One Life Read online

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  It was as if everyone got a memo over the summer and I missed it. It was quick, and it was jarring, and I had no idea what was going on. All of a sudden, the girls didn’t run around with the boys anymore. Gender roles became sharply defined. Sitting around and chatting was a girl thing; charging around after a ball was for boys. Wearing shorts and sneakers became, if not a cause for social rejection exactly, still definitely not something other girls were doing. And while being good at sports had always guaranteed me a certain confidence and popularity that carried over into the classroom, that dynamic was no longer assured. I wasn’t picked on or bullied, but I didn’t know where I fit in or how to behave. I felt suddenly, deeply uncomfortable.

  The craziest thing about all this is that somehow my twin did get the memo. Having been the quieter of the two of us for most of our lives, overnight Rachael turned into a social butterfly. She dressed right and boys liked her. She made plans and hung out with people. My mom tried to help by suggesting I could be sporty and tomboyish and still find a cool dress to wear, but I didn’t know where to start. Thank god for Rachael. For the whole of sixth grade and a few years after that, she basically managed the style and social decisions for both of us. I bought what she told me to buy (anything popular) and tried to ride on her coattails socially. “Rach, what are we going to wear?” I would say each morning, and for the rest of the day would try to stay as near to her as possible. There were times when I walked so closely behind Rachael I was literally running on her heels.

  If someone had told me I was gay back then, I might’ve been like, “Oh, OK, got it.” (Actually, I probably would’ve instinctively pushed back against the label and snapped, “No, I’m not.”) All things being equal, however—if everyone knew their sexuality right away without it being an issue—I don’t think I would’ve felt uncomfortable about it. The problem was I didn’t know what was going on and the uncertainty bothered me. People in my family are self-possessed and have definite style—not my dad, obviously, who goes around in clothes fourteen sizes too big for him—but my mom and my siblings are all very confident, and one of the ways they express themselves is through clothes. When my mom puts on a crisp white shirt every night to go work at Jack’s, she’s like an actress preparing for the stage. There’s a version of her life in which, having looked after first her siblings, then us, she might have turned into a domestic martyr, but that’s not my mom, who practiced self-care before there was even a word for it. She has always been like: I’m getting dressed, I’m going to get my jewelry and do my hair, because looking good is a way to be independent. I wanted to be like that—decisive, self-confident, never overwhelmed by the circumstances around me. Instead, I was just awkward.

  I told myself not to panic. I was a late bloomer, I thought. That’s all it was: I was simply late to the party, and if I didn’t want to be super feminine or have crushes on boys yet, it went hand in hand with the fact that I didn’t get any taller until the end of sixth grade, or get my period until I was almost fourteen. It wasn’t even that I didn’t find boys attractive. It was more that I would look at a boy and have this feeling of I don’t know if he’s cute or not. I just don’t know! It’s not moving the needle, so I’ve got no idea! But I didn’t feel nonsexual or have crushes on girls, either. Those years were completely mystifying.

  If this sounds like denial or repression, it didn’t seem that way at the time. Redding wasn’t exactly liberal in those days, and even now there are churches not far from my parents’ house that practice “conversion therapy”—praying over gays to straighten them out. Within our family, however, there was no homophobic talk. I knew my mom had been Catholic, but I didn’t consider the Catholic Church’s position on gays, or anything else for that matter, as having anything to do with me. And at school, while the word “gay” in the 1990s was slang for “bad,” when people said, “Oh, that’s so gay,” in the normal flow of things, it didn’t seem to me, at the time, like anyone meant anything by it.

  My older sister, Jenny, is bi, and she had a serious girlfriend when I was growing up. No one ever spoke explicitly about her sexual orientation or who she was dating—it would simply be “Oh, this is Jenny’s friend,” rather than “This is her girlfriend, and Jenny’s gay, this is a big gay relationship”—but without officially knowing it, I still knew, plus she always had gay friends. To this day I’ll say to her, “Fuck you, you should’ve told me I was gay, what were you thinking?” Although I know what she was thinking, which was: “I’m not going to be the one to bring it up. Mom’s going to be pissed to have another one on her hands.” (As it turned out, one more gay in the family was a low estimate.)

