Dreamland (19 page)

The bus trip amounted to his redemption. Months before, as Enrique toiled in the sugarcane fields with his father and despaired of ever finding a way out of his poverty, he suddenly received, and accepted, an offer to work in Phoenix. A cell boss needed a driver for his heroin store.

On his last day of work as a sugarcane farmer, he arrived at the sugar mill black from the soot and dust of the field, as if he’d stepped out of a coal mine. He took his bags of sugarcane and threw them as hard as he could onto the pile.

“The next job I have is going to be for love of the work, not for need,” he promised the foreman.

The next day he kissed his mother and took a bus to Arizona.

This was his chance. The San Fernando Valley, with his uncles working, would always limit him. He went to Phoenix eager to show his abilities. In a week he knew the streets, and before long was running the store himself—cutting up the heroin, answering the beeper, and driving to deliver the balloons to the clients. His customers were mostly professional women: lawyers, nurses, a prostitute or two. He soon raised the store’s daily take from twelve hundred to three thousand dollars. He worked from eight
A.M.
to nine
P.M
., grabbed a hamburger at a drive-through, and was at home by ten
P.M.
to balloon up the heroin for the next day. He didn’t have time to clean his apartment or his clothes and he made five thousand dollars that month.

One day, his suppliers in Phoenix told him the boss would be arriving that night from Xalisco. This man impressed Enrique. He had a permit and could cross the border legally whenever he wanted. He was there to meet with his workers.

As Enrique headed home that night, his beeper buzzed. He found a pay phone. The big boss wanted McDonald’s—a fish sandwich—before the meeting. Enrique scurried to get the food and returned to the apartment. He walked in as two gunmen had his boss and his suppliers in their underwear and on their knees in the bathroom.

The invaders had found two ounces of heroin, jewelry, and some cash. Yet when they demanded more, and placed a gun to his head, Enrique kept silent. That morning, he had packed tens of thousands of dollars in stacks of cash, but had no time to do anything with it. He put it at the bottom of a trash bag overflowing with the detritus of his fast-food diet—old french fries, pizza crusts, used paper plates, and soda cans. If he told the gunmen about the money, it would look like he’d set it all up. So he took their pistol-whipping in silence and they left with only five thousand dollars and those ounces of heroin, while at the bottom of that garbage bag was another eighty thousand dollars they didn’t get.

The boss, a grateful witness to this kid’s loyalty, pulled him off the street and gave him two heroin drivers to supervise. Enrique worked harder. Business boomed. He sent money to his family to begin building a house for himself. When telephone service finally came to the Toad, he paid to make sure his family had a line installed in their house.

Three months after the robbery, Enrique was ready to return home. He bought his boots and hat, and boarded that bus with the fifteen thousand dollars in his pocket and his eyes wide-open. Below the bus, he had stowed duffel bags bulging with clothes, jewelry, shoes, and VCRs. For so long he had sought this magnificent return. He thought of his uncles in California who had sent him home with so little after working for so long. They hadn’t the spine to make the business what it could be, or the vision to see what he was capable of. His new boss had vision; Enrique felt elated to have broken from the small world of his rancho.

The clothes he brought home were Levi’s 501s, Guess, Tommy Hilfiger, and Polo—measures of his success. His dad would have to remain silent. At fifteen, Enrique had been helping his family survive; now, at eighteen, the heroin he sold in Phoenix allowed him to take over the job full-time.

His family gathered him up at the bus station in Tepic. They drove him down the highway, through Xalisco, into their rancho. There, across the road from his childhood home, stood his new house, under construction and paid for with the money he had sent. It had two bedrooms, a full kitchen, a garage with an automatic door, a roof through which the rain never came, and a bathroom that was indoors. He felt at that moment that everything was possible, and he wanted to cry.

Later, in his room with his mother, he pulled the cash out of his pocket and more from his sock. It fluttered onto the bed.

“Did you rob someone?”

“No,” he said, smiling broadly. “It’s mine.”

