You all seem to get a kick out of the lunatic escapades of earlier years and that leads to thoughts of writing an autobiography but that strikes me as such a vain thing to do. Unless you're a world leader or cured polio or something, it just doesn't seem appropriate to me. I believe I'll satisfy myself with writing stories on the blog as it stuns me how many people read it.
So, here's another one.
Lotho and I were never big dealers because we sucked at it. There was a day-in / day-out pot party going on in the attic of my parents' house and you'll never make any money if you smoke up all the profits. And we did. Maybe we would have kept dealing if we were any good at it but we weren't ... except this one time.
We got a pound of reefer and then spent at least one evening dividing it up into nickel and dime bags I really don't know how long we spent doing it as you can get one hell of a lot of little bags out of a pound. Our thinking was we would take them down to a concert that was happening that week-end and they would sell as fast as hotdogs.
On the night of the show, Lotho and I got ready. Laughing Gecko, Cadillac Man and the Old Dog were in on this one also. We stuffed every pocket of our jackets with as many of those little bags of reefer as we could and then we were ready.
I haven't mentioned the Old Dog previously but he was very much a part of the central corps of maniacs. However, he was neither old nor a dog as he married the lady he was seeing at the time and he is married to her to this day. He had more trouble with cars than he did with women as he had a TR4 but, not long after he bought it, the frame broke. He decided the solution would be to get another TR4 and somehow splice them together ... but the frame on that one broke too. That was the Old Dog.
We were right that nickel and dime bags would sell like hotdogs but, even so, there was no chance we could sell all of them. The people were streaming into the concert hall and many agreed that a concert-sized bag of reefer was a very good idea so business was quite brisk but show time was very close and no way we were going to miss any music just for a bit of domestic law-breaking.
Getting into the concert presented a bit of a problem. This was before the days when a cop sits next to every single person in the concert but there were still lots of them, most particularly there were some cops watching every turnstile as people went inside. We still had our pockets stuffed with reefer but there was no chance we were going to throw it away so we decided that nothing works like a good bluff and then we got in line to go inside.
Everything was working pretty well as Laughing Gecko, Cadillac Man, and I went through the turnstile with no trouble ... but then it was Lotho's turn with the Old Dog behind him. For some reason the cop on that turnstile took some exception and asked Lotho what was in his pocket. Lotho pulled out a bag of reefer but the cop wasn't satisfied and told him to keep going. Finally Lotho emptied the whole pocket and there was a tidy pile of bags of reefer on the table.
We were watching Lotho going through his ordeal and were thinking, dude, run for it. There really wasn't any way he could do that as he couldn't go back without climbing over the Old Dog and he'd have to do an extremely fancy move to get past the cops.
The situation kept developing as the cop still wasn't satisfied and he wanted Lotho to empty all of his pockets. This kept going on until there was a little mountain of nickel and dime bags in front of the cop. We held our breaths as we watched. There wasn't anything we could do but we weren't going to leave so we waited to see what would happen next.
The cop told Lotho to put all the bags into a barrel of confiscated dope. The barrel was huge but it was half full of all kinds of dope. It wasn't a huge deal as this was before crackheads and junkies gave getting high a bad name but we still wouldn't have predicted what happened next.
The cop waved Lotho through into the show!
It wasn't over or at least not as far as Lotho was concerned. He was never short of nerve so he asked the cop if he could have the reefer back. This might not have been his best move but still the cop didn't lose his patience and again he waved Lotho through, albeit without the reefer.
So this was the start and end of our dope dealing careers. I have no idea who was playing in the show that night but I'm betting none of us forgot what happened before it started.
By the way, before anyone goes out to warm up the police helicopters, this was forty years ago.
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