Dipping and Dabbing

By Lorenzo Williams

This book is loosely based on the author’s life story, the struggles with the disease of addiction and recovery. Sunshine and rain!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662443053

Book preview

Chapter 1

May 1, 1983

I turned myself in and was charged with first-degree murder. I remember sitting in my cell trying to cry because of the life I had just taken. I frowned up my face, and no tears came. I found out later in the week the Department of Corrections was given all the cats that came in with murder charges or similar violent charges, some pills called hell-dog, some sike medical shit that was supposed to keep one calm and nonsuicidal. But after me not being able to shed any tears, I felt fucked up and in a state of shock, so I started cuffing my pills and trashing them when the COs weren’t looking. Being that I had only taken the pills for a few times, it wasn’t hard to get back to myself, where I was able to cry and remember how I got there. Although it was like a dream, the pain I felt was so real.

Ten days a man must sit on the Morgan Street lockup before being transferred to county jail. My bond was $100,000, and you had to have some kind of collateral to go with 10 percent cash before a bondsman would touch you. Even still my family was broke, and I didn’t save any of the money I had made hustling, so I was a done deal. Two kids, a one- and a three-year-old, and a nineteen-year-old wife I had left alone. Pride and shame were more of a crime I had committed, in addition to murder.

After two or three days into my stay, I started waking from my fog. I looked around and saw myself in the company of men I thought were long gone. I mean, I hadn’t been locked up in ten years and I had done time with mostly everybody in town, and some were here, but I thought we all had sat down and changed from the old behaviors that kept us locked up when we were younger. But I saw now that nothing had changed, especially this hellhole called Morgan Street jail. The cells were made for one man, with steel beds and porcelain toilets, but now the steel beds were replaced with steel bunk beds, so the small cell could hold two men instead of one. There was now a makeshift chow hall, in the smallest room they must have had. Food was never hot, and we had fifteen minutes to eat, but it didn’t take that long to eat a spoonful of beans and one or sometimes two hotdogs, or some other shit like that, along with a small crackhead juice.

It was sad that I had placed myself in this situation, but more so was the fact that I had caused the life of another human being to be lost, so I had to learn acceptance and being powerless as fast as possible if I wanted to survive. Days went by so slow. I felt my life slipping away—no air, no sunshine, no visits, and only a shower twice a week. We were packed in the cell blocks like slaves and smelled like we can only imagine slave ships smelled—no deodorant, no hairbrushes or combs, no toothbrushes and toothpaste—and we still had on the clothes we came in there with. For the entire ten days all one could hear at night were cries and statements of regrets. Many were there for robbery, rape, and murder, and there was no feeling of hope or belief of a future. After ten long and torturous days, it was time to be transferred to Hartford county jail. Packed in a paddy wagon like sardines, freezing even in this springtime warmth, now I knew why these wagons got the name ice cream trucks.

Once inside the jail again, we were packed into one-man holding cells—five, ten, and more—until processing. We all stood the same, beat down, some dope sick, and all of us smelling like shit, breath, and ass. Many, if not all, feet stank so bad you could smell them through our sneakers, and the heels of most men’s feet looked like leather. And our clothes had turned into plastic, not to mention the hunger we felt. It was only delayed due to the anticipation of not knowing what next to expect. We were given court sandwiches; that was one piece of meat, two pieces of bread, no kind of condiments whatsoever. Oh, and we must not forget the crackhead juices, the four-ounce drinks that were nothing but sugar.

After what seemed like forever, which was about twelve hours, we were taken out the cells one or two at a time, given a shower and jail clothes that fit either too, too small or too, too big, then some worn-out sheets and a blanket. Maybe you got lucky and got a flat-ass pissy pillow, then off we went to the cell blocks that were assigned by the amount of bail and charges you had. The higher the bond, the higher the floor, which only went to the third floor; but that was where all the high bonds were—murders, rapes, assaults, kidnappings, all the fucked-up shit people do (we did) and had done. I was placed in cell 29, second floor, block west 2, again a one-man cell converted into a two-man cell by way of adding a top bunk. I was placed in the cell with a young White boy who happened to be leaving in the next two days after his court appearance according to him.

The two days and nights that followed were a relief compared to Morgan Street, yet little did I know what was next to come. Each night we stayed woke talking about how we got there and what our next plans would be or what was the worst that could possibly happen. At least my cellie did know what was going to happen to him; he was going home in the next day or two. But I was just bargaining. After talking until we fell asleep, I woke the next morning noticing my cellie was gone to court and this motherfucker had used my hairbrush and toothbrush before leaving, but at the end of the day he returned, and I got in that ass.

