Section 1 – Crisis
When the tactical squad raided my basement apartment in February of 1985, they discovered a baseball-sized rock of cocaine. It was a final drama of a dizzying downward spiral. I had spent over a decade immersed in movements for social justice. Now I was an addict and an alcoholic.
The cops sledgehammered my safe, confiscated weed and rock, ransacked my political books, and made off with my triple beam scale. My oldest son, Ricky, was barely a week old at the time. My wife, recovering from a C-section, was cuffed and taken to the lockup at 26th and California. I was picked up at work and taken to the 9th District to be charged with a Class X felony. I was facing 6 years.
When I didn’t show up at my mom’s 75th birthday party two days later, my Waukegan family found out. Mom said that it was as if someone had grabbed her by the hair and dragged her around all four corners of her kitchen.
After I got bailed out, my brother and two sisters hit me with stern questions. How had I let my life spin out of control? What happened to the other Bill, the one who was all about positive things for the community? Would I step up and get rehabilitation? Would I take responsibility for the family that I was starting?
It was a netherworld that I inhabited at that time. I was the main pusher of grass and coke in a couple of bars on Morgan and Lithuanica. I was in the taverns every night, able to get going each morning by snorting thick lines of coke. My friends were former gang bangers, bar flies, addicts, hookers, and other chronic losers. I was out of my mind with that white powder swirling in my brain. The devious drug managed to convince me that up was down and down was up. I was running the streets and feeling a false exhilaration.
Some nights I would make a triangular pub circuit, checking in with the night denizens of three boozy cultures. I’d start out at Stanley’s, a shot and beer place in Bridgeport, where I had a regular clientele of other drug abusers. Quite a few were descendants of the original Lithuanian community. Others were white ethnics of one stripe or another, navigating the sticky floors and the nasty urinal. They were hog butchers, day laborers, veterans, unemployed, hustlers, ex-cons, criminals.
My next stop would be Rudy’s, a projects bar at 39th and State. For reasons I still don’t quite understand, I enjoyed the feeling of danger in showing up alone at a ghetto joint. The place was usually overflowing. Most of the drinkers lived in the Robert Taylor high rises. It never was hard to get into a spirited talk. I remember playing a type of “dozens” with a quick witted friend. He pointed to my Miller Lite and said “You’re Light Bill”. My response brought down the house. Pointing to his Lowenbrau, I told him that he was “Low and Brown”.
I saw knives drawn, gang disputes, hustles and flows. Who could forget the night Mr. T showed up with a huge pet snake draped around his shoulders? Or the joyous juke box music of “Happy Birthday Martin Luther King” from Stevie Wonder?
Completing the third leg, I would stop at a Mexican bar in the Back of the Yards. There I might run into some of my students from the English as a Second Language class that I was teaching a few blocks to the west. Maybe I’d smoke a joint with Indalecio, a guy from Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco. I had visited him on his ranch the year before. Maybe I’d buy a watered down drink for a B-girl and talk nonsense in Spanish.
Sometimes I would make the circuit twice, getting plastered, varying one destination or another. Heading home, my car was unsteady. My brain was depressed. That’s what alcohol always brings. I was more comfortable in this realm of smoky darkness than among everyday people. In this house of mirrors, I was shopping drugs. My trademark political agitation was a thing of the past.
When the night ended at an after-hours joint, I had my white powder to keep me going. Some nights my wife would call a bartender begging to speak with me. Often I would ignore her. It reminded me of how my mom used to put me on the phone to my own dad. I’d beg him to come home from his stool at Club 18 so many years ago.
All the self-evaluation on rejoining my family took me only so far. I rationalized that I had sacrificed so much for the movement in my 20s and early 30s, that I deserved to earn illegal profits and live that life. I told myself that I would probably eventually find some job and work it till retirement. For now I was trapped in the grip of addiction. I was my own best customer, erratic, crazed, sexually impotent, and oblivious to the risks I was taking.
Now diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, I’m setting out to explore the threads of motivation that ran through my life and made me the person that I became. I need to make sense of a dangerous arc. The same Bill Drew lived in times of idealism and exuberance, times of despair, and then re-generation. Finally I returned actively to my ideals. The memoirs are primarily meant as a service to my sons, who are now entering manhood. I want to recount the good with the bad.
I hope my unsanitized history can provide insights into the many factors that came into play as we lurched from the tumultuous ‘60s into an era of Reaganite conservatism. So many people today – especially the youth – are again finding themselves nose to nose against inexorable take backs. We find ourselves having to defend everything from our standards of living to our very civil rights. Bleak is the future that my sons are facing. I hope that my memories can give the next generation some hope and ideas on how to regroup and counter attack.
The theme of redemption is helpful in explaining five parts of my life: the imprint of an Irish Catholic upbringing, my period as an activist, my descent into addiction and drug dealing, my 25 years as a bread winner, and my return to activism as I neared retirement. Though I am not in any way religious, redemption is a useful concept. Though I do not believe in the doctrine of original sin, I cannot deny that the concepts of sacrifice and atonement live deep inside of my unconscious. Sacrifice can be a good thing — especially when you need a second chance.