When I get pulled over by the police one afternoon while driving down the most notorious stretch of road in Las Vegas with Eric “Picc” Jackson, the man who worked for the devil for 20 years, I know I have nothing to fear. If this had been anytime before March 8, 2001, man, forget it. The police would be the least of my worries. Hell, I probably would have welcomed them.
Because if I had been driving down Jackson Street with Picc before he sobered up on that day in March, I would have very likely had a .38-caliber semi-automatic pistol (his constant companion, along with a feral urge to smoke cocaine) in my face, in which case I would very definitely give him anything of value on my person. If I valued my life.
“You couldn’t be in the same room with me,” Picc says of his days as a hardcore junkie. “Everybody within a five-mile radius becomes victims. I had to have it.”
But today is Sept. 15, 2006. Besides, I know that not only is Picc unarmed, but he also means no harm. Quite the contrary.
The police ask what we’re doing on Jackson Street, where, as Picc says, “There’s nothing … but misery and death.” I explain that I’m a reporter here to observe him as he does outreach work convincing the addicts in the area to attend his recovery meetings. The police still run our IDs.
It probably has something to do with the fact that I’m a 26-year-old white guy and he’s a 44-year-old black man, an odd combo in this neighborhood. And the fact that Picc told the police that he was a former shot-caller with the Gerson Park Kingsmen, and that the last time he was arrested was for 18 counts of attempted murder.
As we sit in the car waiting for the police to give us the-move-along-now, surveying the empty street and the dusty lots and concrete bunkers that line it, I tell Picc that I wouldn’t be surprised to see a cowboy on a horse emerge from the shadows. It is, after all, the Wild Wild West Side. He laughs — an operatic chuckle that rattles his compact but hearty frame. He knows what I mean.
A bearded old man with a vicious limp pushes a shopping cart across the street. Picc says, “He’s been out here hustling a looong time.” Picc would know: He spent a looong time out here, too — around 14 years — getting high.
“They fade away to the dust,” he says of the people who use on Jackson Street. “Then a new one will come up, and they’ll fade away again.” That’s the cycle.
The police come back over and tell us we can go. Since everyone in the neighborhood has seen us talking to the police (including another junkie carrying a leaf-blower who nodded hello to Picc), Picc says we’ll have to come back another time.
And, since giving up drugs and alcohol and the criminal life that went along with it, there’s always another time for him to come back to Jackson Street and try to reach the unreachable.
Yes, Eric “Picc” Jackson may still refer to himself as a hope-to-die-dope-fiend, but he’s not courting the Reaper anymore. He’s courting addicts before they fade to dust — just like he almost did.
The escape artist
“My street name is Picc. There used to be a running back … with the Chicago Bears called Brian Piccolo. He was a white guy and he started as a running back. That was a black man’s position and he mastered it. He had so much heart. I had so much heart.”
Eleanor Jackson, 73, is sturdy as a tree stump. So when she tells me that moving her four sons, including her youngest, Picc, from Washington to Nevada was “a tragic adjusting,” I’m a little surprised that she lowers her head and her voice. She’s a tough lady. Raising four boys alone will do that.
Picc may have been born Nov. 18, 1961, in Seattle, but his real home was West Las Vegas. Historian and area native Stan Armstrong says of that time and place, “People pretty much had to fend for themselves.” And that’s exactly what Herbert Gerson Park’s denizens did.
“Gerson Park was a close-knit family,” says Picc of the now-defunct housing project. “When something happened to one of the kids at school or something, we would walk over to the adjoining neighborhood as a unit, parents included.”
Picc’s intelligence and athletic ability flourished there. For a time, anyway. Indeed, Picc was one of the youngest people, at 12, to start high school in Nevada’s history. And even though he was small, as a running back on the football field he was “an escape artist.” Everybody in Gerson Park knew he was NFL-bound.
But he’d already started to go the other way. His brothers founded the first gang to come out of Gerson Park called The Associates, which mutated into the infamous Gerson Park Kingsmen.
