NightWork

Daniel Muessig

Copyright 2011 Daniel Muessig

Smashwords Edition

Chapter 1. 11/08/07 2:54 AM

I was many things. I was a writer. A sex addict. A boyfriend. A best friend. A man of rich and exciting prospects. Now my face is swollen to grotesque proportions, my skin is sallow and hangs off of me both flabby and underfed. I have lost everything that has ever mattered to me. My girlfriend, my friends, my family. All of them are lost to me now. I am dead to them. My girlfriend is dead. She died over my greed so I killed her even though it was not my gun and my duct tape. I am a fugitive, a person of interest in several pending cases involving trafficking and murder. Given every advantage in life, every chance to do well or even mediocre and I failed in all respects. Of late I am a vortex whose actions and presence have done nothing but infect all who enter my radius with raw, dripping, suffering, which oozes from the knowledge that I was not always lost. There once was a time of promise for me. A time when my own image in a mirror was not a repugnant mask concocted by this cut rate plastic surgeon near Hunting Park who specializes in trannys. I’m not saying I was ever handsome but now my head throbs with its ugliness. It intermingles with the pain and poor work. There are sticky patches of open skin tied by sutures that range from loose to tight dependant on some sick whim. My hair is bleached an unconvincing blonde that clashes with the greenish yellow of my body and the wine colored injury of my face. My head is swollen; it bulges to a disgusting size. Home is now this dank little hideaway near 16^th and Fitzwater. I sit shivering in the dark as I neglected to get the heat on in my own safe house. I sleep on a blue and white floral patterned air mattress that doubles me in half.. Most of the flowers are yellow with my thick sleeping sweat, the sweat of dread that hunted people produce. The flowers near my head are dyed more beautiful colors, orchid, rose, buff and pink from my facial secretions. I am in constant pain. My lips were shot through with collagen and then ripped back open as their profile was reduced. The effect is sausage innards bursting from a meager casing. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to cry but I do plenty of both down here in this lair, a one bedroom shotgun shithole halfway buried below basement level with windows that show the alley sidewalk. My nose was supposed to be reshaped. I don’t know if that is what happened. It was broken. I can say that much with total certainty. It is bulbous and reddish purple, wide and flat as if it has territorial ambitions on my cheeks each of which were cracked to make my face sharper. The surgeon, the father of an associate said he aimed to make me a Nordic playboy. I can see that he’s had worlds of practice creating garish facsimiles of people for desperate people. If some dude wants silicone tits and to look like Kimora Lee and wants this all done in a day under questionable sanitation for a stacks slid under the table and maybe some future earnings kicked back, this is the butcher they call. He is famous up and down the east coast. He has twelve cars and lives in a mansion with a messy yard. Inside it is all vomit colored shag carpeting and modular cream seventies egg chairs. He hasn’t fixed his own house since Jimmy Carter finagled over hostages and his lustful heart. This is the motherfucker I let slip a Buck Rodgers surgical mask on me in the Bustleton Avenue Marriot amongst filing cabinets and dust and get to work mangling my face.

The truth is I like it. It is bloody, pussing, swollen penance for every dollar I wasted on limited edition Nikes or jewelry for my girl when I should have been saving. I should have been writing. I should have been learning. I should have done or been anything but this. I don’t go outside. There is a fridge full of food that can be made cold or cooked in a Foreman but since I can’t even open my mouth more than the width of an Oxycontin eighty milligram pill that is not much of a problem. Truth be told I haven’t eaten in three days and I haven’t drank water in two. My head stopped sweating but the migraine and fever persist. Dirty Doc Frankenstein MD gave me several bottles of oxys. I have moved up to the biggest ones now and even they don’t stop the pain except for a few hours when I am given the illusion of bliss. I move my face and stride around my cage making grandiose gestures like a fascist demagogue. Then the pill wanes and my face screams agony with the contortions I have put it through. I was warned to keep the dressings on and not to talk or scream or smack my head off the wall when I’m so fucked up and I want to look uglier to hear the pain bellow until I deafen me. I was warned that tampering with any of this haphazard work will make me look deformed and lead to infections and abscesses that will pale my current state. I was warned that all of this will kill me. I was warned not to sell drugs. Once I started selling drugs I was warned not to get greedy. Once I got greedy I was warned to be careful. My father was a history teacher who always warned me to analyze patterns. Patterns in past behavior determine the future of nation states. The character of leaders,… of the people. It can hinge on a matter of seconds.

Now I sit alone in the cold lit by the glow of my laptop screen, writing this and sobbing as I scroll through a battered cellphone with picture after picture of us together. She loved me so much and I can see the love in the pictures, the way she glows when her face is nearest to mine, how she pouts her lips and angles her nose to fit into the crook of my neck. I can smell her hair now and remember the arrangement of fibers on the rug, the logo of my baseball hat faced outwards leaning off a black Ikea table, the date on the computer screen as it snapped the photo. I see it all each moment is a perfect crystalline prison that I lock myself within until the pain paroles me. She is the love of my life. She is a was because she is gone now. She is dead and they killed her trying to get to me and some money. Or maybe to send me a message. Or maybe because they wanted to kill her and she saw them. She was imperfect. She was vain. She had a bad temper and was jealous of me. She acted childish at times. She was horrible with checks and forms. She was a wonderful person who would have been an even better wife and mother had she not been tortured, beaten with her own dinner plates, duct taped in our bedroom’s corner with her favorite stuffed animal, a Koala bear named Simon I bought her in Melbourne lying next to her and then shot right through her beautiful face two times and then once more in the back of her curls. That was how I found her when I came home ten days ago. Her face was less recognizable than mine.

