Tag Archives: addiction

Progress

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VINCE

I saw the doctor today. They told me they have to switch my medication because insurance won’t cover it. I’ll be going on something called Cinnamon, or Sinamet, or some such shit. I was really happy with my Mirapex: no side effects and it did the job. But it would appear as if it is not my choice.

Orientation was boring, but not as boring as sitting in my cell doing nothing. We got to watch the PREA (Prison Rape Elimination Act) video again, which I still find hilarious. I’m sure if ever there was one thing that would completely eliminate prison rape, it would be a half hour video tape from the late 80s, in which men with mustaches talk about blowing their cellies for candy bars. Have some dignity, guys. Hold out for a bag of coffee or something.

In the 10 days that I’ve been in general population, I have learned everything that they spoke on in the orientation. And anything that wasn’t covered could be found in the handbook we received the night before. So for nine days, we had questions that needed answers. We found answers, in one way or another, to questions that all could have been avoided by giving us the God-damned…. Sorry, mounting frustrations.

It would appear that this prison, like St. Cloud, is run by 200 people in 300 different departments. And none of them seem to want to deal with prisoners.

Today I found out I got the one open industry job in the garments factory. Or, garments building, I don’t know. I’ll be making the clothing for inmates in all Minnesota prisons. I’m excited not only because I got the best and highest-paying job out there, but because I will no longer be on room restriction as of Monday. Until now, I’ve been stuck in my room after noon every day. I couldn’t go to the gym except for on weekends. Now I can really begin my training.

I haven’t been able to get on the treadmill since Sunday. So I’m sure when I get back on it Saturday it’ll be just like the first time.

—

Am I just lazy? Mybae. Smotemies I relay dn’t want to erxecise. I have gnoe to the gym ticwe in the past two dyas, walkeld one mlie, then lfet. I couldn’t even stay for an hour. Ugh.

—

Today, I said I would do it.

Today, I said I would not give up.

Today, I succeeded.

I ran a whole mile. In 10 min, 36 secs. Not bad.

Moose Lake and the Dozen Dwarfs

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ANNE

I visited Vince at Moose Lake. It was “not too bad,” as we say in Minnesota to mean, “it was awful.”

IMG_2827

The guard who accompanied me through the clanging locked doors was friendly; too much so. After all, I had seen Orange is the New Black by now and I wondered if he would go home and think about me. That’s a nice way of putting it.

The waiting room was “decorated” in grey and teal, with paintings depicting bucks that would be a hunter’s wet dream, Bald Eagles, and a log cabin in the woods with an American flag flying in its front yard.

Could it be even grimmer than St. Cloud? Yes, because it was built as the State Hospital for the Insane in 1936, during the Great Depression, so austerity was the guiding principle in its design.

IMG_2831

I was directed by a CO sitting on a dais to greet Vince on the “hug rug”, which was pretty much what it sounds like—a two-by-four foot rug where inmates and visitors were allowed their brief hug in front of a CO.

Vince knew it had been an old mental hospital. I explained how Ronald Reagan had emptied out all the mental hospitals in the 80s, under the cover of “helping people live in the community rather than institutions.” Community turned out to mean mentally ill people huddled under bridges and in homeless shelters, because the community programs were so underfunded. I told him how Ronald Reagan had slashed benefits for the widows and orphans of veterans, including me, and how I still held a grudge toward the old bastard who conservatives seemed to hold up as a saint.

“Reagan must have forgotten a few mentally ill guys here, mom. There’s this guy who must have an IQ under 70 who sucks his thumb and tries to hide it by covering it with his sleeve.”

And a guy in the cell next to his had breast implants. His cellie, his lover, had been transferred and Vince could hear him whimpering at night.

He talked about how Moose Lake was the repository for sex offenders, who he referred to as men who are “that way.” He glanced around each time he said this; apparently bad mouthing sex offenders was an offense in itself. Vince claimed there were no statistics posted online for Moose Lake because 75% of the offenders there were chomos. I will cover that in my next post.

Vince leaned forward and looked around the room to see if anyone was listening. “Mom, when you get home, do some research and find out why there are so many dwarfs in here.

“What?” I asked.

“Yeah. There’re at least a dozen. And one midget.”

He moved on to the next topic, how the inmates here had so little privacy that they defecated in the showers, and how he and his two buddies were playing a game of who would find a hair in their food at each meal, because there was always hair in the food.

