Son of a Critch

by Mark Critch

  “I got to buy something for me brother.” Fox reached into his cords and showed me a fistful of money. There must have been forty dollars in his hand. I’d never seen a kid with that much money before. Clearly this was a special day, and if Fox wanted company on his quest, I was his man. Together we strode out the door, across the parking lot, past the yellow guardrail, and into no-man’s-land.

  We continued our quest along the banks of Mundy Pond, tossing rocks into the water to watch them skip. “So, what are we buying?” I asked as nonchalantly as possible. I desperately wanted to know, but I didn’t want Fox to know that for fear he wouldn’t tell me if he knew how badly I wanted to know. I couldn’t think of anything a kid would need another kid to buy, especially a younger kid. The whole thing seemed strange.

  “Promise you won’t tell anyone?” Fox asked, looking back at me as he navigated his way over the fence.

  “I promise,” I said, huffing and puffing my way behind him. I hoped I wouldn’t catch my cords on the metal wire and spend the rest of the day with my arse hanging out.

  “I got to go to a guy’s house and get something. If we do it then we can have some, too.” “Please let it be French fries,” I thought as my sneaker boots touched terra firma again.

  “So, what is it?” I was near to bursting with excitement.

  “Weed,” Fox said over his shoulder. He made his way toward a section of public housing units across the street.

  “Oh, yeah.” I tried to turn the letters around in my head to make sense of them. Weed. I knew what weed was. I once found a card on a street downtown that said “A friend with weed is a friend indeed.” I kept it hidden in a drawer with some comic books. The idea of it, lying there secretly between All-Star Squadron #2 and Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #8, made me feel kind of like a badass. A little part of the adult world was in my possession that only I knew about. But that was as close as I wanted to dip into that world. I stopped in my tracks. “Not, like…weed, though. Right?”

  Fox turned back to face me. The moment he’d dreaded was here. He’d have to try to convince me, a nerd, to help him buy drugs, or forge ahead alone. “It’s no big deal,” Fox explained, rolling his eyes. “I just got to give this guy the money, he gives me the drugs, and then I bring it home and give it to my brother. Don’t be such a baby. It’s no big deal.”

  No big deal? Even hearing him say that word was overwhelming to me. Drugs. He wanted me to help him buy drugs, then we’d bring it into the school and he’d sit there in class with drugs in his desk. And did he want me to help him deliver it, like mules on a school bus? The whole thing was mad. I could hear the sound of eggs frying in my mind, just like in the TV ad: “This is your brain on drugs.” Fox was going to turn my brain into a fried egg, sunny side up. I didn’t even like my eggs sunny side up. I liked them scrambled with bacon. Come to think of it, I hadn’t had lunch yet and I was getting hungry. Oh no! I had the munchies. Was I already high?

  “Nope. No way. I’m not buying drugs on my lunch break.” I headed back to the fence and tried to climb it again, but I was still too winded from the initial jump. I tried to look cool facing away from my drug-runner friend with one foot in the chain link and my hand up, gripping the top of the fence, while I regained my breath. I must have looked like I was disco-pointing, Travolta style.

  “You don’t have to buy anything, ya wuss,” Fox pointed out. “All you got to do is come with me in case anything happens. I don’t want to do this alone. I don’t want to do it at all, but if I don’t my brother said he’s gonna kill me.” I felt bad for Fox and would surely attend his funeral, but I didn’t budge. I couldn’t. I was trying to fend off an asthma attack. “Please,” he said, a slight quiver in his voice. “You’re the only friend I got good enough to ask.”

  This kind of schmaltz was better than any drug to me. A warm feeling radiated through my body and my breath came back without the need of my inhaler. I was needed. I released my grip on the fence and turned to face my friend. “Fine,” I said. “But I’m not getting high.”

  We walked in silence toward the block of houses where the drug lord plied his trade. I’d seen drug dealers on Miami Vice and CHiPS, so I had some idea what to expect. His lair would probably be some highend apartment. The furniture would be all white. The walls and carpets would match the furniture except for the tabletops, which would be a mix of glass and mirrored glass. Beautiful women in bikinis would look on, disinterested, as the deal went down.

