Lost Angeles, CA

Mystery Drug One by David Lenson (Massachusetts Review 1995)

Wed, 29 May 2013 17:11:14 -0400

photography by Vicky Moon, Atlantic Cities

by David Lenson (The Massachusetts Review 36. 1 (Spring 1995): 43.)

IT IS SO MUCH A PART of the fabric of Western life that it has come an element of the landscape. In the density of cities or the isolation of dirt roads at the edge of town, the neon iconography of beer and spirits illuminates every corner of the American universe. Bar and lounge find their place in every architectural gesture, from corporate obelisks to side porches of bayou lean-tos to blocks of converted factories. On billboards above town and country, images of bottles and their venerable marks appear: Old Grand-Dad, Old Crow, Hiram Walker, Johnny Walker, Jim Beam, Jack Daniels. These are images of patriarchal comfort: the warmth and greeting of a tavern as a better home; the bottle opened in leisure after a laborious day; the jingle of ice or reassuring pop of a cork or metal cap. Wherever one goes in the West, alcohol is offered like the grasp of a hand—or in place of it. And yet beneath alcohol’s icons and institutions lie its familiar wastes: its broken glass, a body stretched out in the gutter, an angry shout in the street, the wreckage of cars, promises, families and dreams.

As alcohol affects every cell in the body, so it touches every moment of our history from Homer and Plato to the beery homecomings from a dry Iraqi war. Wherever the cultivation of grapes, hops or grain is known, the transmutation of those nutrients into that alternative diet has also been practiced. How deeply alcohol is woven into our history can be seen most clearly in those moments of the drug’s negation, when its afterimage proves as strong as its presence. In those times of its denial, alcohol merely vacates the surface of the landscape and crawls into the secretive holds of those same buildings and streets: the fluorescent church basement of an AA meeting; bootleggers building and tending stills in dry counties of the South; or the obsessive reassertion of the socially metamorphosed drug under Prohibition.

Like the cannabis drugs, alcohol can be described only in a web of contradictions. It is a depressant, but also a stimulant; it encourages sexual behavior, but depresses sexual performance; it promotes an atmosphere of relaxation and friendliness but leads to tension and violence; it makes people gregarious but at its extremes finds them reclusive and alone; its imagery is masculine but its subscribers are more than equally women. To some degree, again as with cannabis, these are constructions put upon it by its opponents. The character imputed to alcohol varies according to the agenda of the adversary. If the concept of user-construction is tenable, every individual drinker should behave differently, and this would give rise to the plethora of contradictory interpretations of alcohol. But at the same time the psychoanalytic position is that all drinkers, while drinking, are diseased in the same way: “Diagnosing a psychiatric illness in a person who is drinking heavily is impossible. Heavy drinking produces insomnia, depression, anxiety attacks, delusions, and hallucinations.”(1) Not only does an inquiry into alcohol stumble across these contradictions, it also stumbles over itself on the way to them. Every approach seems only to accentuate them, and every method eats its own tail and disappears.

Even if alcohol—and I don’t believe this—were one thing to all drinkers, even if it were a rare fixed element in the polymorphous world of drugs, its very ubiquity would still mean that there simply are too many places to stand and look at it. To investigate crack there is really nowhere to go but the crackhouse, which provides only a single angle of vantage. To study pot one may go any number of places, but always to their back alleys or curtained rooms. To study heroin one must go specifically to junkies. But for alcohol there is no right place to begin. It could be my living room; it could be the Bowery; it could be Buckingham Palace. It could be an urban or a rural habitat, or a suburban raised-ranch neighborhood. Alcohol is limited to no one race, gender, ethnicity or social class. Because it is inescapable it becomes impossible to find.

Like every manifestation of the ineffable, alcohol is often anthropomorphized, usually as a man. It walked the agora of Greek antiquity in a mask of Bacchus. Jack London called it John Barleycorn. It is personified on whiskey labels as a grandfather or a gentleman. This practice of personification is undoubtedly a response to alcohol’s penchant for evasion, since it can also be characterized in the palest abstractions: as the “cause” of the car wrapped around a tree, the “reason” for teenage pregnancy, the “explanation” for the dissolution of a marriage. For those who want it to usurp their breath like a god assuming the body of a priestess, it is available. For those who want it to elongate everything into a fogbank of distance, it is available. It is there for those who want it to confirm their way of living, and also for everyone who needs an antithesis. It can kill you young or comfort you in old age. It is protean, the perfect example of a drug whose effects are intertwined with the very personality of the user, and the social arena where that user’s character is exercised. Reason fails at the sight of it. To analyze it is to tilt at windmills. Whatever you accuse it of being, it becomes something else. It is a game whose rules are rigorous and nonexistent at the same time. Every statement about alcohol is true and false at the same time. It is the reductio ad absurdam; every line of thought about it implodes into self-contradiction.

Even the character of the user becomes variable and almost schizoid. The good behavior of a decent human being becomes its own mirror image: recrimination. A kiss becomes a bite, an embrace a stranglehold, or else a weapon’s dropped to the floor in tears. Everything turns into its opposite in an instant. But as anyone who has ever passed a pleasant evening in the filthiest bar in town can testify, alcohol also has the power to turn hell into heaven, or the worst debasement into ecstasy. Rich people use alcohol to experience poverty, while poor people use it to turn their hard streets into esplanades of El Dorado. A stranger becomes your best friend, and your best friend becomes a stranger. Alcohol memory can be vivid in undiminishing colors and last for years, but alcohol can also black out the night before. Its affect is highly individual, yet it is swiftly absorbed into a general sentimentality. It spawns rebels who conform to its paradigm of rebellion.

It is its will-o’-the-wisp nature that allows alcohol to be legal. It absorbs equal amounts of praise and blame in the world, since it is unknowable. Therefore no one can find the last argument against it. It evades its attackers by changing itself into something else. Yet whatever it becomes it is still entirely itself—whatever that is. It is universally held to be guilty, but no one can say exactly what it is guilty of. You can make devastating specific grievances against it—it killed someone I love, it makes me be someone else, I get dyspepsia from it—but it has no characteristics apart from the person who drinks it.

Alcohol is the stranger at the party who talks to anyone who will talk to him. But it is a familiar stranger. The familiar stranger is counted on to reduce the heterogeneity of wedding guests to the lowest denominator which is still sufficiently common. All manner of uncomfortable situations are forgotten even as they are happening. In this there is a measure of forgiveness both of oneself and others. Suddenly, across the room and the night beyond its windows, what is simply is. And in this is-ness there is a faint aroma of promise: that if the night were driven far enough at its ulterior side would be some paradise. It turns old bawds of city streets, where too much has happened, into innocent lanes of possibility. It lets things be what they pretend to be, even if they are the crudest traps for tourists or the most uninhibited scams. Filth becomes romantic and elegance becomes the backdrop for tawdry scenes. Alcohol is the theatre of appearances; it is the willing suspension of disbelief; it is a fetishism of form bloated with easy emotion; it is all those things, but in just the right amount on just the right evening it plays on the pulses, for a short time, a world that is not exhausted, a night that is forever young.

My discussion could end at this moment, since I have apparently left myself nothing to say on the subject. But one additional thought presents itself. If alcohol is so empty a signifier, in this it resembles nothing more than sobriety, which is a null set defined only by adjacent regions of intoxication. Alcohol is bounded on three sides by its own absence, but on the fourth it opens into a morass of half-recognized chimeras: disinhibited mixtures with other drugs, violence, unprotected sex, accidents, amnesia and death. These outgrowths of alcohol intoxication are more permanent than the high itself, and remain to be contended with after the drug wears off. By contrast sobriety leaves no such legacy to intoxication. As a mirroring myth, sobriety’s greatest drawback (besides its virtual non-existence) is its insistence on the status quo, even though that is an impossible demand. Alcohol is an agent of transformation both physiological and psychological, and many of the changes it potentiates are irreversible even if the user never touches the drug again.

How to characterize these changes? Alcohol is ordinarily the drug that introduces neophytes to the essential permissiveness of being high on something. It is therefore regressive and progressive at the same time. Against the background of childhood’s regulation it suggests that breaking rules, particularly with respect to what used to be called “manners,” is possible after all. But it also brings the user back to an earlier point in childhood when the rules were not yet fully codified. It is a return to the game called Dark Fun when children shut out the lights and play hide and seek in an attic two floors above the adults, and on discovering each other linger to touch and explore. In the noisy adult disorder of a drinking party there are chance encounters on the way to and from the bathroom, unscheduled embraces and whispered surprises. Inappropriate attractions are disinhibited and their tropisms followed without regard for the consequences. In this respect alcohol is not so different from cocaine. Once in the thrall of either one (or both) the user uses more and more, and follows the urgency of arbitrary desires with little internal policing.

So the issue is not progression or regression so much as transgression, the crossing of boundaries interdicted by some social authority. But what authority? Here there is no answer apart from the individual user. If all acculturation is born of restriction, there is still no universal code even of manners, let alone ethics in the grand sense. The authority in question is quite simply whatever the user accepts as such. But if this is the case, the assertion of authority is simultaneous with its negation. Why would anyone establish authority only to transgress against it? What gives impetus to this transgression! The only possible conclusion to be drawn is that the user does not choose the authority, but has it forced on her or him. The transgression is thus the crossing of a boundary that the user accepts as valid but unjust and unwelcome. Reason buttresses the authority but feeling impeaches it at least intermittently. Alcohol cannot overthrow the authority; it can only taunt it. If there is an explanation for this mystery, it lies in alcohol’s self-contradictory capacity to heighten and deaden feeling at the same time. Alcohol (as much as heroin and cocaine) is an anaesthetic, and because it dampens mental or physical pain, it appears capable of promoting joy—joy that ought to occupy a greater space in consciousness, or so the user thinks. So alcohol’s famous disinhibiting is really only the elation born of a momentary respite from restriction and suffering. And again as with cocaine, the pain is only deferred and not escaped, as the ambiguities of feeling finally self-destruct and leave the authority unscathed.(2)

The elation arising from relaxation of suffering can take on a life of its own. When experienced as pure joy, it is a sensation achieved by deadening other sensations. Liberation from pain can be felt as liberation pure and simple, and feelings of liberation can create the illusion that anything is possible regardless of laws, odds or ethics. A user who experiences alcohol in this way is likely to seek that which is most inhibited, and so some otherwise well-heeled drinkers turn to violence or sexual misconduct while others dance, masturbate, or only get facile in conversation. The aftermath of the high is therefore more than a physiological reaction, more than headache and nausea. It is also the apparently vengeful rebuilding of all those barriers which the drug was able momentarily to dissolve. Because alcohol anaesthetizes some feelings and heightens others, it effects a schism in the brain, a sorting out of its own boozy purviews of consciousness, a staking of its own terrain. I believe this is an individual matter, contrary to the psychoanalytic view. If a great many drinkers turn violent, perhaps this is because this is a violent society underneath its peeling lacquer of civility. If many drinkers are guilty of sexual misconduct, this could be a result of the contradiction between laws and public rhetorical morality on the one hand and the Hollywood/Madison Avenue celebration of the body on the other. The Freudian objection lies in its view of this disinhibition: as a suspension of the superego and unleashing of the libido which, being instinctual, is the same in everyone. But alcohol, by excusing transgression, works (like any other drug) within a setting of social and individual circumstances. There are many examples of heavy drinkers who have continued to work effectively even while drinking—the Winston Churchill phenomenon. For some users, alcohol can swiften intellectual or imaginative activity, or increase wit and charm, while for others it allows them to violate the social agreement and withdraw from conversation—or from public life.

Drugs like alcohol, marijuana and nicotine, for which all generalizing descriptions are self-contradictory, can only be understood contextually. To understand an alcohol high, a whole string of questions is necessary: Who is the drinker? What is she or he drinking, how much and for how long? Who is the drinker with? Who are those others What are they doing? What are their values? Where are they? What time is it? What has the drinker always dreamt of doing that makes him or her excited and afraid? What have the others always dreamt of doing that makes them excited and afraid? A young man can have too many drinks and stand on a ramparts looking out to sea and dream about the great love of his life. An old woman can have too many drinks and flail bitterly at those who still have dreams. As Jack London wrote, “The desire for alcohol is quite peculiarly mental in its origin. It is a matter of mental training and growth, and it is cultivated in a social soil. Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone…The part that alcohol itself plays is inconsiderable, when compared with the part played by the social atmosphere in which it is drunk.”(3) And that, of course, can be nearly any set of social circumstances, at least in the West.

What about the social backboard off which alcohol must be bounced? Is its inherent effect like that of the unheard tree falling in the forest? Is it unknowable While it would be an absurdity to speak of the effects of cocaine in the absence of a user, it is equally absurd to speak of the effects of alcohol in the absence of the user and someone else. But who is this perennial Other? Is it still there when the drinker drinks alone? Do those who drink alone talk as if to someone else? Who is it among the group in which the drinker is drinking? Is it all of them, or some, or just one, or none? Can it be someone who isn’t there even in a crowd! Who, in other words, do we drink with? Or do all drinkers drink with the same invisible Other, which would explain why people utterly unlike one another seem to get along better when they are drinking?

Here we could resuscitate the psychological argument. Suppose that the Other is invariably an absence of someone, a role unfilled in a play. Then the group with whom the drinker drinks could be auditioning for that part. Someone might fill it or a night or forever. Or on certain nights it could not be filled at all, or even screen-tested. And sometimes there may be so many persuasive actors that it is impossible to decide among them. Maybe some drinkers are strict in their standards about this “one-I-am-drinking with,” while others are less discriminating. If this is so, then London’s argument for social determinism becomes questionable once again. It is not the social circumstance alone that counts, but the individual drinker’s utilization of that setting as a possible locus for the appearance of the Other. Alcoholism would then recapitulate the search for love or sex over and over again. Perhaps “to drink with” is a relationship of greater intimacy than we imagine. Or perhaps the association of amorous quests with youth gives the drinker a daily opportunity to revisit that time, when the world was a continuous adventure of desire and possibility, instead of remaining fixed in actualities. Or else it is different, and more like this: that the “one-I-am-drinking with” is the only constant in a life full of infidelity and death, uncontrollable change and reversals. If so, then desire, hope and possibility still prevail, since no real person is constant. In truth, it is because this Other isn’t there that we desire it. Because it does not exist, we drink.

A friend once said to me, “The wonderful thing about being a drinker is you feel great when you’re drinking, and you feel great when you’re not.” Some drinkers can rest from the unquenchable thirst for someone to drink with, while others are driven to it day after day. It seems antisocial to stop drinking and stay home, but it is also not particularly “social” to go out nightly looking for someone who cannot be there, who can only be impersonated. To stop drinking is to acknowledge, at least for a time, that the search cannot have a successful conclusion. Those who cannot stop, after enough time has elapsed, go out drinking hopelessly, knowing in advance who will and what will not be there. These people end up drinking with the dead.

But there is also the question of whether the Other is really an Other. It is possible that the mysterious stranger with whom the drinker wants to drink is no one but her or himself. That the Self, in other words, is the ultimate Other. The question then becomes: why does the drinker go out at all? Why don’t all drinkers drink alone And why is it frowned upon to do so? What better condition than solitude for finding this thing which is at the same time totally alien and most intimately oneself? To go out, then, and drink in a social circumstance is a way of proving that all the others are not the Self, a way of affirming that the Self is both superior and not there—a being somewhat in the nature of a god.

What if the Other is, simply, God, and what if the Self is identical to both? It is not an accident that AA asks its members to refer responsibility for their actions to some sort of divinity. Alcoholics are absolutists; that is at once their terror and their charm. To foresake alcohol there must be a conversion to another god, whatever it is. Without it, the drinker’s rectitude of opinion would be lost, that moral certainty, that transcendent sense of righteousness. You can personify the “one-I-am-drinking with” as Bacchus or your mother. The New Testament assures us that we can drink with Jesus if we like, he who turns water into wine. Plato gets drunk with, Homer gets drunk with, Euripides feels bad about not getting drunk enough with, and all the Emperors who had themselves declared gods celebrated in a sea of vintage. Let us not reflect on the atheism of their mornings-after. Let’s just say that the alcoholic has an abiding faith, that tonight is the night I drink with God, the biggest Other, and even though the only venue I can raise for this baptism is the VFW two towns over, still I’ll be there every evening at the same hour, which is the ultimate manifestation of faith.

The problem then becomes: how can alcohol be such a hotbed of contradictions when it is finally absolutist I think the answer lies in the notion that for absolutists the absolute never comes, and that being the case, the relative world in which everything else takes place is without a means for resolving contradictions. If there is no point of truth above or to the side, how can the myriad approximations that we live among conform to any order at all? Even if a God did appear on the Mountain, wouldn’t that numen only serve to shame our human dreams of order! Wouldn’t our reason collapse to a scheme where + and - were =, and everything that didn’t belong to the god were equivocal! For the alcoholic, nothing makes sense but the possibility of that Absolute, the entity that unifies the Self and the Other. So night after night they risk the law and the perils of the wheel, because who else is worth drinking with? And so alcoholics seem inhuman, like gurus perched on cold mountains or ascetics in the desert, and their piety makes them insufferable. They are the children of god. The atheists among us cannot abide them easily, but their intolerable thirst for the Absolute makes them seem like unwelcome prophets in our midst. Their metaphysical question is posed on every corner where icons of “spirits” flash in the darkness.

This sort of rhetoric is reminiscent of the old view, common in the 1960s, that drug use is an expression of mystical impulses.(4) What makes this position suspect for alcohol, though, is the sheer commonness of its use. The only explanation would be that every individual contains the potential for “spiritual progress,” but that the true way is blocked by the hustle and bustle of Consumerism’s getting-and-spending, Quick administrations of drugs serve the same purpose, in a constricted time-frame, as years of zazen on hardwood floors. The fact that alcohol is legal is then the crucial fact of its difference. Plainly, Westerners are told that this is the only acceptable way to seek self-transcendence. If the above hypothesis has any value, alcohol’s unification of the Self and the Other into an Absolute shadows the aims of monk and meditator. The incorporation of liquor and beer icons into the landscape is therefore a phenomenon not so different from the placement of churches around town commons in New England, or the inescapably central location of cathedrals in Western cities, except that alcohol’s candles and shrines are more numerous and ubiquitous. All through human settlements are signposts of worlds beyond: the mezzetin calling from a mosque, the virgin in the side yard of a three-decker, the wink of Johnny Walker over the passing lane of an expressway. Transcendence must be immanent, and never just at odds with the warp and woof of the avenue. If rural Greeks in antiquity met their gods at crossroads, at our crossroads we expect to find a roadhouse or a package store. If this is so different from other legal religions, why does Communion use wine! To co-opt it, to turn it into their god’s blood.

If all the charges brought against alcohol are true, let it be remembered that non-chemical religions have also led to violence, breach of trust and the erosion of families by such devices as war and celibacy. Again, this is where alcohol’s legality is so important. Practices with true religious content tend to seek acceptance, as was the case with the Dionysian religion in the outlands of ancient Athens. While the cults of hemp and LSD seek legalization, the cultures of heroin and stimulants (having few religious pretensions) do not. The history of Prohibition is now a cautionary tale like The Bacchae, a parable of violent disruptions when the god is denied. The notion of a legal high is perhaps then not really an anomaly if we understand its social construction in congreational terms. Drinking bonds millions of otherwise dissimilar people together, just as Catholicism does. No wonder the only successful antidote, 12-Step programs, maintain all the social and religious structures of alcoholism while replacing the sacrament with black coffee.

With this in mind, the ism in alcoholism is revealed in a different light and a heightened significance. It is not only the medical ism found in botulism but also the ism of creed like Catholicism or Stalinism. The medical ism denotes a physical malady: the complex of medical problems associated with chronic consumption of alcohol. But the wider ism suggests a coherent view of the universe. What beliefs, however, could this system contain, if every utterance about it is only as true as its opposite? Is alcoholism like the systems of Heel and Marx, where all opposites are equally true and give way to a higher truth as they approach the synthesis, the Absolute, the classless society? Is this what the search for a perfect fellow drinker is about, is that unity of Self and Other related to the union of subject and object in Hegel’s An-sich-fur-sich? Is it about resolving class contradiction when there is only one class left—the drinkers?

But this is getting silly. The fact that all statements about alcohol are only as true as their opposites does not imply that there is any systematic or logical method for resolving and advancing those contraries. It only tells us that consciousness influenced by alcohol tends not to feel opposites as opposites, and tries to avoid having to resolve them in any way. There is nothing systematic about this. A drinker’s involuted rationale for continuing to drink is what passes for its logic. But he refusal to press the dialectic to synthesis has an element of tolerance about it, a pessimistic shrug and another draught. The bitterness of a quarrel worsened by alcohol gains intensity from its internecine status. Drinkers, like members of the same family, are not supposed to quarrel, so that when they do their disputes get passionate or vicious. An event I observed over and over again during my career as a musician illustrates this: two drinkers (almost always male) drinking together all night suddenly leap up and beat each other senseless, breaking glass and furniture and bringing police or ambulances, only to settle down together on the same barstools the next night as if nothing had happened. Alcohol-related violence may be the nastiest sort precisely because it has no basis in any real difference, hence has no reason either to start or cease. It is the form of contradiction only. So too the contradictory nature of statements about alcohol despairs of any better resolution than a barfight. Any attempt to force coherence on this ism leads to the same conclusion as a body tossed over the bar onto the speedrack.

To be able to resist solving contradictions is sometimes seen as a state of grace. Whitman, Emerson and Nietzsche thought so, and Keats seemed to like holding contraries in an eternal balance potentiated by “negative capability.” What characterizes drinkers is a postponement, if not a cancellation, of the resolution of any dialectic. If Heel’s logic progresses through concatenating predications of the Absolute, alcologic fails to progress because of the futility of any predication of alcohol. Where Hegelian or Marxist dialectics are generative, as contradictions lead to new syntheses, alcohol is degenerative. Opposite predications simply co-exist in defiance of any means of resolution. Here is the heart, then, of the problem of alcohol: it feels like a state of grace in that it escapes the Western obsession with dialectical thought and the resolution of contradictions, but in fact the same old polarities keep snarling- at each in a perpetual statemate without either changing or vanishing.

Perhaps this is why drinkers and ex-drinkers alike tend to keep searching for a god or an Absolute. It is a way of re-establishing an eschatology for a universe that seems to have ground to a halt. And because alcohol is legal, this search can be carried out in open social fields. Illegal drugs also have social fields, of course, but they are closed: these drugs are generally used with other known users who can be counted on for secrecy. Perhaps if all drugs were legal they would come to resemble alcohol in this respect. But they aren’t. So alcohol is exceptional in that a drinker can openly go out in the hope of meeting the ideal drinking companion, who can cause time and thought to move and make sense again. And so alcohol is a drug of unending quest, and its principal affect is a longing too divine to be satisfied. This longing survives the habit in those who quit—but for those who have not, tonight is always The Night.

1 Donald W. Goodwin, Alcohol and the Writer. New York: Penguin Books, 1988, p. 196.

2 The hangover seems to be the supreme dramatization of this, since it is experienced as the superaddition of yesterday’s postponed pain upon the normal pain of today. People who stop drinking note that their aches and twinges take up a larger portion of their awareness, even at those times of day when they never drank. John Lennon’s line from “I Found Out” seems apt: “Don’t let them fool you with dope and cocaine / Ain’t gonna harm you to feel your own pain.” But it might.

3 John Barleycorn or, Alcoholic Memoirs. New York: Signet, 1990, p. 235.

4 See, for example, Robert S. de Ropp, The Master Game. New York: Delacorte Press, 1968. Here the author of Drugs and the Mind argues that drug use is in essence a misdirection of mysticism, although psychedelics like LSD and cannabis can be valuable in at least suggesting the existence of an egoless state of transcendence.

Relics of a Utopian Journey: Thousands of Americans moved to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and '30s in pursuit of a more just society. A few remain, but their dreams were shattered long ago.

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:02:53 -0400

by Jonathan Peterson, Los Angeles Times, December 29th, 1991

Back in the Great Depression, in the days when communism was a gleaming red star that beckoned working-class dreamers from across the sea, 24-year-old Rose Kostyuk packed her bags and moved to Russia.

It was an exciting adventure for a spunky young social worker from Philadelphia. Thousands of miles away, the first real socialist state was being hammered together. Idealists everywhere felt a magnetic pull toward this utopian land of Lenin. All the possibilities of a lifetime lay ahead. The year was 1932.

And then came reality. Kostyuk fell in love with a Russian Communist and left her American husband. She married the Russian and had children. But all around, the workers’ paradise was sinking into a world of terror and paranoia. Finally, there was no escape.

America-safe, familiar, rich America-drifted as far away as a childhood memory.

“Why I survived, I don’t know,” Kostyuk, now white-haired and in a wheelchair, tells a visitor to her log cabin home in this rustic community north of Moscow. “Can you explain it?”

They journeyed from the United States to the Soviet Union by the thousands in the 1920s and early ’30s, an assortment of political radicals, Depression refugees and restless spirits, enchanted by the promise of a society more just than the one they were leaving behind.

Some brought modern machinery. Union members packed their hand tools. Others lugged little besides idealism. Those with Eastern European roots felt as if they were going home. And for a brief, now forgotten interlude, these pilgrims were welcomed, several thousand in all, scholars estimate.

But the season of goodwill was fleeting: By the late 1930s, those Westerners remaining had become a people displaced, often shunned by Soviet neighbors and co-workers, feared as subversives, in some cases jailed or even executed.

A few of the wanderers and their children survive in the old Soviet Union to this day, having outlived the country that proved a false utopia. Their personal tales are remarkable and often troubled-stories of tragedy in the severe Russian landscape, of noble fantasies and brutal letdowns, of innocent choices with heart-breaking consequences.

“He died in 1946, his last words about me and my children,” Kostyuk wrote recently of her father, a druggist, who once cautioned her about expecting too much from human nature. Even now, “I cannot put these words on paper without tears.”

Although a few of the Americans have clung to the goals of their youth, a larger number acknowledge lives of cruel disappointment. The atrocities of Josef Stalin’s regime and the corruption that became epidemic are widely seen as a betrayal. Today’s messy, final collapse of the Soviet Union comes almost as an anticlimax.

“I think a lot would agree that the dream was a fantasy, that their lives were lived in vain,” said Paula Garb, a researcher at UC Irvine and a former Soviet resident, who chronicled their experiences in her 1987 book, “They Came to Stay.”

Benjamin Leib, a weaver from northern New Jersey, was one of the many who came to stay in the land of Lenin. As a young man, he had moved to the United States from Poland but never found the home he was looking for. He was jailed for organizing a strike at a textile factory in Paterson, and his Communist labor activities landed him on an employers’ blacklist.

Out of work in the Depression year of 1933, he sought refuge in the Soviet Union. His sad odyssey, and that of his family, illustrate the hardships that befell many of the emigres.

His son, Gary, who left grade school in New Jersey to make the long-ago trip, still recalls his father’s disappointment in the Soviet Union; how the hard, lonely life in the “workers’ country” contrasted with the excitement of New Jersey’s radical labor movement.

“In America, he was a leader,” said Gary Leib, now 70, a friendly, balding man with twinkling eyes who lives half an hour from the center of Moscow. “A lot of people wanted to be with us. Here, he went to work and went home, went to work and went home. People weren’t interested in politics. They were afraid. You say the wrong thing, and they take you away.”

Ultimately, the hardships of Soviet life proved overwhelming. Benjamin Leib died of starvation during World War II. In the 1950s, when Soviet authorities imposed a mass crackdown on foreigners, his daughter-Gary’s sister-was arrested and held in a northern town for a year.

“Someone squealed that she was going around with the wrong people,” Gary Leib said of the trumped-up charge.

Extra attention from the KGB wasn’t the only danger for an “Amerikanka,” a term for these foreigners from the United States. Life was perilous enough for ordinary Soviets living under a dictatorship. Gary Leib, who mastered Russian and graduated from Soviet schools, believes that being American-born and Jewish added up to a double whammy. It made it harder to get accepted to college, blocked him from becoming a military officer and later cost him jobs teaching English and working in a research institute.

Comforts came in personal life, in his Soviet family and his love of music. To this day, he needs little encouragement to pick up his accordion or sit at the piano and play the bittersweet Russian melodies he has composed over the years.

“The ideals were good,” said Leib, a widower, who supports himself by translating English science books into Russian. “But they didn’t work.”

Many of the Americans-perhaps half, researcher Garb estimates-had left the Soviet Union by the mid-1930s, either disenchanted with the hardships or frightened away by Stalin. Those who stayed, especially if they had become Soviet citizens, were more or less marooned after about 1937, when authorities made it much harder to leave.

Some remained true believers. To Sally Laakso, it was the “reforms” of the 1980s that came as a betrayal, not the brutalities of the past. Even now, her 75-year-old eyes light up when she speaks of V.I. Lenin, the Soviet apostle, or harks back to the lofty spirit of workers in a bygone era. They were people like her father, who brought his family to the Soviet community of Karelia six decades ago.

There, near the border with Finland, he joined in efforts to build up the local lumber-based economy.

“Conditions were very primitive,” Laakso recalled in her Moscow apartment, decorated with wood carvings made by her husband of 55 years. “But everyone was enthusiastic, because we were told: `You are going to help build socialism.’ “

The compact dwelling, across the way from a Russian militia station, is a world apart from the United States of her childhood, where she sang in the school choir and wrote for the school paper.

Her father, a floor layer who had come to America from Finland, was harassed by the FBI for his efforts to organize workers, as she remembers it, first in Michigan and later in New Jersey. Finally, “My father thought it best to move to the Soviet Union,” said Laakso, who keeps fit with a regimen of swimming and ice skating. “At least we wouldn’t be persecuted for socialist views.”

But like many of the other foreigners, the family walked straight into a buzz saw of misfortune.

Just two months after arriving in Karelia, her father-“a husky, heavyweight wrestler”-was riding in a boat loaded with lumber when a storm struck. The boat capsized and he drowned.

Later, Laakso would survive the German bombs that exploded around her train as she fled Moscow during World War II with her children. But after they packed into a small home in Alma-Ata in Central Asia, tragedy returned: her infant son, her sister and the sister’s children all died of tuberculosis. Her brother, serving with Soviet army intelligence, was captured and executed by the Finns.

Laakso survived as a teacher and translator, once dubbing the Russian for the 1938 Tyrone Power movie, “In Old Chicago.” How could she endure it all? “Everyone was brothers,” she explains. “Everyone was helping each other out. That’s why we were able to withstand the famine and everything else.”

Now she watches with dismay, even rage, as the ideals of socialism are roundly bashed, as people propose removing Lenin-“a leader of the world”-from his famous tomb in Red Square. Indeed, new insults to a revered past seem to crop up every day: the relentless spread of American pop culture, once-proud leaders who now “dance to the tune” of George Bush and the CIA.

“Now that everything is being destroyed, it’s the biggest mistake that could ever be done!” she cries.

To understand her fury, it helps to recall the America that Sally Laakso left behind, a place where a squalid poorhouse awaited the needy, where divisions of class and race were vast, where there wasn’t even Social Security. By contrast, the fledgling Soviet Union seemed to promise something fairer. Full employment, universal health care and retirement aid all were guaranteed.

After her father drowned, for example, Sally and her brother received state grants, and their mother, who suffered from arthritis, survived on a steady disability check.

On top of that, Soviet rhetoric depicted a place where people of different races and religions pulled together as comrades for the common good. In America, racial segregation remained deeply entrenched and often was enforced by law.

Many of the early Western witnesses-those who returned to the United States by the mid-1930s-were favorably moved by the grand experiment. “Most of them, it seemed to me, spoke with great fervor” about their experience, “of having experienced something emotionally and intellectually quite unusual,” said Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton University historian and expert on 20th-Century Russia.

Yet those who stayed for the long haul often became alienated. Robert Robinson, a toolmaker from Detroit, hoped that as a black American, he would get a fairer shake in Soviet society than he had at home. Gradually, however, he concluded that popular attitudes did not live up to official speeches.

“No matter what my Russian neighbors told me, regardless of how much Communist officials bragged about their system of social justice and the equality of people, I was never really accepted as an equal,” he wrote in his biography, “Black on Red.”

Still, Robinson, who finally got permission to leave Russia after 44 years, felt he was luckier than some of the other black Americans he had encountered. “The fortunate ones were exiled to Siberian labor camps. Those less fortunate were shot.”

But perhaps no one’s journey through the Soviet Union was more tumultuous than that of Rose Kostyuk, a mixture of high ideals and caprice that quickly collided with dark Soviet reality.

The young woman had left Philadelphia with her first husband, an unemployed lawyer. Within two years, she was aboard a train thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of frying food, bound for a state farm in Central Asia with her new husband, a Russian Communist.

Images of her life near the Afghan border in Uzbekistan still flash like a kaleidoscope: Pristine meadows alive with red poppies, herds of sheep on parched hillsides, her husband, Vasya, “a village boy from Minsk,” mounting a horse at daybreak and riding off to inspect the cotton fields.

Summer afternoons got so hot that they would wrap themselves in wet sheets and cover the windows of their hut with blankets. They started a family, and Rose kept busy tending the two children. But danger soon crept into their romantic oasis. Vasya’s standing in the Communist Party plunged, maybe for defending a member who was out of favor, maybe for having an American wife.

Rose felt guilty for whatever part she played. In a fateful if ill-conceived gesture, she became a Soviet citizen and gave up her U.S. passport. Later she would explain her profound sacrifice: “I felt sorry for the poor goof who had jeopardized his career by linking his life with a foreigner… . If he had been a wiser man and less of a Don Quixote, he wouldn’t have done such a reckless thing.”

