My Little Sister, Tina

This story is about my little sister, Tina Gay Faddis who was third in line and the only girl in our family. She was a tad more than three years younger than me, the oldest and wasbetween Jeff and Kevin. Tina had the same birthday as my daughter, Heather (August 3) who was born exactly 25 years later.

I remember Tina being a happy young girl. She was very smart, pretty and she liked to play with the other kids in our neighborhood. We lived on a cul-de-sac that that had six houses and a duplex, and each one had several kids living in them. The busiest house was across the street from us where the six Hair kids lived. Many days were spent having fun outside with all those kids. We played softball, hide and seek and wrestled on the lawn.

Being the only girl in our family, Tina was teased a lot by the three of us boys. We made her laugh with our joking and she would get all worked up to the point she had to pee. Several times she was not able to make it to the bathroom in time which made us laugh all the more. One benefit of having brothers was their protection. None of the punks at school gave her a hard time because they all knew she was Stan and Jeff Faddis’ little sister. Tina was 8 when our father died and I think she appreciated that her brothers watched out for her.

One day when she was about 10, on her way home from school, she walked by a house that had a sign on the fence that said, “free kittens.” She asked our mom if she could have one of them. Mom consented and so Tina started to leave to walk back down to the house to get it. I had a gut feeling that the old man who lived there was a pervert so I decided to tag along.

At that time, I had a coat that looked like it was made from a grizzly bear. If you’ve ever seen the TV show Third Rock from the Sun, one of the characters wore a coat exactly like it. It had long brown and black fur and a hood. I had the coat on the day we walked to the man’s house. We went to the back door which led to the laundry room where the kittens were kept in a cardboard box. I stood to the side so the old man could not see me when he opened the door. The man answered the knock and Tina told him she had come to get a kitten. Seeing that she was apparently alone, the man said she could have a kitty but she had to kiss him to get it. He beckoned her to come into the laundry room. My blood boiled as I realized my suspicions were true. I stepped into the doorway so he could see me and advised him that I would kill him if he touched my little sister. My 13 year old heart was beating hard as I said this and I was scared beyond belief. I told Tina to pick a kitten out of the box sitting by the washing machine which she did and we beat it out of there. Later, we were able to laugh about it and wondered if that old pervert thought a grizzly bear was about to get him when he first saw me. From then on, when I walked by his house, if he was in the yard or on his porch, I’d glare at him and we would silently go back into his house.

The two things I could not protect my little sister from were the poor choices she made about men and drugs. Her boyfriend at the time, got her involved in using illegal substances. My recollection is that she first started by using inhalants also known as “huffing.” This is done my spraying aerosol paint into a plastic bag and inhaling the fumes. Since I was away at college when this all started, I was unable to take steps prevent it; however, I believe that even if I had been there I could not have stopped her. Jeff was there but I don’t know if he tried to stop her because, as I did not learn until much later, Jeff was also using drugs.

One summer, when I was home from college, Tina called the house to say she needed help. Some guy had taken her (she went willingly) to Coalinga where they were staying in a motel. He was a truck driver and was hauling tomatoes to the canneries around there. After a couple of weeks she wanted to leave but he refused to take her back home. I drove the 100 miles south to the cheap, rundown motel they were staying in. He was surprised to see me because Tina did not tell him I was coming. He said he wasn’t going to let her she leave. I told him he could let her go without incident or he could have me stomp a mud hole in him. Either way didn’t matter, but my sister was going to come with me. He did not protest any further and so we left.

At some point in her use of drugs, Tina began using heroin intravenously. She once told me her habit was so severe that she could easily shoot $600 of heroin a day, if she had it. You can imagine the terrible things she did in order to support her drug abuse. One way was to commit burglaries looking for cash and things she could sell on the street. In the early 80’s she was convicted of six first degree burglaries and sent to State Prison for eight years. She violated her parole many times and went back and forth from freedom to custody.

In 2005, at age 44, Tina was driving herself and her then boyfriend to the Chicken Ranch Bingo Parlor in Jamestown, CA. She was flying high on methamphetamine. Driving down a sloping curve near a bluff called Lover’s Leap, her vehicle crossed the center line and hit an oncoming car head-on. The crash killed Tina as well as the woman driving the other vehicle and severely injured one of that lady’s two children. Tina’s boyfriend was unscathed.

In later postings I will write more about my little sister including that she was the mother of two. But for now I’ll stop but not before I point out what a mess the use of drugs makes for the person and their families. Our mother and I tried many times to get Tina to seek help for her drug abuse, but the only person uninterested in getting treatment was her. The sadness of this is beyond comprehension.