"Schwag Carpeting" by Jennifer Schwartz

I smoked a LOT of pot in college. I still do, but there was a period of time when I would smoke any kind of weed that I got from any shady mother fucker, under any circumstances. I basically needed to be blown outta my mind 24/7.

I guess I realized it might be a problem when one time a friend and I were scraping all of my paraphernalia to gather together one pathetic bowl of weed because we were both out. I had pulled out every utensil I had and finally we gathered a little bowl on a sorting tray. We knew this was pathetic and started to laugh really hard about this terrible situation when one of us laughed so hard we blew all of the weed on the floor into the carpet.

Now, I don't know if you smoke nearly as much as I do, but when you have little flakes of weed land on any surface with fuzzy fabric, like carpet, an angora sweater or a golden retriever, that weed is as good as gone. It just, *poof*, disappears.

But I was desperate and there was no way I was going to let that little pile of weed I worked so hard scraping together be lost to the fuzzy carpet. My friend and I gasped and started to freak out, picking all the little pieces of weed we could find out of the fuzzy carpet and packed them directly into a bowl. We were NOT going to let that sorting tray accident happen again. When we had found as much weed in the carpet as we could, we realized that what we had packed into the bowl was mostly carpet with little flecks of weed here and there.

We said, "Fuck it" and smoked the bowl of carpet anyhow. It tasted awful but I could have sworn that I got a little high.

"Crack is Whack" by Zach

Disclaimer:

I am not proud of this story. But I must continue to tell it in the hopes that I will never do crack again. And that it will dissuade you, kind reader, from doing the same.

On a pleasant Brooklyn evening I returned home from happy hour to find a disheveled black dude on the stoop in front of my apartment. Here, on a street leading to the projects, I lived with two girls and three cats in a cramped but decent enough NYC flat. Sure, I heard drive-bys and gang fights and domestic disputes on the street at 4am, but I was proud of my first pad in the big city.

Anyway, the man blocking entry to my place asked if I could spare three dollars. Now, this was curious to me because normally when a person begs for money they low-ball, simply asking for "some change". Needless to say I found the requested amount of $3 to be odd... ahem.

When I asked him why he needed that exact amount, he quickly and unabashedly replied, "Cause I need to get some more crack and that's what I'm short."

Simple enough, right?

Well, being the kinda guy I am, wanting to engage in yet another psycho-social trust experiment, I tell him that if I give him the $3 that he has to come back and smoke his score with me. I had never smoked crack before and I wasn't really interested in getting high with this guy (wink, nudge). I just wanted to see if my "experiment" would work; to see if he really would come back as he promised he would.

Well....

Sure as shit this guy comes back ten minutes later with a gleam in his eye that excites and frightens me at the same time. For anyone who has waited for a drug deal to come through, you know the feeling you get when your drugs arrive, regardless of how long you've waited or how much shit-talking you've done about your dealer. When that moment comes all is forgiven.

So he says to me, "We gonna do this?"

With a bit of hesitation and realizing that I had to hold up my end of the bargain now, I said, "Yeah, but let's do it out here on the stoop cause I think my roommates are home and I can't just take some random dude into my apartment to smoke crack."

Here's where he gets upset and uses some not-so-subtle intimidation tactics on me; the kind you find in prison or war that indicate you don't have a choice in the matter. My experiment has flipped on me a bit. I concede, knowing my roommates are in fact not home, and walk him upstairs into my apartment.

Furthermore, who does crack on a stoop in Brooklyn? I should have known better.
What was I an amateur?

We get inside and now I can really see this guy. He's got a scar down the left side of his face, running clean from his eye to jawline. This pit-bull looking motherfucker seems a lot more intimidating in a well lit room, but suddenly the fear dissipates when he sniffles and says, "Hey man, you got any porn?"

"Uh, yeah", I reply.

Luckliy, one of my roommates was seeing a guy who was classy enough to give her a copy of Cheri magazine as a birthday gift. I unearthed it from the pile of Nylon and Vogue magazines on our coffee table and tossed it to my new friend. He disappeared into the bathroom and for the next 5 minutes I sat quietly in amazement, withholding judgment.



When he comes back into the living room after his conjugal visit he sits down and explains to me that he has indeed just gotten out of prison and hasn't seen a woman's body in a long time. He imparts a story about getting busted for stealing cars and serving time for a couple years upstate. I ask him where he got the scar and he turns to me with a disgusted look, saying, "Where you think?"

My fear returns and I thank god I have never been to prison. This JewAmerIndian pearl of a body would be mince meat in minutes.

Quickly I change the subject and focus on the task at hand: getting high!!

