After Age 40, A Crack-Up And Recovery

Renee Perry digs into a plate of bacon and eggs at a diner near where she started her life, in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, and talks of new beginnings.She speaks quickly and with excitement, but her story is punctuated by periods of sadness, commas of regret, and the exclamation points of blown opportunities.She is a 52-year-old former drug addict trying to turn her life around. Hers is not the typical story of a directionless teen who fell into drugs: Renee Perry was a working mother – and grandmother – who started smoking crack at 42.Renee Perry, raised in the Edenwald Houses by god-fearing parents, worked hard and brought up three children. Then, unable to make ends meet and with her children scattered, she descended into the hell of crack cocaine.“I was so depressed and messed up,” she says, pushing the food around on her plate. “All I would do was cry and get high.”Life for Renee Perry has been a long, tough road, full of bad choices. Her parents raised her and her two brothers and a sister in a strict atmosphere.“My father scared us to death about boys and sex,” she says. “We were raised in the church.”After graduating from John Adams High School, she started nursing school, but got “spooked out” by the cadavers. She took secretarial courses and landed a job at Saks Fifth Avenue, where she met her future husband, a security guard.They moved to Bed-Stuy in 1972 and she quickly had her first child, Tyran, when she was 20. Another, George, arrived the next year.“My husband was like, ‘You stay home barefoot and pregnant and I’ll go hang out,'” she recalls. “Then, his friends started coming over, hanging out, and they would all smoke weed.“We fought all the time. Once, I had no money to feed the children. I asked him for some money and he said, ‘I only have $5 left and I’m going to buy some weed.’ He walked out. Instead of spending his last money on food for his children, he went out and got high.”She left. “That was when I realized I had to get a job and fend for myself,” she says. They reconciled, but she threw him out for good when she was pregnant with her daughter, Shanae, who was born in 1979.She found a boyfriend, but he turned out to be an alcoholic and ladies’ man. She dumped him and moved back to the Bronx with her children and in 1981 landed a job with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.She was struggling to make ends meet when, in 1985, she fell for the man who would become her second husband.“He was doing drugs, but I didn’t know that,” she says. “He stole our TV and VCR and then he took my 1979 Chrysler New Yorker and sold the tires.”In the early 1990s, with Tyran living with a girlfriend, George in college, and Shanae in Virginia with her stepfather, Ms. Perry began doing drugs.“I was stressed out trying to make ends meet and pay for college. I started with woolies,” she says, referring to crack-laced marijuana stuffed into hollowed-out cigars. “It made me feel good when nothing else did.”She did that for about five years, continuing to work for the MTA. Then, as always, it spun out of control.“I was smoking crack out of a pipe,” she says. “For a while, I kept working steady, but I’d smoke before I went in and smoke again on lunch break. Then I started calling in sick. Soon, I didn’t do anything but drugs.”Eventually, her family convinced her to seek help. She enrolled in a two month program and began seeing a psychiatrist, but quickly relapsed.“The program was too short and I just wasn’t ready to change,” she says. She started seeing her children less and didn’t spend much time with her two grandchildren.Finally, she reached the breaking point and told her psychiatrist she was back on crack. He got her into Phoenix House. She spent 18 months learning to accept responsibility for her actions and to deal with her problems, rather than run back to the pipe.“It’s been hard, but I’m doing it,” she says. She’s back at the MTA, working the midnight shift so she can see her family.“I am extremely happy today,” she says with a wide smile. “I finally love me. I know I have to live day by day. I have to get through today. I’ll take care of tomorrow when it comes.”

After Age 40, A Crack-Up And Recovery

After Age 40, A Crack-Up And Recovery

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