High Price

try. I now realize this must have seemed like I thought I was too good to do that type of work, but I didn’t know how to bridge the expanding gap between us. I didn’t even know how to parse that distance to myself.
    One of the few people I connected with back home was Yvette Green, a former girlfriend who was then studying nursing. We’d go to that Denny’s where I’d once “dined and dashed” with my high school friends—but now I was spending hours with her, reading and discussing literature. She gave me support, comfort, and peace of mind. Indeed, one of my greatest regrets in life was losing touch with her when I did leave Florida.
    When I was home, though, I mostly just felt out of place. I had expected to slide easily back into that world, even to educate people and show them how cool I was by sharing with them the skills I’d learned for success. Instead I discovered repeatedly that I didn’t know how to do that. My hometown itself began to seem increasingly foreign to me. In the air force, I’d unconsciously abandoned the habits of mind that had desensitized me to the daily wear of being condescended to and disrespected, but I didn’t yet have a way to appropriately communicate my new perspective with those who still needed those defenses.
    I found it more and more difficult to connect with my closest friends and family members. I wanted to discuss the larger societal issues that trapped so many people like us in those horrible conditions. But they were more concerned with immediate issues like how to pay this month’s rent and how to put food on the table today for their kids. They had little interest or time for what someone called my “academic masturbations.”
    I wanted to work on changing the world and all they wanted was work. I didn’t fit anywhere. It was like that awful time in adolescence when you feel half-formed, no longer a boy but far from being a man, as well. Everything felt somewhat awkward. I soon realized that I couldn’t stay unless I wanted to relinquish the new self and changed vision of the future I’d constructed in the air force. To live at home without going crazy, I’d have to reembrace what I now saw as a very limiting worldview and pattern of behavior. I knew I had to resist that.
    And as this conflict between my new self and my old ways increased, I got in touch with my cousin Betty. She had moved to Atlanta after her divorce was finalized. She invited me to stay with her there. I could take the credits I needed to complete my college degree at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Also in Atlanta was Patrick, my good friend and fellow airman with whom I’d served in England. He, too, had recently been discharged. He was one of the few people I knew who understood the transition I was facing after leaving the military.
    Given my experiences at home, I figured that anywhere else would probably be an improvement. When I first arrived in Georgia, Betty had a house in Stone Mountain, just outside metro Atlanta. But money woes forced her to move to a smaller place in the same town. Unfortunately for me, however, Atlanta really wasn’t much different from Miami. I didn’t really find the move any more conducive to furthering my educational or personal goals. However, I did meet Melissa, the woman who turned me on to cocaine—and my relationship with her, ironically, is what led me to Wilmington and Rob Hakan’s class.
    My introduction to cocaine and Melissa actually started with a bad experience with marijuana. That incident not only was the beginning of my relationship with her but also gave me more insight into the effects of marijuana and into how environmental factors can strongly affect the drug experience. Additionally, it should have made me more skeptical about what I was hearing on the street about drug use and about what I’d later hear from addiction researchers, but I wasn’t yet thinking critically enough to recognize this.
    I met Melissa one summer morning in 1988 in the laundry room of the apartment complex where I lived with Betty. I was home at that time because I hadn’t yet enrolled in school and was working some night shifts for UPS to make money before I went back. Melissa was a gorgeous caramel-skinned woman with long hair. She wore colored contact lenses that made her eyes look blue, an effect that I found disconcerting. Her aunt, who was also extremely attractive and about the same age, was also doing her wash when I met