Thinking of Las Vegas makes me feel nauseous. Manuel reminds me that all this happened to me just a few months ago and is still fresh in my memory, assures me that time will cure, and one day I’ll talk about that episode in my life with irony. That’s what he says, but it doesn’t apply in his case—he himself never talks about his past. I thought I’d come to terms with my errors, that I was even a little proud of them, because they’d made me stronger, but now that I’ve met Daniel, I wish I had a less interesting past so I could offer myself to him with dignity. That girl who intercepted an overweight man with varicose veins in the club parking lot was me; that girl ready to hand herself over for a shot of booze was me too; but now I’m someone else. Here in Chiloé I have a second opportunity, I have a thousand more opportunities, but sometimes I can’t get the accusatory voice of my conscience to shut up.
That old man in shorts was the first of several men who kept me afloat for a couple of weeks, until I couldn’t do it anymore. Selling myself like that was worse than going hungry and worse than the torture of abstinence. Never, not drunk or drugged, could I avoid a profound feeling of degradation. I always felt my grandfather watching me, suffering for me. Men took advantage of my shyness and my lack of experience. Compared to other women who were doing the same thing, I was young and good-looking; I could have arranged things better, but I gave myself in exchange for a few drinks, a pinch of white powder, a handful of yellow rocks. The more decent ones let me have a quick drink in a bar, or offered me cocaine before taking me to a hotel room; others just bought a cheap bottle and did it in the car. Some gave me ten or twenty dollars, others kicked me back out onto the street with nothing. I didn’t know you should always charge first, and by the time I learned, I was no longer prepared to carry on down that road.
I finally tried heroin with a client, directly into the vein, and I swore at Brandon Leeman for having kept me from sharing his paradise. It’s impossible to describe that instant when the divine liquid enters the blood. I tried to sell what little I had, but no one was interested; I only got seventy dollars for the designer bag, after pleading with a Vietnamese woman at the door of a beauty parlor. It was worth twenty times that, but I would have given it away for half as much, my need was so urgent.
I hadn’t forgotten Adam Leeman’s telephone number, or the promise I’d made to Brandon to call him if anything happened, but I didn’t do it, because I was thinking of going to Beatty and appropriating the fortune in those bags. But that plan required a strategy and lucidity I completely lacked.
They say that after a few months of living on the street, a person is definitively marginalized; you look destitute, you lose your identity and social network. In my case it was faster; it took just three weeks for me to reach bottom. I sank with terrifying speed into that miserable, violent, sordid dimension, which exists parallel to the normal life of a city, a world of delinquents and their victims, of crazies and addicts, a world without solidarity or compassion, where people survive by stepping on everybody else. I was always high or trying to get high. I was dirty, smelly, and disheveled, increasingly crazed and sick. I could barely keep a couple of mouthfuls of food in my stomach. I coughed constantly, and my nose was always runny. It was an effort to open my eyelids, glued together with pus. Sometimes I fainted. Several of my jabs got infected. I had ulcers and bruises on my arms. I spent the nights walking from one place to another—safer than sleeping—and in the daytime I looked for hovels in which to hide and rest.
I learned that the safest places were the most visible ones. I would beg with a paper cup in the street at the entrance to a mall or a church, which can trigger feelings of guilt in passers-by. Some would drop a few coins, but nobody ever spoke to me. Today’s poverty is like leprosy used to be: people find it repugnant and frightening.
I avoided the places I used to go to regularly, like the Boulevard, because that was Joe Martin and Chino’s patch too. Beggars and addicts mark their territory, like animals, and keep within a radius of a few blocks, but desperation made me explore different neighborhoods, without respecting the racial barriers of blacks with blacks, Latinos with Latinos, Asians with Asians, whites with whites. I never stayed in the same place for more than a few hours. I was incapable of carrying out the most basic tasks, like feeding or washing myself, but I managed to get alcohol and drugs. I was always alert, like a hunted fox, moving quickly, not talking to anybody. There were enemies on every street corner.
