S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  I attacked my recovery with the energy I’d expended chasing crack highs. Every facet of my routine was structured around recovery. I hit at least one meeting a day—two or three on my days off, Fridays and Saturdays. I resumed working my night shift, listening to the scanner and racing to crime scenes. A couple of friends, fellow reporters, asked me how I was doing. They had asked an editor about my sudden disappearance, and I’d given the editor the green light to let them know I was in rehab. My transition back into the real world was going better than I’d hoped.

  I was floating on what support-group old-timers call the “pink cloud,” a feeling of well-being some people experience early in recovery. When I was drinking and using crack, I’d been running on a cycle of highs and crashes. Now, as the toxins left my body, I felt a pleasant, almost constant low-level buzz. Addiction was my punk.

  Then, on my seventy-seventh day clean, I ran into Carrie as I walked home from work. It was just after midnight on a bitter early-March night. I could have easily waved to her and gone on my way. Instead, I waved and strolled straight up to her.

  “Hey, stranger,” Carrie said. She was wearing a heavy parka and slacks. “Haven’t seen you in a minute.”

  “Yeah, I was away for a while.”

  “I’ve got a twenty,” Carrie said.

  The magic words. Just like that, an internal switch was flipped. A hit or two couldn’t hurt. I’d been good, I’d earned it. It was a form of temporary insanity that’s difficult to explain to a non­­addict. Intellectually, I knew that using crack again could have dire consequences. Maybe some part of me needed to test myself. But the fact was, and always will be, that, as a junkie, using drugs comes naturally to me; abstaining is out of the ordinary. Later, I would learn that it was not rare for people who had been sober ten, twenty, even thirty years to relapse, often with horrific consequences.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  At my apartment, Carrie divided the rock in two with her fingernail, loaded her pipe with one half, lit up, and took a long hit. She leaned over and shotgunned me. I exhaled and quickly loaded my chunk into the pipe. It dissolved instantly. I inhaled.

  I knew I was in trouble before I exhaled. My addiction was no longer a punk. Cunning and baffling had done their bit, and powerful was now stepping in. My addiction wanted more.

  Carrie saw it in my eyes. “Are you okay?”

  I looked at her, not caring that she was sexy and skilled and willing. My words came out in a low, tortured whisper: “We need to get more.”

  Carrie nodded. A few minutes later, I turned onto S Street and pulled up in front of John’s Place. A lone slinger stood in front of the bakery. He jogged over.

  I rolled down my window. “You got anything?” The dealer shook his head. “Out of product at the moment.”

  “This can’t be right,” I said as I pulled away from the curb. I made a series of right turns and returned to the spot in front of the nightclub where I’d made hundreds of buys.

  S Street was dry.

  “I know another spot,” I said. I pulled away and headed east on Rhode Island Avenue, toward the corner of 1st and T Streets Northwest, my secondary copping zone. There were no dealers in sight.

  It was a minor miracle—two of the busiest open-air rock markets in the city were shut down on the very night I relapsed.

  I drove Carrie back to Thomas Circle, dropped her off, and went home. A monstrous sense of remorse kicked in. My seventy-seven days of sobriety were gone.

  How could I have been so dumb? When I started over—if I started over—I’d be a newbie again.

  I wanted to be clean. I wanted to smoke half the crack in the city. I stared at the ceiling for two hours, until finally I drifted off to a fitful sleep.

  I woke up as dawn was breaking. I’d gone to sleep hoping I’d be fine when I awakened, but instead, my addiction goaded me. More. Now.

  More would be available. The morning was cool, but brilliantly sunny. By now S Street or 1st and T or one of the dozens of other rock zones within a short driving distance would be open for business. All I had to do was get in the car.

  No.

  Yes.

  Maybe.

  More, more, more. Every cell in my body screamed for more crack. I peeked out my bay window. It was almost 8:00 a.m. The neighborhood was stirring to life.

