Scare City

Graffiti Near Broad Street Station, Newark, NJ | 3 Mar. 2022 | Difo

Quirks of Humanity’s evolutionary history have resulted in an outlook and decision making process that is biased heavily toward assuaging immediate drives—toward the present. So we often fail to assess properly the risk that our current behavior presents to our future selves.

To whatever extent those statistics apply to Human beings in general, quadruple those numbers for Human beings who are addicted to hard drugs.

Who am I to disparage the people slaving under addiction’s undiscerning lash? It’s 2022. Drug addiction isn’t tantamount to moral bankruptcy anymore. We’ve even found compassion and empathy for the teenaged, street level drug pushers who we acknowledge are acting rationally and reasonably given the system of grinding poverty they screamed into from their mothers’ wombs.

Well I knew addiction before it was cool, before it got famous, back when it was playing at the local clubs. Not the sanitized parity of drug addiction from reality TV. I mean back when addicts were just “junkies” and “bums,” and pushers were “super predators” and “thugs” and whatever other euphemism White America could use to call those boys “niggers” without calling those boys niggers.

No one spoke in terms of “opioid epidemics” back then, and there was no Narcan—when junkies overdosed and died, junkies overdosed and died. No second chances. There were no meditation retreats, no cognitive behavioral therapy, no Suboxone—there was jail cell detox, and ibuprofen, and Twelve Steps. That’s it.

It was the 1990s. Junkies, and the Brown boys who supplied them, and the scores of run-of-the-mill poor people who lived and died on their battlefield, were utterly disposable. They were the inadvertent product of the social system that had generated their poverty, and whose subsequent efforts to ignore its creation had resulted in an unofficial system of open air prisons euphemistically designated, “the projects.”

Late on August 18th, 1998, I was driving toward one of those projects, passing through the Oranges, eastbound on Route 280. I was going to engage in my favorite pastime—intravenous injection of hard drugs.

Boy’s Not Black

I was alone in the car, and it was late—almost 11 pm. Not great conditions for buying drugs at a project building that was policed like the Gaza Strip. My rust colored, ‘83 La Sabre was ramshackle enough that it wasn’t out of place in the parking lots around where I was headed. That didn’t matter though. It didn’t matter either that my skin was as brown as anyone’s at Marion Gardens.

I dressed like a White boy, and I talked like a White boy, I even walked like a White boy. It was no wonder, either. Deflecting attention from the most relevant element of my identity—being Black—was a central feature of my identity. Maybe if I hadn’t become so good at it, I’d have had a chance of blending in at Marion Gardens. But as it stood, I was a 17-year-old kid from the White suburbs, and I looked like it.

M-City

Marion Gardens, known informally as, “M-City” was a public housing complex located in Newark, New Jersey. M-City opened to tenants in 1941 and the complex persisted, almost in spite of itself, for 68 years. It was demolished in 2009 along with the many other public housing units in Newark which exemplified why fear and ignorance aren’t good starting points for confronting pernicious social issues. The city began phasing out those despair factories in the early 2000s in favor a townhouse model of public housing.

M-City was built on a rhomboid tract of land that covered the area of about nine city blocks. A public one-way street ran down the center of the overall space splitting it into northern and southern segments, two isosceles triangles with their bases facing each other. In each of triangles’ six corners rose a five-story, brick building. Each was roughly “L” shaped and had a footprint of about two blocks. The area in the middle of each triangle was an open courtyard area designated, ostensibly, for recreational activities.

When I was copping heroin and cocaine in Newark, the buildings that constituted M-City had already been standing longer than anyone had ever intended. Generations of politicians had by then neglected the complex for more than half a century, and generations of its more destructive inhabitants had used that time to deface every inch of its shared space. In spite of the decline, or perhaps because of it, M-City remained a thriving market where one could buy and sell any number of illicit products and services, but especially hard drugs.

More important than the consistency of supply at M-City was the absence of heat. There was more or less always some police presence at M-City—regular beat cops—but those guys usually weren’t looking for trouble. Beat cops weren’t narcs. When the narcs showed, they showed up in force, and in tactical gear, and they didn’t fuck around. Everyone—I mean, everyone—bolted when the narcs ran up on M-City

A small price to pay. From the perspective of a 17-year-old heroin addict, M-City was in the midst of a golden age during the summer of 1998.

