Sniffing
To kids looking for quick thrills, painting the town has a meaning all its own.
(Page 3 of 3)
When I got back to San Antonio I had a talk with Rogelio Chapa, the executive director of MANCO, who had once been a heroin addict and had served time for manslaughter after accidentally killing a man in a bar fight. Chapa was unsure about my writing about these details of his past—he was afraid they would convince kids that his being a junkie had been a necessary prelude to his current success. But he was, you could sense it, an extraordinary person, and his lifelong ordeal had not yet been flushed from his face. Otherwise he was trim and middle-aged: he could have been an actor on one of those Spanish soap operas Pacheco had told me the barrio grandmothers stayed home all day to watch. He had a scar on the far left side of his face, and his half-frame glasses coordinated nicely with a thin mustache. He was talking about something he called the “continuous variant activity approach.”
“These kids, their attention span is very short—they’re prone to get bored very quickly and if you don’t have something for them right away they’ll run off to their stash and start sniffing paint again. We’ll have a basketball game, say, then once they start messing around, goosing each other in the ass, we say, ‘OK!—a pool tournament!”
“What we need is a center with enough stuff where we could keep prolonging what we call their ‘abstinence span.’ You’ve just got to keep them busy. It’s going to take community involvement to solve this problem. Parents are going to have to take control of their youngsters. There are some mothers who are afraid of their twelve-year-old offspring because they become violent on paint and attack them with bottles and broomsticks.
“These kids don’t sleep properly, they don’t eat properly. They become aggressive, violent, get into fights at school. They’re responsible for a lot of the vandalism around here. This hasn’t been documented by the police, but we know these youngsters, we know what they’re up to. The only recourse is for guys like Juan and Freddy to get out there and do some street-level counseling. It’s a very unstructured kind of preventive approach we have with them.”
Chapa reminisced for a while about the forties and fifties when the westside had been San Antonio’s main source of drugs. He said that various well-positioned and respected Anglos would come to his house and he would score for them.
“The thing that was most prominent then was grass. But then when heroin came in you’d see the change. Guys who used to go around with fine Stetson hats and fine straight-legged pants and used to drive big cars were suddenly walking along the street dressed like bums.
“You get a youngster today sniffing paint—I’ll cut my own throat if his grandfather wasn’t into dope here back in the forties.”
Garcia had found three sniffers for me. One of them was a thirteen-year-old girl that Virginia Tijerina, TIDAPP’s only female caseworker, had been working with for about three months. Tijerina didn’t want her to fall under the influence of the other two kids Garcia had brought, so I talked to her alone in Tijerina’s office.
She was a very shy girl, whom I’ll call Louisa. Her father was in state prison, her mother was an alcoholic. For three and a half years she had been sniffing paint—she said she always sniffed “Bright Silver”—and not going to school. Once, after running away from home, she had been sent to Villarosa, the halfway house where Eduardo’s friend had seen the chronic sniffers and resolved never to have anything to do with paint again. Louisa said she had never lost weight like the other “spray kids.” Though she would sometimes sniff paint all day and all night she had always retained her appetite. After a month or so in Villarosa she had run away, made a truce with her mother, whose authority she had previously not been able to abide, and moved back home.
It was an awkward interview. Louisa spent the better part of it looking down at her knees, and my attempts to isolate her paint-sniffing experience—one single thread from an intricate tapestry—seemed less and less to the point.
“What do you do now? What do you do all day?”
“I stay at home. I watch the Mike Douglas Show. Sometimes I fell like walking and I go for a walk.”
“There’s no way I can convince her to go back to school,” Tijerina told me afterward. “She doesn’t care about her life.”
The two boys Garcia had found for me were both about seventeen, both in high school. One of them—Alfredo—readily admitted that he still sniffed. He said this with an exasperated smirk, as though he were truly impatient with himself.
Raul, the other one, had been a heavy sniffer but claimed he was reformed now. His hair was shorter than Alfredo’s and he obviously paid more attention to it. He had been in and out of reform schools and homes for boys for a good deal of his adolescence and he had that wiriness, that skittish grace that people who are accustomed to making their own way so often seem to have. At seventeen, he radiated for the adults in the room a patronizing, recalcitrant courtesy. He was wild and he knew it.
Garcia had told me earlier of a common paint-induced hallucination, one that several kids had told him about during one of those long evenings when he had taken them camping.
“They’d see weird things. Like toy soldiers in a field. Then, of course, the train—a lot of them saw that. I think the train more or less depicted death for them. Of course the power of suggestion had something to do with it. Not everybody saw the same train, but they did see death in some form or fashion.”
I asked Alfredo if he had ever seen the train.
“No, but como, I would think I was in the sky. In the tunnels once I thought, you know, I did it too much—I started seeing things like monsters and started running. If you’re somewhere alone, though, you get everything out of your mind and you do the spray, then you’re happy.”
Alfredo said he had tried paint for the first time in the tunnels at the insistence of his friends.
“They told me to pick up an empty can, you know, then they handed me a spray can. They said, ‘Spray this in there!’ I said, ‘No.’ I heard it was bad for you. But then I tried it, I did the spray. When I did it the first time it tasted ugly. Then I started doing it and liking it, and they said, ‘It tastes good,’ and I said, ‘Yeah!’
“Now sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t. When I don’t have anything to do I go out with my friends. If I see Juan and Freddy comin’ I throw it away.
“I do it cause there’s nothin’ else to do. Sometimes when I go to school they smell the spray and call me spray-head and everything. But other guys, they have stuff to do—they play basketball and football and everything. I don’t like to play those. I like to swim, but there’s no pool here.”
I asked Raul what paint was like.
“It’s like—you have a feeling of dizzy—a buzzing to your ears. Once I see a shadow, I see death. I was like this, doin’ the spry”—here he crouched down on one knee and put his head beneath his nose—“I was like this and I had a feelin’ this man was comin’ back on me. I see he had a—what do you call it?—sickle. He told me to name my favorite station on the radio. Then he hit me like this on the shoulder”—Raul rolled from his position as though something powerful had just swooped by and grazed him. “Then he ran away. When you do spray you have a feelin’ someone’s comin’ back on you but you can’t see him.”
Another time, he said, he was high on paint, and God and the devil both appeared to him in his room.
“Good said, ‘You want to come with me, Raul, or with him?’ I went with God. I smashed the can.” He pulled a rosary out of his pocket and displayed it.
Raul also showed us a long scar on his forearm where a friend had cut him with a knife once when they were both high on paint. He said he didn’t fell a thing when it happened.
I asked him why he had ever enjoyed sniffing paint.
“I just have fun,” he said. “I see the basketball guys playing. It’s bad for you though. You can get your brain skinny.”
Afterwards we all went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. We all had a number two combination plate. Freddy Garcia got heartburn.
“I always get heartburn when I eat Mexican food,” he said.
We talked about the tunnels and about mothers who believed their kids sniffed paint because they had the evil eye, who would consult readers and spiritual advisers and sometimes even chain their children to the bed to keep them from sniffing.
Pacheco mentioned that it looked as if TIDAPP may have run its course, that the program may not be refunded for next year.
“During the three years we’ve been here some guys have made it,” he said. “You don’t always hear about the results until years later when you get an invitation to their graduation or wedding. That makes you feel pretty good.”
On the way back to the MANCO offices we dropped the two boys off at their housing projects. When Raul got out he offered me a three-stage handshake and said, “When will I see you again?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I watched him walk back to the housing project. There was a full moon and by its light the silver paint on the walls was almost luminous, so that I could make out each signature and, below the, each c/s, the charm that guaranteed power over one’s own name.
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