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CKBooks Publishing
Amazon
Smashwords
Category:
Memoir
Publisher: CKBooks Publishing
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 224
Copyright: May, 2013
ISBN-13: 978098925213
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
As a child in 1980s, Chicago Willie stole to help feed his brothers, sister, and himself. In grade school his teacher told him to have his parents help him with his homework, but his mother, the only parent around, didn’t know how. As a young man Willie started smoking pot, which easily turned into harder drugs. This eventually led Willie to a life under someone’s front porch, two prison sentences, numerous trips to jail, and various recovery programs.
Living in the House of Drugs is the story of Willie Lee Triplett, a recovering addict and alcoholic. It tells of Willie’s life in the suburbs of one of Chicago’s poorer neighborhoods, his chance trip to Wisconsin, and his struggle for sobriety. It’s a no-holds-barred account of Willie’s life on the street, in prison, and the roller coaster ride of recovery that many addicts know well. The story is unique in its telling, following not only Willie’s interesting life story but also the author’s interactions with Willie as she learns of his sometimes sordid past, seeing beyond the story and into the man.
Excerpt
Holy Crap
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’m sitting in my car outside the Jamaican restaurant where Willie likes to hang out. We had our first interview here two weeks ago. Willie told me that the owner lets him sleep in the back on occasion.
Willie had been waiting for me here for over an hour, and when I didn’t show up, he left. The gentleman at the restaurant said Willie would be back, so I wait. I feel like it’s the least I can do. He has already left me six messages on my cell phone telling me that he was waiting for me here. I had already driven a couple blocks down the street to make sure Willie wasn’t sitting outside of my brother’s rental property where I had picked him up the week before. Willie’s first message from last night said he would be sitting there. I wanted to make sure he didn’t go back there since I hadn’t shown up at the restaurant when I said I would.
The problem is I didn’t check my messages again after I received Willie’s first message this morning because I knew I couldn’t call him back. I was at work and, unfortunately for Willie, I got out late. Willie isn’t allowed to have a phone. Drug dealers and users have cell phones, and since Willie is staying in a court-sponsored halfway house after being let out of jail because of a possession charge just three weeks ago, they don’t let him have a phone. They also don’t let him have more than twenty dollars a week, which pisses Willie off. He doesn’t think he can function on twenty dollars a week. Maybe that’s supposed to be his motivation to find a job.
You see, Willie has been drinking since he was five and doing drugs since he was seven. Willie has been in a state prison twice, sentenced to three years the first time and six years the second, and just four weeks ago he decided he’s had enough. He’s had enough of “drinkin’ and druggin’,” but mostly he’s had enough of “losin’ things”: losing clothes and jewelry, losing cars ‒ “Man, I had some nice cars” ‒ losing money, and I think most important of all to Willie, losing women.
Willie considers himself a ladies’ man. He likes women and he likes sex. I find out that it’s not that he used sex to get drugs, as he had intimated at our first meeting, but it’s the other way around; he used drugs to get sex. Willie has an addiction to having sex while he’s high.
I am interviewing Willie because Willie has asked me to write his life story. Willie knows I write and have published a couple books of my own, so he wants me to put his thoughts down for him. He says he is doing this so that others can read about his life and learn from his mistakes; he wants to help people so they don’t end up like he ended up. At this point, I am taking him at his word. In the short time I have known Willie, I do know that Willie tends to tell it like it is. You can usually tell when Willie is bullshitting you; he’s not a very good liar. But his struggle with addiction is just that, a struggle. So I can’t help but feel that the other reason he wants to do this is to try and make sense of it all, somehow. Maybe if he tells his story out loud and others read it, it will validate all that he has gone through and continues to go through to try and beat this addiction.
I look out of the windshield of my car, and I catch sight of Willie two car-lengths away. He is standing next to the parked cars in the street. He has on a black stocking cap, a worn plaid jacket, and blue jeans. Willie’s about my height ‒ about 5’6” ‒ and a little stocky. Willie likes to eat.
He points to me and gives me his now familiar Willie smile ‒ a sideways sort of wry smile ‒ as he saunters over to my side of the car. If I had known what he was going to tell me in my interview today, after he had reeled off some pretty raunchy, graphic tales as if he was reading off a grocery list ‒ doing as much drugs and having as much sex as he could pay for ‒ I would have contemplated scheduling another appointment with him.
