This story was originally written in late 2000. It was published in a free little paper called the "Backroads" in the Fall edition. I've made a few edits since then. DISCLAIMER: This story is a completely fictional account. I have never sold pot. I do not know "Ford" or "Jen" or any of the other fictional characters in this story.

The life of a drug dealer isn't as easy as everyone thinks. On the other hand, it sure beats working at Wal-Mart. It pays the college tuition too. I'm a small time pot dealer. I drive a few hours out to one of the bigger cities, meet up with a friend of a friend, and bring back a pound or two of pot. You can find a pound for about $1000, and after it gets broken up into ounces, quarters, and eighths, you about double your money. The riskiest part of it all, in my opinion, is driving it back across the interstate. I am always afraid that a headlight will burn out or something, and I'll get stopped. My old K-car absolutely reeks of marijuana by the time we've been in the car for an hour or two, even though the pot is usually wrapped in plastic, brown paper, and then in tinfoil.

Having pot means having friends. Sure, the loyalty of some of them is questionable. But when you run dry for a day or two you figure those ones out fast. You've got to have a good distribution network if you want to get anywhere in the underground scene. Everyone knows someone, and the stuff has to pass from hand to hand so that everyone's comfortable with everyone else next to them. It upsets me when strangers show up on my doorstep looking to buy. I used to play stupid, but hey, it's tough enough to make a buck without pissing folks off.

I got this friend, Danny. We work together at the restaurant. He's a wiry little fellow, and he knows lots of people. He's currently in his second year as a senior at the local high school, and just about everyone he knows sparks up. Honest, Danny's half of my distribution network. Every day I give him an O, and he brings me the money back the next morning. Every day. Mostly I think he breaks it up into the eighths that his friends can afford, and then smokes a fair amount of it himself. That's okay with me. I get an O's worth of cash from him, he gets to spark up as much as he likes, and the stuff gets moved. There are a few people that buy ounces every now and then, a lot of folks that come looking for quarters or less. By the end of the week, it's time to restock. Sunday's as good a day as any, and that's usually when you'll find me and Jack on the interstate.

Jack's the other half of the operation. Before I met him, finding Jane was a hit or miss sort of thing. Sometimes someone knew someone, and occasionally this someone would even have it. Not so with Jack's friends. They always have pounds to sell. So Jack knows where to buy. Me and Danny know where to sell. Jack and I each ante half the money, more or less, and split the difference according to how much each of us had put in the kitty in the first place. I'm a cheap bastard, and I've usually got more cash at the end of the week, so my share is usually a fair bit bigger. A sometimes I manage to score the goods a little cheaper than what Jack thinks we did, so that's money in my pocket too.

Really, all this logistics, buying, selling, knowing who's who? It's all fine in the beginning. You get this rush just from going through the motions, knowing that you're making your dollar by pulling a fast one over on the Man. But after a while it gets boring. You've got to keep reminding yourself that dealing, possessing, toking, it's all illegal. Everyone you know has some on them, or wants to buy some. Everyone jumps at the chance to spark up some of your bud. Free bud is one of the few things better than free beer. Free sex is another. No one even bats an eye at the cool ass turtle shaped hookah. The whole thing just sort of becomes passé after a while. The interesting part is the people you meet.

Ted deals pot too. He's a good friend of mine from high school, and we picked the same college, but he moves in different circles now. He tends to keep things a little smaller, and sometimes when his regular supplier is a little slow to meet his needs, I'll spot him a qp or so. He likes to try different things too. He supplies a lot of the frat boys with GHB. There's a big stink about it being a date rape drug now, and maybe it is, but there's a lot of weight lifter's out there that swear by GHB for building muscle. They probably wouldn't notice any memory gaps anyway.

Chuck grew up in my neighborhood, but he was a couple years older. He's maybe 25 now. He still likes to hang out with us, but he doesn't smoke up much. This guy loves mushrooms. He's the only one I know that grows his own magic mushrooms. He isn't too bright on the business side of things though, and last time I asked him, he was owed more money than he'd ever made selling them. Mushrooms are a funny sort of drug, not like pot at all. I used to think that they were a pretty cool alternative to acid. Acid is way too long of a trip, and freaky things can happen inside your head. That changed after I ate 3 eighths at once. On my word, I saw rainbows of pastel colored stylized flowers, bright primary colored textures flowing across the walls, and this incredible bright red dragon. The dragon was just visible for a moment, a bright red, abstracted, Chinese style dragon. He wasn't visible after that first moment, but I FELT him with me the whole rest of the trip. To hell with that shit. I'll stick to pot.

One time Chuck stopped over with a quarter of shrooms and him, Jack, and me all tripped. Jack and I were roommates at the time, Chuck had flunked out of school and had driven into town to crash with us for the weekend. Chuck can be rather mean and arrogant at times. Jack was breaking the stems off of the caps, and he was going to just eat the caps. Chuck saw what he was doing and started yelling at him, made him eat the whole pile. I thought that was a bad karma way to start off the trip, but I didn't say anything. We went uptown to do some drinking and tripping. I tripped pretty hard, but I kept enough sense to drive properly. Jack was fruity as a bowl of Fruit Loops. He couldn't stop laughing sometimes, and then other times he looked absolutely panic stricken. After a while he couldn't hold a conversation well, and we figured we'd better get him back home.

Jack started looking better after he was home for a few minutes, then he started getting all emotional. I'm not one to talk, because every time I trip I think I've got to sort out all my life's problems, and set my life "back on track" right then and there. Jack doesn't get that way, he just gets all mushy. He kept thanking us for getting him home, and telling us how he couldn't remember where he lived for a while, nor what his name was, and he had just wanted to cry. Jack works out a lot, he's a little taller than me, and probably 70 lbs heavier than me. I'm really, really glad he didn't decide to sit down and cry somewhere, because I doubt that me and scrawny little Chuck would have been able to get him back into the K-car.

