A mirror, cracked

Gary PHILLIPS and Jervey Tervalon were shooting nothing more potent than the breeze when they hit on a notion.

The writers had found themselves sitting on yet another panel, sorting through urban Los Angeles’ all-too-familiar miasma of troubles -- gangs, drugs, joblessness and a very particular mounting rage that can eventually explode into riot.

But it was a one-on-one, post-panel talk that unearthed something new, a pathway into something deeper than just enumerating urban woes: a way to get at the specifics, the personal missteps, the tragedies.

“You see anthologies about all sorts of things,” says Tervalon, the author of several novels and editor of the anthology “The Geography of Rage” about L.A.’s 1992 civil unrest. “Cocaine was what took so much apart -- it’s the scourge of our times. So why not one about cocaine?”

Out of it evolved “The Cocaine Chronicles,” which assembles a roster of more than a dozen literary and crime fiction writers, including Jerry Stahl, Susan Straight, Lee Child, Emory Holmes II, James Brown and Bill Moody. The idea was to get at not just the drug’s sway but its cachet.

Tervalon and Phillips were interested in diverse points of view to understand the larger effect of the drug, beyond the high. To that end, the stories offer glimpses through various prisms -- mules, dealers, abusers and the abused. The editors were interested in the indelible mark cocaine left on the culture, across all lines -- age, economics, race -- and the nuances between the lines.

They weren’t interested in making the book some sort of public service announcement. “The stories didn’t have to be a moral lesson,” explains Phillips, who parcels out his time writing crime fiction, comic books and screenplays. “The idea is that one draws their own conclusions from the stories. And some are more morally ambiguous than the others.”

There’s the jagged, stream-of-semiconsciousness monologue of Ken Bruen’s narrator jonesing in “White Irish.” There’s the unsettling unspooling of Nina Revoyr’s “Golden Pacific,” about a little girl and her mother adrift, who come front and center in harm’s way. There’s Straight’s meticulous evocation of the life of a mini-mall and the richly embroidered back story of one of the ghostly women on crack who haunt it.

Into that mix is Stahl’s tilted vignette of two holed-away coke fiends on a binge. Filling the backspace: a flickering, soundless television and endless anecdotes of fictional B-celebrities’ appetites and peccadilloes.

“I ever tell you how much Larry Fine loved his blow?” asks Suzy, the connection. “The man was a hedonist.... How do you think his hair got that way? He wanted to be the white Cab Calloway, but it never worked out.”

The book is organized into four sections that in some way reflect cocaine’s consequence on the characters -- “Touched by Death,” “Fiending,” “The Corruption” and “Gangsters and Monsters.”

The possibility of creating such a 360-degree examination intrigued Akashic Books’ Johnny Temple, who, after running into Phillips at a mystery writing convention a couple of years ago, green-lighted the project.

“There is this great literary romanticism around heroin. But cocaine has not played as visible a role in literature,” says Temple. “I thought that this sounded like a fresh, interesting concept -- with a great organizing theme, a diversity of perspectives, race, ethnicity and ethical perspective that in some way finds some sort of common thread.”

Most everyone they asked to contribute said yes. That is, “except for one,” Phillips says. “ ‘Nah, man, I can’t do it. I’ve got a reputation,’ ” Phillips says he was told. There were no rules for the writers except: “Tell us what you want to tell us” and “cocaine must be part of it,” he says.

“The Cocaine Chronicles” joins a larger self-reflective discussion just gathering steam -- as African American journalists, essayists and culture critics have begun to look at the ‘70s and early ‘80s, connecting the dots from the optimism of the post-civil rights era to the war zone so many neighborhoods of color became by the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

Among them: Nelson George’s “Post-Soul Nation,” which considers the arc from the 1970s to the triple hit of AIDS, crack and Reaganomics by the end of the 1980s that tore many black and brown communities apart; and photographer Jamel Shabazz’s new collection, “A Time Before Crack,” published by powerHouse Books, is a stroll through the late afternoon of optimism. The book is Shabazz’s self-described “visual diary” of young people in New York City between 1975 and 1984.

