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Cinderella Redux
- Les Merson
- 2007
"I don’t tell this story out loud because it’s not much of a story. No plot. No neat ending. No clever turns of phrase. And because I always end up weeping. Not for … [others]. But for myself. And for the world I’ve helped to create. A world in which I allow my intelligence and goodwill to be constantly subverted by my pursuit of comfort and pleasure. And because knowing all this, it is doubtful that given a second chance to make amends for my despicable behaviour, I would do anything different, for I find it easier to tell myself the story of my failure as a friend, as a human being, than to have to live the story of making the sustained effort to help."
– Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Cindi who grew up much too fast on the Switsemalph Reserve #6, six miles west of Salmon Arm. Hours before other kids were waking up to their favourite cartoons, Cindi would wake up to booze, butts and vomit littering the house. For as long as she can remember, it was her job to clean up the mess and even at six years of age, her mother expected it to be spotless. Although her mother slept in until mid-morning each day, she forced Cindi to wake up at 5:30 am every morning, just as she had when she was a child attending the Kamloops Indian Residential School. After Cindi cleaned the house, rousted the drunks and sent them home, the young girl would ready herself for school. Remarkably, she was never late for school, even after the wildest parties, knowing her mother would beat her if she was. Her mother was the town bootlegger and the parties happened every night of the week except Sundays. It wasn’t that her mother was religious; she wasn’t. It was simply that by Sunday afternoon, the booze was all gone. That didn’t mean that Cindi got the sabbath off; in fact, her mother made her work twice as hard. “She’d get really fuckin’ cranky on Sundays,” Cindi recalls.
Cindi’s father left when she was three and she and her brother were raised by their mother. In spite of her father’s absence, she says that he was a good Dad because he never hit her. “Not once,” she emphasizes. Cindi blames the Residential School experience for the dysfunction within her family – particularly her parent’s alcoholism and her mother’s physically and emotionally abusive nature – and says her mother reenacted many of those experiences on her children. “They’d make her lean against the wall on her knees for hours as punishment and she’d do that to me,” Cindi remembers. Echoing the priests at the Residential School, she told her daughter that she loved her but didn’t like her. “What the fuck did she mean by that?” Cindi still wonders incredulously. Never once did her mother apologize for the abuse, never once did she say sorry. Instead, she would buy Cindi things, small inconsequential things. In spite of the abuse, Cindi says her life was better than most of the kids on the reserve because her mother was able to provide more. Yet, aside from a couple of times that she and her mother cuddled on the couch while watching a movie and the endless hours spent swinging frenetically by herself on the old maple tree in the backyard, Cindi has no pleasant memories of her childhood. For Cindi, value, worth, and even happiness seem to be measured almost exclusively in economic terms. She is, as we all are, the sum of her experiences and the lessons her parents taught her. Over and over again her mother would reinforce her worthlessness …
"When she would get really angry with me, she would make me take off all my clothes and kick me out the back door, saying, ‘You didn’t pay for this. You didn’t pay for that. I paid for it. Take it off, take that off…’ She’d kick me outside and make me sleep outside wearing only my socks and panties … It happened many times, too many times, starting when I was nine until I was almost fourteen."
When Cindi was nine years old, she was promoted from cleaner to runner and apprentice bootlegger. Almost. She still had to clean up after the parties, but because her older brother had ripped off their mother, all trust and responsibility were passed on to the daughter. It was a lot of responsibility for a child, magnified by her mother’s disabilities which included alcoholism, confinement to a wheelchair, and serious health issues. After five years of helping her mother bootleg, Cindi came home one Fall afternoon to find her mother hanging from the old maple tree that she used to swing on. She had committed suicide. After the birth of her own children, Cindi says she was able to forgive her mom, but at the time it was a devastating loss. “Just when I needed her most, she left me,” Cindi says. She didn’t blame herself for her mother’s death because her mom was in a lot of physical pain, but the family doctor did. He accused Cindi of pushing her mother over the edge by running away from home two weeks earlier. “That fucked me up for a long time,” she remembers.
Giving the doctor the benefit of the doubt, he obviously wasn’t aware that suicide is the leading cause of death for First Nation’s people between the ages of ten and fourty-four. Nor did he know that the suicide rate among First Nation’s women is seven times greater than the suicide rate amongst non-aboriginal women. And it would seem that he was ignorant to the abusive and predatory treatment of First Nation’s children at the Residential schools, which both her parents attended, which has contributed significantly to family dysfunction, substance and domestic abuse, and suicide amongst First Nation’s adults. Cindi’s father never spoke of his experiences at the Residential school. She only knew that something “pretty bad” must have happened because he’d carved his wrists and forearms up “pretty good.” “He must have hated himself pretty good to do that,” she shudders.
