Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (16 page)

“It did exactly what I was already doing when I was toting guns and being crazy, which was the heart—it was a pure physical thing,” he remembers. “It was like the heart, boom boom boom . . . You’re definitely hyped . . . It only lasts for five minutes. Then you need another hit and another hit and before you know it you’ve been up for four fucking days, and looking horrible, and things that used to be a lot more important in your life—like bathing and brushing your teeth and, oh I don’t know, eating become less and less important than chasing it.” He says, “That was it—I was on a crack mission.”

That first time, he kept going and was high for a week, and he knows he must have nodded off a few times, but there was no bedtime, no REM sleep, no rest—and crack, so much crack, and strippers, and prostitutes, all piling into this hotel room, and now there is a party rolling and ripping through it and Chino does what the men do—he fucks the hoes, he rolls, he smokes.

Arnold Rothstein was a psychopath. He found it easy to play the role prohibition had handed him as the amoral terrorizer. Chino said to me one afternoon: “I’m pretty sure people will read this and think, damn, Chino had borderline sociopathic tendencies.” But as he tried to play the role prohibition required of him, Chino found something awkward and unwanted breaking through. It disrupted his ability to carry out his function in the drug delivery chain. It was empathy. One day, the mother of one of his crew approached them and asked to buy crack. Chino recalls: “Seeing the look in my boy’s face when his mom came to buy from us . . . It wasn’t like a look of embarrassment. It was a look of hurt. Sometimes you can see the hurt on somebody.” He said later: “It’s hard to not feel compassion for somebody . . . We are born with compassion . . . What breaks loose is my ability to feel not just what’s happening to me, but what is happening to someone else.”

They sold her the crack. But it’s hard to be Arnold Rothstein with a conscience.

The more the pain of what he was doing intruded into his consciousness, the more he jabbed it away with violence, or drugs. Chino wasn’t a psychopath, but the prohibition system we have created required him to be one to play his role in it. So he drugged himself into psychosis.

But prison had not been entirely a waste of time for Chino. A fellow prisoner taught him how to steal cars in Spofford, and when he was then caught for that and sent to back to prison, he learned how to be a Blood and ascend to a whole new level of gangsterism.

At first, the other inmates assumed Chino was Hispanic. In some lights, he looked black; in some, Native American; but the Latina gangs tried to recruit him because he looked most like them. But he couldn’t speak Spanish or relate to their world.

That’s when a girl called L.A. approached Chino and told him he could be Blooded in—if he was prepared to work for it. Chino discovered the Bloods were a gang who originated on the West Coast out of the wreckage of the Black Panther Party and its revolutionary goals. The Bloods were “the bastards of the party,” a nickname so pervasive there’s even a movie with that title. To become a Blood he had to learn this history and all their ethical codes, which are written down like laws. You don’t steal from your supplier. You don’t drop a dime (that is, talk to the police) if you get caught. You don’t do fucked-up shit when you are flagging—that is, when you are wearing your official Blood colors.

If you break these rules, there are very clear punishments, from lashes to death.

Once he learned the codes, nine Bloodettes crowded into a cell to watch Chino take the oath. It began with the words: “Blood is 410 percent gangster.” Now he was Blooded, he had an extra layer of protection. From this day on, when he was locked up and severed from his crew, he had all the other crewless Bloods in the prison watching his back.

It was here, in these cells, that Chino first fell in love. When Chino saw a girl named Nicole, he felt a crazy lust but could only express it with aggression and loathing: he had learned from his mother that that’s what love is. He went to Nicole’s cell and told her the head of her set was a faggot who was being raped in the ass, and that Chino was going to kill her. He made shooting noises. Then, one day, Chino got word that his girlfriend out on the streets, in the free world, had been raped. There was nothing that Chino could do from his cell to protect her, and he was distraught. Nicole came to see him and told him she was sorry to hear about what happened. Chino couldn’t believe—after all he had done to her—that she was being so kind. “That literally changed me,” Chino recalls. “That one act of human compassion . . . I went into her cell and started talking to her. And all my shit stopped.”

Nicole was released and they lost touch, but something about the experience stays with Chino.

But neither the Bloods nor the discovery of love could protect him from the people who seemed, from where he was standing, to be the toughest gang of all—the corrections officers. On the Island, one officer, whenever he saw Chino, started taunting him—you want to be a man, he said, but you’ll never be a man. You’re just a dyke. Chino cursed back: “Why you so afraid of me, yo? Is it because you’re not really a man?”

The officer was especially incensed when Chino started going out with one of the most beautiful women on the island, a stripper who I will call—to protect her identity—Dee. (This is one of only three places where a name has been altered in this book; the other two are indicated in the text later.) He had learned to love with Nicole, and now it seemed to be coming more easily to him. He could do this. He could care. It incensed the officer. So one day he grabbed Dee, pulled her into a facilities cupboard, and fucked her. There was nothing Chino or Dee could do.

