Single women, when they get to be about my age, sometimes start taking in stray cats. When my yoga instructor mentioned she had one, and that she was looking forward to a quiet weekend with her little buddy, I envied her. Instead of a stray cat, I had taken in a meth addict who woke up singing “Adelante, Dios!” and sweetly demanding Mexican pastries.
What can I say? I was doing all kinds of spiritual exercises to open my heart, and it was wide open.
Alejandro was the only person who came through my Desert Mother camp, which was actually in a forest on the Olympic Peninsula, where I was hollowing a simple little dugout shelter into the base of a steep slope covered by ferns, blackberry vines, and birch trees. The Desert Fathers, in case you aren’t familiar, were precursors to the medieval monks. They went outside the cities and towns to live in solitude and simplicity, offering hospitality and wisdom to people who sought alternatives to the evils of the society of their time.
The site I’d chosen for my Desert Mother camp was just on the edge of a mid-sized town, only a short walk from the first gas station. I could walk the two miles to the library, where I went to do my freelance work online, and to the gym where I showered and practiced yoga. For the first week as I prayed and meditated and developed my campsite, I didn’t see anyone else at all in the forest.
I was almost finished excavating the space for my shelter when my first and only visitor came through. I heard the man’s voice singing in Spanish and greeted him, “Hola!” as soon as his head and shoulders were in view above the foliage. We talked, I standing in the hole I’d made and he on the ground above me, until my Spanish faltered, then we switched to English.
I tried to explain my project.
He said, “Do you do drugs?”
“No. It’s for God.”
“I do drugs. I’m going over there to buy drugs now.” He pointed toward the pair of old RVs covered in mildew and tarps that housed my nearest neighbors. I had been thinking of going over and introducing myself to the neighbors so they wouldn’t be creeped out in case they noticed that someone was camping in the woods so close to their place. It was early November, and the foliage was thinning enough now that I could see their lights through the trees at night.
“What kind of drugs?”
“Crystal meth.” He shook his head to correct himself. “I call it clear.”
He had all his teeth, a full head of hair working its way out of the ponytail at his nape, and his skin had a healthy glow. He was thin and looked maybe 30, but he insisted he was 45, three years older than me.
Alejandro sat on the first log I’d placed as part of my roof, his heels against what would become an inside wall, and told me a long, bitter story that involved a nephew, an iPhone, and a car, then another story about how he’d been fired one day after working there for eleven years. He held up two fingers together and said that when two people are together… and one doesn’t do drugs… He knew he needed to quit the drugs. His compadre was always telling him he was a better person than that. He looked at me with hope shining in his eyes. He told me he treated women very well.
I explained that I was a nun, but we could be friends. We could hang out any time.
“Let me see your shovel.”
I had been working slowly and deliberately, ‘discovering’ every bit of my house-to-be with joy and gratitude, thanking each little rootlet that became part of the walls and sorting the soil that I removed by composition, for later use. My visitor worked quickly, chopping at the roots and sending the soil flying down the hill. His hair shone blue-black in the sun, whisps falling into his eyes.
“I’ll come back and help you tomorrow. But I won’t come back at night. I don’t want to scare you.”
“If you do come by in the dark, be careful. There’s a big hole in the ground.”
He went away laughing, pinwheeling his arms, toward the town, not the trailers.
He came back ten minutes later with two sodas. We sat on the log together with our feet in my future house and talked until the sun went down and the light on his face changed from orange to blue. I gave him the hug he asked for before he continued on toward the trailers and I went into my tent to sleep.
I prayed for Alejandro as I waited for the sun to come up the next morning, then worked until my shelter was finished, knowing better than to expect him to come back so soon. I knew he would be back sometime, and I couldn’t wait to show the finished project to the only person who had seen it and had also had a hand in making it. I had carved sconces for candles into the clay walls, little cubbies for my things, and I’d rounded out a tiny fireplace with a smoke hole angled away. There was just enough room for me to sleep in my nest of blankets.
In yoga class we stood in Warrior One position, then opened our hearts and pinwheeled our arms back. I pinwheeled my arms and thought about my visitor.
He came back the night of the first frost. “Señora! Señora! It’s very cold!”
Still wrapped in my sleeping bag, I folded back the blanket I was using for a door and pulled him in through the hobbit hole-like entrance.
“It’s very cold. People are following me to my compadre’s, I can’t go there. Nobody’s following me here.”
I knew about meth addiction and paranoia. I’d been through it years ago with a lover who believed people were following her and spying on her. We had to move every month, from town to town, in a jagged line across Nevada to Southern California, until she deduced that I had to be one of “them.” Otherwise how did they keep finding her?
“I don’t have room!” But he was cold.
“Like this!” With a nervous smile, he unzipped my sleeping bag and spread my blankets flat. “I go here, you go here.” He lay against the wall, facing me. “I won’t do nothing to you.”
I snuggled into his chest. Like a cat, he kneaded my back. “Is it ok if I move my hands? Like this?” His hands moved in wider circles. He kept asking, “Is this ok? Is this ok?”
My heart was wide open. My body was just a temporary home for my soul.
He slept all the next day and the following night. His sleep was filled with groans and cries. He clenched his arms around me and ground his teeth. I woke him from repeated nightmares.
