Crystal Clean (15 page)

He never learned a foreign language, unless you count Andowneese. (And I do.) And he’ll never drive a car, but he drives me nuts every day and hopefully for the rest of my life. He went to his prom, graduated high school and started going to camp every summer where he goes white water rafting.

I can’t speak for my son, but this is what I think: Andy has no idea he’s different. Rather, he takes great pride in his extraordinary patience and tolerance for everyone else in the world that just doesn’t get it. With enough time and repetition, one day they will. Until then, he’ll wait.

“Enna trwy again. I sorwy.”

“Sweetheart, I know.” I stopped crying and wiped my face with my sleeve. “I’m not mad at you, punkin, I’m just sad about what happened.”

“Oh essa not sad. Essa Mom’s happy.”

“Now that I’m with you, yes.”

At home, I stripped his clothes, started the shower and threw all the damning evidence in the washing machine
-
with extra soap. I fixed him lunch and he spent the rest of the afternoon playing Mario Kart, waiting for Allan to come home so he could race against him.

Alone in my room, all the emotion flooded back, filling me with grief so deep that it felt like anger. I wanted to vent to someone, but there was no one I could talk to about it. I didn’t want to hear what my mother would say:

Kimberly, stop it! There’s no reason for you to be upset like this, and there’s certainly no reason for tears. It’s over. I’m worried about you letting things get to you this way. By the way, are you taking your medication?

Allan had a, “Sorry, man, you okay? Let’s play Mario!” attitude. He didn’t understand why I let things affect me the way I did. Nothing seemed to upset Allan. He just rode a kind of mid-level groove and let Mary Jane pay the fare.

That left nobody.

I knew from experience not to subject other people to anything but the pleasant parts of Andy’s and my life. I’ve had friends encourage me to open up about his early years, only to never see them again. Experience taught me that people thought they wanted more information than they could handle. I didn’t blame them. I mean, Christ, how would you react?

Hey, you okay? You seem upset.

I am, actually. My fourteen-year-old son shit his pants at school today.

Excuse me?

Yeah, well the nurse says it’s diarrhea, but he’s actually constipated. See, when he was a baby...

Where was I supposed to start? Where was I supposed to stop? Most importantly: what gave me the right to lay all that on someone whether they asked for it or not? They had no idea what they were getting into. They were just being polite, and I couldn’t blame them. I mean, what do you do when someone dumps unexpected heavy information on you?

When Andy went to his room to play Mario, I went to my room and got high. I smoked long and deep and pretty soon, I
wasn’t upset. A few minutes later, I was comfortably numb. The sadness and grief I’d felt faded like chalk wiped from a board. With a good eraser and little effort, the board comes clean a layer of chalk at a time. That’s how it was with meth. Every bowl I smoked peeled away a layer: pain, sorrow, fear, self-doubt, shame, regret. None of it existed inside that high. It was just my drug and me, and the only thing that mattered was maintaining the numbness because what I would otherwise be feeling seemed unbearable.

That’s how it happens. You start out wanting to get high, and you end up needing not to come down. Getting high
-
smoking meth
-
hadn’t been
fun
for a long time. It was how I got through the day. It’s what I did to keep from falling apart. I smoked meth to feel more social. I smoked as a way to relax. It made me feel normal. More importantly, it made me forget all my insecurities and pain, and it dampened my self-loathing for all the things I was and all the things I wasn’t.

I had no coping skills and no boundaries. If I possessed the skills to handle things like Andy’s accidents, the boundaries would be inherent.
Stop telling me how I should and shouldn’t feel, Mom. I’m frustrated and sad about what’s happening, and here’s how I intend to handle it, so just back the fuck off.

Just the thought of standing up for myself like that
-
of saying what I truly felt
-
terrified me because it was too risky. More than anything, I craved my parent’s approval. They were all I had and I was afraid that if I ever did anything to disrupt the status quo, I would lose them. My fear wasn’t unfounded.

In my family, love was conditional, based upon following rules and doing what was expected rather than simply for
being
, and
God
help you if you rocked the boat.

When I was in the third grade, I got the idea to throw my parents a surprise party for their anniversary. I was nine years old. I’d always wanted a surprise party and I assumed everyone else would, too.

Mom kept a list of phone numbers on a piece of cork above the telephone and though I didn’t know most of the people on it, I called them all. Each person, or couple, was assigned to bring a main dish, side dish, dessert or booze. I told them gifts were welcome, though not necessary, and to please park on the surrounding streets to maintain the surprise.

