* * *
The other night I watched a show on drugs. It talked about this study where they rigged rats to a machine that shot them with cocaine every time they pressed a bar. The man on the show explained that the rats pressed the bar at the expense of food, sex, sleep, pressed even when it meant they’d suffer electric shock, kept right on pressing for hits until they fell out dead.
Chapter 10
“But what if this is?”
—Champ
Ain’t a spot to squeeze in nowhere in sight, which shouldn’t really be no big old surprise, since most days, meaning a day like today, finding a place to park near campus is like defying physics or catching a lightning bolt or slapping bullets out of midair. Been so bad, twice I wrote a letter (didn’t send either one of them, though) to our crater-face school president beseeching him to increase the meter count or better yet build a new garage so fools don’t have to wander miles upon miles trying to find a spot for their ride. By the time I find a spot, by my kick around watch, I’ve missed almost half of Professor Haskins’s Advanced Speech class. With no change for the meter and no time to get none, I leave the car parked on a prayer, meter blinking expired, leave it paralleled, throw on my backpack, and zip down Broadway, hustling around the tennis courts to the canopied park blocks and the pebble-paved pathway where last winter I slipped on a patch of ice and busted my ass.
And here’s the cold part about being late to Haskins’s class: The room is too small to sneak in unnoticed, not a chance of it, so I burst into a dead sprint. Okay, okay (there goes the hype again), something close to a dead sprint is more like it, what with leaves on the ground and the ache of bruising my ass-cheeks months back is still fresh on my mind. My legs kicking and my arms pumping so fast they blur the words of the dude with the Santa Claus beard proselytizing from an overturned bucket. Legs kicking and arms pumping past nerds plowing through notes, past pretty young things lap-balancing encyclopedia-thick texts, past jocks strolling with knotted tenny shoes looped over their shoulders, past huddles of exchange students, all the while the smell of roasted lamb, roasted chicken, and seasoned ground beef taunting my empty gut. But ain’t no time for snacking. Pow! I duck into one building, blast through another and another with that juiced-up Olympian speed, me zagging through clogs of striving Einsteins till I reach Haskins’s room, stoop to catch my breath, fix my laces, and pull my shirt from where it’s stuck to my skin from sweat.
A head or two twist around when I walk in. Haskins pauses long enough for me to find a seat. Mr. Thomas, he says, his voice deep and scratchy. (Imagine an old blues singer: a B.B. this or Muddy that.) Nice of you to join us. I was worried you’d miss your turn, he says. How long before you’re ready? The thick of Haskins’s specs, you’d believe him if he claimed he could see outer space. He twirls a stick of chalk. He settles in a desk in the front and crosses his legs.
It won’t take long, I say. I fleece my pockets for a tissue, pat my face, search my bag for my speech, and ramble up to the lectern. I clear my throat, look out at the room, a class as full as it’s been all quarter, at Haskins sitting in the front row, a critique sheet on his desk. Good morning, I say. My name is Shawn Thomas and my speech is called “The Bias Effect.”
* * *
Here’s the forty-four-billion-dollar question:
What’s the link between the NBA lottery and America’s War on Drugs?
The answer: Leonard Kevin Bias.
The über-ballyhooed Len Bias, that is.
[Pause. Eyes.]
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the night the Boston Celtics selected the former Maryland Terrapin with the number two pick in the NBA draft. The six-foot-eight small forward with the liquid jumper and bionic legs was everybody’s pick for the next coming, a talent to rival Michael Jordan, some said maybe better than Jordan, a player who could fuel the league for years to come. Well, Bias didn’t transform the B-ball universe alive, but his death from a cocaine overdose forty-eight hours after that draft sure has metamorphosed America.
[Pause. Eyes.]
Soon after Bias’s death, House Speaker Tip O’Neill (rest in peace), let’s call him Commissioner Tip O’Neill, inflamed by the death of a player who’d become a neutron star in what was known as the DMV, and whom Tip, not ironically the representative of Boston, believed had died of a crack overdose because he was black, convinced his Democrats they needed a swift and stern response.
