Wasted (10 page)

 

 

Sam Reynolds phoned Regina Hartwell.

“I’m doing well,” said Regina. “You’d be proud of me. I’ve gotten Kim out of my life. I’ve been clean for a month. Everything is going great.”

Hartwell even decided to get a job again. After all, Kim had taken one. LeBlanc then worked at Westbank Dry Cleaners in the community of Westlake, a so-called elite suburb of Austin that was home to successful writers, musicians, attorneys, and high-techies and where drugs, sex, and alcohol flowed freely among cheerleaders and football players. If Kim could work, so could Regina.

Ynema Mangum tried to help Regina get a job. As Regina’s twenty-fifth birthday drew near, Mangum set up an interview for Hartwell with Xerox, Ynema’s own employer, for a job as office assistant in the accounting department.

This is just the right thing to put Regina on the right track, to get her motivated, to get her working toward a career,
thought Mangum. The two had been friends for about six years, and this was Ynema’ s last try at their friendship.

Hartwell went to the interview and aced it. Xerox thought she was smart, funny, outgoing, attractive, and a great dresser.

“They’re going to do a drug test,” Regina told Ynema.

“No problem,” answered Ynema. “You told me you haven’t been doing anything, that you’re clean.”

“Well, uh, I smoked some pot last week.”

Just as in years past, Mangum knew Hartwell was lying. She knew that Hartwell had done drugs harder than marijuana.

“Rather than embarrass you,” Regina said, “I’d rather just not go back and accept the job.”

That hurt Ynema. It hurt because she believed it showed that she, Ynema, had become hardened. She was interested in huge corporations with health-insurance plans, with chances for advancement, with 401(k)s.

Regina was interested in making her friend not look bad for hanging with a druggie. That’s the way Ynema Mangum looked at it. That’s the way Hartwell’s real friends always looked at her actions—as protecting them, not as protecting Regina.

Ynema knew something else about her friend. She knew Regina tried hard to be normal. She knew Regina wanted to have an education, to have a job, to be a professional woman, but that Regina didn’t have the discipline or the roots in her spirit to do that.

Regina Hartwell wanted the whole panoramic view so badly that she couldn’t focus on just one thing. She was a random person. Her most organized routine was to get up, go to Diva’s, do drugs, and obsess about a woman she couldn’t have.

On her upcoming twenty-fifth birthday she would gain access to all of her money—every single dollar of it. She could do whatever she wanted. No answering to trust officers. No begging, pleading or lying. Just cold hard cash.

 

 

The weekend of February 10, 1995, Regina Hartwell threw herself one hell of a birthday party.

She rented the Presidential Suite at the Embassy Suites hotel, then ordered three limousines and filled them with Dom Perignon. She took about a hundred friends to Manuel’s, her favorite restaurant, with her favorite waitress. She ate chicken enchiladas verdes, her favorite. She wolfed them down in her usual fifteen seconds.

Eventually, everyone made their way to the hotel for drugs and drinks.

But on that twenty-fifth birthday, on that very special occasion for Regina Hartwell, few people gave her a birthday present.

Jeremy Barnes went to the Warner Bros. store and bought Regina a Wile E. Coyote pen, knowing her love for the
Road Runner
cartoon character, because she had said she was going to return to school.

Anita Morales gave Regina a very special ring, one exactly like her own.

Regina always gave away things that were important to her. When R. A., her former best friend who had introduced her to Mike White, and with whom she had since reconciled, died soon after of AIDS, Regina placed the ring on his finger. It was buried with him.

Too familiar with death too young, Regina Hartwell was devastated by his death.

 

 

Regina Hartwell and Anita Morales sat down across from Regina’s financial officer. Regina chattered, picked up a pen, signed the papers, and they left. They drove over to Kim LeBlanc’s workplace, the dry cleaners. They got out, walked in, Kim signed the papers, and they left.

Hartwell had just created a $5,000 mutual fund account to help LeBlanc pay for college.

“Why are you doing this?” asked Morales.

“Because I love Kim.” Regina beamed for joy. There was no more to be said. Incredibly hardheaded, once Hartwell had her mind set, there was no changing it. That’s the way she was. Stubborn, and tough. Very tough.

