Doing time with Noel: Part 1
When I first met Noel Berrios, he was inmate 719332 at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, the men’s jail in Philadelphia, awaiting trial for drug charges. I was there reporting about the jail system’s efforts to bring medication-assisted treatment to help inmates with opioid use disorders enter recovery before being released to decrease recidivism. My friend, Cyndi Rickards, who teaches a class with Drexel University students alongside students experiencing incarceration, also let me tag along on a visit with Noel about a project. When I told him I was a reporter, he right away said he would share his story with me, and I gave him my cell phone number and mailing address. It was the only way for us to communicate: for me to deposit money into a Global Tel Link account and for him to call me, or to write back and forth. Noel’s letters began arriving shortly after we met, surprisingly frank and intimate in content and tone. Noel had been waiting for me to come along, waiting for someone to show an interest in him and his experience.
Here’s what I learned about Noel early on: He was born on Nov. 20, 1973. He grew up in North Philadelphia in one, if not the only, Puerto Rican families in a mostly black neighborhood, “in the heart of the ghetto, in the Badlands,” Noel said. Neighborhood kids gave him a hard time because he didn’t look the way they did, talk the way they did, eat the same things their families did. “I used to go fightin’ to school and fightin’ coming back from school just because of my nationality.” Noel also learned to do battle in a family of 13, 11 brothers and two sisters, all from the same mother but from two different fathers: Ramos vs. Berrios. “For some reason, it was like a competition between us,” Noel wrote in one of his first letters to me. The two factions vied with each other for superiority, often physically, and no one intervened. Now he’s in touch with seven of his siblings, Noel said. One of them died of AIDS. Another one was shot seven times during a dice game. Miraculously, he survived. Then one day when he got upset with some dealers on his stoop, someone shot him once, and he died, Noel said matter-of-factly. “I think it was all a set-up.”
Noel also explained that he has been incarcerated most of his life, starting in juvenile detention around age 15 and locked up on and off ever since, primarily on drug-related charges. From a young age, Noel saw the drug dealers’ flashy cars and wanted that kind of money himself. He began small-time corner dealing. He joined the Latin Kings. Noel also started using pretty heavily early on. “I’m a weed junkie,” Noel told me, though he also prefers crack and drinks and shoots heroin and does speedballs, a combination of heroin and cocaine, whenever he gets a chance.
“I’ve been in and out of prison and drug addicted for over 20 years,” Noel wrote. “You’re probably saying that I should’ve learn my lesson by now, and I did. It’s sad to say that it took this long for me to realize it.” He said he knew that I would wonder why this time it would be different. “I’m tired of running, tired of the same thing, tired of being a dissappoint [sic] to others, seeing the hurt in people’s eyes when I end up in jail or running the streets getting high. It’s true what they say: you do become a product of your environment, and that’s what I’ve become. I want to change. I want to give me [sic] a chance to live a life I know I can have.”
The problem in part has been a lack of a support system, Noel said. Growing up, his father was an alcoholic, and his siblings were always fighting. Noel loved his mother dearly and called her the “glue” of the family. When his mother was alive, she always looked out for him and visited him and made sure he had money in his commissary for toiletries and extra provisions when he was incarcerated, Noel said. She brought everyone in his family together, got them to laugh and eat and have a good time. And she protected him, Noel said. When she was alive, he knew someone was there. But when she died, he was desolate — more alone than he had been in his entire life.
Noel has never recovered from the fact that he was upstate in prison when his mother died from complications from diabetes. He said the prison system wanted to charge him $1,800 to travel to his mother’s funeral. Of course, he didn’t have the money. Noel has never forgiven his extended family, including his father, for failing to come up with, or even try to produce, the funds to get him there. If everyone had just pitched in a little bit, it would’ve been so easy, Noel said one day on the phone. I could hear the pain, the bitterness in his voice. This neglect seemed like an ulcer that had been plaguing him for years.
In an early letter, Noel told me that he always had dreams of becoming a fireman or a police officer. “But as a kid, I always felt myself a coward and still think I still am, and I always hated myself for that,” Noel wrote. “My life was, and still is, very, very hard. I carry a lot of pain and suffering and battle myself on a daily basis.” When he watched “Silver Spoons” or “Different Strokes” or “Family Matters,” Noel asked himself why his life couldn’t be like one of these TV lives with family and friends like that. But he was “always made fun of, always being the butt end of everybody’s jokes. Even family would berate me. I always ask myself and GOD [sic] why my life is like this. What did I do to deserve this? Will I be able to overcome such pain, and heartache, and disappointment? Will I ever be able to live life on life’s terms?”
In particular, Noel said he recalls an incident in the park when he and a younger brother were playing and a couple of neighborhood bullies sidled up to torment them. Noel didn’t run, but he also didn’t fight back. He even considered taking up the guys’ offer to hold his little brother’s arms behind his back so they could punch him a few times. Then they would let Noel and his brother go. “Thank GOD he didn’t go through with that, and my brother had more heart than I did. But what that did to my mental and emotional state — it destroyed me. It hurt me to the very core of my soul to think that I was going to let someone hurt my brother just so I won’t [sic] get hurt… That still bothers me to this day.”
Another thing that bothers Noel to this day happened after a car ran over his foot when he was 15, and he had to wear a cast up to his waist for months. When a doctor finally took it off, he warned Noel to use his crutches and not walk on his foot. Noel did the opposite. At a checkup, the doctor told Noel that if he broke it again, his foot would have to be amputated. But that’s not what still nags Noel. It’s that a personal injury lawyer came around and won him a gob of money that he came into when he was 21. All of a sudden, Noel said, his brothers and sisters and extended family were nice to him. He shared around. “But when the money was gone, everything went back to normal, and when I needed a helping hand, I got looked at like I was crazy,” Noel wrote. “That really hurt. And you know what with all that, I will still give them my last. I would starve if it meant that someone in my family was hungry, or if they were cold and I had on a coat, I would take off my coat and give it to them.”
By this point in our correspondence and in some intermittent phone calls, Noel began to call me his “Angel,” because I listened and didn’t judge, and because he started to feel comfortable telling me things he had been holding inside so long. “It was a blessing and an honor to have gotten to know you and has really put a new lease on life for me,” Noel wrote. “You have opened my eyes and heart to a world forgotten, and I thank you from the deepest recesses of my soul.” In addition to continuing to be impressed by Noel’s eloquence, I was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the role I was taking on for him, which seemed at times like that of a psychiatrist or a priest; so I would remind Noel that I was just a journalist interested in his story — interested in what his experience revealed about the very American issue of the revolving door between drug and mental health treatment centers, the street, and incarceration. But, of course, inevitably, I was also becoming a friend and cared about Noel and his well being, especially after what he disclosed next.
I knew there was more to Noel’s history of trauma than being the only Puerto Rican family in a black neighborhood and the bullying from the outside and the fighting within the family, including the whippings his drunk father used to administer with a belt. Eventually, Noel told me that he was sexually abused for many years as a child by the son of a local priest. No one in his family acknowledged it or stopped it when Noel explained what was going on — or even believed him for that matter, he said. Then Noel wrote to me obliquely and movingly about the abuse, saying, “The mind shuts down. That kid can never be a kid again, and what is being done, it’s being done repeatedly, and the child is dieing [sic] every time it’s being done.” Noel said that that “child is no longer beautiful but ugly in the mind, and to be loved is a scary thing. In fact, he or she feels that they can never be loved again.
“They say that time heals all wounds, and that may be true. But what happens when you feel that there isn’t enough time or think that this wound will never heal? The festering of this wound soon becomes gangreenish, the poison begins to flow, and the only way to stop the poison is to cut off the root of it — but the root is you, so what could be the only option? Suicide comes into play, and that is the only way to get rid of the poison because it’s already in the bloodstream.” Others turn to drugs and gang life, Noel said. “In the mind that is broken, the streets showed love, the streets showed loyalty, so thay [sic] thought. How can a human being recover from a scar that will always be a reminder because this scar is not on the outside but on the inside?”
Hearing about this sexual abuse traumatized me vicariously. I never felt judgmental of Noel or critical of his choices, but rather I saw him as a product of his environment and of a childhood full of cruel and unusual punishment — one rife with abuse of the type no person, much less a child, should ever have to experience, although legions suffer through it on a regular basis, leading to mental illness, addiction, crime and often incarceration instead of treatment.
But though my heart tore into bits for Noel, I felt it was necessary to re-draw some boundaries at this point. For one thing, I told him, he had to stop calling me his “angel.” I was just a flawed human being like anybody else, and though I cared about him and what was to become of his life, I was primarily a journalist wanting to follow his story to the extent that he was willing to let me. So Noel, knowing my penchant for tattoos and piercings, started calling me “gangster rat” instead. “How are you, gangster rat?” Noel greeted me each time he called. And he started calling more often.
I didn’t mind at first and was eager to learn more and take ongoing notes about Noel’s life. But I did keep having to fill up his Global Tel Link account, since nobody else was, and we had started running through the funds more quickly. When I found out Noel was a reader but lacked material in jail, I sent him some fantasy books, his genre of choice. A couple of times, I even put money into his commissary so he could buy decent soap and deodorant, which apparently you have to pay for in jail. Plus, the food is shit, and Noel needed soups and snacks.
