Indian Boy
10-05-2009, 01:07 PM
This is a story that I've been working on. It's a true story about a crack addict that moved into my apartment building a few years ago. This is only the beginning but I'd like to hear what people say so far, i.e. whether it's interesting or boring, or my description of the crack addict is good or overdone, etc. Thanks for any comments and suggestions that are to come.
The Staunch Crackhead
Crackhead Pete was the slightly problematic crack addict who moved into the apartment just above us on the first day of May. His arrival came as a bit of a shock to us because none of us were even aware that the previous tenants had moved out until Crackhead Pete made his presence known late one night.
It was towards the beginning of May. Outside the nights still had a pretty good spring-time coolness to them, the kind that made you tug your Boston Red Sox hooded sweatshirt over your head to feel comfortable. With the apartment windows lifted a crack, and beer bottles jammed under them to hold them open, we had a nice breeze blowing in on the small group of us hanging out in the living room that night. I think it was a Tuesday. We weren’t doing anything special or productive for that matter. Not by any means. We were just idling around like pathetic shtbags on the couch and chairs, drinking and passing some dope, randomly telling each other how great life was now that we had our new apartment to hang out in. Although it was the middle of the week none of us had anything to do the following morning but sleep. I’d quit going to classes a few weeks earlier, Marty had done the same, and JT, well he’d been dealing with some pretty nasty hangovers in the mornings that prevented him from going to work on a regular basis which, in turn, led to his termination. So with no school and no jobs anywhere in our weekly plans, the heavy drinking and the constant smoking well into the late hours of the weeknights had become a rather common occurrence by the time Crackhead Pete came along.
The guy must have smelled the dope in the air because he came a-knocking on the apartment door just as my buddy, the Wolfe, relaxed back on the couch next to me and packed another bowl into his pipe. Marty was the polite one who climbed off the edge of the couch, cut through the thick cloud of smoke that lingered in the air and opened the door. Crackhead Pete rushed into the living room for the first time like some over-energetic salesman bursting with a sales pitch to sell his latest irrelevant product.
We all just kind of stared at him with blank looks, through red glossy eyes, wondering who the fuk this strange guy was. He quickly went with the formalities and told us his name was Pete and that he and his girlfriend Wendy had just moved into the upstairs apartment two days before. When somebody asked him where he was from, he answered that he and Wendy had moved from G-town (the projects), they’d been relocated to the upstairs apartment due to insufficient housing. In short, Crackhead Pete and his girlfriend Wendy were overflow section 8 tenants who couldn’t fit into the projects anymore so they’d spilled out into our building on Water Street.
Crackhead Pete was a scraggly little critter, maybe in his late thirties or early forties, but a grueling life of excessive drug use had taken a harsh toll on him physically. The skin about his forehead and cheeks was weathered down and terribly cracked making him appear even older than his years. He was dressed in torn jeans, the kind most people would throw away or use as a grease rag, and he had a filthy white t-shirt, much too huge and baggy for his meager frame so that it hung down low, practically to his knee caps. His hair was light brown, the color of dry dirt, and it was wildly ratty and bushy and he had a scruffy go-ti covering his mouth, so that he resembled a filthy billy-goat with skin. Everything about him was bony, gaunt—his shoulders were two bony humps jutting out of the corners of his t-shirt, his wrists, his fingers, just sticks protruding from that big ugly t-shirt. There was a strange energy about him that I immediately noticed, the kind that caused him to constantly move his body when there was no need to, side to side, arms up, arms down, step forward then backward, almost as if he were dancing off beat to the music in the background. Made me dizzy. I wanted to get up and put my hands on those bony shoulders and hold’em in place for ten seconds just to see if I could. When he spoke he spoke with a high voice and he moved his hands all over the place, up and down, left and right, and his eyes were wide and his grin was long and he said, “yeah, yeah” an awful lot.
Like when the Wolfe leaned back on the couch, puffed out some more smoke into the room, and asked Pete in a nice mellow voice if he knew a guy by the name of Squiggy T. from the G-town projects and Crackhead Pete moved like lightning and answered, “Yeah, yeah, Squiggy T. He’s a good guy. Sells great weed. The best. I know’em. Yeah, yeah, sure. Squiggy T.”
