Member-only story
Blues For Vida
An ode to a once great pitcher who became an unfair symbol in the drug wars in the late 20th century.
The day I stopped loving my father was the first day I saw a drug addict cry about their inability to stop. A ghetto celebrity in Tacoma and a successful businessman before he became a basehead, he used the connections he developed, to scam money, get a comeback job at UPS, smoke that up, and then spend a few years playing a victim of the system. In that time he got away with a lot of shit and around trap houses, the most egregious things being roughing up runners, people were always 11–15-year-old kids looking for father figures. Because I wasn’t there all the time, because I was Bob Lashley’s boy, and because Bob Lashley had a sad story, I wasn’t jumped on or “Rick James’d”( aka forced to smoke crack at a young age). I knew enough kids that were, however, and my survivor’s guilt is hellish.
About 1990, the hell-peak of Hilltop’s violence years, my father decided to stop pretending to be sober and forage around trap houses. I can still visualize those last few times I felt like finding him. Closing my eyes, and remembering those dilapidated, poison-leaking, glorified shacks, I can see the cars, and the slick or bouffant-haired white kids waiting for runners to give them the stuff to live out their less-than-zero fantasies. I can see the said runners going back and forth, and the men like my…