All of this led me to wrestle with my motives, to peer at my relationship with Noel with a keener eye. Was I becoming merely a friend? Was Noel manipulating and using me? Was he falling in love with me because I was the only one there for him on a regular basis? Was I crossing some invisible journalistic boundary? And if so, did it really matter?
Doing time with Noel: Part 2
Noel has served 15 years upstate in prison at six penitentiaries. “I got kicked out of five different prisons,” Noel said. “One was, I didn’t even cause no trouble, and they kicked me out. They thought I was the leader of the Latin Kings.” The Latin Kings is the oldest and largest Latino street gang worldwide. Noel is a member of the Latin Kings, he said, but he’s certainly not the leader locally and has never been within any specific incarceration setting. But the way the Latin Kings rolled together and approached life appealed to him. “I’m always going to be honest with you and be straight up,” he said. “The fast lane and the drug selling and the getting high and getting with the women — that was intriguing to me. I felt like I needed to be part of something.”
As he got older, however, the more arrests he collected, the time separating his incarcerations shrank to less than six months — and the life of the Latin Kings began to feel less tantalizing. Noel regrets not being around when his mother was sick and dying, and it gnaws at him that he was also in prison when his younger brother, Reuben, had his legs amputated after a car accident. Perhaps his worst regret is being a father but not knowing his children.
“My daughter’s mother: she was something else,” Noel said with a chuckle. “We used to do a lot of coke. She used to drive me up the wall. She would sleep with everybody. When I come to find out, she started cutting herself. She tried to run me over with her car. She was obsessed. She didn’t want me to go nowhere. I was 17 she was 25.
“My son’s mother — that was a different story. She was hitting on me ’cause the girl I was with was sleeping with her husband. It was friends with benefits,” Noel said. But “she caught feelings from that.” He liked her; he really cared for her. But he got so used to women cheating on him that relationships became almost meaningless to him, Noel said. Now his son is already 2-years-old, and “everybody seen [sic] him but me,” Noel lamented. “They say he looks just like me, like I spit him out.”
All of this information came out in a torrent of phone calls during March and April last year. Then Noel’s case was dismissed. The prosecution’s key witness didn’t show up for a hearing, so the judge dropped the charges. Noel was free to start again.
Once Noel hit the outside, I drove to North Philly to meet him at a house he was painting. He had a friend who was hiring him to do contracting jobs here and there, but the work wasn’t steady, and Noel found himself sleeping at friends’ places — friends with whom he had a history of getting into trouble. Some nights he passed in his boss’ Jeep, though Noel was reluctant to admit his predicament. We drove around his neighborhood in my minivan, from Frankford Avenue to Cambria, Reese, Fairhill, Somerset, and all the other streets he ran growing up. Noel showed me the school he fought his way to and from every day.
“This used to be one of the craziest motels you could come to: prostitutes, drugs,” Noel said when we passed the Liberty Motel on Germantown Avenue and Westmoreland Street. Now it was shuttered. “They close [sic] it down,” Noel said. “They got busted.”
At another intersection, a middle-aged woman with several missing teeth, Sherry, accosted Noel through his open window. She was furious at some guy who had apparently sold her short on some pills, ground one of them into the dirt and then demanded money back for it. “I need someone who can mother up on his mother fuckin’ ass,” she said. “I don’t need someone who can talk, or I’m going to stick him for real… And if I kill him, I don’t give a fuck.”
“I talk to you about that,” Noel said.
“What does that mean?” I asked as we drove off. I suspected Noel was going to give the kid an ass-whipping or something of that nature. But Noel denied it, saying he was going to have a “sit down” with him instead. “Will he listen to you, this dude?” I asked. “If he does, good thing,” Noel responded. “If he doesn’t, not so good thing.”
He didn’t elaborate, but I got the point. Plus, Noel’s forehead belied the violence of his life on the streets. He had a long gash streaking down into his eyebrow with seven crude stitches, and a wound on the top of his closely-shaved head from someone hitting him with a brick. He was jumped, Noel said, because he gave his word for someone who owed a debt and didn’t pay it off. Noel was furious at himself for getting into this situation. But he had the last say that morning, beating up a guy with a chair. At first I thought he meant a wooden chair, but later, when I asked horrified, Noel laughed at me and said that it was plastic, making me feel only slightly better. I was starting to get edgy, but I took some deep breaths. I could freak out at home later and never see him again if I felt that was necessary. I was starting to suspect that my husband was going to be upset with me for having gone off with Noel, alone, without any kind of safeguard.
I shoved these worries away, struggling to make merry chit-chat until we arrived at a public place where I felt safe. Noel was starving, and I had promised him lunch, so we headed toward McDonald’s where he scarfed down a Big Mac, an eight-piece chicken nuggets, a milkshake, and a soda. I wasn’t eating because I had lost my appetite. Plus, I was recording our conversation, until the manager got nervous and kicked us out. Before that happened, an older gentleman recognized Noel, and they spent several minutes catching up. I was starting to gather that Noel not only knew lots of people in the area, but that he was also looked up to by many folks.
Though he denied that he was high the day I was with him — I really couldn’t tell if he was or not but suspected that he had at least been smoking pot — Noel admitted that he had been using weed off and on and drinking and even doing some crack since he had been released from jail. So Noel was right back in the thick of it, transient, doing drugs, working but not saving any money, and having trouble finding a place to live.
Then, I didn’t hear from Noel for a couple of weeks. It was almost a relief. Maybe he was gone from my life. I was starting to feel responsible for him in some way that I couldn’t quite decipher but that didn’t feel entirely comfortable. But as the days passed with no word, I started to worry about Noel. His father was worried, too.
Soon, however, Noel’s call came in from CFCF. My morale sank as I listened to Noel and his frustration with himself. A security guard had seen Noel and another guy walking out of a warehouse with a bucket of compound material that they were going to sell for drugs. The other man fled, but Noel got caught. So there he was again, awaiting arraigning in court and a possible trial if he didn’t reach some sort of a plea agreement. Like many at CFCF, Noel couldn’t make bail, and no one in his family was able or willing to come to his aid. I suspected it was a combination of both, especially after I spoke to Noel’s father and his brother, Reuben, on the phone several times.
“It’s for him to be patient,” Reuben said. “That’s the only thing, for him to be patient. Right now, he’s only thinking about himself.”
Reuben said he and his father were fed up with Noel’s 20 years of cycling in and out of jails and prisons and that Noel needed to start taking more responsibility for his actions. When I said that I thought Noel was trying to do that this time — he was so ashamed and fed up with himself that he had landed right back where he had been just a few weeks before — Reuben remarked, “Listen, we all made dumb decisions in life. He got to grow up… He ain’t got to listen to me. He got to listen to life.”
Reuben’s words made me wonder again how much Noel was using me to make his life in jail easier. I wondered if he actually sat in his “hut” — jail slang for cell — and calculated just how much money he could get off this naive journalist before she wised up and stepped away like everybody else in his life. I vowed only to continue to deposit money into the Global Tel Link account so we could talk, but not to buy Noel any more books or to drop any more dollars into his commissary. I was torn about this, because I truly felt Noel was sincere when he said that I was the first person in a long, long time who he was comfortable talking to — who was a true friend. He swore that he didn’t care a “lick” about any money, that he was just so grateful for my standing by him. A growing, aching part of me didn’t want to let him down.
Maybe that’s why I decided in late June to visit Noel at CFCF, not the official way a journalist or lawyer would go, evading the strip searches and endless waiting, but the way that every other friend and family member had to do it. I knew enough to bring just my I.D. and bare necessities and to leave my purse and jewelry at home. But I brought so little that I forgot to carry a quarter with me for one of the little lockers in the waiting room to plunk my car keys in. The only white woman in a room full of black and Latino men, women, and children, I had to go around quietly asking people if they had an extra quarter until someone got so fed up with me that they dropped one in my palm.
My keys secured, I tiptoed up to the front desk to let them know that I was ready for my visit with Noel. “You’ve got to take all of those out,” one of the guards said, pointing to my 11 piercings. It hadn’t dawned on me that these would be a problem, and I had no idea how I was going to remove some of them, including my nose ring that the piercer used pliers to connect through the hole in my nasal cavity. But some determined women in the bathroom helped get every last jewel out, and after showing the guard all the empty holes in my ears and nose, I proceeded to wait two-and-a-half hours to see Noel.
A female guard finally called Noel’s name, and I stepped into a little cubicle with a curtain, where the guard made me lift my shirt and pull open my bra and undo my shorts. I didn’t feel that ashamed, however, since I already knew from Noel that he frequently had to squat and cough. The main concern is the passing of drugs and weapons through the jail. But Noel said that despite such precautions, you could get any of the same drugs available on the street inside CFCF or in any of the prisons he’d been in, for that matter. For instance, a girlfriend might shove pills into her vagina and somehow furtively remove them during a visit with her boyfriend or husband. Sometimes drugs are passed through kissing. More often than not, people pay the guards to bring them in, Noel said, though I had no way of verifying these claims.
