High Price (16 page)

Because I was captain of the basketball team, part of my job was to inspire the other players and ensure that they did their best. Bruce Roy, who was a sophomore at that time, was one of the most talented ballers I’d ever seen. He loved reefer at least as much as he did basketball, maybe more. If we were going to succeed on the court, he was essential. But sometimes he’d miss practice, either because he was off getting high or because of some other drama. I realized that Jamaican Mike’s marijuana offered at least a partial solution. Since Bruce was going to smoke anyway, I could supply him myself. That meant he’d have to come to practice if he wanted the best weed.

And that’s how I started selling. Again, it was not because of any addiction or even any liking for the drug itself on my part. I did it because of reefer’s role in my social world. Weed could get Bruce to practice; I used his desire for the drug to give me more control over my life, ensuring that one of my star players showed up. And although it didn’t open my mind in terms of its effects on my own consciousness, it did expand my circle of friends as my access to it put me in touch with more of the school’s so-called stoners or burnouts. Before, as a jock, I’d looked down on them. Now I began to see that such people could be cool. Indeed, they turned out to be some of the most open-minded, intelligent, and intriguing kids I hung out with in high school.

I began spending my lunch hour with the school janitor, a brother named Bobby whom I knew from the neighborhood. He reminded me of “Carl the Janitor” from
The Breakfast Club
. We hung with these two white girls, one of whom was a really cool girl named Jana. I’d known her since middle school. She would sometimes get so wasted, taking only God knows what mixture of drugs, that she’d be virtually unconscious in class. Jana had Marcia Brady straight blond hair and wore dark eyeliner.

The four of us would get high at my cousin Betty’s house—the same place where I almost got killed sleeping with Naomi, the night that Betty’s husband came home and thought I was in bed with his wife. I wasn’t sensitive enough to realize that Jana was a lesbian—and that was probably at least part of why I was never able to get with her. But I liked her offbeat personality and never would have become close friends with her if it hadn’t been for weed. Experience with the wide variety of people who are attracted to drugs and drug culture would also help me later when I began research aimed at understanding use and addiction.

For those who focus on pathology, of course, my drug experiences would be seen as an aberration. I had many risk factors for addiction in my childhood. These types of risk factors are another part of the dialogue on drugs and addiction that is often misunderstood. For example, I grew up with domestic violence: this alone is linked to an addiction risk that is doubled to quadrupled compared to those who don’t live in a violence-plagued home.
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My father certainly abused alcohol: that’s another factor associated with a doubling to quadrupling of risk. Moreover, my mother sometimes smoked cigarettes while she was pregnant with me, and my parents were divorced: both also are strongly linked with elevated risk. In addition, I lived in a poor neighborhood with bad schools at a time rife with racial tension.

With all that against me, you might think that addiction would be inevitable. But that is not how risk factors work. As noted earlier, simply finding a correlation between two phenomena doesn’t mean that one causes the other. For instance, a space alien might visit earth and observe a strong correlation between the appearance of umbrellas and the amount of rainfall. The alien might conclude that the presence of more umbrellas causes more rain to come down. This would, of course, be inaccurate. We earthlings know that it simply means that the more it rains, the more likely people are to use umbrellas to protect themselves.

It could genuinely be true that domestic violence does make children more susceptible to later-life addiction—or it could be that each of those things is associated with a third factor, for example, stress, that causes both domestic violence and addiction to increase, while domestic violence itself has no effect on addiction susceptibility. Simply having one risk factor or even many, therefore, may not even directly relate to addiction itself, let alone doom people to definitely develop it. I myself never got close to being addicted to anything.

And even when I later tried drugs like cocaine, I remained unscathed. Further, the reality is that my experience is actually far more typical of drug use than the dramatic addictions we see on TV, in movies, and in books. Most people who use any type of drug don’t get addicted; in fact, most people who try particular drugs don’t even use them more than a few times.

