She sits on the outside patio table, holding the cell to her ear, her sandaled feet on the bench. Her new sponsor told her to call him to thank him for the birthday gift. She knows he will answer. After all, he’s a teacher, and college teachers are always at home in the summer. Something in the back of her mind remembers the times before he left. He made her laugh by reading funny story lines into the children’s books. She made him laugh with her mispronunciations. “Pinch pies” for French fries. “Trees” for broccoli. “Head gate” for headache. An ex-navy man, he would give her close order drills. When he said, “About face,” she would hold her pudgy hands on either side of her cheeks and smile. Children are so literal, she muses, as she punches in the numbers.
“Hi, is Rick there?” she asks, already passing her palm nervously over the back of the plastic phone. Why does she want to be high when she talks to him? She knows he’s been sober many, many years now. He lives in San Diego with his new wife, a Jewish woman she has never met. She once was going to take the bus from Victorville to San Diego, but she got high instead.
“Hello, who is this?” says the female voice.
“This is Trudi. Is my Dad there?”
“He’s asleep right now.”
“Oh, wow. I didn’t know. I’ll call some other time.”
“No, I’ll get him. I know he’ll want to talk to you.”
Asleep in the middle of the afternoon? She remembers when she would go days without sleeping—high on crystal—accomplishing things she never knew she could accomplish, yet never finishing anything. When she became a welfare mother of nine children, she would console herself with the fact that she “needed speed” to do all the chores of a stay-at-home mom. But speed has its way with you. It’s like a giant light that clicks on inside you and makes you alive like nothing else can make you feel. She’s been off it for ten days. When she received his fifty dollar gift certificate for Target in the mail, she was on her eighth day without using. Just past her birthday. It was what he said in the accompanying card’s lines that made her stay clean for two more days. “Just for one day. That’s how I made it these 20 years. You can do it too, Trudi. I know you used to work here, so I guess you can find the best deals. Love, Dad.”
Her throat tightens as she waits for the phone to be passed to him. Her hair is short and blonde, and she has just turned thirty-nine. She is wearing shorts and a halter top. She has a tattoo on the bicep of each arm. “Armando” on one bicep, which is the name of her ex-husband, and “Speed kills,” on the other, which she got done by another inmate, when she was doing her time in the California Correctional Institute for Women in Corona.
“Hello, Trudi! Happy birthday, honey!”
She knows that voice, even though it’s been ten years since she’s seen his face. “Thanks, Dad. I’ve got some good and bad news.” That fat chick in the front row of her Narcotics Anonymous meeting said tweakers see life in black and white. Highs and lows. But we live for the highs.
“The good news is that I got my driver’s license back because Armando paid me some overdue child support payments. He’s out of prison now. The bad news is that we’re living out of our car because our slumlord kicked us out.”
“Oh, you know, you only have one day, Trudi. As long as you’re clean, you’re as good as anybody else. What happened with the landlord? Were you using drugs? Where’s your mother?”
She knows that topic well. “She really got on my nerves. She was driving me crazy. She’s living somewhere else now. We try to live at other people’s places, but it’s hard with the baby and all. The slumlord told us she was demolishing the house, and then, three days after we left, we saw she was laying tile, fixing the windows and plumbing, stuff she never did when we were living there!”
“It sounds like she’s going to rent to someone else or even sell the place. You might check with Legal Aid. I don’t think she can do that to you.”
“Yeah, I know. We were at the courthouse the other day for the child support, and I talked to someone.” How is she talking to him like this? She wants to protect herself from the pain. She is crashing into the abyss that tweakers know so well. She’s afraid she won’t be able to come out of this one. “I’ll see about it, Dad. Jeff’s working, so we can get food for the baby, but we need a place to stay. I’ll check with Legal Aid like you said.”
“I have something I want to read to you. Remember in 1999, when you got arrested? Your brother called me on the phone, and I wrote a poem. It was just published, and I want you to hear it. I call it ‘Gothic Gunshots.’”
Oh, shit! Now he is trying to get inside her head again. Doesn’t he know who owns her head? Tina, glass, the crank monster. It’s like the fat girl said at N.A., “Tweakers who have gone as far as we have don’t know the difference between the high and real life. The only real life is when we’re high, and we can never appreciate normal life again. You know, a good movie, a good book, stuff the normies get high on? They’ll never be the same for us.”
“Well?” he says. “May I read it?”
“Yes,” she says, swallowing hard and staring at an orange tree in the backyard of the fat girl, Louise, her new N.A. sponsor. Last night, her sponsor told her, “Only seven percent of us ever make it to normal life again, Trudi. Are you gonna make it?” The tree has one shriveled orange at the top branch, about ready to fall. She is that orange right now. “Yes, I’d love to hear your poem, Dad.” She grits her teeth and waits.
95° in April, the sun beats in on me,
the week’s not going right this time
students stare at me, disproportioned gazes,
waxing and waning . . . they argue for me
about rap censorship, about sex education,
about women in combat.

