High Price

by Carl Hart

  Within three minutes, the shooters were caught and arrested by the police. But medical aid didn’t come nearly as quickly. No ambulance at all arrived to help Melrose. His friend Michael’s mother, Annie, called 911 four times, trying to get someone to take him to the hospital. Michael’s sister Jackie ran to a nearby firehouse, where firefighters stood with their arms crossed, not responding to her pleas for help.

  Annie had covered Melrose with a blanket and was sitting with him as he lay dying on the street for nearly twenty minutes before the paramedics finally showed up. An angry crowd of more than a hundred people later marched to the firehouse, furious about the slow response. Authorities claimed the rescue workers weren’t authorized to help until police arrived to ensure that the shooting was over. But the arrests had occurred within minutes—and there was no reason to believe that there were additional gunmen at large.

  Derrick “Melrose” Brown left behind four fatherless children. We’ll never know if he could have been saved by a faster emergency response.

  Melrose never had a chance. There were many critical experiences and policies that had led him to that corner, starting with his dismal educational history and the lack of economic opportunities it presented. But at the time, I blamed it all on crack cocaine. If he hadn’t been slinging, if drug trade rivals hadn’t come for him, he would still be with us, I thought. Forgetting my own early experience seeing my sister shot for no good reason and the equally senseless deaths of my friend’s brother and the white motorcyclist I saw shot in retaliation for his death, I became convinced that crack had made everyone go crazy. And I soon decided to get involved in research that I thought could help do something about it.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Maze

  It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error and another to put him in possession of the truth.

  —JOHN LOCKE

  Everyone in the psychology department knew about the class: some students even created T-shirts reading, “I survived experimental psychology,” which they wore proudly afterward. It was among the most demanding courses in the entire curriculum, one of those make-or-break requirements that tend to weed out the distracted, lazy, uncommitted, or otherwise challenged.

  Still, we hadn’t expected to face a human version of the radial arm maze. We had seen this eight-armed, circular contraption in the rat lab and read about it in our texts. None of the thirty-odd students was quite sure what to do as we found ourselves, on a beautiful sunny North Carolina day, in the center of a large unpainted wooden structure, the size of a half-court in basketball.

  It was about the third week of what was essentially my senior year of college, 1990. I was at the Wilmington campus of the University of North Carolina. I had no idea that this class and my professor, Rob Hakan, were about to change the course of my life. All I knew was that I was keeping my eyes on the prize, which for me at the time was simply graduating with a degree in psychology. I still had a vague idea that I wanted to work with underprivileged black children. I didn’t have a specific path to that job in mind, beyond finishing college. Although that goal was tantalizingly close, if I hadn’t taken Rob’s class, I don’t think I would have gone on to become a scientist.

  Experimental psychology was focused on research methods, and the maze exercise initially seemed irritating to me. It was not exactly a challenge to determine which of the arms did, in fact, have a jar of Skittles or M&M’s at the end of it. I felt slightly insulted to be treated, quite literally, like a lab rat. However, because I knew and trusted Rob, I went with it, figuring that he must have an important point to make by putting the class through this exercise.

  And indeed when I tried to write up the results afterward, I immediately understood the experiment’s purpose. I had to go back to check the number of the arms in the maze, the markers like red and blue dots of paint that helped distinguish between the arms that contained rewards and those that were empty and other specifics that I hadn’t realized were important at the time. I could see why these details mattered and the importance of observation and measurement in experiments.

  And as the semester progressed, I similarly began to discover the order and purpose that underlay much of what at first had seemed pointless to me in psychology. There was a beauty to the structure of this science and there were formulas for understanding behavior. What had seemed like arcane requirements for research and petty concerns were revealed as important ways to avoid bias. They were necessary to control the conditions so that you could ensure that the variables you were studying were indeed linked to the outcome of interest and not just incidental, but causal. This was a way to look under the hood of human nature by stripping away some of the confusing complexities. And it was quantitative, mathematical, solid.

  Most important, I was learning how to think and communicate like a scientist; discovering for myself the profound truth of Einstein’s quip that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” For Rob’s class, we wrote up a new experiment every week. That meant loads of practice, just as I’d needed to succeed in basketball. And as in basketball, practice helped me understand and learn how to work within the rules. As I learned them, I got better and more confident. All the while, my behavior was constantly being reinforced with “attaboys” from Rob and on tests and papers, good grades.

  While I was having this awakening, Rob saw that I was increasingly serious and encouraged my questions. He wasn’t one of those dazzling or charismatic professors who wow students with their outsize personalities and intellect; instead, he was quiet and soft-spoken. But he was young and attractive and his creative and challenging exercises and enthusiasm about his subject made him appealing. He stood about six foot four, with sandy brown hair.

