S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  Shadows were creeping onto the street. Late afternoon was giving way to twilight, my favorite part of the day. It signaled the end of the workday, a time to relax, maybe hit Corky’s with some Herald Examiner pals—though any time after noon worked for me, and I didn’t need any company to knock back a few drinks. I was twenty-seven, old enough to know better, young enough to feel invincible.

  A few hours earlier, I’d gone to Corky’s and downed two gin and tonics with my lunch. The lingering buzz from my lunchtime drinks had made me stupid cocky.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Raven reached back into her pocket and pulled out a glass pipe. Its filter was blackened from repeated use.

  She reached into her pocket again and brought out a lighter, then removed the rock from the baggie and cut it in half with her fingernail. She loaded it onto the filter and tapped it until it was secure, then brought the pipe to her lips, flicked on the lighter, and put the flame to the pipe.

  The rock hissed softly as it dissolved. Raven inhaled. Thick white smoke coursed through the pipe and into her mouth. She held her breath for about five seconds before exhaling a puff of white smoke, handing me the pipe, and nodding.

  I glanced over my shoulder—the street was dead quiet. Olympic Boulevard might as well have been forty miles away. With darkness encroaching, passing motorists would have needed superhumanly sharp eyes to see what we were doing. I put the pipe to my lips. Raven flicked on the lighter and put the flame to the tip of the pipe.

  No backing out now.

  I inhaled. Smoke invaded my mouth and lungs. The rush hit me almost instantaneously, euphoria detonating in my brain and spreading quickly to every part of my body.

  I wobbled and took a step backwards.

  “You okay?” Raven said.

  I looked into her big brown eyes. “Wow.”

  Raven grinned. “Keep the lighter and the pipe. And take this for the road.” She handed me the other half of the rock. The waning sunlight finally surrendered to dusk.

  I drove home high, alert, ecstatic—and a little scared. This feeling was too good. Was my world about to crash?

  The next morning, I hit the same neighborhood to complete my reporting assignment, scored a couple of interviews with immigrants, and went to the office and filed my story, quick and clean.

  Alone in my rented condo, I took a single hit each of the ensuing two weekends. Both highs were rapturous—though not quite as intense as the first one. I wanted that feeling back.

  On a Saturday afternoon a week after I’d finished the last of my freebie samples, I started to think about just how close my place was to Raven’s street. I could be there in ten minutes. I slammed down a couple of beers for courage and grabbed my car keys.

  Raven was in the same spot in front of the motel when I pulled to the curb. She sauntered to my car and leaned into the open passenger window.

  “I thought you might be back,” she said.

  “You thought right. That stuff’s pretty good. Can I get another?”

  Raven made a show of looking warily to one side of the street, then the other.

  “There’s been some plainclothes cops lurking around,” she said. “I got a room. Safer to do this inside, if you don’t mind.”

  The motel room was a dump. The mattress was thin and worn, the carpet dirty and ripped. A small TV was suspended from the ceiling. Raven, on the other hand, looked magnificent. She wore a formfitting black tank top and painted-on jeans.

  I handed her a twenty. Raven opened the nightstand drawer, brought out a rock encased in a plastic baggie, and passed it to me.

  My hand was on the doorknob when she offered a new deal: “Tell you what: If you buy two and let me have one of the rocks, I’ll do you while you hit yours.”

  “Do me?”

  “I’ll suck on you while you hit the pipe,” she said.

  Raven had my attention. My last two blasts had not only gotten me euphorically high, they’d also made me hypersexual. My libido was healthy to begin with. On crack, it was turbocharged.

  I let go of the doorknob and turned back to Raven. She pulled off her tank, revealing full white breasts straining against a black lace bra.

  “Deal,” I said.

  I handed her another twenty. Raven reached into the nightstand and retrieved another rock, a pipe, and a lighter. We sat on the bed. Using her fingernails, Raven cut a big chunk of her rock, about two-thirds, and loaded it into the pipe.

  “You ever been shotgunned?” she said.

  “No. What’s that?”

  “You’ll like it.”