She’d talked to Kim’s mom about the fund, and Cathy LeBlanc had approved. As far as Kim and Regina understood, Cathy LeBlanc knew of and approved of every aspect of Kim’s relationship with Regina.

That was good. Regina Hartwell liked getting the approval of a mother.

But there was a problem. Tim Gray was sharing LeBlanc’s apartment. He slept in the living room while Kim slept in the bedroom. There seemed to be no hope of Hartwell getting physical attention from Kim.

“I’d do absolutely anything for Kim,” said Regina. “Anything.”

Anita Morales had heard that enough times to make her sick of hearing Kim’s name.

“Regina, you’ve just gotta buy something for yourself. Look at this apartment.” Jeremy Barnes glared at Hartwell’s tacky coffee table. It was covered in plastic, black-and-white checkered shelf paper. “Girl, it’s time you fix this place up. Do something for yourself for once. You deserve it.”

Barnes had tried for months to get Hartwell to buy herself a couch. He knew she had the money. He cleaned her apartment on a regular basis, and had seen her financial statements. But trying to get Regina to spend money on herself was like trying to pull money out of Scrooge. Barnes took Hartwell by the hand and led her down to the furniture store to buy a sofa.

Regina couldn’t find anything she wanted to buy, but she could find a million things she didn’t want to buy, and a million reasons not to buy them. They walked down the aisles, Regina pointing her finger at this and that. “I don’t like that. I don’t like that. I don’t like that.”

“Reg, girl,” said Barnes, “if you don’t hurry up and buy something, I’m going to pick out something, and they’re going to deliver it this afternoon. And I’m going to pick out the biggest, floweredest-looking thing that you can ever imagine.”

She picked out a black, faux-leather couch.

She gave her old furniture to Kim LeBlanc to help furnish the apartment Kim shared with Gray, and for which Regina paid the rent.

 

 

“Is it silly that I bought a Jeep that matches Kim’s?”

“Oh, no, no, no, it’s not silly.” Jeremy Barnes stared at the green Jeep Sahara with the huge tires and perfect sound system. “It’s great, Reg. It’s just great.”

Regina Hartwell socked her hands into her pockets and grinned.

But Barnes really thought it was the stupidest thing he’d ever seen in his life. He wasn’t about to say that to Regina, though. She was too happy, and it was getting rarer and rarer to see Regina happy.

“You deserve it, Reg. You deserve whatever you want because you have the biggest, bestest heart of anybody I know.”

 

 

On Valentine’s Day, Regina Hartwell gave Kim LeBlanc a diamond ring. It looked like an engagement ring. It was just one of many gifts Regina bestowed on her over the year. She gave the beautiful Kim a Gucci watch, her mother Toni’s ring, a phone, and a CD player for Kim’s Jeep.

“I want to sell it,” Kim would later say to Regina of the CD player.

“No. Why?”

“I want to buy an eight ball of coke,” Kim answered.

“I’ll pay for it,” said Regina.

But that would be months away, when Hartwell wasn’t so flush with money. She was rolling at this time. She could buy LeBlanc anything she wanted.

Regina felt she could face anything, so she went home to Pasadena to visit her father and stepmother. Her visit with Mark and Dian Hartwell went well. They talked, listened, and bonded. They loved each other. Regina actually had hopes of building a wonderful relationship with her father, the kind of relationship Kim LeBlanc had with her mother.

Then, the words she’d spoken for so many years didn’t seem so hollow. “If anyone tries to hurt me, I’ll call my daddy, and he’ll take care of them. I’ll call my daddy, and he’ll . . .”

Regina told Anita Morales about her great trip home. She told Jeremy Barnes about her great trip home. She really was on a roll. Life couldn’t get much better than that.

“Jeremy, you know I really need my apartment cleaned, and the Jeep is looking really bad. You want to make some extra money?”

That was just like Regina—to know when Jeremy needed her. Jeremy’s roommate had moved out, Jeremy had to pay all of the $700 rent himself, and he was short $200. He hadn’t told Regina, but she just knew it anyway. That’s the way Hartwell was; she cared so much about certain people that she instinctively knew when they were in need. At least that’s what Jeremy believed—Regina loved certain people to the fullest.

 

 

On March 5, Jeremy’s birthday, Regina went to The Gap to look for a present for him. But just like with shopping for a couch, she couldn’t find a thing.

