Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets by Beatrice Sparks
His forehead wrinkled and his body tied itself into a hard knot. “I don’t know. I had had little problems before…you know…but they had never clobbered me so completely or even hardly at all. Then suddenly and in one black whirlwind swoop it was like the whole world came crashing down upon me, covering everything, maiming everything, and a dark sulfur cloud squeezed me out of my existence into an imprisoned unrealness of fermenting hostility and pain.”
“What do you mean, ‘fermenting’?”
“Growing, taking over, souring. My life became foreign to me! I was part of the unwashed, the unwanted, the hated—a troublesome alien—and I seemed to be forever cloning myself into more unacceptable, unworthy, unhappy mes because the misery was too much for one young, stupid, helpless kid to bear. I know that seems crazy enough to have me locked in a rubber room in a loony bin…”
“No, it doesn’t, Sammy. It just means that the beautiful, warm, belonging, protective, brightly colored balloon you had lived in all your life, up to that point, had been suddenly popped, deflated completely, leaving you flat and empty. You had to, then, in some sense, reinvent your life and your place in it. It’s too bad you weren’t able to get help right then.”
“Yeah, before things got so out of hand that we may never be able to get my Humpty Dumpty self put back together again.”
“Oh, we’ll get Sammy Humpty Dumpty put back together again good as new, maybe even better. Never you fear.”
“We’ve got to do something soon! I can’t stand this pain and confusion and fragmentation much longer. I feel like I’m two people, the good person I want to be and the bad person I am! Actually I know this sounds completely out of orbit, but sometimes…in fact more and more often now…I feel like maybe I’m many different people.” He started crying softly. “Lately, I’ve even started thinking of names for some of the evil entities within me.”
“Do you think that might be feeding your problem?”
“Could be.”
“Can it be dangerous to encourage any kind of negative thinking?”
“Yeah! We’ve gone over that!”
“When things get bad, have you ever tried silently singing a ‘feel good’ song over and over till it kind of kicks into your brain? Just to show yourself that YOU are in charge?”
“No.”
“Could it hurt to try?”
“Guess not, but I can’t think of one right now.”
“Really?”
“Yeah…blank…except…this is dumb, but when I was little my favorite song was…it’s silly…‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam to Shine for Him Each Day.’”
“What does that mean?”
“I dunno. I guess nothing.”
“Ummmmm. If it doesn’t mean anything, maybe it is silly.”
Sammy became very serious. “No, it’s not silly. Let’s see. A sunbeam is part of sunshine, so probably it’s warm and friendly and comforting…”
“And?”
“It drives out the darkness.”
“And?”
“I used to like to sit in the meadow by myself sometimes when we went camping and just feel the warmth and brightness of the sun kind of hug me. I remember I could feel it almost like it was some kind of a soft, belonging, happy cuddling that I didn’t ever want to stop.”
“Close your eyes and relax. See if you can feel sunbeams caressing your face now.”
After a minute or two, he whispered, “I can. I can. I really can. I wish I could just escape into that sunbeam kind of time-stands-still feeling forever.”
“You can’t do that. You wouldn’t even want to. There are too many exciting, adventurous, creative, challenging things you still have to do with your life. But you can, on occasion, encourage yourself to take side trips back to that private awesome world that only you own.”
“That’s a cool thought.”
“What does the Jesus part mean to you?”
“Aah…safety…belonging…love.”
“Seems like a pretty good combination to me.”
“This will probably sound disturbed, and I couldn’t say it to anyone but you and my mom, but it makes me smile inside when I think of ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’ and old-time kid things. I’d like to be a good, clean, little kid again, now and forever.”
“How does being a good, clean, big kid now and forever strike you as a cutting off thought for today?”
SUMMARY OF SESSION
Sammy talked about his problems in East Los Angeles. He wanted to get out but didn’t know how. His gang’s “turf” was its own country with its own laws and boundaries. He stayed drunk or stoned to exist. We talked about what he might have done, how negativity is literally a toxic poison to the human mind, and how he might choose a “feel good” song to replay in his mind when necessary.
Samuel Gordon Chart
Thursday, August 11, 7:45 A.M.
Sixth Visit
SAMUEL (SAMMY) GORDON, 15 years old
(Sammy called at 6:30 A.M. and asked if he could
come in before school)
“You look as though you had a really bad night.”
“I did that for sure! I think that the unbelievable, unforgivableness of my past is just beginning to really sink in! I had nightmares all night, each one getting more nightmarish.”
“Come on, Sammy, you’re supposed to be dumping out, not building up.”
“Yeah, I know, but I can’t make sense out of how someone who was raised in a loving, caring, privileged home like I was, who had friends and hobbies and everything that is supposed to make them normal, could go off and do the abnormal things I did. I wonder if there’s something wrong with my brain, if I’ve got a tumor or weird chemicals or something. I can understand the kids who didn’t know any better not doing better, but me…there was no excuse. I don’t know how I ever got from here to there.”
“You got there one step at a time, precious person. One, sliding, downhill step at a time. You were suffering from depression, which is possibly the worst form of human suffering, and you began giving yourself constant negative conditioning until you squeezed out every bit of joy and light in your life! That can happen to anyone who has not been forewarned and forearmed about and against the NEGATIVE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING!”
“I wish I’d known then what I know now.”
“But you didn’t, dear Samuel. That’s why it is so imperative that we start emphasizing to people, especially young people, the NEGATIVE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING. Okay, so you, like millions of other people, during a down time in your life inflicted negative thinking patterns on yourself and allowed the negatives to grow until they took over—”
Sammy interrupted. “And I allowed CR (CRANK chemicals) and sap (alcohol) to drag me ever deeper and deeper under, until I was not even hardly a human being anymore…”
“Oh, Sammy, I know you regret your past mistakes, and you should! But don’t hoard them in your heart and mind so you can continuously wallow in them like a pig does in the mud.”
“I want to stop, but first I’ve got to get rid of more junk and more junk and more junk. It keeps expanding until I feel like I’m going to explode.”
“But we are eventually going to defuse your past! Don’t allow yourself to think differently about that for a second.”
“Okay. Back to East Los. I wanted out more than anything, anything! But I was afraid to leave and afraid to stay, and besides, I had no way to get out. So, I kept myself twisted and spun (drunk and drugged) to the point where I couldn’t have thought if I’d tried.
“Then one night, I stumbled across a softly mewing, little newborn kitten in an alley. I can’t remember where I found a carton of milk, but I got it somewhere and dipped my finger in and then let the soft, helpless little ball of fur lick it off. I hid the two of us behind some old crates, with him inside my jacket for I guess a couple of days. He just kept getting weaker, and I kept getting more in touch with reality.
“I couldn’t believe where I was and how lo
“A few times I heard Cholo calling me. I suspected he had a run, but I didn’t want to kick with them anymore, even though my stomach was growling from lack of food and my head was aching as well as all my other body parts.
“After a while Sammy died, and part of me died with him. I took off my shirt and wrapped him in it, then scrambled through the trash can till I found a little box his size. I buried him in the corner of the bin and walked down to the church to pick two flowers to put over him. I was off my turf and was asking to get popped, but I didn’t care. Most of me was dead already.”
“That must have been inconceivably painful.”
“No, actually by then I couldn’t feel anything, but now I know not feeling might be even worse than feeling! Anyway, some forevers later Cholo found me wandering around looking for a way out and thought I needed action. I was too weary to resist. A few of us piled into his car and oozed around looking for trouble. Nothing much happened, and I’d just gotten out of his buggy when another car drove up and started shooting. They got me in the thigh and through my shoulder and waist.”
“You were hit in a drive-by?”
“Yeah, and I went back and forth between being glad it was me that ‘got it’ and being in so much pain that I wished the shooters had done a better job. The guys wrapped me in plastic so I wouldn’t bleed on Cholo’s car and took me to General Hospital, where they unceremoniously dropped me by a side door. In a way I understood, because it wouldn’t do any good for them to get themselves involved.
“After what seemed like another creation of time, with me moaning and crying for help and bleeding all over, someone came to the door and called for some other guys with a stretcher. They took me through endless doorways and then left me lying in a cold, drafty hall. People scurried back and forth, and it was like I was invisible. After what seemed like eternities I could hear myself sobbing like a baby and under my breath calling for my mom. Eventually two white ghouls stopped, pulled down the blanket someone had thrown over me and shook their heads. One said, ‘See this rag (bandanna showing a gang’s colors)? These guys come in like flies. There’s no end of them.’ The other ghoul snickered as they pushed me into the operating room. I tried to get up to leave, but a big white-dressed refrigerator came out of nowhere and held me down while someone gave me a shot. As I drifted off I heard them talking about how bad I stunk.”
“You must have been grossed out completely by all that terrible negligence and inconsideration.”
“Yeah, and I thought, as I drifted past a blackness deeper than any blackness I’d ever known, that at last it was over. But it wasn’t. Eventually I woke up in a blurred world of activity, people running around and pushing and pulling me from one table in a bright room to a gurney, then down a series of long winding halls, each having a different colored line or lots of colored lines running down its middle.
“After what seemed like miles, the aides stopped in a ward filled with multicolored corpses or at least different shades of black and brown and yellow corpses. It was more scary than any Stephen King movie or book ever could be. I waited for flames to start bursting up through the floor, especially after one of the corpses started making noises so gruesome they were otherworldly. I was rolled next to the noisy creature who was spewing up putrid yellow-and-green sulfur-smelling liquid that scorched my nose and my throat. I began shaking so hard I thought I would fall onto the floor until the two green-clad hospital staff members who had wheeled me in, pulled up the sides of my bed and sauntered away.
“The person next to me kept gagging and throwing up. His soft moaning and groaning outdid any sickening, spine-tingling sound effect movie studios could produce. After a while I wanted to get up and help him, but I was too weak. Besides, when I tried to move I could feel that I was tightly bandaged from my shoulder down to my ankle.
