The Financial Lives Of the Poets

CHAPTER 16

I WANT MY DEALERS

To be smarter than they are;

Welcome to Weedland

“Wake up, Slippers,” says a voice I don’t recognize. I snap awake.

“Welcome to Weedland!” Jamie says from the backseat. I look out my window and then over at Dave the Drug Dealer, who is driving.

“You have a nice nap?” asks my sidekick Jamie.

“How long was I out?”

“Half hour.”

It was oddly relaxing, riding in a car with someone else driving, even if that someone was Drug Dealer Dave and his car was disconcertingly just like my own. We met at Bea’s, and since I hadn’t slept in days, I started feeling my head bob as soon as Jamie began a story about “this dude in my math class who wants to get an operation to make himself into a chick, but dude says he ain’t gay and I’m like, what the fuck you mean you ain’t gay, but he insists he ain’t gay, he’s, like, a woman, and I’m like, ‘Dude, until you’re a real woman, you are totally a ram-banger, yo,’ and he’s like: ‘But if I’ve never had sex with a man, how can I be gay?’ and I’m like, Dude, whoa! That is kinda freaky…”

And the next thing I knew Dave was saying, “Wake up, Slippers.”

And I snapped awake here in…

…Weedland, which exists in the last place I would’ve ever guessed, a small farming town an hour from the city, on a little road behind the main street of this endlessly dying wheat and mill town-a town which fell on hard times so long ago the people there are actually nostalgic for the old hard times. These new hard times? Boring. Wimpy. Back in the old bad days, they ate dirt. But they were happy!

I don’t tell Dave that I’ve been to this little town at least five times before, back when I was a reporter. Off a nowhere, two-lane highway, this little shitburg is close enough to the city that it was one of five or six trusty small towns that served the newspaper staff whenever we needed “rural reaction” to stories. We came to Weedland fairly often (without knowing it was Weedland, of course) to write about this agricultural bill’s failure or that wheat embargo, or this local politician’s pandering run for office. Sometimes a story just calls for a random quote by some craggy old farmer and there was always a craggy old farmer to quote here, the sons of other craggy old farmers that my newspapers quoted in the hard-times 1970s, the grandsons of old crags we quoted in the hard-times 1930s. Legacies.

Dave parks along a street of plain clapboard houses, just behind the town’s main street, which is, appropriately enough, called Main Street. The house we walk toward is situated behind a couple of unlikely Main Street businesses-a camera and watch shop and

small engine repair. There are a dozen houses on this block, six on each side of the street. We park behind a red Camaro (so much depends on a red Camaro) and I follow Dave and Jamie between piles of leaves up the sidewalk to a simple two-story with a pitched dormer, a hot tub on the side of the house and an old RV with an electrical cord leading to the back door.

Dave rings the doorbell.

A shortish, roundish, twentyish guy in a backward ball cap answers the door, chattering away on a cell phone (“No way…She did not…Come on…Just my brother’s friend and some cop…No way…Come on…No way…”) and after opening the door he steps back without really acknowledging us; he just keeps talking, into infinity (“No way…Come on…She did not…No way…”) as he pushes through a door and disappears.

“Don’t worry about that guy,” Jamie confides. “Fat fuck thinks everyone’s a cop. I hate that guy.” Jamie is wearing his skullcap again, along with a knee-length black coat and a disarming pair of black glasses (he explained that he’s out of contacts and his mom switched insurance companies to one that has totally worthless vision benefits).

Jamie says again, “Fuckin’ hate him.”

And I haven’t known Jamie all that long, but I’m surprised to hear him say he hates anyone. Maybe all skullcaps simply hate all ball caps, some kind of Red America/Blue America, India/Pakistan thing.

I look around the living room of this old house. There are a couple of beer posters and a big map of the world, a bad oil painting of a house in the woods, a couch, two old easy chairs, a TV, a set of World Book encyclopedias and another bookshelf of Reader’s Digest Condensed. The carpet is well-worn beige. But for the beer posters, it could be your grandparents’ house, everything where it should be, yet there’s still something…I don’t know…wrong

about it…something forcedly random, as if it’s been put together for a family melodrama by the set designer of a local theater.