“Jeremy, I went to The Gap. Nothing looked like you. So, here, I’m over this.” And she handed him a $100 bill.

 

 

She went out and bought a Honda scooter and registered it in the names of Regina Hartwell and Kim LeBlanc.

 

 

She bought an eight-foot-long Bombardier jet ski and registered it in the names of Regina Hartwell, Kim LeBlanc, and Tim Gray. She also gave Tim a ruby ring. She made plans to take Tim and Kim to Cancun near Kim’s birthday. She planned on buying Kim huge, new tires for her Jeep.

Money went fast. Regina needed cash.

 

 

She also needed a friend, a real friend. Regina phoned Sam Reynolds.

“It’s going okay with Kim,” Hartwell told her.

Sam dropped to the floor, shocked that Regina had actually called her. She listened carefully.

“But it’s not perfect,” said Regina, her voice sounding sad.

Still, Reynolds was happy that Hartwell had phoned her. It made her feel that her love wasn’t a one-way street ... that Regina cared for her ... that Regina didn’t think Sam’s calls were a pain in the butt. Reynolds was so happy that she remembered exactly where she had sat on the floor when Regina Hartwell had reached out to the past and groped for help.

 

 

By May, Regina had taken a job working beside her old roommate Trey Lyons, whose social connections Regina thought impressive—people who were good for the scene, who were good for the image. They worked at Kim’s Dry Cleaners in Westlake.

Kim LeBlanc went back to work at World Gym in Oak Hill, her old high-school place of employment.

But work plays hell with partying. One has to make time for drugging.

Kim LeBlanc was lonely, very lonely. It had been five months since she had broken up with Regina Hartwell, at least broken up in LeBlanc’s mind. She guessed they were broken up in Hartwell’s mind, too. Regina did, after all, talk to Kim about girls Regina was interested in.

LeBlanc didn’t do the same back—she didn’t talk to Hartwell about the guys she was interested in. That still didn’t feel safe. LeBlanc was lonely for male companionship. Her year-long life as a pseudo-lesbian was making her feel incredibly uncomfortable.

She hadn’t been with a young man, sexually, since the middle of her senior year in high school. That seemed like several lifetimes ago. Cheerleading. Partying. Making tamales for the Spanish club. Painting sets for school plays. Being feminine, frilly, with long, blonde hair.

She reached for a brush to comb her brown, cropped hair and glanced around World Gym. She glanced at the women on stairsteppers. She stared at the men clanking weights. At least she was this close to her old life, working out and working.
Here
, LeBlanc thought,
finding a guy should be easy.

“The next guy who walks around that corner,” she whispered to herself, “I’m going to ask out.” LeBlanc ignored the phones she was supposed to answer in her job as a receptionist and watched the corner.

She couldn’t believe her luck. There he was. Six feet, four inches tall, hazel-green eyes, light brown hair, built like a pro football player—a lean, mean, fighting machine. His hands had the faintest whispers of blond hair. They looked safe, loving. Kim smiled at Justin Heith Thomas.

He smiled back. He had a very sweet smile.

 

 

Justin Heith Thomas was three years old when he and his parents, Judy and James Thomas, went fishing with his father’s brother, wife, and son Michael. Times seemed okay in the Thomas household. There were big gallon jugs of wine around, and cold, cheap wine was always good on hot, sunny fishing days down at the creek. They lived just outside of Riverside, California, on land good for growing crops and raising chickens.

Justin and Michael sneaked in and out of the trees. They spotted the jug wine and giggled. They’d seen how it made their parents laugh, joke, love. Justin and Michael squatted like little Indians and tippy-toed over to the wine. Together they juggled the bottle until they each got a few little nips.

“Justin! Michael!”

The boys froze.

“Jim,” yelled Judy, “Justin and Michael have been sneaking the wine.”

“Oh, leave ’em alone,” said Jim. “Just leave ’em alone.”

Justin continued to sneak his little nips. By the time the family walked the road toward home, Justin was wobbly. In fact, he was downright drunk, and he fell over and passed out in the road. His daddy picked the toddler up and carried him to the car.

Before little Justin reached puberty, his mother attempted suicide twice. He remembers his mother and father arguing, while he stared at his daddy’s truck, which was loaded to the hilt with his father’s worldly possessions.

