Woman in #10
© 2001 By Timothy M. Leonard


It’s perfectly appropriate necessary and understandable on this overcast Pacific Northwest day full of fog and mystery watching her leave. She was finding her way in this hard cruel world. Have mercy.

She lives downstairs in apartment 10. A good number, 10, symbolizing one and zero, unity. She is from California with long bleached out blond hair, around 40, perhaps younger than memory, but her incessant rampant disease makes her look older. She pays the toll to get across the bridge. She is on a one-way trip. I am a passive observer in her life.

I don't see her very often but when I do I remember the Gazebo Group. She may have been in a group at one time or the other. The group of addicts gathered outside the hospital during treatment. The only place where addicts smoked was the gazebo. Fifteen plastic chairs in a circle around stone block ashtrays. I was surrounded by addicts in various stages of withdrawal from heroin, crack, speed, depressives and alcohol. There wasn’t a work-alcoholic in the group.

Everyone in the gazebo was trying to sort out their lives. Some talked about their insurance scam payment plans - buy now pay later their families, the nurses on wards of misery and abandonment, about the lack of doctors, the cement walls and their institutional care histories. I sat among lost lives and despair in their realities. The air was full of illness surrounded by recovery, dead eyes, muted laughter, faint hope and many repressed angry regrets. Addicts were huddled against slashing rain as smokers coughed in their collective misery. One day one step at a time. A film at night told us how endorphins help us feel good and how alcohol creates a false reality by blocking transmitters known as TIQ.

Gazebo addicts bummed quarters for a pay phone to reach friends and family. Tom told a story about how he relapsed after 25 years. How he just stopped, plain stopped one night while driving home when he saw a neon liquor sign flashing. “Vodka calling.” Down in the gazebo we heard patients scream and bang their heads against walls on the 5th floor. They are on a suicide watch. All the addicts are in various recovery attempts to regain self esteem. It is about surrendering personal control and finding trust. Turning our lives over to someone who knows what they are doing. The mother of all paradoxes. Addicts are wolves crying and howling in their self imposed vast wilderness of pain, hatred, agony, looking for self love in detox, weaving fanciful dreams, trying to get it all together. Some lived as if they were already dead.

I worked on my personal puzzle. Before I checked in after growing tired of it all living with a woman in a disastrous, self destructive relationship I played the rescuer, a father figure, and my victim turned around and sank her teeth into me. They always do. She tried to kill herself. I bailed her out of jail after they arrested her for disconnecting the 911 call and she went home for treatment.

I submitted to therapy. I learned I needed, if I was going to survive and be healthy, to acknowledge the fact, hard cold realistic truth that I wasn’t responsible for my mother’s death. I confronted this at the heart level, not the head level. In therapy before detox and group I broke down, cried and talked about old fears and self destructive behaviors my old angers and resentments. I gradually started taking more responsibility for my life.

I realized how potentially realistic, normal and centered our personalities in the relationship had changed during the last five months. How hatred, anger, sarcasm (hostility disguised as humor) and negativity were gradually replaced by caring, love and open trusting communication. How we finally let each other go and moved on with our respective lives for the sake of sanity, structure and stability.

The last thing she said to me on the phone from home sweet home after I mailed her stuff out including the silver blade she threatened to use one fateful evening was, “Well that saves me from another road trip.”

“Yes,” I said to her, “The road gets longer, lonelier and tougher. Take care of yourself.” The gazebo group searched and discovered triggers; a room, memory, face or place which set them off on their individual wild journey into addiction. We journeyed inside states of medicated bliss looking for endorphins and a sense of self responsibility to stay clean and sober. Water became a source of inspiration.

“I am sick,” an addict wrapped in blankets said, “So I drink to make myself feel better.” They were all agitated, nervous and apprehensive. I was curious about it all and knew it was ok. While wandering halls and sitting in the gazebo I had visions. I was in a sweat lodge ceremony down on the rez, walking through fire consuming fear and anger or sitting in a cave above tree line releasing toxins.

I don’t know how the woman in #10 works her insurance, even if she has any coverage. They sold her small blue pickup truck to pay the bills. She’s married to a guy with long hair always tied back in a pony tail. He’s a part-time flagger. We passed once down along the uneven asphalt path running next to the Sound where it crashes into the rocks swirling across from the prison lit up like an amusement park 3 miles away. He was walking their terrier and offered me a sweet.

“Care to have some Jolly Rancher?” he asked playing out the dog’s leash. “No thanks,” I said, turning down the craving.

That was the only time we spoke and I've lived here almost three years but I’m out of here tomorrow. We haven't been here very long but we've been here long enough.

Heading east along the Columbia river into the heat of the nuclear repository area where Department of Energy scientists try to figure out the procedure of making glass bricks - if that’s the answer - out of 53 million gallons of spent uranium left over from the 40’s and then bury the stuff before it leaks into the earth. I understand it’s already seeped down 130 feet and 250 is the max.

You know someone out there will really turn in their grave if that happens. Yes, I’ve been here in these parts long enough to have seen a lot, learned a lot and figured out a few things.

