Tag: begging

I moved back to San Diego after 9/11 but Greyhound would take a few more years to crack down on the counterfeit Ameripass scam so I still went back to Chicago a lot. This might have been the same trip where I used a fake bus pass to smuggle over an eight ball of crystal meth to make a couple hundred dollars. Justin Two said that nobody in the greater Chicagoland area could get their hands on red phosphorous to synthesize it so meth was relatively rare and expensive.

There must have been some truth to this. I was pretty deep into the Chicago hard drug culture in 2000 and 2001 and the only meth that seemed to be around was brought directly from Southern California by either me or other people in our friend group. It’s probably a lot cheaper and easier to find there now but I’ve never actually looked for it there to know for sure. I don’t particularly like the stuff.

Anyway on this particular trip I was staying with Dave and Vanessa just before getting on a bus to go back to San Diego. When I first moved out to Chicago everybody in my social circle had lived around Logan Square and then everybody seemed to be moving to the Ukrainian Village and now people were getting spots in Pilsen and Bridgeport. It was the same old gentrification cat and mouse game – punks, hipsters, junkies or whatever you want to call us looked for cheap neighborhoods, made them cool and then had to move again when being cool made them expensive.

Dave and Vanessa lived in Bridgeport. Bridgeport had originally been an Irish ghetto – I heard somewhere that the neighborhood had been specifically selected to keep the Irish segregated because it was bordered by train tracks and the Chicago River and only a small handful of streets could be used to get into or out of it. Me and Dave and Vanessa would jokingly repeat a mantra to each other that we constantly heard as a statement of pride from the neighborhood’s older residents:

“Bridgeport. Born and raised!”

I just looked it up and apparently Bridgeport is now among the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in Chicago. Even back in 2001 it had an Asian grocery simply called Egg Store in the same block of Halsted as the Unique Thrift Store. Dave and Vanessa’s apartment shared an alley with a Dunkin’ Donuts and there was a Little Caesar’s nearby so it was really easy to find free food in dumpsters. One night a police car approached to stop us and Vanessa got them to drive on by shouting out:

“It’s political!”

On my final night in town I wanted to get some heroin. I was a lot more experienced with copping on the corners of the West Side, then the largest open air heroin market in the world, but it was already late and there was a housing project in walking distance. Me and Dave decided to try our luck at the notorious Stateway Gardens.

I had ridden there once with Justin Two but even he only went there because every other possible spot had mysteriously stopped serving. Out of all the projects he took me to it seemed the most lawless with open fires burning in metal trash cans. At this point the buildings we’d copped at before had already been demolished and the only one left standing was totally unfamiliar to me.

We walked down State Street while looking at the tower and waiting for somebody to call out the familiar cry of “Rocks! Blows!” that designated a drug spot. A couple of Black teenagers beckoned to us from a doorway leading into a dark stairwell. Dave was scared to go in and waited for me back at the sidewalk.

It was a setup. As soon as I walked in I got shoved over one of their friends who’d been waiting on his hands and knees to trip me up. The maneuver reminded me of a little animated segment from Van Halen’s famous Right Now video that was used to advertise Crystal Clear Pepsi. It was the first and last time I’ve ever seen it used in real life and I had to at least admire the classic ingenuity of it.

The guy who’d shoved me quickly punched me in the face and took my wallet. I had sixty dollars that I’d been planning to spend on dope and maybe a little over a hundred dollars altogether. Assuming it was the same trip where I’d smuggled the Crystal it would have been the last of my proceeds from the profits. I asked if they could at least give back my ID and Debit Card because my account was empty and I could just cancel it anyway:

“Hell no, get the fuck out of here!”

In all of my time coming to bad neighborhoods to cop this was my first time actually getting mugged. The closest was getting ripped off with empty pieces of folded aluminum foil one or two times when neighborhood kids would take over a spot after the actual dealers left. It’s a dangerous game as anything that’s bad for business carries the risk of violent retaliation. The guys that just robbed me were also most likely young and desperate considering one of them was willing to get on the ground and get his clothes dirty.

I walked back to Dave and told him what had just happened and we turned around to walk home. We ran into another addict leaving the project, a tough young Irish guy, and he asked us if we’d just been able to cop. I told him that I was trying to but had just gotten robbed instead:

“Fucking niggers! You want me to come help you kick their asses?”

I said going back into the building would probably be dangerous. He concurred:

“We’ll probably all get killed. They shot my friend with a zip gun last week!”