So Jack gets the hiccups, and he starts getting obsessed with getting rid of them. He tried breathing into a paper bag, drinking water, holding his breath, all that crap. We stopped him from trying to drink water while standing on his head. With the way his mental state was, it just sounded like a bad idea. Finally he settled down, but still had the hiccups. There we were, sitting quietly on a picnic table behind the apartment in a low income housing development. It was, I dunno, midnight or 1 am? I stood up to go inside, and all of a sudden I heard "BLAH!" Thud. I turned around and there was Jack flat on his back on the ground, looking like he was ready to have a coronary, and Chuck's laughing his ass off. Jack was plenty pissed when he finally managed to find his feet.

"What the hell was that for?"

Maniacal laughter from Chuck.

"What the fuck are you doing?!?"

Chuck was just howling at this point. I didn't understand either, but I figured if Chuck didn't come up with something quick, Jack was going to really give him something to laugh about.

What had happened is that Chuck was sitting across the picnic table talking quietly to Jack, and out of the blue he jumped at Jack and screamed. Jack was still tripping pretty hard and fell right off the damn bench. When Chuck finally got enough breath to talk, he explained that he was just trying to scare the hiccups out of Jack. It worked. Jack didn't have hiccups anymore. Jack claimed that he'd rather have had the hiccups than be scared out of 2 years of hid life. He didn't pound Chuck though, even though he really deserved it.

Ford Prefect, he's a Douglas Adams fan, is one of the few coke dealers that I know. Let me say right now that coke dealers are one of the lowest forms of life on planet Earth. They just really are not good people. But Ford Prefect is the kind of fellow that you just have to like. Not only that, but the fellow he buys coke off of also deals pot, and Ford's helped me hook up with a brick more than once. He's got this way about him, when you meet him for the first time he makes you feel like you've known him for years. When I'm hanging out with him, it is amazing how many people insist that they know him from somewhere. But then maybe they do, he gets around a lot.

Ford's always got a chick with him. Always. Sometimes two. I guess I didn't really understand at first, until he mentioned that he was dealing coke. Coke dealers always get the absolute best looking chicks, I swear it. And they'll do anything for a no-cash fix. I was over at his place one Monday night watching the game when this girl stopped by. Pretty, pretty little girl. Nearly as tall as me, long straight black hair, and eyes so blue I thought that they might be colored contacts. Ford, me, and some guy I didn't really know where there, and none of us knew this girl. After a few awkward moments of just standing there looking at each other, this girl, she said her name was Jen, claimed that some friend of hers was out of town and that he'd told her that Ford could help her out in the meantime. Ford recognized the guy's name right away, said he'd mentioned that she might stop by. Ford assured her that everything was cool. She cozied up to Ford just as soon as he spoke up.

They whispered to each other off and on for a few minutes. About 15 minutes after she sat down with Ford she stood back up. She glanced at me and the other fellow, then back to Ford.

Jen says, "Are you serious?"

"Hell yeah. But it's your decision, you do what you want to do."

She glanced back at the two of us again, and that was the last time she looked us in the eye. I guess God and Satan and coke dealers have that in common. They all like willing volunteers. She stripped right then and there. This girl was nice. The only fat she had on her was in her tits and just enough to pad a curve on her hips. Those breasts weren't huge, but they were shaped so nice it brought a tear to my eye. Or maybe it was the fear that she'd step too close and poke my eye out with one of those things. She couldn't have weighed much more than 110 lbs, and if there was a down side to seeing her naked, it was that her ribs stood out a bit more than what I like. While we caught our breath, Ford hadn't batted an eye. He moved her across the room to a table, leaned her over the table, undid his fly and then did her.

"Uh. Ford? Maybe we'll just split and catch you when you're not so busy, eh?"

"Nah man. That's half the fun, stick around."

Well, what do you do? We divided our attention between then game and Jen. Ford wasn't overly gentle, but he wasn't abusive either. After he finished and zipped up his fly, he left the room. Jen just sort of stood there looking a little lost. Us guys glued our eyes to the TV. Ford came back and scratched some white powder into a few lines on the table he'd just banged Jen over. He dropped a dollar bill onto the table and sat back down on the couch to watch Jen snort the lines. I think it made his night to watch his wad drip back out and down her legs while she was bent over that table. When Jen turned around, she looked happier than we'd seen her yet. She got dressed quickly and climbed back up beside Ford. Man. I really hate coke dealers.

Along about the third quarter of the game, Jen decided to secure her next fix. After some more whispering, she knelt in front of Ford, undid his zipper, and started giving him head. She sucked, swallowed, and wiped her chin. Apparently Ford was looking out for us, because me and the other fellow were next in line. Hey, I wasn't going to complain. She was good at what she did. It sort of wigged me out though, never a word said between us, and she never looked up at me. After she was done, Ford handed her three packets of powder coke, and then she was out the door. I never did find out the final score of that game.

Don't get me wrong. I've tried coke before too. But the biggest thing that I get from it is the driving need for MORE! I don't need that. And it isn't exactly the idea that he traded drugs for sex. I've gotten laid before simply because I was the one with the pot. Quietly. Away from the party, in my room.

The incredible disregard for someone else's feelings just amazed me, even from someone as insensitive as Ford. I suppose it doesn't make much of a difference though, because in the end Jen really didn't seem to care. Cokeheads get that way after a while. There are their own universe. Solipsism at its finest.

Hey, maybe it is true that weed makes you more philosophical.

-G-