If you think Commissioner Tip’s game plan was all about Bias and pursuit of the greatest public good, think again. It was an election year and the donkeys were dead set on socking it to the GOP, who’d won two years prior in no small part by convincing voters their rivals were “too soft on crime.”
All right, so even if the Dems’ motives weren’t wholly pure, at least they had the sense to seek counsel. There was no way an experienced group of lawmakers could fathom drafting a bill without research, facts, testimonies, expert opinions.
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
[Eyes.]
The response of Commissioner Tip and his collective of vote-seeking senators was about as soft as the bad-boy Detroit Pistons. That answer was called the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The bill, which volleyed for a spate between the House and the Senate, was ratified that October; it passed sans a single secondary expert opinion, with all of zero hearings, without conversation the first with a single person from the Bureau of Prisons, minus insight from even one judge, sitting or retired or dead and brought back to life.
[Eyes.]
It was a tough, big, attention-grabbing bill, infamous for a draconian-like feature that had been outlawed since the 1970s: a mandatory minimum, more specifically the hundred-to-one ratio.
[Pause. Pause. Eyes.]
What that ratio means is this: it takes a hundred times the amount of soft cocaine to trigger the same penalty for crack cocaine.
Tip and his boys set the triggers for first-time offenders at five and fifty grams. Five grams of what old-school dealers called “ready rock” earns a five-year federal bid. Fifty grams earns a ten-year set. By contrast, you’d need five hundred and five thousand grams of soft cocaine for that much time behind bars.
[Pause. Eyes.]
Let’s put that in furthur perspective? The average role player wandering the streets with five grams, what amounts to a few rocks, in his pocket would receive the same sentence as a team starter toting a half kilo.
It means the sixth-mantype dealer arrested with fifty grams on his person, what amounts to the size of a jumbo meatball, is subject to the same sentence as an all-league dealer caught with five kilos!
Now that we all know the numbers, can we agree they don’t add up? That the math adds up in the worst way.
[Pause.]
Now here’s another billion-dollar question. Which ethnic group is most sentenced to the unsportsmanlike bids?
Answer: The lion’s share don’t look nothing like Commissioner Tip and his team of rah-rah politicians.
[Pause. Eyes.]
Before you accuse me of playing the race card, check out a few more stats
Nationwide, blacks make up eighty-two percent of the cocaine defendants, while whites and Hispanics make up two-thirds of cocaine users!
Nationwide, blacks receive eighty-eight-point-three percent of the mandatory crack sentences!
In Bias’s home state, the stats aren’t any better.
There, blacks make up sixty-eight percent of all people arrested for drugs.
There, blacks now land drug-related prison terms at eighteen times the rate of whites!
I could go on. Believe me, I could.
[Pause. Pause. Eyes.]
It’s safe to say—no, it’s true and right to say—Commissioner Tip and his Dream Team of legislators not only dropped the ball on drug laws, they exacerbated it to the crisis of a forty-four-billion-dollar (take that salary cap!) annual blunder. Commissioner Tip has passed on, so the new question, the question for all the bank, is this: Which politician wil
l have the guts to amend what has become the biggest mistake of twentieth-century American law?
* * *
Even a super-senior such as myself don’t know what to make of this silence.
Haskins stands and tucks the hem of his African-colored ethnic print shirt, the light turning his natural into a gibbous black globe. Polished wing tips, pregnant wallet stuffed in the front pocket of slacks cinched at the waist into specs of a corset. This is what the activist-turned-professor look looks like live in vivid color. He saunters up, and I make my way to the back to a seat. He makes a comment that I don’t hear from eyeing the Filipina chick across the room.
Would anyone like to offer feedback? Haskins says. Or ask a question. I sit up, roll my neck, press my toes to stretch my calves. The pugnacious earthy chick with the tangled hair, who stay shooting me a cryptic eye, shoots up a hand. You make it seem like some big conspiracy, she says. She pulls her knees to her chest, leaves her demolished boots hanging off the lip of her seat. As if America has some goal to put blacks in prison. Like, that’s just so ridic, she says, and waves her hands past her eyes. Like beyond ridic.
