I Smoked Crack Once

Man, fuck that night, and fuck it in that “barely interested but whatever, it’s there and who else are you going to fuck” way. You’d convinced me to go with you to Milwaukee to try to track down some blow, and I was somehow thinking I should settle into some sort of hophead lifestyle anyway. I mean, I had just given my entire paycheck, meant to pay my past due rent, to some shady fuck with shiny teeth and a big plan to double my money. He knew a guy, and his guy would be able to give me the kind of shit I could turn around quick in the small town I lived in where the only fucking thing to do was drugs. Except the shiny teethed shitbag had disappeared with that money, and now you had this crazy fucking thought that we could find him, and if we couldn’t, we’d use all the money the others gave us in advance for drugs we didn’t have to buy drugs from someone else, cut those drugs, and still come out ahead.

This isn’t a fucking story I saw on bad network television, either. This is my life, you jerks, and this shit really happens. And don’t go thinking I think I was just caught up with the bad kids. I was fucking up my life, and, despite the fact that my job at the time was shift manager at Burger King, I was smart enough to know that none of this shit was a good idea. Even the Burger King job was a load of shit. Everything about my life was a bad idea.

But I went with you, anyway, because my money was already gone and what the fuck else made sense? But the night didn’t really turn out the way we planned it and I ended up sitting with you in some trailer park smoking all the crack we’d just bought with this blacktar toothed couple while their little kid bounced on the bed and called his dad a fucker. “I want my applejacks you fucker!”, that little kid kept yelling out, bouncing up and down, awake and ready for a bowl of the ‘jacks at 3 a.m.

Yeah, I was dead set during that time on helping my life fall apart, not quite satisfied with it only being mediocrity level shitty. When I was little I’d always thought I was going to end up being pretty great at something. I could tell by the number of times my white trash family drawled “You think you’re better than us? You ain’t no better than us!” that I clearly was, in fact, better than them. That’s not saying much as they weren’t exactly champions of anything. But I did figure that coming from bullshit people like that and knowing I wasn’t a bullshit person from the time I could form a thought meant that I would do something amazing. When I found myself grown up and losing at the greatness thing, I guess I just figured that if I was going to be a fuckup, I was going to be the most amazing fuck up I could be.

Last weekend I was hanging out with this guy who was smoking speed. I called it meth, but got told that that’s what you call it if you don’t know anything about it. So, this guy, his whole life is falling apart, and he keeps talking about how fucked all of it is. And he’s crouching down, looking shifty toward the drawn shades, telling me how I should never ever get mixed up in this shit, how I have an innocence about me that I just shouldn’t lose. And this guy, the whole time he’s telling me what I should do with my life, and the whole time he’s complaining about all the shit that’s falling apart in his own life, he keeps heating up that pipe, vapors filling the glass like magic dream smoke from a cartoon where a goddam genie is about to appear, and he’s taking hits off that pipe, and he’s saying “I have to figure it out. My life is falling apart, and I have to figure out why.”

After that night with you shit got a lot worse for me. But then I got bored of the worse. It wasn’t killing me, and even if I kept all that shit up, I doubt seriously that it ever really would have. I’d just be missing teeth and looking old at this point, and I’d likely still think I was somehow better or different than the other crackheads I knew. I was a little white trash kid who thought I was better, and back when I was fucking teenagers and chewing E, I thought I was better than them. But I looked at this guy, and I realized that I’m not really better than anything. We all know what’s fucking us up, and I have a different list than he does, so who knows if he’s going to live past next year or steal my shit, or end up killing someone. Life’s just so fucking random, isn’t it?