An Angle on the World Read online

  One night, after cadging some food, he and two friends slipped out a window. He felt rapturous at first, blending into the woods, but it was also dark and cold, and after a while the boys couldn’t tell one star from another and wandered aimlessly in circles until the guards captured them.

  As punishment, Leroy was banished for three weeks to the Hole—a rank, bare, confining room in the cellar of the institution. Undaunted, he kept trying to get away, and on his third attempt he came upon a devious, little-travelled route that took him through orchards and cornfields and then to a railroad track that led him to the city. He was sixteen and had been away from home for five years, but his father still had no use for him. Instead of giving him comfort or advice, the old man reported him to the police, and he and Leroy had a vicious fight before Leroy bolted out the door.

  For a few months, he hung out in District pool halls, supporting himself by hustling suckers at eight ball and rotation. After Pearl Harbor was bombed, other men from the area enlisted in the Army, but Leroy felt no particular allegiance to the country that had jailed him as a child, and he decided instead to travel and gain some experience. He packed a knapsack and hoboed around the East Coast, working as a waiter, a bellhop, a welder, and a cook. When he couldn’t find a straight job, he indulged in petty cons, running a Murphy Game with a pal and sending unwary johns (they’d paid in advance) up the stairs of a nowhere apartment building for a tryst with the voluptuous but nonexistent Miss Murphy.

  While Leroy was snoozing in a Manhattan cafeteria one afternoon in 1947, luxuriously unemployed, he struck up a friendship with a blues singer, Jimmy (Babyface) Lewis, who toured with an all-girl band, the Sweethearts of Rhythm. They got on so well that Jimmy hired him as his valet, and Leroy started travelling with the boss, making time with various Sweethearts, dressing in high style, and meeting people like Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton at parties. An accommodating type, he kept a stash of marijuana on hand and sold it to band members and hangers-on, always holding back a little for himself, but he became incautious in his dealing and sold a few reefers to an undercover cop, earning a three-year term on Rikers Island.

  There, in 1947, courtesy of a fellow-inmate, he got his first taste of heroin. It gave him a wonderful insulated feeling of relief, and once he was back outside he chased after it desperately.

  An excuse, a blessing, a sickness, a seducer—to Leroy, heroin was all those things and more, and to buy it he dipped deeper into crime, pulling robberies and embarking on a familiar downward spiral to oblivion. The drug had such a grip on him that he might never have quit if he hadn’t almost died of an overdose, waking one miserable Harlem dawn to find himself stuffed in an apartment closet with the rigid, ice-cold body of another junkie.

  That was enough, finally, to drive him into a New York hospital for a difficult course of treatment and therapy, which involved facing his childhood, his terrors, all the good and not so good reasons for his addiction. When he returned to Harlem, in the mid-nineteen-sixties—drug-free but with no firm plans for the future—he saw that the place was not the hallucinatory night town he’d remembered from his years on dope. While he’d been nodding off, a regular Rip van Winkle, Harlem had changed in positive, unanticipated ways.

  Young blacks and whites were canvassing on behalf of civil rights, and Leroy joined them as an organizer for the Harlem Action Group, mainly because it was a paying job. But he was quickly seized by the spirit, thrilled to hear his secret grievances articulated in public. His life took on purpose and direction, and all his natural sympathies were aroused. He discovered that he had a talent for leadership, like his heroes Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass, and he put it to use by arranging marches and rent strikes. He also opened a cleaning business, giving work to many of his neighbors in the community.

  In 1966, after a trip to Africa encouraged his militancy, he returned to New York and began counseling drug abusers in state prisons. He was so effective that a wealthy benefactor gave him fifty thousand dollars to open a drug-treatment center of his own. He rented a building on 145th Street and called it Reality House. Many clients were waiting for him, because the word was out that he’d been through it all himself. He had mastered every trick in the doper’s repertoire, and he got scoundrels to cooperate by telling them the truth: heroin is a superior high until it kills you. And, he warned, there would be no immediate rewards for recovering—you bought back some health and self-respect, but they were likely to be grabbed from you the minute you left the center.

