In Chicago, I tumbled headlong into drugs and tavern life.  My new “family” included all the people who were glad to see me coming because I had the drugs.  One of these was Bobby Bloom.  He was sometimes a bartender at Bob’s on 32^nd & Morgan.  He was strung out on cocaine.  His wit and jokes drew other people to him.

Whenever he needed a delivery for his own use, I’d slide a snow cone under his hand on the bar.  He would add entries to the heavy drinkers’ tabs.  And then pay me from the register.  Sometimes he paid with food stamps.  Other times I would meet him in back of a hamburger joint where he worked.  We would exchange boxes of stolen food for the white powder.

One time, he had me meet him in front of a house on Ashland.  He handed me an envelope and I gave him his dope.   After he split, I discovered that the envelope was filled with pieces of newsprint cut to dollar size.   I couldn’t help but smile.  It was much better than a ploy by Bobby’s brother.  Pete had once offered me the key to the trunk of his car as a marker to pay later.    I remember seeing Bobby on the toilet seat at my apartment shooting up in his forearm.  The last time I saw him, he was walking down Morgan at 7 am.  He was carrying a blanket and a pillow – either looking for somewhere to crash or just getting rousted from where he had crashed the night before.  I’m told that he died of AIDS.

Despair gripped me.  All the progressive movements were on the defensive as the political tides shifted.  Before, our youthful cry of dissatisfaction had been the dominant impetus; now calls for rollback and revenge came up from the suburbs.  This was a huge deal.  It expressed itself strongly in our culture.

The hopeful strains of R&B, country rock, and soul were being drowned out by pulsing disco – or elaborate orchestras.  The drug of choice was not the doobie that a group would pass and share.  Cocaine, that evil white powder, was flooding in.  Now you’d maybe share with only one person – going off to a private place to toot lines.  The white stuff would make you babble on with grand illusions about yourself.  Welcome to the ‘80s.

I don’t bring up cultural context as a way to excuse my degeneration.  I do say that it is a seductive addiction.  It became a substitute for the adrenaline rush from my times as an activist.  I was not the only one who used an artificial substance to regain some of the old excitement.  In fact, a frenetic focus on self was invading our cultural forms and aggravating the anxieties of an aging generation.

Cast adrift on Chicago’s mean streets, I was without the old sense of purpose and collective will.  Suddenly after 15 years of working in a disciplined group, I had no peers who would help me figure out my tasks.  Gone were the smart friends who could help search for that crack in the opposition, that location to place a wedge to widen the possibilities.  Formerly we had thought nothing of speaking frankly of our own mistakes.  We offered honest opinions on the weaknesses of our comrades.  Now secrets and boasts were the norm.

The conclusion of my criminal life came when cops asked me to step out of a computer lab that I was monitoring at National College of Education.  They took me from the Loop to the 9^th District lock up at 35^th and Lowe.  I remember sitting between two burly cops, cuffed and in the back seat.  Riding under the Chinatown Arch, it dawned on me that I was, at last, relieved of the stress of my double life.  It was like the classic serial killer would say, “What took you guys so long?”

I hired a lawyer and began a long, stressful wait for my court date to finally come up.  When my mom told me that I should enroll in graduate school, I shot back, “You go to grad school.”  But it was really my only good option.  Because I had been living and breathing social causes, I figured I’d have no trouble studying Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Hoping that good studies could affect my trial and sentencing, I strove to ace every class.  I specialized on computer applications in urban planning.  It was not a school sponsored specialization.   Computers were my personal strategy for getting a good job so that I could support my family.  I chose a niche that was growing and relatively free of competition.