The Rebirth of Tammy Davies

We celebrate today a new beginning, not in a maternity ward but in those shining places of the soul where one makes life-affirming decisions.

It’s the emergence of Tammy Davies from a past of drug addiction, prostitution, prison and suicide attempts into a world of another chance.

Once she wanted nothing better than to die, ending each day with a scream to God to “get me out of this!” Now she wants nothing better than to live.

I wrote about Davies three years ago when she was deep into her addiction, a tense and edgy woman of 34 who had been on drugs since she was 10 and on her own since she was 12.

She had turned to hooking to support a $300-a-day heroin habit and had been beaten, robbed and raped more times than she could remember.

I had never met anyone before who had endured such despair, who had attempted suicide so many times and who had wanted so badly to die.

Her whole life was a bad dream.

What attracted me to her, however, was not the melancholy nature of her existence, but her ability to draw.

Art is often born in dark places of our experiences or in the fantasies we create to combat our nightmares. In the case of Tammy Davies, she drew the strangely delicate faces of the women she wanted to be, their expressions a wondrous blend of serenity and hope.

And when she wasn’t drawing women, she was painting creatures from mythology with tears in their eyes. In the sad world she occupied, even unicorns cried.

*

Today, she’s in a different place. Free of drugs for two years, she has become the women she drew, reborn into a life she had never before known.

I revisited her after receiving a letter that reminded me of our first conversation and said, in effect, “You oughta see me now.”

She lives with her brother in a neatly kept home in Baldwin Park. When she answered the door, I couldn’t believe it was the same woman.

Composed and stylishly dressed, she’s no longer the haunted, stringy-haired derelict I met in 1993, when she was a half-step away from another fix.

She works full time as a waitress, has sold six of her paintings and prays each night not for oblivion, but for the courage and self-esteem to go on.

It hasn’t been easy.

Shortly after I interviewed her the first time, she almost died from an overdose of heroin. Up until then, she had been clean for eight weeks, and the idea of being back on drugs was too much to bear.

“I went home and slit my throat in three places,” she said as we sat in the living room of her home.

It was offered in a tone of incredulity. She couldn’t quite believe it had been her, Tammy Davies, who had occupied that world.

“I didn’t want to be the person I was. Remember I told you about the tunnel I traveled when I almost died, and the light at the end? Well, this time I was four feet from the light and begging God not to send me back.”

But God, she said, didn’t want her to die that way and returned her to try living once again.

“From that moment on,” she said, “I was through with drugs. I knew I would never go back to them.”

*

One pays prices for the kind of life Davies lived, and she’s paying it now. Years of drug and alcohol abuse have left her with heart and kidney damage. She can’t get credit, and the only jobs available pay minimum wage.

“But at least,” she says, “I can deal with my pain now. I know it’s OK to cry. I don’t have to cover my sorrow with chemicals.”

Her goal in life is, and has always been, modest. She wants her own tattoo parlor.

Off and on for years she has translated her gift for art into faces and designs on human bodies, including her own. Tattoos are visible on her arms under the edge of a short-sleeved blouse and on her wrists.

She still has customers who come to her home, but it’s her own shop she wants, as part of the rebirth she has experienced.

“I’m working toward something better,” she said to me that day in the home she keeps with meticulous care. “I’m waiting.”

Once she lived in a world of pain, drugs, death and fear. Creatures of mythology wept rivers of tears for the person she was. And now? . . .

The first time I met Davies I knew that she had not abandoned drugs. One sensed it by her demeanor, her attitude and the nervous look of a prowling animal in her eyes.

Today I know she has. The wonder is that she ever found the strength to try life again. The effort deserves applause. On your feet. Show respect. Tammy Davies is in our midst.