  “This is it,” Fox announced as he climbed the steps to a plain-looking row house. He knocked on the door, looking over at me with a grimace. There was no going back now. The door opened with a creak and a guy who looked like he hadn’t been outside since bell-bottoms were in answered the door.

  He greeted us with a solitary “What.” If these were the guy’s business skills, no wonder he’d had to turn to a life of crime. No “How can I help you today, gentlemen?” or “You look like a couple of men who could use some narcotics. Can I interest you in some cannabis?” Or some well-timed upselling: “How about some heroin? It’s on special.”

  “I’m Fox,” Fox said by way of introduction.

  “Are you Fox’s brother?” the drug dealer asked. Then he seemed to realize it was an unnecessary question. “Come in.” He looked behind us as he let us in, no doubt checking to see if the “fuzz” had followed us to his “pad.” “How much do you need?”

  “This much,” Fox said, handing over his entire wad of cash. Fox was as good a negotiator as the drug dealer was a salesman. Although, to be fair, I guess you don’t need to be Mary Kay to sell weed. The dealer counted the money and tossed it on the coffee table. His hideout was not at all what primetime TV had prepared me for. He had a well-stained couch and an Iron Maiden flag for curtains. The rest of his decor consisted mainly of innovative ways to use milk cartons. He opened a kitchen drawer and removed a big ball of tinfoil. He broke something off, wrapped it in excess tinfoil from the bigger ball, and gave it to Fox. “Here.”

  I was no expert on drug value. I still don’t know how much it is for a gram or a block or an ounce or whatever it is, or even if a gram is metric and a block is Imperial. But even at that young age I knew we were getting ripped off. Chances are any adult who’s willing to sell drugs to a couple of grade seven kids is not going to be the most honest guy to begin with. I could tell that Fox suspected we were getting ripped off, too. Fox was my friend. He thought enough of me to ask me to come along on a drug deal with him, and I was going to have his back.

  “That’s not enough,” I heard myself say. Fox shot me a look that said, “What the hell are you doing, idiot? You’ll get us killed.” But I held my ground.

  “What?” the dealer asked. He seemed startled by the accusation. That’s when I realized something about him. We’d come to a low-end drug dealer’s house at lunchtime. This guy was stoned.

  “That’s not enough. You’re ripping us off. We’ve done this before, you know. His brother is gonna be mad.” The guy stood in his kitchen doorway and stared at me. He seemed to be weighing his options (maybe even considering kicking us out), then forgetting what he was thinking about and trying to remember what he was doing.

  “Yeah. Cool,” he said. “Whatever.” He added another small tinfoil ball to our bounty and tossed it to me. “Now get out of here.” Fox and I bolted for the door, and as it bounced open and closed behind us I heard the dealer say, “Come again.” He did have a bit of salesmanship in him after all. I appreciated the thought and made a mental note to become a return customer if I ever needed to buy drugs again.

  “That was deadly!” I shouted. I’d never felt so alive. There was no way doing drugs could ever compare to the rush of buying them. And we hadn’t just bought; we’d haggled. We’d undoubtedly been ripped off, but we’d been slightly less ripped off, and that made all the difference. The only bad thing about the experience was that we couldn’t tell anyone. It’s not like I was going to brag to the old man. “How was school toda
y, Mark?”

  “Oh, pretty good, Dad. Bought some weed at lunch. I think we got a pretty good deal, too.”

  “Good for you, son. I wish your brother knew the value of a dollar. He always pays way too much for skunk weed.”

  * * *

  —

  For me, marijuana was a gateway drug—to beer. I was invited to a sleepover at my friend Kevin’s house. And excitingly: Kevin’s parents would not be home. I’d never been unsupervised for an entire evening. I had no idea what it was like to sleep in a house that did not have an adult in it. I eagerly made my way to Kevin’s after school, confident that I’d be staying up well past my bedtime, perhaps even by two or more hours.