Dave the Drug Dealer bounces on the balls of his feet as we wait for the person we’re meeting. Dave’s hair is freshly trimmed and gelled and he’s wearing a beautiful worsted wool overcoat. I have a wool overcoat almost like it and again, something feels off about that-my drug dealer sharing the same car, same coat? A drug dealer should drive a low-rider Monte Carlo, and wear sharkskin or black satin or velour sweats or something. I officially don’t like having a lawyer for a dealer.

We stand a minute longer and, finally, into the room comes the man we’ve been waiting for…and again he’s not at all what I expected-even though I don’t recall expecting anything. This guy is round and heavy, in his thirties, with a baby face and puffball cheeks, thinning blond hair. He’s wearing the largest parka I’ve ever seen, zipped to his tree-stump neck. He’s a walking Quonset hut, this guy. Then Big Parka and Dave do an awkward handshake hug thing-heads tilted back, using the soul-shake as a buffer between them.

“How you doin’, man.”

“Good. You?”

“Oh, you know.”

“So.” Dave backs away from the hug and…presents me. “This is the guy.”

I put out my hand and Big Parka takes it with his squishy wet mitt. He gives me a damp handshake and I look up into his ruddy, gentle face. “Nice to meet you, Guy.”

“Uh…no.” I glance over at Dave. “My name’s not Guy.”

Big Parka looks back at Dave. “You said, ‘This is Guy.’”

“No. I said, the guy. ‘This is the guy.’ His name’s Matt.”

“Oh.” Big Parka looks sort of horrified at this dealer faux pas. “I thought Guy was like…short for Matt.”

“How could Guy be short for Matt?” Dave asks. “Who shortens a name by going from four letters to three?”

I feel bad for awkward Big Parka, who is in full blush now. I actually think he might cry. “But…it could be a nickname, right?”

“Dude’s nickname is Slippers,” Jamie says.

“Oh,” says Big Parka. “Look, Slippers. Is it okay if Dave and I talk alone for a minute?”

I say that of course it’s fine. Then Jamie and I sit on the couch while Dave and Big Parka rumble off to talk in low voices in the kitchen.

On the couch, Jamie says, quietly, “Dave grew up around here.”

“Really?” It’s not that I’m that surprised Dave is from this town; I’m just surprised that Dave is from any town. Of course he has to be from somewhere, but you don’t expect to end up in the old neighborhood of your drug broker.

Jamie goes on, sotto voce: “Big dude in the coat’s named Monte. He went to high school here with Dave. Played football together. You imagine those dudes playing football? Shit, I should’ve lived in a small town. I’d have been fuckin’ all-state. Definitely wouldn’t have gotten cut in eighth grade. After they graduated, Dave moved away, went to law school. Monte stayed around here. This is his grandpa’s house.”

“Where’s Monte’s grandpa?”

Jamie makes a kind of bug-eyed face that makes me think either Monte’s grandfather has gone crazy and is in an asylum or that Monte and Dave have choked him to death.

“Monte got popped on a possession couple of years ago. Dave got him off and they been workin’ together ever since.” Jamie nods toward the kitchen. “Asshole on the cell phone? Monte’s brother, Chet. Real prick. Leeches off Monte, stupid motherfucker. Me ’n

him are gonna go one day. And I can’t wait, yo. I’m gonna lay that punk-ass bitch out.”

Even though this sounds like empty bluster coming from Jamie, I contemplate giving him my effective four-point nonviolence lecture, a version of which I delivered to Franklin earlier (…(1) Except in rare cases of self-defense involving hand grenades, violence is always wrong, even against stupid motherfucker punk-ass bitches…)

Jamie looks around the living room. “So…you’re like a businessman and a writer?”

“I covered business for the newspaper for eighteen years.”

“And you write what, poems and shit?”

“Mostly shit.”

“So how’d you get into that? You get, like…a degree in it?”

I’ve been sitting next to Jamie on the couch, but now I turn to face him-gaunt cheeks, straight, dyed-black hair, a stud through his nose and another through his lip and that tattoo wrapping partway up his neck, and at the top, a pair of downturned eyes. My drug dealer sidekick is like any kid venturing a tentative question. He blushes.

