The Life and Times of Innis E. Coxman

by R. P. Lester

  “You want me to save you any?”

  He slowly turned his head and looked at me like I’d insulted his intelligence. “What the hell, Coxthman? You know you’re gonna do it all before we thee each other again.”

  “Well, yeah. You’re right. Can you even drive?”

  “Yeah, I’m good. But hey, thomething I wanted to run by you. You remember Alotta Thith?”

  “Tits?”

  “No, Thith.”

  “Dude, are you saying, ‘Blech’?”

  “No, motherfucker—Thith! Alotta Thith! Quit being a dickhead, Innith!”

  “Hahaha! I’m sorry, man. Yeah, I know her. Alotta Shitz—that slore who got ‘IF YOU DON’T EAT IT, YOU DON’T NEED IT’ tattooed above her pussy. What about her?”

  “The athked me to take care of thomething for her and I’m gonna need your help. Come by the Needle on Thunday. We’ll talk about it.”

  “Cool. I’ll be there, Swizzlestick.”

  “Fuck you, Coxthman!”

  Seek and Ye Shall Find

  In his autobiography, Life on Planet Rock, American journalist and former editor of Rip Magazine, Lonn Friend, wrote of an experience he shared with two tramps from a home shopping network when he was invited to cohost a live program.

  QVC, that oasis for lazy housewives everywhere, was shilling a Bon Jovi DVD to their viewers as the band performed a show in San Jose. As Mr. Friend relates it, the two female anchors were firing off product pitches one after the other, spewing them forth in such rapid succession as to scalp the journalist completely. Instead of doing the sensible thing and bashing their faces together, he interjected to tell one of the ladies, “Your enthusiasm is a bit intimidating,” halting both of the chatty Cathys in their tracks.

  When I initially read that line, my associates and I were in a bank lobby making a large withdrawal. Though the situation at hand demanded my full attention, the passage was so profound that I holstered my .45 and diverted focus away from the teller.

  I reread the line ad nauseum: “Your enthusiasm is a bit intimidating.” I became lost in an amusing memory, thinking back to an incident that personified Mr. Friend’s statement with truth and clarity.

  ***

  Tell me something, good people: did you know that pieces of your car audio equipment have serial numbers? From the wires in your radio housing to a chip in your amplifier. Including that one speaker in the rear passenger door that plays nothing but static. Nearly every part of the system has digits burned, printed, or stickered on for easy identification. Well, in case you didn’t know that, I’m here to tell you that they most certainly fucking do. And I became privy to this fact when a few of America’s finest scattered the pieces of my car audio on the shoulder of a highway early one morning.

  All four-hundred-and-eighty-two of them.

  ***

  It was a particularly hot and sticky night, even for the South. My balls were chafed and itchy. I hadn’t had sex in months so I knew it wasn’t crotch rot. I quickly deduced that it was my nutsack rubbing the day’s sweat against my thighs, creating a deliberate friction to burn if ever I’d felt one. My abundant perspiration was the result of riding around with a pound of Mexican bud at 4 o’clock in the morning while attempting to corral two idiots, making futile efforts to squelch their baked rendition of “Guantanamera” as they hung their bodies from the windows like limp, diseased stalks of corn.

  ***

  Connie Langus and Burt B. Trippin were two of but a handful of friends I’d made in high school. They’d been a couple since junior year and were still going strong in our late teens. Back when we were prisoners of the school system, we talked of pooling our meager resources to form a risky venture with great returns. Once we escaped the dungeon of secondary education, our trifecta turned nebulous conversation into substance.

  We became pot dealers.

  Not long after we went into business, the coffers of good marijuana in Louisiana were in depletion from a statewide crackdown. New laws written by the legislation made it harder than ever before for someone to hit the bong unmolested. Users caught with so much as a seed in their vehicle were levied hefty fines and an overkill of jail time; they made an example out of a friend when they handed him five years for two joints. Many suppliers in our part of the state decided it wasn’t worth the risk anymore, not for the punishments being given by the courts.