  I started hanging out after class to talk with him, then playing basketball with him on the psych department’s intramural team. He turned me on to musicians I’d never heard such as Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. It seems strange now to think that I hadn’t heard the music of these icons before meeting Rob at age twenty-three. But in my narrow world there didn’t seem to be space or need for white folk singers. Rob also introduced me to books like Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, which helped me feel a real connection to academia. I well understood the feeling of wolfishness and the sense that one doesn’t belong in polite society described in the book. Like the main character, who sees himself as a “wolf of the steppes,” as well as a man, I felt I had a dual nature, too.

  At the time, I was living with a woman named Terri Howard, a slender, light-skinned sister with huge brown eyes that made her look as though she might be the female twin of the musician Prince. She was a business major and we would be together for four years. While I tried to look respectable and behave respectfully toward her pretentious Republican mom and her mom’s new husband, they seemed to think that a man like me with three gold teeth and whose speech was still filled with heavy street vernacular was too rough around the edges for their Terri. I took considerable comfort in learning that a leading German intellectual who lived more than a century earlier than I did had struggled with many of these same issues.

  Further, Rob made it clear that there was room in research for people like me, those who had not followed the traditional middle- and upper-class route to academia. Indeed, his lab team at the time was a collection of seeming misfits—all of whom went on to later success in medicine and research. One guy was a bona fide Deadhead, complete with long hair, beard, and hippie paraphernalia. Another started as a skinny, highly distracted dude who had so much energy that he smoked pot to calm down. His intensity made people nervous. There was also a highly driven married couple whom we called “the spouses” (their last name was Strauss), whose visible competitiveness stood out at laid-back UNC-Wilmington.

  After I got one of the highest grades in his class, Rob encouraged me to enroll in an advanced independent study course that he would supervise. It was then called advanced physiological psychology, but it would now be la
beled as behavioral neuroscience. In order to complete the coursework, however, I had to learn some new skills. The first thing Rob wanted me to do was to learn to operate on the brains of rats. Although I was much more interested in helping him with survey research he was then conducting on human sexuality, he was out of funding for that project. He convinced me that if I learned how to do rat research, I just might help unlock the secrets of the human brain, cure addiction, or at the very least, make a career for myself in science. I was flattered by the attention and wanted more such praise. I wasn’t sure at first, but over time I began to think I might be able to do it.

  Much of my confidence came from the fact that Rob was very clear with me that hard work was what mattered most. Because he kept reinforcing that idea, I wasn’t as intimidated by the subject matter and the actual brain surgery I had to do as I otherwise might have been.

  “There’s a place for people like you and me in science,” Rob would say, meaning for those who weren’t the obvious nerds and geeks, the ones whose persistence and diligence could allow them to overcome any educational deficits they had. My dismal high school education had left me without the science background and vocabulary expected of a researcher, but Rob saw that I was willing and able to do everything required to remedy the situation. I had already shown both him and myself that I wasn’t afraid of hard work, even if it meant going back into the maze repeatedly.

  I’d had to run a labyrinth of my own before I found Rob and the two other mentors who guided me into science. When I first got out of the air force, it was not at all clear where my future lay. After leaving the service in 1988, I’d first gone home to Miami. I was about thirty credits short of a college degree and planned to finish my coursework at Bethune-Cookman College (now Bethune-Cookman University) in Daytona Beach. I’d saved up a few dollars and was feeling pretty good about myself.

  But having been in England and in the military, where I had considerable responsibilities, being back in the American South felt like stepping back in time. My old friends couldn’t even imagine having done many of the things I’d done in the air force; their visions of the future were stunted by their lack of education and inexperience with anything other than the small neighborhood where they’d spent virtually all of their lives. I could now see the limits of this point of view, rather than simply accepting it as “how it is.”

  Another experience further reinforced my sense that there had to be more than this for me. A few months after my discharge, I interviewed at the then-nascent Rent-A-Center company for a managerial job. The chain rents out furniture, computers, appliances, and other essentials to people with little money and/or bad credit, charging high interest rates and offering hope of eventual ownership if they can keep up the payments.

  By this point, I’d become worried that I would run through the money I’d saved up during my time in the service. I also wanted to save even more to use toward finishing my degree. The regional manager who interviewed me recognized my skills and talent. Indeed, he almost immediately suggested that I work at an existing store for a short time, just to get to know the trade so I could be prepared to manage my own new location in a few months.

  But the day I started turned out to be my last day at Rent-A-Center. The store was located in Carol City, on 183rd Street and Twenty-Seventh Avenue, an area I knew well. Its customers were overwhelmingly black. And yet I was the only black employee at the store. Worse, the local store manager treated me with disdain. He asked me to do tasks requiring physical labor and generally treated me like a short-term, dumb-ass minimum-wage drone, not a managerial candidate. He spoke down to the customers, making subtly patronizing remarks and refusing to play the radio station that broadcast the music that we liked. I quit at the end of the day. I simply couldn’t take being treated like that anymore. I knew I deserved more respect. And I began to see that I wasn’t going to get it working in my old neighborhood.