But wait, I had never smoked crack before and didn't know what to expect. I know that crack is basically just baking soda mixed with cocaine, but I didn't have a clue as to how long the high would last or what feelings I may experience.

I told my friend, whose name was Lamar, I had never done this before. He flashed a smile and pulled out his broken crack pipe. As he lays out the rocks and packs the pipe he says, "We gon' have a good time."

At this point I'm staring at the broken glass pipe thinking, "Alright! This is authentic!"
Like when you go to Xochimilco in Detroit.

Lamar takes a drag and exhales a thick, white cloud of smoke more dense than any bong rip I've ever seen. He sinks back into the couch and passes me the pipe. I follow suit. For the next ten minutes there's nothing but the hum of electricity and stale smoke lingering in the air. Coming out of our haze we pack it up again and another ten minutes of brain annihilation ensues.

Smoking crack is like taking a combination of a vicodin, weed and nitrous, making for a brief euphoric dance party in your head. Then you snap out of it and clamor for more. I knew my addictive personality was a perfect match for this drug but it's not the sustained high that weed, alcohol, or good cocaine can give you. You have to keep wailing away on that pipe every couple of minutes to keep your buzz worthy of recognition. That kind of effort is too much for me. Drug administration should be quick, and the wave ridden as long as possible.

A half hour passes and, after a few more drags on the pipe, I realize it's time for my friend to leave our little two-man party. But before getting up to leave, Lamar asks what I'm up to tonight. I mistakenly tell him that I'm going to a party (which I'm already late for due to my crack smoking experiment). He smiles and says he's got shit else to do and he likes partying with me (fuck, who doesn't, right?)

Perhaps my brain was mush but I saw no reason why bringing a new friend to the party was such a bad idea. So what if he's a crack head and former convict. Who cares? He had served his time and, at this point, we were both just a couple of crackheads. Who was I to judge him?

I said, "Sure. Let's go".


Our "if the mood is right" crack-using friend is depicted here with a cane.

"Double Your Pleasure" by Anonymous

After a long, tiring streak of drinking and dancing for many nights in a row at a night club in Metro-Detroit the lights came on and it was time to leave. My attempt to meet someone was once again thwarted and I started to think there had to be a better way to be single and mingle.

As I was walking out, I noticed my inner thigh was sticking to the inside of my jeans. In a drunken stupor, I shoved my hand down my pants to see what was lurking in the abyss. It was gooey and sticky and when I pulled my fingers out to explore what was creating this hot mess, I was overcome with the smell of grape.

I, nor anyone I knew, that evening had been riding the bubble-licious train so there is only one explanation that I could come up with:

In my booze-fueled haze, I had not only *gasp* sat on a night club toilet seat but had unknowingly entered into a symbiotic relationship with a stranger's used gum.

I'd hit rock-bottom, or so I thought, only to arrive home (alone) and have to use Goo-Be-Gone on my lady parts.

"Rock Bottom at Raffrika's" by George P. Gordon the III

It was the year after I graduated from college and I was confused and lost about what I wanted to do with my life. The summer before what would've been my final year my father sat me down and said, “look, you have got to finish school."

Now at the time it didn't seem like that big of a deal to me because it was the start of year 5 and I was already thinking "nobody graduates in 4 years anymore." My thought process was that I'd take the 20 hours I needed to finish in two semesters rather than bust my ass in one. My old man didn't see it that way, so that fall semester I took all 20 hours at once.

This was a pretty arduous task for me considering that I had never taken more than 15 hours and had no qualms about dropping a class or two if it was not to my liking. But I had to do it. To make matters worse it was my first year in college with a car and I had to pay the money back which was spent by my father who made the decision for me to hurry up and graduate. I owed him a lot of money.

I wanted to keep my on-campus job but to supplement my income I waited tables on the weekend. I was taking 20 hours /week in school, working part time on campus, then waiting tables Friday & Saturday night, and all day Sunday. It was a tough schedule but I made it through.

The restaurant I worked at was a place called Rafferty's. It was a chain down south that was nicer than Applebee’s, but shittier than Chili’s (if possible).

This was Memphis, TN and only two types of people came into Rafferty's: poor white trash and ghetto clientele --jean shorts, wife beaters, gold teeth, real camouflage and jerseys--just awful.

It was nothing to be working one night and have a party of five just reeking of weed. I once had a guest at a table get up and start peeing beside another table. And of course tipping might as well have been some sort of alien custom because nobody who dined there understood it. (The servers who worked there hated waiting on the black folks that came in there, but the white folks didn't tip either.)

So why would I work there? Well, several members of my fraternity already did and the store manager, who works there to this day still, was one of my best friends. Even though I had never waited tables I knew I could get a job.

