Fresh Pack of Smokes

by Cass Blanchard

  Spanish Villa

  It was a cheap and raggedy apartment building but it was affordable and one day we were looking at a place there and I was very young and it was just my sisters and my mom and I was alone looking at one of the rooms when the landlord came up to me and put his hand around my throat and whispered, “I don’t believe you”—I was confused and did not tell anyone until many years later and I remember now the looks he would give me every time I saw him, when she had a question or whatever, which really wasn’t that often and today I’m pretty sure he had done things to children.

  Jail

  I was not prepared for the amount of waiting that occurs, I waited to be processed and waited to be transferred and waited in the wagon and waited in court and waited to eat and waited to be counted; everything slowed down to a set routine where time was measured, inmates were arrested for drugs and often their drug was heroin so unless they have methadone right away they get down sick and having a cellmate who is going through smack withdrawal sucks, my first cellmate managed to smuggle in crystal meth but she left after a couple days and I was glad cuz it’s not the greatest to be in close quarters with a person on meth; I was going to be transferred to accw since my security risk was minimum so I waited in the holding cell for the sheriffs to frisk me and then waited in the wagon to go to the facility—what followed was the basic routine in which everyone is bored so the dramatics are elevated, I was lucky I was only there for four months but I felt sorry for the women headed to federal, like this one woman facing twenty-five or another charged with giving a man hiv—after lunch I always worked out and in the evenings lifted weights, during the day I shot hoops but I spent most hours sitting in the gazebo smoking cigarettes; when I was waiting to be released it felt like time was creeping by, as if seconds were minutes and minutes were hours and the world just slowed right down.

  Camp Cupcake

  Detoxing in the cells, slowly the psychosis goes away but I was still sure there was someone in the toilet talking to me and I can definitely hear loud drips in the plumbing system, I swear my brain is swiss cheese; one good thing is in the North Van court cells they gave you McDonald’s for lunch and I like to put French fries in my burger and I get a kick out of the woman sheriff who looks like Santa Claus with a mullet but I keep quiet and listen to the noises; before the cells, before jail, there was a lonely kid who wanted to die, who wanted not to live and so I ended up inside and met characters larger than life, fucked up, like the prison guard who called me stupid cuz I dropped a piece of paper or Red who kept on entering the country illegally to see her kids or the mental woman whom everyone in jail hated or the two East Indian women who tortured someone, or so they say; accw is called “Camp Cupcake” cuz it’s so easy to do your time there plus it isn’t federal—federal is a whole different ball game—and all that estrogen in one place, women are fucking in the bathrooms and anywhere else they can try and take away the loneliness.

  It’s hard to explain what it’s like to have your freedom taken away, how scared you are, a world all its own, a whole different reality; I learned that if you act like a bitch, you’ll be treated as such.

  Women

  I would have to say that women are insidious, women play mind games and are turncoats and when they’re hardened, they’re more dangerous than men and have potential for violence and a dog’s ability to sniff out weaknesses, and women never forget, they’ll hold a grudge to the end of time, they are masters of psychological warfare and will enslave and hold hostage without shedding blood, these women are usually a bit older and have been hooked on narcotics for years and their entire lives revolve around using and dealing drugs, they will be your best friend until the money is gone and then they’ll be gone too, some are solid but it’s best not to make too many friends because in the end you’re nobody’s buddy.

  Dramatis Personae

  Suzy bullshitted the wrong bitch and had her orbital broken so she walks around looking like a piece of rotten meat and was lucky she didn’t end up in a coffin, she takes advantage of weak girls and tricks them into getting cuffed so they’re fucked and stuck while she licks her chops in the alley behind the Patricia Hotel in the freezing cold, digging her own hole; I watch her from Carl Rooms and realize I hope for her downfall, another one, I’ll call her Kay, bears scars from living day-to-day getting high and forgetting how to cry, she says anger grips her all the time, she lost people because of it, not really giving a shit, for a dense moment we meet and touch and I taste her, finger-fuck her senseless, until she stops trembling and though this is a brief fling, I’ll never forget Kay who down there she will always stay; Sunny tells me how heroin has stolen her emotions as she sticks the syringe in with ease, her mouth hanging open, she is a lifelong dope fiend, everything inside her is dead.