  Raven lit up and inhaled. She held her breath for several seconds, then leaned toward me, as if moving in for a kiss, and pointed to her mouth. Our lips met. Raven exhaled a monster hit into my mouth. The room began to spin. I was woozy with ecstasy and desire.

  “That is a shotgun,” Raven said.

  I undid my belt while Raven blew on the pipe, trying to cool it. I slid my jeans down, then my boxers. My joint was already stirring to life.

  “So you’ll do me while I take a hit?”

  “That’s how it works, babe.”

  Raven placed what was left of her rock atop the nightstand and handed me the pipe and the lighter. My rock was intact. I cut it in half.

  She reached into her purse, on the nightstand, and took out a condom. She put the condom into her mouth, bent down, and had it around my penis in one smooth motion.

  As she began working on me, I loaded my rock into the pipe, lit up, and inhaled.

  The crack attacked my brain as Raven sucked me off. I held, held, held my hit. Raven’s head bobbed up and down.

  I exhaled and came at the same time, a beyond-belief, star-bursting, epic climax. My entire body convulsed with pleasure. I lay back on the bed, limp and amazed.

  Raven motioned for the pipe and the lighter. She blew on the pipe for a couple of minutes, then loaded her final chunk of rock and took a long hit. A few seconds later, she leaned over and shotgunned me as I lay supine.

  As I headed out the door, with half a rock in my pocket, I asked, “How can I reach you?”

  “I’m around here all the time, babe. Come see me whenever.”

  Hooking up with Raven for crack and oral sex became part of my routine for the next eleven months. I’d usually see her on Saturday afternoons, after playing pickup hoops in the morning. Now and then, if I was flush after scoring some holiday pay, I’d see her twice a week. But I was careful—at first—about limiting our encounters. I didn’t want my life to spin out of control.

  The truth is, by the time I took my first hit, my alcoholism was already taking me to scary places. I was reckless, compulsive, and I made bad choices. At least a dozen times in my mid-twenties, I drank to the point of full or partial blackout; the following day I could remember nothing of the previous night, or only small portions.

  One night, about the time I met Raven, I got totally blasted at Corky’s. I wasn’t blackout drunk, but I was close to it. As best I can recall, I cruised Raven’s street and didn’t see her.

  Frustrated, I headed home. On a downtown street, I spotted an older version of Raven. She was dark-haired and pretty. The woman was simply standing on the sidewalk, not near a bus stop, not talking to anyone. I still wanted to get high. Drunk logic took over.

  I parked about a block away and wobbled over. The woman smiled at me. I took it as an invitation and asked if she partied. Sure, she said. I asked if we could party, if she’d do me, for forty bucks, as I recall.

  She took a step back and made a hand signal. An unmarked LAPD sedan roared in from a nearby alley. The woman was a plainclothes LAPD cop, working vice. A couple of her colleagues swooped in, briefly put me in flex-cuffs, and sent me on my miserable way with a citation for solicitation.

  Things couldn’t get worse. Or so I thought.

  On my way home, I stopped at a pay phone on Main Street to call my roommate. It was a system we’d developed: Whoever was out later would check in with the other,
in case he had female companionship and wanted some privacy.

  As I was putting a coin into the phone, a pair of muscular arms encircled my torso. The attacker lifted me off the ground, pinned my arms to my sides, and led me behind a small shack in a dark parking lot.

  “Be cool,” the man said. “I’ve got a gun.”

  I quickly sobered up.

  My attacker was wearing gray sweats. He was about six-two, 235 pounds, I would later learn. As he took me behind the shack, out of sight of anyone on the street, I squirmed out of his grasp and looked at his waistband. No gun.

  He reached around my waist and grabbed my wallet from my back pocket. I reared back and slugged him as hard as I could in the groin. He moaned and took a couple of steps back. I kicked him in the groin, ran to the street, and flagged down a passing squad car.

  The cops found the would-be mugger staggering down the street a block or two away. I found my wallet in the parking lot. I’d lucked out. My attacker appeared to be drunk. If he’d been sober, he could have pummeled me, or worse.

