The Residue Years (8 page)

The DJ calls couple skate and plays a slow jam. Here comes Kim gliding off the floor, her hair floating behind her. Babe, come, she says, reaching out. Get up, will you.

Now? I say.

Yes! she says, and tugs me off the bench and onto the floor. We catch each other hand in tender hand and lock a tandem stride for laps. The DJ mixes one slow song into the next. The chick I hit rides by snickering with her bright-clothed crew. Superskate
flies by in a backwards scrawl and nudges me into a stumble. My girl grips me tight, keeps me steady.

Look at us, she says.

Right, I say. Look.

That I've been searching for the same things ever since.
—Grace

It's like lightning, like love, like the cure. And if you haven't felt it you can't judge—or at least shouldn't. If you haven't felt it, how could you ever really know what us addicts, us experts, are up against in this life of programs and counselors and sponsors, what we face because of or in spite of our earned expertise? Ask, and if any one of us is telling the truth we'll admit that our kind of lying is like a religion.

This is why they say no one does this alone. Why they say once an addict equals always one. Why they say your program membership should be lifelong. Why they mandate ninety meetings your first ninety days. It's tough to guess how many are here except to say that it's more maybe than expected and never enough as it should be. Up front a new group leader—he's a shaggy redhead with freckled arms—sits on a table and sips a steaming mug. He raises a hand and waits until the gabbing stops, until the members scrape their chairs into place; he waits and clears his throat and sets aside his drink and stands.

Hello, I'm an addict and my name is Randy, he says. Welcome to the Learning to Live chapter of Narcotics Anonymous. I'd like to open this meeting with a moment of silence for the addict
who still suffers. This settles us. Randy hops off the table and pads near a portable chalkboard.

Is there anyone attending their first meeting? he says. If so, welcome. You are the most important people here. All we ask is that everyone present follow one law: Never attend a meeting with drugs or paraphernalia on your person. If you're carrying, please take it outside and leave it and we'll welcome you back. This protects our meeting place and the NA fellowship as a whole. Randy moves near the first row of seats. He's short and soft, a mix that usually gives grown men a complex, but somehow commanding. You have to make five years or more to lead a group, which means for us—or at least those of us know who've been in this place, those who've tried and failed, who've quit and joined—Randy is an apostle. If you've used today, please seek out a fellow member at the break or after the meeting, he says. It costs nothing to belong. You are a member when you say you are.

As is my habit, I scan the shoes of the members in my row—it ain't a clean pair among them—then off to my sides. My neighbor's arm is sprent with needle pricks, his thumbnail discolored. No way to justify this life, my life, but slamming a needle is a whole other harm. Randy leads us in the
we
version of the Serenity Prayer:
God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference
.

We finish and members volunteer—everyone's always so eager to submit—to read from the basic text.

Who is an addict?

What is the program?

Why are we here?

How does it work?

The twelve traditions.

The meetings begin the same. So goes a theory of resurrection.

An addict, any addict, can stop using, lose the desire to use, and learn a new way of life
, they say.

They say and they say and it sounds so easy, as if living clean is no more than hitting the right switch, as if it takes something less than heroics to face history dead-on, to accept the life we've earned. The meetings are meant to be havens, but not everyone comes for safety. Last week. I wasn't but few blocks away last meeting when this guy approached me—breath smelling like the worst breath—claiming he had what I need. I'd seen him in the meeting, reciting the steps, even stuffing money in the seventh principle basket, seen him running his glazed eyes up and down the rows. No, I think I got what
you
need, I said, and offered him a handful of mints.

We make fearless and searching inventories.

