Episode 1: The Black Market Bungle
“Jesus, it sounds like that helicopter is trying to land on top of the building!” Duane was getting nervous.
He was fidgeting fast, on his feet, looking around aimlessly, as if waiting for the inevitable, tragic conclusion to a predictable scene in a formulaic, B-movie.
Duane was tall and slender, with a messy bushel of brown, curly hair. He looked like a hippie-farmer, and wore a brown, army navy jacket inside the house, that was inappropriately warm for the weather.
“What the hell is going on here guys?” Duane was getting jittery.
“Don’t worry about it” I reassured him. “This is Los Angeles, it’s like this all the time.”
Despite my attempts to calm Duane down, he was just getting increasingly agitated.
“There are helicopters in this neighborhood, all the time,” I repeated.
As I was speaking though, I had to raise my voice to be heard over sound the helicopter.
“No reason to be alarmed!” I shouted.
“Yeah,” Duane was unconvinced, “I know, but that chopper sounds like it’s trying to land on this building.”
“This is a small apartment complex.” Johnson chimed in, while poorly attempting to pantomime an explanation with his hands, “there is no helipad here.”
Johnson was tall and athletic. He wore tan khakis and a white button up shirt, open, over a wife beater. It was hot out still after sundown and he was sweating as he stood in front of a floor fan wiping his face with his undershirt.
Duane nodded slightly at Johnson, but his eyes were adrift. He was also dripping sweat, and looked flustered, and off-kilter. He must have been starting to think that this was some kind of a setup. From Duane’s point of view, I could see where he was coming from.
From my point of view though, I was nervous too, and I just wanted to get through this deal as fast as possible; one last score before we could turn over a new leaf. Literally, Johnson and I, wanted to turn over a new ‘pot leaf’, as I had convinced Johnson to help me realize my dream, of emerging from the shadows of the black market, to become pioneers and historic, first to market, legal cannabis entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, my other career seemed to be stuck in the mud, and I hadn’t been able to land a writing job, or anything remotely resembling one, since we had moved to Los Angeles.
With the epic writer’s strike and the meltdown of the global economy, right in the rearview mirror, coupled with the proliferation of online content and new media, the traditional institutions for an aspiring writer to break out, were broken and in a spiraling state of exponential, atrophy.
Even if the entertainment industry and the writing market hadn’t been trending in the wrong direction, I had learned that it still took at least a decade or more, for even the most talented people to work their way into anything that passed for a decent job.
It took countless, torturous internships to get your foot in the door. Obtaining access, meant years of paying your dues and peeling back various layers of professional networks, until you knew the right people with the right connections, that could help you score, one of just a small number of highly coveted opportunities.
It didn’t matter though, I had convinced myself, because legal cannabis was my calling, and my fast track to fame and fortune. This deal with Duane and J2, was somehow the manifestation of the machinations that I’d been imagining for months.
Finally, for the first time since I came to California, I actually had a chance to take my concept up, from out of the ethers, and transmutate it, into reality!
It’s true, I was also anxious. I didn’t know Duane, and we too, were taking a big risk, but there was really no cause for panic. As I had honestly relayed to Duane, this was Los Angeles. And… there were helicopters here all the time.
“So how do you know J2?” I tried to make small talk.
Duane shot me a dirty look and then lit into me.
“Why do you want to know that?” he barked. “You’re asking a lot of questions.”
We had just met Duane a few minutes before. He still had 30 pounds of weed sitting in the trunk of his car parked across the street.
“He’s just trying to break the ice,” Johnson laughed; his goofy smile, a stark contrast to the growing tension.
“I don’t like this at all.” Duane frantically paced back and forth. I could tell he was about to flip out at any second.
“It’s all good,” I assured Duane, “take it easy. Have a seat, do you want a drink?”
Duane skeptically looked down at the crummy, soiled futon in the center of our living room which was covered by an equally questionable looking blanket. To be fair, we had found most of our furniture in the trash, by the side of the road.
The used futon sat across the dark hardwood floor, from an old TV set, which was parked on a cardboard box.
“I’ll pass,” he was unimpressed, “can you cover that window, please?”
