All or Nothing (17 page)

The old guy took the bag of jewelry from me and walked to the side of the house, quickly disappearing from view. I didn't see the transaction go down, but I didn't care. By now, withdrawal symptoms were coming on in waves. Getting straight was my only thought. A crack hit would do the trick, take the edge off, and buy me some time until I could score more dope. After a few minutes of subdued haggling, the old guy came back with two crisp $10 bills in his hand. “Give me my fucking money,” I said, but he shook his head. “We're going to split this shit,” he told me. I wasn't in much of a position to argue.

The old guy knew I wanted crack; there was no other reason for me to be on MLK Boulevard. Flush with our $20, we made our way to a group of kids on bicycles. They were either dealers or lookouts, and young ones at that—ten, maybe twelve years old. Standing in the center of the crew was a tall, agonizingly thin kid who was a little older than the rest. He was dirty and smelled like spoiled milk, a crackhead for sure. Even among junkies, crackheads stand out. Meth leaves you toothless and psychotic; heroin dots your arms with abscesses and infections; weed just saps your motivation. But crack is a different animal. I've seen sane, stable lawyers and doctors give up everything—their families, friends, and careers—for crack. I never used another drug that plunged me down a hole after just the first use, not even heroin. The saying goes, “One hit is too many, a million ain't enough.” If you use crack, it will eventually own you. I found it so addictive that I dreamed about getting high while I slept.

The old black guy opened his hand and produced one of our new tens. He handed it to the tall kid, stuffed the other in his pocket, and quickly bolted from the scene. I could tell he wasn't a base head. He just wanted a drink. The tall kid handed the money to a kid standing next to him, who gave him a fingernail-sized ball of crack in return. I stood on the sidelines, waiting for a chance to get in on the game. The whole thing went down as if I were invisible.

Suddenly, I realized these kids were ignoring me on purpose. The tall kid was planning to hoard the rock for himself. There was no way that was happening. I had just made everyone's dreams come true. The old man got his booze, this kid had the rock, and I had no more jewelry to sell, no money, and I needed a hit or I thought I'd die.

I wasn't looking to throw down with some crackhead and his posse of gun-toting buddies, but he had what I needed. We started sizing each other up, trying to see what the other guy was going to do before making a move. Before long we were pushing and shoving, trying to gain the upper hand. I grabbed his shirt and threw him to the ground. Suddenly he pulled back, realizing I wasn't going to back down. He probably needed his fix as desperately as I did, and he knew there was no way he was escaping me to take a hit. He either had to share it with me or risk losing it all.

As we picked ourselves off the ground I felt a small trickle of blood moving down my pant leg. Bruises were already forming on my right forearm and shoulder. I took a deep breath and moved back a few steps, glancing at the other guy. There was a gaping hole in his right pant leg and a mixture of dirt and sweat covering his face. Looking at him, I realized he was probably only fifteen years old, but already his eyes were drawn and tired. “Let's just split this shit,” he said. As he reached into his left pocket and pulled out a pipe my entire body sank with relief.

We each took a drag, inhaling fumes from a makeshift pipe fashioned out of a hollowed-out tire gauge fitted with a Brillo-pad filter. After just one hit, the rest of the gang suddenly jumped on my back and threw me to the ground, kicking and punching me nonstop. I felt my body starting to cave under the endless barrage of blows. Somehow I got off the pavement and scrambled away. They didn't chase me. They probably just wanted me out of their neighborhood. As a white boy in the ghetto, I was a lightning rod for cops. I looked around. The tall kid had vanished, and the crack had gone with him. That was it—five hours of hell for a single hit.

I made it around the block before I realized that I'd lost my glasses at some point during the melee. With no other choice, I turned around and walked back to the scene with my face red and bloodied, my body aching and bruised, and my clothes ripped and caked with dirt. The kids were still there, and they immediately started hurling rocks at me, big ones. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my glasses lying awkwardly in a small patch of grass. They were pretty beat-up, but I dodged the rocks as I ran over to fetch them.