Vasya was thrown out of the party anyway and tipped off that his arrest was imminent.

Rose and the two children fled to Moscow, where she ended up in a peasants’ hostel, being disinfected along with several Gypsy women in the shower room. The children were led off to a separate ward.

Her next stop was the feared office of the NKVD security service, predecessor to the KGB:

“I stood in line with all the wives of arrested people and said, `Here I am. What do you want with me and my husband?’ I remember the man was very annoyed with me. He said, `We’ll come for you when we want you. Now get out.’ “

For some reason, Vasya wasn’t hauled away, nor did the police come after Rose. In fact, he was allowed back into the party, along with many others, during a brief lull in Stalin’s terror. Still, he cut his ties to Central Asia, and the family settled in Tomilino, the rustic colony near Moscow where Rose lives to this day.

Through all the years of stupid, baffling injustices, she tried to hold steady to her dream of a better world: “We endured things that we couldn’t understand,” she says now. “Sometimes my husband and I would put a blanket over our mouths at night and say, `This isn’t the way things should be going.’ But we didn’t say it loud.”

Beyond the political horrors was the lingering ache of feeling not quite welcome. Rose remembers returning from the Ural Mountains after World War II to a ransacked home: 42 Harvard Classic books that her father shipped from America had been taken, along with her homespun Ukrainian carpets, even the wiring from the walls.

Later she dropped in on her next-door neighbor, she recalled, “and there was my meat grinder on the table.”

Worst of all, perhaps, was the forced separation from family. Soviet travel restrictions applied to everybody, yet they had special meaning for those with relatives outside the country.

The feeling is captured in a yellowed copy of a letter she wrote in December, 1945, after a rare telephone conversation with her family: “For three days I haven’t been where I am. I’ve been with you, waking up in the middle of the night with your voices in my ears again, trying to see you in my mind’s eye, talking to you again.

“The business of permission to visit is a ticklish one. It takes at least six to eight months to get a decision. But I must see it through. I must recapture my old fightin’ spirit. If only this once.”

The request was turned down and she never saw her father again. Looking back, the postwar years run together, a dreary period of stress and worry in contrast to her colorful, earlier adventures.

Finally, after 33 years in the Soviet Union, 20 of them awaiting permission to travel abroad, after impassioned letters to Stalin and Nikita S. Khrushchev, she got the OK to go-by herself-to the United States. Stepping off a KLM jetliner in 1965, Rose entered a world transformed from the Depression years: Her working-class friends and relatives now lived in middle-class splendor right out of Ladies Home Journal.

There followed many joyful reunions and smaller pleasures, such as eating oysters, lobster and “real Italian spaghetti” after decades of potatoes, cabbage and other basic Soviet fare.

But, if Russia had proven far from an ideal home, the United States no longer felt quite right either. “I just didn’t have the guts or imagination to picture all of us Kostyuks adjusting in this new world,” she later wrote in her memoirs. “Besides, they were waiting for me to come back to them.”

Gary Leib made his own return trip to New York, Boston and Cleveland last April after an absence of almost 60 years. His impressions included “friendly” New York drivers, compared to their wild Moscow counterparts, the taste of pineapple and other forgotten foods-overall, a place that has everything.

“If I were five years younger, I’d leave (the Soviet Union for good),” he declares. “Even now I contemplate it.”

Sally Laakso has also traveled abroad in recent years, to the United States in 1981 and to see relatives in Finland. But she feels at home in Moscow. What’s alienating is “all this slinging mud at everything that has been sacred to us.”

If the pilgrims have suffered more than their share of disappointments, however, few have lost fondness for the high-minded principles that propelled their journeys.

Six thousand miles from Los Angeles, Rose Kostyuk is sitting at a small table in her home of 50 years, offering a guest a piece of honey cake and cup of hot tea. Outside the window, a postcard scene unfolds: the first snowflakes of the season-great, wet flakes-are parachuting onto the golden leaves that cover the yard.

She remains bright and alert these days, stays up “half the night” reading. She is slowed only by a fall that put her in the wheelchair last year. She shares the cabin with her daughter and her grandson’s family. Husband Vasya died 10 years ago.

“The meaning of life always occupied more than what I was doing with my own life,” she muses. “Now I’m hard put to understand the meaning of things in my own country, the country I made my own.”

As the snowflakes pile up on the window ledge and a newborn great-grandchild cries in the bedroom, she offers a parting thought. It’s a memorial, really, to a tortured land-and to all the idealistic seekers who gave up everything for it once upon a time: “It’s such a simple dream,” she said. “Why should it not be possible?”

Look back in anger: Hemophilia, the AIDS epidemic, and the question of who "deserved" the virus (by David L. Kirp, Dissent Magazine, Summer 1997)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:48:00 -0400

Hemophilia, Rights, and AIDS

by David L. Kirp, Dissent Magazine, Summer 1997

On a warm afternoon in the autumn of 1996, a limousine pulled up at the gates of the Bayer AG plant in Berkeley, California, and a handful of young men piled out of the car, megaphones to the ready. “We are here to take your name away!” they shouted. “I.G. Farben, I.G. Farben, Zyklon B, Zyklon B”-an unsubtle reference to the lethal gas manufactured by the German pharmaceutical house and used to chilling effect in the Holocaust-“four thousand dead, four thousand dead, four thousand dead.” A cameraman recorded the scene, preparing “great source tape” for television stations to air.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, similar “zaps” were regularly launched by AIDS activists against drug companies. Then, the demonstrators were mainly young gay men, members of ACT-UP, protesting the pricing practices of pharmaceutical houses that made AZT and other drugs unaffordable to many people with AIDS. Though the focus of the 1996 protest remained AIDS, the protesters were hemophiliacs, not homosexuals. A few years earlier, they would have praised the drug company for manufacturing Factor VIII, the blood-clotting concentrate that enabled them to lead normal lives, but this lifeline had proved to be the source of HIV contamination. Consequently, more than half of those with severe or moderate hemophilia were infected with the deadly virus; and, since many nations relied on U.S. suppliers for blood-clotting products, similar calamities were reported not just in the United States but across the globe.

A tragic accident, the pharmaceutical houses called it, but to many hemophilia activists these casualties were the inevitable result of decisions driven by corporate greed.

Out of the nightmare of AIDS a new social movement has emerged. Not only in the United States but in scores of nations, people with hemophilia, historically quiescent, became a vocal group with an identity, an animus and a strategy. Their anger has been directed at firms like Bayer, which manufactured Factor VIII, as well as at governments, for their supposed failure to warn of the danger; at their doctors, who, they asserted, misled them; and even at their own organizations, which allegedly minimized the risk of exposure to HIV. This newly energized movement has demanded compensation from drug companies and governments, as well as apologies for wrong-doing and justice in the criminal courts.

In the midst of the AIDS devastation, people with hemophilia have claimed a degree of control over their own lives, and in so doing, they have obliged governments and transnational corporations to take them very seriously. While this is good news, there is also another, less noticed and less happy, tale to be told-about the fissioning of the AIDS-infected universe along the fault line of the deserving and the undeserving, the innocent and the guilty.

Historically, people with hemophilia were united only in stigma and suffering. The first scientific advance came in 1941, with the separation of plasma from whole blood, which meant that people with hemophilia could be treated without the many complications of ordinary blood transfusions; until then, there had been no way to replenish Factor VIII, the protein in blood plasma, absent in people with hemophilia, that helps blood to clot. This was only modest progress, however, because the plasma treatment was painful and protracted, keeping many hemophiliacs from holding steady jobs and obliging them to depend on welfare. A generation later, when the first blood-clotting product, cryoprecipitate, became available, things changed dramatically. One dose of cryoprecipitate contains Factor VIII drawn from five to fifteen donors, not just one, and the treatment is faster, infinitely less painful, and tar more effective than the administration of whole plasma. This was a major advance-still, many hemophilia sufferers hoped for more than an approximation of normality. Hemophilia is an inherited disease that strikes only males, and young men in particular had a hard time coming to terms with their genetic inheritance. They wanted to be entirely normal-to be able, as the director of the French Hemophilia Association said, to climb Mont Blanc.

Factor VIII concentrate, which first came on the market in 1970, held out the hope of total liberation. Unlike cryoprecipitate, this blood product could be kept at home without refrigeration, and could be used prophylactically. It revolutionized the lives of hemophilia sufferers, as school and work became taken-for-granted activities. But the very reason the concentrate is so effective, the fact that a single dose is drawn from thousands of donors, is also why it posed potentially grave.risks-why the gift of life could also be a poisoned gift. The possible dangers became evident soon after the concentrate went on the market, when substantial quantities were found to be contaminated with hepatitis B.

Then, a decade later, came the advent of AIDS. Although this mysterious new disease, identified in 1981, was originally believed to affect only gay men (the U.S. Centers for Disease Control initially referred to this condition as GRID, gay-related immune deficiency), within a year the first cases of blood-borne transmission were being reported. Yet instead of switching back to cryoprecipitate, with its far lower risk of contamination, most people with hemophilia continued, fatefully as it turned out, to rely on the concentrate until the middle of the 1980s. The professionally run organizations that spoke on behalf of people with hemophilia were chiefly concerned about maintaining the widespread availability of Factor VIII concentrate, and so were inclined to minimize the AIDS risk. There was only the remotest possibility that tainted blood was used, these spokespersons averred, and that threat was outweighed by the risks of diminished mobility for people with hemophilia denied access to Factor VIII concentrate. In arguing that hemophilia sufferers preferred the risk, presumably minute, of being exposed to contaminated blood to the loss of access to Factor VIII concentrate, the specialists made risk calculations on behalf of their clients-calculations that turned out to be terribly wrong.

‘J’accuse’

By the mid-1980s, as the death toll mounted among people with hemophilia exposed to the virus through blood transfusions and Factor VIII concentrate, the victims’ anger crescendoed. In modern societies, which purport to be able to manage risk, such calamities are not regarded fatalistically, but instead invite a search for causes and culprits.

Hemophilia groups had long been dominated by the medical and pharmaceutical establishments, and consequently reacted cautiously to the news of tainted Factor VIII. Commenting in 1983 on one drug company’s decision to withdraw a batch of Factor VIII, the U.S. National Hemophilia Foundation declared: “It is not the role of the NHF to judge the appopriateness of corporate decisions made by individual pharmaceutical companies…. [Such corporate decisions] should not cause anxiety or changes in treatment programs.” (Emphasis added.) At the international level, so substantial was the dependency of the medical specialists on their pharmaceutical patrons that until its 1994 conference, the World Federation of Hemophilia forbade any public criticism of the drug companies.

In country after country, newly energized people with hemophilia shattered these cozy arrangements, seizing control from the supposed experts. At the outset of the epidemic, the French Hemophilia Association had adopted a policy of quiet diplomacy and backdoor overtures to government, in order “not to have hemophiliacs talked about” and not “to accuse either doctors or the State”; an activist splinter group, the French Hemophilia Association of Poly-Transfused Persons, brought charges against the blood banks and the French Hemophilia Association as well. In the United States, the insurgent Committee of 10,000 issued a scathing report, “The Trail of AIDS in the Hemophilia Community,” drawn from documents discovered in legal proceedings, which summarized “evidence that demands a verdict” against, among others, the established hemophilia organization.

These newly energized groups turned to tactics that, although the staples of other social movements, were anathema to traditionalists. In Holland, usually known for its consensual manner of decision making, a debate over the purity of the blood supply became known as “Bloody Sunday” for its acrimony. Doctors and people with hemophilia in Denmark split over the propriety of a confrontationist strategy, and the fact that the chairman of the Danish association’s medical committee was also a blood products manufacturer became a point of controversy. The Canadian Hemophilia Society, in the words of its president, started “crying scandal” on behalf of self-styled “victims,” as people with hemophilia publicized their own plight and demanded a state investigation. In Italy and Denmark, insurgent hemophilia rights groups abandoned the practice of insisting on the privacy of people with hemophilia; television stations were invited to record the plight of hemophilia sufferers, as a strategy for boosting public support.

During this initial spate of activism, the principal demand in most of the thirty-three member nations of the World Federation of Hemophilia was that hemophiliacs with AIDS and their families receive financial compensation from the government and/or the drug companies. Most people with AIDS, of course, did not contract the disease from factor concentrate, but rather through sex or dirty needles shared by drug users. In distinguishing hemophilia sufferers from other people with AIDS, and claiming they were uniquely entitled to compensation, the activists were doing more than practicing interest group politics; they were also making a judgment about who was and wasn’t deserving. The international federation nurtured. these efforts, even as it tiptoed through the social minefield of guilt and innocence. In a memo to member national organizations, it observed that “the public has to be convinced that haemophiliacs are particularly eligible for compensation, especially with respect to psychic and social aspects….” (Emphasis added.) A few months later, it urged that governments recognize “the uniquely tragic position of people with haemophilia who have become HIV-seropositive through the use of medically indicated blood products….” (Emphasis added.)

As new information has continued to surface about what was known about AIDS and blood, when it was known, and by whom, the sense of outrage has heightened among activists. Pharmaceutical houses were accused of putting hemophilia sufferers’ lives at risk by knowingly distributing tainted batches of Factor VIII. Over a period of months, sometimes years, those companies failed to test the blood they used to manufacture concentrate in order to determine whether it was infected with HIV, and failed to switch to heat-treated Factor VIII, a process that destroys HIV, until their stocks of the non-heat-treated product had been used up. For their part, public health officials were charged with criminal indifference to the plight of people with hemophilia.

Nowhere was the drumbeat of betrayal and evil-doing heard more loudly than in the United States. A “genocide” was occurring, the newly formed U.S. Hemophilia/HIV Peer Association declared in 1991, because of the “commercially driven practices of certain large pharmaceutical corporations.” Those firms had failed to counter the earlier threat of hepatitis B. Had they done so, “they would have prevented the transmission of HIV.” Moreover, “with the exception of persons who were transfused with contaminated blood, only our community has been brought down by AIDS precisely because we followed the advice of our doctors.” These activists condemned the National Hemophilia Foundation in equally strong language. “It is. difficult to comprehend how the NHF could have failed to sound an alarm” about hepatitis B. Once AIDS appeared, the bill of particulars noted, “the NHF … advised hemophiliacs not to be alarmed and not to change their treatment methods…. That remained the advice we were given … into 1985…. In effect we were told by NHF to use [Factor VIII] just as though there were no danger of AIDS.” Under those circumstances, the foundation’s reassurances were acts of betrayal, the manifesto continued. “We-the alienated-do not identify with the hemophilia institutions. After all the debacle of the 80s, we do not need an organization that cozies up to the corporate decision makers….”

At the 1992 NHF convention, protesters wearing death masks confronted “the corporate mass murderers.” The NHF had refused to seek financial compensation, believing that such a move would be dangerous because socially divisive, “an ideological throwback to Elizabethan Poor Laws, with notions of ‘deserved’ and undeserved populations.” The new generation of activists demanded compensation-which by this time had been provided by every other postindustrial democracy-not only as financial relief but also as “a partial payment for wrongs that had been done.” They insisted, as well, on an apology for the infliction of needless suffering and death. “Today we demand justice,” exclaimed a mother of two hemophiliac sons, both dead from AIDS, “and shout to the world and to this committee, `How did you let this happen to us?”’

Across the globe, hemophilia rights movements were similarly strident. In France, which has a centuries-long tradition of venerating its blood donors, the revelation that, for financial reasons, batches of Factor VIII (and whole blood) had been used despite knowledge of their likely impurity, led to an alliance of rebellious hemophiliacs, journalists, and lawyers. So enraged were these activists that at the criminal trial of a senior health official, police feared that infected syringes would be thrown at the accused. In Japan, lawsuits and street theater were the twin prongs of the hemophilia rights campaign. One attorney explained the dual strategy: “We have learned on other occasions that rights will not be bestowed from above if we are silent.” On World AIDS Day 1995, 1,400 students gathered at Waseda University; two weeks later, rallies were held in eight Japanese cities, as two thousand demonstrators massed at Tokyo’s Ministry of Health and Welfare. This public campaign forced the heads of pharmaceutical houses and health officials in Japan to rethink their attitude of cavalier dismissal. In 1995, Green Cross, the country’s primary supplier of blood products, had patronizingly said that “[w]e feel pity for the patients rather than being sorry for them.” Less than a year later, though, amid a widening blood scandal, the Green Cross president reversed his position. At a meeting with spokesmen for the hemophilia rights group, he bowed deeply in apology, his forehead touching the floor, and this display of physical and psychological vulnerability became the defining moment of the conflict. Subsequently, a high-ranking Japanese government official has been sentenced to prison for his role in the blood products scandal, and officials at companies that manufacture blood products stand accused of falsifying data.

In Canada, more than a hundred policy makers have been the focus of a multiyear investigation, conducted by an official commission of inquiry at a cost of more than $14 million (Canadian), and it is anticipated that the commission’s report will result in charges of criminal misconduct. Variations on these themes have been played out in half a dozen other countries, including Ireland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Even Switzerland, home of the International Red Cross, widely believed to have set the gold standard for purity of the blood supply, has had its own blood scandal.

Innocent Victims-and Everyone Else

Across the globe, the story of AIDS and people with hemophilia is told the same way: a tiny and vulnerable group, born with a medical condition that it has struggled to overcome with the help of modern science, guilty of nothing except faith in its doctors, is decimated by the very forces that it regarded as its saviors. It’s an irresistible narrative, and politicians of varying stripes have been drawn to the cause like moths to flame. In Japan, a health minister seized upon their grievance to clean house in his bureaucracy, so boosting his own political career. Hemophiliacs formed an alliance with the ultra-right National Front, which stood to gain politically from the hemophilia sufferers’ plight. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party nominated a hemophiliac candidate for Parliament. Across France, posters featured a torch with a flame of letters that spelled out the party’s favorite scapegoats-“Socialis .me, Immigration,. Delinquance, Affairisme”-equating them with SIDA, the French acronym for AIDS .

Even where innocence and its shadow weren’t so sharply contrasted, gays and hemophilia sufferers often found themselves at odds. The fact that hemophilia was often confounded in the popular imagination with homosexuality exacerbated the divide. Hemophilia activists in France relied on homophobic fears as a reason for maintaining the separation between groups led by gays and those led by people with hemophilia. Because hemophilia sufferers are men, these spokesmen contended, their joining forces with gay groups could be read as confirming the belief that people with hemophilia were homosexual. (“Hemo-homo,” a common schoolyard taunt in many nations, graphically expresses this popularly conceived connection.) For its part, the Italian Hemophilia Association demanded hospitalization for people with hemophilia apart from other terminally ill AIDS patients, who were mainly gay and intravenous drug users. These quarrels reflected more profound differences in how the gay and hemophilia movements responded to the AIDS epidemic. Gayled AIDS organizations neither sought special compensation nor placed much stress on identifying and punishing the culpable parties, as did people with hemophilia. At the outset of the epidemic, it was rumored that AIDS was a CIA plot to kill off homosexuals, but that claim was quickly dismissed as paranoid. For gays, there was little support for conspiracy theories; AIDS wasn’t a metaphor, just a virus. The gay AIDS message has emphasized empowerment rather than victimhood (tellingly, people with AIDS, or people living with AIDS, not AIDS victims, is the preferred expression), as well as the need for the AIDS-infected to become involved in influencing policy that directly affects their lives. Such participation has been conceived as altering the curve of the future: promoting effective treatment, a vaccine, and eventually a cure for the disease. For that reason, gay activists have pressed for greater public support for AIDS research, and some have schooled themselves in the language of science in order to participate in forums usually dominated by scientists.

Hemophilia groups, by contrast, have mainly presented themselves as victims entitled to compensation. Perhaps because, unlike gays, they already expected to receive care, they concentrated their energies on the misdeeds of the blood products industry rather than on AIDS treatments or vaccines. Their demands have been expressed in terms of tangible entitlements-financial settlements-as well as symbolic acts of contrition. To a remarkable extent, the movement has achieved its goals. In that success are to be found the seeds of its possible demise.

W(h)ither Activism?

The future of the hemophilia rights movement is uncertain. Having achieved much of what it set out to do, the movement has only the power of solidarity, or the possibility of a new threat to the purity of the blood concentrate supply, upon which to pitch its appeal. The movement has spoken about the price of death but not the need for treatment. It conceives of justice as being therapeutic, but justice is a discipline, not a cure. Despite all the criticisms hemophiliacs have leveled against their doctors, they remain dependent on those physicians, and this reality also limits the potential for mobilization. If solidarity and fearfulness prove to be insufficient glue, this new social movement will have exhausted itself in the battle over AIDS-tainted blood.

Not just hemophilia rights organizations but social movements generally stress the grievances of a narrowly defined constituency, because that is the easiest way to provide coherence, to gain members, to construct a shared narrative. This isn’t necessarily a measure of social justice, however. In a polis where such groups hold sway, the public interest gets defined as the aggregation of these groups’ grievances. Meanwhile, equally valid claims are ignored because there’s no group prepared to press them. In France, the budget for indemnifying people with hemophilia is more than twice the annual outlay for AIDS prevention (and many times the budget for AIDS research). In the United States, individuals exposed to HIV through blood transfusions will not benefit from pending federal legislation, which provides compensation only for people with hemophilia. Nor were these transfusees invited to appear before the national commission that reviewed the operation of the U.S. blood supply system, since that commission’s mandate was expressly limited to hemophilia sufferers.

Identity politics of this kind is inherently divisive, for it thrives when a particular worldview, a tale of blame, gains popular support, even when this means rejecting rival claims for justice. When hemophilia groups described themselves as “innocent victims,” they invited hostility toward other people with AIDS, especially homosexuals and intravenous drug users, who could not so readily occupy the moral high ground. Their argument from innocence made it easier for public officials to focus on these favored groups, especially people with hemophilia and children with AIDS (who have also received disproportionate government aid), while paying less attention to the vast majority of AIDS cases, which are not blood-linked.

The narrative of fault and blame, as well as the focus on the plight of appealing individuals-Kimberly Bergalis in Florida, the sweet-faced teenager allegedly infected with HIV by an irresponsible gay dentist; in Japan, a charismatic adolescent who has been the symbol of the hemophilia movement-represent the successful adoption of familiar tactics of identity politics. But if emotion-laden appeals assume pride of place in democratized policy conversations, rational public officials will become more risk-averse, unwilling to invite the political fallout that comes from taking on those who can take to the television studios. In the aftermath of the hemophilia rights movement, who will risk being known as “Blood Britta,” the Danish health minister who, AIDS activists claimed, “wants dead bodies on her table”? Who will weather the insult hurled at an American doctor whose professional life had been devoted to the care of people with hemophilia, and suffer being called “the Mengele of the Hemophilia AIDS Holocaust”?

The successes of the hemophilia rights movement have meant help for a handful of people who needed it. Yet in another kind of society-one less committed to the justice of Elizabethan Poor Laws, more inclined to shared responsibility-the fact that a person is seriously ill would be reason enough to deliver such help. Moral tests would not be imposed before assistance was forthcoming. The prevailing calculus of support, which invites distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving in the delivery of assistance, signals prudent public health officials how to respond to the next health crisis, and the one after that. One current public health debate concerns whether all blood should be screened, at enormous expense, for the rare and non-fatal virus hepatitis C; another has to do with whether blood found to be contaminated with Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease should be recalled, and recipients of such blood informed-even though there is no evidence that this disease can be transmitted by blood-because there is no way to prove the absence of risk. In such instances, the politically safe decision is to insist on zero riskeven if this means expenditures that would not withstand cost/benefit scrutiny, and even as far larger risks that won’t be captured in vivid policy dramas are ignored.

Footnote

This essay draws on materials collected as part of a thirteennation study of AIDS and the blood supply, supported by the Toyota Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, in which the author is a participant. A longer and substantially different version of this essay will appear in a volume published under the auspices of that project.

Subject: Acquired immune deficiency syndrome; AIDS; Hemophilia

Publication title: Dissent

Volume: 44

Issue: 3

Pages: 65-70

Number of pages: 6

Publication year: 1997

Publication date: Summer 1997

Year: 1997

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Place of publication: Philadelphia

Country of publication: United States

Publication subject: Literary And Political Reviews, Political Science

ISSN: 00123846

CODEN: DSNTAB

Source type: Magazines

Language of publication: English

Document type: Feature

Insights From a Perpetual Outsider; The creator of 'Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992' examines the riots' echoes #longreads (LA Times, '02)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:45:11 -0400

by Anna Deavere Smith, Los Angeles Times, April 28th, 2002

Summer 1992.

Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, took me out to breakfast in New York City after seeing my play “Fires in the Mirror,” about riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in August 1991. Those riots were the consequence of a buildup of tensions between blacks and Jews, sparked by the death of a young black boy, Gavin Cato, and the murder of a young Hasidic scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum.

Some would call the death of Cato a murder; others would call it an accident. Some would call it a reckless accident. Most people would consent that Rosenbaum was murdered. Some people would call what happened in Crown Heights a riot, others would say it was an occupied territory. There were Jews who called the events a pogrom.

How do you even begin to have a conversation when the terms themselves are a cause for dispute? And so they should be. After all, history is made by the way the stories are told, and particularly by whoever has the power to put the words in print, or some other form of dissemination. Being a student of language, I was intrigued to come to Los Angeles, and to work with Davidson and his theater to create a play about the riots in LA.

“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” was to be based on interviews, of which I would perform excerpts in a one-woman show. I was already aware that I could not start an interview by using the word “riot.” I would ask first to see how the interviewee labeled the “events.” It was variously called, at the time, a “riot,” “a “rebellion,” an “uprising,” a “revolution.” In political circles, where language tends to be most calculated, it was called the “events of April 29.”

Soon after my arrival, two Korean American graduate students at UCLA contacted me. My heart raced when the conversation began. “We heard what you are doing, and we are afraid you’re going to get it wrong.” Here we go again, I thought to myself.

I have cast myself as an outsider in my artistic life. Labeling my life’s work “On the Road: A Search for American Character,” it is my goal to try to tell stories from multiple points of view, which involves going out of my “place” to get a point of view other than my own. It is a passion that I have, born out of my own position as a girl growing up in segregation. I see the dangers of being relegated to a “place.” For me, the disaster of “placement” is an intellectual and spiritual disaster. Clearly there are other disasters—being put in your place can trap you in a social class, wind you up incarcerated by the blinders of poverty, or wealth for that matter.

I am used to being seen as the outsider who has no business telling a story that is not my own. But that morning, as I held my breath in my hotel room with my phone tight to my ear, the sentence did not end as I expected: “We are afraid you’re going to get it wrong, so we want to help you.” These students subsequently took me around L.A., showing me “their city,” sharing with me “their story,” and introducing me to people who never would have talked to me on their own. They translated stories; they sat with me across from interviewees, urging the stories out.

In a fractious society such as ours, who can speak for whom? Who can author the story? How in the world will we ever author the story that is big enough to include all of us, or are we only to be a string of little stories, are we left to be a niche culture? The fact is, we have to find partners to take us and move us around a variety of stories.

While in Los Angeles, I came to believe that some of us—not all of us, but some of us—need to come out of our safe houses of identity and meet each other in the crossroads of ambiguity. It’s not very safe out in the middle where you dare to cross the line, but it is creative, it is exciting.

It was Tennessee Williams who gave us the romantic idea of the “kindness of strangers.” In L.A., it was the brilliance of strangers that I found so compelling.

Twilight Bey is the person for whom “Twilight” is named. He is a former gang member. I was immediately interested in him because of the confidence of his stroll. I knew I needed to learn to walk like that, calmly, no sudden movements, easy, focused and yet light on my feet. His walk was alert, it was alive, it was awake. It needed to be. My plan was to walk where I did not belong, to unknown places, always with the possibility of crossing over a line I did not know existed. I went from a Beverly Hills real estate agent’s office, decorated down to the tiniest paper clip, to the gang-war torn gym at Nickerson Gardens. I knew that at any moment I could be crossing a line that was dangerous to cross. Yet the experience was rich beyond words.

I interviewed 288 people and performed 46 of those. I have learned so much by walking in their words over the last 10 years. I know the real tragedy of the riots, and yet it lives in me as a long poem, filled with sadness and loss, but nonetheless a long and beautiful poem, uttered by the residents of your city. The ability of each interviewee to bring words to what happened was extraordinary. Everyone was fluent. But does the city remember its fluency now?

Otis Chandler, former publisher of The Times, told me that the city would forget, that they had said the same thing in the ’60s. So many people said to me in 1992, especially people with influence— politicians, movie executives: “We-must-not-let-this-happen-again. We-must-not-live-in-our-safe-little-worlds-separated-by-the- freeways. ” But, as Chandler warned, they have forgotten.

If the world is to progress, the commitment to do something other than living in safe little worlds needs to be rehearsed and realized. This is true whether those little worlds are physical neighborhoods, races, classes, religions. The riot should not be forgotten. It should be reviewed. It has valuable information on how to live in the world, not just in a city. The riot should not be repeated, but in that brief moment when people were stunned, consciousness was on the brink of being raised. Yet we are still not awake.

We should not erase the riots from our civic and cultural history. We should remember it, and wake up to its lessons and move those lessons into our worldview. We need it at this moment, when a more alert, wide-awake, aware walk is needed as we move about our lives and in the world. That should happen not only in schools, but anywhere that we presume to have influence. When we work in the world, are we doing so behind a barricade of freeways, classes, cultures, races, or are we testing the boundaries, taking another route, crossing over where we don’t belong to become more fluent and to bring more fluency into what we do?

A biologist once said to me that we have no proof that knowledge will save us, humans, from extinction. We are often satisfied that life is what we know, about ourselves, our businesses, our families. But is it possible that our well-being in our cities, in our world, demands constant exchange, constant movement, constant shifting, constant transformation.

I ended “Twilight” with the words of Twilight Bey: “In order for me to be a true human being, I can’t forever dwell in darkness, I can’t forever dwell in the idea of just identifying with people like me and understanding me and mine.” There are so many things we can do to get closer to becoming true human beings. It’s not rocket science, it’s not brain surgery, but it should be respected as such.

There are many echoes from the 288 people I interviewed. Last year, I completed a film version of the play for PBS. I wanted “Twilight” to be of use for schools after its life on the stage was over. It occurred to me that people who are about to go to college now, in the very early years of this century, would have been 8 years old at the time of theriot. I wanted them to know what happened in Los Angeles in 1992, and to be able to process it now that they are old enough to consider what they might like to do in the world. Perhaps a few among them will dedicate themselves to finding ways to encourage people to speak, where all conversation has collapsed, where there are no words, only gunshots.

“Twilight” was screened at USC Law School recently, and I did a question-and-answer session afterward. At the end, an 18-year-old and her friend came over to me and thanked me for the film, and said to me, “I was one of those people who was 8 years old when the riot happened.” It’s unrealistic to think that we should celebrate only the good stories. I could see in this student’s eyes that she was grateful to see this story, a tragic one, unfolded before her.

To have been here in Los Angeles and to have had the privilege of hearing your story, in the 288 different ways it was told, was a consciousness-raising experience for me, a profound one. The contribution of these words to me, a collector of words, was invaluable. It caused me to think differently not only about my own art, but about the art of my generation and generations to come. As an actress, as a writer, is my cause to have the audience look at me, merely me, or is my cause to have them see something in the world differently through me?

I would like to change the way we educate artists. I think they can be critical in this culture and in the world, and that we are a yet untapped resource. Can we as artists dare to come out of the safety of our studios, into civic life, to speak in a different language than politicians and activists? Do we dare ask the public to trust us to communicate to them about the issues that are serious in their lives? I have started the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue to ask that question. The institute ran for three summers at the end of the 1990s at Harvard, and many artists and some scholars worked with us, lived with us, dined with us, experimenting with new ways to connect to audiences and make art about social change.

In this ever-fractious world, artists have a bigger role to play, as those who not only mirror societies, but those who also bring things together in a different way. Metaphor is at the root of all art. Metaphors do just that—they bring together dissimilar entities and therefore suggest something about each entity. As artists, we are usually suggesting not so much that one thing is similar to the next, but that they resound against one another, shedding new light, the way the sun projects off a white wall.

I had a very special phone call 10 days ago. It was from Twilight, after whom the play is named. He told me that he felt as though he was an orphan of the civil rights movement. “Ten years after the riots, the orphans of the civil rights movement have been betrayed and lied to again. I expected investment in the community: community co-ops, community-based businesses and a true investment in the children. There is a lack of compassion and understanding by those who control resources. They passed more laws to oppress youth than to provide resources to build youth up.”

When Twilight met me, he had just come from meeting with a group of youths in a juvenile correctional facility. That morning he had given them a single word to respond to as a part of an exercise he does. The response was dramatic. The word elicited tears and a great deal of passion. I had visions of the room falling apart as he told me several anecdotes of how the youth responded. The word he had asked them to respond to was “father.”

I think of Twilight as my opposite. We come from entirely different backgrounds. I am an academic and an artist. He is an activist and former gang member. He has dark-brown skin, I have light skin. He is not so tall. I am very tall. And yet sometimes, my resonance with him makes me think of him more as a twin than as an opposite. As he talked about the word “father,” and how these young men, many of whom are unfortunately destined to be caught in the revolving door of the criminal justice system for some time, I wondered what would happen if Twilight were to come to a class of mine, in a university, and do his exercise with the educated and, in most cases, privileged students I teach. How would they respond to the word “father”?

It would be an education for them and an education for him. What I am proposing is a back and forth, expanding our realms, looking to make resonances as a first step toward that world where we save ourselves from our fractiousness. That’s a place where all of us can start, cross the lines, mix things up, do something to challenge the idea of what your place is and where you belong.