  Although the message was honest, Leroy did not enjoy delivering it. In a short time, overburdened, he was disillusioned with the rehab game, asking himself hard questions. For instance, why bother to treat someone if you’re only going to discharge him into the same poverty and neglect that contributed to—maybe even caused—his addiction? Moreover, he was feeling restless, uncomfortable with his new status and success—he had recently married a black woman he’d met in Harlem, and had become a father—and eager for another challenge. So, like many other pilgrims of the period, he headed for California.

  Leroy arrived in San Francisco in 1968, nearly broke, a year after the Summer of Love, when psychedelics were giving way to hard drugs. He had promised to join a friend in a black-oriented clothing company, New Breed, but instead, drawn to a scene he recognized and identified with, he sought out a vacant storefront in the Fillmore district and started Reality House West. The conditions there were awful—a leaky roof, one toilet, sacks of beans and rice for food—but he seemed to thrive on adversity: he was wholly in his element, willing to feud with Huey P. Newton and his Black Panthers over turf.

  Devoted to his new center, he put in twelve- and fourteen-hour days and scrambled to make ends meet. Always short of cash to pay his staff, he encouraged volunteers, and one morning a prim young white woman in high heels and lipstick landed unexpectedly on his doorstep. It was Kathy, and she announced that she wanted to do some work with addicts, because a student strike had shut down San Francisco State College and she was supposed to earn credits off campus.

  Looking down at her from a point about eighteen inches above the top of her head, Leroy gave her the full force of his skepticism, thinking she was yet another Lady Bountiful dispatched from the Kingdom of Good Intentions. He was wrong. Kathy’s family was not well-to-do, and her intentions, however plainly stated, were pure.

  Her father, an engineer for the Southern Pacific railroad, had had a bad heart, and had died while Kathy and her younger sister were still girls, leaving them in the care of their mother—an old-fashioned, old-country woman, who was born in 1905. A strict adherent of the Greek Orthodox faith, she had far less interest in revolutionary politics than in Archbishop Makarios; and, being uneducated, she supported the family by running a cottage industry in the basement, preparing phyllo dough and selling it to the city’s better restaurants. After school and on weekends, Kathy would help her stretch the dough, pulling it out in long, taffylike strands.

  Because of her rigorous upbringing, Kathy took to the harsh labor at Reality House. Without complaint, she mopped floors, scrubbed the bathroom, and walked the sickest junkies through their tremors. She’d always sympathized with the suffering of outcasts; in fact, she was haunted by an episode from her teens, when she had gone downtown to Union Square in a new suit she’d made for herself, believing she looked elegant enough to cross a class barrier and shop at I. Magnin. But as she approached its revolving door a crippled, horrendously disfigured man came at her out of a crowd, asking for help, and she fled from him. At night, in dreams, his pleading face still came back to her.

  Kathy had been pursuing a degree in international relations, but after six months at Reality House this seemed silly. She traded her dresses for jeans and sweatshirts, and learned to swear, braid hair into cornrows, and raise a fist in salute. At home, her mother prayed for her, accusing her of betraying the family and giving up her education; and that pushed her closer to Leroy and his cause. He had two sons now, Malik and Esa
n (both Swahili names), yet his marriage had fallen apart, and he was relying on Kathy for support. She was strong, capable, and energetic, and she stood by him as Reality House entered a period of crisis that threatened it with collapse: the financial situation was grave; there was more heroin and cocaine around than ever; and Leroy’s arguments with the Black Panthers had got so heated that he was carrying a gun.

  It took a few years to sort out the problems. By then, Leroy and Kathy had married, and were living in an ordinary town house in suburban South San Francisco. They had managed to keep Reality House together (they’re still running it, as a nonprofit corporation), and now, thanks to grant money from the city and the state, it was healthy enough to provide them with a joint income of about two thousand dollars a month. Leroy had made peace with Huey Newton and had begun studying for an equivalency degree in psychology at Antioch West college and writing his autobiography.