“Please don’t go,” his mother cried as she begged Jim Thomas to stay.

Jim Thomas got in his truck and drove off.

Judy Thomas walked back in the house and wept more tears.

Justin didn’t know for sure what happened next. It was the same year he had drunk the wine, so he was still only three years old. He thought Judy had gotten lots of pills and taken them. He didn’t see her do that, but he came across her, lying on the floor, looking dead.

“What’s wrong, Mom? What’s wrong?”

Judy didn’t answer.

Justin paced by her, time and time again. “What’s wrong, Mom? What’s wrong?”

Judy couldn’t answer.

Terrified, Justin called his grandma, Judy’s mother. How he knew her number, he wasn’t sure. But children, even three-year-old children, can often dial the number of the one they know will come no matter what.

The scream of an ambulance broke his mother’s silence. Then Justin’s uncle Andy, Judy’s brother, arrived and he took Justin home.

Justin’s daddy kept driving—clear across the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and halfway across Texas. Jim Thomas drove to where his mother lived, in Gonzales, Texas, a small town just east of San Antonio, just south of Austin.

That was when Justin Heith Thomas started staying with his mother’s parents.

 

 

Both Judy and Jim Thomas had grown up in the farming region of Sunnyhead, California, a city in the desert foothills not far from Los Angeles. Judy’s family managed a local chicken ranch. Jim’s family migrated throughout the U.S., from farming community to farming community, before finally settling in the Riverside County town.

Jim’s uprooting and rerooting and uprooting again were just one foreshadowing of the history of chaos in the Thomas family. There were six children in Justin’s father’s family. One child died quickly after a premature birth. Another died at age twenty-one after being hit by a car.

Justin’s grandfather Thomas was an alcoholic. His grandmother Thomas drank only occasionally. But when she did pull her wine out from underneath the sink, behind the washing powders, she drank until she was drunk, which led to argument between man and wife.

“You son of a bitch,” she yelled at her husband.

“You’re not calling my mother a bitch,” he yelled back and slapped her across the face. The hand belted across the face by the six-foot-tall man and the sudden black eyes on the four-foot, eleven-inch tall wife put an end to the argument, always.

Justin Thomas was said to bear a physical resemblance to his grandfather Thomas.

 

 

To escape the tyranny of Justin’s grandfather, Bonnie Thomas, Justin’s aunt, ran away from home when she was sixteen years old. She was considered her father’s “baby girl,” and her father hated all of her boyfriends. He particularly hated the one she was in love with at that young teen age and who, over the decades they were together, provided her with four children to mother.

Bonnie eventually did return to the Thomas fold. She and her brother Jim became as close as entwined fingers, and she became more of a mother to Justin than his own mother.

Jim, in contrast to Bonnie, was considered his mother’s “baby boy.” His escape from the family dysfunction came in the form of a stint in the Army and a trip overseas to Vietnam. He was eighteen years old. There, like many soldiers, the teenager managed to smoke a little dope in the jungles.

 

 

Upon his return from ’Nam in the early 1970s, Jim met Judy. Jim was a handsome, six-foot-tall war vet who was particular about his appearance. He liked his jeans perfectly creased by the dry cleaner’s and his shirts perfectly ironed. Judy was a pretty, eighteen-year-old Hispanic just out of high school who worked as a teller in a local bank.

Judy and Jim dated. They fell in love, and after Judy got pregnant, they married. Justin Heith Thomas was born to Jim and Judy on November 3, 1971. Jim’s and Judy’s marriage lasted about four years. Jim agreed to pay child support, agreed to visitation rights, and remained in Gonzales, Texas. Every month, he sent Judy child support. And every summer, Judy sent Jim Justin.

Judy maintained a stable work history and landed a managerial position in the bank, but her personal life and work life were diametrically opposed. There were the suicide attempts, multiple relationships, and multiple divorces. There was little time for Justin, and her son ended up being raised by her parents.

 

 

Justin was six or seven years old when he first found his daddy’s marijuana.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Marijuana,” said Jim Thomas. “It makes you high.”

Justin didn’t quite understand. “Can I light it?”

“Yeah.”

