American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  As a showcase of private-sector efficiency, Opal’s classroom was no more promising. One woman was eating chips for breakfast beneath the No Eating sign. Another was drunk. The instructor, Darlene Haines, was complaining to the class that she didn’t feel qualified to teach. “It’s kind of hard for me,” she told the group. “They just kind of threw me into this.” As she left the room, a chorus of operatic warnings rang out. “They’re building orphanages and prisons!” the chip eater said. “It’s going to be like Mississippi!” Haines returned with breaking news: Potawatomi Bingo would hire anyone who passed a drug test. Someone asked if marijuana was a drug. Things went downhill from there. “I can tell this isn’t working,” Haines sighed.

  Needing a body for a practice interview, she called on a short, dark woman in the back wearing a look of boredom. Opal, inconspicuous until then, came forward with a mime of contempt. Head rolling, limbs flopping, she crossed the room in an arc of attitude and slouched into a chair. “I know how to get a job,” she said. “I just don’t know how to keep a job.” Then as Haines launched into her role as the fictitious employer, Opal sprang to life. Her spine straightened. Her gaze locked in. “I am a courteous person,” she began. “I am hardworking. I am dependable.”

  Haines looked startled. “What motivates you to work?” she asked.

  “Being around smiling people,” Opal said, smiling.

  “What are your greatest achievements?”

  “Well, I graduated from high school, and back in ninety-six, I completed a thirteen-week nurturing course.”

  “If I asked you, when could you start?”

  “It would be next Monday, so I could arrange my babysitting situation.”

  “That won’t be an issue?”

  “No, I won’t let it affect my job performance.”

  “Girlfriend!” the chip eater gasped. “And you said you wasn’t motivated!”

  Then Opal’s limbs went limp. “I’m one of those women who don’t want to work!” she said. Dragging herself back to her seat, she looked concerned that no one would believe her.

  “The sister’s gonna make it!” Haines said.

  Opal, in fact, was working. Chased by the tightening rules, she had found a part-time job cleaning a hospital lab, and I joined her there the following night. Swabbing and scrubbing in a musical voice beneath posters of the digestive tract, Opal created a mood of easy intimacy. She didn’t airbrush her wild adolescence (“I was out of control!”). She didn’t disguise her motives for moving to town (welfare in Milwaukee “pays the most”). Her candor seemed the only aspect of her character she cared to defend. “I am an honest person!” she said. Though her formal education had stopped at a semester of community college, her account of welfare history could have been drawn from a grad-school text. AFDC was created in the 1930s for white widows, she said, “but with so many African American women on it” the politicians decided “it was just out of control.” If the rolls were still predominantly white, “none of this W-2 would even be in effect.”

  In describing her streetwise past, Opal offered an unprompted aside. Lots of her friends had gotten high, but drugs had never tempted her. “Even though I fought and hung out with those people, I never did drugs,” she said. When I visited her apartment, I noticed a sign that proclaimed it a “Drug-Free Zone.” The man she introduced as her fiancé, Kenny Gross, was wearing a no-drugs pin. At that point, Opal had been smoking crack for seven years. And the drug was about to carve a destructive new path through her life.

  “My Mama said I was bad since I was a baby,” Opal was saying a few years later. We were driving around the South Side of Chicago on a survey of her youthful haunts: the projects where she had lived as a girl, the alleys where she had started to drink, the schools from which she had gotten expelled, the apartment where she had first smoked cocaine. Like her childhood, the trip began with the grim high rises of Stateway Gardens but passed through creditable working-class zones, and the accompanying narrative was equally eclectic, able to support multiple theories of her addiction. Opal began with biology. “I never knew my daddy, but he was a hard-core drug addict,” she said. “Plus my Mama drank a lot, so I probably got it from both sides.” One could add child psychology, wondering how much nurturing she got as the last of a young single mother’s five kids. “It was like Viella raised us,” Opal said of her oldest sister. In a later conversation, Kenny, her boyfriend, traced Opal’s addiction to the murky realm of self-esteem: “Opal never thought she was attractive. She thought she was so dark.” Mere proximity may have also played a role: she married a drug dealer. While the return to old streets and rebellions set her in high spirits—“Them was some fun days”—traces of loneliness showed. Three of her siblings had regular visits with their father, but Opal was left to speculate about hers, something she still did wistfully. He was so high the one time he came to visit, her mother wouldn’t let her see him. “I always think, ‘Would things be different if I had known my father? ’ ”

