S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (18 page)

But the young biker was worth the gamble, Jim believed. “I saw the potential in him,” he recalled. If Diamond Jimmy succeeded as the resident manager, he could be an example for other neighborhood addicts. He might help others get clean and sober.

Diamond Jimmy did well—for a while. He kept the church clean and helped with the ongoing renovations. Jim kept a close eye on him. But after about four months, he noticed that the biker was starting to slack off on his duties around the church.

Jim heard that Diamond Jimmy’s girlfriend had been seen at the church late at night or early in the morning. Jim had told Diamond Jimmy that sleepovers were prohibited. The pastor also noticed a change in Diamond Jimmy’s eyes—a slight glaze, the kind he’d seen in countless active addicts.

Jim told Diamond Jimmy that he had to let him go. Diamond Jimmy didn’t get upset or try to cajole Jim into letting him keep his job. He seemed to accept that he had messed up, Jim thought.

“He tried,” Jim said. “[Crack] was just too overpowering for him.”

A couple of months after Jim had dismissed Diamond Jimmy, someone told him about another guy who might make a good resident manager, a man named Robert.

Robert was preparing to leave Lazarus House, a transitional housing center for alcoholics and addicts in recovery. Jim met with Robert at the church and asked if he’d like to be New Community’s resident manager. No, thank you, Robert said politely. He knew he couldn’t live and work in a crack zone. “He wasn’t that strong, that dedicated to his recovery program,” Jim said.

Instead Robert recommended a fellow addict he’d met at Lazarus House: Billy Hart.

Like Diamond Jimmy, Billy had been brought down by crack. In the mid-eighties, D.C. police caught Billy with a wallet that had been taken in a burglary. Years later, Billy said that he hadn’t committed the break-in—but that he knew who had. Abiding by the code of the streets, he kept his mouth shut and took the charge. He pleaded guilty to burglary and receiving stolen property and did two years at the Lorton Correctional Complex.

Billy had already done some time for offenses related to his addictions to powder cocaine and bam and just about any kind of illegal pills he could get his hands on. While he was locked up in Lorton, he heard other inmates talking about an amazing drug that was new to D.C.: crack.

After he was released, Billy lit up a rock and was hooked. With one hit, he went from run-of-the-mill addict to desperate crack fiend. His run didn’t last long, though—just a few weeks. It ended one night when Billy copped a dime from four teenage slingers a few blocks north of S Street.

Billy handed over his money. One of the dealers gave him the crack. Billy looked at the puny amount inside the little plastic baggie. It wasn’t even a dime, half of the standard $20 rock.

“Sir, this is not what I paid for,” Billy told the slinger. He asked for a bigger piece.

“Nigga, what you paid for is in your hand,” one of the dealers said dismissively.

In that moment, something inside Billy broke. He refused to leave until the slingers gave him a bigger rock or his money back.

“Today, you’ll have to kill me,” Billy told the dealers.

Billy didn’t know if any of the slingers were strapped. He didn’t care. He was going to get his ten bucks back or take a bullet, and he didn’t care how it played out. “I was ready to die,” Billy recalled.

The lead slinger considered Billy for a moment, then said, “Give that nigga his money back.” One of the dealers gave Billy his $10.

“Don’t ever come back here again,” the alpha dealer said.

That was Billy’s lowest point. “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired,” he said, reciting a phrase often used in recovery programs. It means that a junkie or alcoholic has had enough of the self-destructive cycle of addiction and feels defeated enough to try a new path.

In that moment, when the drug dealers let him go with his life, “I believe God stepped in,” Billy said.

Billy had no money and no insurance. But he wanted to get clean. He checked himself into a twenty-eight-day treatment program at D.C. General Hospital, the city’s public medical facility, and started attending support-group meetings. When his four weeks were up, Billy went into a transitional group home, then to Lazarus House, where he met Robert.

