I Walked 47 Miles of Barbed Wire (Part Two)

Photo of the author by Will Ireland, courtesy of Prog Magazine.

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE’s website thought it would be amusing to employ a 42-year-old who is already counting down the days to his next family holiday in Tenby.

In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use urban dictionary, "menk" is Scouse/Woollyback slang for a mentally ill or educationally subnormal person, and is a shortened version of mental. As in, “Your Sergio Tacchini trackie is sick la, look at that menk Doran, he can’t even afford a Walker trackie. Let’s hit him with a brick and push him in the canal."

MENK 61: I WALKED 47 MILES OF BARBED WIRE (PART TWO)

*PART ONE IS HERE.*

I think there is a point to me writing this. And by “this” I don’t just mean there is a point to this particular, squalid, weirdly self-aggrandising story of how I ended up smoking a fair bit of crack cocaine about 12 years ago. What I mean is I think that I now know what this is all about. And by “this” I don’t mean life; that would be a risible suggestion. I don’t even understand what’s happening in Game of Thrones or how my toaster knows when the toast is done, so I’ve got no chance with getting to the bottom of real life. What I mean, is that after two years of writing these columns for VICE, I’ve just started to realise that they’re all concerned with control and how much or how little a person has over their own life.

At first these columns were mildly diverting stories about waking up in the park hungover with no shoes on. When I was offered the chance to write for this site I figured that if I wanted my tenure to last beyond a month or so I needed to be able to speak with authority about the subject in hand and some would say that waking up in the park hungover with no shoes on is one of the most prominent components of my skill set; if not my actual USP. But now, perhaps rather self-importantly, I have decided that these columns are a string of mildly diverting stories about waking up in the park hungover with no shoes on; except sometimes with additional woolly rumination on how much say people have in whether they wake up in the park hungover with no shoes on or not. Whether or not the loss of the shoes was written in the stars. But before we talk about pre-destination and the illusion of free will, let’s talk about crack cocaine.

Unlike making freebase cocaine – which takes a little bit of practical science knowhow, an ability to find 10 percent ammonia solution and ethyl ether, a steady hand and a clear desire and aptitude to not set yourself on fire – any idiot can make crack cocaine. You could do it right now if you like. Put the contents of your wrap in a metal ladle or big soup spoon and add about a quarter the amount again of baking soda before adding some water and stirring it in with a matchstick. Heat the underside of the spoon with a cigarette lighter until it bubbles and then use a butter knife or something similar to pick out the oily lumps of yellow precipitate that form in the liquid. What hardens and eventually dries on the blade of the knife is a rough and ready form of crack cocaine.

Nature abhors a vacuum. There will be a crackhead out there somewhere reading this harrumphing in disgust at my beastly method, saying, “No, no, no, dear boy, this simply won’t do…” There are of course genuine crack cocaine cognoscenti in existence who are just as annoying as the goons who keep notebooks full of observations on the real ale that they’re drinking – even though it tastes exactly like pond water. These crack hipsters are the fizzing bellends you meet when you’re younger who can literally only talk about techniques for joint rolling or bong making, some 25 years later down the line. But real ale, grass and crack are simply types of fuel and not really worthy of that much discussion once you have them in your possession. When you are doing narcotics, spending all of your time talking about taking drugs is a failure of the imagination much worse than having a five-hour conversation about four-star unleaded petrol while driving from London to Hull.

But my imaginary crack making adjudicator is right, my method was shit. All I can say in my defence is that in The House, theirs was much worse. Those animals would just mix crappy builders' chisel, baking soda and water on a plate – a hepatitis B coloured plate that patently used to reside in a local junior school – and bung the fucker in a microwave.

The opening gambit on the first evening I smoked it was direct and only a half lie: “The coke got wet. So we dried it out in the microwave. No point in throwing it away though; might as well smoke it.”

It was such a ridiculous thing to say that everyone started laughing their heads off. And three minutes later I was smoking a rock.

To be fair, crack has a pretty punchy hit the first few times you do it but then, the first few times you do pretty much any drug properly is always mind blowing. Here’s a more interesting thing: smoking crack was fucking hectic but nothing compared to the first time I smoked dope or the first time I drank whiskey in my mid-teens if I’m really truthful about it. I didn’t slide onto the carpet with my brains seeping out of my ears and forming liquid patterns on the carpet and I didn’t run round The House with a cricket bat smashing stuff to pieces while listening to the Ramones on full volume. And when it comes down to it the real measure of a drug is what it’s like when the dust settles. What it’s like when you settle into your steady pace with it. And smoking rocks is a bit joyless, to be honest. A bit of a bloody chore if you want to know the truth.

The standard of chess playing plummeted in The House. Several games were forfeited dramatically. Levels of unintelligibility rose. There were some world class outbreaks of gibbering. The smoker’s anthem of choice became "Moaner" by Underworld played at window rattling, ear disrespecting volume. We formed an imaginary band and wrote a song called "Stairlift To Midget" but on the whole not much creative stuff happened. Not much of anything other than scoring, smoking and clown’s chess happened. And the talking became quite minimal and focused. A lot of boring drug talk out of necessity.

I stopped because I changed jobs and left the area not long afterwards, which makes me wonder about how physically addictive the stuff is supposed to be. Psychologically, I’m sure the drug is like a tractor beam but then, the only people smoking crack are the ones with well-established cocaine problems to begin with. No one finds themselves in a crack den saying, “Well, usually I have a glass of port on a Wednesday and I thought to myself, ‘What the heck, why not live a little?’” Crack just seems to be a more efficient means of uptake when you really need to be able to tighten up the quality of the product yourself and you need more bang for your buck. To me, when it was sinking its claws in, it was only just a little bit more gnarly than plant food. Which essentially means that I found it a bitch to stop during a session and it was obviously open to habit formation but I’d say it’s certainly not as addictive as smoking cigarettes, for example. One hit is brutally immediate but then you drop down to way below your starting point in terms of mood and nerves very quickly, so you essentially get the equivalent of a hangover maybe a quarter of an hour after smoking. And there’s a very easy way to deal with this… especially if you’ve got 50 quid in your pocket. Just pray that you’re not supposed to be doing anything the next day.

Aesthetically crack doesn’t exist in the same milieu as vintage single malt whiskey but it should do really: at the expense of whiskey’s standing. You can say what you want about smoking rocks but there’s literally no way you can dress up what you’re doing like you can with liquor and it doesn’t matter how good your cooking method is. You can’t lie to yourself about why you’re doing it. No one sits around saying: “Lovely ochre tones on this rock. It’s got a honeyed pearlescent finish from the double cook. Lighting it up, the gentle sizzle reminds one of the refreshing rains that hit Lake Windermere in late April after sweeping majestically in across the Atlantic. It’s got a complex nose, full of barbed wire, cellophane wrapping from Lucozade bottles, dentist’s gas and a three-day rave piss. The front is like a left fist to the kisser from Gentleman Jim Corbett and then it settles in like wearing an ice balaclava during a ham-fisted trepanation procedure.”

But try telling any of this to people who pretend that whiskey tastes like anything other than liquidised badger’s gall bladder and see how far you get.

I’m not working for the Crack Marketing Council, though. I don’t really care that much if crack has a slightly worse rep than the one it deserves. My take on it is this: on the balance of things, I’d give it a miss. It’s not as nice as cheese on toast.

Previously – I Walked 47 Miles of Barbed Wire (Part One)

You can read all the previous editions of John's Menk column here.

This blog is for entertainment purposes. Don't be a moron.