He asked me to research something about “two-thirds, first offense” legislation, but since neither of us was allowed to have a pen or paper, I can’t recall what it was now. Some great advocate I am!

“The AA group is just a bunch of old timers telling war stories, so my buddies and I started our own group. We’re all above-average intelligence.” I walked him through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and he seemed to pay close attention.

We talked about his health. “They took me off Mirapex to save money, and put me on a new drug, so I was kicking all night with my Restless Legs—you know how it is.” Indeed I do. “They finally told me they’d had me on a child’s dose.”

Personal Hygiene

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VINCE

Today I was moved out of the six-man room into a more traditional two-man. We call it rolling the dice: Who will I get as a roommate? Well I did alright. My cellie is roughly 55, retired, and has a few too many DUIs. He will be my roommate for the duration of my stay in Moose Lake.

He’s clean, quiet, smart, and he has coffee!

We spend an hour or so getting acquainted and it becomes obvious that we’re going to get along. Another big step. I am now comfortable. Tomorrow morning I finally attend the orientation to Moose Lake. The future looks promising.

Once I get a job, the time will fly by. I have put in applications for every available position in every department. And although I have heard that anywhere in the kitchen/diningroom is the worst possible place to work, I believe it is where I will be most valuable. Unfortunately, they will probably not want my opinions or advice. I do hold a food safety certificate from the Minnesota Department of Health through 2015, so I may be eligible for something better than “general worker.”

ANNE

Three years ago, despite all his food safety training, Vince got Salmonella. He was violently ill for a couple weeks and couldn’t work. He didn’t want me to visit him until the worst was over. His friend Seth tended to him; I’ll leave it to Vince whether he wants to provide any of the gory details. When I finally saw him, the skin on his hands was bright red and hard from the prolonged dehydration.

He didn’t have health insurance so he racked up some substantial medical bills. Since Salmonella is a potentially fatal communicable disease, the Minnesota Department of Health conducted an investigation but couldn’t determine the source of the infection. Was it from Vince’s work as a cook? Did he get it on his friend’s farm—or while hunting? Any contact with animals, dead or alive, or their feces, could have done it. So his medical costs weren’t covered by Workers’ Compensation, and his employer didn’t pay sick time, so he was just (sorry) shit out of luck.

Whenever things like this happen to my son, I hear the voices of condemnation and judgment in my head. They say it was his fault that all this happened—he didn’t finish college so he wasn’t at a safe desk job with health benefits and paid sick leave. He didn’t have any savings. Maybe he was high or drunk and didn’t take the right precautions….

This is something we are particularly good at in America; we blame the poor for their plights and we hold on to the illusion that if they just worked harder and kept it up for another five or 10 years, they could become successful—in fact, they could make it big!

I am grateful for Obama Care. It’s not perfect, but at least once Vince is out he’ll have health insurance.

A Job with Benefits

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VINCE

I am currently in a six-man pod, sort of what I think a dorm room might be like.  Right now, I am the only person in it.  I feel like any moment, a tumble weed will roll on by, just passing through, like all my roommates thus far.

This is the only six-man pod in the unit.  It is where everybody goes their first day.  People move or SRD (Supervised Release Date) all the time, so there is quite a turnover in this room.  No, not the pastry.  I happen to be next in line to move, and there are five people on the way here from Brainerd, but for now, I’m all alone.  I will be moved to a two-man room as soon as one becomes available, probably tomorrow.

—

Ouch!  The ladders on the bunks are on what was the foot side of the bed at St. Cloud.  I hit my head on the sharp steel foot step.

Song list, cont: Rastaman Chant, Busta Rhymes; End of the Line, Traveling Willburys; Love, Reign Over Me, the Who; Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You, Sugarloaf; Flash, Queen; and Flower, by Moby.  That’s the song from the opening credits of Gone in 60 Seconds.  I don’t know any other Moby songs, just to let the ladies know.

—

For about three years, my routine in Lanesboro rarely changed.  I would occasionally leave town and go as far as Fountain, about eight miles, to hang out with my good friend Seth.  We had known each other since I moved to Fountain three years earlier.  We were non-gay soulmates.

