Part 4: Jeffrey's Reincarnation Courtesy of GCG

Back when Jeffrey Scooter had fallen on hard times—“was a junkie,” Sharla Scooter would say—he would sit at the outdoor tables at the Vermont Avenue Starbucks, smoking cigarettes and staring at the passerby. I’m smarter than all of you, he would think as he sat, running black fingernails through stringy, unwashed hair. Every ten people or so, he’d choose one to kill and envision eviscerating them with whatever was convenient: for example, he’d pick the chubby woman in those ridiculous shorts that read “Hot Mama” across her sagging ass, and mentally impale her with the nearest Starbucks umbrella.

Six months later he was scooped up by the Global Conglomerate Group, cleaned up and put to work because, in fact, he was smarter than all those imaginary victims. Jeffrey’s mother Sharla, an truculent Amazon of a woman who stood over six feet tall, liked to say that she knew Jeffrey was different from the moment he “emerged” because “he was the ugliest baby I’d ever laid eyes on”. Sharla was a bully, but Jeffrey’s baby pictures supported her observation: unusually pale with tiny, piggish eyes and a fine coat of black hair covering his body (that, to Jeffrey’s credit, fell off days after his birth), most agreed that he was, in fact, the ugliest baby they’d ever laid eyes on. Still, from the start Jeffrey was clearly a gifted boy and, at the age of ten, Sharla had his IQ tested. Finding out Jeffrey had an IQ of 145, Sharla embarked on a campaign to put Jeffrey in an advanced learning track and simultaneously make sure “that tiny head of his doesn’t get too big”. The campaign resulted in a full scholarship to MIT and an accompanying Oxycodone addiction.

Jeffrey was able to keep his problem under wraps throughout his undergraduate education, but it swallowed him whole as he attempted to get his doctorate and, two years after graduating from MIT, he was helplessly lost in the belly of his addiction. Sharla shut him out of her life immediately, quoting in a singsong-y voice the mantra she’d heard at the Al-Anon meeting, “The three Cs! Didn’t cause, can’t control, can’t cure! Look for your handouts somewhere else, junkie!”

He hitch-hiked out to Los Angeles in search of a generous uncle who lived in Malibu and got stuck in Hollywood, where he comfortably outfitted himself with a dealer and a shitty room in a cockroach-filled hotel, never making it across town. He was about to snort his last crushed-up OxyContin—how he cherished feeling the pill break beneath the drinking glass as he brought it down again and again—when Marcus and Rick kicked in his hotel door. He stared at them stupidly for a moment, and then they lifted him up by the armpits and dragged him out to the car. He struggled and screamed—they’d taken him before he’d gotten a chance to do the line.