  Maple Ridge

  Somehow we ended up in Maple Ridge where we stayed for a week or so at this dude’s place and then went out for days hunting money for drugs while Kim got almost-daily Western Union money from her sugar daddy, our combined drug habits needed more cash so I did what she trained me to do and that was servicing men for money and I remember hustling on this block called North Road late at night and this one guy who I had a date with never picked up a girl before so he was nervous and generous with money, I could state any price and I have to admit I felt sorry for the bloke, he looked like he was going to piss himself, this block on North Road was dark and dangerous and the business was pretty good, I didn’t think too much about danger cuz if I did I would not be able to do this shit and if I was not able to do this shit then I would be punished and pressured to get back into it and it was guaranteed money which was the most important thing, it was like drugs were more important than my life, so this one dude picked me up and I actually preferred his company over Kayla’s and so I spent time with him, he was an okay guy but cuz of my misplaced sense of loyalty I called Kayla in front of him and he told me I sounded like I was afraid of her and he didn’t want to become part of it so I left and went back doing the same old bullshit; there was a crack house in Maple Ridge we frequented for a bit run by a scary dude named Dodd who was pretty decent to me and I met this woman there who hustled as well and she was disturbed by how young I was and that I was doing this shit and other people were often disturbed that Kayla, who supposedly loved me, would let me do something like sell myself to help feed our expensive habits, but in the end everything is all about money.

  Market and Metal

  On Hastings there’s a black market of sorts that goes on for a block where one can find things like steaks and porn and clothes, people have their shopping carts full of junk and dealers hustle the crowd, Glen and Kim and I used to drive a large old van around scrounging for food in the back lot of the Superstore and then selling it on the street, this block is crowded and when police walk the beat the crowd disperses fast like mice and then regroups, we also used our van to collect metal and sell it at the junkyard and if you collect enough you can get quite a bit of money, those old radiators are good to scrap, once a big truck went by and a chicken fell out and sat there in the middle of the road and for a minute I thought I was seeing things cuz it came out of nowhere and it was one of those poultry who can’t walk anymore and two seconds later a dude took the chicken, probably to sell it in Chinatown I don’t know, but I felt sorry for that chicken and I would have carried it to the spca but the man was quicker than me so that’s how it goes.

  The Drunk Tank

  It started with too much crack, soon I was hearing voices through the electrical lines and I followed their arguments for hours, time was non-existent and I ended up downtown in the rain shuffling along the curb, I was occupying a place in between realities and on one hand a man was trying to drag me into the alley and on the other hand a woman was annoyed because I was attracting too much heat and I was because the next thing I knew I was in St. Paul’s, the nurses wrapping me in blankets trying to warm me but I got scared cuz I didn’t know I had gone
to a hospital, all I knew was people were touching me and soon the nurse’s kindness turned to anger and she threw me out on the street; somehow I made it across the road and passed out on the flower bed outside 7-Eleven, the cops came and didn’t believe that my name was my name until they ran it through the system, I was put in the drunk tank with two tough women for an hour or so before they let me go and I went down the street to Princess and curled up between a pay phone and some stairs; I called my parents and waited for them to pick me up cuz they still helped me even during the times when I was truly screwed up.

