HERE IS THE TRICK: compartmentalize your life. Rationalization becomes much easier that way. You’ve got one thing over here, and another over there. People who have affairs, or at least people who are good at having affairs, are masters of this. A shrink told me about this one time like it was a diagnosis. But I thought it was a pretty decent trick.
Don’t think about your childhood. Put your anger in one box and your depression in another. Those two things will be hard to look at together.
If you are going to take a woman’s purse on the street, don’t think about how she looks like one of your friends’ moms. Someone who picked you up from school or made you peanut butter sandwiches and lemonade on summer days. If you absolutely have to think about this, think about it later. Put her in a box and say she is just some lady spending her husband’s holiday bonus checks. Nobody’s ever given you a holiday bonus.
You might be expecting a big cathartic breakdown. Where everything you have ever done will catch up to you, and you will cry and beg for repentance. You will gnash your teeth and rend your garments. The light of God will break into your heart and free you from the bondage of self; you will turn your life around. This might never happen. If it happens, then you have failed at compartmentalization.
You might call someone from your past, an ex-girlfriend, say, and the conversation might be much quicker than you imagined. Where you expected a reckoning, sympathy, you might find someone anxious to get off the phone. You might realize that your actions have hurt people. You might realize that she really, really doesn’t care. Your self-pity may come to an end. You might cry for hours into a bare mattress in an empty room in a halfway house. You might drench the bed until it sponges up, and you might crack a window and soak the filters of your cigarettes until you can’t breathe through them. This is not compartmentalization. Put her in a box. Call her names. Stop crying for god’s sake.
Being broke is unavoidable. Come-ups are, unfortunately, largely case by case. Remember: nobody likes their job.
Go for food stamps. Wait in line all day at the office downtown in those hard plastic chairs; lie about your work and living situation. Ignore the electric whir from the fluorescent lights and try not to sweat too much. It’s a long wait ’cause they hate parting with their money. Then it’s another few weeks to get the EBT card in the mail.
Some corner stores will let you buy beer or cigarettes with EBT. These stores are found in bad neighborhoods and are unaffiliated with national chains. Some drug dealers will take EBT fifty cents on the dollar.
You can look for drywall in dumpsters and cut it into little rocks, bag it up, and sell it to crackheads. But if the cops find it, they will charge you with possession with intent to distributeas if it was real crack. That was Nancy Reagan’s doing. And you’ll have a bunch of pissed-off crackheads looking for you.
It wasn’t until later that I learned the game I was playing is called “Hey, Mister.”
Everybody has done it at some point. You’re too young to buy booze. You take your money and just kinda loiter around outside a liquor store. You don’t want to be too near the entrance because the guy behind the counter might see you, and sometimes those guys can get on their cowboy shit and come yelling at you or call the police. You wait for someone to walk up, you give them a look, and then you say, “Hey, Mister.” Probably not those exact words. But you ask them to buy you a bottle. You give them your money. And depending on what type of person they are, they just might do it.
Some guys just want to help out. It’s what keeps the rich tradition alive. They see you and your friend huddled up, nervous and stammering, fighting over which one will have to go ask, dropping your voice a few octaves to seem older, holding out a few crumpled bills, and they think about some summer night when they were a kid, when they played “Hey, Mister” themselves and showed up to a friend’s house or a lake party with a bottle of vodka and everyone cheered. When they had a drunk, sloppy kiss with the cute girl from geometry class and threw up in the pool.
Then there are the drunks. Not the homeless and wet-brained drunks, but the ones just barely clinging to their earthly possessions. They pull up in the parking lot in a beat-to-shit Honda or an old F-150 that makes a sound like dogs barking as it drives. They step out in a bathrobe or slippers or whatever stained clothes combination they have specially chosen for shuffling around their house, sleep-watching cable. These guys won’t give you the time of the day. They’re myopic; they’ll walk right past you and ignore your little voice clearing, the crack in your pubescent throat as you say “Hey, Mister.”
Then there’s the homeless ones, the guys who smell like sour sweat and dried shit, that have beards and sinewy, skinny bodies like stray dogs — harsh tans and open sores, cuts on their knuckles, burn marks and faded stick-and-poke tattoos on their knotty forearms. No teeth and three shirts. They will want you to pay them for their services, or at least buy them a little something. These are the guys that when you see them take their first pull of the day, you feel it. Like when you stop at a gas station after a day of landscaping in August, when you open the cooler and take the first pop off a Gatorade before you even make it up to the register. That’s how they pull. You feel the world relax, you feel the tightness all around you just up and unfold, even though you didn’t even know it was there before, and you weren’t even the one taking the drink. It’s rare to witness someone achieve satisfaction so quickly and so fully.
Anyways, the third kind, that’s the kind of Mister I said “Hey, Mister” to after I slipped away from home and hopped the Greyhound from Tampa to Key West, in the middle of a ninety-degree night, fourteen years old, still shivering from the long bus ride when he walked up.