  At the age of fifty-one, he was mellowing. Although he was rueful about the pain he’d caused others, he tried not to dwell on the past. He still liked to read, and knew a bit of Shakespeare and Homer, and more of the Bible and Dale Carnegie. What gave him greater pleasure than anything else was a new ability to demonstrate openly his affection for his new wife and his children—Malik and Esan and a boy and a girl he’d had by Kathy. The boy, an infant, was known as Camlo, after a Gypsy god; and for Camlo’s older sister Kathy had chosen the name Agape, the ancient Greek word for love.

  * * *

  A mid afternoon at the Chateau, and the dining room smells of pork roast in plum sauce. A pair of cockatiels carry on in their cage, while one of four miniature poodles the Loopers own makes a loud yipping noise. A resident named Duane and his friend Bud come in, back from a day center, their faces pink from walking in the sun. Bud used to be a sailor. Duane plays electric guitar, writes rock music, and once had a three-state hit (“My Bayou Baby”) on an independent label out of Atlanta. The song, which he performed on the record, has a Roy Orbison flavor—that spooky Southern feel of gators, swamps, and voodoo.

  Ever since Duane was a boy in a backwoods Florida town, he has been hearing what he calls “suicidal voices” in his head. The voices put him in a hospital for the first time when he was twelve, and at their most strident they tell him he’s utterly worthless and urge him to do everybody a favor by killing himself. He tried this once, in 1983, shortly after he moved to San Francisco in the hope of furthering his career. Over the Christmas holidays, a friend left him alone in the apartment they were sharing, and he became delusional and overwhelmed and drank a can of plastic-wood solvent. Fortunately, he recovered with his throat and stomach intact, and after he got some counseling at a halfway house he took a room at the Chateau. He has never again done anything self-destructive.

  Even though the voices are still with him (“They’re real faint now,” he says), Duane is often in good spirits. Today, joking around, he’s wearing a painter’s cap he found in a giveaway box in the neighborhood. He gets a big kick out of it, regarding it as a weird gloss on the whole notion of hats, but the truth is that he doesn’t have many decent clothes, nor do most of the other residents. Rodrigo, who’s meticulous, wanting to pin down permanently every thought, word, and emotion, felt compelled to explain this to me last week. He wore a wildly patterned but almost colorless sports coat, a remnant of somebody’s Caribbean vacation. “Touch this,” he said, extending an arm. The shiny material was as thin as tracing paper. “It’s hard to be in fashion when you have to shop at the Salvation Army,” Rodrigo said.

  The irony of such wardrobes is that they sometimes make residents look crazier than they are. This can also be true of anti-psychotic drugs. Even as they control hallucinations and stabilize mood, they can cause impotence, dizziness, blurred vision, a cottony mouth, and drowsiness. They may make one constipated or give one diarrhea. Occasionally, they add a herky-jerky edge to a person’s gait, or cause his legs to bounce or jiggle. (Residents call this the Prolixin Stomp.) About twenty per cent of those who use such drugs for long periods develop tardive dyskinesia, a sometimes irreversible condition characterized by involuntary facial contortions and darting movements of the mouth, tongue, and jaw.

  Yet the sad fact is that nobody at the house functions well without meds. The Loopers will let a resident go off drugs at any time, as long as Mel Blaustein approves, but such experiments have almost always ended badly, with a gradual return to psychosis as the chemicals dissipate from the bloodstream. (That can take as much as six months.)

  The dining room is the social hub of the Chateau. If you sit at a table, you invite company, so I am not surprised when Rodrigo pulls up a chair. In a polite, earnest way, he asks if I think smoking is a sin—this has been his major preoccupation lately. Worried about both his soul and his health, he has decided to cut down on tobacco, and save some money as well, by smoking only butts; he collects them from ashtrays and deposits them, little treasures, in a blue plastic file-card box.