A drug dealer’s life is one marked by constant waiting. You wait for the work to come. You wait for the customer to arrive. You wait for the money to get picked up if you are being fronted or you wait for your connect to replenish your supplies. It is a life filled by days wasted in slow increments. Meaningless time spent in front of televisions or slumped in cars with the music off. Time spent sleeping but not resting, listening for the telltale sign of someone walking around the back entrance to your crib, hand curled on the gun you keep by your night table. Or the worst sort of waiting: up late night, bags packed near the open window, ready to bail out of your own home one step ahead of the cops. Calls made to friends in different cities on phones that will be dropped into sewer grates, duffels stuffed with little more than drugs and money. Your girlfriend crying, sobbing her eyes rimmed reddish and puffed next to your because you may be back in twenty minutes or you may be sending her postcards from Rio, Tunis, or a small cell for the next five to ten years. A whole lifetime of tranquility shattered into shards of panic by one text message: “DUDE (our nickname for our boss, his other being Uncle Morty) GOT POPPED, SHUT IT DOWN AND BAIL!!!!” Years of saving, hundreds of transactions for twenty dollars for five thousand dollars, for sixty dollars and for two hundred fifteen thousand dollars down the drain because now you will be burning it jet fuel style, lamming faster than the cops can move. You pray it’s the state police, they are incompetent, pussy cats compared to the iron gauntleted, black helicopter, MP5 strapped Feds. The Feds have the mandatory minimums and the ninety plus percent conviction rate. They have witness protection, heat sensors for grow houses, and high definition shotgun mics. The DEA and the FBI can shut down your bank accounts, get in your emails, and exert enough pressure to make your best friends wear wires and sign affidavits. The one way to beat them when it comes to endgame is to keep things low tech. I packed a bag with a few spare pounds of trees that were in the apartment, stuffed the bottom with all the money in my wall safe, about eighty five thousand dollars, and grabbed my various fake ID’s. The back window was already opened by my girlfriend who was crying, shaking, her curls twisted frizzy by sleep and yanked in hysterical hands. “Please don’t go!!!” she pleaded with me. I donned my black carhart hoodie and popped the clip in my gun, a black P 89. I shoved the gun into the small of my back and cinched my belt. My body stank with the sweat of poor sleep and sudden movement. My stomach wrenched itself in knots of shit and gas. Outside it poured. I felt I was Dante headed to meet Virgil. The room was yellowed in low light and the window stood before me, a portal to ink and cold. “I’m sorry”, I said and I was. I was miserable as her. I wanted nothing more than for the message to be a joke, a false alarm, a crosscourt shot of a wrong number. This was Philly. Lots of people sold drugs. Maybe the bol with the number one off from mine was part of a heroin ring. I ripped a drawer out the dresser and pulled a packet taped to the back of it. This I jammed in my pocket. I opened my bag now getting frantic, looking at each one of my three phones to see when the text had been sent. I checked the number it was unknown but this was nothing new, anytime important communications had to be made new phones were put into play then discarded after one call. In the non violent world of weed smuggling and distribution we used phones the way real gangsters used guns, tossing them over the body of a dead conversation with every number wiped and no record to be had from the prepaid alias. I used to get chided sometimes and chewed out on other occasions because of my lack of phone discipline. I should have checked the code on the phone, a series of letters and numbers that would identify the sender. There were a jumble at the end of the text but I could feel the police drawing closer. Any minute they would ring the bell to our apartment, announce themselves and then send our cherrywood door off its hinges. We lived on the ground floor, which was stupid for a drug dealer but I was adamant about not flashing money, unlike some of the others in my organization who rented lofts or bought brownstones with sub prime mortgagees paid from endless stockpiles of cash. My girlfriend and I lived modest on our little one bedroom in University City with its tall windows and shitty gray carpeting. The apartment had a galley kitchen where she’d stand and sing along to Phish on I Tunes while she cooked me dinner, her glasses fogging up with the steam from the pots. This was our home. She stood in that kitchen, silent now shaking with grief and fear shredding open pound bag after pound bag of trees, eash one labeled with sharpie. “Jack Frost”, “AK-47”, “Mother’s Finest”, “Blueberry”, “Sage”, all of them went into a whirring disposal unit three times the size of a normal one. To access it she had to unsnap some bolts on under the sink and lift the metal basin off. I had it installed just for such an emergency and we had gone over what she was to do which was help me get rid of the trees and then wait for the cops. Once they arrived she would lie to them and remain calm while she waited for me to get in touch with her.

