Introduction: The Corner of Fourteenth and Vine

            Several winters ago, long before Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine had been gentrified into the hipsterish OTR, on a bright, bittercold day, I watched a woman and four children gather to cross at Fourteenth and Vine. Around them were the traffic in motion on Vine, the traffic at rest on Fourteenth, the vigilant and reposed dope boys leaning against the boarded windows of the pool hall, and the walkers with their canes or their strollers or their bags of groceries. Around them all was a maze of brick and neon, signboards, walk lights, glass, vinyl, plywood, chrome, paper, asphalt, plastic, and, in the path of a passing truck, a plume of diesel smoke descending.

            The corner of Fourteenth and Vine in Cincinnati was then and still is a busy corner, one of the busiest in the city. The area around it has become trendy and gentrified. The bar on the southeast corner is still a bar, but it now sells sushi and sake. The abandoned pool hall across Vine is now a shop selling gourmet donuts. But at the time, this corner was at the heart of the ghetto that erupted in April, 2001 in response to the police killing of Timothy Thomas. Thomas, an unarmed Black man wanted for minor traffic offenses, died just a few short blocks away in an alley off Republic Street, a darker, quieter place where you will see fewer people. But at Fourteenth and Vine, at any hour of the day or night, it is not at all uncommon to see all manner of people crossing or waiting to cross, many of them so ordinary as to slip easily from memory, others so extraordinary as to stay in mind for a long, long time.

            Sometimes, a city is just like a small town, especially if you are engaged in a neighborhood. You get to track people over the long run: This friend went to prison and has now returned. That one has found religion and is off the drugs. And so on. But at other times, in a city, people flash in and out of our lives like pictures in a magazine. You see them for a moment, then you turn the page and the image is gone. But some things stay in mind; some images remain alive to us long after we leave them. And so it has been for me with this group of five people on a winter street so many years ago, for I have carried the image of this woman and these children, almost photographically, for over a decade.  They stay with me, in part, I suppose, because of a little riff of drama between the woman, who was tipsy, and the oldest of the children, a pre-adolescent girl with a proud, wary eye.

            The woman was white, the children were black, and it seemed the woman was an interloper in this scene. She looked like someone’s grandmother, but she did not look like theirs. And the oldest girl, who may have been twelve, was clearly in charge of these children. She had them linked, hand to hand, lined up at the curb like marchers. They were packed, identically, in bright insulated coats, hooded, bundled, and immobilized like fine china packed for shipping. They were bright-colored beauties, admirably protected and prepared for the bitter cold air of Vine Street.

            But the woman was bare-handed, dressed shabbily, out of season and out of fashion in a camel-colored cloth coat with a kerchief knotted at her chin. Twenty years earlier, she would not have looked out of place, for she would have looked like many women among the thousands of Appalachian migrants who then shared this neighborhood with growing numbers of African-Americans. She reminded me of women I have seen in coal camps, or in country stores, or outside storefront churches on Wednesday nights after services. These are knotty, strong-minded, sharp-tongued women, hard-scrabble matriarchs, the moral and emotional centers of struggling displaced families. My own grandmother was one of these. They are woman of great density, made solid by grief and wisdom.

            But this woman had lost that solidity; she had not that focus. She was the center, it seemed, of nothing. Moreover, she was marked in a strange way by four scratch marks, parallel as in a stave of music, running down her right cheek. She teetered unsteadily to the right, then back to the left, then again to the right as she leaned toward the youngest child, the wide-eyed one, and extended a shaky hand to take him by the mitten. For a moment, the old woman wobbled, and it seemed she might mislead this wide-eyed one into the teeth of the traffic.

            The girl, from her end of the line, watched with her wary eye.

*

            Terrible things have happened at the corner of Fourteenth and Vine. Some of them have been the major, get-in-the-news kind of terrible ---traffic accidents, robberies, shootings and the like. But most are the small, usual, almost manageable, easily unnoticed sort of terrible.       

            Children are on these streets, and on the streets of the world, much of the time. And it seems to me a terrible thing that a child should witness, day after day, such physical and moral damage, such a daily disillusionment in which matriarchal figures are made either pitiable or fearsome by addiction, men drift hollowly toward the next fix, young men waste arrogantly on the corners, young women become young mothers become prostitutes.

