Blueschild Baby

by George Cain

  It happened not only with black cocaine use in the early twentieth century—fearmongering was used to drum up support for the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which regulated drugs for the first time—but with Chinese immigrants and opium in nineteenth-century California; with Mexicans and marijuana in the 1930s; with black heroin use in the 1950s; with the inner-city crack epidemic of the 1980s; with the rise of meth in poor white communities at the turn of the twenty-first century.

  Every addiction story needs a villain. But America has never been able to decide whether addiction is an illness or a crime. Some addicts get pitied, others get blamed. Alcoholics are tortured geniuses. Drug addicts are deviant zombies. Male drunks are thrilling. Female drunks are bad moms. White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of color get punished. Celebrity addicts get tabloid headlines and posh rehab with equine therapy. Poor addicts get prison terms. Someone carrying crack cocaine gets five years, while someone driving drunk gets a night in jail, even though drunk driving kills more people every year than all illegal drugs combined. In her account of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander points out that many of these biases tell a much larger story about “who is viewed as disposable—someone to be purged from the body politic—and who is not.”

  * * *

  When I started reading literary narratives of addiction, and absorbing literary mythologies of addiction, I was struck by how many of these works—and these myths—were by and about dead white men. The lineage of boozy luminaries, literary legends I worshipped as a young writer coming of age, ranged from the modernist drunks—Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald—to the sages who followed them across the course of the twentieth century: John Berryman, Malcolm Lowry, William Burroughs, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace. I’d always seen these authors as dashing rogues—appealingly dysfunctional silhouettes—who mined dark wisdom from the depths of their tormented psyches.

  There are other accounts of addiction out there, of course, but many of their authors haven’t made it into the canon: Clarence Cooper’s 1967 novel, The Farm, an acutely realized portrait of addiction and “the cure” at a federal prison-hospital in Kentucky, and an astute dissection of the ways “rehabilitation” has often involved yet another assertion of white control over incarcerated men of color; Lee Stringer’s 1998 memoir, Grand Central Winter, about his days of addiction and homelessness, and how he finally, literally, started to write his way out of them; and James Welch’s 1974 novel, Winter in the Blood, about an alcoholic Blackfoot Indian in the midst of an existential crisis under the huge skies of Montana.

  Blueschild Baby tells a very different story from the mythologies I’d inherited about dead white men who wrote beautiful prose—who turned their psychic pain into heavy drinking, heavy using, and iconic art. This novel excavates its fair share of dark wisdom, but it doesn’t lean on any easy mythologies about the triangular relationship between suffering, addiction, and beauty. Instead, it tells the story of a man who has done hard time for his addiction because his country decided—before he was ever born—that he had probably already done something wrong.

  The novel begins with George arriving back in Manhattan after his release from prison—even the sight of Manhattan makes him crave the drugs again—and follows him through a few increasingly desperate scores, through a grudging reunion with his former partner and four-year-old daughter, and then a meeting with his parole officer in the Newark courthouse—where he passes the “marks of rebellion” on Springfield Avenue, the residue of the recent riots: blackened stores and broken glass and a burnt smell in the air.

  Nothing about this novel is easy. Its protagonist has more in common with the “unrepentant addict” of William Burroughs’s Junky than with the uplifting heroes of more straightforward tales of recovery and redemption. Its protagonist is callous and abusive. George watches a woman overdose and feels mainly a kind of strange thrill at being able to pronounce her dead. He sees his four-year-old daughter for the first time since she was born, and then leaves her again. He feels little more than loathing for her mother. He sexually assaults her babysitter. Cain resists respectability politics at every turn—by presenting a character who is smart and full of yearning, but often acts aggressively, violently, even unthinkably.

