New York in the '50s (16 page)

The first hour of the committee meetings, when addicts and families could talk and get information in what now might be called a support group, began with the serenity prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous. The group was led by Ramon Muñoz. Ramon had been through the treatment program at Lexington and was one of the few who had managed to stay off drugs after coming back to the old neighborhood. I got permission to sit in on these sessions myself, where I played the journalistic role of fly on the wall, just listening and taking notes. I knew that strangers, especially from the press, were usually not allowed into such private sessions, and I felt privileged to be there.

Word spread that addicts who wanted to kick the habit could receive help in getting to Lexington. Norm Eddy had the forms to fill out, and sometimes the committee would provide bus fare. The problem was that it took several weeks before an applicant found
out he was accepted. During this waiting period, the addict would often start using again and lose the desire to stop.

One night I watched a nervous young man, who tried to cover his broken English by speaking quickly, tell the committee, “I wanna go K.Y.” He explained that he had only a six-month habit now, and he wanted to kick before it got any worse. Ramon recommended he go to Rikers for thirty days and kick his habit while he awaited word from Lexington. A discussion followed, with other addicts also urging the young man to commit himself to Rikers, and from there go straight to Kentucky, so he'd stay clean and out of trouble. By the end of the meeting, the young man had disappeared; he never showed up again.

An official from the prison on Rikers Island came one night to talk to the committee and answer questions, and one of the neighborhood boys who'd been there asked why addicts who went to kick their habit cold turkey were put on hard labor four or five days after they arrived, when they were often still sick from the process of withdrawal. The Rikers official explained that “many of you fellows come back again and again, sometimes two and three times a year. Well, we instituted that hard labor so you wouldn't get the idea we were running a country club out there.”

Long, hard, bitter laughter burst from the audience.

Another night I heard some people at the committee meeting talk about going to visit one of the teenage boys from East 100th Street who was at Riverside Hospital, and I asked if I could go along. The next day we took a subway to 134th Street, where we boarded a ferry for North Brother Island, a small patch of land about ten minutes away. Standing in the spray of the deck with my new neighbors from East Harlem, it struck me that New York City had a ferry ride for everyone. My literary friends in Greenwich Village took the Staten Island ferry in imitation of Edna St. Vincent Millay, reciting her lines from “Recuerdo”: “We were very tired / We were very merry / We went back and forth / All night on the ferry.” Immigrants from Europe took the ferry from Ellis Island to the streets of New York, and tourists whose ancestors had made that trip in a former generation took a ferry to the Statue of Liberty, reciting in homage the verse of Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your
poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” On North Brother Island, teenagers were trying to breathe free of the enslavement of heroin.

We visited Julio in the detoxification ward, and he led us out to the solarium to talk. This was his second trip to Riverside: the first was on assignment from a judge, after being arrested for possession of heroin; this time was voluntary, after taking an overdose of some “strong stuff.” He'd been told it was pure heroin but didn't believe it, and he took too much and OD'd. But now he had already kicked and was eager to get back to the streets. On his first visit here, he had stayed fifty-two days and twice tried to escape, once by swimming (“I was busted in the river”), once when he was just about to dive in. This time they wanted to keep him for a standard program of six months, but he said he didn't need it, he would never get hooked again. He said if that happened he wouldn't go back to jail or the hospital, he would just OD: “That's the only way out for a junkie.” It was part of the lore, based on painful experience in the neighborhood: “Once a junkie, always a junkie.”

On the wall of the bright solarium was scrawled in pencil
JUNKIES' PLACE
, and under it was sketched a lopsided cross. Below that, someone had drawn a coat of arms with an addict's “works” (needle, syringe, and belt) on a field of chipping green plaster. Just beyond, the arc of big windows gave a sweeping, sun-washed view of the New York City skyline. I tried to see it from this vantage, through the eyes of a Puerto Rican kid hooked on heroin rather than from the starry-eyed perception of a young midwesterner out to fulfill his dreams. The soaring buildings seemed then not so inspiring as haughty and teasing, as if to say, “You can see us, but you can't reach us.” It gave me a chill. I had a sense of the fractured, fragmented views Manhattan represented to its millions, the kind of shifting, kaleidoscopic experience Dos Passos tried to capture in his early novel
Manhattan Transfer
.