Anna Deavere Smith, an actor and playwright, is a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and NYU Law School. She has a recurring role on “The West Wing.”

"Riots Observed in Fiery Fragments"—David L. Ulin on the Literary Legacy of April 1992

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:36:00 -0400

by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times—April 22nd, 2012

One of my favorite pieces of writing to emerge from the 1992 Los Angeles riots is a poem by a writer named Nicole Sampogna, called “Another L.A.” In it, the poet traces the odd dislocation of living on the Westside while so much of the city burns. “They send us home early, again,” she begins, “supposedly for curfew sake, / but I know it’s to beat the traffic.” And then: “over there the smoke rises, / horns blare, streets scream, / shoot, loot, / bash windows, bash heads, / lights out / knocked out / by a black & white with a baton. / but, here / will the pizza man deliver after sunset?”

There it is, the dislocation that so often marks Los Angeles, and never more profoundly than when the not-guilty verdicts in the LAPD beating of Rodney King came down 20 years ago. Depending on where you lived or the part of town in which you found yourself, the atmosphere was static or chaotic, suspended or engaged. I remember, on the second afternoon of the conflagration, watching as a Fairfax district neighbor sunned herself on her small front lawn, while in the distance, sirens screamed. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, perhaps in the way it reflects Sampogna’s sense of the city as disoriented, in which we connect (or don’t) “to the other LA with the flip of a switch.” How in such a place do we evoke the larger story? How do we find common ground?

This was the central question raised and left unanswered by the riots — and it remains essential to Los Angeles. But 20 years later, the shelf of books addressing the disaster is threadbare, conditional even, as if we’ve never figured out how to write about these events. Sampogna’s poem appears in a small anthology called “The Verdict Is In,” edited by Kathi Georges and Jennifer Joseph. It’s long out of print, as is Jervey Tervalon’s 2002 collection “Geography of Rage: Remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992,” which gathered recollections by 39 writers (disclosure: I am one of them) on the 10th anniversary of the tumult. On my desk are a handful of other titles: Wanda Coleman’s “The Riot Inside Me,” with its heartbreaking title essay, Lynell George’s “No Crystal Stair: African-Americans in the City of Angels,” which opens with the astonishing “Waiting for the Rainbow Sign.”

“I’ve already seen the look,” George writes of her passage through a stunned city. “Driving through the Silver Lake hills to avoid Sunset Boulevard’s panicked snarl, I climb along the incline. People are out jogging and walking their dogs, even though fires have moved closer, are no longer a distant TV hell. The higher I climb, the more I see residents take note of my car’s make and color; they mentally record the license number, but more importantly my unfamiliar deep-brown face, any distinguishing marks. They look at me as if they will at any moment join together to form a human barricade if I make a wrong or abrupt move.”

In Granta, Richard Rayner offers this self-lacerating perspective: “Los Angeles was a lot like South Africa. The apartheid wasn’t enshrined by law, but by economics and geography, and it was just as powerful. In Los Angeles I was afraid of blacks in a way I never had been. I behaved in a way that would have disgusted me in New York or London. I was a racist.”

This is all terrific stuff, vivid and honest, which is what happens when writers enter their discomfort zones. And yet, what strikes me most is how, not unlike the city it describes, such material reveals itself to us in pieces — which are another metaphor. In that regard, it seems oddly fitting that the most comprehensive literary response to the riots remains Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” a theater piece, written and performed by an outsider who channels the cacophony of voices at the city’s heart.

Cacophony is one of the standard tropes by which we view Los Angeles, a city defined by its unknowability. But if that’s part of the personality of the place, what I have in mind is something more specific, something about the fire this time. It’s the difference between the 1992 riots and the Watts riots, which George referred to as “bold-faced, italicized,” when I asked her recently for her thoughts.

In the wake of the Watts riots, Budd Schulberg helped to found the Watts Writers Workshop, mentoring African American writers such as Coleman, Quincy Troupe and the performance poetry group the Watts Prophets. In the wake of Watts, the city catalyzed around a variety of elements, not least the iconography of the fires, of L.A. turning inward to devour itself. “The city burning,” Joan Didion wrote in her 1967 essay “Los AngelesNotebook,” tracing the line of a more extensive history, “is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself: Nathanael West perceived that, in ‘The Day of the Locust’; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.”

No equivalent sense of history emerges when we think about 1992. Instead, we are left with fragments, snapshots, the loose tiles of what former Mayor Tom Bradley liked to call “the glorious mosaic,” which the riots revealed to be a lie. That’s true even of King’s new memoir “The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption” (HarperOne: 245 pp., $25.99), which seeks to capitalize on the 20th anniversary of the riots but never offers a coherent point of view. It’s unfair, perhaps, to expect this of King, who was thrust, or thrust himself, into a situation beyond his control. Nonetheless, it’s also emblematic of the displacement, the lack of a collective vision, our inability even now to take a broad perspective on the riots and what they mean.

All of this begs one last question: What, if any, responsibility does literature have to current events? It’s a mistake to parse writing so overtly, to expect it to function as anything other than an oblique lens. And yet, it’s also impossible not to think about E.M. Forster’s “buzz of implication,” the impression on a writer of his or her time and place.

Other books have touched on the 1992 riots. Most are academic or legal, but some are more: William T. Vollmann’s “The Atlas,” which features a brief essay about driving into L.A. on the night the fires erupted, or Michael Connelly’s novel “The Concrete Blonde,” in which a serial killer’s victim is found beneath a burned building. Even there, however, theriots exist as backdrop rather than centerpiece.

To some extent, that highlights the disposability of memory in Los Angeles, although more to the point is the diffusion with which we continue to approach this event. I keep coming back to Sampogna, to Coleman, George and Rayner, and their sense of “our (dis)connection,” of the riots as a story we have never quite known how to tell.

Inside The Shooting Gallery, Addiction And AIDS: A four-part series by Barry Bearak for the LA Times ('92)

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:18:00 -0400

This four-part series went deep inside a Brooklyn shooting gallery to explore addiction and the AIDS epidemic. The reporting is masterful and provides a deeply nuanced account of a very specific moment in history. The pieces were written by journalist Barry Bearak and appeared in the Los Angeles Times during the last week of September, 1992. Bearak won a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists for the series, in the category of editorial writing. Bearak has also written for The New York Times and The Miami Herald. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his accounts of poverty and war in Afghanistan, and currently teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Not only does it serve as an example of extraordinary journalism, but it is also a reminder that newspapers truly are the first draft of history.

Read it for the writing, which is as lyrical as it is evocative. Read it for the narrative, which will draw you in and seize your heart. Read it as an artifact of history, a haunting snapshot of what it was like to be alive and addicted and possibly HIV-positive in 1992. Read it because it is a reminder of what happens when societies don’t act fast enough, and when we willfully ignore the people who live in the dark shadows of our great cities. But mainly you should just read it, because it is important, and it is powerful, and it is true. This is what happened:

Part One: “In a dank, burned-out building, addicts engage in a microbiological roulette, sharing contaminated needles. Here, America’s drug war meets failure and AIDS is spread.”

Part Two: “In War on Drugs, the Battle Against AIDS Falls Behind Remedies: As crackdown on users busts up ‘safer’ routines, addicts increasingly grab for dirty needs.”

Part Three: “Life, Death, Birth and Love, Twisted by Heroin’s Power: A pregnant hooker frets over an HIV test. It’s the only thought that competes with the call of dope.”

Part Four: “Road to Detox, Do Not Enter: With a will for redemption set to expire within hours, junkies finally seeking drug treatment face a road filled with holes and barriers.”

IN THE SHOOTING GALLERY: ADDICTS AND AIDS (Part 4 of 4) Road to Detox: Do Not Enter With a will for redemption set to expire within hours, junkies finally seeking drug treatment face a road filled with holes and barriers.

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:48:50 -0400

Part 4 of 4.

[Georgie Vega] rarely ventured into Manhattan. He seemed a yokel amid the great hum. [Nelson Martinez] sensed this. He began to make fun of Georgie’s rumpled cutoffs. “If we’re going to be dope fiends, let’s at least be clean dope fiends,” he said, steering his pal to a store and treating him to a pair of new jeans.

It was almost 4:30 by then, but Nelson and Georgie set aside a few moments to shoot up their drugs in the men’s room. Georgie removed his shirt so he could use it as a tourniquet. He wrapped it around his left arm, holding one end with his hand, the other with his teeth. He found a plump vein.

By Barry Bearak

Full Text: They were wasted and ruined dope fiends, breathing in urban grief as if it were oxygen. And there came a madcap day last summer when the two of them desperately wanted to get into a drug program, only to find that their neediness counted for nothing amid the jaded ranks of the social service bureaucracy.

Full text:

“Maybe we could go to an emergency room and stab each other,” suggested Nelson Martinez after the failed 13-hour scramble around New York City.

Georgie Vega considered the idea seriously. “I suppose that would work,” he said wanly. “But couldn’t we just pretend to faint instead?”

Both men were caught in the ebb tides of life, with needles in their veins and bedlam in their heads. They wanted to get into treatment but had to do it right then, not later. They knew their will for redemption was likely to last only a short time, then the streets would win them back.

So after indulging in a last supper of heroin and cocaine, they had stayed awake well into a hot, still night. By 4 a.m., they made their way to a detox center at Beth Israel Hospital in Lower Manhattan, where the doctors wean addicts from dope, using the synthetic narcotic methadone.

Georgie had been a patient there once before. Getting admitted was quirky. Usually, an applicant was given an appointment to return in a week or two. But sometimes, because of no-shows, there were last-minute beds. In hope, addicts camped out in the pre-dawn and signed their names to a list.

That Thursday morning, three other dope fiends were already ahead of them. “You know, you’ve got to have a Medicaid card,” one of them advised Georgie and Nelson. Without Medicaid or private insurance, nobody was getting in these days.

This was disappointing news. They were inept against such obstacles, unable to follow the poorly marked roadways into social programs. The system requires too much effort from the spent, too many leaps of faith among the faithless.

And it is overloaded. The Bush Administration estimates that there are 5.5 million drug addicts in America, including 1 million who use heroin; of the 5.5 million, about half would probably be in treatment if it were available, 1 million too many for the current number of slots.

Addicts wanting to enter a program face a gnarl of red tape. It was overwhelming to someone like Georgie. There was no central office to find out where there were openings. Even when he did get an appointment, it was for some date rooted in a rational, workaday world where calendars hung on walls.

Then there was the matter of payment. To qualify for Medicaid, he would have to wait in long lines at who knew where. Proof of ID was required: items such as a birth certificate, driver’s license, utility bills, rent receipts.

Georgie had none of the right papers. Twenty-five years on heroin had torn up his copy of the social contract. He was homeless, without income or even a wallet, a vagabond in the storm, sapped by the AIDS virus and a drug habit.

He said to Nelson: “This isn’t going to work. It’ll take us too long to get on Medicaid. I think maybe God wants us on dope to teach us a lesson.”

But Nelson was insistent. We can get “temporary Medicaid,” he said. After all, this was an emergency. They just had to find the right welfare office.

And so the two junkies set out into the maw.

Earlier in the summer, Georgie Vega, 38, had gotten lucky in latching onto Nelson Martinez, a guy with some money undergoing a life meltdown. Nelson had recently broken up with his wife and turned to heroin for consolation, raiding his bank account and flushing the savings right out through his veins.

Amiable Georgie was there as a sort of sidekick. In the Bushwick section ofBrooklyn, he ran a “shooting gallery,” a little room where addicts did dope. He was an earnest listener, a junkie’s version of the sympathetic bartender.

Nelson, 33, was willing to share his heroin with this likable new friend-and not just the basic $10 bag for “getting straight,” but three or four at a time, enough to bring on the consuming warmth of a good nod.

But as the weeks passed, Nelson began to take stock of himself and tote up the misery: He missed his wife and daughter. Sores pocked his face and hands. He was down to his final $1,000 and the beloved gold chains around his neck.

“If I don’t go into (drug) treatment, I think I’ll kill myself,” he said one afternoon. “I’ve lost it all. Beautiful wife, beautiful apartment, two cars, all up in smoke, man. I think it’s too late for me now.”

“It’s not too late,” Georgie answered.

“Yes, it is.”

“I said that myself once: that I’m an addict and I’ll always be an addict. But here I am, willing to give it another try.”

Just as Georgie had shared in Nelson’s downfall, he now wanted to join in the resurrection. Georgie had been thinking of entering a program for months now, but one thing or another always held him back. Usually, where there is a will there is a way, but his will had holes and gaps-and so did the way.

As the hectic day unrolled, they tried another detox center, at Bellevue Hospital, but it was only for alcoholics. So they settled into the “temporary Medicaid” idea, first returning to the gallery to shoot up more dope. Their wake-up shots had worn off; they needed some heroin to fight off the aches.

Their plan was plausible. It was indeed possible to get emergency Medicaid, and in this the two addicts had a rare advantage. Nelson held five $100 bills in his pocket and was willing to blow some of it on taxis. He wanted to begin at the biggest welfare office he knew of, the one on Northern Boulevard in Queens.

That building had the look of a converted old warehouse. They ambled into a room with long brown walls-a weary, needy-looking place, with lines in front of seven windows and handwritten signs Scotch-taped at odd angles.

They waited their turn, then Georgie went first. “I want to apply for temporary Medicaid,” he said, lowering his head to talk under the glass.

“Are you on welfare?” the clerk asked.

“No.”

“Well, the only way you can get Medicaid is to be on welfare.”

Nelson, dressed better, his gold chains dangling, decided to take over. “We want to get on Medicaid so we can get into detox, please,” he said.

“Sorry, you’d have to wait 30 days anyway,” the clerk responded.

“I might kill myself in 30 days,” Nelson pleaded.

The clerk raised her shoulders in a shrug of apology, but the gesture was not enough to move them on. “It’s done by machines,” she added by way of vague explanation. “They can’t print that fast.”

Nelson had regrets so immense they filled nearly all his thoughts. He was smart and educated and born to the middle class. But he had always made more money as an outlaw than by playing it straight. He dealt drugs and had done time on gun charges. Once, while on parole, he had been on welfare.

He remembered his caseworker, a Jamaican with dreadlocks. He and Georgie found him sitting upstairs at a desk against a wall, clipping his fingernails and reading a newspaper. Nelson explained their problems, but the man said that temporary Medicaid cards were issued only for “medical necessities.”

Still, he said his supervisor would return soon from lunch; maybe she could do something for them. “Go and sit down over there,” he suggested. “And try not to nod out or the guards will be chasing you out of here.”

Nelson paced along an aisle of cubicles as Georgie found one of the plastic seats in a large waiting area. His eyes, awash in heroin, were going down like setting suns. He was asleep when Nelson finally got hold of the supervisor.

She was wary of him and impatient-and her answers seemed to lash out like a scolding. “No place that gives welfare and Medicaid can give temporary Medicaid,” she said. “You need to go to a place that just gives Medicaid.”

And such a place was on “16th Street in Manhattan.”

The Manhattan location was a long ride away, and there might be a wait when they got there. So Nelson thought they ought to first detour through Spanish Harlem, over to an area he called “Zombie City” because the action never dies. They could buy some dope there on the corner of 116th Street and Lexington Avenue.

Georgie rarely ventured into Manhattan. He seemed a yokel amid the great hum. Nelson sensed this. He began to make fun of Georgie’s rumpled cutoffs. “If we’re going to be dope fiends, let’s at least be clean dope fiends,” he said, steering his pal to a store and treating him to a pair of new jeans.

After that, they hailed a taxi, which fought the traffic down Lexington, past Bloomingdale’s and into the canyons of Midtown high-rises. “I love this city,” Georgie said, gawking at buildings out the window. “Look at this.”

The taxi driver dropped them at Union Square, 100 blocks south. They wandered around, asking directions. There was some urgency now. Time had been spilling away. It was already 3:30, and offices would soon close. Also, they needed to shoot up the dope that Nelson had in his pocket.

When they finally found the right building, they did not know which room to enter. People were in a rush. They stopped at a curved desk where a woman was talking into a phone headset. Nelson announced his pressing questions.

“This is Welfare on 16th Street,” the woman answered dismissively. “You want Medicaid over at 330 W. 34th.”

There was still time, if only they could make it to the right place. Dope fiends are in the know about many things: which heroin is good, which neighborhoods are hot with cops, which drug programs treat them OK. It is the ins and outs of the social service labyrinth that leave them befuddled.

Policy-makers concede this. “Our addicts are lost in a desert,” said Dr. Beny J. Primm, director of the federal Office for Treatment Improvement at the Department of Health and Human Services. “They don’t know how to engage the system. And when they can’t engage it, they get impatient and give up.”

But the system’s failure is its chaotic structure, not any shortage of treatment slots, Primm said. By his estimate, there were 450 available beds in New York on the very day Nelson and Georgie wandered the desert.

That is a debatable claim. Local officials asked: Show us the beds.

At the big office on 34th Street, the two addicts poked their heads through several doorways, begging assistance, then meandering into a huge room with dozens ofdesks. At a long counter, a woman beside “Table Five” told them they needed to be in “Line One,” over in the far corner.

Nelson was not as fast at these injection rituals. He ducked into a toilet stall to cook up a shot. Just as Georgie rolled him a lighter under the door, a janitor walked in and sized things up. “Busy, busy, busy,” the man said.

Georgie guessed the janitor might know something about temporary Medicaid. “They sent us to 16th Street, no good,” he said. “So we come here.”

“You’ve got to talk to them,” the janitor said.

“Who’s them?” He pointed toward the rows of desks outside the door. “You know, them.”

Georgie waited in Line One, but Nelson dawdled in the john. He had mistakenly dropped a small packet of cocaine into the trash can and was intent on finding it, even if that meant unfolding every discarded paper towel.

The line moved slowly. Georgie’s turn finally came a few minutes before 5 p.m. It was a short discussion. He had been in the wrong spot. He needed to be at the Application Desk, back over by Table Five where he had started.

He hurried across the big room. “Can I ask you a question?” he said to a clerk.

“I’m sorry,” she answered, her fingers busy in a file drawer. “I need to get this outof the way.”

Georgie spoke up with more urgency: “I want to get into detox.”

The woman turned to face him now. “You came too late,” she said, shaking her head. “We’re not giving out any more appointments.”

“We’ve been getting the runaround all day.”

She eyed him more carefully, looking over his sweaty face. She spoke slowly and distinctly for the junkie’s benefit. “When you come back in, all they’ll give you is an appointment,” she said. “You won’t get emergency Medicaid. Then, with an appointment, you have to come back in a week or so and see an interviewer. Then, after they have reviewed the case, the client is contacted by mail, and that takes three weeks or a month.”

Georgie took this in and was stunned. “So the mumbo jumbo about getting on Medicaid the same day is bull——?” he said without anger, just resignation.

“That’s right. The only way to get on is with HIV (the AIDS virus).”

At last, good news. His face brightened. “Well, I’m HIV,” he said.

The clerk took a step back from him. “You’d have to be able to prove it with a certified letter from your doctor,” she said.

With that, Georgie was beaten. His shoulders sagged. And the clerk knew she could shift her attention back to the end-of-the-day filing.

Not all was lost, as it turned out. Nelson found his cocaine near the bottom of the trash. “Praise God,” said Georgie, who had lately been drifting to religion. Nelson kissed the medallion on his beloved gold chains.

Georgie then repeated what the clerk had told him, and some of the story hit Nelson like a punch in the gut. “You’re HIV?” he said. “I don’t believe that, bro. That blows my head.”

Later, as they walked out into the street, Georgie admitted that he had not wanted to confide this fact; he was afraid of losing a friend. Nelson reassured him, “If anything, that only brings us closer together.”

It was then that the two started to scheme. Surely, they could get into a hospital that night, somewhere, somehow. They could stab themselves or fake an overdose. Or maybe they could get a room and go cold turkey on their own.

But first things had to come first. While they were thinking over plans, they decided to head back to the gallery to shoot some more dope.

And there they went, two heroin addicts pushing through the rush-hour crowds near Greeley Square, eager to hail a cab on the Avenue of the Americas.

This is how it turned out: There was a newspaperman who had been hanging around the gallery, asking his questions, sifting through the archeology of people’s lives. He watched as the heroin teased at the sweet tooth of addicts’ souls, and he felt cravings of his own, for all the details he could get.

In return, he did not give much, some sodas and sandwiches and a few times a new pair of sneakers. More than anything, the addicts seemed to need him to listen; some confessed sins and wept into his notebook, though they would have been better off revealing themselves to a social worker or a doctor.

The reporter wanted to dispense some antidote for the drug life, but he had little to offer but curiosity. Then one day, he interviewed the city’s chief policy adviser on drug abuse, David Condliffe, who had never been to a shooting gallery. The reporter agreed to take him, though he wanted a favor in return. Surely, Condliffe could get these addicts into treatment.

Then the reporter would be able to say an easier goodby to these people who had watched out for him in a dangerous place, giving them-and his conscience-a comforting ending.

For three days, a large mobile unit parked down the block from the gallery. A half-dozen city workers sat inside, screening the two-dozen or so dope fiends who came in, using a portable phone to locate beds in a drug program.

If there were 450 available slots in this great city, they were impossible to find by these workers who knew the system. Placements came grudgingly.

And even then there were problems. Sometimes, when a spot opened up, the addicts refused to go right in, insisting they had business to settle first. Other times, the addicts wanted to go immediately and appointments made for a few days ahead were useless, set aside as heroin overcame their penitent mood.

Jo-nice Williams had tuberculosis, and the places that agreed to treat her TB would not do anything for her drug habit and vice versa. Nelson Martinez refused help altogether. He was doing too much cocaine by then and spewing a scary delirium. Paranoia percolated in his eyes, and he began to carry a gun.

The lovers Lourdes Pabon and Lips Santiago got an appointment for 7 a.m. two days hence. She was five months’ pregnant, poisoning her womb with dope. But then the couple overslept through this chance at salvation, lying beside each other on a cot in the shooting gallery, Lips snoring with his mouth wide open and flies dancing around his breath.

Georgie Vega was mistakenly sent to a program with no heroin detox, then was refused at another place because he had no Social Security card. A city worker gave him a ride to his mother’s apartment to get the card, but by then he was dope sick and came out instead with an electric fan. With a dope fiend’s practiced alchemy, he quickly turned it into gold.

Two days after the van left, Nelson was shot in his legs and hips and a hand, right in front of the gallery. He had begun to deal coke, and the story going around was that he was interloping in someone else’s territory. As he bled in the street, some creep slipped the gold chains off his neck.

This shooting seemed a bad omen. Many of the usual faces began to vanish. One morning, Jo-nice Williams arose at 5:30 and somehow got a bed over at Beth Israel. “I feel great, and when I get out of here, I’m going to be all right, unless life leads me back to Bushwick,” she said, drug-free in the hospital.

Back to Bushwick is where life led, and when she went up to the gallery, Lips and Lourdes were gone. There had been a fire, further damaging what was already a half-demolished house. Lips claimed the police set the blaze, and when he went to file a complaint, he was arrested for violating his parole.

The stress seemed to send Lourdes into premature labor. A drug-exposed boy was born Aug. 28, weighing only 3 pounds and 10 ounces. The mother entered a detox program, pledging her love to Lips and planning to get an apartment. He asked her to smuggle him some drugs into the jail at Rikers Island.

Georgie Vega was also arrested. He had not visited his parole officer in years, and the detectives found him when they made a periodic check at his mother’s house. The heroin at Rikers was so damned expensive; he had to go cold turkey. For weeks, his stomach cramped up and he could not eat or sleep.

Since then, jail time has freed him to study the Bible, which he had been longing to do. Worship seemed to have immediate rewards. In court, the judge said he only had to serve three more months. He should be out by Christmas.

“I had prayed on it, and God looked out for me,” Georgie said with a gush of enthusiasm. “That God, I guess He knows what He’s doing.”

IN THE SHOOTING GALLERY: ADDICTS AND AIDS (Part 2 of 4) In War on Drugs, Battle Against AIDS Falls Behind Remedies: As crackdown on users busts up `safer' routines, addicts increasingly grab for dirty needles

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:46:03 -0400

Part 2 of 4.

“For heroin addicts, the nation’s switch to a war footing had some odd and unintended effects. A drug habit is a brutal taskmaster; addicts look for stable routines. They need reliable ways to get cash and drugs. And they covet dependable spots to inject, sheltered places with a stash of needles, where other addicts are nearby to share a shot or help them “hit” an ornery vein.

Instead, needles have remained a mainstay of the black markets. Georgie Vega, who last summer ran the gallery on Melrose, partially kept up his own dope habit by selling them at $2 apiece. Georgie, 38, was a 25-year veteran of the hustles of heroin addiction. He understood the cat-and-mouse games between junkies and cops-and appreciated the fact that the addicts of Bushwick were harassed but seldom arrested. Their safety was in their own insignificance.”

by Barry Bearak, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 28 1992

Full Text:

The cop was shouting, “OK, junkies, get the f—- out of there!” And as the four haggard dope fiends slowly filed out, he rapped each on the back with his nightstick, then stalked up the back stairs into the “shooting gallery.” It disgusted him to look at the wretched little room where these people shot up, this nest ofAIDS and tuberculosis and who knew what else.

Patrolman Kenny Brenkert stomped on a small pile of sterile syringes, knocked over a table that held small bottles of bleach disinfectant, swung wildly with his stick at the bedsheets that kept the windows hidden from the street. He breathed the air, which was thick and stale.

The policeman began to curse, f——— junkie this and f——— junkie that, until his partner stopped him. The other cop was scared. His hand flapped at a swarm of insects that whirled up out of the trash. “C’mon, let’s get out of here,” he said. “These flies bite you, it’ll kill you.”

So ended another skirmish in the long, wearying War on Drugs. The police had shooed off some dope fiends, a kind of scuffle repeated thousands of times, day after day, sea to shining sea. In this instance, it closed down the drug spot at 384 Melrose St. for an entire 6 1/2 minutes. And it did one more thing. It made those addicts a little more nervous, a little more hasty and a little more likely to spread the AIDS virus that steeps in their blood.

Shooting drugs is a common way of passing HIV, and galleries are the most likely spots where the million or so injecting drug users (IDUs) share the dirty needles that harbor the virus. During other times, with other priorities, this might have provoked a major public health effort, its centerpiece being a vast expansion of drug treatment programs.

But the human immunodeficiency virus hit amid other preoccupations. In the 1980s, drug policy was defined almost entirely as a law enforcement problem-a war. Billions were spent on high-seas interdictions, aerostat balloons above the Mexican border, military operations in South American jungles. On the tough streets of poor neighborhoods, small-time dealers and users-mostly minorities-were snared like shrimp in a dip net. The prison and jail census doubled to 1 million.

There was less enthusiasm for treatment. Underfunded drug programs overflowed. By 1990, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 107,000 Americans were on waiting lists-waiting to just say no.

For heroin addicts, the nation’s switch to a war footing had some odd and unintended effects. A drug habit is a brutal taskmaster; addicts look for stable routines. They need reliable ways to get cash and drugs. And they covet dependable spots to inject, sheltered places with a stash of needles, where other addicts are nearby to share a shot or help them “hit” an ornery vein.

By standards of supply and demand, the presence of more cops on the street has had little effect on the heroin trade, according to federal studies. But it has caused addicts to inject in a rush, especially those who are homeless. They make hurried visits to the galleries. Or worse yet, they shoot up outside, in an alleyway or the tall weeds of an empty lot, all the more likely to ignore sterile needle practices that might save them from the virus.

“Addicts like predictability; if the police keep them running around, they can’t maintain established networks and they end up getting high in as many places as they can and as many times as they can,” said cultural anthropologist Richard Curtis, who has studied street life here in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. “I guess society has to decide which is worse: the drugs or the AIDS.”

In 1990, the National Commission on AIDS chastised the federal government for its “failure” to confront “the close and deadly link between the sharing of injection drug equipment and HIV.” It recommended a system of drug treatment on demand as well as the removal of legal barriers that most states (including California) have to the possession of syringes for illicit purposes.

Instead, needles have remained a mainstay of the black markets. Georgie Vega, who last summer ran the gallery on Melrose, partially kept up his own dope habit by selling them at $2 apiece. Georgie, 38, was a 25-year veteran of the hustles of heroin addiction. He understood the cat-and-mouse games between junkies and cops-and appreciated the fact that the addicts of Bushwick were harassed but seldom arrested. Their safety was in their own insignificance.

“The courts are too crowded,” Georgie said. “So all the cops do is chase you away or beat you up. If they take you in, they have to come in with you, and then who’d be around to hold down the street? Just look at the streets.”

On nearby Knickerbocker Avenue, the trade in crack and heroin was as wide open as a carnival midway. Forty dealers often worked a single corner, some touting and some holding, their bags of dope in their socks and their cash in a tennis shoe. Every other day, the Tactical Narcotics Team came in and busted people in spurts, easy as bagging groceries. But the trade never shut down.

A squad car slowed in front of the burned-out house that was Georgie’s place maybe 20 times a day. The cops rarely walked up, though an addict never knew what might happen when they did. Georgie was there the day Brenkert ransacked the place. The cop came out grumbling about how much he hated the whole rotten neighborhood, how he’d been doing this for six years, getting spat on and shot at.

Oddly enough, Georgie and the others concluded that Brenkert was an OK guy, even if he did louse up their sterile needles. At least he did not get rough with anyone. “Now if it had been Rogers, this cop that walks the beat, then you’d have seen people getting bumped all up and down,” Georgie said.

And everyone at the busy corner of Melrose and Knickerbocker agreed, one-upping each other with stories of Officer Patrick Rogers.

For weeks, the threat of Rogers hovered over the gallery, though there were other reasons for jumpiness, the biggest being the wild use of cocaine. Addicts liked to mix their heroin shots with coke-or shoot up the cocaine alone. This provided a pleasing surge, but the sensation was often bedeviled by a grim rippling of paranoia. “Bugging” was the junkie term.

There was a demented quality to the chatter then. Noel Marquez, usually serene, would change into a different, chemical self, hyperventilating and ripping his clothes to tatters with his hands and teeth. Jo-nice Williams imagined things crawling out of a gash in her foot. “Maggots go in and out of that hole,” she muttered. “They’re breaking down my cells even faster than the HIV.”

When Georgie shot up too much coke, he would hide behind the rusted-out washing machines in the abandoned place next door. Usually, however, he was one of the steady hands, a kindly uncle to the nervous and sick.

One afternoon, he tried to calm a jittery guy named Robbie, whom Georgie knew from prison. Robbie kept springing to his feet, peeking through an eyehole in a wood panel for a look-see at the street. “There’s police out there!” he whispered urgently.

“Don’t worry,” Georgie said. He was reading a book about astronomy that he had fished from the garbage. “Sit down. They won’t come up.”

“Oh, God, no, I know they’ll come up.”

“Quit buggin’.”

They sat in silence, Robbie rocking on a cot with his elbows in his palms. The only sound was the jingling of an ice cream truck. Suddenly, a hand yanked the sheet off the open window of the back wall. Rogers was standing on a mound of rubbish and staring in, at a bad angle to glimpse Georgie in the corner but able to look right at Robbie.

The policeman had no interest in arresting anyone, but he did want to empty the room. He hurled a clump of plaster that whistled as it flew inside. It caught Robbie in the mouth and then splattered to pieces.

American attitudes toward narcotics have teetered between extremes, dating back to opium remedies that were popular before 1800. There have been periods of relative tolerance when an addiction was likely to be seen as a personal affliction-and other times when it was viewed as a willful, anti-social act, requiring the retribution of handcuffs and jail cells.

In recent decades, public sentiment has been reflected in the federal drug budget: whether more money was channeled to treatment and prevention (demand reduction) or to police work (supply reduction). In 1972, even during the rhetorical heat of an earlier drug war, treatment was favored. A largely white, middle-class, pot-smoking “counterculture” had flourished, and the Nixon Administration aimed two-thirds of its budget at the demand side.

By 1986, under Ronald Reagan, the drug budget had doubled, and 74% of it was targeted instead toward supply. Cocaine in $5 bits of smokable crack was hitting the streets in a wildfire of ghetto marketing: Inner-city crime rates soared, crackbabies were born to addicted mothers. When the good people in bad neighborhoods complained, they were obliged with the police drug sweeps; in New York, 92% of those arrested for drugs in 1989 were black or Latino.

In the midst of this war, public health experts suggested something quite unwarlike, an approach tried in Europe: Give clean syringes to IDUs to slow the spread of HIV. This idea not only seemed folly to drug hard-liners, it angered minority leaders, many of them liberals. If the government handed out needles, wouldn’t kids conclude it was OK to shoot up? The whole notion struck many as a “cooperation with evil” and even a “genocidal mentality.”

New York City was an early battleground over “needle exchange.” In 1988, its health commissioner began a program that offered clean syringes for dirty ones. Resistance was so intense that the only distribution site was an old X-ray clinic at the Health Department, an intimidating location for addicts, beside the criminal courts building and a jailhouse known as The Tombs.

That program failed, though another, limited “exchange” was started a few months ago. The extraordinary rate of HIV among minorities-as well as its heterosexual spread from addicts to others-has changed many minds. There are now sanctioned needle programs in several cities, including Boulder, Colo.; Honolulu; New Haven, Conn.; Portland, Ore.; and Seattle.

“Needle exchanges” provoke obvious questions for researchers. Do they actually reduce the spread of HIV? Do they entice more people to inject drugs? The experts sort through the limited data; it is unlikely they will ever agree conclusively. Potential studies would have to be as complicated as the addicts themselves-matched control groups among subjects out of control on dope.

