The Big Fix (8 page)

If I faltered from this path, I knew I was headed for the grave. After I completed my time at the treatment facility, I moved to a transitional house. I wasn't ready to be released into the world completely raw. I didn't know if I ever would be. Recovery was not a soft pillow to land on after a hard fall. All I knew was that I wanted to be able to look at myself in the mirror. I wanted my body to be my own. I wanted to be free.

Chapter 4

WALK A DAY IN MY SHOES

I
have no luck with shoes.
That's what I was thinking as I stood in front of the ATM fiddling with the ankle strap of my left shoe. Between the permanent damage from shooting up in the soles of my feet and the extra weight I was now carrying, finding a decent pair was nearly impossible. I still had a mile left to walk home. Distracted by the expectation of my shoe turning into a slow torture device, I didn't notice the man approaching the ATM until I caught his round face out of the corner of my eye. He was close to six feet tall, well dressed and well groomed. He looked like a professional man. His eyes were an unusual color of gray with corners
that crinkled as he smiled widely at me; his smile was one of recognition. I saw the flicker of his gold bracelet as he placed his hand on the wall close to me—too close—as if to engage me in a conversation.

Can't he see I'm using this damn machine?
I concentrated on pushing the right buttons to take out money. Forty dollars to be exact. It will need to get me through the weekend. I felt him staring at me, and I turned my body to block my PIN number.
Some people are so rude,
I thought. What kind of asshole invaded the sacred space between a woman and her money machine?

He interrupted my irritation. “I see you really have changed,” he said.

I quickly slipped the bills into my wallet and pretended I didn't hear him.

As I walked away, the images started to click: the man, the face, the voice, the bracelet. They were too familiar. My past, like the San Francisco fog I walked through on my way to work every morning, was murky yet inescapable. Where did this man fit? Was the memory a positive one or a deep regret I had buried inside myself to forget? I started on my mile-walk home, my irritation giving way to uneasiness and then shame with every step. I knew who this man was—how could I forget? He used to give me $40 if I would give him a blow job without using a condom. This was during the AIDS era, and I was adamant about using condoms with tricks. But a few times he convinced me to skip it with him. That day at the ATM I had taken out $40. The irony was not lost on me, or on him, I'm sure.

Home for me at this point was a single room in an old
hotel that had been converted into a sober living facility by the Salvation Army, where I could be required to submit to urinalysis at any time to prove I was clean. I had rolled up to the place one year ago, fresh from the treatment center, with two garbage bags of possessions that were either donated or paid for with my small income. For the first time in my life, I was attempting to be self-sufficient. My mother, of course, wanted to find some way to help me. My demonstrating that I was actually clean made her more determined to find ways to insert herself back into my life. She didn't need to give me anything in order to do that, though—I wanted her there. In that first year of recovery, I learned so much about my own dysfunctional relationships through the way she and I interacted. There was a fine line between providing someone with support and creating an unhealthy dependence. In feeling my way through recovery, I was trying to distinguish what that meant.

People discouraged me from moving back to the Tenderloin, but I had no choice—rents were lower there. Still, my rent was $360, which ate up almost all the money I earned at a call center doing phone surveys. I had found the job in the paper with the help of the rehab's job coach. I am not sure what the qualifications were to be the job coach, but there were rumors he was sleeping with male residents. The job paid $7 an hour. It was more than minimum wage and just enough to pay all my bills. It took twenty-nine years, but I was finally finding some independence.

I was surprised at how easy it was to get my job, even as a convicted felon. I was hired on the spot in my first interview. At first, my ego led me to believe I was so charming
they just had to hire me. The reality was quite different. They simply needed bodies. The turnover rate became apparent as I watched people walk out in the middle of a shift on a daily basis. Well, I figured, the bar is so low that I can excel here. I reminded myself that I had convinced junkies to buy heroin from me despite the fact that I looked like an extra from Michael Jackson's
Thriller
video. Therefore, I must be capable of finding a way to get people to complete these surveys. I could be very convincing when I needed something. I turned that survival tactic into a workplace asset. In fact, it wasn't long before I was made a manager.

The other major benefit of the job was that it gave me enough downtime to work on learning my positive affirmations. I needed those, since I still felt as if my grip on my new life was precarious at best. The rehab center had sent me through a program designed specifically for criminal offenders. This week-long course showed me that I needed to learn to modify my behavior or I would end up back in jail or prison. When I completed the class, I was handed a set of four flashcards in a waterproof holder that fit in my pocket.
Fake it till you make it
was a catchphrase that chimed in my head. Okay, yes. I was willing to try it. I had flashcards with these phrases tucked away in my pocket (I was not yet confident enough in my femininity to carry a purse). I spent hours upon hours flipping through these cards between calls. I was hoping that changing the way I thought about myself would change the way I lived my life. I was back living in the Tenderloin; the steps of recovery needed to be inside me.

       
I enjoy my clean and sober lifestyle.

       
I enjoy being clean and sober.

       
I am a good person.

       
I wanted these things to be true.

My cravings for drugs were very sporadic, but they were still there. Since I had spent the bulk of my recovery in a controlled environment, I had gotten over that early phase of obsessing over drugs in a relatively safe place. But out on my own, my cravings would appear out of nowhere. They didn't come from what some might consider typical sources. The emotions that surfaced made for triggers I could not easily identify. Feelings were something that had always made me uncomfortable in my own skin, and they came up so unpredictably. Seeing people using drugs on the street did not give me cravings. Old places did not make me crave heroin either. I found that my triggers were more nuanced. The smell of vinegar, the scent of cheap coffee, or an alcohol smell could make my stomach flip in the same way it had when I was waiting for a hit. These are smells connected with the injection of cheap, adulterated tar heroin—the drug itself has a vinegary smell, coffee is often used to cut the dirtiest street-level version, and I would use alcohol pads to wipe up the blood that ran down my arms and legs after removing the needle. Living in this area was more of a blessing for me than a curse, though, because of the instant visual reminders of where I would return if I decided to use again.

