Episode 3: The Pipe Dream
My cousin’s eyes looked feral as he came in through the front door. He appeared to be sprung on uppers and the sides of his head were shaved into a mohawk. He was wearing a tank-top and shorts, and carried himself like a battle-hardened, road-warrior.
“Hey Nate,” I greeted him as he put his bags down on the couch, “how was Burning Man?”
“Life changing,” Nathan’s voice was deep and profound, even as he fidgeted around with his hiking pack. He wildly tossed his dirty clothes all over the room, one by one, violently yanking his grungy garments from out of his tightly stuffed bag.
“I did flip out on a mix of LSD, molly, and mescaline though,” Nathan fluttered about the kitchen, as he quickly moved around, scooping up his dirty clothes and tossing them into a laundry bin on the floor, “oh, and I was also on DMT.”
“That’s insane.” I was stunned. As far as I had known prior to this conversation, my cousin was super square and didn’t even smoke pot.
“The crazy part,” Nathan opened the fridge, and started poking around, “is that we trashed my rental car.”
The plot thickens. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing.
“You destroyed a rental car, how?”
“Yup, it’s pretty fucked up.” Nathan nailed a three-point shot in the hamper with his smelly, soiled, sweat-crusted socks, “I abandoned the car in the desert.”
“What are you talking about?” My cousin was clearly having a nervous breakdown.
“I was tripping my balls off with some guy I met there,” Nathan leaned back against the kitchen counter for support, bracing himself, as he experienced an acid flashback, “and for some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to smear the upholstery and the whole interior of a Cadillac convertible, with cans of baked beans.”
“Beans. Why beans?” I didn’t know what to make of this development.
“I’m not sure,” Nathan searched his head for a justification, “I think that’s all we had. It was ugly though… I mean… we even smushed beans into the sun visor, and filled the entire glove box. There were beans everywhere. It was bad.”
My mom had asked me at the end of the summer, if I would be willing to set aside a day or two to help my cousin in the city. Nathan was a few years older than me, and was a successful new-media and marketing professional who lived in the trendy NoLita (North of Little Italy) district of NY. All my mom had told me to prepare me for this pandemonium, was that Nathan had heard I was in town, and had asked if I could take a train out to Manhattan, so that I could help him move.
Why doesn’t anyone in my family ever contact me out of the blue to do something fun? I had mused, like invite me to a party, or a museum, or even to go bowling?
I needed a break from reading rejection letters for my latest book proposal anyway, and I thought that maybe I could get some inspiration from a night or two in SoHo, so I had agreed. Somehow though, I had been brainwashed into staying now, for three weeks and running…
“So, let me get this straight? “I couldn’t believe what my cousin was telling me, “you leveled your car with legumes, and then deserted it, in the desert?”
“I panicked,” Nathan threw his arms in the air, to reenact his anxiety, “I freaked out on mescaline, so my friend gave me a ride to the airport, and we evacuated to Vegas. I had no way to get back for the car, so I had no choice, but to cut my loses, and leave the Cadillac for the vultures.”
“Wow, that’s quite the story.” I complimented my cousin, on his zany, self-destructive misadventure.
“The rental agency has been blowing up my phone, and now they say, they’re going to sue me.”
“That’s a… fantastically… unfortunate situation.” Feeling uncomfortable sitting as my cousin buzzed around the room like a humming bird, I stood up and moved out of range of his erratic orbit.
Nathan abruptly landed on the couch, and pulled a tiny computer out of a messenger bag. He balanced the lilliputian-laptop between the tops of the tips of his knees and started typing away.
“What are you going to do?” I was still trying to make sense of his predicament.
With determination on his face, as he stared at his miniscule computer screen, Nathan threw down the gauntlet, “I’m going to counter sue.”
“Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” I was perplexed, “what possible grounds or legal standing could you have?”
“I know what I’m doing,” Nathan ducked the question, “I have two different lawsuits pending, against my former business partner, and the property management of this building.”
* * *
When first I got to Prince Street, Nathan explained to me, that he actually had not one, but two, overpriced apartments. He rationalized to me, how he inadvertently wound up with the dual rentals in the same bourgeoisie building. Nathan had wanted to move from a one-bedroom on the fifth floor to a two-bedroom on the sixth floor, and signed a new lease, assuming that the management company would let him out of the old one. They didn’t, and now he was on the hook for the both!