The visit flashed by. All I remember is that Noel and I talked nervously and too fast, both of us watching the clock. I recall that Noel was wearing a short-sleeved beige jumpsuit and white socks with cheap plastic slides. I remember that his color looked sickly under the fluorescent lights and that he had dark circles under his eyes. He said I was only one of three visitors he had ever had during his entire 20 years of incarceration.
After our meeting, Noel began to rely even more heavily on our talks over the phone, sometimes calling repeatedly in one day if I didn’t pick up. Of course this irritated me. But I also knew that he was utterly alone, that where he was and where I was was, to some extent, just a result of our backgrounds. Had I been born in his neighborhood, into his family, onto the mean streets of Philadelphia, I might very well be the one in the jumpsuit and plastic slides. I did, however, keep reminding Noel that I was a journalist who intended with his permission to tell his story, and that though we had become friends, I wasn’t able to do much to help him beyond listening.
Truthfully, my relationship with Noel was starting to cause problems in my marriage. My husband, Jeff, reasonably wondered what we talked so long and often about. He questioned the safety of my meeting up with this man who had such a violent past, even though I had a visceral sense that Noel would never hurt me. I started to feel guilty and to decline Noel’s calls when my husband was in the room.
When Noel was due for a hearing, I would head to Philadelphia’s Criminal Justice Center at 1301 Filbert Street. But I never saw Noel. Month after month, his case was not called. And when it finally came up, after the warehouse security guard had failed to identify Noel in a line-up, the judge threw his case out without even bringing Noel to the courtroom for the news.
Ultimately, Noel applied for and was accepted to the Forensic Intensive Recovery (FIR) Program, which was originally implemented in response to a federal consent decree that required Philadelphia to reduce its inmate population. Initially, eligible inmates received substance abuse treatment and support services outside of the institutions through early parole and re-parole. But now participants can get treatment for their substance use disorders in lieu of incarceration. Noel was lined up with an inpatient drug and alcohol treatment program that also offered services for those with comorbid mental illness.
But after one, two, three months of waiting for a bed, Noel’s calls to me, especially through the winter holidays, became more and more desperate. One day, he asked me to drive to his dad’s house to get $50 to then send through Western Union to some woman who would tell her boyfriend in jail that she had received the money, and Noel would be able to buy food from him with it. I told Noel I wasn’t comfortable with this situation, that I was over-stressed with my own life at the moment. Noel said he was glad that I told him, but I could tell he was angry. Then he ranted about how sometimes he felt like disappearing and not telling anybody where he was.
Noel lamented that he had wasted his life in jail. This statement hit me particularly hard that day. From then on, when Noel called, still with no bed date at the treatment center, more and more angry and full of despair, I felt awful for him — but also liberated. I knew that he was going to have to work through all of this himself, and that ultimately all I could do was listen.
Doing time with Noel: Part 3
As Noel waited at Philadelphia’s Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility for a bed to open up at a rehab as part of the Forensic Intensive Recovery (FIR) Program — which was allows eligible inmates to received substance abuse treatment and support services in lieu of incarceration — he became more and more frantic. Since a judge had accepted him into the FIR program, Noel had been waiting more than three months to get out of CFCF, possibly longer than his sentence would have originally been. “I’m really struggling to hang in there,” Noel told me over the phone. “I’m really trying to keep myself calm.” He became convinced that a mix-up with his paperwork at the courthouse had led to a delay in his getting a bed. I didn’t know if this was true or not, but I knew that Noel believed it was true and that that fact was drawing him near to the edge of despair.
Noel was out of money for the commissary, out of food (other than what the jail served, which he said went right through him), and out of what he called “cosmetics,” things like deodorant and soap. He couldn’t stand the rough, jail-issue variety. He wanted the dignity of buying something with scent and heft that actually kept him from smelling like he lived on the streets, he said.
I had been desperately trying to resist the impulse to loan him money to buy such items from what turns out to be a brisk black market that runs inside CFCF and probably most jails and prisons. As Noel explained it to me, a guy loads up at the commissary on items inmates desire, since the only way to buy from the commissary is by submitting a slip days in advance and receiving the goods once a week. Friends, lovers, and families of inmates can Western Union money to the man’s girlfriend on the outside. Once she confirms to him through a phone call that she has received the funds, he distributes the merchandise. I was fascinated by the fact that prison officials tolerated this black market system, when they were so intolerant of so much less flagrant behavior. But despite my interest, I was trying to stay out of it.
A few weeks earlier, when I “loaned” Noel $50, he told me to call a woman nicknamed “Klo-E”, who would give me instructions. She told me to Western Union the money to her. It was quite a process, involving multiple texts and of course a $12 fee Noel didn’t know or tell me about. Then passed several days when I was convinced that “Klo-E” had duped me, taken the money, and as Steve Miller sings, “run.” But then she texted that she had retrieved the funds, and Noel thanked me during his next call, saying he had received his deodorant, soap, soups, and other goods.
“Why do you go through so much soap and deodorant?” I once asked Noel. He said that he showered three times a day. This sounded like obsessive-compulsive disorder, a diagnosis I was unaware that he had. But Noel said that he felt compelled to shower that many times a day in jail because it was so dirty with so many germs are circulating through close quarters. Last year when he was at CFCF on another bid, Noel developed an abscess in his throat.
“Now, how does one get an abscess in their throat?” Noel asked me, outraged at the memory.
He put in a sick slip and told the jail doctor when he finally saw him that his throat was really sore. The doctor gave him Tylenol or some analgesic like that, said he had probably contracted a virus. But then the abscess exploded in Noel’s mouth one day while he was in his hut. He was gagging up pus and blood. That finally landed him in the hospital where they treated him with intravenous antibiotics and where he was finally able to heal. He was chained by his wrist to the hospital bed every day that he was there.
Finally, in mid-January, Noel called ecstatic that he had been assigned a bed in a treatment center at Eighth Street and Girard Avenue at a leg of the North Philadelphia Health System called Girard Medical Center, which faced major layoffs last year. Still, Noel had done time in the rehab there before, felt he knew for the most part the lay of the land, and was optimistic about returning. He was leaving CFCF in just a few days for intake at Girard.
“This is a really great feeling,” Noel told me. “Now the work begins. I feel real good about this year. I think this is the year for me that my life will change.” I said I hoped so.
Noel added that he felt like he wasn’t going to give up this time during his 28 days in treatment. “I’m going to utilize everything they have for me,” Noel said.
The first time at Girard Medical Center, even though he had become a community leader, Noel said he got out there as soon as possible. He said he wanted to get back to the life of the “rush.”
Still, he had fond memories of his first round at Girard. His father had brought him a whole Little Caesar’s pizza “in the box and everything. I gained good weight there, too. I exercised. I’ve been dying to hit the steel,” Noel said.
Then, as if reckoning with CFCF demons before he left the jail, Noel said there was something he was needing to tell me but that he couldn’t really talk about it on the phone. Of course, this only started me asking more questions. I mean who in their right minds would actually be recording and listening to all these phone calls anyway? So many times Noel had told me that they’d been locked in their “huts” (prison slang for cells) because they were short guards. So even though Noel seemed to feel the FBI was tapping the jail phones, and who knows, maybe they were, I remained skeptical and never let it stop me from pushing him on subjects he opened up and then shut down.
“Weapons was brung out, you understand?”
“What?”
“You know what weapons are, right? They was brung out.”
Finally, I got it out of Noel that he was by himself in the day room and members of another gang (Noel belongs to the Latin Kings) approached him, armed, about some beef. Noel admitted that he, too, had a weapon.
“You got two things in prison,” he told me, “your word and your balls.”
Although luckily, everything got “squashed” before violence erupted, “it was going to get dark,” Noel said. “Trust me, it was going to get dark. Like I told you, sometimes I got to put myself in survival mode. I’m not going to let anybody do that shit to me.”
Our talk turned to what Noel would take from jail with him to the treatment center. “I ain’t taking anything from here. I might just take a bar of soap and deodorant and a pair of boxers.”
During this stint in jail, Noel had done some time in the “hole,” or solitary confinement, being let out one hour a day. Guards had tossed his hut and found a small bit of Suboxone, an opioid usually used in maintenance treatment for opioid use disorder but that can also cause a high when abused. Noel said when he went to the hole, he had “a nice little cotton acquirement, but that shit went to shit.” His cellie (jail slang for cell mate) had wound up with his bag of stuff, and Noel had acquired a lot of nothing in return.
“I’m going to leave here with the boxers I’m wearing and nothing else,” Noel decided.
Our talk then turned to the fact that women would be on the same floor as Noel at the treatment center and about how rehab romances were dangerous. “I got a lot of things I need to take care of first [before having a girlfriend],” Noel said. “If I do meet a girl, I’m going to tell her, if you want to hang out and all that that’s fine, but there are things I need to take care of first.”
The Sunday evening before he left for 8th and Girard, Noel called and said he was nervous. He went over the calling procedure and visiting days with me, almost as if trying to reassure himself that he wouldn’t be alone on the outside. As much as he had hated jail, it was a known, and now he was entering the somewhat unknown. The cliche came to mind that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. I chose not to share that with Noel.
Monday I arrived at 8th and Girard near Girard Medical Center, part of the North Philly Health System, a cluster of towers and buildings covering an approximately three-block radius, with a package of clothing I had gathered for Noel. I made my way from one building to the next, each security guard directing me to another place, none of them seeming to know what they were talking about.
