I didn’t have any appointments yesterday, but I went ahead and came in.  This place is helping to save my life.

"I wanted to tell you my story, I wanted to help--this café has been so good to me."  Beth maintains eye contact while she talks.  "She is clear-eyed, open, genuine."

"When the guy--R.--who helped me first adapt to living on the streets recently went back out drinking again, where did I go?  I came here.  I had a good lunch.  I had my groups that I’m in; the spiritualness in my class “Opening Yourself to Divine Love,” with the pastor Killian Noe.  Killian is great and she’s my circle leader here at the Café, and Michael, my instructor--we’re going through the book The Untethered Soul--all of this is helping me a lot.  I don’t isolate as much."      

Beth was born on the Santee Reservation in Nebraska in 1961, alongside the “Misery” River.  "When they stuck up another dam it was cheaper to build them a new town than it was to move the old one and reroute the water."  That was Santee.   

"My mother is white and she was widowed at 28 with three children, and she is a very independent woman--I never remember a time when she did not drink.  I cannot to this day stand the smell or the taste of scotch, because that’s what my mother drank.  I’m not quite half-breed," she tells me.           I ask her why she uses that term.  She nods.

"Of course there was that stigma, you know half-breed, Cher came out with it."

"I guess I stole my first can of beer the winter before Daddy died in ’66.  They found me behind the door, drunk.  I was five years old."  Beth shrugs her shoulders and continues, her disclosures still woven with bewilderment.

"I can remember getting colds and getting cough syrup that I loved.  And I went in search of Vic’s Formula 44 when we were out , barefoot, down the hill, in the snow; we lived on a dead-end street in Des Moines, Iowa at that time.  I ended up with a bone marrow virus, which affects me to this day--if I get too cold, my hands will freeze in one position, and my feet will cramp.  So of course they had me on cough syrup with codeine.  The house had to be up to 78 degrees or I’d freeze--I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t walk, I’d freeze up, all my joints."

"I was born a drunk.  The fact that I was obsessed about it even at four!"

She spent her teenage years, she says, in search of the party.  Her partying, punctuated by beatings and rape, led her to begin “geographical cures that got her nowhere.”  Hitchhiking was her mode of travel.  Texas, Michigan, Oregon, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, Washington.  Sex became her bargaining chip.           

"Sex was never about intimacy with me, it’s a tool.  And I still don’t have intimacy because now I’ve decided I don’t want it.  There isn’t anything anybody can offer me other than guilt."

Somehow I think she doesn’t believe this all the way.

"I have quite the collection of memories and friends. I used to live in an industrial dryer.  We thought it was frozen, and we had a couple of guests over.  We would put our cups on the little ledges.  When we got up on one side, the thing swung down.  All the cups went flying.  We had at least five people in that dryer, all partying."  She chuckles.

I ask her what led to her 8 months of sobriety, and she tells me it began two years prior when she began a series of grand mal seizures, detox, jail, and “on the roll again.”  The cycle ended when she woke up on a garbage scow in Ballard named Truth, and the Recovery Center of King County called and said she had a bed.  She laughs about the name of the boat. " I have to keep it humorous," she says.

"Last summer,  I first started Killian’s Circle in August, and I didn’t take any classes ‘cuz I was real busy with trying to find out about my arthritis and getting major amounts of dental work done.  I actually have teeth!  And they just did more dental work yesterday.  I have a lot goin’ on.  And I try to remember 'It’s okay, Beth, you don’t have to do it all.'  And if I make it 24 hours I have to say 'Okay, Beth you’re home in your bed.  You haven’t taken any medications that weren’t prescribed.'"   Her speech is melodic, rolling up and down small hills, phrases dipping in and mixing with dialogue from her past.  In all of her words, there is a strength, something close to earnestness.

"And this place I could come!  I didn’t have any appointments yesterday, but I went ahead and came in.  This place is helping to save my life."

"Here , they treat others with respect and dignity.  I find this place has changed my mood from my really low lows to a place where I can handle it.  I have been beaten and raped, and I have beaten myself down, and I’m learning to appreciate me and gain some self esteem."

"The Café, I knew if I came here I would be safe--no one would say 'Oh, you’re making mountains out of molehills.'  If they need to say something negative, most people have been through enough that they can say to themselves “I won’t say anything at all.”  They won’t say “Oh, get off your pity pot, quit nitpicking” about this, that and the other cause I am a perfectionist in some areas and a slacker in others.  Here, people keep in mind that we’re all human.  And if somebody does dress somebody down in public, they’ll get dressed down by the people saying “That ain’t right!"

Beth is saving her money now.

The only reason I would move away from Seattle at this point is if my mother said I’d like you here, I need you to come be with me.  I did that for Grama.  Grama had a stroke a mini stroke.  So I was sober, I was two years sober at the time.  I had nothing holding me, the courts.

I want to see my mom this spring.  She’s in Colorado now.  Born in Minnesota, my mother met and married my father in South Dakota, spent a lot of time on the rez in Nebraska because that was my father’s tie to his mother and her people.  And Iowa.  And Michigan.  And Seattle.

When I told my mother I was saving to come see her, her mood just got really good.  Beth smiles, and stops, as if she has just reached the really good part of a story.