  One subject that doesn’t arise in her childhood story is welfare: her mother was hardly on it. Half the time Opal was growing up, her mother worked two jobs. Like her cousin Hattie Mae, Ruthie Mae Caples was raised on the Eastland plantation, a granddaughter of Pie Eddie Caples, and she was still picking the Eastlands’ cotton when she had her first child in her teens. After a detour to southern California, she joined the extended family in Chicago and found a job at a Zenith plant assembling TVs. Working her way out of the projects by the time Opal started school, Ruthie Mae settled at Fifty-ninth and Michigan—rough but not projects rough. That leaves Opal in that great class of troubled people often assumed to have been raised on welfare, who grew up with hardworking, single moms. “My Mama was at work all the time,” Opal said.

  Her siblings settled uneventfully into blue-collar lives. A brother made a navy career and another drove a truck. One sister worked as a medical clerk and the other in a bank. Yet “badness” acquired a power for Opal early on.

  “I was just bad!”

  “Man, we was bad!”

  “We were some bad teenagers, boy.”

  “Bad as hell.”

  “Just bad!”

  While Angie and Jewell saved their rebellions for adolescence, Opal got kicked out of sixth grade. “Running the halls, not going to my classes, talking back to the teachers . . . What didn’t I do?” she said. She got caught spray painting a field house and trying to set it on fire. Corporal punishment didn’t work; trips to Aunt Vidalia’s brought the kind of rough-justice whippings honed in plantation days. The Jubilee CME Temple didn’t work, either, though Opal liked singing in the choir. Trying to keep Opal out of trouble, her mother sent her to a public high school for girls. Opal got expelled in her sophomore year. In junior high school, she had started to drink—gin and juice, Wild Irish Rose, whatever she could find. “We used to get drunk and throw up all in the alley,” Opal said. “Man, we used to trip!” She also found a protector. With a flashy wardrobe and a chassis for a chest, Robert Lee Johnson, her first boyfriend, made a fatherless girl feel safe. They stayed together throughout high school and married at City Hall two years after Opal’s graduation, on her day off from Wendy’s. Her mother wasn’t there—she had to work—but she sponsored a reception shortly after, on Valentine’s Day. Opal, at twenty-one, wore red and planned to stay with Robert Lee forever. For all her problems, Opal, unlike Angie and Jewell, entered adulthood with a diploma, a marriage, and a job.

  Opal’s mother got Robert Lee hired at Zenith, but third-shift work on an assembly line didn’t hold his interest. One day he came home with what looked like a bag of soap chips. Crack was new to Chicago, and Opal was stunned to hear how much selling it would bring: $200 in an afternoon. ”Oowww, we fittin’ to have a lot of money!” she said. The ambience of the drug scene was ready-made for Opal’s sense of adventure: the guns, the men, the scales, the cash, the pagers, the commotion. She and Robert Lee lived behind the Calumet Building, a high-rise filled with prospective cli
ents, and Opal spent her nights on the back porch, drinking, watching the alleyway fights, and lending Robert Lee a hand. She had their first child at twenty-two, a girl they named Sierra. But that didn’t slow them down, and neither did Robert Lee’s arrests, one while Opal was still pregnant and another before Sierra turned one. With a single conviction for selling cocaine, he drew probation.

  In Opal’s tellings, the one letdown of married life was the discovery of Robert Lee’s affairs. She was pregnant and visiting him in jail one day when she found a mysterious Tanya on his list. Stopping by McDonald’s, she judged the cashier, Rene, too eager to slip him free food. Opal wasn’t one to take betrayal passively. Slipping a suspicious key off his ring, she let herself into Rene’s apartment and discovered Robert Lee in the living room, ironing his clothes. Opal found Rene and beat her up, and she swapped blows with Robert Lee, too, in knockdown, lamp-busting brawls. Opal doesn’t scare easily, but at five foot eight, two hundred pounds, Robert Lee could scare her. Still, a decade after splitting up, she refused to get divorced. “I was in love with him,” she said.