Finally, one kind-hearted guard in attractive glasses took pity on me. She flagged down an official looking older woman walking into the building, whose name I was sorry I failed to catch, and asked her if she could help me find where Noel Berrios was staying. The woman took me into her office, made a call, and told me someone would be down to pick up the box. I gave her a hug and went to wait. When a young woman pushing a trolley cart finally arrived and spotted me with the package she asked if there were any cigarettes in it since North Philly Health System — like all other city-affiliated treatment centers — had gone smoke free as of the first of the year. “No cigarettes, no food, no nothing. Just clothes,” I said and went out to try to find my car that I had illegally parked.
That night Noel called, speaking in what sounded like a quieter, deeper voice, perhaps because he was no longer shouting over the din of a jailhouse population, some of whom were always in line behind him waiting for the phone. “Hey, gangster rat!” he said, his usual greeting. We chatted briefly about how he was settling in, about how happy he was to finally be out of jail. Noel thanked me for the clothes. “I’ve got the jeans on right now,” he said. “They fit perfect.” He told me that there was as a one-hour orientation on Sundays at 1 p.m. and that visiting was from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Then he asked me for another favor. “Can you call my dad and tell him I need like $25?” In a moment of weakness, I agreed.
I felt conflicted because I had taken time away from my family and spent more than $100 on shirts, jeans, and a coat for Noel the previous day. I wanted to give him a kick-start to his treatment. I also felt that I was again crossing a boundary from journalist into friend, but I didn’t really care that much at this point.
However, after we hung up Monday evening, I began to feel resentful toward Noel — maybe that he wasn’t more thankful about how I had gone out of my way for him over the past two days and that he had again asked me to call his father for a favor, something I had already told Noel not to do. I called anyway, angry with myself for caving in.
After some initial chit-chat, I told Mr. Berrios that I had dropped off some clothes for Noel earlier in the day and that he had asked me to call him to see if he could rustle up a few dollars for soap, deodorant, and so forth. “You already brought him clothes?” Mr. Berrios asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, why didn’t he tell me that when I spoke to him?”
“When did you talk to him?”
“About an hour ago,” Mr. Berrios said.
So had I.
Noel seemed to be playing us against each other to his favor. Did he fail to tell his father about the clothes so maybe Mr. Berrios would bring him more? And Noel had told me to call his father and plead his case, although he had already spoken to Mr. Berrios just before or after he had talked to me. We didn’t have his number. Noel was calling us. And he seemed to be calling the shots.
Or maybe it was more innocent than that. I wanted to give Noel the benefit of the doubt. After all, no matter what, we had gotten to know each other very well. We were friends. And even if he was using me, I was also using him as material, possibly for a series of articles, possibly for a book.
“Time will tell if he takes things more seriously this time,” Mr. Berrios said, noting the fact that Noel had already been in the same treatment center, as part of the FIR program, once before. “Time will tell.”
Noel had said that in prison you only had your balls and your word. If he was playing his father and me off each other, if he was manipulating us, he was certainly showing his balls. But since it was only the first day for Noel on the road this time toward what I hoped would be some sort of recovery, I decided to still take him at his word.
Doing time with Noel: Part 4
After I dropped off clothes for Noel at his treatment program, my phone rang with a “215” area code and a number I didn’t recognize. Suspecting it was Noel, I picked up. “Hey, gangster rat! How you doing?” I was happy to hear Noel’s voice, happy that he had made it out of jail once again, albeit into another kind of shut-in environment, but this one at least hopefully therapeutic. Noel thanked me for the clothes. He told me that a doctor at the rehab center had committed him for 86 days, instead of the 28 he was anticipating, because of his PTSD from childhood sexual trauma, extensive drug use, and bipolar illness. But Noel was happy for the extra time. “I feel really good about this go-around, gangster rat. I really do.”
I told him I was proud of him. He said that meant a lot to hear me say that. I realized how few people in his life had ever told him they were proud of him. I felt the honor and the burden of being one of the few.
Almost immediately, Noel went on buprenorphine, the opioid replacement therapy that cut his cravings for heroin and other narcotics and kept him from getting sick without getting high. He was gaining weight. He now wore a size 40 jeans, Noel said. The ones I had bought him, a size 36, were already too small. “Even my dad was like, man, you getting a belly like me!” Noel said.
But he wasn’t too worried about getting fat. Noel said his body was just starting to recover from all the abuse he’d put it through for so many years. He also said that he really felt good about this time in treatment — that he was getting a lot out of it already, that he was so glad he was there. Sharing in group was becoming easier for him, and he felt less ashamed about his past or what he had done during his active addiction. “If people judge me, that’s on them,” he would say. “I’m just trying to help myself.”
During one phone conversation, Noel talked about a nightmare he had recently had in which a pack of pit bulls was attacking him. Noel was frantically trying to fight them off. We spoke about how the dream might be about him confronting his demons, the beasts that had been chasing him into a life of drugs and crime, anything to get away from facing his past trauma. Noel also described an intense “drug dream” he’d had at the treatment center. He was with some people he used to hang out with, and he was giving them more and more money to buy heaps of drugs. It was very frenetic. When he woke up, he felt like, “Phew! It wasn’t real,” Noel said. “I realized I was actually glad to be where I am and not back on the street.”
Two of the guys he came into the program with from jail had already walked off to go get high, Noel said. That was him, not too long ago, he mused. This time around felt different, though. This time, he was finally starting to contend with his past and his current issues so he could begin to live a more “normal” life, Noel said.
Noel had had a good talk with his brother, Reuben, and Reuben had sounded better than he had in a long time because he had lost some weight, Noel said. Reuben had to have his legs amputated years ago after a horrific accident, but, just like Noel, he seemed to be working to improve his health, his future. Noel thought that Reuben might be open to coming to see him.
His father, on the other hand, was not being so open. Noel seemed to have clenched onto the hope that his father would finally become the father he never was — attentive and empathetic. These words are mine, not Noel’s. In fact, Noel always defended his father, saying that he worked hard to support his new wife and his wife’s family and that nobody helped him. Unsolicited, (a move I wrestled with later), I suggested that perhaps Noel needed to try to let go of the fantasy that his father would change, that that probably wouldn’t happen. “I know,” Noel said. “But it’s my fault. I brought all this on myself.”
Then I broke the news to Noel that I wouldn’t be visiting him until after we had moved back into our house that a tree had crushed a year ago and that was almost finished being rebuilt. The earliest I thought I would be able to make it would be March. “It’s ok,” Noel said. “I always say, family comes first. You need to focus on your family.”
He did admit, though, that he was a little upset when I didn’t visit him his first week at the facility when I had initially said I would and then needed to postpone because of my relationship with my husband. Jeff wasn’t saying anything, but I could tell he was put out by my interaction with Noel. I had reassured Jeff that this was a story for me, that Noel had, indeed become a friend, but that the relationship was nothing more than that — that Jeff and the kids came first. I said I would never visit Noel if that would make Jeff feel better. No, Jeff said, that wasn’t what he wanted. But we did agree that it was best for our family if I didn’t visit Noel for a while. So now I found myself in the uncomfortable position of trying to do what was right for my loved ones, despite the fact that I wanted to see Noel and felt guilty about letting him down.
A few days passed with Noel’s number popping up on my phone screen and my ignoring it. I had been so busy with sick kids, work, and preparing to move home that I easily found excuses to avoid his calls. But I knew the real reason I wasn’t answering was because I felt like I was betraying his trust by not visiting right away as I had promised him I would when he was still in jail.
Noel never tried to make me feel guilty about my not seeing him immediately. In fact, he continually expressed a reciprocal interest in my life that I felt to be somewhat extraordinary for someone in his position, for someone with so many immediate needs and problems. For instance, he always asked about our house and how it was coming along. When I said I was frustrated that things weren’t moving as swiftly as I would have hoped, Noel said that when he got out of jail, he was seriously thinking about having a “heart-to-heart” with our contractor. Noel was joking but also adamant about wanting to help me in some way. I always assured him that it was all good — that things would work out — that I was just venting. But I was impressed with his sense of empathy and a little frightened by the violence behind his words.
There were other things that surprised me about Noel. His steadiness, for instance. Despite the fact that Noel had spent all of his adult life in and out of incarceration settings, had endured a year at one point in the hole with only an hour a day outside, and had suffered from bipolar illness and anxiety, he seemed so sturdy. Even when he was feeling his worst, and even when I sensed a sort of franticness to his mood, Noel had an underlying fortitude that I have rarely encountered in another person — especially one who has been through so much.
Noel never yelled, rarely cried, always reasoned with me or himself when talking about emotional topics. He had the ability to maintain equilibrium in the most challenging circumstances. When we spoke about the fact that Philadelphia had just banned smoking at all city-affiliated rehab centers, including the one he was headed to — and Noel was a heavy smoker — he was matter-of-fact. “Well. What are you gonna do? I’m just going to have to deal with it.” He told me that they would help him with patches and other nicotine-replacement protocols.
