Crack Tales

Episode 1

0:00
Gospel call and blues music.

William:
I’m William Borden and you’re listening to Episode 1 of Crack Tales. It’s my story and the stories of some people I love about what happened during my ten-year addiction to crack cocaine.

A quick warning. This podcast contains adult language and is adult in theme including frank discussions of sex and sexual violence, suicide, and drug use. If you find yourself triggered by any of these topics, please, honor that, and consider carefully whether you should continue. 

The truth, often although not always the right choice, is critical in the case of this podcast. I spent so much of my life, on and off crack, hiding who I am and deflecting what I perceived as threats through presenting myself falsely, through being what I thought would protect me. In some cases, I missed out on intimacy and the joy of just being myself with another human being, and in other cases, I saved my fucking life. One of my favorite Brandi Carlile songs says, “´Because passing through the eye of a needle, isn’t easy as it sounds, for those like me.” 

I decided, upon committing to telling this story, that I would be honest and open. So, drugs and sex, lots of both. Struggle, pain, insanity, suicide, disregard for myself and others, and finally recovery and an ability to sit in my own skin for the first time in my life. This first episode has been released on the 20th anniversary of the first day that I did not use crack, ever again. I couldn’t have done it alone, by a long shot. I have family, dear friends, coworkers and some time, (laughs), a lot of time, in the rooms of AA and NA to thank for this life I now live. Don’t worry, we’ll get to it all. The good, the bad, and the ooooh lordy, the ugly. 

If you have yet to listen to the trailer for this podcast, I’d recommend it as it provides a bit of background. There are also two other episodes available that predate this official inaugural episode of Season 1 – Episode 0 and Episode 0.1. While Episode 0 includes something I will repeat later in this episode, it’s a primer on crack, both Episode 0 and 0.1 include stories outside my years of addiction, one about me as a child when I knew I was not a typical boy and one about an experience that really was a comedy of errors. Check them out.

In any case, welcome to Episode 1 of Crack Tales. And now, a crack primer.

Music

3:22
William:
Crack is an illegal stimulant. People use it recreationally. Um yeah, I don't know, recreationally sounds really nice, um (laughs) and you know, parts of it were nice, but a lot of it was very ugly. Technically, crack is a form of cocaine. It is cocaine. People take the powder, the cocaine powder, and process it by cooking it so that the hydrochloride salt, one part of cocaine, is removed from the cocaine alkaloid, that's the technical term and basically what that does is it leaves a solid piece of rock, which is much purer than most powder on the street, and much more intense. The process removes a lot of the impurities and the cut, you know, that people put into it when they sell it on the street and it transforms the powder into something that can be smoked because powder effectively cannot be smoked. The process for making crack is really simple: water, baking soda, cocaine and heat basically is all you need. And it's hard to figure out for me, which is more expensive, but what I do know is that I frequently put $20 worth of crack on a pipe and took all of that in one hit. Inhaled $20 in one lighting of the pipe. And then after that $20 was gone, I, you know, had a great rush for a few minutes but then I was left with a craving - the most intense feeling I've ever, the most driven I've ever been about anything which is incredibly sad to say. But that craving, overpowering - and basically it didn't matter what I had to do to satisfy it. I had to have more. So, crack is sold on the street. It's also sold by dealers, people buy crack cocaine from dealers not on the street, but a lot of it was sold on the street when I was around. It's ready to smoke. It's already been cooked by the dealer. And so, people just buy pieces of it that they can smoke. I could buy $10 at a time if I wanted and you know, I mentioned putting $20 on a pipe and smoking it in a few seconds. So, $10 is nothing in terms of quantity. And imagine a crackhead rounding up $10 at a time, panhandling, committing crimes, doing whatever it took and then taking that $10 to the dealer, getting their little rock, smoking it, within minutes left in a state where they're just going to do anything to get the next hit. That that basically is what the epidemic and chaos of crack was that we saw on the streets. It's also really important to note that, you know, human beings are different and everybody has their own experience and so this experience of crack cocaine that I'm sharing with you is my experience. I imagine it's… many people have had the same but there are also, I'm certain, many people who have very different experiences from mine so that's important to note. The things that I share with you are my experiences alone. 

