News

Sympathy for the Devil

Continued from page 2

In June 1981, the game changed: Nebbitt found himself under arrest, suspected of one of the murders popping around him like a video game. The warrant was refused for lack of evidence, but he ended up on probation for carrying a concealed weapon. Shaken, he and the older guy he'd hero-worshipped in the 'hood, who was also in trouble, jumped bond and headed for Tampa, Fla.

Nebbitt was arrested again in Florida, caught red-handed driving a stolen car filled with stolen blue jeans. Charged with grand theft auto and grand theft in St. Petersburg, he spent a month in the local jail, and then they surprised him by releasing him on bond. "Guess they didn't do a real good check showing that I had charges pending in St. Louis."

Not sure where else to go, he came back to his mother's house in St. Louis, stayed low, started back hustling and made a lot of money. Then he surprised the Florida judge by showing up for his court date. He returned to St. Louis on probation, turned himself in and ended up serving only a couple of months. "So I was back in St. Louis, 20 years old, free again, made it out of all that stuff."

The illusion lasted almost a year. And then he tried to buy tires from a guy who'd stolen a car. "I'm so stupid, I told him to bring the car over where we were," he groans, "instead of going over there and getting the tires. We were out back looking at the tires, sayin' how nice they were — I was gonna pay for them — and the police came." Nebbitt's friends ran, but he just stood there, innocent for once. He was charged with tampering and sent back to the workhouse.

"There's this gigantic room with 50 people," he recalls. "You don't have any defensible space. There's a lot of fighting, and at first I was really into that, the stupidity of it." It'd sound better to say he fought because he was scared, but he wasn't. "Most of the people I grew up with had been in jail before me. People would say, "Oh, that's so-and-so, he from out west.' You don't have to be raped or let anybody squeeze you for money, because somebody from out west is gonna ride with you. And when you come in, you are greeted: "Hey, what's up, Von?' It was almost like a reunion."

Magic Tragic

Nebbitt came home from prison on Halloween 1982, and his first child was born that night. He was 21, snorting cocaine regularly and dealing for a living, and his son's mother, Diane Mims, had accepted the fact. "I brought the money home," he shrugs. "I don't think she really liked what I did, but she never said, "Don't bring that money into this house.' Neither did my family."

From T's and blues, Nebbitt moved to heroin and cocaine. His old partner "was in federal prison, or I would have hooked up with him in a heartbeat — because he wouldn't have killed me. Any time you got that in the drug business, it's important." He found an old high-school buddy to hustle with, and they worked the streets themselves for a while. Then they hired a few guys and started moving up, and Nebbitt started snorting heroin. "When we mixed it to sell, we'd just put a little bit aside" — uncut, pure, giving him what's called a "dealer's habit." He would've denied it; he was convinced he wasn't addicted. Still, he hid the using carefully: "I didn't want it to get on the streets that I was using heroin, because then you are not going to be as effective or efficient as a dealer."

What are the prerequisites for even brief success? "You gotta be relentless," Nebbitt says. "Can't be sensitive. Have to be self-centered, not care about anybody else. Gotta have good business sense and a good reputation on the streets. Keep your word. And people got to know that if they try to rob you, you will do whatever you need to do. So a history of violence helps."

This from a man who now worries about imposing and brings extra water in case a companion's thirsty, routinely extending the kind of courtesy that reaches beyond habit to anticipate someone's needs. "When I thought I'd be sensitive," he explains awkwardly, "I medicated. When you have heroin, you don't feel, period. I didn't care who was being hurt. It numbed me out, made me think I was invincible, convinced me I could manipulate my way into or out of anything."

Invincibility ended when — after an especially good month running the streets, using heroin every day, undercover — Nebbitt started feeling run down. "I told my brother I was going to take a few days off, spend some time with Diane and the new baby. Told myself I needed to dry out; I'd been getting way too high.

"So I went home to Diane, and that night, it woke me up about 3 in the morning. I was in a puddle of sweat, the whole bed was wet and I had this stench, like sewage, and I'm thinking, "What the hell is going on?' Diane was looking at me really strange — she said my body had been jerking and shivering while I was asleep. I tried to get up, and it was like my joints didn't have any lubrication in them, like I was 100 years old. I thought I'd just run myself down. Then the other symptoms started, the runny nose and diarrhea, and I thought, "And I got the flu!'"

Mims tried to feed him chicken soup, but he couldn't keep it down. "I didn't know what to do," she recalls. "He kept saying it was the flu." Nebbitt says he couldn't even sleep, "stayed there all night just woke. Next morning my brother called. He'd been using heroin for years, and he started asking me questions. I didn't know he was doing the Heroin Addiction Survey on me! I was answering yes to every question, and he started laughing, and I didn't see a damn thing funny that I couldn't stop shitting for five minutes. He said, "Man, you been fuckin' with that Boy?' (Heroin is "Boy"; cocaine's "Girl.") I denied it, said, "I just can't run around like I used to. I'm going to GNC, get me some vitamins.'"

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
Next Page »