Chuck went home with a friend after school to spend that Friday night, and my best friend’s parents were picking me up at eight ‘o clock, giving me time to play hostess.

Almost everyone from the list showed up and when Mom and Dad came home from work, the house was full of people yelling, “Surprise! Happy anniversary!”

I’d planned the party for weeks and was proud of myself for pulling it off so well.

When the doorbell rang at eight, I grabbed my little flowered vinyl suitcase and went to tell my parents goodbye. Mom grabbed my arm and asked through clenched teeth, “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“I’m going to spend the night with Eve.”

“You’re not leaving here without doing these dishes, Kimberly! After all
this
, you think
I’m
going to do them?”

It simply never occurred to me. There were paper plates and plastic utensils. I wasn’t thinking about things like glasses and serving spoons. I was a bad girl. I’d been thoughtless and inconsiderate, so I stayed and did the dishes while my friend and her dad waited in the driveway.

All these years later, my family still talks about that night and how stupid I was. According to my mother, the phone list was of people who were
acquaintances
, not friends. She barely knew most of them and was horrified to come home from work at the end of a long week to find virtual strangers in her house eating, drinking and generally making a mess. And to top it all off, I had the audacity to think I could get away with leaving her to clean up.

When I left Andy with Mom and Dad and lived in my van for a time, my father didn’t speak to me for a year. When I called the house, he would set the phone down without a word and I’d wait for Mom to pick up the extension. When I was there, he wouldn’t acknowledge my presence. He didn’t get out of his chair, talk to me or speak to my mother about the fact that I was actually in the house. I never stayed long.

I asked Mom about it.

“He’s hurt, Kimbo. He doesn’t understand you, and you’ve hurt him.”

“Is he ever going to talk to me again?”

She would change the subject

A year passed and Andy and I moved in with Allan when my mother called me on Valentine’s Day to tell me my father
wanted me to come to the house. He hugged me, gave me a card, and just like that I existed again. Nothing was ever discussed and hasn’t been to this day, except for my mother to repeat what she’d said about me hurting his feelings.

In my family, we don’t talk about the bad things, especially when the bad thing is me.

Which is why I think I never said anything about what happened to me in the sixth grade. I knew that what was happening wrong, but I wasn’t sure that I was not to blame, and there was no way I was going to risk getting in trouble or losing the tenuous relationship I had with my parents by telling them my dirty secret. Keeping everything inside, living with pain, confusion and anger, even for the rest of my life, was worth the price of love.

As I grew up, I assumed that extended to people in general. You are the sum of what happens to you and the things you do. Tried and judged for your sins, the verdict determines your worth.

If moments of clarity and realization happened when they should be happening, maybe there would be no addiction.

Chapter 1
5

“Get out here, NOW!” It was a fall morning and I thought Allan was already gone, but something made him come back into the house to get me. I zipped a sweatshirt over my nightgown, slipped on my sandals and joined him in the front yard.

I was speechless. Hundreds of neon colored pieces of paper
-
green, pink and orange
-
littered our street from one end to the other. They covered the road, filled the gutters and flecked our neighbors’ lawns, cars and porches. Allan handed me one of the five by seven homemade flyers. In large, bold, block letters it read, “Got meth?” with our address beneath the catchy phrase.

“Oh, fuck,” was all I could say. I looked up and down the street, overwhelmed at what I was seeing.

“Come on,” Allan said, and started picking them up as fast as he could.

It was shortly after seven in the morning. Andy’s bus had already come and gone, but I doubted the driver could have read the flyers from his position. I hoped not.

We had no choice. I brought a garbage sack for each of us and we started grabbing. The lawns were set with early morning frost and our fingers quickly numbed. There may have been thousands of those damn flyers. They were everywhere: stuck to houses and the wheels of cars, tucked underneath windshield wipers, and wedged in bushes. The road looked as if it were painted in neon, and most of those papers had tire tracks on them where they’d been run over in the early morning hours.

A woman who lived a few houses down from us came out to help. Allan and I looked at each other, panicked, as she walked over to me.

“These have your address on them, don’t they?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m so sorry for all this. We’ll have it cleaned up as soon as we can.”

“I’ll help you. Is someone stalking you or something?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Allan shake his head almost imperceptibly. I wasn’t too surprised either. We looked like average middle class citizens. There was nothing about our house, our living habits or us to make anyone suspicious of any illegal activity. We were neighborly enough that people knew I was a bail bondsman, which explained my comings and goings at night. We
did yard work and waved to our neighbors when Andy came home in the evenings. Allan’s son rode his bike and skateboarded up and down the street on the weekends we had him, and the boys would play catch in the front yard. We decorated the house at Christmas and I took extra rhubarb from our yard to share with the neighbors. We were responsible for letting the irrigation water down to the rest of the block in the summertime.