So, there you go – perhaps more than you ever wanted to know about crack. 

6:53
William:
By the way, I have no judgment about the use of drugs. I don’t. I don’t see myself as being in a position to judge anyone about anything. That doesn’t mean I don’t try to guide others though, based on my values and my beliefs and on my experience. I simply say, “Well, in my case…” and then I relay what my experience has been and how it has affected me. No one could tell me back then! I don’t have any illusions now about convincing anyone of anything. I’ve got a good case study about drug use though, and if anyone asks me, I always say the same thing. Don’t start. Find other ways to give yourself what you need. If it were possible to smoke a joint, have a drink, snort a line, drop a hit – once in a while, to experience a different reality, then, why not? How different is it really from traveling to a new place and experiencing a new culture, or experiencing the effects of a new love, or flying down the track of an impossibly high roller coaster? Well, new love doesn’t last and if one stays in the relationship then one adjusts over time to a different, less dramatic, less drastic orientation to the other person involved, and in most cases survives and even thrives, or at least grows. Rollercoasters, while fun are not something we usually do 24-7 while, say, missing work. I suppose a roller coaster addict is a possibility in this world of world’s but I can’t see how checking one out is a long-term life risk. And, traveling? Well, the nature of travel requires planning and time and usually is a part of one’s life, possible only when other things, like income, are maintained. So, again, while travel addiction might leave a hippie stranded on the beaches of Phuket selling hand-woven palm fronds that that same hippie has crafted into overalls or a frisbee even, or in extreme cases cause that hippie, like so many I’ve seen in my obsessive binges of Banged Up Abroad, to consider transporting drugs across borders only to be made the subject of my favorite tv show. Travel? It doesn’t have an immediate barbed hook like so many drugs potentially do. Putting a foreign chemical in your body could potentially maim or kill you in that moment, or, like in my case slap some handcuffs on you and throw away the key. One just doesn’t know and so, I always say, the risk is not worth the potential devastation. And let it not go unsaid that I also believe that sitting with whatever distress or other feelings we may be having – in the addict those can be positive feelings too – I lost my job so I drank, I got a new job so I drank, it’s a valuable way to grow, sitting in those feelings. Feelings propel us forward, usually. Sometimes at the pace of a meandering Montana river, oh the memories I have of growing while floating in a canoe with amazing friends, from Sloane’s Creek down to Leslie’s place, singing the entire score of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Or, the process may feel like a flood, or as the Spanish call the overcoming of land by water, an inundación. Ever felt inundated? I have. Anyway, to be clear, I do not judge anyone’s use of drugs, but if I’m asked my opinion, I always just say no, don’t do it.

Music

10:59
William:
Sunday, September 25, 1960; Saturday, July 24 1971; Friday, May 31, 1974; one Saturday night or possibly early Sunday morning, I don’t quite remember, in February 1992; Saturday, June 27, 1998, and although I’m agnostic, lordy lordy thank you for Friday, February 22, 2002. Apparently, the big things in my life happen on the weekend. These Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays spanning 42 years include the day I was born, the day my father died, the day I was raped, the day I started using crack, the day my mom died, and the first day I didn´t use crack anymore.

I promise we’ll get to the aforementioned “ugly” – the drama, but first we begin with location and environment – my place of birth and the community that helped to form Little Bill as I was known for years in relation to my dad, Big Bill, and my cousin, Middle Bill. Let’s begin.

I was born in 1960, a really good decade to call my own if I don’t say so myself. The Civil Rights Acts, the Black Panther Party, the Sexual Revolution, the Women’s Movement, the Voting Rights Act, the Anti-War Movement, Gay Liberation, the Watts riots, Stonewall, the Peace Corp, Zip Codes, James Meredith at the University of Mississippi; Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and Walmart – oh, um, sorry. Not Walmart.