Confusing Images

Walking into M-City to buy heroin was for me a lot like walking into a suburban pharmacy to buy Advil. In the 90s, teenagers were either White and from the suburbs and presumed to be good, or they were Brown and not from the suburbs and presumed to be bad. Crossover plots were for the movies. Wherever I went, I was a Black teenager who, with the exception of skin color, presented as a White suburban teenager. I didn’t fit neatly into one or another of the mental containers and heuristics 90s-era White people and 90s-era Black people used to make sense of one another.

It’s hard to overstate the deleterious impact—long term and short term—that fitting in nowhere has on the adolescent psyche.

When I showed up in M-City, I was greeted by the sorts of bewildered looks which were routine in my life but which nevertheless peeled a layer off of my sense of self each time I saw one. The dealers’ momentary confusion always gave way to the capitalist itch that agitates everything everywhere, and a group of Black teenagers would swarm around me, calling out the brand names stamped onto the bundles of heroin baggies clutched in their hands.

“Yo, I got that ‘DMX!’” one kid would shout, shoving a wax paper baggie of dope into my face. “‘Air Force One,’ ‘Air Force One’ over here—that shit bangin!” another would yell.

Don’t be too hard on yourself if the picture I’m drawing doesn’t look like the one in your head about what it was like to buy drugs in 90-era project buildings. People’s ideas about what urban poverty looks like are premised on movies and local news coverage. Most of the time, buying drugs in M-City had little in common with those media portrayals. Most of the time there were no gunshots. Most of the time there were no junkies dying in the alleyways. Most of the time there were no crackheads sucking off strangers behind dumpsters.

The supply side of the M-City drug market consisted of groups of poor, Black teenagers competing with each other to sell as much heroin and cocaine as they could, and junkies trying to buy as much heroin and cocaine as they could. It was capitalism in its rawest form, and just like capitalist systems everywhere, the M-City drug market generated a hierarchy on both the supply side and the demand side of the ledger. The most aggressive and unscrupulous pushers accumulated status and cash at the expense of the other boys. Junkies with the most money—people from the White suburbs—were treated with relative respect, while average, poor, Black junkies were less than trash.

I wasn’t poor or from Newark, though. I was barely even Black. And in August of ‘98, I was winning. The drugs were abundant and the narcs were not. Life was good in my small corner of the black market that was always seething under Newark’s faded surface.

Former Site of James Baxter Terrace, Newark, NJ | 3 Mar. 2022 | Difo

Scarcity

Deeming an irresistible product illegal doesn’t stop people from consuming and selling that product. Everyone knows that. Prohibitions succeed only in transforming the consumption and sale of illicit products into criminal enterprises.  If, however, reducing the number of people who use an illicit drug is only peripheral, and one's real goal is to stigmatize and brutalize the communities and individuals adjacent to the illicit products? Well then, prohibition works just fine.

There are, of course, federal and state prohibitions against the consumption, sale, purchase, and possession of heroin and cocaine, which meant that purchasing drugs at Marion Gardens was always in some sense risky. Yet the atmosphere at M-City during daylight hours was akin to that of a bazaar. Children chased each other on and around dilapidated webs of metal that were once jungle gyms. Their mothers and grandmothers huddled in groups nearby, pausing their gossiping from time-to-time to shout startling obscenities at misbehaving children.

Groups of young men—the squad leaders—lounged on stoops and on benches drinking beer, passing blunts, whooping at tumbling ceelo dice. Teenage boys—the runners—scurried here and there, racing from heroin shopper to stash spot and then back to heroin shopper with the product tucked in their palms. The middle school-aged boys—the lookouts—were arrayed like sentries on the outskirts of the complex, itching to sound the alarm when 5-0 rolled through. There was an harmonious order and a hum of regularity to the scene invisible, incomprehensible to the outside eye. In the end, M-City was simply a community of poor people navigating a landscape of adversity difficult for middle class minds to fathom.

Things changed in M-City when the sun went down. The infrastructure of commerce and the banalities of apartment complex life disappeared. There were no mothers and kids on the playgrounds. The runners and the lookouts were gone. At night, a different system took over—a system with fewer rules and with a glut of rogue actors in search of someone or something to exploit.

