Author: Izzy

Promoted by Chris with no edits.

In my memory, all the Reagan years have a taint — a texture almost –of cruelty.  I particularly hate 1982.  In 1982, Nancy hadn’t just said “no” yet, and the drug war wasn’t officially announced — but it was on, let me tell you.  The neighborhoods I lived in then were “those” kinds of neighborhoods.  They were full of junkies and in 1979 they were full of ambulances.

By 1982 you only saw coroner’s vans.  No one called the police anymore, not with so much brutality and fear.  Reagan’s presidency heralded the outdoor overdose, the corpse on the lawn, the curbside hospital drop.

A few minutes is an awfully long time when someone’s not breathing.  The time it takes to pause and wonder if it’s as bad as all that, if it’s worth the risk — that uncertain minute can make the difference.

So many people died in those minutes.

And that’s why I hate 1982.  In 1982, I knew about AIDS.  It was a year of despair, disbelief, hopelessness.  A year holding your breath.  1982 was the life or death minute, stretched to eternity.

1981 wasn’t like that.  It was wild and thoughtless and angry.  For me it was breaking up with the drummer and running off with the artist.  It was nightclubs and concerts.  It was no place to stay and nothing to eat, but who cared.  It was going to gay nightclubs and dancing to Pete Shelley’s “Homosapiens.”  It was excitement and wonder when my friend Dennis told me we could travel the world by stealing credit card carbons out of dumpsters in Beverly Hills, but then not having the nerve or ambition.  It was breaking my engagement to the artist and marrying the drummer.  It was turning 18.

I didn’t think at the time that I was hopeful or optimistic.  I didn’t think I was naive or trusting.  But I’d think all that later, looking back on the last year I didn’t know about AIDS.  Looking back, I’d think that we’d all been innocents.

At the end of 1981, my friend Rob got sick.  He had a cold or an infection or who knew what.  He went to the free clinic a couple of times.   One of the doctors admitted him to the hospital.  They said he might have the gay flu, which is what they called it before they called it the gay cancer.  They said there was no cure, that it could kill you.  

A year is an awfully long time during a deadly epidemic.  An awfully long time to let it spread.  That’s what I kept thinking in 1982.  Why aren’t they saying anything?  Why aren’t they making announcements?  How many people are getting it right now?  When will someone tell them?

They named it in 1983.  Ronald Reagan didn’t mention AIDS publicly until 1987, the same year my artist died of it.  I imagine he caught it in 1982.  Dennis and Rob are dead now, too, and I remember them today on World AIDS Day.

I remember being told that my shy artist’s last words were “I worked for Andy Warhol.”  I remember thinking it’s odd what you’ll say when you want someone to acknowledge that you’re worth their notice.

I remember Dennis regaling me with tales of his world travels.  I remember Rob at the bus stop, going to the clinic, wearing a suit.  I remember 1981 and the dancing.  I remember 1982 and the silence.

There’s a famous quote by Nietzsche:  Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

What brought this quote to mind was not something about terrorists or torturers, bombs or war, but two stories I happened to read today about everyday things here at home.  One is a story about teenage girls in a small town.  The other about a prison artist in solitary confinement.

Meet Helen Brady:

She is just 14 years old. While many other girls her age are filling the chatmosphere with gabby text messages, Helen is practicing arresting illegal immigrants. (Or, in this case, her friend Courtney.)

And Donny Johnson:

His paintbrush, made from plastic wrap, foil and strands of his own hair, lay on the lower bunk. So did his paints, leached from M&Ms and sitting in little white plastic containers that once held packets of grape jelly. Next to them was a stack of the blank postcards that are his canvases.

Helen’s story is told in the LA Weekly’s Girls Gone Border Patrol.  Donny’s is described in the New York Times article (via the IHT), M&Ms color a prison artist’s solitary life.  Both articles are quite lengthy, but well worth reading in full.  Both articles have stuck with me all day.  They’re odd stories.

Another day, and what sounds like another arrest on the Arizona border. Naco is a city where “The Border” is no abstraction. It is the painfully real corrugated-steel barrier — rusted in spots, barbed in others — that slices the town neatly in two. One half for the United States, one half for Mexico. In Naco, the border is where illegal immigrants and the Border Patrol come to perform their intricate ballet of catch-and-release.

