Have you ever smoked crack?

I haven't, but I've seen it done more than once. The first time was in 1992. I was in a strange transitional place in my life and for some reason hanging out with a big hooker named Rita. Believe it or not, our relationship wasn't a sexual one. Each of us found the other attractive, but we never acted on it. For my part I wouldn't risk becoming emotionally attached to someone who I knew would be sleeping with other people for money moments after saying how much she cared about me. In so far as she was concerned, she had a preference for short Latinos with thick moustaches.

We were drinking buddies. I met her in a sleazy bar on Main Street back when the now bustling part of downtown Houston was still pretty skanky. We had a few drinks and seemed to enjoy one an other's company. She was a big, six foot, brunette from Arkansas, with big blue eyes, heavy over sized breasts, and a trailer park twang that was as comical as it was rustic and charming in a backwoods kind of way. After we talked for an hour we discovered that our birthdays were exactly eight days and one year apart and we both drank vodka. At the time we hung out I was working a dead end job, which involved lifting heavy objects and she was hustling the streets. By hustling I meant she was begging, picking pockets, breaking into cars and turning the occasional trick. She would do virtually anything to keep a roof over her head. She'd left Arkansas when she was 17 and had spent the previous five years drinking hard, snorting coke and doing smack and her face showed it. At 23 she looked 35. When I met her she drank mostly. She only did drugs when either she had the money or when someone else provided them. She lived in a miserable downtown hotel that seemed to be a haven for prostitutes.

The owners were reprehensible recent immigrants with thick accents of unknown Eastern European origin. They knew most of their mostly female residents were working girls and turned tricks in their rooms so as not to be left out they charged the girls a $10.00 visitors fee for each "visitor" who came in so as to get their "cut" of the action. One day Rita and I had a cheap bottle of vodka and went up to her room to get drunk beyond belief. She drank to escape the problems she'd created for herself, and I drank to escape the minuscule demons of my own making which paled in comparison to what she saw each day on the cruel streets. As we sat drinking warm vodka from cheap thin plastic glasses there was a frantic knock on her door. When she got up to answer it a skinny redhead with a black eye entered.

"Girl. You aint gonna believe this shit." She said as she entered without fanfare.

"What's wrong?" Rita asked

"That bitch Chloe." The redhead said "That skank is saying I'm going on $10.00 dates."

"You're shittin' me?" Rita said in disbelief. The nameless redhead was a sight. She was wiry to the point of being what many would consider anorexic. Her skin was pale and blotchy and she wore too much foundation. Her hair was a peculiar shade of brownish red and her eyes were a placid blue. The problem however was the fact that when she entered while she looked in the general direction of Rita and me she seemed to be looking straight through us. She had what soldiers and Marines call a thousand yard stare. Her eyes were filled with fear. It looked almost as if she were staring down the barrel of a gun. "I ran into her outside" she continued "and kicked her fuckin' ass."

Funny thing about those who sell sex for a living. We call what they do 'picking up Johns' or 'turning tricks.' The simply call it going on dates. I guess in their mind it sanitizes that which they do and makes it a bit more mentally palatable to them. What could be more harmless or NORMAL than going on a date? While being a whore amongst whores isn't a bad thing, being a CHEAP whore was considered to be unacceptable. One girl claiming another was doing 'dates' for anything but the going rate was an affront worthy of getting cut.

"She do that to your eye?" Rita asked

"Fuck yeah." The redhead countered. "But don't worry, I got her." She said. "I got that bitch good." She sat down on a beaten wooden chair as Rita returned to the couch where I sat with a generic bottle of god awful vodka. The redhead poked around in her purse. "I mean seriously." She continued "Who the fuck does that bitch think I am?" From the worn black handbag that looked as if it had been fished from a dumpster she fished out an odd looking bent piece of glass tubing.

"I don't blame you." Rita said as she obliviously snatched the bottle from me and filled the scratchy, thin, plastic cup to it's rim. "She needs ta mind her own fuckin' business." The redhead reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of tissue and carefully unfolded it. In it was a tiny clump of something that looked like baking soda. She gently placed it into the piece of glass tubing then began to fish around in the dirty, faded jeans that hung from her boney frame and pulled out a beaten, purple, plastic lighter.

"What's fucked up" The redhead continued as she desperately flicked the old lighter until it finally produced a flame. "Is that I fuckin' trusted her! I mean she even crashed with my ass a couple of days when she couldn't make her rent. Fuckin' bitch!" Once she had a flame she greedily placed the other end of the tube into her mouth and puffed it as tiny billows of white smoke came from her face.

I tried not to stare, but don't think it really mattered. She was in another world. She closed her eyes and the fear that had been on her face seconds earlier seemed to become a distant memory. She was in an odd state of euphoria. The fight she'd been in minutes earlier had become irrelevant, for the moment her problems had all disappeared. The rock she was smoking had been a small one or else she might have shared it with Rita.

Rita and I let the conversation end as the redhead seemed content to silence herself. Rita and I resumed drinking amid the chemical smell produced by her friend's quickly inhaled crack rock. Neither Rita nor I could sit in judgement. Rita over the time that I knew her slowly ruined her life with the same drug. She wound up doing a lengthy prison term for possession of it and some of the crimes she committed in order to get it. I was drinking at the time and couldn't pretend that my own vice was a harmless one.

It was the first time I'd ever seen anyone freebase cocaine, and I wish I could say it was the last. Unfortunately for me over the years that followed I witnessed entirely too many members of my generation destroying their brains and lives with that poison. Some would ultimately wind up dying as a result of it. Mine was not the first generation to lose a good portion of it's better minds to drugs. I guess it's part of an odd cycle of stupidity. With age comes a certain degree of wisdom, but in retrospect I can't help but wonder where Rita, her red headed friend and various other members of my generation are now and where they would be had they better used their common sense.