The Life of Tryin’

"G-Men Are Comin’ To Town"

Ya better watch out

Ya better not cry

Better not talk To the FBI…

G-men are comin’ to town…

Yes, folks, they’re here. Many people in Eugene, the Northwest, and nationwide are being approached by Federal Agents regarding the recent roundup of activists. Eugene is not unfamiliar with Federal Grand Juries, but do you know what do to if you’re approached by agents for questioning or subpoenaed yourself? Think you’re immune? Think again. You don’t have to be on the Most Wanted list to be approached, questioned and intimidated (they are very skilled at this). If your name has been mentioned, even casually, in questioning of others, you could be of interest to them. By the same token, if you mention someone to them, even casually, you could jeopardize someone else. Besides, if you exhibit any cooperation at all, you could be slapped with a subpoena to testify in front of a Grand Jury, without a lawyer present. It doesn’t matter if you "don’t know anything". Seemingly inconsequential information can lead to your being subpoenaed, or putting someone else on the hot seat. It’s important to know what to do. What to Do If the FBI or Police Contact You for Questioning (from the ACLU): If the FBI or police contact you, write down the name, agency and telephone number of the person who calls or visits you. If an FBI agent or police officer asks to speak to you, tell him or her that you want to consult with an attorney first. Any information you give to an officer without an attorney, even if it seems harmless, can be used against you or someone else. Lying to an officer is a crime. Remaining silent is not a crime. You are not required to allow the officer into your home or office without a warrant. Ask to see the warrant. If the officer refuses to show you a warrant, do not stop him if he forces his way into your home or office. Tell the officer that he does not have your permission to enter. If the officer says that he has a warrant for your arrest, you have a right to see the warrant. You must go with the officer, but you do not have to answer questions until you consult an attorney. If you are detained, you should ask for an attorney and REMAIN SILENT. For further information and attorney referrals: National Lawyer’s Guild Bay Area Hotline (415) 285-1055 ACLU Hotline (617) 482-3170 x 318 KNOW YOUR RIGHTS! Shelley Cater break_the_chains@yahoogroups.com

We’ve got intrigue, slick black-shod government agents, informants, lies, betrayal, paranoia, wiretapping, stake-outs, and more twists than a logging road through the Cascade Mountains. When all the statutes of limitations run out, I plan on making my fortune emulating Dean Koontz!

The really scary thing is how well-prepared I am for all this. I am calm, focused and determined.

Bring it on, motherfuckers!!!

Ok, so I’ve been back in Eugene now for almost two months. I have to say, I don’t think I’m adjusting well. Most of my time is eaten up by work, which usually keeps me preoccupied enough that I don’t spend much time worrying about the house or other stuff. But when I’m home, for the most part I feel overwhelmed and angry…which doesn’t do much to improve things, alienates people and generally depresses me. The state of the house and the work required to get it back to some state of sanity is, well… huge. If everyone in the house was on board and put in one solid week of 8-hour days hauling garbage to the dump, cleaning, painting, and doing minor repairs, it would still be far from done. And not everyone in the house IS on board. The people who have been trying to keep things together are understandably burnt out, and the other three are useless.

Meanwhile, my kids are in Portland and I’m here. That sucks ass. I hate being too far away to just ask Zoe if she wants to go eat sushi or spend the night. I hate not knowing if Duncan is getting enough sleep or food. I feel like I’m being pulled in two diametrically opposed directions. My whole life is at cross-purposes with itself. ARRRGH!

I gotta whip this shit into shape… and soon. Once again, selling the house just seems like the smartest thing to do. But I can’t just give up on it without really trying to get it together first. So, I guess I’ll chip away at all the work on my weekends… one little bite at a time. My friend Julie and her little son Arthur want to move in and help me make it glow. That makes me very happy. I hope other people in the house feel the same way when they meet her…

Oh, and did I mention that my name still hasn’t been put back on the Trust paperwork since the refinance? Apparently You Know Who’s mother hasn’t signed it and sent it back to the escrow company. My ass is really hanging in the wind here. I mean, this is my life savings, n’ all…

Lordy lordy.

I wanna be blog-a-riffic. I wanna tell you ’bout my days. I wanna tell you ’bout my youth. It ain’t so damn long ago that it ain’t worth tellin’.

The time: the 80’s.
The place: Athens, Georgia
The feel: Sultry hot days, steamy evenings and wee morning hours. Thunderstorms roaring through with little time to prepare. How many times I got caught in a downpour I cannot tell you, but I can tell the memory: of suddenness, of opportunities nearly missed, of electricity in the air. It was my awakening, my golden hour, the hour that lasted years. The years of my redemption and damnation.