Breakfast was served around 5 a.m. each morning in a small glass room called the dayroom, I guess because it was where we ate all three meals, watched TV, played cards, and worked out. Anyway, every day for the next week or so I would go in the dayroom and be talking to this real dark-skinned dude. He had a mouth full of gold teeth and smiled all the time I would be talking, but he never answered any question I’d ask. Then I found out he was Cuban and didn’t speak English at all.

Jose Rodriquez

A few days passed by, and a friend of mind named Sonny kept telling the Cuban dude to turn his radio down ’cause it was five in the morning and after we ate breakfast we all wanted to go back to sleep. Well, Cuba took Sonny as a threat, and he saved some shit and piss in a milk carton for two weeks. So we walked in the dayroom one morning at 4:50 a.m., and as Sonny and I sat down, Cuba walked right in and threw the shit and piss in Sonny’s face and all over the room. This shit was the worst thing I had ever smelled. As the horn blew, all available officers came running, and as they all started slipping in the piss and shit, this fucking Cuban reached in his pants and pulled out a sword that he had made from the lamp over the toilets in our cells. But before he could get it right, Sonny was whipping that ass. I mean, Sonny wasn’t bullshitin’. He whipped Cuba’s ass before the COs could stop him. They dragged Cuba to the hole, kicking and talking shit in Spanish, then the COs locked all of us up and went home to shower. Some even went to the doctors because the AIDS virus had just hit national attention, and motherfuckers were panicking over shit like this—blood, other human waste, spit, etc. Well, we later found out that Cuba had escaped from a Cuban prison, swam one hundred miles on a raft in shark-infested water, made it to Florida, and hitched-hiked from Florida to Hartford, Connecticut, looking for his wife. Well, he found her sitting in a car on Barbour Street, with her new boyfriend. Cuba stuck a machete through her into him. Later when all was said and done, Jose Rodriquez was sent to Whiting Forensic, the institution for the criminally insane, for twenty-five years to life. Me, well, I ended up getting Cuba’s single cell. It appears that you have to have a considerable amount of time facing you in order to get a single, and so it was.

June 30, 1983, I was indicted by the Connecticut state grand jury for first-degree murder. And so this is how and where my story began.

Chapter 2

Tampered With

My head was being held down in his lap as his penis was choking me. I tried to raise up off it, but each time he held me around my neck tighter and tighter until I had no fight. All I could see was his cap he held over his face with his other hand, and I remember how he was sitting on the steps of the hallway keeping me held between his legs. I was only around six years old at the time, and I don’t remember the whole incident, and for so many years I tried to forget it ever happened. It was always stated in my days of growing up that if you participated in homosexual activity in any manner, willing or unwilling, you were labeled a faggot, so for many years to come, this came to me as a dream or episode that periodically came to mind as if I had seen it in a movie. Never did I believe it really happened, but it had, and I was always afraid to mention this incident to anybody. Besides, I didn’t want to believe this shit myself; nevertheless, I accepted it. I didn’t have the teachings that this kind of tampering with a child was not the child’s fault, but only the behavior of a sick adult. However, I got through it by pretending it never happened, but the dreams kept coming back. Not until I got grown did I accept that this tampering with did in fact happen, and so I learned: we are only as sick as our secrets, and secrets keep us sick.

This building we lived in also left me with a few good memories. For one, there was the first time I fell in love/ At the age of five or six, I met a girl, and to prove my love for her I climbed out on the window ledge and hung from the sill to show her I was her man. However, she thought I was crazy, and her parents told her not to play with me anymore. My love life was short-lived, and I never saw her again. The next thing I experienced was the time some lady jumped on my sister, which caused my mom to get into a fight with this lady, and at some point someone passed the woman she was fighting a razor and she cut my mother across her forehead and face, ending in thirty-five or more stitches. Mama always said she knew who passed her the razor, and it was said to be a family member on our side! I remember Mama coming home from the emergency room with a large bandage across half her face. All her blood was on the hallway floor most of the day before someone washed it away. There was so much blood I thought Mama was going to die. It seemed as though every weekend or every night someone in the ghetto was fighting and bleeding.

Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, wasn’t easy—lots of roaches, rats, and mice, violence, blood, night screams, and death, run-down houses. All the neighborhoods were worn down and falling apart. All the adults drank and started fighting after a certain amount of booze was gone.

I remember pissing in the bed until I was twelve ’cause most of the time I dreamed I was standing at the toilet and other times I was afraid to get out the bed ’cause I could see mice playing in the middle of the floor in the moonlight. I could hear mice inside the walls running up and down all night, and the rats in the backyards were so big and bold I was scared as shit to empty the trash, so I’d get as close as I could and throw the garbage toward the cans. We moved in Newark every year, as they say, like gypsies. I went to three or four different elementary schools and don’t have many memories of those years, but I do remember Mama always making each move a better place than the last, and never did we see a day without food or heat. Some way or another she provided and did so alone. My father and mother separated before I was old enough to remember and didn’t learn why until I was grown and old enough to understand that my mother told me the devastating story.

