Garth Johnston (yes, that's right, he's a reporter!)Crackhead Al was sort of a friend of mine back a few years after Richard Pryor blew his face up while cooking up some crack (freebase cocaine) on an airplane. My own first experience with free base cocaine happened while I was driving a taxi for Dover back around 1983 or so. A white man and white woman were in the back and I noticed in the mirror that he had one of those little torches that were being sold around the country in neighborhood candy stores and bodegas. When he lit it up I became very alarmed. We were crossing Central Park from West to East along the 65th Street transverse. Then out came a lab type plexiglass thin with stuff in it which he started to cook up right behind me. Wikipedia says that the American crack epidemic ran from 1984 (interesting, no?)and and 1990.
Al, this other Jewish guy who had a Sephardi surname that I forget and Charles a very black man who spoke with the dialect of the Mississippi Delta and was muscled like one of those guys Paul Robeson sung about lifting bales of cottonwhich is where he was from were the three who I was aware were deeply involved in the stuff.
Al had been more or less a friend of mine sharing breakfast at the Tiffany on Sheridan Squareand joking around. He went fast into addiction and it was odd and scary to see. For a while Al would come back to the garage loaded with cash whereas the Sephardic guy and Charles were always broke begging for loans, going out on credit (in those days the driver paid in advance for the shift) . But as there were not enough drivers to cover every car every shift the garage made compromises. Al was always flush with cash, his eyes bugging out like baseballs and his voice stridently loud, his conversation repetitive, boastful and self centered. He soon took up with a tribe of crackheads on Star Street in Bushwick, in the basement of a wooden frame house. There wee a few young women and their calling was to service the truck drivers who parked along the deserted side streets of Bushwick and the males of the tribe went out on expeditions wherein they would locate cars that had boostable radios, smash the windows of said cars, remove said radio, sell and repeat.
I went out there once on Al's invite shortly before he simply stopped showing up at the garage so I saw this stuff myself, Not the activities but the talk about the activities which were called "missions." I went out there on my own after not seeing Al for a couple of weeks and one of the girls invited me in, offered to "do" me for four dollars and told me that Al was "on a mission." I never went back. (BTW I declined the offer as such stuff offended my ethical standards.)
I am supposing Al, Charles and the Sephardic guy are all either dead or seriously one or the other might have found religion probably in a prison if so.