What also surprised me throughout my months of speaking to Noel as a journalist and ultimately as a friend was that despite the fact that we came from such disparate backgrounds, we had so much in common. We made each other laugh. We liked to tell little anecdotes about our days: about how my daughter had thrown up in the middle of Target, about how much fun he had had bowling with folks at the rehab center. Noel taught me street/jail slang, saying, for instance, “Souk, souk now!” (I may have the spelling wrong) for “Look at you!” or “Way to go!” Then he would belly laugh when I would use the phrase when he reported something positive that he had done, such as starting to share in group.
But mostly, I was surprised at how much we could empathize with each other’s emotional struggles, our battles with anxiety and depression not being that different from one another’s, despite the fact that we had treaded such different life paths. As everyone always says but rarely experiences the truth of in their own lives, depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues don’t discriminate. But through my talks with Noel, I realized how deeply these behavioral health conditions were the greatest of equalizers. We spent a lot of time discussing how it doesn’t matter where you come from or how fortunate or unfortunate you happen to be; if you have anxiety and/or depression, the suffering is the same. You may feel unique or isolated, but you are actually surrounded by a harrowingly immense pond of other fellow sufferers, each of whom thinks that their tribulations are special but who are actually, to use the phrase of one of my past therapists, very “garden variety.”
Noel and I were both “garden variety” and similar when it came to our mental illness. If we were feeling low or worried, we didn’t have to explain very much to each other in order to understand. We knew from our own experience what the other person’s experience was like. I was stunned that I was feeling this kind of empathy for someone I had gotten to know mostly over the phone and who had grown up in poverty and in in prison and jail, while I had two master’s degrees and had come from an embarrassingly fortunate background — at least in the material sense.
But despite our ability to connect and understand each other and make each other laugh, issues continued to arise that made me angry with Noel and that made me feel like he was trying to take advantage of me in certain ways. During almost every conversation, Noel would talk about his lack of funds. His brother, Reuben, had promised to try to come up with $25 for him but hadn’t followed through. His father had dropped off a pair of pants and sneakers and a couple of dollars, but it hadn’t gone far enough. They walked to the store yesterday, but Noel had had no money to buy anything. He was running out of soap. He was breaking out in hives, he thought, from the Ajax laundry detergent that the rehab center gave them. He needed a different brand.
At every turn, I found myself on the verge of trying to solve Noel’s problems, of offering to drop off money or to pay for his bowling and movie outings — outings that he seemed to be enjoying so much. Folks had banded together to scrounge up the $8 for Noel to bowl and eat pizza, for instance, an experience he continually referred to. “It was so great just to hang out and laugh and have a good time without using substances.” I was pleased for Noel, but I was also trying to avoid becoming financially responsible for his ability to enjoy this new kind of fun. And as Noel swiftly climbed the “levels” the program established for good behavior and progress to allow for increased independence to build toward a greater chance of success upon release, he said that he was nearing the point where he could go out on pass with a friend or relative.
I found myself tempted to take him out for some kind of experience, despite the fact that I hadn’t even yet visited him at the facility for an in-person meeting — which would only have been our fourth in the entire year-plus length of our knowing each other. I also wanted just to see Noel under supervised circumstances, and I knew my husband would not only be uncomfortable with me taking Noel out on my own, but also angry with me for doing so. That Noel might already be reaching a point where he was expecting me, literally and metaphorically, to be the one to bring him into the world was causing me anxiety— and making me fear that I was losing grasp, once again, on the boundaries of the situation.
Losing Noel: Part 5
Noel has disappeared.
I miss him calling and singing out, “Hey, gangster rat!” and telling me about his day. I miss Noel saying “souka, souka now!” when I shared something positive with him — his expression for “way to go” — something he told me he made up after listening to Phil Collins’ “Sussudio.” I remember being surprised that Noel had listened to Phil Collins and that we shared an affinity for that song.
A week ago, Noel stole his brother’s trans pass, which he could probably sell for about $100-$150. Noel never made it back to his recovery house, so he got kicked out. That’s what Tom, Noel’s former rehab roommate who was at the same recovery house, told me. “It’s a shame when I heard he didn’t come home the other night,” Tom said. “If you’re not on your Ps and Qs it [the need to use] can sneak up on you.”
It seems to have snuck up on Noel.
A few days before he disappeared, Noel told me that he was struggling. “I had a little craving, but I blew it off,” he said. “It came, and it went. So I’m going to a meeting tonight to talk about it.”
Noel also told me that he was both “excited” and “nervous” about leaving his inpatient treatment program at Girard Medical Center, where he was supposed to spend 90 days but was released after just 60 — something having to do with Medicaid. I was disappointed and concerned for Noel that he wasn’t going to get his full three months. With his history of having a substance use disorder, trauma from childhood sexual abuse, and bipolar disorder, I felt he could use all the time he could get.
Still, Noel was doing really well. “I’m learning about letting it all go,” he told me about his work in groups and individual counseling sessions. “You’d be surprised. People been through worse stuff than me, and if they’re brave enough to put it out there, then why can’t I? They’re not suffering. They’re living. It’s a really great thing.”
Noel had attended a couple of Temple basketball games with friends from the program under escort and come back ecstatic about the experience. “The thing that surprised me was I did not think about one time about taking off,” he said. “This is good, this is good. I’m being shown you can have fun without drugs or alcohol.” The only other sporting event Noel had ever been to in his life was a wrestling match when he was in a juvenile detention center.
Not only was Noel getting out and seeing a larger world full of possibilities, he was a model patient and was named president of Three North, his tower, twice in a row. When he climbed the ranks and was finally able to go out on pass, family members embraced him, seeing the hard work he was putting in.
Once, Noel rented some Kung Fu movies, his genre of choice, and while they were watching TV on his brother Reuben’s couch, Noel looked left and then right. Reuben and his father had both fallen asleep. They could finally relax around him without worrying that he was going to steal something or take off, Noel said.
“That was beautiful feeling,” Noel said. “I haven’t felt like that in a long time. Stuff like that makes me want more. I want more of that.”
He was working to get his identification, his medical insurance, his welfare, his food stamps.
“Another thing,” Noel said, “I’m learning to be patient with everything, like with a lot of let downs. I used to be like, when people would let me down, I would snap. But I know I have no control over it.”
When I visited Noel at his inpatient program, I almost didn’t recognize him he had put on so much weight, and he seemed so stable. When he was running the streets, his face was drawn. Now, he looked totally different, his face full, his arms beefy from “hitting the steel,” his belly peeking over the top of his jeans.
“I’m really, really adamant about getting this right,” Noel said. “Like when a lightbulb clicks in your head.
“I’m really, really tired.” Tired of running the streets? I asked. “Tired period,” Noel said.
He was taking Suboxone, a medication to help cut his cravings and enable him to stabilize his life and do the work he needed to do in treatment. He said it was helping a lot.
Noel also said that a couple of guys who had been released from the program a few days earlier had died — had gone back to using and had overdosed because their tolerance was so low after rehab or because they caught some deadly fentanyl, a synthetic drug 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, circulating in the streets.
“I’m worrying about me,” Noel told me during the visit. “I’m really focused on getting my shit together. I spoke up and talked about the molestation.”
Another guy talked about his experience with sexual abuse, so that gave Noel the courage to discuss his own trauma for the first time ever in a group session.
Noel told me during the visit that when he was on the street, often he would sleep in “abandos,” slang for abandoned buildings. One time he slept in an 18-wheeler rig that belonged to someone he knew. But the rig had a massive hole in one side. It was below zero. Noel tried to plug the hole on the passenger side, but it didn’t work. He nearly froze and had to get out of there, Noel said.
“Sometimes I would walk around for weeks without sleeping. I would just keep getting high.”
One time, he was on a binge and had just purchased two bags of “rock” [crack] and a 40-ounce bottle of liquor. It was about 9 a.m. “I took a hit and started talking to a lady I knew,” Noel said. “The next thing I knew, I was being kicked by a cop.” It was dusk. “My body just shut down on me, and I couldn’t wake up.”
If he could, he would stay in the inpatient program longer, Noel said, not suspecting at that point that he would be pushed out after just two of his three months. “Honestly, I’m a little bit nervous. I think about how many times I completed programs, and I left out there and did the same shit.”
But Noel also seemed confident. “I find myself looking in the mirror and saying, ‘You’re going to make it this time.’”
I hoped he would. I worried. I had my own stuff going on, trying a new antidepressant for my major depressive disorder, and it was giving me a lot of side effects. In fact, the day Noel disappeared, when he was already in a recovery house, I was supposed to meet him at his brother’s apartment for dinner. I called in the morning and cancelled, because I hadn’t slept in two days and just wasn’t up for it.
Noel was kind. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Your health is more important.”
He said he, himself, was taking it “one day at a time. I don’t want to overwhelm myself with everything.”
That was the last conversation I had with him.
I couldn’t help feeling guilty that I had killed plans with Noel the day he took off. But his brother told me not to worry about it, that I had nothing to do with Noel hitting the streets — which was probably true.
“It is what it is,” Reuben said. “He wants to go back to it, that’s his problem. It’s his life. He can do what he wants. I’m used to it. I’m not worried about him no more. I’m not going to stress myself about him no more.”
