by Hunter Biden
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 your shit is. Always recook your crack if you got it from someone you don’t know to burn off the trash some dealers mix in. Never stick your stem in your pants pocket, where it can break when you sit or fall out of your pants while you’re ordering at Popeyes.
She often pointed out rites of passage in my crack addiction, even numbering and abstracting them, like a lecturer in an advanced independent-study course.
#37: Loses apartment keys whenever he goes out.
#67: Never picks eyes up from the floor more than thirty seconds at a time because always scanning floor for crack crumbs.
At one point, she said I’d graduated into crackology’s PhD program. It was during the phase when it took me an eternity just to pack a bag for a trip. I’d have a flight in two hours, and two days later I’d still be sitting in the apartment, bag open and clothes strewn everywhere. Rhea would walk in and shake her head. “Are you fucking kidding me? Here,” she’d say, and grab my clothes, stuff them in the bag, and push me out the door.
Rhea saved me, even as she sucked me in. She wouldn’t let me buy from anyone else, protecting me from having to track down my own drugs on DC’s more cutthroat streets. She taught me how to use as safely as possible. She was meticulous about who she bought from, where she bought it, and what was good stuff and what was trash. She always bought in reasonable increments that, in theory at least, limited me from going on a full-out binge—meaning, in the relative insanity of that universe, not using continuously for more than two or three days straight. (Later, on my odysseys through California and Connecticut, two- and three-day binges would seem quaint.)
I loved Rhea as much as I’ve ever loved a friend. She’s the only person from that period of my life I actively maintain good memories of. During my years of addiction, I learned this: mean drunks and addicts are mean people, violent drunks and addicts are violent people, and stupid drunks and addicts start out as stupid people. Rhea was none of those. There are embarrassing, shameful, even shocking things we’ve all done while high. Yet there is a line that the best won’t cross, no matter how desperate: hurting someone. Rhea wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Rhea breaks my heart more than any friend I’ve ever had. Wicked smart, stand-up-comedian funny, resourceful, damaged—she’s been pedaling through a haze of survival and drug addiction for so long that she’s scared to death to put down the crack pipe. She has no relationship with her family, doesn’t have anyone in her daily life who loves her genuinely and unconditionally. She has no memory of any beauty awaiting her on the other side.
It would be a miracle if Rhea was ever able to get clean. But by the mere fact that I’m sitting here and writing about her, I’m a miracle. One day I hope to be strong enough to go back to see Rhea, in that very dark place she resides, and do what I can to get her in a position where she wants to be saved. I don’t want Rhea to believe that things will get better only by her dying.
Until then, her lesson is stark and unrelenting and holy: we’re all just human beings, trying as hard as we fucking can.
CHAPTER EIGHT INTO THE DESERT
In October 2016, I set out on a crack-fueled, cross-country odyssey.
That wasn’t my plan. The plan was to get well. Until a couple of months earlier, I’d limited my crack use to once every three days. I believed I could quit it on my own, whenever I wanted, before it devolved into a full-time disorder. I was driving back and forth between DC and Delaware to see Hallie and her kids, our relationship still just a shared-grief oasis, and tried to keep my drug use hidden.
But I was also traveling for work constantly, mostly to generate new clients and trying to keep existing ones. My drug use accelerated in tandem with my stress. Smoking crack cocaine every three days soon became smoking every two days, then every other day—then every hour of every day. While still fairly new to the around-the-clock use of crack—and still learning how to be a functional abuser at that enhanced scale of addiction; still learning how to excuse myself in the middle of meetings every twenty or thirty minutes to light up in the men’s room—I knew I needed to do something before it spun out of control.
At least that’s what I told myself.
I was quick to deflect any notions that I was in extreme distress, that there was anything awry beyond my drinking, which had become more blatant as my anger rose over a dissolving marriage and the separation from my daughters. I avoided family and friends who were most likely to spot it. That included my dad. I didn’t want my family to confront me and insist I return to a rehab center that I’d been to before. I knew that wouldn’t do me any good right now. I was entering a new realm—a new level of darkness.
Following a relapse and my discharge for failing a drug test after an embarrassingly short stint in the U. S. Navy Reserve, I had rehabbed in 2014 at a clinic in Tijuana, where I was treated with a plant-derived psychoactive called ibogaine—legal in Mexico and Canada but not in the United States. A woman there knowledgeable about alternative therapies told me about a wellness ranch in Sedona, Arizona.
Grace Grove Retreat is run by a couple who are devoted New Agers—the woman goes by the name Puma St. Angel, a moniker she told me was given to her years earlier by a shaman. It sounded like a spot that might be just different enough, just alternative enough, and just potentially effective enough to help get me well. It was more of a holistic detox center for stressed-out executives than a drug rehab clinic. It offered treatments such as liver and gallbladder cleanses, meditation and yoga classes, and hikes through the spectacular red-rock terrain that surrounded the center. I saw it as a place where I could reorder myself and get healthy.
