S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (19 page)

Phil visited me on Christmas Day. He brought me a present—a thick Los Angeles Raiders sweatshirt. He tried to encourage me.

“Think of this as something you have to go through to succeed,” he said.

A few days later, one of the counselors, an easygoing man with dark, curly hair, summoned everyone into a meeting room. Most alcoholics and addicts never seek help, never try to get sober or clean, he said matter-of-factly. Of those who do, maybe 15 percent stay clean and sober for a year or more.

“Look around the room,” the counselor said. “Chances are, only one of you will make it.” That got my attention. I couldn’t think of any reason he’d lowball the success rate of rehab. The title of an Elvis Costello song popped into my head: “Clowntime Is Over.” I looked around the room at my fellow patients.

If only one of us is going to make it
, I decided,
it’s going to be me
.

I was sprung on Friday, January 10, 1992. Some of my fellow patients became reluctant to leave as their release dates approached. I understood: The unit was a safe, controlled environment. The outside world was dangerous—booze and drugs were there for the taking. I didn’t know if I’d be able to stay away from crack. It was time to find out.

On a cold, sunny morning,
Post
colleague Courtland Milloy, at my request, picked me up from the hospital and drove me straight to a support-group meeting. Courtland had been through Suburban, was doing well, and had visited me about a week after Phil did. At the meeting, I raised my hand and reported to the group that I was fresh out of rehab. I was all in.

The first ninety days were crucial, all of the counselors had said. They’d hammered the message into us: Any addict or alcoholic who was serious about recovery should go to at least ninety support-group meetings in as many days. Addiction is cunning, baffling, and powerful, they’d said.

I attacked my recovery with the energy I’d expended chasing crack highs. Every facet of my routine was structured around recovery. I hit at least one meeting a day—two or three on my days off, Fridays and Saturdays. I resumed working my night shift, listening to the scanner and racing to crime scenes. A couple of friends, fellow reporters, asked me how I was doing. They had asked an editor about my sudden disappearance, and I’d given the editor the green light to let them know I was in rehab. My transition back into the real world was going better than I’d hoped.

I was floating on what support-group old-timers call the “pink cloud,” a feeling of well-being some people experience early in recovery. When I was drinking and using crack, I’d been running on a cycle of highs and crashes. Now, as the toxins left my body, I felt a pleasant, almost constant low-level buzz. Addiction was my punk.

Then, on my seventy-seventh day clean, I ran into Carrie as I walked home from work. It was just after midnight on a bitter early-March night. I could have easily waved to her and gone on my way. Instead, I waved and strolled straight up to her.

“Hey, stranger,” Carrie said. She was wearing a heavy parka and slacks. “Haven’t seen you in a minute.”

“Yeah, I was away for a while.”

“I’ve got a twenty,” Carrie said.

The magic words. Just like that, an internal switch was flipped.
A hit or two couldn’t hurt. I’d been good, I’d earned it.
It was a form of temporary insanity that’s difficult to explain to a nonaddict. Intellectually, I knew that using crack again could have dire consequences. Maybe some part of me needed to test myself. But the fact was, and always will be, that, as a junkie, using drugs comes naturally to me; abstaining is out of the ordinary. Later, I would learn that it was not rare for people who had been sober ten, twenty, even thirty years to relapse, often with horrific consequences.

“Let’s go,” I said.

At my apartment, Carrie divided the rock in two with her fingernail, loaded her pipe with one half, lit up, and took a long hit. She leaned over and shotgunned me. I exhaled and quickly loaded my chunk into the pipe. It dissolved instantly. I inhaled.

I knew I was in trouble before I exhaled. My addiction was no longer a punk.
Cunning
and
baffling
had done their bit, and
powerful
was now stepping in. My addiction wanted
more
.

Carrie saw it in my eyes. “Are you okay?”

I looked at her, not caring that she was sexy and skilled and willing. My words came out in a low, tortured whisper: “We need to get more.”

Carrie nodded. A few minutes later, I turned onto S Street and pulled up in front of John’s Place. A lone slinger stood in front of the bakery. He jogged over.

I rolled down my window. “You got anything?” The dealer shook his head. “Out of product at the moment.”

“This can’t be right,” I said as I pulled away from the curb. I made a series of right turns and returned to the spot in front of the nightclub where I’d made hundreds of buys.

S Street was dry.

“I know another spot,” I said. I pulled away and headed east on Rhode Island Avenue, toward the corner of 1st and T Streets Northwest, my secondary copping zone. There were no dealers in sight.

It was a minor miracle—two of the busiest open-air rock markets in the city were shut down on the very night I relapsed.

I drove Carrie back to Thomas Circle, dropped her off, and went home. A monstrous sense of remorse kicked in. My seventy-seven days of sobriety were gone.

How could I have been so dumb? When I started over—
if
I started over—I’d be a newbie again.

I wanted to be clean. I wanted to smoke half the crack in the city. I stared at the ceiling for two hours, until finally I drifted off to a fitful sleep.

I woke up as dawn was breaking. I’d gone to sleep hoping I’d be fine when I awakened, but instead, my addiction goaded me.
More. Now.

More would be available. The morning was cool, but brilliantly sunny. By now S Street or 1st and T or one of the dozens of other rock zones within a short driving distance would be open for business. All I had to do was get in the car.

No.

Yes.

Maybe.

More, more, more.
Every cell in my body screamed for more crack. I peeked out my bay window. It was almost 8:00
a.m.
The neighborhood was stirring to life.

I paced back and forth from my living room to my kitchen, considering my options: I could call a fellow alcoholic in the program, turn myself in, and start over. I could call Champagne—I still knew her pager number by heart—and go to town.