  This makes my mom sound homophobic, which she wasn’t. She just wanted her children to have an easy path through life, and to her generation gay meant hard, or at least harder. Anyway, as far as I was concerned, I wasn’t gay. In my freshman year of high school, a boy named Josh asked me out, and although I couldn’t tell if he was cute or not, it seemed like a good idea to say yes. We got along great. I liked him a lot. We dated for months and never did anything. It’s so funny, looking back: we never took a single step forward sexually. More months went by and still nothing happened. I think I wanted to do more—or at least I didn’t not want to do more—but he didn’t really push, so things never advanced. Then we broke up. That was Josh. It’s totally hilarious to me now.

  One result of all this confusion was that I drilled down further into my life in sports. I had a built-in community there, not just in soccer but in the other activities Rachael and I excelled at—basketball and track—and my success on the field was just enough to keep my confidence afloat. We were still playing competitively with the Mavericks, touring every weekend in the Sacramento Youth Soccer League, and then the summer I turned fourteen, when we joined Elk Grove, a much bigger team, soccer was suddenly big news. In 1999, the FIFA Women’s World Cup was staged in the US, and after reaching the final, the US won 5–4 against China, in front of a crowd of ninety thousand people at the Rose Bowl—still a record crowd for a women’s game in the US.

  I remember watching those games on TV and being thrilled. I knew the World Cup would be big, but whoa; I had no idea women’s soccer could pull such a crowd. Still, I didn’t watch the final and think, That could be me. As a dream, it seemed impossibly far off; clearly I was too small and didn’t run fast enough to have a hope in hell of getting to that level. It wasn’t just that. Rachael and I loved to play, but we weren’t exactly planning our careers yet. I sympathize with modern parents, who are sold this idea that if you do the right things—have your child join this club, do that camp, meet this coach—you can pretty much map out their route to sports stardom. It’s a misconception. Of all the kids who start out in soccer, 99.9 percent will never play professionally. The only true path is to free your child to have fun and see what happens.

  If Rachael and I didn’t hunger to play in the pros, we did put up a poster of the US Women’s National Team on our wall and enjoy the fact that players like Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain were suddenly household names. Everything else in life felt so complicated and, in our family at least, was becoming one hundred times more so thanks to my brother, but here the rules were straightforward: you won or you lost, you were good or bad. It was that simple. Years later, when I played in the World Cup final in front of a TV audience of 82 million people, I would find the narrowness of most professional athletes—their tendency to behave as if nothing outside of winning matters—not only limiting, but wrong. But for a brief period of adolescence, that childish tunnel vision was a heavenly refuge.

  4

  BRIAN

  The way my family tells it, as a young kid, I idolized my brother Brian. And I guess, what with the hair, and the clothes, and the being into soccer—and the “Brian Rapinoe’s my brother, and I’m just like him!”—it must be true. In all honesty, though, I can’t really remember. I look at pictures of my
brother from when we were kids and I have a certain fond feeling. He had all kinds of naughty magazines, I remember that. But I don’t have many definitive early memories of him, positive or negative. This might sound overdramatic, but the later memories of Brian have come to be so dominant, they block almost everything else out.

  This is the truth about having a drug user in the family: it never ends. You get on with your life, and everything carries on as normal, but the feeling of devastation never goes away. I was on a plane to Europe recently, watching a movie starring Julia Roberts about a drug addict kid who comes home for Christmas, and suddenly I was crying. It hit too close to home. It felt exactly like the story of my family growing up, and that story is so raw, emotionally, still. My parents were always honest about Brian and he was never a source of shame, either at home or at school. We learned to talk about his problems, to say, Yeah, my brother is fucking wild, and to absorb what happened to him as healthily as we could. That doesn’t mean our hearts aren’t broken. What are you going to do? It’s incredibly sad and incredibly hard, and whatever happens, it will always be that way.

