The Hustle (13 page)

What I do want is to get as far away from the Northwest as I can. Just as the first shoots of dotcom mania are beginning to burst forth in Seattle, I move to Budapest, Hungary. I find that, in post-Communist Eastern Europe, just about any native English-speaker with even the barest modicum of competence can do well. Shortly after arriving in the country, I start to work at the Ministry of Defense, teaching Hungarian military officers conversational English. I soon land a job as an editor at an English-language business newspaper owned by American expatriates when my predecessor goes missing after a booze bender.

The big stories in Hungary, in the years after the end of the Soviet Union, are globalization and privatization. During socialism, each Eastern European country had maintained factories to produce necessities such as steel and iron instead of importing. The system was inefficient, but it guaranteed employment, even if your job was nothing more than sitting around and stamping papers in triplicate. After 1990, the state either shut down or sold off these relics of the old system. Western corporations such as General Electric relocated factories to Hungary, where they could take advantage of lower labor costs. This ushers in an immense social shift. People suited to the new system—the educated, those who speak English—see their standards of living increase enormously. People who are not prepared for these changes lose their jobs and watch as their pensions shrivel. As a naïf arriving with little idea about anything, I'm astonished at how swiftly a political and economic system that had seemed static and insurmountable can wither. Those who are not ready, and not agile, get left behind.

The years I live in Budapest coincide with a triumphalism about the “end of history” and the ascendance of American-style capitalism. Reminders of Seattle are constant, as the stock prices of companies such as Real Networks and Amazon.com march straight up. I hear about high school classmates who have become millionaires through their stock options in Internet start-ups. I have it pretty good, too. I meet my future wife, an Australian who works at her country's embassy in Budapest. We move into a massive apartment with two balconies overlooking a square and a view out to the Buda Castle. I can't believe my fortune after having arrived in the city with a backpack.

But with all the euphoria about the “New Economy,” I don't really feel changed at all, just relocated. The memory of Tyrell sometimes creeps back on me. I remember swimming in a lake when I was a kid, treading water, my legs churning beneath the dark surface. Sometimes a tendril of weed would brush my foot, sending a cold shiver through my body.

After three years in Eastern Europe, it feels like time to leave. I return to the United States and begin graduate school in the Bay Area, while my fiancée goes back to Australia to pursue her own studies. The dotcom crash has already darkened the sunny promises of the Internet boom. A month after my arrival, terrorists fly planes into the World Trade Center. History is restarted, an unpredictable force that swirls and eddies and carries us all along at its whim.

I live in the cramped attic of a house in Berkeley. Sitting there at night, my mind often returns to the team, and especially Tyrell. I look up the story published after his death in an online database and read it again. It doesn't give a reason for his murder. The reporter had pieced together a few details—a bust for selling crack and a habit of hanging out at an after-hours gambling club—but no one had any idea why Tyrell had been killed. In the article, people who had known him call Tyrell “likable” and “not rebellious.”

Reading the story again, it becomes clear that the reason Tyrell's death was considered worthy of the front page was his involvement in integration programs—there was one where wealthy families from the suburbs “adopted” poorer ones at holiday times; and there was our team. The reporter spoke to Coach McClain, who told her, “We thought it was a good idea to expose these different kids to each other, to combine inner-city kids with rich white kids. And it worked.”

I wonder if it had actually “worked” for anyone. Did any of the white kids still think about it? What had happened to my black teammates who'd gotten into private schools through Randy Finley's efforts? It was nearly twenty years since we'd all practiced together in the Lakeside gym. How had my teammates fared? What kind of men were they? Did anyone, like me, miss the camaraderie we got from playing together?

It's only a short flight up to Seattle, so I decide to try to find out. In October 2002, while still in graduate school, I make my first trip back. I don't expect to write a book. I just really want to know what became of these guys.

Tyrell, naturally, is foremost in my thoughts. The other player who has really stuck in my head is Myran. He had always been so outrageous. Since he had such an ability to chatter, I guess that he is probably a salesman. I imagine household items such as vacuum cleaners. I can see Myran loading up on commissions.