I started to hear voices and sometimes found myself answering them, although I knew they weren’t real, because I’d seen the symptoms in several residents of Brandon Leeman’s building. Freddy called them “the invisible beings” and made fun of them, but when he got bad, those beings came to life, like the insects, also invisible, that used to torment him. If I caught a glimpse of a black car like that of my pursuers, or anyone who looked familiar, I’d slip away in the opposite direction, but I didn’t give up the hope of seeing Freddy again. I thought of him with a mixture of gratitude and resentment, not understanding why he’d disappeared, why he couldn’t find me when he knew every nook and cranny of the city.
Drugs kept hunger at bay as well as the many bodily aches and pains, but they didn’t calm the cramps. My bones felt heavy, my skin itched from being so dirty, and I got a strange rash on my legs and back that bled because I scratched so much. I’d suddenly remember I hadn’t eaten for two or three days, and then drag myself to a women’s shelter or the Saint Vincent de Paul soup kitchen, where I could always get a plate of hot food. It was a lot harder to find somewhere to sleep. At night the temperature stayed in the high sixties, but since I was so weak, I felt cold all the time, until someone at the Salvation Army gave me a jacket. That generous organization turned out to be a valuable resource; I didn’t have to wander around with bags in a stolen supermarket shopping cart, like other strays, because when my clothes stank too much or started to get too big for me, I exchanged them at the Salvation Army. I got several sizes skinnier. My collarbones and ribs were sticking out, and my legs, which used to be so strong, looked pathetic. I didn’t have a chance to weigh myself until December, when I discovered that I’d lost close to thirty pounds in two months.
Public washrooms were dens of delinquents and perverts, but there was no choice but to hold my nose and use them, since the ones in stores or hotels were now out of bounds. They would have kicked me out before I could get in. I didn’t even have access to gas station washrooms; employees refused to lend me the key. And so down I went, almost sliding down the banister of the staircase to hell, like so many other abject beings who survived in the street, begging and stealing for a handful of crack, a bit of meth or acid, a swig of something strong, rough, and brutal. The cheaper the alcohol, the more effective—just what I needed. I spent October and November in the same state; I can’t remember with any clarity how I survived, but I do remember the brief moments of euphoria and then the degrading hunt for another hit.
I never sat down at a table. If I had money I might buy tacos, burritos, or hamburgers that I’d throw straight back up with interminable heaves on my knees in the street, my stomach in flames, my mouth split open, sores on my lips and nose, nothing clean or kind, broken glass, cockroaches, garbage cans, not a single face in the crowd that might smile at me, no hand to help me. The whole world was populated by dealers, junkies, pimps, thieves, criminals, hookers, and lunatics. My whole body hurt. I hated that fucking body, hated that fucking life, hated lacking the fucking will to save myself, hated my fucking soul, my fucking fate.
In Las Vegas I went for entire days without exchanging a greeting, without a single word or a gesture in my direction from another human being. Solitude, that icy claw in the chest, had beaten me to such an extent that it never occurred to me that I could simply pick up a telephone and call home in Berkeley. That would have been all I needed, a telephone; but by then I’d lost hope.
At first, when I could still run, I prowled around the cafés and restaurants with outdoor tables
, where the smokers would sit, and if someone left a pack of cigarettes on the table, I would swoop past and grab it, because I could trade them for crack. I’ve used every toxic substance that exists on the street, except tobacco, although I do like the smell of it, because it reminds me of my Popo. I also stole fruit from supermarkets or chocolate bars from the station kiosks, but just as I couldn’t master the sad trade of prostitution, I couldn’t learn how to rob. Freddy was an expert, having started stealing when he was in diapers, he claimed, and gave me several demonstrations with the aim of teaching me his tricks. He explained that women are very careless with their purses; they hang them on the backs of chairs, put them down in stores while they choose or try something on, drop them on the floor in the hairdresser’s, put them over their shoulders on buses—that is, they go around asking for someone to relieve them of the problem. Freddy had invisible hands, magic fingers, and the stealthy grace of a cheetah. “Watch carefully, Laura, don’t take your eyes off me,” he’d challenge me. We’d go into a mall, and he’d study the people, looking for his victim. With his cell phone stuck to his ear, pretending to be absorbed in a loud conversation, he’d approach a distracted woman, take her wallet out of her purse before I even saw, and then calmly walk away, still talking away on the phone. With the same elegance he could pick the lock of any car or walk into a department store and walk out five minutes later through another door with a couple of watches or bottles of perfume.
