Books

Crackilton

a novel by

S.E. Tomas

Copyright © 2015 by S.E. Tomas

All rights reserved.

1

I was in the passenger seat of my mom’s car, heading south on Highway 2 to Edmonton International Airport, when the craving first started. It came on suddenly and for no apparent reason. One minute, I was calmly looking out the window at a snow-covered field alongside the highway, thinking about the trip home, and the very next, all I could think about was doing a really big blast of crack.

At first I tried to ignore the thought. I hadn’t smoked crack for three weeks while I was in Edmonton. The last thing I wanted to do was to start smoking it again. The craving was intense, though. Even after my mom had dropped me and Emily, my five-year-old daughter, off at the airport, and we’d checked our luggage, gone through airport security, and boarded the plane, I was still thinking about getting high.

As time went on, the craving only got worse. After a while, it started to affect my concentration. I tried to watch a show on the seatback television during the flight to pass the time, but the urge to get high was so distracting that I could barely even follow the plot. I started to feel extremely edgy. I kept thinking about getting some dope and putting a rock onto the end of my stem. I kept imagining the way I’d always feel after doing the first hit. It literally made me break out in a cold sweat.

By the time we were an hour away from Pearson Airport in Toronto, I was jonesing so bad. I no longer cared about how I hadn’t smoked crack for three weeks, or how I’d told myself before going to Edmonton that I wasn’t going to smoke it anymore. For a second, I forgot that I even had my daughter with me. All I wanted to do, as soon as the plane landed, was rush back to Hamilton as fast as I could so that I could get some dope and get high.

When the plane finally landed, I picked up our luggage in the baggage claim area, jumped in a cab, and took Emily back to my ex-girlfriend Nicole, who lived in Toronto. After doing that, I got into my car, which I’d parked at Nicole’s place on my way to Edmonton, and then drove to Mississauga to pick up Christine, my girlfriend. Christine had been staying at her parents’ over the Christmas holidays. She was a graduate student at McMaster University, where she also worked as a teaching assistant, and had been on her break from school.

I was hoping that it would be a quick stop at Christine’s parents’ house, but I had no such luck. Christine’s parents had made a big dinner that night and they insisted that Christine and I go to the fridge and grab whatever food we wanted to take home with us. It was a nice gesture, but at that moment, I wanted to get high so badly that every second that delayed it was unbearable. Without being rude, I helped Christine get some leftovers out of the fridge as quickly as possible, made sure to say thank you to Christine’s mom and dad, and then we got out of there.

It took about half an hour to get to Hamilton from Mississauga. The roads were dry and it was late at night, so there wasn’t much traffic on the QEW. The entire way, I drove twenty to thirty kilometers per hour over the speed limit. I would have driven even faster, but every time I tried to Christine got nervous and told me to slow down.

My plan when I got off the freeway in Hamilton was to drop Christine off at home and then go get some dope. Christine didn’t know that I still smoked crack—it was a habit that she’d thought I’d quit when we first got together—so I had to make up a bullshit reason for why I was taking off.

“Baby, I’m just going to drop you off, OK?” I said, as we were approaching our building. “I want to go get some weed.”

Christine looked at me and sighed. “Do you really have to do that tonight?” she said. “It’s almost midnight, Jim. I thought we’d spend some time together before going to bed.”

“Yeah, I already called my weed guy,” I said. “He’ll get pissed off at me if I tell him now that I’m not coming over.”

Christine let it go without an argument. When we got to our building, on Ottawa Street, I dropped her off and then went to see Chester, the old guy that I went to to get crack in Hamilton.

It didn’t take long for me to get to Chester’s. He lived about five minutes away, on Barton Street, near Ivor Wynne Stadium. Barton was a main drag and the longest street in Hamilton, but a really long stretch of it, which included the area by the stadium, was really run-down with a lot of boarded-up storefronts. It was generally known as the place to go in Hamilton if you were looking for drugs or hookers.

When I got to Barton Street, I parked in a vacant lot and then walked over to Chester’s building. Chester lived in behind a store, so his door opened right onto the street.

A few seconds after I’d knocked on Chester’s door, the door opened. “Oh, hey, Jim,” Chester said, looking a little surprised to see me. “Long time no see.”

