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A dime bag for the schoolgirl
I thought escaping Vassar to make Harlem drug runs meant I could be in the elite world, but not of it.
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PROJECT GIRL | BY JANET MCDONALD | FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX | 231 PAGES

Editor's note: Janet McDonald, one of seven children, grew up in a housing project in New York City. Her memoir tracks her lifelong struggle with identity, her attempts to reconcile her hopes of success and her ties to the growing poverty, crime and drug abuse of her old neighborhood. In this excerpt, she spends her first year at Vassar College confronting this identity crisis by experimenting with drugs.

BY JANET McDONALD | The train conductor announced 125th Street as "the first stop in Manhattan -- next stop, Grand Central!" It amused me that he didn't say the "H" word -- Harlem. The little Harlem station, with its rickety wooden benches and peeling walls, was so different from grandiose Grand Central. I had never gotten off the train at the Harlem stop but was sure I would blend in easily in the black neighborhood. Dressed in my usual jeans and sneakers and carrying thirty dollars Daddy had sent me, I wandered up the broad street, not sure of anything -- why I was there, what I would say, how I would be received.

I headed toward a group of tall buildings. Projects. I loitered there for a while, feeling reckless. At last, a young guy approached. "What you need?" His eyes scanned the street. I felt awkward. "Uh, I got twenty bucks." I thought saying "got" and "bucks" would establish me as a homegirl. I might as well have shouted, "Excuse me. I don't wish to be presumptuous, but do you have any heroin for sale, and if so, could you provide me with the quantity/price breakdown?" He smiled. "Where you from, New Jersey?" The ultimate, humiliating insult. "No. I'm from Brooklyn." "Yeah? You seem like you from New Jersey. You sure you not from New Jersey?" His words meant something was terribly wrong with my presentation, that I appeared middle class, maybe even whitegirlish.

A stocky woman with bad skin and glazed eyes approached with an air of no-nonsense urgency. "You straight?" she asked. "What you need?" "Lemme git a dime." He didn't ask her if she was from New Jersey. He eased something into her hand as she slipped a bill into his and she split. Straight. Dime. I filed away the new vocabulary words in my memory. The dealer turned his attention back to me; I was ready. "Lemme git two dimes." He slipped two glassine envelopes into my hand, and I fumbled a twenty into his. "I'm on this corner every day, so look for me when you come back. If you don't see me, ask anybody for Eddie." I was so pleased to feel part of this new group that I almost forgot to ask Eddie my second question. "Uh, do you know where I can get ..." Another vocabulary lapse. "You need works? See that building over there? Go to 1-B. That's Pops' crib. He's cool."

My naïveté was astonishing. I was a Vassar freshman buying heroin in Harlem, without benefit of white-skin privilege, wealth, or family ties. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was arrested in his BMW a few years later doing the same thing, he wasn't prosecuted. I, on the other hand, would have been sent straight up the river, not back to Vassar, but to prison. My existential explanations of tribal yearnings and identity conflicts would have fallen on deaf police ears, as would have my explanation that it was my first time. I was a classic no-common-sense, all-book-learning casualty. Ernest and Ann were doing it, as were a whole lot of my project friends. I wanted to belong, too, make my last stab at being truly project before my inevitable transformation into Straightback Sally.

I followed Eddie's directions to the low-rise tenement building and tapped softly at 1-B. A dark eye peered through the peephole. Four locks unlocked, clicking one after another. Absolutely anyone could have been on the other side of the door, but my only concern was the embarrassment I felt. The door opened. Before me stood an old man with black skin and white hair who looked like anyone's sweet old grandpa, except for the enormous revolver protruding from his waistband. Speech failed me. I felt too ashamed to ask something so awful of someone who could be my grandfather. Besides, he might scold and lecture me about the folly of my ways. "Don't be shy with ol' Pops, honey, come on in and make yourself comfortable. No need to be shame with me. You want some works?" I sat on the couch, wanting to throw myself into his grandfatherly embrace and tell him how unhappy I was. Why wasn't he trying to talk me out of it, tell me I was hurting myself, that I should go back to Vassar and stay put? "How many you want, honey? One? Two? They a dollar a piece." I read the marking on the big cardboard box of syringes: "Harlem Hospital." It was a depressing scene, the two of us there, grandfather and granddaughter, with that box.

I wasted no time making a spectacle of myself back at school. To be able to use the works, I had to overcome the fear of needles I'd developed during my annual elementary-school inoculations. But my fear of death stopped me from mainlining, which was how most junkies I knew lived, and died. Instead, I just stuck the needle in my thigh. Most of the time, though, I opted for a less life-threatening route. I scooped the white powder onto the tip of a fingernail file and brought it to my nose. Bitterness flooded the back of my throat. A warm drowsiness relaxed my body. I cruised over to Kendrick House, where I performed every attention-grabbing act imaginable, short of wearing a T-shirt with "Hey, look at me!" printed on it. I paraded around, wildly exaggerating every sensation. I slumped in a high-backed chair in the middle of the lounge, leaned against the fireplace, knees slowly bending, did a slow-motion doze in the recreation room. I wanted everyone to know that I was not like them, and would not become like them.

N E X T_ P A G E: Snorting smack with a black belle from Tennessee