I can tell you that the Fall I moved to Athens, a fresh new face from the big city Atlanta, I was thrown into a maelstrom of creative surgings. In the four short years I lived there, the word was music. It was HAPPENING. House parties with crazy good bands and drunken 20-somethings stumbling around ignoring the genius in front of the room. Painful. Psychedelic Saturdays were happening. Me, Ben, John, and whoever else wanted to go along for the ride. Drop a hit or two or nine. Yessirree. Some of my pseudo-hippie friends and I, we wanted to start a vegetarian restaurant co-op. The space we wanted to rent was still owned by the Klan member who had shot a black man on the street right in front in ‘68 and never been prosecuted. Everyone knew it, and what do you do? Old newspaper clippings and the Big Boys Club. Who you gonna rassle with? No one. You just give up some small dream and walk away, cuz really, what else was there to do? But hell, we still knew what the word “co-op” meant, that somewhere (other than Athens) people were doing it and it was working. Meanwhile we worked at our fast food jobs and prayed for revolution.

We could stage our own small rebellions. Occupying the sidewalks with ART. Jill had her hats and Wax n’ Fax was THE place to go sell your Led Zeppelin first-cuts for $2 to support your cigarette habit. You could write a post-dated check at the Baxter St. Smoke Shop. If you were lucky, you had a friend who worked at The Grill and could slide you a burger. I lived off post-dated checks written on the bank where my dad was VP for a coupla years. The Human Rights Festival, downtown every year, proved that we meant BUSINESS. The cops were conspicuously absent as we sold our tie-dyes and pushed “We Think You Suck” newsletters to frat boy revolutionary wannabes. Anarchy was COOL, man, but only the hardest-core among us could cough that nomer up for public viewing.

I, like a dumbass, crawled through Ross Shapiro’s window one night. What 20 year old male could possibly refuse a drunken lovestruck female appearing in his bedroom at 3 am? Well, I guess Ross could, cuz he sat up in bed and demanded my departure. I fled.

Orton Carlton was the consummate street messiah. A little bit “off” and over 30, but dedicated to the SCENE, man, made him the subject of many a video but left him unvited to measliest of draining-off-the-last-of-the-beer wee morning hour social gatherings. Granted, he smelled bad, and he left a trail of dandruff wherever he went. The man had post office boxes in 25 cities. I don’t know who sent him postcards, but if you dared to visit his single-bulb lit room, his dedication was made apaprent by the extensive collection of local show flyers posted on his wall. Not an inch was uncovered.

Oh, wait a minute… in the realm of street messiahs, I forgot Zeus…the gender variant heroin addict (the ONLY known addict at the time in Athens) who was famous for wearing tutus and was rumored to stuff Barbie heads into his rectum. I heard he passed away about 10 years ago. Said a prayer for him, I did.

I can tell you a story about a train trestle. There’s drugs involved, too. The Psychedelic Saturday Club, after a night of well-placed graffiti, trundled on down to the train trestle over, what was it? Augustus Street? Anyway, this trestle was only wide enough for the train itself, about 50 ft. over the road, with just a 3-foot wide maintanence “turnout’ midway across. We climbed on up there and waited for the next train. I think we were drinking, too. Drunk and tripping is a crazy thing, man-o…yeah. Anyways, here comes the train…you can hear it a mile before it actually arrives, rounding a curve. I only had a little time to think about where I was and what the fuck I was doing there when that big ole headlight hits us….BWAAAAAAAHHHH from the engineer. He sees us sitting there, but what’s he gonna do? There was this little railing, just a slap-dash two-by-four. I held on. That train come a-roaring through only three feet from my face. Guess what? I pissed my pants, yessir. Thought I was going to meet my maker. That big wind, smell of axle grease and steel-on-steel that only a bigass train can provide, and the rumbling, oh god, that trestle shook like it was going to go into orbit. And then it was gone– me in my wet pants grinnin like a Cheshire cat, the giggle that won’t erupt into a full-blown laughter until days later. My jaws are hurting from holding it in. HOT DAMN!! Holy shit, I never felt so alive.

Oh, and that solar eclipse. Thought I was trippin all over again. Ben was, but he was ALWAYS tripping. Ever been outside during a solar eclipse where all the shadows, the “dappling” through the trees, look like little crescents from the eclipse? Fucking freaky.