I took my excessive drinking farther than anybody in my friend group.  Start early, go late, every penny of my disposable income went to drinking, weed, cigarettes, and gambling.  I had a perfectly good driver’s license but thankfully, no car.  So that was it for that three years, then I got fired from the restaurant, lost my apartment, and pretty much everything like my mom wrote, and eventually had to move in with Seth in Fountain, where I was able to secure jobs at the two restaurants in the town.

I moved out of Seth’s after about a year and got my own place again, right across the street from work. After a while I was full time at the Bent Wrench, where I was allowed to have a tab.  Oops.

—

[ANNE: My organization played a lead role in the release of what’s referred to as “the torture report” on the CIA’s interrogation activities post 9/11, in which they water boarded people, left them soaking wet in cold cells, suspended by shackles, or given “rectal feedings”, which are really just a medieval torture, according to a medical doctor on our board of directors who has literally written the book on physicians’ complicity in torture.

Why do I mention this? Because 50% of the American public still thinks torture was necessary and acceptable. So why would they give a shit about someone like Vince? If they think it’s okay to water board some guy in Gitmo, why would they care one iota about Vince—a self-confessed druggie–rotting in solitary, or being denied family visits, or other minor but repeated indignities?

It seems to me that Conservatives love their families and friends and forgive them anything, but are harshly judgemental of strangers, while Liberals love strangers but can be indifferent to their family and friends.

Rodney King had it right when he asked, during the LA riots following the acquittal of the LAPD officers who had beaten him, “Can’t we all just get along?”]

Christella Clear

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ANNE

My sister’s request for visitor status was denied. She hadn’t actually signed her name, she had typed it in a fancy script. I can understand that.

—

My uncle died. He and my aunt lived three doors down from my family growing up. You might expect me to say he was like a father to me, since my dad had died, but he was an uncle, which is even better. He was kind and loving and innocent and curmudgeonly at the same time. He was a professor of English at a local private university and it was his life’s mission to teach proper punctuation and grammar and an appreciation of reading English Lit.

When my cousin and I were sorting through his belongings, I came across a hand-written thank you note that Vince had sent him for some little favor. It was so cute, so I mailed it to Vince, along with the funeral notice.

There was a postage stamp on the envelope of the thank you letter, so the prison blocked it. Vince got a cryptic notice that something had been mailed by someone and that it had been denied. Did he want to file a complaint, or give them permission to destroy it? After several phone calls we figured out what it was and Vince said he wanted to go to the mat to get it back. He filled out a request form to have the materials sent back to me. The prison accidentally mailed the form to me. I mailed it back to Vince. By then he had filed a second form. Three weeks have passed without a response.  I think they destroyed it and are hoping we’ll forget it.

—

My niece’s request for visitor status was denied. She moved a few weeks ago, so the address on her application form didn’t match the one associated with her driver’s license number. An honest mistake.

—

I sent Vince a photo of my sister with her new chemo ‘do:

Connie

He and my sister used to be very close. Life intervened, they hadn’t had much contact for years, but now prison and cancer had brought them back together.

I don’t know how it all transpired but a prison mate of Vince did a sketch from the photo, and Vince started asking if I had received a package. This went on for weeks. And more weeks.

Finally I did receive a very large, flat package. Inside it was a sketch:

Sketch

The return address was in Chicago, and there was a note on letterhead adorned with butterflies:

Dear Anne:

My name is Christella, I am the sister of an inmate that is a Moose Land Correctional Facilitees with your son Zinnce (I hope I got the name right). My brother was asked by your son to draw this picture, but they cannot give each other items so my brother mailed it to me and ask me to send it to you. Please send the enclose picture of the drawing to your son so he can see what Mark did.

I hope you like the drawing. Mark (my brother) told me the person in the photo was ill. I don’t know her name but I will keep her in my prayers, along with Mark and your son.

God Bless,

Christella

Beginnings

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VINCE

I am very happy to be out of St. Cloud. That was a horrible place. Nobody seemed to be running it. Or, to put it another way, 100 people seemed to be running it in their own different ways. So if we were told to do something by one guard, we could actually get in trouble if another guard did not like it. But then that same guard would back up the other guard. I can’t even explain it properly.

Mom may notice my writing become sloppier than usual. I am back down to a 4” flexible Bob Barker pen. I ordered some real pens for next week.

