Mike

Welcome to the Jungle

 

1988, age thirteen, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

 

I'd always dreamt of being a rock star. It seemed like the perfect life for me. Sleep in every morning and stay up all night. Who wouldn't love that sort of job?

I stood at the storefront window, staring in at the rock and roll display. My longhaired icons posed in sultry formations for the camera. They were my idols. I loved the music, and even though I already had one lucky Guns and Roses tee shirt, I wanted another.

On the walk back to my foster home, the wheels in my brain spun recklessly. I could break into a hundred cars before getting enough spare change together to buy the new album or a new tee shirt. I needed a bigger caper.

When I returned to the foster home, both my ‘parents' were gone. I went directly to their bedroom, which they usually locked, but this time was open.

I searched their drawers and closet for money. They were keen to my little thieving problem, so they hid their stuff well.

Not that well.

I had never committed a cheque fraud before, but age thirteen seemed like a good time to start. In the top drawer, I found a cheque written out to my foster dad for two hundred dollars. I knew that I'd need identification in his name to cash it. After sifting through a small pile of I.D., I found his sailing club card tucked underneath a stack of boxer shorts.

I knew that I would have to be confident and assume the identity of my foster dad to pull it off. I remembered a cheque I received a year ago from an elderly lady for some lawn work. She had written Good Job Mike! on the face of the cheque. I'd cashed that cheque without any sort of I.D., so I wondered if that would work again.

In the bank, the teller smiled down at me from behind the counter. She scanned the cheque, then my innocent face. I made sure I bent my knees while standing at the counter so that I would appear smaller than I really was.

"What sort of work was this for, Ray?" she asked me in a proud motherly tone.

"Yard work," I said. "I want to buy my mom a birthday gift."

"Hold on a minute," she said and disappeared with my cheque.

That was the moment I learned something important about crime. There is no such thing as a halfway crook. If you embark on a criminal mission, you must stay to the end if you want to succeed. I felt like running out of that bank the minute she left to speak with her manager, but the thrill of succeeding at my first major crime kept me planted to the floor.

When she returned, the warm smile contained a touch of doubt. My heart pounded in my chest.

"Okay Ray, I can't cash this for you unless you have some sort of identification."

My criminal mind had not yet been groomed for any sort of fraud, so I can't explain how I understood my next move. I reached into my pocket and produced Ray's wallet. I removed the sailing club card and slid it across the counter to the woman. She picked up the I.D. and read the name.

"Is this all you have?" she asked.

"I'm only thirteen," I said. "I'm waiting for my driver's license. It should be here in a few years."

The woman laughed and slid my I.D. back to me.

"Well, that's definitely I.D.," she said with that warm smile. "How do you want the money?"

1989

 

                I've sat in a dozen principal's offices in my life. The sure events that got you a seat in the main man's office were fighting, yelling at teachers and acting the clown in class.

The chair next to the door in Mr. Macdonald's office was a familiar spot for me. I'd sat there at least ten times before the first break in the school year, probably a school record. His office was eerily similar to every other one I'd been in. Four white walls with little or no sign of creative inclination towards the decorating, the same school issue desk and chair, and a bookshelf filled with management guides and personal reading material. Principals were so boring. From my time spent in their offices, I'd have to say that they were all created from the same mold, and that was a shame, because the mold had gone out of style a long time ago.

I wasn't like most disciplinary cases. My mold had been broken the day I was born.

As I waited for Mr. Macdonald to return to his office, my mind began to wander. My criminal tendencies took over.  Ten seconds to search his desk, five seconds in travel time from the chair to his chair. Twenty seconds in all it would take to find something to steal. The game was on. I noticed his jacket hanging from a hook on the back of the door. Later, in the playground across the street from my school – ex-school – I sat on the bottom part of the slide and removed the brown leather wallet from my crotch. Inside, I learned more about Mr. Macdonald's life. He had twenty dollars and a variety of food coupons in the money compartment and pictures of his family and his I.D. in another section.

I removed his credit card and smiled.

I'd never done credit card fraud, but at that moment in time, I had nothing else to do with my life. Since Mr. Macdonald felt the need to expel me from his school, he had a lesson of his own to learn, and I would be the teacher.

I felt comfortable with crime. The business of thieving had me hooked. Who needed school when there was so much more to learn on the streets?

I took the money and credit card and tossed the remainder of the wallet's contents into the garbage. 

