Michael Crichton - Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues

It was spring—a warm spring, I remembered, staring out at the rain—and I had been so enchanted with Berkeley and the people I’d met, that I’d just kept putting off the business part of my trip. And then, the morning that I was definitely going to see about business, Steven announced that we were going to Big Sur and loaded his VW bus full of camping equipment and charming chicks, and off we had gone, my feeble protests notwithstanding. So that it wasn’t until my last day in town that I had gone to see Ernie, the connection in those days.

I’d found Ernie lying on the living room floor of his gaudily painted apartment, stoned out of his mind on psilocybin. And Ernie had informed me, in rather vague but nonetheless emphatic terms, that there was no grass to be had, at least not down his alley. The gist of our conversation was more accurately that he told me to get the hell out of his place, he was stoned on psilocybin and didn’t want to get bummed on dope deals. That night I’d found out about my friend’s bust, and it was then that I’d decided to do some instant hustling on my own.

The next day I went out on the street. Walked down to the Forum and stood around, just listening, waiting for something to happen. Asking anybody who looked like they knew which way was up if they had any bricks, and always getting No for an answer, but always with a few references (“Shit man, nothing happening far as I know, but you could ask Toad—you know that dude, Toad, wild-looking freak with four fingers on one hand, he’s always up around here about six. He had some bricks last week”). And waiting around to ask Toad, and Sonny, and Detroit Danny, and anybody else that might show up.

And then finally, just when I was about to leave, say the hell with it, and climb back onto the Beantown bird, these four black cats showed up and started talking bricks. And everybody jumped, because Ernie had been, in his own way, telling the truth. There just wasn’t that much dope to be had. So everybody on the street was hungry to get their hands on weed, and they were taking chances they wouldn’t ordinarily take, like fronting bread to strangers, in the hope of scoring some smoke and being the only cat in town with, as the saying goes, shit to burn.

Which set up these four spades, who wouldn’t normally have had a prayer of hustling dope on the Avenue. They were flashy dressers, all conked and zooted, and they looked to be as likely prospects for bricks as a Central Square car salesman. But everybody else seemed to trust them; everybody else was fronting bread to them and dreaming mounds and mounds of dope, so I dreamed too, and we arranged to meet and exchange commodities.

I went off to wait in a supermarket parking lot, and pretty soon a huge white Caddy snaked in and I hopped on board. They didn’t know Berkeley, they said, they’d just driven a load up from San Diego because they’d heard things were dry. So we drove around for a while, looking for a good place to do the deal. The whole time, all they could say was “What’s a cool place? Find a cool place, man, a cool place.” They seemed very nervous and jumpy, which I thought a good sign, a sign they really had stuff. I kept them driving around for a long time in search of the mythical cool place.

I wasn’t about to tell them I didn’t know Berkeley any better than they did, because I didn’t want them to think I didn’t know what I was doing. Dope dealing, especially when buyer and seller are unacquainted, involves a primitive ritual which can be described in terms of I Am More Hip Than Thou. The object, if you are buying, is to let the other cat know (never directly but as forcefully and significantly as possible) that (1) you have bought a lot of dope in your time, and are not to be messed with; (2) you know what dope goes for in the area, and what quality it should be for the price; and, hopefully, (3) you are a very big dealer yourself and can provide the seller with a lot of business if he measures up to your standards.

Now all this is for real, and deadly serious at the time it’s going on, simply because the margins for profit are so broad and so extraordinarily ill-defined for both parties. For example, the seller knows that he can deal a good brick in Berkeley for about a hundred and twenty-five bucks, but he may have paid fifty, seventy-five, or even a hundred for that brick himself, depending on where he bought it and in what quantity. So he may or may not be in a position to be talked into lowering his price. On the other hand, if the seller discovers that you, the buyer, are not from Berkeley but from the East Coast, and consequently will not have to be competitive in terms of California prices when you unload the bricks, the seller’s price will shoot right up. So both sides play an intense strong-arm psychological game, and I was working hard at it when we got to one quiet, lazy street and I motioned them over to the side.

“This a cool street, man?”

“Yeah, very cool,” I said. And then, “In fact, I live here. I just wanted to do it here so I wouldn’t have to walk around the streets holding.” They laughed nervously. “Let’s get out and check those bricks,” I said. The keys were supposed to be in the trunk. I started to get out when a quick, leathered arm pulled me back.

“Be cool, brother. I’ll get the stuff.”

Be cool. Yeah, groovy. Only I didn’t dig “being cool” in the car, because I was holding a fuck of a lot of bread and they’d seen it. And so long as I stayed in the car it was too easy a set-up. I’d shown them my bread but I hadn’t seen any bricks, and I was alone with four cats I didn’t know. So when the cat hopped out I stuck my boot in the door, then kicked it open and followed him back to the truck.

“Thought I told you to stay in the car, man. You want to fuck us up?”

“Relax, man,” I said, “relax. Nobody’s going to fuck anybody up. I’m just doing what I came here to do. Now let’s see those bricks.”

He looked at me suspiciously and then nodded and opened the trunk. That’s a good sign, I thought, as he disappeared into the trunk, that’s a good sign, that he’s so nervous. He’s as uptight about getting ripped off as I am and that means he must have the shit.

He emerged holding a small brown-paper bag. There were supposed to be four bricks in the bag and it didn’t look big enough for two, but I figured, What the hell, what the hell, the market’s tight and he’s probably got pound-and-a-half bricks. He wouldn’t have told me beforehand because he’d be afraid I wouldn’t want them, but what the hell, I’ll take pound-and-a-half bricks before I’ll go home empty-handed, and maybe we can arrange a lower price or something. At any rate, I was still with him as he placed the bag of bricks on the roof of the Caddy and turned to me. I was still with him and events were moving along now like a poker game. After every round the spade would look over to see if I was still in the game.

“Let’s see them,” I said.

“You got all day to look at them bricks,” he said. “How’s about you handing over the bread?”

The stakes were going up. “I just want to have a quick look,” I said.

And then I pulled out my knife, a little Swiss Army knife that I always carried with me to cut the bricks open and slice off a taste.

The spade had been looking nervously in the direction of the other three dudes in the car, and when he turned to me and saw the knife he jumped back in fright.

“Hey man!” he was almost yelling. “What’chu doing, huh? What’chu doing? Put that blade away, man! Put it away right now or the deal’s off.” He stood back away from me as he talked, as if I’d threatened to stick him with it when I’d taken it out.

“Relax for Chrissake,” I said. “I’m going to cut a taste and then you can get out of here.”