Fresh Pack of Smokes

by Cass Blanchard

  Dial-a-Dope

  For a long time we used the dial-a-dope system instead of buying from hustlers on the street, it was a system that worked as it’s better to be inside and high and not outside getting paranoid from all the potential trouble, and of course the cops, so we called the dealer and either he came in through the back door or someone got in the car and drove around the block to do the deal, the dial-a-dope dealers we did business with were mostly young Asian men with slick cars but not so slick as to bring attention and the dope itself was good, not the nasty meth-like crap you get on the block and it weighed proper wrapped in plastic, over time you built business relationships with these dealers and maybe once in a while you could cuff dope and they’d trust you to pay it back but I hated owing anybody anything, I’d rather go without rock than owe money and owing money to people like them wasn’t smart, maybe on the street you could score pretty fast but there is always a risk of getting ripped off because that window of opportunity between the moment you have cash and the moment you get your dope is what goofs live for, so it was worth the wait for the dealers to take the time and drive to where you were and even though that wait can be torture, the moment you smoked that crack it was all good.

  Behaviour

  I learned how to fuck people over and take advantage of their feelings, like I managed to convince my friend to send me money, I got a couple hundred dollars off of this one couple and since sex work is all about squeezing money out of clients, I underwent an education in how to grind money off men in order to feed this habit that sucked the decency out of me, this habit that had thrown me into a dark and endless hole, I appealed to whatever was someone’s weaknesses like playing the young helpless girl, or the best blow job you’ll ever get for which I would receive a substantial tip, or straight out seducing passersby which is a lot easier than you think as I’ve done it countless times, or playing along with a fantasy like this guy who liked to be called “master” and who talked about his tiny penis with the utmost confidence, or after a date sometimes the man wants to hold hands while he drives me back; I was trained to get what I want from people and I was driven by selfishness in order to score drugs since that’s the point of it all anyway isn’t it, and I was surrounded by people who did the same damn thing over and over and who thrive off weakness, but before I was armed I was an object preyed upon by scare tactics and manipulation so I guess it’s a twisted version of paying it forward but I managed to do my time without getting into a fight in fact I had friends but jail doesn’t rehabilitate and soon after being released and rehabbed I was out again taking advantage of people and sometimes being taken advantage of myself.

  Pills, Booze and Weed

  Pills were something I usually didn’t do, instead it was Kayla who would take lots of Valium for days on end and I liked her on that more than on crack cuz she was less controlling and was nicer, I took a couple pills once to come down from a binge and I fell asleep while walking and ran into trees and stumbled in the middle of the road and I woke up standing and was surrounded by police who were in a couple cars and on foot, there must have been six of them but they let me go, during the times that I drank it was to go all the way, no sipping just chugging it down til I was down drunk and many times I blacked out and woke up in strange places but I preferred crack to alcohol cuz booze made me more vulnerable; weed was never really my thing but Kayla smoked it to level things in her head and she became so much more calm, I wished she would smoke weed every day but those days were becoming far and few between, I feel like I needed something to give me some sort of sensation whether it was the first smoke of the day or cheap wine or rock, there was a need in me to alter my consciousness as much as possible.

  Love II

  I was in love with crack cocaine, so close, warming me when I was cold, just me and my rock, the ultimate loneliness of holding my pipe in my fist and not caring if I die, not caring if I live this sad lie, the shit I would do to score these little white pebbles of cocaine just boggles my mind but fuck it was all worth it when I inhaled that smoke and the dope hit my brain; like a cat I had nine lives, I should have died so many times and I feel like I broke up with my best friend who was closer to me than my own folks; I whisper softly and drink clear moonshine to forget the pain of leaving this love behind.

  Don’t Worry it’s Only Psychosis

  They hide in vents in gates in fences in cars and right behind me this is madness this is insanity, the telephone poles talk to me and tell me to walk around them exactly three times, there are strange connections in a very scary Wonderland and I am a very sad Alice and I whisper it all goes down the drain; I walk more and see those two dumbbells on Gore Street, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, then it gets worse cuz I’m answering myself now, an entire conversation, and we are arguing about whether we’re being recorded because I can hear the playback.