(…)Helen, along with 20 other teens, is an officially certified Border Patrol Explorer Scout. The 90-day training program, started last year by the Boy Scouts, exposes teens, ages 14 through 17, to a career with the Border Patrol. “It gives you a cool feeling, like you’re a real agent or something,” says Helen.

Border Patrol Captain Terrence Ford started off with the basics of statutory and criminal law. But the fare quickly became more challenging — if not controversial. The teens learn to raid buildings. They learn to pull cars off the road. They learn to shoot guns. They even learn to track “illegal immigrants” — or advisers dressed as illegal immigrants — on moonless nights with night-vision goggles.

This is definitely not your father’s scouting program, but it’s still a huge hit with parents. Enrollment is swelling.

Last Friday night, more than 500 people jammed into a gallery in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to assess 25 of Donny Johnson’s small, intense works. There was sangria, as well as big bowls of M&Ms. By the end of the evening, six of the postcard paintings had sold, for $500 each.

(…) Most prison art, the kind created in crafts classes and sold in gift shops, tends toward kitsch and caricature. But there are no classes or art supplies where Johnson is held, and his powerful, largely abstract paintings are something different. They reflect the sensory deprivation and diminished depth perception of someone held in a windowless cell for almost two decades.
 
 They pulse, some artists on the outside say, with memory and longing and madness. Others are less impressed, saying the works are interesting examples of human ingenuity but fall short of real artistic achievement.

But it’s the details that get to me.

For teens on the American side of Naco, the border is a means of security — and even a potential career opportunity. But below the line, in Naco, Mexico, the border is the subject of hatred. For Mexican teens developing an identity and a sense of their place in the world, it represents a constant slap in the face — and, in their eyes, the ultimate double standard. It keeps friends and family on opposite sides of the fence from visiting each other, while ensuring that the Mexican half of Naco is forever abloom with border crossers and drug smugglers.

(…)Helen Brady has never ventured south of the border, despite being able to see Mexico from her back yard.

About 3,300 of the state’s most dangerous prisoners are held at Pelican Bay, which is among the toughest prisons in the nation. But even here there are varying levels of security. The problem prisoners, like Johnson, are held in the Security Housing Unit, which everyone calls the SHU.
 
 He lives in an 8-by-12-foot concrete cell. His meals are pushed through a slot in the door. Except for the odd visitor, whom he talks to through thick plexiglass, he interacts with no one. He has not touched another person in 17 years.

I can’t shake the thoughts of Helen and Donny, although they couldn’t be more different.  Donny’s a murderer, Helen’s a kid, but they’re both a part of something bigger.  They’re connected somehow with something brutal, something monstrous, in the heart of our system.  They’re symptoms of some madness we indulge.

We need to stop fighting monsters.  Nietzsche’s quote ends with this warning —  And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.  

I imagine the abyss stares out of Donny’s eyes, the eyes of a killer who hasn’t touched another human in 17 years.  But I imagine a glint of it in Helen’s eyes as well, and all the other little girls learning to hunt humans.

Some names have been changed.

I got a call last night from my best friend, Grace.  Grace and I have known each other our whole lives.  Our families toted us to the same church when we were infants.  We’ve been best friends since we were six and we endured the slings and arrows of elementary school together.

In many ways, Grace is like a sister.  When I got thrown out of my home at 14, I moved into Grace’s house.  In a very real way, although we’re not blood relations, we’re family.  Last night, Grace had some family news to share.  Another of our “sisters,” Cindy, had a baby.  His name is Elijah.
Elijah is already a person, a precious individual.  I don’t know him, but he’s been named and I know he’s a fighter.  He’s bound to me not through genetics, but through all the inextricable ties of time and place.  I suppose I’m his aunt.  I suppose Grace is his aunt, too.

Elijah deserves to be happy.  He deserves to be welcomed into the world with joy and laughter.  He deserves to start his new life in the arms of people who love him and to be surrounded by care and kindness.  Elijah will not be getting the life he deserves.

Elijah is 5 days old now.  Grace did not call me sooner because Elijah’s arrival in this world was not greeted with joy, but some other emotion we cannot describe.  The news of this new life brought  me and Grace, his aunts, feelings of profound sadness, grief, and something akin to horror as well.  Except there is love mixed in.  I don’t know what to call love and caring absent the joy and hope.  Perhaps this is despair.

