Simon's $50 pound of weed.

This is, by far, my post popular post, receiving a bunch of views every day, but nobody has ever left a comment. You can do it anonymously. You should leave one. What is it you're looking for that brought you here? Did the title lead you to believe somebody had a pound of weed for sale, over the internet, for $50? Were you trying to figure out what a pound of weed is worth? (ProTip: Try THMQ.) Are you doing research for school? I can't, for the life of me, think of what else might be bringing so many clicks this way. Why don't you leave a comment and help end the mystery?

I first met Simon in 5th grade. He was a couple years older than me, several times my size, and a compulsive liar. On the bus, he would brag to me about how he had so much body hair that he had to shampoo his chest, pubes, and armpits, and how his flacid penis was the size of a full roll of paper-towels. Simon was clearly black, but would vehemently deny it, claiming to be a Mexican/Native American hybrid, despite looking like neither. He referred to black people as "colored people."

I considered Simon a friend, though this didn't prevent me from occasionally setting off his violent temper just for kicks. I learned that simply stating "I am God" would infuriate the religious kid, so it became something I enjoyed saying. Both of us were classified as "emotionally handicapped" and stuck in a classroom of other fire-starting crazies, and on several occasions, I witnessed the full power of his explosive rage, with screaming, book-throwing, and eventual restraint by all the adults in the room.

In 8th grade, I lost my "emotionally handicapped" label and stopped riding the short bus into the neighboring school district. I started going to the school I was supposed to, and Simon followed me the next year. I had no classes with him, but would sometimes talk to him in the hallway.

One day, Simon pulled me off to the side of the hall. He looked around suspiciously, and then leaned in close to my ear.

"I'm looking for a pound," he whispered.

"A pound of weed?" I asked in my normal voice.

"Shhhh! Yeah. Can you help me out?"

"Yeah, I'll see what I can do," I told him, and walked away.

As luck would have it, I had a friend in Spanish class who was a known pot dealer that had recently been busted by his mom. She had opened the trunk of his car to find it full of weed that he had grown in the woods. She was furious, and wanted him to get rid of it all immediately. For this reason, he had actually offered me a pound of weed at the crazy discount price of $100 just days before Simon's request. I declined, as I didn't smoke or have $100. When Simon asked for the pound, though, lights starting going off in my head. I didn't tell him about the offer, because I figured I'd pretend I was looking around, and then make some money brokering a deal for him. Even at the time, so many years ago, you could consider yourself well-connected to even get an ounce for $100, so anybody actually looking to make some money would have no problem dropping a few bills for a whole pound.

"Hey, Simon," I called out in the hallway a couple days later. He walked over to me.

"Yeah?"

"I found that pound you wanted," I told him.

"How much?" he asked.

"Three hundred bucks."

Simon rolled his eyes. "I already found one for fifty!" he said, walking away.

I told my friend in Spanish class about the failed transaction. We both agreed that Simon was completely full of shit.

The last time I saw Simon was one day when he showed up at school when I was in 12th grade. He spoke in a very soft voice and told me he was now a missionary. I didn't know whether or not to believe him, because nothing he ever said seemed to be true. I didn't really care, though. That guy was a jackass.

Crack Hedger's dog.

I was in 10th grade when I met Crack Hedger. It was the first day of school, and he was one of the incoming 7th graders riding my bus for the first time. My friend John and I were trying to talk to the new kids, and giving a couple of them new names. Most of the kids were obnoxious smartasses, but Crack seemed like a cool guy. His name was Joe, but we decided it would be Crack. Our logic was that Joe was white, and crack was white, and crack was also hilarious, so it was a good name.

I turned 16 that year, and my grandpa gave me my first car, a beat-up 1988 Dodge Colt, nicknamed the Chudmobile. The car was white, chud was white, and chud was also hilarious, so it was a good name. Crack offered to fix up my car stereo, for free, so I started going over to his house and letting him work on it. He put a new tape deck in, and installed an amp and some big speakers. He even built me a big speaker box to sit in the back of the car so I could drive around, bassing people out with a deep, low-end sound that made all the loose bits in my car rattle. All the parts came from a junkyard down the road from where he lived, and he said the guy who owned all the junk cars there told him he could take whatever he wanted.