Jim could tell that Billy was serious about staying sober. He sensed that Billy and his sobriety could withstand living and working in a crack zone. He gave Billy the job.

Billy was great at maintaining the church, and though he often attended other churches on Sunday, he quickly became an integral part of the New Community family, developing close friendships with Jim and many members of the congregation.

Shortly after he was hired, Billy did something on his own that made Jim’s spirit soar: He launched a weekly support-group meeting at the church, open to anyone from anywhere. He called it the No Exclusions, Everyone’s Welcome group. As of 2014, twenty-five years after he launched it, the meeting was still going, every Tuesday night.

“Billy was the answer to my prayers,” Jim said. The fact that Billy made it and Diamond Jimmy didn’t demonstrates that for an addict to sustain his or her recovery, “two things have to be working,” Jim added. “The individual has to come to a decision to take personal responsibility in his own life, to surrender his life to God. There also has to be a good support system in place.”

Providing a support system was part of the church’s mission. The rest was up to the addict.

“I didn’t have a strategy to change one person at a time,” Jim said. “My goal was to be faithful to God’s call to come here, establish a church, be with the people, offer an alternative, and see what happens.”

If that alternative wasn’t embraced by everyone on S Street, it didn’t mean that New Community had failed. “We didn’t have the idealistic idea that we’d change the neighborhood or that we were the answer to everyone’s problems,” Jim explained. “We were joining with the people who were here, who were besieged by drugs, violence, crime, disinvestment by banks and businesses, and, to a degree, neglect by the city.”

Jim never felt discouraged that most dealers and addicts he reached out to never reached back, never turned their lives around.

“My expectation was always that a few would get it, but most wouldn’t,” he said. “I don’t care about numbers. We’re not in control. We believe in a power greater than ourselves. You never know who’s going to make it.”

It was past 9:00
p.m.
when I checked into the rehab unit on the third floor of Suburban Hospital. Most of the staff was gone for the day, and the patients were in their rooms. A nurse told me I’d have to spend the night in the detox unit, even if I was sober at the moment. “Procedure,” she said.

I shared the detox room with a middle-aged man who was fresh off a hellacious bender. He muttered something about being a college professor. He said his name was Tom.

It had started with a park picnic with a pretty woman, Tom told me. It was a beautiful fall day. She brought a bottle of wine. After being sober for eleven years, Tom said, he figured one glass of wine wouldn’t hurt. The drink sparked a two-month binge. Tom said he’d been slamming down booze nonstop for a week before he checked into the hospital.

Tom tossed and turned and moaned. I closed my eyes and eventually drifted off to sleep to the sounds of his agony.

My misery was compounded the next morning. As I sat inside a small office, filling out insurance forms, a nurse said I had to contact a family member, whoever would be considered next of kin, to let him or her know where I was.

“Is there any way around this?” I asked.

“No exceptions.”

My head dropped. I brought my hand to my forehead and started rubbing the spot between my eyes where Big Man had pointed his gun.

Calling Mom was out of the question. She’d broken down crying when I told her I was moving to Washington to work for the
Post
, and they weren’t tears of joy. She hated to see any of her kids leave home, let alone move across the country. I wasn’t up for telling her I was in a drug-and-alcohol rehab unit.

The idea of calling Pop was equally unappealing. In almost every way, he was a great role model. He was short but strong, barrel-chested and robust. He’d enlisted in the Army as a teenager, become a paratrooper, and served in Germany during the occupation. He no doubt saw some awful things, which he never talked about, at least not to his kids. While I was growing up, he was a supervisor at the Southern California Gas Company, maintaining and repairing gas lines. He must have been ill from time to time, but until he suffered a heart attack in his fifties, I don’t remember him calling in sick to work—not even once. I believe my father would have done great in college, but he never got the chance to go. He started working as soon as he was out of the Army.

