S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (3 page)

I parked about a block away and wobbled over. The woman smiled at me. I took it as an invitation and asked if she partied. Sure, she said. I asked if we could party, if she’d do me, for forty bucks, as I recall.

She took a step back and made a hand signal. An unmarked LAPD sedan roared in from a nearby alley. The woman was a plainclothes LAPD cop, working vice. A couple of her colleagues swooped in, briefly put me in flex-cuffs, and sent me on my miserable way with a citation for solicitation.

Things couldn’t get worse. Or so I thought.

On my way home, I stopped at a pay phone on Main Street to call my roommate. It was a system we’d developed: Whoever was out later would check in with the other, in case he had female companionship and wanted some privacy.

As I was putting a coin into the phone, a pair of muscular arms encircled my torso. The attacker lifted me off the ground, pinned my arms to my sides, and led me behind a small shack in a dark parking lot.

“Be cool,” the man said. “I’ve got a gun.”

I quickly sobered up.

My attacker was wearing gray sweats. He was about six-two, 235 pounds, I would later learn. As he took me behind the shack, out of sight of anyone on the street, I squirmed out of his grasp and looked at his waistband. No gun.

He reached around my waist and grabbed my wallet from my back pocket. I reared back and slugged him as hard as I could in the groin. He moaned and took a couple of steps back. I kicked him in the groin, ran to the street, and flagged down a passing squad car.

The cops found the would-be mugger staggering down the street a block or two away. I found my wallet in the parking lot. I’d lucked out. My attacker appeared to be drunk. If he’d been sober, he could have pummeled me, or worse.

A couple of months later, when my alleged attacker went to trial, I volunteered to the prosecutor how my awful night had started. He told the defense attorney, who asked me about it when I testified. I told the truth. The defendant walked.

A few weeks later, as I recall, I dealt with my citation. I admitted guilt, paid a modest fine, and filed the paperwork to have the incident expunged from my record. The episode should have been enough to scare me off crack and booze, or at least to prompt me to take a hard look at the direction my life was taking.

It wasn’t.

I thought of Raven and crack as distractions—from personal woes as well as from ongoing career troubles. A few months after I met Raven, in the spring of 1989, I was dating Rosa, a smart, sarcastic, pretty teacher I’d met during a reporting assignment at her South Central middle school. One sticky summer night, she said she’d come over to my apartment in Figueroa Terrace, a hillside neighborhood a few miles north of downtown. I’d injured my left ankle playing basketball a few days earlier and could barely walk.

An hour before she arrived, I broke out my pipe and smoked a piece of a rock. I intended to stop there, but I ended up killing the entire thing. By the time Rosa got to my place, I was completely wired. She brought a bottle of wine, which we quickly downed. Now I was high and drunk, my inhibitions and judgment washed away. We stripped off our clothes and headed to the bedroom.

“Protection,” she said. “You know I won’t do it without a condom.”

I knew. I
knew
.
But in the moment, I simply didn’t care. “Let me just start. I promise I’ll cover up.”

“You’d better.”

I didn’t.

Rosa’s face morphed into a mask of horror the moment I came. She pushed me off her, jumped out of bed, and frantically dressed.

“Sorry,” I whimpered. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

Rosa paused and looked at me, revulsion on her face. She didn’t say a word. She finished dressing and went into the living room to put on her shoes. I limped in.

“Can we talk about this?”

She wouldn’t look at me as she stormed out. I threw on a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and some sneakers and hobbled after her.

Rosa saw me and marched around the corner toward her car. I followed. She stopped and stared at a concrete wall surrounding a nearby apartment complex.

“Can we talk about this, please?” I said.

Rosa stared at the wall. I pleaded for her to say something. Finally, while still staring at the wall, she said, “I had an abortion a few years ago. It was the most awful experience of my life. I vowed to never put myself in that situation again. I told you to put on a condom, and you disrespected me.” Tears were welling in her eyes.

Shame engulfed me. Rosa was in emotional agony—and at risk of even more physical pain—because of me. I’d always considered myself a decent guy, and now I’d brought a world of anguish to a woman I cared about.

Over and over, I apologized and begged for forgiveness. Rosa stared at the wall and didn’t say another word. After five minutes of this, I limped back to my apartment. For a week, I called and left messages. I taped a note on the door to Rosa’s apartment asking for another chance.

I never heard from her again.

A few hours after I left my plaintive note on Rosa’s door, I got roaring drunk and drove by Raven’s street. I couldn’t find her. I drove home frustrated and lonely.

My career wasn’t going any better. After more than six years at the
Herald Examiner
,
I wanted to move on but had nowhere to go. The
Los Angeles Times
gave me a couple of interviews, but that was it. My dream choice, the
Washington Post
,
responded to my résumé and clips with a polite kiss-off letter.

I slogged through the rest of the summer. Gordon Dillow, a
Herald Examiner
columnist and drinking buddy, kept a fifth of Jim Beam in his desk drawer. It was an old-school journalist’s move, and Gordon was old-school to the core. He generously shared his booze with me. I began spiking cups of soda with Gordon’s whiskey. I’d sit at my desk or at a computer, getting blasted in the middle of the workday. My life had no direction.

In early August 1989, a
Post
job fell from the sky. A recruiter called: There was an opening for a night police reporter, she said. With the city’s homicide rate spiraling upward, thanks to neighborhood crack wars, the paper needed to hire someone ASAP. Was I interested?

A good deed had led to the call. A few months earlier, in the spring, I’d gone for a reporting assignment to a small Catholic church in Boyle Heights, a hardscrabble section of East L.A., where volunteers were helping immigrants cobble together documents to qualify for amnesty under newly reformed immigration law. Inside a tiny community center, I saw another reporter, a middle-aged white man in a suit, struggling to interview a Latina woman. I volunteered to translate.