I tried to put Freddy’s lessons into practice, but I didn’t have the knack. My nerves failed, and my miserable appearance made people suspicious; they followed me in stores, and on the streets people kept clear of me. I smelled like a sewer, my hair was greasy, and my expression desperate.
Halfway through October the weather changed. It started to get cold at night, and I was sick. I had to pee all the time and got a sharp burning pain, which only went away with drugs. It was cystitis. I recognized the symptoms because I’d had it once before, when I was sixteen, and I knew it could be cured quickly with antibiotics, but without a doctor’s prescription, antibiotics are more difficult to get hold of in the United States than a kilo of cocaine or an automatic rifle. It hurt to walk, to straighten up, but I didn’t dare go to the hospital emergency ward; they’d ask me questions, and there were always police on guard duty there.
I needed to find a safe place to spend the nights and decided to try a homeless shelter, which turned out to be a badly ventilated shed with tight lines of cots. There were twenty-odd women and lots of children. I was surprised by how few of these women were as resigned to misery as I was; only a couple of them were talking to themselves dementedly or picking fights, the rest seemed quite sane. Those who had children were more determined, active, clean, and even cheerful. They bustled around their kids, preparing bottles and washing clothes. I saw one reading a Dr. Seuss book to her four-year-old daughter, who knew it by heart and recited it along with her mother. Not all street people are schizophrenics or crooks, as some think; some are simply poor, old, or unemployed, and most are mothers who’ve been abandoned or are escaping from various kinds of violence.
On the wall of the refuge there was a poster with a phrase that has become forever engraved in my memory: “Life without dignity is not worth living.” Dignity? I understood all of a sudden, with terrifying certainty, that I’d turned into a drug addict and an alcoholic. I suppose I must have had a shred of dignity left, buried among the ashes, enough to make me feel an embarrassment so sharp that it was like being stabbed in the chest. I started to cry in front of the poster. My distress must have been very obvious, because soon one of the counselors came over and led me to her tiny office, gave me a glass of iced tea, and asked me my name in a friendly way, and what I was using, how frequently, when the last time had been, if I’d received treatment, if there was anyone they could contact.
I knew my grandma’s phone number by heart—that’s one thing I hadn’t forgotten—but calling her would mean killing her with sorrow and shame, and would also mean obligatory detox, rehab, sobriety. No way. “Do you have any family?” the counselor insisted on asking me. I exploded with rage, as I used to do all the time, and swore at her in reply. She let me get it out of my system, without losing her cool, and then she gave me permission to stay the night in the shelter, violating the rule; one of the conditions for acceptance was not to be using alcohol or drugs.
The shelter supplied fruit juice, milk, and cookies for the children, coffee and tea at all hours, bathrooms, telephones, and washing machines—useless for me, because I only had the clothes I was wearing, having lost the plastic bag with my few meager belongings. I had a long shower, the first for several weeks, savoring the pleasure of the hot water on my skin, the soap, the foam in my hair, and the wonderful smell of shampoo. Then I had to put the same stinking clothes back on. I curled up in my cot, calling in murmurs for my Nini and my Popo, begging them to come and take me in their arms, like before, and tell me that everything was going to be all right, not to worry, they were looking out for me, lullaby my baby, lullaby and good night, sleep tight my sweet, little piece of my heart. Sleeping has always been my problem, since I was born, but I was able to rest, in spite of the lack of air and the snoring women. Some of them cried out in their dreams.
