REGGAE REGGAE SAUCE

The House That Crack Built

‘Everyone’s on drugs’. I want to say that. It’s a very strong opener. It’s not true though. There are people out there who don’t take drugs; people who don’t indulge in obsessive, compulsive, substance abuse. So I’m told, anyway. But for the rest of us - what a calamity. Whether it’s sugar, Prozac, Heroin, caffeine, cannabis, nicotine, or even those who think they’re not on drugs, not realizing that by not eating, or eating too much, or how they fuck and fuck and fuck and fuck, or they shop and shop, maybe they fight? It’s the long route to get the drugs. Through excessive, obsessive, and compulsive behavior they generate their own combinations of serotonin, dopamine, adrenalin - home-brew cocktails. They’re still self-medicating, which is a fashionable way of saying they’re doing anything, something, obsessing, dreaming, desiring - anything but simply sitting there and being themselves. Self-medicating is anything that we do to avoid that most terrifying - and virtually prohibited - of all human situations - doing nothing.

I know that’s not much of a revelation. The frankly psychotic solutions of treatment centers - bred from the womb of modern psychiatry - ‘addiction’, and what that means is now part of the general consciousness, part of the doxa. I’d guess half the developed world could tell you step one of Narcotics Anonymous, and half of those wouldn’t know the origin. It’s an absolute swerve that people don’t know step two mind you, because it escalates quickly - by step two, God’s gonna help you. Wow! A calamity indeed. The crackpot ‘disease theory of addiction’ not only makes no sense whatsoever, it also provides a handy - and in no way helpful - excuse for some of the most nasty bastards you’ve ever met: “I feel a lot of guilt about my behavior in active addiction”, “Alan, it’s your disease that made you sucker punch your grandma in the face to steal her wedding ring. That’s the disease of addiction.” Is it fuck! Alan is a nasty bastard, and until he realizes that cuffing his grandma to steal her wedding ring was a choice, like all his drug use and associated behaviors, he doesn’t stand a chance of getting off the stuff. If he doesn’t understand it’s all about choice, how can he choose not to do it?

Everyone here’s on drugs. That’s for sure. It’s a Crack house, which kind of gives the game away. Their hungry-ghost eyes, tattered and stench-heavy clothing, the pulsating aura of absolute desperation emanating from the group in a almost statically charged cloud of grinding teeth, jangled expressions and twitching limbs; everyone here is on drugs. And everyone here is waiting for more. That’s how we got to sitting around this Rastafarian, who’s squatting in the middle of our circle of need, curling out a shit, while he mumbles about us being a bunch of ‘stupid wasters’. ‘White trash’ was in there too, between the straining, incomprehensible patois, more grunting and more shit that dropped from the gaping hole (judging by the girth of the plop) of his naked arse and onto the Sunday supplement below, where the glossy, plasticized face of Television’s Philip Schofield’s received it all with an end of history kind of smile. He grunts his last grunt. The Rasta, not Television’s Philip Schofield. He’s done shitting. “Yuh bunch a fools, luk at yuh watcyh mi ave a shit! Mi cud probably feed mi shit tuh yuh an yuh wudda still waitfi di Crack. Disgusting people.”

It’s not the best marketing. But Crack is beyond marketing. Crack is beyond Crack. I have a friend who loves/hates it so much he pukes in anticipation of smoking it. Crack was a drug waiting to happen. Well, an effect waiting for a marketplace to happen. A Marketplace of people so bereft of connection, so void of commitment, so atomized and alone; an effect only those who under the superficial and wafer thin personality they trot around as ‘self’ have absolutely nothing. Hollow, broken, trauma-laden, and self-hating consumers. Crack would not have taken hold in any other historical hour. It needed people of this type - and a lot of them - combined with a disposable, immediate, and artificial culture - and when those two societal forces crossed, upon that nexus it seized, and so here we are, part of the crack explosion, watching a Rastafarian wipe his arse on the sports pages and wondering how much longer we’re going to have to take his shit until he serves up the goods, so we can take it, and for a few short minutes inhabit a space where, even though the stench of his well digested jerk-chicken is thick in the air, and through the miasma we can still see his hateful eyes, judging us as we consume his product, we simply no longer care, about him, or anything. We no longer know what it is to care. We no longer know what it is to be.

