I chased that high, on and off, for the next three years.
If the intent when reaching for that first hit is to anesthetize yourself so you won’t feel the hurt or shame you felt just moments before, then crack is your new best friend.
After that first bell ringer, I smoked it every day for the next two weeks. It was, indeed, my new best friend; booze was now like an old high school buddy I still got together with but saw less of as time went on. I spent a couple of thousand dollars on crack in those first two weeks, with Rhea serving as my conduit. Before I knew it, I was all in. In the big, bad world of functional substance abuse, as practiced in polite society, I’d crossed what for many is an unfathomable line. I knew it as I crossed it. I’d lift a crack pipe to my mouth, flick the lighter with my thumb, and before inhaling think, What the fuck!
But my new best friend turned more and more demanding. Addiction’s most self-defeating algorithm: if you’re numbing yourself against acute feelings of emptiness or trauma or self-loathing, those feelings will double in intensity as each high tails off.
The antidote is simple: more. Yet the more of the drug you use, the less effective it becomes—the less bang that you and your self-worth get for your buck. There’s an antidote for that, too: lots more. The power of not feeling, if only for increasingly fleeting seconds, remains the only power you have.
Crazy as it sounds, a substance abuser often feels like a smarter version of a non-abuser. I wasn’t a sloppy or mean drunk; I wasn’t an addled or dangerous crackhead. Whether it’s genetic or physiological, I have the capacity and tenacity to use to excess, and a single-minded unwillingness to quit. That makes addiction easy rather than hard. I had figured out how not to feel bad while still going on about my business. I couldn’t comprehend how people who weren’t addicts didn’t understand how great crack cocaine is. I mean, if you knew how good it made you feel, maybe you wouldn’t look at me like I had three heads.
Of course, it’s all delusional and self-defeating—but not at the moment. At the moment, you can do crack around the clock, every day, and still make your meetings (sometimes), still return your calls (sometimes), still pay your bills (sometimes).
And when you can’t do those things? There’s always crack to make you feel not so bad about it.
Here’s the thought you never have:
Put. The. Pipe. Down.
Crack is just an answer. It’s not the answer, but it’s the most obvious answer to the question non-abusers ask addicts all the time.
Them: Why do you do drugs?
Us: Because they make me feel good.
All that was ahead.
Rhea eventually moved into my apartment and stayed for about five months.
It was raining cats and dogs one evening when she stopped by under my window to see if there was anything I needed. She was soaking wet, and I insisted she come inside. She lugged her bike up to the second floor, saw a mattress in my empty second bedroom, and fell asleep there.
The next morning, I went to work and left a spare key. When I came home, she was still there and nothing was missing. Three days later, she was there still. Five days later, I cut her her own set of keys. She never officially moved in; I never officially said, “Take the spare bedroom.” But she didn’t move out until I moved out.
I know it sounds insane. Yet I also knew Rhea was smart enough, and had been on the streets long enough, to realize she had a good thing. She was the most honest crook I’ve ever known. She’d call me at work and start the conversation with “I found some of your credit cards…” Or: “I didn’t steal your ATM card. I took it. The difference between stealing and taking is me telling you I used them. I won’t ever lie.”
“Rhea,” I’d say with a sigh, “we have to get over that.”
Rhea is also the funniest person I know, as well as the most eccentric. She’s plagued by obsessive-compulsive behavior from her years of addiction. She dresses in clean, well-maintained clothes and always smells fresh—or fresh-ish. She showers twice a day when she can and brushes her teeth and cleans her nails obsessively. She has slept on the subway for days or even weeks, using a small public storage unit to stow her clothes, which she keeps compulsively tidy. Inside my apartment, she watched only true-crime shows, feeding a paranoia that slipped into something more acute when she smoked too much and went too long without sleep.
One TV episode detailed the story of a clinically insane guy who broke into houses, lived in the walls, then killed everybody. He was eventually caught but escaped from prison. I was in L.A. when Rhea watched it, and she called me in a panic. When I got home, she’d put tape over my door’s peephole, as if passersby could peek in. She was certain the wall-living maniac was still on the loose and about to show up any minute.
Rhea told me endless stories about her childhood. She was raised in her grandmother’s house in southeast Washington, DC, near RFK Stadium, and so was a Washington football fan. Neither parent was around and there was little supervision. She was… mischievous. She’d sneak into the police precinct station, loiter around the lobby, then crawl beneath a bench and spend the night. Other times she slept in the backs of parked police cruisers, hiding in the rear footwell and riding around without the cops knowing. She once saw a Prince concert after sneaking into the arena two days before the show and sleeping under the bleachers.
When she was around sixteen, she decided to go to
