This time, it took thirty minutes. Before I gave the guy my $100, I’d told him to leave behind his Obama Phone—the free cell the federal government started giving to financially strapped Americans during the 2008 recession, under the Lifeline Act. Obama Phones are mocked by conservatives as another liberal scheme to redistribute wealth, yet the legislation was first passed in 1985 by President Reagan to give households access to communications and emergency services through home telephone hookup. That act was merely updated by Obama for a wireless world—to the delight of crack addicts and dealers everywhere.
My guy didn’t want to give it up.
“You gotta trust people,” he told me with a remarkably straight face.
I thanked him for the life lesson, then told him to leave his cell or there was no deal. He left the phone and ambled off, then returned not long afterward with $100 worth of what he said was crack. You never know. Often it’s baking soda or crushed-up pills that somebody has turned into rocks. You light it up and you’re high before you even hear the pops—hear the “crack”—whether it’s the good stuff or not. The anticipation knocks your socks off; studies have shown, and my experience verifies, that the fiercest rush occurs in the nanoseconds before your lips touch the pipe. It’s not until a minute or so later that you can determine whether you’re smoking the real deal, and by that time your connection can be out of the car and long gone.
In this case, however, what he brought back was damn good. I’d gotten his phone number off his cell while he was inside, and I turned our late-night one-off into a four-day Nashville run. I called him three or four times a day over that period. He was a godsend for me, and I was the best thing that ever happened to him: over those three days I probably handed him $1,500. The transactions became relaxed, almost matter-of-fact, like dropping in to buy vegetables from the same sidewalk grocer. We hardly ever exchanged a word.
And except for those brief excursions, I stayed holed up in my hotel room with my pipe and my lighter and my crack.
I have to pause here a minute. I apologize. Every neuron in my brain is firing right now, shouting, Get me more of that! Get me more of that!
That’s what recalling incidents like what I just wrote can trigger. Addicts know what I’m talking about. It’s a thin, wobbly line to straddle. While it’s important for someone recovering from addiction to speak honestly about what he or she went through, there’s also the risk of reigniting those old cravings, which can be fucking monsters.
It’s the power of language, for good and for bad. It’s the reason characters are afraid to say Voldemort’s name aloud in Harry Potter and instead refer to him as He Who Must Not Be Named. They don’t want to unleash his dark power over them.
There are times while writing this book when naming the things I’ve done becomes too much—crack’s dark power is unleashed. This is one of those times. Even though my mind realizes that the peace I once got from taking a hit off a crack pipe was temporary and ultimately self-destructive, it also understands that it felt better than the pain I experienced before I took that hit. Crack wasn’t the only answer to my ache. But, again, it was an answer, and certainly the most expedient one to that age-old question people won’t stop asking:
Why can’t you quit?
Because, motherfucker, it feels too good!
So as I write this, I can still feel the hard, hot pipe on my lips, the heat ballooning inside my mouth, the smoke crisping my lungs. I still twitch with the muscle memory of the torch-blast rush that shot to every tip of every appendage of my body. Recalling the events of that night in Nashville, I still get a shiver down my spine.
I can still feel myself seated in my car that late night—the throb in my lower back from those countless hours on the road, the creeping hunch of my shoulders, the racing of my heart—as the guy with the dirty nails and clean sneakers came out of the apartment building with my bag. I can still remember how I fumbled around the side pocket for a lighter and a stem. I can see myself reaching for a new ball of Chore Boy to use as a filter, then deciding to use the old one instead, knowing it was covered in resin and thinking how much better the crack would be if I could draw the smoke through it. I still remember that there were three new stems in a paper bag in the back seat and that I considered reaching around the headrest for one of them. I stopped myself because I thought I’d be better off doling them out, one day at a time, during the rest of my cross-country journey.
I remember I planned to recook the crack back in my hotel room. Then I tried to remember if I had a spoon to simmer it in, or if there was a microwave in the room I could use to heat it up.
I remember that I couldn’t remember.
I still recall that I thought about stopping by a liquor store on the way back to the hotel. Then I realized I could call room service if I needed a drink but then thought about how much more expensive that would be than buying from the store. In the end, I ditched the whole idea, as if my decision not to drink that night was simply a matter of fiscal responsibility. I remember thinking about getting something to eat, too, then thinking, Fuck it, I have more important matters