Lying in my nest of blankets, he told me how to find the little Mexican bakery behind the gas station, and half a dozen empanadas became our morning ritual. We made silly rhymes and puns as we ate them in bed, then we took the blankets outside to shake out the crumbs. He said, “Do you think I’m lazy? I will go to work.”
He was gone all day and came back at dusk with a duffel bag full of stereo equipment. I protested that my house was too small, and I was trying to keep my camp as natural as I could.
If you read about the Desert Fathers, you find a story about a monk who was visited by a woman who claimed she needed a warm place to sleep but really she wanted to see, on a bet, if she could tempt him to break his vow of chastity. All night, she watched him burn his fingers in the candle so the pain would distract him from desire. I am not such a prude, but I took inspiration from the story of how committed the Desert Fathers were to hospitality and I made room for the speakers.
He selected one speaker to take to work the next day, a light-weight model with the Goodwill sticker for $3.99 partially scratched off. No lunch, no tools, just the speaker.
I looked up stories of recovery from meth addiction online. There was one woman who posted that it was two years before her head was clear-headed enough to hold a job after she quit meth. Another said that her family’s nurturing had helped. That was something I could do.
We ate all the food I could buy. I went to the food bank for more, and we ate that too. As we shared a bowl of soup, taking turns with the spoon, he told me I should find a better job.
“Well, it’s convenient for now.” It had been enough to feed one person…
“It’s convenient? Is that what this relationship is to you? Just a convenience?”
We both laughed.
Rain set in. He came home from work with his shoes, socks, and jeans soaked to the knees. His pockets were full of little bits of evergreen from the Christmas wreaths they were making somewhere near the airport. It was a long walk. I had no way to dry his clothes. I stripped him and wrapped him in the blankets. As I massaged warmth back into his feet he said, “I’m not a fucking baby. I’m not a fucking deer.”
He told me he used to work very hard. He sent $300 to his mom every two weeks, he paid child support, had a big house, and still he had plenty left over to live on. And then one day he woke up in the hospital. There was a problem with his nose. It had something to do with the cocaine. He had never partied with people, his drug use had always been secret. And then he beat up two guys at work and was fired, just like that, one day, after eleven years. Everyone knew about the drugs now, and he was ashamed. That was why he was walking through the woods that day when we met instead of taking the road. He didn’t want anyone to see where he was going.
Now, No more drugs. “¡Adelante, Dios!”
He showed me a sheet of notebook paper on which he’d written ¡ADELANTE, DIOS! followed by the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, and the Nicene Creed. He couldn’t believe he still remembered the words after all this time. I tacked it to the clay wall of my little house.
As November got darker and colder, he came home later each night. I left his dinner on the campfire coals and went to bed. When I got empanadas in the morning, he said, “The baker must know you’re getting these for someone. You didn’t tell him they’re for me, did you?”
I had, indeed, been tempted to tell the baker who I was buying the pastries for.
He was now coming home at 4 am pretty regularly and sleeping for only a few hours, refusing to let me take off his wet jeans and coat. I rolled over onto a hard, angular object one night and found a gun in my bed. I carried it carefully out of my house, showed him where it was in the morning, and told him not to bring it back to my camp.
All that day I tried to think of healing words to say. I had said things to my past lover out of frustration and hurt feelings, and I had been unkind. I had not loved her with my whole heart. At church there is a line in the confession of sins where we say to Jesus, “I have not loved you with my whole heart.” So, fingers in the flame.
“So, you know I’m doing drugs again. You don’t like it, you want me to go, I can find somewhere else.”
I thought about the possibility of having my camp, my little hermitage, all to myself again.
Alejandro stayed away for a few days, even though I hadn’t asked him to, then came back and shook me awake at 4 am to say, “Go cancel your phone right now. Don’t wait for morning.” He rubbed his eyes–a worried gesture that had become familiar. He had been borrowing my phone, a little pay-as-you-go flip phone. He told me someone had taken it because they wanted to know who he was with, where he was from. Then he fell asleep with my arm wrapped tightly in both of his, his warm breath on my hand.
I hadn’t slept well. I’d dreamed that my camp was invaded and fought the urge to get up and leave before I was fully awake. In another dream an old friend was trying to warn me about something but there was no sound coming from his mouth.
I extracted my hand from Alejandro’s grip and walked into town. There was an email from a friend, a fellow Desert Devotee, who woke up in the middle of the night with such a strong intuition that I was in danger, he drove from his own camp in rural Missouri into town to email me: Leave your camp now and don’t go back. Then he started out on the 1500-mile journey in case I needed rescue.
I didn’t go back. I rode a series of buses north toward family, praying for my sleeping guest all the way, asking if I should have gone back to warn him and hearing the answer inside – no.
I did go back to that town a solid week later. I found my camp not ransacked, still inhabited. I picked up a grey stocking cap I’d watched him lose and find a thousand times and put it on. Then I walked up and down the road to town wondering what I would say if I saw him.
There was one time when I knelt to pick that hat up off the ground for him. He offered his hand to pull me to my feet. I took it and said, laughing, still on one knee, “Will you marry me?”
He smiled into the distance over my head. “Maybe.”
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Laura B. Fox is a ghostwriter living off-grid in Washington State with five goats, five cats, two dogs, two ducks, two other humans, and too many chickens.
© 2023, Laura B. Fox
Halfway Down the Stairs 