My Life Part III: Courage In A Bottle

Selling coke has its advantages.  The people you meet are characters.  I recall one guy in particular that I called The Meat Man.  The Meat Man paid for his dope with meat. 

(Photo from www.ChinaTraderOnline.com)

He worked in a three-person team.  Just like in any robbery, there is a getaway driver.  They usually send a male and female who look like a couple into the store.  This group targets Publix and Super Wal-Mart grocery stores.  They push a cart into the meat department and start loading up.  They look for prime cuts: Prime rib, filet mignon, slabs of ribs, big-priced cuts.  They will grab lobster, both alive and frozen – you really have to see this to believe it!  …I know because I watched the whole operation.  I wanted to know where my meat came from.  They push this cart toward the front of the store.  Note: If you have bought choice cuts of meat, you know this adds up pretty fast.  One cart of meat is easily worth $500.

Their driver has parked out the front door on the crosswalk, usually in a small pick-up truck.  When they feel the coast is clear, they bolt through the door.  Bringing the cart next to the truck, they throw the whole cart into the back.  The driver takes off as the two-person team jumps into the truck.  If this wasn’t illegal, I would have YouTubed it.  I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.  Especially when some fat store clerk is trying to be a hero and stop them.  They then call me and I get all the meat in trade for dope, usually at about $0.20 on the dollar.  That’s the Meat Man’s hustle. 

I try to combine them all.  Like the guy who is an opportunist.  He comes by with one of those $3,000 stainless steel grills from Home Depot.  Now I can cook my meat.

Next week he comes by with a trailer full of lawnmowers and yard equipment.  Now I can cut my grass.

I’ll be damned if one week he doesn’t come by with a full-blooded, red-nosed pitbull.  You guessed it!  Now I have a dog.

…And a big-screen TV, Maytag industrial side-by-side washer and drier, his and hers matching Trek mountain bikes.

Terrible, I know.

There are some major down-falls too.  Very quickly it began to affect my friendships.  Until this point, I had a fairly good group of friends.  Most of my friends knew what I did, but it’s only weed, right?

Of course there is family and certain friends you don’t want to know.  You definitely don’t want them to know how much you sell.  People can ignore it if they think it’s just a little, once in a while.  It was fairly easy for me to fool everyone.  Not many knew the size of things.

Coke is way different.

I remember the looks I got when certain friends found out I was selling powder.  Some people eased right out of the scene.  A couple wives forbade their husbands to be around me.  Slowly a new group of people began to come around.  Slowly I began to change as a person.  I don’t think I even realized it then.  Looking back now, I see it all.  That ‘hindsight is 20/20’ is very accurate.

When people opposed me, I began to push them away.  Unfortunately, those were also the people who loved me.  I spent a lot less time in a 4X4 and began to spend more time in the strip-club.  The time came when I wondered why I even had a day job.  Who wants to get up and go to work when you have a night job that pays more and the hours are better?  So I began to go to work later and later.

I mean, between you and me, it was kind of funny.

Have you ever seen that movie, “Groundhog Day?”  Once the guy finds out that - no matter what - he’ll wake up the next day, he starts doing whatever he wants.  That’s exactly what I did.  At first I just showed up late - an hour or two late – so far so good.  The company I worked for insisted we fire up and work at 7 a.m.  However, they messed up when they made me foreman.  Suckers!  You see, I ran my crew.  I was the boss on the jobsite.  My boss was a supervisor who didn’t really come around.  He was also one of my best customers.  So I made a corporate decision to start work at 8 or 8:30 a.m.  The rest of the company started at 7 a.m. and we started between 8 or 9.  Many of my workers were doing coke they bought from me.  Really, I had the whole thing on lock.  Once I realized I could get away so easy, things got worse.

As foremen, we drove big service trucks the company supplied.  We had coolers and water kegs on the back for the guys.  By noon we would head to the store and fill the coolers with beer.  For the rest of the day we would drink beer and do lines of coke.  Whenever someone wanted to hook-up and make a buy, I would meet them on the job site.  The job site became my own personal playground.  There was very little work being done for my boss, but a lot of work being done for me.  My job became a big party.