When I was in seventh grade, my science teacher challenged the class to explain an experiment involving how air and water behaved in a beaker. She might as well have asked me to recite
Hamlet
in Farsi. That night, as usual, Pop was in his chair, reading the paper. I described the experiment and asked if he had any idea what it might be about.

“Partial vacuum,” he said, without looking up from the paper. The next day, after class, I approached the teacher, Mrs. Powell. “That beaker experiment—is it a partial vacuum?”

Mrs. Powell broke into a big smile. “You got it. Only a couple of other people in the class got it. Great job.”

But my father and I never had a conversation that involved any emotional depth. When I was a teenager, I asked out a girl I’d met on my first job, going door-to-door to sign people up for a drawing to win an air-conditioning system. She agreed to a date. The next day, an angry guy called and said he’d kill me if I got near his girlfriend. I ran the issue past Pop, who was watering plants in the backyard. He just looked at me and didn’t respond.

It could have been that my problems seemed insignificant compared with what he’d experienced at my age. Pop grew up in the 1930s and ’40s in the dusty Arizona border town of Douglas. He and his brothers moved to California as young men, and Pop talked about his life before that only when he was around his brothers and Mauro, a boyhood friend who married one of Pop’s sisters. During holiday gatherings, Pop would loosen up, becoming outgoing, charming, and funny. I’d sit quietly nearby, listening to stories about how the white kids would pick fights with Pop and his brothers and friends. Or about Pop’s own father, who, according to family lore, not only rode with Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa but was one of Villa’s officers—and once mercifully and defiantly spared the rich townsfolk he’d been ordered to kill.

I was afraid to tell Pop that I’d been put away. I feared he’d respond with either unyielding anger or overwhelming disappointment.

I came up with an approach the nurse accepted: I’d call my aunt Linda, Pop’s youngest sister. She could talk to him like no one else in the family. She was usually sunny and agreeable, but I’d seen her push back at Pop during family discussions. If I or Mom or any of my siblings had tried that, there would have been hell to pay. But Pop never said a cross word to Aunt Linda.

I made the call. I told my aunt where I was. I said I’d been drinking too much and left it at that. She agreed to call my parents. An hour later, I was summoned to the front desk. Pop was on the line.

As I took the phone, I braced for the worst.

“Hi, Chach,” he said. My childhood nickname. I think it was short for
muchacho
; no one ever explained it to me, and I never asked. Pop’s voice was relaxed. I could sense him smiling on the other end of the line, three thousand miles away.

“Hi. I guess Tía Linda called.”

“She did. She told me you’re in the hospital. This is good,” he said. “You’re in the right place. I’ve known a lot of guys at work over the years who have dealt with this. If they can do it, you can do it.”

It was the first time Pop had ever told me he believed in me. That handful of words, delivered in that optimistic fashion, was precisely what I needed to hear. Maybe I could
somehow parachute off this rocket ship to self-destruction.

A complicated mixture of emotions welled up in me: relief, gratitude, hope—and pride. I had a father who, even though he didn’t say much, knew exactly how to buck me up when I needed him the most. If Pop believed in me, I had a chance.

Pop and I talked for a couple more minutes. I promised to call home every week. I hung up the phone and turned to the nurse.

“Let’s get on with it,” I said.

The rehab unit reminded me of a freshman dorm. Everyone was assigned a roommate. Each room contained two beds, two nightstands, a dresser, and a bathroom.

My fellow patients ranged from teenagers to senior citizens. A woman in her early sixties had skin that was as yellow as a ripe banana, from jaundice. Her doctor had told her that one more drink would kill her. A truck driver in his thirties was on his thirteenth go-round in rehab.

I threw myself into the routine and listened. I tried to
get
it.

In lectures, counselors and doctors described alcoholism and addiction as a disease. It can’t be cured, they said, but it can be managed. The disease never rested, they said. Even when we weren’t using drugs or drinking, our addiction or alcoholism was doing push-ups, building strength, biding its time. It was a monster that could be driven into hiding—but never killed.