Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (38 page)

Not long after that, Bud stood on a big stone porch and hurled himself off it, onto the concrete below. He landed on his head. His skull cracked, and he began to bleed. “Either I was imagining in my child’s imagination” that it would be okay, he says, “or I just hated the life I was living.”

It was after this incident that he discovered a way out. The answer, he believed, must lie in the mystery of words. His ghost-father’s profession had been to shape words into stories: they must contain some alchemy, some answer, to what was happening. Bud cut strips of words from the newspaper, hid them in his pocket, and took them out at school break times, to secretly swallow them. “I thought that if I had the words inside me,” he says, that they “would reveal their meaning.”

As Bud got older, he started to obsessively play sports—baseball, basketball, cross-country, track, anything that would stop him from thinking, “just to get my mind off [the fact that] the house would be in some kind of chaos, [with] people fighting, or else there’d be no one there at all.” Even in the middle of the freezing Ohio winters, he would stand for hour after hour on the basketball court alone, shooting hoops. “It was like a trance for me,” he says. There was no pleasure in winning. It was the process he craved—the moment when he was not alone with his thoughts.

But he couldn’t run all the time. He learned to live in the stationary world by falling into almost hypnotic trances: he would be sitting with people, but he would go somewhere in his head where he couldn’t see or hear them, and he was alone, and he was numb. “I was able to shut it out. Disassociation,” he says. “You remove your consciousness from what’s going on around you.” People would often say: “Bud, where are you?” and he would look blankly back. He had started to do it as a small child whenever his mother left. “I thought, if I can just stay enough long enough in a trance, she’ll come back, she’ll come back.”

The first time he heard about black holes in space, Bud felt he intuitively understood them. “They absorb any light coming near them and crush it. I felt like that in here,” he says, jabbing at his insides. “When I first read about a black hole in space I thought—that’s how I’ve always felt. That’s exactly [it].”

The trances were one way of erasing himself from existence—but before long he found a better way. When he was fifteen, he took an overdose of aspirin. A police officer came into the hospital as he lay in bed after having his stomach pumped and snapped: “Do you know what you’re doing to your mother?” Shortly before he left high school, she told him: Your father did exist. You did know him. And there was a newspaper story you should probably go look up. After that, Bud started drinking “and I drank for oblivion. Just to knock me out.”

He went to study journalism at Northwestern University, but he couldn’t focus and dropped out. He kept trying to kill himself, but his belief that words could save him remained. He discovered the French poets of the late nineteenth century. Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud became his friends and his way out. “I saw their lives were a total mess,” he says, but “what they gave me was a reason to live another hour, another day, another week.” Their words kept him going. “I decided this is maybe something I can do because I’m so totally fucked up and they’re so totally fucked up—[yet] they’re able to do something that actually gives something life-enhancing to someone else.” He vowed to write poetry every day, no matter what else happened to him. “I thought—poetry is something that can never be taken away from you . . . You can only lose it yourself.”

He had a deeper ambition, one he kept to himself and told to nobody. He hoped that one day, he might write one poem that did for another human being what their poetry had done for him.

Bud volunteered for VISTA, one of the antipoverty programs set up by Lyndon Johnson as part of his War on Poverty, before it was replaced by Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs. He arrived at his posting in East Harlem a year after rioters had tried to burn it down, and the block he was assigned to—at the very top of Central Park—consisted of five stories of narrow apartments with long, snaking fire escapes, and stoops facing the street that were always thrumming with people. It was no different from the Harlem that Billie Holiday had arrived in forty years before. Bud was told to go and introduce himself to everyone on the block and ask what help they needed. He was taken aback by how many people were crammed into every apartment: when he told one little kid that he shared a house with just three people, the boy was incredulous. He shared an apartment with seventeen.

He was spending his days handing out subway tokens to kids who didn’t have enough money to get to school, or taking elderly people to get their first-ever eyeglasses or hearing aids, when he noticed a guy who was always walking up and down the block. He wore a black hat, black shirt, black pants, and sunglasses, whatever the weather.

“Don’t have anything to do with him,” the residents told him. “Don’t talk to him. Don’t bother him. He runs the block.”

Bud had heard of heroin, because he had read the novel
Naked Lunch
by William Burroughs, but this was the closest he had come to it in the real world. He looked away, but he kept thinking about this man. “I felt like I was being driven inside,” he says, “by something—I didn’t know what it was.”

After he left VISTA, Bud started working in the West Village in one of the first stores ever to sell Jimi Hendrix posters and buttons, and he met a Manhattan poet a few years older called Shelley, and they started to hang out. One night, they went to Shelley’s apartment, and some of his friends turned up with some heroin in a little bag.

“I was always wondering—is this the night I walk to the Brooklyn Bridge and just jump off?” Bud remembered.

He laid the heroin out in lines and snorted it through a straw. Soon after, “I just felt this warmth in the pit of my gut that had always been really cold,” he says. “When we went outside—it was freezing out, but I felt warm. I was almost floating.” That first night he walked around feeling calm and dreamy. He went back to use heroin again soon after, and as he started snorting it regularly, he found “I was able to just go to sleep whenever I wanted to, or stay awake and feel good whenever I wanted to. I had never felt good. Even with all those sports—if I did well in the sport, I didn’t feel any better than if I didn’t. It was just something to hurl myself into to take up time.” But now, “I felt that I didn’t want to kill myself anymore. I felt good. I didn’t feel like I hated myself. I felt like I was as good as anybody else . . . Just this warmth. Instead of that black, cold hole, I had this warm feeling in there.”