So there I was waiting tables at Rafferty's on the weekends and hating life. To give you an idea about what was on the menu at “Raffrika” (a name that my buddy Todd coined because of the large groups of African Americans that would frequent there) one word could describe it and that word would be FRIED. Chicken finger platter: fried. Club Sandwich: fried. Bread Basket: fried.

The one healthy thing on the menu was a house salad with fried potato sticks on it. But the most popular version was the Chicken Finger Salad which had a mountain of, you guessed it fried chicken. Of course we had burgers and steaks but everything else was fucking fried. (Memphis is one of the fattest cities in America)

A steak we had was called the Cowboy Steak--which was about the size of your fist and was ALWAYS ordered well done by the awesome customer base at Rafferty's. When it was brought to the table it looked like a lump of sizzling coal.

With a clientele like we had, and a menu that was unhealthy to say the least, you knew the staff had to be interesting. There was Sylvester a coke-head from the streets of Memphis and Carlos and Nebraska (yes his name was Nebraska) two brothers who were slightly off. The wait staff rapidly turned over but our fearless leader Pill Bell (Bill Bell)--A rotund redheaded, piece of shit, degenerate, thieving, drug using, womanizing (only if they were underage), and lowlife GM, was always there.

Pill Bell would steal from the servers by charging them $2 to wear the Rafferty's shirt--a shirt that was rarely washed and smelled like it was fried. He’d steal from the bar by drinking all of the Crown then buying well whiskey and pouring it back into the Crown bottles, which in Tennessee was ILLEGAL. He ran a sports gambling ring in the restaurant which again is ILLEGAL. And of course he named his daughter Britney after a then pubescent Britney Spears. The guy was a pederast.

I toughed it out though and at the end of that hell semester --1.6 GPA-- I graduated. Seeing that I didn't want to go out and get a real job, I went to graduate school. This was a no-brainer because my campus job was willing to give me an assistantship, meaning that once I became degree seeking and passed the GMAT, grad school would be paid for and I’d get $800 a month. Maybe I'd work a shift or two for extra cash but nothing crazy. That semester of grad school I had one goal and that was to kick ass on the GMAT and after taking it 3 times. I never did. I never got that assistantship.

I never finished grad school and lost my campus job because by the end of that summer I was not in school anymore. I was a non-student and a full time waiter at fucking Rafferty's.

As the months went on I was the only one left working there. My friends had moved on (they were fired) and Todd had been transferred. I had to get out of there.

One day after coming home to the foul stench of fried food, I realized that I’d had enough. I was determined to take the first job opportunity that came my way and it happened to be working for a pyramid scheme which at the time seemed legit enough. It was one of those places that advertised themselves like this:"Do you have what it takes to make 150K in your first year of employment?!?!" I was down for at least looking into it. I remember the first day the salespeople would stand around in circles shouting, "We've got juice, how ‘bout you?!?"

Now of course this was a sham but I so desperately wanted to leave Rafferty's that I'd figure I would take anything. My job was selling children's books and toys inside K-Mart, Toys - R - Us, and any other shit store in the south. We were selling this crap under the pretense that the money raised was going to a children's charity. These items looked more like dollar store reject items but people were willing to buy it because they thought it went to a good cause. And it did--sort of. Roughly less than 5% of the proceeds went to that charity, the other 95% went to that shady business and to my team.

I knew something was up when we were specifically asked to not take donations. Why not? It was a charity, right? But it was a lot easier to make it look legit if we were ACTUALLY selling these items. So by the end of the day I had to make sure I had a running tally in my head of donations so when we settled up at the end of the night it looked like the numbers matched. Meaning, at the end of the day we had to give away some of this shit. I was in essence scamming a scam company who was raising money for a scam charity.

It all came to a head when after having to drive 2 hours away, setting up a table in bumble-fuck Mississippi, and working all day, we each made $58. I quit immediately and went back to Rafferty's.

Rock bottom hit hard when I went up to Pill Bell and had to ask this horse- ass for my server job back and explain how I didn't make it in the world of selling children's books for a fake charity. I went on to sell fried food to low-lives at “Raffrika’s” for another year.

Rock Bottoms: Short and Sweet

" After arriving on an ill-planned vacation with basically no money I sustained myself on leftover room service trays that littered the hall of my hotel... for 3 days."

"I was so poor for a stretch of time that I couldn't afford basics let alone new potting soil for my rapidly withering plants, which by all rights, were my only decent possession. I started stealing soil from my landlord's potted plants in the hallway cup by cup at a time to fortify my own plants. This plan worked great until she caught me in the act and told me she "suspected it was me doing it." I was literally dirt poor when I hit rock bottom."