CRACK

CRACK

I've been surrounded by addiction my whole life. It’s in my bloodline—grandma, grandpa, uncles, aunts, my father, my mother. Heroin. Cocaine. Marijuana. Alcohol. Pills. PCP. You name it, someone in my family used it. I didn’t just stumble into addiction—I was born into it.

My first tastes were alcohol and weed, the usual suspects. They were always around, always easy to reach. But those were just the warm-up acts before I met my true poison: heroin. Still, before heroin ever wrapped its cold grip around my soul, I had a full-blown affair with crack cocaine.

In the early 1990s, crack hit East Los Angeles like a plague. Just like it did in every Chicano neighborhood across the city, it tore through our community like fire. I was still in high school, already knee-deep in an addiction that had me breaking into cars on the weekends to keep up with my cravings. I wasn’t a kid anymore—I was a fiend in a classroom.

I’ll never forget one night in '94, taking a fat hit and suddenly not being able to breathe. My heart raced out of my chest, and I thought I was dying. I stumbled into the shower, laid down, and wondered if that was it. But my heart didn’t burst. My lungs didn’t quit. I lived, but something inside me changed that night. I swore off crack. At least for a while.

Before I got strung out, I was selling crack for a guy named Fat-Ass Junior in '92 and '93. But like most street dealers, I made the mistake of sampling the product. I smoked up all my supply. I remember when Junior came up to the house and I just told him flat-out, “I smoked it all. I got no money and no product.” He just shook his head and said, “That’s fucked up,” then walked away. I was ready to face whatever came next. That's how deep I was.

Later that same year, while breaking into a car, I found $500. And instead of spending it recklessly, I flipped it. I decided to build an empire. Crack had ravaged my neighborhood, turned good women into sex workers, turned proud homies into shadow people, but we were still in survival mode. We justified it by telling ourselves if it wasn't us, it would be someone else. And we made money. A lot of money. Fast.

But fast money brings fast consequences.

Operation Safe Streets—better known to us as the Green Jackets—caught up with me. We were getting into the car when I asked Thumper, “Is that the Green Jackets?” He said no, but he was wrong. They jumped out of their unmarked car just as I tossed the dope into a vehicle pulling off. The sheriff yelled, “STOP!” And, unbelievably, the driver actually stopped. They pulled him out, and like clockwork, he started singing. I got caught with an ounce of crack and an eight ball of powder cocaine. That December 22, 1996 bust earned me 22 months. I got out October 1, 1998.

But my freedom didn’t last. I had a 41-day run—the infamous “Return of the Mack.” On November 11, 1998, I got busted again. But those 41 days? Legendary.

It started with an overdose at my own welcome home party. The homies were about to dump me in an alley, thinking I was dead, but somehow they brought me back. The next day, about 20 homies pulled up to my house to see me—big love. That’s when the Green Jackets rolled up again. Ramirez was the one. One of my parole conditions was no association with Ford Maravilla gang members and no drugs. Ramirez looked at me and said, “He shouldn’t be here with these guys.” They cuffed me. I thought it was over. But Ramirez told the rookie to unhook me. “Let him go.”

That same night, I ran into my homie Kept. He handed me an eight ball and told me Scrappy was running a spot for him on McBride Street. Two side-by-side efficiencies—straight out of a movie. One was for the customers, the other for us. There was a hole in the wall to pass the money and product. Classic trap house. Starship Enterprise-style.

Scrappy was slipping though. He was using heavy, and you know what they say—monkeys can’t sell bananas. Eventually Kept told me to take over the spot. It was mine now. I turned that one ounce into four ounces fast. Customers slept in the first efficiency while we lived large in the second. I made sure they got their wake-up calls—black, white, heroin, crack, didn’t matter. You treat your customers right, and they won’t snitch on you.

That house lasted over a month because I ran it with respect. No disrespecting the women, no playing people. We had a menu on the wall—$20 got you a big crack rock, less than $20 got you the "Husky special." I was running with Dopey, Husky, Lazy, Mousie, Scrappy, Lil Two, Vaga, Clever. And then there were the regulars: Roberta, Green Eyes, Denise, Mariana, Poison, Frances, Audrey, Liz. It was 41 days of pure chaos—party and bullshit.

Eventually, we even started leaving messages on the walls for Operation Safe Streets, like taunting ghosts daring them to come.

My pops came bursting in one day asking if I had anything in the house. “No,” I lied. He told me they were raiding the block. The whole barrio. Lazy got picked up with $1800 on him. When my cousin got released, he brought me the money. I still had two ounces of crack, chunks of heroin, and about $5700. I tried to rent a car but didn’t have a credit card, so we hit the motels instead—three nights at the Destiny Inn, three more at the Come On Inn.

But on that sixth day, Monterey Park PD kicked in the door.

940 McBride and those two motel rooms hold a lot of memories. Some funny, some dark. Like when my neighbor Pete found us at the hotel. Or when someone shoved a dildo through the wall at the trap house. But there was also pain—deep, raw pain. Husbands looking for wives. Children crying outside motel rooms. The first night at the motel, a baby had been shot in a Winter Gardens drive-by. I looked out the window, and the air felt heavy with death. Denise came later and confirmed what we already feared.

Forty-one days. In the gang world, that was a lifetime.

It was glory and grief wrapped into one. But looking back now, I see the cost. The destruction. The lives lost or broken, including my own.

I didn’t just smoke crack. I sold it. I profited from it. I hurt people. But I also learned. I’ve lived through it all. 

And yet—I’m still here. That’s not luck. That’s not coincidence. That’s mercy.

I’ve walked through hell with a glass pipe in one hand and blood on the other. I’ve sold death and survived it. But I’ve also heard the whisper of God through motel walls and jail bars. I’ve felt His presence when no one else believed I deserved saving.

I don’t write this as a hero. I write it as a man redeemed. As a man who has done dirt, but who now walks with clean hands—not because I cleaned them, but because grace did.

This is more than a story about crack.

It’s a story about a God who walks the dope house and the detox center. Who visits trap spots and prison cells. A God who didn’t give up on a cracked-out Chicano from East LA. A God who traded my pipe for peace.

And I’m here to tell you:

There is no high greater than hope.

No dope stronger than divine mercy.

And no hole too deep for God to climb into and pull you out.