Dont Count Me Out A Baltimore Dope Fiends Miraculous Recovery by Rafael Alvarez

Author:Rafael Alvarez
Format: epub

9

Bonnie and Clyde

“Patti went along with any idea I came up with to make money and get high.”

—Bruce White

By September of 1980, two years out of high school, Bruce had been strung out on narcotics for several years, “a day-to-day maintenance addict,” he said. “Dope sick by mid-afternoon if I didn’t get what I needed.”

Methadone—which he began taking in high school—took the edge off. Traces of PCP in his urine kept kicking him out of methadone programs. At a clinic in East Baltimore—the old City Hospitals on Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown—Bruce met the only love of his life that could not be taken intravenously.

“She was in front of me in line—a blond vision in a T-shirt: ‘Peppermint Pattie, Get the Sensation.’”

It was an experience—a candy-bar tease on the shirt of a chick Bruce found captivating—that he was intent on getting.

Patricia Faith McCormick was a young drug addict and barmaid who, like Bruce, was dependent on methadone while still using street drugs.

“I waited for her, leaning against my motorcycle and doing my best James Dean,” said Bruce. “When she got out, I asked if she needed a ride home, and she said she was taking the bus. It took a minute, but I convinced her to ride with me.”

Perhaps she should have gotten on the bus. The ride with Bruce—first back to the White home to pick up liquid morphine and then to Patti’s apartment to “hang out and get high”—ended with finality for her four years later.

It led to armed robberies of pharmacies and drug dealers, constant abuse of narcotics, prescription forgery, failed pregnancies, rafts of PCP, marriage, long days of dealing with a psychotic boyfriend, and, on the same motorcycle she’d so eagerly hopped on the morning she met Bruce, her death.

“I spent the night the first day we met,” said Bruce. “The next morning, we rode back to the [methadone] clinic on my Harley. A couple of days later, I got down on one knee in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and asked her to marry me. She said yes.”

And continued to say yes to pretty much anything and everything Bruce proposed.

“We were a toxic couple, but we truly cared about each other,” said Bruce. “We couldn’t stand to be around normal people because it reminded us of what we weren’t.”

They were deviants in love; partners in crime, dope, and sex, and sometimes all three in the same hour; a couple of lost, dangerous souls infatuated with firearms and each other.

According to Bruce, “Patti was the most kind and gentle spirit I’d ever met—a loving and giving woman, a much better person than me.”

It didn’t take much to be a better person than Bruce White back in the day. Like the best molls of yore, Patti stood by her man. “She’d drop you without a second thought if she thought you were going to hurt me,” said Bruce. “If you got between me and Patti, you’d lose.”

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