Glass House

by Brian Alexander

  Anyway, there they were, in a Mexican standoff, when Mark’s dad, having heard the commotion from several doors away, burst in and said he’d called the police, even though he hadn’t. His dad managed to coax them out the door. Mark’s hand was shaking so bad he couldn’t control it, but he’d hoped nobody noticed how scared he was.

  With the demise of the little band of drug runners, Mark went more or less on his own. Lots of his friends knew that if they wanted something, Mark was likely to have it, or he’d know where to get it. Girls—cute ones, some of them—would fuck him, sometimes two at a time, like he was a goddamn silk-robed sultan, not a skinny kid who’d once hung out at a skate park. Later, he and a friend would have girls come over to clean house. The girls—“ho cakes,” Mark and his friend called them—would strip out of their jeans and tidy up naked in return for Percs. Mark was smart enough to know girls didn’t fuck him because they loved him.

  By the time he was twenty-one, Mark was a serious pillhead—he’d always hated the idea of sticking himself with a needle. The deeper his own addiction became, the more close calls he had with the police.

  The time a cop beamed a spotlight into a car he was riding in on Kimberly Avenue up in Columbus didn’t stop him. He and this black guy had an ounce of cocaine in the car, but, lucky for Mark, the black guy got out and ran, and naturally, when the black guy ran, the white cop chased him and left Mark alone. He just walked away. The time a Lancaster detective who’d been eyeing him followed Mark into Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips on Memorial Drive didn’t stop him. Mark was spun out as hell, but he managed to stay cool enough. The time a Crown Vic followed him into River Valley when he was high on cocaine and had weed and a gun in his car didn’t stop him.

  His parents tried. They weren’t aware of all he was up to, but they knew he was meddling in drugs. His dad lectured him, told him he was over eighteen now, an adult, and would be charged as an adult. Straighten up, Mark. This is serious. A felony could wreck your life. His mom called the school system and tried to tell them that drugs were everywhere, even among the “nice” kids—but back then, nobody wanted to listen.

  The dying stopped his dealing. As Percs and Oxy and, finally, heroin began displacing weed and cocaine and meth, more people started dying. Ray, for example. One day Ray was over at Mark’s family’s home, just sitting and talking to Mark’s mom. The next, paramedics were hauling Ray’s body out of a place up on Mulberry Street that every kid in town knew was a party house: older guys and younger girls and pretty much whatever drug you wanted.

  The scene wasn’t as fun as it once was. Ho cakes were no longer so enticing. Besides, once Mark got heavy into the Percs, he didn’t want sex all that much anyway, because opiates kill your sex drive. Mark decided he’d just be an addict with a job.

  Maybe he was getting older. Or maybe it was because he fell in love. I’ll call her Rea. She’d dated Brian Gossett for a while. She was a nice girl. She wasn’t nearly as into drugs as Mark was, and, for the first time, he could picture himself making a life with a woman. He and Rea moved in together and even talked about getting married.

  But the stream of pills almost dried up, and what pills he could find became so expensive that by 2012 he was forced to overcome his fear of needles and turn to heroin, which was cheap and available. He was now a needle-using addict. Rea wasn’t, and their relationship suffered.

  There were some bad incidents. Mark once tried bath salts and got so spun out and crazy, he hit Rea. Rea stabbed him. It wasn’t a bad wound, but they both wound up at the police station. Mark told the cops he’d stabbed himself, and the episode blew over. One time when Rea injected Mark with dope, his eyes closed, his breathing slowed, and he seemed to fall out—OD. She freaked, thinking she’d killed him, but it was just that the dope was so much better than what he was used to. That was the thing about dope: It just kept getting purer. He finally broke it off. “I’m toxic,” he told her. “You can’t be around me.”

  He hated being an addict and hated to lose his love, but even the breakup wasn’t enough to drive him into treatment. Neither was the time he found a neighbor who’d overdosed and was turning blue. “Maybe half a dozen people I know have OD’d, and I still kept going,” he told me. Recently, some of Mark’s dope had been cut with fentanyl. He wound up passed out in his car for most of a day.

  No matter what he did, he couldn’t hold on to the warmth of those first minutes after a hit. He’d spent many thousands of dollars, and ten years of his life, chasing the sweet safety of it.