“Something like that,” I said. “An ex-boyfriend. You know how that can be.” It was the only excuse I could come up with.

I knew exactly who was responsible: Garnett. There was no one else would would have or could have done something like that. He was back together with his ex-wife and apparently, I was his new hobby.

“Yes, I do! I’m so sorry for you.”

“It’s just that it’s so embarrassing. You know. All our neighbors. You’re so sweet to be helping us like this. You really don’t have to. I just feel awful.”

“It’s not a problem. Let’s get this taken care of before anyone else sees them.”

We had the street cleaned within a half an hour.

The following Saturday, Andy and Allan were playing Mario Kart in Andy’s room while I was locked in mine watching movies and getting high. I barely registered the faint knock on the front door, but I heard something in Allan’s voice that I’d never heard before when he called for me. When I rounded the corner from the hallway to the living room and saw the two police officers standing in my house, I felt a surreal rush swarm through my body and for a moment, I thought I would lose consciousness.

“Can I help you?” I was relieved at the sound of my voice: conversational and relaxed. I sat on the sofa next to Andy who was sitting next to Allan.

“We’ve received some reports that there’s a methamphetamine lab being run out of this home,” the taller of two officers said. “We’d like to search the premises.”

My face was frozen in a polite smile, but my brain was racing. In my room, on the table next to my bed, lay my loaded pipe and container holding three huge, clear crystals. There was also another quarter pound of meth sitting on the top shelf in my closet next to a half pound of pot.

“Do you have a warrant?”

“No, ma’am. All we have are these three calls, all saying the same thing.” I waited for him to continue. He cleared his throat, asked his partner for the file he was holding and started flipping through it. “They all say that there’s heavy evidence of a meth lab being run out of here.” He looked at Andy, then back to me. “What we’d like is your cooperation. We can get a warrant if we need to, but if there’s nothing to hide we can just clear this up now. Do you mind if we take a look around?”

Oh my
God
. Oh my
God
! That rat-bastard, Garnett. That stupid son-of-a-bitch. What the hell am I going to do? I can’t let them search. I’d have to be out of my fucking mind to consent to a warrantless search, even if the house was clean. No, they can’t search the house! For Christ’s sake, what am I going to do? What am I going to say?

“I’m sorry, I can’t let you search without a warrant.” I was scared shitless and I was going to pieces in my head, but I held my façade. I sat with my legs crossed, looking, I hoped, like a polite, concerned, responsible citizen who was simply asserting her fourth amendment rights.

“Ma’am, we can get a warrant if we need to, but we’d rather take care of this now. Just get it out of the way so we can let the concerned party know that there’s nothing to worry about. Will you let us take a quick look around?”

“I’m sorry, I really don’t mean to be rude, but I can’t, in good consciousness, allow you to search without a warrant.”

The officers looked at one another, shifted their weight from foot to foot and cleared their throats.

“Ma’am,” the taller officer started again, “if we can do a quick search, just have a look around, it’ll only take a minute. We need to be able to let this party know that we checked out the situation and there’s nothing to worry about.”

Jesus,
God
! Get out! Get out of my house. I can’t keep this calm front much longer. Does this look like a meth lab? Do you see any glass containers in here or outside? Any tubing? Do you smell an odor that makes you suspect that what Crazy-boy has told you is true? NO! So quit bugging me and go away!

“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head, “I’m really not trying to make things difficult for you.”

“Ma’am, there have been three different complaints about a lab being run out of this domicile. We need to know that this isn’t the case.”

“Officer, I think I know what’s going on here. There’s a man, someone I used to be friends with, who’s been stalking me,
and this is exactly something he would do. He was arrested last year for multiple counts of malicious stalking and harassment of his ex-wife, they got back together and now, apparently, I’m his new target. Can you tell me if all three reports were made by the same person?”

The second officer, who’d been quiet throughout the exchange, leafed through the papers in the file and said, in a low voice, to his partner, “It does look like all three of these...” I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said.

The one I’d been speaking with pushed the file closed, pulled himself to his full height and spoke to me in his OFFICIAL POLICE OFFICER VOICE. “Ma’am, there have been several reports of suspicious drug activity and, specifically, reports of a meth lab being run out of these premises and we need to search your house.”

