An Excerpt from my book, "The Collapse of Time."
Last night, I crossed the line. I did the dirty deed. I just said no to just saying no, and I went out and bought myself a $10 rock of crack. It had been a long time coming. I wanted a rock of my very own, one I didn't have to share, one I could do all by myself in the kitchen, so I could experience the deviant thrill of it all, all by my lonesome.
If you've ever smoked crystal meth, and tasted those delirious plasticene vapors through a fine-crafted glass pipe, then you'll probably smoke your first hit of crack and wonder what all the fuss is about. Crack, after all, is simply cocaine and baking soda when you get right down to it, and molecule for molecule, cocaine really doesn't measure up to the beautiful high brought on by crystal.
It's the hype that makes crack so good, because when you smoke it, your forebrain recalls everything you've ever heard about it, the news reports and the cover stories about urban wastelands and instant addiction, the lurid pictures of crack babies and black teenagers with handguns. A hit of crack brings forth all these images and more, of a difficult world made devious by the arrival of crack. Smoking crack allows you to cross the line separating the merely good and bad from the truly ugly and destructive, and as soon as you taste the smoke, you feel like the goddamn anti-Christ.
And why shouldn't everyone cross that line, at least once in their lifetime? The line gets blurry during wartime, when naked aggression and pre-emptive strikes against foreign powers seems like the best way to deal with our problems...smoke a little crack, and you'll soon see it all come into perspective.
