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

meant.
    One time, when he was twelve, Chino went to see Deborah in a psychiatric unit. He brought her a knish, her favorite food. Deborah obsessively asked Chino who he was having sex with. Chino explained he wasn’t having sex with anyone, but Deborah kept asking, insistent. Looking back on this, Chino would realize she was trying to give him all the guidance she could, on the tiny range of subjects on which she felt able to dispense advice, knowing time was short.
    The last time Deborah came home from her stints in and out of jail, she announced she had found Jesus, and she was wearing a dress. Chino couldn’t remember ever seeing her in a dress before. She had a boyfriend, a real jerk, whom Chino hated—but he was at least reassured to see that his mother was, for the first time in Chino’s life, undrugged.
    It didn’t last long. One day Chino came home and his mother was frantically searching the house, looking in strange places, for something unnamed, unseen. She believed something was hidden inside the radiator. She was due to take Chino to the movies, but she was clearly in a crack frenzy—and soon she ran out of the house screaming, vanishing down the street. Chino started to run after her, but then thought to himself: “I’m not going to fucking run after her. I’m tired of looking for her. If she goes, she goes.”
    Later that night, there was a call from the hospital. Chino and Mrs. Hardin went to see her. The body in the bed, stuffed with tubes, looked incomprehensible to Chino. Deborah’s tiny body had blown up as if she had already been filled with embalming fluid. Her face and hands were distended and misshapen. The nurses said Deborah had been trying to rob a woman on the bus, and when the police arrived to arrest her, they beat her. But her liver was already destroyed and she had water on the brain. Deborah would never wake up again. She was thirty-three years old. At the funeral, Deborah’s boyfriend sneered at Chino. “So,” he said, “you’ll cry for her now?”
    Not long after, Chino found his corner, and started selling his crack. And three years after that, when he was sixteen, he would smoke it for the first time. “I wanted to know,” he would say to me years later, “what she chose over me.”

    Chino was first put into a jumpsuit and caged when he was thirteen. He was sent to Spofford Juvenile Detention Facility in the Bronx as punishment for his violent “street shit” against other teenagers, which he carried out because “the dealing puts me in positions where my default emotion is anger and my default position is retaliation.”
    The paint was peeling on the walls. There was a stench of mold in the air. There was no fresh air anywhere—it was almost hard to breathe. Nobody asked if he was okay. Nobody tried to talk to him about why he was there. Their manner wasn’t cold or aggressive: it was utterly indifferent. The staff looked at the kids as objects on a loading line that it was their job to briefly inspect. As Chino puts it, instead of bottles or sneakers, this loading line happens to hold humans. Do you have any medical conditions? Are you sexually active? Next.
    In this child prison, you could watch TV, watch TV, or watch TV. Oh—or you could play Spades. Chino remembers: “To say I felt alone would be an understatement. I felt like an animal . . . When you go to prison, the one thing you got to check at the door is not your wallet or your jewelry. It’s your humanity.”
    He was being taught, in stages, that life is a series of shakedowns and shoot-outs, punctuated by boredom.
    In prison, “being humane can get you fucking hurt . . . Simple shit like, [if] you’re home in the world and somebody knocks on your door and says, ‘Can I borrow some toothpaste, a cup of sugar?’ you’re like—why not? It’s fucking sugar. Who cares? Take the whole fucking thing . . . You don’t do that shit in jail . . . You can’t do that shit. That just opens up