by Luke Davies
I picked up my pocket phone book. I opened it at ABC. I ran my finger down the page. Greg Anderson. Who the fuck is Greg Anderson? As I began to concentrate on the new task at hand, I tuned out of Candy’s lost battle.
The last thing I remember her saying was, “Listen, we’ll come around and pick up your washing machine.”
But Colin drew the line. Colin had more dignity than that.
About household appliances, at least.
FREEBASING
Colin was a freak occurrence. I mean, the public phone, the way it all happened: the odds were remote. Still, when you open yourself to the possibility of weird money or quick money, it’s bound to happen every now and again. That’s how we got into Tucker’s coke deal.
There was a time when cocaine was a drug I liked. I was young and full of beans. I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, and selling lots of hash and pot.
The money began to roll in. The amounts I was dealing got bigger and bigger. I was like a small business, expanding from the ground up. The kind of thing the government would have been proud of. It was a vibrant, golden time, full of excitement and unlimited opportunity. There wasn’t a single sign on the horizon of imminent downturn.
As I started doing bigger amounts of grass, I started making connections with people who were older and better-traveled down the drug path. Cocaine appeared, and before long I was buying it by the ounce and selling by the gram. Along the way I learned to freebase. It was a necessary business practice. If you weigh a given amount of cocaine before and after turning it to base, you can work out its purity.
Eventually things got out of hand, as they do with the yip-yap drugs. I succumbed a little too much to the unstoppable madness of freebasing and ended up owing a couple of people a lot of money. But that was a few years earlier, and Candy hadn’t been in the picture then.
With Candy and me, hammer was the all-consuming thing. We were both firmly of the opinion that cocaine was a serious pussy drug, or at least among people silly enough to snort it. Freebasing, of course—crack, as it was coming to be known by the time I met Candy—was a different matter. A very fucked-up way of life, for those who like their pleasure hard and fast and endlessly repeated rather than our way, hard and slow and endless. A fucked-up way to fuck up.
But a lot of people liked coke, and there was market value in that.
Candy and I looked bad enough that yuppies wanting to rough it for a while in coke dealing could believe we had some cred; but not so fucked-up and tattooed and toothless that they didn’t trust us.
I never actively looked for cocaine business, but occasionally something would pop up that warranted some middle-manning. Some shifty coke brokering.
Tucker was a muso who sometimes bought our smack. He was one of those types who had been the drummer for Dragon or John Farnham, some shit like that, fifteen years earlier, and was stupid enough to boast about it.
Tucker was like a gun for hire at cheesy club gigs now. Once, I’d delivered some dope to him at the Starlight Club. The band was dressed in frayed but matching baby-blue tuxedos with flared trousers. Tucker was listlessly attacking his drum kit to a rather haunting version of “Girl from Ipanema” as boozy seniors bored with bingo stared into their drinks. I guess I would want some heroin too, under such circumstances. But he was a little sad, the way he hadn’t had a habit in ten years and tried to hold things together in that pathetic I’m-not-on-methadone-but-I’m-not-going-to-let-things-fuck-up way.
Anyway, there was some big pie he had his fingers in. Or maybe not so big, but big enough for us. Ten ounces of coke at a good price, and everyone could make a little cash. I knew a keen buyer, through O’Brien, and one thing led to another. But everything was subject to the purity of the coke. And Tucker, who had freebased before but didn’t actually know how to cook it up, wanted me to be the tester.
He also wanted to use our warehouse. Fuck it, we couldn’t say no to a quick cash injection. It was worth a thousand bucks, just to be there and test the coke. Tucker was pretty nervous. There was more in it for him. He even came around to the warehouse earlier in the day. He swept and dusted and put flowers in a vase.
I didn’t like the two guys selling it, but then those coke and heroin worlds didn’t intersect a great deal, not down at our level. The buyer was some film guy, some pansy fucking producer or something, and I felt sorry for him, because he was extremely nervous and not doing a good job of hiding it.