When I told her this so many times over the last eighteen months she’d always listen and then add her own amended instructions. “Yes”, she said. “I will dump all the tress down the disposal and I will cry..I will wail because I know you will be leaving and I don’t know when I will see you again or if you will be safe…I won’t know if you are alive or dead until after you call me. I will help you and I will do whatever I need to do but I will die when you leave me.” Now I the murderer, sweated in the low light, watching the corpse split open food saver sealed bags and dump them into the whirring disposal. The basin of the sink lay upended on one side in the living room looking like an object from a sinking ship, unmoored and unnatural in the moment of chaos. The apartment smelled of every strain of high grade weed one could imagine. Citrus melded with skunky accents overridden by the cat piss odor of haze. An explosion of colors, golden hairs, purple buds, light green pods interspersed with white keif dust. No Beasters no middies. Our organization was a boutique operation. The disposal clogged and disgorged wet chunks of tree on my girl’s face. She gagged and then flicked them off. An inveterate pothead she would have loved the irony of this moment had it not been so horrible. Each one of those pounds was worth at least fifty five hundred dollars. There were twenty-one pounds in the pile to be disposed of meaning that I had just liquidated over one hundred thousand dollars of tree that I had gotten fronted to me. If there was an organization to be contacted after all of this, I would be responsible for shelling out fifty stacks minimum to get a new load and sell it at a loss to cover this one. The financial implications were disastrous. All across town I had no doubt my people were doing the same, sweating and swearing as they set fire to all their savings, empty bags scattered like the husks of so many primordial insects and sacrificed the end to means that were no longer justifiable.

When the last pound was shredded, my girl turned to me and outstretched her thin arms. I gathered her up and whispered in her ear. “I promise you I will come back, no matter what. Even if I have to go overseas I will come back for you….I love you!!!” She nodded and dipped her head for me to kiss. “Go..:” she said. I walked into the bedroom and picked up my bag. I rammed my feet into a pair of grey on black Airmax nineties. She made a motion for me to wait and handed me my IPOD. Digital music made becoming a fugitive far more convenient. She stood by the window holding her stuffed Koala, hugging it with a grip that would have killed a newborn. “I love you”, I said to her as I mounted the sill “I know”, she said and made the Koala’s paw wave to me. I waved back, threw open the window and dove into the darkness. I hit the ground running after a one second fall whose shock loaded my joints to capacity. I broke right to the side gate and onto St. Marks Place, an immigrant to a world of night; I hoped soon to send for my wife. I turned one last time and blew a kiss to her silhouette in the window. I’ll never know if she saw me. I never saw her alive again.

I trotted in the rain feeling it soak into my hoodie as St. Marks place became slick and blacker. My airmaxes churned up puddles of grime and made a sandpaper noise every time I shifted direction. I had a lot to do. First and most important was to elude capture. If the police or the Feds were on their way then I had to put some distance between myself and the apartment. They would sweat my girl, they may even take her into custody for a night and her parents would come to bail her out fuming at the insult I had perpetrated by pretending to be one of them. But that would be it for her. No wiretaps had her voice. She helped me count and weigh but no grand jury was going to put her on the stand. If I could break the cordon, destroy my share of the evidence, and lay low for a little the chances were good that she and I would reunite in another place quite soon. I opened my wallet and tossed my real ID but kept my real passport. I may need it to get out of the country and I was not confident in how other one swiped. The rain hammered down, cars rolled by their bodies coated in what I imagined to be glossy reactive armor. My shoes lost their layer of dust and began to look new then squeak. I stood on the corner of 43^rd and Locust and waited until a two toned red/white taxi halted for me. He rolled down the window and eyed me with suspicion. “Airport boss?” He was Greek and had a sharp nose that jutted out under a mop of brilliantine black hair. I detected his accent. It smelled of sunny weather and shoddy dockside apartments, black coffee and days of nothing in the heat. “Nah”, I said and tossed a fifty dollar bill onto his lap. “I need to get out to 2900 South 20^th and I need you to wait for a little.” He unlocked the door and the silver knob shot up with a metal thud. “Let’s go boss’, he said and we set off.

Most of our group’s weed was contained inside this self storage unit. Large enough to stash a semi truck worth of anything, this was our drop point. We had an elaborate combination lock system that was alternated and updated on a constant basis. The envelope I had taken with me had the series of combinations for the unit. It was set on asphalt, single units with no attendants at night. No one was supposed to have access to the site after closing time but our number two guy Jamie had bribed three employees with trips to Delilah’s stripclub on Delaware. For five hundred dollars a go each one of them got a blowjob and a quickie by the same chick we traded zips to for such services. Her name was Mystique and none of those cats had ever fucked a stripper before. The next week we all had the same keys they did to open the main gate up. The cab swung onto 38^th Street and slid past the Veterans Hospital. It was too near dawn for anyone besides hospital workers and SEPTA drivers to be out and about. A few cops sat in cars that idled by the WAWA. The University of Penn campus loomed up a gothic fortress whose spires were wrought iron and whose brick was bleached to marble gray. It reeked of stoicism and patrician virtue. I didn’t like the place but it had provided me with a lot of work, more than I could handle ever since I got rid of my chief competitor.

