the misfit west

Category: Uncategorized

  • two tenths of a percent

    It snowed overnight. Almost five, my normal wake up time, and the yard lies white and quiet. Last night the house finches stayed at the feeder past sundown, orange chests puffed against the cold, working the nyjer like a last meal, the seed the bag calls thistle even though it isn’t, and the orange on them comes from whatever they eat. Every dusk they do it, and every dusk my mom and dad come back in with them. At church camp in Ekalaka I saved up my questions for God, where carrot seeds come from, where birds sleep, and the one that got me ostracized, whether my brother would go to heaven after stealing from my parents. The counselor asked if he had asked God into his heart. I didn’t buy it. One evening I looked over to the eaves of the bunkhouse and saw a single bird preening for sleep, fluffing his feathers, tucking his bill, lifting his leg, locking his grip.

    Last night a man who works at Sweet Melissa’s came over. He found me through my sobriety post, 1212 days, a post I was real scared to put up, but what if it could help someone, ego ego ego. It reached someone. He came in sniffing my walls for lead. He circled Undine Park three times the way a dog circles before it lies down, glad I cleaned it up, glad about the other garbage can, and every lap brought him back around to his basement apartment and what it costs him. He probably makes what I make. I work two to four hours a day. This is the nicest house I have lived in that wasn’t my parents’ (never mind the dishwasher that won’t pump), I pay for every inch of it, and I’m here all the time because Angel, my three-legged husky, can’t be left alone.

    I don’t do hard drugs, he told me, I would never shoot up, and he held it up like a clean plate. He is ninety-nine percent of everyone in treatment. When I went, two of us in the whole room had fetty as our drug of choice, and the room always looks like that, a few of us with tracks behind us who made it across. Meth and fetty don’t visit, they move in and put their name on the lease. I worked at Sweet Melissa’s until 2008 and left because I couldn’t stand in that much addiction anymore. He works there now. He called himself a moderate drinker, and by six his words were sliding off the table. Dude, I’m not scared of your darkness. You’re just getting it on my carpet.

    I need therapy but I’m poor, he said, more than once, like a chorus, so I offered spirituality, the cheap seats, and he hissed, not literally, but you know. I told him the 95 Theses are kinda important if you are going to shit on the Catholic Church. Who else is standing up for immigrants? For the poor? Hahaha, he said, the pope has lung cancer, the American one from Chicago, the one I had just prayed for by name.

    I gave him the stages of change, ambivalence, the whole map, and he planted his feet on the wrong side of every line. He wanted his liver to die, he said, and tossed it at me like a dare. He wasn’t bothering anyone, he said, from the middle of my house. You reached out to me, bro. He couldn’t trust anyone, he said, item nine on the PCL-5 almost to the word, strong negative beliefs about yourself, other people, or the world. When I got to my ecumenical meetings and what spirituality does for people in addiction, he left so fast my sentence was still hanging in the air.

    Go get treatment, bro. In 2023 under eight percent of people with an alcohol use disorder got any treatment at all. Twelve hundred and twelve days, and I had them out on the table all night like a hand of cards nobody asked to see. Dad used to slip his belt out of the loop so fast I swear I saw sparks.

    I thought about reaching back out, hey man, I didn’t mean to talk about God. But I did mean to. I had gone to prayer meeting for the first time and told him it was about recollecting my childhood. Somebody could have handed me help back then and I wouldn’t have known which end to hold. I for sure said at one point I don’t want to get better. Wyoming doesn’t hand out random conversations, you have to go knocking, and the only thing keeping my own damn self going is to close the laptop and knock anyway.

    I wrote my father’s obituary. He was taken home by his Father on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2008, it says, and he played the stock market with no regrets, even on the very day of his passing. He shielded me from my own personality, forever propping me up when people didn’t like me. That summer, the summer the Powder River Basin dug more coal than it ever has, I walked out of UW with an English degree and into a coal testing lab, because that’s what Wyoming had for me. Awful, tedious work. There was a sign up sheet for overtime and I signed up the way Dad would, and the other women pulled their names off my shifts one by one. We worked in pairs on swing shifts that mirrored the mines, twelve hours of somebody else’s silence.

    I came home and laid it all out, and he had my back, right there in front of my mom. A small thing, and it has stuck to me ever since. We kept the same hours, and I would call over to North Antelope Rochelle, the control room, and ask for Dave, and read him the sulfur from the lab, two tenths of a percent, the cleanest coal in the country coming out of his pit, and then we’d trade jokes and hang up.

    My last call to him came the night before. I said I wasn’t coming over, too cold on a night like that, and that I loved him. We joked, and that matters, because he hated the phone and always got off by saying it hurt his ear. That night a cold front came through with snow, and by the next day it was one degree above zero at the Gillette airport. He fell and froze to death. My mother found him.

