When she got older, Rhea lived for two years in motel rooms she never paid for. She sneaked into the rooms as cleaning ladies finished up, then slid under the bed before the guests returned, staying there through the night.
This was at the height of the crack epidemic, and Rhea got swept right up. Violence was out of control, and women living on the street were especially vulnerable, day and night, to sexual assaults.
She told me she had seven children, one on death row, another in prison for life. She didn’t know the whereabouts of the five others. I overheard her talking on a phone once or twice with a sister who lived in the area, but that appeared to be the extent of their relationship.
When Rhea didn’t have a place to stay, she had buildings she could sneak into and sleep in the stairwells. There was an apartment in a public housing complex that she sometimes rotated into and out of with a couple of other people, staying as a guest as long as she could. She had to check in at the guard stand out front, where they kept track of visits, and she’d constantly get in arguments there over whether she’d exceeded the number of times she could go in.
Rhea avoided the police like the plague. She hadn’t been arrested in a long time, but she told me she had priors—petty crimes, creeping into houses, usually of people she knew—and she was such a known entity on the streets that she was scared to death of being sent away for a long time for some trivial bullshit. I never saw her so much as shoplift.
Rhea survived for decades on streets that lose people every day. She could be a handful, as you might imagine. She had a hair-trigger temper and anger issues, but she also wasn’t beyond putting on the persona of a mentally ill madwoman whom other street people wouldn’t mess with. It helped keep predators from doing what predators do, which is prey on a little woman who was now an aging little woman.
Among the many maladies associated with her long-term crack use, Rhea suffered from peripheral neuropathy. She told me the painful condition was induced by an allergic reaction she had to cocaine mixed with lidocaine, a numbing agent often used for legitimate purposes as a nerve block. She’d lose feeling in her extremities: fingers, toes, nose, the tips of her ears. When the weather turned cold or she smoked too much, her nose and ears blew up like balloons.
Now Rhea was living with me. I was gone much of the time, traveling for family, or business, or just trying to disappear. But when I was home, the two of us interacted like a deranged, crack-addled version of The Odd Couple, her Felix Unger neatnik habits crashing against my slobbier Oscar Madison tendencies.
She commandeered the TV and only watched those true-crime shows, with the volume turned way up. It drove me insane. I’d wear headphones, or pace the room and shout for her to turn the damn thing down. The angriest I ever got at her was when she took a belt I loved and cut it in half to fit her size-nothing waist. Rhea weighed maybe eighty-five pounds soaking wet.
I probably bugged her more than she bugged me. She got mad when I left dirty clothes on the coffee table or spilled vodka on a rug. When I wasn’t traveling, she left the apartment more than I did; after so many years on the streets, being confined inside for too long made her itchy and claustrophobic.
That time on the streets took its toll, of course. She’d limp from an infection in her ankle, or arthritis would flare up in her hips. Sometimes bursitis almost immobilized her; the pain she had to endure just to get up could be excruciating. I’d take her to an emergency room if it became unbearable. Otherwise, I’d go to a CVS to pick up prescriptions she got from a clinic, antibiotics for whatever infection she was prone to.
It was heartbreaking.
Mainly, however, we just planted ourselves on the couch and smoked a ton of crack. For endless hours, day after day, it was the same numbing ritual, over and over and over: pipe, Chore Boy, crack, light; pipe, Chore Boy, crack, light; pipe, Chore Boy, crack, light.
A world of previously invisible commonplace objects became indispensable accoutrements to our sacramental routine. The pipe we used most often, called a stem, was actually a made-in-China glass tube that comes with a decorative paper rose inside. Sold as a tchotchke and referred to as a “glass rose,” it’s used to smoke crack. The tube is the same length and width as a 100-millimeter cigarette, and so can be carried surreptitiously in a pack of cigarettes.
Chore Boy is a spun-copper scouring pad. Packaged in orange boxes displaying a cartoon boy wearing blue overalls and a backward-facing red cap, Chore Boy is designed to clean pots and pans. Addicts, who call it “choy,” use it as a screen to hold the crack in their rose pipes. Rhea always lit the choy first to burn off any chemicals.
At DC bodegas frequented by addicts, clerks conveniently hand you a pipe and choy together when you order a “one-and-one.”
Archmere Academy, Georgetown, Yale Law—and here I was, ecstatic with my new knowledge of rose pipes, Chore Boy, and one-and-one.
Smoking with Rhea was a master class in crackology. She had a million rules: Always know where