I could try to live. I could self-destruct.

I was paralyzed. I didn’t have the courage to pick up the phone and call a fellow addict, to admit what I’d done and start over. I was terrified of where I’d end up if I took another hit. Back and forth I paced.

I slipped on my leather jacket and stepped outside. In a daze, I wandered west toward downtown. I didn’t have a plan, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before I ran into a strawberry or a slinger. I was moving toward my next hit.

I’d gone only a couple of blocks when I ran into Roxanne. She was wedded to heroin, but she stepped out with crack now and then. I’d picked her up a couple of times when I couldn’t find Champagne or Carrie.

She had greasy, light-brown hair, bad skin, and a missing front tooth. Roxanne could have been in her late twenties or her early forties—her prodigious heroin consumption made it hard to tell. She always wore long sleeves, even on blazing-hot days. But in the summer, she wore open-toed sandals, and I’d seen the track marks between her toes.

Roxanne was sitting on the curb.

“Hey there,” she said as I approached. She got a better look at my face and added, “What’s wrong?”

I sat down next to her, confused, ashamed, afraid. For a long moment I stared at my feet, fighting back tears.

“It’s all right,” Roxanne said. “You can tell me.”

I turned and looked into her brown eyes.

“I screwed up,” I blurted out. “I went to rehab right before Christmas and I stayed for three weeks and I got clean and was released and I was doing great and I had seventy-seven days and last night I screwed up and I used again and now I just want to keep going.”

My addiction crouched, waiting. Roxanne probably knew every slinger in the neighborhood.

If Roxanne had offered to hook me up, I would have handed her cash on the spot. I would have walked into the darkest crack house in the toughest combat zone in the city.

Roxanne put her hand on my shoulder.

“It’s okay, sweetie. Take it easy,” she said softly. “There’s no need to kill yourself. You just need to start over. I know—I’ve been there. I was clean once.”

I was sobbing freely now. I looked into Roxanne’s face and knew she was telling the truth.

“Are you sure?”

“Just own up to what you did and you’ll be okay. Go to a meeting, tell what happened, and take it from there. You don’t want to go back to using.”

I wiped away my tears, leaned over, and kissed Roxanne on the cheek.

“Thank you.”

“You can do it,” Roxanne said.

I wobbled back to my apartment. For nearly three hours, I paced. Then I drove to a club in Dupont Circle that hosted noontime meetings. I raised my hand and turned myself in.

“I relapsed last night,” I said. “I’d been clean for seventy-seven days and I took another hit of crack.”

The twenty people in the room listened, dead silent. A few looked straight down at the floor. I could sense what they were thinking:
Better him than me
.

I didn’t care. The second I finished talking, my urge to use evaporated like so much crack smoke.

I wasn’t cured—I knew the monster could reappear at any moment, commanding me to drink or smoke crack. But in that crucial instant, I also knew that I wasn’t going to use that day.

I wanted to live.

A few days later, on a Saturday afternoon in early April, someone knocked on my door. I looked through the peephole and saw Carrie. She was in tight jeans and a formfitting cotton polo shirt.

I didn’t think about it. I opened the door and let her in. She smiled.

“Hi, stranger. I’ve been wondering where you’ve been. Haven’t seen you around the way. I was worried that something happened to you.”

I’d been avoiding Carrie’s usual spots. Something
had
happened: The relapse had scared the hell out of me.

“I’ve been around,” I shrugged.

“I’ve got a couple of rocks, if you want to party,” she said.

Should have seen that coming.
My pulse quickened. I was thrilled. I was terrified. I should have asked her to leave.

Instead I said, “Can I see?”

Carrie reached into her inside coat pocket and pulled out two twenty rocks, each wrapped in a small plastic baggie. I stared at the rocks in her palm. She’d scored good weight.

“You have a stem and a lighter?”

She nodded, patted her coat pocket.

Carrie slipped off her coat. She started unbuttoning her blouse.

I thought about the consequences. Even though my addiction had been dormant since that terrifying night of my relapse, it would now be ferocious, twenty feet tall with ripped muscles.

It would win.

I would die.

Carrie was working on the second button of her blouse. I reached out and touched her hands.

“No, Carrie. I can’t do this. Believe me, I’d love to. But I can’t. I’ve been clean, and I’m trying to stay that way. I’ve relapsed once. It was pretty bad, and I can’t do that again.”

“
You go to meetings? You’re in the program?”

“Yeah.”

Carrie nodded. She buttoned up and put her coat back on.

A crazy thought popped into my head. I went with it: “Listen, if you want to go to a meeting, I’ll take you. If I can get clean, you can, too.”

A wistful smile crossed her face.

“I was clean for a while. I was in the program. I had a few twenty-four hours built up. Then .
.
.” her voice trailed off. “Maybe someday.”

Carrie walked out the door.

I slumped onto the sofa and waited for my heart to stop pounding.

Chapter 8

Drive-by Promotion

On the morning of January 20, 1993, Lou stood at his post at the corner of 3rd Street and Constitution Avenue Northwest, three blocks from the Capitol. Like almost every other Metropolitan Police Department officer, he was on the street to provide security for Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. As the captain in charge of detectives for 1D, Lou typically wore suits. But inauguration duty was all about visibility, so he’d broken out his white shirt, blue jacket, and MPD hat for the first time in a couple of years.

It was a beautiful morning, Lou thought—sunny and brisk, but not too cold for January. He had a perfect view of the west side of the Capitol, where presidents are sworn in. The crowds behind the barriers set up along the street were growing by the minute.