Consider our last three presidents: Bill Clinton, who claimed he “didn’t inhale” the marijuana cigarette(s) he smoked; George W. Bush, who admitted marijuana use and is widely suspected of having taken cocaine; and Barack Obama, who admitted to using both drugs. President Obama even said that inhaling “was the point” of smoking reefer. Whatever your politics, none of them can be seen as not having reached the pinnacle of power and success.

Their drug use was inconsequential—in large part because they all avoided legal consequences from it. If Barack Obama had come up in a time when the drug war was being waged as intensely as it is now, we probably would never have heard of him. A single arrest could have precluded student loans, resulted in jail time, and completely ruined his life, posing a far greater threat to him than the drugs themselves did, including the risk of addiction to marijuana or cocaine. Even among people at the highest risk, like I was, it is still the case that the majority do not become alcoholics or drug addicts.

W
e got a hit record, they gonna come out for that,” Russell Simmons told my brother-in-law Dr. Love, arguing that we should charge five-dollar admission rather than the two dollars we usually got for a Saturday night dance. Russell was managing his brother’s group, Run-DMC. He would ultimately, of course, become one of rap’s biggest promoters, parlaying Def Jam Records and other hip-hop ventures into a multimillion-dollar fortune. And Run-DMC—with Russell’s younger brother Joseph “Run” Simmons, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, and Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell—would soon be the pioneering voices of hip-hop, taking home its first ever gold record and bringing the music into the mainstream. In 1983, though, all they had was a single: “It’s Like That,” with “Sucker MC’s” on the B side.

At the time, rap was still nascent. It was so below our radar that I barely even mentioned to my friends at school that we’d be performing with Run-DMC at our next show. We certainly weren’t convinced that people would pay five dollars to see rappers, even if they did have a hit single. We still thought it was kind of uncool, perhaps even clownish. No one had a clue that Run-DMC would amount to anything.

Russell had contacted the Bionic DJs because he wanted his group to tour South Florida—and we were known as the hottest DJs in the South Florida scene. Run-DMC didn’t have their own traveling equipment yet, so they wanted to borrow ours for that portion of the tour. We worked out a deal where they could perform with us, using our equipment in a trial run at Washington Park Gym, where I’d attended my first dance in middle school. It wasn’t our best venue. We’d had problems with turnout there at times, but it was big and available at the right price and time.

Dr. Love raised our objections to the price but ultimately agreed to Russell’s terms. We confirmed the date. And soon we learned from the rappers that the heavy bass beat came from an 808 drum machine. We wanted to see it—but they hadn’t even brought it with them. As they performed, we discovered that they’d decided to use the sound from their own record, not the 808, when they played live with us. That left my brothers-in-law decidedly unimpressed. At nine thirty or ten the night of the show, we all went out back to smoke weed before we got started. Someone lit up a fat one and it was passed around as we talked about music and equipment and which of the girls who passed by were the hottest.

As we’d predicted based on the price, however, only about a hundred people actually turned up to see them. The show itself was interesting: I watched as Run’s performance captivated Amanda, a girl I’d once dated. I thought, Hmm, maybe there is something to this rap thing, maybe this guy has some talent, maybe this stuff could impress girls. It was hard to believe, but there I was watching her watching them in their black hats and jeans. Run seemed to have her starstruck. Still, the turnout soured the deal for my brothers-in-law, who nixed any future collaborations because they hadn’t made much money.

A few years later, in 1986, when I was in the air force in England, I paid to see Run-DMC when they toured Great Britain for the release of their album
Raising Hell
. It started getting major airplay all over the world. And when I returned home the following year while on leave, I found that rap had blown up. Every party, every night, you’d hear LL Cool J’s second album and Run-DMC, everywhere.

I saw Run-DMC in interviews telling kids to say no to drugs and staying in school. I had to laugh, remembering those brothers smoking weed with my friends behind Washington Park Gym. But it would still take some time before I could consistently distinguish between truth and bullshit about drugs.

CHAPTER 7

Choices and Chances

Chance favors only the prepared mind.