  One thing that Opal couldn’t understand was why people smoked cocaine. What could make them rob their families, neglect their kids, even sell their bodies to get it? “I saw how bad they looked and I said, ‘Man, how could they do that?’” Robert Lee’s brother had started smoking Primos, cigarettes laced with crack, and when Sierra was about a year old, he rolled one for Opal. She smoked it and felt nothing. She tried it again. “And you know what?” she said. “It didn’t take no time at all to get hooked. But you don’t know you’re hooked.” A few months later, Opal was pregnant with her second child and getting high constantly. “I used to think of all kinds of lies,” she said, about why Robert Lee’s drugs were missing. She said that his brother smoked them. Or a friend smoked them. Or she sold them and spent the money. One way to see Opal’s theft of the drugs is as revenge for Robert Lee’s affairs. (Enlisting his brother as a confederate gave her betrayal an incestuous edge.) Another is as pain relief: Opal had been medicating herself since her days of alleyway gin. When Robert Lee caught her rolling a Primo, she told him it was for a friend. “And he believed me!” she said. “Or he acted like he believed me—he was codependent.”

  But he wasn’t blind. Opal smoked crack throughout the pregnancy, and shortly after the baby arrived, she burned through the rent money. Robert Lee sent her home to her mother, hoping that might set her straight. But “I was gonna do what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it,” Opal said. While the new baby, Kierra, was born free of cocaine, Opal grew so thin her relatives feared she had AIDS. Opal and Robert Lee reconciled, and soon she was pregnant again. So was Rene. Opal was back living with her mother when her third daughter, Tierra, was born in the spring of 1993. By then she was twenty-six years old, severely depressed, and she had been smoking crack for three years. That’s when Jewell came home for a visit and happened to give a call.

  The drug that captured Opal had ancient appeal—some cultures thought coca leaves a gift from the gods—but crack didn’t make its American debut until the first half of the 1980s, appearing in Miami, Los Angeles, and New York, and exploding, by mid-decade, across the country. Crack is cocaine mixed with an additive, then cooked, cooled, and “cracked” into smokable pellets. Compared to powder, the champagne drug of the seventies, it had two advantages. Reaching the brain through the lungs, not the nose, it was much more efficient than snorting. It was also much cheaper. A gram of coke cost $100, but a crack vial could be bought for as little as $2.50. Suddenly, everyone - could afford it. To say that crack makes you feel good hardly captures its appeal. People who smoke it resort to words like euphoric and invincible, describing a sensation that unites pleasure with power. “I felt I could handle anything, do anything,” ran a women’s magazine account. “Crack has you up and on the go,” Opal said. “You on a mission.”

  From the outside, the behavior of addicts defies explanation. In biochemical terms, the explanation is clear: the euphoria is a rush of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that tells the brain it is experiencing intense pleasure. Food and sex cause dopamine to surge, as do all drugs of abuse, from nicotine to heroin. Crack causes it to surge to mighty levels. It’s a climax. A winning lottery ticket. The dunk that secures the championship ring. The problem is that the brain adjusts: it needs these new levels of dopamine just to feel normal and still more to feel high again. But chronic drug use actually causes it to get less. The body then inflicts a double whammy by activating a chemical, CRF, that suppresses the brain’s sense of pleasure. With that, Mardi Gras is over, and the cops are on Bourbon Street swinging their sticks. Crashing, the crack addict grows paranoid, desperate for more dopamine. At the start, people smoke to get high, but over time they smoke to feel normal again. They smoke to “get straight.”

  As powerful as crack is, not everyone who tries it gets addicted. An addict develops a kind of brain disease, albeit one of her making. The drug hijacks the circuits that govern motivation and reorganizes them around the lone task of getting more crack. In the paradigmatic cocaine experiment, once a lab rat discovers that tapping a lever will deliver the drug, the tapping takes over her life. She doesn’t eat, she doesn’t sleep, she doesn’t feed her young. She binges until she drops dead. While some people manage to stop on their own, most need the structured help a treatment program can provide. Even then about 80 percent relapse within a year, a figure that helps explain why public support for treatment programs is hard to sustain. For treatment to succeed, it literally has to change the brain.

