The diciest time to buy was in the predawn morning, stepping into a place where it’s inadvisable to be at 4 a.m. with a pocketful of cash and no weapon. You learn little things to protect yourself. You never approach someone before they approach you: You don’t want to look too desperate—as if showing up anywhere at 4 a.m. doesn’t look desperate enough—because anybody who’s in the business of selling crack is in the business of ripping people off. They’ll sell you actual rocks from a driveway if you look too needy. When I could, I tried to buy from a user instead of someone who was obviously a dealer. Crack addicts usually came back with something of substance if I also gave them money to get some for themselves, and then promised them more. They had skin in the game. They’d be reliable right up until the point where they got all that they needed and then, almost invariably, they’d rip me off, too.
No honor among us crackheads.
In Nashville, I was a bloodhound on the scent. Like everywhere else I’d bought crack, I knew I could go there cold and in no time assess what highway to get on, what exit to get off at, what gas station to pull into, and what unsavory-looking character to choose as my newest, most trusted associate. I had done it everywhere I’d been the last few months—I could get off a plane in Timbuktu and score a bag of crack.
I followed my usual modus operandi. I headed for a commercial district in the sketchiest part of town and looked for a gas station or liquor store that served as a congregating spot for a quorum of homeless addicts. I’d pull in, stick the nozzle in the gas tank, lock my car, and head inside to buy cigarettes or Gatorade. It rarely took long before somebody out front asked if I could help him out with some change. I’d hand him whatever was in my pocket, then ask for a favor: “You know where I can buy some hard?” The key was finding someone who was homeless because he needed to support his habit, not because he was mentally ill, which was too often the case, and sometimes tough to distinguish.
I found my guy in less than an hour. He was about my age, maybe a little younger, but looked like he’d had a really hard life, at least recently. He was sinewy, had dirty nails but clean sneakers, and wore a dark jacket that looked passable from afar but up close was tattered at the sleeves and hadn’t been laundered in a while. He was down on his luck, not plainly homeless but likely on the verge of it.
Yet his eyes burned with the hard, voracious intensity that crack addicts carry into every encounter—and which I also carried into encounters like this one, despite my Porsche and law degree and childhood spent in a Senate sauna listening to the most powerful men in the country call out a hearty “Hey, boys!”
A crack addict’s intensity can be intimidating. It feels distinctly predatory, which makes you feel unmistakably like prey. While the drug itself doesn’t induce violent behavior, the desperation for more of it most certainly can. Unlike a heroin addict, who, comparatively, luxuriates for a while in his high, a crack addict is scheming shortly after using about only one thing: how to get another hit in the next thirty minutes.
The guy at the gas station that night in Nashville sized me up, too.
“I got Chore Boy. You know what I’m talking about?” he asked with a test in his voice. I told him I did and acted like I was put out by the question. We got in my car. I asked where we were headed.
“I’ll let you know,” he said in a casual, sandpapery tone. “Just pull out of here.”
Our conversation from then on was confined to a series of blunt, robotic bursts.
“Turn right here… Now left here.”
“What’s the address?”
“I don’t know the address. I just know where it is.”
He told me not to smoke in the car. He told me to buckle my seat belt. “Cops are always up here. They’ll arrest you.”
He spotted my pipe on the console.
“Anything in here? I’ll smoke the resin.”
“You just told me not to smoke in the car.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
It was dark and, except for us, the streets were practically deserted. I had no idea where I was or where we were going. GPS became moot. I kept turning.
He told me to park in front of a run-down, putty-colored two-story apartment building. The way this scenario would usually end is that I would park, give the guy $100 to buy crack, and tell him if he came back I’d give him another $100 to buy for himself. Then I’d wait, like an idiot, at 2 a.m., in the most dangerous part of town. Seven times out of ten he didn’t come back. Yet I’d keep waiting anyway, telling myself that it hadn’t been all that long. Ten minutes would stretch into an hour, then into an hour and a half. I’d go through elaborate mental gymnastics to justify not leaving. I’d remember a guy I once bought from who came back two hours later.
But mostly they didn’t come back: You get burned. You feel ridiculous, you feel pathetic, and then you feel desperate and start all over again, trolling the same gas stations and liquor stores and clubs until finally—at 4 a.m., or 7 a.m., or 10 a.m.—you find a guy who comes through, who actually brings back enough to hold
