October's blog: Melindaville
What could life be like after
recovery from hardcore drug addiction?
Today Melinda Roberts Tyler is a successful and
award-winning professor of psychology, happily
married to her soulmate, full of warmth and gratitude
for life. Over fifteen years ago, however, she was a
heroin and cocaine addict living on the streets of
San Francisco, at rock bottom with very little will
to live.
Melindaville
chronicles her
journey from hardcore addict to honors student and
professor. It is a fascinating, though often
harrowing, story. After moving to San Francisco to
pursue an acting career in the early 1980s,
Melinda gets involved in the burgeoning punk scene
and performs as part of the band Wild Women of
Borneo. Along the way she becomes an exotic dancer
and high-priced call girl, as well as demonstrates
an entrepreneurial spirit by starting “the world’s
first fantasy phone service,” Julie’s Hotline. As
her dependency on drugs intensifies, her life
begins to fall apart. It takes twelve years of
addiction before she begins to put it back
together again.
The blog contains excerpts from her memoir in
progress (working title: Lost and Found: A
Journey) as
well as consciousness-raising posts on the nature of
addiction as a health, not moral, issue, with
underlying causes and more sophisticated solutions
than “just say no.”
Melinda’s ultimate goal is to use the proceeds of her
eventual book sales to fund a foundation for sex
workers. Drug addiction and the sex industry are
intertwined. Many sex workers choose that path after
suffering childhoods of abuse. Maybe they start
working in the business to support an existing habit
or begin using just to get through the workday. Drugs
like heroin or cocaine provide compelling comfort in
a small package, a way to numb the pain of the past
and present.
Melinda plans to fund treatment and higher education
for these men and women who are so often invisible
and voiceless. I can think of no better
champion.