Warrior Pose by Brad Willis

Alejandro, clearly the dean of the riverbed. He is twelve years old, but he’s so small and thin that he barely looks eight. The dark circles around his eyes are haunting. And the basuco has given him a form of palsy. It’s painful to watch him struggle to coordinate his spasmodic arms and head as he fills his pipe, fights to get the stem between his lips, lights it, and sucks in a long hit.
    â€œMy parents threw me on the streets when I was five. I was the youngest of many brothers and sisters. They could not afford to feed me,” says Alejandro as he exhales a plume of deadly smoke that eerily wisps around his face.
    His words are garbled and hard for our interpreter to understand, but a deep intelligence still manages to come through. “This is my home. I have lived here seven years. Longer than anyone else. I know I’m dying now. I don’t care. All I want is my basuco . They can push the clay over me when I’m dead.” With his head shaking, hands quivering, and eyes spasming, Alejandro takes another hit and drifts off into a world of his own. As we say good-bye, I wish I could lift this boy out of his hole in the riverbed, carry him in my arms to an airplane, whisk him home, help him recover, and give him a new life.

    With Alejandro in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1990.

    My final day in South America, still in Cochabamba, Bolivia, I feel my back catching on fire again. I still have some Motrin, but I’m out of Valium. I’m on a major story far from home, and so the prospect of a serious flare-up scares me to death. I find a drugstore that looks more like a corner newsstand, with a half-dozen sheets of Valium pills sitting on an outdoor table by the entryway, each encapsulated in a little plastic bubble. The sheets hold two dozen pills apiece and cost next to nothing, and I don’t need a prescription here. I buy them all and quickly punch three or four from one sheet and dissolve themunder my tongue, anxious to get the muscle-relaxing drug into my bloodstream as quickly as possible.
    Within fifteen minutes, my body begins to feel like jelly. I’m a little woozy as Dennis and I sit down to dinner. After a few glasses of wine, the pain is only a memory. This is such a logical and necessary course of action that if you told me it looked like Alejandro and I had something in common, I’d think you were out of your mind.

CHAPTER 7
    30 Rock
    S PRING OF 1990 BRINGS another bitter Boston winter to an end. Thousands of cherry trees blossom throughout the city in brilliant hues of pink. I’m at my desk, leaning as far back as possible in my chair without falling over. This takes the pressure off my back as I gaze out the window at my favorite cherry tree glistening in the midday sunlight. A hummingbird hovers at one blossom, drinks nectar, then zips away in a flash.
    â€œWillis, come to my office!” Stan Hopkins firmly calls out from across the newsroom, breaking my reverie. It’s a tone I’ve never heard from him.
    â€œSure, I’ll be right there,” I respond, getting up from my desk and taking my usual pause: pressing my palms into my lower back, rolling my shoulders a few times, checking in on the pain, and reassuring myself I’m ready for any new assignment Stan might want to discuss. But his tone was strange, and I wonder if something is wrong.
    Stan pauses deliberately as we sit down in his office. My mind races through the possibilities. The news budget is being slashed. He’s been fired. Or…they’ve found out about my back problem and I’m being benched. I can’t take it anymore and ask, “Is everything all right?”
    He regards me with a sober face. “I’ve got a problem with you,” he says. This puts me over the edge . It’s my back. Somehow the news got out. I stare at my feet, about to admit the whole thing before he says another word. Then Stan smiles. He says, “Don Browne just called. He’s