He was a hippie cat with short hair, a yoga enthusiast with an absent and arrogant way. Back when I first got in the game and hit the block with 20’s of sage he got at me time and time again for weight. I brushed him off, still content to push my blue butterfly .7’s to everyone at the restaurant where my girl worked, an overrated Asian fusion spot packed by waiters who spent their tips on trees and Chinese customers who didn’t tip ever. Each night I’d saunter in at closing time and elbow up the bar little jarlets clanking in my jeans. He’d cop five for one hundred bones, I never offered him a deal, and talk my ear off about all the good trees he had. But they weren’t as good as mine. He and I both knew it. So we talked and bullshitted, him throwing that question of weight at me in the submarine jazz lighting and me parrying it with canned arrogance. One day I caved and told him a number, seventeen hundred on a quarter pound of the Sage. He agreed and came through my apartment the next day. To greet him I had a quarter pound of regular bud that I had bought as an emergency measure from some kid up the block. My Sage supplier would not free up a quarter pound for me. The hippie, Carl, sat there in his black t-shirt and bike messenger black jeans weighing out the garbage I had foisted on him. He then got up without a word and left seventeen hundred on my living room table. I had made a cool six hundred dollar profit, my largest gain to date. I went back out and reinvested in another quarter pound of the garbage. I called him up to see when he wanted to come down. He was blithe and snide on the phone, “I don’t think we can hang out man…I’m real disappointed in the quality of your stuff…” In truth he was disappointed in the quality of his judgment. This set the tone for the rest of our interactions. I hooked up with the outfit and began supplying him. He was threatened by this arrangement having sold weed in West Philadelphia for over ten years with no serious competition. At that point he was still killing me in volume, doing ten thousand gross a week compared to my two thousand. But Mircosoft or any corporate giant panics when it loses even ten percent of its market share, and they get petrified if their competitor has better product. I had access to better trees than him. He had better selling connections but my suppliers were my friends. We worked as a unit. So they remained patient and floated me pounds with the instructions to drop the price so low that all the other independents had to either cop from me or pack up. First Drexel caved, three of its main dealers started coming to me when I moved the price down to three hundred an ounce for headies and began poaching their customers. The older independents followed suit, snaggle toothed hippies who could not afford to smoke for free if I cut off their local customer bases. Carl was stubborn however. He held out, using his Allentown outdoor headies connect to stay somewhat competitive with me and severing all contact between us. I went from offloading pounds I had gotten fronted for four thousand eight hundred to him for five thousand six, to existing in my darkened apartment shades drawn, serving kids ounces and quarter pounds but nonetheless sitting on a five pack at all times owing twenty plus thousand dollars. Momentum swung between us. We dueled with text messages thrown into the ether picked up on prepaid screens in Seven 11 parking lots or personalized I-Phones in graduate dorms. “I GOT OUNCES OF JACK FROST FOR 340!” my message would say. “C HAS PACKS OF JACK HERRER FOR 4400”, they’d reply. He was sitting on a few stacks then, more than me to be sure, so he felt confident that he could weather the price war. He underestimated my commitment to taking over the neighborhood.

Chapter 2. 08/17/07 7:30PM

The reason I entered the headies trade in the first place was because of its lack of violence. There was little gangster pretension in this small slice of narcotics trafficking. The money was slower but still significant and the chances of ending up in prison or dead were much lower say that of a street heroin dealer of coke distributor. Almost our entire outfit was white and college educated. We listened to hip-hop and associated with some thugged out friends of all races, but we did not subscribe to the drug dealer as a thug ideology that had permeated popular culture since the advent of gangster rap. This was ironic because were it not for rap none of us would ever have considered entering the drug business. But no matter what one does to earn money, if they operate on the illegal side of things, then there comes a time when violence is needed. There is no better business bureau to contact when some kid you fronted burned you on two stacks after five months of continuous business. The police are not going to be sympathetic if you call them to your crib after someone broke in stole all of your weed and unreported flip cash. At a certain point in illegal endeavors one either has to either eat each loss they incur or start exacting revenge for economic disturbances. This is the reason for almost every act of violence that occurs outside of a domestic setting between adults. In the court of the underworld all are adjudged guilty before trial. So there is no shame in getting what is yours.

Carl was not doing anything wrong. He was sitting in his apartment that reeked of patchouli and cat dander with his pasty girlfriend arranging crystals collected from Herkemur, New York, smoking huge bong rips and eating Tandoori’s buffet twice a day. He led a life of contentment and all might have gone well for him save one fact: he was competing with me and I fancied myself a real criminal. Therefore by not knuckling to my pressure he was choking my business. I set out to fuck him and fuck him I did.

Carl made the majority of his loot fronting quarter pounds and pounds out to Penn kids who then broke them down and retailed smaller amounts for higher profit margins. By putting his trees and money out on the street Carl had upped his cash year by year and developed a lot of customers. When I set out to take him down I was still low in the hierarchy of my own organization. There were cats offing twenty pounds a week or more, I was doing six pounds a month. My income was about a thousand in cash a week which at the time bought everything I could dream of. Nikes, restaurant meals, rare DVD’s, and escorts for late night trysts, these were the stuff of dreams. Happy, ensconced in my adolescent fantasy playground I was still not content. Once Carl was gone I would be the de facto kingpin for headies in University City. The trade of two huge colleges beckoned. For weeks I bided my time, not contacting Carl, avoiding him as he did me while I wracked my brains for some way to put him on the shelf. I debated my information on him and what he had on me. I knew his girlfriend and his full name. He knew both of those facts about me as well. I knew where he lived. Ditto for him on me. I knew some of his friends. He knew a few of mine but none who were vital to my operations. Already I was seeing people as expendable. One night I threw on my Grey Black LRG winter camo hoodie and weighed out an ounce of small batch outdoors on my digital scale. I bagged it up and grabbed some other weed, and left my apartment, walking past the restored brownstones on St. James and past the CVS parking lot where University of Penn cops always sat as they ate Greek Lady takeout and monitored their radios. The weather was humid, disgusting and soon my hoodie ended up slung over my shoulder as my hairy arm deflected the sweat sheen that bloomed on my forehead with each step. I was gasping by the time I made it to the four hundred block of South 43^rd. I walked up on the darkened porch whose eaves dripped with shadow and rang the iron bell for the bottom apartment.