1990

 

The yellow Datsun screeched around the corner, narrowly missing several parked cars. My foot was an extension of the accelerator. The automatic transmission of the stolen car ground away as I alternated from brake to gas.

"Slow down," screamed my friend Dallas from the passenger seat. He held on to the door as the car fishtailed around another corner.

            "I can drive," I lied. "I got this."

            Easter gifts for our girlfriends cluttered the back seat. Baskets of chocolate eggs and stuffed bunnies slid from side to side as the car recklessly spun its wheels around soft bends in the road.

            Into a residential neighborhood we sped. Past manicured lawns and driveways with basketball hoops. These were the neighborhoods I targeted for my break-ins – the homes that I stole from to buy the goods in the back seat. This was the kind of neighborhood I had stolen the car from. The kind neighborhood that had unlocked back doors and open ground floor windows – all potential victims of my dishonest tirade.

            The back end of the Datsun bumped a parked pickup truck.

            Dallas's knuckles glowed white against the tan leather of the door inlay. "You should let me drive."

            "One more turn," I said, and pressed down on the gas.

            The hairpin turn came out of nowhere. I saw the oak tree on the front lawn, the elderly woman watering her flowers, the two young kids playing in a ditch across the street. I knew we were going too fast. I slammed my left foot down on the brake, at the same time pressing on the accelerator with my right.

            "Look out!" yelled Dallas. His free hand gripped the dashboard in front of him.

            I lost control of the car. The wheel jerked from my hand and the last thing I remember was how quickly the oak tree appeared in front of my face.

            I crashed the car and made it out alive. That was my first trip to Juvenile Hall.

1990

 

I removed the bottle of Ritalin from my pocket and showed it to Stevie. His eyes lit up with dollar signs and he snatched it from my hand.

            "There's enough here to get at least a gram of weed," he said, and snapped the lid back on the bottle.

            "Are you sure?" I asked.

            Stevie tucked the bottle into his windbreaker pocket. "Trust me. Those guys eat these up like they're Smarties."

            It seemed that whenever I moved to a new foster home, along with it came a new school and a new medication. I'd always thought the Ritalin was for kids who couldn't pay attention in class – at least that's what my foster mom told me. Ritalin was the latest attempt at settling me down in class, but it wasn't until I met Stevie that I realized what they were really good for. I listened to him because he was older than me, and had taken way more medication than I could ever imagine.

            "You shouldn't take these," he said as we walked towards the high school. "They make you more stupid than they do smart."

Stevie told me three days ago that he had a guy in the high school that bought all of his Ritalin, and that it had been nearly two months since he had actually swallowed a pill. He'd perfected the art of concealing his morning application under his tongue, quickly expelling it behind his parent's back and saving them until he had enough to bring to his high school connection.

                I had a better plan that would eliminate the wait. I stole my entire bottle.

            When we arrived at the high school, three figures waited for us near the bike rack, just as Stevie had promised. The kids were much bigger than we were. When they saw us approaching, I noticed one search the area before taking any steps towards us. They acknowledged Stevie with a nod.

            "You got the shit?" the biggest one asked.

            Stevie produced the bottle of my Ritalin. "Fifty tablets. Two grams."

            Stevie knew all the lingo when it came to dealing with drug dealers. I'd gone with him several times downtown to buy weed, which we'd smoke and ditch school in favor of doing break and enters in people's homes.

            The big kid took the bottle. "Two grams. You're fucking stupid."

            The other two kids laughed. One lit up a cigarette.

            "I ain't giving you shit," the big one said. "You deserve less."

            They walked away from us without another word. I stood staring at Stevie, shocked by what had just occurred. Stevie remained silent and his chin dipped into his chest.

            "What just happened, Stevie?" I asked with a slight trace of panic.

            "Forget about it," he said. "They're a bunch of dicks."

            Stevie turned to walk away from the bike rack, but I didn't budge. They just took my entire supply of Ritalin and gave us nothing in return. Stevie promised that we would get something from these guys. That was the only reason why I had stolen the stuff in the first place. I watched Stevie walk one way, and the high schoolers the other. I was not about to get ripped off.

            "Hey fuckers!" I screamed at the teens.

                The three boys turned back to us. Stevie stopped and stared at me. His eyes wide with fear. I stood my ground, facing the three giants.

            My face glowed red with fear and anger. "You owe me something."

            The biggest boy laughed amongst his friends and walked slowly back to me. He tossed his cigarette to the ground and spat at my feet.

