Lindsey Hanks – Part II

Anthony Jeselnik once said “Keep Austin Weird is a stupid slogan. The only thing weird about Austin is that nobody here understands alcoholism… (We) should just change (our) slogan to Austin: The opposite of rehab.” Such a poignant and concise remark was ironic to hear coming from a comedian whose profits partially depended on the lifestyle made punchline of the joke. Anthony highlighted, in a stunningly precise way, the rotting underbelly of the ‘coolest city in America’. (Expedia 2017)

Yet, wherever this lifestyle which celebrates addiction is found, it never stops with the adults. Addiction is contagious, chronic, lifelong and inheritable; transcending generations in a mostly never-ending cycle. This was Lindsey’s existence and the reality for many of us that grew up here in this so-called “Live Music Capital of the World”.

Sure genetic components may open the doorway to addiction, but it’s the lifestyle forced on us day in and day out, throughout the entirety of our childhoods and upbringing into adulthood, that thrusts our remains into an inescapable dungeon and locks the door behind us. One would be hard-pressed to find one of our schoolmates untouched by this demon; whether in their own families or indirectly in their friends’. 

There are many ways I’ve seen it impact my classmates, some of us in our earliest years…

There are those of us who endured early childhood trauma: we who were unfortunate enough to have been born addicted; to the hardest substances in the drug trade. Thankfully, Lindsey wasn’t one of these kids.

For girls in particular, there’s the rape and sexual assault perpetrated by loved ones or their lovers, too often because the parents are incapable of noticing. I knew several of these children that cut their arms in exhibition of this pain- even in their pre-teen years. Again, Lindsey was not a victim of this kind of abuse. 

Not to be excluded, there’s always children born to dealers and heavy addicts. Households that make victims of the children within, purely by exposure to the lifestyle. Needles hanging about, parents selling to their kids’ friends. Lindsey’s family was not one of these and she did not live in a trap house.

Such children born out of these aforementioned environments are made into fodder for the prison industrial complex. Our society condones such casualties and casts them aside silently and with malice; like a factory dumping its unneeded excess into a river. It might be unethical, but it’s probably legal (or they’ll soon lobby until it is). This is how such children are treated.

If Lindsey was one of the abovementioned types (i.e. ones exposed to prolific abuse so oft-read about in newspapers), it’d be pathetically acceptable in our culture to extend a downcast nod; one lacking action, but confirming sympathy, feigning empathy. “Such a tragedy”: the deigning thought conveyed. Meaningless, this look does nothing save that it entitles the bearer to self-validation. Yet, no action is implied or necessitated by such spectacles. Instead, givers recuse themself of guilt and responsibility by gracing their imagined audiences with such display of pity; as if said victims could possibly benefit from it and should graciously appreciate it; as if by pitying these victims, they prove themselves good.

The reason why Lindsey’s tale is a cautionary one is because it doesn’t fit the narrative. 

She was part of a middle class, suburban, white family on the Round Rock-Austin border. In 2016 and 2018, the area she grew up in was given the title of ‘safest city in Texas’. It even peaked as the #4 safest city in the country according to Niche.com, which analyzed US Census and FBI crime data for the rankings.

One could offer a rebuttal that Austin is a city best known for its nightlife, after all. To reconcile that point, it rendered perhaps the best opportunity for obtaining all the trappings of the American Dream: affordable living, well-ranked schools, safety, convenience, space. For the last decade, it has enjoyed a spot at the top of nearly every list for the ‘top city in the US to live’. Austin’s been awarded first place from US News for multiple years. 

Some of us locals endearingly refer to Austin as the ‘blueberry in the tomato soup’ on account of its sociopolitical contradiction of the surrounding areas. Indeed, the mentality in Austin can be summarized as ‘live and let live’; a laid back city which thrived on its lack of pretentiousness. 

Yet, for some reason which no one has been able to explain to me, despite all of the above, there are 20 names written in my copy of Lindsey’s testimony in silver Sharpie; 20 names, many of them children, whose lives were cut short; almost half due to their own will… despite having all of these advantages. These children went to school with one another, were within a couple grades of each other. I KNEW THEM. They’re just the ones whose stories will be remembered here, but there are many more. These youth died in a city notorious for its supposed appeal to their demographic (i.e. a family city, a city for young people). Tragically, the latter appeal contributed to their deaths.