    At twenty-eight I wrote down his biceps like softballs, his strong arms carrying my small body down the stairs while I pretended to sleep, because I didn’t want to walk myself and I loved to be held by him. Those same arms came ripping out of the bedroom one day while I watched Flintstones in the living room, a little too loud I guess, Dad in his jeans, eyes red, no shirt, hulking, a softball shoved in his bicep, the belt in his hand. The memory of the punishment fades from there. What stays is the mystery of what I did to piss him off so bad other than watch Flintstones. He told me himself he had been an injection user, and after he died we found out about the hepatitis C, and now I wonder about the roids. They kept secrets like canned goods, and I had to pry most of them open myself, including that my brother is my half brother. But he built his own fence, panned for gold every summer in the Black Hills, and painted us, all of us, and hung us on the walls beside a painting of the welding. We had deep talks. I’m not idealizing him, we just found it easy to talk.

    That last call, I had wanted to come over and see Lou dog, Louis in the obituary, one of his two loyal dogs. Later the vet took Lou’s tail, infected at my mom’s house over a snowstorm. She was a complete mess, and so was I. She hurt herself at the bar one night and it breaks my heart, and I mean breaks me, to picture her that open to the world, and then so spicy other times. I’m the same way. I feel the same pity, but it’s not pity, it’s deeper, it’s regret he died and we were never the same, and I’m sure that rode in her head at the end.

    My mom killed herself.

    I think of her every day. Her soft voice singing You Are My Sunshine, which is a song about waking up alone. She was the one who snuck us into things, a pasta dish with pine nuts in Broadus on the way to camp that tasted like the trees, the fanciest thing we had ever seen. I wish I remembered Dad better, but I didn’t want to get wrapped up in grief again after I got in trouble. I don’t hold either of them in contempt for anything, the hardest place to stand, because when you refuse to flatten a person the grief takes over. In grief and loss was great unaffected love, and the two cannot exist without each other.

    The church is pressed into me like a thumbprint in clay, for better or worse. I know most of the verses by heart and don’t need the hymnal. When I was little they were just words in my mouth, wool tights and the long service, a God who belonged to Dad and his belt. They waited in me for thirty years. I am unbaptized but still going. As a kid I was way, way, way careful at communion. If I felt unclean I just wouldn’t go up. It all weighed more then. Now I just raw dog up there and take it. Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, even thine altars. Nobody made the birds earn it. My church is called St. Paul, the tentmaker, the old bastard who still messes up religion today.

    My parents were hard on me sometimes, and it gave me this gusto to never give up. I know how to work. And then I gave myself the wisdom to know when not to. The Gita says you have a right to the work and never to the fruit of it, and my parents only ever taught me the first half. They handed me addiction in its purest form and never once owned it, shipping me to treatment at seventeen instead. Same with my siblings. My brother would shoot up. He went to treatment himself and even wanted to become a counselor, but that didn’t happen. I went to treatment in Aurora on Medicaid, and I became the counselor, and now everyone wants to do it with me, the one that did it, and I’m wondering what for.

    Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. The birds are home, I think, because home is fluttery, flying, moving, can’t always be seen, disappears into the night. Soft. Lovely. Sad. It comes back in pieces whether I’m ready or not, the chocolate donut with sprinkles in Mom’s purse during the long service, Dad’s boots covered in waterproof and baking in the oven before the mine, the mason jar of cigarettes, Mom’s dry ass pot roast, Lou’s tail, Fred Flintstone a little too loud, You Are My Sunshine in her soft voice, and Dad on the phone saying he has to go now, it’s hurting his ear.

    House finches sleep in the eaves of houses, up against the warm wall. For years the bird people said when a sleeping bird settles its weight onto its heels, a tendon pulls the toes shut and locks the grip, so it can’t fall. Then some scientists took the toe tendons out of starlings, and the starlings held on all night anyway, on balance and the plain curl of their toes. Sometimes I feel like my own tendons have been removed and still I’m hanging in there. I knew in heaven the birds would sleep with us instead of disappearing into the night. Tonight the finches will come back to the nyjer after the sun goes down, and I’ll watch from the window until they go under somebody’s eaves, maybe mine, and tomorrow I’ll put the seed out again, nyjer for the finches and whatever the cottontails and squirrels get to first.

  • drop your weapon

    A client says she feels empty, and before she gets to the end of the sentence the manual is open in my head. I used to carry the real one into the room and flip to the page with her sitting right there. Now I follow the story closely, sorting what is cultural from what is pathological, and the words from the diagnosis start to pop up on their own. “He was the best thing to ever happen to me.” “The world is a dangerous place.” I know that page because someone once turned to it for me.

    Listening, I walk through the rooms of a client’s life. The suicide of a friend. An estrangement. Divorce. Children who won’t get off their phones and children who won’t get on the phone. Sometimes a cue in somebody else’s room sends me wandering through my own, and I come back to the face in front of me wondering how long I have been gone and whether I’ve caused a rupture. The client keeps talking. I return to the safety of a diagnosis, where everything has a name. Mine has one too. Somewhere between the second counselor and the fifth, someone wrote antisocial personality disorder in my file, and I have been trying to figure out who ever since.