The young boy touched a flame to his daddy’s joint and watched Jim Thomas as he inhaled on the reefer with a loud, sucking wheeze. His daddy’s often sad face washed into a silly, little, satisfied grin, and Justin leaned back with contentment.

For Justin, it was a thrill and an honor, a bonding moment, just like all those many times before when he had been allowed to light his daddy’s tobacco cigarettes for him. Justin had been doing that since he was three years old.

 

 

Justin’s memory is more vague regarding his mother’s second suicide attempt.

He was at his uncle’s when he was told, “Something’s wrong with your mom. We’re going to the hospital to see her.”

But no one told Justin what had happened to his mother. He just peered his eyes over her body, as she lay quietly in her hospital bed, and he desperately searched for something visibly wrong with Judy. He couldn’t find a thing.

Later, he learned she had once again tried to commit suicide.

 

 

After the two suicide attempts, Jim requested full custody of Justin. Judy turned him down.

Justin lived with his mother two or three years at a time, when she was involved with a man in a good relationship and when it was time to try the “family thing” again. Mom was good then; Mom was stable then.

But when the relationship fell apart, as it always did, Justin remembers Judy blaming the wreckage on him.

“I hate you!” she yelled at Justin. “It’s all your fault! I hate you!”

She repeated the words to her son, over and over, until her anger echoed in his brain without his mother even voicing the words. And Justin was angry back.

He was angry, then he was lifeless, so very lifeless. All he wanted was for his mother and his father to love him, to physically love him—for his mother to tuck him in bed and to hug him and kiss him goodnight, for his father to wrestle with him on the floor like little boys and daddies do.

It wasn’t to be. Justin was returned to his grandparents and his uncle Andy. They provided him with his values and life lessons. But they weren’t his mother and father.

 

 

Justin was twelve or thirteen years old and with his uncle Andy when Judy’s third husband threatened to leave her. Judy and her husband had been out drinking, they’d done some fighting, Judy phoned Andy, and Andy and Justin rushed over to Judy’s.

They found Justin’s mother with a bandaged hand, in a cast or a splint. She’d cut herself with a piece of glass. There weren’t a lot of cuts, just one deep, telling slash.

 

 

That was about the time Justin began to understand the high of marijuana his daddy had explained, the euphoria of drugs. In junior high, Justin Thomas’s daily routine was simple. His mother woke him for school. His buddies came by the house for him. They left together, then stopped and picked up a couple of more friends. On their way to school, just after the stores and just before the schoolyard, they stopped in a field and smoked a joint.

At lunchtime, they went behind the handball court and smoked a cigarette, sometimes a joint. After school, they smoked another joint. Justin was cool and having fun; no square or preppie friends for him.

But one day, behind the handball court, the boys got caught.

“You have a choice,” Justin was told at school. “Join this drug-rehab group, or we tell your parents.”

To save my hide,
thought Justin,
I’ll join the group.
He was thirteen years old.

It was better than facing his stepfather.

Justin maintains there were no ifs, ands, or buts about it; whenever he screwed up, his stepfather belted him.

According to Justin, one time when he smart-mouthed off to his stepfather, he was smacked. Justin argued back, his face painted over with rage. The stepfather took a wooden paddle and broke it across the thirteen-year-old boy.

I wanta kill you!
Justin yelled in his mind. But Justin Thomas was a child. He was helpless against a full-grown man, and he was smart enough to know that. He was smart enough to know he needed an equalizer.
I wish my dad was here to beat you up!
thought Justin.

 

 

Judy worked during the day, and at night she went to cosmetology school—with a goal of earning extra money. She was materialistic and a gold digger in Justin’s eyes, traits he had picked up from her, and her attempts at gaining wealth from men weren’t working.

Justin’s mother hired a young girl, who lived up the street, to stay with Justin until Judy got home. Sometimes the sitter came to Justin’s home. Sometimes Justin went to the sitter’s home. He was thirteen. She was eighteen. She had a pool.

Sometimes, they went swimming.

Justin stared at the young girl’s breasts, full and tanned in the hot desert sun. He kept his eyes on them as he slowly, quietly swam up to her side. She lay there serenely, floating on a raft, looking like an Egyptian goddess, dark hair, blue eyes, legs firm, curved, sensual. They made a young boy’s body beat. Justin Thomas was in lust.