Long before he had heard of heroin, Bud had been trying to put himself into a numbed trance, a distant place in his head where he would be freed from his thoughts. Now there was a drug that could take him there, for far longer than he could manage on his own, and he was glad. “I thought—if I have this stuff, I could maybe have a life,” he says.

Whenever Bud had tried to have sex before, he thought of seeing his mother being raped, and he couldn’t go through with it. Not long after he started using heroin, he was sitting in a bar on the Lower East Side—bars felt more like home to him than anywhere else—when a tall young black woman with long raven-colored hair came up to him. He thought that she was gorgeous, and that he was the most lost man in New York City. She pushed a piece of fried chicken in his face.

“You want a bite of my chicken?” Misty asked.

Bud was probably the only straight man in New York City who would have said this, but he replied: “No thanks, I’ve already eaten.” She walked away, and he thought—oh, Bud, you are a mess.

She came back to him. “Where are you from, anyway?” she asked.

“Ohio.”

“Where’s
that
?”

She took him that night on the Staten Island Ferry, and on the deck on a summer’s night, they embraced. When they got back to her apartment, he was terrified, but he wasn’t going to say no.

Misty lit candles and went to get a little wine, and then she put on a record. “It was so beautiful and there was pain in it,” Bud says, “and it reached right inside me and the voice was so extraordinary . . . I had never heard a voice like that before.”

“Who’s that singing?” he asked.

“Don’t they have
anything
in Ohio?” she said. “That’s Billie Holiday.”

And with Misty, and with Billie Holiday playing, he could have sex, and he was happy. He knew “it was an experience from then on I could always hold on to.”

Bud received his draft card to go to fight in Vietnam soon after, but there was no way he was going to go to kill innocent Vietnamese people, so he went on the run, back and forth across the country. He was indicted before a federal grand jury and knew he could face five years in prison when he was caught. He was often hiding in little towns where he couldn’t find heroin, and when this happened, he quickly became suicidal again. Bud didn’t want to be an addict—he knew shooting street heroin was a bad idea, for all the obvious reasons—so he spent five years without using, attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every night across America, and he was constantly depressed.

One Christmas Day, he decided to finish the work he began when he was a little boy jumping off his porch, and he took a car and drove it into a wall at sixty miles per hour. The last thing he thought before it hit was, with relief: “I’m dead now.”

He woke up to find a surgeon picking pieces of glass out of his face. When he was discharged from the hospital, on crutches, his head swaddled in a turban, he looked around in the numbing Ohio winter and thought: “I can’t believe I’m still here. I can’t believe I’m still in this.” He found himself walking the streets with a hammer hidden in his clothing, searching for somebody to hit over the head, to snatch a couple of dollars for smack. But as he contemplated breaking a skull, he “saw a pitch-black hole
⁶
open in front of me”—a hole that would crush him—and he couldn’t go through with it.

One day he came home and his mother called him. She was being detained in a psychiatric unit—she had been manic for years now—and explained she had an exciting announcement. She was going to run for president. “I think I have a real good chance too,” she explained, because she was guaranteed the support of all the mental patients, alcoholics, and drug addicts. She told Bud to think about what cabinet appointment he would like after the election.

“I spent considerable time,”
⁷
he recalled, “trying to decide between secretary of health, education, and welfare.” He thought: “In my family, if we didn’t count our chickens before they’d hatched, I don’t think we’d have been able to do very much counting at all.” It would have seemed absurd to him then, but Bud was going to wield real political power, and soon.

He needed to run from the United States and from his urge to use smack. So, not sure what else to do, he headed across the Canadian border, toward the Downtown Eastside—an area he was going to transform.

As he stood surrounded by sirens and heard Margaret describe how that little boy had watched his mother overdose and his father hang himself, this story flashed before Bud and he thought—It doesn’t have to be this way.

For years, he had heard the drug warriors point to drug overdoses and say: see? This is why we need to crack down. This is why we fight our war. But Bud knew that the drug war doesn’t prevent overdoses—it massively increases them. Ethan Nadelmann, one of the leading drug reformers in the United States, had explained: “People overdose because
⁸
[under prohibition] they don’t know if the heroin is 1 percent or 40 percent . . . Just imagine if every time you picked up a bottle of wine, you didn’t know whether it was 8 percent alcohol or 80 percent alcohol [or] if every time you took an aspirin, you didn’t know if it was 5 milligrams or 500 milligrams.”

Even more important, under prohibition, people use their drugs in secret, to make sure the police don’t spot them. Bud and his friends would hide in dumpsters across the Downtown Eastside to shoot up—but this meant that if they overdosed, nobody else would spot them, and they would die. Bud looked it up in the library and saw that in European countries that provide
⁹
addicts with safe rooms where they are watched over by nurses as they use their drugs, deaths from overdose had ended.

But what could Bud do? Who would listen to him? He convened a meeting in a hall provided by the local church, and announced that people inside the Downtown Eastside were going to have to fight for change. Nobody was coming to save them. They would have to save themselves.