Her mom had told her daughter very little about the abuses she had endured during the seven years she attended residential school. Cindi knew that her mother had hidden the worst from her. On one occasion, though, her mother was really drunk, “all crying and shit …” She confided in Cindi that she had been raped by some “pig priest” who called her his “dirty little Pocahontas,” beginning when she was eight years old and continuing until she was twelve. Cindi was around eight years old at the time and that was the closest Cindi’s mother ever came to explaining herself or apologizing. “She hugged me and I hugged her back. I lied and told her it was going to be OK. I guess I always knew deep down that it wasn’t going to be …”
Cindi exhales, “thank God I wasn’t sexually abused as a child.” She believes that she would have been if her mother hadn’t paid her uncle to guard her bedroom during her mother’s wild parties. Although it might seem extraordinary that her mother would go to such lengths to protect her child, it wasn’t. Phil Fontaine, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, says that too often “the victim becomes the victimizer.” That was certainly true for Cindi’s mother, although the abuse she inflicted on her children was never sexual. According to Carol La Prairie in her study of aboriginal victimization and family violence, Seen but not heard: Native people in the inner city, incest, child sexual abuse, and domestic abuse have reached epidemic proportions in First Nations’s communities; it has also touched Cindi’s extended family. One of her cousins, Nadine, committed suicide just before Cindi’s twelfth birthday. Cindi says there was no indication that she was depressed or suicidal. Quite the opposite, in fact. “She was partying and drinking all the time,” Cindi recalls. “I stopped hanging out with her because she was so wild.” Many years later she found out from her aunt that “Nadine’s grandfather was having sex with her. It started when she was six years old. She never told anyone, not even me and I was her best friend.”
In spite of the considerable pressures of adolescence combined with her mother’s suicide and being shunted from relative to relative for the better part of four years, Cindi was, by her own admission, a “good girl.” She abstained from alcohol, sex and drugs until she was almost nineteen years old, a choice which caused incessant teasing from the other girls. They called her “Virginia” and “square” and refused to hang out with her. Cindi says there was nothing exceptional in her decision to remain a virgin. She says that her Mom instilled traditional values in her. “My mom told me not to do it until I was older, … not to give myself to anyone.” For a number of years, she was also the leader of a girl’s drum group which performed at pow-wows. In order to remain a member of the group, it was mandatory that she abstained from alcohol and drugs. She credits the drum group and the spiritual leadership of the elders for helping her to stay clean and sober during that difficult period. She continued to do well at school, making it to the middle of Grade 11 before she became another statistic – one of the 47% of aboriginal females who did not graduate from high school in British Columbia (in contrast to only 15% of non-aboriginal females).
After Cindi quit school in Grade 11, she went to live with her father and just “kind of hung out.” However, drinking in Cindi’s home and on the reserve was spiralling out of control and Cindi’s aunt feared for her niece’s well-being. The aunt intervened and brought Cindi down to Vancouver to live with her. Unfortunately, the aunt, also a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, possessed several demons of her own; most notably, she suffered from alcoholism and depression. Vancouver was a million miles away from Cindi’s home, her drum group and the pastoral setting and simpler lifestyle of the Adams Lake Indian Band, and it made her realize how much she missed her mother, even the negative attention she had received from her. Three days after she arrived in Vancouver, three months shy of her nineteenth birthday, Cindi snorted her first line of coke at the Balmoral Hotel on Hastings. She went there for the cheap beer. That was fourteen years ago and “I just got stuck,” she explains.
Cindi didn’t become an addict right away but within weeks she was dealing drugs, utilizing all her mother’s training as a bootlegger. In fact, she even had people working for her. Proving the adage that misery loves company, one of her workers, an addict, persuaded her to experiment with crack. Cindi remembers that first time: “I liked it. It was like, whoa! … I pulled some money out of my pocket and said, ‘here, go buy some more.’ Fuckin’ stupid, eh?” It was at that precise moment, even before the physical addiction would enslave her, that drugs took control of her life.
