Friday, December 8, 2017

The Wilderness Years - Free Agent (Part 1)

And so there i was, Hippie Jack and Cocaine Mike were the dynamic duo of fuck-ups and so Mr. Big decided to cut his losses and walk away from anyone associated with them, i tried to take their place, lobbied for a sit down, had Karen the Bartender put in a good word, Hippie Jack went so far as to tell Mr. Big that i was the guy he should be dealing with but Mr. Big wanted Jack cut out and he was most likely thinking that my sense of loyalty to the lovable hippie would have meant me cutting him back in, on a limited basis, and he was probably right, in hindsight i could understand why i wasn't next up even if i had earned that shot, it looked like i was part of a crew of numbskulls, whatever that pair touched turned to shit and while i'm not sure how much Mr. Big lost my best estimates are north of ten grand, yeah i know what's 10G in the drug business but let me ask you this? ever loose ten thousand dollars? then again it was one of the hazards of the game...

So i was cut loose, i did my best to posture and piss and moan and told Karen someday i'd take all Mr. Big's fucking business, she'd been around long enough to know young bluster when she heard it and when it finally sunk in i skulked home and began looking for a source, a good one preferably but at this point any source would fucking do...

This is the life of a street level dealer circa 1997 and the economics that went with it.  I'd been at my warehouse gig 2 years and made $7 an hour, after rent and bills and student loans i'd have roughly 40 bucks to eat on every month and so like most of the working poor i needed a second job, just so happened that my second job was slinging weed and the pay was pretty decent, i set my own hours and damn if work wasn't fun! Each night could be a party if i so made it and even at my minor level i was good at what i did which meant i knew how to hook up the bartenders which resulted in free booze and recommendations for new customers, life was good... as long as i had a connection. I wasn't getting rich, but i was getting by and having a pretty good time...

As i sat in my sanctuary/office known as the back bedroom of the sevenfivenine i knew i needed both gigs and i knew i needed the slinging more than the warehouse but the warehouse gig was the security blanket if things went tits up with the ganja and at that moment things looked like they had gone tits up with the ganja. I had managed to save a few grand which was oddly probably more than most of the people i knew but i also knew that without the weed that what took two years to scrape together would take two months to disappear, not to mention becoming accustomed to the lifestyle of the low level hood, which meant closing the bars or hanging at the strip club, being hood famous as the kids used to say... my master plan of selling grass to pay off my student loans was suddenly looking like a house of cards and the wind was slowly starting to pick up...

There's a lot of things that run through the head at times like this but the one thing i pretended wouldn't happen was that i wouldn't find another connection, i had been steady and fair and not a complete fucking nutter in terms of dealers and so many of my own customers were out asking around about hook-ups, saying they knew a guy who could move shit, and while i appreciated the help i needed to find my own connection, it is a profession rampant with paranoia (imagine that!) even on the lowest of levels, connections were tricky things, you wanted to keep a buffer between the supply and the clientele because you don't want someone stealing your business, the trick was to move up until you found a comfortable level to do what you wanted to do, it's a thought that's lost on most cats out there dealing, they think it's like the shit they see on tv... it's not... if you're gonna make any money at it and not end up in jail you better treat it like a serious profession...

Since moving back to North Oakland and setting up shop Mitchell's had been my home base, now it felt like an insult to walk in the place, Mr. Big would still hang out there and the last thing i wanted was to be drunk and start running my mouth, i didn't need the hassle, i had been hanging out at Joe's Bar, a scant half block from my place, a barfly bar recently purchased by a young guy we called Pizza Joe because he also bought and ran the pizza shop that adjoined the bar, and what the hell else would we call him? of course Pizza Joe bought the place with the money he made selling blow, he was a good guy and knew i was in the game, occasionally i'd hook his lady up because  i had better weed than anyone else she knew at the time, with things officially gone pear-shaped i posed the question one night as i stood in the pizza shop, did he know anyone? let me make some calls he said...


3 comments:

looby said...

Ohhh...nice bit of suspense at the end there :)

The low-level paranoia -- it does live with you full-time. I tense every time I hear a car outside my front door, and as to people knocking -- that ratchets up the tension even further.

Wendy and me were talking the other day about our ideal jobs. Well, I've already got it, but like you, it's a question of dealing with the anxiety that comes with increasing income. And laziness and not taking simple precautions. The internet is full of people who have gone to jail for failing to cover their tracks in ways that are obvious from the outside.

Anyway...looking forward to see what happens next!

Kono said...

looby- thanks for reading my good man, in the ever present world of marketing and selling ourselves i've often occasionally thought of ways to promote the lounge, like calling my faithful reader(s) Barflies, i should print up shirts and if i ever do sir you will get the first one!!

And yes, the number of people who end up in jail or broke and running from their supplier are astounding, it's not the glamorous gig television would lead us to believe, it's a job and if it's not handled like one you get sacked, except in this world sacking can take many forms, most of which are not very healthy...

daisyfae said...

there's a damn good reason for that paranoia. i saw a friend who ran a minor grow operation completely lose his shit once over nothing. shut it all down overnight. turns out about a week later he'd have been discovered, and likely would have had serious trouble. knowing when to trust the paranoia is apparently a good skill to have.