So you’ve got the wife and the kids. You’ve got and are just barely hanging onto, the co-op in the chic enclave, you’re so middle-aged. Some men, finding themselves adrift in a wood in their middle years, go to the gym: I troll whores for coke.

After you’ve seen the horrors of Chelsea Pier’s ice rink on a weekend afternoon, nothing raises the spirits of the inner-borough salary man like secret afternoons and evenings spent in Bushwick or Washington Heights trolling whores for coke (TWFC).

TWFC consists, at its simplest, of asking hookers to buy you coke and seeing where the relationship takes you.

Some say TWFC is nothing but safe sex for geezers. Maybe they have a point. I’m not a critic. I don’t want to start thinking about why I TWFC, I just want to tell you how great it can be and how you can do it too if you want to.

For starters, you must have the whores and the retail coke outlets in reasonable proximity. TWFC doesn’t work if you have one and not the other. So this means, in my experience, doing your trolling in poor neighborhoods. I like Bushwick and Washington Heights, but beginners can start with whatever slum is closest.

Maybe its just parochial favoritism on my part, but I don’t think you can beat Washington Heights as a place to TWFC. So I think its worth a trip uptown for most neophytes.

The first thing you have to do is find the whores. You tell them you don’t want sex, at least, not at first. You ask them if they would get you some coke. You tell them you’ll pay as much as for sex or close if they come back with the drugs. Since a lot of the whores are drug addicts, this is kind of like finding something in common with some woman in a bar or office and going from there.

One of the most obvious risks is that the whores take your money and that’s the last you see of them. You have to accept you’ll get ripped off a lot. If you can’t afford to lose the bucks, then TWFC is not for you. But it is cheap. You say you want a twenty of powder and you’ll pay them more than the twenty you’ve giving them to get it, like $35 or $40 or something when they come back with the drugs. Since a lot of them are crack addicts, you have to specify that you want powder or you’ll end up with useless crack.

A lot of times, if they want to do it, the whores will give you some worthless ID or a really cheap radio or CD player or something for you to hold to prove that they’ll come back. These gestures by the whores are all well and good, but whatever they give you is likely to be easily abandoned by them and certainly doesn’t mean they will come back. But there’s no harm in accepting these items. Soon, you too can have a collection of really cheap transistor radios at home.

If they do come back with the drugs, it means you can trust them. You can get to know them. Maybe you’ll do the drugs with them though they usually won’t have anyplace to go to do them. And you’ll just have to endure the whore’s complaints about what a waste it is to snort, rather than smoke the coke. I suppose, though, if you find yourself smoking coke with your new friends, you may be getting deeper into TWFC than I have. This article is really more of a how to get started piece, if you’re smoking coke with your hooker-friends, then, congratulations, you’re well past the beginner stage of TWFC.

The other obvious thing about TWFC is that you could get laid. They are whores even if you’re pretending just to be drug buddies. I never had sex while TWFC, but I tried to keep an open mind about it. Responses from a hooker-friend like “I’m not taking my bra off because I’ve got some kind of abscess on my breast,” or “I don’t know if I have AIDS or not,” or “If you think that when I’m on the roof of a six-story walk-up with one of my Chinese johns that I’m going to go all the way downstairs to the deli for a condom, you’re nuts” can be off-putting. Maybe I’m too sensitive.»