All or Nothing (15 page)

We kept the car for a few days, driving around to different ghettos and approaching dealers on bikes. “Show us what you got,” I said to the dealers. When they stuck their hand in the car window holding a bag of crack to show it to us, I'd slap their hand and drive off as the bag of crack fell into my lap. Gibson wanted to keep the truck, but there was a warrant out for my arrest and I saw no reason to be driving around in a stolen truck. I convinced him to abandon it one night in an empty parking lot.

The crack we stole from those small-time dealers in Fort Lauderdale was always cut or bulked or buffered with laxatives, Benadryl, sugar, starch, talc, brick dust, or even fucking Ajax. Drugs are almost always cut with something else. Some dealers want to make it go further; others just want to charge more. This leads to all different breeds of crack, coke, and heroin. Our buddy Dan who was living in Orlando told us they had shit there that was higher up on the food chain. “This is pure shit that hasn't been stepped on a million times,” he told us.

We had ten grand burning a hole in our pockets, and this sounded worthy of a trip. After a long 220-mile, drug-fueled cab ride from Fort Lauderdale to Orlando, we checked into a motel and spent the night smoking and shooting. By morning we were tweaking out of our minds. With crack, the high doesn't last long. Right away you just start freaking out. Your pupils dilate, your speech slows, and you start hearing and seeing things that no one else does. It's a psychotic state that you're completely aware of but can't do anything to change.

Out of crack, we headed for the Orange Blossom Trail, a major road that's famous for its notorious drug crime. Almost immediately, we saw some young drug dealers. “We're looking for some hard,” Gibson told them.

“You a narc?” asked one kid who seemed to be the leader. I didn't blame the kid for being suspicious of two white guys in this neighborhood.

“No,” Gibson said, but the kids didn't believe him. “Get the fuck out of here,” the leader told us. “I mean it.” Before we could move he pulled out a gun and started shooting into the air, letting us know that he was serious. Gibson and I took off, running as fast as we could as the sounds of gunfire still echoed in the distance. It was only ten or eleven in the morning, but the sun was already blazing relentlessly in a cloudless blue sky. There wasn't even the slightest hint of wind, nothing to cool the scorching heat. My soiled, soaked clothes were caked to my body; my hair was a matted fucking mess. As I ran sweat bubbled from my forehead, stinging my ears and smearing my glasses, which dangled perilously close to the tip of my nose.

Finally, Gibson and I stopped, panting and completely out of breath. We couldn't hear the gunfire anymore. When we looked behind us, there was no one in sight. Quickly, we made our way off the tracks and down a hill of gravel, weeds, and packed, dry dirt. Right away we stumbled across a guy sitting alone, smoking Black & Milds, with his feet propped up on a weather-beaten milk crate. He was lean and lanky, with fetid dreadlocks framing his narrow face. The vague silhouette of a gun was visible beneath his many layers of clothes.

“We're looking for some hard,” Gibson said once again. Without uttering a syllable or even looking up, Mr. Dreads got up and started walking. We followed him a few hundred feet through some bushes to a clearing that led to a littered parking lot, and beyond, a wretched bilevel motel with peeling paint on the green-and-blue doors. All over the parking lot were lookouts—ten-year-old kids on bikes who spent their days popping wheelies and warning dealers when the police showed up. “One time, two time,” they called out, depending on how many cops they spotted. The kids saw us, nodded their approval, and backed away.

Mr. Dreads guided us through the motel parking lot, navigating a path carved of cars, lookouts, pint-sized prostitutes, and addicts, until we arrived at room number 4. He knocked on the door three times and left without saying a word. The door opened, and we walked in. Quickly the door closed behind us. The room was dark save for a lone lightbulb hanging from a broken ceiling fixture. The curtains were drawn, but I could still make out the staccato blink of the motel's red-and-white neon marquee. On a table in the center of the room were a couple dozen clear plastic bags, a gun, and two small stacks of cash.

“You a fucking narc?” The dealer was wiry and anxious. A thick, shiny gold chain dangled from his neck, and a stack of small gold bracelets circled his wrists. He grabbed the gun from the table and pressed the cold steel barrel to my temple.

