The Bad Mother

On making it easier for addicts to do drugs

In 1989 I lived in Hollywood, a few blocks from a laundromat from where, at eight months pregnant, I’d had to run because two guys were having a fight with broken bottles. There was a 7-Eleven next door, and when my daughter was about a year old, I met a woman who was standing out front. She was about my age, with caramel-colored hair and a baby daughter a few months older than mine. The baby sat in a broken stroller, with dirty cheeks and hands made grubby from the snack foods people coming out of the store would offer her.

“What I really need are Pampers,” said the young woman, whom I’ll call Miralee. I bought her Pampers. As I walked away, the baby held out to me a piece of gummed banana.

I visited Miralee the next day, and the next. I learned, from her husband who was sometimes around and asking for money, that they’d come south for a construction job, the job had fallen through, they were staying at the motel next door trying to get back on their feet. I asked friends whether they had any work for the husband; one said he could use him on a painting crew. The husband told me, sure, but what he needed were some sneakers. I bought him sneakers. I will mention here that I was not in a good financial position, but a pair of $50 sneakers seemed like a small thing to do to help. The husband did not show up for work.

I had two friends at the time who lived on my block; we all had daughters the same age and would push them in their strollers in the afternoons up into the hills, breaking off stalks of wild fennel for the girls to teeth on. I told them about Miralee and the baby. Unbeknownst to me, one of them went down to the 7-Eleven.

“I called child services,” she told me the next day.

I thought this was extreme. I thought Miralee just needed a little help. I brought her to my house. We did laundry in the washing machine my stepmother had bought me. We sat on our knees in the TV room and folded laundry, two women in their mid-20s with baby girls gurgling on the carpet nearby. I told her I’d bring some breakfast to the motel the following morning. Not too early, she said.

It took some doing for me to get the East Indian manager to let me past the grate and up to the room. I knocked for a long time before Miralee opened the door. She looked puffy and exhausted and took the bag of food without much ado. If memory serves, we did this more than once.

A few weeks after I’d been spending time with Miralee, we were per usual in front of the 7-Eleven with the baby, and I was, maybe, making some plans for her—

“Look,” she said. “We’re crack addicts.”

I don’t remember the exact sequence of what happened next. I do remember, as the husband yelled about my not being willing to pay for another night at their motel, how it instantly became clear how shambolic and desperate their lives were. They are were on an hour-to-hour hell-ride that I had been helping pay for. Miralee told me social services kept showing up, that she was afraid they were going to take the baby. I think I entertained the idea that I could somehow care for the child, an idea my daughter’s dad immediately put the kibosh on. But in truth I’d gone cold. It was all lies and pain and I’d been abetting it. I told Miralee I could drive them to a shelter, which I did, piling the family and their broken possessions into my car, the husband fuming in the back, Miralee quiet and big-eyed next to me, asking if there was maybe another way, the baby clapping her hands in my daughter’s car seat. I helped them carry their stuff up to a room in a depressing building near MacArthur Park and never saw them again. I did later fictionalize their lives in a novella called The Bad Mother.

People read this and think the bad mother is Miralee, or another girl in the book with a baby. This is not the case. Hollywood is the bad mother, the place that tells you she will take care of you, that you can float away on the dreams she will help deliver, that all you need to do is show up.

I thought of all this this morning, remembering an article I read yesterday in the Washington Post, about New York City’s first supervised overdose center, where people can inject heroin - everything is provided but the drug itself; where things are made easy and comfortable, and where, if people overdose, there’s a crew waiting to revive them. “Since the authorized service began operating Nov. 30, organizers say workers have reversed 76 overdoses [out of 440 visitors],” the article notes, “a small victory at a time when the nation is reporting a record number of fatal overdoses amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

I appreciate that this is being seen as a victory; also, that any suggestion that it is abominable to encourage addicts to shoot up may be met with responses of, “So you want these people to die?” Of course not. But I also don’t want to keep handing people a loaded gun.

The issue of what to do about drug addition is as polarizing as any in this country, and complicated. People will disagree with legalizing and decriminalizing; about incarceration and treatment; about what constitutes compassion. I am in the middle of reading two books about the issues, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger, and The Least of Us, True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, by Sam Quinones, whose previous book, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal.

I am likely not going to change anyone’s opinion about what constitutes compassion, when it comes to helping addicts. And I will wholeheartedly agree that the open-air drug markets in Bryant Park in NYC, in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, are heartbreaking, dangerous, filthy and all but without hope. I get why people believe they are helping by offering an alternative, a clean, safe place for addicts to feed their addictions, addictions that, as they grow, people have less and less agency over, as if, with each dose, they chop off a little more of their leg until, even if they want to, even if they dream of their legs, they cannot stand. And I understand how you would want to help this person up, would want to figuratively or even literally cradle what is left of them in your arms.

But then I read the following, from a woman in Shellenberger’s book: “How compassionate is it to let somebody just shoot dope for the rest of their lives?” She had been a meth addict; had lost her job, had lost her kids, life had been the same abomination every day until she got treatment, until she walked away on her own from the false comfort that was lying in a safe space being watched over by people making it easy to shoot dope, by people whose message was, it’s okay; if you die, we’ll bring you back so you can do it again.