First Place Winner

Phoenix House

By Bill Asenjo

"Man, this won't hurt a bit; it'll feel real good," Louie said as he slipped the needle into my forearm like a nurse taking blood from a baby. We sat on milk crates in a damp New York City basement.

"Hold still, man." Louie gripped my wrist. I trembled a bit from excitement and fear. It reminded me of getting laid the first time. Louie's dream-clouded eyes told me just how good I would soon feel. Once the waves of nausea passed I remember thinking there wasn't anywhere else in the world I'd rather be.

As a boy I'd heard the street mantra: once a junkie, always a junkie. But I never gave it much thought, convinced it didn't apply to me. Just like every heroin addict once had.

It began with my own money, on weekends. Soon mainlining on my own, I stole anything a pawnbroker would buy, from anybody I could. A few years of mainlining changed this former high school track star and Boy Scout into a conniving, strung-out scarecrow. Angry scars traced the veins on the inside of my forearms.

Desperate for relief from the direction my life had taken, I checked into Beth Israel Hospital's detox ward to avoid the next inevitable arrest -- an arrest that would mean prison.

#

"Well, looks like you get out tomorrow." My detox counselor flipped the pages of my chart. "Why not visit the Phoenix House program this afternoon?" Phoenix House induction occupied the floor above Beth Israel Hospital's detox ward.

"Man, I ain't going to Phoenix House."

"You don't have to stay. It'll be a change of scenery for a few hours."

"Ahhh, I don't know." Avoiding his stare I knew my counselor would nag me about residential treatment programs until I left. "I still get out tomorrow, right?"

"I get paid whether you try Phoenix House or go back to shooting junk." He shook his head with a sigh.

I didn't want Phoenix House, but the thought of returning to my old life depressed me; prison scared me. Tired of ripping and running, as bad as I wanted to get high I longed to be free of the life heroin demanded. If only I could stop thinking about shooting junk.

#

"Hey man, what's happening?" A stranger stood in my doorway. Savoring the sultry June afternoon just beyond the bars, I turned from the window. "Ah, you know, thinking."

"The streets, right?" The stranger stepped into the room.

I shrugged my shoulders like a kid responding to a parent's probing question.

"Why don't you do what I did?" He smiled as his eyebrows arched. "Give Phoenix House a shot."

I remembered seeing him and several other ex-junkies from the Phoenix House outreach team talking to detox patients the week before. "Give me a break." I turned back to the window.

"Two summers ago I was just like you," he continued as if I'd shown interest. "Wanting to get high all the time, so bad I could taste it."

I half-turned toward him, my expression said he'd just told me water was wet. "So you went through Phoenix House and now everything is wonderful, right?"

"Hey, what can I tell you?" His smile faded. "Do what you want. It's your life."

"Tell me something I don't know."

"Look man, why be a chump?" His smile reappeared as if he were reasoning with a stubborn younger brother. "Junk'll always be there. And anytime you want to leave, you leave."

"Tomorrow. For me that's tomorrow."

"Okay, I guess you don't want a different life." He took a few steps toward the door. "But remember next time you're sitting in a cell I told you things could be different. It just takes a time to get your mind right."

"Yeah, how long is that?" I asked, as if he were selling aluminum siding.

"I don't know about you, but it took me about a year."

"A year?!"

"Once I got some clean time, got my GED, started working, things looked better." Then with the enthusiasm of a boy going to a ballgame he said, "Hey man, I start Bronx Community College next month." He squared his shoulders. "Got me a special lady, making my mama proud, and don't even have to think about getting busted anymore."

My interest in the window began to fade.

"Beats the streets. And damn sure beats lock-up." He moved toward the door again. "Could be you if you wanted. What's junk done for you?"

And then he was gone.

A half-hour later I knocked on my counselor's door. "Yeah, okay." I said reluctantly, "I'll check it out."

He smiled and scribbled on a form.

#

I noticed him when he walked into the room. Bowlegged as a cowboy, he'd never been near a horse. Genetics maybe -- malnourished more likely -- a heroin addict from Harlem, John Gidner wasn't old enough to buy a beer.

"John, it's your turn," the coordinator said with a frown from the front of the basketball court-size room. "Get your sorry butt up here." A large, intimidating presence with just a hint of gray in his Afro, the coordinator had been one of the biggest dealers in the South Bronx.

"Damn," John said under his breath as he rose to face an audience of felons. At first appearing bashful, a shifty-eyed smile hinted his pedigree: thief, hustler, courtroom regular.

