Pubdate: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 Source: Inquirer (PA) Copyright: 2001 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc Contact: http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/home/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/340 Author: Claire Smith 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. - --- MAP posted-by: GD