Crack lived a few minutes away from me, in a house along a gravel road, with no other houses nearby. His place had an old bomb shelter and a lot of animals. As we started hanging out more, I got used to his dogs chasing my car as I drove away. I was scared of hitting them at first, but Crack told me just to drive and they would get out of the way. With time, my fear of running over one of his dogs subsided.

One summer afternoon, my friends and I decided to take a trip to the mall. There wasn't really any reason for it, but it was something to do. Living out in the middle of nowhere, the mall was a 40 minute drive away. I picked up John, and then went to go pick up Crack, the plan being to pick up my friend Sean next.

As we pulled away from Crack's house, his dogs started chasing my car, as they usually did. Like always, I just drove as if they weren't there, knowing they would get out of the way.

And then one of Crack's dogs ran right in front of my car.

"Fuck! No!" I yelled as my car drove over the dog. There were two sickening thumps as each tire on the passenger side squished the dog.

We stopped the car and got out. The dog lay in a heap, twisted and whimpering.

"Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, man," I said. As an animal-loving vegetarian kid, I was a bit freaked-the-fuck out.

"It's alright, man," Crack told me. He calmly scooped up the dog, a decently-sized Australian Shepard, and got back in the car. As we drove back to his house, the dog bit him and then puked on him.

We got back to his house and got out of the car. His dad and his grandpa came out of the house as Crack set the dog on the ground. I saw that it was dead, and started crying.

"It's alright, man," he told me. He didn't seem to care at all.

"I killed your fucking dog, man!" I said, wiping tears from my face.

"Shhh!" he whispered, not wanting the adults to hear me say "fuck."

His grandpa grabbed a shovel, and started walking out somewhere to dig a hole to bury the dog in. As he walked, a poodle started yapping at him and following close behind.

"Shut up, you son of a bitch!" the old man yelled, causing me to stop crying and start laughing.

Crack's sister came outside and saw my wet face.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"I've never seen a punk cry," she said.

We left again, picked up Sean, and went to the mall. I didn't really feel like going anymore, but we went, anyway.

I felt like shit for a week or so. My dad told me to get Crack a new dog, so I offered to do so. Crack declined, saying, "Don't worry about it, man. That dog was stupid as hell, anyway. Nobody cares."

Crack Hedger died four years ago today in a car crash. He was 19 years old.

Jeremiah was a fat kid.

I met Jeremiah in homeroom in eighth grade. He was a fat kid, and only friends with half of the circle of miscreants I sat with. I didn't realize this until I suggested hanging out with him after school, and my friend told me, "No, I don't like that fat kid." I sometimes called him "Buttcrack" behind his back, because his buttcrack was often visible when he sat down. On at least one occasion, I came up behind him and dropped a pencil into it. He didn't think it was funny, but I did.

Jeremiah invited me over to his house after school one time, so I rode his bus home with him. As we got closer to where he lived, I noticed that none of the houses were particularly nice, and I knew that a lot of the people who lived in that area had to be really poor. Jeremiah lived in a two-story house on the edge of a river. There was no siding on the house, and the insulation was clearly visible. I wondered if it was a temporary or permanent condition, but I didn't ask. When we got to his house, his sister, who was in the same grade as us and who had also ridden the bus home, disappeared into her room. Jeremiah's little brother was home, and wanted to hang out with us. For a while, we threw things into the river. We threw rocks at first, and then started throwing toys and half-empty aerosol cans and other assorted garbage into the water.

"Do you smoke?" Jeremiah asked.

"Sometimes," I said. I didn't, but I didn't want to sound like a square.

Jeremiah got a pack of cigarettes from inside and we walked into the woods with his brother. We each took a cigarette from the pack. I thought it was weird that Jeremiah's little brother was smoking. He was in 3rd or 4th grade.

"Don't you inhale?" Jeremiah asked.

"Yeah," I said, sucking on the cigarette and blowing the smoke out. I couldn't figure out what they were doing that I wasn't doing.

When we were finished, we went inside and Jeremiah offered me some Kool-Aid. He handed me a cup and went to the fridge to get the Kool-Aid.

"This cup is dirty," I said. The bottom was crusty and brown. Jeremiah got me another cup, but it had the same problem. I looked at more cups from the cabinet, and they were all crusty and brown in the bottom.

"It's not dirty," he said, "We drink a lot of tea."

I drank my Kool-Aid quickly, trying not to think of the bottom of the cup.