The journalist, Jay Mathews, was the West Coast bureau chief for the
Post
.
Before I could ask, he offered to write a letter of recommendation for me. I’m certain I never would have gotten even an interview without Jay’s thumbs-up. Years later, I learned that Phil Dixon, a
Post
assistant city editor who’d held a similar job at the
Los Angeles Times
in the 1980s and liked my work, had also championed my cause. In anticipation of a drug test, I abstained from crack for a long, miserable week. I flew to D.C. on a Monday, went through a gauntlet of interviews on Tuesday, flew back to L.A. on Wednesday, and was offered the job on Thursday. It turned out the paper didn’t screen for drug use. I accepted without bothering to negotiate. I didn’t feel the need—the first offer represented a 33 percent pay bump.

Word spread quickly through the
Herald Examiner
newsroom. That afternoon, I wandered over to the sports section and lingered to watch a tennis match on TV. A sports editor I barely knew turned to me and said, simply, “So you’re going to the Show”—the sportswriters’ term for the major leagues.

I was moving up from the minors.

A few days before I hit the road to D.C., I visited Raven for one final crack-enhanced tryst. I wasn’t worried that my crack use was getting out of my control, but I didn’t want to run the risk of getting popped in D.C. for drug possession. And I wasn’t about to do anything to jeopardize my roster spot in the Show.

Raven let me into her room and took my cash. She was usually holding at least one rock, but on this afternoon she had to go out to make the buy. The room smelled of cigarettes. A dozen or so butts lay in an ashtray on top of the battered dresser. I sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the remote from the nightstand, and channelsurfed. There was no porn, just the big three networks.

President George H. W. Bush appeared on each channel, sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office. I was about to click Poppy off when he picked up a clear plastic bag. My eyes zeroed in on the big white chunk inside. Could it be?

“This is crack cocaine,” the president said grimly. He poked at the monster rock. Federal agents had busted a dealer and seized his stash in Lafayette Park, right in front of the White House.

“It’s as innocent-looking as candy, but it’s turning our cities into battle zones, and it’s murdering our children,” Bush said. “Let there be no mistake, this stuff is poison.”

The president asked who was responsible for the drug problem, and then provided the answer: “Everyone who uses drugs, everyone who sells drugs, and everyone who looks the other way.”

I wasn’t looking away. I was staring hard at the plastic bag of crack, wondering how many $20 rocks were in there.

Raven returned. She tossed two rocks on the bed.

I turned off the TV and reached for my pipe. Raven had her own glass stem, but I’d brought mine for a reason. She stripped off her shirt and bra. I undid my belt. We finished the two rocks before I could get off. Raven said she could make another buy.

“Why don’t we try it with the res?” I suggested.

By now, Raven had shown me how to scrape out the gray-black residue that built up inside the pipe after repeated use. The residue was considerably stronger than any rock.

We waited about ten minutes for the res to harden. From her purse Raven retrieved a straight piece of wire, about six inches long, and a small mirror, which she placed on the bed. She removed the charred filter from the pipe and placed it near the mirror.

With the focus of a brain surgeon, Raven held the glass stem over the mirror and scraped its walls with the wire. Fine dark-gray powder spilled onto the mirror.

“Half for you, half for me. Me first,” I said. Raven nodded.

With one of my
Herald Examiner
business cards, I pushed the powder into a neat little pile about the size of half a rock. Raven put the filter back into one end of the pipe. With my thumb and forefinger, I carefully loaded the res onto the filter. I brought the pipe to my lips, flicked on the lighter, brought the flame to the pipe, and inhaled.

I held the res smoke as long as I could, exhaled, and gestured to Raven. She went down on me as I lit up again.

I climaxed the moment I exhaled the last of my res. I lay woozily on the bed as Raven loaded her share of the res into her own pipe and lit up. She took a long pull, leaned down, and shotgunned me. A few minutes later, I dressed and handed my pipe to Raven.

“I won’t be needing this anymore,” I said.

On my final day as an Angeleno, Gordon and another
Herald Examiner
crony treated me to a final lunch at Corky’s, where I downed three gin and tonics with my turkey sandwich before lurching out to my Escort for the long drive east.

Leaving Los Angeles felt like a getaway. For me, L.A. was the city of doomed romance, excessive drinking, and risky crack use. D.C. beckoned like a new lover. I was going to the Show, where I’d be working in the same newsroom as Bob fucking Woodward, racing to crime scenes in the most murderous city in the country.

On top of that, the previous month, a nationwide ABC News–
Washington Post
poll had shown that 44 percent of Americans considered illegal drugs the nation’s most serious problem.

The president had just declared a war on drugs—and I was going to be a war correspondent.

Chapter 2

Combat Zone

Marion Barry strutted across the makeshift plywood stage, chin up and shoulders back, a bemused look on his face. Boos and catcalls greeted him. He turned to the crowd, gathered for a street festival in Adams Morgan, a trendy part of town full of nightclubs and ethnic restaurants. The mayor of Washington, D.C., lifted his arm and gave the crowd a single-fingered salute.

Video footage of the event made it to the six o’clock news a day or two later, a little more than a week after my valedictory tryst with Raven. I sat in my new apartment in Washington and watched on a fifteen-inch TV perched atop a box of books as I chomped on a Roy Rogers burger and took slugs from a bottle of beer. It was mesmerizing.

Los Angeles was also led by a black mayor, Tom Bradley. An ex-LAPD cop, he was calm, dignified, widely respected—and pathologically cautious. My pal Tony Castro, a
Herald Examiner
columnist, joked that Bradley had undergone the world’s first charisma bypass.