Riverside Hospital, at least, was a tangible indication of the city's awareness of the suffering of a whole segment of its population, a human response to the heroin epidemic that swept New York after World War II, especially among young people in the slums. At the time I visited Riverside, three fourths of the adolescent addicts lived in 15 percent of the city's census tracts—the poorest, most overcrowded
and dilapidated areas of New York. Riverside was the only hospital in the world used exclusively for treating juvenile addicts, and the only
community
hospital of any kind in the country for the treatment of narcotics addiction.

The shame of addiction was felt deeply in East Harlem, but the committee's stand that addiction itself was not a crime but a sickness brought more people out and into open discussions. One night after a meeting, I listened to Pee-Wee and Maria debate the question that was argued so often in the neighborhood, the conundrum of cause and effect.

Pee-Wee said addiction wasn't caused by conditions of the neighborhood or society, but teenagers started “because it's a kick.” They go from smoking pot to snorting coke to skin-popping heroin and end up mainlining. Maria disagreed. She said kids got on dope because of the miserable conditions, family problems, lack of a home. She believed the cause was often psychological: “Some of these kids that get hooked, they do it for punishment.”

We had started walking down 100th Street, and we came to the corner of Second Avenue, where we stopped under a streetlight. Pee-Wee smiled and shook his head. “Listen, Maria. When you're flyin' through the air at ninety miles an hour and grabbin' hunks of cheese off the moon, that's no punishment.”

I didn't learn about drugs just from going to committee meetings. One night while I was having dinner with Norm and Peg Eddy at their apartment, a well-known figure from the neighborhood burst in whom I'll call Boppo Cruz. He was a junkie who had been to prison twice for robbery, to get money to buy heroin, and now he was selling it. Norm had helped him when he wanted to kick on two occasions in the past few years, but he was using again, and high the night he came in as we were finishing dinner.

Boppo was a handsome, brown-skinned man of twenty-seven, sharply dressed in slacks, sport coat, and button-down shirt and sporting a natty leather cap. Norm introduced us, and Boppo turned and asked me what I was doing there, looking straight at me, or through me, the question flung down like a challenge. I knew I couldn't lie or hedge the truth, sensing he'd pick up on it at once. I said I was writing a book about the neighborhood. He asked
if I'd written anything else—a pro wanting to know if he was talking to a pro—and I said I'd written articles for
The Nation
. He nodded, as if accepting my credentials, and pulled up a chair to join us for dinner.

Watching him eat in his hyper, exaggerated state of awareness, I kept thinking Boppo would drop something. He seemed to be moving in a dream, or under water, but at very high velocity. When he finished eating, he pushed his plate away and paced around the kitchen as he talked, seeming to bounce off the walls as he jerked back from them and turned, pacing the other way again. He said he was working the Upper West Side now, but he told Norm to keep a kid named Tony, from 100th Street, away from him. The kid was just back from Riverside, and he was still weak and Boppo could hook him—he snapped his fingers—like
that
. Norm told Boppo that people looked up to him, that he had a responsibility.

Boppo took a deep breath and began to speak in a resonant voice: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main … any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” He paused, then said quietly, “John Donne. I know that crap.”

As if he'd finished a performance, he left the room. Norm got up to walk him to the door, and I followed. Boppo yanked his cap down on his head, turned to us, and said with a condescending smile, “If you hear of anything to do to make a living besides narcotics that isn't dull, let me know.”

Eventually Boppo did find something more fascinating than narcotics. A few years after the night I met him, he fell in love. He tried to stop using, cut way down on his habit, and went to Norm to ask for help to get completely clean before he got married. Norm drove him up to Trail's End, a cabin the parish owned in upstate New York, and there he kicked what was left of his habit and came back down to be married in City Hall. He took straight jobs, fathered a child, but fell back to using drugs and then selling them again to support his habit, and his wife divorced him.