"Toe pine…" John shifted from one foot to the other as if his shoes were too tight. Several in the audience snickered. "Toe pine…" John stared at the clock on the far wall to avoid the faces. "My baby's…toe pine…" His attempt at the Fiesta's hit song, “So Fine” stumbled across the room -- a speech impediment produced "toe pine." With the focused expression of someone threading a needle, John sang for the sullen residents in the Phoenix House morning meeting.

"Okay, who's next?" The coordinator scanned the group. "Lenny? Ronald?" The audience shifted uneasily. Each of us had to entertain the group weekly. But it was one thing to sing on street corners, doo-wopping in doorways, stoned on wine and reefer. This was something else. In this place nobody was cool. Detoxed from drugs, sheared like sheep, street clothes traded for lame uniforms, it would be two years before any of us graduated. Phoenix House took a military approach to rehabilitating junkies. Whistles unexpectedly pierced the night. General inspection they called it. Scrub linoleum floors with toothbrushes. Broken rules meant shaved heads, big signs reading, "I am an undisciplined baby" worn through twelve hour workdays and to bed at night. The only other option was discharge. But the streets meant returning to the old life -- sooner or later. And the old life meant prison and death -- sooner or later.

"That's it." The coordinator barely looked up from his clipboard. "Morning meeting's over, gentlemen. Time to get to work."

#

"John," I said, "buffer or mop?" John "Toe Pine" Gidner and me were fresh from the detox ward. We would spend the next two months on the service crew. After several months, inductees transferred to one of a dozen treatment facilities across the city. If they lasted that long.

With the exception of those sent to Phoenix House by a judge or parole officer, nothing could keep anyone from signing out.

Except fear.

For many of us fear outweighed the craving to shoot dope -- sometimes. Fear and craving seesawed in our psyches, as much a part of our existence as breathing in and out.

"Man, it don't make no never mind, do it?" Toe Pine grabbed a mop and looked at me like a kid who'd lost his dog. " Damn , I wish I was high."

I might have shot junk with Toe Pine. For that matter I might have shot heroin with any of the Phoenix House residents. In the last few years I'd been to the cooker with dozens of junkies from Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn -- wherever my habit took me. After I checked into detox the streets were flooded with China White. Countless addicts turned up bloated in basements or plunged dreamily from rooftops. But overdoses meant primo stuff. Even Bobby Kennedy's son made the trip from Boston. The New York Daily News said so -- every time he was busted. That kid from Cambridge had to have it just like we did.

Yet even though heroin ruled the city like an invisible dictator, it remained a second-class story. Front pages focused on the moon landing, Woodstock and a war Cronkite delivered to dinner tables each evening.

It was the summer of '69.

#

"One small step…" Armstrong's black and white image appeared on the tiny TV screen from a quarter million miles away. Seated on a wooden folding chair in the Phoenix House dayroom, I stared vacantly at the TV.

"That boy's on the moon ! Damn!" an older black man said loud enough for everyone to hear. He looked around to see if anyone shared his enthusiasm.

"Yeah," a gray-haired man with a sickle-shaped scar from cheekbone to chin said. "When that Sputnik thing flew over I was doing a dime in Greenhaven." He smiled like a proud father. "Never thought we'd beat them Russians to the moon."

I couldn't tell if these guys were old or had just done too much time. Either way I had other things on my mind. Though physically detoxed, twitching and puking heroin from my body, the mental obsession remained as firmly rooted as a brain tumor. It whispered to me, teased me with promises it would never keep. I dreamed about it, thought about it constantly -- how the rush would feel, picturing blood pulsing into the syringe before coaxing it into a vein.

"Hey, you guys done watching this?" A muscular White man frowned from the doorway. "The Yankees are playing."

"Yeah, go ahead." The gray-haired man nodded toward the TV as he lit a Camel. "We done watching that moon thing for a while."

Lost in thought, like a jilted lover longing for the days before things turned bad, I only seemed capable of recalling the pleasure junk provided. A selective amnesia kept me from remembering how much I hated time in the Tombs, Manhattan's mausoleum of a jail built to hold rebel prisoners from below the Mason-Dixon line; how much I despised the con jobs each morning just to get that first fix so I could feel normal – whatever that was.

I wandered into the dayroom and from behind the metal bars surveyed traffic below as it moved noisily downtown. Stevie Wonder's “My Cherie Amour” drifted in from someone's radio. A tall black kid pressed his face against the bar-covered window next to mine. Still powerfully muscled, Lenny had been a Golden Gloves finalist from East Harlem until junk nailed him.

