She loves them and she smiles when I point out the A&R man from Atlantic Europe, in town from London just to catch this show.
They are indie-folk-fabulous, a movement disguised as a circus. Thursday night she is in the balcony for Band Marino, Orlando’s finest.
We start with the basics lots of fun, too much Starbucks and way too many cigarettes. I’ve never walked this road, but I decide that if we’re going to run a five-day rehab, it is going to be the coolest in the country. Her life has been so dark yet there is some soft hope in her words, and on consecutive evenings, I watch the prettiest girls in the room tell her that she’s beautiful. I sit privileged but breaking as she shares. She owns attitude and humor beyond her 19 years, and when she tells me her story, she is humble and quiet and kind, shaped by the pain of a hundred lifetimes.
She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone I’ve known, like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star. It is unspoken and there are only a few of us, but we will be her church, the body of Christ coming alive to meet her needs, to write love on her arms. We become her hospital and the possibility of healing fills our living room with life. For the next five days, she is ours to love. The center has no detox, names her too great a risk, and does not accept her. The nurse at the treatment center finds the wound several hours later. She cuts herself, using the blade to write “FUCK UP” large across her left forearm.
She drinks long from a bottle of liquor, takes a razor blade from the table and locks herself in the bathroom. Six hours after I meet her, she is feeling trapped, two groups of “friends” offering opposite ideas. Her arms remember razor blades, fifty scars that speak of self-inflicted wounds. She has felt the touch of awful naked men, battled depression and addiction, and attempted suicide. She has known such great pain haunted dreams as a child, the near-constant presence of evil ever since. We pray and say goodbye and it is hard to leave without her. She says she’ll go to rehab tomorrow, but she isn’t ready now. We ask Renee to come with us, to leave this broken night. She has agreed to meet us, to listen and to let us pray. It is a familiar blur of coke, pot, pills and alcohol. She hasn’t slept in 36 hours and she won’t for another 24. When I meet her, cocaine is fresh in her system. These words, like most words, will be written next to midnight, between hurricane and harbor, as both claim to save her. Stories wait for endings, but songs are brave things bold enough to sing when all they know is darkness. I would rather write her a song, because songs don’t wait to resolve, and because songs mean so much to her. I lean forward, knowing this will be written, and I ask what she’d say if her story had an audience. It hits me that she won’t see this skyline for several weeks, and we will be without her. Music is a safe place and Pedro is her favorite. She sits and sings, legs crossed in the passenger seat, her pretty voice hiding in the volume. Pedro the Lion is loud in the speakers, and the city waits just outside our open windows.