Playing Horse

Ruby Myhre uses chemicals despite repeated chemical dependency treatments. In June 1999, Ruby Myhre completed Eden Day Program and began their methadone program. On or around October 19, 1999, Ruby Myhre completed Park Avenue and began a six-month methadone program. In conjunction with the program, she submits to regular urinalysis (UA). On December 21, 1999, the UA was positive for cocaine and opiates. On December 28, 1999, the UA was positive for opiates.

In December, 1999, Marvin Waldahl failed to complete outpatient treatment at Park Avenue. He attended 19 out of 21 days, missing the last two weeks [sic]. On October 19, 1999 Marvin Wahldahl began a methadone treatment program. In conjunction ... he submits to urinalysis. On 10/26/99, 11/3/99, 11/16/99, 11/23/99 and 12/3/99, Marvin Waldahl's UA tested positive for marijuana. On 12/21/99, 12/28/99, 1/5/00 and 1/14/00, Marvin Waldahl's UA tested positive for opiates and marijuana. On 1/21/00, Marvin Waldahl's UA tested positive for cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine.

--From a May 26, 2000 court document compiling Ruby and Waldahl's offenses

An addict's past can be full of complicated, unfair things, but it's nothing compared with the pain of a mother's regret. Such is Ruby's remorse that she seems simultaneously determined to get her children back and quietly accepting that she may have lost them forever.

It's a rainy day in May, and Ruby is sitting at a table in the kitchen of the two-story house on Knox Avenue North where she lives with her 62-year-old grandmother and her 25-year-old aunt Amber Myhre. "I was never bad to my kids," Ruby says emphatically. "I never beat 'em, I always fed 'em. But I was a drug addict." She continues, distilling her story without asking for sympathy. Ruby never takes pity on herself.

Her long brown hair is pulled back into a bun, and her loose, green "Lugz Sports" T-shirt and gray shorts reveal a heavy, rolling figure, an indication, she says, that she's off heroin (addicts tend to be razor-thin). She has a broad nose, dark eyes, olive skin, and the flat cadence of someone who has seen the darkest depths of heroin addiction and is no longer spooked by the harsh realities of life.

A few feet from the kitchen, down a small hallway, is Ruby's room. There's a neatly made twin bed with a plaid bedspread pulled taut around the corners, and a copy of the Serenity Prayer is taped to the mirror above an oak dresser. She has struggled with drugs for nearly half her life.

Ruby never knew her father, an Ojibwe man who worked various janitorial jobs in Nebraska and Kansas. And to hear Ruby's version of events, her mother did her more harm than good. She says she was a high school student when her mother Danna Myhre introduced her to heroin. It was a case, Ruby says, of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Danna was in and out of jail on various drug charges, but whenever she would come home, there would be heroin in the house.

"Mom always knew where to get it," Ruby recalls. "It was always around." Ruby found herself shooting up on weekend nights to hide her newly acquired taste for heroin from her brother and sister. Soon she had dropped out of high school.

One day Ruby and her mother went to visit friends of Danna's, a family by the name of Waldahl, to buy a puppy, a chow named Rico, for Ruby. Ruby met the Waldahls' son Marvin, and quickly the two became inseparable.

"Ruby would see her mom doing [heroin] the whole time she was growing up," recalls Waldahl. "Mostly what I remember is the grown-ups would drink and play cards together. It was always party time. I ended up turning into a junkie over the whole thing." He didn't finish high school either. (Ruby and Waldahl are no longer in contact with each other; City Pages used public records to locate Waldahl, who agreed to be interviewed for this article.)

In February 1993, the couple's oldest child was born. Four years later another baby girl followed. Despite becoming parents, Ruby and Waldahl kept using heroin. They shot up at night, after they put the kids to bed in the duplex they shared with Ruby's mother on Washington Avenue North. To make money, they would shoplift from one Home Depot during the day, only to return the merchandise for cash at another at night. "Home Depot will give you cash without even blinking," Ruby says with no hint of irony. "All the drug dealers and users go to Home Depot to feed their habits." (Ruby has a felony on her record, the result of using a stolen credit card at Brookdale Mall in 1998; she's on probation until November.)

Even then she battled feelings of guilt and remorse. "Every day I'd wake up and ask how I could expect to ever get my kids through this and have them not be affected," she recalls. "What the hell was I thinking?"

In 1998, when Ruby turned 20, she and Waldahl decided to clean up. Both enrolled in a methadone treatment program at 1800 Chicago Ave. S. in Minneapolis. It helped, but only temporarily. "Many times you wake up and say you're never going to do it again," Waldahl says, adding that some setback would always arise, such as the deaths of his father and uncle. "Then you're using all over again."