Jeremiah and I got in trouble for making fun of a kid on my bus named Jeff. I don't remember how it started, but we found ourselves in the office, being interrogated by the vice-principal. When we left the office, I suggested we drew comics about how Jeff and the vice-principal were gay lovers. We showed each other our comics at the end of the day. Mine had lots of tiny panels and was fairly graphic, despite being cartoony. Jeremiah's comic was a couple of stick-figures interacting in a couple of giant panels. I told him we should draw some more. The next time, his panels were tiny and I could tell he was doing his best to emulate my style. I thought it was cool.

In 9th grade, Jeremiah made friends with my sister, and would frequently write her notes. She told me that they were stupid, because he would make up ridiculous acronyms and expect her to know what they meant. She'd always have to ask.

"What is S.Y.A.L.A.M.T.?" she'd ask.

"You don't know? See you at lunch at my table!"

In 9th grade, I began my drift away from my obnoxious friends and began hanging out with nerdier kids. Jeremiah and I remained casual acquaintances, and he was still in my homeroom until I was reassigned in 11th grade due to my complete inability to tolerate our teacher. Jeremiah always wanted me to smell his fingers in the morning. Some guys do that to brag about getting laid. Jeremiah did it to brag about smoking cigarettes, and sometimes weed, before school.

In 10th grade, I was riding home with a group of friends, and they wanted to stop at Jeremiah's house. His mom had made up an excuse to get Jeremiah out of school early that day, because his older brother had shot a deer and they needed Jeremiah to put his name on it. His brother had already killed as many as he was legally allowed to. When we stopped at his house, we all got out of the car to look at a deer his brother had killed. It was laying in the back of his pickup truck. My friend Jason poked it in the eye with his finger until some goo came out, and then wiped his finger on me.

"He's a vegetarian," Jason told Jeremiah's brother.

"Really?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he said.

"That's what I said!" Jason said, and everybody laughed except me.

In 11th grade, Jeremiah and this other kid, Nick, were talking in homeroom about their plans to go hunting over the weekend while tripping on Jimson weed. Having done very minimal internet research on the subject, I knew this was a terrible idea.

"You can't have a good trip," I told them, "Only a bad one. You'll hallucinate and think everything you're seeing is real."

"Yeah," Jeremiah said, "It's going to be fucking awesome!"

I couldn't do anything to dissuade them, so I just worried all weekend that I would come back to school to find out that one of them had shot the other. I never heard anything more about the event, so I assumed they never went through with it. I didn't mention it, fearing that if they hadn't already done it, they might decide to give it a whirl.

Another time, Jeremiah and Nick asked if I wanted to go snipe hunting. They said all you had to do was shine a light into a bag at night, and a bird called a snipe would run into the bag. I had heard about this before, in a book of urban legends. I told them it wasn't true, but they insisted that it was.

"The best part," Jeremiah told me, "is once you get the snipe into a bag, you can bash the bag against something until it's dead."

In 12th grade, having been moved to a different homeroom, I barely talked to Jeremiah at all. He hung out with Nazi stoners who hated me. There was a rumor that a friend and I were gay lovers, which turned me into social poison. Jeremiah's little brother told my girlfriend that "your boyfriend is the gayest kid in the school." Still, Jeremiah, perhaps because he was never particularly popular, even in the shittiest of shitty social circles, was always cool with me.

One morning before class, as I sat on a bench in the hallway talking to a friend, Jeremiah stopped to say a few friendly words. He was walking with a Nazi stoner who I had never talked to, and whose last name sounded like "Sodomizer." Sodomizer's brother had called me a sand nigger, and had also professed his desire to fuck my sister. While I spoke to Jeremiah, Sodomizer glared at me.

"Fucking faggot!" he yelled, as soon as they had turned around and started walking away.

"No, he's cool," Jeremiah said.

"That's not what I heard."

Jeremiah came up to me one morning and told me he was growing weed in his basement. I was glad to hear this, because for some reason or another he owed me some. Having done minimal research on the internet, I knew a little bit on the subject. Mainly, I knew that you needed a specialized lamp if you wanted to grow indoors.

"What kind of light are you using?" I asked him.

"I'm not using one," he said.

"Um, plants need light, dude."

"Not weed !" he told me, and walked away. I asked him later how it was going and he said it never grew. I acted surprised.

