.

But when I momentarily lost my dream, I did cry. I had carried my pain for so long. I was ready to give myself a rest. On my way home that night, I was crying for all the things I had not cried about. It felt good. When I finally got to the door of my building, I was finishing with my intermittent sobbing. I could accept the full range of my feelings again. It took me just a few steps up the stairs toward my room to snap back to reality. This was just a setback. It wasn't going to stop me.