For its part, the Bush Administration has a stand. Bob Martinez, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said in July: “Needle exchange programs squander our nation’s hard-earned gains in the drug war.”

He suggested instead: drug treatment.

Under the Bush Administration, the drug budget has doubled once again to nearly $12 billion. The favored strategy is still to emphasize supply rather than demand, roughly 70% to 30%, but with the huge increase in total spending, the money for treatment and prevention has gone up dramatically. Is it enough yet?

Dr. Herbert Kleber, until recently the White House’s chief adviser on treatment, said the system is still sadly lacking. He estimated that the nation has the treatment capacity for 1.8 million addicts with all kinds of drug problems-and said that services for at least 2.5 million are needed.

“The Republican Administration has failed to ask for sufficient funds, and the Democratic Congress has failed to give the President even what he asked for,” said Kleber, now at Columbia University. “And the public? There’s no outcry. No one gets punished politically for voting against drug treatment.”

By Kleber’s calculations, decreases in the IDU population could be achieved at a fraction of the cost of imprisoning the same number of addicts. “But prison has been the more popular idea,” he said.

New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center has the largest treatment network in the country. Waiting lists for a detoxification program usually run five days to three weeks; waits for methadone maintenance-intended to replace heroin use with regulated doses of a synthetic drug-sometimes range up to one year. (In Los Angeles, the average waits are 19 days for detox and 29 days for methadone maintenance, according to county officials.)

“In essence, we have 200,000 heroin addicts in New York and 33,000 methadone maintenance slots, all of which are always filled,” said Dr. Robert Newman, head of Beth Israel. “These are people who are killing themselves and who are a plague on the rest of us. Out of our own self-interest, voting, tax-paying, drug-free Americans ought to provide more treatment.”

The federal government has an Office for Treatment Improvement. Its director, Dr. Beny J. Primm, agrees that the system is in bad shape but insists there are enough treatment beds. It is just too difficult for addicts to find those with vacancies and present the IDs required for Medicaid reimbursement.

He said: “The system is too arduous, especially so if you are under the influence of drugs; and if you are a minority, it is triply arduous; and if you have a prison record, it is quadruply arduous.”

The system is designed for people who make rational choices. Heroin addicts are not like that. Their decisions about seeking treatment are not stop-go, on-off. The craving for drugs and the desire for salvation exist side by side, the craving almost always the stronger. When the urge for salvation does get a leg up, the impulse often lasts only a short time; it does not return for an appointment three weeks down the road at a location across town.

“They should have a thing where a hospital takes you the same day, without you having to prove who you are,” said Georgie Vega. “What else do they need to know? You’re a dope fiend; you want treatment. (Needle) tracks on the arms are all the identification the cops seem to need.”

Heroin addicts have a slogan: “It’s so good, don’t even try it once.” The drug is such a pretty little poem without any words. At first, only curiosity needs to be satisfied. Then, after repeated doses, the body itself pushes for more. The user tries to inch right up to a scary edge without slipping into the mudslide. But that edge-addiction-is hard to gauge. And once into its slide, it is hard to climb out and stay out.

Treatment is no silver bullet; failure rates are often 50%. Some programs are better than others-and each addict brings a different commitment to recovery. The hardest people to save are those without roots in jobs and families, those whose roots have sunk only into the drugs themselves.

At the gallery, most of the 100 or so who came around each day had some experiences with treatment. They talked the talk. Jeannette, a prostitute, introduced herself by saying, “I’m from a dysfunctional family.” Jose Abizuri, 29, was already in a methadone program and only came upstairs for the cocaine.

There were intricate tales of reform and relapse, misadventures of despair that were awful with violence and crazy love and all the demons of self-hatred. Marilyn Rodriguez, middle-age now, blamed her parents. “They ruined my life,” she said. But her friend Speedy saw it otherwise. “They only ruined your childhood,” she corrected. “It’s you who’s ruining your life.”

Some hated the preachiness or regimentation of the drug programs or refused “to trade a heroin habit for a methadone habit.” Others were discouraged dropouts. “I’m in this for good now,” said Harry Hocknell, who once ran away from a treatment center. “There’s no way back to the other life now.”

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome has made it all the harder. Even before, there were those who doubted whether treatment was worth it. They had been ripping and running with dope for 10-20 years. There was a hole in their lives like missing footage in a home movie. What could they achieve now, some dead-end job sweeping up and a room in a fleabag?

With the virus, most everyone at the gallery had a death sentence. Why not stay with the slide downhill? That was how Jo-nice Williams felt. She had HIV and tuberculosis. Her daughters were going to grow up without her anyway. “Drugs is the only thing in life I enjoy,” she said. “Why stop now?”

Too often, Georgie Vega felt the same way. Other times, he thought this matter of dying required some attention. If he had to face Judgment, he wanted to demonstrate faith to his Maker. He spoke of getting into one of “those Christian treatment programs,” ready to detox with God as his therapist.

One night, Georgie went without sleep, intent on throwing himself at the mercy of a program when it opened at daybreak. He walked along Irving Avenue toward his mother’s house, where he kept his few ID papers. And that is when he saw it, an open office.

“The dope fiend mentality took over,” he said. “I had to check it out. You know, the Bible says: Resist the devil and he shall flee. But I couldn’t do it. I found two radios inside and got $15 for one and $20 for the other. The devil told me, `Here, Georgie, go get yourself some dope and a coke.”’

A few days later, Rogers, the feared cop, was back. His partner, Isidro Arroyo, was the first up, wheeling at the top of the stairs, gun drawn and surprised to see the room so full. Who knew what to expect in there?

Four junkies froze at the sight of the shiny firearm, all except Georgie and a guy named Puggie. Georgie tossed aside an empty syringe. Puggie had been “booting,” playing with a hypo in his forearm, making his blood go up and down the barrel of the syringe. His thumb gave the plunger a final shove.

Officer Arroyo was in a lecturing mood. “We constantly try to treat you like human beings, and you constantly try to act like animals,” he said. “If you want to use drugs, this is not the place. There are kids who live on this block. Last year, we had a kid stuck in the foot with a needle.”

One of the addicts appeared much cleaner than the others, though he, too, was a longtime junkie. Arroyo told him, “Look at how you’re going to look in a couple of weeks. You’ll be full of disease, like all the rest.”

He put his gun away and motioned for his partner to come up. Rogers eyed things for a few seconds, then sniffed the air. “You’re pigs,” he sneered. “… If you were clean, you’d be all right. But I’m going to treat you just like where you live, like garbage.”

Then, this particular time, the cops simply left. Georgie shook his head from side to side, struck suddenly by waves of personal shame.

“The cop was right about the kids,” he said softly. “We’ve got to watch where we throw the needles.”

Police efforts notwithstanding, some experts fear America is on the verge of a new heroin epidemic. There are ominous signs: The purity of Southeast Asian heroin has improved while its price has dropped, probably because of increased supply. Among new users, many seem to be in their thirties, refugees from hectic years on the crack pipe. Of the teen-age converts, it is popular to “chase the dragon,” slang for smoking heroin off a piece of tin foil.

The needle, of course, is a more efficient conveyance than the nostril. If the supply of heroin were to suddenly decline, devoted sniffers would probably switch to syringes. With hypodermics sometimes hard to obtain, this would increase the need for sharing and start new brush fires of HIV infection.

Georgie Vega got his syringes through various connections, including diabetics who had prescriptions. He was thought to be an ethical merchant, unlike others who used a needle and then resealed it in its plastic sock.

Ever since Georgie found out he had the virus, thoughts about dying made him feel like a pallbearer in an endless succession of funerals. Other people always wanted to borrow one of his used needles, and he would tell them to bleach it out. “I tell them I’ve got HIV, and some don’t even give a damn,” he said.

Even among the careful ones, precautions were incomplete, limited to the needles themselves. Addicts went ahead and shared other paraphernalia of the injection ritual: the rinse water, the cotton filters, the bottle caps where they cooked up the shot. The virus could live in each of those things.

Bleaching was a common preventive at the gallery, addicts reusing syringes after quickly flushing out the barrel. But recent research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse shows that even this may not be fail-safe.

“When HIV gets into coagulated blood and dried blood, such as in a needle, it’s not clear how effective bleach is,” said Dr. Marvin Snyder, NIDA’s acting deputy director. “It may be killed in 10 seconds or it may take a minute or a minute and a half.”

Public health experts were initially skeptical that the AIDS epidemic would make heroin addicts change their injection behaviors. But few IDUs are self-destructive to the point of death; they merely want to chase the high.

Fear keeps many from these infectious shadowlands, the galleries. “In ‘70 or ‘80, about 50% of the injectors in New York would have used galleries; sharing needles was a normal part of injecting,” said researcher Don Des Jarlais. “Now there’s only a small number who share on a regular basis, but probably half still share occasionally.”

A big concern are the new users, those sniffers not yet in the high-risk category. Few of them visited the Melrose gallery, a place too far down the mudslide for an initiate. One who did was Carlos De Jesus, 34 and born again, a chatty man who said he was hit by a car as a boy and felt the Holy Spirit rescue him from death. He boasted that he would “never, ever” inject.

“You hang around here, you’ll be shooting up and pretty soon you’ll have AIDS,” warned Ruben, an older man, 32 years on drugs.

“I don’t believe I will,” answered Carlos, respectful of his elder.

“You’ll have no choice. It’s never the way you want it to be. Let me give you some advice: Don’t come around here any more.”

A few weeks later, Carlos was on the needle, absent-mindedly carrying around a syringe as if it were an extra finger on his hand. He almost scraped it against one of the newer regulars, an imposing guy just out of prison, Alfredo (Big Al) Lozado.

“Hey, stay away from me with those works,” Big Al barked.

Carlos was barely aware someone was talking to him. “We’re all sons of God, right?” he said and then waited, hanging impaled on his own question.

“I don’t know about God and that s—-,” Big Al answered. “Just don’t point those works at me.”

Syringes were in scarce supply that day. Georgie had no inventory. To get cash, he had begun selling one of the local brands of heroin, “Overtime.”

It made him nervous, being out in the open, dealing to strangers. He was ripe for a bust by the undercovers-or even one of the beat cops.

But it would not be Patrick Rogers. The feared patrolman was not coming around by then. He had been hit in the head with a bottle, his sergeant said.

Someone along those wicked streets had hurled it from a rooftop.

Copy Right Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext) [Los Angeles, Calif] 28 Sep 1992:

Publication title: Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext)

Pages: 1

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 1992

Publication date: Sep 28, 1992

IN THE SHOOTING GALLERY: ADDICTS AND AIDS (Part 3 of 4) Life, Death, Birth and Love Twisted by Heroin's Power Addicts: A pregnant hooker frets over an HIV test. It's the only thought that competes with the call of dope.

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:46:00 -0400

Third of Four Parts

“[Lips] had a partner at the gallery, Georgie Vega. For use of their place, they charged people $2 or a taste of drugs. It was strictly a business arrangement. Lips did not like Georgie and vice versa, especially with him letting [Lourdes Pabon] hang around there to share in the heroin and cocaine.

Lips was dope sick too. He was taking all the tastes for himself, and it was a few hours before he was willing to share any with Lourdes. Then they sent someone to call 911 on the pay phone at the corner. An ambulance came 90 minutes later, and Lourdes was carried away on a stretcher.”

by Barry Bearak

Full Text: She was five months pregnant, and her belly had not yet outgrown her streetwalker’s skirts. Lourdes Pabon, 28 and comely, made more money than most on the Flushing Avenue stroll. “The angels come down from the sky for me,” she would say after a good night. And by “angels,” she meant the men who paid her enough to satisfy her needs for heroin and crack.

The baby would be her fourth. Two were living in Puerto Rico, and the third, born addicted to cocaine, was in foster care here. “This one will be the same, maybe worse,” she said of the child-to-come, feeding on narcotics in her womb. “If I had Medicaid, I would have gotten an abortion a long time ago.”

Drugs kept her from her gloominess. She could shoot up and then there she was, in the broad daylight of simply being, without a messy life to muddle things. Heroin was such a relief that way, and so nice generally, except that it always wore off and the scramble for more seemed to go on forever.

Lourdes was immersed in the pharmacology of estrangement, one of a million injecting drug users in America. Opiates were the religion of these masses. They were possessed. They practiced their own rituals-rites of craving and duties without morals-each aimed at getting to the next bag of dope.

Lourdes paid the customary prices for this life, poverty and family exile, though there could be an even more awful cost. AIDS was being passed in dirty needles. Lourdes tried not to think about this, but one day last summer she impulsively took an HIV test-and for three crazy weeks awaited the results.

“I’ve always been scared of death,” she said, as the fateful day came near. “I don’t like funerals and none of that. But now it’s like I’m walking in a cemetery all the time, waiting for a hand to reach out and grab me.”

Lourdes was confident of little but her looks. She liked to have a steady man around, someone to help her out when she was dope sick and too achy to hustle for a wake-up shot. When her lover-the father of the baby inside her-was sent away to prison, she needed someone new. It was then she happened upon the hole-in-the-wall “shooting gallery” here in Brooklyn at 384 Melrose St.

One of the two dope fiends who ran the place was Joseph (Lips) Santiago. He had this oddball tattoo of a female pair of lips on his neck, which was no wonder, the way the hookers fussed over him. He had once been quite a ladies’ man, before the heroin had shorn away his style. He now defied the heat in a smelly pair of discarded wool suit pants, rolled three turns at the cuff.

Lourdes liked him, and he her, cautiously at first, then with a little more give. Some women were only after free tastes of the drugs that came his way, though she seemed less greedy than most. She brought him breakfast in the mornings.

Lourdes was new to the neighborhood known as Bushwick, and Lips filled her in on the scene. There was a place a few blocks away doing research on acquired immune deficiency syndrome. They paid $30 to any addict who took a test for the human immunodeficiency virus. It was a one-time deal, enough for three bags of dope. And it sure beat working the stroll.

Lips, 33, found himself amid a flurry of emotions. At times, it seemed that something close to love was scooping at his heart. “I like her a lot,” he said. “I can see us being together a long time, you know, a real couple.”

He had vague plans for their escape from that ratty gallery. Lourdes, after all, was a pregnant addict and probably HIV-positive. The city had special programs for people like her, welfare checks, even rent-free apartments.

“I’m tired of this,” Lips said, nodding toward the burnt-out shell of a place where he lived. “This is not for us, stuck here, always doing the same thing, chasing the drug, killing ourselves little by little.”

This was strange talk for him. Usually, Lips was a straight-ahead fiend, conniving without remorse, guilty of all the fiend malpractices. He had the virus and barely gave it a thought. “I’m going to die high,” he pledged.

But Lourdes had pried open a new part of him. Around her, he was “an old-fashioned papa,” protective, even a little domineering. He had a junkie’s bias against crack-heads and yelled at her whenever he saw her with a pipe.

Heroin was his preference. If Lourdes was dope sick, he tried to make sure she had a shot. “I got to take care of the baby,” he said, shouldering his manly burden. “The baby’s inside her. It needs that stuff too.”

Lips had a partner at the gallery, Georgie Vega. For use of their place, they charged people $2 or a taste of drugs. It was strictly a business arrangement. Lips did not like Georgie and vice versa, especially with him letting Lourdes hang around there to share in the heroin and cocaine.

“Lips is a game player; her too-not that well, but she plays,” Georgie said of the situation. “They don’t love each other; they just need each other. She needs a place to sleep and get off, and he’s working her for down the line, maybe to get an apartment from welfare with her and the baby.”

The two men bickered about who took the tastes. One day, an addict came to Georgie, asking for a clean needle. “I got him,” Lips said, moving between them and trading a syringe for a shake or two of dope. Then Lips shot up into his muscular forearm as Georgie stalked out, muttering about greediness.

“Look at him go, leaving like a bitch,” Lips said. “He’s the greedy one. People can see it. They let him taste and taste, and he doesn’t share. They say, `Hey, Georgie, I got you off seven times. What about giving to Lips?’ “

A few hours later, another of Georgie’s customers came upstairs and Lips took care of him. “Tell Georgie, Luis was here,” the man said as he left.

“I don’t give a damn about Georgie,” Lips said.

“He’s a brother.”

“He’s a selfish bastard.”

This struck Luis as such an odd remark. “Isn’t everyone?” he asked.

Lourdes’ skin seemed rubbery and lifeless. She had fevers. Was this the beginning of AIDS? Was this already the end? She could not stop worrying about what her test might show-and she mixed too much thinking with her dope.

Lips did not want her working the streets anymore, though he never minded the money. Men in big cars picked her up and gave her good tips to go with the standard $10 for oral sex. They told her she had a pretty face, even though she had a few scabs where she picked at herself during binges on cocaine.

A lot of her “dates” would ask her to go cop them some drugs. One guy thought she shorted him and began to beat her. He kicked her hard in the stomach, and she stumbled back to the gallery, holding herself as if shot.

Lourdes lay down on the one cot, rolling herself in a dirty quilt. Addicts kept filing in, doing their dope and asking her about her moaning. Maybe they should call an ambulance, they asked. But Lourdes did not want to go to the hospital until she had some heroin. “Please, give me,” she pleaded.

Lips was dope sick too. He was taking all the tastes for himself, and it was a few hours before he was willing to share any with Lourdes. Then they sent someone to call 911 on the pay phone at the corner. An ambulance came 90 minutes later, and Lourdes was carried away on a stretcher.

One of the people at the gallery was Lips’ 28-year-old nephew, Edwin. He told his uncle, “Go with her, man, she needs you.”

“I got to stay here,” Lips insisted.

“C’mon, this woman brings you food, coffee, a few dollars when she’s got it-and you won’t even go with her?”

But Lips was already heading back upstairs, gone before the ambulance even pulled away. He was preoccupied with the whereabouts of his next shot, though, in a passing moment, he did admit he would miss having Lourdes around.

He began to mimic the way she pronounced his name in her thick Puerto Rican accent, theatrically calling out, “Le-e-e-ps, Le-e-e-eps, oh my Le-e-e-ps.”

Few junkies enjoy the life. The dope is fine; it is the chasing of it that stinks. They each propose various ways of escape, some as wild-eyed as winning the lottery, others as sensible as getting treatment. The virus is another answer. Feared as it is, it at least places some time limit on their pain.

Georgie was talking again about getting into a drug program, which Lips thought silly. “First of all, it’s not that easy; you just don’t say I’m going to stop and then stop,” Lips said. “Even if you do get into a program, then you get out and get high all over again. So what’s the use?”

That described Georgie’s pattern all right. At age 38, he had gone through detoxification five times, but it never stuck for long. “I need help up here,” he said, pointing to his forehead. “I been on dope 25 years. It’s like getting lost in a forest. It may take me another 25 years to get out.”

Sometimes, he simply longed for a rest. Even jail could be better than the drug life: all the head games, all the hustles. He himself was in trouble. He owed money to a dealer and had to work it off. The dealer gave him eight bags-$80 worth-of dope to sell. A warning came with it: Don’t screw up.

Georgie’s plan was to sell the heroin and then go into treatment. First, he went over to his younger sister’s apartment to let her know what was up. She was always after him to get help. “You really gonna do it?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, I’m going, no doubt about it,” he said and meant it.

Rosie Linares stared at her brother, this grungy, homeless man with the AIDSvirus, living his life inside a drug habit. It was all so stunning, the enormity of his troubles.

“You’ve got to take care,” she said as Georgie nodded. “You don’t want to die looking like that.”

His next stop was his mother’s house. She would let him sleep there, and the dope would be safe. But he woke up during the night and decided to shoot up one of the bags before going out to peddle the rest.

That, of course, was a mistake. “One bag didn’t do anything for me,” he said. “I started rationalizing: `I’ll do two more bags, then sell two packs of (syringes) to make up the money.’ So I did the two more.”

As he got high, the urge for treatment started to wither. What were his chances of getting clean, anyway? He did the calculations in his head, multiplying all the maybes, then subtracting the sum of his previous failures.

There he was, with five more bags of dope in his pocket and a safe, quiet place to use them up. Georgie Vega began to sing himself the junkie national anthem, which goes: Who gives a damn, who gives a damn, who gives a damn.

Lourdes got out of the hospital; she and the fetus were OK. The nurses gave her a slip for a prenatal checkup, which she threw out. She was no good about health precautions, though she did remember when her HIV test results were due back. She pretended not to care-and she could not think of anything else.

On the appointed day, Lourdes was quaking as she went inside. She told them her name, and they asked her for the yellow card they had given her. Results were confidential: no names, just numbers. Lourdes had lost the card. All at once, she felt dizzying crosswinds of frustration and relief.

But then the lab technician fingered through some files. She had remembered Lourdes and found the report. “I’ve got it,” the woman said and smiled, which seemed reassuring. They walked back to a rear office and sat down.

Lourdes expected some prelude, a little small talk before the big announcement. But the other woman was direct. “It’s positive,” she said flatly.

Air flooded into Lourdes in a single inhale. Then the fear in her eyes turned to warm water. The woman repeated herself: “HIV positive.”

Lourdes jumped up. “I have to get the hell out of here,” she cried.

“No, I have to give you some referrals,” the technician said. Eventually, she was able to coax Lourdes back and tell her “this is no death sentence” and that “people have lived for 15-16 years with HIV and never come down with AIDS.”

Lourdes listened without hearing, feeling only the hand that was grabbing her in the cemetery. She sobbed all the way back to the gallery.

The place was crowded. Lourdes caught Lips in the beam of her eyes, and he led her off to an adjacent, trash-filled room, the one with buckets used as toilets. She told him her news and waited for him to offer his comfort.

“I’ll stick with you,” he said, genuine sincerity rich in his face.

“Really?” she asked. She wanted to hear him say it again.

“We both have it,” Lips said. “I’ll help you, and you’ll help me.”

And with that, he embraced her, though even the warmth of his body did not seem quite enough. In such a treacherous world, there was only one way to give his soothing promises the proper ceremony.

Lips cooked up a shot. And he put the needle in her vein.

Copyright: Los Angeles Times, 1992

Publication title: Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext)

Pages: 1

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 1992

Publication date: Sep 29, 1992

IN THE SHOOTING GALLERY: ADDICTS AND AIDS (Part 1 of 4) A Room for Heroin and HIV In a dank, burned-out building, addicts engage in microbiological roulette, sharing contaminated needles. Here, America's drug war meets failure and AIDS is spread.

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:43:53 -0400

This is the first of a four-part series of articles that went deep inside a Brooklyn shooting gallery to explore addiction and the AIDS epidemic. The reporting is masterful and provides a deeply nuanced account of a very specific moment in history. The pieces were written by journalist Barry Bearak and appeared in the Los Angeles Times during the last week of September, 1992. Bearak won a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists for the series, in the category of editorial writing. Bearak has also written for The New York Times and The Miami Herald. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his accounts of poverty and war in Afghanistan, and currently teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism.

“America has long had a malign attitude toward its heroin addicts, alarmed by their crimes and intent on their punishments. In the age of AIDS, this sternness bears the heavy weight of self-destruction. The nation has an estimated 1 million injecting drug users, and in recent years they have not only been responsible for 34% of all newly reported AIDS cases, they have also been the main cause of the epidemic’s spread to the heterosexual population.

HIV eventually becomes the full-blown syndrome. The CDC has recorded 24,323 cases of AIDS among adult women. Of those, 71% are considered IDU-related (50% are drug injectors themselves and 21% are women who had sex with IDUs). By the same token, 57% of 3,898 pediatric AIDS cases have been tied to IDUs (40% were children of IDU mothers and 17% were born to women who had drug injectors as sex partners).”

Part 1 of 4

by Barry Bearak (Los Angeles Times, Sept. 1992)

Full Text: Heroin is his shepherd; he shall always want. And so Georgie Vega made his way toward the burned-out hollow of a house at 384 Melrose St., slogging through the trash heaps out front and stepping amid the crazed air dance of a thousand flies. He climbed seven rickety inside stairs into an eerie nether world that dope fiends know as a shooting gallery.

Georgie was a big man there, co-proprietor of a place that was stunning not only for its outlaw customs but also for its fertility for disease. A shooting gallery is a classic location for the passing of the AIDS virus, a spot where addicts-some knowingly and some not-take part in a kind of microbiological roulette, sharing the lethal hardware of contaminated needles.

America has long had a malign attitude toward its heroin addicts, alarmed by their crimes and intent on their punishments. In the age of AIDS, this sternness bears the heavy weight of self-destruction. The nation has an estimated 1 million injecting drug users, and in recent years they have not only been responsible for 34% of all newly reported AIDS cases, they have also been the main cause of the epidemic’s spread to the heterosexual population.

In the face of this mortal turn, society’s response has been confused and sluggish, allowing tens of thousands of additional infections and inevitable deaths.

“We’ve made it real hard for these people to survive,” said Dr. T. Stephen Jones, assistant director for substance abuse and HIV prevention at the federal Centers for Disease Control. “There’s too much of a feeling that drug addicts are excrement and we’d do well to be rid of them.”

The priority has been the War on Drugs and not emergency public health measures to convert addicts to safer needle practices. There is a hesitation to do anything that might appear to condone heroin use. Instead, addicts are urged to seek drug treatment. But while billions of extra dollars have poured into police work and prisons, money for treatment has lagged. Dope fiends, as they call themselves, are routinely turned away, left to fend for themselves in a caldron of plague.

Early this year, Georgie Vega tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus. This was not unexpected; he had shared a zillion needles long before he had ever heard of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. “I’ve seen lots of guys die already,” he said. “They turned into skeletons, and their teeth fell out and everything. I hope I die before I get that far. Maybe I’ll be lucky and just die one night up in the gallery.”

Upstairs, the cramped, blood-haunted room was almost always airless this past summer. Dirty bedsheets hung over the openings that once were windows. Traffic in and out was undisguised, a caravan of whores and street criminals and beautiful losers, each keeping the erratic schedule of a stray cat, all there to be immunized for a few hours against the sorry facts of their lives.

The ritual was most often a hurried one: the white powder shaken into a metal bottle cap, drops of water added, a small flame set beneath, the fluid drawn through a tiny wad of cotton into a syringe, a tourniquet pulled tight to make a vein bulge out, a thumb pressed against the plunger. Then, at last, a liquid warmth began to ripple through a grateful body, a dim light deepening to full glow, a feeling so nice it can take a person around the bend forever.

Georgie Vega, 38 years old and no dummy, had first gone around that bend 25 years ago when heroin seemed just another part of the onrush of manhood. The years then melted together, their possibilities shrunken small. When not in jail, he was homeless, with little going for him but a cunning born of the streets and a genuinely good heart that made people trust him.

This spring, Georgie and a drug acquaintance, “Lips” Santiago, ventured into the abandoned structure on Melrose. They did a quick bit of housekeeping and set up their makeshift gallery, a far better space than the empty lot near the Flushing Avenue whore stroll where they had shot dope during the winter. They charged the standard gallery entrance fee: $2 or a taste of drugs.

With this indoor spot, Georgie was a good man to know in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. He shot up as much as 30 or 40 times a day and could tell a person which dope was the best around. More than that, he hoarded hypodermics and could be counted on to sell them at $2 apiece.

On busy Knickerbocker Avenue, heroin was easier to buy than a can of soda, dozens of people calling out the local brands like vendors at a ballpark: Body Bag, Mambo King, TNT, Overtime, Al Capone. Tougher to get was a set of works. Unpredictably, the illegal trade in needles dried up for hours at a time, leaving junkies with dope in their pockets and none in their bloodstream.

Sometimes, even Georgie ran out, and that turned the gallery tense. “Damn this thing!” he cried out, unable to inject with a dull needle. The veins in his arms had long ago collapsed; usually, he shot the dope into his neck, an awkward technique, staring into a jagged hand mirror to guide the pinprick.

But on that afternoon he only had works he had used before. The points had lost their bite, and when he tried to “hit” himself, he was only able to push a vein aside. “God, that hurts!” he moaned, a small bead of blood forming on his neck. He asked Lips to insert it for him.

“Bulge out that vein,” Lips said, and Georgie inflated his mouth with air until his cheeks and neck puffed out.

“You in yet?” Georgie asked anxiously.

“Be still,” Lips said, jiggling the spike.

“You in?”

“I’m in.”

A trickle of blood ran down Georgie’s neck, twisting like a river on a map. He then sat down. Four other addicts were nearby. Conversation meandered.

Suddenly, a sweaty face poked up the stairway that emptied into the room. Ray Morales was no regular, just a sometimes guy. “Give me a set of works,” he ordered.

“No got anything right now, Papi,” Georgie answered in his friendly way.

“C’mon, man, c’mon!” Morales insisted. He thought Georgie might be trying some junkie con on him to jump the price.

“OK, here,” Georgie replied, handing over a used needle with some advice: “Bleach it out.” He nodded toward a small bottle on a round table.

“No time,” Morales said. He was on his way home from work. His ride was waiting. He was eager to shoot his dope and get out of Bushwick.

“I’m telling you, man, bleach it out,” Georgie repeated.

But the other addict was too impatient. “f—- it,” he said, and he jabbed the needle in, taking into his arm an urgent mixture of drugs and whatever disease might be living in the plastic barrel of that syringe.

Dope was thrilling; dope was drudgery. Dope was sanctuary and dope made all of them fugitives. Dope was a way of life and a shortcut to death. The best and the worst of it was its sheer everydayness, never a letup, 24-seven. It had the ability to free people, finally, from all their damned self-awareness, into a primitiveness, up-down, yes-no, just get to the next bag of dope. But the getting often got complicated, a daily mesh of alliances and betrayals.

Most common images of heroin addicts are wrong. They do not lie around in a gauzy euphoria. A serious habit is too demanding for that. These are people who wake up sick and broke, needing to hustle $50-$200 in drugs to make it to tomorrow. The pressure to produce is relentless. They must be disciplined, moving fast, alert to scams, theirs to pull off and theirs to suffer.

“You’ve got to know how to talk, to get over, be streetwise, a lot of things,” Georgie said, analyzing the life. “I’ll do anything to get high: lie, cheat, steal. I’ve even taken (stuff) from my mother. Now I’ve lost her trust. That’s screwed up; that hurts. But a dope fiend is a dope fiend.”

Still, it takes all kinds. The gallery filled over and over with humanity’s variations of gender, color and spirit, among them desolate angels and wicked predators, sometimes the one becoming the other in the panic for a shot.

A few of the customers only dabbled. For them, the dope was closer to a weekly kick than a daily compulsion. They had maintained roots in jobs and families, and were stingy with their names. One husky guy cursed himself for getting blood on the sleeve of a clean, pressed shirt; he’d have to lie to his wife about that, maybe “tell her he scratched a mosquito bite.”

Another occasional shooter was Herbie, the gabby butcher at a supermarket. “Not every junkie is a greasy thief,” he said, proud of career and family. And then there was Arthur, a $100-a-day dope fiend who somehow managed to maintain the well-scrubbed appearance of his last job, a trainee at a bank. “I can cross back over whenever I want,” he boasted. And before summer’s end, he landed a good position with an assets management company.

For addicts such as Georgie and Lips, the gallery was headquarters, home sweet home, their own special hustle. They provided a service to 100 or so people every day. Their place was a haven off the street, only minutes from where the dope was sold. A junkie could shoot up and cut out, lessening the danger of getting caught with a needle or a bag by some nosy cop on the beat.

That it attracted so many different kinds of users was the god-awful nightmare ofAIDS experts who did mathematical models. A shooting gallery afforded what they called “efficient mixing”: high-risk behaviors across the lines of age, race, class and friendship groups. People left the gallery and went their separate ways, spinning microbiological roulette someplace else.

In Bushwick, entree into the drug world required no cult knowledge. Young children on two-wheelers steered buyers to heroin and crack. Drugs were the lyrics of merry singsongs, the chant of a little girl with an ice cream cone and a young boy skipping the lines on a sidewalk.

Georgie’s dope habit thrived in this ecology. He got by on personality. The streets were mostly Puerto Rican; blacks maneuvered them with ease, but white people had reason to feel edgy. Georgie was good at befriending these whites and acting as their broker and guide. In exchange for a taste, he would buy them premium drugs and set them up with a clean needle.

There are few pure heroin users these days. Georgie shot both heroin and cocaine-“the boy” and “the girl”-and smoked a little crack besides. The high of choice was the speedball, the mixing of one or more bags of heroin with a bag of cocaine: a “one-and-one” or a “two-and-one” and so on.

Bobby Dalziel, a 37-year-old junkie, 20 years older by looks and 40 older by world-weariness, said a speedball shot made him feel as if his system were going up and down at the same time: “The initial effect is the rush of the coke, like you’re taking off, and then all of a sudden the dope comes up through your stomach and overtakes it to make you feel relaxed.”

That coke rush is the treat they chase. A $10 bag (single shot) of heroin lasts four to six hours, but for longtime addicts it is only potent enough for “getting straight,” curing their dope-sickness so they are back to the even keel of normalcy. Cocaine is a launch beyond. Even some junkies in methadone maintenance programs-their need for heroin blocked by a synthetic narcotic-came to the gallery to feed their veins pure cocaine.

“You always need coke on top of your dope,” said an older addict named Ruben, who works at a hotel in housekeeping. “It’s the urge for the rush. If you shoot up and don’t get any rush, you’ve got to buy another bag. And if you buy and you do get the rush, it feels so good you go right out for more.” He laughed at his own pretzel logic. “Either way, you need another bag.”