  By the time I knocked on Kevin’s door, Gary and Lee had already arrived. “Come in,” Gary said. “Have you got any money on you?” I coughed up the ten bucks I’d brought for buses and snacks and Gary snatched it from me. “We’re gonna try to get beer.” Beer? Weed was one thing. That had been for Fox’s brother, and I knew I’d never have to smoke any of it. This was different. If there was beer coming into the house, then I’d most certainly be pressured into drinking some of it. I was living in an After School Special.

  My parents didn’t keep liquor in the house. I’d never actually seen anyone drink alcohol before. I knew that people sometimes got drunk, but none of my parents’ friends ever drank when they came over. The other guys had parents who not only drank but would occasionally have parties. They’d grown up around liquor and had even snuck a taste here and there. Not me. I was a total alcohol virgin, and the idea of drinking terrified me. I would have called the cops on us, but Gary was already using the phone.

  “Hello, Gulliver’s Taxi?” Gary was speaking in his deepest voice, which was slightly higher than Michael Jackson’s. “Hi. I’d like a dozen beer picked up and delivered please.” Back then, cabbies would pick up and deliver alcohol to you for a small fee. Underage drinkers would often use this loophole to get beer without having to show any ID. It was a game of Russian roulette. If you were lucky and you got the right driver, the beer would be yours. But if you got a stickler then you risked having him tell your parents. The lads had weighed the odds and decided it was worth a shot.

  “He’s on the way,” Gary said, hanging up the phone. “Now, which one of us is going to go to the door when he comes?” All eyes looked to me.

  “Me?” I protested. I was a terrible choice. Not only did I not want to drink, but I had the least experience around liquor. If the driver casually asked what my favourite brand of beer was or something, I’d have no idea what to say. Plus I was the most worried, so I’d surely have the worst poker face. I would definitely crack.

  “Because,” Kevin explained, “you’re the biggest. You’re taller than the rest of us. You look the oldest.” The other boys nodded. Lee was just as tall as I was, but I had to concede that I did have a certain worldliness about me. It wasn’t that the other fellows were naive. I just had an air of sophistication. Perhaps I was the best man for the job after all.

  “All right,” Gary said. “Just don’t talk to the cab driver much. Just say thanks and give him the money.”

  “He shouldn’t say anything at all,” Lee suggested. “Just take the beer and shut the door.”

  “What if he knows he’s a kid?” Kevin wondered. “If he asks where Mark’s mother is or something?” This shook my confidence. Kevin was the one who’d suggested me, and now he seemed to think I was doomed to failure.

  “Maybe we should all go,” I offered. “That way if one of us clams up, someone else could do the talking and so on. It might look less suspicious that way. We could call up to the kitchen like if your mom was home. We could pretend she was just too busy to come to the door.” The boys looked at one another, considering this, before shaking their heads.

  “Nah,” Gary decided. “It’s best if you do it. We’ll stay upstairs so he doesn’t see us and think it’s a bunch of kids having a party.” “Yes,” I thought to myself, “better if he thinks it’s just one seventh grader drinking a dozen beer on a Friday night.”

  “Cab’s here!” Kevin shouted, spying the two headlights in the driveway. “Good luck!” The boys rumbled up the stairs to the second floor, leaving me alone with the beer money. The doorbell rang, announcing my moment of truth. I spied through the peephole to see a young man with long hair, a thin moustache, and a battered leather jacket. He certainly looked like the kind of guy who’d sell a dozen beer to a lonely seventh grader. I gave it a moment so I wouldn’t seem too anxious.

  “Hell of a night out there,” I said nonchalantly, flinging open the door. The driver looked down at me, the prize dozen Dominion Ale under his arm. He peeked past me to see if there was anyone else in the hallway.

  “Someone here order a dozen beer?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Yup! Me,” I answered with a touch too much bravado. “How much do I owe ya?”

  “Hello?” he called into the house. “Is anybody else home?” The boys, sticking to their plan, did not move a muscle, creating an awkward silence that lingered like a bad smell. He was on to me.

  “Are your parents home, little fella?” he asked, pushing past me and walking into the house. This did not feel right. What was he doing entering the house? Was he going to put the beer in the fridge for us? How was I going to answer his question? If I said no, we’d surely be in trouble. If I bluffed and he demanded to see them, we’d surely be in trouble. I decided to answer honestly.

