It was my seventh phone call in an hour. One more would have been impolite under the circumstances. The seventh is the antsy one. There would be no eighth call. At that point I would decide to call another hook-up.
But Amir had the best shit, usually two or three kinds, and all kind. And the particular stinky strain that I was seeking, Amir was holding right now (Purple Pine Berry). Clearly indicated by the thick airplane-pillow-shaped clear package autographed with black magic marker it came in. Purportedly crossed with Afghani seeds and Thai Stick on a lush Vancouver mountainside in a wood thick with blackberry bushes; it was pinecone-shaped and the mythical “Purple” that only comes from high grade Indica. We already discussed the Purple and the Pine- but the Berry, oh the Berry; sweet, tart, and soft. It was the same shit that Willie Nelson was busted with in Kansas on his tour bus a few years ago. Some of the strangest and strongest marijuana I have ever smoked. The fresh taste of the languid smoke burned slow, offering a true body high my customers were clamoring for.
So good that I would short every quarter ounce I sold a gram (using a thick Zip-loc sandwich baggie, instead of a generic type, to make up the weight). Usually leaving me with a nice big cola of a bud for myself. Every six quarters I sold would create a bonus bag, making me a lot of friends, money, and a surplus of weed to smoke finger-sized joints with that summer.
Cursing and pacing under a cold slow rain like silver spray paint, Amir’s neighbors wonder what the hell I’m doing in their gangway, squinting and looking up into a murky sky for twenty straight minutes. I’m soaked and trying to decide if I should trust the bell I just rang ten times (it’s been broken for years), or hop the fence and bang on the door. The fence is a slick black aluminum monster. I twisted an ankle for a quarter pound on its sheer face a few years back. It was Saturday morning and Amir snorted coke on Friday nights, and required some rousing.
I want to tell the neighbors baring their nostrils at me from above that the guy I get my weed from is really stupid. He usually forgets that I am outside. I want to tell the neighbors posed like pigeons in their window, phone in hand calling 9-1-1, that Amir doesn’t have a bell and he forgets to check his cell phone. I wish them to invite me in, and let me explain my clandestine presence over tea and cookies, or a Bud Light or something, anything but standing out in this rain while being eyeballed.
Amir picks up his cell phone and coughs “downstairs?” into it. The rain hits my exposed ear lob opposite my cell phone. A head pokes sideways out of a window above. Squinting up at the neighbors who aren’t there (they don’t care) I giggle to myself about a habitual paranoia that goes hand in hand with smoking and buying. Amir’s bald head and bushy eyebrows followed by a thick right arm stick out into the rain, defying gravity horizontally, out of a tiny kitchen window four stories up. He’s never wearing a shirt. He looks like a naked sideways bobble head doll.
The silver key is airborne now, lofting down toward my head from the fourth floor above. I reach up to catch it, pausing to think about the amount of times we have went through this ritual and its catch/ drop ratio. At about thirty yards, it’s amazing that it favors the catch. This time the key breaks through my hands and cracks me on the forehead like a proper Chinese Star. I’m surprised at how much it hurts. Bending over to pick up the key between my legs, blood rushes to my head and turns the volume up on the sting. I check for blood between my eyes, and my fingertips meet the slippery trickle. For an overweight and lethargic cokehead, Amir has incredible aim. I grumble my way up the back steps with my T-shirt flipped over my face, and I apply pressure to a new wound, steeling myself for the minor social event that is the weed buy. It’s always low-key with Amir. No big deal. But we always have to smoke. Fucking have to. It doesn’t matter what is going on after the buy. Job interview, Funeral, or First Date, I never forget to bring my Visine and breath mints.
His social status as a dealer of fine cannabis since high school has stunted his social growth, his unchecked megalomania. Now in his thirties, he has the air of a Mafioso. No matter what he says or does, his inner circle of friends never critiques, and always approves. Every time I come through someone new is washing his dishes with a ball cap on backwards, wearing a nifty pink floral apron that Amir keeps for the occasion. Amir always has a group of helper monkeys to laugh at his stupid jokes or agree with his bizarre statements. He feeds them shake from the bottom of the bags once they are limp and his pocket is fat. He then washes the resin out the bag with extra dish soap and shreds it in a gigantic office shredder in the kitchen. Sometimes I’d rather get caught with the oz. (real weight) than endure another conversation like the one where I explained to Amir what a Polaroid was. I repeatedly asked if he was being serious, while explaining the instant photographic process Edwin Land introduced it to the world in 1932. Thinking the fact he never saw one before incredulous, wishing to take my little baggie and hit the road so I could go make some dinner. Weirder still, he graduated with a Photography degree from a prominent local Art School.
Walking heel to toe, I take a seat on his expensive leather couch that’s too big for the tiny living room (More evidence that drug dealers do not know how to use tape measures) and endure his joke about the wound on my forehead. A permanent murk of heavy smoke at chest level swirls in the gray light, and is eternally visible and disturbed every time I enter the room and sit down on the cold leather. Amir always seems freshly showered and I think he shaves his head every day. He’s rough today though. Holding his head together with a free hand, switching between the left and the right palm, keeping pressure on his frontal lobe while he rolls a joint from the thick oz. in the little bag he is selling me. We always smoke out of the bag I’m buying to keep it away from the federal sentencing evidence table.
Amir’s guy Devlin peddles his wares out of his 1978 Town & Country station wagon with ghostly traces of Grateful Dead stickers on the bumper. He hasn’t had a driver’s license in years. He usually smokes a joint or two while driving in the ’78. Not the brightest guy, he’s been known to light his beard on fire while toking. The neon yellow shopping bag filled with quarter pounds ready for sale sitting nearly exposed on his back seat. Recently busted for smoking out of a corncob pipe while driving, the cops never bothered to check there. They just took the pipe and continued their rounds.
Devlin throws seeds out the same window daily, from his smoking chair, after work, late shift. People’s Court whines from the TV, and the seeds land four floors beneath his window. Months later, a four foot high stalk rose high above and eventually topped out at eight feet. The bad apartment complex landscape shown bright in front of its shadow, visible 24 hours under lawn lights. Apartment #420.

