“I need a car,” she whimpered in a tinny voice, high-pitched like a toddler whining for more, more, more.
“Yeah, well, I need a car, too,” her mom rapid-fired back, sounding irritated but looking hurt and frazzled.
We sat in her kitchen, the window propped open for a cool breeze to float in. Her sober house subsidized by the city of San Francisco is just off Third Street in the Bay View district. Mostly African American in culture, this neighborhood offers great deals. Complete houses go for $300,000–sometimes a little less and other times a little more. The woman, a mother of two who missed the chance to raise her children while out on the streets using and drinking as they grew up in the care of grandparents, listened to her daughter strung out on crack.
“Mama, did you her me. A caaaarrrrrr,” her 36-year-old daughter sing-songed. “Gimme uncle’s number.”
Mama scrolled through numbers on her cell phone. “Just hold on. Now I got it. Ready? 372-8476,” she said.
“You talking too fast. Do it again.”
“3…7…2…8…4…7…6.”
“I’m thirsty. Byyyyeeeee, Mom.” Click.
I listened to the conversation on speaker phone. This woman, Eva, a 58-year-old grandmother, and I work every week for several hours as she strives to complete each of the Twelve Steps in Alcoholics Anonymous. At the kitchen table we sat as she recounted one of dozens of stories from her previous life. How it works is that she identifies a specific relationship that drives a resentment–a reliving of anger–only relinquished by humbly and honestly admitting the role she played in this stifling emotion–an inability to let go of perceived wrongs done to her in the past. When her daughter called, Eva had been working through a resentment against her mother who passed away suddenly several years ago.
Last Sunday I visited Eva’s church where the pastor baptized her. Dressed in a white linen sheet and shower cap, two church men walked her up the stairs to a long wooden rectangle way behind the ordinary pews. Inside this spiritual geometrical shape was water. First, the pastor, an elderly gentleman, walked in the three feet deep water. Then his friend followed. Both men stood tall and ready to welcome Eva into the water; she reached, unsteady at first, for their strong hands and they all met in one clutch. Back she went as the pastor held her nose and dipped her quickly. Everybody clapped and most cried including me. Reborn at 58-years-old.
I saw her daughter at the ceremony. She wore resentment on her face bright as the sunny day; she also wore the same party dress working for a Saturday night and not for a Sunday morning. But she looked beautiful whenever her face didn’t turn towards her Mama because then she scrunched up tight, silently angry at the loss. Eva’s son has never touched a drug in his life. Truly, he looks like a choir boy in his early 20s. Stunningly handsome he works at Starbucks and has already cut a CD of music. He told me it’s his way out and through the difficult times. He still lives in the house where his grandparents raised him. Eva often asks for her children to give her a kiss and let her know how she’s doing. Children raising parents is never easy to watch.
Addiction reduces everyone to childish behavior; numbing out to the world doesn’t give anyone the chance to grow up. Even though I’ve moved to a new neighborhood, I still encounter folks without a home living on the street a few feet from my front door. I haven’t seen in a while the woman I befriended in the park near my old home. I still hope to connect with her.
Mostly though the story is the same. In front of the Safeway way out here on La Playa Avenue just a block from the Pacific Ocean, I met Dave the other night. He has a fascinating drawl when he repeats to everyone who walks by, “I don’t mind. I really don’t mind at all if you have a penny. I like pennies. I don’t mind them at all.” One woman knew him and broke open the container of cookies to give him three chocolate chip ones. His face is weathered and ruddy around blood shot eyes. “I have a good heart and that’s enough, right?” he asked me, child-like and hopeful.
I smiled but switched the topic–my valiant stand not to enable, an effort more to protect my heart-strings than his.
I asked him and he said he had lived on the street a very, very long time. “Sure, I got problems I can’t get over,” he concluded. Right, that’s it; addicts stew over resentments that bind them to drinking and using–forever in most cases. Yet some grow tired of feeling so sick and tired of the same old pattern. Eva finally reached for sobriety, ten months of them.
In working with her I am lucky enough to witness how close her past could have been my future. Addiction is an equal opportunity employer and discriminates against nobody. Sure, on paper the socioeconomics between Eva and I are different but at the end of the day we are cut from the same cloth. That’s why AA works so well. Mostly for alcoholics but for anyone actually. The steps simply help a person accept human limitations and so in turn live by compassion principles. That’s all and it’s damn simple.
A woman who I admire deeply said the other day over coffee and deep in the throes of laughter, “I’m just a drunk.” Yes, she was and at the same time she earned a bachelors degree in science from an excellent east coast school and now prepares to become a doctor; funny, kind, empathetic, brilliant, and beautiful–she sure doesn’t look like a drunk four years into her sobriety. But there you have addiction. Exteriors reveal nothing. Addiction is an interior job and predictions are way off who will become intimately acquainted with its dynamics. Why doesn’t Eva’s son use and drink like his sister?
In fact, Eva’s son looked remarkably similar to the clean cut and golden handsome young man I saw today in line behind me at Safeway around 7:15 a.m. as I was on my way to work. He placed one cold 20-ounce Heineken on the conveyor belt just moving forward into his day. He refused to make eye contact with anyone because that’s how shame works. Why him? He actually looked so talented standing there.
Walking home from work tonight on Market Street near Fourth in San Francisco, I stopped to give a dollar to a bearded guy sitting on the sidewalk with a sign: “Staying positive and hoping for kindness.” Not more than ten feet away, four men and a woman worked diligently to replace a heavy gilded metal door, one half of the entrance into The Palace Hotel. These five adults struggled to fit the door back on; earlier it was removed so a Rapide Aston Martin could drive onto the marble entryway and remain as a center piece decoration.
I am curious how mature is it to drive an expensive toy like this? Funny how other addictions besides chemical ones also retard growing up. How far apart are Eva’s daughter drunk on crack hoping for a car to appear out of thin air and the consumer high on material prestige stumbling greedily into signing the contract for this luxury car?
At the end of this day, I couldn’t help but chuckle in a disturbed and grateful way over how blessed I am. Life is smooth. My elitist life cocoons me. Living in a country where a predicted sales price of a car for $260,000 rests easy on display while outside a cacophony of human voices asking for some spare change, bankrupt by addiction, bereft of a stable start in life, I humbly whisper to myself as I look into the eyes of a street person, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Posted by karolinawrites 