Duane nodded towards a sheet that had fallen from the window by the front door. It was hanging straight down from the top left hand corner, and covering just a small vertical sliver of the room, exposing the narrow walkway in the exterior lighting, and the handrail of the second floor of the apartment building through the window screen.
“No problem,” I went over to ransack a desk drawer up against the wall, between the living room and the kitchen, “I just need to find some thumb tacks.”
Duane shot lasers beams out of his eyes at me and then looked over at Johnson.
“J2 didn’t say anything, about there being, two people here,” he complained.
“Gabe’s cool man,” Johnson vouched for me, “we went to college together, I’ve known him for years.”
Duane’s priorities and paranoias are totally askew right now, I reflected to myself, he shouldn’t be worried about me, he should be worried about the weed getting stolen from his car, or even just his entire car getting stolen.
Crime is no joke in this neighborhood, I thought.
I found the tacks and then walked back over and stopped in front of Duane on my way back to the window. I was just going to let it go but…
Duane stood at least a foot above my head, and as I looked up at him and caught his attention, I silently signified and communicated to him, as we were making eye contact, what I really thought of him at the moment, and that even though, he was taller than me; I held the high moral ground, and in truth, I was the one, that was actually looking down at him, and at his small, petty behavior.
“You’re being totally ridiculous,” I dramatically dressed him down, “counterproductive, needlessly confrontational, hostile and paranoid. Whatever you need, to feel more comfortable right now, I’m willing to do it, but you need to please, calm… the… fuck… down.”
“I don’t kn-”
“You’re freaking out for no reason,” I yelled over the roar of the chopper, which had now grown deafeningly loud, “and it’s not helping anyone, or making things any bette-”
“This is the Los Angeles Police Department!”
I was interrupted mid-rant by a bullhorn coming from outside the apartment.
Looking through the window, I could now see dozens of armed SWAT team members standing outside the door, holding assault weapons.
“Los Angeles Police!” The boisterous voice repeated through the megaphone, “Put your hands in the air and get down on the ground!”
The helicopter hovering outside our apartment slowly spun in the air, shining its spotlight through our window, illuminating the soot-covered white sheet and casting its beam across the length of our living room.
I threw my hands up in the air.
Through the blinding glare of the searchlight, I could see the silhouette of bodies in tactical gear moving past the doorway.
I looked towards Johnson and Duane but my eyes were burning, and all I could see was white.
I had a sudden and chilling epiphany.
Has Duane been fucking with us? It dawned on me. This whole time?
I felt so stupid for having tried to convince Duane that the helicopters were nothing to worry about. He must have known all along that this was a set up.
Jesus, I’m a fucking imbecile, I brow-beat myself, the cops are probably laughing their asses off, right now. They’ll be telling this ‘world’s dumbest criminals’ story to their friends, for years.
“Get down on the ground! Keep those hands up.”
It was clear as day… how did I miss it?
I awkwardly tried to lower myself to my knees and onto the ground without dropping my arms, but I fell over sideways.
I am so fucked…
I gingerly rolled over onto my stomach, and in slow motion, I placed my hands over the top of my head, interlocking my fingers together.
This can’t be happening?
This can’t be real?
I reflected on how crazy the situation was.
What is wrong with me?
How could I have fucked up, so very badly?
It all seemed obvious to me in retrospect. I had been under the spell of my own magical-thinking, and I hadn’t wanted to critically question my good fortune, or poke holes in a deal, that had seemed too good to be true…
* * *
Need help making sense of this whacky industry? Give me a shout.
Earlier that morning I had just gotten dressed and came out of the bathroom, fifteen minutes before it was time to leave. I found Johnson by the coffee machine in the kitchen, not at all ready to go to work. It was the morning of Thanksgiving, 2008, and we were supposed to go live on the phones that day, after having completed, nearly a week of paid training, at a non-profit telemarketing center.
“Are you going to work in your pajamas?” I sassed Johnson, who was wearing a t-shirt and sweat pants.
“I’m not going,” Johnson declared, as he poured himself a cup of steaming hot, black coffee, and started drinking it without any cream or sugar. “I don’t care. This isn’t what I came here for.”