Between paying for all of these lawyers, not to mention having to lay down the rent for two high-end residences in an ultra-hip neighborhood, Nathan was burning through cash, and bleeding out, faster than a fornicating teenager in a Friday the 13th movie.
He desperately needed income, but luckily, Nathan informed me from the sofa, he already had the foresight to put a plan in the works.
“In fact,” Nathan further elaborated, “you’ve already begun the process of turning my living fiasco, into a money-making opportunity, while I was away…”
Nathan had left for the famous festival, flying out on the 21st of August and left me in charge of his pair of pads, just two days, after I was begged out to the Big Apple. While he was gone, Nathan had given me my first assignment, which was to take an inventory of everything in both apartments on a spreadsheet.
He instructed me to collect an excruciating amount of detail accounting for the full complement of all items on both floors, including, but not limited to, furniture, kitchen utensils, toiletries, and cleaning supplies. He even had me record the individual names of the DVD’s and the books on his shelves.
I couldn’t understand what the purpose behind this was, but I did it anyway, even as I took advantage of an opportunity for a sabbatical by myself in the city for two weeks, to work on my writing, and brainstorm on an idea I had, for a start-up business.
Now though, Nathan shared, he was finally ready, to read me in on his plot, and make sense (so to speak), of the task I completed while he had been baking his brains out, in an arid, dust covered, wasteland.
* * *
Need a hand with your cannabiz?
“I’ve got a scheme for you to make some scratch,” Nathan submitted, “while making sure, that I can cover my nut.”
“Ok…” I anxious about, what he might have up his sleeve.
“We’re going to illegally sublet both apartments,” Nathan pitched me his caper, “as an underground hotel on Craigslist, and you’re going to manage the whole thing.”
“We’ll rent out one of the rooms, and stay in the other?” I clarified.
“No, we’ll rent out both,” Nathan revealed.
“Ok… where will we, stay?” I responded with concern.
“We’ll stay in which ever one isn’t being occupied, and if they’re both full, we’ll get a hotel somewhere else.”
“So, we’re basically just going to move all of our stuff, up and down, back and forth, between the two floors, every day?” I was skeptical.
“We need to be flexible and nimble to capture every potential demographic of guest,” Nathan educated me, “from singles to couples, and families. That way, we can keep at least one of the rooms booked all the time.”
“Well, I can help you for a little while, because you’re family and all…” I cautiously hedged my boundaries, “but I’m not sure how I feel about working for you officially, or committing to a long engagement…”
* * *
“Hold on,” I panted, gasping for air and out of shape, “let’s stop here for a second.”
“You can take a break in a minute,” Nathan battled back, as he stretched his arms out, behind his head, “let’s load up the dolly, and then I’ll dump this cargo downstairs, while you stay here and guard the rest of the stuff.”
My cousin, is really starting to push his luck…
I leaned my arm up against the wall by the elevator and caught my breath. I had put on a bunch of weight after I graduated, as I had been sitting around on my ass, getting flabby while finishing my new novel.
The first draft had been my senior thesis at the College of Santa Fe. Since then, I had endlessly reworked my meandering masterpiece, even while sending out query letters to publishers and agents. Unfortunately though, I hadn’t gotten any bites back yet on my whacky, post-apocalyptic, fiction book, Assholes at the End of the World.
This is lunacy. My fatigue was festering. We never should have moved this much crap into the hallway to begin with! We should have just started with a manageable number of things, and then taken more, smaller trips!
I wiped sweat off from my face with the back of my forearm, we’re just going to have to move the same stuff upstairs again, in another day or two!
Our plan still didn’t make any sense, but I wasn’t going to argue with Nathan about it again, especially not this morning.
It was 9/18/08, and the economy was in a total tailspin. The day before, Wall-Street had just been taken over by anarchists. They were committed to occupying the finical district and other places across the country. The protestors were squatting for social justice and wouldn’t leave until an undefined list of demands were met.
My mind had been wandering since I woke up, and with doomsday seemingly looming at our society’s doorstep, I was just glad to have a safe spot to lay-low for a moment while I waited to see how the unrest plaguing the nation, was going to play out.