As drugs consume lives, one of the first things addicts lose is their hobbies, amongst the many other things that make them who they are as individuals. Gone are the financial resources, the opportunity, the inclination and even the ability to pursue their interests. When she first arrived in the downtown eastside, Cindi preferred singing karaoke in the upstairs lounge at the Biltmore Hotel to dancing and partying downstairs in the beer parlour. “My friends are like, you’re so lame, sitting around with all those old people singing. You should be downstairs dancing with all these guys … I’d be upstairs all night.” Night after night, she’d sing her heart out to Mariah Carey and Toni Braxton songs. They were difficult songs and she’d practice for many hours in preparation. “People really liked my voice. They’d clap and cheer when I was done.” Sadly, she doesn’t sing karaoke anymore. Drugs have taken that away from her too.
Three months after she arrived in Vancouver, Cindi met her first love sitting in the smoking pit of the Balmoral Hotel. He was a little rough around the edges, as are most El Salvadoran drug dealers, but he was also everything her father wasn’t. He was outgoing and charming, he was clean and sober, and he told Cindi what she wanted to hear. Cindi fell for him, “bigtime.” It was not coincidental that he also shared several of her mother’s worst traits. He was angry, controlling and abusive.
The next few years shuffled by. Time does when you’re standing still, going nowhere. They spent 14 hours, everyday, walking the same eight blocks along Hastings from the Astoria Hotel to Pigeon Park and then back again. “Down here it’s all about survival … people do stuff so they have something to eat, so they have their drugs. You do what you gotta do in order to survive.” Cindi hates the downtown eastside and is emphatic that it isn’t her home. “It’s a fuckin’ coffin,” she pronounces. Of that period, Cindi guesses that most of her drug use was propelled by boredom. “Yeah, drugs numbs the pain, but it also kills the fucking boredom. I hated the bars, all the bitching and bullshit …”
Just after she turned twenty-three, Cindi got pregnant. It wasn’t something the couple had discussed or planned on, but both she and Juan were excited by the news, believing it would change things for the better. Cindi immediately stopped drinking and drugging. She snaps her fingers for emphasis, “Just like that.” As a child, she had vowed that she wouldn’t raise her kids the way her mother had raised her. With newfound clarity and resolve she had an epiphany:
"I was sitting at home one day and I just realized, you know what, we’re killing people. Not fast, but slowly. We’re ruining lives. We’re taking their money that could have been for clothing or for food. I … asked Juan to quit … I said, ‘I’m getting sick and tired of this. I feel bad. I have a conscience. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ So we quit and moved to Toronto."
When Virgil wrote that “love conquers all,” he wasn’t talking about the downtown eastside, an abusive El Salvadoran drug dealer or his drug addicted aboriginal girlfriend, but he might as well have been. For more than five years, Cindi remained clean and sober while working two “straight-john” jobs in Toronto. Why Toronto? “It was about as far away from the downtown eastside as we could get,” she explains. “I wasn’t on welfare,” she says proudly, “and I was doing a good job of supporting my family and raising my kids.” With a smile on her face, she said, “we had everything you could want, even a big screen TV. I felt like a fuckin’ Princess…”
But few individuals escape their past unscathed and the absence of positive role models in her life began to hamper the relationships with her common-law husband and her kids. The two adults argued incessantly and it often turned violent; Cindi found it increasingly difficult to hold it together. Finally, her abusive, “control freak” boyfriend caused her to throw it all away and seek the solace of a crack pipe. She craved something to anaesthetize the beatings and the boredom. “When you’re addicted, there are no fuckin’ choices,” she states unequivocally. At first, crack did the job but soon she found she was crashing harder when she came down and getting high was becoming more of a struggle. “I couldn’t get high enough. I became a tweakin’ crack addict and a shitty fuckin’ parent …” she confesses with embarrassment. “But I didn’t hit my kids, never once,” she hastens to add.
After Cindi lost both jobs, the couple moved back to Vancouver and their old ways – Juan selling and Cindi using. They shared a house with her aunt who would look after the children upstairs while Juan walked his beat and Cindi was out using or passed out downstairs. But in a moment of maternal instinct and selflessness, she realized: “I’m in the wrong, I can’t watch my kids right now, so I sent them away. My mom did wrong by keeping me and I seen all that bullshit.” For the past four years, her kids have lived on the Adams Lake Indian Band reservation with her father. Cindi recognizes the irony of the situation but says that “the Chief made a lot of people quit drinking and it’s pretty much dry now.” She says her kids are well off there because her Dad’s “got money.” Most importantly, she believes her father has defeated his demons and that her kids will be safe with him.