But initially, as I watch that sly smile and that strut, I think it is just Willie being Willie, so I roll down the window. He reaches in and gives me a hug and kiss on the cheek. In the three weeks that I have been working closely with Willie, he’s never given me a kiss before. He had always hugged me but never a kiss. I’m momentarily stunned, but I brush it off, as I try to do with most things with Willie.
Willie frequently does things I am not particularly comfortable with: the language he may use, the physical closeness he likes to have, the looks he gives me at times. He grew up in the projects in Chicago. I grew up in a predominately white, middle-class city. His role models were black hustlers, mine were white liberals. He barely made it through school, I have a college degree. So I expect to be surprised at times by what Willie says or does. But so far, it’s all been minor things, so I let the peck on the cheek pass without a comment. I’ve got my guard up more than usual, ready to deflect anything else he tries in that direction. I don’t expect anything, but who knows.
I let him in the passenger side of the car so we can go somewhere to start our interview. He’s got to be back at the halfway house by three and it’s almost two.
“What’s up, cupcake? How you doin’?”
I bristle.
“You don’t like dat nick name?” he asks.
“Not really. I don’t really consider myself a cupcake,” I reply.
“Dat’s a good thing?” he says, trying to convince me otherwise. He can tell I don’t go for it. “How ’bout pumpkin?” he offers as a substitution.
“That’s better, but don’t say it when anyone else is around,” I instruct him.
I don’t mind if he wants to adopt me like some sort of puppy by giving me a nickname, but I’d rather he keep it between the two of us.
We decide we’ll go to the library just a mile or so from his halfway house, where we had gone the week before. That location had worked out fairly well. We had been told to quiet down only once, but we didn’t get kicked out. Willie informs me he has to get a paper signed by a local business first, then check in at the halfway house before we can start our conversation.
One of the requirements for Willie to live in this halfway house is he has to get five signatures a day, to show he’s been looking for a job. He has to leave at eight a.m. and be back no later than four p.m. So we drive a couple blocks to a pay phone (he can’t use my cell phone or he’ll get in trouble) and down another block to an ice-cream place. Willie will have them sign his preapproved job sheet.
As fate would have it, they have an empty room for us to use at the library. So we settle in, me at my computer, Willie sitting sideways on the bench next to me so he can see what I’m writing.
Today I want to get something for the beginning of the book, so I tell him I want him to talk about his lowest point, or the point where he had decided he had had enough of drinking and drugs. It turns out they weren’t the same thing. I didn’t know how much sex played a part in Willie’s addictions, but I soon would.
(It is sometime in the 1990s, Chicago, Illinois. Willie is thirty-seven)
“I was on the corner of Sherman and Lawrence Street standin’ by the Sherman Hotel. It was pourin’ down rain. A white guy pulls up and says, ‘You wanna turn a date? If you let me go down on you, I’ll give you fifty dollars.’
“I hadn’t gotten high in like three days, so I don’t think about it too long, so I got in his car. He took me to his house, and we go down into the basement. Then without expectin’ it, he pulled a sword on me. He wants me to go down him. I did it. Den he told me, screw him. Now I was confused. I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t screwed no man before, but I wanted the fifty dollars, so I screwed ʼim. I didn’t get off, but he got off. He paid me my money, den he put me out of his house in the pourin’ down rain. I was standin’ in the rain thinkin’ I should’a robbed ʼim. But he might’a called the cops. Dat was the first time I thought, ‘What’s wrong with me?’
“I came upon a lady [a whore]. I tol’ her what went down. She said it’s hard the first time you do somethin’ like dat. When you get bad, you’ll do more den dat. We became hustlin’ partners. I did the day [for drugs], she did the night [for money]. I got comfortable with druggin’ every day.”
Here comes the grocery list. He goes from one story to the next and tells me these embarrassing, amazing stories so fast it’s as if he has to get them off of his chest. He has to tell me all the eye-popping details so I know how bad it was, so everyone will know how bad it was. He doesn’t leave much out, and I’m glad I’m looking at the computer screen and not at Willie as he tells me about this next encounter.
