Morgan’s Story
Intro
Jermaine Morgan grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, the middle of three children. Jermaine was raised in a middle-class household and had a happy childhood, well cared for by his parents, who have now been married almost 55 years. However, when he was about 15 years old, his cousin told him about heroin and how it could do wonders for his sex life. From that point on, with a few breaks for attempts at recovery, Jermaine was a heroin addict. For about 25 years, he sold drugs, stole, robbed, lived on the street and ate out of garbage cans. He did whatever it took to survive and feed his drug habit.
But in 2016, he went into rehab for good at a methadone clinic in Brooklyn and has remained heroin-free ever since. He is a volunteer peer counselor/advocate at the clinic and has lived in a three-quarters house since 2016. Now 50, he hopes to become a paid certified peer advocate sometime soon. He has left his past behind and no longer goes by the name Jermaine. We all call him Morgan, and we relish doing so. What a sweet, impressive and inspiring man he is.
Morgan is one of seven formerly homeless individuals who recently graduated from the Panim El Panim program co-sponsored by Broadway Community and Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing.
Here’s Morgan’s story, in his own words, as told to Peter Aronson on June 14, 2023:
Growing Up …
I’m from Paterson, New Jersey. I was born on March 18, 1973. I am a middle child, with an older sister and a younger sister.
My mother and father have been married for almost 55 years. They were married before I was born and before my older sister was born. My father was a printer and my mother a teacher, a teacher for mentally-challenged kids.
During my childhood when growing up, I didn’t want for anything. I had the latest fashion of clothes, video games, anything else that was out and that the kids wanted. All I did was ask and I received it, but I also had to maintain passing grades. The only thing my father asked of me as a child was to make sure that I graduated high school, because when he was a kid he didn’t. He had to quit school to help with the bills in the house, because he was the oldest. So he didn’t want me to quit school. He just said: “Just make sure that you graduate high school.”
My mother was from Washington, DC, and my father is from Estill, South Carolina. His life was 1
hard. Like I said, he had to quit school to work in the fields and help support the family. I believe there was 12 Kids on my father’s side. My mother, she graduated high school and it was almost the same number of kids in her family. I think my mother had 10.
My father’s family in South Carolina was very poor. My grandparents worked for Mr. Boss, a white farmer. My great grandmother and my grandmother both worked for him as a housekeeper. They each made $12 a week working for him. My grandfather worked in the fields picking cotton, beans and peaches. He made $25 a week, working from 6 am to 6 pm. Even my father worked in the fields, starting around age 10. Some days it was 105 or 110 degrees and he loaded watermelons onto a truck, packing them seven high and seven across. He made $1.75 a day. Then they changed it to $1 a truckload.
My father’s family had so little money that the 12 kids had to share their clothes, shoes and all that stuff. Something terrible happened. Mr. Boss raped my grandmother. That’s why my uncle is half white. Mr. Boss was never prosecuted.
That was the norm back then. If you had an African-American working for you and they looked presentable, they took advantage. They had no money. I guess that’s what they had to do to survive. It’s like what we have to do today to survive.
My father wanted to forget that part of his life, because of what they did to his parents. My father came north to New Jersey with his family in about 1965, when he was a teenager.
Because of all that happened in South Carolina, my father didn’t want to be with Caucasians. Through the grace of God now, he has changed a little bit. But when we were growing up, one thing he said: “Never ever bring any Caucasian here as your girlfriend.” And then he told my sister: “Never bring Caucasians in the house as your boyfriend.”
My childhood was great until I got to high school, at John F. Kennedy High School in Paterson. I started developing and maturing. Then I wanted to hang out. I wasn’t living in a poor area. I was living in a middle class area. JFK was a public school that was mixed with poor kids. They wanted to try to take over. So I had to learn how to defend myself at a very early age. My uncle used to be a boxer and he used to take me to training. I learned how to defend myself. I was 12 at the time.
Problems Start in High School
When I got to the ninth grade, there was an attractive female from the block who I liked. She was older than me and my cousin told me that he had something that will make me last longer sexually, will make her fall in love with me. You know, me being young and naive, I didn’t know what he was talking about. He introduced me to heroin. He set it up for me to get together with this girl, because my cousin had a trailer in his yard, because his father didn’t want us to hang out in the street. So my cousin set it up and he gave me some of the heroin, but that day I did not perform, because the drug overtook me. I never felt anything like that in my life ever again. I can’t describe it. I could say I was just floating. I was too high, I didn’t even know what to do. So she left. But I ran into my cousin later on and he asked me, “How was it?” I didn’t perform, I told him. But I liked the high. And so he said he would set it up again. That was it. This is how it began. I began sniffing heroin on and off. I wasn’t a full blown addict yet, because I still had to maintain my relationship at home with my parents and go to school. And after school, I had a part-time job.