When you smoke crack or inject coke, you can’t hear for about thirty seconds. All you get is a sound like a 747 landing down the street, or an aluminum train howling past your face. It sounds like water on fire. Like a ghost fight or a panther crying. Some people call this “getting your bell rung.” Medically, I think it is some sort of cocaine-induced tinnitus.
The structure of a cocaine molecule looks like a boat. Hanging off the bow is a single nitrogen, or base, called an amine, which makes the molecule slightly basic. In the powdered form, this nitrogen is bonded to a hydrogen ion to make a hydrochloride salt. If you take that salt and mix it with a slightly stronger base such as baking soda or ammonia in water, then the hydrochloride ion gets broken off and bonds to the stronger base; if you heat this mixture, then the hydrochloride gets burned away. Without the hydrogen ion, the amine, or base, becomes free. You see where this is going.
Heat a pot with water, don’t let it boil; turn the knob to five or six. Mix three parts coke and one part baking soda in a Pyrex, drizzle water on it so it gets soggy. Put the Pyrex in the heated water. Keep it on the stove and stir a little bit. Let it bubble until it turns to mashed potatoes, then it will congeal into a pancake. Pop it off the burner and put it under cold water. Once cooled, take out the pancake and carve it up into little rocks. The kitchen will smell like burnt rubber for a few hours.
Talk to it while it cooks. That will make the whole process go easier, faster; I don’t know why — that’s psychology, or maybe magic.
It’s called crack because the baking soda makes a little cracking sound when it’s getting burned. It’s the sound of carbon dioxide being released from the molecule as it changes states, same as Rice Krispies.
Everyone knows that meth fucks up your teeth, but it isn’t the meth, actually, that rots them out. It’s not candy. The meth just makes you stop producing saliva. Spit helps kill germs and bacteria in the mouth, so without it your gums and your teeth fester. The bacteria grows and grows and crawls in the soft tissue down around your roots, all in the holes you nervously chew in your cheeks until your teeth start turning yellow, brown, black, and disappearing. Spit is disgusting, but, like many things, the alternative is worse.
When you shoot cheap meth, your mouth fills up with oil, typically Coleman camper fuel. Most meth is bad meth, and all you need to make bad meth is some Sudafed, lithium ion batteries, Coleman camper fuel, Drano, table salt, and a two-liter bottle. It’s kind of a pain because you have to shake the bottle and twist the cap every few seconds. Getting the lithium strips out of the batteries isn’t easy, either; you have to pierce the casing and pry off the top, then remove the insides and unroll them. During the reaction, the oil works as the solvent so it doesn’t break down, and it slides right up your veins and drips into your mouth. You will smell it, too, but it isn’t in the air. It tastes like how you’d expect. Like gasoline and slippery, bitter cum.
Find the bars where young white people drink in a neighborhood that was Black two years ago. “Up-and-coming” areas. Somewhere with a lot of foot traffic and wait around when it starts to die out. The people here want to get robbed, I swear — it adds to the “experience.” They’ll give it away. Look for boat shoes, polos, expensive purses, look for baby blue and yellow. Look for drunk people; they are less predictable but also less likely to call the cops.
If you don’t have a gun, use a knife. If you don’t have a knife, use a needle and say you’re sick. You can do this by an ATM, but there are usually cameras there, so hang back a little.
Why do you do it?
Common answers: You are running from something. Trauma, especially. You were raised wrong, you didn’t know any better. It’s genetic and one or both of your parents are the same way. You are incapable of living life on life’s terms. You don’t care about other people. You have exceptionally weak willpower. You are too sensitive. You are a delicate, misunderstood genius like those musicians who die choking on their own vomit or the writers who put a shotgun in their mouth. The ugliness of the world is too much for you. You have a disease.
These are all flimsy excuses.
The lizard brain, the reptilian brain, the amygdala: these refer to the same thing. A little almond-shaped bunch of nerves in your brain responsible for decision-making and emotional responses. They are a part of the limbic system, which is at the head of the mesolimbic pathway. The pleasure pathway. The reward system. It’s the oldest part of the brain; it’s been around since mammals evolved from reptiles, since we had scales instead of hair and walked around on four legs licking each other with forked tongues.
A little clump of neurons in the center bottom of the brain projects the dopamine out through other areas of the brain, and when it hits the end of the trail, you feel a positive sensation, a reward, and you become satisfied. But the pathway is unable to distinguish drugs from food or sex because it is all translated into one language, dopamine. Where a good meal will release about 50 units of dopamine and sex releases 200, a tiny shot of crystal meth releases more than 1,000. Once the ventral tegmental area (VTA) takes on this much dopamine, the whole system gets hijacked. Over time, the system can become accustomed to these unnatural amounts of dopamine, and satisfaction and reward sensations become harder to achieve. This is why the need for drugs takes over the need for food or other basic necessities. Once the pleasure pathway is rewired, you’ll spend all your time obsessing about what rewired it, about how to get it.
