CRACKLE HEAD HAYES

Crackle Head got his name when he was a baby and used to teeth on a huge blossom of electrical cords dangling from an outlet behind the TV. The repeated shocks caused his hair growth to stunt, leaving him with the hair-do of a balding man in his fifties,  the pure white skin on top of his skull surrounded by a u shape of wispy hair.    He kept the name of course because of the drug Crack.


I met Crackle when I was driving cab in 80's in Toledo Ohio.   He was probably normal once, before I met him.  He started coming around only after losing everything to smoking rocks of crack.   People called them crack monsters.   He would come by the cab garage everyday between shifts, when everyone was there, to beg, and he always had a different reason.  Every day.  He came out of no where one day, had never driven from our small garage when he had money and a cab...  then disappeared a few months later.  Prison, I guess.
If begging did not work, then theft came....

The first thing you noticed about his was the hair.  He was young then, just twenty nine or so...   My boss knew the story of how his hair was always like that and filled me in.  I imagine it did make for a weird life, and you have to wonder... is this why he ended up on crack?  But of course most other crack addicts had hair...so....

I was 26 and pretty ignorant, just then going back to school and getting the education I was too bored and distracted by drawing and writing to take in during my public school years.   I probably thought a lot of myself at the time.   I worked out a lot, stayed clean.  Studied a lot.  Spent all of my spare time writing or making love.  In that order.  I was getting A's and thinking that I might just make myself into a writer after-all if I keep this up.

Seeing someone almost my age, begging for crack money, his hand out, speaking in a dull, monotone voice, terrified me.  I literally could not tell what this guy had been like before this started.  His entire demeanor was just about manipulating someone into giving him money.  All you could see was this need.   I never turned my back on him.


  He had black glasses, thick, that slid down his nose a lot and he pushed them up and would whip his long whisps of side hair away from his face.   Him and another crack head were living in his parents basement, after both losing their cabs to crack.   The other driver was older, in his fifties, and had always done pretty good as a pot smoking, hard drinking cab driver, until crack came around, and he started getting busted buying, lost his cab license, his medallion, cab... everything.





Crackle Headed Hayes saved my life, though.... I have to give him that.  He was a walking billboard about Just Saying No To Crack that was impossible to ignore.  Ten years later, late on night, I was tending a bar and left with a very gorgeous woman, a stranger, who said she would score some weed on the cab ride home.  You guessed it.. she came back out with crack,  and  it was 330 am after drinking all night... and of course, so I smoked it.  Man.  I understood why there are crack whores at crack houses.  I had never done cocaine or metaphetimine before.   So the drug was very powerful to me, the most intense experience I have had.

We smoked until it was gone, then fell asleep....The next morning I woke up terrified that I was about to turn into Crackle Head and took every precaution.  period. I refused to even see the woman again, though she was great in every other way.... and may have turned out alright, but this was self-preservation.   My unconscious liked that drug so much that I dreamt about it for two weeks.   Two weeks.  I could see just how easy the naive' or the TOO BRAVE FOR THEIR OWN GOOD could destroy their lives...  and still feel good.  Ugh.   And Whatever pleasure center the Crack sets off....  ends up depleted afterwards.. setting off a spiral down only the drug itself offers relief from.  Ugh.

Crackle Head.  People like that come and go.  Dissipate into prisons and the streets, disappear...  In my mind his face is a Stop Sign.  I can remember his skinny, long haired form coming up and begging day after day, for just five dollars, with a new reason all the time....  during every shift change at the cab garage where he worked for years before Crack just took possession of his life and sold off everything he had, lost him his job and family and self-respect.  ...  .He was see through.  Everyone knew he was lying.  That he wanted to buy a rock.   Ugh.   Ugh.  Ugh.  Drugs like that kill a lot more than just your life.