Guest Post JF from Bay Area

"Chip off the old Block"

See...drugs have been in my bloodline long before I was even a daydream. Both of my birth parents were addicts..."My mother was a vodka queen and my father was a rock star..
So I ended up rolling stoned in the back of a cop car"

From what little I really do know of my mother, she was from upstate  New York, and Im pretty sure thats where she met my father..they split when I was 2 years old. I remember the fights, I remembered seeing my father slap the shit out of my mother one day during an argument  and I think my mother had us stay in a hotel that night. Her nose was bleeding and I guess I found a band aid and gave it to her and it made her laugh and she hugged me...My father and mother both drank a d fought when drunk, it became a normal part of my childhood, the yelling and screaming...but by that time my young brain was already corrupted by the addictive genes passed to me.  My father told me that they would drink and smoke weed together and my mother like to huff glue..and she may have continued this while prenant.

This was around 82, maybe 83. My father moved out and I stayed with my mother for the beginning. I remember some happy times as a child, but the years of drugs and denial have made some harder to recall. My mother was always beautiful to me,and I remember the loving and caring she gave me when it was just us...this only lasted a year or two. My father would visit after we had moved into a new apartment. He came over drunk one night, I remember his brim hat and leather jacket...my dad was always Mr. Cool..He was what I wanted to be.

Anyways, I was sitting next to him on the couch while he argued with my mother...I dont rememeber about what but she wanted him to leave. My father laid back a little on the couch and put both hands into 
his jacket pockets.. and the pulled out two handguns and set them down on the table "Look I will come see my son whenever I want and nobody will stop me"
A silver .38 snubnose on the left, and a small black revolver on the right...I wanted to touch them, to play with them...I knew they were dangerous and I wanted them still.

I remember my father mentioning something about bringing a machete over when he comes over next...and I he told me I could help him cut vegetables up and we would make soup together. Looking back I now see the underlying threat that he probably made. I guess I was still somewhat innocent...
When he left I remember hearing my mother said she was going to put him "behind bars"...which confused me..I didnt understand why my father would have to work at a bar? I thought maybe it was punishment to be a bartender or something..I look back and laugh at these things.  Once people hear my stories they start to understand why I am the way I am..I never claimed to be sane, but maybe I should come with a warning label.

My father was a pimp in New York, sold drugs while there and also had a $200 a day heroin habit...these are from what I know when he would get drunk and start telling the stories. He had 3 hoes working for him and drove a Cadillac, this was sometime in the mid 70's I would imagine. My father was super fly..with a distict swagger to him, he walked so cool and could sell an eskimo ice at twice the price...There are definitely distinct features we share, I find myself feeling more like him. I dont think I really understood my father until he died and I had to clean out his apartment. The side to him that I always remember was his ability to be successful, he was a smart man that graduated high school at 16, went on to earn a Masters Degree and then went into the army for 10 years. I always saw my father in a suit, every day, suit and hat... or the fedora and the black leather 3/4 trench. Always drove a Cadillac, then a Riviera, a Chrysler Celebrity which I thought was the coolest car ever because it talked.

What I learned about him after he died was the other side, the hard core drug addict that struggled with depression and paranoia, and the struggle of raising a child by himself. My father was a lonely man that just wanted company. I realized all the opportunities I lost to bond with my father. We never really got to speak to each other as adults, I was left with a lot of unanswered questions because we never got to have a real man to man talk with him. When he died we were both strung out crack and chasing the next high instead of trying to repair our relationship.

It was the mid 80's and I was now living with my father near San Jose..he had a new girlfriend named Vicky and she had a son my age and a daughter a few years older than us. The crack epidemic hit and rocked the world. They began freebasing, this would change things forever and I was now exposed to the dark world of crack cocaine. My father would get high and paranoia and would have my crawling in the floor behind him because he thought people were to get us. He would set booby traps around the house to make sure nobody would break in..all the windows had these little jingle bells on them so if someone were to open on the bell would ring.  Some nights my father would swear he hear the bells ringing and rush to pulled me out of bed  and tell me to get on the floor. He had his shotgun with him and was loaded it. He would crawl throught the house peeking out of windows chasing shadows. The bells he heard ringing I would imagine were from the rocks he was smoking...a fat hit of some good dope is know to give you a "bell ringer"..an auditory hallucination that some of you know well.
My father would drive to Hunters Point to cop his dope in the 80's ...Vicky or one of his other women took him out there and put him up on the crack game. Where to cop from and when..back when H.P was serving dope on damn neear every corner, sometimes he would cop over from Fillmore..the crack era was taking over...I learned this from the cassette recodings I found my father had made telling his life story. I have since lost these gems.

Crack tore apart the relationship with Vicky, she started fuckin people for dope and got real strung out and was known for disappearing for days at a time, she'd holed up in a rockhouse fucking people for dope.  She moved out and my fathers paranoia continued to escalate. He boarded up all the windows to the house so the neighbors couldnt sneak in or see him smoking dope inside...I didnt understand it at the time but looking back I can see his habit got worse.  He was  still maintaining a 100% professional image and you would never guess this man was a crack addict, his gift of gab of astonishing.

His job in the past had us moving around a lot, I can recall living in more that 20 different states before turning 10. He was part of the team thag developed that Zip+4 Program for the postal service (FYI-those are the last 4 digits after your zip code that helps give a more definitive location  of your address)

We eventually would move to the the West Bay, just a few miles from Hunter Point, a 10 minute drive. This would have been around 86 or 87, Crack was public enemy number one on the streets. I look back at the struggles my father went through to keep a roof over our heads and put food on the table
and I understand why he got high, why he drank, and why he taught me the things he did at such you age.
At 15 I smoked my first joint laced with crack, we called them chewies. You roll a joint and crush up and sprinkle the crack with it...after the first time I fell in love with it as well. I loved the taste, I loved the numb lips, I loved being so high that I just didnt think or feel anything. Any cash I could come up with at that age went towards chewies. Everyone would chip in  $5 each and we could get all we could. Sometimes there would be up to10 of us and we would just roll up as many as we could and just smoke all day...everyone would get silent as hell and just zone off  into their  own zone when we smoked.  I fell in love and started selling weed to support my new habit.... all the profit would go into the after school smoke sessions, then I would just start bringing the weed and supplying it for the session and they would bring the crack. I spent a whole summer doing that 5 days a week and my rock star adventure with crack was just beginning...

TO BE CONTINUED