I found kindred spirits in writers and artists and musicians and activists, like my friend Beth, a gifted painter with strawberry-blond hair, pale blue eyes, and a faint mulberry birthmark on her cheek, like the fingerprint of God, and Becky from my dorm, who recruited me into the women’s issues team and the antiracism team of the student government, where I gave a presentation on the sterilization abuse of American Indian women. I researched the Nestlé Company’s infant formula campaign in underdeveloped nations, which caused babies to become malnourished, spending hours in the library’s musky basement, where government documents were housed, using my critical skills for something worthwhile, kindling my passion for politics, for justice.
My father passed to me his Mother Jones and Nation magazines, with passages he’d aggressively circled and annotated in his barely legible handwriting. I remember how when he’d lived with us, he’d scowl at Nixon on television, call him a “bum,” the worst insult I heard my father say. Politics and books became the bridge to reconnect with my father, the start of our lifelong conversation.
Sometimes I wonder how I survived those high school years, how I wasn’t maimed or killed the hundreds of times I got into cars with people so fucked up they could barely stay in the lane, or by getting behind the wheel of a car myself after drinking, smoking pot or angel dust, taking speed or acid. Worse, I might have hurt or killed someone else. I could have been raped by strangers with whom I hitched a ride, or by boys on whose couches or in whose cars I passed out.
I know girls who weren’t as lucky, at least the ones who talked about it anyway, and I know the boys who raped them, hometown boys; one was a kid who sold me a joint of dust, noted in my diary on December 1, 1975; one was the older brother of a boy I liked, who attended the junior high across town, from one of the most respected families in Walpole; the third was an older townie with California-surfer good looks, who one day at a pond laughed at me when I said I could swim across. Not only can I, but I’ll beat you. In the water I took off, then floated on my back as I watched him far behind, paddling clumsily like a dog. I found out later that he’d sexually assaulted my friend’s sister while she was passed out at a party.
I could have become a burnout, a space cadet, circuits blown, a no-mind. I could have died of an overdose a hundred times if I hadn’t passed out first, or run out of drugs, or been prevented in some way from ending up in oblivion because I did not know how to stop. I could not stop.
In junior high, sometimes when my father visited I’d shoot baskets in the hoop at the top of our driveway and he’d wager a quarter that I could sink the ball from what might have been the three-point line. When the ball swished through the net, he’d say, “Double or nothing,” raising the stakes once to $32 as I hit the sweet spot again and again. But I always went too far. He knew I’d keep trying to impress him, keep shooting for more and more money, but he also knew that I’d miss eventually. I never quit while I was ahead, before I lost everything.
When I consider what could have happened, I become momentarily unhinged from my present life, flush with a loosed anxiety that somehow I might still be in danger, or dangerous. If I was that reckless with my life, that capable of stupid, careless decisions, if I was senseless then, I could be senseless now—untuned to the danger signals around me. I feel so narrowly escaped from those terrible fates, as if somehow I passed through an ever-closing portal into my future, stumbled through it, like at the Polar Caves in New Hampshire, which my family visited one year, geological formations turned tacky tourist site, where we barely fit through the Lemon Squeeze, a narrow passage between rock walls, or the Orange Crush, a tunnel-like passage through granite, the opening a small bright hole to the other side.
When I hear about so many people addicted to opiates now, I wonder if that would have been me. I never heard of heroin or opiates in Walpole in the 1970s, but I took every drug that was available then—angel dust, acid, cocaine, crystal meth, speed, Quaaludes, pot, hash oil, amyl nitrate (sniffing from a small amber vial), nitrous oxide (whippets).
What pulled me off the path of self-destruction was a confluence of events, part fate, part choice. There were people who left me, people I left behind—Paula and Alison, my drug cohort. Weekly for a year my counselor, Jim, provided a guiding hand, a nudge toward healthier choices. The natural process of maturing helped, as I outgrew the neurobiology of the adolescent brain, less understood in the 1970s. Like 90 percent of errant youths, I “aged out” of delinquent behavior, which peaks at sixteen or seventeen, then declines.
