S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (2 page)

As a
Post
crime reporter, I chronicled the burgeoning bloodshed in the city’s combat zones, even as I contributed to the pathology with my own addiction. I would cover Lou’s inroads against the city’s most prolific killers—until we came up against city and newsroom politics.

Lou was thirty-four when I met him. He’d been on the police force for seventeen years, having joined as a cadet in 1973. Lou started out working as a patrol officer in tough sections of Northwest and Northeast Washington. He was smart, calm, dedicated, and determined to do what he could to stem the violence.

Investigating shootings like the one at 5th and O provided a strange kind of refuge for him. He wouldn’t go home until the case was put down. That meant working twenty-four or forty-eight hours straight, which meant no sleep. That wasn’t such a bad thing—no sleep meant no nightmares.

They’d started about the time crack hit the city in the mid-eighties. He dreamed of gunmen, their faces featureless, coming for him in a dark room. Some of them had handguns. Some wielded shotguns.

“Get away, motherfuckers!” Lou would scream. Lately, his wife, Loraine, told him, he’d started sleepwalking toward the dresser, where he kept his service revolver. Loraine didn’t scare easily, but Lou could tell she was afraid he might grab his gun and shoot her without knowing it.

I, meanwhile, was determined to write as much as I could about the carnage. By the time of the 5th and O drive-by, I’d been a crack user for a little more than two years. I’d first tried the drug on another reporting assignment, when I was working for the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
.

Staffers at that paper had minimal supervision, and I got away with more than most. I was a regular at Corky’s, a dive bar across the street from the
Herald Examiner
’s offices on South Broadway. I hit the place three or four times a week after work, and now and then I got an early start.

In mid-September 1988, I was assigned an immigration story. After working the phones for a few hours, I headed out to find some interviewees. I drove west on Olympic Boulevard, past high-rises crowded with poor Central Americans, grimy motels frequented by streetwalkers, and concrete fast-food stands sporting sun-blasted peach and teal paint jobs and adorned with signs boasting of THE WORLD
’S BEST TACOS
or
L.A.’S BEST BURGERS.

It was a tough area, perfect for my mission. Central American gangsters controlled the streets, the parks, the alleys. Some blocks belonged to the gang known as Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Others were ruled by the 18th Street gang. In their wifebeaters and jeans, gangbangers openly peddled marijuana, heroin, and crack. At some intersections, the slingers covered every corner, keeping a sharp eye out for LAPD black-and-whites—or anyone who looked like he didn’t belong.

Buttonholing strangers for interviews wouldn’t work in a full-on crack zone. The street dealers might figure me for a cop. Maybe they’d leave. Maybe they’d make me leave.

I needed a relatively quiet street. A mile or so west of downtown, I hung a right and took inventory: a cheap little motel, a couple of apartment buildings, some single-family homes. No slingers in sight. With my notebook and pen tucked into my back pocket, I hopped out of my car and wandered up the street, looking for someone to interview.

The girl quickly caught my eye. She was standing under a little awning in front of the motel. Apparently in her early twenties, she had fair skin, jet-black shoulder-length hair, and a beauty-pageant-worthy body clothed in cutoffs and a tank top. She looked like a rising starlet, someone you’d see in a cheesy sitcom or a shampoo commercial.

She busted me checking her out and threw me a quick smile. I smiled back. She waved me over.

The interviews could wait.

“Hi,” she said. “Haven’t seen you around here before.”

“I don’t live around here. I’m on a work assignment. What’s your name?”

“Raven. How about you?”

“Ruben.”

“So, Ruben, do you work
all
the time?”

“What do you mean?”

Raven twirled her fingers through her hair. “Do you party?”

“Why are you asking?”

Was she flirting? Was I that lucky? Raven took something out of her back pocket. She opened her hand, displaying a small plastic baggie. It contained a white, square-shaped chunk about the size of an M&M.

“Got some rock,” she said. “Give you a hit, no charge.”

Crack was raging through the poorest sections of the city. Though it was relatively new to L.A., the drug was already taking on a mythic quality. Doctors warned that even one hit could hook someone, hopelessly and forever.

Time stopped. I knew the little chunk in Raven’s hand was dangerous.

I pictured the junkies I’d seen during reporting forays to Skid Row: homeless, desperate men who crawled on the pavement, searching for stray bits of crack. Dead-eyed women who worked the streets offering their bodies so they could score another hit.

“I’m not lying,” Raven said. “First one’s free. You won’t find a better deal.”

I pushed the images of desperate addicts out of my mind—no way I’d become one of
them
.
I’d smoked pot four times and had never gotten very high. I’d smoked PCP twice. I’d hallucinated for a couple of days but quickly returned to my normal routine. If I could avoid becoming hooked on pot and PCP, what harm could there be in trying one hit of crack?

I looked over one shoulder, then the other. No foot traffic, civilian motorists, or LAPD cruisers were in sight. Forty feet away, westbound traffic was flowing on Olympic Boulevard as downtown workers headed home in the direction of upscale Mid-Wilshire, Hancock Park, the Fairfax District, and beyond, toward tony Brentwood and finally Santa Monica, with its golden sunsets and cool ocean breezes.

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.