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  It was a generational thing, or it was bad luck, or bad timing, but whatever it was, Brian got into it. In the last twenty years, opioids have killed more than 450,000 people in the US, a large number of them in and around Redding. My hometown has the classic profile of a rural area hit hard by the opioid crisis, a hollowed-out former industrial center where lots of people, many of them suffering pain from manual work, were overprescribed opioids. In recent years, Redding has recorded one of the highest rates of opioid pills per capita of almost anywhere in the country, while the overdose rate is more than triple the statewide average.

  All of this was just beginning in the mid-1990s, when I was ten and Brian was fifteen. Maybe he started taking drugs earlier than that, smoking weed or whatever, but the first real memory I have regarding his drug use is of our parents sitting us down after dinner one night to tell us that Brian was about to be in the local newspaper. Rachael and I were in the paper all the time because of soccer, but this was different: Brian had been arrested at school for possession of meth. Even though it was a first offense, he’d had so much on him that the case went to court and he was sent to juvenile detention. Everything unraveled from there.

  Or rather, things went back to normal, then collapsed, then renormalized before collapsing again, and so it went on, around and around. As anyone who has lived with an addict knows, the descent happens in fits and starts, and for long periods it can seem as if things are OK. Brian would be back at school, attending drug rehab, seemingly getting himself back on track. Then slowly the signs would start to resurface.

  My sister and I didn’t understand much of it, at first. We were too young, and anyway, we were preoccupied with our own lives. I was going through my period of social awkwardness, Rachael was busy being popular, and every weekend we were crushing it at soccer. It didn’t seem abnormal to us if our brother disappeared for long periods, either into his room or outside the house, and reemerged looking strung out on the sofa.

  And there were stretches when Brian would seem to be fine. It’s one of the misconceptions about drug abuse that it only strikes those who are unhappy, or misfits, or from terrible homes—all dumb clichés, none of them true. You can’t tell by looking at someone, or their family, if they’re likely to use drugs, and when Brian was clean, he was amazing. Everyone loved him. He was calm, and chill, and funny, and charming, and right up through high school, there was cachet to being his sister. In his early teens, he had been as into soccer as we were, traveling on the weekends for games with the Mavericks, going to practice and hanging out with us at halftime. This is when he’d have us do drills around the cones, then let us take shots at the goal as a reward. He loved that he could teach the game to us, and we loved learning from him—or at least this is the image my mom has painted for me, along with the one of us hunkered down in front of the TV, three loving siblings together. It’s painful to think about now. When Brian got into drugs, we didn’t just lose him, we lost the memories of who he had been.

  As we got older, we learned to recognize the signs. My mom’s brother had had drug and alcohol problems. I had a friend whose dad was a heroin addict and who’d been sober for a long time and ran a recovery center in Redding; Brian would end up going there for a while. And one of our neighbors’ kids died of an overdose from a fentanyl patch. But until Brian started using, we really had no idea what it was like. There’s a period when you know but you don’t know, when you’re still putting little details together and figuring it out. Brian hogging the bathroom was always a big sign. He’d be in there for what seemed like hours in the morning while my sister and I, teenage girls obsessed with how we looked, banged on the door, yelling at him to get out of the shower so we could get ready for school. There’d be another red flag when we walked into the kitchen and opened a draw to find no fucking spoons; Brian had taken them all. Eventually, the signs were so stark you couldn’t mistake them: holy shit, a syringe in his room, and all this drug paraphernalia in the bathroom. Finally we understood he was using in the house.