Ben was the only love in my life that loved me back before I even had a chance to get there. I had met him at a friend’s party, and we were inseparable. He was attracted to me because I was the only girl he’d ever met that didn’t smoke pot, but tripped on acid. He thought that was just too cool. I was an art major, and I thought Ben was hot cuz he had actually had a SHOW of his art. And his head was big (physically) and he laughed all the time. About fetuses and chaos. I was interested in those things. We spent three years together. Jim Herbert, the landlord and my art teacher, had a hole he peeked through over the door. We didn’t care, we just kept on fucking.

And then the music. MMMMhmmm. I caught so much. I think I spent three years out till 3 am, mostly dancing. In Athens at the time there were some 600 bands and three clubs to play in. I can’t shake the smell of clove cigarettes out of my head. Everyone was smoking those fuckers….INSIDE. Ugh. Anyway, it’s amazing I kept getting A’s in my classes with all that clubbing going on. I begged a pair of pliers off the barkeep at the Uptown Lounge and pulled my braces off one night. Would you call that a coming-of-age ritual?

The Potter’s House for by-the-pound old clothes (including, but not limited to, my favorite threadbare pajama bottoms and button-up paisley shirts). Stitchwork for Allen Ginsburg. The 40-Watt Club for everything else. Including way too many gin-n-tonics during a snowstorm to forget Ben, and that I’d cheated on him and how much I hated myself for it. I built a pitiful snowman in the street that night. The only snowman Athens had ever seen. There was a crowd.

Ah, memories. Never forget where you come from. Nice to be able to say where you’re from without shame. Hey, young’uns…that’s what some age’ll get ya.

I want to tell a cool story about something that happened to me once. About ten years ago, when I was living in my little house on 5th St., I had my friend Jeff over for dinner. After he left, I was lying in bed thinking about our conversations and the fun we’d had. I was very relaxed, but still perfectly alert. When I closed my eyes, I had the distinct sensation of riding a horse. I opened my eyes, and there I was still lying in bed, but when I closed them again, I was back on the horse. I could feel the thundering of hooves beneath me and see my legs in black knickers, the saddle, and the mane and back of a dappled grey horse beneath me. I looked at my surroundings, saw twisted old cypress trees, the grey misty late afternoon. I could smell the salt air rolling in with the clouds. I was in the south of France. I looked next to me, and there was Jeff, riding a dark horse, only he wasn’t Jeff, he was my older brother. In that moment, a lifetime of memories came flooding back to me. Part of me was still vaguely aware of Shelley lying in bed, but most of me was Jeff’s younger brother. I was aware that our mother had died when I was quite young, and that we lived on the family vineyard in an old stone house with our aging father. I was aware that Jeff (whose name was Robert) was frustrated with me. He wanted me to grow up and accept that we would soon have to run the family farm. I, however, had no interest in farming. It was the 1780’s in post-revolutionary France, and I wanted to go to Paris to become a sculptor in one of the many artist collectives that were popping up all over the city. I didn’t have any interest in staying in a small rural village to marry a rural girl and have tons of children and break my back growing grapes till I was old. I wanted to go talk art and politics and philosophy in coffeehouses with the new generation of free-thinking intellectuals in Paris. After this wave of awareness swept over me, I opened my eyes in my bed in my little house and wondered what the fuck had just happened. I knew only a few seconds had passed. The experience felt like it moved much faster than I could have imagined it all. I filed it away in the ‘weird’ drawer and forgot about it for awhile. A few months later, Jeff and I ended up in a relationship. After we had been together for several weeks, I took him to go see a psychic who lives on the Lorane Hwy just south of Eugene. Her name is Francelia Woodward, and at the time she was in her late 50’s, living in a very middle-class split-level ranch house with a couple of llamas in the yard. I’d heard about her through my friend Susan, and heard she only charged $10, so my curiosity won and we went. Francelia specializes in "past-life" readings. When she started the reading, the first thing she said was that she saw Jeff and I arguing in a vineyard. She said it was the late 1700’s in France. She said we were brother and sister and that we argued a lot. (I was shivering, Jeff was crying.) I thought "but I was male in that lifetime", and then she said, "Oh, excuse me, Shelley…you were a man, Jeff’s younger brother." She said our father had just died, fallen off a ladder trying to patch the roof, and that Jeff was angry because I had told him I was going to Paris. She said he felt very abandoned by me, saddled with all the responsibilty of keeping the vineyard afloat. She said I became a relatively successful sculptor in the city, and that I lived in what she called an "artists’ co-op apartment building with a gallery in the ground floor". She said the lesson for Jeff and I was that we needed to be cautious about arguing too much, and for me to be sensitive to Jeff’s insecurity and abandonment issues. (That’s a whole different story!) Anyway, there it is, just like it happened to me. I am a firm believer in reincarnation, but I don’t think it’s a linear "first I was this person, then I was this person…" kind of thing. I think we exist on multiple dimensions all at once, and that sometimes we’re lucky enough to be aware of more than one lifetime.