I slowly and agonizingly helped Nathan stack the mess of clutter from all over the hallway onto the cart. Nathan was fairly fit and athletic, at least relative to the sorry state that I was in. He zipped around me in circles, at seemingly super-human speeds, putting me to shame by comparison as I laboriously and slothfully, fussed with the wagon.
Nathan’s only gear these days was fast-AF, and more than ever, he seemed like a man on a mission; albeit, possibly, a suicide mission. It was evident that Nathan had undergone a radical transformation, and appeared like almost a different person, since he had gotten back from Burning Man, two weeks before. Since this time, I noticed that Nathan had been taking a lot of Adderall, and in retrospect; when he brought me up to speed on the hotel-hustle, he looked like, he hadn’t slept in weeks.
A wealthy looking, older woman, seemed a little stuck-up, as she struggled to navigate the obstructions and detritus that had exploded across the hallway from out of Nathan’s 6th floor apartment.
I hefted a heavy cardboard box of files out of her path as she walked by. Unappreciative of my efforts to clear her way, she appraised me with a look of contempt as she went into her flat.
I had kind of become, Nathan’s de-facto unpaid intern, in a bizarre business-boot camp. At best, I was gaining invaluable experience and knowledge that would help me on my own entrepreneurial journey. At worst, my suffering would probably at the very least, make for a funny story.
I furthermore had refused money from my cousin, because I didn’t want to be beholden to him; and if you take someone’s money, that also means you have to take their shit. I might as well have accepted the money though, since I was already taking a firehouse, full of his excrement, anyway…
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Nathan impressed upon me, “let’s get this stuff downstairs.”
I dropped the box down on the cart with a thud. The dolly was getting maxed out with a hodgepodge of our belongings and Nathan’s business boxes. The eclectic odd and ends that we still needed to collect from the floor of the hallway included five laptops with various loose cases and wires, a bowling pin, a drum simulator, a guitar, a camera bag, and a book of quotations about, “The Funniest Things”.
After another trip we got all of our junk removed from the common space and relocated into a messy, lopsided pile, in the center of the living room in the flat on the fifth floor. Nathan handed me a bottled water and I sat down for a sorely needed break.
“Are you taking notes?” Nathan kept me on my toes, “I have a meeting in a few minutes, there’s no time to fuck around.”
I pulled out my phone and opened up a notepad application. I had recently purchased my first smart phone. They had just released the inaugural iPhone the year before, but all I could afford was a cheap knock-off by LG.
“I need you to take the linens and my dirty clothes to the laundromat,” Nathan laid out my marching orders, “when you go back you need to do a deep dive into 6K. Make sure it’s spotless, and then double check everything again. Then be ready to meet our guest this evening. You, getting all of this?”
I’m not sure how much more of this I can take, I seethed, I am quickly careening towards critical-mass!
“I get all of that,” I quibbled, “but what’s wrong with the laundry machines in this building? That would be a lot faster, and much, much easier, if you ask my opinion.”
“We don’t want management to catch onto us.” He shook his head, “Jesus, Gabe… you have less common sense, than a sun-tan lotion, lifestyle-brand, for spelunkers.”
“Ok,” with my app still open, I waited to see if he had anything further to dictate to me, “do you have any like… special instructions?”
“Define, special instructions.”
“You know…” I stammered, “for the laundry?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, you know, special settings or whatever…”
“I’m not sure I follow?” Nathan stared back at me in disbelief, “Is this, your first-time, doing laundry?”
“I usually just throw everything in,” I tried to justify myself, “I don’t have any problem with the colors mixing with the whites. I’m for all of the garments in the laundry coming together, and overcoming their differences.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Nathan called me out, “I’m pretty sure that’s a Seinfeld bit, by the way.”
“For my heat setting,” I painfully explained, “I usually just choose… random.”
“For the love of God,” Nathan looked dramatically disappointed, “where have you been, all of your life?”
“I’ve been, all over the place!”
“Just separate the colors,” Nathan chided me, “and choose warm water.”
“Warm water. Got it.” I entered a note onto my phone screen.
* * *
I meticulously separated out the colors, but I wasn’t sure where the greys or tans fit into the picture. I took my best stab at segregation and started three loads in large commercial machines.