Drug Dealers Don’t Take Venmo

I glared into the green hue that backlit the digital clock on the dashboard. It was 11:39 PM.  “Fuck!” I whisper-yelled to myself. I grimaced and lifted the La Sabre’s sagging roof upholstery out of my sightline, craning my neck to glimpse the happenings out on the courtyard. It paid to take the time to back into the parking spots at M-City. It meant that I could maintain good situational awareness before getting out of the car. Plus, the odds that a rapid, unanticipated departure from M-City would be necessary were never zero. At night, the odds increased significantly.

Dope dealers don’t take Venmo. I pulled a pile of folded bills out of its stash spot. Junkies are forever stashing items they perceive as valuable in hard-to-remember places. Scarcity is inherent to the drug addict experience precisely because governments have made the acts of using, obtaining, and selling them illegal, and because culture has deemed drug use immoral. That manufactured scarcity, combined with very real physical and psychological addiction to intoxicating chemicals, spawns within the addicted psyche a kind of desperation that we in the developed world rarely witness, let alone experience ourselves. People addicted to hard drugs are capable of the sort of lizard brain ferocity and paranoia that many of us would express if water (or toilet paper) were to become an inaccessible commodity.

Scarcity-driven paranoia was the reason I always stored my drug money in a compartment I’d created behind my shitty car’s shitty center console. That’s also why, before getting out of the car, I always divided my drug buying cash into at least two separate bundles, hidden in two different stash spots on my person. 

I’d rustled up $160.00 on that particular day in August, 1998. I put $20 of it back into the stash spot. I could go without food but the La Sabre couldn’t go without fuel, and twenty bucks worth of coke wasn’t worth spending the night at M-City.

I split the remaining $140 into three bundles of folded bills. I buried the largest sum in my shoe, inside my sock and under the sole of my foot. I calculated that the person who shook me down would probably be a panicky drug addict with a knife, not a professional armed robber with a gun. An amateur wouldn’t think to search for such an unusual stash spot. And besides, no thief—professional or amateur—would want to stand around mid robbery and wait for me to take my shoes and socks off. I wondered for a brief moment how I’d behave if I were to be thrust into that kind of life or death scenario. Then it was gone.

I placed the second pile of cash into my other sock, but in the traditional sock stash position on the inside of my ankle. The smallest sum I placed into the right hand pocket of my jeans. I tightened my belt around my steadily shrinking waist and it felt like cinching closed a tall kitchen garbage bag.

I peered out through the windshield one more time. Then I opened the door, and got out of the car.

Aggressive Nonchalance

The key to success in carrying out an activity that’s illegal or that otherwise violates some rule is to be aggressively nonchalant. Of course, an individual engaged in illegal activity should perform that activity in a way that doesn’t arouse suspicion. That’s obvious, and it’s not what I mean. I mean that the illegal actor should affirmatively, confidently, even conspicuously behave as though they have every right and every reason to be where they are, doing what they’re doing.

We Humans are all afflicted with a bias toward normalcy. We want so much for events to unfold the way they usually do, or at least how we predict that they will, that we often ignore, disbelieve, or minimize clear threat data in our environment. As soon as a cop or a drug dealer or some mom with her kid saw me walking through M-City,  their brain would begin convincing itself that I belonged there.

The successful illegal actor understands these dynamics and gives onlookers the behavioral clues they need to confirm their bias. People who live in M-City, or anywhere else, don’t run from tree to tree, wearing dark sunglasses and fake mustaches. That’d be suspicious behavior. But M-City tenants also don’t behave as though they’re trying not to be noticed—they don’t behave neutrally. M-City residents walk toward their apartments while carrying groceries and finishing the phone conversations they were having with their sisters when they pulled into the parking lot.

My gait as I walked across the courtyard was that of a person anxious to get into a shower and then into bed after a long shift on a factory floor. I forced myself to take my hands out of my pockets and off of the cash burning a hole in my Jncos. I pushed the hood of my sweatshirt back off of my head, and reminded myself to not look down at the ground, or around at my surroundings. I walked with the purpose and confidence of a person for whom walking across the courtyard was a routine part of an average night of their life on the losing end of capitalism.