Holy cow… I’m kinda nuts today. Last Sunday the event I’ve been working my ass off on for the last four months finally happened. It was really cool. 250 people showed up, all the technology worked for film, sound, etc. All the speakers showed up on time. The MCs were on top of it, the food was delicious (fry bread tacos!!) and even though someone ran off with the last of the donated money (luckily, I’d emptied the jar earlier) and the little kids were running amok all day, I got nothing but positive feedback from everyone. Klairice and I need a vacation after that one! I do get a free massage this week, thank heaven. But the weird thing is, I can’t slow down. I keep waking up in a cold sweat, panicking about nothing. I got stoned last night. I never do that. Well, rarely, anyway. But it worked. My body felt all soft and squishy, and my brain did too. Thought I’d sleep like a baby, but then 4 am I was wide awake. I’m really worried about my friend Denise and her family. She has a really severe case of hepatitis, and is getting very little support. Heard she was crying all night in pain. I feel helpless to do anything to help her. Hate that feeling. So many people that I love are struggling with really intense physical ailments right now. It’s scary. I kinda check out, cuz I get flashbacks of my mom wasting away in a hospital bed. It’s hard for me to engage with people who are hurting and dealing with medical institutions. I wish I was stronger in that department. I could never be a nurse. On the up side, my co-worker and friend Dean just gave me a laptop computer he didn’t need anymore. It’s light years from my old piece of crap. I can actually SEE all your pictures instead of little pixillated blurs. I can get my email checked and sent off in 1/4 of the time it used to take. Holy Cow! Now that I’m free of organizing woes, I might actually be able to have a social life again. I miss my peeps. Call me, send me a note, tell me you miss me, too. Time for a barbecue!

Well, here we go…the big 4-0! I never imagined that I would live past 30, so lookin 40 in the face is just plain weird. What’s different? Well for one thing, every morning I wake up with some kind of ache…neck, shoulder, knee, lower back….or my arms are totally asleep and I have to shake shake shake them to wake them up. Getting old ain’t for pussies, says my friend George. He’s 46, so I guess he knows what he’s talking about…and what I have to look forward to in a few short years. I promised myself I wasn’t going to be a smoker when I turned 40. I’ve got two weeks to quit. Yipes! I’m into my longest stretch ever of being single in my whole adult life. That’s weird, too. But honestly I’m getting too set in my ways to accomodate someone else’s trips right now. It’s kinda lonely, but I don’t feel like I’m missing much. I got machinery. But I miss pheromones. I am being courted by a 64 year old Black Panther and I have to say he’s pretty adorable in a radical, articulate, thoughtful kinda way. We have a date next week. He wants a woman that spends the night and then goes home the next day…sounds like a match to me! Another thing that’s different in the last year or so is that I’m making a lot more friends in their 40’s. It’s been great to not be always the oldest in every group I hang in, and to meet other folks my age or older who are at least as weird as I am. People who are still really engaged in living and not in acquiring stupid comsumer goods. Artists, musicians, gardeners. People who build crazy backyard shacks and live in them. People whose Ideal Social Gathering is a barbecue. People who are eclectic and diverse. People who have lived their ideals for so long it’s not for show anymore. People who’ve been through burn-out and jadedness (is that a word?) and come out on the other side. So, I’m planning a big blowout party next weekend. I know I’ll drink too much, but I’m hoping I won’t do the "my life is over" tears-in-the-beer thing. I’m looking forward to seeing all my pals of all ages there (4/23, River Ruin…be there!) and seeing all your rosy cheeks by the fire in the backyard or bobbing your heads to some live music in the basement.

[My brother writes me an 8 page letter from prison about every three days. They are a good read, so I'll be posting excerpts from some of his more interesting letters on occasion. He would love penpals...if you feel inclined to write to him, please do.
Darrell Cater
#14768691
OSP
2605 State St.
Salem, OR 97310
He can only recieve letters written in ball point or pencil, up to 10 photographs per letter, and xeroxed material. No blank paper or stamps. No original artwork unless ballpoint or pencil.]

