Word: cranked
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...Part of crank's appeal to Paula, and apparently to most users, is that it helped her get things done. It made her feel capable, on top of things. She could party into the wee hours (often having sex with virtual strangers because, as she puts it, once you've stayed up all night with someone, you feel pretty close to them), go to work the next day, then come home and clean her room. "I even started depending on it to go to school," she says...
Then came what Paula claims was a three-month-long, nearly sleepless crank run that left her homeless, expelled from school and seeing ghouls behind every tree. Crankers tend to exaggerate, but her memories of the streak have that patented methamphetamine exactitude. "I knew I had to get nutrition, so every day I had a pudding snack, an applesauce and a little carton of milk," she says...
...Jennifer, the conscience-stricken mother, the party's still not over. Another crank-warped week has passed; another Friday night has rolled around; and though she's thinner, paler and less coherent, she's feeling considerably richer owing to the arrival this morning of her monthly child-support check. Swaying nautically on her favorite barstool, she reports that she has made some changes in her life in the past few days. She's moved out of her parents' place, leaving her daughter behind, and has taken up residence in a rented house with two male roommates who share her taste...