Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9408020001
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Janie Miller and Cosby Burns were players in the crack cocaine game.
Both walked the path of substance abuse - as users, as dealers, as both. They knew each other from the streets - the "user world," they called it.
Somewhere in their troubled lives, they found a way out of that world. Janie, 31, simply wanted more from life. Cosby, 35, was forced to seek help after his second conviction on drug distribution charges.
They bumped into one another last November at a Roanoke detox center. Janie was being discharged. Cosby was visiting a friend.
Cosby sensed that Janie was lost, scared. He worried that she would slip out of recovery.
He talked to her, helped put her belongings into a cab. Instead of directing the cabbie to Janie's Southwest Roanoke home, Cosby asked him to drop them off at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
"I felt she really needed a meeting, any meeting," Cosby said. "She was depressed like she was going to go use. I didn't want to see it."
They talked frequently in the days after, Janie leaning on Cosby, Cosby giving Janie the support someone had once given him.
They found solace in each other's company: two recovering addicts, one new to the tortuous process, another nearly two years into the struggle.
On Memorial Day weekend, they married.
"They're miracles," a friend said at the wedding. "It was meant that they should meet. They've worked for happiness, and they deserve it."
It seemed the idyllic story ending, with love the cure to all of life's problems.
But it wasn't. For Janie and Cosby, pulling life together would not be easy.
Janie's mother died of a heroin overdose when Janie was 10. She was placed in several foster homes and later sent to live in her native Charlottesville with her father, a chronic alcoholic who had left her mother years before.
There, Janie says, she was sexually abused. She ran away at 14. At 15, she had her first child. She had her second at 19, her third at 23.
As a child, she'd dreamed of a life with a husband, children and a beautiful home. She thought she'd found that in a man in Charlottesville who "swept me off my feet," she said.
They had what appeared to be a good life. She worked as an office manager with a telemarketing firm. He had a job with a national moving company. The couple, though not married, lived in a house that his parents had given them.
But the man abused her.
"He beat me, locked me up - every type of thing that a man could do to a woman, insane things," Janie said.
She put up with it for three years. She didn't know how to get out of the relationship.
In 1989, eight months pregnant, she woke up in a hospital, surrounded by police officers and social service workers.
She had broken ribs and a bullet in her back. They told her she had a choice: leave or they would take her children.
Janie chose to leave. She and her children were taken to a shelter under 24-hour protection.
Authorities called around the state looking for a shelter that could take her in on an emergency basis. She was hesitant, too proud to stay at a battered women's shelter.
"I was eight months pregnant, black and blue, and I didn't want to stay in a shelter," Janie said, almost laughing in disbelief. "I had so much, and I had nothing."
Authorities found a shelter in Lynchburg that could accommodate her and her children. She stayed briefly, relocating to Roanoke days later.
She has been a client of virtually every public assistance, counseling and rehabilitation program in the Roanoke Valley - for a home, for clothing, for money to get the water turned on, for waking her up to the abuse.
Total Action Against Poverty found a room for her at its Transitional Living Center, which provides food and shelter to homeless people and helps prepare them for independent living. Within a week, Janie had the baby, a girl, at Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
She was discharged from the hospital to Turning Point, the Salvation Army's shelter for battered women.
From the shelter, she moved into a subsidized apartment on Rorer Avenue in Southwest Roanoke. She tried to make the apartment nice for herself and her baby, filling it with thrift store goods and yard sale buys.
But she was lonely, and bored.
"So I put the baby in a stroller and walked on up the hill and socialized," Janie said. "But I picked a helluva group to socialize with."
The group - "party people who liked to hang in the streets," she called them - introduced her to crack cocaine.
"I thought I was it," she said. "But it was really killing me. I was just running from one problem to another one."
When one man raised a hand to her, she tried to burn him. Instead, she burned the back porch of his house.
"I tried to set him on fire," she said. "I'm afraid of what I'll do to any man who tries to hit me. I won't go through it any more."
Janie pleaded guilty to arson charges. She lost her apartment - and her children, who were placed in foster care.