“He loved his wife, and the day he was divorced was the last shot of heroin he ever took,” Norm tells me years later. “He finally made
a commitment never to use again. He did get to drinking, though, and developed a disease related to alcohol. He died just before turning forty.”

A few survived, like the man known as Doctor Joe. He managed to kick heroin by turning to booze, and felt it was his mission to “share the truth” with others. A number of addicts were able to get off heroin only to become alcoholics, but that was considered an improvement, a step up from hell, because it didn't put you in jail. Doctor Joe met junkies from the neighborhood who got off the ferry from Rikers or Riverside, took them right to a bar, and got them drunk, believing this course was better because it was legal. In the process of carrying out what he saw as his mission, he too became an alcoholic, went into a tailspin, and Peg Eddy found him passed out in the hallway of a building on 101st Street. She got him into an alcoholism program at Metropolitan Hospital, and he kicked that habit too.

“Joe later converted to Pentecostalism,” Norm says, “and became a deacon in his church, and now works for the parks department.” He is one of the few former addicts from the old narcotics committee days who is still alive, clean, and doing well.

Norm had been pastor of the storefront church on 100th Street, but he was spending so much of his time on the issue of narcotics—visiting addicts at Riverside and in prisons, going to court with guys who were arrested, helping them get jobs when they got out, counseling their families—that he decided to make that his full-time ministry. The committee got some unexpected outside help from several foundations and, in 1958, opened its own storefront office.

Looking back today on the influence of the committee's work, Norm says, “At the end of five years we had file folders on more than two thousand addicts we had seen and tried to help. Of that whole number there were only eight people we knew about who had stayed off drugs for more than a year. So I think it's fair to say we had
no
influence.

“We'd been doing commendable work,” Norm adds, “but we failed to see the methods of helping an addict become a ‘new man' or ‘new woman'—the kind of transformation some of them found
in Pentecostalism. I still run into people we knew in the days of the committee who say, ‘You helped me go to a hospital and get a job and then I found a new life in the Pentecostal church.' What I began to see was that I've been a guide, a signpost, pointing people in a direction. The important thing was that we touched the lives of two thousand people, and some were touched by the spirit of God. We were only a step in a long path. We were also a clear Christian witness in demonstrating we cared.”

Next to the Veteran Bar & Grill on First Avenue, around the corner from where I was living, was a boarded-up storefront painted black and decorated with silver handprints. There was no name on the door, but anyone in the neighborhood could tell you this was the clubhouse of a teenage gang called the Conservatives. The name had nothing to do with politics, but indicated a change of activity and purpose, from engaging in streetfights with rival gangs to holding dances, playing pool, and looking for jobs, with the help of an adult director, Ramon Diaz. In its own parlance, the gang had given up “bopping” and “gone social.”

Teenage gangs were enmeshed in the culture of New York in the fifties, becoming part of the city's popular mythology with the runaway success of
West Side Story
, which translated the story of Romeo and Juliet to that of Maria and Tony, a Puerto Rican girl and an Italian boy, and the rival ethnic gangs of Sharks and Jets.

Guns and drugs proliferated in the tenement districts after World War II, and both were used by the burgeoning gangs, in a revival of the neighborhood gang tradition that began with the first Irish immigrants in the early nineteenth century. There was no tradition of gangs in Puerto Rico, but the kids picked it up in New York, part of their assimilation into life on the mainland.

It was when they decided to give up guns and street fighting that the Conservatives had changed their name. Before that they were known as the Enchanters, a gang that was formed right after the war. By the early fifties they had a total of seven “divisions” in East Harlem, grouped according to age—from nine to twenty, you moved up through the ranks from Tiny Tots to Mighty Mites, Juniors, and Seniors. The Enchanters spread to the Bronx, Brooklyn, and across the river to Hoboken, New Jersey. Their branch in lower
Manhattan was still one of the most active fighting gangs in the city when the East Harlem group went social in 1957. The change was not born out of idealism or a sudden transfusion of social responsibility, but simply because most of their leaders were dead or in jail. The new rules were no drugs or guns, and the members put their fingerprints in silver paint on the clubhouse door as a symbol that they would never have to be fingerprinted by the police.