“Doctor be trippin’ hard, today, Roscoe.”

I’ll never forget those words. I was manning the cash register at Delta Drugs, the pharmacy my dad Roscoe owned in San Bernardino, California.

I cleared my throat.

Denise was the Nursing Supervisor at Dr. Hawkins’ medical Clinic located a few doors down in the building that he and my dad shared. The poor girl was trying to get my father’s attention. The late morning sun was glaring through the floor-to-ceiling windows and there was a momentary lull in the day’s activity. The doctor two doors down had just finished seeing his last group of patients before lunch.

The year was 1986.

Hawkins’ clinic was at the opposite end of the run-down, cream-colored medical complex where my dad and I toiled each day. Thick metal bars covered every window, and the perimeter was heavily secured. The single-story adobe style office building was located smack in the middle of a bleak, depressing ghetto: populated mostly by Blacks but there were plenty of Hispanics and Asians living there, too, along with some of the poorest of poor White Trash. The local Hell’s Angels chapter was one block to the north. I never saw a soul go in or out of that place in over a decade. Creepy.

San Bernardino lies seventy miles inland from the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, at the foothills of the mighty San Bernardino Mountains. The ‘Inland Empire’ is at the nexus of the 215 Freeway north and interstate 10 going west, towards the coast. Thick orange smog blankets the region almost every day, blown in from the LA basin. The toxic mist hangs in the air, tinting the iridescent sunshine with an acrid, orangey hue. The barren landscape surrounding the pharmacy was mostly undeveloped city property: open spaces filled with dead grass, broken bottles, random junk and tall, prickly weeds. In the distance, the crumbling neighborhoods were shrouded in the shade of Eucalyptus and palm trees.

We sold more soda and candy bars at the pharmacy than anything else. Every patient who came through those doors purchased one or the other or both when they picked up their prescriptions. Right next to the cash register at the front counter were four huge racks crammed with every conceivable diabetes-inducing sugary treat: Snickers, Milky Way, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, M&M’s, Kit-Kats: you name it, we carried it.

On the far wall were three industrial refrigerators with milk, beverages, sandwiches and bottled water. Next to those was a freezer filled with ice cream. In the corner was a Hostess display rack stocked with Honey Buns, Ho-Hos, Snowballs, and Twinkies. On the shelf directly in front of me were three rows of popular hair treatments and skin lighteners such as Jerri-Curl, Pommade, Royal Crown, and Floclaire. Beyond that were the sundry items. Delta Drugs was a convenience-store oasis amid the soul-crushing urban sprawl.

Denise was a nursing student at Cal State San Bernardino. She was an attractive, ambitious young Black girl with classic features. Her nappy black hair was tied with a yellow ribbon in a taught bun at the back of her head. Clad in the requisite light-green nurses’ garb, Denise was pacing nervously back and forth in the waiting area. Her exasperation was obvious.

She repeated herself more forcefully in case my dad hadn’t heard her the first time:

“Yeah, Roscoe, doctor be trippin’ hard today…” She looked at me forlornly.

My dad was stationed behind the massive 5-foot tall fortress-like counter which separated him from the outside world. He stood proudly before the multi-line telephone and his brand-new IBM computer screen, where he could be found every morning guzzling outrageously strong Luzianne coffee, chain smoking Dunhill’s and waiting for Dr. Hawkins to start calling in ‘scripts.

We were the only people in the store at the time. Denise was adamant.

“What do you mean, honey?” Roscoe asked her with mock concern.

“He saying weird shit, acting all strange….Doctor seeing so many people today, he not even washin’ his hands between patients! He be trippin...”

Roscoe and I exchanged knowing glances. This was part of the normal daily routine at Delta Drugs. When Dr. Hawkins pulled up in the back of the clinic driving his big gold Porsche 928 every morning around 9 o’clock, he would go to his office and immediately call Roscoe on the direct line, requesting his morning fix of Darvocet N-100 and Valium. This exchange ordinarily took place before Hawkins even saw his first patient.

My dad was more than willing to comply with the doctor’s highly unethical demands, since his survival as a small-business owner absolutely depended on maintaining a good relationship with every doctor in town; especially Hawkins. They shared the same office space, after all.

Roscoe Conklin Darensburg was a Creole born in New Orleans, Louisiana: the quadroon child of a well-to-do building contractor in The Big Easy. Roscoe had a highly evolved, deviant mind. He graduated from Xavier University, one of the most prestigious ‘all-black’ colleges in the country. Roscoe had hazel eyes and caramel-colored skin. His childhood friends and most of his half-brothers and sisters were much darker than him. Like many Creoles, however, he considered himself to be far superior: superior to everyone; not just Black people.

“Creoles weren’t slaves,” he’d often remind us, “they owned slaves!”

Yadda yadda ya. Whatever.

The Creole culture is a potent mixture of Black, White, Spanish, French, Native American and even German influences. New Orleans was and still is a thriving international port city with a racially diverse population, where all of these disparate societies coalesce. The alluring offspring from the multitude of interracial relations became known as Creoles. They are an utterly unique, very proud people – and in my fathers’ case, a very confused people.

I will admit here and now that Roscoe wasn’t exactly somebody who I would describe as a pillar of society. Not by a long shot. Precisely where and when he turned completely to the dark side is a matter of conjecture; probably before he married my mother. She was a naïve teenaged hillbilly from Indiana when they met at the Walgreen’s Pharmacy that Roscoe managed in Hyde Park, Chicago – that bastion of Liberalism. He was 30; she was only 19.