Addicts were always trying to “make an angle,” one with heroin trying to find one with coke. They became “cooker friends,” in league for a while over glassine packets of powder and a bottle cap, a bond often too tenuous to survive the apportioning of the shots. Georgie was a matchmaker between the dopes and the cokes, taking a taste as commission. His internal chemistry was regulated by the happenstance of whoever and whatever came up the stairs.

It was an insane life, and he knew it. The contradictions sometimes amused him-and other times made him hate himself. The cocaine actually ate into the staying power of the heroin. “We wake up sick, get straight, then start using the coke until we get sick again,” he said. “Is that crazy or what?”

Georgie was ashamed of his life. Where had it gone? He was only 13 when he first tried the needle in the bathroom of a park in Brooklyn. Over the years, his soul then seemed to drain away through the tiny holes in his veins. Dope was his problem, his remedy, problem, remedy. He was in its loop.

Much of the time, Georgie was more the heroin than he was Georgie. “Dope has no conscience,” he said, and so sometimes neither did he. He had done awful things: burglaries, swindles. He had gone through people’s pockets while a bigger guy yoked them around the neck. His prison terms totaled eight years. The lockup was his second home, “the only time I eat a balanced meal.”

Now he was a middle-aged man with an incurable virus, his bed a moldy cot in a ratty gallery. His sister Rosie lived a few blocks away. Her 13-year-old, Mario, was Georgie’s godson. They hugged each other at his sister’s apartment, but he and the boy agreed never to acknowledge each other on the street.

Dope had won a long arm-wrestle. Georgie had gone through hospital detoxification programs five times, his last try in late 1991. Rosie had picked him up when he was released. He talked hopefully then about a job, a family, an actual life. He swore he knew better than to go back to Bushwick.

It was a reformation that lasted less than a day. He began to suffer the itch of a deadly boredom. It was accompanied by what seemed an obvious, predestined truth: He was what he was, and he’d be this decayed, addicted self for the rest of his years, however few years that was.

And he said, the hell with it.

Georgie and Lips believed a great junkie cliche: There are no friends, just associates. The gallery was strictly business. They did not like each other.

“Lips only cares about himself and drugs; to me, human beings come first, though I’m sometimes the same way,” Georgie said, trying to be fair. “I love drugs too. But I’d never put drugs before human life. I’ve seen guys OD, and people start going through their pockets without even trying to help them.”

Lips Santiago, 33, was a former stickup man, not long out of the lockup himself. He also had the AIDS virus, though his immune system still seemed resistant. Muscles defined his arms and shoulders; he had been a body builder at Sing Sing, even as he kept up his heroin habit behind bars. His real first name was Joseph. A pink pair of female lips were tattooed to his neck.

Lips was a lady’s man, a peculiar trait since heroin dulls the sex drive. “Dope is the only girlfriend I got time for,” he declared. Still, the female admirers came around. Moneymakers too. He’d finagle cash off them from time to time, offering to cop them some dope, then running off. “You do that when you’re stressing,” he explained, comfortable with his own excuse.

When “stressing” for a shot, it was OK to “fiend”-or cheat another addict-and the dope gods would grant absolution. Lies were part of the game, though it was a good idea to later make some gesture of amends.

Every show of friendship had good purpose if it somehow led to dope down the road. Memory kept a ledger: “Remember that time I got you straight when you were sick?” The gallery was a theater of manipulation, of tactical begging and bullying.

One of Lips’ acquaintances was Carmen Contreras, a slight, slender-faced woman better known as Shorty. She usually worked the corner of St. Nicholas and Flushing. She was HIV-positive, a fact left unmentioned to her “dates.”

Depression was afloat in her big eyes. She had lost a child to crib death, a husband to divorce and her trust in men to a rape and beatings. Shorty was a “needle freak” who loved to let the spike linger after it entered her arm.

One week, she persuaded Lips and Georgie to let her help out in the gallery and collect some of what was owed “the house.” Even in a den of connivers, her slyness was special. She would shoot up between parked cars, then minutes later come upstairs complaining she had not had a taste of dope all day.

“I’m sick, so sick,” she moaned, her ashen face bleeding sweat.

And Georgie and Lips gave her what they had.

The gallery looked worse to some than others, depending on how far they had wandered along dope’s withering journey. It was an 11-by-11 space with charred beams at its top. The walls were gouged and moist. The furnishings were a cot, two small tables and two stuffed chairs, the fabric frayed and discolored.

The odor made some addicts gag. An adjoining, debris-filled room had buckets to use as toilets. Who knew what germs hung in the stale air? Jo-nice Williams, one of the regulars, was tubercular. So was Benny De Jesus. “They say I’m real contagious,” he reported one morning, back from the hospital. No one cared as he slept off the last of a fever in one of the big chairs.

As galleries go, this was a decent place. It may not have been as elaborate as some in Harlem-actual apartments with running water and electricity. But at least Georgie and Lips had a thin carpet on the floor and a fire hydrant across the street. It sure beat “the condos,” the under-part of a deserted loading dock off Jefferson Avenue. Junkies had shot up there for years.

This block on Melrose was notorious. The cops hated to patrol it. At one corner was a wide-open crack trade, at the other a cluster of small apartment buildings. Young kids often wandered over to the drug side, playing in the trash in front of the gallery. Georgie scolded them all the time. “Get outta here!” he’d yell. “There are needles down there. You’re gonna get stuck!”

By its broadest definition, a shooting gallery does not require much. While some are set up in homes, most are merely guerrilla settings, in the rusted hulks of abandoned cars or the cardboard lean-tos of weedy lots. They are everywhere and nowhere, their presence thinly concealed, obvious once seen. They have traditionally been hothouses of diseases, particularly hepatitis.

In New York, most injecting drug users (IDUs) were doomed to AIDS before medical spotters even had it in sight. Historical studies of the epidemic-using serum samples taken for other purposes-show the infection rate among IDUs went from virtually zero in 1978 to 29% in 1979, to 44% in 1980, to 52% in 1981. A decade ago, the virus was already ticking inside 100,000 IDUs here.

No one had to tell dope fiends that something had been loosed. They eroded before each other’s eyes, walking the slow motion of the fevered, erupting with cancers. Bobby Dalziel recalled: “One of the guys I shared with had this milky-white thrush crap in his mouth; the doctors didn’t even know what it was. So he died, this guy who used to give me a taste of whatever (drugs) he had. Then three more of my buddies dropped dead. And, of course, then I got it.”

Word was getting out through the addicts’ crude networks, though the talk was as much hearsay as science. By 1984, more than half of the city’s IDUs were worried enough about the virus to change their injection routines, said Don Des Jarlais, a highly regarded drug researcher who serves on the National Commission on AIDS. But unfortunately, the changes usually were things that only reduced, and did not eliminate, risks, such as refusing to share needles with obviously ill people.

By and large, the addicts were on their own against the tide. In those early years, society spun in place, its public officials immobile against a blood-born contagion. It was clear that IDUs were in for a slaughter; after all, they received a mini-blood transfusion every time they shared a needle. But a determined rescue of such pariahs was hard to gear up. AIDS had little voice against the ongoing din of the War on Drugs.

“Our response was inadequate,” reflected Dr. James R. Allen, director of the National AIDS Program Office of the U.S. Public Health Service. “The decision to emphasize law enforcement was being made by people whose concern was not the health of the nation.”

The epidemic was lowering its scythe among gay men and IDUs. “Certain folks saw this as a comeuppance,” said Jones of the CDC. “There was a lack of compassion that was fairly broad-based, in particular for the (drug) injectors, who tended to be poor, black, Puerto Rican and other Hispanics.”

At the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), government publications were forbidden to mention that heroin users were at a special risk for AIDS. “There was a sense of prudishness,” said Dr. Marvin Snyder, acting deputy director. “The idea was that it was unseemly to talk about dirty needles.”

The late Mel Rosen was the first director of the state of New York’s AIDSInstitute. In 1985, he wanted to send outreach teams into the city’s shooting galleries to instruct people how to clean syringes. “(City officials) told me they would arrest me and my entire staff,” Rosen recalled recently, just before his death. “I was dumbfounded.”

The gay community rallied to help itself, but this was not likely among drug addicts, their ache for the next shot so dominating, their social isolation so great. They did not have a voting bloc, good jobs, organizations. There was no IDU pride week and no insistent marches up the boulevards.

In August of 1988, for the first time, new AIDS cases among IDUs and their sex partners outnumbered those of homosexual and bisexual men in New York City. By then, it was becoming common around the nation to refer to intravenous drug use and AIDS as the “twin epidemics,” the one madly feeding the other. Public health experts were insisting that more be done. But what?

There was no way to herd more addicts into existing drug programs. Snyder, of NIDA, said the treatment system had not improved in 20 years: “We have compassion for heart patients, but nothing but contempt for drug users. That’s very sad. Addicts basically have a brain disease. Their brains have been modified so they can no longer make free choices when it comes to heroin.”

If dope fiends were continuing to shoot up, maybe the risks for infection could be reduced by dispensing bleach kits and needles. Many other nations were doing that, but America by and large balked. How would it look, the government providing junkies the means to antiseptically shoot up narcotics?

Eventually, the distribution of bleach did become common nationwide, though the Los Angeles County supervisors did not permit it until last year. Several “needle exchanges” came into being, but while some are legal, most-as in Los Angeles-are the out-of-a-car-trunk operations of a dedicated underground.

For the most part, the IDUs remain a neglected million. In 1990, the AIDS working group of the American Public Health Assn. warned that more delays in drug treatment and HIV prevention “will mean suffering and death for thousands of high-risk individuals, their sex partners and offspring.”

At present, the infection rate among IDUs is generally stable, which is both the good news and the bad. In New York, the percentage has leveled off at that ghastly 50%. There are 4,000 to 5,000 new infections each year to replace the people who quit using drugs or who die, Des Jarlais said; nationally, there are 15,000 to 35,000 infections annually that are related to injecting drug use.

Some cities are faring better than others. This depends on the number of heroin addicts they have and their rate of infection. Newark, N.J., and San Juan, Puerto Rico, endure problems as bad as New York’s.

In Los Angeles County, there are an estimated 80,000 to 190,000 drug injectors, but the HIV infection rate is only around 6%. No one is sure why the percentage is so low, though some reasons have been suggested. The virus came later to the city, arriving after most junkies had begun taking precautions.

Then there is the matter of the automobile culture. In Los Angeles, people are more inclined to drive home and hit up alone or use their cars for privacy. Either way, they are less likely to play the fateful roulette of the gallery.

If many Americans thought AIDS more a solution than a problem-a way to rid society of human parasites crazed on junk-then that attitude should have been shaken by the spread of the virus from IDUs to their sex partners.

About 335,000 IDUs are believed to be infected with HIV. It is estimated that they have passed the AIDS virus to 50,000 to 75,000 non-injectors, mostly through unprotected sex, though also perinatally, mother to unborn child.

These sexual transmissions are generally male to female, Des Jarlais said. About 75% of IDUs are men, and it is common for males who inject drugs to have sex with females who do not. While most women IDUs are prostitutes, their purchased favors are usually oral, a far less likely means of infection.

HIV eventually becomes the full-blown syndrome. The CDC has recorded 24,323 cases of AIDS among adult women. Of those, 71% are considered IDU-related (50% are drug injectors themselves and 21% are women who had sex with IDUs). By the same token, 57% of 3,898 pediatric AIDS cases have been tied to IDUs (40% were children of IDU mothers and 17% were born to women who had drug injectors as sex partners).

Heterosexual sex is the chief means of HIV transmission worldwide. As the plague years go on, that seems certain to be true in the United States as well. The AIDS link to drug use is undeniable here. About two-thirds of U.S.-born heterosexual AIDS patients have reported sexual contact with an IDU.

“Why hasn’t more been done?” asked Des Jarlais. “A big factor has to be race. Illegal drug use has always been associated with minorities.”

African-Americans and Latinos make up 46% of all AIDS cases in the United States, but 72% of those that are related to injecting drug use. In New York City, among female adults, 85% of the AIDS cases are minorities; among pediatric cases, the number is 90%.

The poor are the most beset. Epidemiologist Ernest Drucker, a noted tracker of the plague’s lethal path, writes that in New York, 20,000 children have already lost one or both parents. “By the year 2000, if the trend continues, the number of AIDSorphans will exceed 100,000, and nearly every family in the South Bronx, Harlem and Bushwick will have lost several members.”

To many, this seems too carefully targeted for a mindless virus. Polls show that many blacks believe AIDS was deliberately created in a laboratory. “You can’t disassociate the conspiracy theories; the data is too startling,” said Ronald Johnson, an activist recently named New York’s coordinator for AIDS policy. “Society only gets concerned when something hits middle-class suburbia. Its will to protect marginal people is, as you’d expect, marginal.”

Conspiracy talk went on at the gallery all the time. In many a dope fiend’s view,AIDS looked like a major-league hustle, a way for rich white people to clear the streets of undesirables and make some fast money in the process, providing medical care and whatever.

One of the regulars was a well-groomed guy named Joe. He had the grim look of a cynical Irish cop who knew the score. His roots were in white, middle-class Queens, so his life had straddled two distant worlds and he thought he understood the chasm: “This AIDS thing is too removed for most white people. It’s over there with the niggers and spics: Let ‘em die.

“But it’s lives up here. These are people with lives-Lips, Georgie, Benny and the rest. And we’re forcing them into a room where they share works and cotton and water, passing the virus. It’s always them, them, them.”

The gallery itself was a model of racial harmony. The miseries of dope and the exigencies of hustling were blind to color. Wooed by the needle, the addicts were all part of the greater brotherhood of getting straight. It was them against the world-at least up to a limit. That limit was the onset of the aches of dope sickness. Once there, it was one fiend against another.

Lips and Georgie had begun to wise up to that little liar Shorty Contreras. She was spending less and less time working the streets and was now mooching most of her drugs off the gallery trade. She scraped all the empty glassine bags for residue, which was something Georgie liked to save for himself. And she even reached between Lips and a guy about to give him a taste.

“It’s my turn,” she said boldly.

“This ain’t your place!” Lips shouted. “You ain’t got a turn.”

“I’m sick, Lips,” Shorty said, retreating.

“Who do you think you’re kidding? I’ve been in this game too long.”

“I’m sick.”

“You screwed up. If you’re sick, you’re gonna stay sick!”

For a few seconds Shorty was silent, trying to keep her composure against a seepage of tears. Then she gathered the paper sack that held her sexy underwear and stalked off toward the Flushing Avenue stroll.

The men said the women had it easier because they could always sell their bodies. And indeed, most of the women conceded that the wages were reliable, though they scoffed at any notion of ease in the labor.

“I’d like to see men go out and do what we do,” complained Jo-nice Williams. “I hate all men, gut down inside, and I automatically hate them if they pick me up. Every time I get dope sick and need to hustle, I never get a regular but always some guy who’s fat and disgusting.”

Most people called her J.J. She was 33, a widow with two teen-age daughters and a long run of woe. Dope and tuberculosis had straightened the curves of her figure. She suffered fevers that seemed to be making her dissolve.

J.J. scuttled around the neighborhood, familiar to everyone, touting and hustling. A deep gash in her foot had become infected. She persuaded herself that it smelled bad and she could no longer command worthwhile money for sex.

“It don’t make that much difference anyway, the way things have gotten,” she said. The low end of prostitution had become dominated by crack-heads who would do whatever for $5, only half of what a heroin addict needs. “How can you compete against all these bitches who’s giving it away?”

J.J. did not tell men she had HIV. “Ninety-nine percent of the girls out here got the virus, so a guy ought to expect it,” she said. But it had become fairly standard practice to ask a man to wear a condom. Sometimes, this paid a bonus. A trick would peel off a few extra bucks to forgo the protection.

Other, more-miserly men would simply threaten to take their business elsewhere. “Then what are you going to do?” J.J. asked hypothetically. “You’re an addict.”

There were many other kinds of moneymaking schemes. Some of the men enjoyed the action. This was their chance to be on top, them in control and society on the cement, telling people to give it up, give it up, their fingers on people’s shelves, in their pockets, against their bodies.

Harry Hocknell seemed the gallery’s most expert shoplifter. A former Army paratrooper, he was an amiable Norman Rockwell-looking American who entered stores with smudges of paint on his arms and a hard hat on his head. He shot dope into his neck, sucking his thumb to make the veins show.

“Krazy Glue, pens, shampoo, razor blades, batteries, film-you can always get half-price for those,” Harry said. “I take auto parts, a lot of tools. You know what else is good? Video movies … I fence them off to whoever: store owners, gas stations, an auto dealer who lets me sleep in his cars.”

At the gallery, scavengers talked of their dreary foraging for scrap metal. Panhandlers exchanged techniques of begging: what subway lines were easy to work and which lamentations were going over. Gossip was traded: who got busted and who got sprung and who had been rushed to the hospital saying they wished it had all been different and wouldn’t someone please tell their kids.

The easiest way to earn money, of course, was selling drugs, but this came with big risks. “Undercover guys are all over,” said Lips, who occasionally peddledcrack. “I’m well set up for a bust. Catch me, they read my sheet and tell me I’m looking at five in the joint and 12 on parole. Then we start to bargain and they offer 3 1/2 and nine, and tell me if you don’t like it, you can go to court and (lose). If you (lose), you can end up at 7 1/2 and 15.”

Shorty Contreras had also begun to deal-heroin of all things. Usually, the young drug managers would not front an addict a $100 bundle of dope. They might as well trust a rabbit to deliver a leaf of lettuce. What protection did they have, except the teen-age leg-breakers on their payroll?

But in her convincing way, Shorty had persuaded them. “You can trust me,” she had said. “Honestly, you can.”

Shorty was welcomed back to the gallery, all hard feelings set aside for a few free tastes. The dope was good, until it ran out. Then it became clear she had used up two bundles she still owed on. Lips did not like this situation, but Georgie took pity. He let Shorty sleep upstairs.

When the managers asked for their money, she wrapped herself in a cloak of fictions, though these lies were threadbare by her usual standards. She simply told them she had lost the dope and begged them to let her work it off, selling more without commission. Their answer was: No way.

The young enforcers came charging in through the darkness at 4 a.m., people recalled. Who could tell how many there were, maybe eight, nine? The gallery was a jumble of bodies. Lips wasn’t there, but Georgie was. They punched him in the face. Then they went after Shorty.

“I’ll pay you when I get my SSI check,” she pleaded, but they began to pound on her. She rolled face down between the cot and the wall as the beating went on. Some unzipped their pants and made her perform.

When the attack finally ended, the tiny woman just wanted to lie there. But Georgie and another addict were furious with her for “fouling the nest,” bringing this kind of trouble to the gallery. They made her get out.

For hours, Shorty sat on the curb, heaving great sobs as if something was pulling them from deep inside her. That is how Georgie found her in the morning when he left the gallery, ready to fiend his way to a wake-up shot.

She was badly bruised and obviously shaken, but he had not seen her in several hours and did not know what drugs might have come her way in the meantime.

So Georgie went ahead and asked, “You got anything for me?”

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue assisted in the reporting of this story.

Publication title: Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext)

Pages: 1

Number of pages: 0

Publication year: 1992

Publication date: Sep 27, 1992

Year: 1992

Four Fascinating #Longreads on the Topic of Plagiarism, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New Yorker

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:00:05 -0400

The Plagiarism Hunter: “Former student Tom Matrka has made a hobby of uncovering plagiarism in masters’ theses at Ohio University, and thus far has found thirty examples. The university was slow to act on his discoveries, and a scandal has erupted over the plagiarism.”
Cheating Goes Global As Essay Mills Multiply: ”Everyone knows essay mills exist. What’s surprising is how sophisticated and international they’ve become, not to mention profitable. In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you’ll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai.”
The Shadow Scholar: Looking at essay mills from another angle, or “how an academic ghostwriter for hire produced thousands of pages for undergraduates as well as master’s and doctoral candidates.”
Something Borrowed: Annals of Culture: An article Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 1996 was used as inspiration for a play, but without permission. He discusses the experience.

The Plagiarism Hunter: One Former Student's Quest To Uncover Plagiarism in Masters' Theses at Ohio University, and the University's Response

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:18:49 -0400

The Chronicle of Higher Education 52. 49 (Aug 11, 2006): A8-A11.

by Paula Wasley

Former student Tom Matrka has made a hobby of uncovering plagiarism in masters’ theses at Ohio University, and thus far has found thirty examples. The university was slow to act on his discoveries, and a scandal has erupted over the plagiarism.

Full text:

In a conference room in Ohio University’s Vernon R. Alden Library, Thomas A. Matrka takes just 15 minutes to hit pay dirt.

Scattered before him on a table are 16 chemical-engineering master’s theses on “multiphase flow.” He examines them in pairs. With a hand on each manuscript, eyes darting back and forth, he quickly scans the pages.

Identical diagrams in two theses from 1997 and 1998 strike him as suspicious. Turning a few more pages, he confirms what he suspected.

“This one needs to be turned in,” he says, pointing to an introductory chapter that not only mirrors the structure and content of the earlier one, but also includes whole paragraphs that are virtually identical. “This guy didn’t do a literature review,” he says. “His literature review was opening this guy’s and copying it.”

He reaches for another thesis. “Give me time,” he says. “I’ll find some more.”

Over the past two years, ferreting out plagiarism has become Tom Matrka’s hobby, maybe even his obsession. And he’s gotten very good at it. So adept, in fact, that the former graduate student at Ohio University — now a project engineer at a nearby explosives factory - - has single-handedly blown the lid off a hugeplagiarism scandal at his alma mater. Dozens of former students are now caught up in the investigation, several professors have been reprimanded, and the university is wrestling with how one department fostered a culture of academic cheating.

Regardless of whether Mr. Matrka was driven by revenge or ethics, this much is certain: The scandal would never have erupted without one graduate student’s doggedness.

Tom Matrka always wanted to go to graduate school. And, at 37, the timing seemed right. With a decade of work as an engineer under his belt, he had his debts under control. He enrolled in the mechanical-engineering master’s program at Ohio University. “I love this stuff,” he says. “I really enjoyed being in school.” So when in the spring of 2003, about six months into his master’s degree, his adviser, M. Khairul Alam, invited the straight-A student to stay on to complete a Ph.D., it was, he says, “almost like a dream come true.”

But a year later, the dream soured. Maybe it was because he had turned down a campus job Mr. Alam arranged for him. Maybe it was because he had decided to work with another professor on his Ph.D. research. Or maybe, he says, Mr. Alam just didn’t like him. Whatever the reason, Mr. Matrka says, suddenly nothing seemed to please his adviser.

Mr. Matrka submitted several drafts of a thesis proposal — a formality, he thought, since he had already completed his research - - and each time his adviser proclaimed it inadequate. To Mr. Matrka, it looked as if Mr. Alam was purposely holding him back while letting other, less-qualified students pass through. “He was holding me to a different standard,” says Mr. Matrka. (Mr. Alam declined to comment for this article.)

Mr. Matrka sought the advice of the university ombudsman, who suggested that looking at completed theses might give Mr. Matrka a better idea of what Mr. Alam was looking for. So Mr. Matrka went to the library.

With characteristic meticulousness, Mr. Matrka read all the theses on the shelves that related to his topic — the thermal conductivity of carbon panels. He learned about the library’s off- site archive and requested a few reports from there that also sounded promising.

It was then that he noticed something strange about one of the theses.

“I’m looking at it,” he says now, “and I’m like, wait a minute, I just saw this upstairs the other day.”

There were indeed some remarkable similarities. The first 50 pages of a 1999 master’s thesis, approved by Mr. Alam, reproduced verbatim the introductory chapters of a thesis completed by another student of Mr. Alam’s only a year earlier. “I was shocked,” says Mr. Matrka. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Evidently neither could anyone else. Mr. Matrka took the 1999 thesis as well as a few other, less egregious plagiarism examples to the ombudsman, Elizabeth E. Graham. He notified the university’s judiciary director. He brought up his discovery in a meeting with Dennis Irwin, dean of the college of engineering, who joked that chasing plagiarism could land Mr. Matrka in court. He laid his stack of theses on the desk of Jerrel Mitchell, then associate dean for research and graduate studies, and said, “I think you’d be interested in these.” Mr. Mitchell’s answer, according to Mr. Matrka, was unequivocal. “No, I wouldn’t,” he said as he handed them back. (Mr. Mitchell confirms that he declined to read them.)

With his complaints unheeded and his hopes of entering the Ph.D. program fading, Mr. Matrka kept digging. Over the next four months, he spent his lunch breaks, sometimes up to 10 hours a week, in the library looking through old theses written for the mechanical- engineering department. Turning up more plagiarism didn’t take long, he says. He just looked for items with similar names or topics, and there it was.

Two theses copied pages from textbooks he had on his own bookshelf, he says. Some, including a 2002 thesis that had 14 consecutive pages in common with a 2000 manuscript, even reproduced past theses’ typos and misspellings. Two theses, approved one year apart by the same adviser, had 12 identical pages, and identical titles.

One 2003 thesis was a veritable smorgasbord of plagiarism, replicating five pages from a 2002 thesis, nine pages from a textbook on “flow-induced vibration,” and five more pages taken from Japanese journal articles.

The more he found, the easier it was to spot. By late November, he had turned up nearly 30 theses, most by international students, that appeared to includeplagiarized material.

Quest for Fairness

Tom Matrka would seem an unlikely candidate to take on a university. An extra-wholesome version of the mustachioed Brawny Man, with a bashful smile and the broad chest of someone who dabbles in construction, he is almost excessively polite, the type that arrives on the dot and apologizes for keeping you waiting.

But what he lacks in obstreperousness, he makes up for in patience and persistence. He takes pride in long-term projects, such as the house he is building for himself in the woods, or his six- year-long effort to master the guitar by picking out classic rock tunes every night. By comparison, unearthing 300 pages’ worth ofplagiarism was an easy task. “Some people like to do crossword puzzles or read books,” he says. “I like to read the work of OU grads.”

Some people at Ohio explain Mr. Matrka’s tenacious rooting out of plagiarism as score settling. (In one e-mail message to a faculty member, Mr. Mitchell, the former associate dean, described Mr. Matrka as “some crazy guy” who got frustrated after his adviser wouldn’t approve his thesis.) But Mr. Matrka insists there is nothing personal about his obsessive reading habits. He has never met most of the theses’ authors, and those that he has met he describes as “nice guys.” Instead, he casts his investigation as a quest for “consistency” and fair treatment. The university, he says, held him to a double standard, keeping him back for a year and scuttling his Ph.D. ambitions while turning a blind eye to a pattern of cheating and plagiarism that dates back 20 years. And that, he says, made his blood boil.

“I told everybody, and everybody was just blowing it off,” he says.

Over the course of about a year, starting in December 2004, he wrote letters — to the accreditors, to the chairman of the State Board of Regents, to the chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees, to the university’s president, even to the governor. He sent an e-mail message to a professor whose textbook had been copied. He wrote the dean of the libraries and cornered circulation librarians about the outrage on the shelves. He spoke out against rampant plagiarism before a graduate-student senate meeting. No one seemed to listen.

One Step Ahead

With Mr. Matrka pressing so many buttons, it’s hard to pinpoint which one eventually forced the university to act. He thinks the letters to the accreditors did it. And no doubt relentless coverage in the campus newspaper helped. Either way, once people began listening, the situation exploded into a public-relations nightmare for the university, leaving administrators scrambling to keep up with Mr. Matrka’s discoveries and disclosures. With every visit Mr. Matrka made to the library, the number of cases of suspected plagiarism kept climbing, to the point where even those charged with investigating were unclear how many theses were involved. (According to a March 2006 e-mail message to the dean, the provost encouraged those dealing with press inquiries to “keep it vague.”)

At times the student newspaper seemed to know about developments before the administration did. The Post began reporting on Mr. Matrka’s library discoveries in May 2005. Five months later, in October, Dean Irwin reported being aware of only four or five cases. In an e-mail message sent some months earlier, in July, to the university ombudsman, he wrote, “as far as I know there are no new issues, but if Tom is spending his time in the library comparing old theses, who knows?”

In November 2005, Dean Irwin appointed Jerrel Mitchell to lead an internal investigating committee that included Mr. Matrka’s former adviser, Mr. Alam. The ad hoc committee was attacked in newspaper editorials and letters to the editor as incompetent, even before it became widely known that Mr. Alam had advised on some of the plagiarized theses.

Even worse for the university, after that committee had delivered a tepid report that categorized dozens of plagiarized theses by degrees of gravity and recommended that graduates be given nine months to correct their theses, Mr. Matrka and student reporters took four theses with 20 identical pages that the committee had dismissed as unproblematic, went to Google, and quickly discovered that all four contained material apparently plagiarized from a software manual.

Sensitive to public perception, in February the provost, Kathy A. Krendl, appointed Hubertus L. Bloemer, an emeritus associate professor of geography and former chairman of the university’s Faculty Senate, and Gary D. Meyer, assistant vice president for economic and technology development, to independently review 55 theses under suspicion. In a strongly worded report released in May, the two concluded that “rampant and flagrant plagiarism” had occurred over a 20-year period in the mechanical-engineering department, and criticized Dean Irwin’s ad hoc committee for not recommending sanctions for faculty members “who either failed to monitor the writing in their advisees’ theses or simply ignored academic honesty, integrity, and basically supported academic fraudulence.”

In contrast to the earlier committee’s findings, Mr. Meyer and Mr. Bloemer placed responsibility for the plagiarism squarely on the shoulders of faculty advisers and called for the dismissal of the chairman of the mechanical-engineering department, Jay Gunasekera, and a second nontenured professor, Bhavin V. Mehta, who, together, had supervised the greatest number of plagiarized theses.

Dean Irwin defends himself strenuously against criticisms that the university dragged its heels. “When we were presented with information, we acted upon it,” he says, adding that he often read of Mr. Matrka’s claims in the student paper before possessing any evidence. E-mail messages released by the university indicate that legal concerns and a desire to avoid a campus witch hunt deterred Mr. Irwin from aggressively pursuing Mr. Matrka’s leads. Administrators also worried about being in uncharted territory with their alumni: Colleges have occasionally revoked a degree for reasons of academic dishonesty, but there was no precedent for dealing with such a volume of cases.

Regardless, the scandal has damaged the university’s reputation.

It used to be, says Mark M. Mecum, chairman of the Graduate Student Senate, that when he told people he went to Ohio, they said, “Oh, the party school.” (Ohio University ranks second in Princeton Review’s list of top party schools.) Now he says it’s “oh, you go to the plagiarism school.”

Mounting a Defense

Vipul Ranatunga is an assistant professor in the department of engineering technology at Miami University, in Ohio, where he has taught since finishing his Ph.D. in 2002 at Ohio University.

In early July, he received an unexpected letter by certified mail. The letter, from Ohio University’s legal-affairs department, told him that his 1999 master’s thesis, “Analytical Modeling of Axisymmetric Disk Forging,” contained plagiarism and that he had two weeks to decide whether he wanted to forfeit his degree, rewrite theplagiarized portions, or request a hearing before a university board to challenge the allegations.

Graduates who wished to rewrite, it said, must admit to plagiarizing, and would work with a new adviser to “resolve the rewrite in a timely manner.”

Mr. Ranatunga is one of 37 Ohio engineering graduates to receive such a letter. And, so far, he is one of only two who have chosen to contest the allegations.

What the committees found, in his case at least, is not plagiarism, he says. He argues that those making the charges are not familiar with engineering theses. And, he says, because investigators are relying on evidence provided by Mr. Matrka, they have missed the page in the fourth chapter of his thesis with a crucial reference that explains why the next twelve pages of text and calculations are nearly identical to ones in a thesis written by another student, Zhizhong Zhou, one year earlier.

What’s more, Mr. Zhou is a friend and former colleague. They shared an office in graduate school; Mr. Ranatunga called him “Joe.” If he wanted to pull something over on his department, Mr. Ranatunga could have copied from some less traceable source. “If I’m smart enough to do a master’s in engineering,” he asks, “why would I be so stupid?”

Just Sloppiness?

Until recently, Jay Gunasekera was known chiefly as a respected researcher in the field of metal-forming processes. His colleagues at Ohio University credit him with building the mechanical- engineering department from nothing. He estimates that during his 15 years as department chair he has brought the college more than $6- million in military contracts. In 2003 he was awarded the university’s top title of distinguished professor.

But in recent months those accomplishments have all been overshadowed. According to the university’s count, he has advised 16 of the students whose theses were found to contain plagiarism, the most of any faculty member. This, he notes, is a fraction of the nearly 100 whom he has advised in his 23-year career at the university. He has already stepped down as department chairman in the wake of the scandal, and may yet face hearings to lose his “distinguished” title and possibly even his tenure. “This has completely ruined me,” he says.

Mr. Gunasekera and his lawyer maintain that what Mr. Matrka has unearthed is not plagiarism, but rather some sloppy citation practices. The students may have omitted a few references, forgotten a few brackets or quotation marks. “They should have been more careful,” he says, but there was no intent to deceive, and therefore no plagiarism.

More importantly, says Mr. Gunasekera, the responsibility for plagiarism, along with corresponding sanctions, should stop with the student guilty of plagiarizing. “The only person who knows 100 percent that they plagiarized is the person who plagiarizes,” he says.

Otherwise, he says, faculty members are left with the impossible task of policing students’ every word. “There’s a vast amount of literature out there. It’s hard for me to know what’s taken from where,” he says. “It’s not that easy to findplagiarism.”

The scandal has prompted discussion at Ohio and elsewhere about judgingplagiarism. Some academics, like Hajrudin Pasic, a professor in Ohio’s mechanical-engineering department, suggest that the standard academic definitions of plagiarism are too broad, particularly when applied to fields like engineering.