            "What did you say?" he growled. I stood my ground.

            "Those aren't free," I said, looking him straight in the eye. "You owe us some weed."

            "Or what?" he said. "What are you going to do about it?"

             I wasn't a small kid, just undersized compared to the teenager, but I had heart. Without another word I lunged out at the kid, punching him square in the nose. His face exploded, covering my shirt with his blood. As he fell to the ground, I continued to throw punches, hitting whatever I could in the process. His screams for help escaped from underneath me, but his friends stood by watching, shocked at my violent reaction.

            The bottle of Ritalin fell from his pocket, and like a good sidekick, Stevie pounced on it and ran away.

            After two minutes of fighting, I stood, his blood all over my hands and clothes. He whimpered on the ground as his friends came over to help him up. They ran off in the direction of the school, away from the crazy young drop-out with the unfortunate combination of attention deficit disorder and violent tendencies.

            "You're fucking crazy," said Stevie. He slammed the bottle of Ritalin in my hand. "These are yours. We're dead once that guy gets better."

            I looked at the bottle in my hand. The kid's blood stained everything from my coat sleeves to my pant cuffs. That was the first beating I'd ever been on the winning side of, and it felt good, even though my hand was swollen from punching the ground more times than his head.

            I looked at Stevie and smiled. "I think he'll be back," I said. "But next time, we'll get the weed first."

 

1991

 

            Inside the basement suite of the old, two-story Victorian home, I noticed the wallpaper was made of bamboo. A throwback from the Eighties, the coarse overlay summed up the personality of my grade eleven teacher, Mr. Martz. Bad taste and out of touch.

            I sat in his leather recliner across from my best friend Joey at the time. I twirled in the chair, watching the outdated living room spin around and around. The haunting memories of a generation past melded into one continuous blur, until finally a hairy hand on the headrest ended my ride. The cool eyes of our teacher warned me of unwanted horseplay in his home.

            "This is not a toy," he said in the same levelheaded tone he used with his class.

            Mr. Martz walked past me and sat on the couch beside Joey. Joey smiled and gave me a knowing look. I sat up in the chair and kept my mouth shut.

            "You guys want a drink?" Mr. Martz joked.

            I shook my head no.

            "I'll have a tequila," said Joey and he winked at me.

            I replied with a snicker.

            Martz didn't laugh along with me. "You're too young to drink," he said and he got up and gave Joey a can of pop. Then he reached into a cabinet under the surface of the coffee table in front of him.

            Martz lit a cigarette. "How much do you guys need to get started? Remember, you'll have to pay me later."

            On the table in front of Martz was a ziplock bag filled with bright green marijuana. The two entities didn't match. My teacher and illegal weed. Just months before, I had been busted with weed in my locker. I was threatened with suspension if I didn't tell the police where I got my stuff. I kept my mouth shut, and the school had no choice but to suspend me for two days.

            Now I was buying weed from them. That kind of stuff messed with a boy's mind.

            "Two ounces," said Joey from the cabinet. He poured more alcohol into two low tumblers.

            "Do that many kids smoke?" Martz asked. He opened the ziplock and pulled out a handful of the green bud.

            "Not just at school," I said in the meekest of voices. "But downtown, too."

            Martz looked up from his pot, and shook his head.

            "You shouldn't go downtown," he scolded me as he dropped the handful of weed onto a set of scales. "There are some fucked up people downtown."

            My pot-selling teacher was telling me about fucked up people.

There is no such thing as a halfway crook.

            Mr. Martz was led out of the school in handcuffs four days after we'd bought the weed from him. In front of the entire gym class, the police stuffed him into a squad car and we never saw him again. My final image of the teacher Mr. Martz was a wink in my direction.

His secret was safe with me. I wouldn't tell a soul about his dealings. He was a drug dealer, and from everything I'd learned about guys like him, it didn't matter what they did as their job, they would all mess you up if you even spoke their name in front of the police. I liked Mr. Martz, but it wasn't until I bought weed from him downtown years later that I realized he had become one of those fucked up people he warned me of.

            After that gym class, I headed directly to my locker. My hands shook as I fumbled with the lock, opening it to find the two ounces of weed I'd bought from Martz still hidden in my jacket pocket. Since the teacher was gone, the weed was now free. Joey would be happy for the sudden boost in our economy. Because of Martz's carelessness, we were on the fast track to mini retirement. I grabbed my jacket and slammed my locker door closed. School had worn out its necessity.

