Cecil is 26, medium height, athletic build, with sandy blonde hair and a handsome face. He wears jeans, a polo shirt, lives in a halfway house on White Avenue and attends the rehab clinics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings at the various churches on Harford Road.
I’m up from Florida, still have the Florida I.D. My dad kicked me out—got tired of me stealing all of his stuff for drug money. I’m from Baltimore County. My mom kicked me out last year for steeling all of her stuff and pawning it.
Now, Florida is a great place to get high, plenty of heroin and other drugs in Florida. But they don’t have any rehab down there. People ask me why I would come back to the East Coast—to Baltimore to get clean—and I tell them it’s because Baltimore has the heroin and the rehab, whatever you need, where Florida just has the heroin.
I need to get clean. Not just clean from heroin but to live a clean life, to get away from the dirty crack-house living arrangements. You do realize that you’re like the only person in Hamilton that’s not a gentry homesteader and is also not an addict?
Most of the young whites moving in are coming for the drugs. Baltimore is flush, with [China] white, with rock [crack], with kick [cocaine-fortified heroin] and more oxys than you can imagine. But where the drugs are is where the rehab is—up east here. Florida is nice but it’s a one-way ticket. Up here you can go both ways. I know that people say rehab is a cult and a place to buy pills, everybody chain-smoking, still around the same drug mentality—that is true. But I need the support.
I’m going to do this, Sir, going to beat the system, going to live clean in every way. Have a blessed day and thanks for listening.
I am pleased to inform the reader that Cecil does not yet—and hopefully will never—have the hollow, soulless voice of the lifetime heroin addict, which seems to fix sometime in the late 20s.