Roscoe kept a lot of secrets from his family over the years, but it was fairly obvious to everyone who knew him at the time that in addition to being an avowed atheist with radical political views, he smoked cigarettes like it was going out of style (it was), and he was a heavy boozer. We only found out later about the serial infidelity…

He was also known to medicate himself from time to time. Truth be told, it was most of the time. Roscoe was a pill-popper who promoted prescription drugs. Being a pharmacist has certain advantages, after all: especially if you’ve got an addictive personality like Roscoe. As an asthmatic child growing up the son of a respected pharmacist, I learned very quickly that there was indeed a pill for every ill.

So my dad was certainly not blameless in this little charade he had going with Dr. Hawkins. Whenever the doctor called for his morning fix, Roscoe would answer the phone with a shit-eating grin on his face, as if Hawkins could see him speaking down the line.

“Yes, doctor! I’ll send it right over, doctor!”

Within five minutes, Denise would sprint over to pick up the doctor’s “medicine” and deliver it to him in his office. Then the gravy train would begin.

Dr. Hawkins obviously had a pretty high drug tolerance, considering he was able to function all day while tanked up on heavy-duty painkillers and tranquilizers. This morning, however, the staff was becoming frustrated by the good doctor’s increasingly bizarre behavior.

Doctor C. Mitchell Hawkins was a conceited, freakishly unattractive dark-skinned Black man who clearly had issues in his personal life. Somehow, none of these mitigating factors prevented him from amassing a huge, loyal clientele of Medi-Cal patients.

Hawkins also had a very lazy right eye: I never knew which one to look into when he spoke to me, which was rarely enough, thank God.

Back in those days, welfare recipients in California and mothers with AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), were entitled to visit the doctor once a month. All they needed was a Medi-Cal sticker as payment.

More mothers, more babies, equals more business: at least as far as Medical providers were concerned.

The humid, rank, unsanitary waiting room inside Hawkins’ clinic was packed every day with wall-to-wall welfare mothers and their babies; lots and lots of newborns, old coots, scary-looking gangbangers, elderly widows: anyone who was eligible for a Medi-Cal card. Doctor H. would crank out those patients in record time and send all of them next door to Delta Drugs in a steady stream of reimbursable welfare dollars. It was the perfect arrangement for a couple of amoral sociopaths like my dad and Dr. Hawkins.

My job at Delta Drugs was to help manage the store. I would greet the clients and play cashier for all the candy sales and whatever else. Most importantly, my duty was to peel off the little green and white Medi-Cal stickers for each prescription so that we could bill the state of California for every single penny.

Roscoe was a great bull-shitter. It didn’t matter if he was addressing a barely-literate teenage welfare mother or a smart-assed drug salesman. He could make anyone think he gave a shit about whatever it was they were talking about. I’ll give him that: he had charisma.

While he made tedious small talk with his customers, Roscoe’s nimble fingers where working overtime filling multiple prescriptions behind the counter with blinding speed. Meanwhile, the clients would cheerfully hand over their four by four inch Medi-Cal cards to me so I could retrieve the stickers and complete my task. Cha-ching!

Everybody got Maalox whether they needed it or not because it was easily billable to the state and it was non-toxic. Each patient got four bottles each, plus at least one bottle of children’s cough syrup and anything else that was justifiable and legally billable to the state. If the patients complained, they only got two bottles of Maalox. The idea was to load up every client with as many ‘scripts as possible to bring in maximum reimbursement money from California’s generous welfare programs. I got to fill their grocery bags for them. All for greed.

My dad and ‘The Hawk’ were a Welfare scamming tag-team. Some days, a hundred or more patients would pass through our doors; each one with a huge dollar-sign on their heads – at least as far as those two were concerned.

Most of the time, Roscoe had his young Latina assistant Mary with him to help fill prescriptions. Mary was a Pharmacy student, but now I question how my dad actually came to hire her. She was the most promiscuous woman I’ve ever known. Every day she’d show up for work claiming to be sore from fucking all night with some guy she’d just met. My dad had a clever nick-name for her: ‘Kinko de Mayo.’

“His dick was as big as my arm, Roscoe,” Mary once disclosed. “He tried to fuck me in the ass with that thing, but I told him, ‘no way!’”

It could go on like that for hours. Ever the reprobate, Roscoe was more than willing to indulge Miss Mary (her other nickname), as she recounted every sordid detail from her seemingly endless and increasingly risky-sounding sexual escapades. This was at a time when AIDS was ravaging the population, too: even more appalling to a newlywed like me. Still, I must admit her track record was impressive.

Miss Mary was absolutely shameless.

The names of some of Hawkins’ patients were downright bizarre, too, and they were the source of endless amusement at the pharmacy. We began to refer to the genre as “ghetto names.” Basically, you could put a ‘La’ in front of anything and get away with it in the ghetto. I once billed the state for a brother and sister named LaJohn and LaTrina: The toilet twins!

On one memorable occasion, a new mommy brought her son into the store and proudly announced that his name was Akinsiju. My dad, never one to miss an opportunity for a cynical putdown, inquired:

“Akinsiju? Does that mean he’s a kin to a Jew (snicker, snicker…)?”

I rolled my eyes.

“No,” she replied in utter confusion. “It’s African!”

We heard that explanation quite a bit. Dad began to wonder if some of the patients simply made up those names and claimed they were African. Roscoe once told me that Hawkins had treated a set of twins named Gonorrhea and Syphilis. He claimed that the jackass Pediatrician who delivered them suggested the names as a crude joke, but the semi-literate, teen-aged parents liked them so much that is what they chose to name them!

If that story is true, I thought to myself, somebody needs to be held accountable.

[continued in PART 2]