           

1991

 

            We called it crack corner because it was the only place in the city you could find a real live crack-head. It was a grungy section of downtown, consumed by irregular traffic patterns and pedestrians seldom found in suburban areas of any city. Garbage and evidence of drug activity littered the sidewalks for more than two blocks, but the corner was the worst. It was a dangerous spot for anyone not involved somehow in the drug subculture, so few normal people ventured to that section of the downtown district.

            But the description of normal changed drastically in that part of town.

            A yellow line in the middle of the road separated the illegal merchants from the respectable ones. When a drug dealer conducted sales on that corner, the people across the street watched with disgust. It was as if a spotlight was shining directly down on the dealer from heaven, illuminating his evil plans to corrupt poor souls further into a life of despair. They watched with disdain as hobbled, broken down humans leeched their way to the corner, welfare money in their pockets, to buy small amounts of marked up drugs to satisfy the demons inside.

            Many times I stood on that street corner wondering who looked worse – the addicts or the dealers. At any time of the day my mouth was filled with half-gram spitballs of cocaine. The spitballs consisted of the drug wrapped tightly in condoms, and were no bigger than a peanut. The latex prevented them from breaking open in case I had to swallow if an undercover decided to jump me. The packaging job was the most important part of the entire drug dealing operation.

            At night, the wind chilled our bodies and the job froze our souls. The corner was an all around cold place to spend your time, and all forms of heat were the issue at any point of time. The night air lacked heat. The pressure to sell more than the other dealers made the competition hot. The cops who patrolled the corner were the hottest of all, so hot, we couldn't stand too close or we'd get burned.

When Joey arrived at the corner with a hot chocolate from Seven-Eleven for both of us, he had a crooked smile on his face, the kind he had any time he had just done something bad.

            "Come on," he said walking away. "You gotta see this."

            At two-thirty in the morning, there was a lot to see downtown. The corner became a main meeting place for dope fiends and dealers. Fights broke out. Pimps would drive by looking for their wayward girls. Patrol cars cruised the strip where the nightclubs were, up past the prostitutes on the stroll, ending at the corner, where they took notes and pictures of the who's who and what's what. At two-thirty, life forms were no more than immoral bags of skin drained of hope and direction.

            Joey led me to a covered bus stop on the bar strip. He laughed out loud and pointed to a man on the ground, asleep and snoring as if he were drunk. In his hand was a single flower – carnation maybe. A long thread of drool hung from the corner of his mouth, touching the dirty concrete. A drunken mess.

            "Let's beat the shit out of him," said Joey. He tipped his cup and poured a portion of his hot chocolate on the drunk. "He deserves it anyway."

            I stuffed my free hand in my pocket. It was too cold to do any sort of beating that night. We'd been on the street since seven that evening. I was hungry. My head hurt from carrying the spitballs in my cheeks the entire night. I was envious of the drunk's ability to just let go and fall asleep.

            "Let's just leave him alone and go home," I said. "This place is dead anyway."

            Joey poured the remainder of his chocolate on the man who didn't move. The steam from the drink fizzled in the air. Joey threw the cup at the drunk's head.

            "We should at least rob him," Joey crouched down to search the guy. "Teach him a lesson for falling asleep in the street."

            Joey unloaded each of the man's pockets. I stood over him, scanning the streets for witnesses to our unethical crime. He tossed a nylon wallet up at me. I held it in my hand for a few seconds, shocked that the guy still had some portion of his sober life attached.

            "What's in the wallet?" Joey asked as he stood up. "He's got nothing else."

            I looked in the wallet. "Fifteen bucks."

            Joey smiled. "Cab fare." Spits on the guy. "Fucking bum."

            We left the poor bastard in the bus stop and ventured back to the corner for one last attempt at relieving our jowls of the spits. As soon as we arrived, we were confronted by one of the most nervous junkies I'd ever seen. He stood in our spotlight, hopping from foot to foot to stay warm, scanning the corner for any sign of a dealer. When he saw us coming, his eyes lit up like a video poker machine. Jackpot!

            "You guys holding?" he licked his lips repeatedly as he spoke.

            Joey gave me a look, and nodded.

            "Sure," I said. "What do you want?"

            Rule number one was that you never made the transaction directly on the corner. There was always a back alley or a side street away from the corner in which I could conduct my deals. Joey remained behind on the corner as I followed the junkie about a block away into a small pedestrian alley between two business buildings.