I kind of agree, a dude from across the circle says. He don’t raise his hand cause, shit (his T-shirt is two sizes too small and jeans are shrink to snug!), if he did he might bust a seam. Hey, I’m not prejudiced or anything, he says, but it sounds like excuse-making to me. Do you really think Congress has it out for blacks? C’mon, bud, he says. People commit crimes and criminals go to jail. It’s simple. Everything’s not about race.
If this was another year, my freshman or sophomore or junior year, those quarters my brain’s alchemy was tweaked by a legion of black studies courses (you’d be surprised how riled the right reading list can make you), if this was then, those days I spent stalking campus with a militant’s scowl, I’d say something to set dude’s snug-ass jeans aflame. But this ain’t then; it’s now, my last year, and the real is, no matter what I say, white folks won’t ever hate themselves like us.
You’re right, not everything’s about race, I say. But what if this is?
No one else says another word.
Quiet or no quiet, how I feel about most of them most days, especially the rare ones when I’m carrying a package with my books and papers, how I feel those days especially, is these suckers would be ecstatic if they saw me arrested. Oh, the dreams I’ve had, the nightmares of officers raiding my class, clapping me in cuffs, and parading me to a car parked conspicuous as shit in the Park Blocks, horrors of these squares blabbing to some local reporter how they always thought me up to no good, the vision of my suckerfied classroom nemeses running his weak script for all the world: People commit crimes, criminals go to jail. Simple!
Haskins yanks his hella-cinched slacks well above his hip bones. He calls on the next speaker and the next—one speech on recycling, another on organ donors, both of which real talk might’ve been better than mine. Haskins asks at the end of class if I’m keeping my appointment, and I know I should say no, but why, this moment, do I feel as though I can’t. He packs a vintage shoulder bag and we leave while the next class files in. His office is in another building, and I drag a step behind him the whole way there. Haskins offers me a seat on a green tweed couch, retacks the Who Will Survive America poster that’s come loose at one end, shelves a stack of books from his desk.
Your speech, he says. It was strong. You could tell by their response.
But I don’t think they got it, he says.
Sometimes it’s not what they think, but if they think, he says.
Haskins leans back in his seat, clasps his hands behind his head. So what’re your postgrad plans? Grad school, I hope.
Grad school, I say. No plans for that.
Well that’s disappointing, he says. Is this a certainty? You’d do great in political science.
You mean politics? I say.
Yes, politics, he says.
Oh no, I say. Politics aren’t for us.
Wrong, he says. He takes off his specs, rubs the bridge of his nose. Politics are especially for us. Give it some thought before you dismiss it.
Haskins swivels to face his crowded bookcase, plucks a dusty hardcover off a shelf, shoves it at me. These are some of the greatest speeches of the century, he says. Go ahead and take a look. I think you’ll like it.
Will give it a read, sir, I say. But I’m pretty set.
Give some thought, he says. The program is two years. Trust me, time will pass no matter. You might as well do something with it.
Careful not to open my bag too wide (the stench would be tough to explain), I stuff the book inside and quick-fast zip it shut.
When I leave, there’s a cluster of students wearing shirts and ties with buttons pinned to their chests campaigning for the school election. I push past a flyer-bearing future politician (me one of them?) onto Broadway, stopping by the phone booth (it beats a cell for business 24/7) under the sky bridge to call back a lick. My guy says he’s on his way down. He wants a few zips which won’t buy no mansions, but ain’t nothing to scoff at neither.
Every campus has them, self-aggrandizing weed men. Around here it’s the anarchistic muralized white boys who hock the nickel bags, twenty sacks, and eighths of green to the school’s ubiquitous weed hypes. Got to admit they make me jealous too, cause though the money’s less, unless they get greedy or hella-reckless, they can semi-stealth their business sine die, no troubles.
