High Price (26 page)

“There’s a place for people like you and me in science,” Rob would say, meaning for those who weren’t the obvious nerds and geeks, the ones whose persistence and diligence could allow them to overcome any educational deficits they had. My dismal high school education had left me without the science background and vocabulary expected of a researcher, but Rob saw that I was willing and able to do everything required to remedy the situation. I had already shown both him and myself that I wasn’t afraid of hard work, even if it meant going back into the maze repeatedly.

I
’d had to run a labyrinth of my own before I found Rob and the two other mentors who guided me into science. When I first got out of the air force, it was not at all clear where my future lay. After leaving the service in 1988, I’d first gone home to Miami. I was about thirty credits short of a college degree and planned to finish my coursework at Bethune-Cookman College (now Bethune-Cookman University) in Daytona Beach. I’d saved up a few dollars and was feeling pretty good about myself.

But having been in England and in the military, where I had considerable responsibilities, being back in the American South felt like stepping back in time. My old friends couldn’t even imagine having done many of the things I’d done in the air force; their visions of the future were stunted by their lack of education and inexperience with anything other than the small neighborhood where they’d spent virtually all of their lives. I could now see the limits of this point of view, rather than simply accepting it as “how it is.”

Another experience further reinforced my sense that there had to be more than this for me. A few months after my discharge, I interviewed at the then-nascent Rent-A-Center company for a managerial job. The chain rents out furniture, computers, appliances, and other essentials to people with little money and/or bad credit, charging high interest rates and offering hope of eventual ownership if they can keep up the payments.

By this point, I’d become worried that I would run through the money I’d saved up during my time in the service. I also wanted to save even more to use toward finishing my degree. The regional manager who interviewed me recognized my skills and talent. Indeed, he almost immediately suggested that I work at an existing store for a short time, just to get to know the trade so I could be prepared to manage my own new location in a few months.

But the day I started turned out to be my last day at Rent-A-Center. The store was located in Carol City, on 183rd Street and Twenty-Seventh Avenue, an area I knew well. Its customers were overwhelmingly black. And yet I was the only black employee at the store. Worse, the local store manager treated me with disdain. He asked me to do tasks requiring physical labor and generally treated me like a short-term, dumb-ass minimum-wage drone, not a managerial candidate. He spoke down to the customers, making subtly patronizing remarks and refusing to play the radio station that broadcast the music that we liked. I quit at the end of the day. I simply couldn’t take being treated like that anymore. I knew I deserved more respect. And I began to see that I wasn’t going to get it working in my old neighborhood.

People like my cousin James and MH thought I’d gone crazy. From their perspective, I’d quit a good job for no reason. I didn’t know how to explain it to them. I knew I couldn’t engage them in the type of intellectual discussions about the books and song lyrics and poetry that had helped raise my consciousness while I was in the service. I didn’t feel like I could reach them so I didn’t even try. I now realize this must have seemed like I thought I was too good to do that type of work, but I didn’t know how to bridge the expanding gap between us. I didn’t even know how to parse that distance to myself.

One of the few people I connected with back home was Yvette Green, a former girlfriend who was then studying nursing. We’d go to that Denny’s where I’d once “dined and dashed” with my high school friends—but now I was spending hours with her, reading and discussing literature. She gave me support, comfort, and peace of mind. Indeed, one of my greatest regrets in life was losing touch with her when I did leave Florida.

When I was home, though, I mostly just felt out of place. I had expected to slide easily back into that world, even to educate people and show them how cool I was by sharing with them the skills I’d learned for success. Instead I discovered repeatedly that I didn’t know how to do that. My hometown itself began to seem increasingly foreign to me. In the air force, I’d unconsciously abandoned the habits of mind that had desensitized me to the daily wear of being condescended to and disrespected, but I didn’t yet have a way to appropriately communicate my new perspective with those who still needed those defenses.

I found it more and more difficult to connect with my closest friends and family members. I wanted to discuss the larger societal issues that trapped so many people like us in those horrible conditions. But they were more concerned with immediate issues like how to pay this month’s rent and how to put food on the table today for their kids. They had little interest or time for what someone called my “academic masturbations.”

I wanted to work on changing the world and all they wanted was work. I didn’t fit anywhere. It was like that awful time in adolescence when you feel half-formed, no longer a boy but far from being a man, as well. Everything felt somewhat awkward. I soon realized that I couldn’t stay unless I wanted to relinquish the new self and changed vision of the future I’d constructed in the air force. To live at home without going crazy, I’d have to reembrace what I now saw as a very limiting worldview and pattern of behavior. I knew I had to resist that.

And as this conflict between my new self and my old ways increased, I got in touch with my cousin Betty. She had moved to Atlanta after her divorce was finalized. She invited me to stay with her there. I could take the credits I needed to complete my college degree at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Also in Atlanta was Patrick, my good friend and fellow airman with whom I’d served in England. He, too, had recently been discharged. He was one of the few people I knew who understood the transition I was facing after leaving the military.

Given my experiences at home, I figured that anywhere else would probably be an improvement. When I first arrived in Georgia, Betty had a house in Stone Mountain, just outside metro Atlanta. But money woes forced her to move to a smaller place in the same town. Unfortunately for me, however, Atlanta really wasn’t much different from Miami. I didn’t really find the move any more conducive to furthering my educational or personal goals. However, I did meet Melissa, the woman who turned me on to cocaine—and my relationship with her, ironically, is what led me to Wilmington and Rob Hakan’s class.

My introduction to cocaine and Melissa actually started with a bad experience with marijuana. That incident not only was the beginning of my relationship with her but also gave me more insight into the effects of marijuana and into how environmental factors can strongly affect the drug experience. Additionally, it should have made me more skeptical about what I was hearing on the street about drug use and about what I’d later hear from addiction researchers, but I wasn’t yet thinking critically enough to recognize this.

I met Melissa one summer morning in 1988 in the laundry room of the apartment complex where I lived with Betty. I was home at that time because I hadn’t yet enrolled in school and was working some night shifts for UPS to make money before I went back. Melissa was a gorgeous caramel-skinned woman with long hair. She wore colored contact lenses that made her eyes look blue, an effect that I found disconcerting. Her aunt, who was also extremely attractive and about the same age, was also doing her wash when I met Melissa.

Over the course of our conversation, I discovered that the two women smoked weed—and as any self-respecting player knows, if you’ve got drugs, you can get girls. I said I had a hookup and invited Melissa to stop by Betty’s place that evening to hang out. Then I called Patrick, who typically had at least some reefer on hand, and had him bring it over.

That afternoon I also watched
Oprah
. The show was then at the height of its popularity among wannabe in-the-know black people, so I was a daily viewer. The program that day featured a group of young, attractive women who were known as the “Rolex bandits.” Their trick was to target men with Rolexes in bars or clubs and get them so drunk or high that the women had little difficulty pretending to seduce them and thereby steal their expensive watches. I wasn’t paying all that much attention but got the gist.

Early that evening, Betty left to go out with her boyfriend. Melissa arrived not long afterward, unexpectedly accompanied by her aunt. I understood; she didn’t yet know me and wanted to take her time. Visiting a man’s house alone at night might set up unwarranted expectations.

After some small talk, the three of us passed around a joint. But although I’d continued to smoke reefer occasionally while in England, I had always stayed mindful of the fact that I could be urine-tested at any time. I generally didn’t inhale much: both for that reason and because I still found some of its psychedelic effects uncomfortable and disorienting. Although I’d smoked some in Atlanta with Patrick, I didn’t have much of a tolerance.

