What people are always asking me is how it started, how I got hooked, how a nice guy like me ended up running streets that most people won’t even drive through with their doors locked.

         And what I always tell them is that it started with having money, because that’s the interesting part. I tell them about how I learned to make money selling little bags of pot in the eighth grade and how it just grew. How, by the time I was eighteen, I was moving around twenty pounds of weed every week and had more money than I knew what to do with.

   Because that’s the stuff people like to hear.

   What I don’t tell them about is how my old man was a drunk, or how, when I was a kid, he lost his job of twenty-two years and never really bounced back. I leave out the parts about the boot camp house, the spit-shined shoes, the shaved head, the salutes, the yes-sirs. I choose to omit the stories about the Marine Corps being our family’s religion, about my old man serving in Korea.

   I leave out the stuff about my absent mother.

   These are the things I relived in rehab. These are the things I tried to kill with dope and coke. And these are the things of which I’m aware but choose not to share. 

   I don’t tell them that I cried a lot when I was alone. Or that I was afraid to fight. Or that my father was always telling me I’d never make it in the Corps because I was a pussy. I don’t tell them how I played football when I was young just because my father played when he was, and how I hated every minute of it. How I was always afraid of being tackled too hard, or being laughed at for missing a pass. 

   I don’t tell them how my father called me a faggot my whole life.

   I don’t tell them how my mother babied me and my father ridiculed me.

   I don’t tell them I was a sensitive kid, that things bothered me. I don’t tell people how when we’d drive past the Lexington Terrace or Murphy Homes projects off Martin Luther King Boulevard, my father would explain to me that they had to fence off the balconies because the niggers would throw one another off and how it would make my stomach hurt. I don’t tell them how I wouldn’t wash my hands at the track just because I was ashamed to have the old black man who worked the sink hand me a towel, how I would walk to the bathrooms that didn’t have attendants just to avoid the situation altogether, or how I would slip a five or a ten of my gambling money into the basket when the attendant wasn’t looking and tell my father that I had spent it on ice cream in the grandstand. 

   I don’t tell them because it’s embarrassing. And because nobody wants to hear another story of a sensitive kid. About a kid who found the world almost too painful to exist in.

   I tell people about smack. About how I sniffed two lines one night and it was like someone had handed me the thing I’d been searching for my whole life. I tell them about running the dark streets of East Baltimore. I tell them about being chased by cops and, worse, being chased by dealers for passing off fake bills at various spots. I tell them about being shot at, being beaten up, being robbed, getting burned. And I tell them how I ended up on Rikers Island in New York.

   This is what people like. This is what Hollywood has us wanting to hear.  

    I also like to tell people about how I learned to be a businessman. How I started selling pictures of naked women from my father’s Playboy magazines when I was in middle school for 50 cents apiece. And how that turned into a $30 a week business. Then I tell them how I learned to make other people work for me: I’d steal the magazines and front them to someone else to do the cut work and sales, while I sat back and collected the money.

   I tell them how I learned about supply and demand first hand.  

   I tell them about the first time I smoked pot, and how that turned into becoming a middleman of sorts between Billy Chaswick’s older brother Charlie and the black kids in our neighborhood. Billy Chaswick lived down the street in a duplex where there was always a car on blocks out front and a lawn that always needed to be cut. His brother Charlie was almost thirty and sold pot out of their parents’ basement.

   That’s how it started.

   Billy got me stoned one day. The same day, these black kids from school came around looking for weed because their connection was dry. They knew me, and they knew I knew Charlie and that Charlie wouldn’t sell his weed to niggers, but that he would sell it to me. Within a month I’d abandoned the Playboy business in favor of selling nickel bags of weed to the black kids in my school.  

   And soon I’d become a pothead myself, smoking bong hits every morning before school, smoking bowls and joints during lunch and gym, and smoking away the entire afternoons of each and every day. 

    I also tell them about the escalation from one drug to another. The search and the find.   

    I tell them about how when I got to high school I started doing acid. That not only did I do acid, it got to the point of taking up to ten hits at a time just to get off, just to feel something. I tell people how I tried coke a few times but that it really wasn’t my thing. And how I then found pills, which were.

    If pressed, I might add the part about my parents getting divorced when I was fifteen, and how, finally out from under my father’s iron Marine Corps fist, I was more or less able to do what I wanted.    

   And then I get to the good part. The part where I try smack one summer night with a group of friends, four of us, two of whom never touched the stuff again. And how the other two, myself included, split another bag the following night.