Shit began to hit the fan.  A couple people didn’t like what we were doing.  …Guess he felt like he was the only one working.  He probably was.  So he went to the company office and tried to tell them what was going on.  The funny part?  They didn’t believe him.  He tried to tell them we drank beer all day, had a grill set up and had a B.B.Q. every afternoon, and that we sold drugs.

We cleaned things up a little.  I remember the owner came out to talk to me.  I’m denying all these accusations.  All is going well, we’re leaning on the back of my truck having a heart-to-heart.  Not sure why, but all of the sudden he reaches over and pulls the top off my water cooler.  Budweiser stacked to the top.  He looks at me, looks back at the beer, then tells me to clean out the truck and turn it in to the office.  Best part – I didn’t give a fuck.  Not in the least. 

After that, things got even worse.  I was bored.  Bad things happen when I’m bored.  All my buddies have stuff to do all day.  I don’t know what to do.

The strip-club opens at noon.  Now there’s something to do.  That’s when date-a-stripper began.  Actually, it was more like screw a stripper, hence, “The Stripper Diaries.”

My life began a downward spiral.  The woman I was with was pushed to the limit, at which time I moved in with a buddy of mine.  The things I worked so hard to have in the beginning lost their value to me.  Selling drugs and chasing women became my full-time job.

Until my buddy decided to marry a hoe, we were off the chain.  We were running a bachelor pad.  He had the big house with a pool.  I had the drugs and was able to bring women around. 

I remember at times wishing I could slow down.  This usually happened early in the morning.  I would go out and sit by the pool.  My body hurt.  I was abusing it.  Sometimes my ex would call.  At times I just wanted to go back to the life I had before ‘this.’ 


…But then another call would come in.  Duty calls and I’m off and running again.

I was torn, pulled in two directions at once.  Unfortunately, I always went the wrong way.

At this point I used occasionally.  If everyone was up all night, I would do some coke to keep running.  Drinking and smoking weed is what I liked.  I wanted to be alert and aware of my surroundings.  I didn’t like hovering over a pile of coke.  I did that for almost a year when I was a late teenager.  Up all night, sick for three days after, week-long binges.  Having the coke around this time was different.  I sold it, I didn’t do it.

Then I was introduced to G.H.B.

This drug is a clear liquid.  It has been referred to as the date-rape drug.  This liquid in very small doses has the same effect as slamming a six-pack of beer.  You take too big a dose, and you will pass out.  Users call this a G-hole.  This is similar to being in a coma.

Yes, I know it doesn’t sound like fun.  There are some advantages.  At that time in my life, those advantages outweighed everything else.  One of my favorite things was the way it made me feel indestructible.  Liquid courage in a bottle.  Once I figured this drug out, my life changed.  I really think I grew horns that day. 

I made friends with the guy who introduced me to ‘G,’ as we called it.  He wasn’t an attractive guy, but he had a different woman with him every time I saw him.  Once I got to know him, I asked him how he pulled that off.  This is how he explained it to me – he said, “I’m not afraid of rejection.”

(Can you believe this is 100% Polyester?  ...Me either!)

Guys go out and wait for chicks to talk to them.  Not Tony.  Instead, he would walk around talking to every chick in the place.  The more women he talked to, the more he raised his chances of picking one up.  And it worked.  This guy could work a room and walk with a girl every time.  Together we teamed up and did stuff that even sounds crazy.

I began to use G.H.B. every day.  My friend sold it, so it was around all the time.  I think that it was about this time that I just gave up on my old life.  G.H.B. had me living in the moment.  Everywhere I went I had G. with me.  I was using so much that I went into a G-hole nearly every day.  Your body just shuts down, like a very deep sleep.  Many people die during a G-hole.  You can choke on your own tongue, choke on puke, or just stop breathing altogether.  I did this every day, sometimes more than once.  I was 25 years old.