Have you ever smoked pot before? …Please raise your hand.
I’m just playing. If you raised your hand, the answer to that question is probably yes. If you still have your hand raised, the answer is definitely yes. Put your hand down, stoner!
Like for many others, pot was the first drug I ever tried. At this time I already smoked cigarettes. I would have been about 15 years old. One of my friends and I were building a fort in the woods – you know, doing shit kids do. He pulls this thing out of his pocket and tells me it’s a joint. He goes on to tell me how he got it from his older brother, and we should smoke it. I’m game. Why not?
Looking back now, I see things differently. Fifteen is a little young to get high. Perhaps 18 or 20 is a better age. No, but really – jokes aside – I could give you 99 reasons to just say no. That day, I didn’t say no. I said yes. We abandoned building that fort and rode our bikes around, stoned, just looking at shit. You know: Trees, birds, cars, mailboxes. I remember thinking, ‘We need to get more of this.’
Before long, I knew every kid in my high school who smoked. A group of us would skip class and head to the parking lot. One of my classmates drove a full-sized van. You know, one of those basically an apartment on wheels – the only thing that’s missing is the kitchen sink. We would pile into that van and get so stoned we could hardly stand up. Some of us would abandon the rest of the day completely. A few would head back to class and try to finish the day out. We were a mess.
Paying for my drugs became a problem. I had no money. Many of my buddies took their older brothers’ stash, until big brother wised up and put his foot down. I ended up going to one of the local dealers and began selling their pot for them – not to make money, just to keep me smoking.
Everything was small-scale. We were kids. I would get a half-pound and break it up into smaller baggies. I ended up getting a pager. Yeah – remember those things? Talk about a pain in the ass! Get a page, go hunt down a phone, and by the time you’d find a phone, that person had left wherever they were…. Major pain! This continued through my teen years.
At the age of 18 I left Michigan. I headed south as far away from Michigan as I could go.
My first real job was doing construction work. Moving dirt with front-end-loaders, digging ponds, paving roads… I loved it. Of course I was still smoking pot. Everyone on my crew smoked. In a year’s time, I moved up and became the foreman of a crew. Half of my crew was Mexican. I mean, don’t-speak-English and drive-low-riders-to-work Mexicans. We became friends. I began to learn Spanish. They told me about mota.
Mota is marijuana.
Mexican’s don’t play. When they told me they had mota, they showed me a trunk full of marijuana. Do you know how big the trunk of a 1962 Impala is? They could put like 10 people in there. Maybe they did – smuggle dope and people. Why not?
About the same time, I began riding Harleys. I had one foot in the biker world and another in the Mexican drug cartel. I hear my biker buddies talk about how much they pay for a pound of weed. The Mexicans are much cheaper. …Anywhere from two to three hundred dollars cheaper per pound. I’ve done this before. No problem.
…Except there is a difference. We’re not talking half-pounds anymore. We’re not talking about dime-bags and papers and kids. This is way out of my league.
The first buy is a trial run. Everybody wants to see how this thing works. This is a cake-walk. Easy money. First I go to the bikers. This whole thing is not registering to me. It begins to when I’m handed a Crown Royal bag full of cash. I’ve never had that much money in my hand. $20,000 is a pile of cash. The guy asks me if I have a gun.
“…For what?”
“In case they try to rob you.”
Hmmm… I really didn’t think that far ahead.
The thought crossed my mind to just give the cash back. You know what - let’s just scrap this idea, can we?
Instead, I took the bag. Why not?
So I’m 20 years old. I’m sweating bullets. I had to travel about 8 miles to pick up my package. Yeah. Right now I’m still thinking ‘package’ – why not? $20,000 fits in a Crown Royal bag… thirty pounds of Mexican weed will not!
I pull into an apartment complex and begin to clean the trash out of my truck at the car wash located inside the complex. This is exactly what I was told to do. I don’t see anyone and I’m waiting for the S.W.A.T. team to jump out of the bushes and arrest me. Nothing is happening.
After what seems like an eternity, a painter’s van pulls into the bay next to me. A guy gets out in his overalls, covered in paint, and begins to clean out his van. He opens the side door and unloads six five-gallon paint buckets into the back of my truck. I give him the Crown Royal bag, and the transaction is made. …Time to sweat a little more as I deliver the package.
I cut the bikers a deal and still walked with nearly three grand.
…For one hour of work.
This began a whole new lifestyle for me. I felt like a gangster. …Untouchable. I was suddenly living in an underground world of guys in their 20s and 30s who were driving pimped-out rides, had girls everywhere, and V.I.P. status wherever they go. Up ‘til this point, I was a small-town country boy. Quickly, that all changed.
Those Crown Royal bags kept coming and going. There are no flashy briefcases like you see in the movies. We used bowling bags, fast-food bags, and – my favorite – a regular backpack, slung over my shoulder like a skater punk.
…That’s the easier of the packages. It’s the paint buckets, suitcases, and trash bags full of weed that you really sweat.
Not every transaction was in and out. Sometimes I had to hold 50 pounds or more of weed at my home. Then there were times when I had to split a package for a couple buyers. At one point I had a picnic table set up in my garage. We were using machetes and screwdrivers to peel open bales of compressed weed on that table. When we were done splitting and repackaging, I would sweep the floor. There would be 8-10 pounds of just seeds. That’s when it began to sink in. This is a lot of dope.
I think back to that day many years ago when two boys smoked their first joint. They say weed is a gateway drug. I had no idea the path I chose to walk down that day. It doesn’t work that way for everyone, thank God.
I remember walking into a gun store and buying the biggest, most expensive .45 caliber handgun they had. I was on top of the world. I was 21 and I was king. This began my life of crime….
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