My son calls from college . . . “I don’t want to
shock your drawers off, Dad, but Trudi and Armando
were arrested for dealing drugs in their house.”

Flashback 31 years . . . I stood at the window
of the nursery, tears in my eyes, amazed . . .
the miracle of life . . . my daughter . . . the feminine side
I could never find in my drunken, drugged years.
She grew up and I grew apart . . . staring into bottles
in darkened hallways and in bars, slowly going mad.

The next day, gunshots slaughter children in a Denver,
suburban high school. Talk of “gothic” and “Goths.”
Children who call themselves the “Trenchcoat Mafia”
threw hand grenades, opened up with sawed-off shotguns
on their fellows, killed themselves inside the library
(next to Poe, next to Melville?). Slain Goths of this era
when we forget our children?

I want to call my daughter, but my hand freezes over the phone.
I want to write another letter, but I write this, instead.
I know she must find her bottom. Is it a gothic bottom?
A symbol of the times? I stare out of the window at a crow
passing over the trees. Several birds follow it, attacking, weaving,
darting, in and out of its flight path. Like the smart bombs in Baghdad,
like the Trenchcoat Mafia, like my drug-dealing, dropout daughter,
loose on America! Gothics all! Even her ten, welfare kids.

“Hey, honey!” My present wife comes in. We are writing another
cyber-generation rhetoric and reader together.
“If my ex can’t get all those kids, and my daughter goes to prison,
do you think we could handle a couple of them?”

She frowns, smiles, and gives me a kiss on the forehead.

“I can’t handle ten kids!”

“Two,” I say, kissing her. “I mean two.”

“Certainly,” she says, and she also looks outside. “It’s been a crazy week, hasn’t it?”

I feel myself entering the crow and taking the variety of blows each bird is giving it. I feel myself melting into a gothic sunset.

“Yes, it certainly has!”