I saw Jeremiah once, a few years after we had graduated. I was at our old high school, watching a football game, because my brother was involved in some school-related thing. He was a candidate for homecoming king or something. I saw Jeremiah arrive, followed closely behind by the girl who was his girlfriend as long as I can remember. He was fatter, had a shaved head, and a ridiculously long Z.Z. Top-style beard. I don't think he saw me, which was good, because I didn't want to talk to him.

Mike's reflective shoes.

Right after I graduated high school, I started spending a lot of time with my friend Mike. Mostly, we'd play punk rock in his basement, with Mike on a drum set that came out of a dumpster, and myself banging out power chords on my guitar. When we got bored with that, we'd drive around, digging in dumpsters and getting harassed by rednecks. Mike was probably the punkest guy I ever knew. He wasn't some dumb rich kid who shopped at Hot Topic and secretly aspired to be a successful rich guy. No, Mike was a high school dropout who dug in the trash, made his own clothes, and aspired to be punk as fuck forever.

Mike was the only person who I ever actually saw smoking crack. We were sitting in his bedroom one night before going out for a night of dumpster diving, and had just finished smoking some weed. Mike dumped the ash out of the pipe, and then popped in a crack rock.

"What the fuck, man?" I asked, concerned that my good friend was about to smoke crack.

"Don't worry, man," he said, "I can't afford to smoke this shit. This is just something my brother stole from some guy."

I'd always wondered if crack instantly turned a person into a crazy person, or if it took a lot of smoking to get them to the point where they wandered the streets talking to themselves. Mike didn't seem any different after he smoked his rock. He just seemed like Mike.

As far as I knew, he never became a crackhead. He came from a family of potheads, and I never knew any of them to be too interested in anything else. When his brother was in a serious car accident and was prescribed a bunch of powerful pain killers, he sold them all for weed money.

Mike loved to make and modify his own clothes. While most of my clothes-modification experiments consisted of me safety-pinning things to other things, Mike learned to sew. A routine dumpster-diving expedition once landed us a fine bounty of brand new clothes intended for obese women with preferences for extremely loud clothing. For a while after that, our clothes were often lined with pieces of that bounty: leopard prints, plaids, and plastic imitation snake skin. In addition to lining things with other things, Mike would paint his clothes, add spikes or straps or zippers, and sometimes briefly set his clothes on fire because he liked how it looked afterwards.

Another time, he glued bike reflectors to the bottom of his combat boots.

Mike was a young guy, several years younger than myself, but he had already had a number of run ins with the police. It seemed to be common in his family. One day, Mike was walking around outside when he saw the police driving nearby. He wasn't carrying any contraband, and he hadn't done anything wrong, but the sight of the cops scared him. He started running, and when the police got too close, he jumped into a ditch so they wouldn't see him.

They didn't see him, but they did see the reflectors on his shoes shining in their headlights. They arrested him for resisting arrest, since he was evidently trying to hide from them.

I haven't seen Mike in a few years, but when I did, he still had his mohawk and leather jacket. Everybody else I knew had gotten rid of them long ago. Punk as fuck, I tell you.

Kiser and the jar of pee.

In 11th grade, I took what was supposed to be my last year of high school math. It was a total blowoff class, a very basic math class that was essentially free credits for me. I didn't do any of my homework and never studied, but I was able to pass it just by taking the tests. Unfortunately, it turned out that my guidance counselor, who was working his last year at the school, didn't know what he was doing, and I would end up having to take another math class the next year.

My teacher was a dude named Kiser, a first year teacher with a very young face and incredibly timid demeanor. His first year of teaching would also be his last, and in retrospect I feel terrible about the role I played in helping drive him away from the profession. I'm convinced, though, that even if I hadn't contributed to the shit he had to deal with, he still would never have made it as a high school teacher. Students walked all over him all day long.

My friend Jason and I used to cause trouble for him on a daily basis. We'd do things like turn a desk sideways, and then stand in front of it pretending that we were too utterly confused by the sideways desk to do any work or listen to him. I would sometimes sneak out of class and wander the halls, something I didn't dare do in any other class. Jason used to smoke pot in his class and blow the smoke into a cabinet near his desk, which did next to nothing to mask the odor. Afterwards, he'd go talk to Kiser with his eyes glazed over and his breath reeking of ganja, and Kiser would never do anything about it. We weren't the only ones in my class who gave him shit, though, it was pretty much a team effort, with nearly the entire class contributing. Within a month of teaching, he had already been in trouble twice for things that we had collectively convinced him were OK to let us do: going to lunch five minutes before anybody else was let out of class, and walking around outside on the cross country track (half the class came back completely stoned). As a general rule, nobody listened to Kiser, and everybody did whatever the hell they wanted.

