FIVE

BACK TO SCHOOL

WHEN IT WAS GETTING CLOSE for me to finish drug treatment, I started thinking about what the rest of my life would look like. One of the things that stood out, my most pressing need, was that I did not want to use drugs anymore. You use drugs, you get to a low point in your life, you stop, your life improves, and then at some point you relapse; you go back to using drugs and you get to an even lower place, and that cycle just keeps going on and on, further down and down. I was tired of that vicious cycle.

I wanted to figure out what I could do to raise my self-esteem, to give myself hope, to the point where I would never have to end up at those railroad tracks again. When I thought about what led me there, what really opened up those floodgates, it was the passing of my mother. I always used to have two fears. Fear number one was that I was going to die without having anyone to carry on my name; I was going to die without having a son. Fear number two was that my mother would die before me. I loved my mom so much, I just could not imagine going on living without her.

When she did pass away, in 1997, I took it as hard as expected. I was already using drugs, but after her death I really dove into my abuse. I sold things out of my mom’s house to sustain my habit. Most of the rear wall of the structure, particularly in the dining room area, had what they call jalousie windows: windows with a bunch of thin slats that you can twist and roll out and roll in. They were made out of aluminum, and I sold that metal to buy crack. At some point in my addiction, I had actually dismantled everything to the point where there was no back wall to the house. I shared that story with people at drug treatment facilities. I told them that’s when I really became a rock star, because my dining room became a stage. It was like I was an artist performing for the world.

Eventually, I was the cause of our losing our mom’s house altogether. In six months, I was able to dismantle it and lose it through foreclosure because of my drug addiction. I destroyed what she worked her whole life for. From her early days, working as a maid in San Juan, Puerto Rico, or a waitress in Saint Croix, she had worked herself to the bone to have a home. What a way to honor her life and legacy!

So as I was contemplating my next steps after drug treatment, I started thinking about education. Throughout my life, my mother had always stressed to me the value of getting an education. She was always putting me in book clubs and things of that nature. I used to think about her while I was in prison, helping tutor fellow prisoners on the math section of the employment exam. I felt like I would be making my mother proud if she knew what I was doing. She told me people can take a lot of things from you, but they can never take your education.

IN DOWNTOWN MIAMI THERE WAS AN ABOVE-RAIL SHUTTLE SYSTEM CALLED THE METRO Mover that a lot of homeless people used to use, because it was free and a very convenient mode of transportation. I would ride it from Chapman Partnership to various points around the Brickell Avenue area. Along that route were two places that I loved to stop. Number one was the courthouse, where they had a law library; I would go in there to read cases. Another place where I stopped frequently was the Wolfson Campus of Miami Dade College. Every now and then, I would also go to the library there to go online and just do some research or find out what was going on around the world.

I used to watch the college kids going back and forth, and I imagined what it would be like if I were actually in school. I never thought at the time that it would be a real possibility. There have been so many points in my life when I was living in the homeless shelter, and even prior to that when I was on the streets, that I would have these wish-fulfillment scenarios. I would be walking somewhere and see a nice house and think, “Wow, it sure would be nice to live in a house like that.” I would watch people driving to and from work while I was walking or catching the bus and wonder what that kind of freedom felt like, just to be able to leave your house when you wanted to, and take any route you chose to get to your destination.

Those were the kinds of feelings I’d have when I walked by Miami Dade, but I always dismissed them because here I was, a convicted felon and a homeless person. The college was in downtown Miami where a lot of the homeless people congregate, but it wasn’t antiquated. The campus consisted of modern buildings; they were constantly expanding it and building out. Right now, with all eight campuses included, Miami Dade is one of the largest colleges in the country. If I furthered my education, I could both honor my mother and help raise my self-esteem so I wouldn’t be as tempted to relapse. You know what? I thought. Maybe I can go back to school.

I didn’t think I was going to be able to get in, but on one of those days when I was just roaming endlessly around, I decided to stop into the admissions department and give it a shot. I had to fill out an application. Now, mind you, I had never applied to a college or a university in my life. From high school, I went straight into the military. I always envisioned it to be such an arduous process, so I was kind of shocked by how easy it was. It wasn’t a matter of waiting for an acceptance letter or anything. You just applied and you were good to go.

I had to take an exam to see where they should place me. Again, I got nervous, but it was much easier than I expected. I was always a kid who tested well. In the army, I did great on the test we called the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery). I had it all worked out: I was going to be 11 Bravo Infantry, and then from infantry, I was going to airborne school in Italy. Then, after airborne school, I was going to go to ranger school, and then I’d be Rambo.

At the time I took the ASVAB, I had a girlfriend whose parents were blown away by how well I did. They told me, “Wait a minute, why would you go into the infantry, when you have these amazing scores? You should be going to West Point; you should be an officer.” What they really meant was, You need to be an officer, because if you’re going to be with our daughter, you’ve got to be able to provide for her.

That discussion caused my goal to shift from wanting to be another Rambo to now becoming a pilot. Eventually, when I wasn’t able to pass the eye test, I switched my sights on being an interpreter for military intelligence. I passed a very difficult test that was actually in a made-up language you had to decipher. It was like learning a foreign language right on the spot, but I could do it.

That was all many years before, however. Had I lost some of my natural intelligence during my years of drug abuse and life on the streets when I wasn’t sleeping or eating properly or doing the things that contribute to being able to keep all of my faculties? I thought I was still doing okay, and I had a way that I knew.