Letter recieved 3/29/05

Howdy Folks,
Rainy day Sunday p.m. yard. Kickin it with the homies. Been having anxieties lately. When I was at yard saw people with pin eyes. Didn’t even say a word. Couple of my guitar picker friends looked pinned as well for a 1/2 a second. I thought about coming out and saying You guys got some dope! But I knew if I did they would probably say Yeah, want some? So I said nothing. It’s Sunday. A lot of people get visits on the weekends. That’s how most of the shit gets in here. Last night I know I smelled weed and tobacco but didn’t say anything. Sat around with some hard timers/lifers today talking about all the shit they had seen in here. Stories. OSP History 101. Told me about all the people who played out in the yard I guess back in the 80’s. Jerry Garcia played here…out on the platform in the yard for 2-1/2 hours by himself. All these old-timers, not even deadheads kept sayin "That Jerry Garcia’s no joke". Made me and my friends crack up! Stevie Ray played here twice. The Thunderbirds. George Thorogood. Barbara Mandrell. Thats’ all I can remember. They were also telling me about some movie they made here a couple of years ago with Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton. They said Billy Bob came out to yard every day while they were shooting to hang out with the boys. But Bruce Willis was too AFRAID some convict might shank his pussy ass. All the dudes said "That Billy Bob’s a cool mo-fo, he’s a Power Ranger and he knows it." I guess he’s a dope fiend as well. Everyone was saying he was asking everyone in the yard for "H" and must have gotten some, then didn’t show for work for a week. Pissed off Bruce Willis and all the production crew. He finally showed up after a week heroin run. Got cleaned up and finished the movie. Then they started saying "See the guy with the rain jacket and gray hair, that’s the I-5 killer and that guy over there brutally raped and killed 11 women and that guy…" and so on and so on. Just like I been saying the hardest core show you’ve ever seen. Crazy fucks everywhere! The only people in here that worry me are the young nazi gang punks. They think it’s cool to be here. What idiots. They always try to start a fight or something…

Still healing. I think I’ll at least be able to take care of my wound on my arm by myself in another week. I can’t see me being here more than 2 weeks.They’ll ship me out as soon as my arm is healed enough where I don’t need daily medical attention. I’ll be glad to start exercising my arms and upper body. I’ve already started doing sit-ups, knee bends and walking laps around the yard. I’ve been working more on my mind than anything. I want to get more books on Eastern religions and philosophy. Buddhist meditation and yoga practices would be ideal. More enlightenment. Started reading books you sent me. I have to keep my mind busy. That’s been easy, it’s constantly wandering. Getting better at focusing on what I want to achieve. Spending lots of time in my cage. Staring at the ceiling wondering about things I thought I’d forgotten long ago. I’ve lost contact with all the best people in my life the last few years. Need to reconnect. Patch things up here and there. Thinking of a couple of kind women I want to look up when I get out. Already planning my trim hunt. I need to shack up with an angel at least a week when I get out. The reality of prison has really been sinking in these past few days. Still feel more like a victim than a criminal. With a little help and wisdom I’m not feeling as much anger, guilt, shame, etc. Just going with the flow. Sometimes I feel like I’m in someone else’s body when I’m in here. It’s like a movie, and not my reality. I’m looking through someone else’s eyes who’s in prison. When  I look in the mirror it’s only a vague appearance of myself. It’s me, but I’m different. I’m relaxed, not tripping out. Emotionless. Blah. My body feels tired, my soul is tired as well. That’s the true emotion I’m feeling. It’s all just a bad dream. I’ll wake up sooner or later.
I love Possum Scrotum, Mississippi. Seems I’ll never leave. Maybe I’ll run for Scrotum King this year.

Have enough food, supplies for a couple more weeks with $17 left on books. I should be good. Thank you! I tried to bribe a guy in the laundry for a jacket with a Snicker’s bar. He said there wasn’t any jackets till Friday. I’m fucked. I feel so tired now that I can sleep. Been eating lots. The food in here isn’t healthy. Lots of starch, fat. High calorie. Everyone in here is fat. I might start getting the veggie plate. I’m jonesing to eat my own cooking, smoke a cig, take a nice long bubble bath. Go swimming on a warm day. Drink a tall guinness stout, throw some frisbee in the park. Take a long hike in an old-growth forest. Have sex on the beach on a clear, starry night, go fishing, body surfing in Mexico, tubing down the river. Sitting by a warm campfire tripping on shrooms, smoking a tasty dank bud, playing guitar in a desert canyon where the sound echoes. Been locked up 40 days today…long way to go. Tried calling today, I’ll try again tomorrow.

