Howie & Ronnie

One day early on, when I was hanging in the city and living in Astoria, I got into a taxi with a small box and gave the driver my address... We start talking and the next thing I know, he's passing a hash pipe back to me. He had some dynamite black kashmiri smoke and by the time we got to Astoria, we were best friends.... lol... I invited him up to my apartment and opened the box... next thing we got totally loaded between his hash and my jamaican pot. His name was Howie and he had a younger brother, Ronnie.

Howie was a bit too spaced out for the business I was growing but his brother, Ronnie, was modestly more focused... Ronnie had a really funny voice. When he spoke, he sounded a lot like the cartoon character Goofy. Anyway, we did a lot lot of moves and Ronnie was totally dependable when you absolutely had to have someone to depend on....

Example: We're in a rented house... One of many but this one in particular happened to have a drive-in garage... I mean you could drive right through the garage and into the basement... And, I always wondered about the guy who owned it... But before I get distracted, try to imagine this...

We had about a ton of weed in the basement and it was a mixed load... The thing about moving a whole load was that it often included a percentage of really excellent bud, a bunch of really good stuff, some bales that were picked late and had way too many seeds, some that had gotten wet off the boat, and some that was picked early and had a low bud count but lots of leaf. Also, fairly frequently, there were bales that had gone to dust. So when we weighed in a load, we'd classify it and if the percentages really sucked, we'd even things out to make it all salable. We had a cardboard and plastic connection and we'd be weighing and mixing and creating boxes and boxes... In the process, the dusty stuff got into the air and most of the time everything ended up with a coating of pot. This meant that we also had a cleaning crew to make sure we would be able to move out eventually without getting nailed.

So one afternoon, we had just finished weighing and mixing and bagging and boxing and we get a call from the real estate agent who says she's got a potential buyer in town for a few hours who knows that owner and that they are coming over in an hour so they can see the house. We tried every excuse in the book but to no avail. She is coming over in 90 minutes and that's that. Thrown into full fire-drill mode, we break out the full assortment of vacuums (we had every vacuum cleaner known to man... There was everything from wet-dry vacs to hoover uprights, Electrolux cannisters, a half-dozen dustbusters, etc)... We're into filling up trunks and moving boxes to another house as fast as possible but it's a losing battle. The next thing that happens is the power goes out and we're totally fucked. Now, although we have the benefit of pitch blackness, the place smells like a pothouse and there is pot dust coating everything in the basement.

I call Ronnie, who isn't far away and has a big old empty van... He shows up and we decide that the best we can do is save the load. This is important since, after all, we had the load on the arm and the fronters aren't going to care about the real estate problem. They are going to want to be paid. So the first priority is to get the shit out of there. Ronnie, who is, like me, either absolutely fearless or totally fucking stupid, rushes over with his van and we begin to load it up, end to end, floor to ceiling. Hearts are racing, backs are breaking, the house-sitters are totally freaked out... and we get virtually everything that was left into Ronnie's van. We lock it up and are debating where we can take it and whether it might actually be safer sitting on the driveway, ready to roll if the situation becomes dire.

Bottom line, the real estate lady calls about five minutes before post-time and says the buyer-friend decided to leave town early and they weren't coming.

Ronnie was another super stand-up dude who was always ready to jump in when asked. There are more Ronnie stories but I remember this one vividly because I was on the verge of a heart attack and he was totally cool through the whole drama. I am not sure where either Howie or Ronnie are today... It might be fun to look them up...

Update:  Ronnie is alive and well.