  Lancaster had a couple of cheap motels out on 33: the Baymont Inn, and a frayed dump called the Relax Inn. Mark called that one Relapse Inn because so many junkies checked in there. The pocked blacktop parking slots in front of the motel’s paint-peeled doors were filled with rusty Fords and Chevys and beater pickups whose bumpers were wired in place. The rooms were so cave-dark, people squinted like Morlocks whenever they stepped into the light outside. He’d checked into both places at one time or another, figuring that if he could just go hard enough, he might catch and hold the warmth, and the warmth would pull him out of the water. He shot speedballs of coke and heroin—Mark hadn’t been born yet when comedian and actor John Belushi died from a speedball OD. During one binge at the Baymont, he snorted fat lines of coke off a mirror while standing in the swimming pool. It was the middle of the day. When he checked into those motels, he figured he’d see just how far he could go. But he never got far enough. For days he full-metal partied until his heart was about ready to explode and he started talking to himself, yet he still couldn’t break through and capture the warmth.

  * * *

  Lora Manon, the assistant prosecuting attorney, represented the state. Manon was a career prosecutor who’d seen hundreds of Marks. She appeared, at first impression, to be a steely stickler, a middle-aged, pants-wearing schoolmarm. On the contrary, she was pleasant, with the dark sense of humor prosecutors, cops, and reporters sometimes cultivate. She knew defendants like Mark weren’t Pablo Escobar or John Gotti. She was sympathetic, and sometimes seemed more interested in helping them than in putting them in jail. The question, in Mark’s case, was whether or not jail would help him most. She didn’t know the full story about his past—nobody did. All she knew was that Mark was a young addict like a hundred other ones.

  She’d read the report and had seen that Mark confessed to his lapse earlier that month. She’d prosecuted Carly. One month before, Trimmer (who had created the local drug court as a municipal judge) had sentenced Carly to “community control”—probation—instead of the three years in prison called for under the state code. Carly was “doing well,” Manon told Berens. Mark, though, was having difficulty.

  “I appreciate the fact the defendant has been candid with the court about the fact that he knows he needs to change, and I think that is the situation,” Manon told Berens. There was no doubt now that Berens would go along with the ILC, but he wanted to throw Mark a last scare. “Time will tell how motivated you are,” he told Mark. “How much you care about your future. I can tell you that county jails and state prisons are full of people who don’t care about their future.”

  Berens misunderstood. Mark cared about his future. He just didn’t have any idea what that future was supposed to be, and if it was worth living. An intelligent, funny young man, he coped by trying not to examine it at all, afraid of what he might find.

  At least Mark was going home. If he managed to stay sober and pass his drug tests, in three years he’d have no record. It would be as if his January arrest, and the past ten years of his life, had never happened. All he would have left to remind himself of those times would be the black-and-blue stepping-stones on his forearms, the path he’d tried to take out of the water. Mark could not have guessed that his new path would lead him to Jason Roach.

  * * *

  On June 28, six days after Berens granted Mark the ILC, a few friends and family members gathered in Rising Park for the wedding of Jason Roach and Jessica Cantrel
l. Jason wore a tuxedo, which surprised Jessica. She wanted to know where he’d gotten it. When she asked, he lied to her. They were on a tight budget, after all. They’d saved up about $1,000 for the day. Most of it went for the reception in the backyard of the house where they lived on Sixth Avenue, half a block from the old Baskin-Robbins where I used to scoop ice cream for the Glassco League softball players who walked over from Miller Park on hot summer evenings. That storefront became a Christian “university.”

  The wedding was nice. Jason had always liked Mount Pleasant. He thought both it and the park were beautiful. He imagined raising his family amid that beauty.

  After the ceremony, everybody drove over to the house on Sixth. Jason had rented a little dance floor to spread out over the grass, along with tables, chairs, and a boom box. The newlyweds and their guests had a nice time.

  Jessica thought she might be pregnant again. The marriage and the possibility they’d be raising four children made them think about stopping—using, dealing, everything. Jason had been shooting half a gram every time he got high, and Jessica had been using since she was a teenager, but they both had begun to regret the way drugs had grabbed hold of them. So about two weeks before the wedding, they vowed to quit, cold turkey, all at once, just like that. They vowed to make their family their focus.

