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Entry for October 02, 2006
Crack People
by
Craig 17X (Erving)
The purpose of this paper is to allow its reader to peer through the veil that has been draped over America's bastard, demon child Crack Cocaine. Drug culture is America's broken mirror. America's drug scene is a fascinatingly strange subculture. Since this country's inception., substance abuse has been expressed through a litany and a variety of Illegal drugs. Even though drug/alcohol/ use and abuse as a syndrome is one of the most enduring themes of the historical legacy of this country, it is obvious that the drug use/abuse culture is essentially a renegade and criminal culture.
What does this say about America? Many say that the Native American was conquered and subjugated more by alcohol than by the rifle. It is said that when Christopher Columbo came to this continent his search was for beer rather than freedom and justice. Usually a particular drug's proliferation in a society exists on a variety of social, cultural and economic levels and when a substance is illegal it’s proliferation is mostly transparent unless the participants are no longer those who fall through the cracks of the greater society, or outrage rises to a level where the proliferation becomes too significant to ignore. Any particular drugs usage is then let out of the closet so that the majority can then feel at ease that something is getting done about the menace, and that they can rest assured knowing that they were spared and were not affected much by the scourge. Not so with crack cocaine.
Crack is smoked by politicians, playwrights, revolutionaries, and world-class citizens. Each and every city I have gone to has had the same stories. You hear that somebody has a sister, cousin, mother, or even a grandmother who is tore up off crack. There are the stories of the writhing crack babies born on gas station floors, and mothers with broken lives who pick up the pipe for a quick diversion, but end up with their children being taken by Child Protective Services. Haven't you heard the one about the 13-year-old middle school kid whose family, including the mother and father, are his best crack customers? Drugs permeate every nook and cranny of American society but crack is more pervasive than any drug I've ever seen.
On an esoteric level, any mind-altering drug is sought for its main feature: That is the mood- and mind-altering impact the drug has on the reality of the user. However, crack cocaine is sought out not just because of the impact on the physical reality of the user, but even more so because of how it effects everyone involved with the user. That is to say that the main draw for those who use crack is the environment crack use and abuse creates. The sexual dealing, the manipulative behaviors, the part of the brain which is affected by the drug itself: What drives the world of crack cocaine is Crack People.
I have gone to cities all over America and the world, and the truth is that, anywhere in America or anywhere in the world, within days, even hours after arrival in these places, most individuals are able to go right to a set and score or cop some crack.
There is a uniformity of behavior among crack people, from region to region, city to city. Shared characteristics don't normally transfer easily over such long distances, African Americans are not universally the same throughout the country, nor are Mexicans, Italians or Lesbians, for that matter. When I was in the deep south (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama), the contrast among the culture of the African Americans there was vividly stark in comparison to where I am from (California) and there is a similar set of differences between African Americans in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, WA or Portland, OR) and Oakland. One example is the difference in dialect spoken in these different regions by people who are in the same racial and economic class. The opposite is true about crack people. The same terms are used, the same behaviors exhibited, and the same outcomes are realized, whether you smoke in a crack house or a corporate boardroom. The players are the same from place to place as well. What follows basically is the social hierarchy of Crack People and the way they play their parts no matter where you might find them.
There are three primary groups of players in the crack game: The D Boys or Ballers, the Smokers, and the Twisters or Gafflers. First come the dealers. They are organized in order of importance: the weight dealer or Baller is the top dog, so to speak, and the higher the level of the dealer the more props he gets. This is determined strictly by how much weight he drops or how many D Boys he might have in his crew or click. D Boys and Ballers generally disdain anyone who uses what they sell, i.e. smokers. They're afraid that a smoker will get desperate for drugs and snitch, or try to gank. I am an O. G., one of the originals in the game. O.G.'s are widely respected no matter where they appear because game recognizes game. An O.G. can kick it with a Baller, even though the O.G. might be a smoker, and this is because everyone wants to have game dropped on him by an O.G.