  Streets and Avenues

  Kingsway was where we spent a lot of time, the street is so long so it’s never boring, for days I was on Joyce and Kingsway with Kayla making cash for drugs and since we didn’t have a place of our own we stayed up for days on end, sometimes we got separated and I made money just for me and smoked crack in the bushes and those times we weren’t together was always a relief but I blindly loved her and wanted her around cuz she protected me; there was a time Commercial Drive was rougher than it is now with addicts and criminals and gangs and for a short while I hung in the back alleys with a woman who introduced me to meth, I was so naive I bought her crack while I did crystal, on Kingsway there’s the Cassandra Hotel where we spent a couple days with a decent enough guy who never asked for anything in return and it was nice to be inside after spending a while on the street, for days we were stuck in Maple Ridge and I did my business on North Road where it was dark and scary, I did it because I didn’t care anymore what could happen to me on those roads; once we collected Kayla’s welfare check in Kits and spent the whole day walking through the alleys doing dope which made me paranoid we were going to get arrested while loitering in this nice neighbourhood; we were walking around on Main Street close to Mount Saint Joseph Hospital and in the alley we found two hundred dollars on the ground so fuck the sugar daddy we got a half ball of rock and some cigarettes and we continued roaming, later on I got to know skid row better and found that it was more convenient than other places as there was everything you wanted, you just had to have the money; I’ve been all over Vancouver and every one of these places has a seedy underbelly to get lost in.

  Love III

  Down here there are situations where parents and offspring both use narcotics, one woman would tell her son to turn around so he wouldn’t see her smoke rock and you could feel the shame radiating from her, and a mother and daughter lived down the hall from each other at Carl Rooms and regularly smoked crack together, both dealt together, both fought each other and both looked out for one another and before getting housing they lived in alleys and they have gone through things that are unbelievable and dark and I never knew how I felt about these families, like I couldn’t imagine doing drugs in front of my mom, even the thought of drinking in front of her makes me very uncomfortable, but it’s very easy to judge these women and to say how bad they are but only they know the reasons for their actions and why things turned out the way they did, it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.

  Food

  It’s very important to eat when you use a lot of drugs regularly, this was something I had trouble with as dope took away my appetite and I would go days without food and then I would vomit up the food when I did remember to eat like this one time I made myself eat a bowl of soup and a cup of milk and then I puked my guts out and soon after that I coughed up green bile because there was nothing in my stomach; one cannot starve in Vancouver as there are numerous places that give out free food and most people take advantage of these services but I became dope-simple and ignored the demands of my body and so I suffered when I finally tried to sleep as I twitched a lot and
hallucinated spiders in my hair, crawling all over my arms and it took a long time until I settled enough to slip into sleep and then I would be tormented by twisted dreams.

  Trips

  Behind the Patricia Hotel is an alley with a couple holes in the wall and smelling like chicken and for a half-hour I could not bring myself to walk away, I was stuck in that alley thinking that the army had snipers in the windows of the buildings lining that lane, I thought that the snipers had their crosshairs on me and if I moved I would get shot, I actually hallucinated the barrels of their guns pointing at me, damn I must have hid behind that hotel for hours, the alley behind the Carnegie is a sketchy place that smells like hell and is full of tweekers and big rats and sometimes cops on horses, with dealers wheeling and dealing, with the odd spark of violence, it’s so easy to get stuck in that place all day, all night with some getting jacked by cops and some getting shit-kicked for whatever offense and street-level dealers doing what they do, the block opposite Oppenheimer Park is a shitty little place with an alley parallel to it and it is full of small-time dealers practically in a line like a row of ducks hustling and twitching, the higher-level dealer named Fast supervised the business, he was a big dude you wouldn’t want to fuck with and woe to those who do; the alley off Abbott Street is another piece-of-crap place in the back of a club smelling like wet old shit piss and garbage and again one can get too rip-roaring high and become stuck in that lane for a substantial amount of time all paranoid about cops and getting busted by undercovers, do a hit and become unable to move, every which way is danger—real or imagined—that church on the corner of Gore and East Hastings is mostly full of men and winos hang out in front at the bus stop and cops are there on a regular basis for whatever reason and those drunks sit there and watch the street opposite them where deals are made and drama goes down like a fucked-up reality show, they don’t even need a tv.

  Love IV

  I was smoking heroin in the alley behind the Sunwest Hotel and it took me on a bender as me and this chick rode around in a van with a Russian driver going somewhere I don’t know, I must have looked pitiful cuz a guy drove by and stopped to give me twenty bucks, he saw me massaging my blistered feet, and somehow I ended up in this woman’s place drinking beer and smoking crack but I felt so bad cuz I was nodding out the whole time and I thought that was pretty rude as I passed out on her couch and proceeded to have the weirdest, most fucked-up dreams of my life, then I was suddenly awoken and the whole thing began again, my body was so tired and my mind was like a broken toaster—this heroin was a roller coaster, it felt so good and it was even better if you put a little crack on the pipe, it was like coming in and out of reality and I only remember bits and pieces of that night and how it was so easy to fall in love with smack.

  Hallucinate

  Many times I experienced cocaine psychosis in which I would hallucinate spiders and black worms—I dreaded it so much—spiders as big as tarantulas would crawl all over my arms and worms would twist around in my hair, I could feel them coming out of my pores and my body would shiver and twitch; on the first days of detox I would go through this terrible experience and again when I had to sleep after a bender, I would hallucinate when I took a massive hit of crack too like when I saw a man walking around with an axe and I got so scared, I freaked out the people I was with, right the fuck out, or I would see faces coming out of the shadows and snakes slithering in my pipe and the only thing that took the edge off all these hallucinations was if I got really drunk; I would always see these spiders after staying up for days using and not eating or drinking as much as I wanted, it was my body’s way of telling me to stop or else I would lose my sanity and fuck man sometimes I think I did.

