this one time when i was smoking crack in 1999
In 1999, I was in my sixth year of college and it wasn't going so well. I moved away from State College because I was doing too many drugs and I thought I might die, so I was taking one class at Pitt and working at a Subway and still doing hecka drugs.
I had a coworker named Isaac who was 17. His parents had suddenly become Mormon and moved the family to Salt Lake City, and Isaac was like fuck that and was just living on his own. He originally worked at the Arby's down the street, but couldn't get enough hours because you have to be 18 to work the slicer, so he ended up working at the Subway.
Isaac was kind of a rave kid, but rave drugs are expensive and he was poor, so pretty quickly he moved onto crack as his daily driver. He and I would work the closing shift a lot, and sometimes he would disappear for like half an hour at a time to go smoke crack, but then he would come back and go to town on the fucking dishes, so I was okay with it. We also had a regular named Jimmy the crackhead who would trade in the change he acquired throughout the day for dollars to buy crack with. While I was counting it out, he would do a little dance and sing, "Jimmy, Jimmy, smoke that crack" over and over. And another guy who told me about how awesome it was the time he got a $400 rock that was the size of a golf ball. So you know, I had a pretty nuanced view of crack and crackheads, and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do a little recreational crack smoking.
So one time I was over at Isaac's place smoking some crack, and rent was so cheap then that they had an entire spare bedroom that was pretty much just for smoking crack, and me and Isaac and his roommate and some chick were all in this little room smoking crack. And we were out of fucking crack because we didn't really have enough to start with, because really you can never have enough crack. So we were crawling around on the floor looking for crack that we may have dropped, which I always thought was like a fiction, but really and truly when you're high on crack and wish you had more crack you will end up crawling around on the floor and smoking whatever kind of plaster chips or crumbs you find in the carpet.
Anyway, we heard the front door get kicked the fuck in and some dude yelling about where the fuck is Isaac, and Issac's one non crack smoking roommate pointed to the crack smoking room, and next thing you know there is this enormous black dude there and he is just manhandling poor Isaac. It turns out that this was Isaac's powder cocaine dealer, and he was just like, I fucking told you to stay away from that rock shit, and slamming Isaac against the wall and slapping him in the face and and just generally beating the shit out of him. And back in 1999 when you saw a black guy who was like 220 and fucking cut, you were like, what is this guy, a professional athlete or something. But really he was just a coke dealer and fucking pissed.
So this dude is just shaking Isaac around and yelling and the other three of us just looked at this scene and looked at each other and started crawling around looking for stray crack at the opposite end of the room. And then after a while it was over and Isaac's coke dealer left and Isaac was like, wtf guys, why didn't you do anything, and we were like, are you fucking crazy, he would have killed all of us. And we never did find any crack in the carpet and later I kind of thought about it and was like, you know, I think crack is just really not a good thing and I don't think I'm going to do any more.
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