I was 15 at the time. I was working at a restaurant called Chicken Supreme, cleaning floors and cooking chicken. I kept that job until I graduated high school. That’s when it all started snowballing downhill for me.
I was working, but I was working in the evening, so I had a lot of idle time. During high school, I met a couple of friends who I hung out with in the projects. So when I started hanging out, I started selling drugs to fit in, cause everybody hung out, hanging together, you know. Either you sold drugs or you weren’t part of the life.
I remember one time I got arrested for selling narcotics. I was still a juvenile. I was with my best friend at the time and he wasn’t selling drugs yet. I had to groom him into hanging out and when the police were chasing us, I ran one way, he ran the other way, and I assumed that the police were chasing him. I ended up getting rid of a lot of the drugs as I ran. I know I was going to spend some time in jail. I had the cops beat for a while, because I ran track in high school. But I didn’t do it for too long, because I couldn’t perform, because I was hooked on heroin, so I had to quit the team.
So getting back to the arrest story. I ended up letting the cops catch me with only a small quantity. I ended up going to juvenile for a little period of time. And they wanted me to tell them who I got the stuff from. My parents wanted me to tell, too. You know, they hired a lawyer and everything. They wanted me to tell everything. And this is when everything came out, this is when my parents found out that I was on heroin. I was 17.
I didn’t know the law, but I knew the street law. I ended up getting probation, two years probation for narcotics. I turned the two years of probation into five years, because I didn’t want to pay the $1,000 fine. I refused to pay. They terminated my probation after five years, because they realized they were never gonna get the money from me.
My First Ultimatum
My mother and father sat me down and said: “Listen, you gotta do something with yourself. You cannot be out here. We didn’t raise you like this to be out selling drugs.”
Nobody in my family used drugs. My father drank a little, he was an occasional drinker. You know, the story you hear so often: Drinking and abuse. That was never the case in my family.
So they gave me an ultimatum: Go to rehab or get kicked out. So that’s the first rehab I ever went to. It was called Damien House. I was there for six months before they kicked me out because I was like, “You can’t tell me nothing.” I was not gonna do all the things they asked me to do. I didn’t feel I was hooked on heroin. That was my excuse. I’m not hooked. I ended up getting involved with a girl at the program and that’s a no no. So they threw me out of the program. I came back home, I didn’t use drugs right away. You know, I stayed around the house, played the good old boy until I regained the trust of my parents again. Then they took their eyes off me.
I didn’t have a job and I started hanging out again with the same people in New Jersey. I decided I wasn’t gonna sell marijuana anymore. So I started selling crack cocaine. When I started selling crack, I was making a lot of money. So I’m buying clothes and hanging out in bars. There was a bar like two blocks from where we were hanging out. So I’m 18 years old going into the bar, you
know, and the security guard knows me because he was from the neighborhood. So he allowed me in, I’m hanging out with older people and I started drinking at the bar. And next thing I know, a friend of an associate pulls out a bag of heroin. And I did it. I didn’t get that feeling that I got the first time. I got close to it and I got hooked again. At first I was doing it on weekends only. But that only lasted for a month. Then it became every other day, that lasted like four months. Then it became every day. Then after like two months, it became three bags a day. Then eventually it became 15 bags a day, 15 bags a day. And at $10 per bag, that cost me $150 a day.
I had it figured out, because I was selling crack to pay for my heroin. But you know, the money that I had stacked up ran down, because now I was spending my money faster. I was using more drugs than the money I was putting away. The crack cocaine that I was selling was $10 a bag. So after I sold one bag of crack, I would get a bag of heroin. I had to get a job to pay for my habit.
So I started working in a factory loading boxes in Paterson. And I was on heroin. I would leave my job during break or at lunch, get high and come back a little later. And then when I got off work, I would cop me some more heroin. That was my normal cycle for years. That takes me to the start of 2000. I was 27 at the time and I was still living with my parents.
