My own personal Jesus

November 29, 2004 - 12:13 a.m.

Miss Marijuana left today and it was sad to see her go. Words always fail me when I try to describe Strawberry to other people, because she possesses unique characteristics that I honestly have never seen in another human, except maybe my Amish grandma or Mother Teresa. Despite witnessing and living through an encyclopedic amount of extreme, outlandish and bizarre life situations, she managed to come out generally unscathed and un-jaded.

Out of nowhere stories from the Old Days come out of her mouth, real quick, just kind of tossed over her shoulder as she walks into the bathroom or is on hold on the phone:

“When I was 18 I was high on acid and there was a stray dog and all I could think about was that I need to get some water for this dog so me and my friend were trying to open up a fire hydrant to give the dog some water but we couldn’t open it so I flagged down a police car and begged the cops to open the hydrant for the dog but by then the dog had run away so the cops were like: ‘Oh, so you see a dog here, do you?’ and then they arrested me and hauled me to jail.

“So they locked me up and there was a toilet with a security camera pointed towards it and I was freaking out because I can’t use a toilet with a camera on me. I completely lost my shit and started screaming hysterically and pounding on the walls and doors and I screamed for hours on end, all through the night until finally the guards got sick of hearing me scream so they just unlocked the door and let me go.”

Apologetically, she explained, “What was I supposed to do? I was high on acid and there was a camera on the toilet and I just couldn’t hang with the whole jail cell thing.”

I just couldn’t hang with the whole Jail Cell Thing.

Who says such a thing? If it were me, I would describe my jail experience to my listener in such a way that would evoke Horror, Outrage, Injustice, Anger, and a little bit of Sympathy for good measure. My listener would have sweat on his brow, tears in his eyes, and red, clenched fists. But Strawberry is not capable resentment and true hostility.

I can imagine her conversation with the cop. “Hello, guard? Yeah, hi. Um, normally I’m really cool about seeing new places and meeting diverse peoples, and I’m sure you’re really cool and all, and maybe under different circumstances we could share a beer or something, but this whole Jail Cell Thing? I really can’t hang. I’m sure you understand.”

This is her approach to everything in life, no matter how horrific the circumstances may be, whether it’s someone dying of cancer, domestic abuse, suicide, rape, or brain tumors. She just takes it all in stride and says, “Hey, I heard that you got caught in a house fire and had a stroke as a result of the major skin damage, so I baked you some banana bread, but I made it extra healthy with whole-wheat flour and no refined sugar. I also made some lavender oil and chamomile salve that you can just rub on your neck to induce calm. It’s best to use right before bedtime because it’s supposed to promote good dreams.”

Even when the tragedy happens to herself, she manages to report the events matter-of-factly, even when she was beaten and stabbed six times by two psychopaths in Milwaukee, and rushed to the hospital where the doctor said the blade narrowly missed puncturing her liver which would have caused her to bleed to death in a matter of minutes.

She called to tell me what had happened and her voice was raised about 3 octaves and she spoke very quickly so I knew it must be BAD. My jaw dropped and every hair on my body stood on end as she recounted the details of her assault.

She was at the Fuel Café in Milwaukee seeing some live music and a friend of hers got cold so she went out to her car in the parking lot to retrieve a jacket from her trunk. When she opened the trunk she was accosted from behind by two men and pistol-whipped on the back of the head. Then they grabbed her by her hair and smashed her skull onto the bumper of her car to knock her unconscious. She didn’t pass out, but began fighting them with her bare hands and because their rape attempt had failed, the men proceeded to beat her, rip off her clothes, and stab her several times, slicing her between the eyes, the mouth, the neck, and stabbing into her lower back, into her vital organs. There were several witnesses nearby, and one man came out of his home from across the street, waving a gun and yelling to leave the girl alone, so they fled the scene.

It makes me sick to even write these words because I am so disgusted by the event that even the words seem dirty. I wish I was writing this in a fictional context, because shit like this should never happen in real life. Unfortunately it’s all true, and the reality of the situation was far worse than how I am depicting it here. I have a small fire that still burns in my belly whenever I think about this, even years later.

The emergency room doctor told her that the knife didn’t quite reach her organs, because Strawberry is thick, and has some extra padding around her waist. He said, “If you had been a thinner girl, you’d be dead right now.”