"Man, lookit ol' Applesauce." Lenny groaned. "You know he's feeling nice ."

In a small park across the narrow side street a middle-age Black man called Applesauce nodded on a bench. A distant siren wailed above the dull thunder of traffic. In the sticky summer heat the air seemed almost liquid. We eyed Applesauce's question mark posture with envy. An hour before he'd been one of us, now he slumped on the park bench as if heroin had turned his bones to jelly.

"Damn!" Lenny slammed his big hand against the bars. "I wanna get high so bad."

An eternity passed. Applesauce tried to light a cigarette. He moved like Oz's Tin Man in need of oil.

"Let's get a Coke," I said.

Lenny turned from the window looking like a kid with a book instead of a bike at Christmas.

Lenny and me had hung out from day one, as if we'd known each other forever. And every time one of us wanted to sign-out, the other one talked him out of it. Not more than an hour before we'd convinced Toe Pine not to leave.

"Yeah Toe, so you get high today, what about tomorrow?" It amused me that our reasoning seemed so sensible when directed at someone else. But craving defied logic. Defied description. And we all knew if one of us signed out it tempted the others to leave. Better we all stayed together. Stayed clean. Miserable but clean.

#

"You." The crew chief pointed toward the end of the hallway. "Take this bucket and mop. Start over there."

Scrubbing, polishing, cleaning occupied most of the day until encounter groups or "games" as they were called. Games were group therapy, street style. Nothing fancy, no high-priced shrink, just dump your emotional garbage and maybe learn something about yourself. Masters at self-deception, junkies could easily tell when others were conning themselves.

"Okay, you guys are in B dorm," the coordinator said. The twelve of us entered the dorm and headed for a circle of folding chairs. Suddenly the room seemed smaller.

"Mutha fucka !" Lenny lurched forward in his chair as he screamed at the smug-looking Black kid.

"Lenny, you asshole, you too ignorant to live, " Ronald said as he smirked at the enraged Lenny. He teased Lenny about the awkward way he used a floor buffer. "My man, you ain't nothin' but a damn clumsy clown."

Residents used games to vent frustrations without fear. Phoenix House strictly enforced a code of non-violence. But emotions accustomed to heroin's caress erupted easily.

Lenny glared. Tongue-tied, he couldn't respond the way he knew best.

Ronald came from the kind of neighborhood most of us only saw on TV, a place with big houses and manicured lawns. A doctor's son, Ronald's college education set him apart.

"Say something chump!" Ronald taunted the silent Lenny. With the perverse logic of the privileged, Ronald tried to carry himself as if he were from the streets. The nonviolence rule assured him he could mouth off without concern. Aware of Lenny's reputation as a boxer, Ronald would never be so bold in the street. "Guess you too stupid to make it outside the ring, Lenny." Ronald sneered. "You got the hands, too bad your head don't work too good."

The veins in Lenny's neck swelled.

Later, after games were over, I noticed Ronald swaggering in Lenny's direction. Lenny looked up as he bent to plug in a floor buffer. Ronald's mouth moved but a large floor fan drowned out his words.

Moments later I sensed a dull thud. Holding his jaw, Ronald ratted-out Lenny as soon as he got off the floor.

Justice came swiftly. Lenny was out. The very thing we both feared and wanted. Staff escorted Lenny from the building before I could say good-bye.

"Hey, Lenny!" My words faded as three figures exited the large metal door.

#

We got the news a week later. At first the tenants on Avenue C and 8 th street suspected a broken sewer pipe. Searching the dark basement, a plumber found Lenny's slumped figure -- a syringe still dangling from his forearm.

Soon afterward John "Toe Pine" Gidner signed out, though several of us tried to talk him out of it.

"I just can't stop shooting dope in my head, man," he said. We walked slowly to the big metal door. "I want it so bad it hurts. You know what I'm saying?"

As the door opened, Toe Pine smiled at me slyly. "Look here, man. Being clean a couple of months means that first time's gonna be real good." He glanced at the door. "Almost like the first time, you know what I'm saying?"

I pictured Toe Pine nodding blissfully. And then I thought of Lenny. Fear and craving wrestled between my ears. Much as I didn't want Toe Pine to go, I couldn't wait until he was gone.

#

By the time they found Toe Pine on a Brooklyn rooftop, the August heat had bloated his body. Maggots feasted on his tightly stretched skin.

Like Toe Pine I couldn't stop shooting dope in my head. Yet as much as I wanted to, as bad as I yearned to stick a spike full of junk in my arm, Lenny and Toe Pine kept me clean the rest of that summer.

###