“I just want crack,” I said. Slowly, and I mean really fucking slowly, I pulled $200 out of my pocket and placed it down on the bed. Crack was the only fucking thing on my mind. But the dealer didn't know that, and dealers are always suspicious of white boys. I knew he could just shoot me. It would have been easy. That room hadn't been cleaned in years, and it would probably take days before anyone discovered our bodies. After sizing us up for what seemed like forever, the dealer slowly lowered the gun and walked over to the nightstand. Methodically, he pulled open the drawer, reached in, and produced a small, clear bag holding a couple of white, pebble-sized pieces of crack.

Once we had our stash, we needed a room. We couldn't wait long enough to get back to the motel where we'd already checked in. The lobby of this motel was spilling over with brochures for Disney World, Gatorland, Sea World, Sleuths Mystery Dinner Shows, and a dozen other Orlando attractions that we couldn't have cared less about. Sitting behind a thin layer of grimy Plexiglas sat a miserable-looking young woman. “Twenty-nine ninety-five,” she said without looking up.

The chairs, curtains, carpets, and sheets in our room were covered in cigarette burns. There were holes in the wall, the bedspread was peppered with dark spots, the drawer handles were all broken, and someone had scribbled profanity all over the room's lone wooden desk. The bathroom reeked of urine and mildew. The sink drain was clogged with cigarette butts, and there was a hypodermic needle on the floor next to the toilet. But we barely noticed any of this as we packed our prize into a thin, smoke-stained glass tube. I inhaled deeply, closing my eyelids as I drew in smoke. Gibson swiped the pipe, took a hit, and then handed it back to me so I could take another drag. Soon we were both wired. Stick-thin Gibson, with his hollow cheekbones and tattooed arms dotted with track marks, started pacing around the room, pausing only to take another puff.

Crack gave me a short-lived euphoria followed immediately by an intense bout of depression. This made it even more addictive than the high, because the only thing that helped me get out of this depression was, of course, more crack. Once I was hooked, I just kept sinking. It didn't take long for the paranoia to kick in, maybe a couple of minutes. We each took a last pull on the pipe before the paranoia settled in, and we were both tweaking, just freaking out. The sirens were wailing. The walls were closing in. Someone would be coming through the door any minute. We needed to get the hell out of that room.

We quickly grabbed our stuff and bolted for the door. Just as we were leaving the motel, we ran straight into a local cop. He was clearly in no mood for bullshit. “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” he asked us in a thick, cartoonishly Southern drawl.

“We're lost,” I told him. “We're looking for the bus stop.” I don't know how we fooled him. Our eyes were bulging like crazy, and we were jittery, fidgeting like mad, and talking nonstop.

“Don't move,” the cop told us. “Wait here.” He went to run our names, and we stood there freaking out until he came back empty. If we had been in Fort Lauderdale, we would've been in handcuffs in the back of the squad car. Instead he told us, “You guys have to get out of here now.” Then he kindly gave us directions to the city bus, which dropped us off right at our hotel.

By the time we were back in our hotel room, we already wanted more. I called Dan, who'd encouraged us to come to Orlando in the first place. “We've got cash,” I told him. “Get us as many bags of dope as you can.”

“These are big fucking bags,” he cautioned.

“Fuck that,” I told him. “Just bring me the mother lode.”

Dan pulled up in front of our hotel soon after. Stocky, handsome, and covered in ink, Dan didn't look like an addict, but he'd been a fuck-up for as long as I'd known him.

Gibson and I jumped into Dan's car and drove with him to his apartment. His girlfriend Natasha answered the door wearing a tight tank top over a black bra with a broken strap and blue shorts. She was friendly but awkward. “Hi,” she said distractedly while rummaging in her bag for cigarettes. The apartment had old Formica cabinets, cheap plastic flooring, and shag carpeting that looked like it was out of a 1970s porn flick. The dirty white walls were chipping from top to bottom, and cracks in the windows were covered over with pieces of cardboard and Scotch tape. Outside, it was ninety-five and sunny, but inside the shades were drawn and it might as well have been midnight.

Dan grabbed our money and split to meet the dealer, returning an hour later with the dope in hand. Gibson, Natasha, and I sat around a wobbly bridge table with our fingers tapping, legs twitching, and eyes darting in every direction. We were jonesing out of our fucking minds. Dan tossed the bags on the table, and on cue Natasha bit off the end of an unlit cigarette and pulled out the filter.

