After I wrote the last post, I went on an archeological dig in my parents’ basement. There is a cardboard pyramid in the corner of things that I refuse to throw away, but never keep with me. When I emerged from the cave, I had four boxes of old letters, photographs, concert tickets, a giant stuffed chicken from FAO Schwartz. I even found small scraps of paper on which I had taken notes from Carmen San Diego, and my report card proving that I had found her, and earned my A. I carried them upstairs. As I unearthed old clothes, I had adorned myself. I went down barefoot, in jeans and a tank top and emerged in tights, striped socks, Doc Martens, a Pearl Jam t-shirt with a plaid flannel over it. In the mirror, the ghost of 1993 stared back at me.
Inside one of the boxes was one of the mixtapes that my best friend and I made that summer. I also found a Walkman that still worked. So, I listened to the warbled tape, purchased each song on it, and made a playlist on iTunes. During “Rhinoceros”, I found the box of letters from some of the kids who were locked up with me in one of those mental institutions that were popular in the 90s. None of us was crazy, at least not certifiably, but we’d be caught running away from home, or with a bong hidden under the bed, come home drunk from a party, or failed trigonometry. Most of us were living the motto, “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” the 90s incarnation of “Parents,They Just Don’t Understand.” In 1993, there weren’t just parents to rage against. There was a machine.
Through the miracle of social networking sites, I found the boy on the other side of the wall. So, I knocked. He wrote back within two minutes: a phone number with a Seattle area code and the words, “call me.”
“I try not to remember,” he said, “so, I don’t.”
Still, he has the necklace I gave him hanging from his guitar. I still have the notes exchanged under the door when I was sleeping on a mattress in the lobby. I was about a hundred pounds then, pale white with black hair, a slip of a girl, but they thought I might find a way to bust through four sets of bolted doors and jump over a brick wall three times my height. I took this as a compliment.
“I remember Jeff,” I said on the phone. He did too. “I don’t think he’s around anymore,” I said. He’s on the other side of the wall.
I was on the mattress under the clock by the staff desk when Jeff came in. His ankles and wrists were shackled. When they unlocked him, he ran up and down the hallway like a caged animal, roaring as he hit the wall and turned to run the other way. He was six feet tall, weighed 110 pounds, and had a crack addiction. He was malnourished and given cans of Ensure several times a day, and wouldn't acknowledge anyone. After a few days, his blue eyes had soul in them, and he started to speak.
He might well be the kindest person I’ve ever met. He was gentle, curious, childlike. He had a fifth grade education. His mother was an addict herself. No one taught him how to be good, he just knew. He taught me the proper pronunciation of “ain’t” and how to make moonshine from apples, in case I was ever in prison and needed a drink. He taught me that some drugs don’t grow from seeds, but are made in bathtubs. When he managed to smuggle in a cigarette taped to his dick, he offered it to me, first. I insisted he enjoy it and let him in on the secret pack of matches that we kept taped under the table in the common room. He taught me, without ever complaining once, that life is brutally unfair, that we are not all given the same opportunities, the same chance, or even a choice. He wanted more than anything to learn, to get out of his meth-infested suburb, but there was never much hope. When I told him that I loved him, he dropped his head in his hands and said through tears that it was the first time in his sixteen year old life that anyone had ever said those words to him. One of the letters I found was written the day before he was released. “I really, really love you,” it says, “so love me too, please.”
I had promised to save him. The last time I heard his voice, he was calling from a pay phone. He was about to smoke crack for the first time in three months, and I pleaded with him not to. “I’m in a lot of trouble,” he told me, “I can’t tell you what I done or else you may not love me no more.” For weeks, I left messages with his mother, and then his number was disconnected. I never heard from him again.
I remember one of the counselors pulling me aside one day and saying, “Holly, you’re different. You don’t belong here, and you know it. I lose sleep every night because I know most of these kids are not going to make it. There is hope for you. Do what you have to do, get out of here, and never come back.”
I did belong there. There was hope for all of us. And yesterday, I climbed inside cardboard boxes, and I went back.
On Halloween in 1993, it snowed in Atlanta, Georgia. We could see it falling from the window in the courtyard and begged to be let outside. For five minutes, under careful watch, we were allowed to feel the snow fall on us. This was, for fifteen teenagers who had been removed from the world, a miracle. Snow was as rare as freedom, and not nearly as precious.
They brought us inside, gave us fingerpaints, and told us we could paint the windows to decorate for our Halloween party. An anorexic painted a skeleton. The girl who sang hymns every night alone in her room carefully marked crosses on tombstones. She had buried something her religion disallowed. Shannon, the youngest of us, painted cobwebs. Her mother would allow her release under the condition that she admit she was lying about what her stepfather did. Jeff didn’t paint a thing. He just sat back in a chair, watching us with a big old grin on his face. We painted ghosts. Our bodies were trapped, but we were free.
By the next morning, the windows had been washed. The oak tree surrounded by the brick wall barely offered the light of the sun, and under it, on the concrete, remained a veil of white, the breath of something long dead and resurrected, the thin skin of ghost. Hope.
