ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Parks has spent half his life living in trailers in southwest Arkansas and the other half in cosmopolitan Portland, Oregon. He has been published in The River Poets Journal and on the Green Leaves Press website.

She Was a Beautiful Person

By Daniel Parks


"So I said, 'Fuck your People magazine, you pieces of shit!'"

Bus stop. After work. Some tweaker is telling me her life story. She is a huge woman with long greasy brown hair and a dirty wife beater that shows me way more of her enormous breasts than I would care to see. There is a large tattoo of a cow on the left one. She tells me she is planning on having the pentagram from the cover of the second Disturbed album tattooed right in the middle of her chest. Very fitting, I thought. Whatever had pissed her off about People magazine had happened during one of her apparently numerous trips to the hospital. Or was it jail? She jumps from story to story so quickly that it’s hard to keep up.

"My brother-in-law's trial for child molestation is next month and I'm going to be there," she says. "I hope they chain him down in solitary confinement like they did to me when I was pregnant. They probably already sewed his mouth shut."

"What do you mean, ‘sewed his mouth shut’?" I foolishly ask.

"You know, because they don't like child molesters in jail," she clarifies.

What in the hell was she talking about?

She had immediately begun speaking to me when I walked up to the bus stop to catch the number 12 into downtown. She began by confiding that she hoped the bus would arrive soon so she could hurry home to the bag of crystal meth that would be waiting for her. She had apparently given her money to a couple of friends earlier that day to score the bag for her and she just hoped that they hadn't already done it all.

"I got money hidden all over the house and I hope they don't find it because I caught them lookin’ in the fridge with the CDs and the frying pan. And the candles."

"Wait a minute," I couldn't resist interrupting, "you have CDs in the fridge? And a frying pan?"

"Yeah, because I put the money in the CD cases and wrapped 'em up and hid 'em in the fridge with the frying pan and the candles. Two unlit candles."

Right. Because lit candles would be just crazy.

After a while I started to feel bad for just sitting there listening to her talk about her obviously fucked-up life and even encouraging her to tell me more.  I felt as though maybe I should have been trying to say something positive. You know, something like, “Maybe you should consider carrying your money with you in your purse, or even get a bank account. I’ve always found bank accounts to be a good way of keeping people from stealing my secret refrigerator money.” I wanted to suggest that maybe she could find another hobby besides doing crystal meth, like perhaps bird watching or stamp collecting. She could get a ham radio. She would just have to keep in mind that the voices coming over the radio were not the government spying on her, n or the voice of God commanding her to set herself on fire.

"I watched my friend overdose in that club right over there," she said, pointing down the street. "And when I went to the funeral it was already over." Maybe that was me. At the funeral too late. But then again, I’ve done enough speed and coke myself to know that she would have talked to the street light if I hadn't been there.

"...Because I am a good person. Well, there is somebody I want to rob because he robbed me before. He lives in this big house with all his friends and they got all these radios and TVs and I just want to go over there and bust in and tie 'em all up and throw 'em in the bathtub together."

She probably was a good person once. We all start out that way, I think. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with wanting your friends to enjoy a nice bath together, right?

"...And he came home from spending three hours with that bitch and he wouldn't even kiss me on the mouth. So you know what I did? I wrote a poem. A full-page poem about how I wasn't going to let him touch my hair anymore."

Damn right! Who does he think he is? I very much wished that I could read that poem.

I still couldn’t shake the idea that I was somehow using this poor woman because I really just wanted her to keep talking so I could go home and write a story about it. I may as well have been pilfering through her refrigerator with the other tweakers looking for hidden compact discs.  There was however another reason I kept listening to her.

The truth is that I could very much sympathize with this woman on a personal level. A couple of years ago I left my home in Portland, Oregon and flew back to Arkansas to stay with my parents for a while in the small town where I grew up. The name of the town is Blevins and it has a population of roughly 350 people. There is nothing there but forests of pine trees and old gravel roads leading through the woods to broken-down trailers. In other words, it is the perfect place for enterprising chefs to set up their chemicals and just cook the night away. I didn’t realize that when I was growing up there though. In fact, before I moved to Portland I only came across meth a couple times.

The first time was when I saw the father of one of my best friends standing at his bathroom counter and using a razor blade to chop up a large rock of bathtub crank into lines. I was about sixteen years old. He offered me a small line to snort, which I accepted, and then gave me advice on how to identify a good batch. I can only imagine what it must have been like for my friend to grow up there. To be fair, my friend’s fourteen-year-old sister had just died in a horrible car wreck and his dad was taking it very badly. But that is a different story for another time. There were times when my friend’s parents could be the sweetest and most caring people I have ever known. I never felt afraid or threatened in that house, no matter how bad things got. They took me in and loved me and accepted me.

