Crack House picture by Todd Hryck
I love telling people that I once had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a crack house.
Invariably I get the look — just like you’re probably giving me right now. It’s a look that says volumes in withheld judgment and horror.
“Are you a….crackhead?” the look seems to imply. And then I laugh and explain it was part of an outreach trip to the Kensington section of Philadelphia and I get the relieved smiles and the polite laughter. And yes, I can be an ass.
But after the initial shock value of that statement passes, I always come back to the story about how the addicts living in this abandoned house were still watching TV. And that’s where the tale gets interesting.
Mind you, when I say this house was abandoned, I mean it was the living pit of hell. It didn’t even have windows, copper or other sellable material without 50 yards of the place. But it had electricity. There were lights and TVs and it baffled my mind how any of this could be possible. Then as we left, I asked the group leader who explained the process.
“One of them goes up on the roof with a butter knife,” he said with a devilish smile. “They find a wire running by and they hack at it until they get shocked. Then they grab some jumper cables and make a connection to the box. That way when the electric company comes by to check on who’s stealing the power, they just scramble back up to the roof, unclip the jumper cables and look as innocent as a crackhead can.”
I always remember this story from that trip. Because to this moment I am amazed that people who literally had maggots crawling out of their legs, still had the ingenuity to figure out and manage the process of electrifying a house with jumper cables.
I learned something very important about the human spirit that day. No matter how far down the ladder we go, and no matter how desperate our situation, there is always a way out. Just think, if any one of those crack addicts had applied one tenth of the energy it must have taken to climb up a house and figure out how to hack a live power cable and jump start a house, they could have easily walked the few blocks it would take to find real and last help.
It was a poignant reminder for me: We are usually not the victims we think we are. All it takes is a little drive and a lot of guts and suddenly where it was dark, the lights are on. That’s what the human spirit can achieve, even in the darkest of times.
Robert Knorpp is host of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast at thebeancast.com and is President of The Cool Beans Group, a marketing strategy consultancy based in New York City. He likes laughing even more than breathing. You can follow the madness on Twitter at twitter.com/BobKnorpp.
