(6 of 7)
Hovering in the mission's doorway, a sweatshirt hood drawn over his pale, thin face, is Dracula. That's what the others call him, and he answers to it. Trembling, high and radically withdrawn, Dracula refuses to speak a word, but he does show off an arm full of tattoos. The intricate, dense, almost abstract blue-green filigree seems to say, "This is your brain on crank." The next show-and-tell item is the eyeglass case in which Dracula keeps his syringe and razor blade. The case's interior is obsessively decoupaged with tiny, interlocking pictures snipped from magazines.
Dracula is a great artist, Justin says, and if art is defined as manic patternmaking for no apparent purpose, he's right.
Across town, at a table in the modest apartment where she supposes she'll have to go on living until she finds a job, Alicia is quitting crank. Once an upwardly mobile employee of a FORTUNE 500 company based in a large Southwestern city, Alicia is in her mid-30s but looks 50. Her face is pocked and pitted from her attempts to pick out the crystals of methamphetamine that, she swears, used to form under her skin. Alicia moved to Montana several years ago in hopes of escaping the bigger city's crank scene. She says the subcutaneous crystals aren't a problem now; the Billings meth is not so pure. Not that it matters, because she's quitting.
Tomorrow.
Right now, however, she's lighting one last pipeful in a ritual as intricate as a Japanese tea ceremony. She ignites a propane torch and holds the blue flame beneath the smudge of powder in her clear glass pipe. Crank is smoked differently than crack cocaine; it takes less heat and melts instantly (burning away the impurities, Alicia says). Once the drug vaporizes in a white cloud, Alicia inhales. She then repeats the process. The residues in the pipe, called frosties, are infinitely valuable to crankers, and Alicia keeps torching them until they're gone.
But such solitary crank use isn't the norm in Billings. Crank is a party drug here, a social thing, smoked, injected and snorted by tight-knit groups holed up in houses behind blacked-out windows, talking nonstop about their hopes and dreams and smoking a joint now and then or drinking a beer to mellow out the high.
"You think you're with your best friends in the whole world," remembers the toppled homecoming king. "You stay up all night saying things like 'Man, I'd die for you,' and then in the morning everybody crashes and you realize you hate these people. They disgust you."
Paula, 19, who has been clean for six months following a stay at Rimrock, remembers crank parties as surreal blendings of light and darkness, reality and dreams. "The sun goes up and down and you lose track, and pretty soon you're hearing laughs and whispers and seeing things dart around on the floor. Then the other people turn into monsters."
Boyish, sardonic and stunningly intelligent, Paula, who has never been anywhere else, calls Billings the crank capital of the universe: "The people in my neighborhood all learned crank from their parents. I mostly hung out with 13- and 14-year-olds. It's getting younger and younger every year."