The woman in #10 came home the other day. Her girlfriend, maybe her sister for all I know, brought her home from somewhere, from some rehabilitation reality check-in from some group as an out-patient - checked out from a highly medicated sedated location in their old second hand small run-about of a car badly needing a tune up and radiator.

Seeing the way she staggered I knew it was from a detox unit. Hard time. Making sense living across the sound from a federal prison. Being a veteran of a jungle war 10,000 miles away and the group I recognized the symptoms easily enough. Her face was pale, shallow, pasty yellow. She looked like a zombie. She got out the car squeezing an extra large jumbo plastic soft drink with a straw bent at an angle. She shuffled across the parking lot and disappeared into shadows leaving the sound of a slammed door in her wake.

A couple of days later I heard her door slam downstairs. She passed into into view as her flip flop sandals flapped on asphalt shuffling along down the white ward of her memory. She negotiated a flat parking lot full of rusty second-hand cars and trucks along the pebbled hard methodical surface of her dream down the slope past parked
prison guard cars, jalopies, trucks with high chrome fenders, and second hand expeditionary gas guzzlers out on parole.

She weaved her inconsistent way down her slippery slope of hope past blue trash containers on wheels and headed to the marine dockside store. For years they sold bait, tackle, hook, line and sinker. Facing flat growth they switched to booze bait business to meet the needs of thirsty public prison workers, island tourists or locals. Quick and painless for those needing a quick fix, a quick nip-it-in-the-bud Jack’s Daniel dancing all a round. “Set’m up Mr. Bartender, one scotch, one bourbon and one beer,” Mr. John Lee Hooker said. Line and sinker.

The woman weaved her way her way way down and I knew where she was going. No doubt and no secrets revealed before torrential coastal rains swept the terrain clean as a whistle. She shuffled around the corner and headed toward her salvation escaping her self imposed prison of drudgery, boredom and malaise. Her ghost inside her dream staggered back uphill her thin right hand grasping the message of her salvation feeling the crude brown paper bag texture covering a bottle of elixir. Unbroken seal of approval.

She slammed her apartment door on the rest of her day. I never saw her desire again but I swear I heard someone screaming on the 5th.

The End


How I Spent a Weekend in August
©2001 Timothy M. Leonard

Day 1.

Scene 1.
Went to the movies. Celuloid heaven. Film clips. They flash all these ads before endless promotions of future films. One ad screamed out, “IF YOU DON’T ADVERTISE, NOTHING
HAPPENS!” Bank - parked in shade. Banter with teller. Told the teller a tale. One of them loves popcorn so we formed the PA, a 12-step recovery program. Will that be small, medium or large? Plain or buttered?

Scene 2.
Negotiated cement and asphalt toward the P.O. Fortunately the ‘walk softly’ mocs from Scott in Fantasy, New Mexico guided me to various rapidly disappearing green islands scattered throughout the maze of used car lots, university extension concrete structures and federally allocated handicapped parking zones.

Scene 3.
Buying stamps, specifically images from the Hubble Space Telescope with names like Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316 so of course I launched into a brief but stimulating discourse with the young postal worker woman about how amazing and wonderful the colors and definitions of the galaxies are and of course
mentioned how incredible it is to consider, even begin to glimpse we are inside a building talking over a counter, a barrier, while a frantic mother yells at her daughter, “DON’T touch the stamps” because at her age curiosity about colors lends itself toward exploration and up in the sky I tell the worker are all these really cool galaxies and she says, “That’s interesting, I never looked at the stamps before.” She hands me some change.

Scene 4.
Made in the shade. Talked to a crow and found a stick. Visited old shady trees while walking in thick grass ignoring human hammers building a new police station. Transformed myself into a blind person tapping stick to cross an intersection. Swear I heard drivers muttering under their breath. Wrote a check in braille for $33 to get new vehicle tags and continued tapping on various soft green avenues to bibliotech.

Scene 5.
A plastic glasses lens popped out and was replaced. Childrens’ story hour. Adults screaming as they donate blood in another room. Read about Pakistani, Indian and Chinese nuclear weapon stockpiles in the Himalayas.

Scene 6. Walked to Mandarin House for Mongolian beef, rice and tea. A lot of overweight people shoveling down their food while having domestic discussions about radioactive waste disposal and their frustrations getting teenagers to accept more responsibility. They left a small tip.

Day 2.

Scene 1.
Heat. Contacts after 6 months testing eyeball acceptance. Walk softly eating dried fruit. Liquidation warehouse. Bike shop to see what’s current in industry. Bookstore. No purchase - man wants to know if I have ‘found everything I’m looking for?’ - ‘Yes,’ I tell him, smiling, ‘I have everything I need.’ Found some new incense from Bangalore, India - wandered streets admiring cars covered in leaves and dirt with flat tires.

Scene 2.
Reading Borges, working on various manuscripts, poems. Nap. Reading and writing, web site revisions. Yogurt.

Day 3.
Herbal tea while downloading digital. Composing new projects - poetry collection, flash fiction, insects dancing in light. Two white butterflies in field of clover dancing to feed off purple life. Fed grapes to a colony of red ants. Red fire trucks, 2 pounds of fresh strawberries, blues music - Luther Allison - fresh sourdough bread. Lettuce doesn’t last long in this climate.