  In the late 1990s and early 2000s, meth abuse was rampant around Redding, but thank god that, early on, Brian ditched meth for pills and heroin. It’s probably why he’s still alive; you can’t do meth for a long time and survive. With heroin, once you’re a long-term user, you’re just doing it to maintain your baseline and it doesn’t always come with a lot of chaotic energy. Even when he was using, Brian was calm and chill, either asleep or downing and totally out of it. If he was on a crazy bender, he simply wouldn’t be home.

  My parents knew he was using in the house. I think they thought it was better for him to be doing it there, where he was safe, and where they could do everything possible to try to get him to stop. And they did try everything. They sent him to military school in Mississippi. They enrolled him in every kind of drug rehabilitation program. I think my dad found him a job in construction, so he was working, off and on, while still taking heroin. Things would calm down for a while and we’d let ourselves hope, then we’d get home from school one day and our parents would be crying. We became wearyingly accustomed to what came next—the announcement that “Brian’s been arrested again.”

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  There is another truth about drug addicts, and by extension those who serve time in prison: While, as human beings, they are valued by society at nothing, their symbolic value to the system is huge. For “us” to be “good,” “they” must be “bad”—and not just bad, but irredeemably so. It’s classic divide and rule, them and us, and it makes rehabilitation almost impossible. It also ensures that those entering the system are put beyond the reach of our common humanity. The way people serving time are spoken of reminds me of the myth peddled by right-wing politicians—that the only difference between the rich and the poor is the latter’s own fecklessness. If you are a “repeat offender,” it’s not because of structural failings within the system, just as if you are a drug addict, it’s not because opioid manufacturers aggressively marketed their drugs at you until you were hooked. Instead, you are in jail, or an addict, because that is, at root, who you are. This is the nightmare Brian, my kind, funny, lovely brother, got into as a teenager and is still in today. He was not the “bad” child who went off the rails, just as Rachael and I weren’t the “good” kids who didn’t put a foot wrong. I don’t absolve my brother entirely of blame, but it was always much bigger and more complicated than him.

  It started when I was thirteen and Brian was eighteen, when he was sent to prison for stealing a car. This was the first time he’d been sentenced as an adult, and the beginning of his life inside. Over the next twenty years, he would be in and out of jail—including stints in Pelican Bay and Susanville, notoriously violent federal prisons in Northern California—for a total of sixteen years, half of them spent in solitary
confinement. Outside prison, Brian was just a druggie, stealing to buy heroin, but basically a docile and amenable person. On the inside, he was a violent gang member, frequently having his sentence extended for possession of drugs and deadly weapons, and for assault.

  It was impossible to reconcile the brother we had known with this new image of Brian, or to understand how, while Rachael and I were heading into ninth grade and starting to attract the interest of bigger soccer teams, Brian was in prison joining a white supremacist gang. The way he explained it to our mom afterward was that inside, the races are segregated and organized into gangs, and if you’re going to survive—particularly if you get into trouble, as Brian did—then you’d better affiliate quickly. He never talked to us about it, and he never tried to “convert” us to white supremacy. As far as I know, when he was out, he never went to white power rallies or did anything remotely connected to his life inside (apart from take drugs). It was exclusively a prison persona, adopted as a survival measure to give him a sense of power and identity. None of which made it any easier when, at nineteen, he came home from that first stint in jail with a homemade swastika tattoo on one hand.

  Like millions of prisoners whose main crime is addiction, Brian shouldn’t have been inside in the first place. Why do we even have private prisons, the primary purpose of which is to make money, not to care for or rehabilitate the prisoners? Brian had a drug problem and committed crimes and was out of control and all that, but if you send a drug addict to prison, he’s not going to get sober, which means he’s more likely to reoffend. Then he comes out, has a group of friends who have all been inside, too, can’t vote, has no resources, and has to try to get a job with a felony on his record. If regular people can’t get jobs—which in Redding they couldn’t—the applicant who just got out of prison sure as hell isn’t going to. It’s such a mess.