Tears on the Unicorn

Hardly a day goes by that Tammy Davies doesn’t think of suicide. It floats on the edge of her mind like a bad dream, drawing her toward a light she sees in the distance.

It’s been pretty much this way since she was a child, which is when she began using drugs. Sometimes she closes her eyes and screams, “God, get me out of this!” and thinks how serene death would be.

The way she sees it, there’s only one salvation and that’s in the pictures she draws, the strangely delicate and beautiful faces of women, their expressions a compelling blend of wonder and grief.

Art is often born in dark places of the soul, and this is no exception. Davies’ baggage contains equal portions of talent and despair, which she must haul with cautious steps along the edge of the abyss.

She lives in a world few would willingly inhabit. At 34, she’s used drugs since she was 10, has been on her own since she was 12 and has spent more time in prison than she can remember.

She’s sold her body to support a $300-a-day heroin habit and, in the course of prostitution, has been beaten, raped and robbed in spasms of pain and humiliation that even the strongest would find difficult to bear.

But through it all, she has continued to paint and draw in soft pastels, projecting her own anguish into the models of her imagination.

A figure that emerges when she isn’t drawing the faces of women is the head of a unicorn, with a single tear on its face. It’s a fantasy projection of her own distorted life, where even creatures of mythology cry.

*

I met Davies a few days after she had been released from Sybil Brand Institute for Women. She served two months for driving with a suspended license.

It was an accumulation of many brushes with the law. Her license had been lifted in 1981 for felony drunk driving, involving an automobile accident. She did a year for that.

“I’m clean now,” she told me the other day, smoking cigarettes and sipping from a soft drink can. She’s a thin, edgy woman with stringy brown hair. “I’ve been clean for 70 days. God, I never thought I could do this for even a month.”

She had telephoned me on behalf of another woman in Sybil Brand who was complaining about her inability to receive adequate medical treatment.

But it was Davies who intrigued me most. She had the manner of a wounded bird, wanting desperately but never able to achieve normal flight. Her body covered with tattoos, she seemed a metaphor for the type of woman who, used and abandoned, had lived exactly her kind of life.

She spoke freely of wanting to die as she paced the room of a small duplex in Temple City where she was staying with a friend. Her heavily-scented perfume filled the humid air.

“I’ve been suicidal since I was 12,” she said. “A boyfriend tried to strangle me once.” She laughed nervously. “I should have let him. Another time, I OD’d and traveled the tunnel. The one with the light at the end?” She paused. A funereal silence lay over the room. Then she said, “I just don’t want to be in this world anymore.”

She showed me a poem she wrote. It began, I was born for this? / / Was there something I missed? ...”

*

It was only when she brought out her drawings that Davies concentrated. Page after page of a scrapbook revealed her damaged talent. There were faces, butterflies, a rose . . . and the unicorn, each drawn with a draftsman’s precision and an artist’s emotion.

She did most of the tattoos on her body herself, and once had a job in a tattoo parlor, “but dope wouldn’t let me work from 9 to 5.” She shook her head in remorseful self-appraisal. “I was a garbage can.”

But things are different now, she says. She’s ready to try again, and maybe . . . just maybe . . . it will work.

What she wants is her own tattoo parlor. She sold an old car to buy the equipment and now needs $3,500 to open a shop that will bear her name. It’s a modest goal, but in a life that has had no aim, any goal is a mountain.

Davies still talks about suicide as a peaceful alternative to failure. She’s slashed her wrists a dozen times and bears the scars to prove it. The pain of existence seems almost always too difficult to bear.

I’m not sure she won’t try it again. I’m not sure she isn’t somehow predestined to fail. She’s been failing for 24 years. But I think she deserves a chance, and I’m hoping she gets it.

We shed rivers of tears in today’s world for beached whales and fallen condors. Will only a unicorn cry for Tammy Davies?