            "Let's make this quick," I said. "What do you want?"

            The next moment caught me by surprise. I'd never been robbed before. I was always the quick one out of Joey and I. We were sixteen-year-old kids dealing with thirty-year-old druggies. Quick feet meant less trouble. Most of the time we never had a problem dealing to people, but we knew the danger involved with the game. I made the mistake of walking in a dark alley without Joey with me. It was too late at night. My brain wasn't functioning correctly. When the second junkie punched me from behind, I was lucky that I didn't lose my teeth along with the mouthful of spits. The thunderous punch disoriented me for a few minutes, just long enough for the fumbling junkies to pick up the spits as they rolled out of my bleeding mouth. They danced in silent confusion in front of my face. I tried to press my body up off the ground, but all my strength was gone. The long hours in the cold had paralyzed me. The urge to fight back was nowhere in my body. My head felt like a waterlogged blanket. The unseen junky picked my head up off the ground and squeezed my cheeks with his dirty hands. I couldn't see his face, the only thing I remembered was the smell of his body odor. I was completely vulnerable for the first time in my life.

            After squeezing the remainder of the spits out of my mouth, he slammed my head down onto the cement. I lay helpless, listening to the two junkies talk between each other.

            "Is that all of them?"

            "I think so. What should we do with him?"

            "Fuck him up. He'll come back to find me."

            "He's just a kid. Fuck him. Let's go."

            "I think we should do him. Crack his skull."

            "I got the shit. Lets go."

            I remember the sudden flow of warmth I felt inside when the footsteps of my assailants drifted off into the city night. The relief that I was still alive gave me the most comfort I'd felt in days, there on the dirty ground of what could have been my last stand.

            The next night, I was back on the corner with a mouth full of spitballs, and a syringe filled with toilet bowl cleaner. I was going to find those junkies, and they were going to learn that they should never let a beaten man back up on his feet.

           

1992

 

            The most disturbing sight I've ever seen was the time I watched a junkie shoot cocaine into his eye. Louie, a strung-out fifty something junkie, gingerly pulled down the heavy black bag under his eye and inserted the tip of the needle into what looked to be a vein protruding from the eye ball. His hands were steady for a compulsive junkie. He'd done the operation a hundred – probably a thousand – times before, but this was the first time in my life I'd ever witnessed something like this. Every movement was methodical.

All I knew about Louis was that he bought at least a half-ounce of cocaine from me a day, he was going blind, and he didn't have a functional vein left in his body. He'd gone through the gambit of injections sites on his deteriorating body – arms, feet, penis – but just as quick as his time on earth was running out, so were his available points of entry. The eyeball was surely his Hail Mary of shooting spots.

            He blinked his eye hard, once or ten times, before he looked at me again. He smiled in an attempt to hide his embarrassment. A tear crept out the side of his stoned eye and he swept it away as if it didn't exist.

            "Promise me son not to do the things I've done," he sang.  He tucked his syringe into a black needle case. A true professional. "You ever shoot?"

            I shook my head. "Never had the inclination to. I'm in love with the money."

            Louie chuckled and leaned back in his chair. "So was I, until I had too much of it. Guess every dealer has to spend it on something."

            Louie had spent his money on nothing but drugs. His apartment left little to be desired with its holes in the wall and streams of garbage along the floor. The one bedroom cubicle reeked of sweat and moldy food, and his kitchen looked more like a laboratory than a place of food preparation. The building was a notorious drug complex in my city. Of the four hundred suites, dope friends, drug dealers and prostitutes, occupied at least half of them. I had set up shop in one of the apartments just down the hall from Louie. The apartment took me off the streets at night. It gave me somewhere to live besides hotels and other people's couches, but it mostly served as a convenient office space.

            Louie was a harmless guy, until it came to dealing with drugs. He had a hunger for the stuff that I'd never seen before. Every time I arrived at his apartment, he always opened the door in complete silence, and not a word was spoken out of context. We had an understanding that there was no need for small talk. Strictly business. He wanted the stuff, I wanted the money.

            Louie was a lonely guy; I could sense that every time I came over. There were no photos of family or friends hung on the wall or on a shelf. I wondered how a fifty-something man remained alive after years of shooting dope into his eye and living in filth and solitude. I spent a few minutes after every sale with him, talking about sports or, of all other things, the business of cocaine. I felt embarrassed coming over just to deliver drugs, contributing to his misery. Though we had little to talk about, we were sort of friends with literally nothing in common besides our individual fondness for dope.