Do you want to know how I dealt with the news that Strawberry had been stabbed? I took one giant step out of my mind and LOST MY SHIT. I was so devastated at the mindlessness and violence of the attack, and outraged at the injustice of this happening to my own little Mother Teresa, the last person on the planet that deserves such a thing.

The same day of her attack, the two men were arrested after they kidnapped and raped two teenaged girls, two virgins, in someone’s basement. It seems they forced the girls at gunpoint to get into their car and drove them to somebody’s house and held them in the basement. One of the girls managed to escape and brought the police back to the house to get her friend.

Whuuuuuut. Thhhhhhe. Fuuuuuuck.

That right there is what sent me over the edge and I FREAKED-THE-FUCK-OUT.

“Two teenaged girls? Did the detective say how old they are?”

“Around 16 years-old, I think.”

”Did they say…do you know if they were…virgins?”

“Yeah, I believe so, and both of them became infected with an STD.”

!#$%&*#!

%@&%!#!

@!#*$!&!

It turns out that the “men” were actually boys aged 14 and 16. They were heavily involved in a gang and drug dealing and were part of a group of four boys who went on a 3-week crime spree before getting arrested. Ultimately there were 35 victims, of every age, race and sex, most of whom were beaten and robbed, and it wasn’t until the end that their crimes escalated into the stabbing and the rapes. Strawberry was crowded into a room with all of the victims for a police line-up. Most of them had facial injuries, cuts and bruises, including an 84 year-old woman with two black eyes.

I started drilling Strawberry about the arrests, the charges, and what the detectives were doing to organize a case against them. I asked her if they photographed her injuries and she said, “No” and I started yelling THEY DIDN’T DOCUMENT YOUR INJURIES??? THEY’LL NEVER CONVICT WITHOUT PHOTO EVIDENCE OF THE VICTIMS!!”

I wanted to get in my car and drive straight to Milwaukee, bust into the police station and go fucking loco on the incompetent pigs who were handling this case but instead I just drove 80 miles to where Strawberry was and photographed her injuries myself. A week had already passed, and I knew my pictures would probably never hold up in a court of law, but GOD DAMMIT somebody had to document it.

I became completely preoccupied with violence, and crime, “bad people” and sociological problems consumed all of my thoughts. I was in school at the time and ended up producing no less than three projects related to Strawberry’s attack. The semester was coming to an end and my final projects were a photo essay of the History of Strawberry leading up to her attack, including photos of her stab wounds, for my documentary photography class, a five- foot oil painting depicting the culture of violence in young black men, and a 15 page research paper on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for my Abnormal Psych class.

The state of Wisconsin makes it very difficult to access information about convicted felons, and they don’t have an online database where I could find out exactly what these guys were convicted of, and how long they were sentenced for. (Illinois, on the other hand, will tell you everything you want to know about a felon. They have an inmate search on their DOC homepage.)

The only thing I was able to find was that these guys are registered sex offenders, and since I can’t even link to their sex offender profile, I took it upon myself to take screenshots of their profiles and posted it here.

The other night Strawberry and I were shooting the shit, me drunk as hell, and her smoking to her heart’s content. She was staring off into space and got a goofy little grin on her face. She said, “Have I ever told you how many times I’ve almost died?”

I laughed out loud because I’ve known her for 13 years, and know all too well how many times she’s almost died, but still I said, “Hmmmm, I don’t know. How many times was it again?”

“Well, there’s the time I got stabbed, and then there’s the rare poisonous spider bite that poisoned my blood and left a hole in my arm. And of course, the terrible car accident where the windshield fell in on me and the car was totaled. And then that time that I went over to my friend Jay’s house and when I walked in someone put a sawed-off shotgun to my head and threw to me the ground, because Jay was in the process of being robbed and he was laying in handcuffs getting kicked in the head. Once, I was traveling with a hippy friend who I thought was just into pot but he was actually into crack and he decided to drive us into the ghetto in Mobile, Alabama to buy some crack and the ghetto people started shooting at our orange VW bus. And when I was 18 I was at a Dead concert and took thirty hits of acid and I just couldn’t handle it so I started freaking out and someone put me in an ambulance and I went to the hospital and they tied my arms down and I thought I was dead, I thought I was in heaven with the doctor because everything was green. But I only thought I was dead, I wasn’t actually dead, so I guess that doesn’t count…”

Previous - Next

The Latest Babel

The Fast, Days 1-6
January 28, 2007