Chapter 26. Twilight of the Soul (pt.2)

We never had to assert our roles. It was just natural. Stan was like a lieutenant in charge of street hustle leading the brothers. Those three did all the real work… scoring and selling. Ted’s role was the muscle and that was obvious to all of us from the get-go. I didn’t have a real role at all. If I could have been called anything it would have been a misnomer, but I was supposedly the brains… the organizer… the guy with ideas… the mastermind of the operation.

The Crew became very active in Coconut Grove. The apartment we operated out of was in the back of a duplex on the border, so to speak, between the Black and Cubano neighborhoods of Hollywood. Stan and I moved in with them and switched off at first using the couch and floor. Because of my back, the floor with an air mattress was fine with me. We commuted into town from there in Ted’s rusty red Dodge Dart and began selling high-end dope to the professors and students at the University of Miami. The way that happened was one of those serendipitous things I had stumbled onto while hanging out at the park with Ted.

We’d just gotten started. Stan, Danny and Kenny were off hustling lids. Stan was good at expanding contacts with buyers and, his word, the Chicks. His talents with women and marketing were incredible… women know men who want them and, because of that, men are usually the ones who buy the pot. Danny and Kenney vended baggies on the street and in the Park.

Ted got out of the Marine Corps around the same time that I got out of the Navy, so we were talking about our service time and comparing notes… bars, skivvy-houses in Da Nang, Olongapo and so on… when a middle-aged man, with a neatly trimmed beard, nervously came toward us. He would change his mind and step back gazing into the coconut palms like he was bird-watching.

“What do you think this fag wants?” Ted commented just loud enough for the man to hear him but not too loud to scare him off.

“Say now, he might be the guy Stan was telling us about, remember?”

The man finally mustered his courage, and approached the table, “Excuse me, do you mind if I sit with you a minute?”

I wasn’t sure what he was up to. Ted might’ve been right. He could’ve been cruising for a rim job. He was too nervous to be an informant or narc. I was curious, “Sure, have a seat. What can we do for you?”

“I… I’m looking for… ah, well, not sure how to put it.

“Just say it,” Ted glowered at him.

“Okay, do you know where I can get a lid?”

“Are you a cop?” Ted asked. It was a joke. He knew it didn’t matter what a cop said off-mike.

I talked as though the guy wasn’t there, “You think a cop would be that nervous?”

Ted laughed and elbowed me, “What if he is a cop… don’t cops need pot too?”

I was high and didn’t care.

“No… no,” the man protested. “I was told… you guys have the best. I can pay thirty-bucks for a good lid.”

Though I knew better than to deal directly out of the park, I winked at Ted, “We might know someone that can get it for you at that price.”

The man threw out thirty dollars, offering a card with it, “I trust you guys. I’m off work tonight after seven and this is my address. Come on over for a drink. My wife and I like discrete company.”

He got up and walked a few steps, turning around one more time, he invited us, “I’ll see you there.”

We said in unison, “Sure.”

“Goddamned, did that just happen?” I grinned at Ted.

“Could be a narc.”

“Maybe. We’ll call a conference when we get back to the Hollywood Hacienda.”

Back at the apartment, we had a meeting. So far, we didn’t bother to split up the money between each other. The rent got paid and we all found ways to feed ourselves. We were about to see a dramatic change in fortunes. Stan made sure that he’d come along for this transaction as he read aloud the name on the card, “Dr. Arnold Wilcox, PHD, Professor of physics, University of Miami… That’s the guy!”

We parked down the street from the address and watched the place a few minutes. We could see the man peeking out… looking for us. He’d opened the drapes enough so that we could see that he was wearing a robe.

Ted blurted out, “Shit or go blind! If he’s a narc, he’s a fag of a narc, goin’ around wearing a robe like that. Max, narcs aren’t usually fags. Are they?”

As ridiculously naïve reasoning, it was still logical. I assured him, “Not flaming ones, I wouldn’t think.”

