Crystal Clean (2 page)

“Thank you. I have no idea how this place works.”

“What are you doin’ here anyway?”

“Felony possession.”

“Of what?”

“Meth.”

“You? Never would have guessed that.”

“What did you think?”

“Well, I kinda was thinking you was a narc. You know, put here to spy on us. They do it all the time.”

Great. This is just what I need. In my head I’m picturing a midnight mob stealing my shoes, shanking me and writing ‘Narc’ on my forehead with one of those wobbly little pens.

“No,” I say. “I mean, I’m sure that’s what a narc would say, too, but I’m not a narc.”

“Why’d you get arrested for meth?”

What do you mean why did I get arrested for meth?

“What do you mean?” I say.

“You use?”

“Yeah.”

She’s squinting at me suspiciously. There seems to be a lot of suspicion in here. Probably because everyone here is a criminal. “How’d you keep all your teeth?”

“I brush a lot.” Meth mouth is rampant among users. It’s normal for people to be missing teeth. Any teeth left are usually gray and black around the gums. It happens when people are on a steady diet of chemicals, have poor hygiene and don’t drink enough liquids. I’ve seen people with meth mouth. From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to end up that way, so I brush multiple times a day, use fluoride rinse and drink liquids constantly.

“Do you mind if I ask why you’re in here?” I feel like I may be starting to get on her nerves, but I ask anyway.

“Third time D.U.I. I’ll get prison this time ‘cause I don’t got no family. No money neither.” Her hair color has grown out. From the scalp about four inches down is pure gray. The rest is brownish red.

“How long have you been here?”

“Five months. Still waiting on the courts.” She lies back again with her book. Clearly, that’s enough talk for now.

My bail has been set at $75,000. Jill posts the bond, and my parents drive me home. We barely speak of the arrest, but my father has brought me red licorice. Mom and Dad don’t want to believe I’m a drug dealer any more than Jill does. The licorice is my dad saying, “Aw, Kimbo. Everything will be okay as long as we don’t
speak about what all of this implies. Have some licorice, honey.” It’s his way of saying they love me, I suppose.

I’m home again and alone. Allan is at work and Andy is at developmental therapy. They won’t be home for another hour or two. The police have taken everything: my money, my drugs, my bail bond bag and my keys. All of it is being held as evidence, and may or may not be released to me later in the week. I break into my own house with my driver’s license. That and my two cell phones are the only things the deputies in booking gave back to me. I don’t even have cigarettes. The police left my car on the side of the road where they pulled me over, so I can’t get downtown to where my office is, where all my drugs are. I’ve been off meth for almost 24 hours so I need to make some phone calls.

“Johnny. Can you come over? Do you still have anything left from what I gave you yesterday?” Johnny is Kilo’s cousin. I’ve been working with him since Kilo went to prison, and he moves at least as much meth for me as Josh does.

“Shit! I saw your picture on the Internet. What happened? You okay?”

“I’m okay, but I need to get high and I don’t have anything. They took it all. Are you still holding?”

“I only have my personal, but I’ll help you out.” This means he has the best of what I sold him yesterday.

“Will you come over? I don’t have my car.”

“Yeah, I can be there in about an hour.”

“I need you to come right now. Allan and Andy will be home by then, and I don’t want Allan to know I have to get high. I don’t want to deal with it right now.”

He comes right away. Of course he comes right away. He’s almost out. He needs to re-up and I’m his source, so he wants to make a good impression. He probably thinks I’ll give him a break in price for doing this good deed but he’s wrong. I don’t tell him that, of course. In the first place, he still owes me $2500. In the second place, I need to get high RIGHT NOW. He brings me a pipe and loads it. He lets me take the first hit. It’s a respect thing. He puts a huge rock in the bowl and I smoke and smoke until it’s almost gone, then I hand him the pipe. The smoke makes its way to the center of my soul. I feel serene and much more relaxed. I feel normal again. I feel nourished. I lean back against the couch and tell him the whole story.

“What about your guy? Have you told him yet? Are you still going to work?”

“I’ll call him tonight. I’ll have to see what he says. I don’t know what he’ll want to do.”

“Well, I’m out of product and I have people blowing up my phone. Can you at least get something?”

“Christ, Johnny! I just got out of jail. I’ll do what I can when I can, okay? It would probably help if you had money for me. They took everything last night. All my money. And I’m not getting it back. I collected from Mitt and one of my other guys too and now I have to eat the loss myself.” Mitt is another of Kilo and Johnny’s cousins.