  Shelter

  For a while Kayla and I stayed at a house with other drug addicts owned by an old man with a serious hoarding problem, one guy named Hal lived in the basement and spent most of his days watching the amc channel and there was a man who lived in the room beside him and who stunk like garbage and took bottles to the depot but I don’t remember his name, there was Sally on the main floor who was a drug dealer and rather dangerous and there was Ted who collected food found in the back lots of grocery stores and then sold it on Hastings, Kayla and I lived on the top floor in an attic-style room that had a bed and table and that was where we did drugs and all of us generally got along, I was mostly high, I don’t remember if we went to the North Van shelter first or the shelter by the hospital but I do know we met different people like the woman at the shelter with the two dogs or the guy in North Van who was addicted to Percocets or the few people who let us in at night, anyway we were trying to avoid sleeping on the streets which was something we sometimes did whenever we were between places, it was a situation where sleeping safely was a bonus so Kayla often stayed awake for a week at a time, either drunk or high, or blasted with Valium or often all three and I have to say I got worried when she was sleep deprived cuz she would smoke gigantic crack tokes which made me fear her heart would burst; once she gave Ted a huge toke and a couple minutes later barricaded the door cuz she thought bad people were coming to get us or when this young dude we hung out with for a while received a toke from Kayla and tore his shirt off or when she did it to me and I’d think we would be killed by men with knives—this constant need to be high became more important than having places to stay though we were often lucky enough to find somewhere to briefly inhabit until we fucked it up again.

  Perfume

  Walk down turn right and follow the odour of shit and piss behind Carnegie where low-level dealers and rats roughly the size of small cats scurry by the overflowing garbage dumpsters, some roaming addicts rip-roaring high and stuck in the hole in the wall scared of the blue cruisers and their rubber-glove searches, walk through the scary empty corridors of the Astoria Hotel, a place where bad things happen but nobody ever seems to be around, with dried blood stains on old mattresses infested with bed bugs, beside it the small liquor store where 24/7 alcoholics lurk while sipping Listerine, crack pipes burn lips so toxic that spiders appear out of nowhere and crawl all over skin and floors and pieces of Brillo get stuck in lungs; some twirl around in the alley demanding free cigarettes from passersby, some are on hands and knees picking at wax or sometimes it’s like snipers are in the buildings with trained guns and black helmets, smell the street, how it’s an entity unto itself like cold concrete vessels with dirty puddles and scary people who’ll fuck you over and fuck you up, that block-long street market with hustlers and dealers and scrapers and that smell that permeates the air; down here nothing is fair, it’s a circus with old ghosts walking the alleys as those predators tread lightly and silently behind the innocent.

  VGH

  Instead of pumping my stomach they make me drink a cup of charcoal as they realize the pills have formed a ball and will slowly turn my blood toxic so then I’m wheeled into the psych ward and spend a few hours sweating while my nose drips blood all over the bed and wall; I wake up with a bag of fluids hooked up to my arm and alone in a cell-like room with a grey metal toilet as the nurse watches me like a hawk; I broke into my family home and swallowed a bunch of Aspirin and like a chicken decided I didn’t want to die and so they came for me, in the hospital I went, the doctors act like they’ve seen this so many times before; the other patients are curious like a girl who thinks she’s pregnant with Jesus and the schizoid who follows me around while blushing which is kind of cute; I’m here in this ward for days and my mind turns to normal for a while and it’s scary, more scary than living on the edge, and as soon as I’m free from this ward I score and I get so fucking high that I know for sure there are dead people in the air ducts; I guess this attempt at suicide gave me a vacation from life for a bit and though I’ve hurt those who love me, I’m grateful for the pause.

  Stars

  Instead of calling the ambulance they dumped his body on someone’s lawn, my father had overdosed on heroin and his so-called friends were too afraid of the police to try and save his life and so the cops came to our house and because we were children they gave teddy bears to us, however I was asleep when the officers came so I woke up to my sister crying and she said he passed away and I thought he fell in a ditch, passing away like falling, and so I went to my mother who was in the shower crying and she told me he was dead and I understood; my memories are there but there are not so many of them and some of them I would rather not remember like the alcohol he was dependent on and the violence that came with it; he was troubled but he loved us, I look up at the sky and to me he is a lone star in the ever darkening cosmos.