  I paced back and forth from my living room to my kitchen, considering my options: I could call a fellow alcoholic in the program, turn myself in, and start over. I could call Champagne—I still knew her pager number by heart—and go to town.

  I could try to live. I could self-destruct.

  I was paralyzed. I didn’t have the courage to pick up the phone and call a fellow addict, to admit what I’d done and start over. I was terrified of where I’d end up if I took another hit. Back and forth I paced.

  I slipped on my leather jacket and stepped outside. In a daze, I wandered west toward downtown. I didn’t have a plan, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before I ran into a strawberry or a slinger. I was moving toward my next hit.

  I’d gone only a couple of blocks when I ran into Roxanne. She was wedded to heroin, but she stepped out with crack now and then. I’d picked her up a couple of times when I couldn’t find Champagne or Carrie.

  She had greasy, light-brown hair, bad skin, and a missing front tooth. Roxanne could have been in her late twenties or her early forties—her prodigious heroin consumption made it hard to tell. She always wore long sleeves, even on blazing-hot days. But in the summer, she wore open-toed sandals, and I’d seen the track marks between her toes.

  Roxanne was sitting on the curb.

  “Hey there,” she said as I approached. She got a better look at my face and added, “What’s wrong?”

  I sat down next to her, confused, ashamed, afraid. For a long moment I stared at my feet, fighting back tears.

  “It’s all right,” Roxanne said. “You can tell me.”

  I turned and looked into her brown eyes.

  “I screwed up,” I blurted out. “I went to rehab right before Christmas and I stayed for three weeks and I got clean and was released and I was doing great and I had seventy-seven days and last night I screwed up and I used again and now I just want to keep going.”

  My addiction crouched, waiting. Roxanne probably knew every slinger in the neighborhood.

  If Roxanne had offered to hook me up, I would have handed her cash on the spot. I would have walked into the darkest crack house in the toughest combat zone in the city.

  Roxanne put her hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s okay, sweetie. Take it easy,” she said softly. “There’s no need to kill yourself. You just need to start over. I know—I’ve been there. I was clean once.”

  I was sobbing freely now. I looked into Roxanne’s face and knew she was telling the truth.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Just own up to what you did and you’ll be okay. Go to a meeting, tell what happened, and take it from there. You don’t want to go back to using.”

  I wiped away my tears, leaned over, and kissed Roxanne on the cheek.

  “Thank you.”

  “You can do it,” Roxanne said.

  I wobbled back to my apartment. For nearly three hours, I paced. Then I drove to a club in Dupont Circle that hosted noontime meetings. I raised my hand and turned myself in.

  “I relapsed last night,” I said. “I’d been clean for seventy-seven days and I took another hit of crack.”

  The twenty people in the room listened, dead silent. A few looked straight down at the floor. I could sense what they were thinking: Better him than me.

  I didn’t care. The second I finished talking, my urge to use evaporated like so much crack smoke.

  I wasn’t cured—I knew the monster could reappear at any moment, commanding me to drink or smoke crack. But in that crucial instant, I also knew that I wasn’t going to use that day.

  I wanted to live.

  A few days later, on a Satur
day afternoon in early April, someone knocked on my door. I looked through the peephole and saw Carrie. She was in tight jeans and a formfitting cotton polo shirt.

  I didn’t think about it. I opened the door and let her in. She smiled.

  “Hi, stranger. I’ve been wondering where you’ve been. Haven’t seen you around the way. I was worried that something happened to you.”

  I’d been avoiding Carrie’s usual spots. Something had happened: The relapse had scared the hell out of me.

  “I’ve been around,” I shrugged.

  “I’ve got a couple of rocks, if you want to party,” she said.

  Should have seen that coming. My pulse quickened. I was thrilled. I was terrified. I should have asked her to leave.

  Instead I said, “Can I see?”

  Carrie reached into her inside coat pocket and pulled out two twenty rocks, each wrapped in a small plastic baggie. I stared at the rocks in her palm. She’d scored good weight.

  “You have a stem and a lighter?”

  She nodded, patted her coat pocket.