A small but pudgy figure appeared in the door’s window. He had a jew-fro that waved a bit as he bent to unlock the door. “Hey”, he said in a tone that was non committal to anyone else but his friends who recognized it as the best possible product of a harried Semetic mind. A friend of mine once said that all east coast Jews to some extent grow up under the Cyclone on Coney Island. He meant that all of us carry that Arthur Konigsberg insanity born of neurosis. Izzy Shacter was no different. A graduate of my alma mater: Temple University. He was an experimental electronic music producer, DJ, subsistence weed dealer, and creator of programs that graphic mapped neighborhoods to show potential increases in real estate given a collated set of variables. The perpetual cynic with a stomach ache, Izzy deadpanned and grumbled his way through life with a look of sleepy indignation on his face. He would not have been half the fun he was were it not for his beautiful live-in girlfriend and general caretaker, Drea. “Izzy is who is that?” her voice was singsonged out onto the porch. Without waiting for an answer she yelled, “Let him in I’m making dinner!!!” I nudged past Izzy and winked. “You heard the lady.” He smiled and followed me in.

Eating some pasta, sitting amongst the hardwood and graffiti canvases that comprised their apartment, I pulled out my ounce and tossed it on Izzy’s lap. He smelled it. “This looks good”, he said with some real enthusiasm. Drea smelled it too. “How much?” she asked. “How much is Carl charging you?” was my reply. “Three fifty.” said Drea. “Well”, I said. “I can do you for Three hundred even.” Izzy turned to her she nodded at him and walked into their bedroom to get the money. I took out some other trees, I had an ounce from Hawaii, and packed their bowl. We got high watching baseball and I asked them about Carl. They didn’t know much except that he was a braggart and less than cautious. This struck me as odd because I remembered all of my dealing with him to be pained in that he was almost mute and seemed real shook around me. I had played up my ties to an organization of sorts. So this had intimidated him. I told Izzy I was Carl’s supplier for a time and that we had issues but that it was nothing serious. Then izzy tapped his glass bowl into his hand and it made a sucking noise as the layer of ash broke on his palm. He leaned back and told me this:

“So I guess you know Carl fronts a lot of people. Sometimes the dudes from Penn, they get behind and they stop paying him. Either their dudes stop paying them or they get caught with it, or more likely they start blowing a lotta coke. Whatever the reason he’s told me that he has had some problems with people there in terms of them being late wtth his cash. So here’s what he does: He calls them up and says that he is done with their debt and that they don’t have to deal with him anymore. He says that he has sold their debt to someone else. Then he gets one of his black friends to get on the phone and call the kids next and be like ‘yeah so you owe me now’. He says every time this happens the kids trip over themselves to pay him back, calling him all the time and everything.” Izzy chuckled then his face contracted to a look of urgency. “Oh yeah also”, he leaned off the couch where we sat and Drea craned her head from the bean bag chair she slumped in. “Carl moved to that new building...” “Yeah I’ve been there.” I cut Izzy off. “No,” he interjected back in, irritable. “Listen: He had that one house on 45^th near RX restaurant for a while. But he moved to his new place because one night he was sleeping there and he heard someone outside. So he looks out his window and there are arms on his roof. Two dudes were pulling themselves up from his porch. I guess they thought he wasn’t home and they were trying to rob him. So he grabs a baseball bat and starts cracking this kid’s fingers as he’s trying to get up and in his window. He said he hit the kid’s hand hard the third time and he let go and fell off the porch from like twenty feet onto his back. The kid who was breaking in and his friend who gave him a leg up ran after that. But that’s why he moved.” I sucked the bowl and French inhaled. “Good story.” “It’s true” Izzy maintained. ‘He was scared of people coming in his house that’s why he moved to the apartment building. He didn’t want people to try and break into his place if he and his girl were there.” I kept smoking and eating but my mind was working on what I had learned.

On my walk home I devised a plan. It’d be complicated and have a lot of room for grievous error. Beyond that it was fucked up. I had ceased to think as a person and started intuiting like a racketeer.

