An empty coffee can on the bed was full of broken and burned pipe remnants. He blew glass, but badly. He was always showing me his latest, greatest invention or new design for a pipe or bubbler. I knew he wanted to replace Kelly, the guy who blew all my pipes, but that was never going to happen. I hated his work.
It took me a long time to see to it that Kelly made my pipes exactly as I liked them, and I did not intend to go elsewhere. The stem had to be just the right length, the glass an exact thickness and the bowl and hole on top precisely as I liked. Kelly was good, too. He’d started experimenting with different types of glass and using a hotter gas. His designs were becoming quite intricate. If I wanted to smoke out of a piece of art, Kelly was my man. Besides, Shadoe could barely blow his own nose, let alone a good pipe.
I glanced up at the canister hanging from the ceiling. “Nice, Shadoe. That’s great. Does it work? Won’t it light the wall on fire instead of burning you?”
“No, no. I’ve rigged it so it’s far enough away from the wall and doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling. I’ve worked on this for a while and now I’ve got it perfected.” He was very pleased with himself - cocky even. “So,” he rubbed his thick hands together, “whatcha’ got for me today? I hope it’s different. People kind of complained about that last.”
Well if you didn’t cut your shit with Fruit Fresh, I thought, they might not complain so much. He didn’t realize I knew what he did, but I knew a lot more than anyone might have guessed. It was amazing how much information I could get just for getting someone high, or buying them a little food when they were hungry.
“Yeah, it is,” I said, and tossed him a small rock. “You’ll like it. See what you think.”
Despite everything, Shadoe was a really a nice guy. His was the only house I’d stay and get high at, because I felt safe there. God knows why, but I did. It almost made me feel a little guilty lying to him. The shit was the same as it was the day before, but people are easy. They’ll believe anything I tell them. It didn’t really matter how good it was. I could probably sell bone fragments if that’s what I had.
“This is good. Thanks. Can we do an ounce this time?”
“Sure. Do you have all the money?”
“Right here,” he says, chucking me a roll of bills wrapped with a rubber band.
Shadoe was a handy-man, doing odd jobs for people here and there, but his main source of income at the time was selling meth. The burdens of his weight, age and diabetes made it hard for him to walk, let alone squat and bend. Sitting in a chair in his bedroom closet was about as much exertion as he could stand.
I knew he was barely getting by, and almost lost his house recently. The previous month, he worked out some kind of deal with a man who sold Shadoe on a crazy scheme that I didn’t understand to keep him from foreclosure. Shadoe didn’t understand it either, but he scrawled his name and initialed “here, and here.” When he began “paying the man back,” it was in the form of rent.
Shadoe made enough money selling drugs to keep his utilities on, buy food and make sure he always paid me in full. He enjoyed thinking of himself as a big-time dealer and said that all he cared about was living “the life” and getting high.
For those of us caught up in the drug world, that’s all any of us cared about. Most of the people I sold to disgusted me because I wasn’t like them, right? They were meth-head tweakers. I simply used meth. All of the time.
The truth was, the disgust I felt wasn’t so much for them as it was seeing in them a mirror image of what I’d become.
“Do you have any sandwich bags? All I have are quarter-ounce baggies.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and pulled a box from a shelf in his closet. He was always so eager to please me. Kind of like how I was with Allan, but on a much smaller scale.
It never occurred to me until very recently how Allan must have felt about my “cling-on” ways. My epiphany came in 2009 when I joined Facebook and began the “friending” process. Someone from my past accepted my invitation with a note attached that said, I can’t believe you wanted to friend me. I always thought you hated me in high school. Do you want to have lunch? Two minutes later, the same person messaged me. Did I say something to make you mad? You didn’t respond to my message. And when I didn’t respond to that (I was a little irritated at that point) they sent me another message.
Two thoughts came to me almost simultaneously. Jesus, God this person is annoying the hell out of me/holy shit, that’s probably how I was with Allan. And, of course, that’s exactly what I must have been like. Want drugs? Want sex? Can I do your laundry? Give you a blow job? Buy you a house? (pant, pant, pant) How can you have respect for someone so determined to be a lapdog? It took me six years to catch on, but I get it now. I don’t know what I would have done if I were Allan, but I’d like to think I wouldn’t have moved in with me.
I weighed Shadoe’s crystal and threw him the closed baggie. “Do you have a Q-tip?” I asked, counting the bills. “I need to clean my pipe a little.”
“Here, use mine. It works really good.”
“You know how I am.” I could never use other people’s pipes. I wouldn’t drink out of glasses in anyone’s house, either. Even if they were clean. I always carried a bottle of soda in case I got thirsty. Just one more way of separating myself, I suppose.
Shadoe found a Q-tip, and I started cleaning my pipe. “You’ve put more blankets over your windows, huh?” He had thick, heavy blankets nailed over his bedroom windows from the ceiling to the floor.