For obvious reasons it was the party house to most of the kids that lived around town. Any night of the week you could go there and find the house full of people. There would be kids from age twelve or thirteen and up hanging out with adults and everyone would be drinking booze and smoking weed and playing guitar and singing together. My friend’s mom was always in the kitchen cooking up fried chicken and mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese and biscuits. It was great. I had some of the best times of my life there and I was never offered anything harder than marijuana by any of the adults except that one time after their daughter died.

So that night I snorted the little line of speed my friend’s father gave me and then just went off and had a blast hanging out with my friend and his younger brother. I remember playing cards with the two of them and then suddenly jumping up in the middle of the game and wrestling my friend to the ground. His younger brother jumped in and we rolled around and laughed like lunatics until we couldn’t laugh anymore. We got up off the floor in each other’s arms and then spent the rest of the night drinking whiskey and smoking pot and just being happy that we were young and alive and had each other to laugh and play with.

The second time I came across meth was far more tragic. I was about nineteen years old and my girlfriend and I were visiting one of her friends that she worked with at the nursing home. I didn’t really know anyone there very well but at some point a girl that I had dated briefly in middle school suddenly burst through the door. She began franticly searching the house and calling out the name of one of the other people who lived there. When my girlfriend and I caught up to her and asked her what was up she revealed a Tylenol bottle that she was carrying and told us that it was filled with liquid ephedrine. She said she was looking for one of her friends that lived there who could help her cook the stuff up into meth. She said she needed to find some needles. Her eyes darted fiercely around the room as she licked her lips and told us that she felt as though she were living inside a video game.

At that point in our lives neither my girlfriend nor I had had any bad experiences with drugs or addiction. We both smoked weed every day and usually drank on the weekends and we didn’t have any problems. We really had no frame of reference with which to judge the scene playing out before us and really didn’t know what to say or do.
The girl who had suddenly burst through the door had a very religious father who was also a preacher. There were rumors when we were all growing up that he liked to beat her and her older sister and some of us suspected that he did even more than beat them. But we had always known that things like that were happening all around us to our friends. We accepted it as just another part of life that was unfair and believed that it was something we would have no control over until we were adults and could move away.  And even though my girlfriend and I were now young adults I guess we sort of took it for granted that our friend was going to have a hard life from here on out and that there was still nothing we could do about it. We were a little concerned for our friend but we assumed that she would eventually work out her own problems for herself. We basically laughed the whole thing off and left to go to my house and get high. That girl who had just frantically come into the room looking for a needle to shoot up drugs with was my first kiss in middle school. She was funny and cute and was always doing silly things like stuffing her bra with water balloons. One of them fell out once while we were walking to class. She was a beautiful person. The last I heard she was in jail.

When I left Portland briefly to go back to my childhood home in Arkansas I expected things to be pretty much just as they always were. I assumed I could look up my old friends and we would maybe hang out and drink some beer and smoke some pot and have a great time. Instead what I came home to was a town overrun with meth. When I ran into my old best friend whose father had offered me my first taste of speed the first thing he did was invite me to the house he shared with his wife and infant child and hint that he had something to show me. Well, you can guess what it was he wanted to show me. When I got to his house he took me into his kitchen and pulled out an electronic scale and little baggies filled with crystals. “You know what this is, man?” he asked me. “It’s crystal meth. You want to get fucking higher than you’ve ever been?”

Over the next year I would find out what it’s like to go without sleep or food for days on end until you are hallucinating. I would watch in terror as a thirteen-year-old girl thrashed her body around the back seat of a car and screamed with tears in her eyes about the spiders that were crawling underneath her skin after she had spent untold days and nights shooting up homemade crank. I would sit in an old abandoned trailer and watch the roaches climb up the walls as a cadaverous hillbilly cooked up meth in a skillet while telling me about the FBI agents who were staked out in the old bank building across the street taking pictures of us all. I would sit outside at five in the morning and listen to the trees talk to me. I would be scammed and ripped off repeatedly by my oldest friends and relatives and I would do the same to my own family. I would steal my father’s Xanax pills and take the money my mother needed to feed her seven-year-old child. I would stand outside a stranger’s house in the middle of the night, looking through his bedroom window as I watched my friend crawl across the floor to steal the wallet right out of his pants. I would hold a cocked and loaded shotgun aimed at my friend’s attic, utterly sure that there was someone up there just waiting to get me. All these things and more I would do over the course of the next year in the name of experience and knowledge.

Now I was standing at a bus stop listening to a woman describe her own version of the hell we had both shared and all I could do was think about how much I hoped the bus would arrive soon so I could hurry home and write down the secrets of her life that she had been dumb enough to confide in me.

"So I said, 'Fuck your People magazine, you pieces of shit!'"

Indeed.



Published January 2010