Pocket Lent

  My buddy's birthday was coming up and he had decided to party pretty hard. We’ll call him Charles for this post.

Charles wanted to get a 1/4 ounce of the pink flake that had been going around for a buck fifty a g(ram).

He also wanted to get a QP (1/4 pound) of weed to go with the keg of beer. He wanted the GOOD stuff.

You see, every now and then, this lime green bud with red hairs, no seeds (sinsemilla) and a great high would come to town very much like the song Panama Red...

Maybe some hallucinogenics if we could find any, be it mushroom, cacti or bathtub variety.

He had scrimped and saved for pert near two months, working overtime, bringing his lunch instead of eating off the food truck twice a day, staying out of the bars...

As my dad would say, "Shit in one hand and want in the other and see which hand fills up quickest."

As the big weekend approached, things were looking grim. Charles’s girl dumped him, he forgot to put a deposit down on the keg and he got laid off on his actual birthday.

A lot of guys would’ve just skipped to bourbon and beer chasers at home to lick the wounds and regroup; Not my boy. His way of collecting his thoughts were by throwing his fists. In Tite-ass-ville, there was no shortage of people to oblige.

His mom bailed him out Thursday afternoon and we smoked the pinner (small marijuana cigarette about the size of a toothpick) he had managed to conceal through the entire search when he was processed into jail. His mom was so proud. She called us a “bunch of inmates.”

Determined not to let a little set back like getting arrested kill the festivities, we spent the rest of the night in search of anything and everything in banned substances. When I got home, strolled in at sunrise to get ready for work, we had not succeeded in our quest for party favors.

My freshly unemployed friend continued the search while I was attempting to work a day job and be normal.

I managed to score an ounce of Mexican brown weed from a guy at work, it was seedy and full of stems but it was crumbly dry too. Looked like dirt when it was crushed up and cleaned. A hundred bucks for $25 worth of weed…supply and demand during “Just Say No.”

Charles stopped by my work on the afternoon break and we smoked some of my mediocre weed and he turned me on to a few lines of what was probably baby laxative and benzocaine he had found somewhere while he was out day drinking around town in search of said party favors.

We were going to meet up later at another buddy’s auto body shop in Mims, a.k.a the lonely hearts club- Where the recently divorced/dumped gathered to drink cheap beer by the case, whatever was on sale; Old Milwaukee, Stroh’s, Natural, Black Label…$4.99 a case! Can’t get a six pack of soda for that these days!

At any rate, the cheapest beer in town was at the old Majik Market, which used to be one of the pricier places, ironically, the Indian owned, Discount Beverage. The whole family worked the store.

They were willing to sell rolling papers when the corporate chains stopped selling them to do their part for the war on drugs- Just Say No! D.A.R.E to be different!

They were lax on id’s so parents could send in their barefoot kids with black feet to buy beer and cigarettes along with a sugary treat for themselves; no harm, no foul.

Charles had managed to find an 8 ball- (3.5 grams- ⅛ of an ounce; don’t judge, it’s the only math I know)- of off the brick blow (right off the kilo, not stepped on, cut with Ajax or baby powder) and stopped in at the cheap beer store which was quite busy with all the near-by Mims residents stocking up for the weekend.

He made his way to the front of the line lugging his two twelve packs and as he reached in his pocket to grab his wad of cash, unbeknownst to him, the contraband fell out of his pocket.

He was counting out his money to the clerk, looking forward to an evening of cold beers and cocaine, when the guy behind him said, “You dropped this.”

My friend figured he dropped some cash so he turned around to thank the guy and it turned out to be a Brevard County deputy, holding that little baggie of white powder.

Charles’s throat dropped into his stomach, his butthole puckered up tight- not even dark yet on Friday night and he’s going to jail, goddammit, man. Hadn’t even had time to crush it up in the grinder and do a blast…

In the meantime, all of us at the Home for Broken Hearted Suckers drank our beers, smoked some of the worst pot ever, figuring our friend must’ve reconnected with his ex and was toe to toe by now. His girl always seemed to show up shortly after the cocaine did…

There was no Sheriff’s web page back then so we didn’t hear about his troubles until Monday, after his mother picked him up from jail. Somehow, in her mind, it was our fault.

I was just giving him a ride to pick his truck up from the impound lot but I had to listen to the lecture about leading her son astray, being a bad influence- “He was fucked up when I met him so this has more to do with you than me,” was my response.

“Birds of a feather,” my mother called it. “Dumb ol’ boys, burning off testosterone.”

That was her way of saying that we weren’t getting any, because whenever one of us had a girlfriend, the rest of us wouldn’t see him around until the relationship soured, then it was back to the Lonely Hearts and Auto shop, to pass the time drinking beer, smoking pot and talking about the crazy women in our lives.

Peace and Love!

Average weekend, we cashed in the cans to buy more beer...