The Poet Goes Straight

JACKIE SHEELER was among the first purveyors of one of the most successful street hustles ever to hit New York. In the early 80s, she was a strung-out heroin addict weighing in at about 100 pounds. As the news of the AIDS epidemic first made the papers, she put on a business suit that hung off her and sat on a corner near Wall Street with a sign that read: "AIDS cost me my job."

"In about 20 minutes I had $80, and I knew I had a good con going. The problem was that you could only stay on a corner so long before it got busted out. I eventually started working the subways, which is a lot harder, but I still made money."

Luckily for Sheeler-given her addiction history-she never did get AIDS. What she did get, however, was her life together. By 1989, she'd enrolled in a drug program. Having always wanted to write, Sheeler went back to her muse, started writing poems and eventually garnered success in that tough field. For the last five years, she has run a Friday-night open mic for poetry reading at the Cornelius St. Cafe; she also started poetz.com to help neophyte scribblers. What's unusual about Sheeler's pedigree is that she was raised in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn by a street cop.

Having a policeman as a father was a double-edged sword, she says.

"During the 70s as a kid, it was cool to have a father that was a cop, because on the 4th of July he would come around with confiscated fireworks. He'd pull up with the patrol car and the uniform and guns, and the kids were into that. I guess being a cop is more exciting than selling insurance."

Sheeler is all New York. Her birthday is September 11; in the years prior to 2001, it was the joke of her household.

"I was the daughter of a cop, so of course my birth was meant to be on 9/11. You know like, the emergency number, 911. Now when I go to a doctor's office or whatever they see my birth date is 9/11, and they just say they're sorry."

Growing up was tough. The Brooklyn streets were unforgiving, and her parents fought bitterly and constantly; she didn't consider her household the safest place. Her father had a temper.

"My father was strict and violent; the house was like a battlefield. It was tough when I started dating bad boys. My father patrolled Coney Island, and I was hanging out there with boys that had quite a lot of police involvement. The plus side of that was, when I got in trouble with cops, they wouldn't arrest me because they knew my father-but then when he found out, he would come home and give me a beating."

Sheeler grew wilder, and with the 80s came a heroin habit.

"For the 1980s, I shot dope and lived in abandoned buildings."

In 1980 she had her first poem published, and a few years later she had her first taste of herion.

"Now [I've] survived, it's a wonderful experience because as a writer it gives you material for life."

By 1989, her parents had divorced, and she had a rocky relationship with her father. But he did come through with a contact, and she was able to get into a 24-hour therapeutic community called Samaritan Village in Queens.

"I first got there and I kept hearing I was in treatment. So for months I was waiting for my treatment. I figured they would take me into a room and treat my drug addiction. It took a while for me to get that the treatment they were giving was for me to get up on time, go to groups and keep myself and the facility clean. If I didn't go there I would be dead. I weighed all of 100 pounds when I entered there and had a huge abscess on my neck. I had months to live if I kept shooting dope."

Sheeler shows her gratitude to the program by going back occasionally on Tuesday nights to work as a volunteer. She runs a writing program for the recovering addicts called "Recover Your Voice." She also started writing with abandon, and came out with a book, Off the Cuffs, an anthology of poems written by and about the police.

"My dad was a cop and my ex-husband was a felon, so what else could I do?"

Last year, Sheeler also cofounded a group called Talk Engine. They just recorded a song called "Something for Junior," a scathing three-minute, 49-second screed against the Bush presidency. Sheeler is the writer and the "talk" of the group; the musicians are the engine. On the CD, she growls like a young Patti Smith.

"I sent out a bunch of demos, and I knew the record was going to be successful when I got a thank-you from Bill Clinton's office and an insulting one from some redneck in Scranton, PA. [He] bought a jiffy bag and paid the postage just to send me the CD back with insults written all over it."

She has a lot of anger toward Bush and the message he is sending out to the rest of the world about America.

"We got to the point where the hatred of America is so intense that we have public beheadings. The Bush administration is clearly insane. They come out with this war in Iraq to protect us from terror, and all they are doing is making us a bigger target [and] since 9/11 all the Bush administration has done is to increase the reasons to attack us again? He is a right-wing corporate puppet who is only interested in protecting corporate profits and the assets of the rich."

During the day Sheeler works at a dot-com; by night, she works with Talk Engine finishing off their record, due out this fall.

"Talk Engine has been together over a year. I bring the lyrics and they bring the music, and we just put it together. I was a solo poet for years and had some success, but it was all on me. Now with a group, we all have to support each other. You can be having a good night and someone else is having a bad one. It is a lot different."

Sheeler now calls Harlem her home, where she lives in a "family-oriented building."

When I mention that her block has been known to host quite a few drug dealers, she answers simply, "Not as much anymore."

And it's here that her pedigree as a cop's daughter shows:

"Occasionally I see drug dealers near my building, but when I tell them to move...they move." o