Welcome to the Darkside

The Making of #A0210208 is a compelling story based on the factual events of a young woman's life. Expect to experience a diverse range of emotions as you take this intense journey with her while her life spins wildly in and out of control.

The innocence and adventures of her childhood will make you laugh out loud. The hopelessness she faces as she copes with unplanned teen pregnancy, rape, domestic violence and eventual drug addiction will wrench your heart.

The decisions she makes in the face of psychological dilemmas will leave you cheering her on or exasperated. The courage she rallies in the midst of the soul's darkest fears will leave you contemplating your own.

Each disturbing event leads to the next until, ultimately, she finds herself at a crossroad that will either change her life...or end it.

Hawaii counselor describes her sad youth

  By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Big Island Bureau

Serena Camara now works at the women's prison in Kailua, where she once served time. Women convicts who have read her book often tell her it echoes elements of their own lives.

JEFF WIDENER | The Honolulu Advertiser

Pregnant for the first time at 15, a high school dropout, a rape victim and survivor of vicious abuse by a boyfriend, Camara describes her younger self as "numb" until she found solace in a crack pipe in a foul-smelling alley behind a Chinatown pool hall.

In her disturbing reaction to that first taste, Camara writes that she felt as if she had replaced the security of her real childhood with "a home where I am loved and safe and secure and free, bound up by nothing, trodden by nothing at all. It happens just like that. One second becoming a promise of eternity.

"Eternally I will love thee."

Today Camara, 37, is a substance abuse counselor who works with inmates, and the women convicts who read Camara's book often tell her it echoes elements of their own lives. But to the uninitiated, the story is a peek into a hidden wasteland.

This was Hotel Street before the video surveillance cameras were installed, and before the federal Weed & Seed law enforcement effort clamped down on the area. Camara camped in 'A'ala Park or lived out of hotel rooms, working as a prostitute or selling crack, mingling with a cast of pimps and dealers who shared space with usually clueless Downtown businesspeople.

It was "a three-block radius where they work and shop, where I don't sleep, don't eat, just drift. I think of nowhere else, nothing and no one else. This is where I want to live and then die. Just leave me here, let me be," she wrote.

It didn't work out that way. Instead, Camara went to prison on a half-dozen drug charges in 1992, went through several drug treatment programs and emerged to write what she plans as a series of three books describing her experiences.

The first 290-page volume is entitled "The Making of A0210208," a reference to the inmate number assigned to Camara when she was a prisoner at the Women's Community Correctional Center.

The story is described on the book jacket as "a work of fiction based on fact," but Camara said it is fictional only in the sense that she reconstructed dialogue she couldn't precisely remember and compressed timelines for events to move the narrative along. Apart from that, the story is hers, she said.

The book was published under the pseudonym of "Jayne Dough" because Camara was worried about her family members who didn't know the details of where she had been or what she had done. She wanted them to have a chance to read the book before she went public.

The book's chapters alternate between grim accounts of the woman's adult years on the street and under the control of abusive men, and sometimes sweet accounts of the girl's childhood with her strong-willed mother in a community easily identifiable as Waimanalo.

Camara was jailed for the first time at the Alder Street youth detention facility at age 16 after she stole the keys to her mother's car and drove off with a friend to meet up with some boys.

She was pregnant again by age 17 by a partner who was ferociously violent and controlling, and conceived another child when she was raped by an acquaintance after being lured away from a group of friends during an evening of drinking.

Camara said she has told her story so many times in treatment programs and other settings that she didn't feel much emotion when she put the narrative down on paper.

Camara struggled even after she was released, and was locked up again several times before she finally walked out of prison for the last time on July 8, 1995. She has been clean since 1996, and said a combination of factors finally got her to change her life.

She went through a drug treatment program tailored to women's needs that helped, and she wanted to rebuild her relationship with her children and family.