“I don’t have it all. I got $1500.”

I take the money he owes me and smoke the rest of the meth he has with him. Then I dismiss him with the warning “Do NOT call me. I’ll call you when I know something.”

I have to call Mario, but I’ll do it later. Right now, I want to take a shower before Andy and Allan come home.
God
, I feel so good right now –
like
I’m back in my own skin. The horror of last night begins to fade away.  I have twenty-three messages on my phone – all since last night. I don’t want to deal with anyone right now. It feels so good to feel good again.

Allan comes home as I’m getting out of the shower. I want him to wrap his arms around me and take care of me. I want him to tell me everything will be okay, but he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. Instead he asks about the hash: a present I got for him. He stopped doing meth two years ago, but he smokes pot daily, so the hash was a treat. My heart sinks. I don’t know why I still feel disappointed. I should know by now what to expect, but every single day I hope against hope that something will change.

“I had the hash with me, and they took everything.”

“Bummer. Can you get any more?”

“I’ll try,” I say.
You bastard
, is what I think. I don’t want to talk to him anymore right now. He’s ruining my high.

Andy comes home. I can’t wait to hold him and hug him. He doesn’t know what’s going on. At fifteen, all he knows is that Mom wasn’t here this morning to get him up for school. Again. He knows I’m gone most nights and usually get home just in time to help him get ready. He doesn’t understand or have any interest in where I was last night – only that I’m home now.

“Hey, bug!” I wrap my arms around him before he even takes his coat off.

“Mom!” I kiss his cheeks and nose and the top of his head. He kisses me back and hugs me.

“I missed you, sweetheart. I’m sorry I wasn’t here this morning. Did you have a good day at school and program?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“What did you have for lunch?”

“Doh know. Enna watch Star Wars?”

“Sure, honey. I’ll make you dinner. I love you, Andy.”

“Auya you.”

And for some reason those two words flood me with guilt. After dinner, Allan takes me to my car; I go to my downtown office and hop right back on the rollercoaster. There isn’t much of a choice. Not only do I still need to make a living, but now there are legal fees as well.

Chapter 3

Meth kicked my ass. I’d done my share of drinking and drugs before I started using it, so I’d been around a block or two, but by no means was I prepared for the unique insidiousness of methamphetamine. That may seem unrealistic, but in 1999, the year I started using, there were no anti-meth campaigns like there are today. Looking back, though, I don’t know if the information available now would have deterred me. It certainly hasn’t seemed to put much of a dent in the nationwide pandemic.

Meth reaches across all socio-economic strata, from those living in extreme poverty to middle class soccer moms, college professors, doctors and CEO’s. Many of them are people you would never imagine to be involved with, let alone addicted to, methamphetamine. I know these people because I’ve used with them and sold to them. I know them because I’m one of them. For years, I led a double life, and no one outside of the drug world had any idea what was going on with me. But the fact is, I’m an addict, and meth was my vehicle to self-destruction.

Although I’d done drugs in the past, I was sober when I had my son and I’d been sober for four years when I decided to become a foster mother for the state of Idaho. People asked me then, and sometimes now, whether I was crazy at the time. After all, I was a single mother of a son who has Down syndrome and I worked full time. I remember the decision to foster being a spontaneous one. The idea popped into my head one day, I looked into the licensing process and before I knew it, I had my first placements. Over those three years, I took care of eighteen children, including respite care I did for other families. The oldest child I had was seventeen when she came to me. My youngest was five hours old.

When I think about that time in my life, I don’t know how I pulled it off: daycares, schools, and visitations with parents and social workers, meetings, middle of the night arrivals, therapists and doctors. One child at a time whose life was being ripped apart in its own unique way. On top of that, I worked full time and my son, Andy, went to school and attended developmental therapy five days a week. It was chaos, it was heartbreaking and it was worth every minute of it, although there’s no way I could do it again. It drained
everything out of me, which is probably the reason I started fostering in the first place.

It’s likely that I was in a manic episode of my bi-polar disorder. I was diagnosed years ago and although for me the mania is rare – I’m definitely on the depressive side of the spectrum – I believe that was one of those episodes.