My journey to the laundromat had been a real odyssey, and after I started the wash, I plopped down on a plastic chair along the wall, dripping a pool of sweat onto the floor, in front of me.
A few minutes later, I leaned back in the picnic chair, and checked my phone. I noticed that I had missed a call from my mother.
“Hi honey, how’s it going out there?”
The building was busy and buzzing with activity, as I continued to sit still for a rare moment of rest to recover from my near fatal, laundry-death-march.
“Eh, it’s ok.”
“Where are you anyway?” My mom investigated, “it sounds like there’s construction going on.”
“I’m in a laundromat. Just working on… a project with Nathan.”
“Are you making any money over there, yet?” My mom grilled me.
I peeped through the small portal window, watching the bedsheets spin around in sudsy circles. “No.”
“Nathan’s not paying you at all?” My mom got on my case, “it sounded like, you’ve been doing a lot of work for him?”
“He offered me money, kind of,” I tried to communicate, “but I… ah… I, turned him down.”
“You what?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Well, that’s all well and good,” my mom nagged me, “but how are you going to live?”
“I should be getting some money from those writing gigs pretty soon.” I apprised her, optimistically.
“They still haven’t paid you, either?” My mom continued to interrogate me.
“Which one?” I asked her to be more specific, “I have three clients.”
“I don’t know,” she shot back, “have any of them, paid you, yet?”
I scratched my chin.
“No.”
In theory, three separate gigs that I’d worked on over the past two months were supposed to pay off by now. In practice though, I had gotten nowhere with collecting on the invoices, that I was owed.
“You know,” my mom warned me, “your deferments are going to run out, and you’re going to have to start making payments soon.”
“Dear God, can’t I just, get another forbearance?”
“Sorry.” She broke the bad news.
“Ok,” I could feel the pressure building, as the walls were slowly, but steadily, starting to close in on me, “I’ll figure something out, I suppose.”
“Listen,” my mom threw me a bone, “I talked to my boss, and they’re hiring at one of the companies under our umbrella.”
“What would I be doing?” I got up to check on the clothes, and saw I still had another three minutes left on the machines.
“It’s assembly work,” she brought me up to speed, “manufacturing cardboard boxes.”
“You want me to work at a box factory?” I asked, incredulously.
“The pay is $15/hour to start, and there’s benefits too. You need to get insurance.”
I still didn’t have health insurance and I had been doing my best to avoid getting sick or injured.
“I’m an outside the box kind of guy,” I contended, “I can’t work in a factory, that literally, makes boxes!”
“Well, you’re going to have to come up with some kind of realistic plan for your life… sooner than later.” My mom’s words lingered, long after I hung up the phone.
The clock is ticking…
I moved the laundry to two big commercial dryers and of course I had to leave to go and get some more quarters.
I was running out of time to do something with my career path. I had an idea for a start-up company, but that was just a notion, merely a pipe-dream in my head. I couldn’t even say if it was realistic at all. Was there a future in my fancy? Was there, in staying with Nathan? Or dare I say… at the box factory?
The hour was at hand to leave my past and my youth behind, and to learn how to be an adult. My best friend Ben’s recent death, a few months before, had been a sign for me. Ben had gotten into a fight with his pregnant girlfriend and went off drinking and partying with some co-workers. He mixed booze with fentanyl and then… just like that, Ben’s story was over.
In the blink of an eye, he was now gone forever, and I never even had a chance to say goodbye.
All that matters is making the most of my life, I reflected. We’re all on borrowed time, here on this earth…
I went back and started to get the apartment cleaned up. I washed the bathroom, made the bed, and then dusted, but I wasn’t sure what to do after that…
Wow, I’m terrible at cleaning. I observed.
Once the apartment was in ship-shape, by my limited standards, I went to take a break and picked up my phone from the counter in the kitchen. I saw that I had missed a few calls, including one from Johnson.
I debated for a moment whether or not to call him back.
I was still a little aggrieved with Johnson, even though we had since made amends over the poker game incident, and had stayed in semi-frequent email contact, ever since I left Santa Fe.
I searched my memories, replaying Johnson and Crackle’s incarceration, and subsequent release. When they got home from the airport, Johnson pulled me aside and apologized.
“I felt like what happened was our karma,” Johnson admitted, “because of what we did, to you.”