But Reuben said that his father worried. “It don’t look good,” Noel’s father said when I called him. “It don’t look good at all. I hope that he don’t get locked up again. He knows what’s right and what’s wrong. He wants to go the wrong way, that’s on him.”
It seemed his family was giving up. But I wasn’t, at least not yet.
Noel had become such a big part of my life. Although he knew I was a journalist who was following his story, we had inevitably become friends. I had shared some of my own struggles with mental health with him, and we could empathize with each other — despite our divergent backgrounds — in ways that were unique in my life. This was a relationship that crisscrossed boundaries and caused me headaches and worries. But I missed it.
I asked Noel’s former roommate, Tom, to find out if Noel had gotten his clothes from the recovery house. Tom said the house manager wouldn’t tell him. I called Philadelphia Police Department Headquarters to see if Noel had been booked. He hadn’t. I wish I could say I was relieved. I wasn’t, because if he was in jail, at least I would know he was alive.
I called Temple Hospital and Einstein Hospital to see if he’d been admitted, and he hadn’t been. I told Tom I wanted to drive around Noel’s North Philadelphia neighborhood where I knew he hung out.
“If you were to find him, I don’t know what kind of a state he’d be in,” Tom said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.
“Hopefully he comes right back,” Tom said. “Hopefully he’ll come right back.”
I spoke to another person, Don, who had been in the residential treatment program with Noel, and he said he’d seen him the day before at the outpatient program. “He said he was doing alright, and he borrowed a couple of dollars off me,” Don said. I wondered if Noel was getting his Suboxone to sell on the street.
Noel has less than a month to call his case manager to have another shot at being part of the Forensic Intensive Recovery program, which diverts eligible individuals from incarceration into treatment. If Noel doesn’t call his case manager within that time, the city will issue a warrant for his arrest, and he will be back in jail, where he has spent most of his adult life. Or he will die.
Recently, it down-poured for two days straight. I thought of Noel on the street soaking wet. I keep imagining the worst, that Noel will get a bad batch and overdose, and that no one will be there with Narcan, the overdose reversal drug, to save him.
But there’s nothing I can do other than keep my phone on, keep in touch with his family, and hope that, as Tom said, Noel will “come right back.”
I keep wanting my phone to ring, to hear Noel’s voice on the other end singing out, “Hey, gangster rat!”
Then, just as I was finishing writing this, I got a text from Reuben saying his father had found Noel hanging out at the same spot, in the same abando, where he used to hustle and get high. Reuben said he didn’t know what kind of a state Noel was in, but that his father had said, “he’s right back where he started.”
Reuben added that his father told him to “be nice,” that Noel was going to return his trans pass. “Noel’s lucky I love my dad,” Reuben said, promising to call me in the morning with an update.
“He’s making himself struggle for no reason,” Reuben said. “He can’t take life on life’s terms.”
I doubted it was that simple. But god was I glad to hear that Noel was alive.
Finding Noel: Part 6
My phone was ringing. It was an unfamiliar number with a Philadelphia area code. I had a strong inkling that I should pick up, especially since I had been preoccupied with Noel’s disappearance.
I had feared the worst, that he had overdosed or landed back in jail. In fact, throughout the weeks he was missing, from time to time I would call hospitals around the city to see if he had been admitted and check if he was back at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. I always felt relieved when I came up empty — at the same time worried that I would never hear from Noel again.
“Hey gangster rat!” he sang out at the other end of the line, as if no time had passed since we last spoke.
In fact, a lot of time had passed, and a lot of shit had gone down. For one thing, Noel had disappeared weeks ago from his recovery house and had stolen his brother Reuben’s trans pass. Reuben and his father were not happy with Noel, to say the least. They had been down this ragged path with him too many times before. They were worn out.
But I wasn’t. I was just thrilled to hear Noel’s voice.
“Oh my god, I’ve been so worried about you,” I said.
“I know,” Noel answered, a guilty tone dampening the excitement in his voice. “I’m so sorry.”
“Where have you been?”
“You know,” Noel said.
I kind of did.
He’d been working the odd construction job off and on, cobbling together money here and there to buy drugs and rent a room when he could. When he couldn’t, Noel was couch surfing at friends’ and acquaintances’ — or worse, I feared. I wondered how many nights he’d spent in abandos or on the street. For a while, he had lived with a woman, until she went “loco,” Noel said.
He was so ashamed of himself, Noel said, for dropping out of the recovery house and going back to the streets and using. The worst of it was was that he’d left his clothes, belongings, and most importantly his birth certificate at the recovery house and couldn’t go back to get them because he’d been taking drugs. It was a clean and sober living facility. Plus, he had fled without notice, so they weren’t too happy with him.
At the same time, he was doing fine, Noel said, the familiar chipper tone entering his voice. He was working and proud of himself. He wanted to get together.
“You should come down here and meet me,” Noel encouraged.
I told him I wouldn’t go where he was in North Philly, because my husband would be angry at me for taking risks, despite Noel’s constant assurance that he would never let anything happen to me. I told him I would only meet him at his father’s house in Hunting Park. We set up a date for the next evening.
When I saw Noel, I was startled by the amount of weight he had lost and the depth of the dark circles under his eyes. He pulled me into a tight bear hug.
“I’ve missed you, gangster rat!” Noel said.
I’d missed him, too.
Despite the fact that Noel was back to using heroin, which in Philly was mostly the more deadly fentanyl these days — though Noel had always been more of a “weed fiend,” in his own words — I was amazed at his perseverance, his ability to keep on going even when everything was against him.
We walked to the Rite Aid across the street, and I bought Noel a Gatorade, a pack of Newport 100s menthol cigarettes, and a lighter. Technically, as a reporter, I wasn’t supposed to buy him anything, but this relationship had transgressed any such boundaries long ago and become an unstable mixture of reporter and subject and friend and friend.
In fact, Noel often turned the conversation to me, asking after my family, my health. He knew I struggled with anxiety and depression; he did, too. He and I could identify with each other in this way. And during this meeting, I confessed to having been struggling with a downward turn in my mood and fears that I was on the slide.
“You know you can always talk to me,” Noel said without irony, even though he had no phone, always calling me from one he’d borrowed from someone else. To reach him, I would call his father, Mr. Berrios, and leave a message. And aside from the recent long spell during which Noel had gone AWOL, he would usually call me back.
I was still digesting my conflicting feelings — anger, relief, happiness — at seeing Noel again after such a long absence, during which I had wondered (sometimes guiltily, wouldn’t it be easier?) if he was gone from my life, when Noel rang me again a few days after our visit.
“Listen, gangster rat, I hate to ask, but could you loan me a few dollars, just so I can get a room?”
He was dodging the police who had shown up at his father’s house because Noel had failed to show up at a meeting with his P.O. Noel couldn’t go because they would drug test him, and he’d been using. So now Noel had another warrant hanging over his head, and he had worn out his welcome at his friends’. His father and his brother refused to let him stay with them.
When he got desperate, as he was at this moment, Noel sometimes, though infrequently, asked me for money. Whenever he did, I usually caved in.
I cared about Noel. I couldn’t bear to think of him sleeping out or being sick because he couldn’t get enough drugs to get right. I knew it was wrong to enable him, that I probably wasn’t helping Noel in the long run — and I was certainly transgressing the code of ethics for a reporter — but I couldn’t help it.
So I agreed to wire Noel 60 bucks through Western Union, to a friend’s name, one who had the needed identification to pick it up since Noel had lost his birth certificate and didn’t have an i.d. card, himself. Anxiety and guilt plagued be as I made the transaction at a Rite Aid, going through the labyrinthian bureaucracy on the Western Union phone and then at the register. Jeff, my husband, would be furious with me if he knew what I was doing, so I didn’t tell him and brought home some toilet paper to justify my errand.
“You’ve got to detail my car to pay me back,” I told Noel, after he thanked me upon receiving the funds. He washed cars, inside and out, as one way of making money.
“Of course, of course,” he said. “Anytime. Just bring it here.”
But I knew it would never happen, since the only places I felt comfortable meeting up with Noel were at joints like McDonald’s or at his father’s house where he could no longer go. Noel said that now that he had a room, he would be able to maintain it with payments from the construction work he had lately been doing. I said I hoped he would.
I feared he wouldn’t.
While I continued to root for Noel, who had had little of fortune in this life thus far, a foot barely in the door from the day he was born, he always seemed to mess up. But despite the fact that I lived in a different world and had always been fortunate when it came to material things, I could relate to Noel’s pain and suffering through my own battles with mental health, stemming from my childhood trauma, growing up in an abusive, dysfunctional household.
Because of this, I found I was able to suspend judgement of Noel, to view him as just another human struggling through this world that was so often hard on us and yet so beautiful at the same time, manifesting itself, for instance, through this friendship between me, a white, middle-class gangster rat and this Puerto Rican jailbird, drug user with a heart of gold.
Doing time with Noel: Part 7
Dec 29 · 5 min read
When Noel re-appeared after a long absence, I started to learn just how much I cared about this man who had slipped through the bars of Philadelphia’s Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility into my life more than two years ago, when I met him while reporting there.
I also realized that I had been sucked much deeper into this relationship than I wanted to be and knew was wise, but I couldn’t figure out how to extricate myself without hurting either or both of us.
