"I must have turned a thousand tricks over those six years, you name it, I've done it, the perfect whore, young-looking so the men buzzed around me like bees on honey, you have no idea how many men see working girls for a quick blowjob in the car after work before going home." This is the opening of "XXX," the first of 67 entries in Fresh Pack of Smokes by Cassandra Blanchard.
Fresh Pack of Smokes is a gritty, riveting, poetical memoir chronicling a horrendous crack addiction and sex worker's street life. Blanchard doesn't use periods except at the end of each raw entry, to serve a stream-of-conscious telling of a cyclical, drug-addled madness: performing sex for money, buying drugs, getting high, sex for money, more drugs, etc. Her life was a quest to stay high. A brief stint in jail without drugs made her finally smell the urine, see the rats swarming the garbage and feel the punches and slaps of those she loved and those she pretended to love for her next fix. An addict is never fully cured, and she struggles with her demons, but Blanchard survived to tell her story with strikingly harsh, brutally blunt and occasionally wry observations: about a fellow addict ("Candy's hair was her resume"), a bad encounter with a john ("I'm pretty sure he had done things to children") and beatings ("so much blood you swallow the chunks like dark red liver"). Blanchard's writing in Fresh Pack of Smokes is blisteringly immersive. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer