S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (6 page)

Within five seconds, the slingers on both sides of the street spotted Champagne and sprang to life. Their eyes lit up as they raced toward my car. Yeah, she was known on the block. I watched them close in with a combination of anticipation and horror. I imagined a team of plainclothes cops swooping in, guns drawn, as Champagne exchanged crack for cash from the passenger seat.

“The money?” Champagne asked, calm as Sunday morning.

“Not in the car,” I said, my voice tense. I knew that some cities could confiscate the vehicles of motorists busted for drug buys made from a car. I wasn’t sure if D.C. was one of them. “Do you mind getting out?”

Champagne shrugged. “Fine.”

I handed her the cash. The street dealers surged toward her. I checked the rearview once more.

As soon as her feet hit the sidewalk, Champagne was surrounded by a dozen slingers. I figured she’d lead them into the nearby alley, on the side of John’s Place, out of plain sight. I figured wrong. Champagne stayed put as the dealers formed a tight circle around her. They reached into their pockets, then held out their palms, displaying their products. Calmly, as casually as if she were inspecting fruit at a farmers’ market, Champagne considered her options. I watched in anxious awe.

In Los Angeles, the Latino-gangster slingers in MacArthur Park and in Raven’s neighborhood at least looked over their shoulders for cops during drug deals. Here we were, barely two miles from the White House, and neither Champagne nor the dealers were breaking a sweat.

In fact, Champagne looked bored. After what felt like a small eternity, she nodded toward one slinger and made the buy. The crack dealers retreated to their territory like football players jogging to the sideline after being removed from the game. Champagne strolled back to my car. I checked the far end of the street. Still no cops.

“How’d you do?” I said.

“See for yourself.”

She opened her palm, displaying two healthy-sized chunks of rock in separate plastic baggies. Goose bumps erupted on my arms and neck.

“Nice job,” I said.

I turned on the ignition, shifted into drive, and cruised past the guy barbecuing on his front lawn, the slingers, the bakery, and the church that looked like a castle.

We reached the end of the block. As I hung a right to head back to my apartment, I joked, “I guess these guys haven’t heard about the war on drugs.”

A quizzical expression crossed Champagne’s face. “Huh?”

At my place, we sat on the edge of my bed and got right to it. Without a word, she cut her rock in half, loaded it into her pipe, lit up, and inhaled.

“Shotgun?” I asked. Champagne nodded. We leaned toward each other and she exhaled a blast of crack smoke into my mouth. The hit made me light-headed. I motioned for the pipe and lighter. She handed them to me.

“You’ll do me while I do my rock, right?” Champagne reached into her handbag, brought out a condom, and broke open the wrapper.

“Ready when you are,” she said. The rock was good. Champagne was good. Together, the rock and Champagne were great.

Before she left, Champagne grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a pen from my nightstand and scribbled her name and a series of digits.

“That’s my pager number,” she said. “Call me whenever.”

Remorse kicked in as soon as she walked out the door. I padded to the bathroom and stared at my guilty-looking face in the mirror. In less than forty-eight hours, I’d be starting my job as a crime reporter at the
Washington Post
.
What the hell was I thinking?

In disgust, I grabbed the paper with Champagne’s number, rolled it into a ball, and fired it into a wastebasket. I downed a frozen dinner with a beer, vowed to stay away from Champagne and S Street, and went to bed.

The next morning, I stirred awake as slivers of sunlight angled through the blinds of my bedroom. My apartment was ten feet above street level. A rickety wooden porch ascended from the sidewalk to my door. I opened the door, stepped outside, and, for the first time, picked up the Sunday edition of the
Post
.
The street was dead quiet. On the other side of the block, a middle-aged couple in their Sunday best walked toward the church at the far end of the street. Birds chirped.

I dumped milk, a banana, and some peanut butter into a blender, then reconsidered the previous night.

Champagne had been fun. She didn’t dress like a hooker, so she wouldn’t draw undue attention from my neighbors. She was willing to assume all the risk of copping. She held the money. She made the buy. She carried the rocks until we got to my place.

If I happened to be on S Street when the cops swooped in—if they ever did—well, there was no law against giving someone a ride. The police would know why I was there, but they’d never be able to prove it. The cops might detain me for questioning, and I might suffer some embarrassment. But so long as I wasn’t charged with a crime, my bosses at the
Post
were unlikely to find out about my tawdry activities. There would be no harm, no foul. And thirty-five bucks for a rock and a blow job was a pretty sweet deal.

I stepped into the bedroom and retrieved the balled-up sheet of paper with Champagne’s pager number. I carefully opened it, smoothed it out, and slipped it into my sock drawer.

If the slingers were working that brazenly in the middle of the day, S Street must be an around-the-clock operation. It was a five-minute drive from my apartment. Champagne was clearly connected. I was about to get a nice pay bump courtesy of the
Post
.

I couldn’t see a downside.

Chapter 3

“This Must Be Where God Needs Us”

On a gray, frigid day, pastor Jim Dickerson and demolition man Claude Artis inspected a small wood-frame house on S Street Northwest. The structure stood a few feet from a four-story Victorian that Jim and his humble congregation, a dozen strong, hoped would become their spiritual home, the place they would gather for Sunday services.

It was January 1984. Cops had shooed away the heroin junkies, squatters, hookers, and hustlers who’d made the big brick house at 614 S their own for years. The building would need to be thoroughly cleaned and renovated before it would be of any use as a church. But first, Jim and Claude had to deal with the smaller house, which was also part of the property—and looked as if it might fall over in the first decent breeze.

Jim and Claude crunched their boots over the remnants of a recent snowfall as they circled the sad little building. The front door and windows were long gone. The framing was rotting. The roof looked like two big slabs of Swiss cheese. The whole sorry thing was leaning hard to one side.