  People like my cousin James and MH thought I’d gone crazy. From their perspective, I’d quit a good job for no reason. I didn’t know how to explain it to them. I knew I couldn’t engage them in the type of intellectual discussions about the books and song lyrics and poetry that had helped raise my consciousness while I was in the service. I didn’t feel like I could reach them so I didn’t even try. I now realize this must have seemed like I thought I was too good to do that type of work, but I didn’t know how to bridge the expanding gap between us. I didn’t even know how to parse that distance to myself.

  One of the few people I connected with back home was Yvette Green, a former girlfriend who was then studying nursing. We’d go to that Denny’s where I’d once “dined and dashed” with my high school friends—but now I was spending hours with her, reading and discussing literature. She gave me support, comfort, and peace of mind. Indeed, one of my greatest regrets in life was losing touch with her when I did leave Florida.

  When I was home, though, I mostly just felt out of place. I had expected to slide easily back into that world, even to educate people and show them how cool I was by sharing with them the skills I’d learned for success. Instead I discovered repeatedly that I didn’t know how to do that. My hometown itself began to seem increasingly foreign to me. In the air force, I’d unconsciously abandoned the habits of mind that had desensitized me to the daily wear of being condescended to and disrespected, but I didn’t yet have a way to appropriately communicate my new perspective with those who still needed those defenses.

  I found it more and more difficult to connect with my closest friends and family members. I wanted to discuss the larger societal issues that trapped so many people like us in those horrible conditions. But they were more concerned with immediate issues like how to pay this month’s rent and how to put food on the table today for their kids. They had little interest or time for what someone called my “academic masturbations.”

  I wanted to work on changing the world and all they wanted was work. I didn’t fit anywhere. It was like that awful time in adolescence when you feel half-formed, no longer a boy but far from being a man, as well. Everything felt somewhat awkward. I soon realized that I couldn’t stay unless I wanted to relinquish the new self and changed vision of the future I’d constructed in the air force. To live at home without going crazy, I’d have to reembrace what I now saw as a very limiting worldview and pattern of behavior. I knew I had to resist that.

  And as this conflict between my new self and my old ways increased, I got in touch with my cousin Betty. She had moved to Atlanta after her divorce was finalized. She invited me to stay with her there. I could take the credits I needed to complete my college degree at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Also in Atlanta was Patrick, my good friend and fellow airman with whom I’d served in England. He, too, had recently been discharged. He was one of the few people I knew who understood the transition I was facing after leaving the military.

  Given my experiences at home, I figured that anywhere else would probably be an improvement. When I first arrived in Georgia, Betty had a house in Stone Mountain, just outside metro Atlanta. But money woes forced her to move to a smaller place in the same town. Unfortunately for me, however, Atlanta really wasn’t much different from Miami. I didn’t really find the move any more conducive to furthering my educational or personal goals. However, I did meet Melissa, the woman who turned me on to cocaine—and my relationship with her, ironically, is what led me to Wilmington and Rob Hakan’s class.

  My introduction to cocaine and Melissa actually started with a bad experience with marijuana. That incident not only was the beginning of my relationship with her but also gave me more insight into the effects of marijuana and into how environmental factors can strongly affect the drug experience. Additionally, it should have made me more skeptical about what I was hearing on the street about drug use and about what I’d later hear from addiction researchers, but I wasn’t yet thinking critically enough to recognize this.

  I met Melissa one summer morning in 1988 in the laundry
room of the apartment complex where I lived with Betty. I was home at that time because I hadn’t yet enrolled in school and was working some night shifts for UPS to make money before I went back. Melissa was a gorgeous caramel-skinned woman with long hair. She wore colored contact lenses that made her eyes look blue, an effect that I found disconcerting. Her aunt, who was also extremely attractive and about the same age, was also doing her wash when I met Melissa.

  Over the course of our conversation, I discovered that the two women smoked weed—and as any self-respecting player knows, if you’ve got drugs, you can get girls. I said I had a hookup and invited Melissa to stop by Betty’s place that evening to hang out. Then I called Patrick, who typically had at least some reefer on hand, and had him bring it over.

  That afternoon I also watched Oprah. The show was then at the height of its popularity among wannabe in-the-know black people, so I was a daily viewer. The program that day featured a group of young, attractive women who were known as the “Rolex bandits.” Their trick was to target men with Rolexes in bars or clubs and get them so drunk or high that the women had little difficulty pretending to seduce them and thereby steal their expensive watches. I wasn’t paying all that much attention but got the gist.

  Early that evening, Betty left to go out with her boyfriend. Melissa arrived not long afterward, unexpectedly accompanied by her aunt. I understood; she didn’t yet know me and wanted to take her time. Visiting a man’s house alone at night might set up unwarranted expectations.

  After some small talk, the three of us passed around a joint. But although I’d continued to smoke reefer occasionally while in England, I had always stayed mindful of the fact that I could be urine-tested at any time. I generally didn’t inhale much: both for that reason and because I still found some of its psychedelic effects uncomfortable and disorienting. Although I’d smoked some in Atlanta with Patrick, I didn’t have much of a tolerance.