Being that all my family members always said I was so bad, I guess I had to prove them right every chance I got. I lied, I stole, and I just started shit for no apparent reasons. Even as a child I just liked chaos and drama, noise and excitement. I fed off attention, so I did all kinds of shit to get it. In school it was no different. I starved for attention, joked all the time, ranked on everybody, and started fights as often as I could.

As many stories go, even though I was only seven or maybe eight, at the time I wanted to be a bully, so one day I followed home a new boy who had just moved here from the South. I was punching him, calling him names, cursing his mother, and as I literal with my foot, kicking him in his ass all the way to his house, until his mother came out and told him he had better fight back and better win, or she was gonna whip his ass herself. This little nigger beat the shit out me. That was some shit I wouldn’t do again, try and be a bully. Oh, hell no, I think about that ass whippin’ all the time. And what made us boys up north think that Southern boys were soft, anyway? Shit, them motherfuckers whipped everybody I knew every time one came up from the South. They shamed us in everything—ball games, running, girls, whatever. Them niggers were the ones that came out on top.

Once again it was time to move from Prince Street to Broom Street, to Norfolk, to Howard Street, to Hawthorne Avenue. This time to North Thirteenth Street, which was a tougher part of Newark and even more run-down than what we were used to. On one side of the street there was the old Remco toy factory that had shut down, and a record-making company that produced the actual 45s and 78 vinyl copies. Behind them were the train tracks, and these abandoned buildings were our playgrounds. We built clubhouses and played hide-and-seek inside these factories every day. By this time I had turned ten and thought I was grown. I started sniffing glue in the basement with the older boys. I had started stealing from the neighborhood stores, and we started going White boy hunting. Only a few blocks away was the line that you would cross and be in White neighborhoods, so we crossed over every now and again to start trouble with them. I don’t recall much about school except the name Garfield Elementary, and this was around the time the Beatles hit the scene. All the White kids loved them. They had Beatles lunch boxes, Beatles clothes, and everything was Beatles, but most of the Black kids hated them because it was a White thing and because we couldn’t afford that kind of shit. We were treated differently in class than the Whites. It was played down more so that the openness that went on in the South but it was still there.

I can also remember two of my teachers, and to this day, even at ten years old, I would swear these two bitches were flirting with me. One was so pretty I had a crush on her, and I dreamed of fucking her every day even before I knew how to fuck! The other one just made me jealous listening to the stories she told about her family and the things they used to do. She wore lots of makeup, and every time I talked to her, she had such a frown on her face I knew and felt she didn’t like Black boys, but at that time I didn’t think it might have been because I was just bad as hell, wouldn’t shut up and be still, couldn’t stay in my seat, shit like that, so I just had to put some race in it as an issue.

I couldn’t wait till school was over each day ’cause I got back to my block and time for fun. We had started breaking in the trains that were left on the tracks overnight, and one night we hit pay dirt—a load of Gallo wine. The whole block got drunk for two days. My brother Maurice, who was thirteen at this time, got drunk and came home throwing up all over the bathroom. I cleaned it up as bad as it smelled and helped him in bed so Mama wouldn’t find out he was drinking and bitch about her bathroom. This motherfucker told me the next day while laughing in my face, he would never have done the same for me. Two days later I got my laugh on ’cause he zipped up his uncircumcised dick in his pants zipper. It was so funny, and blood was all in the hallway where he had run up and down the stairs screaming and hollering. It was so bad he had to go to the hospital. That shit was funny as hell, until Mama made me clean up all the blood. Yeah, North Thirteenth Street was a growing experience.

I started smelling myself around this time. I would do anything. We would be sitting out on the steps, like we did waiting for the mailman to bring Mama’s welfare check. I would snatch off my sister’s wig in front of people and she would chase me while crying from embarrassment.

Not long after we moved to North Thirteenth Street, I and a lot of kids from the block and one of my classmates went down into the basement of my building. I was scared to go down there ’cause of all the rats and roaches in the building. Hell, it seemed like everywhere we lived there were rats and roaches, which made me pee in the bed until I was about thirteen years old. Brother Maurice used to tell Mama he would see my eyes wide-open as I would be pissing on him. But truth be told, when Mama turned the lights out for bed, the moonlight would shine right on the spot where the mice would play as if it were party time, and when you turned on the lights, roaches would be everywhere, big fat ones with baby eggs hanging off the back of their asses.

Anyway, in the basement I noticed one of the older boys put a bag over his face and sucked it in and would blow it back out, then he passed it around to all that was standing in a circle and they, too, did the same as he did. In and out the bag went, and then it was my turn. I was only ten at the time, so I didn’t want to seem like a punk or a baby, so I followed suit. In and out the bag went as I began to feel lightheaded and strange. I was glad to