            Louie reached over and grabbed hold of my arm with old-man strength. With the stoned eye shut, he scanned the flesh between my biceps and forearm. He smiled and nodded his head.

            "You got a nice one there." He traced a steady finger down the main vein in my arm. "God, I'd like to bang that when you're ready."

            I yanked my arm away. "What the hell's wrong with you?"

            Louie laughed and sat back in his rickety dining room chair. He closed his good eye and laughed to himself through his clenched jaw.

            "I gotta go, Lou," I said and tucked the crumpled up bills into my pocket. "Call me later."

            As soon as I made a move to the door, the entire apartment filled with an aggressive pounding from out in the hall. I froze, instantly thinking of the police. The bang sounded on the door. I glanced over at Louie, whose stoned eye was open now and aware.

            "Who is it?" asked Louie, concealing his pathetic stoned voice.

            "Open the fucking door, Lou." It was Mariano.

            Mariano was a drug dealer's worst nightmare. He stood about six foot five and weighed no less than two hundred and fifty. How a cocaine addict managed to hold onto that sort of bodyweight always astounded me. Mariano liked his drugs as much as Louie, only he didn't like to pay for them. He was famous for beating the hell out of young dealers for small amounts of drugs. A week before, he had stabbed one of my friends in broad daylight on the corner for a spitball. The guy was insane, and I was in big trouble if he caught me in Louie's apartment.

            I scrambled for a place to hide. "Louie," I pleaded. "Hide me."

            Louie fumbled to his feet, tucking the leather case into the waistband of his pants.

            "Hide in the shower." He pointed to a door next to the kitchen. "That fucker doesn't bath. He won't find you there."

            I bolted into the washroom, quietly closing the door behind me. The room was cluttered with more garbage; used q-tips littered the counter. Empty bottles of over the counter medication and crumpled up balls of bloody toilet paper overflowed the garbage can in the corner. I peeled back the sticky black shower curtain and hid in the tub, popping the additional three grams of cocaine I stupidly brought with me into my mouth, ready to swallow to save my life from Mariano.

            Everyone in the city knew that Mariano would kill you for drugs. Getting busted by the police was far better than having to deal with him. At least the police only took you to jail. This guy dragged you to hell, showed you the sights, then brought you back to Earth wishing you had jumped in the lake of fire instead.

            From my hiding spot, I heard Louie open the door to the apartment. In a second, Mariano's voice filled the room.

            "I'm gonna kill somebody if I don't get high!"

            He was overly aggressive with people – which was one of the reasons no one wanted to be around him. He stole from anyone, and he had a reputation of ruining people's highs when he came around by beating them up. The worse thing about cocaine was that it made you paranoid. You thought about things that would be considered irrational. A cocaine junkie lived in an entirely different world than the rest of humanity. Everything focussed on getting drugs, doing drugs and living through the times when there weren't any drugs around. Mariano couldn't do either of those things without some sort of violence involved.

            Louie squealed. "My guy just left. I'm out."

            Mariano barked. "Bullshit. Empty your pockets."

            I dug through my pockets for the money, stuffing it immediately into my underwear.

            "I'm gonna kill somebody for sure tonight." A plate crashed to the floor. "Fucking drug dealers think they're special."

            I prayed to the Lord I only visited in tight situations. For the first time, I was really scared for my life. I'd dealt with so many junkies, but none compared to Mariano. My entire professional career I'd avoided him. He knew who I was, and I sometimes wondered if he considered the fact that he had never gotten the chance to rob me. I understood that trouble had a way of eventually catching up to you in the seedy world of drug dealing. No dealer could ever go an entire career without having to deal with a psychopath customer. I hoped that day wasn't my turn.

            "I gotta use your can," Mariano growled and the door to the washroom burst open.

            I remained still behind the dark curtain. The spitballs in my mouth swelled to the size of Ping-Pong balls. I worried that I wouldn't be able to swallow if Mariano wrapped his massive hands around my throat.

Please don't let me die in a junkie's bathroom, Lord.

            Cornered in that bathtub I realized that being the dealer wasn't exactly the strongest position to be in. We were really just pawns in the addict's game. The expendable energy source. If one of us dropped, another would take our place.

No one was perfect in the drug game. We all had to face our demons at some point of our lives. My demon stood four feet away, pissing all over the floor, on a manhunt for his perfect victim who looked just like me.