  “Yes. Of course my parents are home,” I said primly. Technically, I wasn’t lying. My parents were always home. They were home at their house. I was not. He didn’t ask whether my parents lived in this house.

  “Don’t look like they’re home,” he said, putting the case of beer down on the floor. “Anybody else here?”

  “Guys?” I called up to the boys, who peeked down from the next landing. “Just them,” I said, gesturing up to the three heads above us.

  “Okay. Here’s how this works. You give me twice the price of the beer and I’ll leave it here and won’t say a word.”

  “We don’t got that much,” Gary shouted down the stairwell. He was right, too. We didn’t. Gary seemed angry at the injustice of it all. We were being overcharged just because we were kids. This was ageism.

  “Well, then,” the driver countered, “got any smokes?”

  “Yup! Got smokes.” Kevin bounded down the stairs with purpose. He ran into the kitchen and pulled a chair over to the refrigerator. Then he hopped up onto the seat and rummaged through a cupboard atop the fridge, securing a pack of Export A greens.

  “Green death. Perfect,” the driver said, snatching the prize from Kevin’s hand. He picked the beer up from the floor and brushed past me, headed for the door.

  “Hey,” Gary complained. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Back to work,” he said without even looking back at us. He opened the door and started to walk back down the steps to his still-running cab. “Thanks for the smokes.”

  “You can’t get away with this!” Kevin shouted after him. “Those are my mom’s smokes.”

  “Oh yeah?” the cabbie asked, spinning around with a smug look. “What are you gonna do? Tell your mommy that you called a cab to bring you beer and the driver took her smokes? Stop wasting my time, ya losers.” And with that he tossed the beer back into his trunk and drove off, one hand out the window in a one-fingered salute to his near-customers. If there was Yelp back then, I would have written him one hell of a bad review.

  “Nice going, Mark,” Kevin said. I detected a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  “Now what?” I asked my assembled fellow members of the Forced Abstinence Society. “There has to be another way to get some.” I said this assuming that there was no other way. Beer did not seem to be in our future. If anything, we were already in trouble. Kevin’s mother would blame us for smoking her cigarettes. Our situation was hopeless, and I couldn’t have been more relieved. I’d look like I was cool enoug
h to drink beer without ever having to actually drink it. “I’d do anything for a beer now,” I said, shaking my head.

  “We can still get beer,” Lee said, suddenly standing up and pacing the room. “We can go down to the gas station at the bottom of the hill and try. There are four of us. That means four chances.”

  “Oh, great,” I said, feeling my gut twirl inside me. The idea of ordering beer over the phone seemed plausible. The thought of all four of us trying to buy beer one after the other seemed laughable. What were we going to do? Was I supposed to walk up behind Lee once he was denied, roll my eyes and say, “Kids these days”? Then plunk my half-case onto the counter? Once I was denied and Gary showed up directly behind me with another case of beer, would the gas station attendant think “Seems legit” and ring him in? Or would he kick him out too before seeing Kevin with his six-pack and then giving in, worn down by the sheer steadfast tenacity of it all? Would the attendant then be driven to drink as well and join us and the cab driver for a few cold ones and stolen smokes? The plan was too stupid to work—so I was all in.

  We made our way down the hill fuelled by the ignorant bravado that comes only from youth. We were already drunk on excitement. We began to sober up, however, as we approached the store. The bright fluorescent lights lit up the night, illuminating our youthful faces in an almost medical fashion. Our every greasy pore and pimple was on display, screaming “They’re not legal” to every passerby. The door jangled as we opened it, announcing our entrance to a girl at the counter. She didn’t look that much older than us. The idea of someone, a girl, close to our own age, refusing to sell us beer made the whole thing seem even more embarrassing.

  We split off into the four corners of the store. We must have looked like we were going to shoplift something because the girl looked up from her magazine, paying close attention to our progress through the shop. We all ended up by the slim offerings of the movie rental rack. Lee had his eyes on a VHS tape in the “adult” section. The cover featured a woman in a bikini next to a motorcycle and promised “hot nude action” with three exclamation marks. “We should rent a skin flick,” he suggested.