“At last the yellow skeleton next to me stopped puking and put the little metal pan he’d been holding on top of a table beside his bed.”
“‘Are you all right?’” I whispered.
“‘Yes, thank you.’” His voice was little more than a moan.
“‘I…I wish I could do something to help you,’” I said, from the very bottom of my heart. I wanted to go over and empty the throw-up pan and wipe off his plastic, tortured-looking Halloween face with a soft wet cloth.
“After a while he asked, ‘Why are you here?’
“I was ashamed! ‘I…I got caught in a drive-by,’ I said.
“‘Poor guy. Are you…is it…?’
“I could feel his honest concern. ‘No, they said one bullet grazed the bone in my thigh. Another hit me in the waist, missing my vitals, and one went through my upper arm, missing the bone completely.’
“‘I guess in a way you’re lucky.’
“I shrugged, then realized how much that hurt. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
“‘I have a liver condition.’
“‘Is it serious?’
“‘Yeah, I’m just waiting to…’
“He couldn’t say the word die, but I knew that’s what he meant.
“In the next few days, Ricardo became as good a friend as I ever hope to have. He told me how his mother was an illegal, but since he was born in Los Angeles, he had automatically become a U.S. citizen. He’d had liver problems since he was a little kid and had always been sickly, so he hadn’t been able to go to school much. His mom had brought him lots of books from the library every week, and a neighbor, Grandma Garcia, had taught him to read and write and think.
“I couldn’t believe that he was only a year older than me because he looked like he was a very old, old, yellow, shriveled-up man. Outside he was scary, but inside he was the kindest, most appreciative, loving, thoughtful creature possible. He never said a mean or rude thing to, or about, the aides who treated us like we were scum, or his sickness, or anything. It made me feel like an ungrateful, self-centered jerk. I wondered what would have happened if we had been born in reversed places. He would have appreciated so much all the things that I had been given, and as for a dad, he didn’t even have one. Mine at least gave my mom money to buy us everything that all the other kids had.
“I hated myself and tried to help him all I could, telling him about all the trips our family had taken to Yellowstone and Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls and all the things he’d only read about and dreamed about. He loved hearing about everything, and while it hurt to tell him because when I finished with each story I had to leave Mom and Dorie and Dana and come back to…but at least I had him.
“Each day Ricardo got a little worse and every other day his mother came bringing him one single flower. I missed my own mom so much that I cried through most nights, but I couldn’t let Ricardo hear me, nor his mom. She was as sweet as he was, and I was glad I could speak Spanish because she knew only a little English. She’d kiss me and hug me and thank me over and over for all I was doing for Ricardo. She had no clue how much good he was doing for me! I don’t know how I’d have held together without him. The other four guys in the ward were tough, vile creatures who cursed to the aides’ faces and spit at their backs. Sadly, I wondered if I would have been one of them without Ricardo’s sweet companionship. I hoped not! I truly hoped not!
“After a couple of days the aides had me up walking with a walker like old people use. The four morons in the room teased me and waited for me to fall down, but Ricardo gently and lovingly encouraged me. I knew with his help I could make it, no matter what the other circumstances were.
“One morning I woke up feeling clammy-cold, and looking over at Ricardo’s bed I saw that he had died. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. Maybe it was the quiet, peaceful, un-pained
“I spent a long time thinking about that and wondering if I’d meet him again in Heaven after I died…or if I’d get there at all…or if the Heaven thing was really true…or…I didn’t have time to figure it out before the aides came and threw the sheet over his face and wheeled him out. A new kind of fear overwhelmed me then. I didn’t know how I could exist in the General Hospital County Ward without Ricardo. It was a place where the welfare people and the street people and the like are taken. When I came in I wanted to scream out, ‘I’m not one of you.’ But I knew I was. Anyway, I somehow survived the next who knows how many days, till I was told I was ready to be released.
“One of the cold, unconcerned women, falling all over themselves in the office, asked me where I was going to go, and quickly I said ‘the bus station.’ She called someone to take me there and after forever an old greenish van lumbered up. On the way to the bus station I became frantic. I didn’t have any money…and…I was scared. When we got close to a smaller branch of the freeway I asked the driver to let me off. I said my aunt lived only a block from there, and I’d decided to go stay with her. The driver didn’t ask any questions. He just pulled over and let me off on the side of the busy road.
“It took a long time for a scrawny, scruffy-looking kid on crutches to hitch a ride, but finally a big, old, beat-up-looking eighteen-wheeler pulled over. The driver, as beat-up-looking as the truck, had to get out and help me up into the cab. He was so rough, it about did me in, but I didn’t say anything because I needed outta there as much as I needed air at that point.
“The driver had a mind like a sewer and a mouth like an open manhole. He kept telling jokes and stories so sickening that I thought I’d throw up on my shoes. I used to think that was an expression, but believe me it’s not. Later he started telling mother jokes, and I wanted to smash him across the head with my crutches, but I didn’t dare. He was so big he could have broken me in pieces like a toothpick.