I was skeptical about this story when Chino first related it to me, but then I started doing some digging. A few years after the incident Chino I was describing, an in-depth investigation by the federal government into the complex where men are held found that there was a “deep-seated culture of violence” towards teenagers, with a “staggering” number of injuries. They didn’t look at the part of the prison complex where Chino was held, but said that these problems “may exist in equal measure” there.
¹³

One day, Chino couldn’t contain his anger any more. He approached the rapist-officer and told him he was a fucking coward who preyed on the weak, and if he’d had the nerve to try to drag him into the broom closet, he’d have been the one getting fucked. Later, in a revenge swipe, he had Chino locked in solitary confinement. “There are many things you can do to a human—you can physically hurt them, you can spiritually pain them, but the most cruel and unusual way is to isolate [them from] all other human contact,” he says. “It’s just too much—especially when you have so many demons . . . That lasted forever.” He found himself slipping into a fantasy world where he imagined he was rich, and free.

Dumped back outside onto the streets, angrier than ever, Chino started leaning on crack more and more. His friend Jason said when he was using it, Chino was “just not there. Like the lights are on, somebody put the radio on, but there’s nobody at home . . . It wasn’t like crazy, running around the street, stripping naked . . . [He was] subdued, maybe just a little off. It just seemed robotic. Almost like the soul was turned off. The emotion wasn’t within reach.” What Chino got out of it, Jason says, was “emotional numbness,” a state where he “did not seem to be able to access emotion . . . During that time, Chino was almost always in a lot of emotional pain . . . [He was] being kicked in and out of [his] house [by his grandmother], dealing day to day with not being wanted by your family.”

The next few years passed in a crack blur. He knew there was more violence with his crew, more dealing, more prison, and a lot of watching TV. He started using heroin. It made things slow down when he needed them to. One of the few things that gave him hope was watching the Oliver Stone movie
Natural Born Killers
. “I feel like it’s the first movie I’ve ever seen where the bad guys get away,” he said. “The bad guys always die at the end of the movie, unless you’re a Freddy or Jason type. Whereas if you’re just regular people murdering motherfuckers you always get yours in the end.” But here, for once, “the bad guys had some kids and did their happily ever after.”

One day, he woke up and realized he was so thin “I looked like a fucking Calvin Klein commercial. I couldn’t take it anymore.” He could feel Deborah’s fate waiting for him. He began to see “it’s like my mother was in a constant battle [with] her trauma, who she is, who she wants to be. All the time. Her demons were way deeper than drugs. Way deeper than prison. I don’t know what they were. They were her demons. I’m pretty sure I carry some from her, and now they’re mine.”

He decided to quit all drugs except weed in one single swoop. He went to stay with a friend who nursed him through the shakes, wiped up his vomit, and brought him glasses of water. Now “there is no more numbness to be had,” he said.

And so—flooded with feeling, violent torrents of feeling—he started to learn and read and think. He began to ask: Had his life been shaped by a policy decision that didn’t have to be made, and didn’t have to continue?

Chino was standing on a New York street corner
¹⁴
once again, pacing nervously, and sweating a little. In front of him, there was a crowd of over a thousand people, and standing next to him was a member of the House of Representatives. We were in Foley Square, in lower Manhattan, on a spring day in 2012. Chino gave the word and everybody, including me, marched behind him to One Police Plaza, the headquarters for the New York Police Department. He walked determinedly, alone, his eyes focused on the middle distance. When we arrived, words erupted from him, through a throat covered with a tattoo of the Egyptian wind-sun god rising.

“We’re not demanding anything that’s alien,” he said. “We want justice . . . Not just on the Upper West Side, but in Brownsville, Brooklyn, too! Not just in City Hall, but in Jamaica, Queens! . . . Now statistically we know who smokes marijuana at higher rates. They don’t look like me. They don’t look like you. They look like [Michael] Bloomberg [then the mayor of New York]. But they don’t face the collateral consequences of being deported, of having your housing taken, your financial aid stripped.”

The crowd started to chant with him.

“No justice!” said Chino.

“No peace!” they replied. And it echoed out across the police plaza, across to the Department of Justice: “No justice!” “No peace!”

He called this protest “a Tale of Two Cities.” Everybody gathered here knew the raw fact that drug use is evenly distributed throughout New York City—in fact, the evidence suggests white people are slightly more likely
¹⁵
to use and sell drugs—but in his neighborhood there is crackdown, violence, and warfare, while in the richer, paler neighborhoods there is freedom and rehab for the few who fall through the cracks. Harry Anslinger’s priorities and prejudices are still in place.

“Our communities are the one that are targeted,” he said to the crowd. “Our communities are the ones that are locked up and sent to bookings so that they”—he gestured toward police HQ—“can get overtime, because we know that it’s about money, because apparently if it don’t make dollars in New York City, it don’t make sense.” The demonstration ended with the protesters—white, black, and brown in equal measure—sitting down and peacefully blockading the police building.

Chino left to lead a class he took every week for young teenagers who were trying to stay out of gang life in the South Bronx. We jumped into a yellow cab and sped through Manhattan, pulling up outside a sign that said “No Exit.” Behind it, in a library, there were teenagers waiting for him. They had been growing up on the same drug war battlefields as Chino.