High Price

papers I was reading. By this point, I was studying the effects of marijuana and methamphetamine as well as crack cocaine, so I needed to familiarize myself with the literature on those drugs.
    And since our participants lived on-site 24-7, that’s pretty much when I was there, too, overseeing the lab assistants and making sure everything was going as it should. I liked getting to know the participants: it not only helped the experiments run more smoothly but also gave me insight into their world, which allowed me to do better science. I now try to minimize the extent to which theories or stereotypes influence my view of drug users, especially if they are standing before me and I can collect my own data.
    My mentor, Marian, was intensely supportive, always letting me know how much progress I was making and keeping me abreast of where I stood in terms of getting a faculty position. She told me late in 1998 that after I’d finished the year, I’d be getting a letter offering me a job, which would start on July 1. I felt immense pride when she told me—and even more so when the letter actually arrived, bearing Columbia’s official letterhead and saying, “We want you to join the faculty as an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience.” Indeed, that was probably the proudest moment of my life, the moment when I knew that I might be able to make a career of this science thing.
    I didn’t know that less than a year later, my world would be thrown into turmoil again, when I discovered that I had fathered a son, who was now sixteen, when I myself had been sixteen, back home.

CHAPTER 14
    Hitting Home
    If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.
    — JAMES BALDWIN
    S tanding outside the VFW hall in Hollywood, Florida, I heard a young man cursing loudly, saying what sounded like my name repeatedly amid the string of profanities. I had been talking to my younger brother Ray and some of my cousins. We were attending Grandmama’s funeral reception. It was October 13, 2004.
    I’d had many more professional successes since becoming an assistant professor at Columbia in 1999: I had been awarded a multimillion-dollar grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), making me an independent researcher running my own lab. I’d published about two dozen papers and had been asked to join NIDA’s African American Researchers and Scholars Work Group, which advises the agency’s director on drug-related issues unique to black people. I was making good progress toward tenure.
    But as I’d worked my way up in academia, I’d also grown ever further away from my family. To put it bluntly, my emotional growth had not paralleled my professional achievements. Indeed, in many ways, I wasn’t emotionally much different from the child I’d been when I’d left home. When something went wrong in my relationships, my main way of coping was to ignore it, suppress my feelings about it, or simply cut myself off from the person or people involved. That’s what I’d done with my family. Not surprisingly, they were hurt by what they saw as my snobbish behavior, seeing my refusal to spend much time with them as evidence that I thought I was above them or was embarrassed by the way they lived.
    From my perspective, I didn’t know how to comfortably reach across the experiential and intellectual gap that now separated us. I didn’t have the emotional tools. Ever since I’d joined the air force, it had gotten harder and harder to negotiate the vast differences between my world and theirs. Each step in my education moved me only further away, through forces mainly beyond my control. The more I tried to negotiate the mainstream, the more time I spent primarily with white academics, the less I felt able to communicate easily with my family. The distance stymied me.
    Also, I didn’t want to admit, even to myself, that I was catching hell in the white world. Trying to learn their language and cultural norms was more difficult and exhausting than my macho exterior would allow me to concede. Frankly, I was getting my ass kicked and had no one to talk with about how to deal with it and simultaneously maintain my sense of my own blackness. In college, I had Jim Braye to mentor me, but even he never had to deal in White America as a black, dreadlocked academic/researcher with three gold teeth, working at an Ivy League university.
    At work, there