Once I’d crossed the expanse of courtyard, I ducked into the semi-outdoor staircase that serviced the building on the southeast corner of the complex. “Diesel,” I said to a middle aged man who was pissing in a corner near the stairs. I spent the ten or so seconds it took him to finish urinating shooting furtive glances around the stairwell and feeling my heart pound in my inner ear like a subwoofer in a nightclub. The hallway was dim, and I could hear water dripping from somewhere, even over the splattering urine. I watched a stream of it trickle around the man’s sneaker and toward me, mixing with the foul greasiness that coated every centimeter of the concrete floor. Ten seconds felt like ten minutes.

The man turned around when he was done and sidled into the flickering, pale orange glow the fixture on the ceiling between us produced. That he was a junkie was obvious, which of course was why I’d asked him for directions in the first place. The corners of his mouth were drawn earthward into a sagging frown—like a harlequin in a sad circus. His eyes were attenuated slits buried in a face that was gouged and pocked from where he’d picked his face apart, perhaps during a bout of crack fueled mania. His skin was crusty and ashy, like a dried lake bed, and his hands were puffy, a side effect no doubt of the abscesses that often accompany long term, intravenous drug use. He smelled terrible. Everything smelled terrible.

Without saying anything comprehensible, or even really looking at me, he motioned up the stairs. I looked up the stairs, and then back at him, and then back up the stairs. I knew I shouldn't go up there.

But I did. If I reasoned at all, I calculated the odds that this bad shape junkie was part of a two-man robbery team to be quite low. Maybe there was a dude selling dope up there, maybe there wasn’t, but I’d be walking back down these steps in a few minutes in either case.

I thanked the swaying junkie and bounded up the stairs.

The Lizard

The stairs were switchbacks, and after climbing each flight, I had to walk past a series of apartments to get to the next flight. One of the apartment doors was open when I passed it and a woman who looked about 40 was standing in the doorway smoking a Newport 100. Rather than nod back to me when I acknowledged her, she asked me if I needed a set of works. I didn’t—the equipment I used to inject drugs into my vascular system was stowed in the La Sabre’s center console. I craved the relative safety of the car’s ruddy doors more in that moment than I did the icy spread of liquified cocaine through my veins. I glanced past the woman to the screaming children she was ignoring in the apartment behind her. There looked to be at least three of them. “Maybe on the way back,” I said, and continued up the stairs.

The stairs ended at the fifth floor landing. I spotted a figure leaning casually against the railing on the far side of the landing, silhouetted against the light polluted sky behind. I couldn’t make out his features until he pushed himself off of the railing and moved toward me. I took an instinctive step backward.

The guy’s Timberland boots were so extraordinarily clean that I noticed them as soon as he stepped out of the shadows. He was wearing gray sweatpants, too—the branded kind that were expensive for no good reason. His white tank top stretched around his torso like shrink wrap making him look a bit silly. At least he had the physique for it unlike most of the rail thin boys in the projects who wore them. He was about my height.

He wasn’t your standard M-City drug dealer, I could see that right away. It was something about the way he carried himself—like a gun slinger, an outlaw among outlaws, a predator, not a businessman. It was all bad news.

“Diesel,” I called out with misplaced optimism. He said nothing, and instead reached into his waistband to reveal a gun which he then let hang casually at his side. My consciousness seemed to lift up and out of my body as my amygdala got into the driver’s seat.

Floating

I watched myself from a distance, like observing groundbreaking neurosurgery from stadium-style seating in a university viewing room. I peered down at the skinny Black kid below, his hands raised, palms facing the gunslinger in the universal Human signal for “I’m not a threat.” His eyes were saucers, the space between his eyelids like porcelain. There was no conscious thought or deliberation or fear in those eyes. Or life, really. Only unanimated emptiness.

I could feel the uneven rhythm of the kid’s ventricles as they forced blood and adrenaline through his vascular system, preparing him for the acute dilemmas that would characterize the next moments of his life, including the question of whether his life would continue at all. The kid was transfixed, motionless, his brain failing to comprehend the sense data it was receiving.

Then something in the kid’s eyes shifted. He blinked once, slowly, and then rapidly several times in succession. His mouth opened, and then closed, and then opened again.

