I Wore a Cocktail Dress to a Crack House

When she was laying out the rows of the white powder on the cover of our Corporate Finance textbook, I was not fazed. When she started to snort it through a rolled dollar bill, I still did not think anything of it. When she said she needed to take her medicine and get a clear head, I said, “Sounds like a good plan!”

She smiled as she inhaled the last line. “I knew you were chill. Some of my friends are hosting avant-garde party downtown. You should come.”

At no point did I think Mel was snorting coke right in front of me while we studied for our first midterm of Business School.

“What did you think it was?” my friend Alison asked.

“Honestly, I thought it was aspirin. In the South, my grandma used Goody Aspirin Powders all of the time.”

“Did your grandmother snort it, too?”

“Well, no.”

At the time I did think it was a bit strange to be snorting aspirin, but who am I to judge? I read somewhere that in France they slip pills up their butts all the time and, as we all know, the French are very modern and forward-thinking.

Mel, who had gone to boarding school in Paris, was also very modern and chic, which was in stark contrast to my small-town Colorado upbringing.

So when she took an interest in me on our first day of Business School, I may have been a bit starstruck, because while it was probably no biggie that she had been accepted, it was such a big deal in my family that they couldn’t even comprehend what was going on. When I told my dad I got accepted to one of the best schools in the country, he immediately thought I was talking about ITT tech and that I had called an 800 number to get in.

Three days after I enrolled, the entire financial market crashed. I remember watching the TVs in the lobby, the same way I watched 9/11 coverage and the OJ verdict. My classmates were mostly upper-middle-class white males desperately trying to break into that next level of wealth and women. (I know this because there were two spreadsheets that circulated that first week: 1) a color-coded spreadsheet of all of the girls that were either bangable or ringable 2) a list of all of the banks that paid out 6-figure bonuses.)

The devastation of the collapse was very real. I called the financial collapse their personal Hurricane Katrina; it was like everything was suddenly swept away from them. I have never seen men cry as much.

Mel was not phased, probably because her dad was an ambassador and her family came from Nigerian oil money. When we first met, she asked me what I was studying.

“Probably marketing,” I said.

“Ugh,” she said, “that’s so average. Why would you spend 150K on an education and not want to at least make double that immediately when you get out?”

She was not wrong.

My mother grew up with 12 brothers and sisters in a one-room shack in the deep South and her entire goal in life was to get out of Tennessee and not be poor. My mother always said there were two ways to get rich:

1. Make more
2. Spend less.

For some reason, we were always doing the latter, since the only thing my mother hated more than the idea of poverty was the notion of working. Despite living in a beautiful home, we survived on about $14,000 a year, which is right below the poverty line. Our house was furnished with things my mother made me pull out of the dumpster. We were DIY to an extreme and I (an only child) grew up hanging drywall, installing ceiling lights, changing spark plugs, landscaping yards, sewing clothes, and rebuilding fences. We ate a variety of beans, rice, and spinach for every meal.

But just because we didn’t spend money didn’t mean that my mother did not strive to be fancy. When I complained that my classmates were leaving the country for vacation, my mom packed the car and we drove to Mexico. We were there for 11 minutes. We went to a fancy restaurant and ordered just tea, more specifically two cups of hot water, one tea bag.

But my mother’s biggest sticking point was fashion. No matter what, I was to be the best-dressed. And so my mother would spend countless hours at the Goodwill (but only the ones in rich neighborhoods) and find the best used designer clothes. She would sew labels she ripped off Calvin Klein jeans onto my no-name Walmart jeans and say, “Now that looks rich.”

So when I told my mom about Mel and how she’d invited me to an art party that she’d described as “scandalous”, she was very excited. When I mentioned that Mel did drugs, she was not fazed.

“Everyone does drugs, ” she said. “That what bored rich white people do.”

“But Mel is Nigerian.”

“Oh, rich people are all the same honey. Go to the party, network. No one’s saying you have to do drugs. You probably aren’t built for it. You’ve always been a bit fragile. Wear something nice, and check for stains. Don’t be sloppy.”

I skipped class to go to TJMaxx and as luck would have it there was a white Michael Kors dress that fit me perfectly. I matched it with a crisp white blazer. It was marked down from $450 to $59 and white seemed like the most appropriate color to wear for the occasion.

I headed over to Mel’s apartment and when she opened the door I was a bit disappointed in her outfit. But that’s how rich people are, I told myself. They have so much money that they want to dress like they don’t have any. Right behind Mel, was her date, Dale.

Dale, I quickly found out, was a dishwasher at the school cafeteria. I asked him if that was his work-study job.

“No, I ain’t smart enough for college. It’s just a job. A good one too. But I dabble in some art shit and some poetry shit.”

I let that sink in. Dale looked a bit like a homeless Christian Bale, but you never know with artistic types; he could be a trust funder trying to find himself.

We all got into Mel’s car and drove downtown. A street lamp was flickering on the corner and there was not another person in sight. I was not concerned. In fact, I thought it was a wonderful ambiance.

It’s super underground, I thought, as I straightened out my jacket.

As we entered the old art deco building with its black tile and gold accents, I noticed that there was an awful lot of graffiti on the walls. Not on canvas, but just on the walls itself. They really went for it. I could hear music down the hall and the air was smoky, there was just enough light for us to navigate the maze of hallways. As we made our way to where the action was I readjusted. We were in a large room with a collection of ratty couches and sofas haphazardly arranged in a circle. There was a table in the center littered with two types of bottles: liquor and prescription. Right next to the bottles were several boxes of aluminum foil and metal scrubbers. It was only then that I started to think something was off. First, the girls were super skinny, not in a trying-to-meet-an-unrealistic-standard-of-beauty skinny but in a play-the-xylophone-on-their-ribs skinny.

Second, I was clearly the best-dressed one there. My outfit was evoking Wolf of Wall Street; everyone else was bringing more of a Bubbles from The Wire energy.

Mel, as enthusiastic as ever, nodded to a friend, who walked over. He gave all three of us hugs and then gifted Mel with tiny bags of what looked like irregular brown sugar cubes.

I am no drug expert. But I knew one thing: these drugs were the wrong color. On TV, drugs were always white. Pure white. These drugs were decidedly not white.

I wracked my mind and tried to remember what this was.

Crack? Wasn’t crack like the worst one? What the hell was Mel doing smoking crack?

I looked at her and saw that she was grinding on someone who was not Dale.

“Um, Dale, I thought this was going to be an art party.”

Dale laughed.

“Well, there is art on the wall.”

That’s when I got concerned. Aw shit, this is not good. Crack is a poor person’s drug and, because this is America, if shit went south, we were going to get in maximum trouble.

In a weird turn of events, Dale didn’t do crack, so he wasn’t surprised when I screamed, “We need to go!”

“That shit is not my shit,” he’d told me. He’d just came along in the hopes of getting a piece of ass. “Mel’s way out of my league, man, but when she is high, man, equal footing.”

“Just grab her and let’s go.”

We drove back to our sleepy college town in silence. As soon as we parked, I started to make my move. Mel, in an odd moment of clarity, started crying and grabbing at me. She pulled so hard that the sleeve of my new jacket ripped right off.

I wriggled out of the jacket to break free.

Dale was smoking a cigarette, laughing at the two of us fighting, probably thinking he still had a chance. I bolted.

The next morning, as I walked to our Real Estate Development class, the jacket was still lying limply on the ground, still shockingly white, with just a smudge of dirt on the collar from my makeup and frayed threads at the shoulder seams.

I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Then I swiftly scooped the jacket and put it in my satchel.

A good dry cleaning and a few stitches and it would be good as new.