As I walked back toward the gas station, the single crack hit had already worn off. But instead of tweaking, I just felt low-down and depressed. I already needed to get straight again, but I didn't have the strength to hustle or scam my way to the next score. I had already surrendered. I was done.

I don't know how long I was walking the streets when a cop drove by. As soon as he saw me walking away from the ghetto he flashed his lights and swerved in my direction. As he approached a hundred thoughts ran through my head. I knew I could just run; I'd done that plenty of times over the past few years, hiding in the bushes for hours until the cops disappeared. But this time was different. I didn't feel like running. Instead, I calmly sat down on the curb as the tall, clean-shaven cop got out of the car. He walked over and looked me right in the eye. “What were you doing in that neighborhood?”

“What the fuck do you think I was doing?”

“Open your hands,” he ordered. My arms were pale, gaunt, and pocked with track marks. “You're in the wrong neighborhood for that,” he said. Cops knew that MLK Boulevard was the place for crack, not heroin.

“I'm a junkie who likes to smoke crack,” I told him.

“Now open your mouth.” Suddenly there was a greater force behind the cop's words. He searched my mouth for crack, but of course he found nothing. “Stand up and put your hands behind your back,” he told me, but I already knew the drill.

When the cop asked for my name, I gave him the real one, adding, “There's definitely a warrant for my arrest.” After confirming the warrant, the cop opened the door and sat me in the back of his squad car. I pressed my face against the window and watched my breath start to fog up the warm glass. Staring off into the night, I knew I was going to jail. But instead of being scared, I felt peaceful, almost relieved. It was finally over.

As I waited for the cop to process my information I asked him to turn on the car radio to 94.9 ZETA, an alternative rock station. Pearl Jam's “Alive” started blaring through the speakers. It was the first time I'd heard music in ages. Slowly, a Cheshire cat smile spread across my face. Despite knowing what was coming—that I'd be sick, confined to a cell, detoxing in the worst imaginable way—I felt giddy. The cop stared at me in the rearview mirror, puzzled. “What are you smiling about?” he asked.

“I'm going to get my life back,” I told him. “I'm going to get my family back.”

On the way to the station the cop grabbed a couple of other guys for drug possession and petty theft. It was a few hours before I ended up in the holding cell, pacing back and forth like a maniac. This was the worst part—the waiting—especially for an addict like me who can't sit still. I spent the entire night languishing in that cell, tormented by withdrawal symptoms, tweaking like mad, and constantly looking over my shoulder, before being transferred to Broward County Jail the next day. There were ten of us convicts seated in the back of that dirty, windowless van, shackled together like farm animals being carted off to a meatpacking plant.

Broward County Jail is an eight-story, maximum-security facility adjacent to the County Courthouse in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Most guys there are awaiting trial or sentencing. Some are serving twelve-month terms. Anyone with a longer sentence than twelve months is sent to a different facility. More than twelve months is “hard time,” and that means prison.

During booking each of us was medically evaluated. Some guys were sent to the hospital before entering jail for gunshot or knife wounds. We were checked for tuberculosis, HIV, and other diseases associated with using. A nurse asked about drug use—what kinds of drugs I used, how often, and how recently I used them. I thought it should have been pretty obvious in my case. Sometimes, if they know you're using, you're put on “detox protocol,” which includes checks from medical staff. But I was a junkie. Even though heroin withdrawal is considered a medical emergency, there was no protocol for me.

The first two weeks in jail were torture. It was so overcrowded that they didn't even have a cell for me. I sat stewing in a cold, windowless concrete box with no comfort except for a dirty mattress on the floor. I was on the first floor, which was general population—mixed together were dealers, addicts, rapists, and murderers. As withdrawal took hold I suffered through anxiety, psychotic thoughts, and panic attacks. Then every inch of my body started to ache. Diarrhea, nausea, mind-numbing back pain, achy bones, and profuse sweating were followed by profound cold. I felt like I was going to die. Some jails treat junkies with methadone or clonidine, which calms the nerves, but since there was a month before my sentencing I got shit, just a handful of Imodium and ibuprofen every six hours. I couldn't eat for weeks. Every day another inmate stole my lunch, but I didn't have the energy or appetite to fight for it.