I had shared his sentiment that ‘car-ma’ had played a role in their being pulled over and arrested. I was only half-kidding, when I confessed to Johnson that I may have possibly placed a curse on them.
Johnson and I shook hands, and he told me that I could continue to stay in the garage for free for the rest of the semester, until I graduated later that spring.
“Hey Johnson,” I put my phone down on the faux-granite countertop in the kitchen, and put the call on speaker, “are you still in New Mexico?”
“No,” he relayed, “I moved to Arcada. How are things going in the city?”
“Great,” I distorted the facts, “I’m just working with my cousin on some background research for a new book I’m writing about modern day, indentured servants.”
“Got it,” Johnson read between the lines, “well hope that the hundo I sent you was helpful?”
“Absolutely,” I agreed, gratefully, “and thank you for that. By the way, I’d be happy to accommodate you, if you dare to go double or nothing, on John McCain?”
Johnson had recently sent me money to pay-up for a bet we had made on the democratic primaries. My pony had been Obama, who defeated Johnson’s dog, overpowering the Clinton campaign with the promise of hope and change.
“No thanks,” Johnson snickered, “I’ll stick to the sports.”
Johnson and I had gambled on a lot of games together in college. He was an athlete in high school, and a lifelong fanatic and member of the fitness fraternity. Meanwhile when I was in school, I was never tall enough and always too Jewish, to make it onto any of the teams. Moreover, I had moved around so much that there was no home club in any major league sport that I identified with.
Nevertheless, my policy as a betting practice was to always wager against whichever team that Johnson liked, or was emotionally invested in. This would ensure tension, drama, and stakes that would help make the games seem more watchable.
Johnson summarized for me, the tale of how he had tried to settle in Los Angeles to pursue a writing career, but had stumbled by himself in a strange city, and had soon retreated to go and stay with his friends in the forest.
I, in turn, brought him up to speed on my crazy stories from SoHo.
“Hey Johnson,” I probed, “do you still have any farmer friends?”
“Bro, I’m at the farm now.”
“Let’s talk about trim then,” I threw it out there, “medical marijuana. The time is now. Do you see where I’m going with all of this?”
“I read you loud and clear,” Johnson processed my inuendo, “you want to start a grow?”
I gazed wistfully into a blue and white painting that was leaning up against the wall of the apartment. The picture was painted on a large plexiglass board, and looked like an abstract rendering of the sky, on a calm and peaceful morning.
“Kind of,” I countered, “I mean… we can talk about that too, but… I want to do the edibles again, though this time like a legit company. Let’s carve out a new niche together, in California after the election.”
Obama had promised to reform federal cannabis policy as part of his platform. I was banking on him winning the presidential election and opening up the floodgates to cannabis legalization.
After Johnson had snapped on me, and he and Crackle, had gotten popped, it should have been an easy decision, for me to move on with my life, focus completely on my future as a writer, and stop selling pot for good.
On the other hand…
Something remarkable had snared my interest, capturing my curiosity and imagination. I had read somewhere about a legal cannabis market that was evolving in California. After I let that clam-bake in for a minute, I became intrigued and inspired, as I began to research this incubating industry.
I daydreamed about being a first mover in a brand new, frontier space that was still wide open. On top of that, there was a social mission, and we could help upend an unfair and counterproductive, criminal justice system.
Moreover, as a writer, I knew that I would have a blast with marketing, advertising, and the creative side of the business, and… I had a really, funny concept for a brand!
I was also just amazed at the economic opportunity of processing trim, and saw this as my window to get started without any capital. At the time, a lot of growers were just throwing trim away or burning it.
Basically, they didn’t want to take the risk of storing the leaves, when the buds that they were sitting on were so much more valuable, and the cops charged by the weight when they arrested you. The police didn’t care if you had fifty pounds of flowers or leaf trimmings, because to them, either way, they were able to collar you for fifty pounds of felony possessions with the intent to distribute, and then some.
The risk for the growers in storing the trim, made it extremely cheap to acquire this raw material that could be turned into a value-added product with a sky-high markup!
Even though I didn’t have much money, if I could get my hands on some trim to start with, I knew from experience, that I could flip that, and then reinvest in more products, until eventually, I would be able to afford the infrastructure that I would need to evolve to the next level.
