The Story of Tinkerbell

Tinkerbell Gets Busted

June, 1999

Gabe sat on the bed in our one-room cabin, his bare foot propped on his knobby, hairy knee as he tried to find a vein. I flipped a page of my Solzhenitsyn novel, trying not to look at the beads of blood coaxed up by the prodding needle.

"I have a weird feeling about this deal they want me to do," I said.

"What do you mean?" The cigarette waggled between his lips, the long ash falling onto the quilt.

"The guy was asking too many questions, and he just seems creepy."

Gabe squinted through the smoke, jabbing around the yellowing bruises on his ankle until blood finally bloomed in the dope-filled syringe. He pushed the plunger home, then withdrew the needle briskly and stuffed it back in the eyeglass case he used as a kit.

"You're such a pussy cockroach." He flicked an ash at me. "You need to be a fearless comrade. If you don't do this deal, we won't have enough dope money to get through the week."

My shoulders hunched. "What happened to the money I gave you this morning?"

"What money?"

I raised my eyebrows. "My paycheck? You know, from working?"

He cackled. "What do you think you just filled your veins with? It was only two hundred dollars."

"It was two hundred and seventy," I muttered.

He rolled his eyes, then stubbed out his cigarette and rummaged in a drawer, coming up with his drawing pad and pencils. He laid the pad on his chicken thighs and started sketching Bill Clinton having sex with Ronald Regan.

I sighed and brushed the cigarette ashes from the bed, then sat staring blankly at the novel. An entire two weeks' pay from my shitty job at the gas station had gone on dope in a few hours, though I knew there was more to the story than that. Gabe wasn't above stealing from me. He'd once taken my debit card without asking, then drunkenly threatened to whip me with a length of PVC pipe for complaining about it, saying I was a capitalist whore, too attached to my material goods.

Gabe and I had been married in a brief ceremony at his parents' house a few months prior. I hadn't even told my own parents until it was already done, and the only reason I'd married him is so that we could go together into the Peace Corps, where we'd be out of reach of our addictions. Unfortunately, Gabe had immediately gotten a DUI, which disqualified him.

I was stuck. I had no one besides Gabe, and nothing to live for besides dope. I'd tried getting another job, another life, but no one would hire me and no one would have me. Gabe said I was only cut out for life as a misfit and a rogue, and for once he was right. Whenever I tried to leave him or the drugs, it hurt too much and I came crawling back.

I didn't care if this drug deal was fishy. Prison was starting to sound like a big improvement in my life.

***

It turned out my instincts were good: I delivered an ounce of heroin to a guy that had been busted and turned snitch. Two weeks later when a pair of sheriffs showed up at my work with a warrant for my arrest, all I felt was an odd relief and even a sort of vague anticipation. I'd always wondered what prison was like.

***

I was facing ten years, even though this was my first offense of any kind, but I was able to make a plea deal for a lot less time. At my sentencing, I had the opportunity to speak; I shouldn't have taken that opportunity. I gave a long and blubbering speech about how sorry I was, while the other defendants in the benches snickered and the rest of the audience averted their eyes in embarrassment.