I hadn’t seen Chester for a while because before my trip to Edmonton, I’d been getting my dope from a crack dealer whose phone number I no longer had. Chester didn’t actually sell dope; he just acted as a middleman. He’d hook you up with a dealer and give you a place to smoke if you needed one.

Chester let me into his tiny, dirty apartment. We walked through the kitchen into a living room area, where there was a couch, a few chairs, and a coffee table in front of an old television set. At the back of the room, in a corner, was a single bed. Sometimes there were a lot of people sitting around, smoking crack in this room. Chester let people get high at his place all the time in exchange for crack. On this particular night, however, the place was empty. I didn’t even see Sal around, Chester’s roommate.

On the TV, Chester had a porn show playing. He’d been in the middle of watching it and getting high when I’d come to the door. Chester was the type of person who always got a sex buzz when he smoked crack. He almost always had a porn show on whenever I went over there.

I knew that I’d have to wait for Chester to finish smoking his shit before we could go out and meet the dealer, so right away I asked where Sal was. Sometimes if Chester was busy, or if he wasn’t home, I’d go out with Sal to meet the dealer. I was hoping that Sal was just down the street, getting a pack of smokes or something, but as it turned out, he wasn’t.

“Sal’s at his girlfriend’s,” Chester told me. “We’ll go as soon as I finish this, OK?”

I groaned quietly and sat down on Chester’s couch. Like everything else in the apartment, it was filthy and was covered in a layer of grime that you could feel on your hands as soon as you touched it. I knew that it wouldn’t be long before we’d get to leave the apartment, I was just jonesing so bad, and the apartment was so nasty and gross-smelling because of all the trash that was piled up everywhere from people constantly coming over to hang out and smoke crack, that it annoyed me that I had to wait.

Twenty minutes of sitting there turned out to be all that I could take. The breaking point came when I heard a rustling sound coming from the huge pile of trash over by the coffee table. I looked down, expecting to see a rat by my shoes, and then sat up a little straighter.

“Hey, Chester,” I said.

Chester had finished the piece he was smoking and was now just sitting there, watching his show.

“Are you going to call this guy or what?” I said. “I’m tired of waiting, man. Come on, call him already. You can watch this shit later. I want to get going. It’s late.”

By the way that I was acting, you’d think that I’d already smoked some crack. Once you smoke it, you’re extremely eager to get more and you don’t want to have to wait to get it. I’d had this craving for so many hours, though, that I just couldn’t wait any longer. I’d reached my limit for waiting.

Chester didn’t seem to be too concerned about how eager I was to leave the house. He stared at the TV for another ten seconds and then slowly reached for his phone. “How much do you want?” he asked me. “Four?”

“Yeah, four,” I said.

Forty dollars’ worth was my usual amount. No matter how much money I had on me, which was never much since the carnival season had ended a few months earlier and I’d started working temp jobs—I’d worked under the table that season and therefore wasn’t eligible to collect Employment Insurance benefits—forty dollars was about as much as I usually wanted to blow at any given time. I knew that I’d get through a forty piece pretty fast, but I also knew that by then I’d be far too paranoid, thinking the cops would be coming to bust down my door, to drive back to Chester’s in the middle of the night to get more. That’s how I always got whenever I smoked crack—totally paranoid. I didn’t used to get so paranoid when I smoked crack, or freebase, as a kid. But at some point, it just started to happen. Chester wasn’t like that, though. He didn’t get paranoid. He had no problem leaving the house.

Chester spoke to the dealer briefly and then flipped his phone closed.

“Where are we meeting this guy?” I said.

“Gage and King,” Chester said. “He’s going to meet us at the convenience store in about ten minutes.”

Chester got his ass up off the couch and then we finally left the apartment. We walked over to my car and then drove to the twenty-four-hour convenience store on Gage and King, which was only a couple of minutes away, to meet the dealer.

After waiting for about twenty minutes, the crack man finally showed up. He came up to the passenger side of my car, tapped on the window, and got into the backseat behind Chester.

A gust of cold air rushed into the backseat. It crept up the back of my neck. I turned to the dealer in my seat and gave him the money. The dealer handed me the dope. It was wrapped in a piece of plastic and tied off in a knot. Two seconds later, the back door opened and the dealer took off down King Street.