I proceed through word of mouth. I get Sean's number through his dad, who still works as a stockbroker. I meet Sean on a Sunday afternoon at a pub in the Madison Park neighborhood, near the shore of Lake Washington. As the Seahawks play on the televisions hung on the walls of the busy tavern, Sean, who is now a prosecutor, laughs when he remembers the team. The first things that come to mind are “playing games in rotten gyms” and riding around in “that brown, piece-of-shit van.”

Our conversation is brief because Sean has to return to the office to work. He tells me about the whereabouts of some of the Lakeside players, including Dino, who he says did very well during the dotcom boom. It happens that Dino's parents own an Italian restaurant a few doors down from the pub. We walk to it on our way out. Dino's dad is at the counter. He tries Dino on his cell phone, chats with him a minute, and hands the phone to me.

Some teammates aren't so easy to find. Though both McClains have seen JT around town, they have no idea how to get ahold of him. Willie Sr. has bumped into him at Safeway and had some words. Willie Jr. tells me that JT generally looks pretty run-down. “It's like life's eating away at him,” Will says.

I go to the courthouse and pull JT's criminal records. He's pled guilty to two felony charges in King County. I type a letter and mail it to the three addresses I find in the papers. A few days later, JT calls and leaves an excited message on my voice mail. He wants to get together as soon as possible.

We meet at a Starbucks in what, not long ago, was a rough corner of the Central Area. When he sees me, JT, who wears jeans and a Los Angeles Lakers warm-up jacket, walks over and grabs me into a hug. At about six feet and 280 pounds, he dwarfs me. As we sit down, he slumps back as if molding into the chair. He has a thick black beard and soft brown eyes that seem to implore for something as he speaks. His words tumble out in a mixture of manic enthusiasm and wistfulness. “The team was like family to me,” he says. “Sometimes you only get one chance in life. That was mine, and I blew it.”

I find that Damian has given perhaps the most thought of anyone to our team and what it meant—and what it did not. On one of my first nights in town, I drive twenty miles down the freeway, exiting just south of the airport to a neighborhood that was known as a home to working-class whites when we were kids. Driving west on a busy road, I pass a series of apartment complexes with stately names that don't match the utilitarian nature of the actual developments. Damian Joseph lives in a grouping of town houses called, for no discernible reason, Cedar Estates.

He meets me at the door, wearing black slacks, loafers, and a dark purple sweater. We walk past the couch and TV in the small living room and into the kitchen. Damian's wife, Michelle, comes in to say hello before disappearing into the back. Damian pours us glasses of nuclear-green Kool-Aid from a jug kept in the refrigerator.

A wide-shouldered man at a little under six feet but more than two hundred pounds, he maintains a loose-limbed, coiled athleticism. His hair is shaved close to his head, and the ghost of a mustache haunts his upper lip. When he wants to make a point, his eyes narrow so that a “V” takes shape in the lines of his forehead, pointing down at his nose. If he's just said something that comes out as strange, amusing, or hard to believe, he leans back and exclaims, “Yes, sir!”

As we sit across from one another at his kitchen table, Damian and I fall into an easy banter. We haven't seen each other since high school, but he's as eager to talk about the team as I am. In the intervening years, it has come to seem like a curious anomaly in each of our lives.

Well into the conversation, Damian asks if I recall the old taunt that Lakeside students chanted when one of our sports teams was losing: “It's all right, it's OK, you'll all work for us someday.” He tells me that he remembers hearing it during a basketball game against Rainier Beach High School, a mostly poor, mostly black public school in the South End.

I haven't thought about it in a long time, but as soon as Damian mentions it, the memory springs back. I recall sitting in the bleachers, my Lakeside classmates, the upperclassman leading the crowd.

“It was embarrassing,” I say.

I ask Damian why, after all this time, he remembers that particular cheer.

“I hate to say it,” he says, “but it was probably true.”