By the time he was enrolled in Las Vegas High School, they had introduced him to Lincolns and diamonds — and cocaine. “So at 17 I was this all-American, and I was selling drugs and playing football. And, all of a sudden, one of my best friends got hit on the football field and broke his neck in three places. He died like two weeks later. It was like my whole world was just tossed upside down,” Picc says.
Soon after he dropped out of school and spent the next two years selling cocaine. Then his mother sat him down for a talk. He’d gone from having a full athletic scholarship to Florida State University, to having a full ride to the cemetery or prison. “My mother came to me … and said, ‘You know Lorenzo’ — which was my friend that died — ‘would’ve wanted way more from you than this.’ My mother convinced me, well, threatened me, I better get back to school.
“So I went back to school at 20 years old, and I got my high-school diploma,” he continues. “Then I went to a J.C.
While there he lead the nation in kick-off and punt returns. Then he got hurt. His coaches demanded he inject steroids so he would heal quicker. “And when I wouldn’t do it, they … throwed me to the side,” Picc says.
He left Taft University, moved to Los Angeles to live with his uncle and started running with his gangbanging cousins. “So here we go again, trying to get Eric back in school,” says his mother. “But he had street knowledge by then.” Eventually, his uncle kicked him out and he went back to Vegas. “That’s when it really hit the fan,” Picc says.
But his first experience with smoking cocaine occurred before he went college. One night Picc, his brothers and their girlfriends were at a flophouse, where they would go after selling drugs to count money and get high. Picc had always complained that smoking cocaine never did much for him, and one of his pals was sick of the complaints. Everyone was sitting around a kitchen table, and this friend said, “‘Come around here.’
“So I came around the edge of the table and he took a hit and he broke … a cardboard clothes hanger rack in half,” Picc continues. “He put one end in his mouth and one end in my mouth and he squatted down. He squeezed my nose and he blew me a charge. It filled up my chest and I started to stand up. And that’s the last thing I remember.”
His next image was of a room filled with blank stares and tortured silence, except for his future sister-in-law’s sobs. She said, “Picc, you was dead.” He didn’t believe her at first, but he had this pain in his chest. Why?
“Well, my brother had been standing over me, hitting me in the chest to … revive me back to life,” he recalls. “But the addict mentality that I already had had started manifesting itself long before I took that hit. With that mentality, the first thing that came out my mouth was: Give me some more.”
Imps and angels
“It had got so bad until when I took a hit of cocaine, I could see these little shadows. These little shadows were like about a foot-and-a-half tall. And when I took the hit, they used to run and I used to see ’em and they would jump in the bushes — and they would call my name.”
Long before Picc almost died from smoking cocaine out of a hanger, one of his brother’s had given him “an ominous warning.” Picc was around 17, and he was helping his brother count money, and watching him smoke cocaine. “He said, ‘Whatever you do, little brother, don’t ever do this.'”
Today, at 5 feet 8 inches tall and about 215 pounds, Picc thinks a lot about the “ominous warning,” and what would’ve became of him if he’d listened. He already knows where not listening got him: down on Jackson Street, weighing 109 pounds, .38 excluded, doing “anything and everything” for cocaine. Which got him stabbed, sent to prison twice, shot in the hip (he was lucky: His friend caught two to the chest and one to the stomach, but lived; Picc mainly just saw the sparks from the bullets hitting the asphalt) and was back on the corner three days later with an open wound, looking to score a hit.
“When I started freebasing, my world started becoming unraveled. Meaning I started downward spiraling. Meaning I started to smoke more and more and more,” he says.
Toward the end of the 20 or so years he spent “stationed on Jackson Street” as a “low-bottom dope fiend,” Picc began to hear voices. “I used to hear people talking to me — and they wouldn’t be talking to me! I could walk away and I could get about to the street and I would swear that one of you guys called me. And I’d walk back over to the crowd, and say, ‘What you want?’ And all the rest of the guys would be like, ‘Damn, what’s wrong with you?'”