Sativa
“Researchers and treatment experts have argued for some time that today’s more powerful marijuana has more harmful effects on users. This report underscores that we are no longer talking about the drug of the 1960s and 1970s — this is Pot 2.0.”
—John Walters
Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy

What the hell is this bozo talking about? Like a plant cultivated and used in China six thousand years before Christ could all of sudden become deadly and start thinning the herd; and what’s with the weird computer metaphor? He’s trying to turn a plant into the Terminator. The same super-strains of marijuana existed in the 1970’s, and through natural selection gently guided by smokers who have turned to science, in backrooms and underground bunkers bright with 1000 watt bulbs the world over, weed is more powerful and ubiquitous than it’s ever been. But it’s still just a weed.
As a mid to low level dealer in Chicago, one has to watch his back. Too many meatheads have guns here. But as a smoker, times are good. Weeds everywhere and quality is better than ever for the right price.
But don’t get it twisted. The ditch weed our forefathers, the hippies, smoked is still available. Everyone and their Mom are smoking marijuana now. An uptight real estate agent I know who makes about 200K a year shocked me recently when he produced a bag of flame from the glove box of his freshly leased BMW. “Don’t you guys do coke?” is what a colleague asked from the backseat as he gladly rolled a pinner up, on the bright glossy new car manual now doubling as a weed tray. My beloved drug is being smoked by all stratum of society; and I feel a loss for the cloak and dagger days of my youth. I yearn for the burn of old. I miss the mystique and danger of the forbidden fruit and the counter culture allure smoking pot once had. We’re post-Nixon. Altamont and a headache.
When my parents met on Haight Ashbury at the height of the sixties fresh of the boat from Ireland, they looked like they were trapped in the fifties. White shirts and chinos, beehive hairdos and Catwoman glasses, parade before me in the family pictures I study after learning about the 60’s in high school. It was at this exact time I starting smoking regularly. Each picture had the date on the bottom in that futuristic font found on old pictures. 1967. 1968. 1969. San Francisco. Completely oblivious to the profound movement that was happening in my parent’s new neighborhood, they drank and smoked cigarettes. And made fun of the longhaired men in robes running around stinking of Petrouli.
My older brother and I shared a room until I was 18 and went away to college. We used to smoke out of a homemade bowl made from a brass-plumbing fixture, while playing Nintendo late at night, my parents soundly asleep in the next room. We were mortified when my Mom entered without warning in her pink nightgown one night. We had just finished a heavy session. Our little lungs blowing full body hits into the tight room with its bunk beds and Iron Maiden posters, the blue flashing lights of Super Mario 3 on the walls. “What’s that smell?” Mom demanded. My brother brazenly answers, “Cologne.” My mom dumbfounded me when she replied, “jeez that’s nice. I should get some for your father.” My brother just laughed and packed another bowl.
The first time I partaked in the Blessed Sacrament was the fourth grade. In a tree with the Krulik brothers, the new kids in the neighborhood, and their older tattooed cousin. I thought they were cool because of their long hair and black suede shoes with red stitching. Way past park curfew, we took turns toking the joint. It vaguely smelled of cat piss. At first I thought I was smoking a cigarette, but when the acrid smoke hit my lungs I knew it was something else completely. All dirty T-shirts and sweaty faced, we each carefully hit the tiny joint and passed it gingerly back and forth to one another through dark maple tree branches until it went out and the cousin ate the roach. He laughed manically and his gray teeth gleamed in the dark. On my second hit, I hacked and nearly broke the branch I was sitting on. I thought I was going to break my neck. An unmarked Narc car creped in a circle around the park minutes later, flashing its light into random trees. It missed our tree. To this day I never have been more scared. And exhilarated.

Related posts:

1. WORD ON THE STREET: SMOKING BAN
2. WHY CIGARETTES ARE WORTH THE HORRIBLE DEATH
3. I SMOKED DMT
4. PURE HEAVEN!
5. OPEN MIC: MY TRIP TO THE 7th PRECINCT