  Jessica hid a tiny stash of dope in her jewelry box, where Jason couldn’t find it. Jason kept a side stash of his own. They used behind each other’s backs. When they were together, they took only Perc 30s, which sorta didn’t count somehow. But they were trying.

  They also talked about stopping their runs to Columbus to visit the Mexicans. The money was good, but the arrangement was getting old. Lloyd had screwed up again, a matter of $1,700, leaving Jason short in paying what he owed the Mexicans. He and the Mexican lady were friendly and all—Jason’s kids even rode the family’s four-wheeler on his visits—but not that friendly.

  “He said somethin’ about April, his girl, fuckin’ did this, did that, he fuckin’ fronted some shit out and got all fucked up,” Jason said of Lloyd. “And he was like, ‘Well, see if you can get me, like, a quarter; I can make money up off that.’ So I went and explained to her what happened and shit, and she was like, ‘All right.’ So I ended up bein’ like sixteen hundred behind.” Jason and Lloyd still called each other “brother,” and swore fealty, but the partnership was sputtering out.

  Maybe Jason and Jessica could leave all that behind and use what they’d made to start a little cleaning business. Jessica’s brother was involved in landscaping work; they could open a landscaping business. Jessica laughed a little when they talked like that. It was weird, she said, how people she knew, once they started talking about quitting, always seemed to get busted.

  TWELVE

  Putting the Baby Back Together

  July 2015

  Sam Solomon reached the finish line of his morning commute from Columbus, pulled his black BMW with Illinois plates into his parking space, stepped out of the car, and noticed the handful of police vehicles, lights still flashing, idling seventy-five feet down the street. “They here for me?” he joked to himself.

  They were not. They were there for Lloyd, who sat in the back of one of those police cars. Early that morning, Lloyd had been standing in his bathroom in the gray-box house across the street from Plant 1—or he sat in a recliner in the living room; it depended on who you wanted to believe—when SWAT and the MCU crashed through the front door.

  About five other people were there with Lloyd. He didn’t know any of them well, except April, his girlfriend. They’d been awake all night, so most of them were a little strung out.

  When the police ran through the house, they found moon rocks on the floor of the hallway leading to the bathroom. Diamond rings rested at the bottom of the toilet bowl, and the toilet was running. Lloyd said he’d been standing in the bathroom for the usual reason; he hadn’t jumped up out of the recliner to try to flush any evidence.

  If he had jumped out of that recliner, he might have been spurred to action more by instinct than by any deep will to avoid arrest. Lloyd was tired, and not just from staying up all night. Life, and a prodigious menu of drug use, had exhausted him. Now he just sounded relieved.

  “I don’t know what the hell it is. Something in my head, man,” he said, referring to, well, everything.

  “You said you are forty years old. Look what it’s doing to you,” the cop said. The two men on opposite sides of the law chatted like a couple of middle-aged women in a Saks Fifth Avenue dressing room. “You look a lot older than that. You should realize that,” the officer said.

  “Do I?” Lloyd asked.

  “You do look a lot older than forty. Do I look forty-nine? You’ll probably say yes, because everybody says I’m fucking old.” The cop and Lloyd laughed.

  Lloyd reassured him. “No, you’re not there. Do I look older than forty-nine?”

  “You do.”

  “Damn.”

  “Get out,” the cop said. “You got to get out of this town.”

  That afternoon, Jason Roach, Jessica Cantrell, and the three small children they cared for—Jessica’s two children with other men and the child they’d made together—drove south on 33 in their Mustang. It was raining. Again. The baby sat in the front seat so Jessica could calm it. The trip up to see the Mexicans on Country Club Road in Whitehall had transpired as it usually did. Jason dropped off the cash he owed from the last payload and picked up another five ounces. That dope, shaped like a baseball, was now sitting in a diaper bag in the backseat.

  As they neared Lancaster, Jason received a text message on his phone telling him that Lloyd had been arrested. Moments after they crossed the city line on Memorial Drive, flashing red lights strobed off the rearview mirror. “Fuck, we’re getting pulled over,” Jason said.