   I tell them about how things were fine for a while: I kept a job; I had an apartment, a car, money, a girlfriend, friends. I tell them how I was doing dope with artists, writers, and musicians, and how I thought it was cool, how it provided an identity. And how, by age eighteen, I had come to look down on the poor suckers that were still just smoking pot and drinking beer. Because they had no idea. No idea where ten bucks and a rolled up bill could take you.

   Fast-forward two months, the end of that same summer, and I have a bona fide dope habit. Fast-forward another month or so and enter Malcolm, a guy in charge of a Baltimore coke and weed operation coming into the South Baltimore ports from South America. A guy in his late forties. A guy buying up real estate in Mount Vernon with drug money. A guy with a two hundred-dollar-a-day smack habit just to get over the eighty MLs of methadone he drank every morning from the Man Alive program on Charles. A guy I hook up with by mistake who starts fronting me more weed than I can possibly sell. A guy whose twenty-bag-a-day habit I become responsible for copping. A guy who gets me selling coke. A guy who gives me a needle and tells me to save my nose and start getting high for real. A guy who’d then been on smack for longer than I’d been alive. 

         Fast-forward another few months and I’m banging the coke I’m supposed to be selling. Banging it as fast as I can draw it up and get it into my veins.   

   Fast-forward a year and I’m 40 pounds lighter and my arms are so full of holes I can no longer wear short sleeves in public.

   Fast-forward another year or so, with some really gritty stories in between, and it’s all gone. Everything. And everyone. And the tab to Malcolm is somewhere near ten grand. 

   That’s the stuff people like to hear.

   But that’s all in the past. And I’m living in the here and now.

   “Hey, Billy. Hold up,” I call out, starting toward the figure in the shadows. But he breaks into a sprint over to Calvert and disappears around the corner without ever looking back.

   Maybe it wasn’t even him. In fact, maybe it was no one at all. This is what happens when you force yourself to stay awake.

   Sleep deprivation is chemical-free mind alteration. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s numbness.

   The blackouts usually start after a couple days. The blackouts and the hallucinations. After a couple days you start losing time, sometimes entire days, and, much like after a week straight of banging coke without sleep, you start waking up, coming to, in peculiar places and strange situations.

   You come to and you’re running full speed from nothing along North Avenue in the rain.

   You come to and you’re handcuffed in a train station for fare-jumping, but you have tokens and cash in your front pocket.

   You come to and realize it’s not your father you’re screaming at but someone else entirely, someone you don’t even know.

   You come to and you’re lying facedown in a field in north Central Park.    

   Sleep deprivation can protect you from too much at once. Call it armor.

   But it doesn’t always work.

   You come to and you see yourself in the mirror, black and blue and swollen around the eyes. You’re holding a dented shaving cream can in your hands, like a caught thief with the stolen goods. And you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to explain this one to your rehab counselors. 

   Sleep deprivation causes you to do things you never thought you were capable of. Other sides of you can surface.

   You come to and a girlfriend has a black eye and a welt across her forehead.

   You come to and your cat’s tail is in your hand and your cat is bleeding all over the floor.  You scoop him up, cradle him in your arms and rush him to the animal hospital where you explain that your roommate closed its tail in the door. But you know they know; they can tell these things from X-rays and how the tail was detached. And you can tell by the way they’re looking at you.

   I’ve been sleep-depriving since I was a kid. Because I needed an escape as early as I can remember. 

   You come to and feel the bruises your old man left on your chest and back after your last ass kicking over some misunderstanding at school.

   You come to after hearing your mother moaning behind a closed bedroom door while your father is at work.

   Then I discovered drugs, and sleep-depriving became a thing of the past. But things didn’t change all that much. The situations were just a little different.

   You come to in your high school hallway as the vice-principal, your mother, and a Baltimore County Police officer are preparing to search your locker.    

   You come to and a man is lying in the alley behind Calvert Street and you’re urinating into his mouth. You’ve got an erection and can’t figure out why, so you run, forgetting about the twenty dollars he was going pay you for your services.

   You come to and a security guard is banging on the door of a bathroom in Metropolitan Hospital that you thought no one knew about but you. You remember you’re in New York. The needle’s still clinging to your arm, blood is on your shirt and on the floor, and you’re saying, “Just a minute,” as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

   These scenes flash through my memory like a slide show of someone else’s life.

   And me, I’m trying to make a feature film.

   You come to and you’re back in your hometown, back to where it all started, back to where it all went down.