“Yeah. Now I think I’ve got every crack covered.” Shadoe was like a lot of people I knew: paranoid as hell that someone was always watching them. Blinds weren’t adequate window coverings, they reasoned, because people could see through the tiny holes where the strings threaded through. It was ridiculous. I hated paranoid people and swore to myself when I started this gig that I wouldn’t let myself succumb to it. I saw enough twacked out people day in and day out, including Garnett, to remind me of my vow, and somehow that allowed me to escape the paranoia that consumed so many people I knew.
I took a huge hit off my pipe, clouding the room as I exhaled. “Shadoe, has it ever occurred to you that you just aren’t that interesting? Why would anyone want to spend their time watching you from rooftops and trees?”
“You never know,” he said. “I like to be safe.” I rolled my eyes because that’s what I always did when we had those conversations.
We sat and smoked, and I listened to him ramble while I updated my ledger.
“You know you shouldn’t write things down. I keep everything right here,” he tapped his head with his still smoldering pipe. “Writing things down will get everyone you work with in trouble if you ever get popped.”
“I’ve told you, the only person my books would ever incriminate is me. Besides, Shadoe, what you keep in your head isn’t anywhere near as accurate as my ledger. I’ve got everything coded.”
I charged Shadoe $1100 an ounce because he thought he was getting a killer deal. The guy he went through before charged him more for product that always weighed light and wasn’t nearly as good as what I had. I also charged him that much because I knew he cut it and should have been making bank.
I had all my ledgers in a file cabinet at home. Every nickel I’ve ever spent on dope and every cent that’s ever come in. When it became clear that I was selling more than just quarters and half grams to cover my own habit, I started keeping books. It was how I made sure business was profitable and not just me selling in order to cover the cost of my own drugs. “We don’t commit felonies for free,” I’d say. Selling meth in the quantity I did was a business, and good business people always know what their bottom line is. It just made sense and it pissed me off when people like Shadoe wanted to lecture me about my bookkeeping.
The side benefit of keeping records, which I didn’t anticipate, was that it was impossible for anyone to do the “Dude, I paid you last time. Don’t you remember? We’re even, I swear to God,” t
hing. My people all knew I kept records because I wrote everything in the ledger in front of them, unless there was a public transaction. “You think we’re even?” I’d ask if they balked at their tab. “Well, let’s just compare your notes to mine.” Sometimes I’d imitate “The Church Lady,” a skit Dana Carvey used to do on Saturday Night Live. “Oh, you don’t have anything written down? Well isn’t that special. I guess all we have to go on is what I have here by your name.” I rarely had anyone question me and they all knew I was fair.
As Bob Dylan sang in Absolutely Sweet Marie, “To live outside the law, one must be honest.”
Josh, my newest “boy,” moved more meth than anyone else did for me, but he was irritating as hell at times, so his price was $950. A twenty-two year old white boy, Josh dressed like a wanna-be gangster with his jeans slung low, untied kicks and his hat on backwards. He’d recently bought a Blue Tooth, the latest thing in cell phones at the time, and wore the earpiece constantly. We’d be in the middle of a deal and he would start saying things that didn’t make sense until I realized he was talking to someone on his phone. Josh was a pretty boy and quite the ladies’ man from what I heard, mostly from him. He had long eyelashes and batted them at me.
“You keep batting those fucking eyelashes at me,” I told him, “and I’ll jack your price up. That shit doesn’t work on me, so quit flirting and give me my money.”
“Awww, Kim. Don’t be like that.”
Josh had a plan. He told me about it one day, as I was weighing a quarter pound of meth for him. He wanted to take over Boise.
“What the hell are you talking about, Josh?”
“I’m talking about taking over. You know, like one day you’ll retire and maybe I can meet your guy. Then I’m going to undercut everyone else out there until I’m the only one left. I’ll be the man!”
I thought he was joking until I studied his eyes and realized the jackass was serious. “Josh, you’re a fucking idiot. You’re kidding, right? You know that’ll never happen.”
“Why not? I’m good at this. That’s my dream. I want to be the man.”
“Yeah, but Josh, you’re not the man. You’re a fucking idiot.”
He started pouting, batting those damn eyelashes at me. “Don’t say that. I’m totally going to do it. You just watch.”
I’d had it. “Goddamn it, Josh!” I slapped the Blue Tooth out of his ear. “Pull up your pants, tie your fucking shoes, sit up and pay attention!” He leaned over and, looking wounded, picked up the earpiece for his phone. “Do you know why there are several bail bond companies in this town? Do you ever stop to think that there is more than one phone company?” He was sitting there, looking offended, as if I’d hurt his feelings, and that only pissed me off more. “It is IMPOSSIBLE for you to be the only asshole selling meth ANYWHERE, let alone Boise. Who the fuck do you think you are? Get this straight. When and IF I ‘retire,’ I won’t be passing any torches on to you, so get that out of your head right now.”
“Why not? I’m a good worker.”
“Because, Josh, you’re reckless and not particularly street smart. You’re a shit for brains kid with visions of sugarplums in your head. Sure, you know people you can sell quantity to, but that doesn’t qualify you for anything. You think the guys who work at Best Buy are all scheming to knock Bill Gates off his pedestal? Maybe they dream about it, but they sure as shit aren’t serious. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because they know their place, Josh! There are banks, not bank. There are grocery stores, not grocery store. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“I understand, but you wait and see. I have a plan. It’ll work.” He was pouting as he put his Blue Tooth back in his ear. “Why wouldn’t you give me to your guy when you retire?”
