Woman in #10

It’s perfectly appropriate necessary and understandable on this overcast Pacific Northwest day full of fog and mystery watching her leave. She was finding her way in this hard cruel world. Have mercy.

She lives downstairs in apartment 10. A good number, 10, symbolizing one and zero, unity. She’s from California with long bleached out blond hair, around 40, perhaps younger than memory, but her incessant rampant disease makes her look older. She pays the toll to get across the bridge. She’s on a one-way trip.

I’m a passive observer in her life.

I don't see her very often but when I do I remember the Gazebo Group. She may have been in a group at one time or the other. The group of addicts gathered outside the hospital during treatment.

The only place where addicts smoked was the gazebo. Fifteen plastic chairs in a circle around stone block ashtrays. I was surrounded by addicts in various stages of withdrawal from heroin, crack, speed, depressives and alcohol. There wasn’t a work-alcoholic in the group.

Everyone in the gazebo was trying to sort out their lives. Some talked about their insurance scam payment plans - buy now pay later - their families, the nurses on wards of misery and abandonment, about the lack of doctors, the cement walls and their institutional care histories.

I sat among lost lives and despair in their realities. The air was full of illness surrounded by recovery, dead eyes, muted laughter, faint hope and many repressed angry regrets. Addicts were huddled against slashing rain as smokers coughed in their collective misery. One day, one step at a time.

A film at night told us how endorphins help us feel good and how alcohol creates a false reality by blocking transmitters known as TIQ.

Gazebo addicts bummed quarters for a pay phone to reach friends and family. Tom told a story about how he relapsed after 25 years. How he just stopped, plain stopped one night while driving home when he saw a neon liquor sign flashing. “Vodka calling.”

Down in the gazebo we heard patients scream and bang their heads against walls on the 5th floor. They’re on a suicide watch.

All the addicts are in various recovery attempts to regain self esteem. It’s about surrendering personal control and finding trust. Turning our lives over to someone who knows what they are doing. The mother of all paradoxes.

Addicts were wolves crying and howling in their self imposed vast wilderness of pain, hatred, agony, looking for self love in detox, weaving fanciful dreams, trying to get it all together. Some lived as if they were already dead.

I worked on my personal puzzle. I checked in after growing tired of it all living with a woman in a disastrous, self destructive relationship. I played the rescuer, a father figure, and my victim turned around and sank her teeth into me. They always do.

She tried to kill herself.

I bailed her out of jail after they arrested her for disconnecting the 911 call and she left the state, returned to mother, friendly manic depressive drugs and treatment.

I submitted to therapy. I learned I needed, if I was going to survive and be healthy, to acknowledge the fact, hard cold realistic truth that I wasn’t responsible for my mother’s death. I confronted this at the heart level, not the head level.

In therapy before detox and the gazebo group I broke down, cried and talked about old abandonment fears and self destructive behaviors. My old angers and resentments. I started taking more responsibility for my life.

I realized how potentially realistic, normal and centered our personalities in the relationship had changed during the last five months. How hatred, anger, sarcasm (hostility disguised as humor) and negativity were gradually replaced by caring, love and open trusting communication. How we finally let each other go and moved on with our respective lives for the sake of sanity, structure and stability.

The last thing she said to me on the phone from home sweet home after I mailed her stuff out including the silver blade she threatened to use one fateful evening was, “Well that saves me from another road trip.”

“Yes,” I said to her, “The road gets longer, lonelier and tougher. Take care of yourself.”

The gazebo group searched and discovered triggers; a room, memory, face or place which set them off on their individual wild journey into addiction. We journeyed inside states of medicated bliss looking for endorphins and a sense of self responsibility to stay clean and sober. Water became a source of inspiration.

“I am sick,” an addict wrapped in blankets said, “so I drink to make myself feel better.”

They were all agitated, nervous and apprehensive. I was curious about it all and knew it was ok. I scribbled notes on yellow paper. While wandering halls and sitting in the gazebo I had visions. I was in a sweat lodge ceremony down on the reservation, walking through fire consuming fear and anger. I sat releasing toxins like a stone in a meditation cave above tree line.

I don’t know how the woman in #10 works her insurance, even if she has any coverage. They sold her small blue pickup truck to pay the bills.

She’s married to a guy with long hair always tied back in a pony tail. He’s a part-time flagger. We passed once down along the uneven asphalt path running next to the Sound where it crashes into the rocks swirling across from the prison lit up like an amusement park 3 miles away. He was walking their terrier and offered me a sweet.

“Care to have some Jolly Rancher?” he asked playing out the dog’s leash.

“No thanks,” I said, turning down the craving.

That was the only time we spoke and I've lived here almost three years but I’m out of here tomorrow.

Heading east along the Columbia river into the heat of the nuclear repository area where Department of Energy scientists try to figure out the procedure of making glass bricks - if that’s the answer - out of 53 million gallons of spent uranium left over from the 40’s and then bury the stuff before it leaks into the earth. I understand it’s already seeped down 130 feet and 250 is the max.

You know someone out there will really turn in their grave if that happens.

Yes, I’ve been here in these parts long enough to have seen a lot, learned a bit and figured out a few things.

The woman in #10 came home the other day. Her girlfriend, maybe her sister for all I know, brought her home from somewhere; from some rehabilitation reality check-in, maybe some group as an outpatient - checked out from a highly medicated sedated location in their old second hand small runabout of a car badly needing a tune up and radiator.

Seeing the way she staggered I knew it was from a detox unit. Hard time. Making sense living across the sound from a federal prison. Being a veteran of a jungle war 10,000 miles away and the group I recognized the symptoms easily enough.

Her face was pale, shallow, pasty yellow. She looked like a zombie. She got out the car squeezing an extra large jumbo plastic soft drink with a straw bent at an angle. She shuffled across the parking lot and disappeared into shadows leaving the sound of a slammed door in her wake.

A couple of days later I heard her door slam downstairs. She passed into into view as her flip flop sandals flapped on asphalt shuffling along the white ward of her memory. She negotiated a flat parking lot full of rusty secondhand cars and trucks along the pebbled hard methodical surface of her dream. She went down the slope past prison guard cars, jalopies, trucks with high chrome fenders and second hand expeditionary gas guzzlers out on parole.

She weaved her inconsistent way down her slippery slope of hope past blue trash containers on wheels and headed to the marine dockside store. For years they sold bait, tackle, hook, line and sinker. Facing flat growth they switched to booze bait business to meet the needs of thirsty public prison workers, island tourists or locals. Quick and painless for those needing a quick fix, a quick nip-it-in-the-bud Jack’s Daniel dancing all a round.

“Set’m up Mr. Bartender, one scotch, one bourbon and one beer,” sang Mr. John Lee Hooker. Line and sinker.

I knew where she was going. No doubt, no secrets revealed themselves before torrential coastal rains swept the terrain clean as a whistle. She shuffled around the corner and headed toward her salvation escaping her self imposed prison of drudgery, boredom and malaise.

Her ghost inside her dream staggered back uphill, her thin right hand grasping the message of her salvation feeling the crude brown paper bag texture covering a bottle of elixir. Unbroken seal of approval.

She slammed her apartment door on the rest of her day. I never saw her desire again but I swear I heard someone screaming on the 5th.