Part Three

Money, Work, Career

To talk about race is fundamentally to wrestle with what kind of people are we, really? What kind of nation are we, really? Not just how many material toys we have, not just whether the economy's okay for a certain slice of the population, stock markets and budget deals and so forth and so on. What kind of people are we, really?

—Cornel West

Strictly for the Money

When Damian was a sophomore at Seattle Prep, the school where Randy Finley had enrolled him, some younger kids who lived on his block asked him why he wasn't dealing drugs—it was a pretty good way to make some cash, they said.

At the time, Damian was already living what he calls a “double life,” shuttling between the small house in South Seattle where he lived with his mom and his sister and a private school that was nearly all white and wealthy. He remembers going to a classmate's house and seeing that it was four stories tall and equipped with Ping-Pong and foosball tables, a pinball machine, a swimming pool, and an indoor basketball court. What impressed him most was the giant refrigerator loaded with food; when he went to houses like that, he always made sure to eat as much as he could. He also was tired of the other black guys from our team ragging on him for being poor. When he thought over the idea of dealing, he was receptive to making some fast money. He went in with a friend—they bought a pound of weed, broke it up, and started to sell it to people they knew.

JT and his mom lived near the intersection of Twenty-third Avenue and Union Street, in the heart of the Central Area. By 1986 there were kids out on the corner dealing. JT was already friendly with a group of older guys who lived in a house down the street—they used to call out to him when he walked by in his football uniform on the way to practice—so he stole some cocaine from his mom's stash and brought it to them. “They were like, ‘Wow, man, how'd you get this?' ” he says. The guys in the house had some friends who knew how to cook it up, and JT had his first supply of crack to sell. “I'd just walk out my door, walk down the street and hit the corner and there's people ready to buy,” he says. “I used to watch the older guys and say, ‘I'm going to be just like them. One day I'm going to be able to jump in my drop-top Cadillac and get me some rims, and I'm going to be able to roll with them.' ”

Tyrell lived with his parents right around the corner from JT and saw the same things. The most trouble he'd gotten into as a kid was shoplifting some Polo shirts from a department store downtown. Now Tyrell, along with his older brother, Donnico, started to see guys they'd known their whole lives—and whose parents had grown up with their parents—with nice clothes and cars, flashing cash. “They were ghetto celebrities to us. Everybody loved them, and they had the jewelry and the money,” Donnico says. “What you have to understand is you walk out of your apartment, this is in your face every day. And then your friend is doing this and doing that and wearing these shoes and you're not, so, ‘Hey, let me try this.' That's how it really broke down—‘Let me try this.' Because we both started off with really four rocks apiece. It went from there.”

While the corner at Twenty-third and Union was the center of the world for guys like JT and Tyrell, it was just one of thousands of end points in a global supply chain that started back in the jungles of Colombia. From there, it flowed up through the Caribbean, into Mexico, over the border into the United States, up to the street gangs of Los Angeles, and then north on Interstate 5 to Seattle, where the product finally filtered down to the final link that put it in the hands of consumers. The drug and the money hit with such force that—just as the dotcom explosion would do a decade later with a different part of Seattle—it overturned nearly everything. Suddenly, at age fifteen, you could pocket several thousand dollars on a good day just by going to your neighborhood corner.

“It was easy,” Damian says. “Quick money, you didn't have to work. There was high demand. And I didn't have any sense. I was just ignorant, unlearned, and foolish.

“Other people, they have a nice car, they have nice clothes, maybe they have a pretty girlfriend, all these things, and so you're like, OK, you know? Just not having what everybody else had gave you the desire to want to get that. So, OK, what's the quickest way to do this? Well, I can go get a pound of weed and sell that, an ounce of crack, I can sell that and make it quick.