She can hear him take a deep breath. She knows that he expects her to say something. She tried writing a journal once in prison. But she knew she needed inspiration, and she found it. A connection. She got some crank from an enterprising guard. She filled an entire notebook in two days of writing. She was going to send it to him, but she read it again when she was sober. It sounded like the ranting of a lunatic.
“I like it. You know, the cops took my kids the same day. Some state van pulls up and they pile them in like a bunch of illegals. This cop gets in my face, and I’ll never forget what she says to me. She says, ‘You call yourself a mother? Your children could have been killed in there! Blown up in a meth lab explosion. You think it’s not possible, you bitch? I’ve seen it happen. Goddamned tweakers! Get her out of my sight!’ I was high that day, Dad. Her words never registered inside my brain until I came down later inside the jail cell. I wanted to die.”
“I know, honey, I know. We wanted to take your kids, but you and your mother didn’t want me to have them. You refused to sign the papers. Remember? Do you hate me that much, Trudi?”
She really wants to get high. Her mind is drifting to the same spot where she waits for her connection to appear. It is Jeff now, with whom she had another child, Connor. Armando is straight and working in construction. Their ten children are sprinkled amongst families in Victorville. She is not allowed to contact a single one. Jenna, Arlene, Brad, Brittany, Soloman, Christine, Jolene, Armando, Leon and Francene. Is Connor next? These children, once completely connected to her, were now torn from her like an abortion. The Pentecostals raved about not having abortions, but she knew better. Her children could be in abusive families. She knows these families, and they all get money from the State, and the State rarely checks up on the children’s welfare anymore. They all don’t care. Cutbacks all around. Crowded prisons, crowded hospitals, crowded minds full of dreams—all that American Idol bull crap! Jeff is dealing weed and tarring roofs. His connection is a secret, but he makes enough for them to stay out of trouble. But now they live out of his car. Her mother caught them getting high in the house. That’s the real reason her mother moved out. But, she is clean today, isn’t she? Just for one day.
“Dad?” she can feel her voice tremble, and she can barely grip the phone.
“What, baby? What is it?”
“Can I call you if I think I’m going to use? My sponsor says I need to call somebody to talk to before I use. I could really use some help here.”
“Of course you can call me. Any time, day or night, as long as you haven’t used. When I was getting sober, my sponsor told me the same thing. All you have is one day. That’s what you must remember. There are only three paths for people like you and me. We can stay sober, we can kill ourselves or we can go crazy and end up in prison. You have to get on the right track, sweetheart. There’s no middle road here. Remember when my Dad died? I made you promise me you would get a sponsor and get into N.A.? The sponsor even called me, so I sent you the money from his estate. Your mother told me you got high with Jeff and then you got arrested for driving with a suspended license. Can I trust you today? To thine own self be true. That’s what it says on the twenty-year token I have in front of my eyes right now. You were just fooling yourself, Trudi, don’t you see?”
She exhales. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll call you,” she says, and she closes the phone and notices that the orange is still there. She walks inside the house and returns the cell to her sponsor, Louise. Louise looks at her and holds her shoulders. “Connor’s asleep. I want you to go meet Jeff and tell him you’ve decided to stay with me until he can get his shit together. There’s no room for him in your life right now, Trudi. It’ll be the end of the line for you.”
“I know. Thanks for watching Connor. I’ll be back.” Trudi walks outside the house and into the heat of the Victorville summer. She knows all these streets from her years as a welfare mother and speed freak. Airbase Road was called “freebase road” by the freaks. Mojave Drive was “mo’ havoc.” And Bear Valley Drive was, of course, “Beer Valley.” It’s amazing how much territory she covered in those many years. The backyard barbecues, the children playing in the rubber pools, the gang fights, the violence, the drugs, always the drugs, hiding in the corners of the houses, in the garages, inside the cars, inside the brain, altering the reality of poverty and the incessant heat, and, all the time, that tiny voice was growing inside her, “Just one day. That’s all I have is just one day.”
Jeff’s car is parked off of Palmdale (“Pawndale”), where there are dozens of pawn shops, welfare check cashing offices, Hillbilly bars and strip joints decorating the avenue. She can see Jeff in the back seat, his feet up, blazing a slim joint in the darkness. The windows are frosted, to prevent prying eyes, and Trudi knows he is toking on some of his product. He always says, “I won’t sell anything without trying it first. What kind of businessman sells shit he hasn’t tested?”
She knows this is the moment of truth for her. He is her connection, and he is the one she must reject. She realizes, as if she is seeing it for the first time in her life, that men have always been her connection. Her father, Rick, was her connection to happiness before he left when she was twelve years old. Her mother, Sylvie, put her and her brother, Randy, into that Pentecostal school for retards. When she was in public school, she tested into the best classes. She could read before she was six. She now wants to read her father’s work and her own work. She knows she must write what her sponsor calls “a searching and fearless moral inventory.”
Trudi opens the back door to the Ford Escort and the gust of bitter-sweet smoke hits her nostrils. Jeff is smiling up at her, expertly pinching off the joint between the nails of his thumb and forefinger and holding it to his lips so he can get the last bit of THC from the burning roach. He never uses a roach clip. He says they’re for pussies.
“I’m going to stay with Louise. She has Connor. And I’m going to go to Legal Aid tomorrow morning to file a complaint. I need to stay sober.”
“Louise? Who is Louise? I want to play with my baby! This shit won’t ride, little lady. Here, look. I have some ice for you.” Jeff extends his grimy arm toward her. He calls himself her “tar baby,” because when he gets off work he looks black and sticky from tarring roofs all day. Roofing is one of the few jobs that will employ ex-convicts. Jeff is not a bad man, she thinks, as she stares at the slivers of white inside his dark palm. She knows she’ll feel much better if she smokes the glass. Tina wants her to use. It is the drug that she mistakes for good times. Good times are not good anymore. She turns from him and tears begin to stream down her cheeks. She is not crying because she can’t get high. It’s amazing to her, but even after all these years of depleting her joy with the drug that devours a body’s source of authentic emotion, serotonin and dopamine, she can still remember what it was like to feel good. She always laughed at the word, “dopamine.” When she was high, she called it “dope of mine.” Mispronunciations. Laughter when she was a child. Her father’s voice, “Just one day. That’s all we have. Just one day.”
“Get inside this car and turn on with me, babe,” says Jeff, his voice a connection with what she knows is a false reality.
She says nothing. She begins to walk down Palmdale, and she tries to hold on to some object or person to keep her sane. A homeless woman comes up to her and smiles at her, a toothless grin. She knows the saying from her days in church, “But for the grace of God go I.” This woman is her moment. Trudi takes the old woman by the hand and leads her up the street. “Come with me,” Trudi says, holding her head up high and looking beyond this reality. “We’re going to get ourselves something good to eat. My sponsor can make some fantastic lasagna.”
The Ford Escort swerves up onto the sidewalk, and the old homeless woman, who is used to these streets, pushes Trudi away from the oncoming car. The speeding car, however, does not miss the old woman, who is crushed against the window of a pawnshop. Trudi stares in disbelief from her sitting position on the sidewalk, as the life blood oozes from the old woman’s body. Jeff’s body has also left the car, and his dark form impacts the brick wall of the pawn shop, missing the window, which would have probably saved his life.
After the police arrive, Trudi walks up to a female cop standing near the crushed body of Jeff. “You know the deceased?” the cop asks. Trudi knows this woman’s face. She is the same woman who cursed at her and took her children away. Trudi’s throat constricts. Just one day. “Yeah, I know him. But, listen. I’m an addict, and I need to call somebody right now. Can I use your phone?”
The woman, without a hint of recognition on her face, hands Trudi her cell phone. “Make it quick,” she says, a suggestion of a smile playing at her lips.
Trudi punches the numbers, and it rings. “Dad, is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me, sweetheart. What’s wrong?”
“Dad, I need you. I can’t feel anything inside, and I need you to hold me.”

# # #

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