Back in the cell after dinner. Horrifying food. My cellie works till 7:30, so I’ve got a couple hours to myself. I like to listen to my cellie’s radio and have a spot of warm tea.Tonight I’ll have chamomile with a tad of honey. Read my Dalai Lama book, listen to tunes. Relax. Reflect. Meditate. Let the cruel world roll by. As John Lennon says "Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans."

When I get out I need to do some traveling. It’ll be Sept, perfect time, have a month and a half to gather my resources, hit the road by mid-Oct, drift down south, maybe stop in S.B. and then off to Arizona, Mexico, timbuktu, Bora Bora. Bumfuck Egypt is nice that time of year. Maybe try to make it to Mardi Gras then South by Southwest. And slowly make my way back to OREGON. I should take Duncan with me. He needs a trip like that! We’ll ride some rails and try to play the Great American Hobo of the 21st Century. We’ll sharpen our survival skills. And learn more about the word contentment. We’ll tell people we’re Buddhist missionaries or if we see cute girls we’ll say "We came to this town to do a survey, to see which town has the friendliest women" then after we’ve broken the ice we could hip them on our other survey’s on which positions certain women like. Spoons is good. Hop on Pop, that seems to be one of the favorites. According to these here survey charts…hell we’ll try ‘em all. Did I mention we’re also doing a condom survey! Before long we’ll have a port in every storm. We could wash dishes for extra food and drink beer for Jesus! Sounds like glorious, victorious destiny.

Found out I’ll never have any resolution on the federal level. Basically they can jam me up any time they want. I better walk the straight and narrow. If I’m not a good tax-paying American I’ll be back in and out of here the rest of my life. I wonder if I could get a passport? I know I’m going to be blackballed from several countries…England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. All British colonies. They were supposed to give up all their colonies back in 1941. The North Atlantic Charter…Winston Churchill told FDR he would give up all their colonies if the US would go over there and take out Hitler. We completely destroyed, leveled to rubble 90% of Germany. I don’t think the Brits kept their end of the deal. Sons of bitches! I need to leave this place. The USA is beat. I’ll come back after the revolution, once the smoke has cleared. Get drunk and sing Death to the Infidels!

I’ve been so blessed. Time to stop nodding, wake up Darrell tell us what you think! You’ve been trying to get numb for years. We’re not letting you off that easy! I’m definitely still here for a reason. What a longer stranger trip it’s going to be. The Beatles broke up 35 years ago. First time I bought Abbey Road, Costa Rica ‘76, they’d been split for 6 yrs. Feel older.

Scored more Ben n Jerry’s Half baked. What a luxury! This is the way to do time! Yeah buddy. There is a god. Getting to play guitar on the yard. Being in that circle is the only circle to be in. Everyone is a drug addict or Ex drug addict. Long hairs. Here on dope charges. A couple good people. Here just like me. No one has more than 3 years. We will all be going minimum soon. I’ll keep bumping into these guys the rest of my set. They say the cops are more laid back here than any other facility. A lot of that has to do with all the lifers. They don’t have much to lose. Sometimes you see a cop tell someone "WAIT!" like the cop noticed someone passing something or smuggling something then noticed it was a lifer and then said "Oh, it’s you, go ahead." Out of paper. Write more later.
D