I arranged to meet up there with a friend named Joseph Magee, whom I’d met during my first stay at Crossroads, in 2003. We’d remained close. Originally from east Texas, where in the late 1990s he helped stage a controversial college production of Angels in America, and now a successful businessman in New York with h
is fashion-company-owning husband, Joey was a recovering addict who’d helped me and countless others through many trying times. He was also a bit of a rehab junkie—he’d been to about forty different rehabs, no exaggeration, and was beloved everywhere he went—and was always willing to come to a friend’s aid at a moment’s notice.
This time was no different. I just called him and said, “Hey, Joe, I’m going to this crazy fucking wellness ranch in Sedona. You want to come?”
His reply: “I’ll meet you there.”
I asked Joey to join me because I knew I wouldn’t want to let him down. Left to giving my recovery over to a pair of strangers, I’d likely as not hit eject before getting there by employing my default evasion in such circumstances: Fuck it. Joey would be my fuck-it insurance.
I had become resistant to traditional twelve-step-based rehabilitation—or too burned out on it, or too proficient at gaming it—for that method alone to seem like much use. It had worked for me for extended periods in the past, and there’s much about it I believe is invaluable—I still employ many of its tenets to stay sober. But addiction is so complex, so individual, and dependent on so many factors that combating it can often make an addict feel like a rat in a maze, continuously searching for solutions while bumping into barriers that keep him or her from staying clean.
It’s a maze in which too many alcoholics and addicts find themselves trapped. Relapse rates for rehabilitation centers hover between 60 and 80 percent, a distressing volume of failure for a $40 billion industry into which abusers and their families pour so much time, money, and emotional currency.
The truth is, by my midforties, I had learned every lesson I needed to learn. Now I was learning how to ignore them. There were more pertinent matters for me to master: the most efficient ways to buy and smoke crack; how best to hide my use.
Those were the sorts of things I became hyperfocused on—not my failures at attempting to get clean but my successes in buying and using without getting caught or hurt or killed during some random drug-buy mix-up. Walking into a park in a high-crime neighborhood to buy crack at 4 a.m. was no different than playing Russian roulette with two shells in the chamber. In some places, it was like playing with five shells—and still, I was willing to spin the chamber again and again.
So off I went to see Puma St. Angel.
I arrived at Dulles International Airport at 7 a.m., three hours before my flight’s scheduled departure, a nod to the ridiculous amounts of time it now took me to accomplish even the most mundane tasks. Before getting out of my car at the airport garage, however, I took a hit off a pipe to hold me over. Two hours later, I was still sitting there, still smoking. I decided it didn’t matter if I left a little later, that I wasn’t on a strict timetable. I’d just take the next flight. When it was too late to catch that one, I resolved to take the next one. A few hours later, I resolved to take the one after that.
I never left my car. Stocked with what I guessed to be enough crack to last a couple of days, I finally missed the last flight of the night. By that point, crackhead wisdom kicked in big-time: I had always wanted to drive across the country, and now seemed a perfect opportunity to do just that. I pulled out of the airport garage around 10 p.m., pointed my car west, and headed toward Arizona, more than 2,200 miles away.
That was day one.
* * *
I drove through the night, finally stopping in Nashville a few hours after sunrise. I checked into a hotel and smoked away the rest of the day. By nightfall, I realized I was already running low on drugs. I rummaged through my car seats and floor mats for crumbs, then drove off sometime around midnight to score more.
By now, I possessed a new superpower: the ability to find crack in any town, at any time, no matter how unfamiliar the terrain. It was easy—risky, often frustrating, always stupid and stupendously dangerous, yet relatively simple if you didn’t give much of a shit about your own well-being and were desperate enough to have an almost limitless appetite for debasement.
Crack takes you into the darkest recesses of your soul, as well as the darkest corners of every community. Unlike with alcohol, you become dependent not only on a criminal subculture to access what you need but the lowest rung of that subculture—the one with the highest probability of violence and depravity.
Navigating that landscape required me to be absolutely fucking fearless. Almost everybody assumed I was a cop—flashy car, false bravado, white—so I’d often pull out a pipe first and smoke whatever I had in front of them, even if there was only resin left on the screen, just to show I was for real.
Then there was the matter of not getting ripped off. Like cold-calling clients, it was a numbers game of hit-and-miss. I’d either hand $100 to someone to make a buy and wait outside a building as they went in the front door and out the back, or I’d find someone smart enough to figure out that I could be their crack daddy for as long as I was in town. Getting burned became an occupational hazard, a kind of repetitive stress injury: I’d get taken by the same guy, again and again, only to return to hand him money one more time, my desperation for another hit so encompassing that I literally could taste it.
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, com
paratively, 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.