The Wilderness Years - Hit the Ground Runnin' Part 2

There were two things that i intended to do straight away once all was unpacked and i had settled in, of course first i bid adieu to the Crown Vic, my fellow fry boy was none to pleased with me and could i blame him? he wanted to head back to tourist town right off and once i had the car unloaded i shook his hand and quasi-apologized, i'm not sure if he thought we were gonna go all Thelma and Louise or some shit and have some deep bond over the course of the trip back, the funny thing was if i had known i could have dropped the car off across the street at the rental place that picks you up cuz they had an office not 30 feet from my front steps, a ghetto office where the local hoods could pick up a rental to sling out of, helping to throw the Five-O off their scent, we'd spend endless hours on the front steps drinking beer and watching the parade of gangsters drop off and switch cars... i handed my fellow fry boy some dough, money for gas and a motel room if he needed it, i thought it was crazy to turn around and drive back but the reality of it was i didn't give a shit, and so off he went, he'd call the next afternoon and tell me he got the car back and all was cool, i thanked him again, i should have been cooler but when you are a young and arrogant prick you don't worry about shit like that, still i should have been...

Now having spent the last two summers and part of the one before that sweating out the drink and drugs into America's favorite boardwalk fries and having only called off one time in those last two summers for being fucked up, a fact my boss said amazed him because i was fucked up alot and because most guys called off once or more a week until they got canned, my boss had handed me an envelope at the end of the summer with 12 one hundred dollar bills in it, a bonus for being able to handle my acid and my booze and still work, a bonus that came in handy for a guy who had just two months before been down to his last $4, along with the staggering number of hours i worked, usually 3-4 sixteen hour days a week and 8 hours all the other days, i managed to dig myself out of a hole and have a month or two of extra rent sitting around, a grand and change was like hitting the fucking lottery and so while i knew i couldn't run out and blow it i did earmark some of it for special projects and now that i was back and settled it was time to get down to it...

You see i was going to write the Great American Novel, sound familiar? i was so fucking wise and brilliant and cool at the age of 25 that the world was going to listen, i was gonna take Hank's blueprint and spend the next few years working shit jobs and fucking and drinking and drugging and when it was all said and done there would be this magnum opus shining up at my ass, a bit like that briefcase that Vince Vega opens in some other shit apartment, i was convinced, problem was my typing was still more than a bit rough around the edges and paper and correction tape cost money and ate up time... so i took 3 of those Ben Franklins out of that envelope and headed down to the local office supply store and bought myself a brand spanking new word processor... yes you read that right and for any millennials that someday might read this a word processor was like a glorified typewriter, it did what the old Word Perfect program did just not as well, but it stored shit on floppy disks and i could revise and correct without having to print it out and re-type whole pages, in my mind it was fucking genius, hell it didn't look much different than the PCs around back then it was just cheaper...

and so i brought it home and took a good two weeks before i ever bothered to take it out of the box and for the first few months i would sit in my room and attempt to crank out stories or poems (back when i still wrote them), i'd stuff envelopes and send my precious little poesy out into the world, most of it getting returned but some of it finding homes in little mimeo'd or xerox'ed magazines, the sort found online these days, most days i'd turn on the machine and get stoned and listen to music and gaze out my window, the little cursor flashing, the leaves rustling outside, i'd sit waiting for genius or inspiration to strike cuz that's how it works right? then turn off the machine and head to the bar or fall asleep reading on my bed, that was of course when i had the time because there was one other thing i needed to get done when i got back, the most important thing, get shit up and runnin', $6.40 an hour and my meager savings wasn't gonna keep me afloat forever...

And so since i was living in the land of opportunity i decided to take all that i had learned in the halls of higher and lower education and put it to use, because really what were Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Mellon, Edison and all the other captains of industry who have graced our fair nation? the short answer is criminals and i'm not much concerned about the long answer cuz this is my fucking tale and i will bend the morals when i see fit, only the best ones do you know and so i took another 4 or 5 Franklins out of that envelope, back when the picture of Ben was still small, i picked up the phone and called the Frat boy Finance guy and arranged to meet, you see the first time i lived in the city of iron, a scant two blocks from where i was now, i had been gifted an opportunity that had been cultivated during the end of my undergrad days, back then a friend and I had taken over the market at Podunk, not really taken over but filled the gap left when Cowboy Dan (see old post) went off the deep end and shut down operations, a friend of mine had a friend (isn't that how it always works) who was in the enviable position to scratch a lot of backs and so he fronted stuff to his friend who in turn looked for other guys to help him move it, turns out i ended up being really good at that and soon was getting two pounds on the front to swing, at the time we thought we were having it, i did most of the leg work and the good Doctor would answer the door and fetch beers and lay low but it worked out well and we had money for the boozer and groceries and pizza, now it didn't last long and about the time it went tits up i split for the beach but it had laid the groundwork...

Now the biggest worry was the year in grad school and the loss of customers cuz as we all know weed dealers are a dime a dozen, problem is they disappear at an alarmingly high rate due to the fact they are stoned and easy-going and tend to fuck up the money and smoke away any profit, of course the other variable in the equation was the product and how it stacked up to the rest of what was floating around, and so i rubbed my lucky rabbit's foot and patted my jade Buddha's belly and hoped that Frat Boy Finance guy had some better shit than he was shovelling while i was flunking out of grad school... the good news was that he did, three different grades, the bad news was he was a tight motherfucker whose prices were a bit steep thus eating into the profits cuz as a former consumer turned entrepreneur i realized i needed to be fair or even better than fair, cheap, to build up a clientele, i had about three months before the lovelies from the student loan gestapo started mailing me payment coupons and i was nothing if not an honorable fucker, i would pay the bankers back on time, ahead of time hopefully so i could fuck them on the interest if possible, so really you could say that this whole operation was started to pay off the debt i had accrued bettering myself in the halls of higher education, and you'd be right, it was exactly the reason i got into it... that and to still have enough money to eat and keep a roof over my head and from where i was sitting the straight and narrow wasn't gonna even come close to doing that...

And so i was back in my hood and back in the game, it started by pulling out a small, beat-up notebook, a notebook with the pages stained and water damaged and with a page or two with a myriad of phone numbers and symbols or codes next to them, this wasn't fucking James Bond this was the low rent district and before long once things got going a bit more i didn't even use a notebook, new numbers would be written down for a few days and committed to memory, even now i grin at the amount of phone numbers i kept in my head, fuckers today use their fucking smart phones, this was old school, wastoid was the smart phone... and so i got on the horn and began calling around, a conversation that went usually like this: El Kono- hey man what's happening, Potential Customer- nothing much man, EK- hey just wanted to let you know things are back to normal, PC- Normal? EK- yeah like the old days over on Melwood, i'm back living here again so if you needed anything let me know, PC-Oh, cool yeah, i gotta guy but i'll definitely keep you in mind, EK- great yeah man just keep it in mind, nothing crazy but decent, decent price too, PC-cool man yeah, i'll be in touch, EK- alright later, PC- later... Now i made this same call about 20 times and did a little leg work and talked to some other people face to face, had them spread the word and all,  of course this new character, a tall man with  large sideburns, a crooked goatee and long natty hair, would become a card carrying member of what he would loosely call, the North Oakland Players, it was long before he had earned that title but he was back and shit was about to change... even if he nor anybody else new it then...