But Life Got Worse
I got kicked out of my parent’s house because of my drug use. I became homeless, sleeping in the projects, people’s houses, back and forth. And these were not normal people’s houses. These were crack houses, where people were getting high off crack cocaine. And I ended up getting hooked on crack cocaine from just one time. A guy was like, “Yo, man, take a hit of this.” And that first hit was like, I never experienced nothing like that either. So now I end up becoming my number one customer from my own supply. And I was doing both heroin and crack cocaine at the same time. And then that was when it got really, really bad, because I couldn’t do one without the other. I had to do my heroin first. I could not smoke crack cocaine without doing my heroin first. I would start feeling sick again. So I had to keep using heroin. And then that’s when I started robbing.
I start robbing people. But after a while, I grew a conscience. I noticed that I was doing too much harm to people, because I was strong and good with my fists. I could fight. So I would rob a lot of men. I would just knock them out and go in their pockets and take stuff. With the women, I would just grab their pocketbooks and run. But I became conscious of the violence, of what I was doing. I thought I might kill somebody.
I never used weapons. I would rob stores after they closed. I would break into the store and rob it. They had their supplies and stuff for the store. I would break in and then sell it to another store, or I might sell it back to the same store I stole it from.
Before my parents kicked me out, I was robbing them. My father had a little social club in the basement, where people came over, played cards and drank and socialized. My older sister acted as the treasurer, keeping track of the money from the club. So there was always cash in the house. My sister would count the money and on Monday morning my father would take the money to the bank. Before he did that, I would steal some of that money. You know, there were times when I would crawl on my belly in their house to get to the money, so no one would see me. At one time, my father blamed my sister for taking the money. But she never did. It was me. I was there when he accused her. He accused my sister of lying. And I didn’t say anything. I just stood there and let him accuse her even though I was the one stealing the money. That’s what heroin does to you.
I also used to rob my father in other ways. I would see at night where he would keep his wallet in his pants pocket hanging behind the door. I used to creep to open the door a little bit and stick my hand over the door and pull the wallet out of his pants pocket. He didn’t know who was doing that. I was comfortable doing it because I knew if I got caught, he wouldn’t do much. They would kick me out for a couple of days and then take me back, especially my father, because I was the only boy. But finally they got sick and tired of what I was doing and they kicked me out for good. That’s when I ended up sleeping in crack houses, abandoned cars, door exits, anywhere that I could get some sleep. I slept on rooftops, anywhere I could. I ate out of trash cans. I went to Duncan Donuts and KFC when they put out the trash at night. I ate out of their garbage bags. The same with the local restaurants. I ate out of all their garbage cans.
I would have to steal drugs sometimes, because I didn’t have enough money to pay for them. The dealers would jump me. But I could defend myself. They say if you hit the biggest one, the rest will fall. So I would hit the biggest one, and once he fell, the rest didn’t want to deal with me. Back then, they didn’t use guns where I lived. It was more knives and fists.
When my father heard what I was doing on the streets, he got concerned. He thought that when he saw me, he would give me a few dollars, and thought that would be enough. But it wasn’t nearly enough to support my habit. This is when my father said, “You gotta do something with yourself, man. Look at you.” This was around the end of 2000.
Trying To Turn My Life Around
Soon after, I ended up in New York City, in a rehab program. I was in that program for 18 months. I didn’t return home to New Jersey until six months into the program. My mother and father thought I was cured, and I assumed that I was cured. I ended up staying, I ended up graduating from the program and ended up working for the program. And this is when I first got a taste of life, a sober life.
And I met a girl back then, she was already set in her own ways. You know, that didn’t last too long, maybe about a year and a half. I moved out, moved to Brooklyn, where I met a guy who I started renting a room with. I was doing good. I was like two years clean. I got the taste of recovery. I assume that I was cured. You know, I didn’t do any recovery groups really. I did them, but I didn’t take them seriously. It was like a fashion show. I went to Narcos Anonymous, but I didn’t learn anything. I would say I got taken advantage of, because I was new to recovery. I didn’t know nothing. I had met that girl my first week. I was recovering, but my sex drive caused a problem. I thought at that time you could just stop using. I didn’t know how sick I was.
I didn’t know I had a problem.