Then there was the smell. “I had the smell of death, man. It was like this odor that I couldn’t get rid of.” Even though his mother — who, because of Picc’s addiction, was left to raise his baby boy — let him come by once every couple of months to shower and sleep, Picc still couldn’t shake the smell.
One thing he will never shake is the damage smoking cocaine did to his body — an ugly fact he was wholly unaware of all those years he spent high. He would later experience epileptic seizures, extreme chest pain and be diagnosed with a disease that was destroying his muscles.
Cocaine’s explosion into the West Side projects didn’t touch Picc alone, says his mother. “We could notice a difference in our children’s behavior. You can see them gradually floating away.”
Indeed, all four of her sons — pupils dilated, hearts racing — floated away on a cloud of cocaine smoke. But God had a plan for Picc.
Eighteen months before March 8, 2001, Picc’s cousin, herself a recovering addict, gave him the card of a man she was then dating. He was a chemical dependency expert specializing in pulling dope fiends like Picc off the streets and putting them into recovery. The only instructions the man gave: Don’t call me unless you’re serious.
At the time, Picc wasn’t serious. “Most of the time, when I kept stuff in my pocket, I’d just throw it away, or if I go home, I toss it out,” he says. “But I kept the card for a year.”
By this time, Picc knew how he was going to die: “I was gonna have a bullet in the back of my head, and a hot pipe in my pocket.” So when he saw those little shadows — which he later realized were imps from hell — Picc was not only smelling like death and courting death, but was in fact dying. “What had happened was I was stepping into the spiritual world.”
But, he says, “God sent me an angel.” And that angel was the man whose card he kept for all that time — a man named Willie McTear.
On March 8, 2001, Picc called McTear and told him he was serious. He went to stay at his mother’s house in preparation for McTear to come pick him up. “That Friday and that Saturday, I was up and I was calling him and I was calling him, because God was compelling me to continue to call him,” says Picc.
Thirty-five calls later, on a Sunday, McTear drove from California to Vegas for Picc. “When I heard from him I knew he was serious,” says McTear. “And I was true to my word, and I came. I already had a bed reserved for him for recovery living” in Orange County. “I said, ‘I’m gonna roll with you till the wheels roll off. Whatever you need, I’m here for you.'”
About 90 days into his recovery, Picc needed McTear in a major way.
Having moved from the recovery home’s couch to the master bedroom, Picc was feeling pretty good about himself and his situation. He had his own shower and other amenities that, combined with his three months of sobriety, had rid him of death’s foul odor. Then he was given a roommate. Not a big deal; Picc had been to prison twice, and was thus accustomed to sharing a room.
But this guy wasn’t from where Picc was from. Before long, Picc caught the guy wearing his cologne. This was a big deal. In prison, boundaries exist that people do not cross. So Picc warned the guy. He didn’t listen.
“I came back in [the room] one day and he had took a shower and … dried off with my towel,” Picc says. “On top of drying off with my towel … he had sprayed my cologne on him. And I’m like, ‘Dude, what’s wrong with you?’ He just looked at me all stupid, and said, ‘I don’t know.’ And that wasn’t the answer I was looking for.”
McTear was working at a hospital when he received an urgent call from Picc. After Picc told him what he did to his roommate, McTear ordered Picc to stay put and immediately hopped in his car. This was serious.
In prison, when a guy disrespects you in the way Picc’s roommate had disrespected him, if you don’t do something, it’s over; the next day you’ll be wearing a dress. Even though he wasn’t in prison, Picc’s old instincts came roaring back when his roommate used his towel and cologne — again.
“Before I knew it, one of the other guys that lived on the other side of the house was coming and pulling me off him. I was choking him,” Picc says. “And as he’s pulling me off him I looked and there was this giant hole in the wall about the size of a person’s head. And I didn’t know what to do, man.” As a violent felon with a book-length rap sheet, Picc would go to prison for life if the guy decided to press charges.