The day before, I felt like we had bottomed out, as we cold-called people for the first time with our supervisors watching. Most of the targets on the roll were elderly widows, that had given money before to various non-profit, fundraising campaigns. For their generosity, a one-time donor, would be eternally punished, and perpetually passed around different contact lists for various organizations to harass them on the phone, and additionally torture them, through other forms of media.
On the heels of the crash of the stock and real estate markets, most of the people that we were bothering had lost something, if not everything, and weren’t in the mood for us to shake them down.
It was terrible, and I felt embarrassed and pathetic, as I read to them from a script. I wasn’t allowed to cut the line, until the person I had in my crosshairs told me, “no,” at least three times. Of course, everyone I talked to said “no”, but I had to keep pushing them to repeat themselves until they really hated me, and I was finally allowed to hang up.
This was one of the most depressing, soul-squeezing, and humiliating experiences of my life…
That being said, I forced myself to wake up early that morning, drink five or more cups of coffees (I had lost count), and then take a shower. I didn’t feel like I had any better option than to continue to suffer through this woeful job with Johnson in good faith.
I was broke, I owed my parents money, and worse yet, I owed Johnson money. Last, but not least of my financial challenges, I now had the country’s most dangerous, and notorious mafia and extortion racket, at my back.
After years of biding their time, they had finally come after me to collect a large debt that was impossible to discharge, and also carried with it an outrageously high and exponentially compounding interest rate. There was no turning to the courts or filing bankruptcy for protection from this untouchable, cutthroat, cold-blooded cartel- the US government, and their partners in the banking industry.
Uncle Sam, along with private student loan lenders, were now asking me for over a hundred thousand dollars. They wanted over seven hundred dollars a month out of my zero dollars of income, and multiple lenders, had already told me, to go and stuff my deferments.
I was doing the telemarketing because I was at the end of the line.
It’s only temporary, I told myself, until I save up enough money, to launch my new company…
In practice though, starting the business anytime soon, was beginning to seem like more of a pipe-dream, every day.
Looking at the leftover coffee, there was just a small burnt layer remaining, ringing the bottom of the pot on the warmer. I emptied out the filter, tossing the soaked, stained paper and spent grounds into the garbage, and then I filled up the funnel again. I added more water to the reservoir and started a fresh batch.
Time for coffee number 6 or 7, I made a mental note, but who’s counting?
“That was fucking terrible, ”Johnson looked firm in his resolve, “I’m done.”
“I’m just really glad I decided to get a college degree,” I commented, “The crippling, life-crushing, debt burden, is definitely worth all of the benefits I that get out of it.”
I had met Johnson the first week, of my first semester, at the College of Santa Fe. We had found chemistry, colluding in a creative writing class, during a group exercise. Johnson and I clicked, as we wrote a few scenes together, depicting a variety of people dying from horrible, albeit comical, scorpion related fatalities.
Both Johnson and I were a few years older than the other students in our circle, and additionally we related because both of us had dropped out of high school to pursue outrageous, outlaw and outside the box lifestyles. For instance, Johnson had driven a motorcycle to Santa Fe when the semester had started, while I had hitchhiked there.
I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t have a car. Johnson had both and seemed to be a kindred spirt. He was the perfect candidate for a partner in crime.
Less than a week after meeting him in class, I had convinced Johnson to give me a ride to Taos, a hip ski town, a few hours north of us, and front us the cash to buy some ‘trim’, that I had a connection for.
I explained to Johnson, that during my time traveling around the country, in my years before college, I had learned how to make cannabis butter, out of trim. Trim, I elucidated to him, is a product in the cannabis supply chain, comprised of the leaves and trimmings that are left over, after the flowers are pruned and prettied up for purchase. ‘Flowers’ furthermore, I put forward, is the fancier, more accurate nomenclature for the ‘buds’, or the ‘nugs’, which is the part of the plant that consumers combust.
My late best friend, Benjamin, had already moved out to Taos with his girlfriend Hana, the year before I got to New Mexico. Ben was a carry-over-character from my lost years of vagabondry and wandering. When I was a little younger, we had toured America together, sharing many extraordinary exploits, during this era of my experience.