I can’t help smiling. “You want to be a writer, Jamie?”

He chews his lip nervously and looks down-unsure if my smile means I’m making fun of him. He’s embarrassed to aspire to something as low-rent as being a writer.

“I don’t know,” Jamie says. “I’ll probably end up in sales…or law enforcement…or, I don’t know…I might be in a band? I’ll definitely have to do something else to make some coin.” He shrugs. “But yeah, I always thought I’d be a good writer.”

Sadly, our career counseling session is interrupted when Big Parka Monte comes back in the room alone. I don’t know where Dave has gone. “Come on, Slippers,” Monte says. “I want to show you something.”

Jamie and I follow him through a rustic kitchen-an open pizza box with half-a-veggie on the Formica table (stoned stock analyst side-note: Domino’s Pizza’s time-tested delivery platform and low price-point make it a solid recession buy)-to a padlocked basement door. Big Parka produces a janitor’s key ring and unlocks the door and we descend (Jamie: “Watch your head, Slippers.”) into a paneled rec room with two small window-wells. There’s an unlit pellet-burning stove in one corner and a ceiling fan moving the warm air around. It is surprisingly hot down here, stuffy even. On the other side of the room an air hockey table is pushed up against the wall. Big Parka grabs one side of the air hockey table and Jamie grabs the other and they pull the table away. Then Big Parka Monte takes a putty knife and wedges it into a seam in the paneling, pries away a door-sized section, sets the paneling against another wall and steps away to reveal a narrow, yellow-glowing hallway lit with strung Christmas lights along its dirt floor.

“During Prohibition, there was a still down here,” Jamie tells me. “Monte’s great-grandpa was a rum runner.”

I follow Monte down this narrow hallway. It’s warm. No windows. There are three small doors off the hallway, each one padlocked. A slender yellow strip of light burns beneath each door. Monte uses his key to open the first door and steps aside as I look in.

Dave is nowhere to be seen; everything he does seems planned in advance for some later testimony: Mr. Prior, did you ever see my client in the grow room itself?

I step into the narrow doorway.

I’m not entirely prepared for what I see.

The room is small, maybe ten-by-ten. It’s almost unbearably bright. There’s a low gurgling hum, the sound of water moving through pipes. Hanging from the ceiling are three banks of hooded lights, like a photographer might use, and the walls are papered in

reflective Mylar. Space heaters line the bases of the walls, and temperature and barometer gauges are on the wall nearest the door. In the center of the room, beneath the lights, are what we’ve come here for: four rows of chest-high counters, each with a pot and rows of large cubes that look like steel wool, each of these cubes connected by plastic water pipes, and rising from each cube of steel wool, like rows of patients on IV’s, three dozen of the most glorious dark green hydroponic marijuana plants anyone has ever seen, their stems bursting into ferny leaves and sitting on top, like dirty Christmas tree toppers, gorgeous bursts of purple-green, scuddy buds.

“Wow,” I say. There are rows and rows of these top-heavy, budding, dark green plants, and more plants hanging upside down to dry and I recall the old gray ragweed my friend Donnie used to grow and it’s like the difference between thoroughbreds and burros. And even though this is what I’ve come for, there is something vaguely unsettling about this room, like one of those chicken farms where the birds are kept indoors and given steroids to grow their breasts. And the low gurgle of hydroponic tubes connecting the plants makes it seem even creepier, like one of those body-snatcher movies, or the nest of dead bodies in the Alien movies. Monte puts a hand on my shoulder. “Come on.”

The next room is similar, but with buzzing sodium lights and what Monte tells me is a carbon dioxide generator. And rather than growing in “rock wool,” as Monte calls the cubes I saw earlier, these stems emerge from a whitish-gray stuff that looks almost like packing material.

“Shredded coconut,” Monte says. “It works great for this kind of plant, but you really have to watch the aphids. I lost a whole crop to aphids one year.”

“I see,” is all I can think to say.

In the next room, the lights are fluorescent and the plants grow

out of a mixture of soil and sponges. “This is incredible,” I say. “You must have a botany degree or something.”