Through no fault of his own, Elijah is a drug addict.  He started his new life in intensive care on life-support.  He was not expected to live, but he’s off the machines now and doing miraculously better.  As I said, he’s a fighter.  

It would be easy to hate his mother.  While Elijah lies in the hospital fighting for his life, Cindy is already gone, out on the streets somewhere.  Elijah is in one of the best hospitals in the world, getting the most modern and expensive medical care available.  No one except social workers has gone to see him yet.  Cindy is probably out somewhere right now, ingesting the drugs that Elijah is crying for.

It would be easy to hate his mother, except that I can’t and I won’t.  I was 14 when Cindy was born.  She came into this world in much the same way as Elijah.  Because I was the other outsider in the house, I was beholden to fill the tasks no one wanted.  I took care of Cindy.

Through no fault of her own, Cindy was a drug addict when she was born.  Cindy’s mother was a prostitute, her father a junkie.  It was tough when she was a baby, she cried so much, but she made up for it quickly.  Cindy was one of those happy, sweet spirits.  

She had a personality that was bigger than her.  She made everyone smile.  Cindy, too, deserved to be happy.  She deserved to be greeted with joy and surrounded by love, just like Elijah does now.  I really hated her mother.

Cindy is in some ways the same, sweet spirit now that she was then.  Only now, it’s Elijah in the hospital and Cindy on the street.  It would be so easy to hate her — Elijah’s her third.  But I remember that sweet spirit.  I think of her now and see that spirit still.  But it’s stuck in an addicted body.  

She sells her body to strangers so she can pay for the drugs it wants.  That soft, warm little body I held in my arms all those years ago.  It’s been through so much since then.  It’s been sick, it’s been imprisoned, it’s been beaten.  

She’s been so addicted, so used, you can barely look at her now.  She’s lost all her teeth.  The men who pay for her now are not buying her sweetness.  The men who buy her now are attracted to her pain, to her damage.  They usually hurt her some more.

No, I can’t hate Elijah’s mother when her pain is so real, so all-consuming, so heartbreaking.  Even when I was 14, a selfish age, I was helpless in the face of Cindy’s pain.  I’d gladly give up my sleep, my grades, going out with friends, to rock her in my arms and sing songs to her all night.

I wish I could fix it now, or at least make it better.  If it was a matter of gathering her in my arms, holding her ravaged body, and singing her the songs from our past I would do it.  I would fly there on the next plane.  I’d clutch her to my breast.  I’d sing all the songs I know.

But that won’t help so I stay put.  She needs something I can’t give.  She’s sick and she’s suffering, as surely as Elijah.  When Elijah is released from the hospital, he’ll be released to the family and live in the house where I lived, his Aunt Grace lived, his other aunts and his mom, Cindy, lived.  He will be the seventh drug-addicted “grandchild” born to two of the sweet girls from that house.

Elijah will have food, he’ll have clothes, he will not be physically abused at home, but I worry.  Perhaps this fighting boy will be different.  Perhaps he will have some extraordinary gift that will allow him to escape his circumstances and rise above his fate, but the odds are he’ll be normal, he’ll be average.  The odds are he’ll be a regular human, perhaps even a sweet one, and not exceptional.

In that case, what will become of him?  I’m too afraid to have hopes for Elijah.  Hope is too painful, so I have prayers.  It is my prayer for him that he gets some of the happiness and love that everyone in life deserves, that in this life, he will be shown the mercy his mother never had and cannot give.  

It is my prayer for Elijah that if he’s a sweet boy and makes people smile, that the sweetness is never crushed out of him.  I pray our society somehow becomes sane and will start taking care of the people who are here.  That it will realize that drug treatment and contraception and compassion are the wiser, or at least the more cost-effective, course.

It is my most fervent prayer for Elijah that the little body the hospital is trying so hard to save will not one day have to be sold.  I pray that if he ever triggers his addiction, he will be treated compassionately and not be turned into a criminal.  I pray for his safety, his health, his mother.  I pray he doesn’t learn to hate her.

And I pray that if one day Elijah ever has a baby, that our tears will all be of joy.

Cross-posted from Unbossed.