Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs Read Free

relative, Lucille Hardin, an old and old-school Southern black woman who had come to New York from South Carolina and earned her living making brassieres. Mrs. Hardin didn’t talk much about her childhood in the segregated South, except to say proudly that she never said “yes’m” to any white man, and that she worked on the assembly lines in World War Two to save her country.
    Lucille Hardin raised Deborah as her own child, adoring her and spoiling her as if she were a little doll. But the word in the family was that at some point in her adolescence, Deborah was kidnapped by a group of men and gang-raped. She was never quite the same again. Nobody seems to know the details of it, or when she started soothing the pain it caused with the jab of a needle and the numbing of heroin. Mrs. Hardin paid for Deborah to go to rehab a few times, but nothing worked for long. She was sunk far enough into addiction to catch the first wave of crack in the early 1980s.
    Deborah would break in and take anything she could to get her next fix from the local gangsters. Her adopted mother would frequently have to call the police on her. It was on one occasion, when Deborah was twenty-two and in her mother’s house, that Victor showed up.
    Long after, Chino will describe this, the night of his conception, with a controlled anger. Cops could rape with impunity “because who’s going to believe a drug addict, right? Who’s going to believe somebody who’s addicted to a substance and will do anything to get that substance, including lie? Who’s going to believe somebody who’s been in and out of prison the majority of their adult life?”
    He came into the room that had been Deborah’s all her life and was going to be Chino’s for all of his childhood, too. Nobody knows now what took place next. Rose told Chino it was a rape, because that is what Deborah told her. Years later, Chino will wonder: “Maybe—I don’t know. I totally think he raped my mother. But I also think that—maybe—some prostitution stuff happened. Or [she] traded freedom for sex.” Was that common then? “It’s common now,” he says in 2012.
    Deborah went into labor in a bar. Chino was born with a severe blood disorder, in a hospital a few blocks away from where Arnold Rothstein died. He weighed only a few pounds, and he had a thin layer of skin over his eyes. The doctors said this was the result of his mother’s drug use during pregnancy, and they thought he was blind and would be mentally disabled.
    Just as her mother had abandoned her, Deborah immediately abandoned Chino—and the same Mrs. Hardin, now in her sixties, took in the baby and raised him, too, as her own. She was a strict grandmother: she had grown up in a place and time when disobedient kids were told to go to the woods to find a branch to be beaten with. It was called “picking your switch.” But, at the same time, she was an old woman, and her powers to discipline, or to understand this new little child, were fading.
    Chino called Mrs. Hardin “Ma.” Every now and then, he was taken to a strange place to see Deborah. He saw only that she was a short, wiry woman who wore men’s clothes and had a smile just like Chino’s. Deborah, he says later, “was my biological mother [and] only in that sense.” Some part of Deborah never forgot her child, and longed for him. One day, she turned up in Flatbush and took the toddler Chino away by the hand, so he could be hers, for once. They hid out for days, not telling anyone where they were. It was a motel. The police arrived. They said they were looking “for Victor’s daughter.”
    All those years, it turned out, Victor had kept an eye on his child from a distance, and when he heard Chino had been kidnapped, his colleagues rallied to find the kid.
    Years later, Deborah snatched him again. When I spoke to him about it, Chino remembered playing in a dollhouse with a little girl and eating chips, when—suddenly—a woman Deborah owed money to