            He flushed, I'm not sure why. When I heard him leave, I stepped out of the tub, trying to avoid his mess. I was glad it was his piss on the floor and not my broken body.

 

1994

 

            "God damn it, Rack."

            For the first time in my life, I'd let my guard down when it came to dealing with a friend. Usually dealing with Rack was easy. He'd bring me the money, I'd give him the dope, and we'd do our separate business and meet up after for drinks.

            Not this time.

            He held the gun steady at his waist. Turned sideways in the passenger seat of my car, he watched my body language, ready for any move I'd make to disarm him.

            "You don't have to do this," I said. "I thought we were friends."

            We called him Rack because of his unbelievable talent to shoot pool. He could have made money on a pro-tour somewhere in the world, but he decided to waste his life dealing instead. Rack didn't look like a typical drug dealer. His curly blond hair and athletic good looks allowed him to fit in wherever he went. He seemed more like a college boy than a killer, but I knew he was no scholar. He had a twisted side to him that made him react differently to stressful situations. At that point in time, he was in the most stressful of situations. He'd robbed several dealers in the city, and foolish me, I thought I was different. I agreed to meet him to sell him a kilogram of cocaine. I didn't actually believe that he would rob me since we went back years, but as usual, the game always seemed to change when you least expected it.

            "Sorry, Mike," he said and tucked the kilo package into his jacket. "If it makes you feel any better, I'm going to pay you back."

            I shook my head and looked away from him. Getting robbed is the worst feeling in the world. It's not the robbery that makes a man feel like shit, but the degradation of the event and the loss of manhood that comes with swallowing your pride.

            Rack left my car and left me thirty thousand dollars in debt to my guy. I was devastated, and I'd be a liar if the thought of killing Rack didn't cross my mind.

            That's if I could find him.

            Two weeks later I woke up to the ring of my building's intercom system. I had a snub nose .38 in my hand as I opened the door to find Rack's smiling mug. He had black bags under his eyes and looked as though he hadn't slept in days. With little emotion, he tossed a red backpack with a Spiderman emblem on the face onto the floor at my feet.

            "Sorry about everything." His smile barely hung on his face. "There's the money I owe you."

            I kicked the bag to the side. "What's wrong with you?"

            Rack checked his watch. "You're a good guy, Mike. Not every nice guy has to finish last."

            He left me that morning and I never saw him again.

 

1995

 

            When my best friend at that time, Dwayne, showed up at my door with two brand new hundred-dollar bills, I should have sensed something was wrong. He'd owed me the money for cocaine for three weeks. He worked a straight job, and there was no chance in the foreseeable future in which he could pay me. His own words. We had been close friends since my days of juvenile hall, only he'd grown up and gotten away from crime.

There is no such thing as a halfway crook.

            Where we completely went our separate ways was in our beliefs in drugs. He enjoyed dabbling every once and a while – the weekend warrior, I never touched a single drop of the stuff.

            Dwayne handed me the crisp bills and I took a moment to inspect them. I was surprised at how new they were. "Are they fake?" I asked.

            "Come on," he said, squirming in my patio chair.

            I usually never took money, handed out drugs, or invited addicts upstairs in my apartment. Dwayne was a friend who was familiar with my lifestyle, so I felt comfortable enough to break that rule.

            "Can you hook me up again?" he said. His eyes remained on the table.

            I should have felt it. I should have seen his despair. His desperateness. The look of a desperate man is the same whether you know him or not. Dwayne had it, and I overlooked it.

            I gave him three and a half grams of cocaine and he left, confessing that he had someone waiting for him around the corner of my building. We hugged, and I sent him on his way with his package – like a dad handing a bag lunch to his son in the morning before school.

            Ten minutes later the drug squad kicked in my door. They stormed my apartment, searching for cocaine. Instantly I blamed Dwayne, and sure enough, when I spoke to the undercover cop later that evening, he confirmed my suspicion.

            I remember that night in the holding cell, after the police had punched and kicked me into a state of silence, a cop came to the cell door. He smiled as he opened it, staring down at my beaten body on the cot. My eye was black and both sides of my ribs throbbed with pain.

            "Seems you had an accident," he said in a cocky voice. "Too bad."

            I turned away from him and spat in the corner of the cell.

            "This is your first time," he said. "But it won't be your last."

