In Short – Issue 3 (Spring 2025)

May 31, 2025

“Silvester” by Camellia Paul

Crack

By Brian McGuigan

I remember when crack took over our block. One day, the big boys from the park posted up on milk crates by the train station on the corner. Had crackheads single-file down our block like the line-up bell just rang. It got so bad that Moms put a lock on the gate to stop them from smoking in our stairwell. Otherwise, we woke up to a mess of empty crack vials, busted lighters, and crushed glass outside our front door.  

“Tha’ last thing I need is anutha’ person ta’ clean up afta’,” she’d fume while snatching the broom from its stash spot behind the fridge when we should’ve been hustling to catch the bus.   

Before the lock—and the subsequent replacements, since a sharp pair of garden shears could chop through our 99-cent store Master knock-offs—people did drugs, fucked, and pissed in our stairwell on the regular. I would’ve thought nothing of the mess, if not for those crack vials catching my eye. I liked science, and they looked like miniature test tubes. Best of all, their twist-off lids came in every color of the rainbow.  

I began noticing them around: on our stoop, at the playground, underneath seats on the J train. Soon a bunch of kids on the block were collecting them. Trading them like baseball cards. I had a ridiculous amount of red tops, some blues and yellows. Purple was the hardest to come by, the Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card of crack vials. For just one, you could fetch a couple sticks of Juicy Fruit, maybe an actual baseball card with a hard bargain.  

How was I supposed to know they were crack vials? I couldn’t eat a fried egg without thinking it was my brain on drugs, but I didn’t have a clue what I was saying “no” to besides not ending up in a frying pan. I thought the crack vials were garbage, and we played with garbage all the time. Kick the can. Stickball. Turning empty quarter water bottles into slingshots that could dent a car door. Me and my boys spent whole afternoons dumpster diving for trash to beat to pieces with bats or set on fire. Growing up having nothing, anything became a toy if you used your imagination. Some kids played marbles with crack vials, or tabletop football instead of using a penny or a piece of paper folded into a triangle, or they just destroyed them, breaking shit a pastime that never went out of style.   

Probably inspired by the chemical smell inside them, I liked to pretend the crack vials were bombs when I played G.I. Joe, stuffing them with shreds of orange and red construction paper for effect. The story was, the bad guys, Cobra, planted these bombs all around the world (my bedroom), and the Joes, led by bomb expert Lightfoot, had to sniff them out and dismantle them before Serpentor ordered Cobra Commander to hit the big red button (a random red checker) and destroy humankind. There were bombs hidden in caves (my Transformers comforter stuffed beneath my bed), under the sea (my sagging hamper), and along mountaintops (my dresser that once belonged to my dead Great Grandma Kathy, meaning I wasn’t supposed to be playing on it).  

One day my moms found me piling crack vials into the back of my G.I. Joe Desert Fox Jeep, and she lost her fucking mind.  

“Do ya’ know what these things are?” she screamed, wrestling the Jeep from my hands. 

When Moms got mad, I usually stayed mute, and it’d blow over soon. Besides, I didn’t see the truth getting me out of trouble. She wouldn’t understand the crack vials were bombs, that Lightfoot clipped the string (the red construction paper inside of them) on the last one before it detonated, and the Joes saved the world.  

Not that my moms gave me a chance to answer before falling into another rant about our building being a shithole. She couldn’t wait to tell the super to take the deposit and shove it when we moved on up, presumably some place where kids didn’t play with crack vials. Whatever I’d done wasn’t entirely my fault—it was the neighborhood, and the city not giving a damn, and God working in mysterious ways, the excuse for all our Ls. She went on like this as her eyes darted around my room, searching. She didn’t know Lightfoot memorized every explosives manual ever made. I quietly forked over the rest of the bombs pressed in my palm.  

I followed Moms to the kitchen and watched as she shook the Jeep’s trunk into the garbage can. I was never to bring “those things” in the house again. They were the kind of garbage you shouldn’t play with, like tuna fish cans. I was sad about losing my bombs but tried not to show it. I wanted my moms to think I was tougher than crying over trash.   

Next, she pulled me to the bathroom sink and proceeded to scrub my hands with a balled-up washcloth. I bit my lip as she struggled to clean a filth I couldn’t see until my skin was raw. Then she had me gather all my G.I. Joes while she filled the bathtub with hot water and soap, leaving them to soak overnight. They were never the same after that. The decals on the Desert Fox Jeep peeled off in the water. The rubber bands that bound each Joe together on the inside stiffened until they snapped.   

Moms never did explain that I was playing with crack vials, and there was no D.A.R.E. in Catholic school, only the threat of eternal damnation. I learned what they were on the block sometime later when my boys started kicking it on the milk crates by the train station and told me to come chill. 

Brian McGuigan (he/him) was born and raised in Queens, NY and now lives with his wife and two sons just outside of Seattle. His work has appeared in Gawker, The Rumpus, Salon, The Stranger, and elsewhere, and has received grants from 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. He was the co-creator of Seattle’s best reading reading series, Cheap Wine & Poetry, and for many years, he directed the literary programming at Hugo House. He’s currently at work on a memoir, from which “Crack” is an excerpt. He also occasionally writes about his 90s rap CD collection at my90srapcds.substack.com