The physical withdrawal took a few weeks to subside. By then I was moved up to the fourth floor, which was marginally better. I started eating, mostly carbohydrates, since that's what they served us. In just a few weeks I gained over thirty pounds. Then I started having vivid, graphic dreams about scoring, looking for drugs, and getting high. I woke up every morning exhausted, as if I hadn't slept at all.

By the time I got a court date my physical detox was mostly over. I called Sam, who I counted on to be there for me despite the many ways I'd fucked up over the years. His friendship was, and still is, one of the greatest gifts of my life. Sam spoke to several of my family members and finally got the name of a family friend, Cindy, who was a public defender. But I was scheduled to appear in court the following day, and there was no time to reach her. My only option was a court-appointed public defender.

For my first court appearance, I was roused at 5:00
A.M.
and chain-linked to other inmates awaiting sentencing before being transferred to the courthouse. It was a humiliating, dehumanizing experience. After arriving in court, I walked up a long flight of stairs before being escorted, still in handcuffs, into the courtroom. From there I was seated in the jury box and had to wait for my name to be called. Minutes before I was set to appear, my court-appointed attorney ambled over to me. He was stone-faced and grim and clearly saw me as yet another run-of-the-mill junkie.

“Jesse,” he told me, “I have to be honest. If you're lucky, you'll get five years in jail.” My heart started racing, and suddenly I couldn't breathe. I asked him, “Can we postpone the hearing until I get in touch with Cindy?” He walked back to the county prosecutor, and he agreed. For the next five hours I sat in that jury box, alone with my thoughts, unable to leave until each prisoner had appeared before the judge.

I thought that Cindy would have better news, but the picture seemed equally bleak when I spoke to her the next day. “You violated your probation,” she told me. “Bail isn't an option. But I can get you out on house arrest.” The problem was, I didn't have a house. I had no money and nowhere to go. I knew my family wanted nothing to do with me.

“I think I'll just stew in jail for a while,” I told her. “My plan is long-term treatment.” She advised me to apply for a transfer to the rehab program at Conte Facility, another Broward County jail. There I would at least get the help I needed.

There was another month until my sentencing, though, and I spent it back in jail. In many ways, it was a good thing that I had been on the streets because I learned some things there that ended up saving my ass in jail. The main lesson was, if it's not yours, don't touch it, and if it's none of your business, don't go near it. Luckily, I knew how to keep to myself, and I quickly learned the strange unwritten rules of jail—like to always spit in the toilet instead of the sink, to get up and walk around the table if you needed something instead of reaching over another inmate, and most important, to never change the channel on the TV. One time several weeks into my sentence another guy was flipping through the channels and passed the Food Network. I caught a glimpse of Rachael Ray. My passion for food had been completely taken over by my addiction, but there was still a spark within me, a deep fascination that struggled to get out. Now that I was clean, I felt it rising. At that point I was desperate to watch anything related to food, but all the other guys wanted to watch
Jerry Springer,
and I knew that if I changed the channel I'd get hurt.

I was back in court a month later, and this time Cindy and I went before the judge. We had already reached a deal with the prosecuting attorney, so I knew what was coming. Six months in county jail followed by six months in a state-run therapeutic community, three months in a halfway house, and then two years' probation. I heaved a sigh of relief. It felt good knowing I would have a place to stay and dry out. After more than a year on the streets, I would get three meals a day, medical care, and a roof over my head. No more sleeping in dirty alleyways. No more waking up to hundreds of mosquito bites. No more need to scam or hustle unwitting strangers for a couple of dollars. Jail was the best place for me at that moment. I could finally let go of the scamming, hustling, and lying and figure out where to go from here.

Back at jail, I exchanged my white wristband for a yellow one, indicating that I had been sentenced. It was a small change, but I saw it as a symbolic one. Finally, I was on my way.