Chapter 3. 8/18/07 10:36 AM

The key to eliminate Carl was to leverage him out. He had a good connect, somewhere out North in Allentown that funneled him homegrown. I debated the logistics of tailing him up there and burning down the growhouse, but I opted to not pursue that plan since it would take me out of University City and endanger lives. I didn’t want to be responsible for someone’s death, ironic then but I was serious. After much thought I decided the best way to edge Carl out would be a bait and switch. I’d contact him and tell him I had a huge quantity of ill trees available for a minimal down-payment. I’d make the offer fall just within the limits of credulity. Something almost too good to be true. He’d prevaricate. He’d waffle. He’d hem and stall and bitch. But he’d take the trees and agree to pay what he owed. But he’d never get a chance to move the trees. After I dropped off the loads, I’d post up outside his apartment building, a gray stone, and double garret deal with an interior courtyard. Students lived there for the most part. A busted intercom system, too much white paint that ran like frozen milk in the lobbies, slopping over fireplaces and trailing misted dots on the synthetic, nailed, carpets. Lots of traffic in and out of the stairwells. I wouldn’t be noticed as I sat in my bosses’ dented Maxima, which we used for situations like these. Once I was sure he was settled in, or once I had made certain he had left with a few pounds to go serve someone in the neighborhood, I would give the signal, a text message from a 7-11 prepaid which would then be destroyed, to the two cats who waited in Abyssinia pub a few blocks over where they would not be noticed. There amongst Penn students and Somali cab drivers they’d pay their check and slide through the single, battered, door walking slow up to the apartment building. They would be told which apartment. Once up there they’d kick in the door or have it opened by subterfuge, perhaps saying they needed to use a cellphone or that delivery food had arrived. After gaining entry to the apartment, they’d tie up Carl, his girlfriend or whomever was home and take all of the weed I had just fronted him, returning it to me and leaving him with a debt that ran in the high five figures. I’d wait a few days, playing very nonchalant, waiting until he could no longer stand the burden of waiting, of owing more than he’d ever had. Then he’d call me, trying to be cool at first but then dissolving into hysterics. He’d swear it was not his fault and beg me to let him ride for a while. I in turn would get just as agitated back at him saying that the trees belonged to my organization and that he owed me all the cash that second. He’d get angry and scoff at me, hanging up but he’d know that he did owe and that the amount taken was so substantial that there was no doubt someone would come to collect. Carl would know that I stood to get blamed and that there was no way I’d cover for him, someone I detested to my boss. I’d then up the ante by sending some new people around his way to collect and crack his face open. This would leave him in a predicament that was unsolvable. Either he could leave town altogether, fleeing his debt and his source of livelihood, or he could go to work for me. Without University City, he’d be useless to his older Allentown connect and if he was paying me back for twenty five pounds of nugs in mid sized increments, I’d have him under my thumb for the next two years by which point he’d in all likelihood either quit selling trees or skip town to get out from under the massive debt he’d accrue. No matter what I did I came out winning.

To enact this move I needed the bait. This was a gamble for me. In theory I would be leaving the trees to someone else for a matter of hours. But if this didn’t pan for any reason, if he got wise or if he somehow put the weed in another house before we could move on him, then I’d stand to be liable. If he somehow sold all the product before by burglary team was in place then the difference between what I told him the trees were worth to entice him and what they were worth in reality would fall on me. There was also the possibility he might get wise to the scam and flee already. If he sold those twenty five pounds for even what my boss got them for then he’d make a free one hundred grand. That was more than enough to set out a new life somewhere safe and ruin mine. This was a huge risk and to undertake it I needed to talk to my boss.

My boss was not just my boss; he was my friend. A great friend in fact. A visionary smuggler and criminal who redefined the high line trees game in Philadelphia with much innovation and secrecy. He was a legend in three neighborhoods and heads knew he got money from North Vegas to Humboldt. Born to a family of Cleveland Heights doctors and investment bankers he opted to sell crack. Kicked out of his house at the age of sixteen he lived in the hood and worked a corner where his light eyes and reddish hair made him a conspicuous target. He did time in Ohio youth prisons before being sprung at eighteen to attend Drexel University in Philadelphia. He arrived with ten thousand dollars and a plan to dominate the university marijuana trade. By the time his parents were the wiser he was expelled and attending Temple University on his own dime. Seven years of on and off schooling provided just enough cover and time to allow his power moves to make him one of the premier drug dealers in Philadelphia. He was not just a drug dealer, he was also a drug addict, consuming thousands of dollars worth of Tussanex syrup a month and retreating for days into a cocoon of nodding and orgasmic moans. I needed to catch him when he was sober but not too sober. His comedowns made him crabby and he’d lie on his leather couches in a bathrobe massaging his temples and barking on us for perceived mental errors. He was a fucking lunatic prone to violence with a rep that carried weight in the ghetto. He had been shot at and had shot back. His friends ranged from corner boys to made guys, prostitues to professors. He was a bona fide legend. But even legends have bank balances and need convincing.

I called him the next morning after I had hatched the scam. My stomach ached from nervous anticipation. Getting this arranged and aligned would be unbelievable if it happened. I sat on the edge of the bed I shared with my girlfriend and opened the cell-phone I used just to contact him. I hit send and hoped that he was not syruped up or in Atlantic City, or passed out atop some hooker’s silicone tits in a Presidential suite downtown. It rang once, twice, four times. I was about to close the phone when he answered. “Yoooo”. He sounded addled, his vocal chords doing an unfaithful imitation of a human being’s but making more the sound of a pterodactyl. “Where you?” We kept phone talk clipped on these particular cells. We had private joints for non-business related matters. “Why?” He was not at home that much was certain. “I gotta talk to you today its mad important.” He grunted in assent and hung up his phone. A few seconds later another one of my joints buzzed with the sound of a received text message. This was the numbers and places phone. Akin to the hotline used during the cold war it was for the most sensitive of information. Code names, money amounts, addresses, all got sent over this phone. They were switched out every two weeks to a month, or if it was a serious situation, after one use. I wrote down the address and then cracked the phone in two. My girl stirred under her side of the blankets. I bent down and kissed her curls and then padded to the bathroom. Running the sink while I brushed my teeth I dropped the halves of the phone under water and then shut the plastic, single knobbed faucet off. I made up a garbage bag for the drowned phone carcass and hit my closet. I threw on some LRG jeans and a Polo Rugby, stepped into my Norway dunks and locked the door behind me as I hit the street. I paused and swore to myself, realizing that I didn’t bring my wallet, but then felt at least thirty twenties in the back pocket of my pants. I flagged and cab and gave him the address from memory.

