Wasted (15 page)

And Mike White did care; he felt he owed Regina Hartwell his life. If it hadn’t been for her, he’d still be messed up on drugs and screwing up his life. He’d needed to be told, he’d needed to be shown what he was doing to himself. Prison had told him, had shown him. Regina had done him a favor. Coke had damaged his heart. She’d saved him from himself. He had nothing to do but thank Regina Hartwell; that’s what he thought.

They made up and shared the evening. She showed off her drug-thinned stomach. She shared her pain.

“I’m dating this girl. I really love her. I don’t know what to do. She doesn’t return my love. I don’t understand why. I do everything for her.”

 

 

“You have got to start getting it together and detaching from the situation,” said Anita Morales. Though she had barely seen Regina for months on end, since the beginning of May, Anita and her new roommate, Carla Reid, had seen Regina almost every night.

And almost every night, trying to put some meat back on her bones, Anita and Carla fed Regina. Hartwell had been wasting away to nothing since she and Kim had been hanging with Justin Thomas.

But Morales and Reid didn’t know that it was drugs, coke, crystal meth, and speed draining Regina’s body, soul, and spirit. They thought she was bulimic. Hartwell vomited a lot; her stomach couldn’t hold anything down because she was always upset.

They thought it was Kim LeBlanc. Kim this. Kim that. Kim does this. Kim does that. Anita and Carla were sick and tired of hearing Regina complain about Kim.

“This is hurting you more than it’s making you feel good,” said Morales. She stood outside in the darkness of the early May night, barbecuing steaks on her back patio, and struggling to find the words that would soak into her hardheaded friend’s brain.

“You’ve gotta realize that it’s only going to get worse.”

Hartwell jammed her hands deep into her baggy blue jeans’ pockets. She wore the jeans and plaid shirt that she often made fun of as the
de rigueur
lesbian uniform.

“It’s not going to get better. Kim’s not going to wake up some day and say, ‘Okay, I’m gay,’ or ‘Okay, I’m gay and I want to be with you, Regina.’”

Regina Hartwell stared at the ground and studied her toes in her favorite Doc Martens sandals. There was no way she could look Anita in her brown eyes. Anita was just too intense, just too serious for Regina right then.

“I don’t like the way you’re still supporting Kim when Kim is off doing her own thing. You don’t have to do that anymore.”

Hartwell was serious, too. At least she looked like she was seriously listening, like a kid who was getting in trouble with her school teacher. But she wasn’t listening. When Regina had her mind set, there was no changing it. And Regina had her mind set.

Anita Morales flipped the steak she was grilling for her thin friend. “Regina, it’s time to do something about it. Get out of it. It’s not working out. You’ve got to make some changes or something because this is really getting old.”

Anita might as well have been talking to the wooden fence.

Regina Hartwell called Ynema Mangum at work. Regina was antsy. “Hey, I really need to get your name off of my bank account,” she said. “Somebody’s taking money out of my bank account.”

“Regina, hey, no problem. I’ll do whatever it takes. You just tell me.”

“Okay, I’ll go to the bank and check it out.”

A few days later, Hartwell called again. “You have to sign something at the bank to get your name taken off my account.”

“No problem, Regina. I’ll do it.”

Mangum had no qualms about getting off Hartwell’s bank account, but she felt Regina was talking in front of Kim LeBlanc and saying those words for LeBlanc’s benefit. She felt she was playing a role in their scenario of drama. She felt all of this because Regina Hartwell never took another step, other than those spoken words, to get Ynema out of her banking life. They were the last words Regina ever spoke to Ynema.

 

 

Jeremy Barnes and Regina Hartwell stood outside and talked in the breezeway. “Kim and I have never really slept together.”

“What?” said Jeremy. “You’re paying her bills and taking care of her and you’re not even getting sex in return? Girl,” he joked, “if you’re gonna spend that kind of money on some body, get something for it.”

“Well,” she shuffled around some, “we’ve kissed and fooled around just a little bit, but we’ve never actually had sex.”

“Well, um, okay,” replied Jeremy.