I was dressing up my outside, not dealing with the inside issues. And so I’m just going to the recovery meetings, putting my best clothes on, my little jewelry on, and I’m just sitting there, not focusing, not listening to the messages, not paying attention. Just sitting there, all because of yet another girl I met. I was going to every meeting because of this new girl, not because of me. I was going just to watch her, you know, just to watch her because she had a nice shape. And this always made the other guys jealous. I was still clean. I always wanted to be the alpha, the big man in the room. But I never worked on my inside. Never worked on my mind. Never tried to figure out why I did what I did. I never worked on any of that.
So you could pretty much say I was dry clean and just going with the flow and that lasted for a while. I ended up leaving this girl because I thought I was all better. And then I ended up getting with my prom sweetheart, the girl I went to the prom with in high school. I eventually moved back to New Jersey to live with her. This was about 2006 and it lasted for a while.
My Final Backwards Slide
But then I took a big step backwards. I had too much free time. I started hanging out with the same old people from New Jersey. I started getting high again. And I was selling drugs again, too. I was hanging out with mostly females. I grew up around females, because of my two sisters. And seeing some of the things that females had to do to get their drugs, how they were being taken advantage of, I didn’t like that. So I would give them drugs without asking for favors. Nothing. I would just give them the drugs. I thought I was keeping them safe. I thought I was the alpha, the alpha male. The alpha always keeps the women safe, safe in the pack and they let nobody else come in. That’s what I thought.
But I knew getting high and getting other people high was not right. I didn’t feel good. I got no enjoyment from it. I knew it was wrong and it didn’t feel right. So this is how I got to New York for the last time. For the final time, to where I am at now. It was 2016.
This woman, a friend, ended up giving me a call and asked me if I wanted to manage a three-quarters house, where people in rehab live. I said, sure, no problem.
This offer made me think. Because I had gotten the taste of the sober life a few years before and the things that I accomplished and how I was looking and had become a productive member of society. I had gotten that taste, and I decided I wanted that again. So I told her to just give me a couple of days and I would get back to her.
I ended up riding the subway for two days from stop to stop, stop to stop, thinking it over. Then I called my friend and I told her I was ready. She told me to come to Brooklyn, to the house I would manage, the house I’m living in now.
Methadone Clinic Helps Me
I had the tools and the desire. I also looked into rehab and this is when I found out about the methadone program in Brooklyn, Start Treatment and Recovery Center. I never knew about it before. Methadone is a blocker, because it calms the beast down in your brain. Calms the joy down, the getting high part. I called and they told me to come in for intake.
At the three-quarters house, my friend introduced me as the new manager of the house. There were like 20 guys living there, on several floors. So I became the manager of this house. My responsibility was to handle the problems. The tenants that didn’t want to pay rent, we had to get them out. So I did that and at the same time, I was going to the methadone program that I’m still in now. And this was 2016, seven years ago.
But I still wasn’t working on stuff. I wasn’t doing anything, wasn’t going to discussion groups within the rehab program. But in 2018 I started participating in the groups and I began learning about addiction. I’ve learned that I don’t celebrate clean time, because I don’t want to ever forget, you know, the pain that I caused others and the pain that I caused myself. So, officially now, I have more than five years clean since 2018, because I didn’t start to get rid of my destructive ways until then.
I’m no longer doing that bad stuff. I no longer think like that. I don’t wanna think like that ever again. So this is why I can say that I want to try to help others. This is how I know that this is my calling to help others, and I’ve been doing it ever since then.
I volunteer at the methadone clinic. I am the acting president of PAC, the Patient Advocate Committee. If a patient has a problem with his or her counselor or a problem with staff, like the nurses or security guards, they come see me. I investigate and assist patients with writing a report. I also do planning for events on such days as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas and Thanksgiving. I also help plan a cookout at the end of summer.
I also assist patients with problems relating to their benefits, such as Medicaid, SSI, or SSD, and make sure they see a social worker, if needed. I facilitate group discussions. I am a peer advocate, whatever I can do to help. In the future, I hope to be a paid peer advocate. I want to help people who are struggling. It took me stopping drugs four times for me to get where I am now. I had to do rehab over and over to get to this position.
Even though my mother, my father and my sisters forgave me, it’s still hard, it’s still shameful. You don’t rob and steal from the people that love you, that gave you everything.
I never forget where I came from and never forget what I did. No one, no one should have to do the things to people that I did. No one should live like that. That’s why I wanna just help the best way I can.
(Morgan’s story was edited lightly for clarity by volunteer Peter Aronson.)