The family support I had for the first twelve years of my childhood, before my parents split, before the system broke down, provided a foundation beneath me, even though I lost my footing for a while. It was like when I swam in that mile race, struggling to keep my head above water, swimming in a crooked line, but I kept going, and at the end of the race, at my weakest, it felt like solid ground rose up beneath me and I could stand. My family had been there for me even if I hadn’t seen them. When I had no friends that summer, I hung around with Sally and her friends, or Joanne and hers. When I needed Sue after Nicky and I broke up, she drove four hours round trip. My father tried to help me; even if he didn’t know what to say or do, even if he couldn’t reach me, he never gave up. My mother showed me early on that help was available through counseling and arranged for me to see Jim when I asked.
Even Gerry Delaney, my misfit guide, helped by treating me as an equal, though I was four years younger, talking with me about books, stirring the embers of my intellect as I headed into my senior year. Gerry took me out of Walpole, showed me a different corner of the world.
All of these factors contributed, but one act was fundamental to resetting my course, like flipping a railroad switch to divert a train, something antithetical to my rebellious nature, that contradicted my mother’s lessons about fighting my own battles, a step that can be most difficult for teenagers, who yearn for independence: I asked for help.
In 2016 I heard Boston’s police commissioner, William Evans, on the radio talking about how juvenile arrests and crimes were down 21 percent that year, which he attributed to diverting kids from the criminal justice system by providing them with educational, vocational, and out-of-school opportunities. The program significantly reduced delinquent behavior, including a 59 percent reduction in carrying weapons, a 64 percent reduction in aggressive behavior, and a 71 percent reduction in victimization. Iceland, too, dramatically reduced teen delinquency by switching the rush kids got from drugs and crime to natural highs. Iceland’s government set up after-school classes, sports programs, clubs for dance, arts, music, life-skills training—all free, with free transportation. Kids “do not need to use substances,” said Inga Dóra Sigfúsdóttir of the University of Iceland, “because life is fun, and they have plenty to do.”
These programs feel intuitively right to me. I was destined to rebel, to do or say the taboo thing; it’s hardwired into my personality. In the fall of ninth grade, when my parents were still tracking my progress, my Spanish teacher complained about me on parent-teacher night: Nov. 12, 1974: Miss Ripley told Dad I did anything I damn please in class. Miss Ripley gave me extra credit for “outstanding achievement in Spanish” and allowed me to correct my classmates’ quizzes, which I took literally, erasing wrong answers and writing in correct ones. At fourteen, I did anything I damn please.
If I had channeled my rebellious energy into activities I loved and that were meaningful to me—even if I didn’t know how meaningful then, the seeds of who I’d later become, books and writing, swimming, nature and environmental conservation, political activism—I might have had a less destructive adolescence. I think of the hours that Paula and Alison and I dedicated to planning the B&E, the collaborative nature of our project, our perseverance, the determination to follow through, to take a risk—admirable qualities, misapplied.
I wonder if my teenage years might have been different if, instead of just driving by, I’d had the chance to go behind the walls of
Walpole Prison, as some Walpole High School students did in 2016, to talk with inmates about their choices that led to jail time—the school using the prison as a behavior modification tool, as my mother had. If I’d met face-to-face with a young man trapped in that brutal place, if he’d said, “I made this choice to take drugs at a young age. I never thought I’d end up here,” as he told those Walpole High School students—would I have listened?
9
Stop the Dust
I never met anyone outside Walpole who’d smoked angel dust, even kids at UMass from tough towns like Revere and Dorchester. Because of that, I linked the drug problem in the town of Walpole to the prison. I thought the concentration of badness had leached into the community, like the time the cesspool in our backyard overflowed and our yard stank. I thought the prison had somehow attracted drugs to Walpole, even though I knew the dealers—Lighty and Wayne Kosinski, who’d been in my house, Paula’s brother, Duane, who’d first turned me on to angel dust, and Paula, my friend. I thought the badness was contained behind the cement walls of the prison, but the badness was in us, too, the citizens of the town, its sons and daughters.