  Before this stance on the plant went into full swing, the stuff rolled in like fog from a placid lake. Being as we weren’t old enough to buy alcohol, obtaining a quarter-key from across town was easier than finding someone to purchase a six-pack. When these Draconian penalties were etched in stone, however, getting a small quantity locally became a headache. Our quandary was two-fold as we weren’t like most people who wanted to score a handful just to get high; our interests were greater than scrounging for pithy bits left on the cutting floor. The way we saw it, if you’re going to catch a case, why let it be over a dime bag?

  Go big or go home, by God.

  We wanted weight, and we knew that tapping the source of all incoming product would be the lynchpin of our success. Fortunately, Connie knew someone south of the border who could secure the amounts we needed to stay afloat.

  ***

  Immediately after graduation, Connie reunited with Merle, her gay/adopted/drag queen/dropout brother who’d moved to Matamoros, Mexico following a fallout with their father (must’ve been something “Meralda” had said). Through his connections, we were able to purchase kilos of primo border bud at rock bottom prices. The only people getting it cheaper were the Mexican cops. We exercised extra care in trafficking our product back into the country; the consequences for our standard shipment were brutal. Once stateside, we funneled the product into the lungs of our adoring public. After setting aside a pound or two for personal use, of course.

  AND THAT’S WHEN THE LOCUSTS CAME!

  No. That’s a lie. But that is when one of the worst droughts in Dixie increased from more governmental interference.

  As if Louisiana politicians striving to please (some) voters wasn’t enough, the DEA and Federales had created yet another joint task force to put a dent in the cartels, performing a sweep of the Mexican countryside that netted hundreds of arrests and a plethora of our dope. It was so bad that people back home were breaking their glass pipes and scraping resin from the stems. Some even tried their hand at manufacturing shitty homegrown. Granted, the local boys did their best, but the weed didn’t get you high and it tasted like a cauliflower queef.

  Now don’t get me wrong—it was around for those who were willing to pay, but forget about making any profit. As what usually happens when a drought rears its sober head, the city was turned into a dealer’s paradise. Sure, people could buy a pound of weed no sweat. At an insane markup. Getting anything more than that was nigh impossible. Even through Connie’s brother, we had some difficulty obtaining an order.

  Gone were the huge blocks of bud lovingly shrink-wrapped by an illiterate Latino. The only amounts being moved were small bundles, mainly half-pound to one-pound bricks.

  And anyone who got it was lucky to have it.

  ***

  Matamoros is directly across the border from Brownsville, Texas. It’d grown steadily by the time we went into business, and the city fathers acted accordingly, hiring additional police officers to safeguard its citizens from the inevitable boom in crime.

  Leaving late in the afternoon wasn’t my idea. I’d thought it was better to stay the night and travel in the daytime rather than run afoul of police and be subjected to the thrills of the Mexican justice system, much less the graveyard shift at Customs and Border Protection. But Connie was ready to get back to her cat. She said it’d been suicidal as of late. Said that her sister was staying with the feral beast to make sure it didn’t hurl itself down the stairs again. Burt and I laughed and pointed at her until she cried. Nobody believed her.

  The events between Beaumont and arrest are foggy. We’d been smoking one af
ter the other since Houston, close enough to home that we felt safe sparking up on I-10 in the middle of the night. Burt lounged in the back, twisting joints out of a Ziploc bag laid next to him on the seat. Even aerating my vehicle with cracked windows, the beige interior reeked of ganja and Newports. I wasn’t really worried about being pulled over, though. Every light, signal, and windshield wiper on my red Pontiac Sunbird worked perfectly. My license and paperwork were in order, and I followed the speed limits. Except for the horn, my car was ship-shape (I’d gutted the innards under the horn cap to store small quantities of narcotics). The only annoyance I’d had was somewhere around Beaumont when Connie swung around in the front passenger to give Burt a handjob. His long, dirty-blonde hair fell gracefully over his ears as he stared at the ceiling, moaning in ecstasy. He unloaded on the front of his Van Halen t-shirt so it wasn’t a big deal. I shook my head, took a hit, and turned up the music.

