Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line - Softcover

Williams, Terry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140232516 ISBN 13: 9780140232516

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1993

Synopsis

"This sad and harrowing portrait of wasted lives is rife with gritty details but thankfully void of self-righteous judgment."—Cleveland Plain Dealer.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Williams, whose The Cocaine Kids (1989) so vividly depicted the world of young N.Y.C. coke dealers, now reports with equal skill and caring on the subterranean depths inhabited by their customers. The crackhouse is a third-floor apartment in a ``faded townhouse'' in Manhattan's West Spanish Harlem. Since 1987, Williams says, he's often visited this drug den as a nonparticipating observer. Owned by an atypical ``crackhead''- -``Headache,'' a late-40s white man of Czechoslovakian Jewish roots--the crackhouse functions as home to a ``family'' of three male and four female addicts, all, except Headache, Dominican or African-American. Writing in tight, clean prose, Williams follows the seven during their daily routines and reveals the arcana of crackhouse culture: how crack became the ghetto's drug of choice; the difference between freebased cocaine and crack, and between crackhouses that deal drugs and those that merely harbor users; the usual crackhouse diet (``thirty-five cent packages of Little Debbie cakes and Johnson cookies and cans of Nutrament''); the special crackhouse lingo (derived, astonishingly, mostly from Star Trek: addicts who want to get high demand, ``Beam me up, Scotty''). More importantly, Williams unveils the hell-horrors of crackhouse life: the maniacal pursuit of the high and its almost invariable twin, unsafe sex; the way addiction can turn an upright citizen into a filthy, self-loathing drug-fiend (e.g., Headache, once a wealthy dry-goods salesman); the rampant, degrading prostitution by women in exchange for the drug. And, unexpectedly, Williams also reveals the surprising tenderness and subtle sense of political rebellion that binds together crackhouse denizens. Compelling ethnography with a rare moral core, important for its clear, persuasive message that these lost souls are victims, worthy of our compassion. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Sociologist Williams ( The Cocaine Kids ) conveys a certain humanity in a crackhouse amidst the terrible degradation depicted in this ethnographic study. Most chapters grittily portray different members of the Manhattan house who together function as a pathetic substitute for family to keep their lives and habits intact. In graphic language, Williams recreates endless rounds of unprotected sex and drug use in the members' search for the "double master blaster"--a combined sexual and drug orgasm. But the book does not consist of shocking descriptions alone. Williams looks at the economics of the community to show how people deprived of hope and means turn to drugs for employment and escape. In giving us access to this netherworld, the author convinces us of the veracity of his assertion that "the people in the crackhouse culture should not be seen as criminals; they are not dismissable people, certainly not disposable."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0140232516
• ISBN 13: 9780140232516
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176