The Staunch Crackhead
Crackhead Pete was the slightly problematic crack addict who moved into the apartment just above us on the first day of May. His arrival came as a bit of a shock to us because none of us were even aware that the previous tenants had moved out until Crackhead Pete made his presence known late one night.
It was towards the beginning of May. Outside the nights still had a pretty good spring-time coolness to them, the kind that made you tug your Boston Red Sox hooded sweatshirt over your head to feel comfortable. With the apartment windows lifted a crack, and beer bottles jammed under them to hold them open, we had a nice breeze blowing in on the small group of us hanging out in the living room that night. I think it was a Tuesday. We weren’t doing anything special or productive for that matter. Not by any means. We were just idling around like pathetic shtbags on the couch and chairs, drinking and passing some dope, randomly telling each other how great life was now that we had our new apartment to hang out in. Although it was the middle of the week none of us had anything to do the following morning but sleep. I’d quit going to classes a few weeks earlier, Marty had done the same, and JT, well he’d been dealing with some pretty nasty hangovers in the mornings that prevented him from going to work on a regular basis which, in turn, led to his termination. So with no school and no jobs anywhere in our weekly plans, the heavy drinking and the constant smoking well into the late hours of the weeknights had become a rather common occurrence by the time Crackhead Pete came along.
The guy must have smelled the dope in the air because he came a-knocking on the apartment door just as my buddy, the Wolfe, relaxed back on the couch next to me and packed another bowl into his pipe. Marty was the polite one who climbed off the edge of the couch, cut through the thick cloud of smoke that lingered in the air and opened the door. Crackhead Pete rushed into the living room for the first time like some over-energetic salesman bursting with a sales pitch to sell his latest irrelevant product.
We all just kind of stared at him with blank looks, through red glossy eyes, wondering who the fuk this strange guy was. He quickly went with the formalities and told us his name was Pete and that he and his girlfriend Wendy had just moved into the upstairs apartment two days before. When somebody asked him where he was from, he answered that he and Wendy had moved from G-town (the projects), they’d been relocated to the upstairs apartment due to insufficient housing. In short, Crackhead Pete and his girlfriend Wendy were overflow section 8 tenants who couldn’t fit into the projects anymore so they’d spilled out into our building on Water Street.
Crackhead Pete was a scraggly little critter, maybe in his late thirties or early forties, but a grueling life of excessive drug use had taken a harsh toll on him physically. The skin about his forehead and cheeks was weathered down and terribly cracked making him appear even older than his years. He was dressed in torn jeans, the kind most people would throw away or use as a grease rag, and he had a filthy white t-shirt, much too huge and baggy for his meager frame so that it hung down low, practically to his knee caps. His hair was light brown, the color of dry dirt, and it was wildly ratty and bushy and he had a scruffy go-ti covering his mouth, so that he resembled a filthy billy-goat with skin. Everything about him was bony, gaunt—his shoulders were two bony humps jutting out of the corners of his t-shirt, his wrists, his fingers, just sticks protruding from that big ugly t-shirt. There was a strange energy about him that I immediately noticed, the kind that caused him to constantly move his body when there was no need to, side to side, arms up, arms down, step forward then backward, almost as if he were dancing off beat to the music in the background. Made me dizzy. I wanted to get up and put my hands on those bony shoulders and hold’em in place for ten seconds just to see if I could. When he spoke he spoke with a high voice and he moved his hands all over the place, up and down, left and right, and his eyes were wide and his grin was long and he said, “yeah, yeah” an awful lot.
Like when the Wolfe leaned back on the couch, puffed out some more smoke into the room, and asked Pete in a nice mellow voice if he knew a guy by the name of Squiggy T. from the G-town projects and Crackhead Pete moved like lightning and answered, “Yeah, yeah, Squiggy T. He’s a good guy. Sells great weed. The best. I know’em. Yeah, yeah, sure. Squiggy T.”