I was in over my head. I’d taken on too much, which is a pattern in my life. I tend to overextend myself and try to take care of everyone and everything. Except myself. I’ve never been very good at taking care of me. All these years later, it’s clear that being bi-polar was a catalyst for another reason I decided to become a foster mother: it was a substitute for drugs. Another way for me to numb out. When being alone with your demons is the last place you want to be, you’ll do anything to distract yourself. Being a foster mother was a good thing, and I was a wonderful temporary mother to all of those children, but for me it was a lot like drugs. I made sure I had plenty of mayhem going on around me, all in an effort to avoid the way I felt on the inside. I’ve spent most of my life neglecting and avoiding myself in one way or another.

I was always an emotional child. A few years ago, I came across a note sent home to my parents from my pre-school teacher requesting a meeting with them. “Kimmy shows undue anxiety during normal activities like taking walks. She seems to worry that something will happen to her. Please call so we can meet to talk about this.”

When I asked my mother why she never called, she said she didn’t think it was a big deal.

When I reached adolescence things got worse until one day, when I was in the seventh grade, the school district psychologist asked my parents to come in for a meeting.

I was seeing my counselor often for what I thought were typical things that bother adolescent girls:  my best friend moved away, my new friends were being mean to me, I felt fat and ugly, nobody asked me to the Christmas dance. But I knew I saw my counselor more than the other kids did and I knew I was always sad. It was embarrassing, getting so many call slips to the front offices, but secretly, those little slips of paper felt like love letters. Someone wanted me. Someone wanted to talk to me. Regardless of the fact that I’d initiated those requests, for a few moments I felt nurtured, and entering my counselors office was like crawling up into a mother’s lap.

But I was ashamed of my emotions, which felt like my broken insides were smeared all over my outside where everyone could see. I would cry at the most unlikely times at school and at home for no apparent reason: Tears of such despair and sadness that it was as if my soul had turned to liquid and draining from my eyes. I was also terribly afraid something was going to happen to me. There were enormous gas storage tanks across the street from the school and I would imagine them blowing up. Some days, it was hard to concentrate in class because I’d be imagining the bloody aftermath of the explosion, caught up in the thoughts of death and destruction that sabotaged my thoughts.

Walking home after school to our empty house, I was afraid of getting shot. There was no basis for my fear. There is nothing “inner-city” about Boise. The City of Trees, was, and still is, a nice little suburbia with a strong Mormon base, and regardless of what you may have heard, Mormons do not run amuck with Tech-9’s shootin’ up the hood. I knew this, but I couldn’t shake my fears, unfounded and irrational as they were. At home, alone everyday after school, I would draw the drapes and duck when I walked past windows afraid that some unseen someone might be laying in wait to pop a cap in my white, middle-class ass.

So I would talk to my counselor who finally decided she couldn’t help me anymore and referred me to the district psychologist. After my initial meeting with her, she spoke with my mother, referring us to a professional psychologist. “If you ever want her to go to college,” she told my mom, “you need to get her some professional help now.”

The first woman we met with had me do the “house, tree, person” test: a projective personality test where the subject draws houses, trees and people providing a measure of self-perception. My drawing of the tree disturbed her the most. She said that the fact that my tree had no leaves and no outward branches was indicative of someone who lives inside herself. My mother thought that, although not a typical tree for a twelve year old, it was a nice picture. The psychologist didn’t agree and so I began seeing her twice a week. After two sessions of doing nothing but stare at each other, we decided that I would switch to another therapist.

Iris was more personable. She was matronly and actually engaged me in conversations. She referred me to a psychiatrist who prescribed anti-depressants. It took a while to find the right medication at the right dosage. In the early ‘80’s, anti-depressants
were mostly tri-cyclic and carried more side effects than their modern day counterparts. The first one I tried plunged me into a nearly catatonic depression. After a few adjustments though, they did seem to help.

A couple of months into therapy, Iris deemed it necessary to have a family session with both herself and the psychiatrist present. I looked forward to having my parents and brother there with me so we could finally talk about things that we never talked about as a family. We rarely spoke about my therapy or the fact that I was on medication other than when my parents would ask how things were going. “Fine,” I would tell them, and that was that. Being the identi
fied patient, I felt separate -
apart from the rest of them. It seemed like everything was fine in our family except for me because I was depressed. So, one bright sunny afternoon my family and I met with my therapist and psychiatrist.

No one said a thing. There were a couple of questions asked but the overall tone of the session was, “We’re fine, we don’t know why we’re here, Kim’s depressed and we don’t know what to do.”

Afterward, in the car on the way home, they laughed and joked about being there. “What a waste of time,” they said. “No need for that again.” I felt ashamed and humiliated for the hope I’d had of the session as a metamorphosis for our family. I’d envisioned us emerging from the cocoon of Iris’s office united in a journey toward truth and healing. When they laughed and made fun, I knew I was definitely in this alone, whatever this was.