When McTear arrived at the recovery home and discovered that the guy was not only alive and breathing, but also fully conscious and not too bad off, he said to Picc’s roommate, “C’mon, let’s go have dinner. I explained to him the people that come from different areas of life. I wasn’t trying to con him. I just explained life and what he had done. He had no idea of the seriousness of what he had done. I said, ‘Let’s make amends.’ I say, ‘You OK with this? And he said, ‘Yeah.'”
That’s why Picc calls McTear “my angel. He came and rescued me off of Jackson Street when there was no hope. I had burnt every bridge. Everybody had wrote me off.”
Down on Jackson Street
“I have this void in me, and this void has to be filled up by God. Because cocaine is the devil. It’s the only drug that ever went down in value. In 1980, we were buying ounces for $2,500. Today, you can get one for probably five. For 20 years I worked for the devil. Cocaine was my master.”
It’s about 9 p.m. on Sept. 15, and I’m back on Jackson Street. I’m sitting in my car, ignition and lights off. Before me is the New Tavern Casino, a dumpy little joint which serves as a gathering place for people in the area. Picc stands out front on the corner a block from where I’m parked on F Street, a stack of flyers in one hand and a water bottle in the other. He’s in his element. Since getting clean almost six years ago, Picc has been coming back to this road of shadows and death to perform his outreach work as often as possible.
All the street lights are either out or flickering. A man is leaning against one of the poles, furiously bobbing his head for no apparent reason. Soon, people in various states of disrepair join him. Then they all scamper off together. The devil is alive tonight.
Jackson Street wasn’t always hell on earth. Laments Armstrong, the historian, “It’s a shame, because during the ’40s and ’50s, Jackson Street was the place to be. It was when blacks could not go on the Strip and gamble. Jackson Street was always the Strip of the West Side.”
With desegregation, however, the road became what it is today, continues Armstrong. “Basically, people just kind of gave up on their community. Jackson Street should be preserved as a historical site.”
It’s hard for me to picture tourists riding down Jackson Street in a bus, listening to some tour guide point out where the Louisiana Club used to sit. And it’s equally hard for me to picture Picc’s mom down here. But, when Picc was a hope-to-die-dope-fiend doing any- and everything for cocaine, his mother would often park her car in the same exact spot I’m parked in now, with Picc’s 2-year-old son in the back seat crying.
“I know everybody down there. We just sit there just like this and wait,” says his mother, folding her arms and mimicking the hard stare she had when trying to track Picc down. “I’d go down there at two in the morning. They knew I wasn’t a threat to them. I didn’t have no fear.”
I do. As I watch Picc stand on the corner, chatting with folks and passing out flyers advertising the weekly recovery meetings he’s organized at various spots around town, I too begin to hear voices. But unlike the ones Picc heard, mine are real. Very real.
A trio of young toughs I saw in the distance a few minutes earlier suddenly appear right next to my car. I stay perfectly still and hope they don’t see me. Then one of them yells, “Crip, nigga!” For a moment, I feel like my stomach will burst open, and all of the butterflies inside will pour out of my mouth. But the toughs aren’t talking to me.
The paralyzing fear that practically unravels me during the 20 minutes I watch Picc try to convince junkies to attend his meetings doesn’t exist for him. He knows this street and the people who live on it well. Besides, God is on his side.
It is God who conquered Picc the violent cokehead. No longer is his face glazed over with the evil pallor of extreme addiction; instead, it bears the light touch of extreme humility. His puffy cheeks and eyes whose lids half-cloak the whites give him an almost sleepy demeanor. And yet he is wide awake.
This is the man who cried at every recovery meeting he attend for the first four to eight months he was piecing his shattered life back together. This is the man who imagined his God as a very forgiving entity. This is the man who worships that God at the Calvary Baptist Church every Sunday, where Pastor Kerry M. Nunley openly discusses his days as a crackhead. This is not the man who was arrested in December 2000 on 18 counts of attempted murder. This is Picc, the man who saves lives.
“These values — morals, integrity — that she gave me,” says Picc of his mother’s influence, “were there.” But he had suppressed them for 20 years. God and Mom “were the only reasons why I was here.”
