The Wilderness Years - Max and Ruby pt. 1

When we last saw our hero (and it was a while ago seeing as a some events kept the Wilderness Years on the back burner) he was scoring pounds of brick weed from the local pizza shop and walking down the street with it in pizza boxes. While i was grateful for Pizza Joe and the hook-up the shit weed was taking it's toll on my corner of the market share. Also dealing with the local hoods and all their superstitions was getting on my last nerve. Nothing on the 13th, no weed around elections, you name it they had a reason, usually non-sense, for not doing business. I was a fucking professional, in my eyes business didn't stop for shit. If the Fuzz were knocking on the front door i'd ask for the warrant and move shit out the back door. Luckily that wasn't the case but let's just say the clientele wasn't exactly thrilled with the lovely Mexican brick that sometimes gave you more headache than high.

Now this being over three years in i had lasted longer than most kiddos my age when it came to this game. There was no shortage of the number of chronic fuck-ups who occupied this line of work therefore it seemed that most of my best leads when it came to finding a new connection actually came from the people who showed up to buy weed. Ruby had already been to my place to score. She was a tall and non-descript girl, another of the South Hills scenesters that had come into the mix via the party store warehouse where i was working. Seems everyone took a job in the party store for a few weeks until something better came along. There was a certain local ska band that seemed to orbit around the place and because of that they all found their way to me. Ruby had shuffled off to school on the east coast and met a nice fellow named Max on her semester at sea. After graduating he moved to the burgh to play house with her and low and behold if he didn't have an excellent hook-up. He was a rich kid from the affluent suburbs of Philly who i gathered was taking a year off to slum it and hang with his girlfriend before grad school or law school or something beckoned him back to the more moneyed side of the Keystone state.

So a meeting was set up. I came with a sterling rep but there was still a feeling out process. Of course they lived above what else? a pizza shop, and once again it was located in one of those beautiful busy city streets where no one paid much attention to the comings and goings of Carhartt coat wearing derelict types like myself. Being close enough to the local university the backpack i carried raised no eyebrows either. Things were falling into place.

Now here's what most likely separates the good hoods from the bad, or more correctly, how to succeed in weed dealing without really trying. Most of it comes down to education. That doesn't mean you have to have an MBA from the Wharton School of Business but you do have to have some fucking bid-ness sense kids. The new gear was definitely high quality but it was a bit more expensive than what i was used to paying. There was a crunching of numbers. Seeing as most of my clientele was buying on the small side i didn't want to raise the price too much thus scaring them off. It's a bit ironic that the ones who bitch about dirt weed are the ones who also whine about prices when the good shit arrives. Mainly it would come down to cutting down the breaks on buying weight while weighing the little stuff more closely. I was known for what the stoners called "heavy bags", "fat sacks" what have you. There was never a question of my shit weighing when you got it home and questioning the maestro was grounds for dismissal. I had cultivated the rep as the connection you didn't want to lose. There would be a few blips and bumps but it seemed like things would work out just fine..

And so i arrived at the pizza shop at the prescribed time. To be cont.