While many urban minority communities might have been besieged then by poverty and unemployment, it was nothing like what was to come. “When crack made its debut in the mid-’80s, it created havoc throughout urban America,” he writes in his artist’s statement. “In June of 1985, the New York City police department had not yet made any arrests for crack offenses. In the first 10 months of 1988, they made more than 19,000.... Emergency rooms were filled with scores of victims ... the funeral parlor industry flourished.... Children were left without parents and suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome. The effects of crack would linger on for generations to come.”

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Different class, same curse

What is most striking about “The Cocaine Chronicles” isn’t just the various permutations that the drug takes -- powder or rock -- or the jaw-grinding highs, or the depths of the personal losses, but how it manifests itself in one life, then takes hold.

Whether it’s a run-to-ruin suburban tract home or a tony rehab facility, what these stories convey is that using drugs for “coping” or “escapism” might be universal, but at the core are key differences.

“Drugs are class-driven like everything else,” writes Phillips, “and stories about crack cocaine aren’t for the mainstream readers of fiction; not the polite subject for drug literature of its crasser little brother, heroin fiction. Lithium is cool, antidepressants are too, but don’t mention crack or freebase ... those low-class drugs for self-medication.”

Two stories that perhaps best illustrate this divide are Laura Lippman’s “The Crack Cocaine Diet” and Detrice Jones’ “Just Surviving Another Day.”

Lippman tells the story of two recently jilted white teenage girls who decide to score coke to take themselves down a couple of dress sizes in a hurry. Their hope is to turn some heads at a party and make their old boyfriends jealous.

This wish takes them to the other side of town and into another world, one that doesn’t look so dissimilar to theirs but one inhabited by darker faces. They don’t know the first thing about what they are looking for, but that doesn’t make them act less entitled or pushy. And despite the story’s light, off-handed patina, one gets the sense early that something brutal and unexpected is about to happen.

For Lippman, a crime novelist and a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, it was a way to retrace the drug’s descent on a community in which she grew up and later worked; a community in transition full of difficult-to-read race and class nuances.

“I remember when people didn’t think of it as a drug that was addictive,” says Lippman. “But in 1989, I lived in a city that was almost destroyed by crack.” The apartment complex where the girls go to score, the crunch of vials under tires are things drawn from real life, the rest was her way of thinking about the way that the trade and those transactions altered life irrevocably.

“I wanted to play with stereotypes and set things on their head,” says Lippman. She thought it would tweak expectations some if the girls too were dangerous.

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Trauma speaks for itself

Jones’ story is powerful for what it says but even stronger for what it omits. A student of Tervalon’s at UCLA, she wrote her story for an assignment. If it’s good, he told the class, he’d publish it in an anthology. Jones got to work: “I wrote it on the bus. I commute from UCLA to Hollywood. So I wrote it in 45 minutes in one bus ride.”

Based on her life, the story details a day in the life of an African American teen, whose strung-out parents steal her lunch money to score, leaving her hungry and at the mercy of her friends’ waning generosity.

“After school I went to basketball practice. If I didn’t eat lunch today, I probably would have passed out.... Basketball was my form of meditation ... I didn’t have the energy or time to think about the bad things that were going on in my life.... I didn’t have to think about school, stupid high school boys or my home life. I didn’t have to think about being scared to get a drink of water in the middle of the night because my dad might be in his paranoid state and try to stab me....”

The held-back quality to Jones’ story, her narrator’s voice, makes it all the more poignant. “For me,” says Jones, 20, “these were everyday things, things that just happened. Life.”

Writing it came quickly, but rereading it has been more difficult.

“It was a little painful going back to those places, but I hope it will be inspirational.” Her parents, she’s happy to report, are much better. “I really want people to know that they aren’t struggling anymore. I want people who may be in the situation that they were to know that it is not ... the last situation they will be in. They will grow past it.”

Whether it is drugs as toys for the idle or drugs as salvation, these stories suggest that no matter what side of the line, chaos may be in close pursuit. Tervalon is encouraged by the early discussion that the book has already inspired. “I’m happy about the surprises. I think that most anthologies have this sort of ‘it’s good for you’ kind of vibe, like they are supposed to be medicinal. Healing.

“This isn’t like that. In a way, we wanted it to be a guilty pleasure. And have resonance.”