by David Carr
Everyone works for someone. The hooker is either working for the pimp or her two-year-old. The stripper works for the dope dealer or the no-good boyfriend. And the deeper I went into the drug economy, I found that everyone, even the person who managed big money and serious weight, was working for someone else. During most of this time, we were all probably working for Pablo Escobar in one form or another. And he probably worked for someone too.
I learned stuff in those days, a little of which helps me in my current life. I can do a threat assessment when I walk into a room, I know how a cop acts when he is trying not to act like one, and that the smoother a bad guy is, the more menacing he actually is. The big, clanky guys who sprayed menace in all directions were mostly profiling, and it was the quiet guys you had to watch out for. One time at Phil’s apartment during a poker game with people in the racket, I got a little fresh with one of those quiet guys even though I hadn’t intended any offense. He took my arms and legs off at the poker table and then, smiling quietly, told me he would be happy to finish the job if I wanted to take a walk. I did not feel like a walk.
In Minneapolis the coke business was pretty much divided along racial lines. I spent most of my time in the Life in rooms full of white boys, all of them talking friendly and nice—no guns, mostly—but everybody kept one eye on the scale and the other on his back.
I ran around a tidy little circle of supply that I could trace blindfolded. Phil was a gangster who knew his way around people and a transaction and was completely fearless. Kenny had an antic customer base, some solid connections, and the virtue of almost never being asleep, which is a fairly adaptive characteristic in a coke dealer. Tony the Hat was a force of nature, a big, scary guy who had all sorts of rules and a penchant for both generosity and ferociousness in equal measure.
The rest of us, well, we were merchants of necessity. And there were a lot of ways to stay in coke. Around this time, 1986 and 1987, there was a whole ring of wannabees: chippers, gram guys, penny-ante dealers, people who knew a guy who knew a guy. It was a movable feast that could be accessed all over town. Over the bar at McCready’s; or the bathroom at the CC Club, a hipster bar in South Minneapolis; almost anywhere at First Avenue, the big rock club downtown. And then when they closed for the night, there was a series of houses, not officially dope houses, but more ad hoc copping spots.
We cokeheads would see one another out and about at the bars, clap hands, and maybe take a trip to the bathroom together, knowing full well that we would see one another later that night when everyone else went to sleep. It was a tribe that included some rockers and artists, but most of us were primarily skilled at eyeballing a gram or cooking coke with nothing more than a Rolaid, some spit, and a crappy spoon. We tried to make like it was just a little something we did on the side, but it became the main event for far too many of us.
Sarah was a fellow traveler who continued to stick in my memory long after those days ended. Sarah was about four-foot-nine and all of fifteen when I met her. Her remarkable figure was draped in Stevie Nicks–like finery, all gauze and spooky hats. Her parents were musicians, and her theatricality was manifest—she’d had a bit part in Madame Butterfly when she was five years old. That little girl could make an entrance and take over a room. She cultivated mystery and allure in a very gullible, mostly male crowd.
“She had this ritual of putting her possessions, her keys, her cigarettes, all the stuff she’d emptied out of her purse and put all around her,” said Kenny, a dealer and friend of us both who now lives in Seattle. “It was almost like a way of putting out some kind of power. Just the way she did it, it was like she knew what she was doing. Like she was at least subconsciously doing some occult manipulations.”
Dealers liked having her around when they went out, because she could hold their coke—as a minor, she would not be subject to any felony counts. Sarah and I knew each other a bunch of different ways. We were fellow cokeheads, did business together, and she helped look after my kids when they were born. Later, in sobriety—both of us were off the stuff, as I recall—we were close for a short time.
Back in the day, she did not conduct herself as a fifteen-year-old. More than once, I was sitting in a room with some knuckle-dragger who was holding court because he had coke, talking smack and parsing out a taste here and there, and then Sarah entered. Within minutes, the large baggie of coke would be in front of her, and she would be directing the proceedings, the jerk now all but licking her hands and wishing he could get his mouth on more.
I never told her, but I knew her from my other life as a reporter. In the 1980s there was a scandal at the Children’s Theatre Company. John Clark Donahue, its founder and artistic director, was indicted for sexual activity with some of the older children at the school. And in the course of the investigation, they discovered that two girls in their early teens had slept with the lighting director. Sarah was one of them.
“I went into a SuperAmerica to buy some cigarettes, and he was working as a cashier. They ruined his life; he didn’t deserve it,” she said in a voice that was a mix of gravel and whiskey when we talked at a restaurant in suburban St. Paul twenty years later. “I knew what I was doing; it was my choice.”
But you were in fact, like, fifteen?
“I was a very precocious fifteen,” she said. “I was a smart cookie. I knew what I was up to.” We both laughed. She often walked around with several males wrapped around her little fingers. She said it wasn’t that complicated.
“Tits and ass,” she said, with a wave of a cigarette after lunch. “I didn’t know how good at it I was. But I knew I could do it. I could do whatever I chose to. Whatever I put my mind to, it didn’t really surprise me.” Despite the collateral damage she had suffered, she said, “There were lots of fun parts. I had a great time. I was young, I was getting whatever I wanted, I was doing whatever I wanted.”