“You know, you go to a club, and everybody else has Jordans on, and you want to step in with some Jordans. If you don't have the power to resist it, you'll get sucked in. And that's not just in the black community, that's all over. I mean look at the people at Enron, they got sucked in to that, they're just on a bigger scale. You get sucked in and it's hard to resist that, it's like, ‘I can make some pretty good money here, so let me go ahead and do this.' ”

Cocaine, in one form or another, has been getting people high a long time—indigenous South Americans chewed the leaves of coca plants for energy before the arrival of the Spaniards in the 1500s. In 1859, a German chemist figured out how to extract cocaine from coca leaves, which allowed the drug to be incorporated into medicines, anesthetics, and commercial products. Several years later in Atlanta, a former Confederate soldier and chemist began to sell a “health tonic” that included an infusion of the drug; in 1886 he named it “Coca-Cola.” At the time, cocaine could be bought legally as powder, in cigarettes, and in a form that could be shot into the veins. It was hailed as a therapy for clogged sinuses and hay fever. By the turn of the century, the drug was available in hundreds of patent medicines that were little more than cocaine and flavored syrup.

In the early 1900s, attitudes toward lightly regulated narcotic drugs such as opium and cocaine began to change. Not only were addiction rates going up, but also the drugs became associated with minority groups. On the West Coast, opium was connected with the Chinese laborers who had come to work on the railroads, and its use became considered “un-American.” In the South, it was “feared that Negro cocaine users might become oblivious of their prescribed bounds and attack white society,” writes David Musto, a professor of medical history at Yale. Among whites, rumors held that cocaine gave black men superhuman strength and made them crazy for sex with white women. Musto, in his research, has found no evidence at all of high cocaine use among southern blacks. But these weren't the beliefs of just a few rednecks; in 1914, for example, the
New York Times
published an article titled “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends' are a New Southern Menace,” claiming that “murder and insanity” were “increasing among lower class blacks” due to cocaine “sniffing.” That year, Congress passed the Harrison Act, which allowed the federal government to regulate and tax the import, production, and distribution of narcotics. A black market for cocaine developed, prices shot up, and the drug became, for several decades, a boutique thrill.

It didn't really begin to come back into the mainstream until the 1960s, when drugs of all types began to be more widely smoked, injected, and snorted. In the 1969 movie
Easy Rider
, the two bikers played by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda smuggle coke inside their gas tanks, their drug-dealing fueling their travels across the country in pursuit of the American Dream. In the 1970s, the drug helped power the rise of disco and club culture. Cocaine's lofty price tag meant that it was mainly a high for people with plenty of cash. The drug was viewed as fairly innocuous—it pepped you up, increased your sexual prowess, and made you, at least in your own head, a great conversationalist.

As the appetite for cocaine grew, Colombian cartels did exactly what would be expected of commodity suppliers in a global economy: They increased production (the big cocaine cartels operated what were essentially factories in the jungles of Colombia, complete with landing strips, healthcare facilities, and dorms for workers). In the late 1970s, huge quantities of coke began to flow north into the United States. The full-blown arrival of cocaine culture was reflected in the early 1980s in the movie
Scarface
, with the classic over-the-top performance by Al Pacino, and the television show
Miami Vice
, which often climaxed with the pastel-clad detectives Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs blowing away a coke dealer and his henchmen.

With more product available, the next logical step was figuring out how to expand the market. Cocaine had been smoked in the form of “freebase” in the 1970s, but the process of making it was tedious and involved combustible chemicals. Sometime in the early 1980s, someone—it's thought the method was invented in the Caribbean, where tons of cocaine transited before being smuggled into the United States—realized that all you had to do to make smokable cocaine was to mix it with baking soda and cook it. The result delivered a short but all-consuming high that some people compare to the intensity of an orgasm.

This new variation of coke could be broken down and sold in $5 “rocks,” making what was formerly a luxury product available to the masses. It was especially well received in urban areas, where black unemployment was double the national average or more, and there was both a supply of users seeking escape and a ready-made distribution network of young men looking to make some cash. On the West Coast, cocaine was brought up through Mexico and smuggled over the border, where it was then sold to already established street gangs in Los Angeles. They converted the powder to crack and began to sell it in their territories, with violence often erupting when one set infringed on the turf of another.

