There are Italians–they’re principally interested in smack–and a contingent of young black men hanging out with white prostitutes. These men are pimps as well as being crack dealers.

We watch the scene: dealers carry rocks of crack or tiny packets of smack wrapped up in silver foil and cling-film inside their cheeks. When a punter scores, he discreetly tucks the money into the dealer’s hand, the dealer drops the rock or the smack out of his mouth and into the punter’s palm. The whole transaction takes only a few seconds. “Why aren’t the police doing anything?” moans my journalist friend. “It’s all so blatant.”

And it is. But what can the police do? Snarl up the whole of King’s Cross in the middle of the rush hour while they try and nab a few street dealers? Supposing they do manage to collar them: the dealers will have swallowed their stash. Fear is a fantastic lubricant.

We’ve seen the street action, and my journalist friend wants to check out a crack den: do I know of one? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I have some friends in the East End who are well-established crack and smack dealers, but they’re not the sort of people who accept house calls, especially from journalists. What a shame I can’t take my voyeuristic friend, but I can take you . . .

The day’s action is just beginning up at Bob’s place. It’s about seven in the evening. Someone has been to see the Cypriot and they’re washing up a quarter ounce of powdered cocaine in the kitchen of Bob’s flat.

Bob’s flat is situated at the very end of the outside walkway on the top floor of a thirties council block in Hackney. It’s a good position for a drug dealer. The police have to come up four flights and get through a locked, bolted and chained door and a barred gate set in the flat’s internal passageway before they can gain access. The windows are also barred.

Not that this deters them. To give the constabulary their due, they have turned Bob’s place over several times recently, but they never find anything. Bob keeps his stash up his anus. The police know this but they can’t be bothered to pull him in and fence with his brief while they wait for it to come out. Bob would have a good brief as well. Bob’s family are well established in this area; this has been their manor for years. Three generations of the family have been hard men around here, respected men. Before they got into drugs they were into another kind of blag altogether: armed robbery.

Bob once told me how they made the switch: “Chance, really. We were doing a number on this Nigerian bloke. We knew he had something but we didn’t know what. It was six kilos of brown. I got the fucker down on the floor with my shooter in his ear and said: “You’re fucking lucky we’re not the old bill!””

Bob is a talkative soul: bright, articulate and possessed of a gallows humour that counts for wit in this society. But Bob is mighty keen on that rock. Sometimes he’ll be up for several days on end rocking it. Not that the crack is his core business– that’s still smack.

As William Burroughs so pithily observed, smack is the only commodity that you don’t have to sell to people; instead, you sell people to it. And the people who it buys come in all shapes and sizes. At Bob’s, most of them get dealt with through the bars of the safety gate in the long, dark corridor that runs the length of the flat. The clientele are a really mixed bunch; all the way from shot-to-pieces street junkies, indistinguishable from alcoholics apart from the abscesses on their hands, to the smart end of the carriage trade: a young man, incongruously dressed in a velvet-collared crombie, is buying a rock and a bag of brown when we arrive. He has an accent that would sit more comfortably in St James’s than in a Hackney council estate.

Bob doesn’t have a pit bull or a Rottweiler; he doesn’t need one. The other dealers around here all know who his family are and they respect them. But what about the Yardies? They don’t respect man or beast. The word on the scene is that they carry automatic weapons and aren’t afraid to use them. They have no respect for the conventions of the London criminal world. I asked Bob about it. “Yardies?” he snorted. “They’re just another bunch of coons.”

In truth, there are always a lot of black people around at Bob’s place. They’re heavily involved in the crack scene. Most of them are second- and even third-generation English. They talk like Bob and his family, and a lot of them have done bird together. Bob’s current dealing partner, Bruno, is black, and Bob himself has been scoring half ounces of smack through a Yardie.

I’ll take you down the dark corridor to the kitchen where Bruno is washing up. Bob’s place is always pretty cluttered, so mind the stuff lying around in the hall. Like a lot of professional dealers, Bob is eclectic in his activities. There are always consumer durables lying around the flat that have either been swapped for drugs, or are stolen goods waiting for a buyer. Bob loves gadgets, and he’ll often detain an antsy punter and force him to watch while Bob takes the latest laptop computing device through its paces.

Bruno is holding a whisky miniature over the steam that’s spouting from an electric kettle. The little bottle has a solution of acetone, water and powdered cocaine in it. As we watch, Bruno takes a long metal rod and dips it down the neck of the bottle. A large crystal forms around the rod almost immediately. This is crack cocaine. The fresh rocks have to dry out on a bit of kitchen towel for a while, but then they’re ready to smoke.