            In the broader world beyond Vine Street, children often see far worse. In the desert cities ravaged by ISIS, the South African townships, on the Mexican train known as La Bestia, . . . . It pains me to think of such places, but this is the place I know. . . . .

            This of course is not the whole story of Vine Street. There are many, mostly untold stories of survival, resilience, even triumph in the streets surrounding. Schools, churches, and social service centers, and individual families offer protective havens. Dotted here and there are a number of halfway houses, treatment centers, and transitional housing units where the work of recovery hums along. There are innocence and strength in these streets, but they tend to remain quietly in the background. Little of this is out on the street; none of it is as vivid and compelling as what is out on the corner where damaged and corrupted life staggers, weaves, toddles, struts, pimp walks, and cruises by at every hour.

            This girl, with her innocent, defiant, almost adolescent eye, had a task: she had been sent to guide these children from one place to another through the color and danger of the street. And was that damaged woman one of their dangers? The girl seemed to think so, and she knows her world much better than I. She knows her world much better than a child should know it. There are dangers in the dope boys, in the traffic, in sexual predators cruising day and night, in the distractions of neon and loud music, and in a thousand other turnings from her path. She was a child with a very adult duty and she would have to answer to someone if anything went wrong. She was wise to be wary of this woman in the camel-colored coat. It seemed that in that moment, deference, fear, anger, suspicion, and defiance all warred within this child as she studied what that unstable woman might do next.

            What more do I know of them? Nothing at all. I had a task of my own before me at the time. I jaywalked past them to the hardware for a pound of nails and I did not look back. I stood in line to pay my money and only later did i realize that I had witnessed a moment of afflicted grace.

            What do I mean by calling such an ordinary, fragment of living by such a title? Only this: We make a mistake if we look for sanctity and respectability only in the Mother Teresa mode. We make another mistake if we see in the a place like the corner of 14th and Vine only the failures. There is to be found here something of sanctity and something of failure in almost everyone.

            This toddling, someone’s-grandmother-looking woman has, I think, a sad, unknowable story. It would seem her grandmother brain had been unmoored by cheap wine or maybe OxyContin. Her addled angels had failed to protect her and she had been marked and shamed in ways I cannot know. Perhaps, in the way of the intoxicated, she hoped, in that bright and penitential day, to bring herself a moment of resurrected wholeness. Perhaps she was trying awkwardly to do right, a saintly inebriate, blind guide, unprotected protector, a broken Bodhisattva, a being holy and deluded in a place where even blessedness is fractured. We here, after all, to do such kindness as we can. We are here to guide each other through perilous crossings. But the corner of Fourteenth and Vine is a place of conflicted blessings. We are wise to be wary of each other.

            The corner of Fourteenth and Vine is a sad place, crowded with wounds. But there is brightness, even sanctity, a grace in affliction, even here. Just enough to allow us a limited sense of hope.

*

            There are many such corners, not all of them in cities. This is a book about the intersection where poverty and addiction cross and complicate one another, where one compounds the effects of the other. It is not a book of research and statistics. I have a great deal of respect for those who work in that manner, but it is not the path I have taken. The numbers tell a story, but they do not tell the story as I wish to tell it.

            Rather, this is a book of recollections, reflections, observations, questions, frustrations, rants, and occasional bursts of hope, a book of the sort of laments and blessings you might find at the corner of Fourteenth and Vine.

            In this small book, I want to explore some of the issues of poverty, dignity, and humiliation, and their relation to addiction, drawing on my experience as a substance abuse counselor for over thirty-two years. And I want to suggest an attitude or methodology which might make working with the low-income addict more hopeful. I hope it has meaning for therapists and counselors.

            But I also hope it has meaning for the general reader,

I became a substance abuse counselor almost by accident. My original plan in life had been to become a professor of English at a university. Toward that end, I completed a Master’s degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. I had been accepted into the doctoral program which, had I completed it, would likely have been my ticket into a world of teaching freshman comp, literature courses in my field, and climbing that shaky tenure ladder. But life makes unexpected turns and so, by the time I ended up in the seat of a Yamaha forklift, three years into a “temporary” job at a paper bag factory, I had already worked as an inner-city youth worker, rural schoolteacher, farm hand, painter for the county highway department, and community organizer, all of which had taken me off the academic track I had planned for myself and into the world of Black and Appalachian poverty. The academic career I had once envisioned was far behind me.