    During my first stint in treatment there was in-fighting among the drug court admin, so we were tossed around five different providers. Some contracted. One guy would ride his bike around, the light brown of his khakis wrapped with a leg band to keep his fancy pants from his bike chain. He was smug and defensive and he didn’t last but a few weeks. We called him Ed 209, after the hulking droid in RoboCop that heard “drop your weapon,” watched the man do it, and shot him anyway. Ed 209, the enforcer, shot his own damn self in the foot and was gone as quick as the rest of them.

    Then there was the woman we called “Debbie Does Counseling,” who had us doing arts and crafts in a downtown building, completely unaware that half the participants were huffing air duster at break. Slurred words and rocking chairs falling all the way back; it wasn’t much of a difference from their normal behavior, so I might not have noticed either. She directed us to make masks with two sides: what we show the world and what we hide. Well, Debbie, forgive us if we can’t really get into an exercise that mocks the fact we can’t piss without it being tested. We can’t hide from the world.

    Then there was Michelle, just another counselor in the rotation, who built every group around her handful of favorites. And then Theresa, the ex-wife of the drug court judge, who would cross her legs in a provocative way during group therapy, my brain racing back to Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Sharon, playing Catherine, who famously makes the detectives sweat, in a scene on millions of VHS tapes being rewound, paused, rewound to get a shot of Sharon snatch. The flirtations confused me, and so did the boys denying they’d been huffing, one making me guess if I saw what I saw and the other if I smelled what I smelled. The whole thing was disorienting as hell and probably on purpose.

    I can’t be sure which one of them gave me the scarlet diagnosis, but it still bothers me. It came after I called Debbie fat (I said the pants don’t make her look fat, the fat makes her look fat, and BAM, new counselor again), told Michelle her groups were agonizing, made comments about Michelle’s face melting off, and called the drug court assistant “Troll” in passing, so I understand why the team wanted to label me. The difference was Theresa could close her legs, Debbie could get some confidence, Michelle could back off her favorites, and the Troll could have been nice. But none of them were court ordered to do so.

    Antisocial personality disorder, allegedly, and a plea to the court to reinstate my underlying sentence, which was still a misdemeanor. Only by the skin of my yellow county teeth, because as I moved through the phases of drug court the law stretched its lookback from five years to ten, which put all three of my DUIs in one frame, and the push for my prison sentence became more real. You can’t breathe wrong in drug court, much less antagonize every last provider, because at some point it does start to read like anti-something, and if anything, anti-women.

    So I apologized in court. I stood at the podium with a room full of men taking sick pleasure in it, the judge yelling at me and no one else, and what I felt was shame and embarrassment. I said I was sorry the way an overgrown five-year-old apologizes for a mess she doesn’t even remember, because sorry was what kept me out of jail. I did whatever penance was assigned to me that week, and then magically the personality disorder melted away, which a personality disorder is not supposed to do, since the manual calls it an enduring pattern, and I graduated from drug court less than a year later with my uncle as witness.

    The DSM wants three of seven before it will consider the diagnosis. One, a failure to conform to lawful behavior, shown by repeatedly doing things that are grounds for arrest. Two, deceitfulness, the lying and aliases and conning for profit or pleasure. Three, impulsivity or failure to plan ahead. Four, irritability and aggression, the repeated fights. Five, reckless disregard for the safety of self or others. Six, consistent irresponsibility, a person who can’t sustain work or honor a debt. Seven, lack of remorse, an indifference to or rationalizing of having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from someone. A clinician reads that list the way I read a client’s life, one door at a time, checking what is behind each.

    I can see how a team might count three. I kept failing my UAs, I lied about them so I wouldn’t spend the weekend in jail, and I enrolled in the spring semester and used meth anyway, which reads as impulsivity on paper. But I have been behind those doors. A failed UA is substance use disorder at its finest, and the lying lasted exactly as long as the testing did. The manual also wants signs of conduct disorder before the age of fifteen, and nobody ever told me I had it. The file had room for all of that, and for Troll and the pants. It had no room for the English degree with Honors on my transcript, or the job, or the fact that I had never been in a physical fight in my life.

    The point of hanging such a heavy word on me was to have grounds to incarcerate me again, and they were willing to rewrite the rules of drug court to do it, charging me inside the program for calling one counselor fat and another useless. Irritability shares a ton of diagnoses, and what bothers me is that nobody assessed their way to the obvious one: polysubstance use disorder and a person who didn’t get along with anyone. Hindsight is 20/20, but if I sat in a room with me now, what I would sniff out is trauma. Plain old trauma from the violent death of my father, which was recent then. Nobody opened that door. I eventually landed in the hands of a much more competent provider, who inspired me to become a therapist.

    Now a client tells me she feels empty, and the manual opens in my head the way it always does. I can tell substance use from conduct disorder from grief by what she does when I ask about the worst year, and I have learned to let the page stay open and the person stay in front of me. Somewhere there is a file with a word in it that was never supposed to come off, and a transcript in a different drawer that says English, Honors, and the two have never met. I ask what happened, and when, and who died. Then I stay in my chair and wait for her to find the date.