Free Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair by Susan Sheehan

1988, the romance resumed, but, except for the sex, things were never quite the same. Crystal had taken a part-timejob as a cashier at a discount store in May, and insisted on paying for their first night back together, at the Capri. Diamond didn’t immediately return to drug dealing—he knew that the cops who had arrested him twice would be watching him closely—and he had little money. Crystal didn’t want him dealing drugs, and encouraged him to get a job, just as she had done four years earlier with Daquan Jefferson. Diamond got an honest job for three weeks and then quit: nine-to-five didn’t suit his temperament. He eventually returned to selling drugs, but on a much smaller scale. When Crystal asked him for a suede skirt, he said she would have to wait, and bought himself sneakers instead. Her friends teased her. “Daquan would buy you anything,” they said, “and still all you want is Diamond.”
    Not quite all. While Diamond was in jail, Crystal had hung out with two other drug dealers (including the one “I screwed for five minutes, first time I ever regretted that”) and had started smoking coolies and “woolas” (a mixture of reefer and crack). Diamond sold crack but didn’t use it. “He was afraid of me turning out to be a crackhead,” Crystal says. “He told me to stay away from the guys I had been with while he was in jail. I said I would, but I didn’t, and he beat me up outside the group home several times—1988 was my year of crack. I told Diamond about Kyle, the first guy I had intercourse with after he got out of jail, because I felt guilty. He then started fooling around with other girls, and I messed around with other guys, who could show me the good life.”
    That summer, the social worker Crystal had had fortwo years left St. Christopher’s. Her new social worker warned her that unless she showed the court that she was making progress toward achieving her goals she would eventually lose custody of her child to Daquan. Daquan had never threatened anything of the kind, but after nearly four years in the group home Crystal was ready to get on with her life for reasons of her own. The dealers who provided her with drugs hung out on Hempstead Avenue, a few blocks from the group home, where there was a cluster of small shops—bodegas, a Chinese carryout, a video store. At first, they supplied her with complimentary crack. Soon she had to buy her own, and she decided that it wasn’t a good investment: the money would be better spent on clothes. She wanted to put some distance between herself and temptation.
    By 1988, the five girls who had celebrated Crystal’s fifteenth birthday with her were long gone. Lynn had left at the age of eighteen, in the summer of 1985, after graduating from Satellite, because she was sick of being in foster care; she went to live with a boyfriend and had a child two years later. Tina and Simone left for similar reasons, and also had babies. Yolanda turned to crack. Nicole became a prostitute. Fifteen or twenty other girls had entered and left 104th Avenue between 1985 and 1988. A roommate of Crystal’s—one of the two with whom she travelled to the movies on Forty-second Street instead of to Flushing High—had a psychotic episode, smashed a number of mirrors and windows at the group home, and wound up in a psychiatric hospital. A few girls went to live withrelatives. Two or three went to college. Some were forced to leave, because they refused to go to school. Several simply left: one day they were there, the next day they weren’t. They were never seen again. The staff learned what had happened to one former resident only when they read about her in a newspaper: she had been arrested for transporting guns from the South to New York City by Greyhound bus.
    Crystal’s favorite period at the group home was her first six months. “We used to always sit down and have