Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (15 page)

Around this time, across the United States, a new blood-borne disease was being uncovered. People were staggering into hospitals and collapsing. It was causing strange symptoms, as if it was a sudden, rapidly killing cancer.

Scientists quickly realized the people in most danger were gay men and injecting drug users who shared needles. They recommended handing out clean needles as a matter of urgency. The Scottish city of Glasgow—which had a massive drug injection problem—became one of the first in the world to do this. As a result, fewer than 2 percent
⁹
of their injectors became HIV positive. In New York City, they refused to do it.

So by 1992, 50 percent of the city’s injectors were HIV positive—including Deborah. When the authorities finally relented, it brought down new infections by 75 percent.
¹⁰
It was too late for this story. Indeed, the people who tried to get Deborah and all the users like her clean needles were threatened with arrest.
¹¹

As an adult, Chino would have about ten memories of Deborah. Half were violent and despairing, half were good. One time she turned up and stole Chino’s back-to-school clothes so she could sell them. They went skating once. They went to Coney Island once and got on the Cyclone and Deborah held his head the whole time. They went to see a movie—the Tina Turner biopic
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Another time she talked Chino through how they were related, and who her own biological mother was. Somewhere along the way, Deborah told him that she was HIV positive, but Chino didn’t quite understand what that meant.

One time, when he was twelve, Chino went to see Deborah in a psychiatric unit. He brought her a knish, her favorite food. Deborah obsessively asked Chino who he was having sex with. Chino explained he wasn’t having sex with anyone, but Deborah kept asking, insistent. Looking back on this, Chino would realize she was trying to give him all the guidance she could, on the tiny range of subjects on which she felt able to dispense advice, knowing time was short.

The last time Deborah came home from her stints in and out of jail, she announced she had found Jesus, and she was wearing a dress. Chino couldn’t remember ever seeing her in a dress before. She had a boyfriend, a real jerk, whom Chino hated—but he was at least reassured to see that his mother was, for the first time in Chino’s life, undrugged.

It didn’t last long. One day Chino came home and his mother was frantically searching the house, looking in strange places, for something unnamed, unseen. She believed something was hidden inside the radiator. She was due to take Chino to the movies, but she was clearly in a crack frenzy—and soon she ran out of the house screaming, vanishing down the street. Chino started to run after her, but then thought to himself: “I’m not going to fucking run after her. I’m tired of looking for her. If she goes, she goes.”

Later that night, there was a call from the hospital. Chino and Mrs. Hardin went to see her. The body in the bed, stuffed with tubes, looked incomprehensible to Chino. Deborah’s tiny body had blown up as if she had already been filled with embalming fluid. Her face and hands were distended and misshapen. The nurses said Deborah had been trying to rob a woman on the bus, and when the police arrived to arrest her, they beat her. But her liver was already destroyed and she had water on the brain. Deborah would never wake up again. She was thirty-three years old. At the funeral, Deborah’s boyfriend sneered at Chino. “So,” he said, “you’ll cry for her now?”

Not long after, Chino found his corner, and started selling his crack. And three years after that, when he was sixteen, he would smoke it for the first time. “I wanted to know,” he would say to me years later, “what she chose over me.”

Chino was first put into a jumpsuit and caged when he was thirteen. He was sent to Spofford Juvenile Detention Facility in the Bronx as punishment for his violent “street shit” against other teenagers, which he carried out because “the dealing puts me in positions where my default emotion is anger and my default position is retaliation.”

The paint was peeling on the walls. There was a stench of mold in the air. There was no fresh air anywhere—it was almost hard to breathe. Nobody asked if he was okay. Nobody tried to talk to him about why he was there. Their manner wasn’t cold or aggressive: it was utterly indifferent. The staff looked at the kids as objects on a loading line that it was their job to briefly inspect. As Chino puts it, instead of bottles or sneakers, this loading line happens to hold humans. Do you have any medical conditions? Are you sexually active? Next.

In this child prison, you could watch TV, watch TV, or watch TV. Oh—or you could play Spades. Chino remembers: “To say I felt alone would be an understatement. I felt like an animal . . . When you go to prison, the one thing you got to check at the door is not your wallet or your jewelry. It’s your humanity.”

He was being taught, in stages, that life is a series of shakedowns and shoot-outs, punctuated by boredom.

In prison, “being humane can get you fucking hurt . . . Simple shit like, [if] you’re home in the world and somebody knocks on your door and says, ‘Can I borrow some toothpaste, a cup of sugar?’ you’re like—why not? It’s fucking sugar. Who cares? Take the whole fucking thing . . . You don’t do that shit in jail . . . You can’t do that shit. That just opens up the door for a lot of bullshit . . . People thinking you’re a punk and they can just take from you. It’s called friendly extortion. It’s like . . . ‘I know you want to give me that, right? I know you want to give me a pack of cigarettes.’ That’s me threatening you without saying—Unless you give me that, I’m going to punch you in the face . . . [But] I was scared . . . as a child, because that’s what I was—of the unknown, of what the next day would bring.”

