The Wilderness Years - The Masterplan

 --- Yes dear reader sometimes i get distracted, i realize it's been almost a year since the last installment of the Wilderness Years, which ostensibly is what this whole blog was set up to document so many moons ago and so now yours truly will make a concerted effort to get on with this tale as i have to finish it sometime... so going back and perusing the archives we will pick up where we left off... ----

When we last saw our hero he was dealing with the delinquent accounts of the Billy Goat while simultaneously reveling in his recent bedding of a svelte and large breasted dancer, Red... once again it was the old yin-yang as the universe loves to keep things in balance, never letting the scales tip too far one way or the other... the year  had just clicked over to 2001, things were rolling along, my orders to Stiv kept getting larger, i had three guys on the payroll at the warehouse, i had the Billy Goat and Ginger Mark as card carrying members of the weight crew and soon i'd add Metal Jerry to that list as well, those three would form the core of the guys who would move a substantial amount of gear for me going forward even if the Billy Goat was a consistent pain in my ass... now having the ability to sell as much weight as possible i began cultivating more worker bees who might be able to help in that department... i always had guys asking me i they could get pounds or half pounds, i had nickel dimers who knew someone who wanted to get a pound, as usual i explained they had to vouch for said newcomer as the last thing i needed was a headache, an up and coming narc squad member somehow getting a foot in the door, having been at it now for almost six years straight (and close nine total) i had things pretty well sorted but the cold, hard truth was it only took one fuck up to fuck me up... 

Red seemed to be well up for a bit of fun the only problem was our schedules weren't exactly conducive to "hanging out", the life of a stripper is predicated on sleeping most of the day, getting up in the afternoon, getting ready for work and then working until 2am, afterwards, depending on the night of the week, it was  a trip to one of the after-hours clubs that were tucked away in various neighborhoods, two of which were in mine, the Castle and the BSC, places that never tired of letting drugged up, drunken strippers in to make sure that a gaggle of drooling knuckle-draggers in Roc-a-Wear track suits and Von Dutch t-shirts while rocking the new millenium version of acid wash jeans... in short a shit show... granted i usually wore cargo pants, something universally maligned at times, but this was more functional than fashionable, the fact was i had a lot of weed on me every night and didn't want to roll into bars with a backpack full of it though somehow pockets full of it was okay and at this point the only bars i worked out of protected me anyway, still it was easier for some clown to come running from behind and grab a backpack off a shoulder than to actually take me down and empty my pockets... besides as the pockets emptied with grass and filled up with cash i used the various pockets to separate which money went to which fund... i used cargo pants as an accounting tool... 

One of the things i've often stated in my quest for... erm, knowledge? is that the most difficult thing most males have to overcome is their own dick.... thinking with it mainly, thinking about it, thinking what they're going to do with it, i've watched it control any number of men that i've known be it their dick was fixated on one woman or many, didn't matter, it was the control it rendered over them... and in the brutal honesty department i was no different and sometimes probably much worse than the average idiot, i was an exceptional idiot and when one tosses in money and drugs and power one will lie to themselves that they are not thinking with their Johnson, if fact they will believe that it is some birthright, the divine right of the idiot king... and so there i was, skirting the line of cliche, the weed king who now had his pick of strippers, all the sad sacks at the club who would toss money around and cack in their shorts if a dancer touched their leg were rather envious of the tall and wasted maniac who did nothing but was showered with attention, when word got out Red had taken a "liking to me" after the whole Veronica affair, it bordered on the comical, the universe was an unfair place... 

Being beholden to no one is a beautiful feeling... the facts were plain and simple... i could now live outside the system if i so choose, i didn't need this fucking warehouse job anymore so why was it that i kept getting up, usually hungover, sometimes terribly hungover, and drag my ass to work when i didn't need to? having studied Cowboy Dan and Hippie Jack i knew the perils of becoming a full-time dealer and in the back of my mind it's what kept me getting up and driving into work, though a few times i had to pull over in the Strip District on my way to the North Side so i could throw up, probably still technically above the legal limit to be operating a motor vehicle but then again that's what happens when you play hard and close the bar on a Tuesday... the warehouse gig was basically paying me $400 a week before taxes, the real job was making five six seven times that per week and was only expanding, the fact that i really enjoyed sex with Red didn't help the cause, i called off once or twice early on just to roll over and spend the morning back in bed but i understood i couldn't keep that up or i'd get shitcanned... did i care? yes and no... 