“Well, let’s go,”

Stan went first and rang the doorbell. We followed to the front porch of the townhouse apartment. The door opened to reveal a tall, dark-haired woman in her forties. She was in a sheer black something flowing over a very pleasant to-look-at body, wrapped in a silky black something else.

She greeted us with a sultry invitation, “Hello, we’ve been expecting you.”

After brief introductions, she invited us to sit on a couch. Ted and I sat at the dining table and Stan took the couch.

The man in the robe wasn’t present at first, but soon after came down the stairs with a matt-board under his arm.

“This is my husband… what’s the name you want to use for these gentlemen?” she asked.

“It’s okay, they have my card.” Motioning to her, he said, “This is my wife…”

She cut him off, “Oh honey, can’t we have some mystery, I’m calling myself, uh, let’s see… How about Fatima for tonight?” 

“Okay, Fatima it is. First, I want to show you this,” the professor offered. He passed the matt board to me.

I was astounded at what I saw on the board. It was a neatly labeled collection of every type of acid and speed on the streets at, or before, that time.

My feelings admiration and pity were mixed, “You collect samples?”

Under each pill or capsule was a description and potency scribed meticulously with a technical pen.

 “Oh, yes. And I do the same with pot too.” He went on about each one and talked on about the properties of each as though he had been showing off a stamp collection.

Seeing it from the couch and sounding a bit paranoid, Stan asked, “You don’t put who you gots ‘em from, do you?”

“Oh no, I can assure you, never,”

Stan gave him a bag we’d made up especially for the occasion. A pack of Zigzags and a colored cartoon from the Sunday paper was put in each bag … it was my idea because … we expected to develop a clientele more sophisticated than the hippies, vagrants, drifters and students that came to the park.

Stan was sitting on the couch with the professor’s wife and began getting a hard-on. She noticed the bulge in his pants and put her hand on his crotch. Stan was hung like a Tijuana Donkey and her interest must have perked as she felt the size of it growing under her hand. Ted and I were preoccupied with the dope being passed around and hadn’t noticed her pulling out Stan’s sausage from his pants. She was sucking on it right there in front of us and her husband. The professor didn’t seem to mind a bit, but Ted was visibly put off by it. I found it weirdly peculiar that Stan was still able to negotiate with the professor while the professor’s wife gave him a blow job. He asked, “So, do you know other professors at the university who would want what we have?”

“Sure enough,” the professor only gave an occasional glance at what was going down on Stan’s lap. “We need discretion and you guys look like you can be discrete.”

Stan stuttered, “How do you want to go about th…th…this?”

“None of my colleagues can afford to get caught going to the park to score pot but almost all of them smoke… at least the ones I work with. So, we need someone who can deliver discretely.

I tried not to watch Mrs. Professor’s head bob. Ted was red-faced, and I could see that he wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of the place. It seemed to me that Stan could do two things at once but not very well, so I decided to get Ted out of there before he blew up and spoiled the whole deal.

To get things moving, I took over the negotiations, “Sounds good to me. How we going to do this discretely?”

“You can make another delivery here in the middle of the week. When you do that I’ll give you a card or two of my colleagues and you can make a delivery to the addresses on the card.”

“Sounds good to me,” and we shook hands.

The professor continued…. “If you want to go now, I can drive Stan home after he is done with my wife.”

Stan, buttoning his Levi’s, said, “Naw, that’s okay. We’d rather you don’t know where we live… security reasons, you know.”

“Yeh, we’re discrete because none of us likes the inside of Dade County Jail…” I added.

“I see,” the professor seemed a little disappointed.

Behind the wheel Ted drove gripping it white knuckled. I was riding shotgun and Stan was sleeping in the back seat. I looked over at Ted and commented, “It bothered you… Mrs. Professor doin’ the nasty with Stan, huh?”

“Yeh, you know, any other time I might be okay but…”

“… Your ole lady in Seattle?”

“Yeh.” He gave me a look that said, Shut-up.

“I know what you mean.”

Stan mumbled… It was hard to tell whether he was awake… “Good deal, eh?”