In one cell, when he was sixteen, he decided this story had to end. He couldn’t take it. He couldn’t take the slow process of morphing into his mother, of erasing himself from existence day by day.

Better to do it in one sudden fall.

He made a noose out of his shoelaces. He double-tied them so they would slip down nicely but not slip out.

He tied them to the top of the bar.

He jumped.

And there was all this fucking slack, hanging down, saving him, and he thought—I am such a fuck-up, I can’t even get this shit right. He tried again when he was out—he overdosed on sleeping pills, twice—but they pumped his stomach and put him back on the street.

Rikers Island is a vast concrete fortress in the East River, suspended in water between Queens and the Bronx. More than fourteen thousand people are warehoused in its stone cells, and it became a second home to Chino and his crew, as it has to generations of teenagers from his neighborhood. But something strange was happening—his drug charges kept disappearing. He was arrested and charged, but the paperwork seemed to vanish. “If you look at my criminal record on its face,” Chino says, “I got let out of the back door of the courthouse a lot, without even seeing a judge. I got let go from the precinct. I had charges that you cannot believe they still let me go.”

He was certainly beating the odds. If you are a part-time street dealer in the District of Columbia—a place with similar demographics and drug use to East Brooklyn—you have a 22 percent chance
¹²
of being jailed for each year you work. But Chino had been dealing for nearly a decade without being imprisoned for these offenses: he always got busted for other crimes. Some of his crew began to suspect he was a snitch, but if he had been, sooner or later the evidence would have come out at trial, and it never did. Chino was puzzled—why them and not him?

Gradually, Chino believed he had figured out what was really going on. Victor had come looking for him when he was a child. Victor had sent his colleagues to find him when he was kidnapped by Deborah. And now that he was a teenager, Victor was—Chino became convinced—still watching over him from a distance, getting his colleagues to “lose” his drug charges down the back of their filing cabinets.

Is this evidence of more police corruption—or does Chino want so much to believe that his rapist-father loves him, despite everything, that he is seeing his hand in the random glitches and failings of a bureaucratic criminal justice system?

He only ever met Victor once. When Chino was in his teens, one of his cousins told him Victor wanted to see him, and he named the corner of Nostrand and Church in Brooklyn, and a time. Victor wheeled toward him. He had, Chino discovered, been shot years before, and was now a paraplegic. His first thought was—Wow, he wears his hair just like mine, in a ponytail. Then he noticed his dad was wearing cut-off leather gloves, just like his mother used to. But he didn’t want to hear what Victor had to say.

“What do you want?” he asked him.

“I want to get to know you.”

“You should have thought about that before you raped my mother and before you walked out of my life,” he replied.

His conversation was rambling. Victor said that his mother was very top-heavy, like Chino. He said his two sons had died in a plane crash. He seemed half crazy. Chino explained: “From the way he approached me, it’s almost like we had a relationship,” like he knew him, like they had been talking all along. Chino didn’t want to know. He walked away.

A few years later, somebody told him Victor had died. He didn’t go to the funeral.

But for Chino, in East Flatbush at fifteen, he was discovering newer and bolder crimes. Now that he had formed his crew to sell crack, they found they worked well together and could push it further: prohibition functioned for him as a gateway drug to robbery and assault. In prison, they were constantly learning about new crimes and new techniques and graduating from this university back onto the streets. They robbed boats in the harbor, taking flare guns and cool Nautica jackets. They tried to get the boats to start up, and whenever this happened, Chino would laugh and say, “So if we get it started, where the fuck are we going? But okay.” They stole cars. They beat people up.

Chino’s best friend at this time, Jason Santiago, tells me that being a gangsta was “emotional armor” for Chino. With a gun and Tupac blaring behind you, “you’re untouchable, so you can’t be hurt.” There is, he says, a doubleness to this gangsta front. You need to appear tough so other people don’t fuck with you. But you also need to be tough to convince yourself you can walk onto an urban battlefield every day and survive.

Chino did everything the boys did—and that included taking girlfriends. “I had to make sure they saw me at all times as an equal, and as a dude and not a chick. I think I did that for my safety as well,” he would recall. “The more they saw me like them, the less likely I was to be abused, or to have to fucking kill somebody.” If he didn’t establish this reputation, “I would probably have been raped. Killed. Or imprisoned.”

He defied anyone to criticize him for being a lesbian—which is how he was seen at the time. Apart from a few stray comments on the street, they were too afraid to do it.

As Chino guided me through his world, I kept thinking about the parts of ghetto culture that seem irrational and bizarre to outsiders—the obsession with territory, the constant demand for “respect.” And I began to think maybe they are not so irrational. You have no recourse to the law to protect your most valuable pieces of property—your drug supply—so you have to make damn sure people show you respect and stay out of your territory. The demand for respect, I began to see, is the only way this economy can function. If enough of the local economy is run by these rules, they come to dominate the neighborhood, even the people who manage to stay out of the drug trade.

One of Chino’s homies, a guy nicknamed File, had links to a gang in Newport, Virginia, who needed new suppliers. They drove out there to negotiate, and it was there—far from home—that Chino made the decision to try crack.