Cindy Paulson: Headed Home

Anchorage > Seattle

When the Hansen post-sentencing dinner ended, I headed to the Anchorage airport, bound for Alaska Airlines flight 398. I was booked straight to Seattle and Glenn Flothe dropped me off, even walked me to the plane. It was a seven o’clock flight, arriving in Seattle at midnight. They – by “they” I mean the State of Alaska – were sending me home. With nothing. No money, no counseling. Worse yet, my connecting flight wasn’t until seven thirty the next morning. If I got lucky, I’d be sleeping on an airport bench. If that’s what it meant to be headed home, I just wanted to skip it.

As I stepped onto the plane I was crushing morbid thoughts. Is it going to be safe? Am I going to be OK or… Is this plane going to crash? Such was my fate, I guess. But I put my foot on the ramp, willed my brain to say “OK,” and forced myself through the airplane door. My seat was at the back of the plane, in the Designated Smoking Area.

I figured this was a ten-cigarette flight. Half a pack just to reach Seattle. That left me another ten for SeaTac. Yeah, I needed a second pack just to get me home.

Five hours in the air. Five. Long. Hours. There’s plenty of time to think. Too much. I smoke a cigarette and light the next one off the stub. A flight attendant starts to offer me a beer, then thinks better of it. Guesses, correctly, that I am underage. Hey, I just turned eighteen. I was thinking vodka. Still trying to crush my memories.

Off the ground and in the air, I start reliving the past six months. To be honest, it was more of them intrusive thoughts. Looking back, I was really a mess. Not that I’d admit it.

Memories

Here’s one of them… Sometimes Anchorage Police officer Gregg Baker and State Trooper Sgt. Glenn Flothe would come and get me from the massage parlor and take me to do a blood test. I remembered one time they took my blood: the nurse, Baker and Flothe were looking at my test to see what was in it. They came around the corner and they looked at me, then looked back at the blood test, probably thinking “how can she have that much shit in her system and just be sitting there like she’s a normal person?” I remember that. And they would ask me, are you OK? Sure, OK, no problem. It was normal, you know.

Now, of course Glenn was pretty worried about me. See, at one point they still needed me to testify. And I was pretty coked out. It finally got to the point where I just couldn’t take it anymore. I left Gentlemen’s Retreat without telling nobody. Just. Up. And. Gone. Because I couldn’t just keep working. I’m like a hot number. The cops are watching me. I can’t really do anything. I can’t. I’m on fire, you know, so I needed to go and do my own thing and blend in. And get wild for a while.

I went hog wild. I just kind of blended into the seams and kind of disappeared. I met people, strange people, people that I knew that I could get anything I wanted from. And we would hang out. But I couldn’t really do too much with them because I had a subpoena that I had to… You know, turn in. So I couldn’t be around them that much either. I hid from everybody. I didn’t even have clothes. And I was just tired of it, because I was so high and loaded. I had no sense of home — only homelessness.

Big Trouble

I was gone three days before Flothe got the call. This one was a dagger to his heart. One of his inside sources — remember Sherry from the restaurant? — told him I was no longer working at the Gentlemen’s Retreat. My whereabouts? Unknown.

Glenn Flothe: What you're looking for is a clue, but you got to talk to fifty people before you come up out of this… We found her at this sleazy little club on the strip. She heard I was looking for her and she came out and she started dancing. She was wearing a G-string and a very – very thin top. Her boobs were hanging out. And she looked like death. Her legs were all skinny and her skin was all white. She was bruised all up and down her legs and arms and she was shaking. Her hair was just a mess. She looked like death warmed over. She had big scabs on her arms. She was picking at herself. She was bad strung out.

And she was… She looked terrible. Terrible! She looked worse than when I first met her. She just gone downhill fast. The pressure was getting to her. She was having a hard time. And that bothered me.

Just from the looks of her, I knew she was dancing and doing all this cocaine and she, you know… She won't tell me where she’s staying at. I saw her that night, but she wouldn't tell me where she’s staying at. That's because [the people at the club] only allowed her to see me with another girl present. And she was scared to say, “I want to go now.”

A Total Dive

Now, consider this situation from my point of view. You know, I was the one who’d got herself into this mess. I wasn’t headed home; I was going in circles. No surprise that I went to my street peeps for help. I still didn’t trust the cops. Or not enough to give myself up. I was still fighting “reality.”

Cindy: Yeah, that place was a dive… A total dive. I don't even know what I was doing there. I needed to make some money because I was trying to stay away from everybody. And I didn't have no money and no dope. I was trying to stay way low and it was just a total dive. I was down and out. […] But this place had just opened and I mean, you could just come in off the street and dance. Nobody was in there. After Flothe found me, I was “rescued” by my friend Morgan. I was still running from Flothe and the cops and all they stood for. Morgan had a place up on Government Hill. An actual place. Not the motels I’d been crashing in. Not the lawns where I sometimes slept in my fur coat.

So picture this… this house… You walk in the door and there's this big, huge pool table and then you keep going to the living room and you gotta walk over this ramp cause there's a fishpond in the house. And the living room is huge. You go through the kitchen and then there's two other rooms. Then in the back is the main bedroom with a bed, a hot tub and a sauna. I had the first room. Seemed nice. At first. 

On A Different Track

But, you see, staying with Morgan meant a whole different bunch of party people. Different pimps and stuff. You know, it’s a whole new clique. A whole bunch of people doing weird shit. Putting drops in your drinks. You know, you’re waking up in strange places that you don’t know where you’ve been and what’s going on. Your clothes are all gone through, you know what I mean? That’s some crazy shit. It was not a good scene. Not a good scene.

And I remember calling Flothe from that house on Government Hill. I just was telling him I was in trouble. And that’s when I called him. I was thinking about home. And he said “you’re coming with me.”

There was a payphone down the road and we went and I called my dad and my stepmom and told her — she answered the phone — and I told her if anything happens to me, I want you to know I love you. And I love Dad both, and it’s not my fault. And I’m calling to let you know that it’s popping off and I ain’t got nothing to do with it. And they wanted me to tell them what’s going on. I said I can’t. But I’m… I’m not safe up here. You know, just give my family my love. And I don’t remember, but it was a lot of crazy shit.

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Purchase Butcher, Baker

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