Hello, I'm an addict and my name is Mark. My drug of choice is meth. I used to deal it, then,
bam
, my first hit. Couldn't breathe without the shit after that. Every day spent chasing the next score. The next hit and nothing else. Up for a friggin week straight sometimes, getting high, no food, a sip of water when I remembered. A real addict too. Would piss myself if the dope wasn't finished and a trip to the bathroom meant missing a hit. It wasn't long before people I'd known all my life turned their heads when they saw me coming, seen someone resembling the old me, with the way, on a good run, I'd shrink down to a percent of myself, skin with a few sharp sticks inside. Got so bad I couldn't friggin stand to walk past a mirror. The dope dropped
me so low that I broke in my mom's place and stole her wedding ring. Worthless man, no other way to put it. Scum who didn't deserve to live.

We make fearless and searching inventories and tell the fearful to keep coming back. Keep coming back and it works. We can stand up and testify when we so choose. But what would I tell them? That the first time I took my eldest. That Dawn, my best friend, promised I'd feel better and forget. That I've been waiting for that to happen ever since. Though when we tell our story, a bit of our trouble becomes another's, there will be no fearless and searching inventory for me. Not today. My business is my business until it isn't.

Randy announces Cleaniversaries, and awardees stroll up to accept their tags. It makes me think of the time I earned a tag, years ago, my first stint in NA. Was proud of it too, but not proud enough to show it. Too afraid of what people might think, or, worse, what they might say. The awardees palm their foil-scripted color tags and stroll back to their seats while the rest of us boom our hands together. Honest, it makes me jealous seeing them. Makes me anxious for my time to come. And when it arrives this time, who cares who sees? When it comes this time, let them all see.

We pass around the seventh-principle basket. We search for something to give, singles mostly, a few fives and tens, an odd twenty. I scrounge for dollars, the best I can do. We read up to the twelfth tradition, the first one I learned by heart:
Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities
.

* * *

The other night I watched a show on drugs. It talked about this study where they rigged rats to a machine that shot them with cocaine every time they pressed a bar. The man on the show explained that the rats pressed the bar at the expense of food, sex, sleep, pressed even when it meant they'd suffer electric shock, kept right on pressing for hits until they fell out dead.

“But what if this is?”
—Champ

Ain't a spot to squeeze in nowhere in sight, which shouldn't really be no big old surprise, since most days, meaning a day like today, finding a place to park near campus is like defying physics or catching a lightning bolt or slapping bullets out of midair. Been so bad, twice I wrote a letter (didn't send either one of them, though) to our crater-face school president beseeching him to increase the meter count or better yet build a new garage so fools don't have to wander miles upon miles trying to find a spot for their ride. By the time I find a spot, by my kick around watch, I've missed almost half of Professor Haskins's Advanced Speech class. With no change for the meter and no time to get none, I leave the car parked on a prayer, meter blinking expired, leave it paralleled, throw on my backpack, and zip down Broadway, hustling around the tennis courts to the canopied park blocks and the pebble-paved pathway where last winter I slipped on a patch of ice and busted my ass.

And here's the cold part about being late to Haskins's class: The room is too small to sneak in unnoticed, not a chance of it, so I burst into a dead sprint. Okay, okay (there goes the hype again), something close to a dead sprint is more like it, what with
leaves on the ground and the ache of bruising my ass-cheeks months back is still fresh on my mind. My legs kicking and my arms pumping so fast they blur the words of the dude with the Santa Claus beard proselytizing from an overturned bucket. Legs kicking and arms pumping past nerds plowing through notes, past pretty young things lap-balancing encyclopedia-thick texts, past jocks strolling with knotted tenny shoes looped over their shoulders, past huddles of exchange students, all the while the smell of roasted lamb, roasted chicken, and seasoned ground beef taunting my empty gut. But ain't no time for snacking.
Pow!
I duck into one building, blast through another and another with that juiced-up Olympian speed, me zagging through clogs of striving Einsteins till I reach Haskins's room, stoop to catch my breath, fix my laces, and pull my shirt from where it's stuck to my skin from sweat.

A head or two twist around when I walk in. Haskins pauses long enough for me to find a seat. Mr. Thomas, he says, his voice deep and scratchy. (Imagine an old blues singer: a B.B. this or Muddy that.) Nice of you to join us. I was worried you'd miss your turn, he says. How long before you're ready? The thick of Haskins's specs, you'd believe him if he claimed he could see outer space. He twirls a stick of chalk. He settles in a desk in the front and crosses his legs.

