Monday, June 8, 2015

And The Beat Goes On...

So it’s 1980 or so...  and we’d been moving around from house to house...  renting some great places.  Some are on hills, some with long driveways, one was completely overgrown by surrounding shrubbery and trees...  another had a drive-through garage that let you park a car in the basement...  yet another was waterfront at Lloyd Point in Lloyd Harbor...  They were expensive, short term rentals...  always furnished...  and all with one thing in common...  They afforded the privacy and privilege to do our thing without being observed or at least without being questioned.  The neighborhoods were exclusive and the presumption was that you were entitled to the privacy if you could afford it.  And, in a nutshell, we could...  and did.
Meanwhile, Nada Mucho realized that we had been at this for about ten years without a problem, and began to integrate us more and more into his plans.  At first, we were landing his big Buicks and Oldsmobiles.  But then RVs began showing up... and vans...  usually chock full with product.  Time went on and, in the course of events, I met a fair number of his people, some workers...  some customers...  and some connections.  And all the while, we kept accumulating people, connections, customers and all the things that pile up as you go down a career path.
For example, there came a time when we were moving so much stuff in so many directions that I was both buying and selling to and from the same people all the time.  Nobody complained and everybody made out.  The people with Jamaican weed wanted Colombian...  There was great stuff from all over, Panama, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc etc...  There were so many different kinds of Mexican that they were called by whatever state they were grown in...  Michoacan, Sinaloan, Yucatan, etc etc...  We *never* sold powder or pills as a rule.  Inevitably, though, they would show up in various places and cause various issues.  Coke, heroin, qualudes, sopers, seconols (reds), tuinols (blue & orange), nembutols (yellows), etc etc... It was all part of the culture but we didn’t let it become part of the business.  Hash?  well that’s another story entirely.  Hashish was no big deal.  It was smokable, edible, and came in lots of varieties.  Lebanese, Pakistani, Kashmiri, Afghani, Moroccan, Nepalese, etc etc...  All had different tastes and smells and effects. 
Sorry to digress but I haven’t spent much time on the products...  They were, after all, the reason many of us were getting high and getting rich simultaneously.  Of course, not everyone came out the other side in great shape.  But that’s still to come. 
So we’re selling pot everywhere...  Every month or so, we’d go down to Wolf’s Corrugated on Broadway in Manhattan and load up on boxes and tape and bags and markers.  I remember the box sizes...  32, 34 and 36 were fine for 15 pounds or so but then the sizes went into the 40s and even 50/52 for whole bales.  We always went for the heavy duty boxes because you didn’t want these things falling apart and specifically not at the wrong time.  After all, we just treated them like boxes of ‘anything’ when we went about delivering.  People deliver boxes all the time and who could tell that these were any different.  The only limitation was that they had hard dimensions.  It was pretty funny at times, walking up to a brownstone with 3 or 4 boxes piled high in your arms, balancing them while waiting to be buzzed in, eyes darting everywhere, hoping you weren’t going to get ripped off, busted, or scammed.  And, amazingly, it almost never went bad.  Of course, the ritual delivery and sharing of a joint was a customary thing...  guaranteeing that by the time I’d made my last delivery, I was totally blitzed.  After all, we did have the best stuff around.
And this is going on and on...  Nada Mucho introduces me to some of his people that live nearby...  one thing leads to another...  and suddenly, there’s another little sub-circle that is created.  And this one is interesting because it crosses all the usual lines of connectivity by adding a geographic element...  The way things normally worked, people met and acquired connections in the course of doing business.  People pop into the scene for a while...  then drop out for one reason or another...  They’d move, get busted, get ripped off, become rip-offs, violate the ‘code’ of proper conduct, semi-retire (nobody ever really retired...  they just said they did).  The scene was like an amorphous blob of quantum physics.  Every deal was different.  Whoever was the source this week might be the low man next week.  And this made it virtually impossible for the enforcement folks to come up with any kind of tree that would enable them to predict who was on top at any given time.   But this little sub-circle crossed all those lines.  Suddenly, I was at the top of a pyramid that I had been in the middle of.  Just by knowing when things were arriving.  Remember, everyone who touched anything marked it up.  Eventually, just by hearing a price, you could figure out how far away the seller was from the true source.  Knowledge was power in this scene.