With their own markets saturated, the Los Angeles gangs began moving the drug to other cities, which was as simple as loading the trunk and heading up the freeway. A web of family connections dating back to the black diaspora from the South decades earlier provided the backbone of the network. One of Damian's sources, for example, was a relative from the Inglewood section of L.A. who also was a Blood. JT, who had cousins in L.A., hooked up with a Crip who became his supplier.

In early 1986—as we were playing on the court—crack was suddenly everywhere, if not in reality then at least in the media. That year,
Newsweek
and
U.S. News & World Report
compared the drug's spread to that of “medieval plagues”;
Time
called it “the issue of the year”; the
New York Times
ran articles on rock cocaine spreading to the wealthy Connecticut suburbs. In the fall, CBS aired “48 Hours on Crack Street,” which featured then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani going undercover to score on a corner in New York City; the show was the network's highest-rated news program in five years. Three days later, NBC responded with its own report, “Cocaine Country.” On
NBC Nightly News
, anchor Tom Brokaw informed viewers that crack was “flooding America.” That June, college basketball star Len Bias, the first-round draft pick of the Boston Celtics, died of what was reported as a crack overdose (it later came out that he had been using powder cocaine, which caused cardiac arrhythmia), adding to the sense that crack was everywhere. As
Newsweek
put it in August 1986, the “plague is all but universal.”

The first time crack really registered in my consciousness came that March, when a different issue of
Newsweek
landed in our mailbox. The headline
KIDS AND COCAINE
was splashed on the front. “The new coke goes by many names on the street, but it is usually called ‘crack' or ‘rock,' ” the magazine cautioned breathlessly. “It is smoked, not snorted, and the resulting intoxication is far more intense than that of snorted cocaine—much quicker, much more euphoric and much, much more addictive.” One toke, warned an expert quoted in the article, could lead to “instantaneous addiction.” The hyperbole continued: “In New York, eager buyers queue up outside crack houses like movie fans outside a theater—and the lines, according to one drug agent, ‘are loaded with kids.' There are white kids, black kids, Hispanic kids—kids from the ghetto and kids from the suburbs.”

It's doubtful that this multicultural group of teenage crack enthusiasts ever existed except in the imagination of a
Newsweek
reporter and his source, but the image of crack as a “smoke it once and be forever addicted” drug was prevalent. Crack is certainly addictive, and it hit the hardest in areas where people were looking to escape or were suffering from untreated depression or other mental health problems (you can think of rock cocaine as the poor man's Prozac). In Seattle, the hard drugs of choice for white people have typically been heroin and, more recently, methamphetamine. Crack, though certainly not confined to blacks only, hit the Central Area and the South End like a tsunami.

Nick Metz came on to the Seattle police force as a twenty-year-old in 1983, working the Rainier Valley in South Seattle. He remembers the beat as relatively mellow at the start—in his first two years on the job, he didn't personally respond to a single gunshot call. When there was violence, it was almost always of the domestic or bar-fight variety. Drug dealing remained mostly out of sight, done from taverns, in workplaces, or in private homes. In about 1987, though, it felt as if he woke up one morning and the world had changed. “All of a sudden, we're getting lots of gunshot calls, lots of gunshot victims, getting calls left and right from neighbors, residences, and businesses about people hanging out on street corners and dealing drugs,” Metz says. “And then obviously the pressure on the police department began to mount, ‘You're not doing enough, you need to do more.' ”

The arrival of crack broke the Central Area and South End of Seattle into a number of separate fiefdoms, each populated mainly by teenage kids. You could track them straight down Twenty-third Avenue. The first spot was at the northern end of the Central Area, at the intersection of Twenty-third and Madison, the area where William Grose settled in the 1880s. Running south on Twenty-third for one and a half miles through the Central Area, you came to the intersections with Union Street—where Tyrell and JT hung out—down to Cherry, past Garfield High School, and on to Jackson. After Jackson Street, Twenty-third Avenue runs another mile south and heads down a hill before it spills into Rainier Avenue South, which soon crosses Martin Luther King Jr. Way, which it parallels through the South End. That area had its own corners, such as Rainier and Othello Street, where Myran sometimes could be found.