I unlocked the deadbolt and stepped into my sparsely furnished room. It was nice that when I moved in it was semi-furnished. The guy who used to live there didn't bother
to clean out the drawers of the only dresser. It contained his recovery books and journals. As soon as I got settled that first night out of treatment, I rocked back and forth on the bed. I was bugging out. I wanted to use so badly or at least go hang out in the usual spots that were just fifty feet outside my window, but I knew I would have ended up with a needle in my arm. How was I going to live? Like the addict I was, I ticked off my options: I could sell drugs and not use them. I could find a dealer to take care of me. I could find a trick and keep the money since now I was not on drugs. I was lonely and afraid of what I would do that night. I read in one of the recovery books left behind that “an addict alone is in bad company.” I got out of my head and went to the nearest meeting, an atheist twelve-step meeting.

The meeting broke all the traditional twelve-step rules. It was perfect for me. People cross-talked, they spoke more than once, and there was more silence than I had experienced the entire time I was in residential treatment. I learned that night that it wasn't necessary to fill up a silence with words. Sometimes, the best response to a problem is to reflect on it in silence. I did not need to have an answer for everything. There was a young man there who talked about being four years clean. He was in his early twenties and beautiful to me. Not just because of his physical features, but because he was kind to me in ways I had not experienced from a man in years. After the meeting, he asked me if I wanted him to wait with me at the bus stop. When I waved goodbye to him that night, I knew that at least for that day I was not going to use. It broke my heart when he relapsed a few months later. Then I was told by the meeting leader that he had killed
himself in his mother's house. In my moment of grief, I had resolved yet again that this would not be me.

A year later, here I was rubbing my sore feet in my dimly lit room, unable to shake the image of the man by the ATM. He'd looked at me like I was someone who allowed herself to be intimate with a stranger. By this point, I was attempting to come to terms with many of the things I had done to support my drug habit. I had tried to keep them buried as I stuffed my feelings down with food. My weight was my camouflage. It hid me from the men in my past who could no longer recognize my larger frame. When I thought about the man at the ATM, I knew I could not hide from what his smug entitlement meant. When I was actively using, heroin took the place of everything. It was my food, my sex, my love. I had no desire to be with any man, but my habit required me to perform. A drug-addicted prostitute is part acrobat, part actress, and part corpse. I was fully aware that I had done these things, yet it was hard to come to terms with the fact that the person who had sold herself—for the same amount I had taken out of the ATM that day—was me. Sooner or later, I would have to come to terms with the fact that I had exchanged sex for money.

Outside my window, I heard the sounds of the Tenderloin. It was full of the hookers, the hustlers, and the violence I escaped when I went into rehab. My walls were scrubbed white, no pictures or posters. There was no carpet, no knickknacks to make things comfortable for me. I was hyper-aware that I was in transition, just like this place. This was not where I wanted to stay in life, but it was all I could handle at the moment.

My needs were simple: a safe place to sleep, a phone call to my mother once a week, a television to watch crime stories that wrapped up neatly at the end of each episode to put me to sleep at night. I was glad to be close to places to eat, because even though there were cooking facilities in my building, I was not sure how to use them. This living situation allowed me to keep my focus on staying clean as my number one priority. The three and a half months I had spent in the program was simply not enough to have a solid foundation for a new life. Eight years of heavy using cannot be erased in forty-two days of intensive treatment. Plus, I had had one foot out the door as soon as I got to rehab—I spent the last half of my stay focusing on working to save enough money to leave. The majority of my healing would need to occur out in the community. The simplicity of my life was a relief, but that relief was rooted in insecurity and fear. I was afraid to do anything other than go to work or meetings because I feared any variation in my pattern would lead to relapse. With the sudden appearance of this man from my past, I could feel the facade begin to tremble as my hands had when I left the ATM that day. I was holding back a mountain of emotions that could fall on me at any moment.

The next morning, I looked through my clothes for something to wear to work. The few pieces I had were hung in perfect alignment. My shoes, all eight uncomfortable pairs of them, were neatly placed at equal distance from each other. Today, especially, everything must be just so for me to be okay with myself.

Standing in front of my meager closet, I tried to push away the thoughts that were making it difficult to get out
the door.
Don't wear that, you look ridiculous,
and
Don't call your sponsor, she does not want to hear about your problems.
I changed my clothes hurriedly three times. With each time, the voices were telling me it was not good enough.

Out of pure frustration, I tried to isolate these voices. The main one was that of an old ex-boyfriend. It was not enough that he had abused me in the past. Now, it was as if he was sitting in the room talking to me in that same condescending tone.

He had this intensity about him that made me feel as if he was the only one who mattered. To prove he loved me so much, he got a tattoo of my name. What devotion, right? He separated me from friends who had any doubts about his sincerity, and I became more isolated from everyone except him. Soon it was as if I could do nothing to make him happy. As he constantly reminded me, “Who would want you anyway?” Alone in our apartment, it was me and him and all my mistakes. After he hit me, I finally left him, only to find out he had been sleeping with my friend, validating my deep fear that I was unworthy of love. I ended up homeless and turned to heavy drugs to numb the pain in a matter of weeks of our separation. This was the first time I had reflected on him in years. I had spent so much time in his shadow, I became accustomed to that dark place.