  In the novel, George explains himself as a black man sick of being touted as a trophy of racial upward mobility, worn out by John Henryism and tired of performing model citizenship. He is a former high-school basketball star and college scholarship kid who has ended up scoring drugs back in the same projects where he was raised. The novel is almost absurd in the extravagance of how Cain demonizes his fictional protagonist, after giving him his own name—as if Cain has made a hair shirt of his own novel, exaggerating his own sins and painting himself as villain in order to exorcise his own demons and to force his readers into contact with a character who is both wronged and wronging, difficult to root for—an addict who spends much of the book harming others.

  How many times have I read certain scenes in this novel—when George watches a man rape an unconscious woman after her overdose and does not intervene; or when he forces himself on his daughter’s young babysitter—and wished it existed without them? Many times. That would make it an easier novel, full of shapelier morals and guided by a more “likable” protagonist. The novel that exists is more vexing, more confounding, more conflicted in the responses it provokes—ultimately a more apt way of documenting addiction itself, a condition that often produces behaviors that alienate our sympathies at every turn. Someone doesn’t need to be blameless, Cain suggests, in order to deserve human complexity on the page—in order to illuminate the tangled knot of addiction, and the subtleties of how we narrate its thrall.

  This conflicted quality—in its many facets—is what ultimately makes Blueschild Baby a great work of art. This novel is alive to the truth of addiction as a socially constructed experience and a physically brutal ordeal. It’s alive to the harms its narrator has suffered, and the many ways he has harmed others. It’s alive to both the wonder and horror of its particular New York City, to the way the broad avenues of Harlem—its north-south thoroughfares—are festive and bustling, while its smaller east-west cross streets feel dilapidated and hopeless—a symbolic articulation of the ways a city can feel simultaneously awe-inspiring and soul-crushing.

  Cain writes with his whole body. His prose is full of all five senses: glittering neon signs and the sick-sweet stench of a dealer’s den; the tinkle of an ice cream truck and the rubbery spine of a heroin rush, the feel of cold eggs in the mouth after a long night. When I spoke to Cain’s ex-wife, Jo Lynne Pool, years after the end of their marriage, she said that while he was working on the novel he carried his notebooks with him everywhere he went. (Even when he went uptown to score.) I can feel that carried-them-everywhere-ness in his prose—those notebooks traveling through the grit and particularity of the world, so he could transcribe not just vague notions of the world, but its exquisite and excruciating grain.

  * * *

  About halfway through the novel, George runs into an old friend named Nandy, takes her to a jazz club, falls immediately in love and decides he wants to get clean for her. (His parole officer has also threatened to send him back to prison if he fails a urine test in seventy-two hours.) Across the course of the novel, George shifts away from the ways he’d once tried to justify his using to himself. He once understood it as a fuck you to the social order, a way “to live life unhindered” by rebelling against white power structures or the tyrannical demands of racial upward mobility. But later in the book, when George passes a crowd of “nodding junkies” on the street, listening to a man who is calling for support for “victims of the Newark rebellion,” he sees them “no longer [as] the chosen driven to destruction by their awareness and frustration, but only lost victims, too weak to fight.”

  The arc of Blueschild Baby stages a conflict between various narratives of addiction—as political
rhetoric, or a form of social rebellion—but it never forgets addiction as a bodily reality: jangling nerves and dry skin, gaunt bodies and sweat, the sensation of “bones scraping against one another inside.” The novel closes on a note of tentative hope, with George recalling the first night he shot heroin—when “a strange moon hung in the sky” and he was first swallowed by that “calm, terribly sudden and infinite”—before he renounces it for good.

  But this renunciation points to yet another tension embedded in the book—or at least, what it means to read the book now, almost fifty years after it was first published, now that its author has been dead nearly a decade: We know that the character of George Cain still believes in his ability to free himself from the same addiction that his author died from.

  Just as Cain’s novel resists fetishizing addiction as rebellion, refusing to ignore its human cost, Cain’s own life thwarts the impulse to narrate self-awareness as salvation. Cain’s lived addiction brought together several driving forces—the allure of the tortured artist spinning darkness into gold, and the stress of being a black man in a country that had cosigned on the notion of his criminality before he was born—but dissecting these motivations in his novel wasn’t enough to liberate him from the physical imperatives of dependence itself. He was able to turn that addiction into powerful and provocative art, electrified by self-knowledge, but that brilliance—that insight, that deep awareness—wasn’t enough to save him.

  When I asked Cain’s ex-wife if she ever tried to get him to stop using, she said simply, “I knew better.”

  * * *

  When I first reached out to Jo Lynne Pool—through her and Cain’s son, Malik, whom I had managed to track down—she was surprised that anyone still cared about her former husband. But I wanted to learn more about this man who had written a stunning, disturbing, singular book and then fallen into almost total obscurity, and she was glad to talk to me about his brilliance and his troubles.

  Pool told me that Cain started shooting heroin after dropping out of college, operating under the notion—as she put it—that “writers needed conflict and adversity. So he deliberately went out to find some.” After dropping out of Iona College, a Catholic school where he’d been given a basketball scholarship, Cain headed west through Texas, and eventually spent six months in a Mexican jail on marijuana charges. When he got out of jail, Pool said, “he had the makings of a book.”

  By the time Pool first met him, in the late sixties, he was already a full-blown addict, though Pool didn’t realize it. She’d come from Texarkana to study at Pratt, and she’d never met “a dope fiend, or a heroin addict, or any other kind of addict.” She was immediately drawn to Cain, with his “green snake eyes” and his evident and overwhelming intelligence. He always walked around with two or three composition books tucked under his arm.

  After Pool and Cain had their first child, he lived two lives. In one, he was trying to be a more present father. He became a Sunni Muslim and joined a mosque that was like a surrogate family. But he would also disappear for days at a time—go up to Harlem (notebooks in tow) and come back glazed. He’d nod out in the middle of dinner. One time, he had a few friends over and while Pool was in the bathroom his friends took off with half her clothes and armfuls of their baby supplies. Cain had to chase them down the street to get it all back. In the New York Times review of Blueschild Baby, Addison Gayle Jr. interprets Cain’s recovery story as a narrative of racial self-possession, as he redeems himself in the “72 hours of living hell” that constitute his withdrawal. “In that time,” Gayle writes, “George Cain, former addict, emerges phoenix-like from the ashes, as George Cain, black man.” In this interpretation, sobriety—rather than addiction—becomes the way he resists white oppression.

  The publication of Blueschild Baby brought Cain the buzz and affirmation he had been craving—the sense of arrival. His publisher, McGraw-Hill, threw him a party in a beautiful loft in Soho. A few days after getting his first royalty check, he ran into one of his friend’s little brothers on the street, took him to a record store nearby, and told him to choose all the records he wanted. Cain and Pool had James Baldwin over for dinner. “People assume black women can cook, so I had to figure out how to fry chicken,” Pool told me. Everyone loved the book; Cain’s mother was only disappointed that she couldn’t recommend it to her friends from church. The affirmation of this reception quieted something in Cain—and for a few years, at least, he was using less.

  But by the time he got a temporary appointment at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—on the merits of the book and its success, moving to Iowa City with Pool and their infant daughter—Cain was restless. He started flying back to New York every weekend. When Pool told him they couldn’t afford his commutes, he took a bus to Davenport—about an hour away, right by the Mississippi—and didn’t come back for days. Eventually, Pool took a bus there herself, with their baby in tow, and when she asked a cabbie to take her to the junkie part of town, he pulled up to a run-down building where she found George inside and “dragged him out by his ear.”