For anyone who might not be familiar a zip gun is a length of metal pipe the same diameter as a gun barrel. You stick a bullet in the back, point it at your intended target and hit the back of the bullet with a rock or hammer. It’s the kind of weapon that is only used by the poorest of the poor with nothing to lose – it has a roughly equal chance of exploding in your face as it does accomplishing g it’s intended purpose.

I thanked him for the offer but said that whatever I’d just lost wasn’t worth multiple people’s lives and I’d just try to find a more reliable spot the next time I wanted to cop. He agreed that I was probably right and offered to come share his dope with us. I was excited when he said dope that he might have bought heroin but he turned out to have only gotten a lot of crack.

Junkies always think that the word dope only properly refers to their drug of choice but the reality is that all hard drug users employ the term more or less indiscriminately. A few months earlier I was coming down after staying up for three days my first time using speed and asked this sleazy Turkish kid who had just started working in the furniture store if he could help me get “dope”.

He said he knew a dealer who could come by but he only had “hard”. I somehow convinced myself that this meant there was a rocked up form of heroin that I hadn’t encountered yet. I got home from work and cooked it up in lemon juice. I didn’t realize that it was obviously cocaine, another stimulant, until I’d already shot it and started feeling the wrong kind of rush.

This time around I was just trying to get high and was as happy to shoot crack as I would have been heroin although it wouldn’t have been my first choice. I didn’t have an actual habit and didn’t have to worry about getting sick – it would actually be a couple more years before I’d experience withdrawal for the first time. Our new friend had never shot up anything before but when he saw us preparing some of the crack for injection he decided to try it.

First he asked for a pen and paper and wrote down two names and phone numbers:

“This one’s my mother and this one’s where they got my daughter, if I die call them up and tell them I love them and I was thinking about them!”

I can’t remember if I ever even found out what his name was. I barely knew the guy and this was the second time he had professed a willingness to lay his life down and potentially die with little to no hesitation. I assured him that I’d start him off with a smaller shot to be safe and he’d be fine.

Crack is just cocaine that’s been combined with baking soda so you can vaporize and smoke it without destroying the cocaine. If you want to inject it you need to cook it with an acid strong enough to dissolve the baking soda – I usually used the lemon juice that comes in little plastic lemons. It feels indistinguishable from injecting powdered cocaine except for the fact that it burns a little more and you get a strong taste of lemon at the back of your throat.

Cocaine is the only drug I know that feels completely different depending on which method is used to ingest it. As much as I like injecting it I’d just as soon not take it at all instead of sniffing it because I don’t particularly like the effects beyond the initial rush. People talk about experiencing something similar after they try injecting opiates but I honestly can’t relate. I’ve never felt even slightly tempted to shoot oxycodone knowing that simply swallowing it will result in virtually the same effective dose.

So I should probably describe what injecting cocaine feels like. The moment you push down the plunger time seems to stop for a moment and everything goes silent in anticipation of the rush. Suddenly your heart rate speeds up as you are hit with a wave of pure euphoria and every sound becomes metallic and distorted like the sound of a vocoder or flange pedal. In one sense it is like your consciousness has been launched out of and risen above your body but at the same time there is a physical sensation of numbness and tingling in every one of your nerves.

The whole thing rarely lasts longer than a single minute.

If the shot was strong enough you will start to drool or even end up vomiting. Smoking it can create similar effects but it’s never quite as intense. The moment it wears off you will feel an overwhelming desire to do it again. I’ve read that rats or monkeys who are connected to an intravenous cocaine delivery system will press the button to redose themselves until they die of a heart attack. Besides the reality of diminishing returns if you don’t wait long enough between shots it literally makes any subsequent injections more difficult because the drug causes your veins to constrict and become harder to hit.

Every time I’ve gone on an IV cocaine binge it’s ended with me desperately trying to hit for hours with a syringe full of blood as random thoughts race wildly through my head.

The Irish guy who had followed us home and was sharing his crack wanted me to keep helping him inject it. Now that I think about it it’s possible that he didn’t even have a pipe – I never saw one and none of us were trying to smoke. He had bought a lot of crack – there were four of us shooting it, me, him, Dave and Vanessa but it still lasted us for hours. Several times he would say that we had already done it all but then suddenly set another rock on the counter next to me so I could cook us all another shot.

My memory’s a little hazy but I think the four of us ended up hanging out in the bathtub full of slightly cool water. There was nothing even remotely sexual about it and we probably left all of our clothes on. We probably liked the way it felt and wanted to cool off as Chicago is already brutally hot in the Summer and the cocaine can dramatically raise your body temperature. Eventually the drugs ran out and our new acquaintance went home and I never saw him again.