"My kids are safe with my Dad. I don’t mean they wouldn’t be safe with me. When I had them I was never abusive. Because of what my Mom done to me, I wouldn’t even slap my kids’ hand. You know how some people go ‘bad’ (she slaps her hand lightly). I wouldn’t even do that. I wouldn’t touch them. I wouldn’t yell at them."
With the kids gone, it was only a matter of time until Cindi and Juan split up. Unfortunately, while the beatings stopped, her addiction got progressively worse. In an attempt to get even higher – to numb the pain and heighten the euphoria – she started to chase the dragon, smoking crack laced with heroin. Shortly after that she was injecting heroin. “I never thought I’d become a hype,” Cindi admits. In a matter of weeks, she was “wired,” just like John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, John Belushi and River Phoenix. The seductiveness of heroin is: “Marked by a euphoric rush, a warm feeling of relaxation, a sense of security and protection, and a dissipation of pain, fear, hunger, tension and anxiety. When heroin is snorted or smoked, the rush is intense and orgasmic. Subjectively, time may slow down. Any sense of anger, frustration or aggression disappears.”
A New York Times article characterized heroin euphoria as “being wrapped in God’s warmest blanket.” “Warm blanket?” Cindi shivers, “I’m always fuckin’ cold.” She doesn’t romanticize her addiction. “It’s like being caught in the devil’s hand … trapped. It ruins a lot of lives,” she concludes.
Cindi admits that she’s not a “good girl” anymore, but says she has a conscience and tries to live a basic permutation of the golden rule: “If someone invites me into their home, I try not to steal from them … I wouldn’t want someone coming over to my house and doing that to me, so why would I do that to somebody else?” She admits that she got caught stealing a couple of rocks to sell for heroin a few of years ago and was “beat up pretty bad.” She is quick to point out, however, that it was only because she was “really, really addicted to heroin” that she stole. For the most part, however, she has been able “to walk straight on the street … You don’t want people running up behind you and shanking [stabbing] you or beating your ass.” When she was in her early twenties:
"There’d be a crew of us [young female drug addicts] that would go around and look for young girls between 15 and 19 [years of age] and we’d boot them out of here. We’d say, ‘this is no place for you, get the fuck out of here. If you’re going to hang around here, we’re going to kick your ass.’ We’d run them out of here. It was pretty amazing that we cared, but we did."
Like many addicts in the downtown eastside (and a disproportionate number of aboriginal women), Cindi is homeless. All her money goes to drugs and for the past four years she has lived on the street. When she makes curfew, she sleeps in a shelter or sometimes on a friend’s couch, but mostly she carries all her possessions in a small backpack and makes a sheet of cardboard, a sleeping bag, and a back alley, her home. Almost daily, she showers at Oppenheimer Park and replaces her wet and dirty clothing with free used clothing from several of the Women Resource Centres that operate in the downtown eastside. While she acknowledges that living on the streets is dangerous, she says that living in many of the skid row hotels can be even more dangerous, especially for new arrivals. When she first moved downtown to the Roosevelt Hotel at 166 East Hastings, she was raped every couple of days for several months until she finally moved out. She said that sexual assault in the downtown eastside is a regular occurrence that seldom goes reported. “Who you gonna tell?” she asks.
In spite of her addiction, Cindi no longer steals or sells drugs. Instead, she sells herself. She says that prostitution and heroin addiction are the two things that she hates the most about herself. Prostitution is uncomfortable and dangerous but when she’s wired, “I don’t fuckin’ care … I just do it and have my money.” She doesn’t like standing on street corners or hopping into strange cars, preferring to wait for her regulars. Aside from the money, she finds nothing pleasurable about prostitution. It is purely an economic transaction; she doesn’t kiss or show any sign of affection nor does she establish relationships with her clients. It is simply, “gimme the money and I do my job.”
Bob is a “john.” He could be one of Cindi’s regulars. He says that “he’s never made a hooker do anything she didn’t want to do.” He’s white, divorced, middle aged, and has a daughter who is a recovering addict. You’d think he’d know better. He seeks out prostitutes in the downtown eastside several times a week, strictly to fulfill a physical need and because it is cheaper and more convenient than dating. He sees absolutely nothing wrong with paying drug addicts for sex.
