I smoked crack by mistake once on a family vacation in Mexico. I tried to buy weed off a kid in the street who offered it to me while showing me a brochure about jet ski rentals. He told me to follow him and I was pretty depressed and unbothered by the potential of being harmed so I did it without question. He took me into a seedy bar and I thought I would end up in some back room but he lead me right through and into the alleyway. There was a federale with an assault rifle standing in the back alley and for a moment I assumed he was leading me to the officer but we walked right past him into a shantytown located right on the opposite side of the tourist strip.

The kid grabbed a plastic bottle from the gutter while we were walking and explained to me that the cop didn't stop me because he knows I am going to buy drugs and he was going to wait until I had done so and then arrest me. Shortly after that sunk in we arrived at a small shack with a blanket for a door and a fence made of cardboard. There were chickens and other small animals running around in the yard.

He pulls the blanket aside and leads me into the shack where there is just a bed sitting under a bare light bulb and two men I can only describe as obviously dangerous smile at me and gesture to a plastic chair in the corner across from them. They all begin talking to one another in Spanish and I get the immediate sense I probably should not be such a trusting person.

I was a fat emo goth nerd for reference, wearing a side satchel with pins and emo band patches all over it and my nails painted black to match my box dyed spock cut. I started to explain that my family was broke - hilarious in hindsight but at the time I was terrified - and even pulled out the bright yellow Walkman portable cassette player I had been listening to while wandering around the resort moping all week. People worth kidnapping at this time would be carrying an iPod at least was my rationale.

I managed to ask for and buy a small bag of some dirty shitty weed and then they started passing around the plastic bottle pipe my tour guide had been building while I was distracted with my drug deal. When it was passed to me I didn't really think twice before taking a big fat hit. Somehow through the most insane high I have ever experienced in my life I managed to talk my way out of the hut and deflect my tour guide from taking my prize; I shoved the bag of shit weed into my underpants rather than "let him hold it".

He told me the cop would be out looking for me and he knew a safe place. I was still reeling from the high but it was starting to fade a bit. I was not sober enough to stop myself from following him once again to a car dealership where I was told a cab was coming to get me. I'm fairly sure they were going to snatch me but I waited for what seemed like 10 or 15 minutes oblivious to that fact at the time. Eventually I sobered up enough to realize I had to leave and make my way back to the resort.

I left and jumped into the first taxi I saw and they took me back to the safety of the gated all inclusive. The punchline of this story is that the next day I took my fat goth ass to the beach for the first time and the kids selling shitty jewellery and souvenirs had far better weed for sale in the false bottoms of their jewellery boxes and all within the secure perimeter of the resort.

I used to live in a decaying high rise in the heart of downtown Calgary where nearly every tenant and even the management were addicted to crack cocaine.

The stairwells were absolutely covered in endless layers of graffiti and absurd attempts at poetic revelations. Once when my girlfriend and I were high on acid the police raided an apartment on the floor above us with the suppport of a helicopter.

I would avoid paying the meagre rent for the tiny one room apartment we shared by showing up at the office in the main lobby a couple of days after rent was due and asking for a receipt. I always told them it had just slipped my mind to ask for one on the first of the month and it never failed to work.

But we still had to eat and buy weed, mdma & lsd so that meant I would wander down a few blocks from our place, whenever I was sober and broke enough, to a street next to a parking lot lined by a chain link fence.

This spot was known as cash corner and most cities probably have a similar spot where you can pick up able bodied men to work unregulated odd jobs - typically moving or construction - and you would get paid in cash at the end of the day.

One particularly miserable and sober Sunday after sleeping in I thought I may as well take my chances and see if I could get some money for the night. I went to the corner and found myself standing there alone.

I didn't have much else to do so I thought I would wait and see if anybody came for me. After a while a black SUV pulled up and a giant middle eastern man rolled down the window and asked if I was looking to work.

I hopped into the passenger seat and we pulled away from the corner. After a block or two in silence I asked him what he needed help with.

It wasn't completely unusual to be picked up by a person in their every day car. Typically it was moving & work trucks pulling up but now and then you would get someone who just needed help to move a couch or something like that

He smiled at me greedily and fished a $20 out of his front shirt pocket while driving with no particular destination I could surmise.

"Show me your beautiful belly and you can have this."

I was in my mid twenties, fat and starting to bald a bit. I frequently joked that nobody would ever pay me for sex because I couldn't even give it away. He pleaded with me more and started to tell me how lonely he was. His family could never understand or accept him. He told me I was beautiful more than a few times.

I took the twenty and shoved it into my jeans and then lifted up my shirt for him. He reached over and started to caress my exposed stomach. I've always hated my ogerish form and no one has ever touched me with such tender desperation before or since.

By now it was clear he was looking for a quiet place to pull over. Driving slowly with one hand he pulled the car into a back alley and after removing his hand from my body he produced another twenty from his pocket to offer me.

"Let me kiss your tummy and you can have this too" he told me pushing the twenty into the hand I raised to protest with. By complete blind luck he had pulled up right behind a house my friend lived in at the time.

I put the money in my pocket as he leaned over and started kissing me all over my stomach, licking me and reaching for my dick. I pulled away and pushed him off me.

"Twenty more to see your cock."

I tried to protest and told him I wasn't turned on and there wasn't much to see but he took the final twenty dollar bill and shoved it into my pocket himself. His giant, hairy hands were suddenly at my belt and he unzipped my jeans and pulled me out.

After a few useless strokes without response he lunged over with his mouth open wide and I shoved him away from me. Somehow he hadn't locked the doors. I burst out of the car and ran out of the alley, circling around the block to the front of the house.

Frantically I pounded on the door until my friend answered and let me in. I told him what had just happened and he said "I would never tell that to another living soul, I wish you hadn't told me."

He let me wait for a few hours to be sure the man was gone and hadn't seen where I had vanished to. On the way home I bought a few bags of groceries and then my girlfriend and I made dinner and watched battlestar. When she asked why I was home so quickly and I told her she thought it was pretty funny.