  Part Two

  Varieties

  The four of them drove around the Woodbine in a white sedan looking for girls stupid enough to get in the vehicle with them while a man in a green van asked every girl if they do anal, I heard that a second Indo hid in the back; there were also semi trucks driven by truckers who regularly picked up chicks, then you have the cheap-ass taxi drivers who pick up on Campbell Street, cover the camera in their cars; these are some examples of men who vary but what they all have in common is that they are weak when you know how to reduce them to jelly; a lot of them are the same, some have the weirdest fantasies you would never know by looking at them, like this one guy loved the thought of a chick slurping up his bowl of cum, with a spoon of course, I didn’t do shit like that as I felt sick even thinking about it; there are a lot of trans sex workers down here as well like this six-foot-four black lady with long dreads and sharp high heels—she defiantly owned it—and men walking the block looking for boys to hook up with and guys driving around the block all over Hastings jerking off with no pants on, once this chick threw a rock at one of these voyeurs; this one man was deaf and mute and drove a special car to work with his special condition, I have to say at first I thought what the hell was I doing with someone like that but he was trying so hard to communicate it was pathetic in a kind of cute way—it is such an easy way to make fast cash—and having been hazed into it, it’s something that I did very simply and eventually without much emotion.

  Battles

  I am not a very good fighter, I’ve doled out a couple weak fists but I’ve mostly had my ass beat, I think the worst part of being kicked in the face is the back of your head slamming into the wall, and there is so much blood—you swallow the chunks like dark red liver; I was living in this place and one night the woman who lived below walked up the stairs and came into our room, she had been beaten to the point where it looked like someone poured a bucket of blood on her like I said, apparently she called someone a “goof,” you never call someone that unless you’re ready to fight, so I woke up in the worst way when someone was toying around with mace and accidently sprayed me in the face, I fell off the bed and slammed against the wall; the woman stuck a pipe in my mouth and gave me a hoot to forget that I couldn’t breathe, a sort of Band-Aid I guess; these are battles I wish I could forget but they stay like the scars on my body that I sometimes still pick at and open.

  Fear

  Many times when I smoked crack I felt a very specific kind of fear, it was like a good part of my high was this feeling of dread and
being scared that someone would kill me and this would go on until my high faded and then all I felt was longing for another toke and then it would come back and I would fear that I was being set up and that I was being surrounded, this conspiracy psychosis gave me a rush and I often hallucinated police lights on every vehicle driving by which didn’t make the paranoia any better and I would distrust anyone I was with or anyone who was around me and I would hide my pipe; when done right I smoked dope in the middle of the day walking down the street, I did this by using copper pipe fittings and one of those skinny hoses that I fastened on the pipe where I put the Brillo and I would put the hose up through my sleeve and the end of it just a little out of my collar where I could put my mouth on it easily, I would light the thing with a torch lighter while holding the pipe just out of my sleeve and when I was done I tucked it away; I did this after seeing Kayla do it and doing tokes like that gave me adrenaline and of course the insistent feeling that I was going to die or be killed by persons unknown and when I’m down again I think about how stupid it was that I was hooked on something that gave me so much fear as well as so much pleasure.

  Love I

  I thought it was love but really it was exploitation, it took me years to comprehend how much Kayla had damaged me and my soul and my sanity and especially my trust of other people—relationships that are based on drugs are never healthy, it’s like a black peach, it looks good on the outside but once you bite it, it’s all rotten on the inside; I went from being a partner to a cash cow to feed our drug habits and our desperation and rootlessness haunted us until there was no respect anymore, like a lone shoestring, the only thing that held us together was sex whether it was us making love or for men who paid me a lot of money for services—I remember the first time I ever turned a trick, I was nineteen and when a dealer asked for a blow job I said that I didn’t do that kind of stuff and of course behind my back he asks Kayla if I would do it for a substantial amount of crack, she didn’t ask me she told me and therefore I did it and that started an influx of dates. Once these exchanges began to be normal for us, the respect she had for me vanished and I was no longer a person but a means to get more money and drugs, violence came with it and it came slowly until she was head-butting me on the street or pulling my hair or scaring me with a hunting knife and I had to deal with her psychosis, which was unbearable; I am sure Kayla is cold inside, but she did make me feel warm and I loved her though I had every reason not to and I wonder now if she’s dead or alive and if she is alive what her life is like and then I get angry because why should I care.