He was now working at a local brew pub, and hooked us up with a friend of his, who sold us two sacks, full of top-notch trim, for only $100 per trash bag!
The haul we got was so high quality, that Johnson and I were able to sit at the table in his dorm room and sift through our score, to pull out over two ounces of flowers that we off-loaded on campus for around $800. We were assisted in this endeavor by his next-door neighbor in the student living complex, Jeffery Crackle; a pothead, hippie freshman, who everyone called by his last name.
With the left-over marijuana material, I taught Johnson how to make infused products. We melted plain-old, unsalted, supermarket butter, right there on the burner, in the kitchen of the common area of Johnson’s on-campus dormitory.
Once the butter had liquified, we slowly stirred in the trim. We brought our batch to a boil and then turned down the heat, and let it go, low and slow, for well over fourteen hours.
The next day, we pulled the pot off the stove, pun intended, and we strained it through screens and panty-hose, meticulously separating out the plant material from the hot green oil.
We turned the butter into baked goods which we ate and sold, in that order. Our supply lasted about three weeks, after which we ventured back up to Taos again, this time, to throw down on twice as much trim.
Even as Johnson and I were starting our edibles empire on campus, we had formed a formidable combo, while also teaming up, in the creative writing department. We had discovered a great dynamic, with Johnson as the director, and myself as the primary content writer, on a variety of projects that we collaborated on.
Johnson had a natural instinct to take charge, while people tended to listen to him, and follow his lead. I, on the other hand, had never intended on being the alpha, and only ever wanted to fit in; to find my home and my place with the right partners, where I could focus on what I did best.
Johnson and I, with our talents in tandem, seemed to have possibly been in possession of that balance. Our highlights included, The Mad Economist, a play about a society, in which every month, all of the rich and poor people were forced to switch places, and Whisky Business, a prohibition era, comedy screenplay.
“Fuck man,” Johnson shook his head in disbelief, “non-profit telemarketing, might literally be, the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
“Give yourself some credit,” I pointed out, “you’ve done a lot of shitty things before. I can make you a list, if that would be helpful?”
“I haven’t sunk this low yet,” Johnson took another a sip from his coffee, “that was rock bottom.”
“Is there anything below, rock bottom?” I posed, “Is there an ‘absolute bottom’, like ‘absolute zero’?”
Johnson paused for a second as he drank more coffee.
“If you want to go in to work today, you can borrow my car. But I’m not going.”
The sound of Johnson’s voice sent me spiralizing into an anxiety attack.
“Are you expecting me to face this nightmare alone?” I panicked, “this was your idea in the first place!”
“Well, you need the money more than I do,” Johnson was callous, “so don’t let me, hold you back.”
Things with Johnson had been tenuous. I still wasn’t sure if I could trust him, and I knew from experience that his motives at any given time, could possibly be suspect, and probably were, self-serving. I felt like I could never completely be at ease around him, because of a lingering tension, that Johnson might find occasion to toss me overboard or throw me under the bus, if he needed to.
Johnson wasn’t as idealistic about the social mission as I was, and in the end, his true religion in life, seemed to be about making as much money as possible, as fast as possible.
I thought that helping me up to this juncture, had probably been like an investment for Johnson, as if he had bought shares of stock in my personal, future’s market. I was ok with that though, grateful for it, in fact, and I was going to make sure that anyone who bet on me, was going to see a big return.
However, to date, I had not been able to prove that yet, and mutual animus had been brewing between us, our first month in LA.
The excruciating realization, that we weren’t going to experience instant success or overnight riches when we got there, was like getting woken up from a deep sleep with a bucket of ice water.
Meanwhile, I ran out of money, and Johnson had to float me for a few weeks, paying for food, and other expenses. He told me was willing to front me for a short while, but not for long. Certainly I had been happy for his help, but now, I was also in Johnson’s debt, which meant I was in his power, and subject to his constant scrutiny and judgement.
I started walking around on eggshells, as he grew more annoyed by my presence in the apartment during the day, and questioned the value of the projects or activities that I was working on. More and more, Johnson was also starting to call attention to the little things I did, which bothered him.