Most of the plagiarism found at Ohio, he notes, occurred in introductory chapters describing research methods and reviewing the previous literature in the field, for which there is little expectation of originality. And all but a few cases involved international students who, he says, whether through ignorance, laziness, or cultural misunderstanding, may have either not known correct citation practices or, struggling to write in a foreign language, been tempted to borrow another student’s words.

Although he does not condone the errors, Mr. Pasic and his peers draw distinctions between plagiarism in introductory chapters and the far graver sin ofplagiarism or fabrication of research results. It would be unfair, he says, to revoke a student’s degree for such a minor offense. “For the introductory part [of his thesis], a student spends seven days, and for his research part, a student spends two years,” he says. “He or she didn’t graduate based on whatever he wrote in the introduction.”

Mr. Irwin, the dean, and Ms. Krendl, the provost, express little tolerance for such distinctions. Although both emphasize that the plagiarized theses vary greatly in terms of their severity, plagiarism is plagiarism, no matter where it occurs, they say. And the university intends to deal harshly with plagiarists. “It’s not acceptable. Period,” says Mr. Irwin.

New Procedures

The university is eager to move beyond the scandal rather than harping on the errors of the past. Thirty-nine compromised theses have already been removed from the library, and administrators hope that the graduates called to rewrite or defend them will do so quickly. Students are now required to submit theses electronically and sign a statement of originality. At the advice of an outside expert, the university is considering an honor code and the creation of a student-led academic-honesty advisory committee.

Administrators at Ohio believe that the problem of systemic, uncheckedplagiarism is unique to the mechanical-engineering department. That conclusion is supported by a survey by Hugh Bloemer and Gary Meyer, who checked 65 theses from 13 other disciplines, finding no similar replications of material. The pattern suggests, says Mr. Irwin, that even within mechanical engineering, “there was a subculture associated with a small number of faculty members that, while it might not have actively encouraged plagiarism, did not rigorously attempt to prevent it.” Accordingly, some sanctions have already been meted out to faculty advisers. For instance, Bhavin Mehta, who was found to have advised 11 plagiarizedtheses, will not be permitted to advise graduate students in the one year remaining on his contract.

Mr. Matrka graduated with his master’s degree in 2005, and decided to get a job rather than stick around for a Ph.D. For his part, he says he will not be satisfied until the university sets the record straight. After all, he says, it is the integrity of his degree that is at stake. (His request, a hefty one, is that the university examine all past engineering theses for plagiarism. Otherwise, he says, it “almost seems unfair to the plagiarists.”) In the meantime, he might consider some more recreational reading of theses. And when the plagiarizing graduates come back with corrected copies, you better believe he’ll be reading those too, he says.

He may not be the only one.

In late June, only a few weeks after the Bloemer and Meyer report called for Mr. Gunasekera’s dismissal, Mr. Matrka ran into the professor at the Athens Kinko’s, making photocopies.

“He was very nice,” says Mr. Matrka. They chatted, and Mr. Matrka offered his sympathy, agreeing that the university needed to be consistent in dealing with anyplagiarism in the mechanical- engineering department. When “Dr. Jay” left, the stray pages left behind at the photocopier looked curiously like excerpts from civil- engineering theses.

Mr. Gunasekera, who has filed a grievance against the university for publicly releasing the Bloemer and Meyer report without first giving him the opportunity to defend himself, won’t comment on whether he is taking up the hunt for plagiarismwhere Tom Matrka left off. What he will say, however, is that “at any university, at any department, I think you would find the same.”

Subject: Plagiarism; Graduate studies; Scandals

People: Matrka, Tom

Company / organization: Name: Ohio University; NAICS: 611310

Publication title: The Chronicle of Higher Education

And if this piece interested you, you can read (and hear) more in this NPR story

And From Another Angle: How an academic ghostwriter for hire produced thousands of pages for undergraduates as well as master's and doctoral candidates.

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:13:22 -0400

By Ed Dante, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2010

Editor’s note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): “You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”

I’ve gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.

I told her no problem.

It truly was no problem. In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I’ve worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company’s staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing. I have seen the word “desperate” misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?

I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created. Granted, as a writer, I could earn more; certainly there are ways to earn less. But I never struggle to find work. And as my peers trudge through thankless office jobs that seem more intolerable with every passing month of our sustained recession, I am on pace for my best year yet. I will make roughly $66,000 this year. Not a king’s ransom, but higher than what many actual educators are paid.

Of course, I know you are aware that cheating occurs. But you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it. Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.

It is my hope that this essay will initiate such a conversation. As for me, I’m planning to retire. I’m tired of helping you make your students look competent.

It is late in the semester when the business student contacts me, a time when I typically juggle deadlines and push out 20 to 40 pages a day. I had written a short research proposal for her a few weeks before, suggesting a project that connected a surge of unethical business practices to the patterns of trade liberalization. The proposal was approved, and now I had six days to complete the assignment. This was not quite a rush order, which we get top dollar to write. This assignment would be priced at a standard $2,000, half of which goes in my pocket.

A few hours after I had agreed to write the paper, I received the following e-mail: “sending sorces for ur to use thanx.”

I did not reply immediately. One hour later, I received another message:

“did u get the sorce I send

please where you are now?

Desprit to pass spring projict”

Not only was this student going to be a constant thorn in my side, but she also communicated in haiku, each less decipherable than the one before it. I let her know that I was giving her work the utmost attention, that I had received her sources, and that I would be in touch if I had any questions. Then I put it aside.

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.

For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let’s be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn’t get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.

As for the first two types of students—the ESL and the hopelessly deficient—colleges are utterly failing them. Students who come to American universities from other countries find that their efforts to learn a new language are confounded not only by cultural difficulties but also by the pressures of grading. The focus on evaluation rather than education means that those who haven’t mastered English must do so quickly or suffer the consequences. My service provides a particularly quick way to “master” English. And those who are hopelessly deficient—a euphemism, I admit—struggle with communication in general.

Two days had passed since I last heard from the business student. Overnight I had received 14 e-mails from her. She had additional instructions for the assignment, such as “but more again please make sure they are a good link betwee the leticture review and all the chapter and the benfet of my paper. finally do you think the level of this work? how match i can get it?”

I’ll admit, I didn’t fully understand that one.

It was followed by some clarification: “where u are can you get my messages? Please I pay a lot and dont have ao to faile I strated to get very worry.”

Her messages had arrived between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. Again I assured her I had the matter under control.

It was true. At this point, there are few academic challenges that I find intimidating. You name it, I’ve been paid to write about it.

Customers’ orders are endlessly different yet strangely all the same. No matter what the subject, clients want to be assured that their assignment is in capable hands. It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal.

The subject matter, the grade level, the college, the course—these things are irrelevant to me. Prices are determined per page and are based on how long I have to complete the assignment. As long as it doesn’t require me to do any math or video-documented animal husbandry, I will write anything.

I have completed countless online courses. Students provide me with passwords and user names so I can access key documents and online exams. In some instances, I have even contributed to weekly online discussions with other students in the class.

I have become a master of the admissions essay. I have written these for undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs, some at elite universities. I can explain exactly why you’re Brown material, why the Wharton M.B.A. program would benefit from your presence, how certain life experiences have prepared you for the rigors of your chosen course of study. I do not mean to be insensitive, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been paid to write about somebody helping a loved one battle cancer. I’ve written essays that could be adapted into Meryl Streep movies.

I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America’s moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.

With respect to America’s nurses, fear not. Our lives are in capable hands—-just hands that can’t write a lick. Nursing students account for one of my company’s biggest customer bases. I’ve written case-management plans, reports on nursing ethics, and essays on why nurse practitioners are lighting the way to the future of medicine. I’ve even written pharmaceutical-treatment courses, for patients who I hope were hypothetical.

I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it’s hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I’d say education is the worst. I’ve written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I’ve written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I’ve synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)

As the deadline for the business-ethics paper approaches, I think about what’s ahead of me. Whenever I take on an assignment this large, I get a certain physical sensation. My body says: Are you sure you want to do this again? You know how much it hurt the last time. You know this student will be with you for a long time. You know you will become her emergency contact, her guidance counselor and life raft. You know that for the 48 hours that you dedicate to writing this paper, you will cease all human functions but typing, you will Google until the term has lost all meaning, and you will drink enough coffee to fuel a revolution in a small Central American country.

But then there’s the money, the sense that I must capitalize on opportunity, and even a bit of a thrill in seeing whether I can do it.

And I can. It’s not implausible to write a 75-page paper in two days. It’s just miserable. I don’t need much sleep, and when I get cranking, I can churn out four or five pages an hour. First I lay out the sections of an assignment—introduction, problem statement, methodology, literature review, findings, conclusion—whatever the instructions call for. Then I start Googling.

I haven’t been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don’t know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there’s Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I’ve taken hundreds of crash courses this way.

After I’ve gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I’ve refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I’ll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.

I’ve also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: “A close consideration of the events which occurred in __

during the __

demonstrate that __

had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define __

for decades to come.” Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment’s instructions.

How good is the product created by this process? That depends—on the day, my mood, how many other assignments I am working on. It also depends on the customer, his or her expectations, and the degree to which the completed work exceeds his or her abilities. I don’t ever edit my assignments. That way I get fewer customer requests to “dumb it down.” So some of my work is great. Some of it is not so great. Most of my clients do not have the wherewithal to tell the difference, which probably means that in most cases the work is better than what the student would have produced on his or her own. I’ve actually had customers thank me for being clever enough to insert typos. “Nice touch,” they’ll say.

I’ve read enough academic material to know that I’m not the only bullshit artist out there. I think about how Dickens got paid per word and how, as a result, Bleak House is … well, let’s be diplomatic and say exhaustive. Dickens is a role model for me.

So how does someone become a custom-paper writer? The story of how I got into this job may be instructive. It is mostly about the tremendous disappointment that awaited me in college.

My distaste for the early hours and regimented nature of high school was tempered by the promise of the educational community ahead, with its free exchange of ideas and access to great minds. How dispiriting to find out that college was just another place where grades were grubbed, competition overshadowed personal growth, and the threat of failure was used to encourage learning.

Although my university experience did not live up to its vaunted reputation, it did lead me to where I am today. I was raised in an upper-middle-class family, but I went to college in a poor neighborhood. I fit in really well: After paying my tuition, I didn’t have a cent to my name. I had nothing but a meal plan and my roommate’s computer. But I was determined to write for a living, and, moreover, to spend these extremely expensive years learning how to do so. When I completed my first novel, in the summer between sophomore and junior years, I contacted the English department about creating an independent study around editing and publishing it. I was received like a mental patient. I was told, “There’s nothing like that here.” I was told that I could go back to my classes, sit in my lectures, and fill out Scantron tests until I graduated.

I didn’t much care for my classes, though. I slept late and spent the afternoons working on my own material. Then a funny thing happened. Here I was, begging anybody in authority to take my work seriously. But my classmates did. They saw my abilities and my abundance of free time. They saw a value that the university did not.

It turned out that my lazy, Xanax-snorting, Miller-swilling classmates were thrilled to pay me to write their papers. And I was thrilled to take their money. Imagine you are crumbling under the weight of university-issued parking tickets and self-doubt when a frat boy offers you cash to write about Plato. Doing that job was a no-brainer. Word of my services spread quickly, especially through the fraternities. Soon I was receiving calls from strangers who wanted to commission my work. I was a writer!

Nearly a decade later, students, not publishers, still come from everywhere to find me.

I work hard for a living. I’m nice to people. But I understand that in simple terms, I’m the bad guy. I see where I’m vulnerable to ethical scrutiny.

But pointing the finger at me is too easy. Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work?

Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.

You know what’s never happened? I’ve never had a client complain that he’d been expelled from school, that the originality of his work had been questioned, that some disciplinary action had been taken. As far as I know, not one of my customers has ever been caught.

With just two days to go, I was finally ready to throw myself into the business assignment. I turned off my phone, caged myself in my office, and went through the purgatory of cramming the summation of a student’s alleged education into a weekend. Try it sometime. After the 20th hour on a single subject, you have an almost-out-of-body experience.

My client was thrilled with my work. She told me that she would present the chapter to her mentor and get back to me with our next steps. Two weeks passed, by which time the assignment was but a distant memory, obscured by the several hundred pages I had written since. On a Wednesday evening, I received the following e-mail:

“Thanx u so much for the chapter is going very good the porfesser likes it but wants the folloing suggestions please what do you thing?:

“‘The hypothesis is interesting but I’d like to see it a bit more focused. Choose a specific connection and try to prove it.’

“What shoudwe say?”

This happens a lot. I get paid per assignment. But with longer papers, the student starts to think of me as a personal educational counselor. She paid me to write a one-page response to her professor, and then she paid me to revise her paper. I completed each of these assignments, sustaining the voice that the student had established and maintaining the front of competence from some invisible location far beneath the ivory tower.

The 75-page paper on business ethics ultimately expanded into a 160-page graduate thesis, every word of which was written by me. I can’t remember the name of my client, but it’s her name on my work. We collaborated for months. As with so many other topics I tackle, the connection between unethical business practices and trade liberalization became a subtext to my everyday life.

So, of course, you can imagine my excitement when I received the good news:

“thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now”.

Cheating Goes Global As Essay Mills Multiply: One Writer's Search Across Continents For Where These Papers Are Being Produced

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:11:10 -0400

by Thomas Bartlett, The Chronicle of Higher Education 55. 28 (Mar 20, 2009): A1,A22+.

The orders keep piling up. A philosophy student needs a paper on Martin Heidegger. A nursing student needs a paper on dying with dignity. An engineering student needs a paper on electric cars.

Screen after screen, assignment after assignment — hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others request an entire dissertation.

This is what an essay mill looks like from the inside. Over the past six months, with the help of current and former essay-mill writers, The Chronicle looked closely at one company, tracking its orders, examining its records, contacting its customers. The company, known as Essay Writers, sells so-called customessays, meaning that its employees will write a paper to a student’s specifications for a per-page fee. These papers, unlike those plucked from online databases, are invisible to plagiarism-detection software.

Everyone knows essay mills exist. What’s surprising is how sophisticated and international they’ve become, not to mention profitable.

In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you’ll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work.

And if the exponential surge in the number of essay mills is any indication, the problem is only getting worse. But who, exactly, is running these companies? And what do the students who use their services have to say for themselves?

Go to Google and type “buy an essay.” Among the top results will be BestEssays, whose slogan is “Providing Students with Original Papers since 1997.” It’s a professional-looking site with all the bells and whistles: live chat, flashy graphics, stock photos of satisfied students. Best Essays promises to deliver “quality custom written papers” by writers with either a master’s degree or a Ph.D. Prices range from $19.99 to $42.99 per page, depending on deadline and difficulty.

To place an order, you describe your assignment, the number of pages, and how quickly you need it. Then you enter your credit-card number, and, a couple of days later, the paper shows up in your in box. All you have to do is add your name to the top and turn it in. Simple.

What’s going on behind the scenes, however, is another story.

The address listed on the site is in Reston, Va. But it turns out that’s the address of a company that allows clients to rent “virtual office space” — in other words, to claim they’re somewhere they’re not. A previous address used by Best Essayswas a UPS store in an upscale strip mall. And while the phone number for BestEssays has a Virginia area code, that line is registered to a company that allows customers to forward calls anywhere in the world over the Internet.

The same contact information appears on multiple other essay-mill Web sites with names like Rush Essay, Superior Papers, and Best Term Paper. All of these sites are operated by Universal Research Inc., also known as Essay Writers. The “US/Canada Headquarters” for the company, according to yet another Web site, is in Herndon, Va. An Essay Writers representative told a reporter that the company’s North American headquarters was a seven-story building with an attached garage and valet parking.

That was a lie. Drive to the address, and you will find a perfectly ordinary suburban home with a neatly trimmed front lawn and a two-car garage. The owner of the house is Victor Guevara and, ever since he bought it in 2004, he has received lots of strange mail. For instance, a calendar recently arrived titled “A Stroll Through Ukrainian Cities,” featuring photographs of notable buildings in Odessa and Yalta. Not all of the missives, however, have been so benign. Once a police officer came to the door bearing a complaint from a man in India who hadn’t been paid by Essay Writers. Mr. Guevara explained to the officer that he had no idea what the man was talking about.

So why, of all the addresses in the United States, was Mr. Guevara’s chosen? He’s not sure, but he has a theory. Before he bought the house, a woman named Olga Mizyuk lived there for a short time. The previous owner, a friend of Mr. Guevara’s, let her stay rent free because she was down on her luck and she promised to teach him Russian. Mr. Guevara believes it’s all somehow connected to Ms. Mizyuk.

That theory is not too far-fetched. The state of Virginia listed Olga Mizyuk as the agent of Universal Research LLC when it was formed in 2006, though that registration has since lapsed (it’s now incorporated in Virginia with a different agent). The company was registered for a time in Nevada, but that is no longer valid either. The managing member of the Nevada company, according to state records, was Yuriy Mizyuk. Mr. Guevara remembers that Ms. Mizyuk spoke of a son named Yuriy. Could that all be a coincidence?

Hiring in Manila

Call any of the company’s several phone numbers and you will always get an answer. Weekday or weekend, day or night. The person on the other end will probably be a woman named Crystal or Stephanie. She will speak stilted, heavily accented English, and she will reveal nothing about who owns the company or where it is located. She will be unfailingly polite and utterly unhelpful.

If pressed, Crystal or Stephanie will direct callers to a manager named Raymond. But Raymond is almost always either out of the office or otherwise engaged. When, after weeks of calls, The Chronicle finally reached Raymond, he hung up the phone before answering any questions.

But while the company’s management may be publicity shy, sources familiar with its operations were able to shed some light. Essay Writers appears to have been originally based in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. While the company claims to have been in business since 1997, its Web sites have only been around since 2004. In 2007 it opened offices in the Philippines, where it operates under the name Uniwork.

The company’s customer-service center is located on the 17th floor of the Burgundy Corporate Tower in the financial district of Makati City, part of the Manila metropolitan area. It is from there that operators take orders and answer questions from college students. The company also has a suite on the 16th floor, where its marketing and computer staff members promote and maintain its Web sites. This involves making sure that when students search for custom essays, its sites are on the first page of Google results. (They’re doing a good job, too. Recently two of the first three hits for “buy an essay” were Essay Writers sites.) One of its employees, who describes herself as a senior search-engine-optimization specialist at Uniwork, posted on her Twitter page that the company is looking for copy writers, Web developers, and link builders.

Some of the company’s writers work in its Makati City offices. Essay Writers claims to have more than 200 writers, which may be true when freelancers are counted. A dozen or so, according to a former writer, work in the office, where they are reportedly paid between $1 and $3 a page — much less than its American writers, and a small fraction of the $20 or $30 per page customers shell out. The company is currently advertising for more writers, praising itself as “one of the most trusted professional writing companies in the industry.”

It’s difficult to know for sure who runs Essay Writers, but the name Yuriy Mizyuk comes up again and again. Mr. Mizyuk is listed as the contact name on the domain registration for essaywriters.net, the Web site where writers for the company log in to receive their assignments. A lawsuit was filed in January against Mr. Mizyuk and Universal Research by a debt-collection company. Repeated attempts to reach him — via phone and e-mail — were unsuccessful. Customer-service representatives profess not to have heard of Mr. Mizyuk.

Installed in its Makati City offices, according to a source close to the company, are overhead cameras trained on employees. These cameras reportedly send a video feed back to Kiev, allowing the Ukrainians to keep an eye on their workers in the Philippines. This same source says Mr. Mizyuk regularly visits the Philippines and describes him as a smallish man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses. “He looks like Harry Potter,” the source says. “The worst kind of Harry Potter.”

Writers for Hire

The writers for essay mills are anonymous and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week, hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to $40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose. Others have no college degree and limited English skills.

James Robbins is one of the good ones. Mr. Robbins, now 30, started working foressay mills to help pay his way through Lamar University, in Beaumont, Tex. He continued after graduation and, for a time, ran his own company under the name Mr. Essay. What he’s discovered, after writing hundreds of academic papers, is that he has a knack for the form: He’s fast, and his papers consistently earn high marks. “I can knock out 10 pages in an hour,” he says. “Ten pages is nothing.”

His most recent gig was for Essay Writers. His clients have included students from top colleges like the University of Pennsylvania, and he’s written short freshman-comp papers along with longer, more sophisticated fare. Like all freelancers for Essay Writers, Mr. Robbins logs in to a password-protected Web site that gives him access to the company’s orders. If he finds an assignment that’s to his liking, he clicks the “Take Order” button. “I took one on Christological topics in the second and third centuries,” he remembers. “I didn’t even know what that meant. I had to look it up on Wikipedia.”

Most essay mills claim that they’re only providing “model” papers and that students don’t really turn in what they buy. Mr. Robbins, who has a law degree and now attends nursing school, knows that’s not true. In some cases, he says, customers have forgotten to put their names at the top of the papers he’s written before turning them in. Although he takes pride in the writing he’s done over the years, he doesn’t have much respect for the students who use the service. “These are kids whose parents pay for college,” he says. “I’ll take their money. It’s not like they’re going to learn anything anyway.”

That’s pretty much how Charles Parmenter sees it. He wrote for Essay Writers and another company before quitting about a year ago. “If anybody wants to say this is unethical — yeah, OK, but I’m not losing any sleep over it,” he says. Though he was, he notes, nervous that his wife would react badly when she found out what he was doing. As it happens, she didn’t mind.

Mr. Parmenter, who is 54, has worked as a police officer and a lawyer over the course of a diverse career. He started writing essays because he needed the money and he knew he could do it well. He wrote papers for nursing and business students, along with a slew of English-literature essays. His main problem, he says, is that the quality of his papers was too high. “People would come back to me and say, ‘It’s a great paper, but my professor will never believe it’s me,’” says Mr. Parmenter. “I had to dumb them down.”

Eventually the low pay forced him to quit. In his best months, he brought home around $1,000. Other months it was half that. He estimates that he wrote several hundred essays, all of which he’s kept, though most he can barely remember. “You write so many of these things they start running together,” he says.

Both Mr. Parmenter and Mr. Robbins live in the United States. But the writers foressay mills are increasingly international. Most of the users who log into theEssay Writers Web site are based in India, according to Alexa, a company that tracks Internet traffic. A student in, say, Wisconsin usually has no idea that the paper he ordered online is being written by someone in another country.

Like Nigeria. Paul Arhewe lives in Lagos, that nation’s largest city, and started writing for essay mills in 2005. Back then he didn’t have his own computer and had to do all of his research and writing in Internet cafes. Now he works as an online editor for a newspaper, but he still writes essays on the side. In the past three years, he’s written more than 200 papers for American and British students. In an online chat, Mr. Arhewe insisted that the work he does is not unethical. “I believe it is another way of learning for the smart and hardworking students,” he writes. Only lazy students, Mr. Arhewe says, turn in the papers they purchase.

Mr. Arhewe started writing for Essay Writers after another essay mill cheated him out of several hundred dollars. That incident notwithstanding, he’s generally happy with the work and doesn’t complain about the pay. He makes between $100 and $350 a month writing essays — not exactly a fortune, but in a country like Nigeria, where more than half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, it’s not too bad either.

Mr. Arhewe, who has a master’s degree from the University of Lagos, has written research proposals and dissertations in fields like marketing, economics, psychology, and political science. While his English isn’t quite perfect, it’s passable, and apparently good enough for his clients. Says Mr. Arhewe: “I am enjoying doing what I like and getting paid for it.”

Write My Dissertation

Some customers of Essay Writers are college freshmen who, if their typo-laden, grammatically challenged order forms are any indication, struggle with even the most basic writing tasks. But along with the usual suspects, there is no shortage of seniors paying for theses and graduate students buying dissertations.

One customer, for example, identifies himself as a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He or she (there is no name on the order) is interested in purchasing a 200-page dissertation. The student writes that the dissertation must be “well-researched” and includes format requirements and a general outline. Attached to the order is a one-page description of Ph.D. requirements taken directly from MIT’s Web site. The student also suggests areas of emphasis like “static and dynamic stability of aircraft controls.”

The description is consistent with the kind of research graduate students do, according to Barbara Lechner, director of student services at the institute’s department of aeronautics and astronautics. In an initial interview, Ms. Lechner said she would bring up the issue with others in the department. Several weeks later, Ms. Lechner said she was told by higher-ups not to respond to The Chronicle’s inquiries.

The head of the department, Ian A. Waitz, says he doesn’t believe it’s possible, given the highly technical subject matter, for a graduate student to pay someone else to research and write a dissertation. “It seems like a bogus request,” says Mr. Waitz, though he wasn’t sure why someone would fake such an order. However, like Ms. Lechner, Mr. Waitz acknowledged that the topics in the request are consistent with the department’s graduate-level research.

Would-be aerospace engineers aren’t the only ones outsourcing their papers. A student at American University’s law school ordered a paper for a class called “The Law of Secrecy.” She didn’t include her full name on the order, but she did identify one of her two professors, Stephen I. Vladeck. Mr. Vladeck — who immediately knew the identity of the student from the description of the paper — was surprised and disappointed because he tries to help students who are having trouble and because he had talked to her about her paper. Mr. Vladeck argues that a law school “has a particular obligation not to tolerate this kind of stuff.” The student never actually turned in the paper and took an “incomplete” for the course.

Essay Writers attempts to hide the identities of its customers even from the writers who do the actual work. But it’s not always successful. Some students inadvertently include personal information when they upload files to the Web site; others simply put their names at the bottom of their orders.

Jessica Dirr is a graduate student in communication at Northern Kentucky University and an Essay Writers customer. She hired the company to work on her paper “Separated at Birth: Symbolic Boasting and the Greek Twin.” Ms. Dirr says she looked online for assistance because the university’s writing center wasn’t much help and because she had trouble with citation rules. She describes whatEssay Writers did as mostly proofreading. “They made some suggestions, and I took their advice,” she says. Unfortunately, Ms. Dirr says, the paper “wasn’t up to the level my professor was hoping for.”

Mickey Tomar paid Essay Writers $100 to research and write a paper on the parables of Jesus Christ for his New Testament class. Mr. Tomar, a senior at James Madison University majoring in philosophy and religion, defends the idea of paying someone else to do your academic work, comparing it to companies that outsource labor. “Like most people in college, you don’t have time to do research on some of these things,” he says. “I was hoping to find a guy to do some good quality writing.”

Nicole Cohea paid $190 for a 10-page paper on a Dove soap advertising campaign. Ms. Cohea, a senior communications major at the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote in her order that she wanted the company to “add on to what I have already written.” She helpfully included an outline for the paper and wondered whether the writer could “add a catchy quote at the beginning.”

When asked whether it was wrong, in general, to pay someone else to write youressay, Ms. Cohea responded, “Definitely.” But she says she wasn’t planning to turn in the paper as her own; instead, she says, she was only going to use it to get ideas. She was not happy with the paper Essay Writers provided. It seemed, she says, to have been written by a non-native English speaker. “I could tell they were Asian or something just by the grammar and stuff,” she says.

James F. Kollie writes a sporadically updated blog titled My Ph.D. Journey in which he chronicles the progress he’s making toward his doctorate from Walden University. He recently ordered the literature-review portion of his dissertation, “The Political Economy of Privatization in Post-War Developing Countries,” fromEssay Writers. In the order, he explains that the review should focus on privatization efforts that have failed.

Mr. Kollie acknowledged in an interview that he had placed an order with EssayWriters, but he said it was not related to his dissertation. Rather, he says, it was part of a separate research project he’s conducting into online writing services. When asked if his university was aware of the project, he replied, “I don’t have time for this,” and hung up the phone.

Policing Plagiarism

Some institutions, most notably Boston University, have made efforts to shut down essay mills and expose their customers. A handful of states, including Virginia, have laws on the books making it a misdemeanor to sell college essays. But those laws are rarely, if ever, enforced. And even if a case were brought, it would be extremely difficult to prosecute essay-mill operators living abroad.

So what’s a professor to do? Thomas Lancaster, a lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University, in England, wrote his dissertation on plagiarism. In addition, he and a colleague wrote a paper on so-called contract-cheating Web sites that allow writers to bid on students’ projects. Their paper concludes that because there is almost never any solid evidence of wrongdoing, catching and disciplining students is the exception.

In his research, Mr. Lancaster has found that students who use these services tend to be regular customers. And while some may be stressed and desperate, many know exactly what they’re doing. “You will look and see that the student has put the assignment up within hours of it being released to them,” he says. “Which has to mean that they were intending to cheat from the beginning.”

What he recommends, and what he does himself, is to sit down with students and question them about the paper or project they’ve just turned in. If they respond with blank stares and shrugged shoulders, there’s a chance they haven’t read, much less written, their own paper.

Susan D. Blum suggests assigning papers that can’t easily be completed by others, like a personal reflection on that day’s lecture. Ms. Blum, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and author of the recently published book My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, also encourages professors to keep in touch with students as they complete major projects, though she concedes that can be tough in a large lecture class.

But Ms. Blum points out a more fundamental issue. She thinks professors and administrators need to do a better job of talking to students about what college is about and why studying — which may seem like a meaningless obstacle on the path to a credential — actually matters. “Why do they have to go through the process of researching?” she says. “We need to convey that to them.”

Mr. Tomar, the philosophy-and-religion major who bought a paper for his New Testament class, still doesn’t think students should have to do their own research. But he has soured on essay mills after the paper he received from Essay Writers did not meet his expectations. He complained, and the company gave him a 30-percent refund. As a result, he had an epiphany of sorts. Says Mr. Tomar: “I was like — you know what? — I’m going to write this paper on my own.”

Subject: Cheating; Internet; Electronic commerce; Essays

Publication title: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Volume: 55

Issue: 28

Pages: A1,A22+

Publication year: 2009

Publication date: Mar 20, 2009

Year: 2009

Section: STUDENTS

Publisher: Chronicle of Higher Education

Place of publication: Washington

"She Used My Work and Now Her Reputation Was In Tatters, Was That Fair?" New Yorker, '04 by Malcolm Gladwell

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:07:32 -0400

By Malcolm Gladwell

One day this spring, a psychiatrist named Dorothy Lewis got a call from her friend Betty, who works in New York City. Betty had just seen a Broadway play called “Frozen,” written by the British playwright Bryony Lavery. “She said, ‘Somehow it reminded me of you. You really ought to see it,’ ” Lewis recalled. Lewis asked Betty what the play was about, and Betty said that one of the characters was a psychiatrist who studied serial killers. “And I told her, ‘I need to see that as much as I need to go to the moon.’ “

Lewis has studied serial killers for the past twenty-five years. With her collaborator, the neurologist Jonathan Pincus, she has published a great many research papers, showing that serial killers tend to suffer from predictable patterns of psychological, physical, and neurological dysfunction: that they were almost all the victims of harrowing physical and sexual abuse as children, and that almost all of them have suffered some kind of brain injury or mental illness. In 1998, she published a memoir of her life and work entitled “Guilty by Reason of Insanity.” She was the last person to visit Ted Bundy before he went to the electric chair. Few people in the world have spent as much time thinking about serial killers as Dorothy Lewis, so when her friend Betty told her that she needed to see “Frozen” it struck her as a busman’s holiday.

But the calls kept coming. “Frozen” was winning raves on Broadway, and it had been nominated for a Tony. Whenever someone who knew Dorothy Lewis saw it, they would tell her that she really ought to see it, too. In June, she got a call from a woman at the theatre where “Frozen” was playing. “She said she’d heard that I work in this field, and that I see murderers, and she was wondering if I would do a talk-back after the show,” Lewis said. “I had done that once before, and it was a delight, so I said sure. And I said, would you please send me the script, because I wanted to read the play.”

The script came, and Lewis sat down to read it. Early in the play, something caught her eye, a phrase: “it was one of those days.” One of the murderers Lewis had written about in her book had used that same expression. But she thought it was just a coincidence. “Then, there’s a scene of a woman on an airplane, typing away to her friend. Her name is Agnetha Gottmundsdottir. I read that she’s writing to her colleague, a neurologist called David Nabkus. And with that I realized that more was going on, and I realized as well why all these people had been telling me to see the play.”

Lewis began underlining line after line. She had worked at New York University School of Medicine. The psychiatrist in “Frozen” worked at New York School of Medicine. Lewis and Pincus did a study of brain injuries among fifteen death-row inmates. Gottmundsdottir and Nabkus did a study of brain injuries among fifteen death-row inmates. Once, while Lewis was examining the serial killer Joseph Franklin, he sniffed her, in a grotesque, sexual way. Gottmundsdottir is sniffed by the play’s serial killer, Ralph. Once, while Lewis was examining Ted Bundy, she kissed him on the cheek. Gottmundsdottir, in some productions of “Frozen,” kisses Ralph. “The whole thing was right there,” Lewis went on. “I was sitting at home reading the play, and I realized that it was I. I felt robbed and violated in some peculiar way. It was as if someone had stolen—I don’t believe in the soul, but, if there was such a thing, it was as if someone had stolen my essence.”

Lewis never did the talk-back. She hired a lawyer. And she came down from New Haven to see “Frozen.” “In my book,” she said, “I talk about where I rush out of the house with my black carry-on, and I have two black pocketbooks, and the play opens with her”—Agnetha—“with one big black bag and a carry-on, rushing out to do a lecture.” Lewis had written about biting her sister on the stomach as a child. Onstage, Agnetha fantasized out loud about attacking a stewardess on an airplane and “biting out her throat.” After the play was over, the cast came onstage and took questions from the audience. “Somebody in the audience said, ‘Where did Bryony Lavery get the idea for the psychiatrist?’ ” Lewis recounted. “And one of the cast members, the male lead, said, ‘Oh, she said that she read it in an English medical magazine.’ ” Lewis is a tiny woman, with enormous, childlike eyes, and they were wide open now with the memory. “I wouldn’t have cared if she did a play about a shrink who’s interested in the frontal lobe and the limbic system. That’s out there to do. I see things week after week on television, on ‘Law & Order’ or ‘C.S.I.,’ and I see that they are using material that Jonathan and I brought to light. And it’s wonderful. That would have been acceptable. But she did more than that. She took things about my own life, and that is the part that made me feel violated.”