—

Back to the future.  OK.  So since I was about 16 years old, I have been keeping track of how many miles I have run total.  Over the last two days, I have run a total of 3/4 mile, bringing my total over the last 20 years to 3/4 of a mile. Ahhh. I’m funny.

Today, I did about eight minutes of the Reebok Step program.  I just did the footwork, sort of trying to get the timing down.  It’s tougher than it looks.  I went two total miles on the treadmill, alternating between walking and running.  I was able to run 1/4 mile at a time.  But my muscles just aren’t used to that much activity.  Even outside of the drug-dealing, at my real jobs, all I really did was stand in one spot for 8-12 hours per day.

A little farther every day.  Without trying to overdo it, I think I’ll be good to go by the time I go.  I need to stretch first, too.  If I am injured while at Boot Camp, that is considered a program failure.  And I would have to sit the remainder of my time in prison.  Just over two more years.  I can’t fail.  Rather, I do not want to fail.

The Creep

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ANNE

Ouch. That Eminem song … so many ways I could go with that.

—

When I was in Istanbul in November, there was a guy from the Philippines in my meetings. His name was J.P. Morgan. No, J.P. Morgan is not a Filipino name. His father had changed the family name in hopes that it would bring prosperity. It didn’t.

I happened to be seated next to J.P.—John—on a dinner cruise the first night. I thought, “Oh no, trapped on a boat for three hours next to this guy—what could we possibly have in common?”

But then we started talking and by the end of the cruise I was calling him “son” and he was calling me “mom.”

John’s father was an alcoholic who had left the family when John was small. John was pimped out at the age of 10, sold to strangers for sex until he was too old and no longer desirable—19 or 20—and he began pimping out younger kids in order to make a living and survive.

By the time I met him, John was Vince’s age, had recovered long ago, and ran a recovery program for street kids. Here we are, talking about his “River of Life” program.  To prostituted young men, John has become their idol, big brother, and mentor. Everybody, including notorious gang leaders, listens intently to John and follows every word he says.

JP Morgan

John and another sex worker had had a son together. He was a teenager now, and John was doing his best to keep tabs on him, though the mother was an addict and moved around a lot.

I asked John if he thought that kids being raised by single mothers was the biggest reason that kids got in to trouble. He looked squarely at me and wagged his finger. “No. It is not the mothers. It’s the fathers.” Alcoholic fathers. Abusive fathers. Fathers who gamble away their paychecks. Fathers who leave.

—

On Vince’s first birthday I called to invite his father to have cake with us, and he said he was too busy with “business.” A drug deal, in other words. I never saw him again, except briefly in a crowd.

From time to time I would ask Vince if it bothered him that he didn’t have a father. “Let’s just call him The Creep,” he said once, and we laughed and I never really got an answer, if he had one to give.

Vince never asked about The Creep. The Creep’s dad had been a barge worker and his mother was a telephone operator who had grown up on a reservation. They lived in a dilapidated farm house in Rush City filled with cigarette smoke and no heat and large bowls of bite-sized Snickers and a big-screen TV. The Creep and I visited his grandmother once, on the rez. She lived in a tar paper shack without indoor plumbing or electricity.

I never mentioned to Vince that the Creep had been a drug dealer from a small town who didn’t have a car or a phone, a high-school dropout who worked as a clerk in a gas station. A guy who aspired to nothing more than hanging out with his friends, drinking and smoking pot, laughing and telling stories about drinking and smoking pot. I never mentioned any of these things because I didn’t want Vince to be influenced by them, if he harbored some unconscious admiration for The Creep.

The Creep had had a son with another woman before I met him, and went on to father four more children. I got $103 in child support once, but that was it.

—

I’m not trying to shift blame; after all I must have had a far stronger influence on Vince since I was there 24/7 for 16 years, right?  I don’t spend all day analyzing and angsting over why Vince is who he is.  But for every Vince, there are 10,000 more like him in prison, in Minnesota alone.  I’m sure they all derailed for a different mix of complicated reasons, just as I succeeded despite a complicated mix of factors that should have kept me down.  If someone could figure it all out, they would deserve to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Babies

We Are Who We Are

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VINCE

We Are Who We Are

My brain is so easily distracted.  My mom emailed some of my older blog posts and I saw my list for a perfect mixed tape.  Well, I simply must make another…Tangerine, Led Zeppelin; Blinded by Rainbows, Rolling Stones; One More Cup of Coffee, Bob Dylan.