The place was a narrow whitewashed brick row home in the Northern Liberties. It was on a street too small for automobile traffic. All the other houses on the block save one were populated by Hispanic immigrants who watched TV with their doors open to accommodate the swells of children who darted in and out twice a minute. Even in the cloudy weather the doors remained open and each TV lit out from the living rooms like votive candles. I came to the skinniest of the homes and knocked hard. The door clacked, clicked and swung open, the border of the dark wood merging with blackness inside. I heard the sound of running water and an FM radio. I pushed the door and it whined a little. “I’m making coffee”, his voice sounded a little healed. “I’m good just water.” “Figured”, he said and handed me a cup with ice. “You good?” That was our universal greeting. Was I? I had some money and a lot of worries, many ambitions and a plan to get over. In this case however he meant was I followed and was I current in all my payments for product given. That was a “no” and a “yea” so I said, “Yeah man I’m good.” He opened up the back door and we walked out into a square of concrete surrounded by a six foot high wooden fence. Our green plastic chairs skidded as we threw our weight on them. His hair was wild and stood up which contrasted with his eyelids, they puffed and sagged. He had a gravel voice with a Philly accent, picked up or effected. He raised his coffee mug in salute and winked at me. With his spare hand he straightened his pajama pants whose plush legs bunched when he moved. Old man gestures. It was hard to believe he was twenty eight. “Okay so here’s what I want to do.” I laid out the entire plan to him bit by bit, building up to the climax and outlining the advantages for him. “So basically you can give me more shit at the same numbers and it will all go because I won’t have any competition. Shit I could prolly get dude to hand over all his connects to me in exchange for leniency. We could extort him for a twenty stack good faith payment and split it. He listened and rubbed his temples while blowing on the cup. “That’s a big risk though. I don’t like casting out that much work with the hope that we get it back.” I countered with the bottom line. “If we can get rid of him then that’s an extra hundred dimes a year in your pocket directly back. I will have no one else in the neighborhood who can last without going to me. Look I know it’s a risk but I know I can do this. If it fucks up then I owe you and I can cover half of it and I’ll just do the rest on the back end.” I paused and looked at him. He had stopped blowing on his coffee, the mug was set down on the ground, my voice drowned the plink it made on the concrete. “But it won’t fuck up”, I continued, sure I was winning. “This will work. I’ve done all the angles. We are gonna win big….huge man.” He grinned at me looking every inch the maniacal eight year old he was, a youthful face, smooth skin with the eyes of a suicide bomber. He loved risk. He was addicted to it even more so then the money. For him it was the thrill of seeing a scam through, of conjuring a deal from nothing and applying the brains and muscle to make it turn to solid cash. He loved being a racketeer, a criminal, a big time drug dealer. For him it was a conscious decision. His little brother was in law school, his parents both successful with a nice suburban home. Like me he was a societal deviant. I had offered him a free dose of the best drug, the most unaffordable. “Who do you want on the heavy stuff?” I had considered this last night as well. “Gimmie Avi and Hasan.” “Done.”, he said and we shook hands.

Chapter 3. 8/17/07 12:58PM

Finding Hasan was not an issue. He called me back soon after I texted his phone and left a polite message with his auntie. Six foot six, he was built like a power forward and looked a lot like the Chicago rapper Rhymefest. He dressed Muslim conservative casual, Nikes or sandals and a kufi. He hated new rap and logos on his shirts, a true throwback. In many ways he was. He had just been released for a murder and gun charge he picked up at the age of nineteen in ninety nine. He ran a three man crack and tree consortium in the Nicetown section of North Philly, a place so decrepit that it was a wonder when people were glimpsed on the streets. The houses sagged and were all the same shit brown color when rust leaked into paint and it all ran together. The whole area conjured saxophone riffs and muted colors pierced by violent flashes that ran as lightning in the kaleidoscope of cracked bottles, gem strewn across the wet pavement. He grew tall there, played basketball with his cousins, got his first pussy at eleven and started selling crack when he was twelve. By age nineteen he was sitting on a few stacks and had the respect of the block. This was when one of his cousins lost in his cups deep in a row-house started to think of murder. In the mob it’s always over business. In the hood even when its business it’s still very personal. Hasan, still named Steven then, walked out of his aunt’s crib one summer morning when the air seemed to trap the sound of the cars driving past. He raised his hand in greeting to his cousin who was coming out of their grandmother’s crib across the street. His cousin didn’t return the wave. He instead lifted the grey Russell athletic sweatshirt that hung halfway to his knees and retrieved a Rusty Sig Sauer from his waistband. Hasan saw him pull our and fell down on the stairs of the row home just in time to feel the WHOOSH of a bullet going over his neck. Little gravel and concrete fragments rained on his torso as the first two shots hit the stairs above him. He was scared and disconcerted, this was his cousin. They had a good business together. They had grown up fighting with water pistols and eating blue ice pops from the Bodega. His cousin had lost his virginity to the same broad he had. But none of this mattered now, the bullets were going and time had narrowed to a few seconds for survival. Hasan pulled out his Glock 17; a model of automation assembled in some European republic of schlosses, sausages, and dear little chocolates. He lay on his steps and extended his arm at his cousin who had now fired wild three times. Distorted reflections on them played on the parked cars painted black or blue. Hasan extended his arm and licked off one shot. It hit his cousin in his head and blew the back of his skull onto the porch he had just stepped down from.