 

 

A few days later, Barnes told a friend, “She really, really needs to go see somebody because she’s not getting anything out of this. And it’s beyond obsession. It’s crazy.”

Folks just didn’t understand what it was like to feel you had another person’s blood flowing through your veins, making your heart beat, your skin tingle, your mind want to work, your arms want to reach out and touch and hug and love and breathe and feel loved and fulfilled for the first time in your life, like you’re not alone in the world, like there’s a mother to care for you, a family who won’t abandon you, someone who accepts you even when you feel all ugly inside. But Regina understood. And it was worth life.

Regina Hartwell didn’t want to get up and go to work. Working was a pain in the butt. It interfered with the partying and with the image she wanted to create. It wasn’t fast-paced. It wasn’t glamourous. At least the name of where she worked was good, Kim’s Dry Cleaner’s.

Hartwell got up, threw on her shorts, her cropped T-shirt, jumped in her Jeep that matched Kim LeBlanc’s, and drove the ten to fifteen minutes to Westlake, the Austin suburb. She swerved into the parking lot and stared across the street at Westlake High School. It was really a rather ugly school, 1960s construction of bricks mortared into boxes—not even interesting boxes—just big, ugly, square boxes of bricks.

Anyone with half a sense of creativity could have done better. Hartwell knew that. If nothing else, she had style. Her pierced belly button danced between her cropped top and her baggy jean shorts. Her keys dangled from her belt loop. She loved to go butch in this Republican neighborhood.

But there was a part of Regina that was envious. The kids who went to Westlake were glamourous. They were the children of country singers and pro football players. They had money—born money, parents’-worked-for money, not blood money. And they had expensive, designer clothes, fast cars, cell phones, Junior League moms, and doctor dads, not redneck plane-mechanic dads.

Regina wouldn’t let anyone know about her envy. She would cover it in humor that sacrificed her targets like clown-faced balloons in a carnival shooting gallery.

“Regina,” said her boss. “No more midriffs. Wear something that covers your stomach.”

Regina nodded. “Fucking pigs,” she said to herself and laughed. A portrait of the boss’s daughter embracing a potbellied pig hung in the dry cleaner’s. Regina reached for a rice cake and gulped down some water.

“Seventy-five pounds,” she told her fellow employees, “I’ve lost seventy-five pounds. My personal trainer helped.” Hartwell picked up the phone to call Justin Thomas.

Her boss watched and shook her head. Regina Hartwell was thin and drawn. Her legs were so crepey that she looked like she’d been heavy for years and now had lost too much, too fast. Her conservative, straight employer just didn’t know what to make of this closed, distant employee with the strange tattoo on her ankle, another tattoo on her shoulder, and the friend with the matching Jeep who came by to talk too often.

The other workers weren’t like that, and Regina was far from the first gay employee at Kim’s. In fact, Regina’s old roommate Trey Lyons worked there, but he had done so many drugs that his parents had made him move home.

“My personal trainer,” bragged Regina again.

“Regina, you’ve got flowers up here.”

Regina walked up to the front counter, glanced at the dozen red roses, and grabbed the card. She read it, looked at the flowers with disgust, and said, “Anybody want these?”

Everyone stared at her like she was looney.

“I don’t want them. They’re from my boyfriend. He’s trying to make up.” She turned to her boss. “Don’t forget that I need a few days off for my trip to Cancun.” Regina glanced out the window to Westlake High School. “It’s a present from my dad.”

 

 

Regina Hartwell was released from her job at Kim’s Dry Cleaner’s.

The trip to Cancun wasn’t really a gift from Regina’s father. It was Regina’s gift to Kim LeBlanc. Kim’s nineteenth birthday was in just a few days on May 17. She’d already bought Kim new tires for her Jeep, bigger ones like her own 31 by 10.50s. The trip was seemingly a last-ditch effort to win LeBlanc away from Justin Thomas. No way could Justin Thomas give Kim LeBlanc what Regina Hartwell could—a vacation in Cancun, Mexico.

 

 

Justin held Kim in his arms. Sometimes, she just wanted to be kissed and cuddled. He never knew what mood she would be in, tie-me-up or hug-me. She was the strangest girl—she was like Dawn. In the middle of making love, sometimes, when Justin grabbed her or held her in a certain way, Dawn had totally freaked out.