MUSIC

13:19
William:
There’s this French term, day-mwan, day-mwan, which means “of the monks.” My little vie de fou, my crazy adventure on this planet had its humble beginnings in a tiny city called day-mwan, far far from France, sitting just twenty miles south of Seattle in northwest Washington State in the good ole USA. And being good ole Americans, ignoring anything foreign, we called my birthplace Deh Moinz, that’s right, Deh Moinz.

Wikipedia says that Des Moines is bordered by the suburbs of Federal Way, uh, let’s see, Federal Way to the south, Kent to the east, SeaTac to the northeast, Burien to the north, and Normandy Park, uh over to the northwest. Essentially, it was one big American suburb, the place this little gay boy got his start. I did a little research and the record shows that the area including and around Des Moines historically served as a location for fishing and clamming for both the Duwamish and Muckleshoot tribes, native and rightful dwellers in what would become my stomping grounds. By the time I came along and knew anything about anything though, there was not a trace made obvious to me or anyone I knew, that I was on Native land – a typical of the times washing away of any facts that would get in the way of manifest destiny – that guilt-relinquishing notion that it was right for Europeans to conquer and, let’s face it, steal North America. We were primarily white suburban kids and we weren’t taught anything about this heinous act that gave us the houses with front and back yards and fruit trees and rhododendrons. We thought everything was ours. 

The city of Des Moines itself was not incorporated until June 17, 1959, a little over a year before I arrived. There were some other famous residents though. One of them, Gregory, he was an internationally renowned operatic heldentenor who died, sadly of a heart attack at 35. I was smoking crack at 35. A heart attack for me would not have been unusual. And who can forget the woman who, was also caught, like me, having sex in a car, Mary Kay LeTourneau! Remember her? 

16:02
William:
We didn’t actually live in the Des Moines town center, which was a cute little place back then. It had the Des Moines movie theater. That theater opened its doors in 1947 and it’s still open today, having survived the 70’s by showing porn films until the residents of Des Moines picketed long enough for the town council to take some action, finally forbidding use of the theater for anything but family-oriented movies. The cinema, the Des Moines Marina and the yearly Waterland Festival fairgrounds, they all seemed light years away from my street, although in reality it was only 2 miles away from the house I grew up in. My street was very, VERY much like all the other streets surrounding us. Typical suburban blocks. Houses of similar size and design, slight floor plan variations amongst them, but all of them one story and none of them had basements. They sat on 10,000 square foot lots front yards rolling one to another, and backyards with fences neighbors could talk over. The Joneses (yeah, I know, I kid you not), the Joneses, the Plumbers, The Bains, the Keezers, the Dunscombs, the Doells, the Fitzners and the Muzios. That´s as far down the street as I can remember except for the Edminsons who lived around the corner and whose mom’s name was Ina, a name I always thought was so cool, Ina! And then there was Layla and Lila who lived one street over, the older of whom acted as our babysitter for my parents nights out. Every family had a mom, a dad and at least one kid and every family was white except the Doells. Mr. Doell had jet black hair and brown skin. I’m guessing he was Southeast Asian, but I didn’t have any consciousness of the world back then, so just knew him as the smiling dad of Debbie, my friend. 35 houses sat next to and across from each other running 5th Avenue south round the corner at 198th to 6th Avenue South which led up to and around the corner onto 196th bordering the Johnson’s woods. Right at the corner of 198th and 6th was Mrs. Strange’s house. That was indeed her name. Mrs. Strange. Her house sat back from the corner. It was a big ole house too. It wasn’t like ours. It was a big old farmhouse and it sat back from the corner and you had to walk on a path to get there and really the only time we ventured un there, oddly enough, was Halloween when she always had homemade popcorn balls. It made the fear you feel walking up to her door, well worth it. Those four streets made up a huge rectangle which we’d ride around and around on our bicycles, and sometimes, during winter, we’d be towed on a toboggan tied behind my dad’s Rambler station wagon. (Laughs) Yeah, 8 kids at a time, of various ages and sizes, each locking their legs around the one in front of them, being towed by a simple rope behind a car on a slick snowy street. Woo hoo! 

