Reflections for a Sunday: Redemption

I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. ~ Shantaram

You can listen to me read this essay here:

I will never forget my 50th birthday, bathed as it was in blood. Blood on the floor, blood on the walls. Blood everywhere.

The day started fine. I attended a wedding at the Self-Realization Fellowship in Pacific Palisades and a reception afterwards at the couples’ Calabasas home.

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At the ceremony, each guest received a little box and when you opened it, out flew a live butterfly, so hundreds of these butterflies flew out of the boxes all at once, into the air. A beautiful and somehow poignant sight. How long does a butterfly live? One month? At least they were free for that short time.

A butterfly is a delicate creature and the world it enters fraught with danger.

After the wedding, a reception was held in the couples’ home in Calabasas. I drove over Topanga Canyon, through Old Calabasas Town and down a wide road to a massive gate with waterfalls on either side. I had once lived behind gates like this, but I didn’t miss it. I had hated the gates.

I announced myself to the security guard and was let in. I continued along a winding road, past large Spanish style homes on either side, and then, through another gate and up and up a long, steep driveway until I reached the mansion, nestled high in the Santa Monica mountains. The view on every side held nothing but nature. In that serene and protected setting, it was hard to imagine that only a few miles away, the less fortunate lived in the drab flatlands of the San Fernando Valley, working mundane jobs, worrying about how they would pay their rent next month or buy the drugs they were dependent upon.

Make no mistake, the people living in the mansions had their worries too, the drugs, the bills. Many lived beyond their means, desperate to keep up appearances, falling far deeper into debt than the peasants living beneath them and with more powerful and dangerous debt collectors. The stakes, no matter who you are, can be high.

Our lives are made up of so many lies. Rich or poor, no matter the country we live in or the religion we follow. Our lies grow and grow, woven together into intricate webs that capture us and will not let us go. The truth is often unbearably frightening. If we face it, we lose all the comfort and security of the false worlds we have built.

The SFV is infamous as the birthplace of the porn industry. If you want to travel into darkness and deception, take a walk there sometime. Except that no one ever walks in Los Angeles. Only the homeless, whose tents you can now see piled up under bridges and along the roads. There are more than 75,000 homeless people in Los Angeles.

But this was years ago, this birthday night, and I had no idea how much worse life would become for everyone over the years. It was bad enough back then.

Never one for parties or large crowds, I left the reception early and drove back down to the flats where I lived in an apartment with my two sons. I took off my finery that I still had from my marriage to a California real estate developer and gratefully got into bed.

It was close to midnight when the phone rang.

“Karen, you have to come right now! Mike has seven stab wounds. I can’t get him to go to the hospital. I’m afraid he’ll die!”

The distraught voice belonged to a struggling single mother; a heroin addict whose son was in school with my eldest son. I knew who she was talking about; a young man who thought he was some kind of Christ figure, out to get himself a following. A failed Charles Manson type who twisted the Bible and talked about the Dark Carnival, inspired by the Juggalo band, ICP. He wasn’t more than nineteen or so, troubled, drug addicted, like so many young people in that God-forsaken town. If you know nothing about Juggalos, you can read my piece The Devil's Playground, although it might give you nightmares.

Juggalos having fun

I got dressed in some sweats and a hoodie, an outfit I preferred much more than the one I’d been wearing a few hours previously and headed over to her apartment in Van Nuys.

I parked my car and walked up to the front door where the mother was waiting for me. She had her dog on a leash and said, “I’m going for a walk. I just can’t take it anymore. Don’t you dare call 911!”

She walked out and that was the last I saw of her that night.

Inside, the apartment looked like a scene from a horror movie. A group of high school aged kids sat on the sofa, staring bug-eyed at Mike who lurched back and forth in the center of the room in an agitated manner. There were blood streaks everywhere, smeared on the walls and door and splattered on the floor. Mike had what looked like some torn sheets wrapped around his torso to cover the stab wounds.

He kept babbling, refusing to go to the hospital. The kids explained he was terrified that he’d be sent back to prison.

“I’d rather die,” Mike kept saying and it seemed like he would.

It was only when he passed out, skin ashen from shock and loss of blood, that I and the kids managed to drag him into the car and on to the hospital.

I found out later that the knife had punctured one of his lungs. Within an hour or so, he would have died.

The police came to interview Mike, and he didn’t go to jail. This time at least, he’d done nothing wrong. He’d been attacked outside a party by someone who was offended by his Juggalo tattoos. No doubt high, he hadn’t realized what was happening to him while he was being stabbed. Incredibly, he had managed to walk to this safe apartment.

I wish that had been the end of it, but it wasn’t. He went on to commit a terrible crime, kidnapping a young woman and forcing her to take money out of the ATM and doing who knows what else to her. I don’t know more details than that. Thankfully, he was caught and sentenced to prison for a long time.

I thought of that poor woman and the terror she must have felt. I’d saved this monster’s life! What if he had ended up killing her? I would never have forgiven myself.

Years later, Mike got out of prison, and last I heard, he was doing okay. I don’t know how he is today. The single mother got clean and turned her life around. We tend to put people into boxes, forcing them to stay there. But we all have the chance at redemption. It’s never too late. Even on the cross, when the criminal hanging next to him asked for forgiveness, Jesus said, “This day I will see you in paradise.”

