Excellent day today. I stopped by Garden District Books to pick up the new Michael Connelly and Ted told me that they still had the Abita Strawberry Harvest Lager, which Chris and I like and which we thought was done for the year, at the Big Fisherman, a superb (though somewhat expensive) seafood market on Magazine Street. I headed over and picked up two six-packs, half a dozen large boiled crabs, and some crab-boiled vegetables to go with them. And I got carded for the beer. A week after my fortieth birthday. "Bless your heart," I told the clerk. I was wearing a baseball cap, and that, or if I'm wearing no makeup, or a combination of the two always seems to make people think I look a lot younger than I am. Later, I listed some more used books in my eBay store including a copy of Killing for Company, Brian Masters' excellent study of Dennis Nilsen, the London serial killer who was the major inspiration for Andrew Compton in Exquisite Corpse. Because of this, though I don't normally sign books by other people, I'm willing to sign/personalize this one if buyer desires.

OK, so you probably knew someone as perennially curious about altered states as old Doc "Benway" Brite was lying about throwing away that crack I found, didn't you? My method of deciding whether to smoke it was to ask myself, "What would Hunter have done?" Chris says Hunter S. Thompson is not necessarily a good role model when seeking drug advice. I say OK, point taken, but if you're going to do drugs, HST is a pretty goddamn good role model: he wrote about how to get on top of potentially overwhelming drugs such as mescaline. Anyone who's not read "Mescalito," the real-time account of his first mescaline trip an hour before he had to get on a plane (available in the underrated little collection Screwjack), has missed a remarkable piece of work: you can actually see him writing his way into control, getting on top of the drug. He turned drugs into art and (some would say) an entire career. He examined the specific effects of drugs with a precise and honest eye. Though he told a few himself, he didn't hesitate to call bullshit on implausibly over-the-top drug stories, such as Ricky Nelson supposedly starting a freebasing fire that crashed a whole jet plane.

So after examining it and ascertaining that, as far as I knew, it looked the way crack is supposed to look and not like lumps of soap or drain cleaner or anything, I smoked the crack using a slight variation on the Coke-can-as-emergency-pipe every stoner has learned at some point. When set aflame, the hard, crystalline, semitranslucent rock sizzled away into a much smaller, sticky lump, producing only a tiny wisp of visible white smoke. Two or three applications of the lighter made each rock disappear. The taste was chemical, like sucking on Mardi Gras beads -- the metallic-iridescent kind that are obviously made of some toxic petroleum product -- but also faintly sweet and toasty, not unpleasant, bitter, or harsh as I'd always imagined it would be. I can't see selling my babies for it or anything (who knows, maybe I just didn't happen to find the primo rock), but it is a pretty nice rush, particularly with a little weed to take the edge off. Major, steadily building headrush. Warmth in the skull, neck, and shoulders, a peculiar strength in the chest as if you're puffing up like a circus strongman. The same bogus alertness/arrogance as cocaine. Energy, a cool (not quite icy) calmness, and a (probably false) sense of mental clarity. Elevated heart rate, but not unpleasantly so. Pretty much like doing coke, but the effect is faster, better, and clearer-feeling, without that nasty napalmed-sinuses sensation. Later on I got a headache, but it soon went away, and I fell into a state of relaxation so complete and delightful that I felt I was melting into our cushy leather sofa.

I freely admit that smoking crack is most definitely Not Living Right, though, and I solemnly promise not to do it again. I've promised my best friend that if I do it again, he gets to slap me and call me a girl. However, now when you hear someone saying, "Poppy Z. Brite smokes crack!" you can tell them it's true.