  Back in Brooklyn, after his temporary appointment at Iowa was over, Cain kept trying to commit himself to a second novel. He didn’t want to fall into the “one and only” trap to which he thought so many black writers had succumbed. He was using more because his writing wasn’t going well, and his writing wasn’t going well because of all his using. He was juggling a full-time teaching gig at Staten Island Community College and a full-time addiction; an infant son in addition to his young daughter. For Pool, their marriage ended the night she picked up the phone and heard a woman tell her that she was pregnant with Cain’s child. Pool left Cain without telling him where she was going, and ended up moving to Houston with their two kids. After years, Cain found them and came out to visit. But he didn’t like it there. “The sky was too open,” Pool told me. “He felt like God could see him.”

  When she spoke to me about Cain, Pool’s voice was full of respect and even tenderness. It was clear she’d been through a lot with him, for him, but she didn’t regret it. She mainly regretted how his life had turned out. He died in poverty, his work basically unknown. She told me about his last apartment, in Harlem, where their kids went—just once, as teenagers—to stay. It was a basement unit that smelled like sewage.

  When we spoke, Pool told me that the mutual friend who had introduced them felt guilty about connecting a “pure-souled country girl” to a Harlem junkie, but she told him there was nothing to apologize for. “How many people get to cook chicken for James Baldwin?” she asked me. In our conversations about Cain, she used the word genius more times than I could count. She wasn’t bitter about their marriage. She’d just done what she had to do. “I’m not upset,” she told me. “I just needed to make sure we survived George.”

  They did survive George, and so did this novel. The only person who didn’t survive George was George himself—who could not ultimately liberate himself from the addiction he documented so unsparingly in these pages. One of the most powerful ways you can honor his memory is to read them.

  LESLIE JAMISON, 2018

  I

  IT IS GETTING DARK NOW and still I roam the corridors of bedlam. I need sanctuary, but there is none, and as my invisibility leaves like a cloak, I feel naked, center of all eyes, fair game for whoever first stumbles across me. I’m at 63rd on Amsterdam and must make it to 81st Street, past the Red Cross on 66th, faggots’ 72nd and the police station on 68th. They are loosing our warders, changing shifts like changing of the guard, and they come streaming in a blue mass. The squat police station vomiting them up, armed with clubs, the majority’s arrogance and a .38. They cruise the alleys and byways of this place looking to snatch us up, kill us if we resist. See me, all crouch and stealth, slipping softly toward a corner, well lit by a bodega, all the while expecting the shouted “Halt!” or fatal bullet from behind. Turn a corner and out of sight, restraining muscles bursting to break in violent activity and carry me off. Walking, one step, two, never turn
ing, as if not seeing them will prevent their seeing me. Then looking, I see nothing, they are beyond the corner or maybe never were.

  A sickness comes over me in this twilight state, somewhere between wake and sleep, my nose runs and my being screams for heroin. It is an internal nervous disorder which floods the brain and shortcircuits senses. I infect the world with it.

  I try to halt the parade of images, it is to no avail. They continue as if no part of self. I am growing smaller, vanishing, the world negating me. Made midget by canyon-forming structures looking down from inanimity. A clicked heel sounds loud in quiet, then echoes to silence. Sounding more often, still silence its dominant theme. Unable to diminish the rest between beats and I’m running fast as I can. My image runs out of the evening, a dusk-colored mauve, setting city sun at my back, to collide with me then vanish at moment of impact, image made counterfeit by countless repetitions thrown from vacant windows. Buildings pass in rapid succession of sameness, each as the other. To stranger’s eyes, dirty brownstones bearing no marks of difference, but to me, Georgie Cain, each is unique, bearing personality vested in and by me.

  I come to Sun’s building. Looking over my shoulder to be sure I am not followed, I dash in. They’re posed as always, the other inmates of bedlam, pimps and prostitutes, the junky souls. Gracing the stairs like debutantes at the ball, all piled on one another, they stare vacantly into the well. Not in white gowns. Somber hued tatters the fashion. As I approach they salute me as comrades do, “Hey brother,” and the bitches, “Baby.” We are a fraternity of selflessness, bound together by our communal rejection. We love each other and know it not.