From the rec room behind us, Jamie calls: “No way, yo. Monte’s self-taught. Dude’s like a genius, somethin’.”

Monte shrugs shyly.

The short hallway ends at a tiny iron door, like the hatch of an old coal furnace. Monte opens it and I peer into a crawl space leading to another glowing passageway. “This tunnel leads to my neighbor’s basement,” Monte says. He tells me that three basements in this block are connected by these tunnels, that each basement has a secret panel leading to other grow rooms. There are twelve grow rooms in all in his little underground maze.

I think about the craggy old farmers I used to interview about falling wheat prices-and I wonder if any of them lived in these houses with moonshine basements converted into marijuana tunnels. Perhaps they’ve been growing pot in this maze of basements for decades.

Monte tells me that his brother Chet lives in one of the houses. The other is a rental that he owns and the renters are friends who aren’t allowed access to the basement, which is boarded up and padlocked. Monte keeps the rent low and pays the renters’ high electrical bills. Every electrical appliance in the houses is the highest efficiency and all of the houses have empty hot tubs or RVs parked outside, in case someone starts sniffing around about the high power bills. Managing power bills is the key to the whole industry, he explains. Drug agents routinely look for big surges in the power grid to find grow operations, so Monte disperses the power bills not only between the houses on this block, but also to the two businesses behind his house, on Main Street: the small engine repair place and the camera and watch shop-both of which can hide higher power bills easier than a residential property.

“So you own those, too?” I ask.

“No, no,” he says, “they’re just friendly businesses. We run power lines from their shops to a few of the grow rooms. In exchange, I pay double their power bill every month.”

“Monte keeps them businesses alive,” Jamie says from the doorway. “Dude’s like the last industry in town.”

Monte’s high round cheeks instantly go red; this amateur botanist drug kingpin is so easily embarrassed.

The whole operation is fascinating to me, and yet there’s something about all of this that is bothering me, too-and not what should be bothering me, that I’m matter-of-factly taking a tour of a sophisticated, illegal grow operation. No, I can’t help wondering something else.

Monte looks back down the dark hallway. “Come on,” he says. I follow him and Jamie back into the rec room. Then Monte closes up Weedland, and we move upstairs.

Dave rejoins us and we sit around the Formica table-Jamie and me on one side, Monte and Dave on the other. Monte’s chair strains beneath his considerable weight.

Chet circles back in, still on his phone, and opens the refrigerator again. “Bullshit…Come on…Not possible…It’s bullshit, that’s why…Come on.”

I glance over at Jamie, who is glaring at Chet through angry, squinted eyes, like a dog about to pounce.

“Chet!” Monte calls. “What’s the matter with you?”

Chet turns to his brother, and shrugs. Then he closes the fridge and moves out of the room onto an enclosed back porch. “Bullshit,” he says on his way out. “Come on, no way.”

When the door closes, Monte smiles. He rests his big red-raw steak-slab hands on the table. “When Dave and Jamie told me about you, I wanted to meet you right away. Nine grand is an impressive first buy.”

“’Course we did a background check on you-make sure you weren’t a cop,” Dave says.

Monte shifts nervously, as if afraid that I’ll be angry at this invasion of my privacy. “We Googled you is all,” he says.

Drug Dealer Dave shoots a glance, perturbed at Botany Monte for popping the illusion of an intensive background search. These guys are worse than Lisa and me, with their glances back and forth, their miscommunications, halting awkward affection for one another. “Anyway,” Monte continues, “we’re excited by your contacts, the new markets you might open up. We’ve always thought there was a…a…”

Dave finishes for him. “A demographic we weren’t reaching.”

Monte glances at Jamie. “I mean, the people we use now are great, but Dave and I always thought there were people outside the usual smokers we know. Older people, people with good jobs and money, people who used to smoke and maybe would again if there was a safe place to buy it. And you’re just the kind of guy Dave says would know ’em: Respectable. Not flashy. No criminal record, no reason for the police to suspect you of anything, no tattoos or drug habits or unsavory associations-”

As much as I wish I could stop myself, I can’t, and at the words tattoos, drug habits and unsavory associations, I glance over at Jamie. He is chewing gum, his neck tattoo twitching at every chomp. He pushes his glasses up on his nose and smiles at me.

