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Contents this page were published in the May/June, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1998 WFP Collective, Inc.
(Part One)
The following events occurred roughly as they are described in a smallish, southeastern city. Names have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent.
History has a funny way of sneaking up to bite us on the butt. The thought crossed my mind not too long ago upon hearing a snippet of Curtis Mayfield's "Fred Is Dead" blaring from a passing car stereo. Mayfield's SUPERFLY album got a lot of play with my drug-counselor colleagues and me back in the day. It was a good party record, and there was the added frisson of being able to fill Mayfield's stark landscape with the shades of recently deceased "clients." There were a lot of dead clients, some of the first casualties in the "war on drugs" Richard Nixon fatefully declared on May 1, 1972. Of the many things for which Nixon will be justly reviled, it is this vacuous, politically expedient declaration that has inflicted the greatest suffering here and abroad, imprisoning armies of the poor, enforcing a smarmy ideology of retribution and repression upon our ruling elites, and carelessly deconstructing our carefully constructed constitutional rights. But in the fall of 1972 such thoughts did not cloud my intellectual horizon - if I could be said to have had such a thing. I was an unwitting recruit in Nixon's war, a traitor then to my own pleasure-loving inclinations, and a shadowy fugitive from my most deeply held, present convictions.
I lose a job and find one...
I was working in a leather shop in those days. Larry, the proprietor, stayed in the back, making belts, hats, fringed vests and other then-fashionable accouterments. I manned the counter, taking receipts, selling waterbeds and drug paraphernalia. One day, a couple, Lavon and Belle, came in. They seemed to take an instant and intense liking to me. They were older - in their 30's - and black, and I was flattered that these inexpressibly hip people should hold so high an opinion of me. I was pleased that they became frequent visitors, until, that is, I saw Belle (who I had always thought hung back out of shyness while Lavon, leaning on the counter, held forth with me) slipping one of Larry's intricately tooled, $50 belts into her handbag.
Any worldly person knows where I'm going here. Lavon and Belle had been ripping me off for weeks. Larry did an inventory, discovering a shortfall of over a thousand dollars, a lot of money in those days, and terminated me with uncontainable sarcasm, averring that no one could be as stupid as I was claiming to be. Of course, I really was that stupid and had colluded only to the extent of being a fool for flattery, but I came away grateful that Larry didn't press charges.
In a vain effort to retrieve some of the loot, I tracked Lavon and Belle down at a local drug program. The folks there were sympathetic to the astonishing extent of offering me a job as a halfway house manager. Luanne, one of the senior counselors, reassured me that under the terms of their grant I qualified as a "paraprofessional," presumably because I had hair down to my shoulders and readily admitted to having used a wide variety of drugs. I had street cred! Alas, as it turned out, I had more credibility with the staff than with the hardened, addict clientele, who by and large recognized me for the credulous pup that I was. But a job is a job, and being a "manager" paid more than twice what I was making as a purveyor of love oil and roach clips. How could I have resisted?
The Program
The drug program was mainly in the business of dispensing methadone, which would have been an impolitic enterprise without the trappings of therapy, without, that is, the cadre of intake workers and counselors, the latter of which, by some miraculous grant-substantiation, I instantly became. There were three kinds of staff: ex-addict, paraprofessional and professional. The "treatment modality" was attack encounter, a thrice-daily, communal exercise in shouting one's self hoarse. I was responsible for running the "evening group" at the house.
Some of the rote exhortations still haunt me: "Pull yourself up, man! Dig yourself, man! You're fronting/contracting/fucking up, man! I'm gonna pull on your shirttail, man!" I actually found myself bellowing this nonsense at poor, unassuming junkies twice my age and coercing them to bellow it at each other. They swallowed it all with the equanimity of those who know where their next cup of methadone is coming from. Others lived with the nagging fear that one more dirty urine or unsatisfactory report from some callow staffer would land them back in the penitentiary.
You see, I wasn't so much a manager as I was a warden. I slept at the house, oversaw dinner preparation, passed out cigarettes, and, at the end of the day, locked the males downstairs and the females upstairs. I searched the house for contraband during the day when the clients were at school or counseling and reported same (the occasional roach or bottle of cheap wine) to higher-ups. Most of the clients at the halfway house were probated to the custody of the program, and I was charged with "custodial responsibilities," as LaTanya, the program administrator, told me. Heady stuff for a 20-year-old. To be fair, though, I was a good bit closer in style to Sergeant Schultz than to Sergeant Friday.
(Next time: A seminar in Sodom - drug counselors on magic mushrooms; the author is the victim of a conspiracy and, in the midst of disaster, recovers his moral compass.)
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