Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs Read Online Free PDF Page A

protect him from the people who seemed, from where he was standing, to be the toughest gang of all—the corrections officers. On the Island, one officer, whenever he saw Chino, started taunting him—you want to be a man, he said, but you’ll never be a man. You’re just a dyke. Chino cursed back: “Why you so afraid of me, yo? Is it because you’re not really a man?”
    The officer was especially incensed when Chino started going out with one of the most beautiful women on the island, a stripper who I will call—to protect her identity—Dee. (This is one of only three places where a name has been altered in this book; the other two are indicated in the text later.) He had learned to love with Nicole, and now it seemed to be coming more easily to him. He could do this. He could care. It incensed the officer. So one day he grabbed Dee, pulled her into a facilities cupboard, and fucked her. There was nothing Chino or Dee could do.
    I was skeptical about this story when Chino first related it to me, but then I started doing some digging. A few years after the incident Chino I was describing, an in-depth investigation by the federal government into the complex where men are held found that there was a “deep-seated culture of violence” towards teenagers, with a “staggering” number of injuries. They didn’t look at the part of the prison complex where Chino was held, but said that these problems “may exist in equal measure” there. 13
    One day, Chino couldn’t contain his anger any more. He approached the rapist-officer and told him he was a fucking coward who preyed on the weak, and if he’d had the nerve to try to drag him into the broom closet, he’d have been the one getting fucked. Later, in a revenge swipe, he had Chino locked in solitary confinement. “There are many things you can do to a human—you can physically hurt them, you can spiritually pain them, but the most cruel and unusual way is to isolate [them from] all other human contact,” he says. “It’s just too much—especially when you have so many demons . . . That lasted forever.” He found himself slipping into a fantasy world where he imagined he was rich, and free.
    Dumped back outside onto the streets, angrier than ever, Chino started leaning on crack more and more. His friend Jason said when he was using it, Chino was “just not there. Like the lights are on, somebody put the radio on, but there’s nobody at home . . . It wasn’t like crazy, running around the street, stripping naked . . . [He was] subdued, maybe just a little off. It just seemed robotic. Almost like the soul was turned off. The emotion wasn’t within reach.” What Chino got out of it, Jason says, was “emotional numbness,” a state where he “did not seem to be able to access emotion . . . During that time, Chino was almost always in a lot of emotional pain . . . [He was] being kicked in and out of [his] house [by his grandmother], dealing day to day with not being wanted by your family.”
    The next few years passed in a crack blur. He knew there was more violence with his crew, more dealing, more prison, and a lot of watching TV. He started using heroin. It made things slow down when he needed them to. One of the few things that gave him hope was watching the Oliver Stone movie Natural Born Killers . “I feel like it’s the first movie I’ve ever seen where the bad guys get away,” he said. “The bad guys always die at the end of the movie, unless you’re a Freddy or Jason type. Whereas if you’re just regular people murdering motherfuckers you always get yours in the end.” But here, for once, “the bad guys had some kids and did their happily ever after.”
    One day, he woke up and realized he was so thin “I looked like a fucking Calvin Klein commercial. I couldn’t take it anymore.” He could feel Deborah’s fate waiting for him. He began to see “it’s like my mother was in a constant battle [with] her trauma, who she