But there ain’t no charitable apathy nor no promo for this illicit shit. Anyone vending what I vend best keep it to themselves. Which I do. You won’t catch me selling to anyone affiliated on any level with this fine, fine institution. But just because I don’t serve the student body, staff, or faculty don’t mean the campus is off-limits for business. Believe you me, there is no safer place for this than here. The Bias Effect. Tough to count the days my backpack’s freighted with more than books, with what’s a sure trigger for a federal charge. Shit, if the Feds emptied my bag today, if they found what’s sealed off in clear plastic, I’d be knee-deep in middle age when I paroled.
Farther up, I find an empty bench between buildings and wait for my lick. I crack the book from Haskins, but can’t focus for shit with this sack in my bag, with the automatic doors opening, with the pitter-patter of people walking past, the schwock of a tennis match, with the boom of the bearded man still ranting from his overturned bucket.
You mind? A guy asks me for a spot on the bench and I make space. He’s carrying a leather briefcase and wears a beta-male blue suit. He asks if I’m a student and I nod, push my face in the pages, but eye him from my peripheral. He covers his face and sighs. He takes his hands off his face and rakes his hair. He picks up his briefcase and lays it across his lap and thumps what could be Morse code for backup. I get up, grab my pungent, freighted backpack, and scuttle the fuck off.
Am I, paranoid? Hell yeah! But check it, the moment right after you stop being noid is the moment you should make sure your people ain’t blocked collect calls from lockdown.
Chapter 11
… they’ll see for themselves.
—Grace
One or the other, cause it can’t be both. The football or the basketball. Either will put a dent in my so-called savings. The itty-bitty money I’m socking away for when these people let me off their papers—and they will. I choose the Spalding and buy a pack of needles and a hand pump, at prices that leave me with too little to mention, so I won’t mention it. There’s a boy that’s more or less between my firstborn and my middle boy dipped over a station and listening to headphones loud as bullhorns. The boy’s holding a CD with a cover that shows a guy wearing a suit and scarf and fedora with his head tipped low. The boy closes his eyes and snaps his neck back and forth. The next song that plays samples an old soul favorite of mine, and I listen until as a mother I can’t anymore. I tap the boy and he snatches off his speakers. I ask him to suggest an album that’s a bit less explicit. He bops down to another shelf and picks a colorful CD off the rack
. This one, he says.
I buy the CD and the Spalding and straggle out the automatic doors with my purchase double-bagged and my previous few dollars fewer. As soon as I get outside, the cold snakes inside me. I’ll have to wait until the paycheck after next for a coat that puts up more fight. Payday is Friday, next Friday, but it’s also the week my court fines are due. Traffic plods along. A hard wind whips up my leg.
This is how it is until the bus comes. The driver is a young woman. I find a seat, but move for a guy who cracks his window in this cold. It’s a long ride to my transfer. I wait under a covered stop for my next bus. There’s a pay phone inside the stop that keeps ejecting coins. The bus rumbles up I-5 and across the bridge and off on the city center and into the bus depot. The depot’s surrounded by pawnshops, old brick buildings, slant parking spots, parking meters made of copper. The last bus carries me across the city. Vancouver, Washington, VW, is lush and unlittered and no one needs to be anywhere fast. I get off and slog what passes for a busy street carrying bags—a heft. Kenny lives in a subdivision, rows of new homes painted tan or blue or gray, homes with double-car garages and neat piles of leaves in the yard—this is the other side of living check-to-check.
If he’d told me about this place—his tongue has never been a conduit for the truth—I would’ve called him a bald-faced lie.
The address he gave me has a big picture window with its curtains drawn apart, fluffy upholstered couches, a glass table, an oil painting of a bowl of fruit.
I am loved.
I am strong.
I am patient.
No one answers. Not the first time I buzz. Not the second. It’s a long time before I hear a voice and the light clop of feet, longer before someone comes to the door. It’s Helen. Are my boys here? I say.
She smirks and slaps a hand on her hip and huffs a lift in her bangs. I sit my bags beside me and cross my arms. I see we still rude as ever, I say.
The Residue Years Page 7