Like I said before, my brother is in prison for heroin. He got busted with almost a half pound and is doing two years. He is currently at Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, but will probably be sent somewhere else soon (hopefully Columbia River, which is about 2/3 mile from my house). My brother has been struggling with addiction of one kind or another since he was 12… pretty much as long as I can remember. He was basically on his own by the time he was 14, living in a squat in San Antonio lovingly referred to as "the Veg House". I went there once when I was about 13 and remember a burnt out old house where someone forget to have the gas turned off, which meant that the stove and heater worked. I remember a Bob Marley poster on the wall and sheets covering the windows and a bunch of kids sitting around doing bong hits. It was all very seedy and grown-up for me, but all the cool kids knew about it, and it was a party every afternoon. I remember wondering how my brother came to live there, and that being the first time I realized we had a pretty fucked-up family. I mean, here were all the "bad" kids in the neighborhood, and they were my brother’s roommates! Many years later, Jimmy Bratton would be found with a bullet-hole to the back of the head, stuffed into the trunk of his car. Pat Mooney was found floating in the San Antonio River. And many other of the kids I grew up with have died of overdoses or abcesses or other junky-related causes. Today, on my voicemail, was a message from my brother’s friend’s mother. Just her efforts to tell me who she was were strange enough. But what she was calling to tell me was that the guy my brother left all his belongings with when he went to the Big House was her son. And he died Wednesday night. He had an abcess that went bad, died of blood poisoning. I called Polly (Mama) to tell her how sorry I was, and now I guess I’m going to Eugene to pick up my bro’s stuff cuz she doesn’t have room for it in her little apartment. I’m really looking forward to the next time my brother calls, so I can tell him yet another of his friends has kicked. I was actually reading a letter from him when I checked my voicemail this afternoon. It’s so weird how these things go. I hate fucking heroin. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no saint. I’ve done my share of the stuff. Always in good fun…hey I never used a needle! I never got hooked! My old boyfriend Troy is also in prison. He never used a needle, either. But he is a junky, just the same. He just smokes it, and is in total denial about how addicted he is. Apparently now he’s a pimp, as well. Every time I go to Eugene, I always have to visit Troy and my brother. Talk about taking a walk on the wild side. I never know who’s going to be nodding out in a corner when I get there. And the thing is…everybody’s kicking. Everyone’s on methadone or going clean on their own, in various stages of withdrawal. I have tried to help my brother kick numerous times. What a joke. I remember when he ODed on my kitchen floor. He was clean for about 3 years after that. That was the only time in our lives that we had an actual relationship. Since then we have said goodbye to some good friends (later, Patrick), I have given him a couch to kick on and gone out and scored Klonopins on the street to help him kick. I have even had to rinse his abscesses with saline and pack them with gauze. Am i a stupid fool? I am the only one he has, and I have never been able to completely give up on him.

A magical transformation is occuring in my relationship to my sisters now that we’re all in our thirties. Some shifts have happened and we’re all finding that we are allies…Not that I didn’t think of my sisters as allies till now, but our connections have deepened of late. I don’t really know what took us so long. We just had a bunch of shit to get over, first…namely, our parents. Anyone who was raised in a family knows what I’m talking about on some level, and bitching about my parents feels self-indulgent on a public forum. I mean, everyone has their own shitty family story, and many more are worse than mine…but hey, it’s my blog and I’ll whine if I want to. The point isn’t how fucked up our upbringing was, so much as how cool it is that we all survived and are coming together in a new configuration of our sisterhood. My son says, whenever I am interacting with other women, "Oh, it’s one of those Ya-Ya Sisterhood things," (and yesterday, the sunglasses I tried on were Ya-Ya Sisterhood sunglasses). That book didn’t leave much of an impression on me, but the Southern upbringing with dysfunctional out-to-lunch alcoholic mother rang a bell. (I also remember something about the kids running and playing in the spray of the DDT truck. The poisons we ran through as kids were maybe not so literal.)

~My mother, Gayle, to me when I was pregnant with my son, eating wheatgerm: "God, Shelley, get over it… I smoked and drank gin and tonics the whole time I was pregnant with you, and you turned out fine."~

Ok, so my sisters and I….here’s the order: Me, Holly Courtney, and Kensey. We have an older brother, Darrell, who has had his own share of abuse at the hands of the Evils. Darrell is in prison right now, here in Oregon. His heroin addiction and small Eugene cartel came crumbling down about his ears, and now he’s got two years to think about it. He’s excited to get another chance at straightening his life out, I’m just bummed that he narrowed his choices down to only two: death or prison.

My sister Holly was the first to bust free. (Well, as adults, anyway…Courtney busted free first while in high school by going bonkers and chasing either my dad or stepmom with scissors. My hero!) Last spring, Holly called my dad and laid it on the line, said she never wanted to see Linda* again, and if that meant she never saw Dad again, so be it. Well, she hasn’t seen either since, even though she lives right there in Atlanta. I have so much admiration for Holly for finally drawing the line. [*Note: I have met more people with awful stepmothers named Linda...makes me want to start a screeching noise band that sounds like cats being skinned alive called The Lindas. If you have an evil stepmother named Linda, please write to me. I may compile an anthology. I'm serious.]

~Holly was about 13 and bought Linda a big ceramic birdhouse for her birthday. She spent $37 on it. (Babysitters in 1981 made $2/hr.) She was so excited about the present she’d bought. A Grown-Up present, something Linda, a birdlover, would really like. Linda told Holly it was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. I confronted Linda about how much she’d hurt Holly’s feelings. Linda said, "She bought it as a joke…to embarrass me. She wanted me to hang it and be the laughingstock of the whole neighborhood."~