19:32
William:
From the time I was born, my family shared a fence and our lives really with our northerly next-door neighbors, the Shields. Actually, before my arrival even, as you will hear from Kay, the mom, about the time she noticed my mother’s car parked on the street, sometime early in 1960, in front of their shared obstetrician’s office. Kay, in that moment, with the old timey, small towney practice of knowing so much about the day-to-day goings on of your neighbors, learned I was on the way. My mother was pregnant again already having had my sisters Gail and Kelly, then four and two years old. Kay’s house next door, just 10 seconds running from our front door to theirs through the driveway and through their hedge. And there lived Duane, her husband, although we called him Lefty, everybody called him Lefty, and their daughters Laura and Julie. This family of four that I have known since I was born are still close friends of ours. You’ll hear more from all of them later, but we shared our lives fairly intimately as neighbors back then, and continue to be closely connected to this day, through all the changes we’ve gone through. 

The Shield’s back yard and our back yard had identical slopes, little hills, which at the time seemed like huge inclines scalable only with great effort on my part. Ummm, they weren’t that big. But, I can remember lying face down, legs taut, and beginning to roll which seemed like forever to reach the bottom, and quite honestly, I don’t know why we didn’t vomit at the end of the whole thing. When I see those backyards now, those grand hills, they’re, they’re really small. And um, they’re just like slight inclines rising to meet the back fence which bordered backyards of the houses on 4th Avenue South, which was quite frankly at that time a foreign land only visited on our way to the local supermarket, XL Sooper – S-O-O-P-E-R, XL Sooper!

21:49
William:
The northern border of our yard shared a fence with our friends, the Shields. On our side we had a small apple tree, a small pear tree and a small peach tree, lovely really, along with raspberry bushes in a row and wildly unruly blackberry bushes. Laura and Julie’s yard always was a bit more presentable – lush green grass where ours was usually yellow and huge, tall, bulging fruit trees while ours looked more like the barely surviving members of the Charlie Brown Orchard for Spindly Misfits. The Shields also had a smooth concrete patio outfitted with posh outdoor furniture whereas all I remember in our backyard were those aluminum folding chairs and loungers which always left you stuck barelegged to woven nylon strips made worse by their color palette of pastel plaids. Back in the Shields yard, they also had a path that led from their patio to the garage – a garage my sister Kelly would soon take vengeance on when Kay did not allow her to spend the night, again we’ll hear more about that later. Somewhere along that backyard path I fell face first, I don’t know at three years old or something, knocking out my front left tooth causing a prominent hole right in the middle of my kid smile. That hole was the focal point of many many Sears photo studio portraits for many years to come. (laughs)

Kay, Lefty, Laura and Julie were our go-tos. They were non-blood family, our friends, our confidants, our inner world really. From the year I was born until I moved to Spain, and a few years after that, our two families spent every Christmas Eve together. I moved to Spain when I was 50, but returned that year for Christmas Eve. You do the math. This holiday tradition persevered through so many changes, divorce, death, addictions, recoveries, births, new partners, and through many calamities that struck one of us or the other. Fresh crab sandwiches on French rolls sprinkled with cheddar cheese and broiled in the oven, Caesar salad, 7-layer dip, oyster stew, Peanut Blossom cookies, fudge and a lot of other things – this has been the menu since I can remember. I don’t know if the year I was born was the first year, but I do know it’s happened ever since. Back in those days, we’d alternate houses, one year at our house the next at theirs. One memorable Christmas Eve when they were – I think I remember this although you know it could just be I remember the stories – one quite memorable Christmas Eve, we were at the Shields and we had left candles burning on our mantle at home. Yeah, live candles, very Christmassy and incredibly dangerous. When we walked in the door after an evening of fun and gift exchange and food, one of the candles on the mantel had begun burning the painting that hung behind it. Luckily the painting itself wasn’t on fire and it had just been scorched. The painting was a four-foot-wide night cityscape, with tall buildings and their reflections in a body of water. The buildings were lined up side by side for, you know, the whole, entire width of the painting. There were, I don’t know, 20 buildings or something. I remember a lot of screaming and a lot of drama right when we entered the house, but it was, it was short lived. The candle had burned a black mark amongst the tall buildings, and, really, it looked like a new, dark building, just like the other ones. We kept that painting hanging on the mantel, burnt spot and all, for years to come. No one saw it. People walked in, nobody noticed. We had to point it out.

