It took her six days to reach Jacksonville. She stayed there for a while, living on the beach. There were a lot of sailors in town, she said, and they liked her. “Nobody liked me in Albany,” she said. “They used to laugh, I was too fat.” One of the sailors took her to Daytona on the Fourth of July weekend, then left without her. She had been here ever since.

“It’s nice here,” she said. “The dudes here are nice.”

A few more beach rats arrived, and she seemed nervous.

“I gotta go,” she said. “There’s a guy over there I don’t wanna talk to.”

Her eyes were bright with panic. She got up quickly, and we walked together back to the boardwalk. An enormous fat man in green shorts lay on a bench, his hair cut short, his eyes pinwheeling, fanning himself with a pocket mirror.

It was dark now. Two scrawny men with junkie eyes stood in front of Lacey’s Beachware, watching the evening’s arrivals from the small towns of Florida and Georgia.

“Why don’t you go home, Kathy?” I said.

“I don’t ever want to go home,” she said, her voice rising. “I don’t want to go home ever again.”

She ran across the boardwalk, down the steps to the powdery sand, rushing toward the lights of the passing cars, and the dark Atlantic beyond. I stayed two more days, but I didn’t see her again.

September 8, 1978

CRACK AND THE BOX

One sad rainy morning last winter, I talked to a woman who was addicted to crack cocaine. She was twenty-two, stiletto-thin, with eyes as old as tombs. She was living in two rooms in a welfare hotel with her children, who were two, three, and five years of age. Her story was the usual tangle of human woe: early pregnancy, dropping out of school, vanished men, smack and then crack, tricks with Johns in parked cars to pay for the dope. I asked her why she did drugs. She shrugged in an empty way and couldn’t really answer beyond “makes me feel good.” While we talked and she told her tale of squalor, the children ignored us. They were watching television.

Walking back to my office in the rain, I brooded about the woman, her zombielike children, and my own callous indifference. I’d heard so many versions of the same story that I almost never wrote them anymore; the sons of similar women, glimpsed a dozen years ago, are now in Dannemora or Soledad or Joliet; in a hundred cities, their daughters are moving into the same loveless rooms. As I walked, a series of homeless men approached me for change, most of them junkies. Others sat in doorways, staring at nothing. They were additional casualties of our time of plague, demoralized reminders that although this country holds only 2 percent of the world’s population, it consumes 65 percent of the world’s supply of hard drugs.

Why, for God’s sake? Why do so many millions of Americans of all ages, races, and classes choose to spend all or part of their lives stupefied? I’ve talked to hundreds of addicts over the years; some were my friends. But none could give sensible answers. They stutter about the pain of the world, about despair or boredom, the urgent need for magic or pleasure in a society empty of both. But then they just shrug. Americans have the money to buy drugs; the supply is plentiful. But almost nobody in power asks, Why? Least of all, George Bush and his drug warriors.

William Bennett talks vaguely about the heritage of ’60s permissiveness, the collapse of Traditional Values, and all that. But he and Bush offer the traditional American excuse: It Is Somebody Else’s Fault. This posture set the stage for the self-righteous invasion of Panama; Bush even accused Manuel Noriega of “poisoning our children.” But he never asked why so many Americans demand the poison.

And then, on that rainy morning in New York, I saw another one of those ragged men staring out at the rain from a doorway. I suddenly remembered the inert postures of the children in that welfare hotel, and I thought: television.

Ah, no, I muttered to myself: too simple. Something as complicated as drug addiction can’t be blamed on television. Come on.…But I remembered all those desperate places I’d visited as a reporter, where there were no books and a TV set was always playing and the older kids had gone off somewhere to shoot smack, except for the kid who was at the mortuary in a coffin. I also remembered when I was a boy in the ’40s and early ’50s, and drugs were a minor sideshow, a kind of dark little rumor. And there was one major difference between that time and this: television.

We had unemployment then; illiteracy, poor living conditions, racism, governmental stupidity, a gap between rich and poor. We didn’t have the all-consuming presence of television in our lives. Now two generations of Americans have grown up with television from their earliest moments of consciousness. Those same American generations are afflicted by the pox of drug addiction.