Alas that moment is still some time away. I know that because it always is. We’ve all been here for at least two hours, the six of us Crack-heads. There were three already here when I arrived. I’ve no idea how long they’d been waiting, and two arrived after me. There’s an odd but intentional silence as we all consider the still steaming logs in the puddle of still steaming piss that has become some kind of Crack-appropriate totem around which we all gather. And time goes slowly by.

You see we’ve all already been smoking Crack for years, months, weeks, or at least the day. And once you’ve started, there’s nothing you can do to treat the chasm of emptiness left in the wake of a Crack hit - except take more. And as I notice light through the scratches in the black painted windows, I realize the sun is coming up, a new day is starting. Normal people are waking up and getting on with their lives. And I’m here, doing this. Again. And I don’t even bother telling myself it’ll be the last time any more because I know it won’t. Unless I die, which happens. It’s quite demanding on the heart is Crack. Ho-Hum.

Nothing works quite like Crack. Except injecting Cocaine, of course, which works exactly like Crack. That’s why Crack was invented. Cocaine Hydrochloride (‘Coke’, ‘Bugle’, ‘Charlie’, Nose Candy’) first isolated from the leaves of the South American Coca Plant in the 1850s, was invented for injection. Water soluble, easily prepared, and boom!, the global medical scene never looked back. But for recreational purposes, it’s quite a leap from smoking a joint, or dropping acid, to sticking a needle in your vein. And rightly so, perhaps. If it’s got to the point where you’re shooting street drugs into your vein to have a Good Time™, you might want to reconsider your life choices. But sticking the stuff up your nose just doesn’t cut it. Sure it does the trick to counteract the booze you’ve been filling yourself with in an attempt to numb your critical faculties and convince yourself whatever you’re doing is actually fun. And yes, it will give you a jolt of energy and confidence. But if you need Cocaine for confidence, it’s unlikely you’ll know what to do with the confidence it gives you, which is why people who’ve been snorting Cocaine talk endless nonsense, albeit, with confidence, but that only makes it more nauseating. Then someone worked out how to smoke the stuff. How to get enough into your body in one go to actually feel like God himself has kicked you up the metaphysical arse. You simply had to remove the hydrochloride salt from the Cocaine base, and bingo! Rather than seizing up and not burning (like Cocaine hydrochloride does), you’ve produced a rock that melts like wax, onto a pile of ash or wire gauze and actually has about the same bioavailability and speed of absorption as injecting Cocaine hydrochloride. And nothing would be the same again. It used to be called ‘Freebase Cocaine’, since you’ve freed the base Cocaine from the hydrochloride salt. And had a fair impact on 70s American ghettos. But it wasn’t until the 80s, when the time was right - nay, primed - for such a drug, when the necessary breakdowns in social relations, when the atomized, lonely, broken, and disposable lives of people would actually find some solace in something so brutal and brutalizing, so hideous and so hideously delicious, that it would actually start to leave its mark on the Western World.

And get this - Crack devastated the Heroin scene. What a tickle! Another calamity. You’ve got to go some to take something like the already grotesque, miserable, and wretched world of the junkie - and make it worse. Yet Crack managed it. Junkies would once look out for each other - sort of. They’d help you out if you were sick - sometimes. They’d even lend you a few quid if you needed it - occasionally. There’s a joke among junkies - just the one - “What’s the difference between a Heroin addict and a Crack addict? They’ll both steal your wallet but the Heroin addict will help you look for it afterwards.” Oh, how we laughed.

But when those rocks came on the scene, the Crack avalanche, tumbling down the mountain and finding the dirty hands of their new Sisyphean slaves, junkies took to them like ugly ducklings to murky water; Crack being one of the few - perhaps the only thing - strong enough to penetrate the somnambulist haze of junk life, it was a novelty and perhaps a nostalgia of sorts they simply couldn’t resist, but at ten quid a pop, it was suddenly each man for himself.

