In the early 1980s, Alvin Bowman was a lacrosse prodigy at Severna Park High School, a dynasty that has captured more state championships than any school in Maryland history, before going on to an accomplished college career at Drexel University, where he was later inducted to the school’s athletic Hall of Fame as a member of its ‘80s All-Decade team.
Armed with an undergraduate business degree upon graduation and a welcoming, gregarious personality, he became a rising corporate star in the field of pharmaceutical sales.
But his recreational drug use, which started in college, eventually morphed into a debilitating crack addiction that nearly claimed his life.
This is the story of one person’s odyssey through the equal opportunity destroyer that is substance abuse, a man you may have encountered in the corridors of corporate America or seen panhandling and eating out of trash cans near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
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Temperatures dipped into the mid 30′s on the evening of November 17, 2022 as the championship game of the Maryland Masters Lacrosse League between the Rusty Cannons and Glyndon-SRLC got underway at Troy Park in Elkridge.
Alvin Bowman, once a lightning-fast, compact ball of muscle that wreaked havoc on opponents from his attack position in years past, doggedly chugged up and down the turf field.
56 years old at the time, he was far removed from his past days of dominance as one of the nation’s best players at Drexel University. Slim and spry then, now he’s slower and rounder around the midsection, with leg, neck and back injuries that compromised him throughout the season.
And he was happy, content to play the decoy in the 8-5 victory that earned the Cannons the title as Fall League Champions.
The joy was evident as he posed with the championship trophy, index finger pointing towards the sky.
The grin that stretched across his cherubic face, in and of itself, told a story. Yes, part of it was the proverbial thrill of victory.
There were also strains of hope in the unseen, of grim, shocking defeats and comebacks that took place far away from the athletic fields that once inspired and molded him, that harbored and nourished his dreams.
Bowman had his life back. He had lacrosse back.
Just a few years ago, that just didn’t seem possible.
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On a Sunday morning in January 2009, Bowman’s soul was at ease as he pulled his spanking new white Nissan with slightly tinted windows into the parking lot of the Messiah Community Church in Owings Mills, Maryland, where pastor Rod Hairston, the Baltimore Ravens’ team chaplain at the time, delivered his sermons.
He promised his wife he’d be back home by 2 pm, but was suddenly overcome with an internal conflict that redirected him, not to his wife waiting for him at the home in Pasadena, Maryland they just had constructed, but to the streets of West Baltimore where his life had previously been completely demolished.
“I rolled up to a familiar spot, got one vial of crack, some weed and some Wild Irish Rose wine and tried to relax,” said Bowman. “But when I put one inside my body, I’ve never done just one. The next one is always right around the corner and then it’s off to the races. When that compulsion and obsession kicks in, I couldn’t stop no matter how much I wanted to.”
He’d been clean and sober for about eight months at that point.
On his way to the church service hours before relapsing, Bowman had a conversation with his sponsor, whom he always spoke with in the early morning after attending his 12-Step Recovery meetings. Once he settled in the church pew, he began listening to Hairston’s sermon, which focused on the disease of addiction.
Hairston, it seemed, was speaking directly to him as he quoted Proverbs 25:28, “A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls” and Romans 5:3-5, “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame…,”
Instead of feeling validated and encouraged for the mess he’d been able to climb out of – which included being shot in the leg in a drug deal gone bad, bouts of homelessness where he sometimes ate out of garbage cans, being viciously slashed with a box cutter by a dealer he once tried to scam, numerous arrests and stints in jail for drug possession, among others – Bowman had an entirely different reaction, one that he can’t readily explain.
It’s hard for him to reconcile how one minute, things felt so great. And the next, he
was heading into the city towards those old haunts that he was so familiar with in search of crack cocaine.
Over the next six weeks or so, he wore those same church clothes and slept in his car, panhandling, and driving his vehicle as a hack.
For those who are unfamiliar, a “hack” is a Baltimore term for an illegal cab that poor folks in predominantly Black communities use to get around as an alternative to public transportation or not having debit or credit cards that can link to an Uber or Lyft account.
There’s a certain hand signal, an outstretched arm with two fingers extended as the wrist subtly shakes up and down, that people use to hail a hack.
