The Wilderness Years - Hogmanay

The strange thing about this time of year was how slow it was, which in a way was fine with me because i was still trying to catch up on sleep from the summer, from a day or two before X-mas eve until the 27th or 28th business was minimal, of course those who would stop by were in festive spirits and i was given six packs and fifths of booze, the occasional bud of high end that someone had come across, being the connection for the common man did have some privileges, of course the warehouse gig was shit at this point cuz i worked for a party store and what's the biggest party night of the year? if you said the night before Thanksgiving you'd be right but the night that the most useless shit is consumed and tossed in the garbage not hours after that clock turns to the new year is/was/and always will be Dec. 31, and so i loaded up van after van and delivered disposable crap to the stores, in the cold and damp, sweating away, there were nights after work when the real job began it was the equivalent of calling in sick, if you didn't catch me by 6pm you were fucked, i was laying in my warm room reading books and falling in and out of sleep, making the occasional cup of tea and listening to the drone of public radio, a good night's sleep then down the steps into the cold to do it all again...

But business calls and when the 29th rolled around it was two full time jobs, luckily one afforded me the option of staying at home and making triple what i did during the day, i figured i was in good shape supply wise but over the next two days i was practically wiped out and when New Year's Eve rolled around i made a quick run to Jack's as insurance, it went surprisingly smooth and Hippie Jack was in good spirits while he waited to go see some hippie band at a local bar, by the time i got back to my place i had a string of messages and being NYE i said fuck it, had people in and out for a steady 4-5 hours, no use worrying about the cops on a night like tonight, the gay guys downstairs were having a party and the sister upstairs wasn't home, in my hood it was just another NYE, standing on the battered wooden steps you could see a dozen parties all up and down the block, i had my own party that night and made some money doing it, people showed up with beers and nitrous and mushrooms, some were in and out in 10 minutes and some left hours later, the stereo played and people mingled about, a fine night of debauchery for the working stiffs, i dumped some herb on a plate and set a pipe and bong next to it, had the woman upstairs been home she would have been stoned from the secondhand smoke rising from my apartment...

Now i would have liked to take credit for this bit of business genius but the reality was i wanted to showboat a bit, things had been going pretty good and tossing out 10 grams of or so of good bud on a plate for public consumption was cool, i knew who was coming over and yes there may have been some ulterior motives where certain females were concerned but it also helped bring a certain level of respect from everyone who stopped by that night, years ago when i had spent a Thanksgiving with Cowboy Dan... Cowboy Dan if you recall was one of my first mentors back at Podunk U. and on that fine day he supplied beers and bongs and turkey and even fucking leftovers, there was something to be learned there and though i think Cowboy Dan's motive's were much purer than mine it was smart business sense... the people who came through the door that night thought i was a righteous cat and that's what i wanted, i wanted them to believe i was their friend and in all honesty some of them were my friends, but there are two reasons why i wanted all the people who came through that door to think i was their friend, the first one being, and it's naive as fuck but helped me to sleep at night, if caught with some shit amount of grass they wouldn't say shit about where they got it, and two that i was building my brand, i didn't understand or realize it at the time but i was, it was fucking business again, as Warhol said it's the most American of art, i wasn't only selling grass i was selling me, i was selling the image of the guy who sold you grass, dread locked underemployed warehouse worker with his middle finger flying squarely at the man, the guy who read like "serious" books and listened to fucking indie rawk, Jay-sus i was a hipster before some asshole even coined the term... or maybe i was just an asshole...

Now i know what you're thinking, you're looking up and saying how much trouble could people get in being busted with nickel and dime shit for the most part? and again i will remind our esteemed guests that Slick Willie put more people in jail for pot possession than any other president, granted it helped to not be black but looking like i did and living where i lived it would take a rookie with a real hard-on for collars to give me the shake down, being this close to a couple of uni's too gave the Fuzz pause, there were always cats who looked like me who wouldn't have two nickel bags to rub together and who wants to do the paperwork for that shit?  Still, a growing number of my customers lived out in the suburbs and so they'd all had a bit of a cruise back home, it's the dumb shit like rolling a stop sign and forgetting that you left the bag on the passenger seat next to you, and let's face it, suburban cops are more likely to do the paperwork, so in the end i wanted a certain level of trust and respect in this illicit social contract that went on when one stopped by, why not? like i said it helped me sleep better, to stave off the creeping paranoia that slips in and out after a busy night... and since this was the busiest of nights i worked the room and established, what i believe they call a rapport, with my clientele...

The funny thing was that while the business was beginning to take off i was still using a little letter scale to weigh and since i didn't want to short people and preferred to give what are known as "fat sacks" i knew i was losing some jack which was okay in and of itself cuz it kept people coming back but i didn't want to fuck myself over, i used a nickel (which weights 3.5 grams or 1/8) and marked a line on the letter scale but it ended up being a smart move hanging out that NYE, you see on the way to his gig a guy i knew who played bass in a math rock band and his younger brother stopped by to score, we went back to my room, which is where i spent a fair amount of time that night and started weighing their shit out and Little Brother looks at me and says, do you want a triple beam? i look at him and say really? and he goes on to explain about his talent for stealing triple beam scales from high school science labs, i asked how much? he was young and probably didn't realize those triple beams could bring a pretty penny, he asks would a quarter be cool? i stick out my hand, deal, he smiles and tells me he'll have it before the end of the week, another break for the kid in North Oakland, an important tool for the trade and i came by it criminally cheap...

It was well past midnight when the final stragglers made their way to the door and i shut and locked it for the night, surveyed the mess that was my apartment, bottles and cans everywhere, ashtrays overflowing, the plate of grass reduced to a few scraps of which i would load in the bong and then retire to my room, the next day being a day off i looked forward to sleeping in and not having to shuffle out into the cold, so i took a piss and wandered to my room, closed that heavy wooden door to keep it warm, turned the radio on low to listen to the hum of late night classical music and collapsed onto my bed, a good night...

Long about Wednesday bass player's little brother showed up, he was on his own with a friend of his and from his backpack he produced a triple beam and a set of small weights, of course then he started hemming and hawing about how much he was receiving in return, i shrugged and told him he agreed to it and he half whined about how much he could get for it, seems he had gotten some advice and feels like he was being shorted, mentioned the weights too which i gently reminded him i didn't ask for, at one point i told him it was cool, he could keep the scale cuz i had a line on  digital one (which was complete bullshit), this seemed to soften his stance a bit, he had went from agreeing to quarter or 7 grams to wanting a half ounce, 14 grams, retail a half was $100, 90 if i really liked you, wholesale even less, triple beams if you could find them which was increasingly more difficult with the commonwealth's crack down on head shops could be three times that much, but my bluff about the digital had worked, what was this kid gonna do with a scale? he didn't have anyone else to take it off his hands and since i did actually need and wanted to keep an air of goodwill going i offered him 10 grams, he smiled and said that's cool and i took the new scale, calibrated it and cut him his payment...when it was all said and done it cost me roughly around 70 bucks give or take, one of the best investments i've ever made...