Charlie K

Jesus Christ lookalike Charlie K...

Charlie was one of those long haired hippie-types who really looked a lot like Jesus... As it turned out, that was where the resemblance ended... I met Charlie one day at the loft... and he invited me over to hang out as his spot on 1st Avenue and 16th Street. He had an 2nd floor apartment in a 4 story walk-up that was in an amazing location to sell pot and acid. There was a pharmacy below him and they had a vertical red neon sign that was directly outside his main window... and all night long, it flashed "DRUGS". Honest... I'm not making this up... It really happened.

Now this was around the time I started to get a little heavier into things... And Charlie, seeing that I knew all these connections, asked me to see if I couldn't get a better deal on this particular situation than he could. Well, I could and he asked me to get him a full suitcase and he'd pay for it. I took it on faith that if he was accepted at the loft, he had to be the real deal. So... I go and pick up the suitcase and I'm on my way over to his place to deliver it. I get to the corner of 1st & 16th and what I see is mind-blowing. The entire block outside his place is cordoned off... Cops everywhere... and my mind is blown when they begin leading about 15 people out of his building (Charlie included) in handcuffs. I'm like thinking holy shit... It must have been a set-up and here I am, 25 feet away carrying a fucking Samsonite suitcase filled with shit.

I squeeze into the phone booth on the corner (yeah, they had actual phone booths with doors that closed) and call the connection... tell him what I'm seeing and basically asking if I can bring it back. He gives me directions to a house in Staten Island and hangs up. I had a bunch of of C-notes in my pocket and the first thing I see is an empty taxi and I flash a bill to the driver and say 'Staten Island?"... and he smiles, nods, eyes the suitcase and says 'Sure... Where to?" I jump in and off we go...

Now, cut to Charlie K and what really happened at his place... It turns out that a cabbie dropped off a passenger in front of his place and the guy gets out without paying. He then runs into Charlie's building while the taxi driver corrals a cop and tells him what happened... So the cop runs into the building after the guy.. and as he's running up the stairs, he smells the pot being smoked at Charlie's... The next thing you know, the place is getting busted and the Narco Squad is out in force... And, not only did they bust everyone who was there but they also ripped off all of Charlie's cash stash, drug stash, and a half dozen third row tickets to the Grateful Dead who were playing that weekend at the Fillmore East. There's a second chapter to that story too... because everybody knew they had the tickets and knew where the seats were. That Saturday night, about a half hour into the show, I heard that someone (Maybe Charlie himself) blew a full gram of crystal acid into the row the cops were sitting in... and they all got seriously dosed... Charlie had walked because the cops stole the dope and there wasn't any evidence... Shit like that happened all the time back then...

Now cut back to the taxi... I'm in the cab with a suitcase filled with weed and I don't have a clue about what really happened... Just that I'm possibly in trouble and I have no idea what the fuck is happening...

So Archie, (I just remembered his name...) the connection, was renting this place in the sticks of Staten Island where he was sitting on a serious number of bricks... In those days, at that time, nearly everything was from Mexico... Jamaican was really unusual to find and Colombian wasn't yet on the distribution menu. Anyway, I don't much remember the cabby but he probably had an idea of what was going on... Nobody would pay a hundred bucks for a ride to SI. We head out over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and we're blundering around trying to find this place when I see the street sign for the place and tell him to pull over so I can go look for it. In reality, I didn't want him to see where I was going but I also didn't want to carry the suitcase while I was walking around looking for it. So I get out and walk about a block until I see the address and then turn around to head back for the stuff... Meantime, a police car that was cruising the neighborhood sees the cab parked on a quiet street at midnight and pulls over to ask the driver what he's doing there. The cabby tells them he's waiting for his passenger... and the next thing I know, the cop car is driving towards me. They must have seen me walking and I turn and walk in the other direction. They see this and I hear them jump on the gas. The next thing I do is run down the driveway of the stash house (stupid I know but it wasn't like I had much of a choice)... The cops turn into the driveway and are heading after me... my heart is thumping out of my chest and I'm sure this is the end for me. I'm in the back yard... One cop jumps out of the car with his gun drawn and yells for me to stop. I stop just as Archie comes out of his back door and yells to the cop "Hey! It's all right, I know him!!' I nearly faint as the cop looks at me again.. then at Archie and just nods, apologizes, holsters his piece and says "Why is that cab parked on the next block?" I am nearly fainting but I tell the cop that I was lost and had him pull over while I checked the addresses. It turns out they had had a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood and they thought I was the burglar. Once Archie said he knew me, they had no problem. I learned a valuable lesson that night... Don't panic... unless they actually know what you're about, you have a higher probability of getting yourself busted than you did of getting busted by accident. And the uniformed cops weren't looking for drugs. They were looking to protect the citizens. And, in a weird kind of way, Archie (and, as I found out later, the guy who owned the entire load) weren't uptight that I had this problem. They were more impressed that I wanted to bring the stuff back and was willing to take that risk. They saw it as an honest, stand up thing to do... And it wasn't all that long before I ran into the big guy again after Archie went into rehab. His name was Lucky and he was in a whole other circle that dealt on a whole other level.

So a few years later, I'm living in Bayside on a quiet street and I walk outside one day and see Charlie driving by. He sees me and we both flip out at the coincidence and low odds of running into each other like that. I mean that this is like a long way from Manhattan and we hadn't seen each other for a long time and who would expect it...

The 'scene' was kind of an amorphous blob of a thing. It was like you couldn't ever know who was in charge at any given time or predict what it would be like the next week or month. Imagine a corporate flow chart where the CEO becomes the office boy and the office boy becomes the CEO overnight. And then a few weeks later, both of them are office boys while the janitor becomes the CEO. That was the thing. The lines of power shifted from load to load depending entirely on the source. If the office boy or girl knew the source first hand, he was instantly promoted to CEO and the other active people lined up below him or her. And, since people were always disappearing (whether they retired, semi-retired, got busted, took a trip, or whatever), the scene was constantly changing. Sometimes someone would make a bundle and drop out until it got spent. Other times, someone would do the wrong thing and get blackballed. Charlie had kind of stoned himself out and fell into the background for a couple of years. He went from CEO to semi-retired while he recovered.

So we hug and spend a few minutes catching up and get around to how he happens to be there... and it turns out that there's a guy who lives around the block that is into things. He asks me to accept that he's the connection and offers to introduce me... and I don't give it much thought and say sure... And after that a lot of things changed again... because the 'guy' wasn't just any guy. The 'guy' was a mega-mover and mega-shaker who was mega-connected at all the edges of the amorphous blob. He was a lot younger (18 or 19) but was nothing like a kid. He was more of a nouveau hippie mafia dude who was into things on a whole different level. We go around to meet the guy and he isn't home... but I see the his ride is parked outside and its a deep blue Citroen sports car that looks like it cost a stupid amount of money. And, to cap things off, the guy's place is actually directly behind mine... I mean, we were on opposite sides of the same fence. And yeah, eventually we'd be out there passing bags, cases and other stuff over the fence.

Charlie, without knowing it, had promoted me way up the business ladder because the 'guy' hadn't gotten to his level by accident. He didn't believe in permanent connection payouts... He would just give Charlie a one-shot deal and then I had a new, incredibly diverse source/resource in my suddenly fast-growing business.

I have no idea where Charlie is today but he was a pretty cool dude. The 1st Avenue spot with the neon sign was off the chart in terms of amazing places.