Saving Patty

The documentary shows what happens when an alcoholic woman who had been homeless for many years returns to her long-lost family.

Read the most recent postings from the last shoot in Oklahoma and Alabama in the Daily/Film Log section.

A short synopsis: On his way to work, the filmmaker is panhandled by Patty, an alcoholic train hopper with a story of sorrow and loss who pleads with him to help her find the family she had abandoned over a decade before. Believing in the best of all possible outcomes, he travels with her to Mississippi and Oklahoma, slowly uncovering uncharted territories of pain and abuse that had originally lead to her self-exile—and finds himself caught in the vortex of other people’s nightmares.

A fuller story: I first met Patty in Los Angeles in October of 2003 as she panhandled me at a 7-11 store in a dicey neighborhood of L.A. There seemed to be more to Patty than another blackened, outstretched hand. She looked older than her 55 years, many of which had been spent sleeping outside under bridges and awnings, and in cubbyholes. Her voice was soft and plaintive, her words a slurry of Oklahoma R’s marinated with a hint of the bottle. She asked me to help her locate her family: two sons, a daughter, and a sister. I’d had my own drinking problem a few years back, so I followed my impulse with a belief in the best of all possible outcomes. Patty and I become friends, and I began taking her to meetings for alcoholics. The film starts with her touring places she had stayed on skid row and explaining her years spent as a train hopper, riding boxcars with various male companions and landing in jail for petty theft and public intox.

I am able to find her her son, her sister, and nephew in Mississippi through a private detective in Tulsa. Though Patty had abandoned her family numerous times in favor of alcohol-fueled odysseys over the past two decades, they consider it an act of grace to have found her alive and want her to move back and live with them. We fly back with her and watch what happens as the dim past unfolds in the present, revealing her 35 year-old son Darrell’s ambivalence. On the one hand, having been raised in foster homes, he looks to her as the only mother he’s got. On the other, she’s still a drunk and the memories of his abandonment surface in bursts of anger. I find that he had been molested by his stepfather Frank and that Patty was too scared or drunk to have intervened. Her sister, who’d always been Patty’s guardian angel, reassures her that “she’ll never want for a home again.” We also travel to rural Arkansas to meet the 21-year-old son who she had to give up when he was one year old.

After her skittish daughter backs out of a planned reunion, Patty begins to drink, this time on camera. Later that summer, they all have moved to another town to be near her sister’s job.  As I try to pry the past from my subjects, tensions between Patty and Darrell escalate, and Darrell proclaims that he’s sick of the past and has buried it. He’s torn between love for his mother and the horror and neglect inflicted on him as a child by the drunk stepfather. I uncover old court papers that say Patty was convicted, along with Frank, of charges of “incest.” It’s hard for me to believe she was capable of it.

I follow Patty through the next two years as she descends into drinking binges and discovers that she and her sister cannot get along; her original reasons for fleeing her family still exist. She takes a Greyhound to Tulsa, her home town, with $40 and no plan or place to stay. As I arrive at the bus station to meet her, we realize that she cannot stay in the Salvation Army without a tuberculosis test. We put her up in our motel room because the Salvation Army doesn’t allow cameras. During a trip to rural Alabama to visit Darrel, Patty lashes out at me, concocting a fiction that I am trying to steal Darrell’s girl away from him. On the trip back to Tulsa, Patty has a meltdown and refuses to get into the car. It takes two strangers, women country singers, to help me get her into the car.  She ends up in Tulsa at a homeless shelter. 

When we finally meet her daughter, Dee Ann, who had been adopted out at five, she tells us her memories of Patty and birth father Frank sexually abusing her. In front of our cameras, she grows more mentally unstable as she is torn between forgiveness and retribution. She leaves Patty in tears after numerous confrontations. As I begin to take on the role of placating the angry daughter and of standing by and watching my friend Patty self-destruct, I am accosted by a man accusing me of exploiting Patty as I film her passed out drunk. “Documentary project drift” overcomes me and I have to save myself. I leave Patty and return to L.A. She died in four months.