Courtney has been living her life independently of parental influence for quite some time. She’s maintained a very distant, but polite, exchange with them. Put herself through school without their help. Well, she’s done now, too. Courtney has a rare condition, a birth defect, that makes her kidneys spit all the phosphorus out of her body. When she was diagnosed at age 3 (after being hit by a car and ‘bending’ instead of breaking her bones) there was only one doctor in the world (in France) really working on Renal Rickets, and as far as I remember, only 13 known cases worldwide. This meant that Courtney was a guinea pig. She had to take prescription supplements and have surgeries to straighten her legs that were bending under her own weight. When she had reached the end of her growth period, our parents took her off the supplements. She always thought it was weird…wouldn’t she still need the phosphorus? But she assumed the doctor she’d had her whole life knew what he was doing. She has had terrible problems the last several years. Pain, bone hemorraging, osteoporosis, tooth loss, bones dissolving. She had to give up on her entire life dream… becoming a scientist…because she can’t deal with the physical demands of being in a lab for 12-16 hours a day. Courtney is one brilliant fucking kitty. She has spent the last 6 years working on her PhD, then had to lower her sites to a Master’s, and now has been forced out of the program altogether…along with her medical benefits, therapy, and teaching job. When I talked to her yesterday, she was on her way to work the graveyard shift washing dishes at the Magnolia Cafe. Turns out the decision to take her off the supplements wasn’t the doctor’s, but our parents’. A recently uncovered letter from her doc (in the box of medical files sent from Dad and Linda’s) said she should remain on the K-Phos for the rest of her life to avoid ‘debilitating conditions’. But at 14, she was determined by our parents to be on her own medically. Was it a matter of expense? Our Dad was the VP of the biggest bank in Georgia at the time. Our suspicion is that the decision was our stepmother’s, that she probably never showed the letter to Dad. She could buy more area rugs and reupholster the couches with that money.

~When our mother was pregnant with Courtney, she went to the doc, who told her she wasn’t pregnant, but hysterical. He prescribed some crazy 1970 tranquilizers and sent her home.~

~Linda to me when I was 14: "You little slut. Having you here is like have GAYLE HERSELF traipsing through my house."~

So, now it’s my turn. I’ve always held out some hope that my father would have some great epiphany, admit that he allowed that bitch to abuse the fuck out of us, ditch her and take us all to the beach for a tear-jerker-movie-style therapy session. In some way, he was the innocent, perhaps abused himself. There is some evidence to support this, Linda’s control over him is absolute. There have been times when I thought we were on the verge of a breakthrough. I lost a baby last year, and for the first time in my entire life Dad was calling me to see how I was doing, to offer some kind of emotional support. I have been feeling closer to him the past year. But we always seem to fall short of real catharsis.

~I was 16 when Linda accused me of having an affair with the single father I was babysitting for. "I know you’re sleeping with that man." What? "You’re such a whore. If you think I’m going to turn a blind eye while you go around fucking every man in the neighborhood, you got another thing coming." She corners me against the counter, raises her hand to smack me, but I realize for the first time that I am now taller than she is. I grab her hand and throw the glass of milk I am holding against the kitchen wall. She may be able to beat Courtney and Kensey with a high-heeled shoe or a hairbrush and get away with it, but she’ll never hit me again and I make sure she knows it. I run out of the house and up the hill to my neighbor and best friend Greta’s house. Her parents sit and listen while I tell what just happened. They tell me I can stay as long as I want. Dad comes home later and calls me, "Get your ass home right now." I don’t want to come home. "Get down here NOW. Do you know what I just came home to? MY WIFE is SMOKING a CIGARETTE! MY WIFE doesn’t SMOKE! You really enjoy disrupting our household, don’t you? Come down here right now, or I’ll come up there and drag you home." I walk slowly down the hill. Linda is upstairs in their room. I imagine her with a highball on the bedside table, cool washcloth on her forehead, looking frail. Dad then sits me down and tells me it’s time for me to go talk to a therapist. That I am always rocking the boat. I can’t believe he really thinks this is all my fault. I wish now that they had sent me to a therapist. Then maybe someone would have told me how fucked up we were treated. I always had to just try to remember, "it’s not me, it’s them. I’m not crazy."~

Mad shouts of unleashed love to my sisters. We haven’t all been in the same place at the same time since our mom died in 1996. I am looking forward to the beach trip we four will take, hopefully someday soon. I’m sure it won’t be tear-jerker movie material, there’ll be too much alcohol involved. Holly will only last about a day before she’s had enough, and Kensey will want us to stay a whole month and sleep in the same bed. Courtney and I will start bickering about stupid shit after two beers, and Holly will want to go to Hooters. Kensey will be kissing us all on the forehead, and I’ll be still trying to boss everyone around.

More to come, if you can stand it…