At the request of her lawyer, Lewis sat down and made up a chart detailing what she felt were the questionable parts of Lavery’s play. The chart was fifteen pages long. The first part was devoted to thematic similarities between “Frozen” and Lewis’s book “Guilty by Reason of Insanity.” The other, more damning section listed twelve instances of almost verbatim similarities—totalling perhaps six hundred and seventy-five words—between passages from “Frozen” and passages from a 1997 magazine profile of Lewis. The profile was called “Damaged.” It appeared in the February 24, 1997, issue of The New Yorker. It was written by me.

Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are few simpler ethical notions than this one, particularly as society directs more and more energy and resources toward the creation of intellectual property. In the past thirty years, copyright laws have been strengthened. Courts have become more willing to grant intellectual-property protections. Fighting piracy has become an obsession with Hollywood and the recording industry, and, in the worlds of academia and publishing, plagiarism has gone from being bad literary manners to something much closer to a crime. When, two years ago, Doris Kearns Goodwin was found to have lifted passages from several other historians, she was asked to resign from the board of the Pulitzer Prize committee. And why not? If she had robbed a bank, she would have been fired the next day.

I’d worked on “Damaged” through the fall of 1996. I would visit Dorothy Lewis in her office at Bellevue Hospital, and watch the videotapes of her interviews with serial killers. At one point, I met up with her in Missouri. Lewis was testifying at the trial of Joseph Franklin, who claims responsibility for shooting, among others, the civil-rights leader Vernon Jordan and the pornographer Larry Flynt. In the trial, a videotape was shown of an interview that Franklin once gave to a television station. He was asked whether he felt any remorse. I wrote:

“I can’t say that I do,” he said. He paused again, then added, “The only thing I’m sorry about is that it’s not legal.”“What’s not legal?”Franklin answered as if he’d been asked the time of day: “Killing Jews.”

That exchange, almost to the word, was reproduced in “Frozen.”

Lewis, the article continued, didn’t feel that Franklin was fully responsible for his actions. She viewed him as a victim of neurological dysfunction and childhood physical abuse. “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness,” I wrote, “is the difference between a sin and a symptom.” That line was in “Frozen,” too—not once but twice. I faxed Bryony Lavery a letter:

I am happy to be the source of inspiration for other writers, and had you asked for my permission to quote—even liberally—from my piece, I would have been delighted to oblige. But to lift material, without my approval, is theft.

Almost as soon as I’d sent the letter, though, I began to have second thoughts. The truth was that, although I said I’d been robbed, I didn’t feel that way. Nor did I feel particularly angry. One of the first things I had said to a friend after hearing about the echoes of my article in “Frozen” was that this was the only way I was ever going to get to Broadway—and I was only half joking. On some level, I considered Lavery’s borrowing to be a compliment. A savvier writer would have changed all those references to Lewis, and rewritten the quotes from me, so that their origin was no longer recognizable. But how would I have been better off if Lavery had disguised the source of her inspiration?

Dorothy Lewis, for her part, was understandably upset. She was considering a lawsuit. And, to increase her odds of success, she asked me to assign her the copyright to my article. I agreed, but then I changed my mind. Lewis had told me that she “wanted her life back.” Yet in order to get her life back, it appeared, she first had to acquire it from me. That seemed a little strange.

Then I got a copy of the script for “Frozen.” I found it breathtaking. I realize that this isn’t supposed to be a relevant consideration. And yet it was: instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause. In late September, the story broke. The Times, the Observer in England, and the Associated Press all ran stories about Lavery’s alleged plagiarism, and the articles were picked up by newspapers around the world. Bryony Lavery had seen one of my articles, responded to what she read, and used it as she constructed a work of art. And now her reputation was in tatters. Something about that didn’t seem right.

In 1992, the Beastie Boys released a song called “Pass the Mic,” which begins with a six-second sample taken from the 1976 composition “Choir,” by the jazz flutist James Newton. The sample was an exercise in what is called multiphonics, where the flutist “overblows” into the instrument while simultaneously singing in a falsetto. In the case of “Choir,” Newton played a C on the flute, then sang C, D-flat, C—and the distortion of the overblown C, combined with his vocalizing, created a surprisingly complex and haunting sound. In “Pass the Mic,” the Beastie Boys repeated the Newton sample more than forty times. The effect was riveting.

In the world of music, copyrighted works fall into two categories—the recorded performance and the composition underlying that performance. If you write a rap song, and want to sample the chorus from Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” you first have to get permission from the record label to use the “Piano Man” recording, and then get permission from Billy Joel (or whoever owns his music) to use the underlying composition. In the case of “Pass the Mic,” the Beastie Boys got the first kind of permission—the rights to use the recording of “Choir”—but not the second. Newton sued, and he lost—and the reason he lost serves as a useful introduction to how to think about intellectual property.

At issue in the case wasn’t the distinctiveness of Newton’s performance. The Beastie Boys, everyone agreed, had properly licensed Newton’s performance when they paid the copyright recording fee. And there was no question about whether they had copied the underlying music to the sample. At issue was simply whether the Beastie Boys were required to ask for that secondary permission: was the composition underneath those six seconds so distinctive and original that Newton could be said to own it? The court said that it wasn’t.

The chief expert witness for the Beastie Boys in the “Choir” case was Lawrence Ferrara, who is a professor of music at New York University, and when I asked him to explain the court’s ruling he walked over to the piano in the corner of his office and played those three notes: C, D-flat, C. “That’s it!” he shouted. “There ain’t nothing else! That’s what was used. You know what this is? It’s no more than a mordent, a turn. It’s been done thousands upon thousands of times. No one can say they own that.”

Ferrara then played the most famous four-note sequence in classical music, the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth: G, G, G, E-flat. This was unmistakably Beethoven. But was it original? “That’s a harder case,” Ferrara said. “Actually, though, other composers wrote that. Beethoven himself wrote that in a piano sonata, and you can find figures like that in composers who predate Beethoven. It’s one thing if you’re talking about da-da-da dummm, da-da-da dummm—those notes, with those durations. But just the four pitches, G, G, G, E-flat? Nobody owns those.”

Ferrara once served as an expert witness for Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was being sued by Ray Repp, a composer of Catholic folk music. Repp said that the opening few bars of Lloyd Webber’s 1984 “Phantom Song,” from “The Phantom of the Opera,” bore an overwhelming resemblance to his composition “Till You,” written six years earlier, in 1978. As Ferrara told the story, he sat down at the piano again and played the beginning of both songs, one after the other; sure enough, they sounded strikingly similar. “Here’s Lloyd Webber,” he said, calling out each note as he played it. “Here’s Repp. Same sequence. The only difference is that Andrew writes a perfect fourth and Repp writes a sixth.”

But Ferrara wasn’t quite finished. “I said, let me have everything Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote prior to 1978— ‘Jesus Christ Superstar,’ ‘Joseph,’ ‘Evita.’ ” He combed through every score, and in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” he found what he was looking for. “It’s the song ‘Benjamin Calypso.’ ” Ferrara started playing it. It was immediately familiar. “It’s the first phrase of ‘Phantom Song.’ It’s even using the same notes. But wait—it gets better. Here’s ‘Close Every Door,’ from a 1969 concert performance of ‘Joseph.’ ” Ferrara is a dapper, animated man, with a thin, well-manicured mustache, and thinking about the Lloyd Webber case was almost enough to make him jump up and down. He began to play again. It was the second phrase of “Phantom.” “The first half of ‘Phantom’ is in ‘Benjamin Calypso.’ The second half is in ‘Close Every Door.’ They are identical. On the button. In the case of the first theme, in fact, ‘Benjamin Calypso’ is closer to the first half of the theme at issue than the plaintiff’s song. Lloyd Webber writes something in 1984, and he borrows from himself.”

In the “Choir” case, the Beastie Boys’ copying didn’t amount to theft because it was too trivial. In the “Phantom” case, what Lloyd Webber was alleged to have copied didn’t amount to theft because the material in question wasn’t original to his accuser. Under copyright law, what matters is not that you copied someone else’s work. What matters is what you copied, and how much you copied. Intellectual-property doctrine isn’t a straightforward application of the ethical principle “Thou shalt not steal.” At its core is the notion that there are certain situations where you can steal. The protections of copyright, for instance, are time-limited; once something passes into the public domain, anyone can copy it without restriction. Or suppose that you invented a cure for breast cancer in your basement lab. Any patent you received would protect your intellectual property for twenty years, but after that anyone could take your invention. You get an initial monopoly on your creation because we want to provide economic incentives for people to invent things like cancer drugs. But everyone gets to steal your breast-cancer cure—after a decent interval—because it is also in society’s interest to let as many people as possible copy your invention; only then can others learn from it, and build on it, and come up with better and cheaper alternatives. This balance between the protecting and the limiting of intellectual property is, in fact, enshrined in the Constitution: “Congress shall have the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited”—note that specification, limited—“Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

So is it true that words belong to the person who wrote them, just as other kinds of property belong to their owners? Actually, no. As the Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig argues in his new book “Free Culture”:

In ordinary language, to call a copyright a “property” right is a bit misleading, for the property of copyright is an odd kind of property… . I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it, you don’t have it. But what am I taking when I take the good idea you had to put a picnic table in the backyard—by, for example, going to Sears, buying a table, and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing that I am taking then?The point is not just about the thingness of picnic tables versus ideas, though that is an important difference. The point instead is that in the ordinary case—indeed, in practically every case except for a narrow range of exceptions—ideas released to the world are free. I don’t take anything from you when I copy the way you dress—though I might seem weird if I do it every day… . Instead, as Thomas Jefferson said (and this is especially true when I copy the way someone dresses), “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Lessig argues that, when it comes to drawing this line between private interests and public interests in intellectual property, the courts and Congress have, in recent years, swung much too far in the direction of private interests. He writes, for instance, about the fight by some developing countries to get access to inexpensive versions of Western drugs through what is called “parallel importation”—buying drugs from another developing country that has been licensed to produce patented medicines. The move would save countless lives. But it has been opposed by the United States not on the ground that it would cut into the profits of Western pharmaceutical companies (they don’t sell that many patented drugs in developing countries anyway) but on the ground that it violates the sanctity of intellectual property. “We as a culture have lost this sense of balance,” Lessig writes. “A certain property fundamentalism, having no connection to our tradition, now reigns in this culture.”

Even what Lessig decries as intellectual-property extremism, however, acknowledges that intellectual property has its limits. The United States didn’t say that developing countries could never get access to cheap versions of American drugs. It said only that they would have to wait until the patents on those drugs expired. The arguments that Lessig has with the hard-core proponents of intellectual property are almost all arguments about where and when the line should be drawn between the right to copy and the right to protection from copying, not whether a line should be drawn.

But plagiarism is different, and that’s what’s so strange about it. The ethical rules that govern when it’s acceptable for one writer to copy another are even more extreme than the most extreme position of the intellectual-property crowd: when it comes to literature, we have somehow decided that copying is never acceptable. Not long ago, the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe was accused of lifting material from the historian Henry Abraham for his 1985 book, “God Save This Honorable Court.” What did the charge amount to? In an expose that appeared in the conservative publication The Weekly Standard, Joseph Bottum produced a number of examples of close paraphrasing, but his smoking gun was this one borrowed sentence: “Taft publicly pronounced Pitney to be a ‘weak member’ of the Court to whom he could not assign cases.” That’s it. Nineteen words.

Not long after I learned about “Frozen,” I went to see a friend of mine who works in the music industry. We sat in his living room on the Upper East Side, facing each other in easy chairs, as he worked his way through a mountain of CDs. He played “Angel,” by the reggae singer Shaggy, and then “The Joker,” by the Steve Miller Band, and told me to listen very carefully to the similarity in bass lines. He played Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and then Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love,” to show the extent to which Led Zeppelin had mined the blues for inspiration. He played “Twice My Age,” by Shabba Ranks and Krystal, and then the saccharine seventies pop standard “Seasons in the Sun,” until I could hear the echoes of the second song in the first. He played “Last Christmas,” by Wham!, followed by Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” to explain why Manilow might have been startled when he first heard that song, and then “Joanna,” by Kool and the Gang, because, in a different way, “Last Christmas” was an homage to Kool and the Gang as well. “That sound you hear in Nirvana,” my friend said at one point, “that soft and then loud, kind of exploding thing, a lot of that was inspired by the Pixies. Yet Kurt Cobain”—Nirvana’s lead singer and songwriter—“was such a genius that he managed to make it his own. And ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?”—here he was referring to perhaps the best-known Nirvana song. “That’s Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling.’ ” He began to hum the riff of the Boston hit, and said, “The first time I heard ‘Teen Spirit,’ I said, ‘That guitar lick is from “More Than a Feeling.” ’ But it was different—it was urgent and brilliant and new.”

He played another CD. It was Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” a huge hit from the nineteen-seventies. The chorus has a distinctive, catchy hook—the kind of tune that millions of Americans probably hummed in the shower the year it came out. Then he put on “Taj Mahal,” by the Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor, which was recorded several years before the Rod Stewart song. In his twenties, my friend was a d.j. at various downtown clubs, and at some point he’d become interested in world music. “I caught it back then,” he said. A small, sly smile spread across his face. The opening bars of “Taj Mahal” were very South American, a world away from what we had just listened to. And then I heard it. It was so obvious and unambiguous that I laughed out loud; virtually note for note, it was the hook from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” It was possible that Rod Stewart had independently come up with that riff, because resemblance is not proof of influence. It was also possible that he’d been in Brazil, listened to some local music, and liked what he heard.

My friend had hundreds of these examples. We could have sat in his living room playing at musical genealogy for hours. Did the examples upset him? Of course not, because he knew enough about music to know that these patterns of influence—cribbing, tweaking, transforming—were at the very heart of the creative process. True, copying could go too far. There were times when one artist was simply replicating the work of another, and to let that pass inhibited true creativity. But it was equally dangerous to be overly vigilant in policing creative expression, because if Led Zeppelin hadn’t been free to mine the blues for inspiration we wouldn’t have got “Whole Lotta Love,” and if Kurt Cobain couldn’t listen to “More Than a Feeling” and pick out and transform the part he really liked we wouldn’t have “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—and, in the evolution of rock, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a real step forward from “More Than a Feeling.” A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative, and that distinction, I realized, was what was missing from the discussion of Bryony Lavery’s borrowings. Yes, she had copied my work. But no one was asking why she had copied it, or what she had copied, or whether her copying served some larger purpose.

Bryony Lavery came to see me in early October. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and we met at my apartment. She is in her fifties, with short tousled blond hair and pale-blue eyes, and was wearing jeans and a loose green shirt and clogs. There was something rugged and raw about her. In the Times the previous day, the theatre critic Ben Brantley had not been kind to her new play, “Last Easter.” This was supposed to be her moment of triumph. “Frozen” had been nominated for a Tony. “Last Easter” had opened Off Broadway. And now? She sat down heavily at my kitchen table. “I’ve had the absolute gamut of emotions,” she said, playing nervously with her hands as she spoke, as if she needed a cigarette. “I think when one’s working, one works between absolute confidence and absolute doubt, and I got a huge dollop of each. I was terribly confident that I could writewell after ‘Frozen,’ and then this opened a chasm of doubt.” She looked up at me. “I’m terribly sorry,” she said.

Lavery began to explain: “What happens when I write is that I find that I’m somehow zoning on a number of things. I find that I’ve cut things out of newspapers because the story or something in them is interesting to me, and seems to me to have a place onstage. Then it starts coagulating. It’s like the soup starts thickening. And then a story, which is also a structure, starts emerging. I’d been reading thrillers like ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ about fiendishly clever serial killers. I’d also seen a documentary of the victims of the Yorkshire killers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who were called the Moors Murderers. They spirited away several children. It seemed to me that killing somehow wasn’t fiendishly clever. It was the opposite of clever. It was as banal and stupid and destructive as it could be. There are these interviews with the survivors, and what struck me was that they appeared to be frozen in time. And one of them said, ‘If that man was out now, I’m a forgiving man but I couldn’t forgive him. I’d kill him.’ That’s in ‘Frozen.’ I was thinking about that. Then my mother went into hospital for a very simple operation, and the surgeon punctured her womb, and therefore her intestine, and she got peritonitis and died.”

When Lavery started talking about her mother, she stopped, and had to collect herself. “She was seventy-four, and what occurred to me is that I utterly forgave him. I thought it was an honest mistake. I’m very sorry it happened to my mother, but it’s an honest mistake.” Lavery’s feelings confused her, though, because she could think of people in her own life whom she had held grudges against for years, for the most trivial of reasons. “In a lot of ways, ‘Frozen’ was an attempt to understand the nature of forgiveness,” she said.

Lavery settled, in the end, on a play with three characters. The first is a serial killer named Ralph, who kidnaps and murders a young girl. The second is the murdered girl’s mother, Nancy. The third is a psychiatrist from New York, Agnetha, who goes to England to examine Ralph. In the course of the play, the three lives slowly intersect—and the characters gradually change and become “unfrozen” as they come to terms with the idea of forgiveness. For the character of Ralph, Lavery says that she drew on a book about a serial killer titled “The Murder of Childhood,” by Ray Wyre and Tim Tate. For the character of Nancy, she drew on an article written in the Guardian by a woman named Marian Partington, whose sister had been murdered by the serial killers Frederick and Rosemary West. And, for the character of Agnetha, Lavery drew on a reprint of my article that she had read in a British publication. “I wanted a scientist who would understand,” Lavery said—a scientist who could explain how it was possible to forgive a man who had killed your daughter, who could explain that a serial killing was not a crime of evil but a crime of illness. “I wanted it to be accurate,” she added.

So why didn’t she credit me and Lewis? How could she have been so meticulous about accuracy but not about attribution? Lavery didn’t have an answer. “I thought it was O.K. to use it,” she said with an embarrassed shrug. “It never occurred to me to ask you. I thought it was news.”

She was aware of how hopelessly inadequate that sounded, and when she went on to say that my article had been in a big folder of source material that she had used in the writing of the play, and that the folder had got lost during the play’s initial run, in Birmingham, she was aware of how inadequate that sounded, too.

But then Lavery began to talk about Marian Partington, her other important inspiration, and her story became more complicated. While she was writing “Frozen,” Lavery said, she wrote to Partington to inform her of how much she was relying on Partington’s experiences. And when “Frozen” opened in London she and Partington met and talked. In reading through articles on Lavery in the British press, I found this, from the Guardian two years ago, long before the accusations of plagiarism surfaced:

Lavery is aware of the debt she owes to Partington’s writing and is eager to acknowledge it.”I always mention it, because I am aware of the enormous debt that I owe to the generosity of Marian Partington’s piece … . You have to be hugely careful when writing something like this, because it touches on people’s shattered lives and you wouldn’t want them to come across it unawares.”

Lavery wasn’t indifferent to other people’s intellectual property, then; she was just indifferent to my intellectual property. That’s because, in her eyes, what she took from me was different. It was, as she put it, “news.” She copied my description of Dorothy Lewis’s collaborator, Jonathan Pincus, conducting a neurological examination. She copied the description of the disruptive neurological effects of prolonged periods of high stress. She copied my transcription of the television interview with Franklin. She reproduced a quote that I had taken from a study of abused children, and she copied a quotation from Lewis on the nature of evil. She didn’t copy my musings, or conclusions, or structure. She lifted sentences like “It is the function of the cortex—and, in particular, those parts of the cortex beneath the forehead, known as the frontal lobes—to modify the impulses that surge up from within the brain, to provide judgment, to organize behavior and decision-making, to learn and adhere to rules of everyday life.” It is difficult to have pride of authorship in a sentence like that. My guess is that it’s a reworked version of something I read in a textbook. Lavery knew that failing to credit Partington would have been wrong. Borrowing the personal story of a woman whose sister was murdered by a serial killer matters because that story has real emotional value to its owner. As Lavery put it, it touches on someone’s shattered life. Are boilerplate descriptions of physiological functions in the same league?

It also matters how Lavery chose to use my words. Borrowing crosses the line when it is used for a derivative work. It’s one thing if you’re writing a history of the Kennedys, like Doris Kearns Goodwin, and borrow, without attribution, from another history of the Kennedys. But Lavery wasn’t writing another profile of Dorothy Lewis. She was writing a play about something entirely new—about what would happen if a mother met the man who killed her daughter. And she used my descriptions of Lewis’s work and the outline of Lewis’s life as a building block in making that confrontation plausible. Isn’t that the way creativity is supposed to work? Old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea.

And this is the second problem with plagiarism. It is not merely extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of what does and does not inhibit creativity. We accept the right of one writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of another—think how many serial-killer novels have been cloned from “The Silence of the Lambs.” Yet, when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with a lawsuit). When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match” a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else’s idea. But had we “matched” any of the Times’ words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.

Dorothy Lewis says that one of the things that hurt her most about “Frozen” was that Agnetha turns out to have had an affair with her collaborator, David Nabkus. Lewis feared that people would think she had had an affair with her collaborator, Jonathan Pincus. “That’s slander,” Lewis told me. “I’m recognizable in that. Enough people have called me and said, ‘Dorothy, it’s about you,’ and if everything up to that point is true, then the affair becomes true in the mind. So that is another reason that I feel violated. If you are going to take the life of somebody, and make them absolutely identifiable, you don’t create an affair, and you certainly don’t have that as a climax of the play.”

It is easy to understand how shocking it must have been for Lewis to sit in the audience and see her “character” admit to that indiscretion. But the truth is that Lavery has every right to create an affair for Agnetha, because Agnetha is not Dorothy Lewis. She is a fictional character, drawn from Lewis’s life but endowed with a completely imaginary set of circumstances and actions. In real life, Lewis kissed Ted Bundy on the cheek, and in some versions of “Frozen” Agnetha kisses Ralph. But Lewis kissed Bundy only because he kissed her first, and there’s a big difference between responding to a kiss from a killer and initiating one. When we first see Agnetha, she’s rushing out of the house and thinking murderous thoughts on the airplane. Dorothy Lewis also charges out of her house and thinks murderous thoughts. But the dramatic function of that scene is to make us think, in that moment, that Agnetha is crazy. And the one inescapable fact about Lewis is that she is not crazy: she has helped get people to rethink their notions of criminality because of her unshakable command of herself and her work. Lewis is upset not just about how Lavery copied her life story, in other words, but about how Lavery changed her life story. She’s not merely upset about plagiarism. She’s upset about art—about the use of old words in the service of a new idea—and her feelings are perfectly understandable, because the alterations of art can be every bit as unsettling and hurtful as the thievery of plagiarism. It’s just that art is not a breach of ethics.

When I read the original reviews of “Frozen,” I noticed that time and again critics would use, without attribution, some version of the sentence “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.” That’s my phrase, of course. I wrote it. Lavery borrowed it from me, and now the critics were borrowing it from her. The plagiarist was being plagiarized. In this case, there is no “art” defense: nothing new was being done with that line. And this was not “news.” Yet do I really own “sins and symptoms”? There is a quote by Gandhi, it turns out, using the same two words, and I’m sure that if I were to plow through the body of English literature I would find the path littered with crimes of evil and crimes of illness. The central fact about the “Phantom” case is that Ray Repp, if he was borrowing from Andrew Lloyd Webber, certainly didn’t realize it, and Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t realize that he was borrowing from himself. Creative property, Lessig reminds us, has many lives—the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish. And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going. The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life. I suppose that I could get upset about what happened to my words. I could also simply acknowledge that I had a good, long ride with that line—and let it go.

“It’s been absolutely bloody, really, because it attacks my own notion of my character,” Lavery said, sitting at my kitchen table. A bouquet of flowers she had brought were on the counter behind her. “It feels absolutely terrible. I’ve had to go through the pain for being careless. I’d like to repair what happened, and I don’t know how to do that. I just didn’t think I was doing the wrong thing … and then the article comes out in the New York Times and every continent in the world.” There was a long silence. She was heartbroken. But, more than that, she was confused, because she didn’t understand how six hundred and seventy-five rather ordinary words could bring the walls tumbling down. “It’s been horrible and bloody.” She began to cry. “I’m still composting what happened. It will be for a purpose … whatever that purpose is.”

FLASHBACK: They were the kids of Malibu Colony

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:36:59 -0500

By Michele Willens, LA Times 2004

In the ’60s, beach-roaming kids discovered the Byrds playing at Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim’s open beach bash. A decade later, Cher’s son Elijah Allman’s first birthday party featured elephants and an Army tank. More recently, a lemonade stand served Tom Hanks, Kevin Kline and Tori Spelling, and every year, kids watch Fourth of July fireworks shot off from a private barge.

Los Angeles has no shortage of wealthy private enclaves, but none has quite the allure of the Malibu Colony, a mile of about 115 densely packed houses, off Pacific Coast Highway, mostly on 30-foot- wide lots, half of them on the “land side” (where prices have reached $6 million), half on the more desired beach side (where a home sold for $15 million this summer). Every house behind the simple wood guard shack and gate has a number (30, for instance) and many of them a celebrity provenance (No. 38 passed from Timothy Hutton to Bette Midler to Woody Harrelson.)

But the Colony is also a place where families have lived since it was established, and where thousands of kids (including this writer and later, her children) grew up, at least part of the year. Memories of the colony’s beauty, close-knit community, its storied residents and sun-drenched privilege drew about 150 people to the Littlejohn family’s tennis court recently for a first-ever Malibu Colony reunion. Ranging in age from 7 to 77, the group was ebullient but well aware of the obvious seductions and potential liabilities of growing up in the Colony.

”It is a place that gets in your heart and stays there, for good and bad,” says Joanne Gerson Blum, who, at 35, is living in her family’s longtime home there.

The magical mile was christened the Malibu Movie Colony in the late ’20s. Southern California Edison heiress May Rindge, who with her husband had purchased the whole of what was officially called Rancho Topanga Malibu for $10 an acre in 1891, was forced to lease it in the late ’20s. Rindge, with the help of friends in real estate, reached out to celebrities such as Dolores Del Rio, Ronald Colman and Gloria Swanson.

With the stars came carpenters from the studios to build cottages, and they were about as sturdy as what you find on a back lot. “It was certainly not glamorous from an architectural standpoint,” says Ann Fulton, who has had a house there for more than 50 years. In 1940, a cash-poor Depression victim, Rindge declared bankruptcy and the rancho was put up for sale.

Richard St. Johns, son of the Hearst newspaper reporter and screenwriter Adela Rogers St. Johns, says, “I went from the hospital where I was born to the Malibu Colony in 1929. Mama loved the beach and her house — No. 104 — was the third or fourth built.”

Adela was famous for her salon-like gatherings — “The house was always full of her pals like Clara Bow,” says St. Johns, an attorney living in London — and for being a surrogate mother for other youngsters. “All the kids called her Mom through the late ’40s … until she came down the stairs one morning and it was wall to wall sleeping bags with kids in them. She walked over to the corner desk, took out a pair of keys, dropped them in my lap and said, ‘You worry about them now.’ And she left for 10 years.”

For decades Malibu remained a slice of country life, away from the city, with cottages and ramshackle houses. There were virtually no homes on the land side and activities included badminton on the beach and an annual play put on by local celebrities on a tennis court.

Today, one thinks of Malibu as full of trendy stores and restaurants like Nobu and Granita. But in its early days there was little but Art Jones’ Malibu Inn — good and bad news for kids growing up there.

“I swear there were some winters we were the only family there,” says Frank Capra Jr., son of the director of such classics as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” (Capra Sr. was on the Malibu Colony Assn.’s first board of directors. “[No.] 95 was our only house from 1933 for many years. My dad used to drive into the studios or have his writers come out to work at the beach.”

Fulton’s screenwriter father bought their Colony house in 1939 when she was 1. It was a splendid summer house for a little girl, but when they moved there full time in 1953, it had its drawbacks, especially once she started high school in Santa Monica. “I was a sophomore and it was the most isolated existence you could imagine. I got a special driver’s license like you get on a farm, restricted to going to and from school. Dating was daring! If guys came to pick me up, you knew it was the real thing.”

Famous people were just neighbors and family friends. “I remember Dave Chasen trying out ribs in our fireplace and then my dad talking him into opening his own place,” says Capra Jr. “Our favorites were Clark Gable and Carole Lombard because they’d take walks with us.”

John Marin, 77, was about 7 when his father bought house No. 90 in the 1930s. “My first serious crush was on Loretta Young, who was renting there. She used to read to her child and me.”

Morton Gerson is another early Colony kid. He lived there with his father during the ’40s, bought another house later, and now his daughter Joanne, 35, lives there with her young family.

By all accounts, the ’60s and ’70s were when the Colony changed most dramatically. Lana Turner’s Malibu cottage was replaced by architect John Lautner’s moon-shaped structure and the building race was on. More and more families came out to live full time.

“I have a theory that it was the fires of the late ’60s and 1970 that drove people out of the canyons and into the Colony,” says Zach Feueur, 51, a former Malibu kid who worked for director Hal Ashby in his Colony home.

It was also when the number of children increased dramatically and the fun began. “It was still kind of the wildlands,” says 49- year old Mark Pierson, a producer-manager who grew up in the Colony and whose parents still have a house there. “That was before it went from bohemia to suburbia. By the age of 5, I was cut loose. It was bikes and skateboards and marbles and peashooters, total freedom. You would go to sleep and wake up with the pound of the surf and you knew what was happening before you walked on the beach.”

Bonnie O’Neal, the only girl in a family that included four boys, recalls that as kids, “We used to roof jump. We’d go along the beach and get on the roof and see how many houses we could go down without falling between. There was no way to be bored.”

But what once seemed spacious could become confining. “It was fantastic until we became teenagers,” says Preston Hagman, son of actor Larry and spa designer Maj, who lived in the Colony for 30 years. “I remember draining pools so we could skate in them. Plus the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.”

“It was a safe place to be wild but let’s say I wouldn’t let my kids do what we did,” says John Moss, today an attorney in Northern California. “A lot of coming of age was done there and it took its toll.”

“All these music people invaded the Colony,” says Pierson, “Donovan, [members of] Led Zeppelin, Ron Wood, Robbie Robertson, Alice Cooper, Neil Diamond, Linda Ronstadt. There were parties and drugs everywhere. We all thought we were going to be the next Beatles so there was a lot of cross-pollination.”

Role models were hard to find. “By today’s standards, all the adults we knew would be alcoholics,” says David Weil, a Los Angeles attorney who grew up in the Colony.

“I remember when Liz Taylor and Richard Burton’s kids used to say, ‘Well it’s noon. I guess Mom’s finished her first bottle of Dom Perignon,’ ” Maj Hagman adds.

“Anyone who could get from today to tomorrow with their children intact was a parenting role model,” laughs Carol Moss, who managed to raise three as a young widow.

Larry Hagman, who paid $115,000 for his house in the mid-’60s and sold it a few years ago to Sting for almost $7 million, tried to take some action, with mixed results.

“I had a big red book with names of kids and drugs and I called all the families in the Colony,” says Hagman, from his 44-acre retreat in Ojai. “One of them told their kids I was keeping a book and that night our house was broken into. I had it hidden under a mattress in the living room and they didn’t find it. I went to the district attorney who told me, ‘I have other things to do than check on rich kids.’ “

Gerson recalls Hagman in a different way. Hagman stormed into his house and “accused my kids of stealing his marijuana tree. I said ‘OK, go to the D.A. and tell them whose tree it was.” Reminded of that, Hagman laughs and says: “I was growing pot and they harvested it before I got a chance.”

Joan Almond, a longtime Colony resident, remembers trying to get a psychologist to deal with the kids and their parents about the potential hazards of drugs and to foster better communication between generations: “The parents were all in denial,” she says. “Then they got this guy from UCLA to come out and organize the kids one summer. Turned out he was giving them drugs too.”

Some parents also struggled with instilling values in such a charmed environment. “I remember when my daughter Monica said to me that so-and-so had 14 pairs of Fred Segal jeans,” recalls Fulton. “I said, ‘Monica, if I had $50 million, you wouldn’t have 14 pair of jeans.’ “

Colony veterans remembered how devoted a father Cary Grant was to daughter Jennifer. When he was divorcing Dyan Cannon (who lived in the Colony), there was a restraining order that prohibited him from coming within a certain number of feet of Cannon. So he rented his own place down the road. “We all remember seeing him in the morning in his bathrobe standing outside so he could watch [Jennifer] go off on the school bus,” says Bill Littlejohn, 90.

The Colony clearly has left a mixed bag of children from the counterculture years. “In doing this reunion, it became like a sociological study,” says Pierson, one of its organizers. “Colony kids suffered from a sense of entitlement going into adulthood. There’s over 300 kids and you can count the homeless, the suicides, the cancer deaths, even one sex change.”

Pierson’s own younger brother killed himself when he was 19; lifetime Colony resident and head lifeguard John Kewitt hanged himself after his wife Linda — whom he met in the Colony — died of cancer. Tommy O’Neill, one of Bonnie’s brothers, was heavily into drugs and tried to kill himself several times.