  Copper

  With the angle of her movements she cuts me to the quick, I smell my blood, maybe I’ll find the iron in her body, metal on my tongue—copper tastes like this—each beat beating my heart, I want to bite her thigh to feel alive and to trace the track marks that scare me so much—in all probability she’ll die soon living this life, some anonymous tragedy where no one cares.

  Love V

  You are like an angel from God Tecia said as I do what few did which was to sit and listen to her story between hits of the crack pipe, sitting in the same spot for hours she says she loves me and that God sent me to her and the only thing I do is shut the fuck up and listen to her heartbreaking stories like how her son shot her brother in the head or how her boyfriend stabbed her with a push stick and smacks her around or how she was homeless and smoked rock with her daughter; I don’t know why but this happened to me a lot, I would just listen and these women would pour their hearts out, every time I relapsed I would pop in on the crying woman and her daughter, I was guaranteed to stay safe and not get beaten up or robbed and Tecia would talk to me about her many lives, so the downside of quitting drugs is that I have to quit everyone as well, like I must ignore my heart strings, to give them up so it’s better not to let others get under your skin, it’s better not to make friends and it’s especially wise not to care about anyone like how I grew to care about Tecia and her daughter.

  Targets

  She used to be a legal secretary and now after smoking so much dope she can’t even talk right, nobody knows what she’s trying to say and nobody makes an effort to so she gets taken advantage of—she let some guy fuck her in the ass for five bucks at the Sunwest—she shows up with this guy, who probably couldn’t believe how cheap this nut job was, and she’s told by management not to take the furniture apart again or she’ll get kicked out; I’ve seen her walking drunk, talking nonsense and my friend whispers to me that it’s all an act and that this crazy woman is getting the last laugh but I doubt it cuz it’s obvious her brain is mush; this other woman wore a wool toque and a trench coat, shuffling around and talking to herself, every time I saw her I went the opposite way cuz there was a hint of hostility in her mumbling and I felt her demeanour was rather angry, I’d seen her on a bus before where she was having a conversation with herself and everyone was quiet until a man started telling her to shut up but she didn’t as it probably didn’t register, she would drag her feet around the streets looking for a small-time dealer since she usually only had three or five bucks for a tiny rock; there are so many women like this, crippled by disease and dope and mental illness, constantly targeted by those who prey on the weak, women whose humanity is consistently stripped until they are naked with no armour.

  How Goofs get Killed

  I was in the Vancouver holding cells eating my brown-bag lunch of a bologna sandwich and a box of juice while the cell began to fill up with women either dressed in prison greys or street clothes, it was a rather large cell and it had a long bench so most of the women sat on that or on the floor against the wall, I sat in the corner facing out so I could see what goes on and so that nobody was behind me—it was an old habit that has taken a while to break, when one is incarcerated you go through a lot of waiting and whether that waiting is peaceful depends on who you are sharing the space with—and there was one woman who disrupted the atmosphere, she began to ask each woman why and how they ended up being locked up, it was obvious she wasn’t playing with a full deck and didn’t know that it was taboo to go around asking people why they’re in jail cuz if they want you to know they’ll tell you, though it was most likely that a lot of these women were arrested for drugs as some were still high; during questioning this one woman jumped up and shouted that she spent four years at fvi and all these women in greys told her acting like that is how goofs get killed, well that shut her up right quick and I did feel sorry for her but hey you got to learn somehow and almost getting stomped on probably taught her to mind her own business.

  Lonely Men

  There are these men who are so lonely they feel the need to make friends when all you want is a quick and easy business deal, these men are so pathetic that I feel sorry for them as they hold my hand and talk about their day or try to kiss or cuddle imagining I’m their
wife or something, however fulfilling fantasies was what I did for drug money so I held their hands while they drove around and engaged in affectionate conversation and smoked the cigarettes they gave me and ate the food they offered me; with these kind of guys, getting tips is practically guaranteed and even better was getting them to become regulars as I only had to accept the affection they gave which was strangely harder to do than it being strictly business; these men are pretty vanilla and aren’t into pain or humiliation and are all in all pretty decent, however there are always exceptions; there are men who managed to make me feel like a nasty crack whore, leaving bruises all over my body or grabbing my hair telling me to take it down the throat and I’d better swallow what they gave cuz they’re paying good money and this goes on and on and soon they become a blur of faces; the only way I could stand it was the thought of smoking a big rock and to keep smoking it until everything faded away.