“Because,” I said. “There are a lot of reasons. For one thing, you’re dangerous. You’ve got a different girl with you every time I see you, and even though I’ve told you I don’t want them around, you still have them drop you off.”
“I have them park down the street,” he interrupted. I glared at him.
“It’s not even that, Josh. You run around with these skeezy chicks, get them high and start bragging to them about your big plan. And don’t tell me you don’t talk about it, because I know you. I’ve told all you guys: women will always fuck shit up. They are your Achilles’ heel, and you will fail because you’re stupid. You just don’t talk about shit, Josh, except that you do because your fucking ego is so out of control. And as for me retiring? Fuck you. Right now all you need to be concerned with is that I’m your man and you need to know your place.”
He pouted some, but didn’t mention his plan to dominate the drug world much after that. He knew what my opinion was, but every now and then, he’d make a comment about his grand plan. Mostly, I saw Josh as a kid with stars in his eyes who needed to be put in his place once in a while. It was worth it, though. He made me a lot of money.
It’s accepted as fact in the drug world that women are trouble. Loyalty went a long way toward securing my position and I took pride in that. I also knew how rare it was for a female to command any kind of respect in the meth world, let alone be successful. Women will rat you out if you piss them off. If caught, women will flip rather than do jail time because they can’t handle it. Women are “cop-callers,” calling the police anytime they feel like complicating your life. Women are more likely to flip (work with the police when caught) if they have kids...
Then again, most CI’s (citizen informants) I’ve known have been men, but I wasn’t about to concede that to Josh.
I was a completely different person with the people I worked with. I wasn’t a mother and I wasn’t a co-dependent woman desperately seeking love. I kept my worlds separate and there was a different Kim for each. It wasn’t acting as much as it was accessing pieces of me that I normally kept hidden. I think everyone has facets of themselves they never explore. There’s good and bad in all humans. My behavior in the drug world had a lot to do with acting out rage from my past. There was so much hurt and confusion inside me, and I was afraid of those feelings. Being more aggressive, and sometimes downright bitchy, was how I vented my anger and feelings of helplessness. The power I felt, and the control I had over people - especially men - was as reinforcing to me as the drugs were.
In the book Drinking: A Love Story, Caroline Knapp writes, “...the problem with self-transformation is that after a while, you don’t know which version of yourself to believe in, which one is true. I was the hardened, cynical version of me when I was with (some people) and I was the connected, intimate version of me when I was with (another.)”
That’s how it was for me, except that I knew I was two different people.
Sometimes I wonder which I was more addicted to: the drugs or the life. Obviously, it was meth, but the drug world itself was a very close second and all of it served a greater purpose for me that I didn’t understand at the time. In that world, I was important. I had status and people respected me. Around my boys, I felt smart, sexy and self-assured.
I started getting high so that I could get more done. Call it the Superwoman syndrome. But I continued getting high as a way to escape the feelings I didn’t want to feel. It wasn’t long before getting high was the only way I could function. I’d become entangled in a web of my own creation, and I couldn’t see a way out. If I quit using, I’d have to deal with the depression and bi-polar disorder, and that scared the hell out of me. I would crash and be non-functional for who knew how many days. If I quit selling, Allan would lose the house, and if that happened, he wouldn’t need me anymore.
I was starting to feel trapped.
Chapter 11
After Christmas, we settled in to our new house and my days, much like my life, were compartmentalized. I was Mommy in the morning, drug dealer during the day, and at five o’clock, I transferred the bond company’s phone line from whoever was on shift during the day to the cell Jill gave me to use for work. I was on-call
five or six nights a week, five p.m. to six a.m., but I didn’t have to sit in the office, which was nice because there were a lot of nights when I would only write three or four bonds. On a good night, I might write eight or ten. I received a flat fee per bond, so the more I wrote, the more I made.
Whatever I’d been doing during the day, when Andy came home, I was Mommy again. We’d go through our usual coming home routine before I made him dinner.
He would come through the front door and announce his arrival. “Oh, hi Mom. It’s me. I’m home.” He still does the same thing and it makes me smile every time I hear it. He’s so deadpan about it, like he’s on the five ‘o clock news reporting something extremely important. To me, he is.
“Hey, Bug! How was your day?”
I used to get a lot of flack from people, mostly my mother, about all the nicknames I have for him: Andy-bug, bug-butt, bug in a boy suit (there’s a pattern there, I know) Mr. Monster, palooka-butt...
The names were just there. I never thought about them, they just came out. Mom would tell me he was never going to know his real name if I kept confusing him by calling him by different ones, but I disagreed.
“Mom,” I would say. “He has Down syndrome, he’s not an idiot.” Sure enough, Andy knows his name.
He’s had a communication log between the school and me every year since he was three, and I still have every one of them. So he comes home and shows me his notebook with his teacher’s comments for the day or some project he’s been working on at school. And everyday, we have basically the same conversation when I ask about his day.
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