26:01
William:
We’re going to hear from Kay in this episode and also from Maggie, both moms in our little circle of church friends, both friends of my parents, and both with husbands and children, uh the children who were also my playmates. They gave me their recollection of our life back then, and also their personal experience of it. In the next episode we’ll hear from the kids, Kay and Lefty’s daughters, Laura and Julie, my sisters Gail, Kelly and Lisa, Gail and Kelly are four and two years my senior respectively, and Lisa, was born one day before my first birthday, me the 25th her the 24th. Can you say “shared birthday parties” (laughs) – for years to come! Also, in episode 2 we’ll hear from Marin, the oldest daughter of Jerry and Irma, and the sister to David and Lisa, another family we were friends with at our church, Southminster Presbyterian just blocks from our house. As a side note, David, Marin’s younger brother, came up with a nickname for his younger sister Lisa, Weekon By Honey Pooch. Don’t ask me. I don’t really have any explanation but, somehow, I adopted that same name for my younger sister as well and for years we called her Weekon. Weekon By Honey Pooch was full but we changed it many times over the years and eventually settled on Weekon. No idea. Anyway, this episode we hear from the adults.

Maggie is an amazing artistic woman who raised two boys with her then husband, but later in life divorced and really found her own way, exploring the world and exploring people. She too remained a friend of my mother’s until my mom died, and Maggie and I developed a friendship as I became a young adult. This friendship lasts today. We’re still friends and I a so grateful for that. I asked Maggie what her life was like back then. They didn’t live on our street, and their house seemed to me to be on the other side of the world, but it wasn’t. It was actually quite close. She talks about our church as well, at the helm of which we were lucky enough to have a man named Wayne Keller who was progressive and charismatic and he was a minister who was not afraid to talk about social justice at that time. At one point though, he moved to a different church, much to the congregation’s dismay, and was replaced by someone completely unacceptable to my parents’ inner circle – and so, like good radicals they first wrote him a letter objecting to his ways and then, they left the church and founded their own home church gathering which went on for years. 

Here’s Maggie. 

28:47
Maggie: 
Of course, before your dad died, we were couples. And we did things together on holidays, and birthdays. And I remember one time your mom showed up in kind of a tent type dress and everybody said, Oh, are you pregnant again? And she said no, it's just the style right now. And so we had a lot of fun together as couples. And again, your dad was, he was a big fellow. So, he had a smile that was precious and a twinkle in his eye to let you know, he was really a sweetheart and a soft teddy bear kind of guy. 

ORGAN MUSIC

Maggie: 
I thought Southminster was wonderful. Wayne Keller at that time was really alive and really good. 

William: 
Did we lose him and then someone else took over?

Maggie: 
Yeah, he went to a different church and we had somebody from the Philippines who were talking about the Philippine people in a derogatory way (W: right) and we split off from that church. We said, hey, we can't take this. We had a house service.

William: 
I remember you used to meet regularly with the group, yeah. I mean that wasn’t typical for the time, people doing things like that.

Maggie: 
No, no, no.

William: 
You know I often think about my high school Summit, which was really a magical community. I’m still really close to the people and your community of adults was like that. Closeness between friends. 

Maggie: 
Real bonding with people

William: 
I asked Maggie what she felt like for her during that time. You know, what was her life like? How did she feel living in that neighborhood and in that community? Here’s more of her thoughts.

