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Mary is the Reason to Say No
South Carolina has recently gone through a difficult time ridding the state of video poker. As the debate roared through courts and newspaper editorial pages heading for a showdown in a state referendum, the women of Killingsworth witnessed a very personal struggle with this issue.
Behind all the well or poorly reasoned arguments is Mary. Mary is a real person with a real family and a real job she has held for 6 years. Mary also has a real disease, an addictive disease that takes the form of compulsive video poker gambling. When she was overwhelmed by the affects of that gambling, she began to use drugs to dull her reaction to the pain in her life. But the gambling came first. Video poker is the primary drug she fights. Mary has lived over six months at Killingsworth and she is afraid to move. The story of her journey to Killingsworth is full of anguish and loss. It is her struggle to stay here and stay drug free that we have watched with much concern. Mary attends NA -- Narcotics Anonymous -- and to our surprise, it has been relatively easy for her to give up the chemical drugs. Mary also attends GA -- Gamblers Anonymous. That fight is not so easy.
I remember the afternoon when going to answer the doorbell I found Mary waiting there. Her face screamed "distress"! Her body seemed sad. When I asked what was wrong she told of a three hour bus ride she just finished. Mary doesn't have a car anymore; she rides the bus. Instead of making her car payments, she made "payments" to video poker machines, so the Toyota was repossessed long ago.
She had gotten on the bus earlier that afternoon because it was her day off. She was going to pick up dry cleaning and go to a doctor's appointment. She described to me the fear she experienced as she approached her first bus stop. From the window of the bus she could see the neon signs inviting her to come into the video poker dens. She sat frozen, missed her stop and missed her appointment. And on and on she rode, around and around the city of Columbia looking for a safe place to get off the bus. Everywhere she went a half-block or so was the neon invitation to failure.
After what seemed like forever she simply returned home to Killingsworth. She still had her dry cleaning money, and she was drug-free one more day. But what a struggle it was. That was a little over eight months ago.
At our house meeting this past week Mary told us she would be moving out soon. She has celebrated 15 months of clean time from chemical drugs, and hooray! she has also celebrated her one year anniversary of clean time with Gamblers Anonymous. Meanwhile South Carolina is free of video poker machines, we hope forever. And Mary allowed her story to be told to churches across our state, to be printed in church bulletins and she put a face on those for whom real life issues like picking up and paying for dry cleaning and buying milk for children and making car payments is an everyday struggle.
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Homelessness is More Than Having No Home
Mary was a surprise....she was not from the usual agencies who call with resident referrals. It seemed a pretty straightforward situation. She hadn't been in jail for years; she hadn't used drugs for a while; and although she began mental health counseling when she was ten years old, she hadn't ever been in a psychiatric hospital. But she had been abused, raped, and harassed as she wandered around.
Mary had been living on the street, under bridges, in abandoned buildings and every two or three months she stayed in an emergency shelter for a few days to get a bath and wash her few clothes. She was homeless; we could offer her a home. This didn't seem too difficult. As we lived with Mary, however, we discovered that the experience of homelessness is more complicated than simply not having a space of one's own.
When you don't have any personal space, you have to keep everything you own with you all the time. So Mary wore all of her clothes all the time....the ultimate layered look. Regardless of the temperature, she had it all on. It took several weeks for her to absorb the notion that the closet in her room was really hers to use. She could leave a few things there when she went out and have a hope they would be there when she returned. Homelessness has to do with how one dresses.
When you don't have any personal storage space it certainly affects how you eat. Every meal has to be foraged. In her first several weeks at Killingsworth Mary ate differently from other residents, finishing 2 or 3 plates full of food at each meal and almost making herself sick. We learned that she had to begin to trust that the food would be there for the next meal. There was enough food to store and a place to store it, so she didn't have to eat as though there might not be another meal for a while. Homelessness has to do with being hungry.
And there was that huge backpack. Everything that Mary owned that she wasn't wearing she carried around on her back. Each morning when she left the house to go job hunting that pack went with her. We tried to introduce her to the concept of "chest of drawers", but had almost given up the hope that she would consider using the space that was now hers to use. For Christmas, one of Mary's presents was a gift-card to a local department store. She returned from her shopping trip with a large smile and told the staff that we were going to be so proud of her, and pulled out a half-size backpack! She told us now she could leave some of her belongings at "home" when she went out. Homelessness has to do with how much and what kind of "stuff" one can have.
By the way, the definition of JOY is the look on Mary's face when she got her first paycheck and brought it in to pay her rent for her space, for her home.......Mary is homeless no more.
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