While we were still in the parking lot, I took a ten-dollar bill out of my pocket and gave it to Chester, like I usually did for a tip. I always gave him money instead of breaking off a piece of dope because I didn’t like to open the bag until I got home. It was a hassle and it took too much time.

Once that was settled, I drove back to Chester’s house to drop Chester off. After that, I headed home. Even though home was only a short distance away, it felt a lot further because all of a sudden, I really needed to take a shit. Having to shit was from the anticipation of having dope on me and knowing that in a few minutes I’d be smoking it. It happened every time I was about to smoke crack.

When I got home, I parked in the lot at the back of our building and ran up the wooden staircase to our apartment on the third floor. Christine had left the kitchen light on for me. I peered into the living room. It was dark and empty.

I took off my coat and went straight into the bathroom. When you walked into our place, the bathroom was directly to your left, as soon as you walked into the living room. It was a small four-piece with a toilet directly behind the door. The lock on the door was broken and the knob itself was almost falling off, so it was good being able to sit behind the door like that, on the toilet. It gave me a few seconds to react if I needed it.

Once I was in the bathroom, I opened the window a crack, put the bathmat up against the bottom of the door, and then grabbed my crack stem. My stem was literally just a piece of copper pipe about four inches long that I’d found one day at a temp job. Most people who smoked crack used glass stems, but I never knew where to buy glass in Hamilton. I just used whatever I could find. To prevent burning my lips when the metal heated up under the flame, I’d wrapped some electrical tape around one end of the stem. Christine thought that I used the stem to smoke weed, which was totally plausible and which I actually did sometimes, so I didn’t have to hide it from her. I had in on the bathroom shelf, in plain sight, next to my shaving kit.

As soon as my stem was in hand, I sat down on the toilet and took a shit. I’d barely eaten anything all day, so there wasn’t much in my system. I basically just peed out my ass for a few seconds.

While I sat there on the toilet, I tore off the knot in the plastic, took the dope out, broke off a chunk with my thumbnail—about ten dollars’ worth—and then put it onto the end of my stem, on top of my screen. My screen was just a piece of a stainless steel scouring pad that Christine had in the kitchen. After melting the dope into my screen a little bit, I did a really big blast, inhaling as much as I could while holding my stem upwards. Before I’d exhaled, I was already high.

The first sensation felt like I was looking out a window. I felt like I was so close to it that my nose was almost touching the glass. My heart rate jacked up. I started to sweat. My vision got blurry. I felt like there was water running down the other side of the glass, over my face. I heard this whoosh sound shoot out of each ear—a ringer, it’s called—and then my hearing intensified massively. Suddenly, I could hear everything, every little sound.

Downstairs, the neighbours had some music on. They had it really cranked up. They were a Native couple and they were always getting drunk and having these loud parties. Normally, in our bathroom you could make out little bits of muffled conversation coming from the apartment downstairs, especially if the people downstairs were talking loudly or arguing near their bathroom. That’s how shitty the insulation in our building was. Now that I was high, I could hear everything that they were saying to each other—even with the music on.

As soon as my hearing intensified, I started to feel extremely paranoid. Being able to hear all these little noises in the apartment—things that I didn’t notice normally when I wasn’t high, like the sound of Christine rolling over in bed and the bedsprings stretching, or the sound of the refrigerator compressor turning off and on—really started to freak me out. I started to get this vague feeling of paranoia. One minute I’d hear a creaking noise and I’d think someone was lurking somewhere in the apartment. Then I’d hear a car drive down Ottawa Street and I’d think it was the cops, coming to bust me.

These paranoid delusions were all that I was concerned about. Like any other time that I was high on crack, any legitimate worries that I had in my life didn’t even enter my mind. It was like they didn’t exist. The crack high just blocked them right out. The high was so intense that I was literally just sitting there on the toilet, thinking to myself, I am so fucking high right now, and listening to what was going on around me.

While sitting on the toilet, I found myself searching for little crack crumbs suddenly. I always got this strange compulsion to search for crumbs whenever I smoked crack. I’d get this feeling that I’d dropped a tiny crumb while I was smoking and that would get me started. It didn’t even matter that I still had more crack to smoke. I searched for crumbs regardless.