And so we wait, and the noise of vehicles passing outside increases as Tuesday morning in the real world gets into gear, or is it Wednesday? But due to these ridiculous power games, and other, weirder, obnoxious behaviors, the silent majority here still suffer; who knows how long it’s going to be before he serves us? He mumbled something about it being delivered but we all know it’s already here. You don’t say that though. He’d love to humiliate us further. Anyone who shits in his own front room for your displeasure needs only the slightest excuse to pull out his knife and make of you a gibbering, crying, wreck for the fun of it. We all know it, we’ve all seen it before. And although that alone would be bearable, it’s only a lizard-brain reaction to a physical threat, after all, the real issue is him chucking you out, Crackless. And it’s not like anyone else is serving at this time of day, because if they were, you wouldn’t be here, that’s for sure. So, we just sit and wait and wait and wait. “Yuh fools wud miss yuh mother's funeral tuh sit here waiting fi di white. Yuh fucking animals.”

Yet remarkably, against all the odds, someone breaks. A girl called Anna, who has left her baby alone in her flat and can no longer take the guilt. Impressive. She stands up, and the whole room seems to shudder at the sheer impossibility of something like this - or anything not curated by ‘Daddy Ras’ (yep, that’s what this dreadlocked and silver track-suited idiot calls himself) actually happening. “Daddy Ras, I’ve got to go, I’ve left my baby alone and I have to go look after her, she’ll be waking up now.” Wow! Eye-contact is made between the rest of us. Not just because we don’t know what the fuck is about to happen, but maybe - I like to think - just maybe Anna has shown us we don’t need to be here, that there’s things in life bigger than our harrowing, torturous, dependence. It’s tense for a moment, but true to form, he rubs salt in the wound of our already belittled lives by putting his hand in his pocket and bringing out a bag of about one-hundred rocks. What. A. Cunt.

“Wah mek yuh neva sey earlier? Mi tink yuh did all just spending time here jammin wid Daddy Ras an ting?” He opens his jewelers scales on the table and adjusts the wheels on the legs to balance the two inbuilt spirit-levels. When you’re dealing in 0.1 of a gram, you need to get it right. For his benefit, not ours. We don’t even get to see the LCD display, which is probably, precisely, 0.02g under what it should be. Suddenly, everyone comes to life. “Can you do me five, Daddy Ras?”, “I only want two” etc., and the sound of ten pound notes being pulled from pockets and straightened out, fills the air. Pipes with ash already waiting for the rocks are picked up as cling-film is unwrapped from rocks at a remarkable and well practiced speed. Flint lighters strike, gas ignites, crack melts, lungs inhale, the medical smell of base cocaine fills the room as humans hold their breath for as long as possible, ensuring they get every possible bit of that chemical into their lungs, into their blood, and saturating their brains. I can almost hear the stuff binding to dopamine transporters, causing it to accumulate and turn the pleasure/reward signal up to maximum. I place a rock on my pipe, I put the flame to the rock and there, just three inches in front of my eyes watch it melt into the ash. I use the bottom of my lighter to cover the bowl of my little shot pipe - as did everyone else - to stop the rest of the rock burning while I hold the smoke in my lungs. I exhale, and immediately light up the remains on the pipe, and as I inhale, everything. Becomes. Nothing. And. Nothing. Becomes. Everything.

Until the door flies off it’s hinges and police storm the joint. Now. Wait. I had wondered why the bloke who was sitting opposite me hadn’t loaded his pipe. Everyone else had, like there was no tomorrow, like there was no time left at all. But not him. And I’ve never seen him before. Then to see an armed officer tread straight into the shit and do a full splits, shit-slide across the newspapers and linoleum floor beneath, hands in shit as he tries to steady himself and stand up as armed officers wave guns about like it’s a fucking war zone. As for Daddy Ras, he’s already cuffed and controlled. ‘What a calamity!” I say.

They take our names, checking for any outstanding warrants. They search us for drugs, but any we hadn’t already smoked were floored in the melee, now just part of the case against Daddy Ras, or Glen Bandara as I knew him at school, the shy, but well spoken, comic reading, computer-game type kid with a white mother and Sri Lankan father. And as I watch some faceless copper wiping shit from the back of his leg and elbows, there’s not so much chatting like dis coming from mi bredren Glen. Just the rest of us being let out into the eye-gouging sunlight, and a man looking at about seven years banged-up saying “Officers, is there any way we can do some kind of deal, I can provide information?”

The End

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