TRACY’S CHOICES By Max Elliot Anderson

A newborn baby girl is a reminder of new life and hope.  At that moment, the whole world is new and filled with possibilities.  The choices she makes at strategic points in her life will have the power to change her life forever.  Sometimes those changes can be positive, and at other times they can lead to death itself. So what choices will she make?  While it is true that many outside forces can push her in one direction or another, the ultimate responsibility for life’s decisions are up to her.  Lying there, the very picture of innocence, this little one will be accountable for her own life. What about you, can you even remember when you were this young, this innocent?

Tracy Eichman grew up in Rockford, Illinois; a mid-sized city where marketing companies come to test new products before going national.  Rockford is considered to be a cross section of America. So what was it that sent Tracy down the path that she took?  Some might say it was her parent’s fault, or that her friends got her off track.  But the fact is, Tracy made some serious mistakes, plus, she made them early and often.  Tracy is an example of a young person, filled with promise and possibilities, who consistently made the wrong choices. She would be the first to tell you, she never expected her life to turn out the way it did.

 “I started drinking very young.  I’d mix all different kinds of alcohol together and everything and in fact, believe it or not, I started drinking in kindergarten. As young as five, I was experimenting with alcohol.  Its like it creeps up on you and you don’t think its anything until somebody says to you like they did with me, ‘Hey, try this mescaline, hey, try this speed, hey, try this, and it just didn’t seem that serious to me.”

Tracy eventually took to the streets, as a prostitute in order to pay for her growing drug addiction. “I didn’t live bad by the way.  I had a nice apartment, I had food, I had everything I needed. The only thing is, who can afford, on anyone’s salary, $400 worth of heroin a day or dope a day? I don’t care if it was 60 below wind chill, I’d be on the street.  I was out there Christmas night.  I’ve been out there Thanksgiving night. Then you know what used to be the worst thing about being out there? It was on Sunday, hearing the bells of the church ring and I just wanted to crawl and hide under a rock I felt so bad. I always believed in God but I knew God hated me because how couldn’t he, I did.”

Tracy was on a collision course with the law, and this is where her life took perhaps its most dramatic turn. Police Lt. Jim Mays had been conducting a prostitution sting operation on 7^th Street in Rockford.  Lt. Mays has nearly 30 years of service as a police officer.  He spent 8 years in the Youth Bureau helping  kids who were in trouble. So you might say he is an expert on kids and on criminal behavior. Jim is also a committed Christian who has spent many years working with the student ministries department in his church.

“On the night Tracy was arrested, we were conducting a series of prostitution stings in one of our high crime rate areas.  Her arrest set up an incredible chain of events.”

 Not only had Tracy chosen to experiment with alcohol and drugs, she had also made choices about her education.

“I did not finish high school. Then the drugs weren’t good enough, just snortin’ ‘em, and then I started to shoot ‘em, and it was better than any real feelings because it was totally euphoric, and you hate yourself, and you don’t have a way to get money, so you get it from your family, or you steal it from your mom and dad. And you have nothing to do with your time because you aren’t in school anymore, and I thought I was real smart, right, and I would go out into the world and learn. I would tell my principal at school that I knew better than he did.  Well, as you can see, prison is what I ended up knowing. I got so disgusted and I knew I was going to eventually get caught for my prostitution, and I begged Lt. Mays to let me go and finish the drugs that I had, and begged him, and begged him and said just let me do one more time, and then I’ll stop. And he said, ‘ You’re going to jail where you belong’.”

Lt. Mays recalled, “Tracy Eichman was the first person in the State of Illinois to be charged with knowingly transmitting the AIDS virus.  The next morning, after reading the newspaper, I was surprised to learn that Tracy was sorry for what she had done and that she wanted to turn her life around.”

Armed with this new information, and given Jim’s background of working with young people and on the street, he did the only thing he could; Jim got directly involved.  He called his pastor, and together, they arranged to visit Tracy in Jail.  As a result, Tracy chose to ask Jesus Christ to forgive her and to help clean up her life. God deals with each of us in different ways. 

For Tracy, God met her need in a jail cell. “…and I said, my way never worked and I can’t go on living like this so I’m knocking, Jesus, would you please open the door.”