She served an 11-month jail term and was released in 1991. In 1992, she had another child - her fifth. She has no contact with the child's father.
"I continued to have children to have a sense of family," she said.
Life with Cosby is the closest she has come to family since she was 15.
"I love Cosby because he accepts me for who I am," Janie says. "There are no skeletons in the closet. He knows it all. He doesn't look at me as that person I was.
"But it's my first time in a healthy relationship. And I still have a lot of fear."
Cosby was the youngest of seven, the son of an operating room scrub nurse and a presser for a dry cleaning business. He was 4 when his father left home.
He attended Roanoke's Lincoln Terrace Elementary School, the old Monroe Junior High and Oak Hill Academy, a private Baptist high school in Mouth of Wilson. An honor roll student, Cosby graduated in 1976, a year early.
He enlisted in the Army after graduation. Two years of his three-year tour of duty were spent at an Army post in Germany, where he worked as a medical supply specialist.
He returned to the States with hopes of working at a veterans' hospital. He instead found work at the Roanoke city Parks and Recreation Department.
Relationships with two women produced two daughters, one born in 1980, and the second in 1983. He married another woman in 1985. They separated a year later.
A friend persuaded him to move to Atlanta. He found work as a swing manager at a fast-food restaurant in nearby Decatur. In five weeks, he was promoted to first assistant manager.
He returned to Roanoke in 1987. Divorced, he looked for a job similar to the one he'd had in Georgia but couldn't find one that paid enough.
"What they offered me to work as manager, I could work in Atlanta as a crew person," he said.
He free-lanced as a painter, hiring himself out to anyone who needed his services. He did well for a while.
But money wasn't coming in fast enough to support himself and his children. He started selling marijuana.
"I felt I couldn't make money, so I started selling," Cosby said. "I was clearing $3,600 in three days."
Tired of dealing marijuana, he turned to selling - and using - cocaine.
"I was fighting a losing battle at the time and didn't know it," he said. "My ego was up there. I thought I could handle it."
He was indicted in 1990 on a charge of selling a $25 rock of crack. He pleaded guilty and was given a five-year suspended sentence. He served three months.
He floundered after his release, eventually finding work in telephone sales. He stayed clean for 15 months.
In 1992, he relapsed.
"I started using again - and selling because of the money," he said.
Cosby wound up in jail again that year, convicted on a crack distribution charge. He vowed to get clean and stay clean. Seventeen days after he was incarcerated, he entered a substance abuse treatment program in jail.
He was paroled in 1993 and entered an intensive rehabilitation program, sponsored by Blue Ridge Community Services. He attended Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
"I was doing what I had to do," he said. "I always tell people I was rescued."
He struggled, separating himself from the temptations of his past. Last month, he celebrated his two-year anniversary of clean time.
"I don't see myself getting back into the old game," he said. "I haven't cared to get back in."
He speaks to college classes, to civic groups, to anyone who will listen about his life and the results of life's bad choices.
Cosby sees drug dealers getting younger and less discreet about their actions. He tries to shelter his children from it, as he tried to shelter them from his own drug activity.
"I lost a lot of valuable time with my children," he said. "My baby girl [a third child, born in 1989] suffered because of it. I used to tell her I was at work, when I was out using."
He says he is ready for marriage, ready to stay with Janie for "a long time."
"Both of us want the same things," he said. "We both see where we're going."
The wedding
The furniture in the living room of a Northwest Roanoke home was pushed to the walls to clear a path for the bride.
Cosby stood with his hands clasped in front, wearing a suit that seemed to swallow his small frame.
A soloist hummed the wedding processional.
Janie wobbled, shaking from jangled nerves as she walked to Cosby's side. Tears dripped from her cheeks to the front of the wedding gown that friends at Total Action Against Poverty had found at a thrift store and had cleaned and altered.
"You are someone who knows my needs, my hopes, dreams and desires," Janie said to Cosby through the tears. "You are someone whose love I will cherish forever. I love you now, and I'll love you forever."