It won't take long, I say. I fleece my pockets for a tissue, pat my face, search my bag for my speech, and ramble up to the lectern. I clear my throat, look out at the room, a class as full as it's been all quarter, at Haskins sitting in the front row, a critique sheet on his desk. Good morning, I say. My name is Shawn Thomas and my speech is called “The Bias Effect.”

* * *

Here's the forty-four-billion-dollar question:

What's the link between the NBA lottery and America's War on Drugs?

The answer: Leonard Kevin Bias.

The über-ballyhooed Len Bias, that is.

[Pause. Eyes.]

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the night the Boston Celtics selected the former Maryland Terrapin with the number two pick in the NBA draft. The six-foot-eight small forward with the liquid jumper and bionic legs was everybody's pick for the next coming, a talent to rival Michael Jordan, some said maybe better than Jordan, a player who could fuel the league for years to come. Well, Bias didn't transform the B-ball universe alive, but his death from a cocaine overdose forty-eight hours after that draft sure has metamorphosed America.

[Pause. Eyes.]

Soon after Bias's death, House Speaker Tip O'Neill (rest in peace), let's call him Commissioner Tip O'Neill, inflamed by the death of a player who'd become a neutron star in what was known as the DMV, and whom Tip, not ironically the representative of Boston, believed had died of a crack overdose because he was black, convinced his Democrats they needed a swift and stern response.

If you think Commissioner Tip's game plan was all about Bias and pursuit of the greatest public good, think again. It was an election year and the donkeys were dead set on socking it to the GOP, who'd won two years prior in no small part by convincing voters their rivals were “too soft on crime.”

All right, so even if the Dems' motives weren't wholly pure, at least they had the sense to seek counsel. There was no way an
experienced group of lawmakers could fathom drafting a bill without research, facts, testimonies, expert opinions.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

[Eyes.]

The response of Commissioner Tip and his collective of vote-seeking senators was about as soft as the bad-boy Detroit Pistons. That answer was called the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The bill, which volleyed for a spate between the House and the Senate, was ratified that October; it passed sans a single secondary expert opinion, with all of zero hearings, without conversation the first with a single person from the Bureau of Prisons, minus insight from even one judge, sitting or retired or dead and brought back to life.

[Eyes.]

It was a tough, big, attention-grabbing bill, infamous for a draconian-like feature that had been outlawed since the 1970s: a mandatory minimum, more specifically the hundred-to-one ratio.

[Pause. Pause. Eyes.]

What that ratio means is this: it takes a hundred times the amount of soft cocaine to trigger the same penalty for crack cocaine.

Tip and his boys set the triggers for first-time offenders at five and fifty grams. Five grams of what old-school dealers called “ready rock” earns a five-year federal bid. Fifty grams earns a ten-year set. By contrast, you'd need five hundred and five thousand grams of soft cocaine for that much time behind bars.

[Pause. Eyes.]

Let's put that in furthur perspective? The average role player wandering the streets with five grams, what amounts to a few
rocks, in his pocket would receive the same sentence as a team starter toting a half kilo.

It means the sixth-mantype dealer arrested with fifty grams on his person, what amounts to the size of a jumbo meatball, is subject to the same sentence as an all-league dealer caught with five kilos!

Now that we all know the numbers, can we agree they don't add up? That the math adds up in the worst way.

[Pause.]

Now here's another billion-dollar question. Which ethnic group is most sentenced to the unsportsmanlike bids?

Answer: The lion's share don't look nothing like Commissioner Tip and his team of rah-rah politicians.

[Pause. Eyes.]

Before you accuse me of playing the race card, check out a few more stats

Nationwide, blacks make up eighty-two percent of the cocaine defendants, while whites and Hispanics make up two-thirds of cocaine
users
!