When we were running together in the Life, she was prone to doing huge lungfuls of crack and then flopping around on the floor like a caught fish in the bottom of a boat. “Seizures,” she said, letting the word hang. “I was a monster.”
There is something of her that I still carry with me. The ring finger of my right hand bears an anomalous bump on the second knuckle. It broke when she had a seizure, and in a panic, I stuck my finger in her mouth. She holds my hand and inspects the old break. She seems impressed.
“You do bite hard,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “When we started smoking, it was all downhill from there.”
18
CRACK: A BRIEF TUTORIAL
I drank a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.
—MARCEL PROUST, REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
Crackhead is an embarrassing line item to have on a résumé. If meth tweakers had not come along and made a grab for the crown—meth makes you crazy and toothless—crackheads would be at the bottom of the junkie org chart.
Racism, as displayed through the prism of the criminal justice system, plays a role. During the urban crack epidemic of the 1980s, both state and federal courts pathologized crack cocaine far beyond its powdered sibling. Black people did crack, white people did coke, so sentencing bifurcated, and Whitey, including me, generally skated.
To avoid both the guilt by association and legal distortions, my gang always purchased coke in its powdered form. We were not averse to snorting; portable, easy to use, and requiring no more equipment than a rolled-up dollar bill, we contented ourselves with sticking things up our nose for many nights of frolic. Lots of the people I knew who loved coke took a long, hard look at crack and demurred.
But not me. Here’s the thing: If you snort a great deal of cocaine, eventually your nose gets full and your synapses get bored. Crack cocaine offers all the benefits of injectable drugs—a complete and immediate rush, the possibility of easing up to overdosing without actually having it befall you
—without all those messy needles, track marks, or exposure to bloodborne contagions.
When smokable cocaine first came on the scene, it involved very complicated processing to produce what was then called freebase cocaine. Powdered cocaine was dissolved in a strong alkaloid solution such as ammonia. Then ether, or some other highly flammable solvent, was added to further refine the mixture and conjure a smokable substance. It yielded a purity that could be eye popping, but it had its pitfalls. Just ask Richard Pryor.
Crack, on the other hand, required just four elements: fire, water, coke, and baking soda. The mix is heated, and the impurities from manufacture boil away. The remaining solid bonds with the baking soda, or base, and a rock is formed. To wit:
Coc-H+Cl-+ NaHCO3—› Coc + H2O + CO2+ NaCl.
Different ratios of baking soda to coke yielded different outcomes. I preferred the very prosaic 1:1. Most crack ranged from 75 percent to 90 percent pure, based on seizures by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. When the coke is cooked with the sodium bicarbonate and water, it tends to make a popping, crackling sound, hence the name crack.
Do anything enough times, and you become an adept. Although a lighter under a spoon could do the job, I preferred a gas kitchen range. I could, using decent coke and a common tablespoon, step up to the range, drop the coke and baking soda into some tap water, give it a few expert sautélike movements to get the good stuff to congeal, and then literally flip the rock into the air and grab it, all in fewer than thirty seconds. The midair grab gave it a flash of tension and drama.
The second stage of ingestion required just a little bit of equipment. Under ideal conditions, a long glass pipe with metal screens at the end would be heated from below. The rock would become a vapor that would cool on its way through the pipe and into the lungs and then, about ten seconds later, the ventral tegmental area of the brain. In a pinch, a soda can with holes poked in it and some cigarette ashes to serve as a screen were sufficient. Necessity is a mother.
Once in the noggin, coke calls its own frantic tune, with all the amps turned up to eleven. The drug, especially when smoked, releases dopamine, the lingua franca of the pleasure impulse. In a neat trick, it attaches to the dopamine transporter, and so the dopamine hangs around instead of reabsorbing, creating a lingering sensation of extreme euphoria. Dopamine rides between the nerve endings for ten to fifteen minutes, cycling the user through a range of pleasurable feelings.
It is, for want of a better metaphor, akin to scoring the winning touchdown in the final game of a championship season, and then reliving that moment of crossing the goal line over and over until the rush ebbs. And rather than the gradual ride up from powdered cocaine, crack makes it happen immediately and profoundly. Senses are more acute, pupils dilate, blood pressure and body temperature rise, and you feel like the lord of all you survey, even if it is a crappy couch and a nonworking television in a dope house.
And then it goes away. There is only one thing that appeals after a hit of crack, and it is not a brisk walk around the block to clear one’s head. There is no such thing as a social crack user. Many normal people get a sense of its lurid ambush and walk away. Others take another hit. In this chronic scenario, the brain argues against the dopamine festival by becoming far less receptive. Higher doses lead to diminishing returns and a brutal cratering after ingestion. What seemed like a way to leave the gravitational pull of this ball of dirt becomes a shovel repetitively deployed to dig a hole that the user cannot crawl out of.