“-Like I told Dave, if you can come up with nine grand for a first buy? That’s a guy we should be in long-term business with.”

“I appreciate that,” I say. This all seems oddly formal. “But I should tell you: I’m only going to do this a little while, until I get a few things paid off, get back on my feet.”

“Sure,” Monte says. “Sure. But-” And then he leans back in his chair and the legs on the chair splay just a bit, gritting on the

old linoleum floor. I worry the old chair is going to snap. “Dave, do you want to-”

And with that, Drug Dealer Dave leaves again. This must be when I get my dope.

Instead, Monte hands me a small pipe and lighter and I fire one up, feel that first hot burn in my throat and then the sweet smoke. Ah yes. There it is. Two hits and I set the pipe on the table. I feel better already.

Monte holds out his hands.

I take the envelope of money from my pocket-and feel a tug of regret (there it goes). Monte doesn’t count it. The money just disappears in his coat. Then Monte rises, goes to a kitchen drawer, opens it and takes out a quart Ziploc bag (Stoned stock analyst side-note: Watch for SC Johnson and Sons-makers of those popular Ziploc bags-to go public) with a big cigar-sized roll of rich green buds in the bottom. He also removes a baby scale, which he puts on the kitchen table. He sets the baggie on the scale and I see that it’s three ounces. Then he hands me the baggie and takes his chair again.

“I need a little time to get the rest of it together,” Monte says. “You can’t just pull two-and-a-half-pounds off the shelves. And I needed to make sure you actually had the money.” He shrugs apologetically. “Tomorrow night, you pick Jamie up, come out here and get the rest. That’s a little taste. Three ounces. I’ll take it out of the two-and-a-half.”

“Just enough for your glaucoma,” Jamie says, and laughs.

I’m a little confused, and feel stupid that I let them take my money. I wonder if that’s why he had me smoke first-to loosen me up. And why’d they have me all the way out here if they were only going to give me three ounces? Why couldn’t I wait and pay him tomorrow? I shift…there’s a hole in my side where that big stack of money sat.

Monte holds the pipe up. “You good?”

I say that I am and he puts the pipe away in that giant file cabinet of a parka. “Put that away,” Monte says, and so I put the three ounces of weed in my messenger bag. Then Monte yells, “Dave!” and Dave comes back in with his briefcase again and I think, Oh great, more contracts, but instead he pulls out an envelope that is red-stamped Confidential. He slides it across the Formica table to me. “I trust you’ll keep this between us.”

“What is it?”

“A kind of…prospectus. A business plan. The real reason we wanted you to come out here tonight. Now, obviously, you can’t take this with you. You have to just read it here.”

A prospectus? What kind of drug dealers have a prospectus? I glance over at Jamie. He is unflappable, never looks confused, but also never seems to entirely grasp what is going on around him. Maybe he should be a writer.

I look at Dave, and then back at Monte, who has that same tentative, eager-to-please look on his round, red face. He runs bratwurst fingers through his side-parted hair. “Everything you’d need to know is in there.”

Then, as I’m still trying to understand, Chet comes back through the room, eternally talking on the phone: “No fuckin’ way.” He opens the refrigerator and grabs a beer.

“Chet!” snaps Monte again.

“You gotta be kidding,” Chet says into his phone, waving his older brother off. “No fuckin’ way. You gotta be kidding.” And then Chet is gone. I’m actually starting to wish Jamie would crack his skull.

I turn back to Dave. “Why do I need a prospectus to buy weed?”

Dave pokes Monte in the big parka. Nods at him.

“There’s something I’d like you to consider,” Monte says. And

he looks at Dave again. “I’m looking for someone…I mean…Ask yourself this: why go on buying milk when you could have your own cow?”

I look from Dave to Monte. “Because…I don’t want a cow?”

Dave puts a hand on Monte’s arm. “What Monte’s trying to say is that you should think about buying the farm.”

I laugh. But they’re serious. I look from Monte to Dave, to Monte again. Yes. They are serious. “I really just want a little milk. I don’t want a cow.”

