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Juan approached and quietly asked, “Do you want me to check on her?”
I shook my head, forcing calm, control.
I will not break down.
I cleared my throat and finally managed to speak. “She probably needed drugs and the only way she can get them is with sex.”
I wasn’t telling Juan anything he didn’t know.
“I have to go to work,” I said, my voice raw. I didn’t have tears left in me, but the anger was always there. “I’ll call Will.”
I walked away before I changed my mind and confronted my mother. I didn’t know if I could handle the emotional roller coaster today.
My family life had never been perfect, but it was okay. My parents bickered, drank too much, but they each had a job and managed to make ends meet. I’d dealt with my mom’s mood swings my entire life—now I suspected she was bipolar, but she’d never been diagnosed, let alone treated. Then my dad killed himself while driving drunk and my mom had to deal with the aftermath. She started smoking pot to help with the stress, she claimed. Then she was in an accident and got a prescription for oxy.
It went downhill from there.
She lost her job, lost her house, and destroyed friendships when someone gave her a place to stay for a few weeks to get on her feet and she ended up stealing from them.
At the time, I’d been living in a studio near Pierce, a community college in Woodland Hills, attending school while working for a tech start-up. I let her move in with me, not realizing how bad she was. When she couldn’t get more pain pills—legally or illegally—she would drink so heavily that she’d pass out. I offered to pay for rehab. I didn’t have the money, but I had one credit card I’d never touched and I would use that. She refused. I told her she had to stop using or leave.
She left.
The guilt ate at me for years. My tech start-up did exceptionally well and when they sold it, I received a bonus—enough to put a large down payment on a small house in a quiet Burbank neighborhood. Two bedrooms, two baths—I hoped to find my mom and she could live with me. I had a fantasy—that she was clean and sober and we could be a family again.
The first time I found her, she was strung out, living in a condemned building with other strung-out junkies. I did everything to save her. I got her a new identification card. Enrolled her in rehab. Found her an apartment I paid for so she wasn’t living on the streets. I enrolled her in Medi-Cal. I helped her apply for public assistance—then learned that there were plenty of places where you could use EBS cards to buy drugs. Dozens of convenience stores that were dealing in the back room would ring you up for snack food but really sell you meth, heroin, fentanyl. Her benefits ran out and she applied for disability. They awarded her money. Again, she used it for drugs. Not food, not housing, just more drugs.
Six months later, she was evicted for starting a fire. She begged me to let her move in with me. On one condition, I said: she went to rehab. She spat in my face and called me a selfish, ungrateful bitch, then walked away.
I didn’t see her again for years, until I found her living on the streets.
I couldn’t afford a private facility, the kind that doesn’t take government money and requires patients to commit to getting clean. Will helped me find one that would have taken my mom in for ninety days and let me pay for it over a one-year period. She refused to sign the paperwork because she wouldn’t be allowed to leave.
You can’t force someone to get clean. You can’t love someone enough to change them. If my tears were pennies, I could have paid for every man and woman in this park to get help.
I walked across Fifth Street, put my earbuds back in and called Will.
I was blunt. “Bobby’s dead.”
“Shit.”
“Juan Perez responded.”
“I’ll reach out. You okay?”
“I’m done.”
“You’ve put in a lot of time lately, you need a break.”
“Not that. I’m done with these people. I’m going to expose the homeless industrial complex. People have got to realize what’s going on!”
I couldn’t believe that I was near tears. Tears of rage. I had to do something. I felt helpless.
“Violet, it’s all there and no one cares. While I know you don’t like to hear it, none of these setups are overtly illegal. I talk about this all the time to anyone who will listen, but they don’t want to see the truth.”
“I’ll make them pay attention.”
“How?”
