The Wilderness Years - Naugahyde Pt. 2

Sitting there near the jukebox, the din of happy hour drunks steadily increasing, the alien light still flashing in every time the door opened, i leaned back and looked Hippie Jack in the eye and said, reeeaalllly, drawing it out, he just kept grinning and said yep, and i asked if i could see it, he said sure you can, i asked how soon and he said tomorrow, i said about the same time, he said yep, i said cool and we went back to bullshitting about bands, i let him do most of the talking, he was espousing the virtues of Frank Zappa and maligning his beloved Dead, he said the scene was dead and Frank was the future though with Frank having died a few years before i don't know how that was... and there was the obligatory cop discussion, i knew i had passed cuz he said he wasn't even gonna ask me, Dina was a top notch reference and she said i was cool, it was like passing the interview, sort of what you would do if you were out with your boss at dinner or some shit, it was the same thing and this guy sitting here might soon be my boss in a way, the guy who supplied, the guy you had to pay and bullshit and keep in good graces with, it was best to sit back and let him ramble, nod and laugh and say a few things, i bought him another drink and then told him i had to split because i had to work in the morning, said my goodbyes and told him i'd see him next afternoon, same time same sandbox...

As i stepped into the early evening and past the piss yellow light that lit a large painted sign reading Mitchell's Tavern, i was practically fucking skipping down the street, past the shitty laundromat and liquor store and check cashing place, a fucking break, of course i had to tell myself not to shoot my wad quite yet, this was of course a racket filled with an endless amount of fuck-ups, lunatics and con artists, guys who promised the moon but instead provided steaming piles of shit, but still the gut was telling me something good, of course the average Joe might be saying to themselves, some girl you worked with for three days walks into a bar, gets up in your mug and starts smiling and talking about how you were always stoned at work and blah blah blah and you end up sitting with her ex-old man, who just so happens to be in the same line of work and with what seems like a much better connection, but that's how it was, that was the risk one took and it came down to keen sense of reading people and a little luck, i once heard a cop talking about how the media fed the public a load of shit, had the common man believing that there were these huge networks of distribution and the like, he laughed, it was all freelancers he said... and he was right, there were loose organizations, it's why they were called connections, the guys doing it knew that shit could go south any time in any way and then the connection was lost and hopefully it didn't zap you along with it, the fact if anyone anywhere on the supply line fucked up it would disappear, it could be people far removed, names and faces you'd never see or know, you do it long enough and learn how good you have it when a bunch of loose cannons hold shit together for as long as they can all for the common good of their billfolds...

The next day i awoke and got stoned and made my way to work, coffee-oj-donut combo because healthy eating was of the utmost importance after spending the night sucking down Scotch and beer, remember this lovely combo because it will make an appearance at a later date in this tale, work dragged as i stood around like the kid on X-mas, i was hoping, i wanted to see what the Hippie Jack could do and even after i got off i still had an hour and a half before i had to meet him,  it did give me enough time to check the messages and do a little business if need be, for once i wasn't worried about any calls coming in, i wanted to get down to the bar and see three lucky 7's all lined up in a row, hear the bells and whistles of the fucking jackpot going off in my head... and so when i could wait no longer i made that walk over to the bar, a half-hour earlier than planned, ordered my Scotch and beer and tried to look as cool, calm and collected as possible, first hoping he'd show and then hoping it wasn't a line of horse shit, i grabbed one of the naugahyde booths with my face towards the door, picked up the local stripper rag that they put in bars all over this part of town and pretended to read while i waited, mainly i looked at half-naked pictures of our local entertainment community, then about 20 minutes after he said he'd be there Hippie Jack rolled on in, grinning yet griping about some injustice of the local transit system, i had already put a Jack and Coke in the wood for him and as Karen poured his drink he looked over and waved, he grabbed his drink and started shuffling over, brown corduroys and worn gray hoodie, couple plastic grocery bags filled with who knows what, baseball cap pulled down low, he could have passed for vaguely homeless...

