My flight takes off in one hour. I get in a cab in Brooklyn, sit in remarkable traffic, get to the airport and race from the backseat of my taxi to the security checkpoint…
There’s twenty-three grand duct-taped to my balls.
Beads of sweat soak my inner soul as I stare at my ticket to make sure it hasn’t been marked with a ‘SSS’ which, as I learned, was the special mark that meant I had to get a thorough search due to my weird last-minute roundtrip ticket that would land me back in NY the day after tomorrow.
I place my backpack on the moving conveyer belt thingy and take a deep breath and walk through the metal detector.
I MADE IT!
Thank God.
I rush to the bathroom to un-duct tape the cash from my balls and run to my gate. My flight is taking off literally ten minutes ago.
But when I got to my gate my name was being paged over the loudspeaker.
Oh no.
They know.
They’re onto me.
I’m fucked.
So I go to the gate attendant and he says
You’ve been bumped up to first class.
Lol, WHAT?!
I just unstuck twenty-three grand from my balls and they wanna move me to first class?!
This is weird. This never happens. Not the twenty-three grand on my balls, that always happens… The first class. That never happens.
So now I’m sitting in first class next to this first class type woman and she is telling me about her life as she drinks red wine while I drink scotch.
Then we land in Denver. I transfer to another plane to take me to a small town that only a small plane can get me to on the border of New Mexico and Colorado.
I’m greeted by my grower. He’s in his truck with a pure bred wolf in the backseat.
He tells me through the window before I get into his truck
She might growl a bit
And I open the front door and
CHOMP!
My face almost comes off.
BAD GIRL!
Like that worked… this was no domesticated animal. This was a fuckin wolf.
We get to his home on the edge of a mountain ski town and we don’t talk business at all. In fact, we go to his garden and pick some mushrooms and chives and some other vegetables and begin a three-hour cook session. The fireplace is lit and crackling with sounds of comfort while the best pot in the country sits on his living room table in front his TV which plays weird cooking shows. I’m bored as fuck watching that shit, but we eat like kings, feed the fireplace more wood and inhale the finest marijuana in the world while slowly dozing off.
I wake up the next morning alone on the couch.
The wolf right next to me, examining my face. She doesn’t remember who I am. Fuck. I look at her. She looks at me. I take a Xanax and stay still for like two hours, trembling to make even the slightest of moves.
Then my grower comes out of his room in full snowboard gear.
Let’s hit the slopes!
Man I barely remember how to ski, but that doesn’t stop our plans.
We get to this ski mountain and take seven million chair lifts up and then take this shuttle that takes the REAL snowboards even higher, to the part of the mountain that’s covered with signs of DANGER, NO HELP IF YOU GET FUCKED… basically. That’s not how it read, but that’s what it said. We are not in ‘ski territory’. We’re completely off the grid.
I’ll see ya down there, he tells me, and leaps off into the wooded mountain swerving in and out of trees like an Olympic athlete. I get up and nearly crash into a pine tree. Then my ski falls off six feet up the hill. I put my foot into the powder to try and get it but sink up to my waist. I stay stuck in the snow for fifteen minutes before I finally climb myself out.
No one is around. I am going to die, I thought. I stare at the way down. I can’t even remember which way the bottom of the mountain is. I mean, everyway is the bottom, but if I end up where the chairlift is not, if I end up where my grower can’t find me, where no one can find me, I’m dead. There’s no service on my phone and it’s fucking freezing.
A couple other lunatic snowboarders skate past me and I shout for dear life
WHICH WAY IS THE BOTTOM!?
So I slide my way down the mountain on my ass, literally, it takes me like two hours. I end up, miraculously, in the right place and my grower is waiting like he’s already done ten trillion runs. I tell him I’m done for the day and we head back to his house.
Again, the wolf does not remember me. She growls again.
Jesus. This fuckin wolf.
She growls louder.
BAD GIRL!
Not sure why she’s acting like that, he says to me.
Ummm cause she’s a fucking wolf dude.
Then comes the one and only hour we discuss business.
Okay. Take a look at what I’ve been working on.
He leads me down the stairs to a room that is fully encapsulated plastic and ventilation systems and lighting systems and all sorts of hydroponic shit that I know nothing about and I stare at about twenty-five plants.
Northern Lights over here, Silver Haze over there, and Sweet Island over there.
Right on.
We put on gloves, grab some cardboard boxes, the vacuum sealer and begin precisely and methodically packaging up seven pounds. Each pound was so fluffy it was the size of three pillowcases, so it took three enormous boxes to get it all together.
Now I got three massive boxes full of pot. We head a few towns out to the local post office cause he tells me they’ve been cracking down lately.
That’s comforting.
He waits in the truck while I go into this small mom and pop post office place and head to the front counter, which is like two feet from the front door.
Delivery?
Overnight please. To this address.
New York?
Yes ma’am.
Contents?
Art.
Value of content?
Art is priceless. A trillion dollars.
She laughs. I gulp.
There’s no scent at all. I’m in the clear.
Okay should be there by tomorrow at 8AM, she tells me.
Great.
We leave the postal joint and head straight to the airport.
We bid farewell, I leave him with the twenty-three grand and I board the small plane to get to the bigger plane in Denver and get back to New York at around 6AM the next day, precisely two hours before the packages are scheduled to arrive at my front door.
As soon as we land at JFK I send a mass text out that says “A Wonderful Winter Full Of Exotic Arrangements. 8AM to 10PM. With love.”
It goes out to forty people. Lawyers, celebrities, real estate moguls, talent agency execs, artists and high profile photographers.
Within fifteen minutes I receive appointment requests. 8:30AM in the East Village, 4PM in the Lower East Side, 5PM UpperWest Side, 6:30PM Harlem, 9PM Jersey City, 10PM Williamsburg… and so on.
All of it, sold.
But I still had to get home and sign for the package… and that’s not all. Those packages may never get there. Those packages may arrive with the DEA. Those packages might send me to prison for five years.
I jump in a cab and scurry back to my apartment in Murray Hill, Manhattan.
I take another Xanax… ready to go to prison if something goes wrong.
Then it comes.
DING DONG
I tremble to my buzzer.
Through my speaker I say, Yeah?
Package.
I’m shaky as hell, as I am every time I do this, which is often.
One sec, I tell him.
I go down my four flights of stairs and stare through the first set of doors like Agent 99 to make sure it’s just a delivery man and no feds.
Yup. I’m in the clear.
I sign for the packages like it’s fuckin Christmas and haul all three massive boxes up the stairs back to my apartment.
Now I gotta be real quick about unsealing and re-packaging the pot in their respective jars and bags. Even one minute of exposure would reek throughout the entire building.
I move like a fox and package up two pounds in one bag, two pounds in another bag. That’s four pounds for my two wholesalers. One in Harlem, one in Jersey City. Only three more pounds left to sell, and those all get taken care of with my appointments. Minimum purchase is one ounce. That means I need to do roughly 48 appointments in 48 hours to translate all that pot into cash and make sure there’s nothing illegal in my small Murray Hill apartment.
In New York at that time, an ounce went for around $400. I sold my ounces for $600 and never had a problem with haggling. All the customers knew the deal. I’m risking my life to smuggle the best pot into New York, and you pay me accordingly… inflated as fuck.
Now… What happens in the next 48 Hours is the story of my life as a drug dealer for nearly three years in NYC… before I took a one-way ticket to San Diego and never came back.