The next morning I went to the Greyhound to catch a bus back home to San Diego. Technically you are supposed to show ID to prove that it matches the name on your Ameripass but the bus line was extremely lax in those days and if any driver asked I just told them that I’d been mugged and was able to travel on without issues. There had even been a violent attack on a bus that was also leaving Chicago that same year but they didn’t start seriously searching people’s bags and enforcing rider ID until the famous incident where a passenger was decapitated in 2008.

My travel was taken care of but the trip takes three days and I had no money whatsoever for food. I also wanted drugs but between not knowing how to cop in other cities and being broke there was no way that was going to happen. I tried to bum cigarettes off other passengers to stave off hunger every time we switched buses or took designated meal breaks.

The first long layover I remember was in Omaha, Nebraska. I’d hung out with some of the Saddle Creek records folks in Chicago, mostly guys from The Faint, but I didn’t know anybody’s phone number or what part of town the kids hung out in. An older bearded man in the terminal was wearing a T-Shirt with a stylized black and white graphic of somebody shooting up and some text I couldn’t quite read. I tried to make conversation by asking him what the shirt said, hoping the conversation might lead to him sharing drugs:

“None of your goddamn business!”

He mostly seemed angry that I had tried to talk to him at all. I continued to search around the terminal and saw an older conservatively dressed woman who seemed like a good person to ask for charity. I told her that I’d gotten mugged in Chicago and I would be on the bus for two more days with nothing to eat. She didn’t say a word but she reached into her purse and handed me five dollars.

I think that was the first time in my life that I’d actually begged. I had done a little bit of busking as a teenager after a friend had loaned me a book about The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. I taught myself how to perform the human blockhead and a trick where I’d suck a condom up my nose and pull it out of my mouth. I dressed up in flashy stage magician clothes and took the show to Mission Beach to try to get donations.

It wasn’t very successful – people would hold their kids up to watch me hammer a nail into my face but then cover the same kid’s eyes and storm off in disgust the moment I pulled out a condom. That’s America – violence is family friendly but anything related to sex is taboo. Besides this people had once or twice offered me food or money because they thought I looked homeless but this bus station in Omaha was the first time I specifically asked.

I thanked the woman and bought myself a sandwich from the vaguely Western themed snack bar. I got back onto the bus and continued on to Denver. There must have been a really long layover there because I remember walking around the city for several hours. I’d been corresponding with Nate from Friends Forever since we’d met at the Fort Thunder show but I had never talked about visiting Denver – he might have even been living in Los Angeles at the time.

I wandered the downtown area until I found a grassy hill next to a bank where all the street kids hung out – runaways, druggies and various other kinds of scumbags. I asked a few people if they knew Friends Forever but nobody seemed to have heard of the band. If I’d known to ask about Monkey Mania I probably could have gotten directions to the space but I somehow wasn’t familiar with the name.

Despite how much traveling I did in those years I never got to see the space and it would be almost another decade before I’d ever hang out or play shows in Denver.

I sat in a park to kill time and gradually realized that it was full of drug dealers. A couple of Mexican couples were hanging out with babies in strollers. Occasionally customers would approach and they’d reach underneath the babies for small color coded balloons. While I recognized that I’d somehow stumbled across exactly the sort of thing I wanted I was too shy to try to convince any strangers to share their drugs with me or let me get a rinse.

Even though I travelled and used hard drugs for many years I almost never did both at these things at the same time so while I visited cities with famous drug scenes – Denver, Philadelphia and New York to name a few, I never experienced it for myself first hand. Now it seems like I’ve missed my chance and American heroin has gone extinct. Maybe if I’d known that the window of opportunity was closing I would have put more effort into this variety of tourism but probably not.

I got back to San Diego and stopped cross country traveling for several years as I became involved with teaching jobs, college and the local music and drugs scenes. I moved back to Chicago in 2006 but never again stepped into the concrete towers of a housing project. I dabbled with drugs a few more times but usually found them in the row homes around Pilsen. I started working as a Substitute Teacher in a lot of the neighborhoods I used to only visit for the purpose of buying drugs.

I started to see the more wholesome and family oriented aspects of these same neighborhoods. One day I was biking by some row homes on the Eastern edge of Pilsen and a local radio station was set up on the lawns with DJ Casper directing hundreds of kids in the steps of his famous Cha Cha Slide.

The final building of Stateway Gardens was finally demolished in 2007. The same forces of gentrification that kept my friends constantly moving to find cheap apartments had been chipping away at the city’s housing projects as developers eyed the newly valuable land they were sitting on. I haven’t been back to Chicago in over ten years now and I wonder if any housing projects are left within the city limits at all.