But Justin had loved Dawn. And he loved Kim. Justin Thomas had cheated on Kim three times before. Remembering how his cheating had hurt Dawn, he stopped screwing around on Kim.

He leaned down and kissed Kim. “I want to have kids,” he said. “I want two or three kids.”

Kim closed her eyes. “Well, we’re gonna leave that up in the air.”

“Why?”

Kim was silent for a very long time, never looking Justin in the eyes. “My stepfather,” she said, “he would try to watch me take a shower. Sometimes he listened to me masturbate.”

Justin’s gut tightened. He hated these discussions. He thought about Dawn. “Well, why did you keep doing it? If you knew he was trying to listen or trying to watch, why did you keep doing it, you know what I’m saying?”

Kim couldn’t believe that he could ask her such a question. “You just don’t understand,” she said.

“What does that mean?” said Justin, angrily. “Did he ever touch you? Did he ever try to have sex with you?”

“I hate God because there is no God. If there was a God, He wouldn’t have let what happened happen. I don’t believe in God. There is no God. If there is a God, I hate him.”

Justin thought about how, whenever he and Regina got into a discussion about religion, Kim always detached herself from the conversation. “Why?” said Thomas. “Why don’t you believe in God?”

“I prayed to God to please make him stop. I begged with Him. I pleaded with Him. He didn’t stop.”

“If he’s physically touching you and doing things to you, why are you going to masturbate and let him listen to you?”

LeBlanc was so angry that she just shut up. Justin held her. It never occurred to him that she may not have had a choice.

 

 

A week before the Cancun trip, Regina Hartwell walked into Jeremy Barnes’s apartment. She had her financial statements, checkbooks, jewelry, and a bag. She shoved them all toward Jeremy.

“Here. Keep them for me until we get back. Jay’s staying at my place while we’re gone, and I don’t want any of this stuff in my house while he’s there. I don’t trust him.” She opened up the bag and pulled out a gun. Hartwell called Justin Thomas, Jay.

Barnes freaked. “I want you to get that out of my house,” he said. “I don’t know what it is.” It was a black gun with a screen of holes around the barrel. To Barnes, it looked like an Uzi. “I don’t care to know what it is, but I want it out of my house.”

“Jay brought it over, and I don’t know what to do with it.” Hartwell pulled out a second gun.

“Get rid of them. If there are guns in your house, I’m not going to take care of Spirit, and I’m not going to clean the house.”

“They’re just collateral for some money I’m loaning him.”

“Get rid of the guns. We don’t know if they’re stolen. We don’t know if they’ve been used in drug deals. Reg, I’ve lived in New York. I know about these things. We don’t know what these guns have been used for.”

“He got the guns because, if we’re going to start dealing drugs out of the bars, he needs protection.”

“What?”

“Jeremy, I’m scared for Kim. Jay always carries a gun because he’s a drug dealer. He wants me to sell drugs, too ... in the bars ... and guns. He wants me to be his partner.”

“Number one, if you need that kind of protection, you don’t need to be doing that in the first place. Number two . . .”

Regina’s heart sank and jumped with joy. She wanted Jeremy’s approval, but she wanted Kim more. To keep Kim, she’d break the law, live with Kim’s boyfriend, break the law for the boyfriend, anything. But she also liked having someone pay that much attention to her, showing her that he cared—a father, mother, a parent.

“I’ll get the guns out of the house,” she said.

 

 

Justin Thomas took a trip to Louisiana just to help out a friend, again, to make sure everything went according to plan.

 

 

Hartwell took Thomas over to Diva’s so that Diva could get a little sweeter deal on his drugs. She provided Justin with front money to buy their meth. She got him into the gay clubs so that he could sell the crystal.

Justin Thomas, an admitted homophobic, was spending a lot of time with lesbians and drag queens. The money was too good not to.

However, his homophobia wouldn’t let him move in with Kim LeBlanc, because she had Tim Gray, a gay man, for a roommate.

