That, in a nutshell, is addict-think.
I jumped on the bike I’d ridden there and headed straight to an area near Franklin Square, at Fourteenth Street and K, a longtime drug bazaar blocks from the White House. It was a warm late afternoon and the streets were mostly cleared out. It didn’t take me long to spot the person I was looking for:
Bicycles.
Almost anyone who lives or works in DC has at one time or another seen Bicycles—also known as Rhea, a homeless, middleaged Black woman—weaving in and out of traffic or swerving around sidewalk pedestrians on a mountain bike that looks three times too big for her. She usually sports a backpack and a baseball cap, and has a sharp, piercing voice that can be heard a block away as she shouts for everybody to get the hell out of her way, which she does almost continuously. (Because I believe Rhea still lives on the streets, I’m using a pseudonym for her.)
I first met Rhea sometime around my senior year at Georgetown. I’d been out drinking with friends one night, got into a foul, to-hell-with-it mood, and broke off from the pack in the middle of the night to visit this same park. It was at the height of the crack epidemic, in the early 1990s, and with a fledgling addict’s wrongheaded sense of misadventure, I decided to see what all the hubbub was about.
A crackhead seemed to spontaneously generate in front of me. He asked what I was looking for. I told him I wanted some “hard,” the street term for crack cocaine. He said sure, just give him $100, he’d be right back. I called bullshit: I wasn’t some naïve college bro, or at least that’s what I tried to project. The guy said no problem, he’d leave behind one of his shoes to ensure his return. That made a certain 2 a.m. sense to me: Who’d take off without returning for his shoe? He assured me he’d be back with my request in no time.
I stood there in the pitch black, in a park you wouldn’t want to loiter around in the middle of the day, let alone the middle of the night, and waited—gripping his ratty old shoe.
Ten minutes later, with the crackhead long gone, this tiny Black woman, a few years older than me but looking twice my age, rolled up on a bike with a shoe that matched the one I was still holding.
“You stupid motherfucker,” she said in a loud, exasperated tone. “You fell for one of the oldest cons in the book. You stupid…”
“Who the fuck are you?” I shot back.
I tried to maintain my streetwise pose. It must have been laughable.
Bicycles then explained with a kind of world-weary patience that dealers often keep old, thrown-away shoes hidden nearby to rip off easy marks like me. To prove her point, she’d retrieved a shoe the crackhead had stashed away.
I stood there like the dumb, gullible college bro I was. Bicycles then sold me what little crack she had on her, and told me to get the hell out.
“You going to get hurt, boy.”
Fast-forward two decades later:
After storming out of the clinic, I spotted Bicycles wheeling by, motioned for her to come over, and asked if she could get me some hard. Since my days at Georgetown, I’d handed her change or bills when I saw her on the street and we’d become passing acquaintances. Washington can be a small town like that. More recently, since I’d moved into my apartment, she occasionally rode by my second-story window and called out to see if I needed anything. She’d take whatever money I threw down, buy me cigarettes or whatever else I needed from a nearby 7-Eleven, and keep what was left for herself.
Bicycles’s response to my request for “hard” this time was flat and knowing:
“You don’t want to do that.”
Bicycles is a decades-long user, not a dealer; whatever she sold she did only to make enough money to buy. But I persisted. She didn’t require much convincing. She needed my money as much as I needed her access to drugs; she’d take my $100 to buy ten dime bags, hand over eight, and keep two for herself. The relationship was symbiotic: we’d exchange money and drugs despite the fact that each of us sincerely wished the other didn’t use. It was two crack addicts who couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag.
A one-act crack farce.
After going through those ritual motions of concern, Rhea snapped the $100 from my hand, pedaled off, and returned minutes later with what I wanted.
I’m not exactly sure of the sequence of events that followed. But I do remember that the first hits I took resulted in only a slightly better bang than I got that time back in college. Then, like now, I pushed the small rock of crack into the tip of a cigarette and lit it up.
Like most things one wants to become successful at, smoking crack requires practice and the right tools. I returned to the same spot the next day, and this time Rhea arrived with the works: crack, a pipe, and a screen. She also gave me a brief tutorial to make sure I took a proper hit.
I spotted a chair half hidden by a pillar in front of a closed coffee shop. I settled in, lifted the pipe to my lips, lit the rock, and inhaled. In an instant, I experienced what’s called a “bell ringer”—crack’s holy grail.
The sensation is one of utter, almost otherworldly well-being. You are at once energetic, focused, and calm. Blood rushes to every extremity; your skin ripples with what feels like bumblebees. Eyes get jangly yet stay alert. Eardrums compress to the point that every sound pours through with such intensity—like a shot through a rifle barrel—that you think you’re having auditory hallucinations. You’re actually