He brought his girlfriend along, like he was confident and casual and did this kind of thing all the time. But I could see the way saliva, what little of it there was, kept sticking in his throat. And the way he licked his lips, and the way his voice came out croaky or high-pitched a few times. It reminded me of what happened to my own voice and my saliva whenever I got arrested.
So there was me and Candy and the two Richmond gangsters (semi-gangsters, at least) and Film Boy and his babe (he’d met her when she was the talent in a yogurt commercial he shot) and Tucker, who was frantically introducing everyone and cracking dumb jokes which are not worth recalling.
The scene was not unpleasant but it was not really relaxed either. We all just wanted to get the deal done and get back to our normal lives: Candy and I to hitting up smack; the semi-gangsters to extorting money from cheesy nightclubs or whatever they did; Film Boy and Babe to showing off to all their filmic friends and learning how to turn a potential profit into a disastrous septum-corroding loss; and Tucker, king for just an evening, to being the sad ferret he was.
Because I was testing the dope, I was this kind of neutral link who both sides were looking to for assurance. Film Boy, in particular, was relying on me to give the okay.
Everyone sat down and Semi-Gangster One pulled out the bag and plonked it on the table. Film Boy looked at me like I was going to tell him how pure it was just by looking at it. He had no fucking idea.
“Go ahead, it’s your deal,” I said. “Check it out.” I was giving him a heavy prompt. I had to help the poor bastard out.
He reached over and took the bag. He dipped his finger in and tasted it on his tongue and teeth.
“Tastes all right,” he said. “Let’s have a line.”
He pulled a razor blade from his pocket and scooped out a couple of mounds. He laid out seven thick lines on a mirror. He rolled up a fifty-dollar note and snorted a line. Then he passed the mirror around. It was really just a ritual of politeness. Probably only Babe was genuinely excited, in a positive sense. As opposed to edgy, like the rest of us.
The coke tasted all right on my gums. I woofed down the snort. I hated that jerky little nyang-nyang thing it did in your brain. Anyway, it had been so long since anything had gone up through my nose, I didn’t really know if this batch was any good or not. What the fuck was a snort supposed to do?
Snorting was silly when you were about to buy ten ounces. The base test was the only way to go.
The conversation sped up for thirty seconds, as it does when people are snorting, and everyone seemed to be speaking at once. Film Boy was weighing the coke on his brand-new electronic scales and being a real suck about how good it seemed. The semi-gangsters were relaxing a little and lapping it all up. Tucker was agreeing with everything everyone said. Candy just sat there smiling.
I really wanted these people out of my house.
“Let’s get testing,” I suggested.
We all moved over to the far corner of the warehouse, where there was a sink and a stove, a space that vaguely resembled a kitchen. We sat around the table. There weren’t enough chairs. Film Boy perched on a milk crate so that only his head was visible above the table. He probably felt as awkward as he looked.
I’d gone out and bought a little glass pipe from a bong shop and some gauze from the hardware store. I’d made myself a good-looking base pipe. No use wasting the test rock.
I set up my diamond scales. Everyone watched the process. There were some nice rocks in the bag but basically it had been powdered pretty well, and it’
s the powder that you want to test from, because that’s where the sugar will be.
I dug deep into the bag with a teaspoon and stirred it around. I pulled out a few small amounts from different parts, what I thought was a representative sample. I weighed out exactly a gram.
I poured a couple of teaspoons of water into a little Master Foods spice jar, which earlier in the day had contained oregano. I’d cleaned it and removed the label. I tapped the cocaine into the jar and swilled it around. The water went a little cloudy but it didn’t look too bad.
I filled a frying pan with an inch of water and put it on the stove, scooped out about half a gram of bicarbonate of soda and added that to the mix in the Master Foods jar. If the coke was any good, I wouldn’t need much more bicarb than that.
When the water in the frying pan started to boil, I stood at the stove with the jar and said, “Okay, let’s see how we go.”