"I’m nice to them. They get there ten bucks, sometimes twenty. They usually get half a pack of cigarettes. If they’re hungry, nothing fancy, I take them through the drive-thru at McDonald’s or Burger King. If they want to talk a little bit, fine … Some I got to know reasonably well … So they actually like to see me."
But he says that frankly, he’d prefer not to talk to them or get to know them. “I don’t care … I just want to be in and out and back home before the end of Larry King Live.” He doesn’t see his actions as enabling their addictions, rationalizing that “if it’s not me, then it’ll be someone else.” While he won’t admit to preying on the poor, the weak and the marginalized, he does acknowledge that he feels: “Sorry for them … I can’t help seeing them as dirty and less than … A lot of them have mental issues on top of alcohol issues, and drug issues, bad parenting and not being brought up right. You see that in the native community, for God’s sake … They don’t even know simple oral hygiene… and things like that. It’s mind boggling when you think about it.”
Cindi bears no animosity, anger, or prejudice towards johns like Bob or anyone else for that matter. “I don’t mind anyone,” she asserts. Most of her regulars were “OK,” although some were “jerks” and a few became violent. And while she’s not a saint, one hopes that she’s not a martyr, either. Surprisingly, she doesn’t appear to have become overly jaundiced by her experiences. Rather, she has a tolerant attitude towards others. “We all piss yellow and we all shit red,” she contends. “You could be coloured yellow and I could like you or love you. Pink or blue–doesn’t matter to me. It’s the kind of person you are.” Perhaps she is too tolerant. She admits that she’s often “too gullible” for her own good. However, when she isn’t high and she thinks about it, she’s ashamed of what she does and is starting to get scared. Many working girls, many of her friends, have been murdered. She has decided to quit.
Cindi is reticent to talk about her most recent conviction for robbery and assault that was reduced to theft under. She is visibly embarrassed and says it is the worst thing she has ever done.
It was for heroin. I was sick and nobody’d help me out. I went up to this woman and told her she had nice sunglasses. I asked her how much they were worth. She said, ‘$300.’ Then I asked her for change and she wouldn’t give me any. So I ripped her sunglasses off her face and ran. Stupid cops called that robbery.
It wasn’t her first time in jail, although she vows it will be her last. She served a total of fourty days in jail awaiting trial, the same amount of time it took God to destroy and renew the world and that Christ spent in the wilderness fasting and resisting the temptations of the devil. With no money or access to drugs during her incarceration, she was forced to get clean. She spent all her time alone reading native literature and thinking. “I was reading a book every two days. It took a lot of self control. I just stayed in my cell and read, read, read …”
Every day she got stronger and so did her resolve to move back to the reserve to be with her family and her kids. She was ready to go home to recover, to reclaim her kids, to get a job, and to be the person she knows that she can be. “I want to become the person I used to be before I got lost …” However, a “really good lawyer” got her released with time served. She wasn’t prepared. “I wasn’t expecting to be released so soon … I wanted to make sure I had a place. Treatment. They just sent me out on the street again” with a probation order that does not permit her to leave the downtown eastside.
Cindi was released three days ago, on Friday, with the best of intentions and not much else. She had no money, no accommodation, and an appointment to meet with a Probation Officer in two weeks. Six hours after she was released, a friend got her high on crack. She got high again the following morning. But for the past thirty-six hours, she’s been clean. She has considered prostituting herself but hasn’t. She is adamant that she wants to quit. In spite of her relapse, she is proud that she has stayed away from heroin and that for the past one and a half days, her desire to get clean and return to her family has been stronger than her desire to get high.
Cindi is convinced that this story is going to have a happy ending. But she knows there’s no such thing as a Fairy Godmother (at least not in her life) and she’s not even sure there’s a God to assist her. She knows that her recovery is going to be painful and take a lot of hard work on her part. She has a tendency to run away from step programs and treatment and is aware that it is going to require a lot of white knuckle tenacity this time. And she knows it might be her last chance. She feels ready and is confident that she will succeed.
However, this story isn’t about “happily ever after” endings. All that would serve to do is assuage our guilt, make us feel better, and possibly become the script for a made-for-television movie. In the end, this story isn’t even about Cindi, but rather about the middle-aged white guy writing it. And I have been transformed. Transformed, not by a stereotype, but by a human being that I was incredibly fortunate to get to know, an individual who has been abused, abandoned and forgotten by all of us, and yet who has inspired me with her courage, her character, her honesty, and her strength.