“It was around dis same time. I came upon a guy, and the man ax for a girl. [Willie assumes the man wants a girl so he can have sex with her.] Dis guy wants to get high. Dis is 1992 at seven to eight at night. I find a girl and we go with him together. When we get to his apartment, I find out he’s gay. He had a mirror and a stool in the middle of the floor. We all get high. His sex drive gets high as he gets high. He wants to see me have sex with the girl as he watches in the mirror. Den we all take a hit. He wants me to blow smoke up her vagina, and I did dat and the girl did dat to me, too. He would smoke, and he would get off as he watched us have sex.”
Even though Willie tells me he likes getting high and having sex, at this point in his life he admits to himself that he was getting a little crazy. So after he hadn’t had any drugs for a few days he went to a place called Chicago Uptown Ministry.
Willie had been living on the street, so he was dirty and he smelled, but they let him in. They let him shower, gave him some clean clothes, and fed him. He remembers three different men that worked at this ministry: the pastor, a man named Dave, and a black man by the name of Charlie. Charlie tells him something he has never thought of before: He doesn’t have to look like a bum to be homeless.
Willie liked the Uptown Ministry, so he went there every day. He soon realized that he had to stop getting high, but, of course, he didn’t. He actually got caught stealing something and landed in jail
When Willie got out of jail he went into a six-month rehab program. He even went to a worldwide AA (Alcoholic Anonymous) convention. But, as he put it, “I still be messin’ with the girls,” and he falls off the wagon and goes on a three-day binge.
At this point he realized he messed up, and he tried to get back into the six-month program again. They referred him to another program, a drug rehabilitation program, but he continued to use, and he was getting more desperate.
“I was on Lawrence and Broadway. A white guy come up in a yellow Corvette. He has a pregnant wife. He took out two or three thousand dollars to get dope. He ax me, can I get him some dope. See, a white guy can’t ax for dope hisself, he has to ax a black guy to get it for ʼim. He give me three hundred dollars to see if I’d come back with the dope. I went to the twin towers to get the dope.
“When you go up to the twin towers, the guys come out sayin’ dey can get you the dope. You don’t even have to go in lookin’ for it. I got the dope, so we went someplace to get high. Den we went and got a girl. We went to the basement of an abandoned buildin’ and got high. He said we all have to get naked. We was doing everythin’. There were two womens ‒ both white ‒ and dis white guy and me. When the white boy run outta money, he lent his Corvette out to the dealer to get more dope.
“He called his wife to bring him another thousand dollars. She brought it. She axed him where his car is. He said he lent it out. He didn’t tell her he lent it to a dope dealer. He called again for another thousand dollars. She came about five times to dis abandoned buildin’. We were in dere three ta four days gettin’ high and havin’ sex. The last time he was scared to call her. Dis time she didn’t bring no money, she came but she was mad. She walked off.
“I didn’t care. I just wanted to get high.
“Dis is where God came in.
“I told her, ‘Your husband’s down here in the basement. If you love your husband, I’m gonna take you down in the basement. You take him home. Get him some help. If I see him down here again, it ain’t gonna be the same.’
“I take her down dere and it’s a mess, shit and piss all around. She’s cryin’. Dey left. Dey didn’t come around no more.”
This is a disturbing story to be sure and I’m amazed how easily he can tell it, but I don’t really stop tapping my fingers on the keys until Willie tells me this next bit.
“I’m in dis club and dis dope dealer had two hundred dollars worth’a rocks [rocks of crack cocaine] in his mouth, [ten ‒ twenty-dollar bags]. The police raid the club so dis guy swallowed the rocks. The guy goes to a restaurant to get some food. He ate and he drank somethin’, den he threw it all up. He didn’t want the rocks no more. He said I could have ’em. I got down on my knees and picked ’em all up.”
Holy Crap! I think to myself. How does a person get that low?
It’s hard for me to imagine this, coming from my lily-white neighborhood with my lily-white friends, where the worst thing we did when we were young was sneak a few cigarettes or try to choke down some of our parent’s hard liquor.
Willie then proceeds to tell me that he finds a girl and tells her he will give her a couple of these rocks of cocaine if she will have sex with him. So they proceed to get high and have sex.
Sometime during all this Willie goes to prison for stealing stuff out of cars. When he gets out of prison a year and a half later (with a year and a half parole), something happens that disturbs him deeply, and I can tell that it still stings.
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