Maggie: 
I was so happy. For example, I did a lot of sewing and I made draperies and I re-upholstered a chair and I did you know, interior things to the house and made it look good and I made clothes for myself. I made some for the boys, not much, but mostly myself. I remember getting all dressed up for Easter in hats and gloves and the boys were dressed in their cute little new jackets. So, I was very happy. It was a good time. It pleases me to do those things.

William: 
I can remember like, like especially and I don’t know why I have this memory but I have a memory of red fabric maybe with white polka dots or something and I don’t know if you were, one day I was there and you were working on a project or something or…

Maggie: 
Yes, I had a kind of a short dress that I'd made with shorts. It was red with white polka dots and it matched the shoes that I had. The red polka shoes. I'm sure I had that on and you were there.

William: 
Like many of the couples in our group of friends, Maggie divorced her husband later to pursue her own journey.

Maggie: 
So, Bob was three years older than I and so he graduated from the university and then we went into the Air Force and we went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lived there for three years and it wasn't until probably ´79 that I got divorced. I needed to travel. I needed to go to school. I needed to get out and see the world. I felt like I was a butterfly captured in a glass jar. And I couldn't get out so I just exploded out of the jar and went on my way.

William: 
This makes me think that marriage – well like many people are already doing, that marriage should be rethought, maybe there will be phases of a marriage where obviously parents need to be home for the children but perhaps built into the marriage could be a next phase, where the primary caregiver gets to go and explore the world. I don’t know. Maggie had some insight, I think. 

32:54
William: 
Kay started out married to Lefty, Julie and Laura’s dad, and then they eventually divorced as well. She went on to meet Gene, who became a beloved member of our family. He’s the one I mostly remember being at Christmas Eves all those years. In any case, I asked Kay about her life at that time.

Kay:
Our house payment was $99 a month and some months it was pretty hard to make that and I remember um see, Laura and Julie are two and a half years apart, so, I must have gotten pregnant pretty soon after we moved there. We were going to the Presbyterian Church and Bet and Betty Keller told us that her friends were moving in next door to us and I can't remember if they (Laura and Julie) were both born when you guys moved in next door, but Gail was there. She was a little bit older than Laura and they became friends. 

William: 
Ok, ok ok Kay! Enough about the girls. What about me?  

Kay: 
Well see the thing is your mom and I both went to the same doctor that we were crazy about this man. He had an office in a house on First Avenue. I can still find that house but he and I remember when she was pregnant with you, the reason I knew she was pregnant was because I drove home one day and I saw her car at that doctor's office and Gail and Kelly had already been born and there she was, again. And (laughs) I, you know, I remember having Julie – stayed at the Highline Hospital in those days and it was tiny compared to what it is now, tiny. And you stay there for several days. That's what the way you did in the old days and I had a terrible time with both children, with stitches and you just never hear of that anymore I don't know why. But, um, he said okay the next time we're going to try hypnotism and you know both your mom and I liked him and so I just said well you know that's possibility if that ever happens But you know you were a surprise, here she was going to have another child. And I honestly, I honestly don't remember when she got pregnant with Lisa. I do remember her getting pregnant with you.

35:33
Kay:
It was you know it was it when you guys were all little, little people that we would have those Christmas Eve events and uh we'd go to church and we'd have the Christmas Eve singing with the candles and then we’d come home and have our little exchange. Mostly, I think your mom started that it was just like well, you kids would run over and bring us lifesavers, the little book of life savers that would open.

What I wouldn't give for those simple days but life isn’t simple. All that has changed.

