Click on the link to read the entire Medium post by Scott Rodd.
On a chilly winter night, I found William sitting on the stoop of an abandoned row house a couple doors down from my place on New York Ave. He pinched two jagged white pebbles from a baggy and packed them into his pipe.
“[People] look at me and see a disease,” he said, tamping the rocks with his index finger. “Until they make the fatal mistake of engaging me. Then they see I’m well-versed, I’m bright — I’m a human being.”
William has spent the last five decades hustling around the Truxton Circle neighborhood. His upbringing here sowed his addiction from a young age. At 9-years-old, he recalls sipping from half-empty cups at neighborhood parties; by 12, he was drinking on a daily basis; at 16, he tried PCP. And when the wave of crack cocaine consumed the neighborhood in the 1980s, it consumed him, too.
His addiction, in other words, is bound by both drug and place.
“New York Ave is my vice,” he said.
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Bates Area Civic Association 