But I knew I was too small to keep up the kind of work I was doing for much longer and I knew the company was breathing down my neck because of my union activity. So, when a drinking buddy ---yes, a drinking buddy--- suggested I apply for an opening at the adolescent drug treatment program where his sister-in-law worked, I jumped on it. I didn’t know anything about counseling, but I didn’t know that and, apparently, neither did they, because they hired me.

I had spent much of my twenties as a community organizer and I tell people I had been a foot soldier in the Way on Poverty. We all know how well that war went. My friend and mentor Iberus Hacker liked to say that the War on Poverty is over; Poverty won. Now that I am retired as a drug and alcohol counselor, I have begun to think of myself as having been a combat medic in the War on Drugs, which is going about as well as that other war.

For over thirty years, I worked either as a counselor or supervisor of counselors (with one more stint as a community organizer), almost exclusively with low-income clients, many of them through criminal justice referrals. For many years, I volunteered as the clinical supervisor for a treatment center serving clients in a homeless shelter. For much of the time, I lived in African-American or Appalachian neighborhoods. I also served on the boards of Appalachian movement and civil rights organizations and maintained relationships with activists and individuals in poverty. I like to think I helped some people; I certainly hope I did. I know I got to see a great deal of humanity and the struggles of people in pain to gain and retain a measure of dignity.

*

My drinking buddy eventually died of his drinking in one of those sad, slow deaths that only alcoholism can induce. But I managed get sober, thanks in part to my clients. It’s not supposed to work that way, but my life has not evolved as it was supposed to at any other point.

This book has not evolved as it was supposed to, either. It grew out of a series of discussions with my friend and colleague LeRoy Birch with whom I co-facilitated a “Poverty and Chemical Dependency” training for Talbert House, the Cincinnati social services agency where we both worked at the time. Our original intention was to co-author a manual for the treatment of the low-income client, modeled on the ground-breaking Hazelden pamphlets authored by Peter Bell on counseling the black client.

But time never allowed it. LeRoy eventually developed cancer and died and now he has gone on to the Great Meeting.

I charged ahead without him, though at first, I only limped. I had written fiction and poetry and had already had my first books published, but I had trouble getting traction on this book. For years, I scribbled notes and fragments, developed outlines, explored ideas and gathered some reference material. Every now and then I would write real hard on a notion. But I always set the project aside for another day.

Finally, at the suggestion of Geraldine Getty, who was then director of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, I began a series of essays for StreetVibes, the newspaper of the Coalition. That gave me the monthly deadline that I needed to get this project completed. Month by month, I met my deadline with a chapter that was supposed to follow a plan I had worked out. Sometimes I stuck to the plan; at other times, driven by what moved me in the moment, I did not. And so, gradually, the plan for a manual came unraveled and the book became something different from what LeRoy and I planned.

I had already given up on the concept of a manual. It would be useful, I know and I hope someone eventually creates one. But I’m just not manual material. Instead of a manual, this has become a book of stories and, emerging from the stories, a book of questions and challenges.

In Gratitude

            LeRoy Birch, as I have said and will probably say again, is the spiritual co-author of this book, which is dedicated to his memory.

            My wife, Elissa Pogue has also contributed clarity, experience, and perspective to these discussions.

            Georgine Getty, Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless director, and the late Jimmy Heath, StreetVibes editor, provided encouragement, insight, space in the Coalition newspaper, and monthly deadlines that kept me moving

            Don Turner, former director of the Cincinnati Center for Addiction Treatment, who introduced me to the work of Peter Bell, has been another important help.

            I gained a lot from my various jobs with Talbert House, the Urban Appalachian Council, the Alcoholism Council of Greater Cincinnati, and Greater Cincinnati Behavioral Health Services and from volunteer involvement with the Drop Inn Center, the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, the Council of the Southern Mountains, Appalachian Focus, the Appalachian Development Projects Committee, the Appalachian Studies Association, the Sierra Club, the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, and the Cincinnati Anti-Klan Network.

            But my most instructive teachers in these matters have been the clients, neighbors, colleagues, and co-workers in recovery, who have endured poverty and addiction and have survived -- and overcome -- with dignity intact.