So he’s here on the former Strip of the West Side, scouring not for cocaine, but for new recruits for his meetings. Meetings held for the sole purpose of helping those who’ve been written off by the world.
Reaching the unreachable
“I love to talk to other alcoholics and addicts. You’re going to be able to see the disease not only in yourself, but you can see it in other people. I can almost feel when something’s wrong with you.”
I cannot tell you the locations of the meetings Picc holds four times a week, nor the name of his program, nor the names of any of the individuals who attend them. Picc wants to protect the anonymity of his groups and their members during this painful and difficult period in their lives.
But I can tell you that I went to an all men’s meeting, held outside in a pavilion, and watched the eight guys in attendance talk about their struggles with no fear of being judged. Like the guy shaking so violently from heroin withdrawals he had trouble holding his cigarette, who discussed the first time he used. Or the guy with his shirt half-unbuttoned, revealing burn marks on his chest, who discussed his battle with the bottle. Or the guy who was initially afraid to speak, but after some encouragement by the group members, damn near gave a speech.
I can tell you about another meeting held inside an auditorium, where a woman was given a cake in celebration of her ninth year of sobriety. I can tell you about her smile, and her excited tracing of her life as a junkie living by a Dumpster, to her life as a manager overseeing others. I can tell you about the applause and hugs that followed.
I can tell you that Picc started these meetings when he moved from California to Oregon, because he saw a need to reach the unreachable. To have the same faith in others’ ability to get clean in the same way McTear once had faith in him.
And I can tell you about Picc and his presence. Because when he speaks, people listen. He has a voice that fluctuates from squeaky to booming, an undulating sonic wave that turns heads and shuts mouths. The same qualities — intensity, determination — that make people respect him now are the same qualities that once made people fear him.
“He’s doing what I’m doing: going and getting people that everybody in the world has given up on. And they’re gravitating to him,” says McTear.
Of course, Picc wouldn’t necessarily have to do this if Las Vegas had the resources. Says UNLV addiction specialist Larry Ashley, “There is some movement, but the Legislature hasn’t really acted too much. [It’s] not a top priority with the state helping people with mental health or substance abuse.”
Which is why McTear took Picc to California. Indeed, the Golden State is so progressive that it has at least one institution, Saddleback College, with a program — of which McTear is a graduate — that trains former addicts, even convicted felons, to treat drug abusers. “You can only transmit it if you got it. You can’t fake this. This is a real kinda disease,” says McTear. “Southern California is to recovering addicts as Mecca is to Muslims.”
Even if Vegas did have the resources, Picc would probably still be holding meetings. He was born to do it. He has a philosophy to share and a story to tell, one which is still ongoing. He’s been married now for about 18 months to Tracy, who just gave birth to a daughter. While Picc’s 13-year-old son still lives with his mother, Picc has a much larger role in the young man’s life than he did when he was geeked-out on coke.
But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. His three older brothers are “still gettin’ loaded,” he says. Indeed, he continues, “I have one that is on Jackson right now. He was the one that gave me the ominous warning. He’s out there real bad now. Every time I go to that area, I look for him.” Yet another one who could fade to the dust.
Picc himself still hears cocaine’s siren call, and, as a result, has to call McTear two or three times a day to “bounce important stuff off of [him, because] I can have a great idea, and it’ll lead to me getting high. Before I make a move, I have to call the sponsor,” he says. Nearly six years after he got in a car with McTear, the disease lives on.
As do others. Smoking cocaine has ruined Picc’s body. He has epilepsy and must take pills three times a day, or he’ll have a seizure. Then there’s the polymyositis, a degenerative muscle disease that will one day leave him in a wheelchair.
And those shadows, well, he still sees them from time to time.
“But guess what though?” says Picc, a smile creeping across his face. “I stand tall through it all.”
Those seeking treatment for drug addiction can contact Eric “Picc” Jackson at 238-4649 or Willie McTear at 203-0753. But only if you’re serious.
VIA:Las Vegas CityLife
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