From Nets to Networks
Part III: Growing Childish
Tina’s biological father took her to live with him and his new wife and baby in Oregon when Tina was twelve. Up until that point his presence, rare but welcomed by Tina, was comprised of letters, a birthday card, a Christmas present, phone calls and an few visits.
This change in environment seemed to be just what Tina needed. Tina smiled and said, almost “I thrived!” says Tina smiling almost dreamily. "Here was somebody who loved me enough to tell me what to do.”
So for two years, between 12 and 14, Tina enjoyed and functioned well in her new family. However, when teenage interests and angst began to surface, things changed rapidly.
“At 14 I started smoking cigarettes and got caught shoplifting. My dad’s wife just couldn’t deal with me. I started getting interested in sex and all this crazy stuff. And I didn't care about any consequences or rules or anything.
“They would try to punish me by grounding me or by taking away stuff—like my TV, my video games. But I didn’t care because I came from nothing anyway—from absolute nothingness! With my mom I had changed schools and had to be the new kid twice a year, I’d lived in homeless shelters, I slept on people’s couches, in motels, in cars. And now, as a teenager, all the rules I was happy to follow suddenly became a big burden. “
Tina’s father and his wife could not handle her anymore, so they sent her back to her mother.
“When I got back, I was old enough to be my mom’s friend now—to be her real drug buddy. It was my mother who gave me my first bag of weed. Then her friends, her homeboys, would give her drugs to take me on drives down Santa Rosa Creek Road so they could give me drugs too and have sex with me. I didn’t know all their intentions because I was young. They were older dudes paying attention to me and saying I was cool.”
“I got really bad into meth and left home. I dropped out of school and was living with this older dude out in Cayucos when one day I opened up my door and there was my dad standing there, down from Oregon. He took me back there and put me in rehab. I stayed a month, then I took off.”
Tina hitchhiked out of Oregon, landing eventually on the streets in San Francisco. “I thought, alright, party time!”
For the next 10 years Tina hitchhiked through and lived in several states. During that time, she was in and out of juvenile hall many times. Each time they had her, they would think that the next logical step was rehab. Tina would always agree.
“They’d put me in rehab, and as soon as I’d get there, I’d leave and start hitchhiking again. It was like my free ticket out of juvenile hall. Right away I’d be right back on the streets doing drugs, partying and having sex.”
For the next 10 years, Tina became more irresponsible and childish as she grew toward womanhood. Though she appeared to move freely about the world, she knows she was trapped in a net of drugs and drifting. Ironically, the door through which she would finally find her escape was a door that opened into prison.
In every family each individual over time tends to settle into a specific role. When Tina returned to her family in California, she quickly took on the role of the person who always gets arrested.“
For me, going in and out of jail wasn’t really shocking to anyone in my family. It became normal. Most of the time I was locked up in the valley or desert areas of the state: a prison out in Chowchilla, another up near Marysville, one down in the Riverside area, and more. I’ve been in a lot of the county jails, too—Richmond, San Luis, Calexico, Bakersfield. I did a regular tour around the institutions of California.”
As bad as
Tina knows prison is, she believes that in some ways it is unfortunately more
accommodating than the world on the free side of the wall.
“Sometimes
I think it’s easier being locked up than being on the outside. You don’t have to make any daily or
life decisions for yourself because you’re told exactly what to do all the
time. You can just kick back and
chill and be lazy and relax. Kind
of like being spoon-fed all the time.”
Ironically,
any programs that were available for “improving oneself” in prison were, in
Tina’s experience, reserved for people with extremely long sentences before
them. Her shorter incarcerations
required nothing of her but childlike daily obedience. Each stay required her to simply “do
time” but not to do anything with that time to change herself or her behavior
in any measurable way. Looking
back, Tina sees that each experience just added more wasted moments to a life
in which she was learning nothing that might keep her from falling back into
the always open arms of the justice system.
This
laissez-faire correctional set-up combined with the laissez-faire parenting she
received at her mother’s home probably had a lot to do with Tina’s many years
behind bars. But despite this
tempting opportunity to blame others for her plight, Tina does not. She accepts responsibility for
what she has done.
Tina
vividly recalls the behaviors that dominated her days and guaranteed her
repetitive arrests:
“I fought
the system for so long. I was in
so many rehabs and drug testing programs. Each time this is what I’d do: I’d still do drugs of course, but I always thought I could figure out
how to get around the test. Like who
can I get some clean pee from? And how can I hide the pee to get it when I need it? And when do I get tested, and how
many days until I’m clean. I was spending a lot of
energy trying to get around those tests. And why? For what? How about this fancy idea—just don’t do drugs?!”
Tina would eventually come up with this fancy idea, but it would take being expelled from a prison to trigger it. More chapters . . .