There was part of me that didn't want to become Cowboy Dan or Hippie Jack or worse yet Cocaine Mike, not that $400 a week was doing shit for me, i could have donated my fucking check but the real truth was i needed to look like an upstanding citizen, a tax-paying type with a job, it solved certain problems especially as the real business exploded, in my head it kept me straight though i was as far from the straight and the narrow as one could possibly get... besides that Mr. John Thursday, a nickname stolen from one Henry Miller which referenced his dick, was doing all the thinking and his thoughts were we should be naked with Red every chance we got... what to do what to do? and so i went to see my chiropractor friend, a guy i'd known since he was in college and lived across the street, a roommate of Granola Keith and an all around good dude... at the time i'd been going to him to keep my back in shape and i asked if it would be possible for him to work something up for the job, a diagnosis saying i should cut back on the hours a bit, say maybe only work three days a week? that would give me two days to "relax", for lack of a better term and so the plan was hatched and within a week i had the paperwork to show the manager, mind you i had already began prepping him the week before with talk of my back being a bit off and my doctor advising me to watch before it really went out... even with bullshit it's all about the foundation... 

Being chronically underemployed has it's advantages, my job was easy, easy enough mentally to do horribly hungover though the physical part posed a bit of a problem, mainly just being exhausted and these days by the time i got home my phone would already be buzzing non-stop... i needed to sell the story to all involved, the boss at work, the waitress at home, though she knew a good bit of it was bullshit and i believe she also worried that i'd slide down the rabbit hole into full time dealer without any W-2 to show come tax time... the crux of the problem was not to get shipped to the doc by the company, i didn't want their workman's comp doctor having anything to do with my ruse, i had my own and his recommendation and so one day i rolled in and asked to speak with my boss... i explained the situation and began shoveling the bullshit quick and fast, explained that i still needed to work but that every night i was suffering from back issues and that my doctor advised i dial it back, work every other day, and so for the time being i'd need Tuesday and Thursday off every week... in a very sly and subtle way i was saying this as statement, i wasn't asking, this was how it was going to go... being able to sleepwalk through this job and still do it better than 99% of the grunts out there helped... he didn't want to loose me (not that some other lumpen-prole wouldn't show up soon enough to take my place) but he also could smell a bit of the shit i was shoveling... 

While i always liked to believe i kept things wired tight i know how the warehouses of the world work, hell workplaces in general, white collar or blue, are pretty much all the same, people like to talk... i may have had three guys on the payroll from the warehouse but i knew people knew, how much they knew was debatable and not all of them knew but some had their ideas and i'm sure even the guys who bought from me may have dropped hints about me while not implicating themselves in any way... it's just how it works... and so i walked out of the meeting and explained to Bruce, the receiving supervisor, a short and round bald man with wire glasses though he let his hair grow long around the sides of his bald pate, what the deal was... Bruce was never all that fond of me to begin with and i could tell had even less use for me now... i'll give him credit though, he wasn't stupid and knew i had worked this out... Buzz, my other co-worker in receiving, worked for me as well so what could he say? his job might be a little tougher two days a week but that wasn't my concern, i was fronting him a pound at a time, at the warehouse he had seniority but the fact was i was his boss... and so began my stint as a part timer... 

It's amazing what the male of the species will do to get laid... it borders somewhere on the comical and the sad, the cock leading the way while the rest of the body just follows behind, i ostensibly had engineered a three day week all so i could fuck more... really that was all there was too it... i couldn't stay out all night during the week and wait until Red got off work so i had to figure out the next best thing, when one is beholden to no one the confidence, what some might even label cockiness, oozes from the pores, i presented my plan as fact, my managers seemed dumbfounded with what to do about it other than let me do it, i've learned that a good vocabulary can go a long way when chronically underemployed, the higher-ups get a bit skittish when one uses "big" words in a coherent way, it frightens them in a multitude of ways and one of those is if they think one is "smart" said employee might pose a threat to their exalted position, not that i wanted to advance up any ladder corporate or otherwise, i was my own boss, i didn't need this job and that is one of the most liberating feelings this lumpen-prole could ever have... (to be cont.)