  Carrie slipped off her coat. She started unbuttoning her blouse.

  I thought about the consequences. Even though my addiction had been dormant since that terrifying night of my relapse, it would now be ferocious, twenty feet tall with ripped muscles.

  It would win.

  I would die.

  Carrie was working on the second button of her blouse. I reached out and touched her hands.

  “No, Carrie. I can’t do this. Believe me, I’d love to. But I can’t. I’ve been clean, and I’m trying to stay that way. I’ve relapsed once. It was pretty bad, and I can’t do that again.”

  “You go to meetings? You’re in the program?”

  “Yeah.”

  Carrie nodded. She buttoned up and put her coat back on.

  A crazy thought popped into my head. I went with it: “Listen, if you want to go to a meeting, I’ll take you. If I can get clean, you can, too.”

  A wistful smile crossed her face.

  “I was clean for a while. I was in the program. I had a few twenty-four hours built up. Then …” her voice trailed off. “Maybe someday.”

  Carrie walked out the door.

  I slumped onto the sofa and waited for my heart to stop pounding.

  Chapter 8

  Drive-by Promotion

  On the morning of January 20, 1993, Lou stood at his post at the corner of 3rd Street and Constitution Avenue Northwest, three blocks from the Capitol. Like almost every other Metropolitan Police Department officer, he was on the street to provide security for Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. As the captain in charge of detectives for 1D, Lou typically wore suits. But inauguration duty was all about visibility, so he’d broken out his white shirt, blue jacket, and MPD hat for the first time in a couple of years.

  It was a beautiful morning, Lou thought—sunny and brisk, but not too cold for January. He had a perfect view of the west side of the Capitol, where presidents are sworn in. The crowds behind the barriers set up along the street were growing by the minute.

  An unmarked car pulled up to the curb. Inspector William O. Ritchie was behind the wheel. He and Lou had worked together in homicide in the early eighties, when Lou was a detective and Ritchie a lieutenant. Before that, when Lou was just a young street officer, they’d both been in the Fifth District.

  Ritchie was one of the few white shirts at the time who was college educated. In 1971, he’d gotten a bachelor’s in physical education from Howard University, which he attended on a track scholarship. He later earned a degree in mortuary science from the University of the District of Columbia. He was smart and hardworking and didn’t like to engage in departmental politics. He and Lou knew each other, but they weren’t drinking buddies or cronies.

  People kept streaming toward the parade route. The crowd was two, three, four deep. It would be a sea of humanity by midmorning. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood.

  Ritchie rolled down his window.

  “How’s your back?” he asked.

  “Doing better, thanks,” Lou said. His lower back was balky. He’d started going to a chiropractor and doing exercises to strengthen it.

  Like Lou, Ritchie wasn’t much for small talk. He got right to it: “I’m about to become chief of detectives,” he said. “How would you like to be my homicide commander?”

  “Yeah, I’d do that job,” Lou replied almost instantly.

  Ritchie wasn’t surprised.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said, then rolled up his window and drove off.

  Lou had aspired to command homicide since the early eighties. He knew that morale was bad in the squad, that detectives were overrun with unsolved killings. But he felt confident that he could improve its collective spirit and make it more effective. He had great street sources, including an ex-cop. Those sources alone would be good for an additional fifteen to twenty closures on homicide cases every year, Lou figured. He wasn’t afraid of the demands of assuming the command at a time when D.C. was the nation’s murder capital. In fact, he relished the prospect. He thought the plan he’d developed over the past few years could revolutionize the way cases were investigated, if only he could get an opportunity to put it into action.

  But first things first. Lou returned to his parade-route duties. Many people in the crowd were smiling, excited that they were about to witness a piece of history and welcome a new, young president. An hour or so after Ritchie drove off, a pair of girls, about twelve or thirteen, approached Lou: They’d come to D.C. for the inaugural and gotten separated from their party. They were supposed to meet with the rest of their group at the corner of 12th Street and Independence Avenue Northwest to board a bus that would take them home after the parade.