One of the recurring themes, whether you smoke or sell, is that you are an outlaw. Everyone involved is breaking the law. Each person involved is acutely aware of this and behaves accordingly. Using crack is a crime as well. I have seen quite a lot of people go to jail for having little more than a basepipe. Every smoker has a fixation on, and obsession with their pipe. Years ago, before crack actually got started, smokers had to go through the process of rocking the cocaine first before smoking. You just bought the powdered cocaine, rocked it up via a chemical process that lowers the melting point of cocaine so that it can be smoked and voila, instant nirvana. There were tools for all of this, including the shaker bottle and the base pipe. These days, the day of the prefab crack rock, all you have to do is go to a street corner and buy it from the many young D Boys that are offering it to you. People will smoke a crack rock on anything that will hold a screen. I have seen crack smoked on broken antennae, broken bottles and glasses, lead based tubing, aluminum foil and cut and tube-rolled beer cans. It’s funny to see a person smoking crack out of a rolled up beer can, while the paint on the can keeps catching on fire. They just keep lighting up, blowing out flames and lighting up some more. People will catch on fire to smoke crack.
I know a guy, a very close friend, who was a person of national prominence and significance. One night while we were sitting around smoking, “Brother X” cut his hand on a crack pipe and was bleeding profusely. We had to force “Brother X” to quit smoking long enough to go to the doctor and get patched up. He had lost a pint and a half of blood! Needless to say, we just took him to the county hospital, dropped him off and split because, as I have been saying, crack culture is underground outlaw culture.
If you sell crack you could be imprisoned for a very long time. One nationally known dealer, who was murdered while doing a 25-to-life sentence at Leavenworth, was in my Spanish class in 10th grade at Castlemont High School. Oddly enough, “Fila” was known as a big time crack dealer, when in reality his main product was 11-500. Eleven-five is another name for heroin. We called heroin 11-500 because that is some kind of pharmacologically assigned number that is used clinically. Though heroin was used all over the city, the area where its availability was most assured was Sobrante Park. Brookfield Village, where I was born and raised, borders 98th Avenue that used to be the thoroughfare to the Oakland Airport. Sobrante Park, about 12 blocks East of us, began on the about the 11500 block of Edes Avenue. Sobrante Park was right across the railroad tracks from my section of town that was known as Brookfield Village.
All of these areas were formerly upper middle class, and predominantly Italian and Portuguese until after World War II. My father was the second or third African to buy a house in the area. He worked for a municipality and made good enough money to buy in the area. 98th and Edes was one of only two ways to get into our section of The Town. In 1968 the wholesale reshuffling of people and their houses began under the auspices of urban development. One of the things that started the decline of my section of Oakland was a decision made by the city government of the time. Working in league with the Port of Oakland (the Port of Oakland is an autonomous authority that controls most of what would be known as South Oakland) the city government decided to expand 73rd Avenue through to the airport. When they did expand the dead-end 73rd Avenue, they blocked off 98th turning 98th into a dead-end street making it no longer a major artery. Those who could, moved and those that couldn’t hunkered down as best they could while the neighborhood’s property values were forced down due to the negative changes in the make-up of the community.
Families started moving away and business people closed their doors all around us. Suddenly we witnessed a steady influx of renters into the neighborhood whereas before most people moving into the neighborhood tended to be homeowners. Here in a community where there was really only one or two ways in or out people had previously known their neighbors and sort of looked out for one another. Soon there were so many new people in the neighborhood you had to lock the doors! The decline of the neighborhood started in about 1969 and continued until around 1974 when, alas, there was little left to decline.
One family from West Oakland moved in around 1970 and I got to be friends with some of the boy’s. By 1975 the father was in jail doing hard time, while the mother, had become a heroin addict, and had a job cleaning houses in San Francisco. The oldest girl married a big weight 11-500 dealer. There was another daughter who was a voluptuous green-eyed girl and all of the fellows wanted to go out with her. After crack (A.C.) she had become a 400 pound nymphomaniac and crack smoker. Back in the day she liked to use Bennies, claiming they were for her weight, and she attempted to try and assert the same claim about crack. We all knew that if you gave her enough crack she would break herself but that was something she would never have done for bennies.