Because I was on the toilet, my pants were around my ankles. I reached down and started to check my pants for crumbs by running my index finger along the creases in the material. When I didn’t find anything, I started to check the floor. We had ceramic tiles in our bathroom. I checked the grout in between the tiles by my feet. I touched something that felt like a crack crumb. I picked it up and looked at it closely, but I couldn’t tell if it was crack or not because my vision was so blurry. It was hard to focus properly. I put the crumb onto the end of my stem very carefully—I was feeling jittery and I was afraid that I would drop it—and then I held my lighter to it for a second to see if it would melt.

About ten or fifteen minutes after doing the first blast, the high wore off. I was still paranoid and my hearing was still intensified because I’d done such a big hoot, but I was no longer high out of my mind. I immediately wanted to do another blast and get super high again. The urge to do this was pretty powerful.

Before I did another blast, I grabbed the towel that was hanging from behind the bathroom door and wiped my face with it. Even though I’d only done one blast, it had been such a big one that my forehead was dripping with sweat.

After wiping my face, I put another piece of crack onto the end of my stem, melted it into the screen a bit, and took another hit. Instantly, I was high again, although not as high as I’d gotten off the first blast that I’d done. Even though I’d done another really big one, it didn’t get me as high because I’d done it as soon as the first one had worn off. To get as high as I’d gotten off the first blast, I would have had to wait awhile before doing the second one. I could never wait that long, though. I could never resist the urge to do one blast right after another one.

Within forty-five minutes, I was done smoking the forty piece. I got four big blasts out of it. I did each blast about ten or fifteen minutes apart. Most people would probably get about seven or eight blasts out of a forty piece, but I always did really big blasts compared to most people that I’d seen smoke crack in my life. I had no idea how I was able to do such big ones. It was just the way I always did them.

When the dope was gone, I continued searching for crumbs. After doing this for a while, I wiped my ass, got off the toilet, and went into the living room to push my screen. Pushing my screen involved taking something skinny enough to fit into my stem—I used the plastic tube from inside of a pen—and using it to literally push my screen from one end of my stem to the other. Doing this scraped off some of the crack that had coated the inside of my stem while I was smoking.

After I’d pushed my screen once, I tapped the end of my stem onto the coffee table just to make sure that there wasn’t any loose crap in there. Then I held a flame to the end of my stem and inhaled. I got one last hoot by doing this.

As soon as the high wore off, I immediately wanted to get more dope. I wanted to keep chasing that first blast that I’d done. Even though it was impossible to get this high again, I still wanted to try. After doing a few blasts in a row, I wasn’t thinking too rationally anymore. I was pretty fucked up. I was just thinking about how great that first blast felt and all I wanted to do was re-experience it. I didn’t care how much it cost. If there had been three hundred dollars’ worth of dope sitting in front of me, on the coffee table, I literally would have sat there all night, doing blast after blast, until it was all gone. The only thing that stopped me from getting more dope was paranoia. I was so fucking paranoid, thinking the cops were outside my apartment, looking for me, that I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house.

Seeing as how I couldn’t get any more dope, I decided to just call it a night. I put my stem back onto the bathroom shelf, turned off the light, made sure that the front door was locked, and then went to bed.

In the bedroom, Christine was passed out. I got into bed beside her and pulled the blanket over myself even though I was still sweating. I tried to fall asleep, but I was still feeling the effects of the crack I’d smoked. Even though the crack high only lasted for about ten or fifteen minutes, it could take quite a while to fully come down from it. The paranoia and jitteriness, in my experience, could last for up to a couple of hours. Now that I wasn’t high out of my mind anymore and I was starting to come down, I started to experience all these horrible thoughts.

You can’t keep doing this, I told myself. You swore to yourself before you went to Edmonton that you’d stop smoking this shit all the time and hiding your drug habit from Christine.

These were the types of thoughts that I would think whenever I was coming down off a crack high. I didn’t like the fact that I’d been lying to Christine about my drug habit, so whenever I was coming down, that’s when I’d beat myself up over it. While I was actually smoking crack, I didn’t think about Christine at all. The crack just blocked all that right out. It was only when I started to come down that I started to think about her. The guilt could be really intense. Sometimes I’d literally have to snort a Percocet, or smoke some weed, to take the edge off. I didn’t have either thing on me, though. On this particular night, I just had to deal with it.

The thoughts lasted for about an hour. Shortly after that, I fell asleep.

End of Chapter 1

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