Your friendly neighborhood crack smoker

When there's just one thing waiting for you at home.

Memories are sneaky. They find the unlikeliest moments to pounce.

Take the other day, for instance. My mom was innocently recounting a news story she had read about an elderly couple stranded on the top floor of their home for days. All because an automatic stairlift had malfunctioned.

I didn’t catch how they were eventually rescued because my mind was far away.

I was back in Hamilton, just over a year ago. It was my first night in a new Airbnb, a dusty one-bedroom with an oversized bath tub (my favorite!) perched above a board game cafe.

It was perfect for smoking crack. I didn’t have to worry about how my weirdly paced, uncertain footsteps sounded to neighbors below. Especially at hours that should find most decent, nine-to-five-fearing folks fast asleep.

There was only one smoke detector too that was well within reach. And a window in the bathroom to release great billows of smoke.

It was so well-appointed for the business at hand, I actually called two different dealers. Just to make sure the product didn’t let me down.

The first shipment arrived faster than I could fill up the tub. But I didn’t hear from the second dealer until well after midnight.

“Sorry. He wrote. Was out of town. I got fyre.”

Although I had already amassed more household crack than any rational junkie could need, I messaged back: “Come over. HURRY.”

“Fyre” may be a wildly overused term among dealers when describing the quality of their product, but the word never failed to get my Pavlovian addict brain drooling.

A moment later, another message. “I’m here. Come down.”

That was too soon. I was in the tub, and freshly deranged. Even putting on clothes would be a hopelessly complicat —-

“HURRY,” the dealer wrote.

Jesus. Funny how dealers always take their sweet time. But when they ring, boy you better hop to it.

It was so late I figured I’d just slip into the ratty robe I had been dragging with me from one rental to the next. No need to even dry off. The dealer had certainly seen worse.

After a quick handshake with my hook-up in the alley next door, I turned back to the apartment’s main entrance.

Locked. Keys.. keys.. where were my… FUCK.

What a devastating turn of events. It was just after the bars were closing. People were spilling out onto the street. And I stood on the sidewalk, wide-eyed, jittery and unhinged. IN A BATH ROBE.

It was the exact opposite of those old folks stranded on the top floor of their home. I would have given anything to be stranded upstairs forever.

Gathering myself and braving the probing headlights of taxis parked out front, I circled the building, probing for an entrypoint.

High above, I spied my bathroom window, a warm light spilling out. Home.

It was open! I only had to pry off the screen. But how to get there…

This time, I had to weather the stares and taunts of drunken bar patrons and circle the whole block.

At last, I found a lifeline. A fire escape. My eye followed it up the side of a building that was three rooftops away from my own.

Yes, it would be daunting to anyone. But when you’re cracked-out, half-naked and clinging to a chunk of dope at two in the morning, anything is possible.

So, I climbed that rickety fire escape. There was a second roof I had to scale to reach the very peak. I paused there for a moment, taking in the view of the city, and the buzzing crowds of drunks below. Mercifully, so few bar patrons look up at that hour. Too bad for them. There was a glorious full moon at my back. What an indelible image I might have made.

Anyway, I had to take a running leap to reach the next rooftop. From there, it was a simple shimmy down to the next. But the eavestrough snapped off in my hands and I ended up falling hard on that roof.

There was also the tricky issue of skylights. The building next to my own had two — and I had to tiptoe at the edges of each.

While peering down into one, I could swear I saw a bed. Imagine what they might have beheld if they stared back at me. The angle, alone. No time for standing around though. Just one more ledge to my rooftop.

And soon, I stood above my beloved bathroom window.

First, of course, I had to lean over the edge and push and pull and jimmy the damned screen, which eventually clattered to the alley below. Boy, that was a long drop.

Best not to look down though. Because next, I was lowering my own skeletal — but superhumanly strong — body down the edge.

This was a situation where the eavestrough could not let me down. Otherwise, I’d go the way of too many crack smokers before me — a naked man found dead on his face in the alley below.

Now, addicts don’t often get a sense of warmth and safety. We forfeited those feelings when we first took up the pipe. But as I lowered myself, at last, into the bathroom, I felt the most unfettered joy you could imagine.

I’d pick up the bent screen a few days later. If it was still there. It didn’t matter, anyway. Home at last. And the bath water was still warm.

I think that was maybe one of two times, I felt anything approaching happiness as an addict.

The joy I felt when the dealer used to show up the fake kind too. Even pledging forever friendship with fellow addicts wasn’t real.

The last thing I had on my mind was forever.

I don’t tell this story in hopes that you will take up my bathrobe and carry on the glorious tradition of running naked and free on rooftops, overcoming impossible odds to reach home.

But rather, to suggest what a mixed up, upside-down world an addict occupies.

It’s a world without regard for ourselves.

It’s a world where only one thing matters. Home is where the crack is.

When you go clean, the world shifts right-side up again. And home is where your mother reads stories from the internet. And tells you every day how happy she is that you are home.