“Look, I’m going to reach into my pocket and get the money out,”  he said.

His voice sounded stronger than I’d expected it to sound, but stranger, too. The gunslinger said nothing but slowly returned the large weapon—I could see now that it was a sawed-off shotgun—back into whatever contraption allowed him to carry it inside his sweatpants. He seemed to have realized that the kid’s compliance was not in doubt.

With his left hand still raised, reaffirming his abject submission, the kid reached his right hand into his right hand jeans pocket, and extracted the folded decoy bills he’d placed there earlier. He squatted down with his left hand still raised into the air, and with glacial deliberateness that bordered on absurdity, placed the cash on the ground in between the gunslinger and himself. He returned his right hand to its spot beside his head, and took two large steps backward toward the stairs.

The gunslinger, his hand resting on the outline of the weapon concealed beneath his sweats, stepped toward the cash with insouciance that didn’t match the circumstances. He squatted down and picked up the bills, looking them over.

The gunslinger was somewhat vulnerable during the several seconds he took to complete his examination, and my heart leapt into my throat when a flash of determination and rage passed across the kid’s face. The odds of a happy ending to the confrontation—an outcome in which the kid exited the building carrying the same amount of money he entered with—were vanishingly small. Still, there were better potential outcomes and there were worse potential outcomes. I was relieved when the kid chose to minimize the likelihood of the gunfire and death outcome by not trying to fight his way out.

The gunslinger and the kid stood facing each other then, the kid with his hands still up in the air, a weird statue. Some of the terror from before had drained from his face. The gunslinger, his Omar Little routine having run its course, regarded the kid now more with curiosity than anything else. It looked as though the gunslinger was realizing for the first time just how unplaceable the kid he’d just robbed actually was.

The kid eased his hands into a rotation so that his palms faced the ceiling, almost expectantly. A quizzical expression hung on the gunslinger’s face until the kid huffed and did something with his shoulders that resembled a shrug. Defiance flickered across his face. The gunslinger blinked as though freed from a spell, and he flicked his head to the right. A quick, sideways nod. The kid backed away until he reached the stairs. Then he turned around and left.

Gulf Gas Station Near “Little City,” Newark, NJ | 3 Mar. 2022 | Difo

In Pain of Safety

I pulled into a gas station a couple miles from M-City and I felt like I’d docked a boat in a port of refuge to narrowly escape a typhoon. Bright lights, shiny pumps, security cameras—an island where the rules applied surrounded by an ocean where they did not. I coaxed the La Sabre’s steering column mounted gear shifter into the Park position. And my consciousness slammed back into my body like a cinder block thrown into a kiddie pool. I banged my palm into the top of the steering wheel until it hurt. Then I leaned my forehead against it, and I wailed.

The pommelling waves of frustration, and fear, and relief subsided gradually, my breathing smoothing from halting, sputtering gasps into deep heaves that were marginally more manageable. I wiped the tears and the spit and the snot from my face, first with the back of my hand, and then with my sleeve once it’d become obvious that my hand wouldn’t be enough. The image reflected back to me in the rearview mirror was that of a lunatic, and I was wracked with howling, gut busting laughter.

We Junkies

The drive to mitigate scarcity, and the propensity to make poor risk assessments in pursuit of that drive, is a centerpiece of the Human experience. Addicts remind us how quickly scarcity forces out of us the raw animal that lives within. And that scarcity is never far away.

We hate addicts for that.

Society disdains drug dealers because their enterprise reminds us that we’ve not only failed the most vulnerable among us, we thrive precisely because of the manufactured scarcity that drives their suffering. Everyone at M-City were mothers, fathers, and children. They were what Human beings look like after centuries of deliberate social malnourishment.

We hate pushers for that.

I’m aware today, in a way I was not in 1998, of my privileged social status relative to the men and women and children whose lives I invaded in my quest to douse the fire of my otherness. But when the cackles of euphoric delirium finally subsided on that unforgettable night at M-City, I was left with the same old gnawing scarcity that impels every junkie to risk everything for another hit. I couldn’t return to the sanity and the safety—the non-belonging—of the suburbs. Not until I got right. In the ways that mattered most to me, it hurt more to be safe.