   Sleep deprivation can also help you remember. It can actually help you focus. Ask any writer or artist who only gets quiet from his or her head in those wee hours of the morning after being awake for some 30 hours. In one of my rehabs I was one of five people chosen to participate in intensive therapy sessions. They woke us in the middle of the night, made us stay up for an entire 24 hours, and then brought us to a dark room and made us dredge up our childhoods for the next two days. Without sleep.

   Tell us why you wanted to make yourself invisible. Tell us about the pain you’ve been trying to kill with drugs. Why don’t we talk about your mom.

   And it worked. It worked because a day or two later I was back on the street, chasing nickels of montequa in the projects on 105^th and Second. It worked because I was back on a suicide run through the worst neighborhoods I could find. And it worked because I’d been afforded my first taste of the truth. The seed had been planted, as they’re fond of saying in the twelve-step world. And like my first taste of a syringe full of dope, I wanted more. More meetings, more groups, more therapy. Any opportunity to keep talking about everything that happened.    

   At some point, though, you reach a point where talking isn’t enough. You even reach a point where you become disgusted by the whiny sound of your own voice. And the only way to combat that, the only way to keep from sliding into the Perkins Houses on the east side, hoping for some more of those white gel caps from ’92, is to take action. 

   A car turns onto 21^st, the repetition of bass a dull throb in my chest, rising into my throat. What I know is not to look. What I know is that I should keep walking, keep scanning the ground for mementos. 

   But what else I know is that I will not be afraid. 

         If you wait for the window to go down and a gun to be pointed at your head, or if you wait for three, maybe four guys to get out and roll up on you like police, if you expect this, there are no surprises. There are no longer any reasons to be intimidated.

         The car stops in front of me and I wait. And the people on the corner, lurking in the alleys and watching from the windows above, wait, too.

         I’ve been in this place before. 

         You come to and it’s late and you’re walking through East Baltimore with your last twenty dollars. You sense someone behind you, but before you can walk faster, before you can run away, the cold steel of a handgun is against your head, and you’re hoping all he wants is your money. The next thing you know, he’s running off with your fix money and you’re calling him a nigger because it’s the only thing you can think of to do to get back at him.

          The window slides down and a face appears in the darkness of the car, illuminated by a purplish glow of dash lights. “Yo, Homeboy. S’up?” 

          I look at the car and then look away again, playing the game.

          “Yo, whiteboy, what you doing over here?”

          “Chillin’,” I say.

          “Chillin’?” he repeats, turning back inside the car to share a laugh with his boys. “This nigga say he chillin’, Yo.” More laughter comes from the car, and I hold my eyes on the driver, waiting.

         Then I lift my bag, making my first mistake tonight. 

         “Yo. Yo. What you think you doin’, Son?” He reaches to the floor of the car but keeps his hand below the window.

         “I told you. Just chillin’.” I keep my hands at my side, clutching my bag.

         Two of them get out and come around to the side of the car.

          Expect the worst and nothing bad will ever happen.

         The small black eye comes up from below the car door. “What crew you rollin’ with, Homeboy? Who sent you here?” one of the two men, now out of the car, is asking me.

         I smile. I smile, because I’ve still got a little something. “L-E-S,” is what I tell him. 

        “L-E-S? Where that at?”

        I tilt my head and purse my lips the same way I’ve seen it done in a thousand music videos and a thousand other movies about inner city America. And then I laugh. “N-Y-C,” I say.

        I back up and sit down and smile. I’ve got them right where I want them, and this little confrontation is just about over.

        Make them think you’re important. Make them wonder if you’re the drop man from NYC with this week’s delivery. Make them think that if they kill you, they might be in a world of shit with the big boys.

        “Who you work—” one starts to say.

        “Yo, chill,” the driver says, motioning his boys back to the car. 

        It’s all in the attitude. It’s all in how indifferent you can look and for how long you can maintain it. That’s what the streets are all about. All about how deeply you can repress memories and sensitivity. All about how quickly you can call up your rage when you need to use it.

        “Fuck it, let’s roll,” is what the driver tells his boys, and then he throws me a long glare. I throw him a smile until the muscles in my face start to hurt.

        The car rolls down 21^st and disappears.

        I reach down and pick up the orange top of an insulin syringe, and I drop it in my bag, tie a knot in the top, and start east, toward Greenmount, to see what else is shaking. To watch America’s war on drugs from the front lines, the trenches, the pockets of America where the cops don’t even go anymore unless someone’s been shot and their blood is pooling in the street.

        I’m headed east toward Greenmount to see if anything other than me has changed.