I screwed the lid on tight to the little jar and dropped a teaspoon into the frying pan, with the underneath of the spoon facing up. I lowered the jar into the water, resting the bottom of the jar on the mound of the teaspoon, to conduct heat away from the jar and along the teaspoon. The last thing we wanted was an exploding base test.
I swirled the solution and it quickly went clear in the heat. I pulled the jar out and untightened the lid for a second, to release the pressure. Then I lowered the jar back into the frying pan.
For about thirty seconds the solution stayed clear, and then a film of oil began to appear on the surface. The cocaine hydrochloride—a salt that dissolved readily in the blood vessels of the mucous membrane—was now becoming pure cocaine base, or freebase, or candy rock, or crack. The bicarb was reacting with the hydrochloride, and the cocaine was being separated from the other diluents.
As the layer of oil thickened, it became too heavy to support its own weight and began to form an almost perfect sphere. As I shook the jar gently, the oil drop fell to the bottom of the jar, where it bounced and wobbled.
More balls of oil formed, and dangled, and fell to the bottom of the jar, until the main ball grew larger and larger and there was no more oil on the surface.
“Well, it’s definitely coke,” I joked. I knew now the deal would go through. “I think it’s okay too.”
I’m sure Film Boy’s shoulders loosened up a little in relief.
When I was certain I’d extracted all the coke, I turned the stove off, moved over to the kitchen sink, and turned on the cold tap. I flicked some water on the jar to cool down the glass. Then, with the jar tilted sideways, I gradually moved it under the flow of the cold water. As the gray oil began to harden, it turned an off-white color. This was the right color, this or a dirty yellow gray; pink suggested the presence of procaine or Xylocaine or some other inferior substitute.
One second the oil was wobbling around, the next it was beginning to lift off the bottom of the jar as I shook it gently, and the next it was a hard white rock tinkling and pinging as it hit the glass. I held the jar up to the room and smiled.
“Tinkle tinkle! We have lift-off.”
“So is it good?” Film Boy asked.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll know exactly how good when I dry it and weigh it.”
The rock was completely solid now. I tipped out the water and dropped the rock into the palm of my hand. I sat down at the table and placed it on a paper towel, bouncing it around to dry it.
When I could hold the rock without getting any moisture on my fingers, I knew it was about as dry as it was going to get. I dropped it onto the diamond scales. It weighed .73 grams.
“There you go,” I said as I fine-tuned the milligram arm. “Your cocaine is seventy-three percent pure. That’s my job done. Apart from beam me up, Scotty.”
Film Boy nodded his head like he was trying to ponder his options.
“Seventy-three, eh? That’s a pretty heavy step-on.”
He was talking through his arse and he was bluffing some slick Greek boys who, while not out-and-out frightening, were tougher than he was. I myself was pretty impressed they’d done this well. I’d seen—and sold—a whole lot worse than seventy-three.
“Listen, seventy-three’s okay,” I said. “I’ve never seen a return better than ninety, ninety-one, and that was rocks. You’re doing okay. Just don’t step on it any more and you’ve got a good product.”
I was a fucking facilitator. I should have been in industrial relations.
“You’ve got a deal,” Film Boy said, and the semi-gangsters grinned, but still in character, and everyone shook hands. Tucker was smiling broadly. No wonder, I thought. Apart from his cash cut from Film Boy, he was probably all set to get a little bag as a prearranged cut from the semi-gangsters. The coke might have been eighty percent pure before that deal was made.
The semi-gangsters counted the money, which took a good while, but was not the kind of thing an outsider could really help with.
I cut the rock into smaller chunks with Film Boy’s blade. Candy and Film Boy and Babe had never based before, so we decided the experienced users would go first and they could watch and learn. I was pleased to be showing off an old and dormant skill.
Being MC, I was first diver off the block.
The pipe I’d bought was ostensibly a pipe for smoking buds. I’d filled the upturned end of the pipe—the end you light—with about twenty circular gauze filters, which I’d cut out painstakingly with nail scissors and pushed down until they were wedged tight.