I imagined doing this at scale in a professional manufacturing facility with quality control and best practices. From the outside looking in, these qualities were lacking in the industry, and would be differentiators, in and of themselves.
Key ingredients, for instance- like ingredient labels, were missing from products, and would be needed in order to drive widespread adoption.
Furthermore, I learned that there was no consistent method of dosing cannabis products in the marketplace, and that the different edibles being sold in dispensaries, had wildly varying systems for measuring and communicating a product’s efficacy to consumers.
For example, while one rice crispy treat might have a label that listed it’s dosage as five ‘happy face emojis’ of strength, a brownie from a competing brand, might instead feature, three ‘gorilla’s’ of potency.
Five is more than three, I tried to work out the math in my head, but a gorilla is stronger than a happy face; so which pastry, will get me more fucked up?
Even though I was by no means, a professional person myself, I saw that there was an opportunity and a need for professional people and companies, that would conduct themselves responsibly, and in doing so, trailblaze the way, to bring the marijuana market out into the open.
“I’m in.” Johnson could see the vision too, “I’m going to try my luck in LA again before Thanksgiving,” Johnson proposed, “why don’t you come out now and stay on the farm with me? Then we’ll head south in November, and look for a pad together in La-La-land.”
LA was certainly the place to be for an aspiring writer and ganja-preneur.
“I’ll have some cashflow coming in from my freelance work… eventually,” I waffled, “but… I am pretty broke right now.”
“Hey man,” he offered, “if you can afford your plane ticket, I can spot you for a little while. I feel like I owe you one.”
As I hung up the phone, I felt more certain than ever, that it was my destiny, to go out west and bring my start-up dream to life. Now… I just needed to figure out how to make it happen.
* * *
I woke up next day, on the wrong side of the air mattress. I knew I needed to get some money together ASAP; so it was time to bite the bullet and check in on my ghost-writing check. I waited until 9am to call and shake down Don, who was one of my non-paying patrons.
He and his wife Janice were Wall-Street professionals who had been living a secret, double-life as swingers, throughout their twenty plus years of marriage. They had advertised on Craigslist that they were looking to hire a writer, to help them tell their story and show the world that they, and the swinger community at large, were just like normal, everyday people, with jobs, kids, pets and mortgages. They might even be… your next-door neighborhood!
Desperate to land a paid writing job to prove myself and power my ambitions, I had responded to their add. Erotic-writing wasn’t my forte, but ‘beggars can’t be choosers’, and I didn’t wind up as a beggar again!
I got a response and then followed up by creating a short, smut-sample for them. The swingers approved of my bawdy bid, and I worked up a contract from a free template I found online. They agreed to a budget, and then I went out to Long Island to interview them in person, and generate the background, character details, drama, humor, and story arcs that I needed to craft a narrative.
* * *
I took a train out and Don picked me up at the station in a black BMW sedan. He was a short Jewish guy, with a shaved bald head, and a heavy NY accent. He drove for a few blocks and then we pulled into the driveway of a nice house in the suburbs.
This is probably just a front! I was starting to get nervous. I expected the inside of their house to look like a torture chamber, adorned in black leather, with whips and chains hanging from the walls.
Is there a chance I could end up getting taking prisoner in a sex dungeon? I worried, how long will it take for my family and friends to notice that I’m gone? I have a reputation for being a spontaneous traveler… Would they even bother to send out a search party?
Luckily, Don and Jan’s house was disgustingly boring and sickeningly vanilla, filled with quaint knick-knacks and children’s toys. Their living room looked like it could have been the setting for any home, upper-middle class, USA.
I spent all day with them, recording their experiences and taking notes before Don dropped me back off at the train station.
I began work on the book right away, though I found it challenging to put myself in their shoes and recreate their lewd life story, in a way which I thought would be appealing to a mainstream audience, and not totally tasteless.
My efforts on this project had carried over into NY, where I had finally submitted the first quarter of the manuscript, a few days before Nathan had returned from Burning Man. As per my agreement with the swingers, they were supposed to have sent me, my first check by now, and they were already more than two weeks late.
I was aware that both Don and Jan worked in the finance industry, and that the market had just melted down. I was apprehensive that their silence could portend the possibility, that they had lost a fortune and were having second thoughts about moving forward with the project, and/or would be unable to pony up for the work I already finished…
* * *
“Oh… Gabe,” Don sounded disappointed as he spoke my name, “hold on, let me get Jan.”