Others simply underachieved. “Colony kids imagined that that’s what their lives would be forever, that they didn’t have to do anything but surf and skateboard and smoke and drink,” says Mindy Marin, a casting director who left for boarding schools during her teenage years. “My brother struggled a lot with alcoholism and told me at 11 he was doing drugs in the Colony. Growing up anywhere else, these kids might have had different futures.”

Though most of the former Colony kids can no longer afford to live there — they’re shocked by home prices that range from $4 million to $15 million — many find themselves heading to the beach on weekends. They bring their own kids out to visit grandparents. But now, the majority of homes are second or even third ones and few children roam the road on a regular basis.

“It was more a village when we were growing up,” says Pierson. “Now it’s SUVs and maids and workmen all the time.”

Michele Willens’ father bought No. 74 in 1969. She is a writer in New York but spends summers back at No. 74 with her husband and two children.

GHOSTS OF DOWNTOWN: How You Get From $1.75 Lunches to $2,000- a-Month Lofts Depends on Many Things, Such as the Death of Urban Self-Loathing

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:27:00 -0500

GHOSTS OF DOWNTOWN: How You Get From $1.75 Lunches to $2,000- a-Month Lofts Depends on Many Things, Such as the Death of Urban Self-Loathing

By Carol Lynn Mithers

Publication info: Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles, Calif] 22 Sep 2002: I.14.

Photo from Skellum on Flickr

The windows are the same, though I never realized how grand they are, how high and wide. Maybe that’s because back then they were masked by cheesy drapes. I probably never saw them this clean either. When no one in the tour group was looking, I rested my hand on one, for connection. Each night when my father and I left the office, we’d open these windows for fresh air; in the morning, I’d flip on the AC and pull them down to shut out the street’s noise and stink. Even so, a smell lingered, stale and depressing. The walls were dirty beige, the carpet oatmeal, the furniture a utilitarian mix of file cabinets, water cooler, battered wood desks. All gone now. Everything from those days is gone, everything but the windows.

From 1970 to 1984, the northwest corner of the seventh floor of the Continental Building at 4th and Spring was my late father’s bankruptcy law office. It was the epitome of old downtown, a bleak two-room suite in a seedy building just a block from the skid row missions.

Today it’s one of three buildings re-imagined by maverick developer Tom Gilmore, and at the epicenter of L.A.’s “downtown renaissance.” This is why, on a recent sunny morning, I found myself on an apartment leasing tour of a place I never expected to see again. In the Continental’s lobby, a low ’60s-era ceiling had been torn away, revealing carved gold moldings. Hall floors were lined with scuffed mosaic tile. My father’s suite, 703, had been enlarged to become loft apartment 702. Where his desk had been was a bedroom area; where a bookcase held his legal texts was a small modern kitchen with black granite counters. Exposed ducts and funky concrete floors completed the upscale industrial look. There are 56 lofts for rent in the Continental. No. 702, with 1,085 square feet, was going for $2,000 a month.

In 1963, when my father, at 48, left a mid-Wilshire law firm to open his own practice, most attorneys with upper-middle-class aspirations had offices in Beverly Hills or brand-new Century City. He picked Spring Street because, he said, he liked being able to walk to court. The truth was that he’d grown up poor, still lived in perpetual fear of poverty, was terrified about starting over while supporting a family, and space on Spring was cheap. (Not having to pay for courthouse parking added to the savings.) Aesthetics weren’t on the radar.

His first office was above Eagleson’s Big & Tall Shop, just off 3rd, a building so old it still had elevator operators. Seven years later, he upgraded to the Continental. In 1904, when it was new and known as the Braly Building, it had been grand. It was L.A.’s first skyscraper, 12 stories, and the tallest building in town for 50 years. Spring Street was prosperous then, thick with banks and dubbed “the Wall Street of the West.” But when World War II defense plants drew workers and, later, returning GIs to the city’s edges, the neighborhood began to collapse. The redevelopment of Bunker Hill finished the job. By the ’70s, the Continental was an outpost in a ghost town.

I spent some of the longest hours of my life in that building. One of the ways my father economized was by not hiring a secretary, and on Saturdays I went downtown with him to file and type. Later, when I was 21, unemployed, directionless and reeling from the loss of a boyfriend to a cult, he gave me a job. To a suburban beach kid, Spring Street at first seemed a terrifying netherworld of grime and garbage, stumbling, reeking winos and shrieking street-corner preachers—things that you didn’t yet see on the Westside.

Next to the Continental was a fleabag hotel with a coffee shop called Jeffrey’s that my father favored because it, too, was cheap— maybe $1.75 for a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of weak coffee. Every time we went in, I wanted to run. The gray-faced patrons who slumped around the tables—like the street people, Eagleson’s elevator operators and the shiny-suited businessmen who kept offices at the Continental—were characters straight out of a Nathanael West novel, men and women so clearly beaten by life that not even a budding poet like me could romanticize them.

I think my father pitied these people, but his main feeling toward downtown was frank contempt. He was there only for reasons of economy; to him, the beauty of L.A. was its scrubbed suburban space, not the kind of aged, urban landscape he’d left behind in New York.

He retired in 1984. Just before he cleared out of the Continental, I took pictures; in my favorite, he’s looking pensively out of one of the tall windows over Spring Street. Shortly after, a developer with renovation plans bought the building, gutted it, then ran out of money. For years it just sat there, trash-strewn, boarded up. One of the few times we happened to be downtown together, I drove my father past it. He nodded with grim satisfaction. “What a piece of crap,” he said.

My father never knew that during the later years I worked with him I’d gone out for lunch one day, actually looked around and up, and had been staggered by the beauty of the buildings around me. How had I missed this? After that, whenever I could, I’d take walks to stare and marvel. I discovered Grand Central Market, Angels Flight, strange nooks and crannies—somewhere on 7th, I think, a hidden outdoor espresso bar where I would sit, drink cups of strong coffee and pretend I was overseas. I saw L.A.’s urban heart and fell in love, and for years I came back: to the self-conscious artiness of Gorky’s, the frenetic clatter of Vickman’s, Broadway’s blaring music and the crowded butcher shops on North Spring, where I could buy freshly slaughtered chickens from Chinese men fluent in Spanish.

Today, middle-aged and encumbered with husband, child, large dog and truckloads of possessions, I’m hardly a candidate for tenancy in the Continental or its sister buildings, the Hellman and San Fernando. The occupied units I was allowed to see during the leasing tour were spaces crammed with lurid art and neon, overseen by profoundly young, hip men and women, all black glasses, faux leopard and tattoos. Later, when I met with Trish Keefer, general manager of Gilmore Associates’ Old Bank District (and wife of Tom), the demographics she read from rental applications sounded like an advertiser’s fantasy: Here were students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (also newly based downtown) and USC, and grown-ups who worked as chefs and Web consultants, or in the clothing, music, entertainment and fiber-optic industries. Average age: 25 to 35.

But I get why these people are here—why, as Keefer puts it, they think living downtown is “so cool.” Art galleries, a clothing and general store, and restaurants are in the works nearby. There are 230 lofts in the three Gilmore buildings, with more soon to come— including in the hotel that once housed Jeffrey’s. I imagine the promise of downtown loft life is like the chance to inhabit some ultra-groovy TV drama: Young people meet in corridors and coffee shops, share ambitions, affairs, tragedies, triumphs—all set against a colorful urban backdrop and given added intensity by the sense of being on the cutting edge.

I’m not convinced that the new downtown will last, if the Continental’s tenants will stay once the novelty wears off. But the fact that it might also fills me with ambivalence. I hate that places and neighborhoods don’t exist until the well-off discover them. I worry what continued upscaling will mean to the poor and working-class people who already call downtown home. I wonder how much this new juxtaposition of wealth and desperation will raise L.A.’s heartlessness quotient—really, doesn’t the ability to enjoy dining at a ground-floor 4th Street bistro require one to see right through the homeless outside the plate-glass windows?

And on a basic level, $2,000 seems a lot to pay for concrete floors and a bathroom without windows. (As I looked over the Continental’s rental prices, which ran as high as $6,000 for a 2,750- square-foot penthouse with private terrace, I could hear my father gasping and whipping out his asthma inhaler. “They want what?” he wheezed.)

But it probably doesn’t matter what I think. The San Fernando, Hellman and Continental, which opened last September, are all fully rented. In No. 702, an entertainment industry couple, who moved from the mid-city with their dog, are now opening and closing those tall windows. I wonder if they think about their apartment’s history or sense the presence of those who came before. Even if they do, I’m certain they’ll never see one ghost—that of the tall, thin lawyer who spent so many hours there: Even in death, he’d choose another place to be. And for that reason alone, they’ll belong downtown in a way he never did.

Carol Lynn Mithers is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. Her last piece for the magazine was a profile of former Occidental College President John Brooks Slaughter.

CORRECTION: SEE CORRECTION APPENDED; Tallest building — In the essay “Ghosts of Downtown” in the Sept. 22 Los Angeles Times Magazine, the 1904 Continental Building, at 12 stories, was called “the tallest building in town for 50 years.” In fact, Los Angeles City Hall, at 28 stories, became the city’s tallest building when it opened in 1928.; In the essay “Ghosts of Downtown” (Sept. 22), it was incorrectly stated that the 1904 Continental Building, at 12 stories, was “the tallest building in town for 50 years.” Los Angeles City Hall, at 28 stories, became the city’s tallest building when it opened in 1928.

Los Angeles writer Janet Fitch on introducing L.A. to itself

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:19:37 -0500

by Janet Fitch, Los Angeles Times, 22 Apr 2012

To write about this city is in some essential way to create it. Not in cement and steel, but in the imagination of its citizens, as well as in the minds of people who will never come here but who nevertheless carry an image of it in their heads. An image that is, in its way, as important as the concrete place where people live and sleep and look for places to park.

So many people come to Los Angeles with an idea of the city, some apotheosis of the American Dream with palm trees plus a really nice car. Then they settle down into ordinary jobs and don’t even understand the part of town they live in, let alone how it fits into the city as a whole or how the city started and grew.

Is it that they lack curiosity? Or is it that curiosity requires a nub of knowledge, as a pearl requires that first grain of sand to irritate the oyster? All they feel is that vague dissatisfaction that the Los Angeles they came here for must be somewhere else, and if only they had enough money or success, they could find it. Meanwhile, they live in a sad vacuum of car and home and freeway.

My project in writing about Los Angeles is to introduce the city to itself. I grew up here, my mother grew up here, my grandmother came here in 1922, at age 15, married to a wardrobe man. I’ve seen Culver City go from a quiet nowheresville where you visited the Helms Bakery on a field trip and got a small loaf of bread, a place so anonymous Patty Hearst hid there before being discovered by the FBI, to a flourishing biosystem of galleries and restaurants.

I remember when Santa Monica Boulevard was the worst street in town, with its picket fence of high power lines, the abandoned streetcar line down the middle, a million ugly billboards and porn theaters. Now it’s adorable, complete with park median and terrific bars and shops. I’ve seen quiet Mid-City become Koreatown, with its high-density shopping and late-night scenes. I remember the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when they hadn’t yet killed off the Ahmanson gallery by walling in the atrium. There used to be a pretty gift shop that ornamented the entry, and I still can taste the excitement of looking across and seeing all the open galleries, how electrifying it all was. Now it looks like King Tut’s tomb. Before they opened it.

Novelists can explain the town to itself so it’s not just the blur you see from the freeway and a vague sense of being cheated because it didn’t match what you thought. Los Angeles in particular needs an introduction. It’s a private city, complex, it doesn’t roll itself out like a welcome mat, though it pretends it does. It’s more like a complex person, full of contradictions, worthy of a long conversation.

Once the citizens of a city begin to understand a place and value it, once its writers clean the mirrors and let people see themselves whole — not just a slice of eye or ear — only then does the city become a certain specific thing, conscious of itself, with politics and a history and cultural depth.

Los Angeles needs its writers to create a more complex and accurate picture of itself, not only for itself, but for the way it resides in the imagination of the world. Glossy entertainments depicting wealth and sybaritic pleasure no more reflect the real city than the slick Photoshopped image of a 16-year-old supermodel helps people better understand women. The L.A. I want to show has freckles, hips, laugh lines. Sorrows, fury, secrets.

As a writer, I see the glaring consequences of our failure to demand reality every day — how we have allowed commercial mythologies to dominate the perception of the city. I see it in the way people receive literature from Los Angeles. Tell people Susan Sontag was from here and you’ll see what I mean. It’s true in all the arts, and perhaps in other fields as well. It’s harder for our writers to be reviewed seriously. L.A. writers still must navigate the entrenched notion that we’re all out here lying by the pool with a margarita in one hand and a phone in the other.

So it’s crucial to get the real place on paper, not only to help Angelenos understand it, but also to create a more accurate picture of it in the imagination of the world. We’re never going to be able to explode that image completely — the glossy, mythical Wonderland is too valuable a commercial product — but we must at least put the real thing on the shelf beside it. It’s often a matter of outgrowing the images that you came here with and replacing them with genuine, observed reality.

Each novelist who relays his or her own personal vision truthfully is contributing to the composite, complex city of the mind that is the real Los Angeles.

Credit: Fitch is the author of several books, including the novels “White Oleander” and “Paint It Black.” She participated Saturday at the Festival of Books on the panel “Fiction — Family Ties.”

A 2008 profile of downtown Los Angeles's notorious Cecil Hotel, where "the hip and the near-homeless meet."

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:14:50 -0500

Check-in at the Cecil Hotel had to wait a few minutes because Kerri Torrance, the clerk working the graveyard shift one night in November, had to deal with a heist.

A man staying on the 10th floor had called down to report that a woman had grabbed his money and bolted.

After the woman dashed through the lobby and burst out the front doors onto Main Street, Torrance called police while a handful of guests waited.

“She’s right out there … you see … well … he said they were doing drugs, cocaine or something,” Torrance told police officers.

Then she cupped the receiver and mouthed, “I’m sorry, just a minute.”

This was not the type of greeting the new owners of the Cecil desire as they try to “re-brand” the 80-year-old hotel between 6th and 7th streets. “We are not a missionary, we are not a halfway house, we are a tourist’s hotel,” Torrance explained.

In its early years, the Cecil and hotels such as the Million Dollar, the Alexandria and the Rosslyn catered to the city’s elite out-of-town visitors, and lavish parties were held in their grand ballrooms.

When the wealthy abandoned downtown during the Depression, the Cecil and others like it became residential hotels that for generations housed those who were one step above homelessness.

But downtown is becoming a hip destination again, and these hotels are sought by developers who say they can turn a profit by luring university students, working professionals and tourists.

A few weeks before the drug robbery, the new owners of the Cecil removed the fuzzy bulletproof glass from the check-in window. Dozens of new lightbulbs glow from antique chandeliers that hang from high ceilings in the renovated lobby.

Torrance said the robbery was unusual — remnants of the “old” Cecil Hotel.

That “old” Cecil had quite a reputation. In the 1940s, it was one of the first public meeting places for Alcoholics Anonymous. It was later the sometime home of serial killers Jack Unterweger and Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez, and is included on a bus tour of eerie Los Angeles crimes.

Some long-term residents, such as 77-year-old Saverio “Manny” Maniscalco (14 years) and 30-year resident Michael Sadowe, still call the Cecil “The Suicide” because over the years a number of people have plunged to their deaths from the building.

But the real crime now, skid row activists say, is that longtime residents can’t afford the higher rents. One group, theLos Angeles Community Action Network, has sued owners of the Alexandria Hotel over what they allege are prejudiced and illegal housing practices. Earlier this month, one of the group’s supporting law firms sent a letter to the new owners of the Cecil, saying that they must stop their redevelopment or face similar legal action.

But the Cecil’s owners say they are not halting their effort to revive the hotel, which they bought last summer for about $26 million. They have promised to spend an additional $9 million on renovations.

A branding firm hired to recast the hotel’s image even came up with a possible new name: the Pearl.

“There’s been a big turnaround of clientele, we’re getting so many more tourists,” Torrance said. “We are changing with downtown, we are changing with the times.”

—

The website booking.com gives the Cecil two stars — by comparison, the Best Western Hollywood Hills Hotel on Franklin Avenue gets three stars — and says “if you want to stay at a fun, colorful hotel in an up-and-coming trendy loft area, with cool restaurants and hip shops, you can stay in one of Cecil Hotel’s 600 rooms, and save big bucks.”

Rooms usually cost $50 to $60 a night, depending on whether guests want their own bathrooms. Larger suites can cost about $100 a night.

But the rates vary depending on which website is used to book the rooms or whether guests have affordable-housing vouchers. When asked what the rates are, Torrance said they are “moderate” and “appealing” but would not give exact prices.

Fresh Monet, Picasso and Kandinsky posters hang on the vivid yellow, red and blue walls next to the elevators on each floor. But around the corner, reality hits: The rooms are small, bugs scamper across the floors and in the dim hallways, one sometimes encounters guests who have been using drugs or alcohol. Fred Cordova, the hotel’s new owner and director of the building’s renovation, said more changes are coming.

He pulled out a map showing buildings north and east of the Cecil that in recent years had been converted into lofts or downtown attractions for the middle class. The Cecil was the last in a string of developments leading south down Main Street.

“There is a great need for quality affordable housing downtown,” Cordova said. “It’ll be classy.”

Cordova hired a security firm for the Cecil to replace guards who had carried chemical Mace, handcuffs and batons.

The new guards wear crisp blue blazers and dark khakis, carrying only a walkie-talkie and badge.

“These suits have gotten us a lot of respect from the public,” said Brandon Foster, head of security at the hotel. “It’s a lot less threatening when we approach people.”

Cordova said that before he purchased the Cecil it was a haven for drug dealers, who would move in for a month and rent rooms for their clients to smoke and shoot up.

“Paramedics were always showing up,” Cordova said. “It was just ridiculous.”

To make room for new clientele, Cordova worked closely with the Los Angeles Police Department, giving officers access to the hotel and residents that he said previous owners had denied.

Foster said it boiled down to “getting a lot of knuckleheads out of here.”

Capt. Jodi Wakefield of the LAPD’s Central Division remembers that when she began her job downtown three years ago, there were frequent calls to the Cecil — most involving drugs and prostitution.

“Now the Cecil very rarely comes across my desk as a concern,” Wakefield said. “They have been very receptive to our requests, and it seems to be working.”

Cordova described his new, hypothetically “perfect” customer as a middle-class tourist looking to stay downtown inexpensively.

That means he’s going to have to persuade people such as 24-year-old Nicole Jackson, who was in L.A. recently to see the Spice Girls kick off their reunion tour at Staples Center.

“My friend and I needed a cheap place to stay,” Jackson said after getting out of an airport shuttle in front of the Cecil. “I didn’t really want to stay here because of the area … but I went on Hotwire and put in the price and was stuck.”

She was visiting from Columbus, Ohio, where she is a graduate student in history, and said the Cecil reminded her of the bohemian youth hostels she encountered while traveling in Europe, with communal showers and bathrooms, and prevalent drugs and alcohol.

After checking in, she settled for a pre-made cold turkey sandwich from the cafe below, smoked a cigarette and looked around.

Jackson said she was pleasantly surprised when she entered the hotel, but changed her mind after she went up to her room.

“The entranceway is unbelievably amazing, and then I turned the corner and was like, ‘whoa!’ ” she said.

—

Maniscalco and other longtime residents of the Cecil say the hotel and surrounding blocks are safer. But Maniscalco doesn’t kid himself; he knows the improvements were not devised with him in mind.

Management has moved him twice in recent months, but so far he hasn’t taken the hint. “Where else am I going to go?” he said.

He arrived on skid row in the 1970s after working odd jobs around the country and falling into alcoholism. He says he’s been sober for years — and feels that the stability of the Cecil has helped keep him on the straight and narrow.

He collects about $900 a month from Social Security, paying $471 for rent.

“This is my last stop,” he said. “I don’t have anywhere else. No family or nothing.”

Maniscalco knows that tourists are paying higher rates and said that in recent months airport shuttles and charter buses have been dropping off dozens of travelers at the hotel.

Cecil employees say that over a month, a tourist may pay about twice as much as a low-income resident.

Alvin Taylor has lived at the Cecil for 25 years. Unlike Maniscalco, Taylor said he refused managers’ requests to move out of his room on the 10th floor.

His room, which in a typical house would be about the size of the dining room, is packed with belongings, including three 27-inch televisions, each hooked to a VCR. “I watch everything,” Taylor said.

Last Christmas, Taylor went back to Texas — “I gotta see my momma,” he said — one of the few times in the last decade that he has stayed overnight anywhere other than the Cecil. Taylor moved to Los Angeles from Houston in the 1970s when he was diagnosed with leukemia, and thought the weather and doctors would be better in Southern California.

He’s been downtown since, mostly unemployed and on disability.

He said that soon after new owners took over the hotel, maintenance crews came to work on some pipes in his room. As they began, Taylor said cockroaches flooded out of a hole in the wall. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I’ve got roaches.”

Maniscalco and Taylor are among 90 to 110 long-term residents — depending on who is counting — and both said they are worried about rising rates and eviction.

Last fall, the two men walked a few blocks down Main Street to tell Pete White and Becky Dennison of the Los Angeles Community Action Network about their problems with the Cecil’s new owners.

“I think they want us to move for one reason,” Taylor told White. “Because they don’t want us to be residents. They’re trying to turn it into a tourist attraction.”

Cordova said he is staying within the law and paying little attention to complaints from the community group.

He said his ambitions are reasonable and that he has no illusions about the neighborhood.

Still, he promises that the Cecil’s makeover will continue and said he is seriously considering renaming the venerable hotel “the Pearl.”

“Because the world is your oyster,” he said, showing sketches of what the new name would look like on the side of the building. “Maybe we’ll get a third star.”

And while we're discussing the Cecil Hotel, a fascinating 1994 LA Times article about Skid Row's aging hotels.

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:10:46 -0500

Welcome to the Hotel Californian. There are no mirrors on the ceilings or pink champagne on ice. Still, like the near-namesake hotel immortalized in the 1977 Eagles hit, this could be heaven. But it seems more like hell. In this five-story, single-room-occupancy building in the middle of cacophonous Westlake, gaping holes in ceilings, trash-strewn hallways and roach-infested rooms welcome tenants.

Conditions like these at the Hotel Californian beset a host of dwellings in Central Los Angeles creating a legion of substandard housing, or slums as they are commonly called. The problem is especially acute in the Westlake and Pico-Union areas, home to some of the city’s oldest buildings. Scores of those neighborhoods’ deteriorating 1920s and ’30s apartment buildings and hotels are rife with fire and safety hazards and unsanitary living conditions.

About 7% of Los Angeles 780,271 multiple-dwelling units are considered substandard, according to the city’s Department of Housing. Local regulatory agencies do not find scads of earth-shattering violations-such as an open elevator shaft or a collapsed roof. But violations are cumulative, in some cases adding up to 20 or more for a single building.

And small problems can grow.

In the 11 years she has lived in the Cambria Apartments, at 738 S. Union St., Maria Conteras has endured trash-filled hallways, unreliable plumbing, and rats and roaches. Those problems were compounded in 1992 when the owner fired the building manager, leaving no one to make even minor repairs. The owner also stopped paying the bills for trash pickup, gas and electricity bills.

“We would complain to the landlord,” said tenant Josephine Guzman, “but he wouldn’t do anything. He wouldn’t listen to us.”

Finally, Conteras and other tenants took matters into their own hands. They organized a rent strike with the help of the Legal Aid Foundation and took over basic management duties, including collecting money from residents to pay the gas bill and trash collection, and cleaning the building themselves every Saturday. “We didn’t want it to get real bad,” Conteras said.

Local regulatory agencies try to compel owners and landlords to keep their properties safe and habitable through warnings, citations and the prospect of prosecution. Some landlords pull their buildings up to code to comply. But a number of other structures continue to slide into disrepair under owners who skirt those warnings, keeping the law at bay.

“They know how to work the system and play into the sympathies of everybody in the system to get as much time as possible,” said Lauren Saunders, an attorney with Bet Tzedek Legal Services.

In other cases, building owners end up becoming the scapegoats for destructive tenants. “Some of these landlords have tremendous problems with drugs, gangs, prostitution, in addition to dealing with old buildings” that are costly to repair, said Barry King, an attorney who has represented landlords for 12 years. “In some cases, no matter how much work they do, there will still be problems with the buildings.”

Building owners can sometimes avoid prosecution if they can persuade individual inspectors to grant them more time to do repairs. But if conditions are grave enough to call in the city’s Slum Housing Task Force, the law usually will catch up to them.

“They can try to put things off for a while but we don’t go away,” said Richard Bobb, deputy city attorney and head of the task force.

The multi-agency task force was created in 1980 to crack down on the owners of the city’s most dilapidated apartment buildings. Its seven inspectors, representing the county health department and the city’s building and safety and fire departments, focus on multiunit structures with common hallways, mainly found in Central Los Angeles and parts of the San Fernando Valley. Smaller, “garden-style” apartment structures on the Eastside and in South Los Angeles are handled separately by the health and building and safety departments.

“We’re after just the basic services for human beings… . Just the basic necessities of life,” said building and safety task force inspector Howard Stern.

The buildings on the task force caseload-about 100 at any given time-are usually in code violation of all three inspection agencies involved. The goal is not demolition, but rehabilitation.

Bobb said that since the task force’s creation, he has seen many more landlords in the past few years bring their buildings up to code to avoid criminal charges, hefty fees and possible jail time.

Part of that increase in compliance is due to the change in the types of property owners, he said. Some of the ’70s and ’80s slumlords who milked rent out of buildings with no regard for living conditions are being replaced by owners who do the minimum required maintenance, and unsophisticated owners who bought property without fully understanding the amount of work involved.

Most landlords, said King, do not run “empires of low-standard housing, but more are mom-and-pop people who are trying to do right.”

In a typical task force case, a landlord is cited and given 30 days to complete the repairs or at least begin the work. Failure to make some significant progress by the deadline may result in criminal charges being filed depending on the number and types of violations, Bobb said. Guilty owners face penalties that range from a fine and the cost of the investigation to doing community service, or being sentenced to house arrest or jail.

Still, there are some who slip through the system’s cracks. A number of factors allow this to happen, judges and officials from city agencies say.

The overburdened system can, at best, investigate complaints and possibly do follow-up visits, but has few resources to do preventive work. Ten members of the city Fire Department handle inspections of commercial and residential buildings over three stories tall throughout the city, said Chief James Hill of the high-rise division. In the Building and Safety Department alone, 260 inspectors in the community safety division were responsible for checking out 49,555 complaints in commercial and residential buildings during fiscal 1993, said Phil Kaainoa, the division’s assistant chief. Budget cuts have dropped the number of inspectors to 228.

And several officials said there is a desire by some sympathetic judges, attorneys and inspectors to work with the landlords to improve the property, only to have some landlords take advantage of that.

“The end goal is to have a building that’s up to code. That’s what we’re all working toward here,” said Municipal Court Judge Vicki MacBeth, who in 1985 became the nation’s first judge to sentence a slumlord to house arrest. “You have to make some allowances sometimes. Because you want to make sure these people still have a safe place to lay their heads at night.”

In a recent reinspection of the 200-room Californian, at 1907 W. 6th St., the list of what was wrong with the building far exceeded what was right, said Frank MacIntyre, a health inspector for the task force. The building has been cited at least three times since 1989 with as many as 20 violations, some as serious as faulty fire doors and no emergency exit signs, according to the city’s building and safety department.

Cigarette butts, used tissues and chewing gum littered the hallway floors and carpets. In one room, a purple T-shirt was strung through a doorknob hole; the door had no lock. Inside was a mess of empty beer bottles, food and dirty clothes, holes in the wall, a broken smoke detector and a pale-green carpet covered with large black and gray blotches of ingrained dirt.

The building’s recorded owner, Dali Dale Inc. of Los Angeles, has done little or nothing in the way of repairs or cleanup, MacIntyre said. Gregorio Groisman, who holds most of the interest in the building but is not on record as the owner, was out of the country, according to the building’s general manager. The only telephone number and address for Groisman was at the Cecil Hotel, 640 S. Main St., which he and now-deceased partner Josefa Lerner sold several years ago. Both the Californian’s business manager and the manager of Cecil Hotel said they had no idea how to reach Groisman.

“We’re trying to get in touch with him too,” said Roger Birdseye, general manager of the Cecil. “He really took (the new owners) for a ride when he sold the building.”

Tenants seldom live in these buildings because they want to, officials say. It is a matter of necessity. They are simply desperate to avoid the dangers of living on the street. For them, any space of their own is a step up.

Some tenants are illegal immigrants, fearful that complaints might land them in trouble with immigration officials. Some are drug addicts or dealers. Others are just looking for an inexpensive, decent place to sleep at night.

Maria Loper, 39, who has lived in the Californian for the past year, is tormented by the flying water bugs that swoop down over her head at night and the cockroaches that crawl freely across her walls and floor. Loper’s 2- and 4-year-olds were taken from her last month by a social worker who said their cramped room at the Californian was unlivable. They had moved here from a local shelter the Red Cross put them up in after their South-Central apartment burned.

“I want to get out of here and get my children back, but I can’t right now,” Loper said. She cried with each mention of her children.

With the single sweep of an arm, a tour of Loper’s $350-a-month home is complete.

Sunlight tries to make its way through a filthy yellow shade. The floor is barely large enough to fit the two single mattresses for her and her children. The walls, their paint peeling, are splattered with dirt and crusted with food. Clinging to a corner of the bathroom ceiling are the remains of a roach nest, a cluster of brown spores about the radius of a bowling ball.

“I complain to (the clerk) at the front desk all the time about the roaches and the water bugs and they don’t do nothing,” Loper said. “And when the (social worker) came, a rat ran across the floor and she seen my bathroom and took my kids.”

But while tenants complain of landlords’ misdeeds, landlords have their own gripes-about tenants.

“The people, they don’t know how to treat these places. They kick in the windows, the doors, the screens, everything,” said Joe Tabello, owner of a 100-unit building at 840 S. Hobart St.

Only 10 of the apartments are rented now. The building looks shoddy in some places-broken windows, filthy carpets and dingy walls-but there are few serious violations, said Herb Zimmerman, a building and safety inspector for the task force.

Tabello said that soon after tenants move in, they stop paying rent. He said he has lost more than $20,000 annually since he bought the building in 1985. Once eviction proceedings get under way, he said, tenants start breaking things up. “They destroy the apartments and we end up looking like the bad people,” he said.

Deputy City Atty. Michael Wilkinson agreed that tenants sometimes vandalize buildings and fail to pick up their trash. But, he said, the lack of maintenance and repair-not poor tenants-ultimately creates slums.

Said Bobb: “Of course, if you didn’t have any tenants in any property, they would remain pristine. But in any property there will be wear and tear. And as management you have the responsibility to limit that wear and tear.”

Bobb has a laundry list of excuses landlords and their attorneys have thrust at him when cited for substandard housing:

“We hired an exterminator. What more can we do?”

“Any building this old is bound to have problems.”

“My client is not a slumlord. He didn’t know what he was getting into.”

Dan Woodard, manager of two buildings on Westlake Avenue since 1988, has seen it from both sides.

“A lot of it is bad tenants,” said Woodard, who lived as a tenant in one of the buildings he manages. “Some of it is the landlords’ fault too because they don’t take care of the places properly.”

One building Woodard oversees, at 720 S. Westlake Ave., was cited by the task force in 1987 while Woodard was still a tenant. Then-owner Tim Priest started to make repairs, but fell behind on his payments and didn’t have enough money to complete the work, Woodard said. Priest, who owned other properties that were also in disrepair, was sentenced to house arrest in the building and later was sent to jail.

“The place was a mess. People would throw trash in the hallway. When I would come home at night from work there’d be flies and mice in my room,” said Woodard, a former Merchant Marine and a recovering alcoholic. “I remember saying that if I ever took over this place, I’d fix it up.”

Woodard is a no-nonsense manager: No drugs. No alcohol. No visitors after 10 p.m. Rent is due on the first of the month. His rules are strict. His security guards are tough. And his buildings are clean and up to code.

“You do what you have to do around here,” he said. For Woodard, that has meant evicting dozens of problem tenants and using his own money to clean up an alley behind the building and making repairs to the building.

Woodward is the type of manager needed to successfully run apartment buildings, said MacIntyre. “You have to weed out the bad or else your legitimate tenants will move out and you end up with a drug-infested, crime-infested rat hole.”

There are as many ways buildings deteriorate as there are landlords, from professional slumlords who milk their buildings for everything they can, to the neophytes who have gotten in over their heads financially.

And judges, such as MacBeth and Susan Person, say individual circumstances must be taken into account when building owners are sentenced.

“I will put people in jail if they are deserving, I have no problem with that,” Person said. “But there is no hard-and-fast rule here.

“And you have to look at how your judgment will affect the people living in these buildings,” she said. “If the landlord goes to jail, the building still doesn’t get fixed. So you have to look at everything.”

However, Bobb and other prosecutors said that making building repairs goes with the territory of property ownership.

“Not everyone can be a brain surgeon. Not everyone can be President. And not everyone can be a landlord or building manager,” Bobb said.

“If you want a passive investment, buy municipal bonds.”

On the Cover

Ramon Ascencio, 75, an unemployed tenant, has lived in his Union Street apartment for 12 years and now shares it with two others.

About 7% of the city’s multiunit housing structures are considered substandard-many of them in Westlake and Pico-Union. Regulatory agencies don’t usually find earth-shattering building and safety code violations, but in some cases 20 or more can be found in a single building. Building owners can sometimes avoid prosecution but if conditions are grave enough to call in the city’s Slum Housing Task Force, the law usually catches up with them. “We don’t go away,” said Richard Bobb, head of the task force.