It is three thirty in the morning. I am sitting on a skuzzy, disintegrating sofa in a crack house in a not very nice neighborhood in Washington, D.C.

I pick absentmindedly at bits of sofa stuffing, pulling clumps from a cushion and dropping them on the floor.

I should be in bed. In fact, a few hours ago, I was in bed because I’ve got to interview a Congressman from New York at 10:30, which is less than eight hours from now.

That was before Haddad—a Palestinian limo driver and crack head whose acquaintance I made recently—knocked on my door a little after one in the morning.

I am trying to take a vacation from drugs, especially cocaine-type drugs that tend to lead to multi-day binges and interfere with the smooth and orderly progression of life. Haddad’s arrival, however, reignites my interest in them.

He is Pavlov. I am the dog. I drool uncontrollably. A two-day vacation from drugs is long enough.

Hence, the crack house.

I generally avoid crack houses, not so much because they have an image problem, but because they truly suck.

Poster children for the ravages of hard core drug abuse are all around me.

A thin girl with stringy, dirty blonde hair, she’s maybe eighteen, offers to blow me in return for a rock. She is the kind of girl who looks like she was cute before she started giving guys blowjobs for hits of crack. Now, she’s just very young and very strung out and in need of a couple of years in locked-down rehab with a serious security perimeter fence.

Even if I’m interested in her offer, it wouldn’t matter. I’m almost out of drugs and so is the crack house. There is nothing that any woman could offer me to make me part with my last crumbs of drugs in what may be the only crack house in the District of Columbia that has no crack.

The drugs are supposed to be here soon.

In the meantime, the crack house has the air of an especially tragic funeral.

Human warmth and animation diminish or increase in direct relation to the size of the drug stash.

Good supply=Joviality and spirit.

Small supply=Sense of impending doom.

No supply=Absolutely no joy about being alive.

Haddad is scrutinizing the top of a table looking for stray crumbs of crack that might have escaped vaporization in his stem.

A black chick is down on her hands and knees examining the filthy floor for the same thing.

I’m trying to de-stuff the sofa.

The young blonde again says she’ll trade sex for a hit of rock, this time offering to do the “whole deal” in the bathroom for one miserable hit.

I tell her that I’d give her a hit. We don’t have to have sex. If I had enough rock for two people. Which I don’t.

“I know you’ve fucking got some,” she says.

She retreats to the opposite side of the room—which is populated with an assortment of maniacally desperate people except for the one or two who still have some drugs left and would not part with it if you put a gun to their heads—and starts to sulk.

The proprietor of the crack house is marching around with a sawed-off shotgun at his side like an especially maniacal bouncer.

Who cares? The only question with any meaning is: Where’s the rock?

I look around. A chestnut colored mutt is wandering the room looking no happier than the human inhabitants. My limo driver buddy is now slumped in a chair rubbing his forehead, looking like he wants to die. Two black girls, probably no more than thirty, both of them missing most of their front teeth, are staring sullenly at the floor. Another guy who is either in his sixties or a very old forty-five and living proof of the wondrous effects of serious drugs, keeps coming in and out of the house. Each entry and exit prompts a trip to the door by our host with the shotgun.

Our host calls himself T-Bone.

Just like the steak.

Two kids are running around the place. One’s an infant who is crawling around the floor. The other is six or seven. I’m not sure if they’re T-Bone’s kids or someone else’s.

The dog pisses on the floor. T-Bone kicks the mutt, who yelps and runs into the other room. He orders the six-year-old to clean up the dog piss.

The kid cleans. The dog yelps.

I stare at the floor and wonder what I’m doing here and why I don’t call child protective services and the ASPCA. But I know why. Because I’m part of the problem and not the solution, is why.

Where’s the rock?

I would leave if I could, but I can’t. We drove over in my Palestinian buddy’s Lincoln Towncar, but the Towncar isn’t here any more. Haddad gave it to a couple of teenagers for twenty dollars worth of rock. They said they’d be back in fifteen minutes. That was two hours ago. They’re probably halfway to New York by now.

Leaving on foot would be suicidal. A white guy walking down the street in this neighborhood at four in the morning would not last long. I’ve already tried to snag a cab. Ten minutes on the street waiting and getting sized up by a couple of guys with hungry eyes sent me back to the crack house.

Whether this says more about the neighborhood or me, I don’t know. I have cursed and screamed at my Palestinian friend and suggested the next time his dumb ass shows up at my apartment building, I’m calling the cops.

I can blame him all I want, but a fact is a fact and it’s time to face facts. This is my fault too. You get into fucked up situations like this one when you hang out in the sub-basements of the drug world.

I check my watch.

Shit. It’s four thirty.

The Washington Metro isn’t far, but it stops at midnight and won’t start running again until five-thirty. By then, the sun will be up and it will be safe to leave.

I will have a couple of hours to decompress, shower and shave. The congressman will never know that a crack- and heroin-crazed reporter is sitting across the desk from him.

What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

We’re supposed to talk about illegal immigration. Better to chat about Mexicans walking, swimming, running and crawling across our southern frontier than, say, drug policy.

Still, I’m going to have to get my hands on some drugs if I stand any chance of making it through the day.

I point at Haddad.

“This is your fault,” I say.

“They say they take car ten minute,” he says, in heavily accented English.

“How could you give away the car for a three-dollar hit?”

“Was not tree dollar. Was twenty dollar. Ten minute with car. Good deal.”

“Yeah, great deal.”

“What I do about car? I must eggsplain car.”

“That’s your problem,” I say.

“I am fuck without car,” he groans, no doubt imagining the teen gangsters using his Towncar to cruise for crack whores in Washington Heights or having it deconstructed at a chop shop in Hunt’s Point.

I couldn’t care less about the car, except that its absence has stranded me in this crackless hell hole until sunrise. I hope they drive it into the East River. It would serve Haddad’s dumb ass right.

I stare at the floor for a long time.

Someone knocks on the door. Our host answers, shotgun drawn. A guy comes in and hands him a baggie full of pre-packaged crack.

“You zee,” Haddad says. “I tell you rock come.”

The room goes from miserable and quiet to loud and happy as T-Bone makes the rounds selling rock from the baggie.

When he reaches me, I hand him sixty dollars and get a dozen of tiny plastic ziplock bags in return. I pack my stem and do a quick hit, immediately going from feeling dead to undead, and pocket the rest.

I can see the outlines of weak light around the curtains and shades.

I get up. I ask our host to unlock the door. He walks me to the door with his shotgun. He is either protecting me or getting ready to shoot me as I leave.

I step outside. It is already warm and profoundly humid.

Daylight has returned.

I check my watch. It’s nearly five-thirty.

I have drugs in my pocket. The Metro will be running in a few minutes.

I can finally go home and get my shit together for another day.

Robert Guskind has been writing for a long time. An award-winning Washington-based journalist and contributor to major national magazines and newspapers, he now lives very close to Manhattan, where he continues to write, shoot photographs and work on a book based on his travels and experiences as a reporter and formerly disreputable dope fiend. He is all better now and is a regular contributor to Cherrybleeds.