“Can you please not leave sugar, all over the counter?” Johnson excoriated me.
I wiped off the Formica surface with a sponge, and then rinsed off my hands in the sink. I grabbed my cup and poured myself a refill, cooling the coffee off to a drinkable temperature with half & half, so that I could choke it down, that much more quickly. I elected to skip the sweetener this time.
Johnson continued to swallow his, scorching hot, straight from the pot to his mug, and as black as his soul.
“If you’re going to leave, you should leave right now,” Johnson rushed me, “or you’re going to be late.”
“But Johnson…” I pleaded, “it’s Thanksgiving!”
“Unless you can come up with another Thanksgiving Miracle,” Johnson opened the fridge and took out a carton of eggs, “I’m not sure what choice you have?”
My second year in Santa Fe, on Thanksgiving day, I was totally broke and I didn’t even know how I was going to be able to afford food, when suddenly I came upon a ‘pot of gold’, and found $400 on the ground in a Walmart parking lot. In my mind, this had been a divine intervention, to reward me with my perseverance through hard times as a poor student.
Elated with my good fortune, I bought beer and groceries that I brought back to Johnson’s house, where we celebrated my ‘Thanksgiving Miracle’.
Looking down at the dirty, puke-colored tiles on the kitchen floor, I shook my head, “I can’t do it,” I resisted him, “not by myself.”
Johnson stood silently as he switched on the stovetop, and started turning up the heat underneath a frying pan.
This confrontation, I was cognizant, is coming soon…
Business and friendship had grown inexorably more complicated for Johnson and I, following a bad fall out in college, after a wild, weekly poker game gone wrong.
During my fourth semester in Santa Fe, I cashed out my student loans, and instead of staying on campus or paying for a meal plan, I crashed on a mattress that was on the floor of the garage, in a house that Johnson was renting with Crackle.
At the very beginning of the semester, Johnson, Crackle, and I, went on a road trip to Humboldt County California, where some of Johnson’s high school friends had been homesteading.
With the money that I had borrowed for financial aid, we were able to buy twelve pounds of pot to sell at school. We quickly flipped the flowers on campus, and then booked it back to California again.
We were starting to build up a commendable cash bankroll, after repeating the process a few times. The three of us had never split the profits, but instead had agreed to pay for communal living costs and had otherwise, kept reinvesting everything back into growing the business, and possibly in the near future, we would look to get into some growing, and the growing business.
It all came to a head one night though, at Johnson’s house in Santa Fe, after the poker game. Once everyone else had cleared out, Johnson and Crackle, unceremoniously, sandbagged me; informing me, that they had decided to vote me out of the endeavor. I was devastated and thought that they deserved to suffer. Suffer they did though, because it turned, by a twist of fate, that the two of them got busted on a run, in a rental car, the very next day.
Looking back, Johnson and Crackle getting arrested, had been a wakeup call for all three of us. While they had eventually been able to get their charges pleaded down to misdemeanors, we had collectively come to the conclusion that the risks were just too severe and the punishments, too prohibitively punitive, to continue peddling pot in a black market business.
It was a tough pill to swallow though, as we would all have to come to terms with the harsh, humbling reality, that it was time to start coloring within the lines, and making money, the hard way, like regular, everyday people. This meant we weren’t special. The rules did apply to us. We would now have to look for approachable, entry-level jobs. Our sky-high ambitions, like shooting stars, had eventually come crashing back down into the earth’s atmosphere…
“That kind of takes the two of us to a weird place.” Johnson warned, making eye contact with me, as he cracked his eggs into a bowl, and vigorously scrambled them with a fork.
“I’m not going by myself.” I put my foot down, “I’ve reached my limit.”
My laundry list of grievances had been rapidly growing for months, as Johnson, and life in general, had continued to serve up, a seemingly never-ending buffet, of all-I-could eat, shit-sandwiches.
“Then, it looks like, we may have come to a crossroads.” Johnson emptied out a ceramic bowl into the skillet, as I watched his eggs start to sizzle on the stove.
This movie, I thought, is not, going to have, a happy ending…
To Be Continued…