  ***

  Everyone’s heard of spidey-sense—that feeling you get when you know something’s amiss. Well, drug users have what’s known as a “shitty sense,” especially when they’re carrying a sizeable amount of drugs they’re going to use. My shitty sense was no different. It began to dump peanuts and corn husks on the back of my neck about the time we drove into Louisiana. I should’ve heeded the warning and snagged a hotel room in Lake Charles, Connie’s cat be damned.

  Being so close to home made me too comfortable. I’d gotten cocky, driving a few miles over the speed limit, my fuck-up doing it on a lonely stretch of country highway that was famous for hiding cops amongst its trees. The sudden appearance of a state trooper bursting from the inky blackness filled my car with bright lights and paralyzing fear. Connie twisted around on her knees, the incandescent beams distorting her face to that of a demon. Burt had been dozing under the spell of a weed nap, unaware of our predicament. I shouted at him to wake up.

  “Burt!” I yelled into the rearview mirror. He didn’t budge.

  “Burt! Wake up! We’re being pulled over!” Connie fared no better, her white blouse rapidly changing colors from the trooper’s twirling lights.

  I threw my right arm over Connie’s head to push Burt back to life and discovered that his sizable cock was still flopped out of his Levi’s. He’d never holstered himself before passing out. I grabbed a handful of rubbery shaft as my palm landed in his lap instead of his leg.

  His face.

  His armpit.

  His nutsack.

  The seminal crust on David Lee Roth’s smiling face.

  Fucking anywhere else, man.

  The feeling of a phantom hand on his dick roused Burt from his slumber. One look at the blue light special illuminating Connie’s face told him all he needed to know.

  Burt B. Trippin fulfilled his name and promptly lost his shit.

  A pound of shrink-wrapped marijuana sat in the trunk, wedged in a space between the carpet and the back seat. The inside of my car looked like a Dutch holiday. I felt a churning in my lower gut. There was no way out of this. I swallowed hard and pulled to the shoulder of Highway 165, a road bisecting the greater portion of Louisiana. The alternative entailed flooring my poor Sunbird and getting hit with additional charges when we eventually hit the spike strips. Either that, or going out in a hail of gunfire. It took me exactly two seconds to weigh my options before hanging my head in defeat.

  I came to grips with the fact that we were going to jail.

  ***

  The state trooper killed his front bar light and exited the white Crown Victoria—presumably washed by a trustee earlier that evening—perching his Smokey Bear hat atop his shiny, bald scalp. Even in the murkiness of night, I could see the creases in his royal-blue uniform pants were sharp enough to cut diamonds. You could tell he was one of those who lived for this shit. He sauntered up to my window. I didn’t try to stall.

  He was jaunty and celebratory when he spoke. “Mornin’! Goin’ a little fast, eh, boy? License, registration and-”

  The smoke hit him in the face like a brick. His right hand instinctively went to the Glock .40 caliber on his hip without drawing the weapon.

  “Step out of the vehicle. Put your hands on the car and don’t move.” His tone was deep, flat, and no longer jaunty. He crouched down to assess the other occupants with beady eyes. “You two. Lemme see your hands. Don’t y’all move a fuckin’ muscle.”

  From the back seat, “Well, which is it? Do you wanna see our hands or not move a fuckin’ muscle?”

  Oh my God.

  We were clearly breaking the law with our actions; cops tend to frown on motorists who are motoring while smoking that sticky icky.

  He confidently showed us who was in charge; you could smell the overpowering aromas of authority and Brut as he radioed for backup and threw us on the hood of my car.

  I then watched as said car was stripped like a porn star’s ego once she found out she was only good enough to be a fluffer.

  Once the other boys he blew Boys in Blue arrived on scene, we were split into three different cruisers. The cop that’d originally stopped us shoved me down to the cheap pleather seats in the back of his patrol car. I landed on my tightly cuffed wrists, the snug steel cutting harshly into my delicate skin. He slammed the door and I righted myself enough to see through the cage. It wasn’t easy with three coats of Armor All (incidentally, the theory of one-size-fits-all cuffs is a crock of shit, man).