Dave shakes his head. “Look, that wasn’t the best analogy. But you really should consider this…it’s a once-in-a-lifetime offer.”

And I don’t know what makes me ask this, maybe the bowl I’ve smoked, maybe simple curiosity: “How much?”

“Well,” Monte says, a little embarrassed. “I’d like to get four million.”

“Dollars?” And I laugh again.

Dave sits back, crosses his arms. “I don’t think you’re taking this seriously, Slippers.”

“No,” I say, “I’m certainly not taking it seriously. No way I’m going to buy a four-million-dollar drug business.”

Monte looks hurt again, those cheeks venting pink. “It’s worth a lot more than that.”

And, as I’m thinking of the falling value of my own home, Dave taps the prospectus in my hands. “After costs, Monte nets upwards of a million a year. You’d recoup the entire purchase price in four years. With his old buyers, you increase the market even a little? You could do two million a year…pay it off in even less time.”

I have no idea what to say. What do you say to an offer like this? You go in to buy a Chrysler and they try to sell you the whole lot, the whole company? “This is why you had me out here? To try to sell me your drug business?”

“The four million includes equipment, property, plants, everything,” Monte says. “And two weeks of transition and training.”

“And you’re not just buying a business.” Dave says. “You get all of Monte’s knowledge, his accounts, access to markets. You get an experienced lawyer-me. And Monte will agree to a noncompete clause so you don’t have to worry that he’ll just go start up another operation somewhere.”

I stare at them. They’re serious. “Look, guys. Even if I was interested, which I’m definitely not, I don’t know what makes you think I have four million dollars sitting around.”

Dave has a quick answer for this. “Monte would carry the contract. I’d arrange it through a foreign bank. You put something down as good faith, say fifteen percent, and after that, Monte gets a percentage of your sales until you pay it off. It would be like making payments, like any home purchase, except rather than paying your mortgage off in thirty years, you could pay if off in four or five. And make a sweet living in the meantime. Tax free.”

“If it’s such a sweet living, why is he selling?”

I think Monte might cry. He shoots a quick glance at Dave and then says, “I’m tired,” his voice cracking. “I’ve been doing this six years. It wears on you. It’s a young man’s game.”

Dave puts a hand on Monte’s arm. Don’t mess this up. “It does wear on you…but while you’re enduring the stress, you can make a lot of money. We’ve managed to put away well over a million dollars for Monte’s retirement.”

It’s quiet in the kitchen, long enough for the irony to register: I’ve been working in the “legitimate economy” for twenty-some years and my retirement amounts to four hundred bucks in the bank and the two-and-a-quarter pounds of knock-off weed I have to come back here tomorrow to pick up.

Monte nods. “I’m going to Mexico. I’m freaked out by the di

rection of the country. I think we’re headed toward global socialism. This isn’t the America I grew up in.”

I just stare. The high is descending on me like drawn curtains. I smile. What do you say to a drug dealer afraid of socialism?

Monte shifts in his big parka. “I want to spend the money I’ve made but I don’t want what I’ve built to fall apart. I’m proud of it.” He looks at the door. “Chet wants it, but he’d be in jail two weeks after I left.” Monte leans forward to confide in me. “He’s kind of a moron.”

Jamie laughs.

“Why me?”

“Monte has wanted to get out for a while,” Dave says. He shrugs. “He has some stress issues, anxiety attacks.”

“I can’t sleep anymore,” Monte says, and his eyes tear up. “I had a nervous breakdown.”

Perfect business for me.

Dave goes on: “So when Jamie told us he met a businessman who could buy real weight, we talked about it, and I said, ‘Hey…maybe this is our guy. He seems perfect for it.’”

It makes me realize just how low I’ve sunk in my unemployed funk, that it’s actually flattering to hear that I’m perfect for something, anything-even a drug operation. “First of all, I’m not a businessman. I was a business reporter. Look, I never made more than sixty thousand a year in my job.”

Monte and Dave look at one another; slight winces.

“And I don’t even have a job right now.”

“You’ll find something,” says Jamie. “You’re smart.”