The room was crowded with people who'd helped them out of the dark days - friends from Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, employees of TAP and of Family Services, Janie's stepmother, sister and children.
The newlyweds posed for photographs, smooshed cake into each other's faces and joked about honeymoon plans.
"Five kids and my first husband," Janie said.
A patient answers a hall phone on the fourth floor of Roanoke Memorial's Rehabilitation Center.
"Janie?" the patient asks. "Just a minute. I think she's in group."
A woman comes to the phone, her voice not immediately recognized.
"Janie committed suicide last night," the woman says. She pauses, laughs and apologizes. It is Janie.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I'm just down, feeling sorry for myself."
Janie relapsed June 19.
She had found a job just before the wedding, cleaning rooms at a Roanoke-area hotel. Her performance at a mock interview before a group of parole and probation officers so impressed an employer that she was invited back for the real thing - and was hired.
The job offered decent pay and benefits. She lasted four days.
She relied on Cosby - who had been out of work for health reasons - to watch her youngest child while she worked.
But a week after Janie started her new job, Cosby found work with a Roanoke cleaning service, a job that required him to travel out of town once a week for three to four days at a time.
Unable to afford day care or to get assistance through day-care subsidy programs, Janie's job performance suffered. She quit.
She was at home again, alone and with too much idle time, just as she'd been a year before. A friend flashed some cocaine. The temptation was too great.
"I was unable to successfully get myself together on my own, and I finally came to the conclusion that I needed help elsewhere," Janie said. "I wasn't able to go to meetings and take care of myself like I wanted with Cosby working like he's been."
Cosby understood. He'd been there himself. When he urged that she be admitted to Roanoke Memorial's rehab center, she went.
"Anyone who has ever used drugs has relapsed," he said.
Janie was working toward regaining custody of her three children in foster care when she relapsed. Now the youngest has been taken from her.
"I think I knocked the chances of them coming home soon," she said.
Rosanna Anderson is director of TAP-Virginia CARES, a statewide re-entry program for ex-prisoners that provides pre- and post-release education, counseling and services in employment, housing, family/community relations and transportation.
The agency has helped ex-prisoners make the transition from incarceration to their home community.
Janie and Cosby have been participants for several years. Anderson has watched them fight to get life on track.
"It's a struggle, competing against the everyday activity of the street," she said. "It's not easy for a person returning to their community, particularly if they move back into the same environment. They see the same kind of activity going on, their friends doing the same thing.
"It's not that easy, even if they have intentions of doing what they need to do."
They must compete for jobs in an employment market that does not wholly embrace ex-prisoners, particularly those with a history of substance abuse. They must constantly battle the urge to slip back into old habits.
And still there are bills to pay, children to raise.
"They're having a hard time making ends meet, really struggling," Anderson said. "It's probably like a roller coaster - ups and downs, in and out.
"One day everything's going fine. One day you're off."
The television is blasting in the living room of Janie and Cosby's Southwest Roanoke home. Cosby is on the couch, hunting for the remote control.
Janie and Cosby are weary, having returned late the night before from a three-day trip to Raleigh, N.C., where Cosby was sent with a crew to clean Winn-Dixie stores.
They are struggling, Janie says. And they want out - of their neighborhood, of Roanoke, of a life that seems headed nowhere, she says.
"We've got a pretty good handle on where we're going and where we want to go," Janie says. "But I don't think Roanoke has opportunity for us. I can't see a future here for us."
The couple is looking farther south, to Atlanta. The two are planning to travel there soon to job-hunt. If successful, they'll settle there permanently, maybe by November, Janie says.
"Once we get stabilized, we'll bring the kids down, at least my three youngest ones," she says.
Janie suddenly starts to speak in the singular. The ``we's'' become ``I's'' as she recalls her past and what she wants in her future.
"I got off to a bad start here. But I'm aware of where I want to go, what my problems are. I was running, like I've done my whole life, running from the same thing.
"I'm not running this time," she says. "I'm moving with a plan."
by CNB