This has its own flimsiness, too. Just more blame shifting. It’ll probably get “disproved” in five years, anyways.
“What are you doing down here? You on vacation with your parents or something?” he asked me.
Back then, everyone who was older than twenty seemed just old to me. But looking back, he couldn’t have been older than thirty-five. He was small with the look of hard living. His stick-and-poke tattoo was of a five-leaf clover and had a date underneath it. I gave him ten bucks and told him I wanted the most of the cheapest. He got a fifth of Popov and told me that it was $9.99. He said he covered the tax with his own.
“You’re gonna need some money. How much money you got on you?” he asked.
I told him the truth. And the truth was that after my bus ticket, which I got round-trip, I had $215 saved up from painting houses all summer.
He told me I was lucky I found him because there were folks down here who would rob me or worse. But he said he isn’t from Florida, so he doesn’t behave like that. He just comes down for the winter when it gets too cold in Chicago.
I said, “I’m here to see a girl.” And it was the truth, too. That was my plan, as far as it went. Nicole. She was a grade up from me and down here on vacation with her parents and her sisters, and she told me that as long as her parents don’t find out, I could come down, her sisters would be cool about it. And she told me that she had been thinking about me since school ended and that she can’t get me out of her head and her dreams, and she said I’m crazy for doing this, but she didn’t want to stop me.
He whistled low and passed me the bottle. He asked me where she was staying and steered me down a residential street — pink and yellow A-frame bungalows with fences, little shotgun houses with four-step porches and two windows to the right of every door. We walked through the streets quick, and he told me he had to make a stop.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Sixteen,” I lied.
“You ever done coke before?”
“Yeah, a few times,” I lied again.
We turned north up the island, to where there’s a trailer park tucked between some scrub palmettos and a few ugly trees. Just about a dozen single-wides propped up on cinder blocks and broken skirting. Sitting a couple hundred yards in between the airport and the high-tide mark, where the washed-up horseshoe crabs dry out, and the sand fleas burrow blindly and chew on the wet, gray shore.
If you can afford it, get your hands on a multivitamin. Meth leeches your body of vitamin D3, which is how you absorb calcium. Without calcium, your hair starts to fall out; it just up and leaves without warning, and everything else gets fragile: your nails, your skin. You’ll get a cut opening a water bottle.
Eat at least a Snickers bar every day, steal an orange from the gas station on Sundays. Snickers has everything you need. Calcium, minerals, protein. It’s not the highest calorie-to-cost ratio, but it’s up there. The best ratio is the plastic-wrapped danishes: the Big Texas and the Jumbo Honey Bun. They typically run for $1.50 to $2, and they are 560 calories. Figuring at $1.75, that’s 320 calories per dollar. A cheeseburger from McDonald’s is about 300. A can of Coke is 140, and a small bag of Lay’s is 160.
Crack and meth cause excess concentrations of norepinephrine in your brain. Meth makes your brain produce more of it, but crack inhibits your brain’s ability to reabsorb it. The crack binds to the protein that is supposed to get rid of the norepinephrine, so it gets stranded, like its car got stolen, and it builds up in your extra-cellular space and kicks neurotransmission into high gear.
The norepinephrine looks and acts just like adrenaline. It initiates fight-or-flight, but it really gets you in the brain. It enhances your focus and your attention, your retrieval of memories. It makes you vigilant. It allows you to process sensory information fast and effectively; you see the delicate patterns of the world and react to them, you organize them, you set up a system and derive meaning from it, courses of action. You become hyperaware to enhance your chances of survival. But if you aren’t in danger, if you’re just sitting around shooting coke, and there is no reason to fight or flee, then you might start to pick up the spare bits of yourself and the world, to organize it into a made-up pattern that is better left unseen — a frightening structure of delusion and paranoia, full of filled-in gaps and illogical connections, a golem of mad information. You have to feed this instinct, too, your brain’s loud craving. You have to give it books.
Good books for junkies: Read Dante, read Moby Dickwhile you’re high, get lost in the chapters that luxuriate on the different kinds of rope and how to tie knots. Read Notes from the Underground, Ellison’s Invisible Man if you are withdrawing. The Waves or Faulkner if you haven’t slept in a few days. Mostly, don’t go north of 1950. Stay away from the beatniks — they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. And memoirs are whiny. Especially don’t read those books about rock stars; it’ll just piss you off because of how broke you are. Trainspotting is pretty good, but heroin is for suicidal teens. If you’ve got enough meth to last you a while, give Paradise Lost a run. See if that does anything for you.
A book is just time-released information. Just ink on paper. A word, one datum in a relatively simple system of information transmission. But there are moments, moments where the information piles up and time stops and everything becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The rhythm of the words and their shades of meaning match up for one brief second. ...
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