  They were old enough and close enough to their meeting spot that Lou could have given them directions. Instead he told them not to worry and drove them to the intersection in his marked squad car.

  On the way, Lou thought about Ritchie’s offer and what he’d do if he were in charge of homicide.

  Ritchie knew better than most the demands of the homicide command. He’d served as the captain in charge of the branch from 1988 to 1990, when the number of killings in D.C. had spiraled toward five hundred per year. In 1992, the city had clocked 443, and the police department seemed to have no real strategy for quelling the violence.

  Many killers were, in fact, getting away with murder: The homicide squad’s closure rate was somewhere in the range of 35 to 40 percent. That didn’t mean that all those suspects were eventually convicted of homicide, though. With drug gangs killing people who cooperated with police and prosecutors, many witnesses were afraid to testify, making it impossible to go forward with a prosecution. Some cases were dropped, and some suspects pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

  The situation clearly weighed heavily on MPD chief Isaac Fulwood Jr., who in September 1992 had announced that he would be making good on his oft-repeated promise to resign if the bloodshed didn’t stop. Talking about his tenure as chief to a Post reporter, Fulwood said, “The number one low has been the record number of homicides, the record number of young black men killed needlessly.”

  Three months after Fulwood’s announcement, Marion Barry successor Sharon Pratt Kelly introduced the new chief: Fred Thomas, a former deputy chief who’d retired in 1985 and had been working as the vice president of the Metropolitan Police Boys and Girls Club.

  Shortly after his appointment, Thomas met with all police department division commanders to get up to speed on how the white shirts were running their respective shops. Ritchie headed MPD’s medical services division, overseeing the facility that treated D.C. cops and firefighters, as well as some members of the Park Police and uniformed Secret Service officers. He told Thomas that he’d saved the department as much as $350,000 annually by setting up a fee schedule for the private physicians who treated injured officers. Before, it had been paying whatever the doctors charged.

  “Is there anything el
se you would like to say?” Thomas asked Ritchie as their meeting wound down.

  Ritchie saw an opportunity: The white shirt who was in charge of the criminal investigations division at the time was preparing to transfer to another assignment. Ritchie made his move.

  “I think I’m the best person to command the criminal investigations division,” he told Thomas.

  For weeks, Ritchie didn’t hear from Thomas. Then, on January 19, 1993, the day before the inauguration, Thomas called to tell him he would be the new chief of detectives, effective the following day. Thomas said he was going to promote the current homicide captain, Wyndell Watkins, to the rank of inspector. That meant there would be an opening for a homicide commander.

  “I only have one person in mind,” Ritchie told Thomas. “Lou Hennessy.”

  Thomas told Ritchie he’d get back to him. The following day, on the inauguration route, Ritchie asked Lou whether he wanted the job.

  But it was hardly a done deal. Thomas called Ritchie about a week later: “I’ve been getting some bad reports on Hennessy,” he said. The chief had heard that Lou was “uncontrollable,” that he’d had verbal skirmishes with fellow white shirts.

  The second part, at least, was true. In the mid-eighties, when he was a lieutenant, Lou had discovered a patrol officer playing Russian roulette with his service revolver in the basement of the officer’s home. The officer was distraught because his wife was having an affair with another cop—who happened to be close to Chief Maurice Turner. Lou relieved the man of his gun and badge and referred him to the Police and Fire Clinic for a mental health evaluation. Following procedure, he then wrote up a memo and sent it to the chief’s office.

  The memo was kicked back: The officer was to remain on the street, with his gun. Livid, Lou called Reggie Smith, the lieutenant in the chief’s office who handled departmental memos.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Lou yelled at Smith, who was close not only to Turner but also to Fulwood, then an assistant chief. Smith didn’t want a written record of the messy problem in the chief’s office, Lou believed. Lou went over Smith’s head, straight to Fulwood, who sided with Lou and arranged for the officer to be relieved of his duties while he was evaluated.