Indeed, much more than a cursory glance is required to unearth and inspect the rot within society that consumed their lives. 

It’s important to keep all of this context we’ve discussed top of mind. Because, to understand Lindsey’s story, you first have to understand that it was not unique amongst her peers. Secondly, you need to understand the time and place it occurred: 

Austin’s tech scene was exploding in the 90s. Around the time Lindsey was born, Dell had just established its headquarters in Round Rock and Austin was quickly developing its own reputation as a sort of ‘Silicon Hills’; a place of refuge for all of the dot-com busted fleeing Silicon Valley.

Her father, Preston, fit perfectly into this picture. As a network engineer, he worked on the devices that gave companies their ability to print, surf the web, send email and chat to one another. Her mother, Kim, was an office admin. 

There were many eerie similarities between her family and mine. My father was an IT systems administrator as well. My mother was and still is an office admin. Hell, I started my career in IT in the same role as Preston, job hopping around until I got serious about my career. 

It behooves me to mention a key difference in those times: IT was treated as overhead. Many organizations’ IT departments only had a labor cost assigned to them and most organizations back then weren’t equipped with the right metrics or knowhow to calculate the efficiency IT derived as a renumeration of profit. This resulted in an entire industry extracting as much labor and time and energy from its workers as it possibly could, for as little cost as possible. So long as an organization was below a certain ‘average’ threshold, it could at least consider the cost savings on labor as their means by which to demonstrate success. 

What came about was a deadly culture of workaholism; a mindset of slavery. I’ll never forget the glee with which my dad informed me that the company was finally allowing him to bring a pillow and bedsheet to work. Although he had spent a good many of his nights there before, the company was worried about liability in case it could be portrayed they were housing people against zoning and licensing regulations. Effectively, they didn’t care if my dad was working 80-100+ hours per week, or that he slept on the floor of his office between workdays, maybe netting only a couple hours a night sleep for weeks on end. No, they only cared that he was just uncomfortable enough to mitigate their liability.

When one becomes a slave like this, dependent upon our wage (i.e. a ‘wage slave’), it becomes harder to avoid degrading into slavery in other ways. If someone is forced to work long hours without rest, what kind of emotional availability will they have for themselves? Their partners? Their children? From personal experience, when a person is driven to such extremes they tend to slip into a life of addiction like a drowning person fighting for their last breath before going under. No matter the amount of resistance they summon within themselves, the system is vampirically draining them of their time and energy; stalking them to their inevitable surrender; forcefully drowning them by rendering their efforts futile.

It can start as harmlessly as a cathartic drink to relax into the end of the day, or a prescription from a trusted doctor, meant to provide relief from the effects of sitting too long or working too hard; all surreptitious beginnings which allow the sufferer to escape their torment for a moment. 

Sometimes, it’s a part of the wage slave package. “Work hard, play hard!” companies advertise. As if this lifestyle is a gift we should be grateful for; as if sacrificing our time and relationships with our children and family could be an equitable trade. I’ve worked for those companies. In my early 20s, one provided me with a dream job: a high salary, a company card, international travel, exotic resorts and hotels. Thousands of dollars per night in places like Bangkok, where business meetings were conducted in the whore bars of Soi Cowboy. 

Counter-weighing the ‘coolness’ of it was the display of guys in their 50s, having done the job for 30 or more years, divorced and hollowed, unprepared for retirement and planning to work until their inevitably lonely deaths. Their kids hated them, their wives left them. 

On the off chance that a woman is able to fight her way into the club, they’re oft-mangled by necessity to fit into their permitted roles; stripping away femininity and uniqueness and replacing it with the approved patriarchal masculinity. All of these types spend their lives watering whatever habits such a ‘fun’ system drove them to: alcoholism, cocaine; round the clock pills.

Society strongarms us into this negotiation from an underhanded position: a position of need.

And it was this position that sealed Lindsey’s father’s fate.