There are no Coke cans with holes in them round at Bob’s. This is a piping household. The pipes are small glass things that look like they belong in the laboratory. The bowl is formed by pressing a piece of gauze down the barrel of a thin Pyrex stem; fragments of crack are sprinkled on top of a bed of ash; the outside of the stem is heated with a blowtorch until the crack begins to deliquesce and melt, then the thick white smoke is drawn off, through the glass body of the pipe and out through a long, flat stem. Smoking a crack pipe properly is an art form.

If you came at the right time, Bob might ask you to join him–if he likes you, that is. And you could while away the evening doing pipe after pipe, with the odd chase of smack in between to stop yourself having a heart attack, or a stroke or the screaming ad dabs. If you stay, you’ll have some amicable conversations with people–one of the Yardies might drop by. The English blacks are also dismissive of them. Bruno says: “Yardies? They’re just down from the trees, man.” It is almost universally agreed that the Yardies overplayed their hand in London. They were easy to spot, too flamboyant for our pinched, petit bourgeois drug culture. The Met has managed to have the bulk of them deported, but their influence as a catalyst to the drug scene has gone on working.

But now Bob is expecting his dad, whose flat this is and who is due out on a spot of home leave. It’s not that he doesn’t want his dad to know that he’s dealing out of the flat; far from it. In fact, Bob’s dad will expect a commission. It’s rather that he won’t want to see a lot of low-life punters hanging around the place. So we say our goodbyes:

‘stay safe, man.”

“Yeah, mind yer backs.”

Security is always variable at Bob’s; sometimes, when he’s especially lucid, it’s fantastic. He drills punters to carefully wrap crack and smack and stash the little waterproof bundles, either up their anuses or in their mouths. As Bob says: “The filth pull a lot of punters as they’re leaving here, and they sweat you, so make sure you stash that gear “cos I don’t want to do ten because some dozy prannet had it in his hand.” But at other times, you’ll find six or seven addicts scratching outside the door of the flat, waiting for the Man. And there are young black kids running up and down the walkways of the flats, taunting the addicts, especially the white ones.

Even out in the street, Bob’s influence is still felt. A tall, young black dude in a BMW CSi notices us coming out of Bob’s block and calls us over. “Have we come from Bob’s? And do we want to go somewhere else where we can go on rocking?” Well, of course we do! We have our public to satisfy.

Basie drives us back up towards the Cross. It’s dark now. He keeps up a running monologue for our benefit; it’s sheer braggadocio: “Yeah, I’ve bin back to Africa, man. I hung so much paper in Morocco they probably thought I was decorating the place.” He isn’t altogether bullshitting. I know from Bob that Basie is both successful at “hanging paper” (passing false cheques) and at Bob’s traditional blag: sprinting into financial institutions with the old sawn-off. I’ve seen Basie round at Bob’s before. Sometimes he’ll have a couple of quite classy tarts with him who look vaguely Mayfairy: all caramel tan streaky blonde hair and bright pink lips. If it wasn’t for the hungry look and the strained eyes, one might almost take them for PR account handlers.

Up at the Cross, we turn into a backstreet and park the wedge. There’s a crack house here that conforms a little more to our public’s expectation. It’s a squat with smashed windows and no electricity. Once Basie has got us inside, we are confronted with a throng of black faces. Everyone here is either buying, selling or smoking crack. Candles form islands of yellow light around which ivoried faces contort with drawing on the little glass pipes.

The atmosphere here is a lot heavier. Sure, Bob’s place isn’t exactly a picnic, but at least at his flat there is the sense that there actually are rules to be transgressed. Of course, it’s bullshit to say there is honour among thieves, but there is a hierarchy of modified trust: “I think you’re a pukkah bloke, and I’ll trust you and look out for you until it’s slightly more in my favour to do otherwise.” It’s an ethic of enlightened self-interest that isn’t that dissimilar to any other rapacious free market where young men vie with one another to possess and trade in commodities. And, after all, isn’t that what Mrs T wanted us to do? Tool around London in our Peugeot 205s and Golf GTIs, cellular phones at the ready, hanging out to cut the competitive mustard.

But, at the crack house in King’s Cross, we have no cachet, and we have the feeling here of being very isolated: a wrong move, a word out of place, and these people might get very nasty. The people here are much more ‘streety” and they have very little to lose.

We’ve seen what we wanted to see, we’ve come full circle; you don’t want to stay in the crack zone, do you? No, I didn’t think so. Turn the page, get on with the next article, go home.

Evening Standard, September 1991

© 2006 by Will Self. Reprinted with permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.