A Second Chance : Drugs. Jail. Homelessness. Berta and Dennis Flowers have seen a place called Rock Bottom. But faith, determination and a fierce desire to regain a son brought them together as a family.
The last time Dennis Flowers was here, he was a child. And now at age 31 he has returned to the bustling Christmas tree lot in the warehouse district near downtown with his wife, Berta, and 2-year-old stepson, Marvin. It has been 15 years, maybe more, since he last had a tree, long before he went to prison.
It has been even longer for Berta, 30, who guesses she was 12 the last time she gazed at the twinkling lights of a family tree. It was before graduating from a private high school where she was ranked second in her class; before attending Delaware State College, where she was a premed student and cheerleader. It was before she lived on Los Angeles’ Skid Row.
The Flowerses have come in search of what will be known as “Marvin’s Tree” to help celebrate their first Christmas together as a family. They join the swarms of people arriving by the carload, strolling like judges at the county fair, scrutinizing trees for height, fullness, girth.
They settle on one that is fresh and affordable, and stands about six feet tall. They take it to their small mid-city apartment and stand it up in front of the big window. Felix, the adopted cat, and Marvin, who was nearly lost to adoption, most certainly will incorporate this tree into their mischievous antics.
Marvin’s Tree is set in a base and tightly anchored.
“Do we put water in here?” Berta asks.
“Yeah,” Dennis says, “the green stuff too.”
Water and green stuff are poured into the base, and a white skirt is placed around it, as Felix hides and Marvin stands back and watches.
The lights go on first. Dennis likes lots of lights. Some of them flash and some glow steadily. New blue, silver, green and red bulbs are hung, mostly in front. Marvin places them in a cluster like huge, shiny grapes. Tinsel ends up on the floor and in Berta’s hair. Marvin takes a break from decorating the tree to decorate himself with stickers on his face and wrists. Marvin likes lots of stickers.
It is a beautiful tree lacking one thing. Berta stands back as Dennis lifts Marvin to crown the tree with a paper angel the child made for this occasion, for this tree. Berta cheers.
During this season of faith and hope, we see miracles where we desperately need them. They emerge from streets where homeless people sleep, where fear and hope are dulled by drugs, from a place and time known as Rock Bottom.
The Flowerses have been there. They are a family only because they were determined to become one, and their story unfolds like a gift to those without hope this holiday season. At the center of their miracle is a child and a faith.
*
Marvin was born six weeks early on Aug. 8, 1993, while Berta was living on Skid Row. She held him and breast-fed him at the hospital until it was discovered that he had crack in his system. Marvin was placed in foster care and Berta returned to the peril and cant of the Row. It would be a year and a half before they would see each other again.
Berta had moved from Delaware to Los Angeles with her mother and sister in 1987. She didn’t get along with her mother and soon moved out on her own. Her first goal was to complete a physics class, the only thing that stood between her and a biology degree. She enrolled at Long Beach City College but soon dropped out and went through a series of jobs.
On Valentine’s Day, 1990, she was viciously mugged on her way home from work. She recalls crawling in the street begging for help. “I couldn’t see and I couldn’t hear,” she says. “I don’t know how I got to the hospital.”
After the assault, a sense of hopelessness and fear began to take root. What was the use of struggling, of working, of going back to school when it all could be stripped away by one violent act?
On May 13, 1991, her 26th birthday, she first smoked crack cocaine. She had turned it down before but finally gave in. It eased the back pain she had been feeling, subdued the uncertainty she felt in her life.
“That,” she says, “is how I started doing drugs.”
It is a frighteningly simple explanation for the monster of addiction that ensued, for the damage it caused. In 1992, having broken ties with her mother, she ended up living in a tent in downtown Los Angeles, where she was high and afraid and terribly alone. That’s the worst part of homelessness, she says. Being truly alone.
You cannot sleep on the Row, she says. You must always watch your back. You cannot trust people, for they are as untrustworthy as you. “People there,” she says, “will kill you for one dollar.”
As a single woman on the streets, she says men tried to claim her. She was assaulted and raped. At various times, she carried a three-foot iron rod under her coat, a 10-inch butcher knife and a .38 for protection. The longer she lived on the streets, the more pain she felt. The more pain she felt, the more crack she smoked.
Her life seemed nothing more than an unimpeded downward spiral, a series of failures. She had failed to stop smoking crack during two pregnancies, failed to be a mother to two sons, and the only reason she was alive was because she had also failed in suicide.
“It was not a cry for help,” she says of the time she swallowed a bottle of prescription pills. “I wanted to die. I know chemistry and I should have died.”
Each day on the Row was a war. Last winter, she started smoking more crack to anesthetize sharp pains in her abdomen. Finally, last August, the pain, the life, the fear, the drugs all became too much.
