Crack Groupies and Easter Bunnies

Karl Lagerfeld: “I have no scene. I go everywhere. I adapt.”

There was a year in my life where all I did was hang around crack heads. It’s not uncommon to have a group of people smoking weed and one or two people that hang around just to hang with stoners, but crack is not like that. Generally, people who smoke crack don’t even like each other, they are just there for da crack. My problem was that I kept meeting crack heads and thinking they were JUST LIKE ME not knowing they were on crack.

One of these people I dated. I’ll call him Svetveldt (a nickname I gave him at random, but I’ve come to find out has the meaning sacred flat land). He is kind of like me in that I’m not sure that there is a distinguishable difference between him on drugs and him sober. The other good friend I had, Amelie, was tri-lingual, loveable, funny and looked like an angel. Until she smiled that is. Svetvelt could play the piano, guitar, sax or anything he picked up. So getting together to make music with them or rap was a good time. I remember I was in line with her one time at burger king and we were ‘grammaring in our pants’, this was the term we gave to our rapid fire combining prefixes, roots and suffixes for new words. I didn’t smoke crack, but I was never without a 64 oz cup of something.

Anyway, I think my lack of discretion in life, for instance not knowing when someone is on crack from a mile away, is related to the fact that I believed in the Easter bunny until I was twelve, no lie. I believed in the Easter bunny because I literally had installed in me from a young age that if I did not believe what my parents told me I would be punished. Compounding the fear of my parents was the fact that we belonged to a religion that taught you should have blind faith and not ask questions. We went to church every week without missing a beat and it was always the same “the church is true because this” and “the church is true because that”. Not once in my seventeen years did I hear someone stand up and say they had any questions or issues with the validity or practices. Questioning the beliefs of the church is in contrast with what everyone else is doing every week, which is supporting the beliefs so you can imagine the discomfort one might feel about speaking up for themselves. Needless to say I was an idiot of a seventeen year old and slowly I’m getting a real education in life and learning from a lot of mistakes. For instance, I know what a crack head looks like. And honestly they will all steal from you, but most of them are pretty good people.

Yes, I do understand what I just said.

Photo by Sharon Benton on Unsplash