story

Storytime today is about the time I smoked crack just to prove a point. 

When I was 12 my friends started drinking. Alcoholism runs in my family a bit and even as a kid I really didn't want to go down that road. I don't really remember too much peer pressure but when I was 14 or 15 I found straight edge punk and suddenly not drinking or doing drugs was part of my identity.

I was straight edge, but I didn't hang out with straight edge kids. My friends did a lot of drugs. We would all hang out at this place called The Crack House, which was a place a couple of drug dealers lived. Despite being called the Crack House, no one was doing uppers. There was weed obviously, but there was also a lot of acid, ketamine and "X" as we called MDMA back then.

My friend Andy set up a fake pharmaceutical lab and would order strange chemicals off the internet before the government realized they had to shut that down. He worked at a place at the mall where they sold Pokemon cards and he would steal a ton of them and bring them to the Crack House and give everyone pure DXM, the active ingredient in cough syrup, and people would just hang out watching fucked up VHS tapes and playing Pokemon.

Throughout all of this I stayed completely sober. I didn't have so much as a sip of beer. I was always a punk kid, but I started going to more hardcore shows and hanging out with more straight edge kids, but honestly I didn't like them. They would give me shit for eating meat, or hanging out with my friends who did drugs. For me straight edge was a personal choice and I started hating the label. By the time I went to college I still wasn't drinking or doing drugs, but I wasn't "straight edge".

I am back home from college one weekend and and I go over to the Crack House and people are just trying to find something to do. One of them makes a joke about doing crack since and everyone there started talking about who had done crack before. Only one person had and he turned to us and said: "Are you telling me, you all grew up in Washington, DC during the 80s and spend all your time at a place called the Crack House and none of you have done crack?
Suddenly it was decided, they were gonna get crack. A handful of people left and an hour later they were back with a baggie full of crack.

When they came back no one had a crack pipe, so they made one out of a light bulb. You mash the bottom with a spoon and then pour salt in and shake it around to get rid of the frost. Not important. What is important is that I asked them if I could hit it. They couldn't believe it, but I had my reasons...

You see when I was in heath class, the only class I ever got a D in, I got in a huge argument with my teacher because she told us weed a was a gateway drug and "everyone who has smoked crack, smoked marijuana first." I called bullshit. "I am sure, some person out there smoked crack first." But she wasn't having it. She said "No. Not once. Ever." Finally I had a chance to prove her wrong.

So yeah, I took a hit and when it didn't do much I took another. I felt a little speedy but it didn't do much. I had never smoked anything before so maybe I wasn't doing it right, or maybe someone sold a bunch of kids from the suburbs completely stepped on bullshit. Whatever the case I just thought it would be a great story for the rest of my life to have smoked crack before ever having a beer.

From that moment on I would occasionally try something. I told the story recently of trying ketamine for the first time. That was the first time I actually got fucked up. The first time I drank was my 21st birthday and I think in the 25 years since then I have been drunk maybe a couple of dozen times. As far as I am concerned straight edge to me was just about not letting drugs and alcohol fuck up your life, and I am still out here living that life. The end.