In 1978, a few months after we graduated from high school, Paula and Alison were arrested. Alison was charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute, and Paula was charged with possession of Class B, C, and D controlled substances and conspiracy to violate Massachusetts’s controlled substances law. They were lucky they’d been caught a few months before President Carter signed the Psychotropic Substances Act that November, which upgraded angel dust from Class III to Class II (with cocaine and methamphetamine), and doubled jail time for dealing PCP from five years to ten. Maybe the charges were dropped, or maybe as first-time offenders Paula and Alison received suspended sentences, but they were both in college that fall, and I was glad for that outcome, glad they’d been given another chance.
I knew the angel dust dealers in Walpole, but I didn’t know where they got their drugs until recently when I stumbled on the connection, the person who supplied Lighty and therefore the person who likely provided most of the angel dust I smoked. Jeff, Sue’s high school boyfriend, who’d distributed dust for Lighty, told me not long ago that Lighty’s source had been his “cousin in Rozzy” (Roslindale), a Boston neighborhood known for dust. Once when Nicky’s sister, Andrea, and I couldn’t find dust in Walpole, we took a bus to Rozzy and asked the first kid we saw for angel dust. He disappeared around a corner and returned with a couple of damp joints, which we smoked on the ride home.
In November of 1977—two months after I’d quit dust for good—Paul Ragucci, a twenty-two-year-old man from West Roxbury, which bordered Rozzy, was arrested with twenty pounds of PCP, at that time the largest seizure of angel dust in Boston’s history. Twenty pounds of PCP would have been 9,072 grams of angel dust, enough to supply nine dealers with over 1,000 grams each. The street value at $10 a gram was over $90,000, or about $356,000 today. Ragucci, it turns out, was Lighty’s “cousin in Rozzy”—a one-man pipeline of PCP into Walpole.
Ragucci, a former high school all-scholastic athlete (he played fullback for Catholic Memorial High, an all-boys prep school), was charged with possession and intent to distribute, which carried a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in Walpole State Prison. But Ragucci’s attorney exploited a Massachusetts statute that allowed people arrested for drugs to receive treatment instead of jail. If the arrestee failed to complete treatment, then the prison sentence would be invoked, like a layaway plan for punishment. Instead of going to jail, Ragucci went to rehab, even though the law specified it should apply only to drug charges “other than the sale or manufacture.”
There’s less forgiveness for PCP-related crimes when they’re committed by minorities. About a decade after Ragucci’s arrest, Garry Jordan, a black man from Washington, D.C., also a former athlete (in 1978 he earned the highest scoring average for a freshman on Niagara College’s basketball team), was sentenced to sixty years in prison for dealing PCP, an extraordinarily harsh sentence, especially since the amount he sold to an undercover cop, 500 grams, was twenty times less than the amount possessed by Paul Ragucci, who didn’t spend a single day in prison.
That I was able to smoke angel dust for nearly two years without anyone confronting me—not my parents or teachers or guidance counselors, no cops, no adult saying, Hey, that’s a bad drug, don’t take it—might have been because of a lag time before police, drug agencies, and schools learned of PCP and understood the scale of its use. When the first cases of PCP overdoses appeared in emergency rooms in the mid-1970s, medical staff thought they were witnessing an epidemic of schizophrenia. A doctor in a D.C. hospital said that PCP had “no equal in its ability to produce psychoses nearly indistinguishable from schizophrenia.”
The first article on angel dust in the Boston Globe, which my father read daily, was in the summer of 1977, when I was hanging around with Gerry Delaney, my dust use waning. “Hospital emergency rooms are ministering increasingly to users of an animal tranquilizer possessing a kick so bizarre it’s been dubbed ‘embalming fluid,’” the article said. In July 1977 the Boston Globe called PCP “a recently popularized drug” and reported a raid of “the first alleged PCP factory” in New England, in a Rhode Island town a half-hour from Walpole, where police seized $500,000 worth of PCP, worth about $2 million today.