I placed my little piece of rock on the topmost piece of gauze and clicked on the lighter. It was a model that didn’t need to be held down with the finger to keep the flame going. You could melt your thumb trying to freebase with a Bic disposable. I adjusted the flame until it shot out a good four inches, yellow at the tip, then blue closer in, and invisible just near the nozzle.
I held the blue part of the flame above the rock, close enough to heat but not touch. The surface of the rock began to turn to oil, which oozed down through the filters. When most of the rock was liquid or semiliquid, I took a deep breath and blew out, emptying my lungs as completely as I could.
At the point where I could exhale no more breath, I turned the flame onto the gauze filters, and at the same time put my mouth over the stem of the pipe and began to inhale. The freebase sizzled and the glass pipe filled with a thick curling smoke, which rapidly disappeared down the pipe and down my throat. The extraordinary thing about the sensation of freebasing was that, aside from all the other wacky things it did to your head, the cocaine acted as a local anesthetic on the throat, so you never felt any pain from inhaling so much hot smoke. Unlike, say, pulling hard on a bong full of really harsh pot.
I held the smoke in. For as long as possible. That roar of the blood vessels began, that luxurious and over-the-top pounding of the heart that I hadn’t felt in a couple of years. My head was going boom boom boom. This was buffaloes and death compared to snorting’s aggravating fleas. A goddamn stampede, an intrabody, extrabody, out-of-body experience.
“Ffffffffhew!”
I blew the smoke out and sat stock-still, staring at a spot on the table, hoping my head wouldn’t explode. About thirty seconds later I felt I could begin to talk. “Jesus,” was what I said. Strange, the expressions we use.
It was a good rush, freebasing, just as blasting coke was okay too. But that’s all it was, all rush and no tail, and you wanted it all the time (I mean all the time, every two minutes; I could get by for a good four hours without heroin, eight in an emergency), and it made you feel real juddery and jumpy and, ultimately, just plain nervous. Also, cocaine made dickheads into bigger, louder dickheads.
The pipe did the rounds. Everyone was pretty happy, especially the novices, though Film Boy got his first pipe wrong breathing out when he should have sucked, and blew his melting rock and a few of the gauze filters all over the kitchen. We gave him a second go, of course. A born goose, that one. Someone should have said to him, early in the game, “Film Boy, don’t even think about dealing.
”
Candy and I got our thousand bucks and said good-bye to everyone, and it was a good feeling to close the door. We stood in the silence for a moment and hugged, pleased with the ease of the earn. In the middle of hugging I realized that there was this other stuff, that I loved Candy and felt some enormous warmth, for her, for us, for the situation, for the way we were in it together, for better or for worse. Then we rang Lester and organized to meet him. To go get some real drugs. To get rid of these jitters from the coke. To come home and get a big one on board.
I DO
We thought a wedding would fix us. We thought we would go through the motions of normality and then normality would arrive for real.
We knew that we were in it forever. When we banged up a warm hit of smack, our love seemed infinite. All that we knew then was the world of bliss, that clean, polar realm of narcosis where the liquid psyche resides. We were, as they say, as one. We’d found the secret glue that held all things together.
“I love you so fucking much, Candy.” There was no eloquence necessary beyond that delivered by heroin.
“You’re my beautiful boy,” she’d croak back, sometimes running her fingers through my hair.
We’d be lying on the couch in the warehouse, drifting in and out of conversation. In this state, the idea of marriage was a given, an absolute—the culmination of the momentum of deep love and loyalty.
But waking up sick, or waiting for dope, it was hard to feel anything other than awkward. Talk was kept at a frigid minimum. Eye contact was avoided. We chewed our nails and waited for phones to ring, for Lester or Kojak or someone with money. We couldn’t touch each other. We couldn’t help each other. It was like love went on hold.
Then when we hit up the dope at last, we’d fall into each other’s arms, and it was as if the terrible tension had never existed. In this way we were like dogs, who in the bliss of being patted forget completely the stress of being recently hit.
