S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (13 page)

It was a stupid, potentially suicidal move. If it had come to a fistfight, the
vato
would have pummeled me. He was probably carrying—if not a pistol, then a knife. And he no doubt had fellow gangsters nearby to provide backup.

Raven’s jaw dropped. Homeboy’s eyes went big.

I curled my fingers into fists, preparing to defend myself against an onslaught of blows. Instead, to my relief, the gangster snickered, waved dismissively, turned his back, and resumed leaning on the rail. Maybe he thought I was too crazy to mess with.

“That was stupid,” Raven said when we got to the room.

We sat on the bed. She broke out her pipe, her lighter, and the three rocks. I grabbed the pipe and reached for one of the rocks.

About ten hours later, I pulled into the driveway of my parents’ house in the last moments of predawn darkness. Raven and I had smoked our way through the night. Over and over, I’d driven from the motel to the ATM and back. At around 5:00
a.m.
, Raven said she had to go. The rocks were gone. She let me keep the pipe, the lighter, and a six-inch piece of coat hanger wire.

I drove home horrified at what I’d done. I parked and staggered to the side of the garage, near a wooden gate that led to the backyard. I turned my back to the street. Using the wire, I scraped the last of the res from the inside of the pipe, onto the bottom of the copper filter. Carefully, I used the wire to push the filter to the other end of the glass stem. I lit up and greedily inhaled the last hit. It barely registered.

The sun started to rise.

The dinner I’d missed wasn’t just a family gathering. It was a wedding-rehearsal dinner. I was supposed to be my brother Javier’s best man, and I’d gone AWOL. I looked at my watch: The wedding was in less than three hours. I was twitchy and sweaty—all that crack had bumped up my body temperature. I’d fucked up, monumentally, decisively, spectacularly, unforgivably.

Some birds chirped. The cloudless sky became bluer by the moment. It was going to be a gorgeous June day.

Shame and remorse overwhelmed me. If I could have flipped a switch and erased myself, I would have. Exhausted, I fell to my knees and wept.

“What happened?” Javier asked, plaintively, when I stumbled into the house. I had no answer.

“It was humiliating not having you at the dress rehearsal,” he said. Javier spoke matter-of-factly, without anger, but each word stung.

After the ceremony, I joined Javier and dozens of other relatives at a backyard-barbecue reception.

The bar was open. I quickly killed three beers. I wanted to get numb. It didn’t work. My tolerance was gargantuan. The beers barely got me buzzed.

My two-year-old niece Nastasia appeared. She toddled onto the back porch, dressed all in white, looking cuter than a box of kittens and puppies.

I stepped toward her, knelt, and opened my arms.

Nastasia looked right through me. She turned her back and walked away. She might as well have reached into my chest with her tiny hand and ripped my heart out.

A couple of days later, I flew back to Washington. I’d be okay once I got back to my routine, I thought. And a big day in the history of the
Post
,
of American journalism, was imminent. I was looking forward to being a small part of it.

A little more than a month after I returned from Los Angeles, on the last day of July 1991, Ben Bradlee stood in front of his glassed-in office along the North Wall, the most prestigious part of the newsroom. An all-star cast flanked him: Bob Woodward, publisher Katharine Graham, her son Donald.

Bradlee was retiring as executive editor. Len Downie Jr. would take over as newsroom boss, effective September 1. Bradlee was taking August off before getting kicked upstairs to a VP post.

The room was packed. Hundreds of staffers stood shoulder to shoulder, crammed into the spaces between work cubicles. Some people stood on desks. Woodward and the Grahams delivered speeches.

In a prearranged tribute, dozens of male reporters and editors wore striped dress shirts with white collars, the kind Bradlee favored. I joined in the fun, rocking a casual, short-sleeve light-blue polo shirt with a white collar.

The ceremony was in the late afternoon, a couple of hours before the start of my shift. I arrived just before it started and stood way in the back, not far from a bank of elevators.

This is history
, I thought as the speeches wound down. Bradlee wrapped it up with a brief, heartfelt oration, which was met with sustained applause.

Bradlee told someone to cut the big cake sitting on a nearby desk. The handshakes and hugs commenced. Staffers surrounded the journalistic lion to say good bye.

Though I’d been working at the
Post
for nearly two years, I’d never met the man. He was on vacation when I interviewed for my job. We’d shared an elevator a handful of times, but I hadn’t even tried to make small talk. What could I have said to him that wouldn’t have sounded fanboyish? “Nice work on that Watergate thing”?

But now he was happily greeting everyone.
What the hell?
It wasn’t like I would run into him at the Y, or at 7th and S. I wasn’t likely to get another chance like this.

I began to maneuver my way toward the North Wall.

A few feet in, I bumped into a copy editor. She worked nights, too. During slow shifts, we talked about books or city politics. We were casual work friends.

“Hi, Ruben. Are you okay?” Her face registered genuine concern. “Are you coming in to work tonight?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“You don’t look so good. If you have a fever, you should just call in and stay home. We’ll get by.”

I doubled back, slipped into the men’s room, and stood in front of the mirror.

A sheen of sweat covered my face and neck. A patch of perspiration marred the chest of my blue polo. I looked as if I’d just run a series of sprints. Or, maybe, I looked wired.

In fact, I
was
wired. A couple of hours earlier, I’d run into Champagne as I was walking home from my lunchtime hoops game. I hadn’t planned on picking her or anyone else up, but she looked good, and I had a few hours before my shift. I took her to 7th and S and handed her fifty bucks for three rocks, which we split. I didn’t even bother trying to get off. I figured I’d be fine for my night shift. But the rock intake had spiked my body temperature. I was like a car that was running hot because of a busted radiator.