That July a Boston Globe reporter immersed herself for a few days with teenagers in Revere, a rough town north of Boston that had a PCP problem, like Walpole. One Revere teenager said that angel dust had been around for a year or two and that “all of a sudden it came in and wiped out the whole town.” Some of her friends, she said, “had no minds left.” That was the name we called burnouts who smoked too much angel dust: no-minds.
Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood launched a campaign called “Stop the Dust” and held a public meeting with Boston Bruins star Bobby Orr and former heavyweight boxer Tom McNeeley, the athletic director at Norfolk Prison. Charlestown’s police sergeant told the packed audience, “Angel dust is not an upper, and it’s not a downer. It’s an inside-out drug.”
In August 1977, U.S. News & World Report wrote that angel dust was reaching “epidemic proportions.” Federal officials estimated that by late 1977 nearly seven million people, most of them aged twelve to twenty-five, had tried PCP. In 1978, a full year after I’d quit angel dust, the National Institute on Drug Abuse released a public service announcement about PCP, starring Robert Blake of Baretta, who warned, “Don’t go near it. It’s a rattlesnake and it will kill you.” And Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward narrated a documentary called Angel Death, which showed a monkey, a jaguar, and a fifteen-year-old boy high on PCP. The boy, George, snuck away to get dusted, and the cinematographer caught him on film, glassy-eyed, slack-jawed, unable to answer simple questions.
By late 1977, Walpole police admitted that PCP was “one of the department’s largest enforcement problems.” Shortly after, though, another article reported that the cops had “broken the back of the angel dust nest in town” and had arrested every major dealer. The claim was optimistic. In 1980, Walpole police, state police, and the feds busted a “major drug factory” in Sharon, a town adjacent to Walpole, involving a Walpole man, Paul Papasodero. Cops found enough gallons of liquid PCP to make $3 to $5 million worth of angel dust ($9 to $14 million today) and a pound of finished angel dust with a street value of $350,000 then.
For two years a PCP ring operated out of Medfield State Hospital, orchestrated by Walpole prison inmates working there as trusties. The inmates forged state purchase orders and procured hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of PCP chemicals, at state expense, which they had drop-shipped to five angel dust labs in Massachusetts. In 1981 twenty-one men were charged, including the trusties working at Medfield, a few men on parole from Walpole Prison, and two men still inside Walpole Prison.
Angel dust lingered in Walpole for more than a decade after I quit, into the early 1990s. I last saw Ian O�
�Shaughnessy in the fall of 1978, after we’d graduated from high school—this boy who, at twelve, had given me my first kiss. He was probably nineteen when I saw him outside the A&P carrying a bag of diapers for the baby he and his girlfriend had just had, proud to be a father. We talked briefly, his voice still raspy as I remembered it from sixth grade, and those big blue bedroom eyes. I remember that summer day we kissed in the parking lot of Fisher Elementary, how he pressed his warm, dry, chapped lips against mine—I can almost feel the sandpaper texture—and held them there unmoving for a few seconds. I remember his scent, like dried sweat, unwashed hair. A few months after I ran into him in 1978, he was arrested for possession of angel dust with intent to distribute, and nine years later, in 1987, he was arrested again for possession of PCP.
And Ken Coffey, my friend in woodworking my senior year of high school, whom I’d ask for help since I was embarrassed to ask the teacher. Ken had a pumpkin face and a big yucking laugh, and we laughed a lot in that class, especially when I pressed too hard on my warped checkerboard drying in vise grips and the tension made the glued-up board explode into forty-eight individual blocks that sprang all over the room, and we doubled over laughing because Ken had made the terrible suggestion that I push down on the warp. Five years out of high school Ken was caught with angel dust, and then again two years later, in 1985, that time winding up in the Dedham House of Correction, the county jail, for a year.
Body Leaping Backward Page 22