But wanting to seem cool to impress the woman I was attracted to, I smoked far more reefer than I’d intended that night. At first we had a good time, just laughing a lot, making silly jokes. After about an hour or so, however, I started to become paranoid. It started with a nagging sense of unease. And then I became convinced that these two suspiciously beautiful women I’d picked up were Rolex bandits like the ones I’d seen on
Oprah
.

Needless to say, I did not have a Rolex, nor was there anything of great value to steal in Betty’s apartment. Melissa and her aunt did not behave in any way that was at all suspect. It was highly unlikely that the day I watched an
Oprah
episode about females who preyed on men using sexual enticements to rob them I would have such an experience myself.

Nonetheless, once the idea was planted in my head, I couldn’t get rid of it. Everything seemed to be telling me that these ladies were up to no good. I tried to tell myself to chill out, but it was to no avail. The paranoia became almost unbearable. I had to do something. To everyone’s surprise, without warning, I suddenly stood up and said, “Y’all gotta get the fuck out!”

What had been a pleasant evening suddenly turned strange. They both looked at me and said, “What?”

“You gotta go. Now,” I said. There was a serious edge in my voice. They froze and then began hastily gathering their things to leave.

I certainly was attracted to Melissa and she seemed into me. But at that moment, I thought she was just trying to use me. I was so paranoid and insistent—and probably frightening—that the party stopped right there. I thought I’d never see her again.

As silly as that experience seems in retrospect, it illustrates some important issues about drug use that have critical implications for how we understand and deal with it. A drug’s effects are determined not only by the dose and the way it’s taken into the body but also by many different characteristics of the user and her or his environment.

LSD guru and onetime Harvard lecturer Timothy Leary first popularized the notion of set and setting as being crucial to the psychedelic experience. By set, he meant the mind-set of the person who has taken the drug: their preconceptions about the substance, expectations of its effects, and the person’s mood and physiology. Setting encompasses the environment: the social, cultural, and physical place in which the drug use occurs. It turns out that these two factors affect all drug experiences, not just those with psychedelics. Though some of Leary’s approaches had serious limitations, the concept of set and setting remains useful and they are crucial factors in understanding drug effects. The major point here is that psychoactive drug effects are not determined by pharmacology alone. It is the interaction between biology (the drug’s effects on the brain)
and
environment that determines drug effects on human behavior. This is why attempts to characterize drug effects on human behavior by solely examining the brain after drug administration are inadequate and naive.

My set and setting the day I kicked Melissa and her aunt out of Betty’s apartment weren’t especially conducive to a “good high.” That
Oprah
episode had raised the possibility in my mind that sexy women were likely to be predators and con artists—so my mind-set wasn’t likely to make me feel comfortable getting high with women I didn’t already know and trust. My reduced tolerance also increased the chances that I would experience paranoia from smoking more than I was used to handling. With THC, the primary active ingredient in marijuana, higher doses taken by inexperienced users increase the odds of negative side effects like paranoia or anxiety.

Set and setting can explain a lot about the variability of effects reported by users who take the same drug and about why different environments can produce different behavioral responses to drugs. The divergent responses of the Rat Park rats (see chapter 5) that eschewed morphine in favor of family and socializing with other rats, and the isolated rats who took dose after dose of the drug, are one example. Another one is the differing experiences of smoking cocaine found in Wall Street traders and among homeless cocaine smokers. The homeless people experience far more paranoia and fear than the executives do because wealthier users are more likely to be sheltered from frightening consequences like being arrested. The setting of the drug use can profoundly influence behaviors that are often attributed to the drugs themselves.

The night I got high with Melissa and her aunt, I couldn’t sleep at all. Now I know that adequate sleep is essential for the health and survival of an individual and that severe sleep loss, even without drug use, can cause hallucinations and paranoia. As a result, even the next day, when I tried to make a deposit at the bank, the paranoia was still with me. Standing in line, I felt as though the cameras were trained on me specifically. I got so freaked out that I left without depositing my UPS paycheck. But I realized early on that this was the result of smoking so much weed and simply waited for it to wear off.