A rock star is born

The dog, the drip and the den.

One spring evening, I drove a U-haul about 450 kilometres from Ottawa to Toronto. In the back, were all my worldly possessions, including a shiny new Masters degree. And in my heart, a much more precious cargo: hope.

I had just been offered a job — straight from school — at the biggest newspaper in the country.

I’d never spent meaningful time in Toronto. It always felt dizzying and indifferent. But family and friends — along with a downtown apartment — conspired to give me a warm welcome.

The future was dizzying too. But also, unbelievably exciting. In those early days, as a newspaper reporter, I was dispatched to all corners of the city, covering everything from council meetings to murders to the extraordinary deeds of ordinary humans. I had a talent for writing about people. Especially when they died. Obituaries were stories that almost wrote themselves, complete with tidy beginnings and endings.

And, after years of uncertainty and occasional bouts of despair, this was the best beginning I could have possibly imagined.

Something else took root though — and had a humble beginning in Toronto. A bit of a coke habit. Until then, my drug experiences were limited to Ecstasy on New Year’s Eve, some shitty acid in high school and, of course, weed.

One night, at the bar someone offered me a bit of powder on a key. It was electric. I walked all the way home — from one end of the city to the other. I may have wilted a little bit in the newsroom the next morning, but I'd survive.

What was one down day at work, anyway? I’d make it up the next day, brighter and better than ever. Honestly, my professional star was burning brightly. Certainly, I could squeeze in a little bit of blow on occasion. Fuck, everyone else was doing it.

My cousin came for a visit once. We toured all the quality clubs, skiing down mountains of blow. We even turned a stranger into a friend, who was lonely enough to drive us around town.

While searching for an after-hours club in the east end, we pulled up at a 7-11.

I needed smokes.

When I got back in the car, there was a new passenger sidled up to my cousin in the backseat: a very interesting looking woman. She was… peculiar. She smiled a lot though and seemed extremely enthusiastic about everything.

“You guys want to come to my place?” she asked.

I looked at the driver, whose name I couldn’t possibly remember. He just wanted to have fun.

“Let’s do it!” I decided, as captain of Team Cokehead.

It turned out, she lived in a crooked high-rise just around the corner. But before we got out of the car, my cousin reached out to hand me a pipe. The pair had been smoking it in the backseat.

“What’s this?”

“Try it.”

“Careful, careful,” he cautioned. “Let me light it.”

Writing about this now, some 11 months clean, you wouldn’t think these words would be so hard to type.

That was the first time I smoked crack.

I didn’t do it again for months, sticking mostly to weekend snowfalls.

At work, my star started to shine a little less brightly. I should probably mention that I had been dating a colleague — a celebrated journalist, only a little older than me. It ended badly. My family is convinced it was a turning point. Rejection brought out all kinds of feelings, maybe issues had been with me for a very long time. In any case, the breakup broke me up. I didn’t heal right. And it left a little hole inside me. It was a hungry void, that only grew as I struggled to fill it.

But boy, did colleagues ever want to hang out with me on Friday nights. Our coked-up newspaper posse toured countless clubs. We brought crowds of newly minted friends back to my apartment. We snorted blow and pledged forever friendship. Or, at least until the morning light.

Someone took me to a crack den once. I don’t remember who — maybe a homeless person I befriended on the walk home from the bar.

He described it like Disneyworld.

I’m going to take a little break here. Because I can’t believe how intensely these memories burn at the moment. It’s not just about the recollection, but knowing the devastation this journey would wreak on so many people — even people I’d meet and love in the future.

Crack’s beginnings were certainly humble. But it was taking me to an epic place that turned a pinprick of self-doubt into a crater, immeasurably deep and 20 years wide.

Now, let’s talk about that crack den, where I would have another kind of beginning.

It was a basement apartment. If I wasn’t so fresh on the scene, I would have immediately noted the ‘No trespassing’ signs stuck to every possible surface outside the side door and realized exactly where I had ended up.

The host, like every crack den host, was thrilled to meet me. He graciously offered a rotten lounge chair, its upholstery barely held together by duct tape and what may have been dried semen. Save for the occasional insect crawling up my pant leg, it was surprisingly cozy — so much so that I decided to take liberties with my self-imposed curfew.

You see, it was a week night, and I had been tasked with a very important assignment for the next morning. I think it had something to do with charity. Like a run for breast cancer or a stair-climb for diabetes or something else that involved pure-hearted people.

Of course, smoking crack the night before such an assignment wasn’t ideal. But whenever I felt the niggling sensation that I was really fucking up, I needed only load my pipe — and all those anxieties would be hushed in an instant.

There were a couple of things about my situation, however, that I couldn’t smoke away. First, there was a dog. She was beautiful, but with a mournful face. Black, with patches of white. I think she was a Lab. She was obsessed with me, insisting on sitting between my knees. Every now and then, she would raise her paw and plant it on my thigh.

Sometimes, she’d even rest her beautiful head on my knee and just stare at me. And I would dutifully put down my pipe and give her as much love as I could muster. But I started to get the feeling this dog wasn’t drawing my attention for a pat on the head. I got the distinct sensation that this dog was begging me to get her the hell out of there.

Despite crack’s formidable powers, I just couldn’t shake the sadness in that lonely, flea-ridden dog’s eyes.

Something else that crack couldn’t do that night was shelter me from the damned leaky ceiling. How does that happen in a basement apartment?

It wasn’t even raining. Yet, I was splashed, often with a direct hit to the head — by a steady, pregnant glob of grossness.

When it fell on my pants, it left a rusty stain. I could only imagine what it was painting on my head.

Finally, I did what most non-cracked-out people would have done at the start. I looked up at the ceiling to see what the actual fuck was going on. Sure enough, there was an issue. It looked like someone had tried to patch a fractured ceiling tile with newspaper. Genius idea. Good old, water-proof newsprint!

Naturally, the leak had oozed through the paper and proceeded to dapple me with various toxins. But hold on a moment! The soggy newspaper looked familiar. Why, yes, it was my newspaper, The Toronto So-and-So. The front page, no less. What were the odds?

And here’s where things get downright unnerving. You see, as I peered up at that sheet, the article itself became clear to me. It was, in fact, a story I had written just a few days earlier. I could make out my very name! All I could do was stare upward in shock and dismay — until another glob broke through the page and landed directly on my eyelid.

“Hey!” I hollered at no one in particular. “That’s my story! You’re using my story to cover the leak!”

The room was indifferent. I persisted just long enough for the gracious host to gaze up at the patched ceiling and pretend to care. To mark the occasion, he even commissioned a modest ‘wow’.

Then he asked me if I could spare a toke.

I still wonder what that Sistene crackhouse ceiling scene was trying to tell me. To run from this place and never look back? Or maybe the unholy water that dribbled through newsprint had already marked me.

It christened me an acolyte of crack cocaine. And a rock star was born.