I walked aimlessly on autopilot down Prince Street. I stopped and waited, listlessly loitering; I leaned against a tree-planter.
“Hey, Gabe,” I could hear Jan’s voice, “it sounds kind of noisy where you are.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t have anywhere private to speak at the moment,” I attempted to excuse myself, “I’ll mute my phone, while I’m not talking.”
“Well, I’m actually kind of glad you called,” Jan took the floor, “I wanted to chat, regarding your recent draft.”
“That’s exactly what I wanted to discuss, as well.” I inhaled deeply.
“Gabe? Gabe? Are you still there?”
I remembered that I was on mute and pressed the button.
“Sorry, was on mute,” I continued to pace, as I found myself standing in front of an iron fence, enclosing the graveyard at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral Market, “I wanted to touch base, about the check.”
“Let’s circle back to that in a minute.” Jan insisted, “I’d like to address some issues with the content first.”
“Ok.” I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I immediately felt like I was under attack.
“I’m not really happy, with what you did to my character in the first draft you sent us.” Jan reproached me.
“What was wrong with it?” I struggled to keep it together and resisted my knee-jerk reaction to take a defensive posture, “I mean, of course I’m happy to fix it…”
“You made me seem like a total slut,” Jan critiqued, “I’m fucking someone in every scene.”
I was blindsided by her feedback because I thought I had already taken great pains to tone down the sexually explicit nature of the narrative.
I stared along at the aged, oblong walls of the only basilica in Manhattan. There were supposed to be catacombs and burial chambers deep beneath the storied cathedral walls of Old St Patrick’s. I had never been down there to check it out myself, but at that moment, I felt like crawling below the surface of the earth, sequestered from the light of day, for a brief reprieve from my troubles in life.
“This is a book about swinging,” I pointed out, “and I did use your interview notes to directly drive the material. I just kind of organized what you told me.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Jan proceeded to pan my work, “but I just thought you made me seem like a tramp. For instance, the scene where I meet Don… it was just kind of… gross. There was no magic to it, it needs to be classier. Does that make sense?”
“You’re referring to the scene, where you and Don meet, and have anal sex, in the bathroom of the biker bar?”
“Exactly,” she charged me, “that scene. You need to do a better job of capturing the romance of the moment.”
I wondered whether she was being serious. I continued walking left past the Cathedral and towards Bleeker St.
Halfway up the block on Mott it was mostly residential and pretty dead, so I paused by a trash can, and lit a joint, from an empty pack of cigarettes in my pocket.
“Ok,” I sat down on a cement staircase outside an apartment building and took a few puffs, “I’ll do my best to clean it up.”
“Well, what about the next chapter?” Jan continued her onslaught, “how are you going to make that more, family-friendly?
“The gangbang scene?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“That was our wedding!” Jan admonished me.
“Yeah, but you slept with everyone in the wedding party!” I was beside myself, as I continued to argue with her.
“I know,” she instructed, “and you need to make it sound classy.”
“So, are you guys going to pay me, or what?” I put my cards on the table.
“We will,” Don assured me, “after you fix this draft.”
“Well…” I anxiously walked down the sidewalk, “I was kind of counting on this check. I had budgeted around the fact that you guys would pay me on time and now, this is kind of messing with my logistics.”
“What do you mean?” Don investigated.
“I’m moving to California at the end of the month.” I mentioned casually.
“You are?” Don sounded disturbed, “you’ve never brought that up before. This is kind of a shock.”
“I’ve got to admit, I’m a little bit concerned,” Jan piled on, “what if we need to do another interview?”
“We can do it over the phone.” I attempted to head off this pretext to a problem.
“I’m a little worried that your focus already seems to be a little scattered,” Don continued to throw fuel on the fire.
“That’s exactly why I need to get out of the craziness, I’m currently in,” I pleaded, “and find a more normal living situation!”
“Ok,” Jan judged, “it’s not our place to tell you where you can live.”
“I appreciate you working with me,” I lied, “thanks for your flexibility.”