She also got help from a residential furlough program offered by TJ Mahoney & Associates, landed her first job at age 26 working in a gas station, and got into college. She began to build a life for herself and found the consequences of the drug-using lifestyle were now greater than the rewards, she said.

Part of her objective in writing the book was to describe women's pathways to crime and drug addiction, which she believes are different from the routes taken by men.

"I also wanted to convey that sometimes drug addiction is deliberate," Camara said. "A lot of people believe they're victims of their drug addiction, and for me what I was trying to express in my book was that it saved me, really ... it got me out of the situation, it released me from the things that I was going through, and it worked for me at the time that I was doing it.

"And then there comes a point where it doesn't work for you anymore, and you have to change it."

Sales of her book have been slow, but "I knew that that's how it would be and I'm OK with that," Camara said. "I know it's going to get where it needs to go at some point. The universe is going to move it where it needs to be."

BOOK PURCHASE

For book excerpts or to purchase "The Making of #A0210208," visit www.authorjaynedough.com.

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.

The Prologue

"I will fuckin' kill you right now!"

I have heard these words before.

I have been here before, both figuratively and literally. This place, where my life is in the hands of him, of them. This place where I am standing, the old lookout up in the mountain, again. I have been here on this cement railing before, when I was responding to a taunt from a boy I liked as a teenager, my life in the balance of my cocky feet, as I walked this cement railing overlooking a steep ravine, laughing with my friends.

Now, standing on this same railing, in the middle of the night, just twenty-one years old, my life in peril once again, but this time not by naivet. But by him, holding the gun, aimed at my face, menacing.

"I will fuckin' shoot you right in the face and you'll fuckin' go right over this fuckin' railing! Nobody would ever find you! You FUCKIN' BITCH!"

I stare into his face. It looks familiar, the demented grin, following the raged spittle spewing from his mouth as he aims his demons at me.

"You know why no one would find you?! Because no one would look for you! You're a fuckin' crackhead whore and nobody gives a fuck about you!"

I stare down the barrel, following it, tracing it, to his eyes. Black, empty, lifeless. I look deep into that void and see myself there, black, empty and lifeless. I have been here beforemy life in his hands, only this time I realize that something deep within me has changed. I want to die. I grab the barrel and pull it closer to my face and scream.

"Then fuckin' do it!"

The freedom begins here. The surge of power, the resurrection of the control I once had over my own life. Here, in this moment, it all comes flooding back. Pulsing, coursing through my veins, racing through my heart, my skin tingling with the current. I feel more alive in this second than I can recall the last few years, the second before I will die, I feel alive again! I feel in control. I have power. The power to choose my own death.

"Fuckin' DO it!"

I pull and jerk the gun into my face, the cold steel making a connection with my warm skin, contradicting, cool, shocking. Bursts of power and freedom flood into me, through me. I struggle for the trigger, pulling, screaming, inside, outside.

"DO it! DO it! DO it! Please!"

I feel a tug and pull as he suddenly, desperately, struggles with me to regain control of the gun.

"NO!"

Was that him or me?

"What the fuck are you doing you crazy fuckin' bitch!?"

I look at his eyes and something I have never seen there before has taken hold. Fear.

He is afraid! He can't do it! He never could do it!

I know in this moment that this is the truth. I have never felt more free of him, them, in my life. This man I feared, loathed, despised, and never loved, this man I thought was invincible and superhuman.

He is afraid!

Silence, except for the crickets that are clicking, chirping, humming so loudly I can't believe I never heard them before this moment. Eye to eye, mine with power and his with surrender. Both of us more alive right this second together, here, then ever before.

Moments pass. Seconds tick. Then he knows, I know, that it is over. He pulls me down from the railing.

"Let's go Home."

Home?

Where is that?

I want to go Home.

Tonight I begin to reclaim my power. I know I will never surrender my power again to anyone, ever. I realize that my power has been seeping from me most of my life, sometimes in slow trickles, sometimes in floods. Sometimes given, most times taken.

He wasn't the first.