HOW MANY MORE, LIKE STRAWBERRY, MUST WE LOSE?

The Lost Boys

Inquirer magazine last week captured beautifully the quiet courage of the
Lost Boys of the Sudan, those orphans who survived a war not of their
making in the wildernesses of their world and ours to seek salvation and
carve new lives.

There is another kind of lost boy, though, neither courageous nor a victim
of any war other than that of his own making. That wilderness is a
drug-infested nightmare created by contemptuous drug czars but voluntarily
bought into by boys who should know better. Some don't ever seek salvation
or redemption, just destruction.

Why this is important to me is that two such lost boys - Darryl Strawberry
and my older brother, Bill - haunt me professionally and personally.

Having publicly chronicled the fall of one, having personally suffered the
chaos created within the family by the other, I long ago reached the
conclusion that Darryl and Bill are one and the same - from their crooked
smiles that make them eerily resemble each other to the self-absorption to
the slow-motion self-destruction.

Both are missing now, out there in that wilderness, after failed efforts to
get clean and stay clean after at least a decade of trying. Strawberry,
flawed even when bigger than life and in his major-league prime, is now at
the lowest of lows. The former Mets centerpiece, Dodgers disappointment and
Yankees revival project is a fugitive from the law, having again
disappeared from a court-mandated drug-treatment facility.

Cancer-ridden and suicidal because of it, the former major-league all-star
leaves little hope that the next news he makes will lead to anything but
the release of those obituaries that news organizations have been preparing
for more than a year. It will be the last big headline of Darryl
Strawberry's star-crossed life, the one he is not trying any longer to avoid.

As for Bill, he's just missing, the long-distance promises of a major sea
change in the way he has led his life resulting instead in a change of
direction back into the unknown. No one knows where or how he is or even
that he is.

This - the missing part - is nothing new, of course. Just as Darryl has
drifted in and out of baseball, he has also drifted in and out of the lives
of his teammates, friends and family. Again, just like Bill.

Only two things have ever been constants: their innate ability to sell the
same lies upon return and the collateral damage that lies in their wake
when they leave again.

The addiction to the lie is as crippling as the addiction to the drugs. Not
even they know any longer where their lies stop and reality begins. After
the nth time, no one believes - and that has to hurt them as much as it
hurts those around them, this complete collapse of trust worse than the
shackles worn into any court or prison.

As for the collateral damage, Strawberry has that beautiful set of children
he never minded publicly parading alongside his bruised and discarded first
wife or the second, well-grounded, wife who supposedly was the key to his
long-awaited arrival of maturity that proved to be just another fleeting phase.

Bill's children, the children he doesn't know, are beautiful, too, because
of their mother, because of themselves. The daughter is beautiful and
brilliant. She giggles at all the right boys, hugs loved ones with feeling,
is a best friend to her mom. One day, she will plow into some unsuspecting
boy's heart with the impact of a bullet train. His life will never be the
same, lucky boy.

The son, the protector, the man of the house, is teenager sure and teenager
shy at once. His heart is in all the right places, his sensitivities too.
You know he will work hard to learn how to be a good man and a good father.
He long ago learned what must be done to avoid being bad ones; for that and
that alone, his father can be credited.

These are the ultimate victims of the drug wars, the victims that Hollywood
skips over in movies like Traffic, in which it is mandated that only the
black faces have to be demonized and the only collateral damage is deemed
to be in upscale gated communities of America.

I contend that the damage is everywhere, some places more than not. And on
a very personal level, I want someone - George W. Bush, Michael Douglas,
anybody - to please quantify something for me. Tell me how many lives of
flesh-and-blood children would have been different, if not immeasurably
fuller, had all our lost boys and girls not allowed themselves to be
extracted in so destructive a way?

The self-absorption of this drug culture, lived out without so much as a
second thought to the impact on loved ones, is so arrogant, so pitiful, so sad.

Collateral damage? They are sick. We are tired of waiting, of fooling
ourselves that the lost boys and girls can find themselves, of needing to
believe that we are not just waiting for the finish.