Then there was Ja Ja, the oldest boy, and Larry, Ron and Don who were my age or there about. Larry was a baseball nut and a full-blown square, while Don and Ron were hustlers learning about the game, as I did, from Ja Ja. Today, A.C., Ja Ja is in prison in Texas for murder. I think they’re going to give him the death penalty. Don was burned out on PCP one night and got his legs cut off by a freight train. Ron is a heroin addict frequently to be seen nodding from the effects of the drug on the corner of 98th and Edes Avenues. Larry is a professional baseball player who has played in the World Series.
Of all the brothers, I ended up spending more time with Ja Ja. He turned out almost everybody he came in contact with. Later, he would marry my wife’s friend (I would marry one year to the day before), who he turned out, and we would end up living together in a West Oakland apartment. At first, Larry and I were pals because we both liked baseball. I had gotten an opportunity to try out with the Montreal Expos baseball team because my father knew a scout named Eddie Jewell who had agreed to take a look at me.
After doing my usual thing of waiting until my parents were asleep, and sneaking out my backdoor and through the gate, making sure to hold it so that it wouldn’t scrape the ground, then scampering through the alley to Ja Ja’s house, I proceeded to get blitzed staying up late smoking some Colombian Red and drinking Pagan Pink Ripple with Ja Ja. At the ripe old age of 16 I was drinking and drugging it up with a guy that was 24 years old. We listened to his late night reveries concerned with the glorious lifestyle of the pimps and pushers. I knew full well I had to get up and try out the next morning, but people don’t take care of business when it comes to getting loaded on drugs.
It was my first time ever having a hangover in my life and, needless to say, I played lousy. After that, and the embarrassment I caused my father (who never suspected what was really wrong with me) I kind of left baseball, hooking up with Ja Ja, Don and Ron and the rest of our combined click for a twenty year ride with a drunk driver; myself. Drinking and drugging day in and day out, we alternately popped, banged, and terrorized our and other sections of Oakland.
Brookfield Village and Sobrante Park were two of the most notorious sections of The Town. Stories of shootings, burglaries, robberies and things of that nature happening in Oakland began with us and our set. Oakland, during the 1960’s and 1970’s was divided and en route to being conquered. The Black Panther Party for the People’s Self-Defense was under siege and attack and we Panther Babies were becoming disillusioned with the movement and our leaders. We began to change. Instead of wearing peace signs or black power medallions we had started wearing coke spoons. Before, we felt we had to hide our leather coats and tams from the police or even our parents in some cases, but now we were hiding jackets that showed our gang affiliation. Most gangs had two sets of clothing, one for popping and one for banging. When we went popping we wore three-quarter length cashmere coats, straight-legged black Levi’s rolled up at the cuff, Stacey Addams round toed shoes and your choice of Beaver-pelt hat. For banging we wore a Levi’s jean jacket with the name of our set printed on the back. Different sets were known for different types of things usually related to crime and drugs. You had the Gents up on 73rd Avenue who sold weed, the Fellas from Stonehurst had crank, and of course, we Jungle Boys had hop. Some sets were good at popping and others were known for their fighting ability. We were known for selling dope.
In retrospect, it amazes me how obvious it should be that drugs are controlled from outside the community, but people don’t seem to want to realize or acknowledge the fact. All they see is a crew or a click grinding dope and before you know it, legend has it that young Black men are corrupting national security through the sale of crack. I knew when I was selling dope that those who were supposed to be actively trying to keep drugs out of the community played large parts in keeping it there. For example, when we would go to some of the other sets there would be pills for sale right on the street corner. Reds (Seconal) were one of the more widely available pills. An individual could buy 10, 20 even 50 reds from some guy standing on a corner every single day with no problem.
The thing about this is that reds are and have always been a restricted drug available only by prescription. What’s more, the Food and Drug Administration, a Federal authority, regulates and controls drugs like reds, bennies etc. So, as I’ve often said, since the dope doesn’t stop when the pusher gets popped, then we got to stop the government or maybe pop the president.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that the influx of a certain type of drug in a community is not a coincidence. The prevalent drugs during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s were mostly depressants, the cause of which slows the thinking processes down. It would be quite difficult to march for human/civil rights with an abundance of heroin or reds in your system.