Hasan accepted the prosecution’s deal to plead to manslaughter. He had already sat in jail for the better part of two years, eating “plain Jane” soups from the packet, no meat because he spent all of his money on the first trial defense. In Philadelphia’s city prison, the modern hell of CFCF, he cooked grilled cheese in his washtub and lit Newport cigarettes off of stingers stuck into the outlets. He was respected in jail too. He didn’t have to air anyone out, although he did have to put his long arms to use and knock some dudes down. He had already done enough time to go home. He told his cellie so. His cellie, an older Muslim man said, “Inshallah Hasan, Inshallah.” Allah’s will was inscrutable because Hasan caught a new charge for possessing the weapon he killed in self-defense with. No plea bargain was offered so he did a few weeks of diesel therapy, shackled to a white kid with a trace red moustache for part of the way. That kid was from Kensington, the white trash ghetto of Philadelphia and he was unrepentant. “I’m a junkie and a booster. As soon as I get out Ima smoke some rock and shoot a bag. I’ll steal anything….fuck that!” Hasan moved from Graterford to Albion to Camp Hill to Western Penn. They even put his ass in Waynesburg for a few months. He walked the yard, said prayers on his rug, did his dips on the grey molded metal bunks, and waited like all caged things for when the cage got opened. Two months previous, but a week late much to his indignation, he was released back to Nicetown and his aunt’s house. He wasted no time in calling his white, Jewish friend of yesteryear to front him some work. There was no problem with that at all; he just had to be available to do some work. He answered on the second ring, still unused to the laconic culture of the cellphone. I told him to meet me in Old City as soon as he could. He assented and hung up, never one for conversation. He listened more than he talked a quality that us Jews lacked in business.

Chapter 4. 8/17/07 1:07PM

Now I had to find Avi. This was a more difficult proposition in that he had no set address. There was an apartment on Reed Street in South Philly home of tri color awnings and Mafia farm team mutant kids rocking white tees, but every time I had ever tried there I had just found his forlorn and kabuki madeup girlfriend, tears plunging under six layers of eyeliner. Avi was another of an all but extinct breed: a Jewish gangster. Unlike his friends and even father, he was not a criminal of finance. Avi was a killer, a short term, low volume coke dealer, and a planner of robberies. At the age of thirteen he served his first prison bid, a five year stint in a Florida adult facility for home invasion. He was released and stayed free for eleven months. In that time he shot two cats in separate incidents over cocaine and burgled to feed his oxycontin addiction. He worked for and grew up with my same boss who was friends with his older brother from camp and private kid jail. His brother overdosed on oxycontin while on the run for a parole violation and died on his couch. His girlfriend found him a day later, bloated and sallow but not yet stinking.

Avi was fucked from the door. His father, Sheldon was a famous weed dealer in the West Philly suburbs. He hustled hard through the seventies and eighties, earning a small fortune. The family lived a trashy, Sephardic version of the American dream, watching big screen TV in a huge ranch house while the mom smoked coke behind closed doors and shopped for groceries in cash. An informant got Sheldon on a wiretap talking about three hundred pounds of trees and Sheldon received a solid nickel in the Federal system. He had a quarter million in cash to hold his family over. Instead of saving the money he gave Avi and his brother a hundred dollars a day each and took them to the mall. Avi’s mom did more coke and pills. Once she took a bat to Sheldon’s new Thunderbird in a fit of frustration over the fact that he hadn’t saved any of the cash. Sheldon’s date approached and the money dwindled. Avi and his brother ate McDonald’s, smoked trees, and bought the complete sets from every baseball card company for the last ten years. Sheldon got sent up, he saw his wife once and fucked her in a filthy visitor bathroom stall, her palms on the wall above the toilet. That cost five thousand dollars every fifteen minutes and they re-eloped for half an hour. Sheldon did his hard five in Terre Haute, Indiana surrounded by black crack dealers from DC, Okie bank robbers, and a few mafia underlings who were doing long stretches for bribery and murder. One night on his tier a fat, red faced guard with a big moustache walked in front of his cell. Sheldon was reading a James Michner novel about Poland called “Poland” and scratching his balls. “Sheldon!!! Sheldon!!!!” Sheldon sat up on his bunk braced for bad news. Avi was already in prison and his older brother was getting ready to go for an armed robbery that involved sticking up a newsstand and then setting the escape car on fire in the courtyard of a Havertown apartment complex. “Guess what?” the fat guard bellowed. Sheldon’s moustache drooped in the approximation of a shrug. “Your snitch just died!!!” The guard always liked Sheldon. He had never met a Jew before and Sheldon was polite to him and gave him good football advice. He was happy to tell Sheldon the news. That night there was a party on Sheldon’s tier. They toasted each other with soda or pruno and ate snickers bars. In his mind he saw Avi stacking boxes of baseball cards in his room. But that house wasn’t theirs any longer. His sons were in cells like his.