  With his close-cropped graying hair, Rodrigo reminds me of a dashing movie bandit. (In turn, he says I resemble his seventh-grade chemistry teacher.) He comes from a big family and has some Cree Indian blood. Only one of his five siblings talks to him regularly; he catches up on the others at weddings and funerals. Devoutly religious, he dabs holy water on his brow when he’s “cranked up,” and keeps a tattered prayer book in his back pocket. As a teenager, he had a bizarre psychotic break during which he left home in a delirium and wandered into the countryside, dazed, frothing at the mouth, speaking in tongues. A farmer rescued him at last and phoned his parents, and he was taken by ambulance to Langley Porter Institute, at the University of California, where he had shock treatments. They cured him, he claims, with some help from The Mike Douglas Show, which he watched in amusement every afternoon.

  When I first heard such stories, I didn’t know what to make of them. They reflect the organic weight of schizophrenia—how it drags one down and leaves one defenseless against the onrushing power of the world. Nothing stays in its compartment: the brain admits every perception, and beauty can flip-flop into ugliness in a matter of seconds. What a relief, then, for Rodrigo to come to himself in a clean hospital room, cared for in privacy and released from his demons. It’s easy to picture him between crisp white sheets, calm and peaceful, his temples shaved, laughing along with the guests on TV. The image is as vivid to me as one he actually describes—a cold, beaded can of Rainier ale that the farmer gave him to quench his thirst.

  “I can still remember the taste,” he’ll say, dreamy-eyed, smacking his lips as people do when they drink from a stream high in the mountains.

  Anatole goes by on his way to the basement with a load of laundry. His clothes are a record of his past. He has faded suits from his days as an insurance underwriter, jeans and flannel shirts from an outdoorsy phase, and a Moroccan robe, as intricate as a tapestry, that he used to wear to parades and events of civic magnitude. He told me once that his brain collapsed on May 12, 1964. When I pressed him for details, he said sarcastically, “What do you mean, ‘details’? It just exploded!” Still awed by the cataclysm, he keeps sifting through it for clues, straddling a gulf between what he was and what he has become, and his awareness of his degeneration, together with his battle to halt it, lends him a tragic, noble air.

  Probably Anatole is the most convivial person at the Chateau, but in the beginning whenever we had a chat he had trouble concentrating. He’d bite his lip and work to modify his erratic patterns of thinking, trying to smooth out all the peaks and valleys. He seemed like a cowboy roping in strays. The task was neither simple nor bleak for him—merely a challenge—and now it goes more quickly each time. But other residents have spent so little of their lives in ordinary human relationships that they’ve lost the gift of language—a primary means of self-definition and protection. After a minute or two of conversing, they forget the subject, stumble over broken sentences, or just fall silent. Often they blame their medication, or suggest, with typical paranoid vigo
r, that they’ve been poisoned, doped, or sabotaged.

  This afternoon is a payday, so everyone is a little tense, waiting for Leroy or Kathy to appear with a stack of envelopes containing their Supplemental Security Income, or S.S.I., checks. A share of the money, three hundred and forty dollars, comes from the federal government, and each state adds something on top. California is the most generous, and that attracts patients from all over the country. “I love it out here,” a resident from Alabama said to me once. “It’s warm, it hardly ever rains, and I’m a lot better off financially than I was in Tuscaloosa.”

  As I cross the dining room to get a glass of water, Georgie intercepts me, his neck craned, swooping in from a great height. “You’re a Virgo, right?” he asks.

  “That’s right, Georgie.”

  “Who do you think killed President Kennedy?”

  “Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  “I hate violence,” Georgie says. In the kitchen, Susan Brier, the manager of the Chateau, is basting the pork roast. Emanations of plum come at me, along with whiffs of garlic and sage. (In most board-and-cares, the menu runs to hot dogs, peanut butter, and canned spaghetti.) Susan offers me a chocolate-chip cookie fresh from the oven. A former philosophy major, she dropped out of college in the late nineteen-fifties to be a beatnik, and her attitudes and ideas remain unconventional. She has worked at the house for seven years, putting in four ten-hour days every week. In addition to cooking dinner, she does some administrative chores, and she supervises everything in the Loopers’ absence.