  Lloyd hadn’t snitched. He didn’t have to. The MCU had been tracking both of them for months. A GPS device on Jason’s Ford Expedition reported his last few Whitehall visits. (He didn’t take the Expedition on this day because his grandmother was using it.) Whitehall police had watched Jason go into the house on Country Club Road, then coordinated with the MCU.

  Five ounces was the biggest single dope haul the MCU would capture all year. Detectives were excited about it. They saw it as an opportunity to get closer to the Mexicans in Whitehall—to “cut off the head of the snake,” as they said. There was no such thing as one snake or one head. Busting a single Mexican family wouldn’t have much impact on Lancaster’s heroin supply—the market was a powerful force that abhorred a vacuum. But five ounces was enough to interest the Drug Enforcement Administration in mounting a cooperative investigation.

  Jason sat in a detective’s car and ricocheted from wheedling to weeping to bargaining. He was just a courier, he insisted.

  He appealed to the cop as a family man. “I got a family to take care of.” He began to cry, just a little at first. “I got a little baby and two other kids. I’m tryin’ to take care of my family, man! I’m fuckin’ strugglin’ in life just like everybody else, man.”

  When his mother, sister, and brother-in-law pulled up to the scene to take the children, his shoulders shook with sobs. He shouted, “Oh, my God! My poor baby! I love you!” out the window.

  The detective’s cell phone rang. His wife was on the other end, wanting to discuss the transportation of a son to summer football camp and a ride to a sports tryout for another child. “Sorry,” he said to his wife. “I didn’t expect to be tied up tonight, but some shit broke loose. Yep. Love you. Bye.”

  Jason’s mother stepped out into the rain and approached the car. “Mom, I love you,” Jason said. “Love you, too,” she answered. “I’s ready to take care of things.”

  Jason offered to wear a wire. He promised to rat out everybody he knew. He called Lloyd “a piece of shit.” He looked out the window again. “I just got married. I’m sittin’ here lookin’ at my kids, man!” He convulsed with weeping.

  “I’ll shut this
whole fuckin’ town down, man!” Jason shouted. “Like, I know every fuckin’ drug dealer. I know every fuckin’ connect. I know everything.” He could do it, he said, because “anything that’s coming in through here is comin’ in through me. Like, I got the connect. I’m going up gettin’ the shit. Like, anybody’s fuckin’ with weight is goin’ through me.”

  Jason had been carrying a lot of weight into Lancaster, but his connect was only one of many. Lancaster addicts typically drove themselves up to Columbus—as Carly, Mark, and Aaron had done—or bought small amounts from one another. Jason even had family members who obtained their own drugs from other sources; they’d been using and selling, too. The collective weight of all those small-time heroin users—not to mention pills, crack, meth, moon rocks like Lloyd’s connect was providing—likely dwarfed Jason’s weekly ounces.

  Even so, the Mexicans did trust him to pick up “OZs”—ounces—not just grams, and return with money. The local cops figured they could use that trust. To do so, they’d have to know a lot more about the woman and her family inside the house on Country Club Road in Whitehall.

  Jason sensed that his best chance to cut a deal was to make the Mexicans sound as major league as he was trying to make himself, and to promise he could take them down. “It ain’t no little shit!” he said of the Mexicans. “They fuck with dope, they fuck with ice. Those people I fuck with, they’re not little shit.”

  And he knew them well. Not only did his son ride their four-wheeler, but he shared dinner with the woman, her parents, other members of the family. “She sees me, she hugs—fuckin’ hugs—my kids. My wife. When I go over to her house, we either, like, eat, get something to drink, sit around, and talk.” He refused to say the woman’s first name, because he wanted to preserve his bargaining power, though he later mentioned it accidentally: Sola. He just called the males “Juan” or “Julio,” and he never could pronounce their last name. “It’s like Guatemaly or some shit,” he said, making the cop laugh. As close as he said he was with the family, however, “I don’t care about them people, you know what I mean? And, I mean, I’ve never been one to fucking, like, rat on somebody or nuttin’, but, like, dude, I don’t care about them people. Those fuckin’ people don’t mean a fuckin’ thing to me.”