Introducing Thought Launcher, a new series for subscribers of Free Life Coach. While Free Life Coach is intended to share wisdom, or at the very least, solidarity with fellow travelers on the path of life, Thought Launcher will contain essays, recollections, and commentary that may feel darker or different. Today’s inaugural post is a rumination on crack and its effect on people and the people around the people who smoke it.
Chicken Pickin’
There’s a phenomenon where crack smokers run out of crack and then begin looking everywhere for a mislaid piece. Trapped in a state of manic hope and denial, they desperately search for one more hit that must be lying around somewhere. I knew about this weird practice, but I never knew the word for it until a friend of mine told me that a drug counselor in adolescent rehab described it a certain way.
“You know when you're on the top floor of a parking garage, smoking crack, and then it’s all gone and you suddenly think that maybe, just maybe, you dropped a piece so you start wandering around scanning the ground, just chicken picking for a lost piece of rock?”
What a perfect word for the re-purposing of evolutionary neurological hardware — clearly designed for gathering food — now unleashed on drug-seeking obsession.
Like Homer Simpson’s line about beer, adaptability is both the answer to and the cause of all of modern humanity’s problems.
When I lived in the East Village in the ‘90s, a woman lived above me. She started every night smoking crack with her friends and by midnight they’d be all out of drugs and fully wired. Then they’d start moving the furniture around, looking for a piece of rock that maybe got away from them. They did this till four every morning, right over my head. Scraping the chairs against the hardwood floor. It drove me fucking crazy.
My friend Dylan, a guy I met in the Army National Guard, grew up in Oakland California in the ‘80s at the peak of the last crack epidemic. He told me that when he was 13 or 14, for fun he’d get a hunk of real Parmesan cheese. Where I grew up in Kalamazoo Michigan you could only buy Parmesan cheese pre-grated in a green cardboard tube. But city kids had access to the good stuff.
Dylan would buy it because if you broke it into little pieces they looked exactly like crack rocks. He and his buddies would drop a chunk of Pecorino on the sidewalk and just observe, like a fisherman tossing a line with a bobber into the shallows of a lake.
Eventually, a chicken-picking crackhead would wander by and then stop, transfixed like a lion who just spotted a sleeping gazelle. (He didn’t say it like that, I just pictured it that way.) But he said they’d freeze, look around, and then carefully crouch down, pick up the chunk of Parmesan, and drop it into a cupped hand. He said they were afraid it would melt, so then they’d cradle their treasure to their chest and hustle away to find a place to smoke it.A few months ago I went with my son to see a movie, American Fiction, at a nearby theater. The place is very nice and when it was built, right before the pandemic, it was a sign that the Lower East Side was getting nice or fancy or gentrified, whatever you want to call it. Well, Covid punched the lower east side in the fucking face. We have a lot of folks on the nod and on the pipe these days. But we still have our nice theater and I like to go. So I’m watching this movie with my son in our fully-reclined seats like a first-class flight on Dubai Airlines (no, I’ve never flown to Dubai) and a guy behind us is smoking crack.
The thing about crack smokers is they just can’t stop. Every ten minutes this guy is smoking more crack. Crack smoke stinks. It smells like burning hair and an electrical fire. So I’m getting really sick of it but I don’t know what to do. If I call the cops it’s going to be a scene. And if the guy is Black, which I wasn’t assuming he was, but if he was, then I’m a white dude in a theater watching a movie about how racist white people are and calling the cops on a Black guy. I definitely don’t want to be that guy.
Well, eventually the crack smoke sets off the fire alarm and the entire building has to evacuate, mid-movie. Everyone, out. That’s when I see that the crack smoking guy is white, just in case anyone is wondering. While we’re leaving I tell my son that the guy was smoking crack.
“That’s what crack smells like?”
“Yep”
“I always thought that was just the smell of the subway.”