I stood there, numb with grief, as I let the pressure from the hot water calm my buzzing senses.
I’ve never liked to decompress in a shower. I loathe being cold. Showers bring back memories of my youth when I would shiver in a bath towel way too small for any human body while heavy droplets of water from my wet hair streamed down my back. I’m sure my dad’s persistent to keep using our fraying towels because “they did the job” and my long hair didn’t help, but back then I contributed it all to showers. They were they problem, and I didn’t not like taking them.
After serving at a homeless facility, showers took on an entire new meaning. It was all I wanted to do. The smells that exuded off these poor people’s pores were unbearable to inhale for long periods of time. A constant combination of cigarette smoke, sweat, feet, body odor, and instant coffee, attached itself to their clothes and now to mine.
I looked at the white tiles around me, allowing the heat from the water to soften my body’s nerves. Today was a tough one, but it had nothing to do with body odor.
It had to do with Tom and Maddy.
***
When I first saw Maddy she was walking across the street right outside the shelter. She had short beach, blonde hair. Playful, cat-eyed pink sunglasses sat on the bridge of her nose, and on her head she wore a cute red bandana tied up on top. She had dark maroon leggings on and a girly fitted sweatshirt with a pattern of playful yellows flowers patched on it. From a distance, I thought she was twenty-one with her Forever 21 themed outfit.
Then I saw her up close.
“I’m Maddy,” she said in a raspy, smoker voice.
She took off her chic sunglasses. That’s when I saw Maddy for who she was today, who she had become. She was not 21, but 41. Her fair, snowy white skin was blistered with sunburns. Wrinkles creased along the side of her face in places I didn’t know wrinkles could form. When she opened her mouth to speak, I noticed she was missing half her teeth.
Right then, Tom, an elderly man in the shelter, about 60-years-old, walked over.
“Got anymore coffee?” he asked.
He held a flimsy Styrofoam cup in his trembling, weathered hands. Tom’s crystal blue-eyes peeked up at me. They blazed bright against his insanely bronzed skin. He was so tan he looked like he laid out on a beach every day for 24 hours. Instead, he lived here, in the heart of Hollywood. How did he get so tan? His signature outfit, of course.
Around his shoulders sat an oversized leather jacket that swallowed his frail frame. He paired his slick jacket with a pair of khaki shorts and no shirt. Tom never wore a shirt. He walked around bare chested like he was headed out for a surf all the time. I wondered why he didn’t want to wear a shirt? Later I would learn, it was because he didn’t have one.
I poured some coffee into Tom’s cup from our constant brewing pot of coffee. He took the cup from me and smiled, exposing what I had never seen before, a mouth full of missing teeth.
There are a handful of people on the streets in Hollywood that some would classify as “brain dead.” What happened to their minds? The same thing that happened to their teeth. Meth.
Maddy is a meth addict. Tom used to be one.
***
Tom spends most of the day mumbling to himself or listening to the country music station on his Walkman, that is so banged up it’s a miracle it still plays music. He loves music. In fact, he was a mega-successful musician in his day. He scored soundtracks for Robin Williams movies. He played with world-famous musicians. He remembers these successes.
Yet, what he seems to recall most about these days is not the success, but all the times he spent alone to get there. He remembers the long, lonely hours it took to be a “success.” He remembers them everyday. When Tom talks to himself, it’s always about his desire for a family and a wife. He wishes he had kids.
Tom is kind and gentle. I imagine if life took another turn, he would have been a great dad. He’s funny too. He snatches all the tow away signs on the street and uses the back of them to paint murals on. Ever wonder why you get so many tickets in Hollywood? Your warning signs were probably snatched up for somebody’s art project. Tom breaks my heart because he achieved what he thought was happiness. Success, fame and money.
In the end, he walked away from it all alone, with only a meth addiction for company.