He slid into the opposite side of the booth and rasped thanks for the drink man, i said no problem and then he proceeded to go off on how the bus system in this town sucks and how he was supposed to catch a ride with this chick he knew but she bailed on him with some bullshit excuse and had this not happened he would have been down here ages ago, i told him it was no big deal and he grinned and took a look around and i said so? and he grinned and said oh yeah man don't worry, he smiled again, you ain't a cop right? naw man i'm no cop and then he laughed and i could tell he had slipped something into his right hand and was reaching out under the table, the best fucking part was that i could smell it before i ever saw it, i looked at him and said shit man, he grinned and out of the side of his mouth cackled i told you it was pretty good, and so there we sat, two guys doing business, we sat and drank our drinks, i asked roughly how much this would cost and he whispered six a quarter pound and elevenfifty a half, he paused twentyonefifty an elbow cuz i can do those too he grinned, i sat back and nodded, told him it sounded good, added that i was gonna finish my drink and head back to the place and give it a test, asked if he wanted anything for the sample, he said no no it's cool, i smiled and got up, shook his hand and made my way towards the door...

There was a brown and blue plaid flannel shirt that i had bought one day at a Salvation Army i believe down on Madison Ave. in Lakewood, it had cost a dollar and it was a fine fucking shirt, warm and ugly and there were women who hated it and ones that tried to steal it from me but this shirt in it's first five years had always been a bit of good karma, good gris gris and juju, not that i believed in that shit but sometimes you gotta believe something and as the Dude had his rug El Kono had his shirt, though it should be pointed out the shirt pre-dated the rug, of course i had it on that night and as i walked out of the bar and into my not quite ghetto-fied hood, i was fairly skipping down the street as the bums and liquor store clerks and Voodoo Lady looked on in bemused indifference, i needed to get home and test this shit out...

I bounded up the steps and into my place and headed straight for my room, i kicked off my shoes and tossed my shirt onto the bed (aka mattress on the floor), pulled up my garbage picked chair and opened the bag next to my new and quickly gathering dust word processor, the smell filled the room and i took it out and there were nice green buds, not much seed, what would come to be known as classic middies circa 1995, it was far and away better than the shit i was peddling now and more expensive, i sat and crunched the numbers and tried to figure out what i could do with it, i stuck my head out the door and called to Jess, she loved getting stoned and would be a help in gauging the quality, she came back and sat down and i packed it up and we smoked, Jess smiled and shook her head, she had a naturally sultry voice, that's alot better than what you got now she said, i smiled and said it sure fucking was, we finished the bowl and she left and i went to work with the numbers again, turned on the radio and listened to the local uni's punk rock show, opened the chest and looked at how much money i had, basically it was about six bills, enough for a quarter pound but if the stuff was like this i figured shit would pick up, business sense dictated a half, that extra fifty saved put toward the head stash and the numbers still come out alright, cut up small it could net $70-100 an ounce on average, no it wasn't coke money but it would allow me to eat and pay my bills...

For those of us who attended college from the late 80's to early to mid 90's there was this remarkable phenomena, every day it seemed when you walked into the cafeteria or library or student union there would be a table with a couple of people not much older than us students sitting there inviting you over to get a free travel mug or backpack or key chain or fountain pen, and in order to receive these lovely gifts all you had to do was sign up for a credit card, hell you were in college and someday you'd graduate and find meaningful employment so why not get started on building that credit score and getting ready to be an upwardly mobile member of our fine society? suuuuurrrre right now you have no visible means of income but those bankers were pretty positive that your presence on said campus meant that somebody related to you had a fucking income, so they lined up for the chance to dole out credit cards to the future of America... and hand them out they did, you could get as many as you wanted, i knew people who had half a dozen, probably don't need to remind anyone how well that worked out for everyone involved... lucky for one worldwide conglomerate El Kono decided to sign up for their card one day and had managed to be somewhat responsible with it mainly due to his dabbling's in the grass business... and on this fine day he was hauling ass with said credit card down to the local bank on his lunch break to cash advance the rest of the seed money needed to upgrade the current state of his business...