One particular song reminds me of me and some parts of my relationship with my mother: Headlights, by Eminem.

[Lyrics not shared here due to copyright issues.]

Sprung!

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VINCE

I made it!  Right after breakfast they changed me out of solitary and took me downstairs to Unit 10, the best unit according to word of mouth.

Already I’ve heard good news.  People are going to Boot Camp early!  One guy said his letter told him April, and he’s locked in for February!

This place is massive.  Until I get a job, I’m only allowed out of my cell until noon, after my first day.  Once I have a job, I’m free to spend my day training or reading or really doing anything I choose.  So far I have chosen to take a really long shower, with all my own hygiene items.  And that was exactly what I needed.

Next step, figure out my schedule, then develop a routine.  I know sooner than later I have to get to the P90X workout.  Cardio is huge at Boot Camp, along with five miles per day, the P90X is used in winter.  Five miles is rain or snow or shine.  I’m a little nervous about getting started.  I know I can do it, it’s just a matter of keeping focused.  I have trouble keeping my thoughts on one activity for very long.

Or on one subject, for that matter.  Next subject.  Actually, I’ll continue on Lanesboro.

I have mentioned the town in previous posts, about working in a couple of the restaurants there.  Well that’s not all I did.

—

OK, sorry, I’ll have to get back to Lanesboro.  I did my first real cardio exercise in quite a while.  To qualify for Boot Camp, you have to be able to walk or run a mile in 14 minutes.  I failed, but not by too much.  I will try every day and I will improve.  I also played four games of volleyball.  So I kept my heart rate up for about an hour, and it felt pretty good.

I watched about five minutes of people doing the P90X thing.  All I have to say to the person that invented that is Fuck You.  Fuckin asshole.

—

Lanesboro is a town of 788.  It has been named the B&B Capital of America or some such shit.  So in the summer, the town can swell into the thousands.  10,000 or more for Buffalo Bill Days.  In the winter, however, almost everything closes down…except for the bars.

That’s where I learned that it’s okay to have six beers before breakfast, skip breakfast, and go straight to the bar to start getting a good buzz on.

Usually by noon I could be near blackout, eat a small lunch, then go home and take a nap. That way I could go out and get drunk with the evening crowd too.

Even on my work days I could show up fairly hammered as long as I could function.  I could even pull beers off the tap during the slow days of winter to keep a nice, even buzz.

Pause…Good news: It’s not the P90X that we have to do and practice.  It’s the Reebok Step video.  My apologies to the creator of the P90X workout.  I’m sure it’s a fine program.  For insane people.  My verbal assault was out of line.

Ashamed of Ashamed

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ANNE

Did you know it’s possible to feel ashamed of feeling ashamed?

Well it is. A couple times, Vince and his friends came to St. Paul for the weekend and stayed with me. They brought everything one needs for an overnight:

BoozeCigs

And since I live in a nonsmoking building, they smoked out in front of the building, or took their home-rolled cigarettes and a cooler full of beer up to the roof and played poker up there. I would bring up a platter of food—hard boiled eggs, olive tapenade, crackers, some fruit—up to them but they wouldn’t touch it.   Once I bought four kinds of sausages at Whole Foods, figuring they were meat eaters, but they wouldn’t touch them–too froo froo.

Vince took his shoes off inside my door, as he had been trained to do from childhood:

Shoes

This is where the shame came in. Here I was, living in what was billed as a “luxury” apartment building, and my son wore shoes like this. And then I felt ashamed of feeling ashamed.  Of being such a snob.

Whoa! Time for a cute kitten photo!

kitten

(Did I mention I do kitten fostering for the humane society?)

Anyway, another time we all went for sushi—Vince’s and my all-time favorite food. And he couldn’t eat it. He had to leave the table to be sick, and then I noticed that his abdomen was distended and my bubble of denial that he was “just drinking” was burst.

I had attended the family program at Hazelden, I knew the medical symptoms of chronic alcoholism, including liver disease.

—

A number of people have said to me that it must be kind of relief that Vince is in prison. At least I know where he is, he can’t drink or smoke, yatta yatta. Yeah, these things are true and they are good, although drugs and alcohol can be had, even in prison.

All I can do is keep my focus on myself—examining my embarrassment and guilt over that embarrassment, forgiving myself for being human, for having feelings, for having mixed feelings.