Then came the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan and, then there was crack. Never before had people seen entire families destroyed by one menace such as they were seeing because of crack. Crack People are the most pitiful and ironic creatures I have ever witnessed. Almost all of them suffer from Acute Cocaine Poisoning with its accompanying traits of paranoia, rapid weight loss or wasting syndrome, and drug-induced schizophrenia. You will know a smoker or a gaffler when you see them by some shared characteristics: they usually dress shoddily, have poor hygiene and are usually erratic sleepers who stay up for days at a time then sleep for long periods after.
They rarely have cigarettes if they smoke but they will always have matches or a lighter. A Gaffler broad’s purse is trashy and unkempt. She keeps a lot of toilet paper and scraps of trash in her purse which she uses as tools to hide drugs and drug paraphernalia she steals or secrets away when she thinks no one is looking. A Gaffler’s fingertips, whether male or female, are usually burnt from all the smoking that underscores the fascination with fire smokers seem to have in common. One of the things with smoking crack is the way in which the matches or lighters are lit, held and discarded. A smoker or gaffler’s house is the most unkempt, filthy house one could see. There are burn marks on every surface in the dwelling.
There is never any food in the refrigerator. They only clean up when they think that somebody is coming over to smoke. Crack children are unruly and ill disciplined due to the lack of constant supervision. I have seen women on heroin cry miserably because they wanted to nurse their babies but couldn’t because they had the drug in their system. With crack it more often likely that the mothers willingly give up their children to chase cola. It is idiosyncratic to crack women for them to abandon their children without so much as a pretense of a fight.
There was one smoker whom I had had an affair with that got tore up. “Minnie” was a beautiful statuesque 42-year-old sister with deep dark chocolate skin tone, a big, round, juicy booty, and a pair of the warmest eyes I’ve ever closed with ecstasy. Minnie had gotten a long awaited back paycheck from the Social Security Administration in the amount of $5,000. In her house were her daughter of 13 years and her son aged three. I moved in and there was just the four of us. Things were going well and when the lump sum came, we had a real opportunity to really do a come up.
One night, to celebrate we decided to get a little indo to smoke. When my god brother “Darren” brought the indo over, I half-heartedly commented that we might instead get some cola because “Darren” had plenty of it. To my surprise Minnie insisted that we buy cola instead. I remember experiencing that feeling that smokers get whenever they have or are about to get some crack. There’s a kind of stomach cramping accompanied by an agitated state of mind. The whole body starts to just kind of quiver slightly in anticipation of getting crack. You lose your appetite immediately.
That’s when I found out that Minnie had been smoking for years in the closet, and that, in fact, the three year old boy was a crack baby, and had a serious speech impediment directly attributable to her using crack when she was carrying him during pregnancy. We had started off drinking a Cisco to celebrate something and four thousand dollars later it occurred to me that things were out of control. As for Minnie, I saw her one day recently and was shocked. Her booty had dropped, her weight now down to about half of what it was. She had gotten her teeth knocked out in the front by one of the D Boys she’d owed money to and her hair was coming out. Her skin had lost its chocolaty glow and looked more like an ashy old gray-brown leather jacket. I asked her why she was walking and she told me she had sold her car. I found out later that it had been taken to recover a debt she owed for crack. The topper was finding out that her children had been taken away by Child Protective Services. They had put together a reconciliation plan for her and the kids but she was too busy smoking to comply and had lost them for good.
That’s the way it is with smokers. They end up losing everything eventually, but they don’t care. They justify their losses, and through their crack-induced psychosis, they're convinced they aren’t affected by crack; that other people are the problem. I lived in one of the many crack hotels that have sprung up throughout The Town, and my room was right next to the room of a Gaffler. She used to buy two or three bubbles and then grind out ten pieces and nickel pops to keep her smoke on. I would be at her hotel room and I'd buy a twenty or fifty rock and go over there to just smoke some with her because she kept a room full of toss-ups and I would be trying to get my f * * * on. I'd pull out the twenty, lay it on the table, take a razor blade and cut the rock in half with the precision of a jeweler. Then I would give her the half-of-a-twenty-rock and proceed to smoke my half or whatever. It would be the same thing each and every time. She would start complaining that I got more than she did (remember, it's my cola in the first place), I would relent and give her some more. Then, since I never carried pipes and such I would have to use hers.