“Damn,” I muttered as I splashed cold water on my face and wiped myself down with a paper towel. I stepped out of the restroom and lingered on the south side of the room, watching Bradlee from a safe distance.

The famous editor smiled broadly. He serial-hugged staffers.

I pivoted toward the elevators and headed home.

The envelope appeared in my work mail slot in early October, a little more than two months after Bradlee’s newsroom retirement bash. My eyes lit up:
Washington Post
stationery. I ripped the envelope open, hoping, hoping, hoping .
.
.

Yes! I clenched my fist, more in relief than in triumph. A reprieve from financial doom.

The envelope contained a check for $730. The money covered additional hours that I’d worked during the previous quarter. The
Post
gave staffers a choice: time off or cash. I always opted for the cash.

The payout covered June, July, and August. I needed the scratch.

I was now picking up Champagne or Carrie, a pretty blonde strawberry I’d met that spring, two or three times a week. And I was using more, dropping $50 to $100 for rock instead of $35.

Part of me realized that I was sliding fast. I tried to slow myself down. That summer, I’d walked into my bank and signed a document limiting the amount I could withdraw from the ATM to $100 every twenty-four hours. When that didn’t work, I cut my ATM card in half. Every week, I wrote checks for cash, just enough for food and other legitimate expenses.

I quickly found a way around that. When I picked up Champagne or Carrie and ran out of cash after buying and smoking a couple of rocks, I’d hit up friends from the Y or co-workers from the
Post
for short-term loans—forty bucks here, twenty bucks there, sums not high enough to arouse suspicion. So I thought.

It took about three weeks to run through everyone I knew. I developed a new system: I’d call friends and relatives on the West Coast with a lame story about losing my wallet and get them to wire me money, usually $50 a pop.

My salary had shot up when I started working at the
Post
in 1989,
from $33,000 to $45,000 a year. I had no mortgage, no child support or alimony, and hardly any credit card debt—and now I was barely scraping by. I always paid back the money I borrowed, but I was on a financial hamster wheel, and the pace was accelerating.

The fat check would help. I slipped it into the inside pocket of my sport coat and headed to the elevator.

Every other Tuesday, I got to pull a day shift, to get a breather from the run-and-gun and work on longer pieces. The “float” day was rotated between me and the other night reporter.

This was good timing: I’d walk home, have an early dinner, watch some TV, get to bed early, and hit the bank first thing in the morning.

Two blocks from my apartment, I ran into Champagne. It was a mild evening, on the cusp of fall. She was sitting on a bus bench, wearing black leather pants and a tight, low-cut red sweater. She was on her game.

I walked over to say hello. Champagne smiled broadly. She reached into her V-neck and adjusted her bra. I saw a flash of black lace on soft white flesh.

“So,” she said. “Are you just here to make conversation?”

I had $30 in my wallet. But there was a check-cashing joint in Adams Morgan. Two percentage points for each check cashed. I could party a little and still drop nearly seven hundred bucks into my bank account.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I drove us to the check-cashing place, then straight to S Street.

Six hours later, I crouched at the bay window of my apartment, peeking through the blinds for the men in black I was certain were coming for me.

My fingers splayed the slats just enough to create a small opening. I twitched and sweated as I spied the cars parked on the dimly lit street outside.

Phantom figures in dark clothes darted from behind one car to the next. Did one of them have a walkie-talkie in his hand? Did another have handcuffs on his waistband? Were they D.C. narcotics? FBI? DEA? A federal-police task force?

Champagne sat on the chair at my desk, calmly scraping the res from her pipe with a piece of hanger wire. The res fell onto a small mirror. She worked by candlelight. I’d turned off all the lights, hoping that a dark apartment wouldn’t draw the attention of the men outside.

“You’ve got to chill out,” she said. “No one’s after you or me. All this smoking is making you paranoid.”

It was an hour or so before dawn. I’d given up on getting off after our fourth or fifth foray to 7th and S. I’d been straight-up hitting the pipe, getting more anxious by the hour, by the minute, by the hit.

Champagne remained cool. Her mood never wavered. She had an amazing tolerance for rock. She scraped out the last of the res and used a razor blade to gather the gray powder into a neat pile. As I’d seen her do dozens of times, Champagne put the pipe in her mouth, leaned down, and expertly sucked the res onto the filter.

She tapped the end of the pipe to make sure the res was secure, then lit up and took an enormous blast. Champagne gestured for me to come over. I took a nervous glance out the window, then crab-walked to her. She leaned down and shotgunned me.

It was a monster hit. I held it for seven, eight seconds, then exhaled and crab-walked back to the window to resume my vigil.

That was when the whispers started.

The voices emanated from behind the parked cars, too distant to be intelligible. I moved the blinds to the side and pressed my face to the window. The whispers glided through the night air, moved above the stairs of my front porch, slipped under my door. I heard snippets of dark schemes:
He’s in there. The squad’s in place. We can take him now.

I shuddered and turned to Champagne, panic in my eyes. “They’re coming,” I murmured.

Champagne waved her hand dismissively. “No one’s out there, babe. You’ve had too much.”

I could see her words. They floated out of her mouth in big black-and-white letters and hung in the air, lining up next to one another to form her sentences.

Champagne put her pipe, her lighter, and her section of wire hanger into her purse and stood up.

“I think I should go now. Get some rest, okay?”

I heard and read her words simultaneously.

From my spot at the window, I watched Champagne sashay confidently down the steps and onto the sidewalk, certain that cops or feds were about to swoop down on her. She walked, undisturbed, around the nearest corner.