He noticed she didn’t ask how he got it. He was sure she imagined.

That night he would always remember was the first time his family had more than enough to eat. He brought out shirts, dresses, toys. His youngest sister called him Dad.

The Arizona heroin business—and his loyalty during the robbery—won him new friends and, soon, invitations to parties in Xalisco thrown by the top heroin cell bosses. They had new cars and big houses. He felt ashamed of his petty dreams of a year before. In this world men dreamed big.

For the next two years, he split his time between his village and Phoenix, running his boss’s heroin crews on the streets. He bought a used black Mercury Cougar. He took his girlfriend and his family to El Sarandeado, El Diamante—Tepic’s best restaurants. He put his sister through college; she was the first in her family to graduate from college. He went into bars and restaurants and didn’t think whether he could afford it. Freedom was what he felt, mostly. His mother no longer asked her husband for money to feed the family, nor endured his blows and insults in exchange. His father no longer had to depend on the mill to pay him.

Over the years, merchants in town had learned many ways to put down the farmers who drew a living from the sugarcane and coffee and who constantly asked for credit. Now, for the first time, the baker smiled when Enrique’s mother entered his shop and spoke warmly to her; he waved to Enrique’s father when he passed.

That year at the Feria del Elote, Enrique and a friend who worked with him in Arizona owned the central plaza in Xalisco. The Saturday of the fair, they paid a banda three thousand dollars to play all night. They drank and offered alcohol to anyone who showed up. They only stopped because Mass at the cathedral was about to begin on Sunday morning. Xalisco had never seen that before from a couple guys from a rancho. Usually rancheros would save all year to pay for only one hour of banda music in the plaza. But heroin did that: it made everyone equal.

It did not, however, endear Enrique to his girlfriend’s father, who was happy to sell his meat to his mother but didn’t want an uneducated kid from the Toad, a chiva dealer, for a son-in-law. When Enrique was a boy, the butcher had been friendly. But since Enrique took up with his daughter, the man never spoke to him and Enrique learned to keep his distance.

In time, returning occasionally to Phoenix, and then a stint in Portland, then back home again, Enrique began to feel unsettled. His salary wasn’t bad but his expenses had risen now that he was spending so much time among all those new friends. He was limited. He could see what was on the other side of that river that he felt divided the Toad from the world, but he couldn’t make it across as a worker.

His ambitions were greater now. He had a car, but wanted a new one. He had a new house, with tile floors; he had piles of clothes and money, but it wasn’t enough to retire on. He’d taken orders all his life and wanted to know how it felt to be the boss.

He was twenty-two, time to get married. His girlfriend’s parents would never allow it. She was still in high school.

So, one day in 1996, he took ten thousand pesos, a thousand dollars, and his Beretta 9mm and filled the Cougar with gas. He went to his girlfriend’s school and drove her off to Puerto Vallarta, stealing her from her parents. It was the village way of marrying against the parents’ wishes. When she realized what was happening, she put up a fight at first, with lots of conditions, all of which he agreed to. He took her to the Hotel Krystal, which he remembered later for the first valet service he’d ever used. When they returned, in the eyes of the rancho, they were as good as married, no matter what her parents said.

He took her to his new house to live. Then he set off to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he had heard black tar heroin would find a market, and he a future.

We Realized This Is Corporate

Portland, Oregon

Dr. Gary Oxman never forgot what he learned from the Bloods and Crips.

In the 1980s, Blood and Crip gangs moved out of Los Angeles in search of new markets for crack cocaine. Their turf war over L.A.’s crack market had turned parts of the city into war zones. Heading north up Interstate 5, one place they landed was Portland, Oregon. By the mid-1980s, the City of Roses was awash in crack and crack houses. Drive-by shootings and murders soared. So did rates of syphilis.

