Free Pipe Dream by Solomon Jones Page A

worse than scary. So Black was almost relieved that Clarisse didn’t give up her straight that easily. If she was going to keep smoking, she would have to be that way, because most of the people she would end up smoking with wouldn’t care about her, about themselves, about anybody, or about anything.
    Pipers are devious. They do all sorts of things to make sure that the person who’s treating doesn’t get high. That way, the person will keep buying more. The tricks range from poking a hole in the screens, so that the crack burns too quickly, to burning the screens so that the smoke doesn’t come through. There are a million ways to get over, and Clarisse wasn’t about to fall victim to any of them.
    “Girl, gimme the straight and lemme show you somethin’,” Black said, extending his hand for the straight shooter.
    Hesitantly, she handed it to him, watching carefully to see that he didn’t do anything extra. Keeping his hands in front of her so she could see what he was doing, Black pulled out a broken umbrella spoke with an empty cap attached to the end of it. With the jagged end, he scraped the thick brown residue off the side of her straight and shook it gently onto a bent piece of matchbook. When he had finished, there was an inch-high mound of flaky brown scrapings on the piece of cardboard.
    “See that?” he said. “That mean your screen’s too loose. You tighten ’em up with this.”
    He showed her the empty cap that he had forced onto the other end of the umbrella spoke.
    “Okay,” she said, watching with wide-eyed fascination, as if he were performing some kind of complex experiment.
    Turning the straight until the end she had been smoking from was flat on the table, Black pushed the screen down until the empty cap crushed it against the tabletop, making it more compact, and thus tighter. Then he turned it over, pushed the screen down enough so she could dump one or two caps, and handed it to her.
    “Hold this,” he said, and emptied half a cap into the straight, then half the contents of the matchbook, then the other half of the cap on top.
    Black lit two matches for her, held them to the end of the straight, and watched her pull the smoke into her lungs. There was a crackling sound, louder than that of a regular cap by itself, and a thick stream of cream-colored smoke shot through the glass tube.
    Clarisse’s entire face seemed to change as she pulled in the smoke, her eyes bulging and her hand shaking as she tried to hold the straight steady. Her body began to move in small twitching motions, and Black became afraid for her, thinking that her heart might give out, as he had heard other people’s had done when the hit was too good. But she continued to pull in the smoke, then held it in, her entire face quivering, and handed him the straight shooter with a slightly trembling hand.
    Black looked at her, then at Leroy and Pookie, who sat watching them, and he knew that this was the hit Clarisse had never gotten before, the ghost that she would chase until she’d reached the end of her road, either in needless death or in hopeless surrender to the crack demon.
    Her eyes became wide, and her jaw became slack as she stood, watching Black in a way she never had. She glanced at Leroy and Pookie, her body involuntarily swaying in a circular motion. Then she looked down at the straight, and down at Black, and roughly slid her hand up and down his crotch.
    He looked into her eyes, and then at the smoke swirling at the end of the straight. Then he shook out the two matches he had held for Clarisse, lit one match, and began to pull the remainder of the thick smoke into his lungs. Clarisse sat down in a chair directly in front of where he stood, sweating and breathing heavily, and began to unbutton her blouse, as if she were melting under the force of some incredible source of heat. Pookie and Leroy sat at either end of the table, watching her and moving closer to each other.
    “You always wanted this,