Kiser used to let us get into groups to do our homework, but nobody ever did their homework, instead opting to talk and goof off. One day, the group I was in was snacking on a jar of pickles that one of our classmates had stolen from the home economics room. When the pickles were gone, somebody remarked on the similarity between the color of pickle brine and that of urine.

"Let me see that," I said, taking the jar. I put in under my desk and unzipped my pants. Everybody in my group started laughing, and even though I hadn't been serious to begin with, I decided it might be a good idea to actually pee into the jar. My group convinced me that it was, indeed, a terrific idea. I couldn't pee in front of people, so I stuck the jar in my pocket and asked Kiser if I could go to the bathroom. Generally, students were never allowed to go to the bathroom in any class, except in the case of a dire emergency, but Kiser had a policy of letting people get one bathroom pass per grading period. In actual practice, though, some of just got up and peed whenever we damn well felt like it.

I walked to the bathroom with the jar bulging from my pants, worried that some teacher might see it and ask what was in my pocket. I was even more scared on the way back, because there was no way I was going to be able to explain why I was carrying a jar of warm pee. Fortunately, nobody saw me.

When I got back to class, everybody in my group was silent as I sat down. They looked at me, and I looked at them. When I took the jar of pee from my pocket and set it on the desk, they erupted into riotous laughter. Pee is almost always hilarious.

The bell for lunch rang a couple minutes after I had set the jar of pee on my desk. My classmates encouraged me to bring it with me, or at the very least leave it on my desk, since we were coming back to that class after lunch, anyway. I was too scared, though, so I threw it in the trash on the way out.

About a month later, I asked Kiser if I could go to the bathroom.

"No," he said, "You already used your bathroom pass for this grading period."

"What?" I asked, feigning incredulousness, "When? I never went to the bathroom this grading period!"

"Yes, you did," he said, "Do you remember the pickle jar incident?"

"Are you trying to imply something?" Jason asked.

"Yeah, what are you implying?" I asked, doing my best to sound completely offended.

"Nothing," he said, "I'm just saying you guys were eating pickles that day."

The last thing I heard about Kiser was that he had grown a huge beard and become a missionary. Poor guy. High school kids are such dicks.

Crackheads, stay off of my porch!

Yesterday, my girlfriend and I were sitting on the couch in the front room. It was hot out, and we had the windows open. I was playing some video games, and she was playing with her laptop.

"What's up?" I heard, coming from outside.

I turned around and there was a somewhat dirty guy with dreadlocks on our porch, walking towards the door.

"What's up?" I said through the window.

He said "What's up" again and stood at the door for a moment. When he realized neither of us was going to get off the couch, he came to the window.

"What's up?" he said once more.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Hey, let me tell you about my situation. My car is broken down, and I'm here from out of town. I'm from north of here. I have my mom with me, she's from south of here. Now, my mom is a diabetic, and..."

"Sorry, man, I'm broke," I said, cutting him off.

"OK," he said, "I'm sorry for bothering you."

"Good luck," I told him as he walked off my porch.

When I'm out, I almost always give money to whoever asks me for some. I know a lot of those people are going to spend it on feeding a habit, but who am I to judge? Ideally, they should be getting help somewhere, but life isn't so ideal. If I can help somebody make it through the day, I'll do what I can, even if they give me a line of bullshit about their car being broken or out of gas (I can't count how many times I've heard that one). My contact with these people is enough that for a brief period, I even contracted a case of the dreaded bum disease.

I draw the line, however, at people coming to my home and asking for money. I don't need mysterious people showing up at my door asking for money, and I sure as hell don't need them coming back again because it worked before.

Later, at around 2:00 AM, we went to the 24-hour laundromat and dropped our clothes off. When we came back, there was some lady sitting on the little strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street directly in front of the house, right next to our driveway. We walked in through the side door, like we always do, and avoided having to walk past her. When we left to go back to the laundromat, she was gone.

