The Wilderness Years - Free Agent (part 2)

It's a shame that these days the kids will never know the glorious dog shit that was known as brick weed, you have to be of a certain age to have a real appreciation of it, shitty outdoor Mexican flattened and pressed for easy transport with a potency level that ranged anywhere from "this shit gives me a headache" to "it's alright if there's nothing else", if you got real lucky it might even actually have a greenish tint but most of the time it was shit brown and smelled like dirt, it was the bottom of the barrel crap and damn near the reason the blunt was invented because the tobacco leaf fucked you up more than the actual dirty brick that was inside, but progress marches on and these days the kids would scoff at this stuff... (truth is so would i unless of course i happen to be on vacation, see Republica Dominica)...

Pizza Joe made his calls, i hung at the bar and drank and watched the news and waited, sometimes the drug game involved countless hours of waiting for something to happen but the feelers were out and i needed a score, and so i sat and drank and hoped, Mexican brick, it was the catalyst for the Pizza Man moniker, of course Pizza Joe had his own weird set of rules, he refused to let me pay more than $1700 a pound, my how times have changed, 17 for a pound of shitty brick, i already knew how thin the profits were going to be, it was a a bit of a risk to make two or three hundred bucks, of course if i bought two at a time the number would drop to 16 a piece, lucky me, i knew i'd loose customers but i needed to keep things going until i could find something new and at least it was something, it was a step back and i'd have to reign my fun in a bit but at least i could still eat, and hell maybe i could use a little step back, take it easy for a little and not get too burned out, maybe even take a day or two off...

I'd have to admit sometimes the stuff was better than others, for a short time it was actually decent and those times would see a little bump in the bottom line, of course dealing with the city kid crews made me actually miss Hippie Jack and Cocaine Mike because for all their shortcomings they were still somewhat professional (some of the time), they handled themselves better, which in hindsight still set the bar pretty fucking low, the wannabe player city kids were either overly paranoid or ridiculously fast and loose, one minute flashing jewelry and rolls and pulling up in their new pimped out ride, the next minute freaking out if you so much as said hello to them because the cops were everywhere, call it bi-polar dealer disorder, call it annoying as fuck, i just wanted to get away from the scene as soon as possible, for all my soap box talk of fucking the system and living outside the laws and what not i often sounded like a fucking suit...

My favorite urban myth from this time was the Election Day Crackdown, seemed the hoodrats had convinced themselves that every election season the local law enforcement would step up its game and begin busting people left and right, there were ghost stories of a friend of a friend of a cousin who's brother got popped just two days ago, of course no one ever actually had to worry because they all stopped and sat around dive bars looking nervous and jittery, there was no coke or smack or weed or at least it was scarce and hard to come by and usually overpriced, and then like magic, the next day everything would go back to normal, oddly i've heard this urban tale from all over, passed down through the hood storytellers in the finest example of our species oral tradition, Young Bucks beware for John Q. Law lurks when the ballot box is afoot...  it was bullshit... it was Kaiser Soze... the only reason these clowns got popped was because they were just that, clowns, they got busted because of stupidity and not some fantastic feat of law enforcement, as a wise officer once stated in the city paper when talking about the local war on drugs, "the guys who are good at it? we'll never see them, maybe if we get lucky but the good ones we don't even get a sniff, that's alright though, there are enough bad ones to keep us busy..."

So i was swimming in the shallow end, each time i began to run out i crossed my fingers and hoped that a deal could be pieced together, usually it happened, sometimes it took a few hours and sometimes it took a three or four days, i'd pace my business just so i would have stuff on hand, i'd screen calls, some people had more privileges than others and i'd try to hold onto stuff for them, sometimes i couldn't fill the whole order but as every stoner will tell you as long as they got theirs it was cool, they'd smoke their friend up until i could re-up they'd tell me, they had the advantage of being the guy or girl who had the number and could get through the door, the people i saw frequently and could move a bit more usually earned the coveted spot sitting on the mattress on the floor, and it was a necessary illusion, if the impression is i always had gear than the kids would stay loyal, to keep me as their #1, like the starting fucking goalie or something...

But as it stood Pizza Joe had come through for me, i'd offer him the obligatory free eighth, tribute as they say for setting it all up and he'd never take it, i think he felt like he was a big brother or something, like he was teaching me the ropes though by this time i'd already been doing it for the last couple years not to mention a few other stints which put my resume at somewhere around three and half years of slinging, but i'd listen and learn, it's what i did, i studied the mistakes and what they did well and incorporated it into what i was doing, sometimes more in theory than in practice and sometimes vice-versa... but the object was to stay afloat and for the time i had done that, i could still pay down the student loans, i could still eat and pay rent and booze and score the occasional and varied recreational drugs, now and then i could even mosey down the street to the strip club and do my part in financing the dreams of any number of budding doctoral students and amateur masseuses, like Mr. Lou Reed said, sometimes you need a bus load of faith to get by...