She reached into her pockets and grabbed fistfuls of rock, giving it away and asking for someone to call an ambulance. As she was being rushed to the hospital, she vowed never to return.
She was treated for a urinary infection, and two months later doctors discovered an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit. Determined not to go back to the streets, she refused to leave the hospital until a shelter and drug treatment program could be found for her. Workers at County-USC Medical Center allowed her to spend the night in a waiting room while they searched for a program willing to offer precious space to one more.
The next day, she was given bus tokens and made her way to the housing program at Bible Tabernacle in Venice. She enrolled in a drug treatment program, where she received individual then group counseling.
“I gave my life to God,” she says. “After trying to kill myself and being on drugs and abusing my body, I said, ‘I might as well give my life to God. He wants it and he’ll do something with it.’ ”
A couple weeks after she arrived at Bible Tabernacle, Dennis walked in from the streets. He was born in South Carolina but came to Los Angeles as a child.
His life had been a series of failed attempts as he tried to break free from drugs and alcohol. Since his release from prison in 1991 on charges of eluding police and violating probation on a robbery conviction, he had been staying with friends, living in missions and in an abandoned house.
On Aug. 22, 1994, he awakened in a pool of his own vomit after passing out on the street. It was one of numerous relapses as he struggled to break free from booze and drugs. He made his way to Bible Tabernacle, where he had stayed before. There, he met Berta. They were married last December. There have been no more relapses.
*
Once she was in treatment, Berta found new perspective on her life. She had always told herself that her two sons were better off without her while she was doing drugs and living on the streets.
Her first son, born a year before Marvin, had been adopted, but she thought there might still be time to get Marvin back. She returned to the hospital to find out where Marvin was living and discovered that a hearing was forthcoming to terminate her parental rights.
On Jan. 26, Berta and Dennis showed up in court. In the year and a half since Marvin’s birth, court records showed Berta’s status as being “whereabouts unknown.”
Such hearings, when the biological parents have not intervened, are largely routine. Berta stood before Referee Armando Moreno and explained that she was Marvin’s mother. Moreno, examining the file, looked up and asked, “Where have you been?”
She was assigned an attorney, Michele Bishop, who met briefly with her, then explained to the judge that Berta had brought proof that she and Dennis had completed parenting class and were in drug treatment. She also brought four months worth of clean drug test results.
“The judge told me, ‘If there was someone to adopt this child right now, I would do it,’ ” Berta says. “I never thought I would get Marvin, but I had to try.”
In most cases it would have been too little too late. In Bishop’s three years as a lawyer in Children’s Court, she has not seen a case like this one.
“I work in a building with five stories of courtrooms filled with thousands of people every day,” Bishop says. “Eighty-five percent of those cases are related to parents taking drugs. Some of them love their kids, but the drugs are prettier. It’s sad, and that’s why it’s so wonderful to see what Berta and Dennis were able to accomplish.”
Each time Berta returned to court, she came with more documentation of her progress. She was spending as much time with Marvin as she was allowed, first one hour a week, then two, then weekends.
The first time she visited Marvin, she cried and asked herself, “How could I have done this?” She felt guilty for being a junkie rather than a mother. She knew she was endangering her babies when she smoked crack during pregnancy.
“I felt guilty, but I couldn’t stop,” she says. “I just couldn’t stop.”
Of God she asked to be forgiven and of the court she asked for a second chance. Social workers, however, continued to recommend adoption for Marvin.
In May, Berta received an A in her physics class at West L.A. Community College and received her biology degree with minors in Spanish, French and chemistry from Delaware State University (formerly Delaware State College). In August, she began a full-time job in quality control at a pharmaceuticals lab. Dennis found full-time work as an auto mechanic.
They enrolled in a family counseling program at the L.A. Mission to strengthen their marriage. “I never had any role models,” Dennis says. “No one ever taught me how to be a husband or a father. . . . I have now what I’ve always wanted, a family. I thank God for that every day.”
Marvin now lives with his mother and stepfather, sleeping on the couch of their one-bedroom apartment, next door to newfound cousins and downstairs from Dennis’ mother.
The only lasting effect of crack being in his system at birth appears to be chronic asthma. Tests have detected no developmental or learning problems, Berta says. In a couple of months there will be another review in which Dennis and Berta are hoping the court will finalize their parental rights to Marvin.
They will awaken early on Christmas morning to open gifts, then attend church services, spend time with Dennis’ relatives and drive to Venice to help feed the homeless, some of whom are people they know from the streets.
“Without God, we would still be out there,” Berta says. “We are blessed to have a home to live in, but this is not our home, it is God’s, and he allows us to live here.”
From God, they say, they have been given a family, a love, an impetuous cat and a tree for Marvin. After many years, Christmas finally has returned to their lives.