  A couple of months later, when my alleged attacker went to trial, I volunteered to the prosecutor how my awful night had started. He told the defense attorney, who asked me about it when I testified. I told the truth. The defendant walked.

  A few weeks later, as I recall, I dealt with my citation. I admitted guilt, paid a modest fine, and filed the paperwork to have the incident expunged from my record. The episode should have been enough to scare me off crack and booze, or at least to prompt me to take a hard look at the direction my life was taking.

  It wasn’t.

  I thought of Raven and crack as distractions—from personal woes as well as from ongoing career troubles. A few months after I met Raven, in the spring of 1989, I was dating Rosa, a smart, sarcastic, pretty teacher I’d met during a reporting assignment at her South Central middle school. One sticky summer night, she said she’d come over to my apartment in Figueroa Terrace, a hillside neighborhood a few miles north of downtown. I’d injured my left ankle playing basketball a few days earlier and could barely walk.

  An hour before she arrived, I broke out my pipe and smoked a piece of a rock. I intended to stop there, but I ended up killing the entire thing. By the time Rosa got to my place, I was completely wired. She brought a bottle of wine, which we quickly downed. Now I was high and drunk, my inhibitions and judgment washed away. We stripped off our clothes and headed to the bedroom.

  “Protection,” she said. “You know I won’t do it without a condom.”

  I knew. I knew. But in the moment, I simply didn’t care. “Let me just start. I promise I’ll cover up.”

  “You’d better.”

  I didn’t.

  Rosa’s face morphed into a mask of horror the moment I came. She pushed me off her, jumped out of bed, and frantically dressed.

  “Sorry,” I whimpered. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  Rosa paused and looked at me, revulsion on her face. She didn’t say a word. She finished dressing and went into the living room to put on her shoes. I limped in.

  “Can we talk about this?”

  She wouldn’t look at me as she stormed out. I threw on a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and some sneakers and hobbled after her.

  Rosa saw me and marched around the corner toward her car. I followed. She stopped and stared at a concrete wall surrounding a nearby apartment complex.

  “Can we talk about this, please?” I said.

  Rosa stared at the wall. I pleaded for her to say something. Finally, while still staring at the wall, she said, “I had an abortion a few years ago. It was the most awful experience of my life. I vowed to never put myself in that situation again. I told you to put on a condom, and you disrespected me.” Tears were welling in her eyes.

  Shame engulfed me. Rosa was in emotional agony—and at risk of even more physical pain—because of me. I’d always considered myself a decent guy, and now I’d brought a world of anguish to a woman I cared about.

  Over and over, I apologized and begged for forgiveness. Rosa stared at the wall and didn’t say another word. After five minutes of this, I limped back to my apartment. For a week, I called and left messages. I taped a note on the door to Rosa’s apartment asking for another chance.

  I never heard from her again.

  A few hours after I left my plaintive note on Rosa’s door, I got roaring drunk and drove by Raven’s street. I couldn’t find her. I drove home frustrated and lonely.

  My career wasn’t going any better. After more than six years at the Herald Examiner, I wanted to move on but had nowhere to go. The Los Angeles Times gave me a couple of interviews, but that was it. My dream choice, the Washington Post, responded to my résumé and clips with a polite kiss-off letter.

  I slogged through the rest of the summer. Gordon Dillow, a Herald Examiner columnist and drinking buddy, kept a fifth of Jim Beam in his desk drawer. It was an old-school journalist’s move, and Gordon was old-school to the core. He generously shared his booze with me. I began spiking cups of soda with Gordon’s whiskey. I’d sit at my desk or at a computer, getting blasted in the middle of the workday. My life had no direction.

  In early August 1989, a Post job fell from the sky. A recruiter called: There was an opening for a night police reporter, she said. With the city’s homicide rate spiraling upward, thanks to neighborhood crack wars, the paper needed to hire someone ASAP. Was I interested?

  A good deed had led to the call. A few months earlier, in the spring, I’d gone for a reporting assignment to a small Catholic church in Boyle Heights, a hardscrabble section of East L.A., where volunteers were helping immigrants cobble together documents to qualify for amnesty under newly reformed immigration law. Inside a tiny community center, I saw another reporter, a middle-aged white man in a suit, struggling to interview a Latina woman. I volunteered to translate.