Fifteen or so drug dealers were working the other side of the street, near the not-yet-derelict Hostess bakery. Delivery trucks lurched out of the huge building every twenty minutes or so. The inviting smell of freshly baked bread, muffins, and cakes filled the winter air. A couple of the slingers wandered over to a fire burning inside a rusty metal trash can on an empty lot directly across the street from the old wooden house.

The drug dealers eyeballed Jim, Claude, and the demolition man’s crew. Claude hired laborers off the street. Some of them were friends with some of the slingers. Some bought drugs from them.

Claude studied the house. He was compact and muscular, with a thick neck and arms and shoulders that could have belonged to a middleweight boxer. Claude looked like someone who could handle himself in a brawl.

“This bad boy’s done,” he said. “It can’t be saved. I best blow it up.”

Jim nodded in agreement. “I’m afraid you’re right. This structure’s not worth saving. We’re better off knocking it down.”

A tall and lean forty-year-old, Jim wore wire-rim glasses and a beard. He was bald on top, with a fringe of brown hair that ran from ear to ear. He looked like he’d be at home in a college lecture hall.

The slingers who’d gathered near the fire leaned toward one another and exchanged whispers. They threw hard looks at Jim and Claude.

Silently, independently, Jim and Claude came to the same unnerving conclusion: The dope boys were using this little house to hide their stashes of heroin, methamphetamine, and Dilaudid. Now here they were, fixing to blow it up.

Jim rubbed the back of his neck. This was grief he didn’t need. The minister looked at Claude. The two men were good friends. Jim asked Claude what they should do. The demo man pivoted toward the dope boys and said, “Come with me, reverend.”

They were halfway across the street when Claude, in his deep, booming voice, called out, “Listen up, fellas, the reverend wants to talk with you!”

Claude had caught Jim by surprise. Jim could usually yap about anything until the seasons changed, and he’d planned on reaching out to the street dealers soon. But not this soon. Jim felt his pulse quicken as they approached the slingers.

Jim and Claude stopped on one side of the trash can. The dealers gathered on the other side, about five feet away, and stared hard at Jim, murder in their eyes.

The pastor shifted toward Claude until they were standing shoulder to shoulder. Jim blew out a white breath. He was scared, shaking, which he hoped the dope boys would mistake for shivering from the cold.
Help me, God
, Jim prayed to himself as he scanned his audience.

In the next moment, the words came to him.

“Listen, fellas. We’re gonna have to blow up that little house across the street,” Jim said calmly. “So those of you who have your stash there, now’s the time to get it out.”

The dealers looked at the house, then back at Jim.

Jim felt his neck muscles tense. He wondered: What would he do—what could he do—if the drug dealers bucked? What could he do if they declared war on him and his church?

A slinger named Chief stepped up to Jim. Chief was an American Indian, with a bronzed complexion and a ponytail that hung to his waist. He never smiled.

Could really use your help again here, God
, Jim prayed to himself.

Chief extended his hand.

“Well, thank you, Reverend. Thank you so much,” Chief said.

The drug dealer and the minister shook hands. Jim exhaled as a sense of relief and gratitude washed over him.

Chief and the other slingers made a beeline for the doomed house.

Jim grew up a thousand miles from S Street, in a small cracker-box house in the working-class, racially segregated town of Conway, Arkansas. He was born in Fort Smith, hard by the Oklahoma state line, about two hundred miles from Conway. Jim was a toddler when his biological father was put in a state mental hospital. Jim’s mother divorced his father and supported herself and her boy by waitressing. She met and married a doctor, and the family moved to Conway when Jim was in the third grade. Jim’s mom and stepfather had two children, a boy and a girl.

Jim’s stepfather was a good doctor, but he was also a binge drinker. He was kind and fun when he was sober, but when he was drunk, he would scream at the kids and sometimes beat Jim’s mom. He would disappear for as long as two months at a time. Once when he was drunk, he waved around a gun and threatened to kill the entire family. Jim’s mother was also an alcoholic and prescription drug addict. Young Jim never doubted that his mother and stepfather loved him and his siblings. But thanks to their alcoholism, domestic tranquillity never lasted long.

Conway was a speck of a place where everybody knew everybody else’s business. What Jim’s family was going through wasn’t a secret. Many of the town’s residents considered themselves devout Christians, and their failure to help his family angered Jim.

“I hated the hypocrisy of many of the church people. They rejected us and stayed away from our family because we were such a mess,” he said. “On one level I didn’t blame them—but that wasn’t real Christianity.” As the oldest child, Jim assumed responsibility for the family, such as giving his mom money he earned from delivering newspapers and doing odd jobs so she’d have enough money for food.

When Jim was about ten, his stepfather and mother started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Back then, in the fifties, many AA meetings were held in people’s homes. Participants of different ages, races, and social classes were welcome—and all were treated the same. In an AA meeting, a wealthy banker was on the same level as a low-wage janitor.
This
is what Christianity is really about, Jim would realize later on: acceptance, compassion, egalitarianism, people with seemingly little in common coming together to help one another with a common problem. His stepfather and his mother quit drinking for a year, but neither could stay sober.

Jim’s home life didn’t prevent him from having a good time in high school, where he was popular. An average student, Jim was a talented dancer, and he played on the football team. He graduated in 1961 and landed a job with Southwestern Bell, repairing telephone lines on poles seventy-five feet in the air. He was already spending time in bars and at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall with some of his hell-raising childhood friends and telephone-company co-workers. A small organized-crime group operated out of the hall. In an ostensibly dry county, the hall sold booze and ran an illegal gambling enterprise.