“But you’re not his type,” said Kim.

“But that’s beside the point,” said Justin.

Gray didn’t like Thomas. He didn’t like the fact that Justin always had drugs. He only spent time with Thomas because Kim liked Justin.

 

 

Anita Morales and Regina Hartwell spent almost every Mother’s Day together. Mother’s Day, May 14, 1995 was no different. They were going to Manuel’s, where Kelli Grand worked. Fridays and Sundays were always the same for Regina—chicken enchiladas verdes with margaritas at Manuel’s.

Morales drove over to Hartwell’s to pick her up. She walked into the apartment. “Jesus Christ,” Anita whispered to herself. “What’s happening?” Regina was standing in her bra and panties. She was so skinny that Morales could see Hartwell’s pelvic bones.

Anita Morales looked around the apartment. It was a wreck. Kim, Regina, and Justin had stayed up the entire night doing drugs. A gun was laying out.

“Jay,” said Regina as an explanation. “He deals guns. I bought them all to keep them away from Kim.” She motioned toward the bedroom. “There’s more in there. Under the bed.”

“You do not need to be messing around with this,” Morales said, as she emptied out the chamber of the one gun she saw.

“But I’ve gotta protect Kim. It’s this guy she’s dating. He’s a dealer. He deals drugs. He deals guns.” Her speech was rat-ta-tat-tat rapid. “He hangs out with gangs in California. He deals drugs. He deals guns. He’s killed people, too. He’s a hit man.”

They drove to Manuel’s. Regina Hartwell spent most of the time there on the pay phone, screaming and yelling at both LeBlanc and Thomas.

“If you really loved her, you wouldn’t be doing this. You wouldn’t be dealing drugs. You wouldn’t be putting her in your world of danger. If you really loved her, you’d stop.”

As much as Anita Morales loved Regina, it was hard for her to hang out with Regina. What Regina was doing with her life was the complete opposite of what Anita wanted to do with hers: law enforcement, FBI agent, investigator, the white-hatted, good guy.

She was soon to graduate from college with a major in criminal justice, and she was currently interning at the Austin Police Department. She was scared that if something bad happened she would be involved in some way.

 

 

Jeremy Barnes thumbed through Hartwell’s checkbook and financial statements. Regina’s bank statements rang up $143,000.

 

 

“We need more drugs.”

Kim, Justin, and Regina sat in Regina’s apartment. Justin reached for the phone and made a call. He knew some heavy hitters. He’d been to Laughlin, Nevada on a drug run. He’d taken Kim to Mexico to pick up a load, and she’d met some of his “family.”

“Be back in a few,” he said and grabbed the keys to Hartwell’s motor scooter, the scooter that Regina had registered in her own name, LeBlanc’s name and Gray’s name.

A bit later, the phone rang in Hartwell’s apartment. She listened, hung up, and turned to Kim. “Jay wrecked the scooter.”

 

 

“I was going down Seventh Street,” Thomas explained to Hartwell, “making a right on Lamar, when a fuckin’ truck came up behind me and jumped in the lane like it was going to make a right turn, you know what I’m saying? I thought it was going to fuckin’ cut me off. But it kept on straight, and the front brakes locked up on the scooter, and I had to dump it.”

Hartwell looked at Thomas. She didn’t quite believe him.

Justin stood in the doorway and studied his road rash. Droplets of blood slowly oozed from his arm, legs, and back. “It’s not that bad, Regina. The scooter still runs, you know what I’m saying? Just the right side is a little scraped up.” He still stared at his own scrapes, heat burns mainly, on his right side.

“You want a paper towel?” said Kim.

“Nah.” Thomas grabbed the keys to Hartwell’s Jeep and left.

 

 

The next day, Regina Hartwell dropped Thomas off at his dad’s workplace.

“I was coming home from work,” he said to his dad and his aunt Bonnie. “It was about 11 o’clock, and a truck cut me off.”

He showed them his wounds. His legs weren’t scraped badly, but both of his arms and his side from back to front were pretty well scabbed over.

“Why didn’t you call us?”

“It was too late,” said Justin, and he lit a Marlboro.