Are you ready for this? When I was homeless, I always remembered that Bill Clinton did a lot of crossword puzzles. So I would manage to get the day’s paper, and I would do the crossword puzzle. If I was able to get at least three-quarters complete, I knew I wasn’t losing my mind. That was my gauge. That was my daily test of making sure I wasn’t losing it.

WHEN MY TEST RESULTS CAME BACK, THE COLLEGE LET ME KNOW THAT I DIDN’T HAVE TO take any remedial classes. I could just get going. What did I want to study?

I reviewed the different courses that were offered, and the program that seemed to call to me the loudest was paralegal studies. Ever since I had worked on my own appeal process, and through helping other inmates with their cases, my interest in the law had been reawakened. Paralegal studies seemed to be a natural fit and an area where I felt that I had a good chance of doing well. I thought that if I could use the skills that I learned while I was in prison, combined with my affinity for reading, I could get a respectable, decent job.

I was not thinking about going to law school at that point, or even eventually being a lawyer someday. That was way too much. Maybe I could be a paralegal and be able to assist an attorney in various cases. Someday.

I remember my first day in class. I got there early because I wanted to sit at the front so I didn’t miss anything. In my head, I thought, Hey, I’m an older person. I’ve got all these young kids that I’m going to be in class with, and they probably have the edge on me because they are coming straight from high school. I’d been away from school for a long time, so I wanted to make sure that I caught everything the teacher was saying. I didn’t want to be in a row farther back, because I didn’t want someone dropping a pencil, or talking to classmates, or flirting with a girl to distract me from learning. I established my seat in the front row, and that was where I always sat thereafter.

One of my favorite parts of orientation when you start a new class is finding out the office hours of the professors. I was one of those guys who believed in using that time. I don’t think I had one professor who I did not go visit during office hours, so I could be better, so I could find out more about whatever assignments I was working on. And I would always be ahead of schedule on my assignments. Whenever I got work assigned to me, I would start on it right then and there. I didn’t wait and put it off and come back to it later on, because I knew things could happen, and then when I was in that time crunch, I wasn’t going to actually produce my best work. I believed in getting ahead of the game.

I was looking to learn as much as possible. But I was also terrified that the school was going to come to me one day and say, “I’m sorry, Desmond, we made a mistake by letting you in.” Maybe it would be the financial aid people who would eventually discover exactly who I was and my criminal history. Or someone else in the administration would say, “We cannot have an ex-drug addict or someone who is currently living at a homeless shelter matriculated here. He must have slipped through the cracks somehow.”

This thought occurred too many times during my school years. While I was sitting there, I used to think, Man, these people don’t know who they have in their classroom. I wonder if they know that I’m a crack-head. I’ve been in prison, homeless. . . . I was waiting for them to chase me out of the classroom.

My goal then was to be able to prove, when somebody raised an issue about my past, that I was worthy. I wanted to be able to have something to prove that I deserved an opportunity to get an education. So I set out to get straight A’s. And for the most part, that’s what I did. There were three classes where I didn’t get an A. Every other one of my sixty credits for my associate’s degree had an A next to it on my transcript. My thinking was that if I could just do the best that I possibly could, then, when these people eventually did come and get me, I could say, “Hey, I know I’m not supposed to be here, but look what I’ve done since you let me in. Give me a chance. Make an exception.”

But that time never came. It’s truly a testament to that system that an older Black man with a criminal record, a man living in a shelter and unable to pay tuition, was nonetheless allowed—even encouraged—to attend college and to excel at it. Sadly, it doesn’t happen everywhere or for everyone, but a high school and college education should be a basic right for everyone living in this country, no matter what hurdles they face.

I totally dedicated myself to being the best that I could possibly be, and I think my professors noticed that. The funny thing is, I had that commitment even back when I was a drug addict, albeit in a misguided direction.

When I was first introduced to crack cocaine, I was shown how to smoke it out of a soda can or a beer can, where to poke the holes and where the ashes go, how the device is fashioned. That was a really crude way of smoking, and I had a natural desire to find out a better way, because, of course, I wanted to inhale all of the smoke that I possibly could.

I graduated from a can to a glass pipe. Somebody had to teach me that, but then I went home and tried to improve on what they taught me by experimentation. I ended up learning something new about the residue that you can bring back together so you can stretch your drugs.

I was always searching. I really became a student of getting high. How could I get the best high possible? I was committed to finding that out. That commitment didn’t just stop with trying to learn the best way to smoke; it was also about getting the best drug. I remember riding a bike in the middle of a hurricane, just so I could buy a crack rock from a good location. I wanted the best, and I was willing to do anything to get it.

If I was that committed to something that destroyed my life, then what type of commitment should I have to do something that would improve my life, like being in college? I figured that I need to put forth at least the same degree of effort. If I actually worked harder to destroy my life than to save my life, then I wasn’t on the right road to healing. If I could have an even stronger commitment to improving my life than to destroying it, then I could really, fully, and finally be proud of myself.

And that is what I did. My first year, I worked incredibly hard and was invited to apply for the honors society, Phi Beta Kappa. When I got accepted, that lifted up my self-esteem tremendously. I’m an honors student! Then other offers started coming in to join this or that academic fraternity. I ended up being a member of three of them in total and got to wear their stoles when I graduated two years later with my associate’s degree with highest honors and as the honors recipient for our paralegal program.