Pissy People

Sometimes crack causes pissyness.

Years had passed since the phone call to me in Nashville and his crack crap was suddenly thrown at me, before the crack-crap had spread out to include more than him and us.

I suppose he got tired. He had tried keeping a fabulous job and life together with crack. He had tried a cry for help to us, and we could not find the help from experts he needed. He had tried giving up, giving into it, living in squalor at the bottom of life, with crack, and could not do it. He had tried keeping a half of a life together with crack, and some petty employee crime. What was left?

It turned out that Todd was right. He did not need the money I was keeping from him to do crack. The detectives and police and business owners started to show up at my door, and call on my telephone about six months into his retail sales job. Todd had written several bad checks over the last year. Most were under $100. It was difficult to know if this was during an off time, on time, good time, and bad time or in between time because his life was so cluttered with all of the crack-crap.

By then he was into just shrugging, frantically wondering if he was going to jail. He would smile in and at all the right times and right places. There was just a hopeless exhaustion and had reached a point in his life where he just shrugged and said this is my life as it were.