Broken: Book Excerpt
Prologue
October 1994
There was a sharp rap on the door, followed by a muffled but unmistakable command from a voice outside in the hallway.
“We want the white guy, just the white guy. We know he’s in there. He comes out now and there’s no trouble for anyone later.”
I was the “white guy.” I knew in that instant that my family’s desperate search to track me down had ended at this decayed two-story apartment in a violent pocket of Atlanta’s inner city. Terrified, I rushed around the room, trying to warn the other crack heads to sit still and keep quiet.
“Don’t panic,” I whispered. “They’ll go away.” But nobody was listening because everybody was as high and as scared as I was. We bumped into one another as we tried to find a way out, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. We were like wild animals trapped by a wind-whipped forest fire.
Who was out there banging on the door? Was it my father? My mother? My wife? My mind flashed back to the morning four days earlier when I left my house in suburban Atlanta. I remembered kissing four-month-old Thomas and two-year-old Henry good-bye. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I told Allison I needed to run some errands before dinner. I drove to the parking lot on the corner of Boulevard and Ponce de Leon, approached a drug dealer with a thick scar running from his left ear to the corner of his mouth, and paid him one hundred dollars for six marble-sized rocks of crack cocaine. I held them in my hand and thought, “These will keep me going for a day or two.” They were gone in four hours.
The knocking became a relentless pounding that shook the door frame. I thought