Near my cot a mother had settled down with her two children, a little baby still breast-feeding and an adorable little girl of about two or three. She was a young white woman with lots of freckles, a bit overweight, who must have been left without a roof over her head quite recently, since she still seemed to have a goal and a plan. When our paths crossed in the bathroom, she’d smiled at me, and her little girl had stared at me with her round blue eyes and asked me if I had a dog. “I used to have a puppy dog called Toni,” she told me. When the woman was changing the baby’s diapers, I saw a five-dollar bill in one of the compartments of her bag, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. At dawn, when there was finally silence in the dormitory and the woman was sleeping peacefully with her children in her arms, I slipped over to her cot, rummaged through her bag, and stole the five-dollar bill. Then I snuck back to my cot, ducking down low with my tail between my legs, like a bitch.
Of all the errors and sins I’ve committed in my life, that’s the one I can least forgive myself for. I stole from someone more needy than me, a mother who could have used that money to buy food for her children. That’s unforgivable. Without decency, you fall to pieces, lose your humanity and your soul.
At eight in the morning, after coffee and a bun, the same counselor who’d dealt with me when I arrived gave me a piece of paper with the address of a rehabilitation center. “Talk to Michelle. She’s my sister. She’ll help you,” she said. I ran out of the place without saying thanks and threw the paper in a garbage can outside. Those five dollars were enough to buy me a dose of something cheap and effective. I didn’t need any Michelle’s compassion.
That very same day I lost the photo of my Popo that my Nini had given me at the academy in Oregon and that I carried with me all the time. It struck me as a terrifying sign, meaning that my grandfather had seen me steal those five dollars, that he was disappointed in me, that he’d left, and now no one was watching over me. Fear, anguish, hiding, fleeing, begging, all melted together into a single bad dream, day and night.
Sometimes I am assaulted by the memory of a scene from that time on the street, a memory that flares up inside me and leaves me trembling. Other times I wake up sweating with images in my head, as vivid as if they were real. In the dream I see myself running naked, screaming voicelessly, in a labyrinth of narrow alleys that coil like serpents, buildings with blank doors and windows, not a soul to ask for help, my body burning, my feet bleeding, bile in my mouth, all alone. In Las Vegas I believed myself condemned to irremediable solitude, which began with the death of my grandpa. How was I to imagine back then that one day I would be here, on this island in Chiloé, incommunicado, hidden away, among strangers, and very far from everything familiar, without feeling lo
nely.
When I first met Daniel, I wanted to make a good impression, erase my past and start fresh on a blank page. I wished I could invent a better version of myself, but in the intimacy of shared love, I understood that this was neither possible nor advisable. The person I am is the result of what I’ve lived through, including the drastic mistakes. Confessing to him was a good experience, proving the truth of what Mike O’Kelly always says: our demons lose their power when we pull them out of the depths where they hide and look them in the face in broad daylight. But now I don’t know if I should have done it. I think I frightened Daniel, and that’s why he didn’t reciprocate with as much passion as I feel. He probably feels he can’t trust me. It’s hard to blame him; a story like mine could scare off the bravest guy. It’s also true that he was the one who provoked me to confide in him. It was very easy to tell him about even the most humiliating episodes, because he listened without judging me; I suppose that’s part of his training. Isn’t that what psychiatrists are supposed to do? Listen in silence. He never asked me what happened, only what I’d felt at that moment, in telling it, and I would describe the heat on my skin, the palpitations in my chest, the weight of a crushing rock. He asked me not to reject those sensations, to accept them without analyzing them, because if I was brave enough to do that, they would open like boxes and my spirit could break free.
“You’ve suffered a lot, Maya, not just from what happened to you in adolescence, but also from being abandoned in your infancy,” he said.
“Abandoned? I wasn’t abandoned at all, I can assure you. You can’t imagine how my grandparents spoiled me.”
“Yes, but your mother and father abandoned you.”
“That’s what the therapists in Oregon said too, but my grandparents—”