I have not smoked coke in two decades, but I remember its every aspect. A pre-high emerged even as the drug was being made: The heart would begin to race, and the pupils would flare in anticipation. Bent over the stove with my confederates, we would be doing our little happy dance. It’s on. It is all about to happen right here, right now. Once the awkwardness of who would get the first hit was dealt with, your turn would come. Crack does not just make a noise when it is made, it makes a noise when it is smoked. There is an eminently satisfying bubbling sound as the solid becomes liquid and, soon enough, vapor.
Unless you are on the streets going from rock to rock with burned fingers and a broken stem—I was never that guy—smoking crack is an indoor sport. There is only this one thing until all the coke is gone. The drinking, chatting, dancing that goes with snorting coke is not really part of the crack experience. Smoking crack is less of a party and more of a religious ceremony, with a group of people gathered around a central icon—in this instance, the very small campfire conjured by pipe and flame. People would sit quietly, rubbing their thighs with anticipation, maybe making an occasional observation about the robustness of a particular hit or how wrecked somebody looked. As long as the coke held out, it was mostly silence and goofy grins of satisfaction. The high would last fifteen or twenty minutes, and then the synapses would begin making a fuss—a head full of little baby birds with their beaks open, crying out for more.
When it comes to rendering the experience in written form, people tend toward the sexual metaphors, but I never found that sex, even good sex, reliably hit for the cycle like crack. Smokable cocaine initially taps into a childlike wonder, a feeling that the carnival had come to town and chosen your cranium as the venue for its next show. Nothing compares to the first hit of your life, the first hit of the night, the first hit of a new batch. The ensuing chase, the endless pursuit of that first time, provides a riddle that cannot be solved.
With nerve endings and dopamine levels in a natural state, inhaled cocaine vapor is the mallet that hits the spot and sends the ringer straight to the bell. Every time thereafter, it goes up a little less quickly, rises not so much. But it still feels better than not. A kind of group hypnosis settles in, with the ebb and flow of the activity—inhale/exhale, your turn/my turn, cook it/smoke it—becoming the end in itself. I have never had any trouble understanding people who can play poker or the slots for days on end, long after anhedonia has set in, win or lose. To stop, to come to your senses, is to admit that it is over; that you have played and lost.
After two minutes, or two hours, or two days, supply dwindles and desperation sets in. The spoon is scraped, and if people are geeked enough, they fall to their knees and claw the carpet for a crumb that might have been dropped. As if. Crack cocaine had the power to reverse the polarity of the relationship between user and drug. All of the smoke in all those pipes was going both ways: The narcotic was being inhaled while my soul was exhaled. Before I started smoking cocaine, I spent a bit too much time on William Blake’s road to excess, but I maintained. But smoking crack was a completely unmanageable activity from the beginning, the vehicle for my trip from party boy to junkie.
Sitting in his cabin in Newport, Donald told me that all my friends took notice immediately. “We hid from you. I can remember working at the bar at Tam’s, and somebody said, ‘Carr is on his way here.’ I split.”
Why?
“You smelled bad, you looked bad, you were sweating like a pig, you were smoking crack.”
He paused.
“As good as friends as we were, as much as I loved you, you weren’t you. I wasn’t talking to my friend David, I was talking to a wild man. You were a creature. I was afraid.”
I can’t remember if that was before or after I came over to his house with a gun. Neither can he.
Donald ended up going for a ride with the crack after I got off, and a bunch of other people I knew lost years to the smoke. Beyond physiology and pharmacology, I’m at a loss to explain my two hard years of smoking it. Even now, as a recovering person, when I see kids in New York clubs sneaking off for a toot, I have no trouble understanding the attraction. A bump of coke in the bathroom, a shot of whiskey at the bar, no worries. But crack? It is a very refined bit of idiocy to get mixed up in that life and expect to remain functional.
By the time I went back to Minneapolis to look around, all of the detox records were gone, but I was able to talk to Bob Olander, the guy who ran Hennepin County’s detox programs at the time. I had don
e a few stories involving him when I was a reporter, and I had always thought he was a no-bullshit guy. He ended up getting involved in my case when I came back as a client.
“It took awhile to get here, but crack moved into Minneapolis, but it was a whirlwind when it got there, and we were just overwhelmed with all kinds of people who were addicted to crack,” he said. “Most of them were black, but it took out its share of white guys like you.”
Several times when I tipped over, I would end up flopping into Bob’s office, no longer employed and no longer employable. At least twice he got me wired into state-funded treatment. I had always thought that part of the reason that he took a strong personal interest in my case was that he thought I still had a good, strong shot at returning to civil society. But talking to Bob, it was clear that he felt I was not a real good bet by the time crack got done with me.
“It took more than once, I remember that. Your prognosis was not good. I never fooled myself about that,” he said. “You had a well-established set of compulsions and a history of engaging those compulsions, and a downward spiral to show for it.” My time at the end of the pipe managed to wipe the smirk off my face.
“Your physical affect was that of an over-the-hill rogue,” he said. “There was a sadness to you, a guy who had been flying high and now was flat on his ass. You just looked beat up. After I saw you a few times, well, you were a pretty arrogant guy, and it gradually dawned on you that you could never be arrogant enough to pull off the life you were choosing.”