Free Prison Baby: A Memoir by Deborah Jiang Stein Page B

We tooled on down the highway from San Diego across the border in my MG.
    OUR FIRST DAY on the beach, I spin out my car into the sand. I forget the science of weight, because as soon as I’m off the damp sand patch near the shoreline, my MG sinks into the dry, dusty sand. Diego gathers a few guys from the beach and they surround the car and pick it up! Then they walk it off the sand. Same happens when we get a flat tire the next day. No tire jack, just a few guys to grip the bumper and lift the rear end while Diego changes the tire.
    Our first night in Mexico we both want to sleep on the beach. Diego warns that we’d better put our cash and keys in our jeans’ pockets and roll them for a pillow so thieves won’t raid our valuables. He grew up in San Diego and spent weekends in Mexico with his family to visit relatives, so he knows things I don’t.
    It’s right after midnight and neither of us needs sleep, neither of us wants it. We peel off our clothes, toss them into the sand, and stand bare, alone on the beach. Forever miles down the sand in all directions to the end of the earth, our naked exposure in open sea air, the galaxy of clear night all around, the risk of public sex and the anxiety of what-if-someone-shows-up, this freedom our foreplay, the start of orgasm before we’ve even touched.
    I lean to kiss him and he pulls me forward. I climb on to wrap my legs around his waist and he falls backward into the sand, me on top. “You okay?” he whispers into the curve of my neck. Often in sex he asks about my needs, not something I find with other men. We kiss and kiss through beach grit and salt air. I straddle him into the late-night heat. The Mexican sun still seeps out of the sand. A coating of beach dust sticks to the sweat on his arms, more inside my thighs. He always comes slowly, and we’d been high all day, smoked Mexican weed and downed shots of Tequila. No sense of time. Hours, it seemed, then he rolls me over and I kneel, grip handfuls of sand. These moments, a night like this, I forget about my past. I forget about the stabs of pain in my stomach.
    We fall asleep snuggled together against a dune and wake at dawn, exhausted from the all-night romp and from the drive the day before. We awake aching for more.
    After I clear my head, I dive my hands into my jean pockets. All my money’s gone. We’ve been robbed. Diego’s jeans are still rolled under his head so at least we have car keys and enough cash to make it through the week.
    BACK IN SEATTLE, Diego rushes me into the doctor’s office without an appointment. I’m flat-backed on top of the crinkled-white-paper–covered exam table. The doctor ignores my moans. He prods and probes, then shakes his head and schedules me for a barium test.
    When he later gives me the test results, he says, “You’ve developed an advanced ulcer, and over some years.”
    Some years?
I’m not yet nineteen. “Explains the bits of blood when I throw up,” I tell the doctor.
    He talks about reducing stress, asks a thousand questions, and then frowns when I fold up the paper he’s handed me with a list of bland foods to eat. And no alcohol. Nothing on the list about drugs, though.
    Oh yeah, I’m stressed. My hair falls out in clumps and quarter-sized bald spots dot my scalp. It’s alopecia areata, a temporary stress-related condition. And I’ve gnawed the inside of my cheek so much it aches from a ridge of scar tissue. I’ve deteriorated inside and out. But none of it a reason to clean up. Why leave my one friend, my family—drugs. Deep down, though, some glimmer inside knows I’ll be better off if I quit. Next Friday, I promise myself. Or the week after. For sure by the end of the month.
    The apprentice in me graduates the day one of the guys I run around with gives me a .38 Special with a mother-of-pearl inlaid grip. For the next five or so years, I spiral deeper into drugs and ratchet up my crimes.
    My light-brown skin and skinny body, down to the bones from