"Let me go first," she would say, "You take forever." Then she would proceed to take forever. Then I would finally get the hooter and as soon as I put my shit on the pipe and tried to get a boo-yao she would start talking nonsensical, looking out the window, saying things like "Shhh…you hear that?" and I would say something like, "Yeah, that's nothing but the traffic going by, don't trip." Then she would do something like ask me to go look out the window to be sure, or pull some other diversion and, knowing what exactly what was coming, I'd go check. Out of the corner of my eye, each and every time, she would either try to steal my D, or hide hers so that she could say she was out and get some more out of me. I used to watch this out of the corner of my eye! But when you're dealing with gafflers, you have to be especially careful because their minds play tricks on them and one can never tell what they might do. What I used to do was let her think she was beating me out of most of the twenty rock, knowing I had a fifty rock in my pocket, wait for a toss-up to come, take the toss-up and split, the result of which was usually, ending up with another ladies jacket, empty purse or fanny pack filled with broken base pipes. It never mattered to me about a fiend stealing dope as long as they didn't try to get my skrilla or try to get violent and make me have to get gorilla on her ass.
Gafflers are the worse kind of smokers. Their role overlaps that of smokers and ballers because they try to sell crack to keep their habit going. Consequently they have to keep up the front of a baller but they don’t have any of the money that comes with being a high roller. Gafflers always try to stay in the middle of whatever’s going on so that they can get a piece of the action. Since drug deals don’t always turn out as planned, and most of the benefits usually fall to the gaffler’s advantage, a Gaffler’s reputation is not the highest in a neighborhood. There are usually quite a lot of people how can tell a story about how they had been got by a Gaffler. Because of the way they get down as bottom feeding predators, being known as a gaffler is not desirable. Gafflers can be male or female and they often bring a bizarre twist to the game. A guy that was a gaffler might sell you anything and tell you it’s cola. Everyone in the game can tell you a story about buying a piece of soap or wax or chalk for $20, $30 even $100. A gaffler broad is either a hooker or a thief. She will promise to do all sorts of things for you sexually until you are out of money or dope. Every trick has at least one jacket or purse or some other item belonging to a gaffler broad who promised sex or some other favor and left the item as collateral while they made their getaway.
The thing that came to me after a while is that, eventually, anybody who is involved with crack will do anything to get it. There is not one woman who smokes dope that, if she runs out of money, and the opportunity presents, would not sell her body for crack. The result is the destruction of the art of prostitution, an honorable and perhaps the oldest profession. A crack user doesn’t care about anything but smoking crack. Mothers have lost the respect of their children because they do despicable things for the stuff. Fathers enlist their sons and together they become predators in the communities. People are killed, go to jail, lose their minds just to get the flavor. The crack game is like a traveling circus filled with cross-eyed knife-throwing clowns. It goes through a city, neighborhood by neighborhood, leaving behind hundreds of people who just wanted to take a peek and end up maimed for life.