Tracy’s problems didn’t end that day, they only got worse.  You see, we are each responsible for how we think and what we do. No matter what your excuse might be, or the troubled background you might want to blame, you are responsible for you . The choices you make in your life, and the choices you have already made, will have a direct impact on who and what you will become.  If you break God’s laws, there will be consequences. If you break man’s laws, you will also have to pay the penalty. Tracy was sentenced to a term of three years in Illinois State Prison for the Attempted Criminal Transmission of HIV. Just before she was taken to prison, a compassionate judge allowed her to be baptized in her newly adopted church home.

“ Isn’t it incredible,” Jim said, “that I was responsible for Tracy’s arrest, but that I also had the privilege of participating in her baptism.”

 Immediately following that early morning service, Tracy went to Dwight State Prison to begin serving her sentence.  Even though she was starting out with a brand new spiritual life, her body was suffering from years of alcohol, drug, and sexual abuse. She knew the end of her life was in sight.

“I just want the children to know that this is not a game, and my innocent joint that I started smoking early in my years in high school, it seemed like, oh, pot can’t do anything to you, its harmless. I’ve lost several friends from either AIDS or drug overdoses in the last couple years, and you just never think its going to happen to them, or that its going to happen to you, but it will, its just a matter of time. And I thank God I’m saved. I mean, when you know you’re not and you know you’ll go to Hell, and you keep the drugs the most important thing in your life, that’s scary. There’s no coming back. When you’re dead, you’re dead, I mean that’s it. I have a chance…I’m breathing, you know.  God is letting me be here right now.”

Tracy received several letters while she was in prison. Many of them were from children. Her story became front page news in the Rockford newspaper. She was interviewed on local radio and television news programs. Right from the start, she wanted whatever remained of her life to have a positive impact on those whose lives she would touch.  She was most concerned about teenagers.

“It’s going to sound probably pretty redundant, but do not do drugs. Drugs is not the answer.  Alcohol is not the answer. AIDS is very real. Don’t have premarital sex. Be monogamous and get married. The rise of teenagers being infected now is astronomical. They’re going up faster than any other group. And same thing they tell you on TV, if you sleep with one person, and especially, God forbid, if you slept with me, you might be sleeping with a thousand. And you can’t tell by peoples looks, or how healthy they look, or anything. Just be careful because we’re living in a very precarious very dangerous time. Prison is not fun, its terrible, and then to be sick here too is not easy, and  without Christ, I could never do it.”

Doctor Larry Bargren, a dentist, sees our choices from a different perspective. “Everything we have today is disposable.  The room itself is torn completely apart by one of our dental assistants which usually takes between ten and fifteen minutes. It’s quite a job to disinfect and sterilize a room, getting ready for the next patient, but we want to make sure that we make the right choices, because when our next patient comes in, it might be a child, it might be an adult, or somebody even in high school.  I want to make sure that the patient we had in the chair last did not transmit any of their organisms to me. Even though we use gloves and masks and shields and aprons, heavy garments and paraphernalia,  we wouldn’t want to transmit and carry these organisms to our next patient.  Those are the choices we make today and young people need to make these choices as well.”

Reaching out directly to young people, he added, “I just don’t understand today, why people aren’t more careful when we can pick up a virus and have our life terminate. I would really hope that the young people that we see as patients on an every day basis would make these same decisions, and hard choices sometimes at school, to choose their friends wisely and choose what they do in their free time wisely. These choices will definitely affect how they live the rest of their life.”

Dr. Charles Inskeep has practiced medicine for over 40 years. “I’ve seen a lot of misery and illness over the years in many age groups from very young, since I used to deliver babies, right up through teenage years and into the elderly. Of the illness and misery that I’ve seen over the years, occasionally it was unavoidable.  There were things that happened to people that they couldn’t do anything about. But what is truly sad is that some of the things that happened were due to poor choices made by the people involved.” 

            “Many young people feel that they are invincible, that things that happen to other people, things that happen in movies where people are injured or where people get illness or disease, they just don’t really feel that it’s going to happen to them.  Well, unfortunately, over the years, I’ve seen that it does. The things that you take into your body, and the things that you do with your body, are going to make a difference. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, sex, these are things that will have an effect on the body that may be long lasting, and may even be fatal.”