I'm sure it was probably a coincidence, but two random weirdos in front of our place on the same day makes me kind of uneasy.

Maybe the dude with the dreadlocks heard the reggae coming out of the stereo and thought it was some kind of invitation to come beg for money. Maybe the lady sitting on the grass was taking a midnight stroll and just happened to stop in front of the house.

Or maybe the dude with the dreadlocks was scouting for places to rob for crack money, and when he saw the various gadgets and toys we had, he told the lady to hang out and see when we're home and when we're not. The rational part of my brain tells me that's it's kind of blatant and stupid, but the paranoid part tells me I should be on my toes. The paranoid part of my brain tells me that crack heads tend to be blatant and stupid, but the rational part of my brain tells me that it's difficult to even look out the window without seeing a cop drive by, which hopefully makes it unlikely that somebody is going to get away with stealing my stuff. I don't have a lot of faith in the police, but I think their heavy presence in my area, right next to a college, should make my home an unattractive target.

Crackheads, stay the fuck off of my porch. You make me paranoid.

Buying drugs on the highway.

"Do you know what I pulled you over for?" the cop asked, taking my license and registration. His partner was scanning the inside of my van with his flashlight.

"Honestly, no," I told him, which was the truth. I had taken the ramp off the highway and stopped at the light at the end of the exit. As soon as the light turned green, they turned on their disco lights.

"Where are you headed?" he asked, staring at my license.

"Home. I just got off work."

"Where do you live?"

"Grove Lane."

"Where do you work?"

"At the university."

"The university, huh? Doesn't it seem like you're a little out of your way?" he asked, sneering.

"Do you know a better way?" I asked, genuinely curious. If there was a faster way, I sure didn't know about it.

"Well," the cop said, ignoring my question, "the reason we pulled you over is because you took an unnecessary detour through a high drug traffic zone."

"The highway?" I asked.

"Do you have anything I should know about? Anything you shouldn't have?"

"No."

"Do you mind if we take a look?"

I did mind. If a cop asks for consent to search, it's because they don't have a real reason to search. You're legally allowed to say no, but cops always have more tricks up their sleeves. I remembered that I had just received my new license plate in the mail, but hadn't put it on. If the one on the back was expired, and I said no to a search, the cops would more than likely write me a ticket for that and anything else they can find. I had no choice but to allow them to toss the car. Every time the cops had ever searched a car I was in, they had made a mess. Once, they even dumped a bag of potato chips on the floor of my friend's car during a fruitless search. I hoped if I cooperated they wouldn't be such assholes.

I got out of the car and one of the cops patted me down.

"What's this bulge in your pocket?"

"Uh, I don't know, can I feel it so I can tell you what it is?"

"Can I just pull it out? You don't have any needles or anything do you?"

"No, go ahead."

He pulled it out, and it turned out to be a handkerchief I had forgotten about.

"Oh, snot rag," I said.

"Gee, thanks," he chuckled.

The cops went through the van, finding nothing of interest except for a pill on the floor.

"What's this pill?"

"I don't know. I assume a pain killer of some kind."

"A pain killer?"

"Yeah, over the counter," I told them, which was the truth.

They let me get back in the car and I waited for a couple minutes while they talked. Finally one of the cops came and gave me my license and registration.

"Is your license plate expired?" he asked.

"I don't know, it might be, I just got the new one in the mail."

He walked to the back of the car and then back to the window.

"Yeah, it's expired. Put that on tomorrow, alright? You're free to go."

I went home, and wondered where it was that I could buy drugs on the highway.

The fake crack.

In second grade, I found some coursely ground salt in the pantry and decided to convince my classmates that it was crack. I knew what crack was supposed to look like from drug awareness ads and the like, and I thought the salt looked close enough, though perhaps a bit small. I put some into a clear plastic bag, like I had always seen it pictured. When I brought in on the bus, I waited until everyone was aboard before I pulled it out.

"Look," I said, "I have crack."

Everybody looked at me incredulously. The general consensus seemed to be that I didn't actually have crack. I decided to prove them wrong. The problem was that I had no idea how crack was used, nor what its effects would be on the user.

I opened the bag, pulled out a pinch of the fancy salt, and put it in my mouth, trying not to visibly cringe as it overpowered my taste buds. I chewed it up and swallowed it.

"Yeah," I said, "This is some good crack."