This, it turned out, was major depression. Over the years, my diagnosis has evolved, along with the DSM, now known as the DSM-IV: Clinical depression, major depression, chemical depression and finally, bi-polar disorder type II. That’s my diagnosis, although my tendencies run to the depressive side of the pole.

Mental illness. I’m forty-four now and it’s still a delicate subject for me. As an adolescent, it was horrifying. I’m not sure which would have been worse: the other kids finding out about my “condition,” or starting my period at school in a pair of white jeans with no hygiene products.

Imagine you’re in an enormous vat of peanut butter. You’re immersed, though somehow, still able to breathe. Try to walk. Try to move your head or blink. Try moving your arms and hands. You can do it, but it will take forever and everything you try to do is
exhausting. The peanut butter fills your mouth and ears. Talking is a chore and aural sensory, dim.

Oh dear. You just dropped your car keys, and you’re late for class/meeting/work/whatever. All that peanut butter is heavy, pressing against you from all sides. By the time you pick up those keys, it will be too late even to try to keep your commitments. So tired. So fatigued and frustrated.

Fuck the keys. Leave them on the floor. Who cares now? Lie down. Even that requires herculean effort and when you’re finally lying there, it’s too much effort to move so you lay there like a lump. With the pressure of the peanut butter against your body, it feels like it’s all you can do to breathe.

Now imagine there’s another giant vat right next to yours, except that one is filled with cool, clear water. Your friends and family are in it. You can see them and they can see you, but they can’t see the peanut butter.

What the hell is wrong with you? They ask.
You missed your class/meeting/work/whatever because of
what
?
They do not understand why you are lying there like a lump, barely able to blink, in the middle of the day, having blown off your responsibilities. Snap out of it. What the hell’s the matter with you? You know, if you exercised more/ate right/got out of the house more often/cheered up/looked at the bright side of life/took the right pills, you might...

Take the right pills. The right medication. Yes, indeed. The right combinations of chemicals that will make me feel “normal.” The magic formula to wash all this peanut butter away so I wouldn’t have to try and explain it to people.

So when people asked:

What? You live in big vat of invisible peanut butter?

I could respond:

Whaddaya, think I’m crazy? No, I was just joking about that. Hey, pass me the bottle/joint/straw/pipe, would you, please? Because I know my doctor said I’d feel better soon, when we get the medications adjusted, but I need to feel better
right now
.

W
hen I wasn’t abusing substances, I was manically chasing my feelings away using other methods. Like overloading my life taking care of other people.

After three years, I decided to stop fostering children. It was too stressful both emotionally and physically, and I wanted my
former life back with just Andy and myself. So when my last child left for his new adoptive family, I closed my foster home.

I was fine for a while, working and taking care of Andy, but my parents suggested going back to school. What a splendid idea! With the foster children gone, I now had oodles of time on my hands, what with working full time and raising Andy. To be fair, the decision was mine. I really did feel abruptly empty with too much space, both inside and out, to fill.

I was in my late twenties at the time and I know I shouldn’t have cared as much as I did about what they thought, but I craved their approval. More than anything, I wanted them to be proud of me, and I figured that maybe if I finished my degree in psychology, I would finally win their hearts and become the daughter they’d always wanted.

So I dove in. I took classes during the day while Andy was at school, and I had him with me at night when I worked at a hospital daycare from three to midnight. A van service would drop him off after his therapy, and we would go home when I was done with my shift. Then we would get up at six-thirty in the morning and start all over again.

I started feeling angry. I thought I was angry with my parents for always pushing me and never letting me just
be.
I was perfectly fine working and raising Andy. I didn’t care about finishing my degree. When I was working on it the first few years after Andy was born, I was an honors student doing research and planning on going to graduate school. But I started falling apart. I had flashbacks during class of when Andy was a baby
-
of performing CPR on my son, of that time in the hospital when they called code blue on him (the first code blue ever called on the pediatric floor at that time) and all the times I called the ambulance to the house. I kept picturing him dead. I didn’t know what was going on and I didn’t tell anyone what was happening because I was ashamed. I was mortified that these thoughts and images were so dominant in my mind all the time. What kind of mother fantasizes about her child dying? Especially in the middle of an American Lit class. I was worried it might be a sign that deep down I wanted to hurt him. How could I possibly tell anyone that I was having such sick thoughts?