At first, I had viewed Noel primarily as a subject for journalistic exploration, an example of the revolving door between the street, jail, and rehab — a vicious cycle that for many people only ends with death in one of those contexts. But as the months toppled along and I got to know him better, I began to feel like Noel was a member of my extended family.
Everything about Noel’s existence was urgent, pulling me in: his drug use, his jail time, his experience with homelessness. I realized in some dark corner of my brain that he provided an edginess absent from my suburban existence. Noel was a friend, a more intimate one in many ways than the soccer and carpool moms I hung out with in my “regular” life. Plus, I was still interested in writing about him.
So while Noel and I were genuine friends, we were using each other. Noel needed my sympathy, my constancy, my funds. I needed his stories and to feel like I was helping somebody. Part of me wanted to be the “Gangster Rat,” the moniker Noel gave me back when he first started calling me from jail.
I felt some relief when Noel recently told me that he had found work again on a small construction job in North Philly and had rented a room; maybe he would pull through this time. But, as usual, the little cash he earned wasn’t enough to pay for his rent and his drug use, and soon Noel was back to couch-surfing.
However, although I was never sure exactly what drugs Noel was using — he admitted to snorting heroin, which in Philly was mostly the more potent and deadly fentanyl, as well as to consuming benzos and lots of weed — and although I knew Noel was high most of the time when we talked, I still, perhaps naively, trusted him. I had never in the years that I had known him felt threatened. He had the habit of reassuring me that I was safe with him, that I was one of the most loyal, kind people he had ever known.
That’s why, in part, I decided to take him to see some cage fighting I was covering. I felt conflicted about exposing Noel to more violence when he experienced so much of it in his daily life on the street. But the tickets were free, and I knew Noel had never been to an event quite like it.
“Am I going to throw up during this?” I asked Noel as we Ubered to the 2300 Arena, where noisy fans gathered to watch people beat the shit out of each other in a cage.
“You’ll be fine,” Noel said. And I was.
I actually liked seeing ultra-fit warriors pummel each other for kicks and glory. But I especially enjoyed listening to Noel’s running commentary: “Oh, he’s in trouble now! Hit him in the body! Hit him in the body!”
When his Uber arrived to take him back to his friend’s house, Noel told me that it had been one of the best nights of his life. I teared up, just as I did a couple of weeks later when Noel called to wish me a merry Christmas.
He’d been on a slide.
Although Noel had finally secured a phone, someone had stolen it while he was sleeping. He’d been hit in the head during a fight and didn’t feel quite right. Noel hadn’t been on a job in days. On top of all of this, the friend he’d been staying with had gone to see family for the holidays, kicking him out.
“So where are you sleeping?”
“You know,” Noel said, finally admitting that he had been wandering around the streets of North Philly for several nights. Noel said he’d gotten ahold of a box-cutter for protection. The previous night he’d found an abando to huddle up in. Noel sounded so despondent that I could barely stand to stay on the phone with him.
I hardly slept that night and met Noel at his father’s house the next day to give him 40 dollars that he swore he would spend on rent and not drugs, though of course, I couldn’t be sure. Noel looked worse than I had ever seen him, thin, unshaven, haggard. He hugged me tight. I didn’t want to release him back into the cold world.
“That’s the last time I’m giving you money, Noel,” I said, wondering if I would be able to stick to my resolution.
Noel said that he hated admitting to me what kind of shape he was in, that he had his pride. He loathed being so desperate, he said. I knew on some level Noel was using me. But at that moment, I didn’t care. I needed to know that he had a roof over his head, at the same time realizing that this was hardly a permanent solution.
“I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable around me,” Noel said, repeating something he often said. “Just because I’m from the street doesn’t mean I’m not a gentleman.”
Noel was a gentleman. I had known him long enough to understand that.
But I also understood that, in some ways, our relationship was keeping him rotating in a debilitating cycle, partly of his own making, from which he had been unable thus far to extricate himself.
With or without me, I wondered if he ever would.
Needing to Find Noel
I woke up on a recent morning with a premonition that Noel was dead.
I’ve known Noel since 2017 when I met him while I was reporting on a pilot program Curran Fromhold Correctional Facility was rolling out to offer inmates who were leaving naltrexone, a drug that can help prevent relapse from opioid and alcohol dependence. I bumped into my friend Cyndi Rickards, who teaches criminology and justice studies at Drexel University and was running an “inside-out” program with inmates and her students. Cyndi was about to meet with Noel and some other inmates, and I asked if I could tag along.
Noel was eager to talk to me. I was eager to listen. He was in for drug charges or parole violations or whatever — it all circled back to drugs. I wrote down my number. Noel memorized it. He has never forgotten it, and I have never changed it.
Our correspondence began, first with me putting money into his global tel link account so he could call and start telling me his story. For some reason Noel quickly named me “gangster rat.” And not long after our meeting in CFCF, he received early release into the forensic intensive recovery program, basically rehab, where I was able to visit him in person, and where he told me more about his life.
Noel explained to me about his early trauma, sexual abuse, being the only Puerto Rican family in an all Black neighborhood, and being assaulted and bullied every day for it. He suffered from depression and other forms of mental illness. To numb out, Noel started smoking weed young and frequently. “I’m a weed fiend,” he would tell me.
My childhood trauma was different but intense, but I have always had a luxury Noel has never had — being able to pay for regular psychiatric treatment. Even with this help, I have been in a lifelong battle with PTSD and depression, which had been deeper and worse of late.
I knew seeing Noel would do me good.
I wouldn’t have to say anything. Just being with him would make me feel ok with myself. He has been through more hellfire than just about anyone else I know.
Noel has also done terrible things to plenty of people who loved him and called him family and friend. But I do believe that deep down Noel has a good heart. Addiction can drive even the most gentle human to madness. Except for times when Noel has tried to take advantage of me — and sometimes been successful — he has always been kind to this gangster rat.
But then I thought, he’s dead.
Frantic, I called his brother, Ruben, who I’ve been in touch with through the years.
“No, he’s alive,” Ruben said. “Same old, same old. I gotta go,” he added, hanging up, obviously fed up with the whole thing.
I called Mr. Berrios, Noel’s father, who I’ve spent many afternoons sitting on his porch with Noel talking. His father is so tired of Noel that he can barely speak to him. However, Mr. Berrios still answers most of the time when Noel calls from random numbers and goes to the hood and buys him a sandwich. Things like that.
“Courtenay?” Mr. Berrios said. “Why haven’t I seen you in so long?”
“I know, I know,” I said. “It’s terrible. Can I come buy with Noel?”
He assented as he alway does, such a strong 89-year-old man, who moved from Puerto Rico to Philadelphia by himself when he was 19, was married to Noel’s mother for 33 years, had five children with her, worked as a Philly cop for five years and then for the sanitation department, driving a truck, for 22 years. He cannot understand why Noel does not have his head screwed on straight.
“A lot of work of the devil,” Mr. Berrios says, shaking his head.
He cannot understand.
So I knew Noel was alive but had no way to reach him. Then my phone buzzed that evening.
“Hey gangster rat!”
“What the hell,” I cried, literally bursting into tears. “Did your brother or dad tell you to call me?”
“What? No. I ain’t talked to them.”
This was so eerie, I said, because I had called them earlier that day, suddenly worried he was dead.
“Now why would you worry I was dead, gangster rat?”
Comments like this always made me laugh with Noel, as if he were taking a tour of the park instead of snorting fentanyl (100 more potent than morphine and 50 more potent than heroin) and smoking crack every day, all day.
Plus, Noel has a special knack for getting into fights. He’s always getting his head bashed, with two-by-fours, pipes, bricks. One time he called me and said someone had hit him over the head with a chair. I said, oh my god, go to the emergency room, you’re probably concussed. He laughed. He was like, “Gangster rat, it was a plastic chair.”
Noel’s always stealing — too often from friends, and sometimes from dealers. He’s a smart guy, but what the fuck?
In fact, that’s part of why I stopped taking Noel’s calls for a while. Dealers were chasing him. Noel was desperate. He wanted me to cash app him money. I wasn’t going to do it. It was unbearable. I had no idea what the real story was, but I had hit my limit, at least for a time. I said no, like I had never said no in the past.
Sometimes I wouldn’t pick up the phone when I saw calls coming in from random Philly numbers and knew it was him, because I was too mired in my own struggles. If Noel wanted something from me, I wasn’t going to be able to take it. Perhaps I should have picked up those calls. Perhaps he just wanted to chat with gangster rat. Maybe he was just lonely, too. Such a hard dance. Who knows.
But now I needed to see Noel. It had been way too long. I would never forgive myself if he died before I was able to chat with him in person again. I was lonely, unable to talk to my regular friends, and terribly worried about Noel who had told me on the phone that he couldn’t stand up straight because he had tried to lift a cast iron radiator and had fucked up his back.
So I headed to one of his two corners, in a neighborhood of drug dealers where I risked being hit by a stray bullet, but also a place of beautiful, if suffering human beings, and regular working folks raising families.
Swerving my 13-year-old woebegone minivan from one side of the street to the other, I called out my window, “You seen Noel?” Most people said not today. Then two ladies said, yes, Noel’s my buddy, he’s right up here. So I parked and jumped from my car.
