'Do you have a scale?'
'No, I guess . . . buy one tomorrow. I'd like to know how muck is here, though . . . Maybe I can weigh it somewhere . . . Tee hee, maybe a store . . .'
'A store? What are you going to do, go in and ask to borrow their scale so you can weigh your heroin?'
'There's a health-food place around the corner. Let's go.'
I wasn't sure what he had in mind as I followed him out of the hotel. 'Mental, what exactly are you planning?'
'You’ll see.'
At the health-food store. Mental strode briskly down the aisle. He circled a vitamin counter, peering this way and that, picking up packages of seeds, and scrutinizing the other entities.
'I don't see what you can possibly do here,' I said as he peered over the top of a display. 'Let's get out of here.'
'Tee hee, there's a scale at the end there.'
'That's for weighing produce, and it's in the middle of the store. You can't use that!'
'Why not, tee hee.' He marched to the scale and plopped his see-through plastic bag of heroin right on it.
'MENTAL!!' I rushed to his side and tried to block the sight with my body, but there were people on all sides of him. 'Are you insane?'
'Shhhh, just watch for shoppers. Tell me when someone comes.'
'Comes? They're already here. There are people all around you.'
'Seven ounces and a little more.'
'Okay. Now put it away and let's go.'
'Tee hee, one more minute . . .' He left the powder on the scale and went to tear a plastic bag from the vegetable display.
'Oh, no . . . Mental, no! Someone will see you!'
He came back and proceeded to measure an ounce into the vegetable bag. I thought I'd the. I looked frantically at the other shoppers, but no one seemed unduly concerned that we were weighing something. 'Will you hurry up?!'
'I'm almost finished.' He poured more in and used a nut scooper from the nut display to scoop some out. 'Now I need something to cut it with. Tee hee, where's the sugar?'
I was relieved to see him leave the scale, but my alarm grew again as I spied him tearing into a box of confectioners' sugar. 'What are you DOING? Don't open that here! Mental, we're carrying; we've got to be a little cool, you know. Stop! Buy it first, take it home, and then open it.'
Flabbergasted, I watched him return to the scale and weigh out confectioners sugar from the ripped-open box. Still using the nut scooper, he scooped the sugar into another vegetable bag. This time I stayed a few feet from him so I could walk nonchalantly away when the guard came to arrest him. But no guard came. Eventually Mental strode off, leaving the torn box sitting an the counter. I followed.
'I'm finished. Tee hee, it worked didn't it?'
'Put it away, now. Put it away!' I said in a strained voice as I noticed the plastic bag of powder still in his hand.
Sweat coursed down my cheekbones as we finally walked toward the exit. Now Mental was headed for the door! I tried to stop him. 'Mental! We've got to buy something. We've been in here half an hour. We can't just walk out with nothing.'
But that's just what he had in mind. He was already past the wrong side of the checkout counter, and he kept going right out of the store. 'Tee hee. See, you got all wrought up for nothing.'
It soon became apparent that business with Mental would not be a simple undertaking. He was even having trouble with the great connection he allegedly had. Three days later he still hadn't made contact. The situation did not look promising. I certainly didn't trust Mental's ability to make a new connection. We needed someone who could handle quantity, and that was harder to find than your run-of-the-mill street dealer. Oh, dear—this was not going to work.
When another week went by without a sale, I decided to convince Mental to let me take the dope to Canada. I knew Jewish Connection was a good connection, however unpleasant our relationship had been, and felt confident I'd have no trouble disposing of the stash in Toronto. It would also be a relief to remove myself from Mental. I didn't wart to go to jail because of his dumb shenanigan.
Mental was not pleased with the idea, but it was obvious even to him that something had to go down soon or we wouldn't have a product left to sell. The only way this business worked—when you had your own habit—was to fly in, sell quickly, and return pronto to where the dope was cheap and plentiful.
Swearing I'd be back in four days, five at the most, I boarded a plane to Toronto. I, too, carried the cargo inside my body, but lucky for me, females have a neater, more-accessible pocket, so I didn't have to shove it up my ass like Mental. Because I'd left Canada only two weeks before, I worried that Immigration might find it suspicious. I fashioned a sad face and told the man at the counter I'd flown home for my mother's funeral. He smiled sympathetically and stamped me in.
As soon as I checked into a hotel, I called Jewish Connection. Sorry, he informed me, he couldn't handle more dope, because he still hadn't sold all of Mitchell's load. Uh-oh. Now what? I tried Dealer, but he was no help either. He dealt grams, and I was selling quantity—Mental had turned the original amount into a pound with the confectioners sugar. Dealer introduced me to someone who wanted to buy an ounce, though, and I agreed to deliver it that night.
The last thing I wanted was to parcel the stash into ounces, but it was the only start I had to begin a bigger connection. I delivered the ounce myself to the buyer and his girlfriend. There was another guy there, and they decided that, after trying the dope, they'd take me to the World's Fair, which was in Canada that year.
Buyer picked a rock and put it in his spoon. Though Mental and I had done a good job smashing it up, there was still a difference between the size of the dope and the size of the sugar—the rock was dope. Buyer did his shot, said it was fab, and we piled into a taxi to set out for the Fair.
We weren't more than a block away when he slumped over onto his girlfriend’s lap.
Oh, shit.
She called his name and slapped his face, but he didn't respond.
Oh shit shit shit! He was going to die of an overdose, and I had all that dope in my room! What should I do now?
The commotion in the back seat alerted the driver that something was amiss.
'Take us back,' the girlfriend told him.
It took all of us plus the taxi driver to carry Buyer back into the apartment. I decided I couldn't leave in the middle of a crisis, though my instinct was to run to the hotel and move my cache. I'd wait and see what happened. If he then or was placed in an ambulance, then I'd go. For the moment, I tried to act like the helping friend, not the killer dope dealer.
We spent the next hour walking Buyer around the apartment, propping him under the shower, and keeping his eyes open. When he finally enabled and sat up by himself, I figured he would survive and that I could leave the apartment without seeming rude or uncaring. Boy, was I glad to go. By that time they no longer viewed me as Santa Claus.
I made another connection—Vinny and Vanessa, two city-style Junkies. They lived in a basement apartment on a quiet street. It was obvious when I arrived that I'd awoken them from a nod. Their works were spread out on the kitchen table, and they couldn't wait to shoot a sample of my product. Then, while we discussed business arrangements, quarter-gram customers came and went, most of them taking a shot at the kitchen table before leaving. To clean a syringe, water must be squirted through it. Vinny and Vanessa's sleazy customers cleaned their syringes at the table, squirting their bloody water in the air. Traces of the descending pink liquid could be seen in numerous trails covering the refrigerator door. Yeck!
I didn’t trust Vinny and Vanessa one bit. I decided to sell them a few ounces at a time, collecting the money first and leading them to believe I had more than I really did. I figured they wouldn't rob me as Long as I was an ongoing source. The dope was good-quality, and they were getting a good deal, so I felt reasonably sure that I