  Leaving a program, a drug user often feels a surge of well-being, a rush of health and competence for three to six months. But old cues can still trigger old cravings. Physical prompts, like a glimpse of a crack house, can do it. So can emotional ones: happiness, sadness, a song. Cues are so powerful that lab rats get a dopamine surge just by looking at their levers. When they relapse, addicts rarely relapse a little. They pick up where they left off. They binge, as if making up for lost time.

  Two years after she got to Milwaukee, Opal got clean. Fleeing First Street after a four-day spree, she spent a few weeks in residential treatment before moving to the halfway house run by Pastor LeGrant. The preacher made three demands: get a job, pay the rent, and attend her storefront church. For all her earthly transgressions, Opal took pride in her spiritual roots—“I love sanctified churches”—and the House of Faith made her feel at home. She was off to a good start in the Twelve Step world when a man at a recovery meeting captured her attention. He would have been hard to miss. If his purple pants - didn’t stand out, the spray of gold jewelry would. It was a look that said to Opal “sophisticated gentleman.” Sitting beside her, Kenny Gross noticed Opal, too, noticed her short white shorts. Watching him eye her, another Twelve Stepper leaned over and warned, “Those shorts are going to get you in trouble.” One rule of recovery, an emotionally fragile process, is to avoid the roller-coaster of romance for a year. And there was another reason for Opal to be wary. “He used to be one of the baddest pimps in Milwaukee!” her housemate said. But the image of Kenny in fur coats and feathered hats only piqued Opal’s interest. As soon as she got an overnight pass, she took him to the Budgetel. “It was magic from then on,” she said.

  Kenny was a decade older than Opal and had been clean for three years. Still, even at thirty-eight, he radiated his old street vibes. He had a quick temper and a face that seemed angry even when he smiled, which wasn’t often. He seldom kept a job for more than a few months, and with an aggressive sideline peddling rings and chains, he drew snickers from Opal’s friends. Like Opal, he was raised by a working single mother, and like Opal he was drawn to the streets—nearly killing himself on a diet of heroin, coke, and pills. He got sober at the urging of a cousin dying of AIDS, and about sobriety he was deathly earnest. He wore his clean date on his NA medallion and defined his life’s purpose as mentoring younger addicts. As Kenny once (inadvertently) put it, having once been a pimp, he was determined to
become a “seductive member of society.” Even at the Budgetel, all he wanted to talk about was The Program. “You on a date, nigger!” Opal said. “I don’t wanna hear about no program!”

  Opal was smitten. With the First Street family scattered about, she invited everyone to meet him at a sobriety picnic. Kenny arrived with a suit and Bible, offering temperance lectures. Lucky and Robert smuggled in beer and dubbed him “Preacher Man.” Opal delivered an ultimatum: if Kenny wanted to keep seeing her, they had to move in together. Their first six months passed peacefully. He got a job as a short-order cook. She had welfare and some short-lived jobs. The girls came home from a stay at Jewell’s—Sierra was six, Kierra, four, and Tierra, two—and Opal enrolled in a nurturing program to improve her parenting skills. Kenny, seasoned at spotting cons, judged her to be sincere. “Her kids are her heart,” he thought. They even talked of getting married someday.

  Still, there were warning signs. Opal’s rush toward romance was one, itself a form of addictive behavior. Her arrest for ripping off Target was another. One of the Twelve Steps requires people to take a “fearless moral inventory” of themselves, which is hard to do during a shoplifting scheme. Opal left the courtroom as her case was called—“I wasn’t fittin’ to admit I was guilty, even though I was”—which left her walking around with a warrant out for her arrest. Mindful of cues, Narcotics Anonymous tells addicts to avoid the “people, places, and things” they associate with getting high. But Opal wasn’t about to avoid Angie and Jewell, even though there was usually a party nearby. She skipped NA meetings. She had a beer. Then, Kenny’s special gold chain disappeared, the one with the abstinence medal. It took him a week to calm down, but when he did she told him what he already knew. She sold the chain, but not the medallion; no drug dealer wanted that. Opal’s relapse, in the spring of 1996, occurred somewhere around the sixth month, toward the outer edge of what the statistics predict.