“Noel!” we screamed.
I saw a hunched, old man, slowly heading toward us, hoody on his head.
“Is that who I think it is?”
“Yaass!” I cried. We hugged, long and tight.
“You are a sight for sore eyes, gangster rat.”
“So are you.”
Of course, I treated the trio to sugary drinks and junk food at the corner bodega before Noel and I drove off to see his father.
As soon as we reached Noel’s father’s house, he hollered at his dad that he needed to use the bathroom. Mr. Berrios slowly unlocked the door. Then Mr. Berrios and I sat on the porch talking about his past and about Noel.
I asked Mr. Berrios if despite everything that he goes through with Noel, whether it’s better that Noel stays in touch with him so that he knows he’s alive? Mr. Berrios didn’t answer. I guess that was a very difficult question.
When Noel came out, we took some selfies, like we always do.
Noel is a very troubled person who has done horrible things to many people. He has suffered immensely and has caused a lot of pain. If Noel were ever to make it into long-term recovery, his list of amends would tumble in long strands to the ground.
But I believe in Noel as a human being. I don’t judge him. I will always call him my friend. And as long as he is around and I have money in my pocket, Noel and I will do what we always do after our porch visits: make our way across busy Hunting Park Avenue to Walgreens, where I nurture Noel by buying him his favorite gummy worms, pistachios, Twix, cold, cold 7-Up, and 2 packs of Newport 100s — with a lighter.
I wish I would do more for you, I tell him.
“Just keep being you, gangster rat. Keep being you.”
I took some video of Noel, with his permission, even though he had been using. If he hadn’t been using, he would be very sick, going through withdrawal. Some people will criticize me for filming Noel. I understand. But I think he has valuable things to say. And he has always, time and again through the years, fully consented to me sharing his story, sober or high. He wants people to know what this kind of life is like.
Postscript: When I got home from my visit with Noel, I received a text back from a number I had texted the day before — a number Noel had called me from. I had texted the number asking Noel to call me. Here was the return text I received: “Noel is no longer allowed in my house. He stole my rent money.”
Saying Good Night to Noel
By Courtenay Harris Bond
A friend recently shared a CBC radio interview with Hubert Reeves, a Canadian astrophysicist who was an expert on the “Big Bang” theory and as revered as a rockstar in France where he lived.
“For those who are feeling hopeless, he says, ‘If you take the attitude that all is lost, then all is lost.’ He adds that the world doesn’t need hopelessness. It needs action, to ensure that the power of restoration will triumph.”
The world does need well-intentioned action, as well as empathy, which Reeves points out is what separates humans from all other animals, except for dolphins and whales. Empathy and careful action will be critical in determining how the world reckons with the war in the Middle East, the multiple crises in this country (homelessness, addiction, gun violence, child welfare), the war in Ukraine — as well as the violence in Haiti, where little hope or future seems to exist.
Confronting all of this human devastation is overwhelming, but I am trying to maintain some optimism that empathy will help shape foreign and domestic policies in ways that it has been unable to in the past. I hope that as collective rage courses through the world, that ultimately collective, considered action will redeem us all.
Rage is a normal, common, and often justified reaction; how individuals or a nation’s leadership handle rage is another issue.
Though it matters little in this wider context, I have had to confront, accept, and tolerate rage about past trauma, while simultaneously learning to use it to my advantage as fuel for my journalistic work and my ability to empathize with and develop deep interest in other people and how they move through life.
That interest in other people’s stories and empathy that I often feel during my reporting is what ended up turning my early interviews with Noel during one of his many incarcerations in 2017 into an ongoing friendship — in large part because Noel also had a strong capacity for empathy developed as a result of his own trauma.
He was sexually abused as a child over an extended period of time by an acquaintance, Noel told me. But he said that his family did not believe him.
To cope with the abuse, Noel became a “weed fiend”, as he said, at a young age. Instead of receiving loving support and a path toward healing, Noel was sent to juvie, where he embarked on his extended, successful career of crime and drug abuse.
And street drugs worked as a salve for Noel’s emotional wounds, which he had never been taught to or helped to cope with in any other way. Numbing out worked, in fact, for nearly 50 years, until it didn’t when Noel died of an overdose earlier this month. I will attend his small viewing next week.
(Reeves also coincidentally died this month. I’d like to believe that somewhere along the way out, the astrophysicist and the weed fiend crossed paths.)
During the years that I knew him, Noel taught me a lot about resilience; the fact that as different as our lives were we could still empathize with each other is what made us friends.
Was it a perfectly healthy friendship? Of course not.
Noel used me, coaxing money, for instance, from me at times. I used him as material for my work.
But ultimately, we trusted each other and cared about each other, as true friends do.
I have been feeling an overwhelming sense of peace after the initial shock of hearing Noel had died has worn off. He is suffering no longer. And perhaps I’m nuts, but I’ve really felt that somehow some part of his soul floating out there has been taking in the warmth expressed to me for him.
Even if Noel did not feel like he was loved on this earth, I hope he is with his mother somewhere feeling it now.
His name, Noel, derives from the Latin verb nasci, meaning “to be born.” During the holidays, carolers sing, “Joyeux, Noel” — merry Christmas.
Even in Noel’s darkest moments, he made me laugh. He had a disarming smile. Noel greeted me every time we saw each other as cheerful as if he had just left a spa instead of readily revealing the weight of the living hell that he was often in, at least near the end.
The morning my phone rang from Mike’s number — Mike, Noel’s dear friend who always took him into his apartment and cared for Noel when he was cold, hungry, wanting a shower, some company, some love — I was in a meeting and let it ring to voicemail. As I was walking to my car, I tapped voicemail and heard Noel’s familiar, “Hey, gangster rat! Where you been? I haven’t heard from you in a while. I’m worried about you. Call me back.”
I smiled because it was preposterous for Noel to be worrying about me. He was the one filling his emptiness with fentanyl and crack, running the streets with no stability or means other than what he could beg or steal. Noel was the one who’d spent six weeks at Temple University Hospital over the summer getting pumped full of I.V. antibiotics to combat a MRSA infection coursing through his bloodstream and into his bones.
When the hospital released Noel with two weeks worth of oral antibiotics to finish his treatment, Mike and I hoped he’d be able to endure another rehab. That maybe this time it would stick.
But the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which has replaced heroin in Philadelphia and throughout much of the country, is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin — and also often deadly laced with the large animal tranquilizer, xylazine. The resulting “tranq dope” wears off more quickly than heroin, so Noel had to get high as often as eight to 10 times a day and had started developing one of the necrotic ulcers xylazine is notorious for causing.
Noel’s family did an autopsy, but I have not had the will to ask his father about the cause of death. I want to believe that Noel took one last hit and slipped into a painless, endless nod.
What I know for sure is that I heard Noel’s voice speaking to me in a phantom message that slid into the ether as soon as I had heard it, after I called back and back, not getting an answer until my calls crossed with Mike’s text: “Noel died.”
I became temporarily obsessed with trying to retrieve this ghostly voicemail that was no longer in my phone and never hasn’t been since, crying that I never got to say goodbye.
I didn’t.
But the truth is that every time we said goodbye it could have been the last, since Noel was slowly killing himself every day, unable to escape from fentanyl’s tenacious grip.
That is not his fault.
Only a steady course of medication, such as methadone or buprenorphine, to help ease Noel’s withdrawal symptoms and cravings, coupled with intensive trauma therapy, job training and assistance, and stable housing, could have given Noel a shot at life.
He was never on the path to receive those supports because of his outlaw status and because of systemic racism and inequity that permeates healthcare, education, employment, and housing opportunities in the United States.
Noel never had an equal chance.
In the end, none of that really matters since Noel is dead, leaving behind a small cohort who truly cared for him, Mike at the top of that list.
Even though I feel relief that Noel is no longer suffering, my mind may continue playing tricks on me, making me think when Mike’s number or another unknown local one pops up on my phone, that I might pick up and greet Noel again. I will always carry him in my heart.
In an interview with Hadley Vlahos, a hospice nurse who recently published a book entitled “The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life’s Final Moments”, she says that the primary uncertainty she has “is what after this life looks like. People ask me for those answers, and I don’t have them. No one does. I feel like there is something beyond, but I don’t know what it is. When people are having these in-between experiences of seeing deceased loved ones, sometimes it is OK to ask what they’re seeing. I find that they’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m going on a trip,’ or they can’t seem to find the words to explain it. So the conclusion I’ve come to is whatever is next cannot be explained with the language and the knowledge that we have here on Earth.”
I don’t know where Noel has gone.
Most of the time I knew him on this earth, I didn’t know where Noel was, or if he was ok, or still alive, until he called again. The same was true for Mike, and that stress took an excruciating toll on him.
I guess, after my journey with Noel, what I want most to say is that his life was significant, as every single human life is.
Noel, you left your imprint on this world. I hope you were resting easy as you were passing through the “in-between,” going on your final trip.
If you or someone you know is in crisis or having suicidal thoughts, call or text 988, the national crisis and suicide prevention hotline. Or call 911, or go to your nearest emergency room. Please take care of yourself. You matter.
WRITTEN BY
Courtenay Harris Bond
Freelance journalist focused on behavioral health. Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism.
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