I laugh and rub my brow, sort of touched by Jamie’s confidence in me. “Shouldn’t you guys…I don’t know…sell to criminals?”

“You can’t just look up the Russian mob in the Yellow Pages,” Dave says. “And you can’t put something like this on craigslist.

And most of our customers-” He glances at Jamie “-aren’t the kind of people who could come up with that kind of money.”

I look from red face to red face. Fat Monte: confused, a little paranoid, flushed. Pocked Dave: intent, brewing, scheming. Jamie: chewing gum.

And I think of…Lisa. She loves to shop for houses we can’t afford. On weekends she used to like going to open houses for two- and three-million-dollar homes. We’d park down the block so they couldn’t see we were driving a Nissan and we’d try to look like BMW people, and then we’d walk through these big, grand homes and pretend to be considering whether the indoor lap pool was big enough for our kids (when they came home from boarding school); whether the subzero refrigerator and double Viking commercial oven would work for the gourmet meals our staff prepared for dinner parties with our country club friends. (I’d occasionally crack from the pressure and say something stupid: “I like the double oven; we could put fish sticks on one side and crinkle fries on the other.”) Lisa was the master at looking these shit-for-sure real estate agents in the eye, conveying, You bet your ass we belong. In fact, she always looks like she belongs. Maybe I just miss her, but I find myself wishing she was with me on this conversation, helping me seem as if I can afford a four-million-dollar grow operation.

I don’t know whether I’m afraid of endangering my drug purchase, or hurting the feelings of my sensitive dealers, or whether I want to be the successful businessman they mistook me for-or I’m just high again-but I find myself feigning interest. I pull the two-page prospectus from the envelope. The first thing I see is a kind of quarterly report, including a graph with three bars-sales in blue, gross earnings in black and net profit in green. As a business reporter, I saw enough of these to know a real winner when I see one. That green bar rises above the skyline like the Sears

Tower. I flip to the next page…see assets dwarf liabilities and expenses. The return on investment is insane.

Dave leans in over my shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking.”

I look up into Dave’s acne-scarred face.

“You’re thinking, too bad we can’t take this public.”

When he thinks I’ve had enough time, Dave takes the prospectus from my hand. “Slippers, this is the kind of opportunity that comes once in a lifetime. Ask yourself this: ‘Who gets to buy a potential two-million-dollar-a-year business for four million?’ You think Jack Welch wouldn’t jump at this? Or Warren Buffett?”

And this is when I finally crack…go all fish-sticks-and-crinkle-fries…burst into laughter. The idea of Warren Buffett owning a grow operation gets me. I can’t do the Lisa-at-the-mansion feint, can’t pretend this makes sense. I’m too high, too tired, unraveling and I simply don’t have it. “Guys, I appreciate you thinking of me, but even if it wasn’t crazy…fifteen percent down is still, what, six hundred thousand? Look, that nine grand I just gave you, Monte? That’s all the money I have. In four days, they’re coming after my house. Which bank do you suggest I go to for this? Which bank specializes in half-million-dollar loans to homeless guys looking to buy hydroponic grow operations?”

Monte looks stung. “I know it seems like a lot.” Again those cheeks flush. The man is so vulnerable. It’s heartbreaking. He is Piggy, Drug Lord of the Flies. “Dave said it might be hard to raise that kind of cash in this economy. Dave thought you might be able to, you know, put together a-” He glances over at his high school buddy “-a contortion?”

“A consortium,” Dave says weakly, to his shoes, embarrassed by Monte’s slipup.

“Right,” says Monte, “a consortium.”

I am sitting in front of the most hapless drug dealers in the

world. “A consortium,” I say, full of sympathy, and again, strangely flattered that-to these guys-I look like the kind of person who could put together a bowling team, let alone a four-million-dollar consortium. “Look guys. I’m going to be absolutely clear with you here. There is no way I’m going to buy a four-million-dollar grow operation-”

“Okay, okay,” Dave says, and for the first time I see something else on his face; thin-lipped and arms crossed, he is pissed off. “We get it.” He stands and shoves his chair toward the table. And then he turns back. “Three-point-eight?”