—
LOUIS PASTEUR

I
caught this fucker stealing,” the overweight white guy told his boss as I vehemently denied doing any such thing. I was at a garage/auto supply store. I had already taken four car batteries and loaded them into Derrick Abel’s car when I was seen trying to take one last battery toward the door. Realizing that I’d been spotted, I turned around and told the disheveled-looking mechanic that I had a question about this particular battery, hoping he’d think I intended to buy it. The young man responded that he needed to get his manager to answer my question. Then he’d led me to his supervisor, springing the trap on me. He tried to grab me and I knew I had to get out of there, fast. I dropped the battery and bounced.

As I sprinted away, Derrick had already rolled out ahead of me. He knew that the out-of-shape store employee had no chance of catching me so he didn’t want to risk slowing down to pick me up. Seeing no better exit, I scaled the fence that surrounded the parking lot. I was on Hallandale Beach Boulevard just outside of Carver Ranches, an area that was a mix of small businesses and homes. The employee—whose belly was hanging over his belt—took off after me.

But I was an athlete, in peak condition. I raced through the next yard. I knew that getting caught could ruin my life. It would almost certainly get me kicked off the basketball team, even if I wasn’t convicted or locked up. The guy continued to follow, trying to catch up. He ran as hard as he could, but he was puffing with effort from unexpected exertion.

The next yard I jumped into, I realized belatedly, had several vicious dogs in it. Their loud barking made my heart only pound faster. I could see their eager eyes and menacing mouths. Trying to keep myself calm, I looked for the best way out. Racing across the grass and barely dodging clotheslines and palm trees, I managed to climb the next fence. The dogs were closer to me than the man was, but neither of them was going to be able to catch up as I shimmied up the fence.

My hands were getting scraped but I felt nothing. The hounds continued loudly snarling as I made my way toward Twenty-Fifth Street. The guy from the shop was now nowhere to be seen. I had lost him at the first fence. But I was sure that a call to the police had been made by then. I wasn’t sure if they were for me, but I could hear sirens in the distance. They seemed to be getting louder so I kept running. Inside, I was laughing at the fat man, but I knew that if I did get arrested, the consequences could be serious.

Soon, however, I caught a break. My friend Reggie Moore, whom we called Tudy, happened to be driving by and saw me racing down the sidewalk. I flagged him down. I was dripping with sweat. He stopped just long enough to let me in to his ’72 white Buick Skylark and rapidly drove off. As we got farther away, I began to relax and my heartbeat slowed to a more normal pace. I laughed as I realized how lucky I’d been and eased down in the front seat. I shuddered at the chain of coincidences that had made my escape possible. I don’t know if I’d ever been happier in my life to see someone.

During my last two years of high school, I’d become increasingly involved in ever more serious crime. None of it was violent; all of it was calculated to minimize risk while getting extra money beyond what we could earn at our minimum-wage jobs. My friends and I regularly stole batteries and rims from cars and sold them to garages and gas stations. And earlier, during my freshman year, I’d started hanging with some kids who burglarized houses.

By then, my family had moved to the projects, which were in Dania. Since most of my friends were still back in Carver Ranches, however, that’s where I spent most of my time. Sometimes I’d stay with my girlfriend Marcia, Big Mama, or Grandmama; alternatively, I’d try to get a ride home or just hang out all night on the corner.

My cousin Larry; a guy known as Pink, who was light-skinned enough to be mistaken for white; and one called Dirty Red, who had freckles and red hair but was a bit darker: these were the brothers I hung out with at that time. We’d hang at the intersection of Twenty-Sixth Street and Forty-Sixth Avenue; the neighbor folks called it Junkie Corner. But it wasn’t what you might think: no one shot heroin, nodded out on their feet, or sold smack there. It was just the spot where young men drank Private Stock and smoked reefer. It was also where we bragged about our sexual conquests and made half-assed plans to steal TVs or other property from unsuspecting white folks.

“Yo, I know some people who are out of town; let’s go to their crib and get some shit,” someone would say.