Tom is not a meth addict anymore, but his brain is damaged from the years he pounded meth into it. Heartbreak is not an accurate description for how I feel when I sit with him. It is devastation. He is homeless, jobless and can hardly communicate. He sits there, listening to his favorite singer, Carrie Underwood, dreaming of a family.
The meth addicts that get clean are the most devastating group of all.
Then, there are the addicts.
***
Maddy seemed harmless at first. She sat there with a felt blanket wrapped around her slender body, sipping on a cup of coffee with an obscene amount of sugar in it. She asked for a pen and paper so we could help get her home. I watched in awe as Maddy, who could barley piece together coherent sentences, remembered every single one of her family’s contact numbers. I watched as she wrote down her home address and the phone number of her dad, mom, grandmother, and brother, all in perfect, bubbly handwriting.
She knew where home was and wanted to be back there.
Our director said we could get her a bus ticket home after we got in contact with her family. Maddy looked thrilled. Then, she went to the bathroom…for fifteen minutes.
When Maddy returned from her 15-minute bathroom break, something in her eyes had changed. The sincerity had been replaced with a rage laced with so much anger that her fair-white skin was now a burning shade of red. She tossed her blanket on the floor, kicked off her slippers and shouted, piercing her anger, her pain, into her hearts.
This is what she said…
“You promised you were going to get me home!”
“You all are fucking liars!”
“Hey bitch, I am 8 months pregnant with twins!”
“I don’t deal with baby robbers like you.”
“You want to know something? The devil is real, and I talked to him. How about that bitch.”
“Have you ever been rapped? Huh? HUH? Well, I have. I’ve been rapped so many times I lost count.”
“I will poke your fucking black eyes out.”
Maddy spit-fired phrases so verbally brutal you would think she was on a battle ground in the middle of war. And she is, she’s in a battle with the trauma in her mind, and because of her meth addiction, it continues to win. At first, there seemed to be hope for Maddy. We were going to call her family, get her back home, and then she returned from the bathroom, high on meth.
She grabbed the poster-board size piece of paper, the one with all the names and numbers of her family members, a way out of this life. Hopeful thoughts popped in my mind. Maybe she could get clean? Get in a rehab facility. Get home.
Then, the unimaginable happened.
Maddy eyed her perfect bubble-letters. All her information to home right there, to a better life. But her mindset had shifted. In one fluid motion, she ripped the poster board screaming, “Patty is a fucking bitch slut, and she will be murdered in hell and I will see of it!” I watched in horror as her parents phone numbers dissolved into a million little pieces around her.
“I HATE everyone!” she shouted. Her eyes blurred with vengeance, but I didn’t see a person when I looked at Maddy this time.
I saw a demon.
“Maddy it’s time to leave the shelter,” our director said. “We can not have this behavior here.” I assumed Maddy would fight this request, but she didn’t. She picked up her blanket and stomped out of the shelter, back to her tent across the street.
I looked at Maddy and her stomach as flat as a board for being 8 months pregnant return to the WORST tent I’d ever seen. It was a one-person tent set up across the street from us. The flap was broken, and the roof was falling inward. She had placed her tent on top of a slope, right next to a giant, prickly bush. Each time she went to get inside her tent, she was stuck with dozens of thorns. She screamed so loud her cries encompassed the shelter we were in.
After she was gone my director informed me she had probably used meth in the bathroom, igniting her sudden crazed, vindicative self.
Want to know what drugs will do to your life kids? Come here and you will see.
***
I learned a lot today.
One, some women lie about being pregnant to get food or water. Maddy got both. Two, every woman addicted to meth has 9/10 been raped or sexually abused. Maddy told us she had been rapped too many times to count. What is it like to be rapped too many times to count? I don’t know the answer, but meth seems to know.
When Maddy is on meth, she looks demonic.
When she is off it, she looks like a broken person. To be off meth, means to live in that haunting reality that you are not okay. The look in a meth addict’s eyes is anger beyond anything I’ve ever seen. It is pure rage. It is pain. The last thing I learned today is this:
The meth addicts are the most challenging group of all.