I took a lot of young people into my home in those days. The artist and writer friends of my sons, the outcasts who didn’t fit into the school system. I never turned anyone away. Many of those young people came back to me years later to say thank you. At the time, I thought, am I crazy to do this? But I know now that I did the right thing.

In 2018, I interviewed two young women who had spent a lot of time at my house in their teenage years. The result was two articles for NAILED magazine called The SFV Interviews: Growing up a Girl on the Mean Streets of LA Suburbia.

Kashmir

Here’s part of Kashmir’s interview, describing the San Fernando Valley:

The SFV is a place that still triggers my PTSD when I return. A place where I have never had a single female friend that hasn’t been stalked, molested, assaulted, sexually cyber-bullied, or raped.

Heroin is absolutely rampant in the SFV. Ecstasy and coke are the least of your worries, and they are ever-present as well. Date rape is mundanely common and yet women are still in constant competition with each other rather than forming a sisterhood. LA glamour is this huge priority. It is constantly strived for, while also publicly rebuked. It’s a show.

Kashmir overcame the darkness of her youth and went on to achieve multiple college degrees.

I think about the horrors our children face every time they walk out the door of our homes and into the street. Although now, those horrors are inside technological devices. The drug dealer that used to seduce children on the street corner is now inside a shiny screen. Drug transactions are made on CashAp and drugs are delivered to a kid’s home by an Uber driver.

As of January 2024, an average of 22 U.S. teens die each week from drug overdoses, most often from fentanyl. The U.S. teen death count from drug ODs can be compared to a high school classroom being killed each week.

Strangely, no one really talks about this crisis. People are quite willing to talk about every other crisis. But this one danger that hits our children harder than any other, we want to pretend it doesn’t exist—at least maybe it does for everyone else’s child, but not for mine.

I’m so thankful that around the time I saved Mike’s life, when I was really struggling with so many personal challenges, like raising my sons as a single mother, I discovered the book, Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. When I read the first paragraph, I just started to cry:

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

I knew exactly what Roberts was talking about. In my own way, I had been chained to that wall more than once. Trapped, tortured, ready to give up, with the choice to drown in hate or rise above it with love. But how, how to do it. Robert’s story greatly helped me to find a way.

The book is a fictionalized account of the author’s own life. As well as the character in the book, Roberts was a drug addict who escaped from an Australian prison and made his way to India, where he had incredible adventures that inspired the story. In the end he gets tired of running, gives himself up to the authorities and goes back to serve a seven-year prison sentence.

Here are some photos that show his path in life:

As a young convict, on a motorcycle in Mumbai, as an author, as a musician in Jamaica

In some ways, what happened to Roberts in real life, after he went to prison, inspired me even more than the book.

In prison, Roberts decided to start writing. He had a guard who tormented him, just made his life a misery. When Roberts finished the first draft of his story, so proud of his achievement, the guard tore it up and threw it away. So, Roberts wrote a second draft. The guard took that one and threw it away, too.

When Roberts got out of prison, he wrote a third draft, and that is what became the worldwide best seller, Shantaram.

One day, as Roberts was signing books for fans, he looked up to find the guard holding the book out for him to sign.

“Could you please forgive me?” asked the guard.

Roberts replied that, to the contrary, he wanted to thank him.

The guard was shocked. How could that be?

“Well,” said Roberts, “if it hadn’t been for you throwing those drafts away, I would never have written that final, best draft.”

Roberts could have hated that guard. But if hate had been his driving force, he would have never persevered. He would have never been able to put all his heart and soul into creating a story that would impact the lives of so many millions of people. My sons read Shantaram and it inspired them in ways that someone like Mike, with his twisted Dark Carnival stories, never could.

Thank God for the good that balances the evil.

Life is filled with twists and turns. When we have to make the most difficult choices of our lives, we never can be sure, in that moment, how those choices will change us or others or how they might even impact millions of people as Robert’s book did. We simply don’t know. All we can do is our best, which can often seem inadequate. And then, keep on going.

I think of my last essay, A Vampire Came to Call, about the Israeli dentist Yuval Bitton who saved the life of Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar. Sinwar went on to orchestrate the October 7th massacre. Bitton’s own nephew was killed in the attack.

Should Bitton not have saved Sinwar’s life? Such questions must haunt him.

Should I have left Mike to die in a pool of blood on the ground of that apartment? I could never have done that.

On the other hand, would I kill Mike if he tried to hurt one of my children? Yes, I would.

This is the dichotomy of life. There are no easy answers and if we’re honest, we really don’t know what we will do in dire circumstances until we face them. We hope we will rise above our own cowardice, our own selfishness, and do what is honorable and right.

I think of those butterflies, at that wedding. Let loose from a confining box into a beautiful but dangerous world. A butterfly is so delicate, so innocent. Would it be better for it to stay in the box? No.

To take those chances in the real world, to know what it’s like to fall down and get up again. To choose courage over cowardice. To save another’s life. To forgive an enemy. This is what life is all about.

Fly free, little butterfly until the very last flap of your wings takes you to heaven.