  The journalist, Jay Mathews, was the West Coast bureau chief for the Post. Before I could ask, he offered to write a letter of recommendation for me. I’m certain I never would have gotten even an interview without Jay’s thumbs-up. Years later, I learned that Phil Dixon, a Post assistant city editor who’d held a similar job at the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s and liked my work, had also championed my cause. In anticipation of a drug test, I abstained from crack for a long, miserable week. I flew to D.C. on a Monday, went through a gauntlet of interviews on Tuesday, flew back to L.A. on Wednesday, and was offered the job on Thursday. It turned out the paper didn’t screen for drug use. I accepted without bothering to negotiate. I didn’t feel the need—the first offer represented a 33 percent pay bump.

  Word spread quickly through the Herald Examiner newsroom. That afternoon, I wandered over to the sports section and lingered to watch a tennis match on TV. A sports editor I barely knew turned to me and said, simply, “So you’re going to the Show”—the sportswriters’ term for the major leagues.

  I was moving up from the minors.

  A few days before I hit the road to D.C., I visited Raven for one final crack-enhanced tryst. I wasn’t worried that my crack use was getting out of my control, but I didn’t want to run the risk of getting popped in D.C. for drug possession. And I wasn’t about to do anything to jeopardize my roster spot in the Show.

  Raven let me into her room and took my cash. She was usually holding at least one rock, but on this afternoon she had to go out to make the buy. The room smelled of cigarettes. A dozen or so butts lay in an ashtray on top of the battered dresser. I sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the remote from the nightstand, and channelsurfed. There was no porn, just the big three networks.

  President George H. W. Bush appeared on each channel, sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office. I was about to click Poppy off when he picked up a clear plastic bag. My eyes zeroed in on the big white chunk inside. Could it be?

  “This is crack cocaine,” the president said grimly. He poked at the monster rock. Federal agents had busted a dealer and seized his stash in Lafayette Park, right in front
of the White House.

  “It’s as innocent-looking as candy, but it’s turning our cities into battle zones, and it’s murdering our children,” Bush said. “Let there be no mistake, this stuff is poison.”

  The president asked who was responsible for the drug problem, and then provided the answer: “Everyone who uses drugs, everyone who sells drugs, and everyone who looks the other way.”

  I wasn’t looking away. I was staring hard at the plastic bag of crack, wondering how many $20 rocks were in there.

  Raven returned. She tossed two rocks on the bed.

  I turned off the TV and reached for my pipe. Raven had her own glass stem, but I’d brought mine for a reason. She stripped off her shirt and bra. I undid my belt. We finished the two rocks before I could get off. Raven said she could make another buy.

  “Why don’t we try it with the res?” I suggested.

  By now, Raven had shown me how to scrape out the gray-black residue that built up inside the pipe after repeated use. The residue was considerably stronger than any rock.

  We waited about ten minutes for the res to harden. From her purse Raven retrieved a straight piece of wire, about six inches long, and a small mirror, which she placed on the bed. She removed the charred filter from the pipe and placed it near the mirror.

  With the focus of a brain surgeon, Raven held the glass stem over the mirror and scraped its walls with the wire. Fine dark-gray powder spilled onto the mirror.

  “Half for you, half for me. Me first,” I said. Raven nodded.

  With one of my Herald Examiner business cards, I pushed the powder into a neat little pile about the size of half a rock. Raven put the filter back into one end of the pipe. With my thumb and forefinger, I carefully loaded the res onto the filter. I brought the pipe to my lips, flicked on the lighter, brought the flame to the pipe, and inhaled.

  I held the res smoke as long as I could, exhaled, and gestured to Raven. She went down on me as I lit up again.

  I climaxed the moment I exhaled the last of my res. I lay woozily on the bed as Raven loaded her share of the res into her own pipe and lit up. She took a long pull, leaned down, and shotgunned me. A few minutes later, I dressed and handed my pipe to Raven.