I was terrified. Knowing you have rights is one thing. Asserting your rights is another. Asserting your rights when you are sitting in a house full of enough evidence for multiple felony convictions is an out of body experience. I felt as though I were watching myself on television. Shocked by what was happening and scared for the woman in the situation, I was in awe of her indignation. It was reality TV at its most base, and because it was happening to me I couldn’t turn the channel.

“Will you give us permission to search?”

“Officer,”
You stupid dumb-fuck! How many times do you want me to tell you no?
“Like I said, I’m really not trying to make things difficult.” (Uncross and re-cross legs) “I know you’re only doing your job, and you have no way of knowing who we are or what this is all about.”

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe! Jesus Christ, when the fuck are they going to leave? How long is this going to go on? What are they trying to do? Wear me down? Do you guys really think I’m going to change my mind?

It was then that Allan spoke up. “Kim, maybe we should let them...” and as I turned my head toward him, I knew from his abrupt silence that the expression on my face was the one I’d intended for him. I turned my attention back to the two policemen who were towering over Allan, my son and me as we sat on the couch in the living room. The sensation I had of slipping in and out of my own body/reality made me feel like I was going to vomit.

“Ma’am, you should listen to your husband. Just let us...”

“He’s not my husband.”
Quit calling me ma’am, asshole!
(Smile still in place? Check. Re-cross legs.) “I’m sorry. Unless you have a warrant, I can’t allow you to search.”
Leave, leave, leave! Don’t you guys have any criminals to chase?

“But if we had a warrant, you would allow us to search, right?”

What am I? New?

“I don’t think I’d have a choice then, would I?”

They were there more then half an hour, rephrasing the question, trying to convince me to consent to a warrantless search. The more they pressed, the more indignant I felt. In my mind, the closet full of felonies no longer mattered. I was fighting the good fight. I was struggling to preserve my constitutional right as an American citizen to freedom from search and seizure. I was righteous.

If I was shaky when they were gone, Allan was epileptic. “Jesus, Kim! How did you do that? I can’t believe that! I can’t believe that happened. I can’t believe you did that. How did you do that?”

“Allan, calm down. I’m as freaked out as you are.”

“Yeah, but you stood up to them. Holy shit.”

“Well? Fuck. How stupid would I have to be to allow a search without a warrant?”

“I don’t think I could have done what you did.”

“Yes,” I said, “I noticed.”

“Sorry.”

After Andy was asleep, we talked about what happened and about the previous flyer incident.

“Kim, Garnett’s not going to stop and this is getting dangerous.”

“I know. I’m sorry about all this.”

“Don’t be sorry. I know it’s not your fault he’s crazy, but you have to do something. You have to stop.” He looked at me. “Or find a way to be more careful. It’s a good thing you didn’t have anything here today. Well, other than probably your personal stash, right?” I didn’t answer. “Right?” I gave him a look with my head cocked to one side that said,
don’t be so naïve
. “What the fuck? What do you have? What’s here?”

When I told him, he was pissed. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about, Allan. This isn’t news to you.”

“Yeah, but Kim, a quarter pound of meth? Why so much?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What the hell are you doing with that much meth?”

I shook my head, blinked and closed my gaping mouth before speaking again. “Allan, how much do you think I go through?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I guess now you have some idea.”

“You’re selling a quarter pound of meth a month?”

At first I though he was being deliberately obtuse, and it pissed me off, but I realized we hadn’t discussed the technical aspects of my business since he’d quit using, and that was a while ago.

“A month? Allan, look around you. How do you think I pay for all this? The house, the utilities and groceries. How do you think I paid your back child support and your delinquent medical bills from that emergency you had in California when you were still driving? How do you think I paid your outstanding tickets in Oregon and California and the fees to reinstate your license? Where do you think the money came from to bail you out of jail and hire Larry to represent you?”

I fell silent. I hadn’t meant to unleash on him like that, but once I started, it was hard to stop myself. He was quiet, too, but not because he felt bad, which is what I expected, but because he was mad.

“What the hell? How much do I owe you? Have you been keeping track?”

I wished I could take it all back. I didn’t want to go into everything. Not then. Not ever, if I could avoid it. I wanted money to be a non-issue. I wanted to take care of the man I loved until he was able to take care of
us
, and as far as I was concerned, that was inherent in our relationship. At least it was in my sick, needy, addict mind. The truth was, I wanted him to depend on me so that he would need me, but I didn’t want to be taken advantage of.

I don’t know what I wanted.