I mean, we didn't even know what we would eat. You know, we had one car that we would share. Nobody had two cars and we would take turns helping each other go to the grocery store, you know? Men carpooled to Boeing simply because they didn't have cars. There was a lot of things we didn't know. We didn't have seatbelts and I don't know how many times my car somehow got shifted and it would roll out into the street with my kids in it. Or, I'd leave them in the parking lot at the old XL and come out and they and the car were rolling down the parking lot. I mean, we'd all be turned into Children's Protective Service now, but we didn't have seatbelts and there were times, I'm not kidding you driving down, the street on Ambaum, I remember with my sister-in-law and nephew and he opened the door and fell out. Well, thank heavens, he didn't get hurt, but you kids would sit in the backseat and jump up and d own. You know, because you could, There were no seat belts. And if you sat in the front pretty soon, you know, your mother’s arm or my arm would be slamming you back to sit against the seat. Because that's just what people did. And so…

You know, the Southminister, we, we had our social friends, our social group really was Southminister, but also it was that community. People that went there lived very close to the church. Walt and Ina, Walt and Harriet, I mean, you know, Jerry and Irma I. mean, people lived not far. And so, your church group became your social group and we would get together in the neighborhood and there'd be more people besides the church group, but we had little parties in our houses and dances at our houses. And, occasionally we'd get in cars and go down to Redondo and dance. But we did a lot of socializing in our homes and in our backyards. More and more I'm thinking about it, and so it was an extended family, but it was definitely a community that much of it was church based. 

William: 
Here Kay talks about the advice that she received from a counselor that apparently a few members of the community were seeing. 

Kay: 
I told you, I remember we all went up to that church camp. It's a Presbyterian church camp on the way to Mount Rainier and I remember one of the people that I sought some counseling from, Dr. Wilde, and the reason I went to him was because Judy was going to him. She was having help and I went to that place. You know, we were kind of entwined emotionally. I remember that psychologist, he said “They should burn that church down and start over” (laughs), you know, whatever I was telling him whatever Judy was telling him, that was what he said “They should burn it down and start again.” (laughs).

39:21
William:
My life began with a stable if not completely emotionally-functional village of people, albeit a community that had criminally little input from any culture outside its own, racism rampant in America having insulated the all but all-white suburbs. That would change in just a few short years as my parents bravely delved into civil rights work, met and began engaging with several civil rights heroes from Seattle and helped bring the notion of Black Power into the church and the community which wasn’t, didn’t always go over so well. We’ll hear about that as well. Prior to that though, in our ignorance, the children played and the parents partied and there was a lot of love. We had a lot of love in our group.

I was a gay kid though, and even back then, prior to any knowledge of “gayness” or sexuality of any persuasion, I knew something was different. I look back on it now and I had this kind of energy around Dr. Larson, our family doctor. His, well, I wouldn’t call it hot back then but, I think that’s what I was thinking, his hot white medical coat. You know, as soon as to have any self-awareness, I was self-conscious and that’s not an easy thing to live with. I knew I was something that wasn’t what people expected. 

The next episode, we’re going to hear more about the neighborhood, but actually from the kids’ perspective. We’re hear from Laura and Julie, my three sisters Kelly, Lisa and Gail, and also our family friend Marin.

MUSIC

William:
Thank you so much for listening. This has been episode one of Crack Tales. Crack Tales is written and produced by me, William Borden, but could not have been done without the incredible gift of my interviewees the people who sat and talked with me and shared their story. Additionally, I want to give a huge shout out and a huge thank you to a team of people who volunteered to transcribe the audio interviews. The way this worked, I conducted many, many, many interviews that were hours long and that resulted in thousands of pages of typed transcripts. I did some of them but the bulk were done by a team of volunteers who gave of themselves, without asking me for anything. I want to thank Beth, my cousin Celese and my cousin Laura, Sabrina, Kate, Elizabeth, Katie, Tsetse and my two friends here in Spain, Sergio and Ioana. This group did amazing work and gave tirelessly transcribing these interviews. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Music for Crack Tales has been generously provided by my dear friend Cornell White. We’ve been friends since the seventh grade when the proprietor of Carolyn’s Cakes on Capitol Hill skipped over us in line and when we complained, she called us, “Green!” I never really knew why. Cornell’s music can be found on Soundcloud, CornellWhiteMusic, all one word.

I’m also eternally grateful for our friendship, but also for the skills that I acquired while working for Anne Rutledge and David Current at their film production company, CurrentRutledge. I know how to edit because of my time at CurrentRutledge. Thank guys!

See you next time. 

MUSIC