Saturday, June 17, 2017

The Wilderness Years - One Car Parades (part 1)

By X-mas of 96 things were running like a well oiled machine, if of course that machine was being supervised by idiots and fuck-ups but up and down the ladder money was being made, i was towards the bottom of the ladder, i didn't mind, i was now steadily making over 4 bills a week, sometimes 5 or 6 on a good week and when you consider my take home pay from the warehouse was less than $345 for two weeks it was easy to see where my energy would be put, granted it was all balanced on a tenuous edge and the slightest shift in the cosmos and it would all be a crumpled heap on the floor, and of course this business was filled half-wits capable of fucking up a one car parade... so it goes...

A few days before the birth of Jaysus H. i stood in Hippie Jack's apartment and presented him with a fifth of his favorite booze, Jack Daniels, Jack fumbled around his place and tried to give me a Reggae Sunsplash visor but i told him i didn't expect a thing from him and that the bottle was my token of appreciation for the fine business relationship we had cultivated and that i hoped we could keep it up, he was damn near misty-eyed by the time i was done and he plopped down on the couch cradling his bottle and said, man you're the best thing to happen to me in years kid, you sure can move shit and you helped me get out of the hole, paid off my debt to Mr. Big and actually got a few thousand saved, all because of you he said, i told Mr. Big all about you man, how you're the guy who moves almost all the shit i get from him... and what could i say? i was proud of my up and coming hoodrat status, i was the tall white-dread kid who could move shit, i was doing exactly what i had set out to do...

Now one of the things i had learned from Cowboy Dan back in my college days, a lesson in dealing, was that it helps to have a legit gig, my job made me do shit other than sling for 40 hours a week which is good because my informal study has shown that too much free time and drug money can lead to what? excess? bad habits? all of thee above? and so it wasn't long after that when Hippie Jack decided to walk up to the edge of what is commonly known as the Downward Spiral, like most things it always starts fun and with the best intentions but as we all know that shit goes out the window real fucking quick... so since Hippie Jack spent most of his afternoons and evenings at various bars, the last of which he would close before inviting people back to his place, he made what one could call an unsound business decision and decided it might be smart to get into the blow business, of course the blow business and weed business are two different things entirely as are the clientele and soon the busiest parking lot you could find from 3 to 5am was the shady uniform company next door to Hippie Jack's place, luckily it was in such a no-man's land only those in the know seemed to notice and somehow the cops weren't in that group...

O' Shea Jackson once wrote, that to be a dope man you must qualify/ don't get high off your own supply, this naturally leads us back to those one car parades because i've seen more wanna-be half-wit shitheads fuck up their fool-proof plans by doing exactly that, the longer the gear is in their hands the more likely they are to do it, if ever i showed discipline it was in the taking of the personal stash and then selling the rest, i knew how to crunch the numbers in order to make the venture as profitable as possible and it's in that fact i differed from 98% of the street level hoods i knew, and when it came to powder the odds of fucking up increased exponentially... and here we have Exhibit A, our man Hippie Jack...

Now while Hippie Jack liked to sell you powder, when he was sitting on his couch he much preferred to smoke his coke, he called it freebase, the news media dubbed it crack, he of course justified his term by stating it was much stronger and purer than the shit you got on the street, i wouldn't know, i never bought that shit, i only bought it from Hippie Jack until he taught me to make it myself, i once stated somehow in the legends of the lounge about just how good the first hit of the day was, like the best orgasm you'd ever had, needless to say much like an orgasm it didn't last long but there was no refractory period and though it wasn't as intense the second and every hit thereafter was still really fucking good, of course this is also how people keeled over dead but we weren't really concerning ourselves with that...

There is another pretty steadfast rule to live by in this business and also a pretty regular occurrence among those prone to fucking up one car parades, it's the old money shifting game, using money that's not yours, say Mr. Big's weed money, to buy coke under the assumption that you'll move the flake before Mr. Big calls in his note... if everything goes right it's fucking hunky dory and you make a bundle and the loan doesn't exist to the unknowing loaner and it's all puppies and sunshine, and sometimes that actually happens, not very often mind you, say twenty percent of the time but sometimes and it's also not the wisest thing to make a habit of it if you pull it off, once is usually down to luck and any more attempts than that is pushing that luck, but that is exactly what Hippie Jack did, pushed his luck, not paying attention to that Murphy guy who was winking from the closet or standing on the fire escape or to be more exact, living in the apartment upstairs...


2 comments:

Exile on Pain Street said...

That's not just what Hippie Jack did. That's what they ALL do. If it were easy, there'd be a higher success rate. It wouldn't pay so well because more people could do it.

Kono said...

Exile- as a local cop was once said in a news article, we'll never see the good ones, never get a sniff, unless we get lucky we won't get close... luckily there's enough bad ones to keep us more than occupied. Interesting guy this cop, wrote poetry and ran a youth boxing club... but he was right. So are you.