Heroin isn't like coke or meth. You can't just inject it. First, it has to dissolve in water. In unison the four of us bit open our bags, tasted the heroin, gagged, and then emptied it into a spoon. Then we drew water into the syringes, filled the spoons until the heroin drowned, and lit a match. When I was on the streets and didn't have a spoon or fresh water, I used water from a puddle or a public toilet. Once little bubbles started forming in the cooker, we each took a piece of a cigarette filter and stuck it in the liquid, careful to steady our spoons with one hand while guiding the tips of the needles into the filter with the other. Once our syringes were filled, we turned them upside down so the air bubbles would float to the top, and then we pushed the plungers to remove any lingering bubbles and to get the dope as close to the tips of the needles as possible.

Now it was time to find a good vein. This can be a problem if you've been using for a while. I knew some guys whose arms got so fucked up that they'd shoot right into the jugular. By then I was a vein expert. I made contact, watched my blood snake into the syringe, and pulled the trigger. A surge of hot liquid quickly moved up my arm. My body tingled, and I felt a spike of adrenaline that consumed my brain in a single bite. There's no mistake when the rush hits. It's like a massive orgasm, only better. All my tension melted away, and I spent the next several hours in a warm, cozy state. Every need or desire seemed fulfilled.

Dan, Natasha, and Gibson each did one bag, but I insisted on doing two. I was voracious. But before I could finish shooting the second bag, everything suddenly faded to black.

As my eyes slowly opened—I don't know how much later—faint rays of light from a sputtering bulb came into view. The sound of water dripping from the broken showerhead echoed in my ears. Sights and sounds are always magnified when you come to after falling out. It's like turning on a light switch. I never had any concept of time when I was high. It felt like I'd been out for hours, but it had probably only been a few minutes.

It took a while for my eyes to recognize where I was: lying on a cold bathroom floor, wet, and naked except for my underwear. My left leg was draped over the bathtub. I had no idea how I'd gotten there or why I couldn't move. The left side of my face was swollen and throbbing. Pus was oozing from an abscess on my left forearm. But I was preoccupied with a thick layer of dried blood caked to my right hand. I tried rubbing it off, and a shooting pain shot up my arm.

Eventually I peeled my body off the floor and placed my hand on the wall to steady myself. I stood there looking at myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyes were bloodshot and teary, so dilated they looked like they had no pupils. My gaunt, almost skeletal face had a dull, grayish hue. I didn't recognize that reflection as myself at all.

As I stumbled out of the bathroom I saw Natasha pacing around the room. “What are we gonna do?” she asked Dan. “I think he's fucking dead.” Gibson was slumped on the couch, fucked up out of his mind. Surrounding Gibson's bare feet were broken pieces of the coffee table. Slowly I put it all together: I must have taken a header on the coffee table as I'd fallen out, and then Dan and Natasha must have stripped off my clothes and tossed me into the shower, trying to get me to come to.

When Dan and Natasha saw me standing there, Natasha quickly rushed over and gave me a hug. Then she and Dan started wrapping me in a towel. “Guys, I'm good,” I told them. As soon as Dan saw that I was indeed okay, he started in with a lecture. “I told you the bags we get in Fort Lauderdale aren't anything like these. You've gotta watch your shit.”

I didn't pay much attention, even when Natasha told me that I had stopped breathing and started turning blue. I knew falling out happened all the time; it was a junkie occupational hazard. I was more concerned with the fact that I didn't get any rush this go-round. There was no relief, no warm feeling, nothing. The pain, fear, tension, and anxiety I'd been running from my whole life were right there staring me in the face. “Where's the rest of the dope?” I asked. “I'm ready to go again.”

Dan drove Gibson and me back to the hotel, and we spent the next few hours on a dope and crack bender. This time Gibson fell out. He turned blue, and his pulse slowed to a crawl, but I walked him around the room and slapped him across the face until he came to. Then we were ready to go at it again.

By morning we were out of crack again and tweaking out as we chain-smoked cigarettes and paced back and forth, talking a mile a minute. We were also horny as hell, a side effect of the crack. Crack is like sex, but without actually having sex. We started scouring the phone book, looking for hookers, with the singular focus of two crackheads. After a while we got in touch with one chick who told us that she was into some pretty wild shit. “Come over now,” I told her.