Oxman was hired at the Multnomah County Health Department in 1984. One day, he spoke to a teacher in a black neighborhood, who explained what was taking place: Bloods, Crips, crack, crack houses, sex for drugs. Hence the syphilis epidemic he was seeing. Oxman and his colleagues studied the outbreaks, and eventually wrote a research paper on the problem, showing that a dozen or so people actively trading sex for crack had triggered a syphilis outbreak.

Federal indictments sent dozens of crack-slinging gang members to prison in the late 1980s. This calmed the syphilis epidemic in Multnomah County. By then, Oxman had learned to listen to the community and also that when it came to drugs, a few people could create a public health catastrophe.

In the spring of 1999, Oxman found himself one afternoon in a meeting with Sharron Kelley, a Multnomah County commissioner, in downtown Portland. It was budget season. Oxman, a thin, fit fellow with curly hair, a mustache, and a goatee, was now the chief health officer for Multnomah County.

Heroin addiction was rampant and the hepatitis C virus was spreading across Portland, Kelley said. How would the Health Department like some money to pay for treatment and services for hep C patients?

That money would help a great deal, he said. Thousands of people were now infected with the virus.

Kelley went on about the treatment and services the county lacked and that Oxman might put in place. As the meeting wound down, Kelley added, “Oh, by the way, there’s this advocacy group in the community called RAP, comprising drug users in recovery. A lot of their friends who are still using are dying of heroin overdoses. Can you do an epidemiological study on that?”

Oxman replied, “Sure.”

RAP—the Recovery Association Project—was a union of recovering heroin addicts organized by a local nonprofit called Central City Concern. Central City had long run detox centers for alcoholics and drug addicts. By the mid-1990s, with the decline of the black gangs’ control of the crack trade in Portland, the numbers of CCC detox patients was falling quickly. Center directors actually wondered how long they’d be in the detox business.

“Then, all of a sudden, something happened. We were getting all these people addicted to heroin,” said Ed Blackburn, now the director of Central City. “You were seeing young people. We were used to seeing forty-year-old heroin addicts at the detox center. Then we were seeing twenty-three-year-old heroin addicts. This was 1994, 1995. We’d been detoxing heroin addicts for years, but it was always pretty stable: five to ten percent of our patients. Then it went up. By 1996 to ’97, it was over fifty percent heroin.”

The Xalisco boys were now all over Portland.

Blackburn is a follower of Saul Alinsky, the legendary community organizer in Chicago, who trained politically marginalized groups in pushing politicians to respond. As heroin surged, Blackburn used a federal grant to train recovering addicts in using their stories and experience in politics. He hired a couple of them and they spent time at the detox centers recruiting others to join RAP. Before long, hundreds of newly recovering addicts organized. They began going to city and county meetings demanding services and funding.

One of them was the legless addict, Alan Levine. By 1998, Levine had been using the Xalisco Boys’ delivery system daily for five years and it had lost its allure.

“You know Joe Camel—that cigarette ad strategy aimed at young people?” Levine said. “That’s what these guys were doing. They were aiming at the young people. The kids could snort it, smoke it, eat it, mainline it. All of a sudden we had a network of high schoolers who were addicted to heroin. Heroin became a lot more potent and a lot more deadly. There were more and more heroin deaths to the point where I stopped using heroin and I started working against it.”

Levine and others hit the streets and soon RAP had hundreds of members. From there, they turned to pushing elected officials to fund treatment for addicts. Levine was eventually put on the governor’s Council on Drug Abuse, and a county drug planning committee.

In Portland a class of earnest activists and nonprofit executives had emerged over the decades advocating on behalf of the disenfranchised and speaking an anesthetized and politically correct language. To this activist class, the RAPsters were like battery acid. RAPsters were street rabble with lives like open sores. They were blunt, uncensored, and not too polite. Blackburn trained them to tell their stories—which often didn’t fit in the neat world of heroes and villains that the professional advocates preferred. Alan Levine could be particularly graphic at public meetings, with his two stumps and an eloquent growl spinning tales of a debased life spent vainly seeking that first high that made him feel like the President of Everything.