            I lay back down on the cot and turned away from the arrogant cop. He laughed and slammed the door; thus kick starting what would be the beginning of a long list of incarcerations with the drug task force.

 

 

           

1994

 

            Bang!

            I kicked in the door of the house, instantly freezing the three occupants seated in the living room. My partner Morris, cloaked in the same black garb and ski mask as I was, flew into the house before me. I swept in behind him with a double barrel shotgun in my hands. The occupants of the house stared into my eyes, studying my concealed face as Morris escaped into the back rooms.

            "Nobody move," I said. My hands shook with adrenaline and fear.

            The occupants, two women and one man, lifted their hands into the air. I'd never done a robbery before, but Morris had convinced me to join him. Apparently the trio had been selling cheap cocaine to our customers, thus slowly taking our business out of the equation. Morris was never one to take undercutting lightly. We tried to sell out of it, but for some reason, these three were beating our prices at every turn.

            Now it was time to show them the nasty side of drug dealing.

There is no such thing as a halfway crook.

I used powerful words to make my point. "If you move, I'll shoot you dead."

            The guy stared narrow-eyed at me. I could tell he was getting restless. Maybe he thought he could overpower me, take the gun from my hands. Maybe he thought the gun wasn't loaded when he stood up and lowered his hands.

            "Sit down!" I ordered.

            "I don't think you'll do it," he said and took a step away from the couch.

            "Sit down, Jason," yelled one of the women.

            But he kept moving.

            He inched closer to me; his eyes focussed on mine. I made the mistake of moving away from him. A sign of weakness. A sign that maybe I wouldn't shoot. He sensed it and leapt at me, grabbing hold of the gun with both hands.

            The women screamed and bolted up from the couch. They remained out of the picture as we struggled in the doorway of the living room, then onto the floor. He managed to get on top of me. I sensed my defeat as I used all my strength to push him off me, but when I did, I monkey-kicked Jason across the floor. He slammed into a wall, then lay on the floor wincing in pain.

            "Blast his ass!" yelled Morris from the hallway.

            I pointed the gun at Jason. His eyes were red with anger as he breathed heavily from the fight. I could feel sweat drip down my back. I'd never shot anyone before in my life. This wasn't how things were supposed to end up. We were just supposed to take his dope and beat him and his crew. The idea of killing him never entered the picture.

            Until that moment.

            "Blast him!" screamed Morris.

            I gripped the barrel of the shotgun with one hand and wrapped my finger around the trigger. "You got the stuff?" I yelled back at Morris.

            "Yeah."

            "Let's go then."

            I aimed the gun at Jason. "Next time I pull the trigger. Stay the fuck away from our customers."

            Morris and I never saw them again.

 

1998

            "There's got to be a better way to do this," I sighed as I opened the third package of cocaine.

            My new partner Marco and I had just mailed our latest shipment of cocaine to Canada from Belize. We'd been doing it for the past three months, never getting an entire shipment up in one piece, but it was an easy gig at that time. The plan was simple, we'd buy the cocaine in Belize, package it in air tight bundles so the dogs couldn't smell it, then package it once more in wooden carvings and send it to Canada marked Fragile. When it arrived, I'd open the carvings with a chainsaw and remove the goods. Simple.

            We sent it through one of the world's more famous courier companies, tracking its movement on the Internet. Whenever a package showed up in a city, the package handlers scanned it. The scan would appear on their system, which was available to the public via on-line. If at any time the package stopped for too long in one city, we would usually write it off, considering the fact that most prepaid Fragile packages were the fastest ones to clear customs. When the package arrived in Canada, the courier would call us on a dummy phone to notify us that we could pick it up. Even that was risky. If the cops knew that there were drugs in the carving, they could wait until the moment we came to get it before arresting us. It was a dangerous game, but very profitable.

            "This is beginning to give me gray hair, Marco," I said as I counted the packages. "We sent eight packs, we have three left, we've lost five this time."

            "What do you suggest?" he said. "This is paying pretty well."

            I stood up and stretched. "Sure. But the amount of drugs we lose each time isn't worth the money. We need a big shipment. All at once."

            "How the hell are we going to do that?" he asked, chuckling at me as he spoke.

            The one thing I'd learned throughout my career of drug dealing was that if there was a desire to get this drug to people, there was always a way. All we needed was a grander mode of transportation.

            "We'll find a way," I said. "For now, lets clean these wood shavings up before my girl gets home."

There is no such thing as a halfway crook.