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as we’re happy with the product.” Jan presided, “And that’s where we’d like to see some improvements…”
I committed myself to jumping through whatever ridiculous hoops that I needed to, in order to help underwrite my journey out west. This would be different from the meandering sojourns of my youth. This time I had desings on starting a company, connections for the trim I needed as rocket fuel to launch the ship, and the path of being a writer to make money as I was getting started.
I couldn’t wait until I got paid by these swingers though, to book my plane ticket, or I might lose the opportunity to get established in a location in LA with Johnson. Even though I was apprehensive about partnering with Johnson again, he was the devil that I knew, and moreover, when he and I were in alignment, we had an unstoppably, successful working chemistry. Most importantly though, Johnson seemed to be the only person on earth that really believed in my abilities, and bought into my imagination.
Short on prospects for the possibility of immediate income, I called up my aunt, Beverley, and begrudgingly borrowed a few hundred bucks. I bit down on my bile and feeling a little nauseous; I pulled the trigger, and purchased an airplane ticket, online. I elected to forgo the insurance, meaning that I had made my decision intentionally irrevocable, and sabotaged my ability, to second guess myself.
* * *
Just a few more days to go, I visualized my way through my suffering, before I affect my escape, from this asylum.
I was panting heavily; hunched over, with my hands on my hips, as I sought out a second wind. One more pointless, painstaking, apartment move, and then… freedom; and I come face to face, with the scariest, craziest and most fucking amazing adventure, of my life, so far!
“I was thinking,” Nathan pushed the dolly into the elevator, “we need to work out a new deal so that you can start making money.”
“I’m leaving,” I leveled with him, “I’m flying out to SFO, in two weeks.”
We stood on the elevator in silence, as the doors opened to the sixth floor, and I helped Nathan roll the truck out.
“The truth is,” I followed him out into the hallway, pushing the cart, as he pulled, “I’m planning to start a legal, medical marijuana-infused products, company.”
“Marijuana-infused product?” Nathan unlocked the door and held it open, “what is that like, a pot brownie?”
“Exactly,” I squeezed the cart from the handle in the back, and shoved with my shoulder, until I got the wheels up over the threshold of the door frame.
“Not to be a dick,” Nathan gave me his blunt assessment, as I parked the dolly in the living room, “but to my knowledge, you don’t have any experience in manufacturing, general business administration, or even in, baking brownies.”
“That is true, I don’t have any real background in any of those things,” I conceded, “I do however, have a baller brand idea,” I boasted, “so I was kind of just hoping, to reverse engineer my success from… the name.”
“What is your brand?” He humored me.
“I Can’t Believe… it’s Pot Butter.”
“That’s kind of funny…” Nathan wasn’t laughing at all, even a little, “but you know you’re probably going to get sued for brand infringement?”
“I’m just planning to exploit this gimmick in the beginning to get my foot in the door, at the dispensaries,” I began to unload the dolly, “and then once I get serious, I’ll change it, as needed.”
“No offense bro,” Nathan helped me take the clutter off of the cart and immediately started haphazardly scattering, and spreading junk out across the living room, “but I don’t think you’ve thought this through. I’m not sure if you’re ready?”
“I’ll be fine,” I warranted, “I’ve been in worse situations before… believe me…”
“I know,” Nathan stacked cartons full of his documents into a pyramid against the wall by the front door, “I do, but still…”
“Have you ever had someone try to drunkenly force you, to cut their finger off, with a scorching hot, kitchen knife before?” I posed rhetorically, “while you were alone, at night, in the middle of the woods?”
“Sure,” Nathan quipped, “all the time, it happened most recently, this past Thursday.”
“Believe it or not, this is actually, my life-story,” I locked eyes with Nathan so that he knew I was being serious, “I survived that and many other hazardous, hilarious, and life-threatening situations before.”
“I get all that,” Nathan retorted, “but do you really think it’s wise, to give up on a sure thing, in this economy, for a half-baked plan, to make pot-brownies?”
* * *
For the next week I worked diligently on edits to the pretentious porn book and then turned in an updated draft to the swingers. However, by the morning that I was supposed to leave for California, I still hadn’t received a check from any of my clients yet.
It was too late to turn back now, though. In my mind, I was already past the point of no-return. I got on the plane, and then later that day, and for the second time in my life, I arrived in San Francisco with only $20 to my name!
To Be Continued…