  They immediately went to work taking apart my beloved dope mobile. Anything and everything that could be dismantled was broken down and tossed onto the shoulder of the road.

  My CD player: ripped from the console, thrown in the median to ruin in the wet grass. My twelve-inch Kicker speakers suffered the same fate.

  A Rockford Fosgate amplifier that I had bought with hard-earned drug money: that expensive item “slipped” out of a trooper’s hands and shattered to pieces on the unforgiving asphalt.

  The seats, front and back: plundered by Smith & Wesson duty knives and a German Shepherd in the early stages of mange. That bitch even relieved herself on the driver’s seat.

  The speakers in my doors: once the cops removed the paneling, they were left to hang precariously by the wires.

  And my dash?.....by the time everything was said and done it would’ve been cheaper to buy a new car.

  The way those pigs carried on, you would’ve thought I had the Loch Ness monster hidden under the front seat. Or long-lost national treasure Amelia Earhart tied to my undercarriage. Or the goddamn ashes of Jimmy Hoffa in the fucking ashtray! I didn’t even know I had a spare tire in that piece of shit until those douchebags arrogantly informed me that they were ripping the entrails out of my ride because they swore they heard the cries of the Lindbergh baby. It was only a matter of time before they slithered to the crevice in the trunk. When they did, you would’ve thought I was the heir apparent to Pablo Escobar.

  Game over.

  ***

  There was no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow; it would’ve been welded shut anyway. Nor did we pass “Go” and collect two hundred dollars; but I managed to collect influenza from the holding tank.

  All three of us were charged with drug trafficking and possession with intent to distribute. They hung me with a DWI just to make sure I knew the error of my ways. Can’t really say I blame them; the whites of my eyes were as red as Atomic Fireballs. If I were a slab of bacon committed police officer I would’ve done the same thing. My precious Sunbird—or the skeleton thereof—was towed to an impound yard fifty miles away. We were transported to the parish jail where we began making harrowed phone calls to eager bondsmen.

  ***

  Don’t think I impart this tribulation with a whimsical air, good people. For all of you reading, it’s a story from some good-looking bastard you’ve never heard of. For me, it was a severe derailment in the Amtrak of my existence. Fact is, we did time over this.

  After weeks of worry and a smorgasbord of funds paid to separate attorneys, we managed to escape lengthy prison senten
ces for trafficking. They even dismissed my DWI charge. The three of us plead guilty to possession with intent to distribute and received two years apiece in six-by-eight cells. My emotions were a composite of fear and resignation when the gavel came down. Mixed with a crumb of gratitude.

  I thought of my friend who’d gotten the five years for his two small joints.

  ***

  We were forbidden to see one another upon release. Felons can’t hang with felons. If you’re seen in the company of your ilk they send you back. The powers that be didn’t care that Burt and Connie were a couple. They were forbidden from contact, lest they return to the clink. As for myself, I resisted the urge to contact my friends. The meager sentence handed down to me, in contrast to what it could have been, taught me to fear that place.

  Prison can change your perspective—provided you have the intelligence of a muskrat. It gives you space to ponder your future, seeing more to the “grand design” than being forced to do the Foxtrot with a very persuasive triple-murderer (my celly was a fantastic dancer). Gradually, my desire to see Burt and Connie faded. A feeling of guilt invaded my conscience; it hurt tremendously that I could schluff my longtime friends so easily. We had been the Three Musketeers for so long, though reconnection would’ve ended gravely.

  The cycle would’ve repeated itself and I’d revisit the same horrors I was blessed enough to live through a first time. I’d take reckless chances with my freedom just to smoke my profit away. I’d put myself in dangerous situations with sketchy individuals who were my “best friends” on Monday, then putting a muzzle to my head on Tuesday.

  I’d never get my life back.