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And Her Eyes Fell from the Scale

Tijanna O. Eaton

In January 1990, I shot my first fix of heroin with the help of a close but secretly addicted friend. By April, I was hooked and had developed a daily habit. By December, I started mixing coke with heroin and lost my job and housing soon after. Eventually, I lost custody of my daughter.

Before addiction, I had been a “responsible member of society,” having graduated high school with honors, attended four years of college, and became an anxious but devoted mother and a budding hard rock musician. I drank socially, never exceeding my two-beer limit. Until one day, I did. But how did I make the jump from simple alcoholism to homeless, junkie, crackhead, prostitute?

Well, I wrote a whole book about it.

It is a jail-crime memoir called BOLT Cutters about my 12 arrests in three years in the early ‘90s. The book details my swift descent into homelessness, drug addiction, prostitution, and recidivism. Each of the 12 chapters details the circumstances surrounding the arrests and includes the backstory of how I’d gotten to each point.

Chapter seven, “And Her Eyes Fell from the Scale,” is the longest and most grueling section. Out of the 12 chapters, it was the last to come together. It wasn't the hardest chapter to write—that distinction is reserved for the one where I almost got beaten to death in a stairwell and, in a separate incident, chased to within an inch of my life—but chapter seven still took the most emotional toll. At 52 pages, it is almost twice as long as the next longest chapter, “Redshirt Day,” about my final trip to jail and the beginning of my recovery.

Coincidentally, chapter seven is a turning point in my addiction and the centerpiece of my book.

An ebb.

A flexion.

A nadir

A hatchling.

It’s the chapter where I meet and move in with One Dred Fred (my pseudo-boyfriend and fellow drug addict), experience domestic violence, and succumb to the vicious cycle of leaving and returning and leaving again. Where I lose custody of my daughter, try to overdose, fail, and claw my way back to an interest in life. Where I leave One Dred Fred for the last time, find safety and predictability in a new homeless shelter, and fight with two new employees who were also residents. Oh, and where I describe the arrest itself—which happened when a cop caught me scaling One Dred Fred’s building—along with an encounter with a girl I dubbed The Crack Angel perched on top our separate bunks in San Francisco County Jail #1.

It’s the chapter that requires me to review custody papers that I’m still unsure how I received, given my "nomadic" nature at the time. I've had these papers for over 30 years, but it is still impossible to locate the address that is on the first page of the first document even though I’ve seen it written there dozens of times. Reviewing these papers always results in molasses in my brain, a slush, a jumble: my inability to decipher even the simplest and most direct information contained wherein.

It’s the chapter where one fleshed-out idea sets off two electrical impulses that send out four pulsating spores, each clamoring for full exploration. It is unruly. A hungry dumpster fire. A cold hand and flint at the end of a day’s exhausting trek. It had requirements and demands. And suddenly, the chapter was an ouroboros, the proverbial snake eating its own tail. And just like this never-ending snake, I felt like I was caught in a cycle that I couldn’t escape.

I needed help from my people because the more I worked on it, the more circuitous it became—the molasses spilling onto each page, sinking in between words, and making my brain stickier. But even the process of receiving feedback was another serpent of a project.

Two opportunities for two sets of colleagues to review the chapter turned into three meetings over two seasons plus one weekend, two and three months in between that were required for me to digest and integrate their feedback. One allotted month had turned into six.

Meanwhile, the other 11 chapters stood ready, waiting, rooting for their wayward sister, encircling her as she spiraled within herself.

On my own, I could not figure out how to reorganize or improve the chapter. It was a heavy lift for one person. However, with two teams totaling 17 people, I restructured the entire chapter by breaking it down into 29 parts. Even though that was just as overwhelming, I finally felt like there was a path forward and the writing flowed more easily because the structure was already in place, and I was just fleshing it out.

Still, there were many times when I wanted to give up.

Why did I feel the need to write about and share this shit? Couldn’t the story move along without the mention of my two favorite dope dealers and where they liked to get head on a break? Or Lance the Pimp Guy trying to discipline me with a plastic baseball bat? No, because then you’d have less context for the significance of what happened in One Dred Fred’s single occupancy hotel room and why it was so hard to leave.

I pressed on.

The ouroboros began to stir and writhe, stiffly at first, uncertain.

I noticed right away that six parts were fucking with the timeline because they did not occur when I thought they did so I removed them, which brought immediate relief. My team pointed out that I’d started with a story, but the end didn’t appear until 30 pages later. Bringing that story together helped the snake loosen its whorl. I grouped disjointed thoughts, deleted repetitious text, and killed precious darlings. I began feeling hopeful that it would eventually release its own tail, stop suffocating itself, and stretch out into its full length.

Each bit of feedback gave me the motivation to continue.

Whenever I’d open the document and not know where to start, I’d picked a new piece of feedback and work from there. Motivation turned into momentum, which fed the structure of the story. Slowly and diligently, the tail emerged from the snake’s mouth.

Finally, animated by their generous and generative support, the chapter was complete. The ouroboros had uncoiled fully, metamorphosing into a dragon.