GLOSSARY Baller: A middle- to high-level dealer. Ballers usually only sell ounces or more. Banging: Criminal activity or crime performed by a group; also gang warfare or feuding with another set. Basepipe: A pipe used to smoke freebased cocaine as opposed to crack (see crackpipe). Basepipes are made of glass and come in a variety of shapes and sizes to facilitate fixations on smoke. Beans: See Bennies. Bennies/Benzedrine; a diet pill/stimulant popular in Oakland during the 1960's and early 1970's. Break your/her/him self: To relinquish, sex, money, etc., on demand. To stay up all night or for several nights smoking until all your money is gone. Boo-yao: A real intense rush from a puff of crack. Short for booty-out. Bubble: Fifty dollars worth of crack that can be broken down and sold to make $110. Cisco: One of the most recent fortified wines to be marketed in the Oakland area. Because of its potency and cheap price, Cisco has been called “liquid crack.” Clergy in the Oakland area have sought a ban on the sale of Cisco. Click: A network of friends that include males and females. Coke spoon: A small silver dipper for sniffing powdered cocaine. Cola: Another word for crack, stemming from the shortening of the word cocaine to the word coke. In the early 1900's, Coca Cola was actually made with cocaine, this was touted as a wonder drug that could cure everything from the common cold to dementia. Coca Cola is now made with caffeine. Crack is a derivative of cocaine, hence cola (or in some circles, uncola). Colombian Red: A very potent form of marijuana with a reddish-brown color, smuggled in from Colombia. "Lumbo,” as it was sometimes called, was very prevalent in the early 1970's. During the late 1970's, marijuana became increasingly scarce. There was no Colombian weed and all that was available was Mexican grown cannabis. Soon, there was an influx of cocaine, from Colombia, as there had previously been an influx of Black Tar Heroin from Mexico. (Please note that the most prevalent drug at a given time in American society, tends to come from countries with which the United States has military conflicts at that time, for example, cocaine and crack became widely available during the contra war in Central America, and Central America is one of the worlds chief suppliers of cocaine (Cannabis sativa). Come-up: To make a lot of money; to recover from a spate of bad luck. Cop: To buy or obtain (see score). Crack: Originally, freebased cocaine which, through a chemical process to remove the hydrochloride molecules from cocaine, purifies cocaine while lowering its melting point so that it can be smoked easily. Crack these days may be anything that resembles the original, but may have very toxic, harmful substances instead. Crack pipe: Anything through which crack can be smoked as opposed to a basepipe which is always made of glass. Crack does not melt as quickly or cleanly as freebased coke and thus, requires more heat that tends to burn and break glass. Crank: Methamphetamine. Usually injected or snorted. Increasingly used as a substitute for cocaine in crack. Also highly addictive. Crew: A group of the same gender, usually around five to eight that make up the nucleus of a team that sells drugs together. D: Slang for dope, usually narcotics. D Boy: Street level thug selling a count (about $500 worth of drugs) for which he gets a commission or a portion of the drugs. Dove or dove rock: Twenty dollars worth of crack, called a dove because the shape of one after rocking is like that of a dove’s tail. Eleven Five Hundred; 11-500; Eleven Five: Heroin. Gaffler: A thief, or a bunko artist. Game: Street knowledge. Game recognizes game: Experienced people know when someone has their level of experience. Gank: To rob, beat up, or swindle another person. Get my (*****) on: The act of, or art of achieving or attaining whatever goes in the blank. Hooter: Another word for a crack pipe, although usually referring to a broken antennae. Hop: Another word for heroin. Hustler: A con artist, thief (sometimes known as a booster), pimp, prostitute, or other non-violent criminal. Indo: A potent form of marijuana presently on the scene. It is mostly ground in Humboldt County, California (Cannabis indica). O.G.: Original Gangster; Old Game. Someone with a certain degree of respect, or with valid, verifiable experience in the underground subculture. Piece of hop: One half of an ounce of heroin, street value $5,000. Popping: A dancing style created in California in the late 1960's and early 1970's which was the West coast equivalent of "Break Dancing", during which mock battles between the best dancers of each crew or click would take each other on for props, or money, or drugs. Useful in solving disputes with out resorting to violence. Seldom used anymore. Prefab rock: Crack. Props: Proper respect. Proprietary treatment. Ripple: One of the first fortified wines to be marketed in Oakland CA beginning in the early 1960's. Score: buy or obtain. Screen: A chunk of copper scouring pad stuffed in the tip of a crackpipe to facilitate a slow burning of the drug. Shaker bottle: A glass jar used to cook cocaine town to a base. Skrilla: Money, particularly drug money but more often used to signify a small amount of money. Smoker: A crack addict. Snitch: One who gives away or sells information, usually out of spite. Square: Everyday, work-a-day person, who does not drink, smoke, or have bad habits or engage in vice. Stomach habit: A psychological addiction to a drug that precedes physical dependency. Tore up: severe, chronic crack addiction. Toss-up: A person who trades sexual favors for drugs. They will, from time to time take money, but usually they want drugs. Trick: A person who pays money or drugs for sex. Turn-out: To introduce a person to drugs or street life. Twister: See gaffler.
2006-10-02 17:02:42 GMT
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