He added this personal insight. “Perhaps it would seem that the things that are happening around you would never happen to you.  Well, I’ve often felt that way in my family, however, I had a nephew who died from AIDS because of the choices that he made. He came from a good family. He had all of the positive things in his background, but he did take the wrong course, and unfortunately, he paid for it.”

On the request of her pastor and several people from her new church home, the Governor of Illinois granted Tracy a full pardon so she could return home to die. But she didn’t die, not right away, and Tracy became kind of an ambassador to young people as she tried her best to reverse a lifetime of  rebellion. Some people from the church gave her a birthday party to mark her first year as a new Christian. A spiritual birthday party.  It was a time of great joy for Tracy.  Later she took part in a Sunday night service on the subject of purity.

The pastor asked Tracy, “How old were you when you turned to the streets?”

“Seventeen”

“And why out on the streets at seventeen?”

“ I would sneak off and go drink and go do drugs, and I was in a real good home, and I wasn’t hungry, and nothing was wrong like that. I just had this overpowering desire for the drugs”

“And so drugs were what drove you to prostitution?”

“Yes.”

“How do you see your story? What’s the Tracy Eichman story and what’s its implication for people who hear it?”

“Christ can do anything.  It doesn’t matter who you are, everything in that book, every single word is truth, and it doesn’t matter because I repented, and, I don’t want to cry, but when I knocked, He was there! He didn’t say you’re a prostitute. He didn’t say you’re a drug addict.  He didn’t put a label on me.  He said you’re my daughter and I made you and I can fix you…”

“These men that go to prostitutes, is there any fulfillment that comes from this?”  

“No, it’s an addiction. It’s an addiction to perverted sex. It’s just as powerful as the

addiction I had, and still have the desire because once an addict, you’re always an addict, and these men are addicted to sex.  Its the sneaking around. Its the doing something behind their wife’s back. Its not the sexual act at all.”

“And you say that that’s as addictive as drugs were to you.”

“Yes, definitely.”

“So what’s your message.  How do you want people, who may never hear you again, what do you want them to know about Tracy Eichman?”

“Now that makes me embarrassed. I don’t want anybody to know anything about me other than you can turn your life around and Christ is the only way to do it. And be very careful children, kids, I love you. When you make a choice, these choices are reality.  They stick with you forever.  You can’t take them back. I picked up a joint and look where I am now.  I could have put that joint down and not smoked it but no, I thought, it’s just a little bitty joint, it couldn’t do anything. Well look what it’s done to my life. So you have a choice, and with the strength of Jesus Christ you can make that the right choice.  If you live by the Word, He’ll give you strength.  If you live by the world, you’re gonna fall. Our will is nothing, its absolutely  nothing. This is not God’s domain down here. This is Satan’s. I can’t wait to get to Heaven, I might have AIDS, but I get to meet Him before you-all. In a way that’s a blessing.  He’s using that for me to be a witness for Him.  If I had never experienced this horror, which it has been, I couldn’t help anybody.”

“So maybe I can help people more by not being raised a Christian. I was raised in an agnostic or atheist family. I wasn’t even allowed to go to church. People I think would tend to listen to somebody that’s been through all that, more than somebody that takes it for granted.”

After months of struggle, Tracy died.  It was a very painful and horrible death. Lt. Mays was honored to be a part of a memorial service held for her. At that service Jim said, “You know the real tragedy is not that Tracy used drugs or that she turned to prostitution.  Its not even the fact that she had AIDS or that she died.” 

Tracy had told him, “If I could change anything, and if I could go back, I will never have a family, I will never have a Christian husband, I will never not have AIDS.  If there was one thing I could change it would be that I never lost my virginity, and that I married a Christian, and had a family. For that I would give anything! God’s will is God’s will.  Some people have to die of AIDS to show everyone else what’s going on, and I’m OK with that. I can’t save the world, I can’t do much, but I can carry what little message I can carry and then think about myself, and my death …..”

Jim asked the audience, “What about you, are you going to live life with God’s help or simply go your own way?  In the end, you are responsible for you.”