Let's Ripoff A Drug Dealer

Jeff, Larry and Ted sat on a couch watching television. The room was mostly dark, except for an evening sunlight struggling around the openings of a window curtain, and the room was silent but for the television, where sounds of explosions and yelling seemed to dominate as entertainment.

Nineteen year old Jeff was in the middle of the couch and laughed when an animated bear coming from the television screen was shot and its head exploded in one big ball of red and white gore, amazingly the bear began walking about like a mechanized metal robot with limited movement searching frantically for the missing pieces of its brain and skull, which were scattered on the ground about it, and when it found a piece of its head, it went about mechanically attaching the snippet back into its proper place. Jeff thought that was funny, the bear assembling his shot off head back together, that was funny, and he snorted like a pig at this; to Larry and Ted, that was the sound Jeff made when he deemed something amusing.

Nineteen year old Larry was on the end of the couch, to Jeff’s right, his arms folded over his rather large chest, his big head resting on the cushioned backrest, falling asleep. It was commented more than a few times, he sort of appeared like a beached walrus. Larry slept a lot; his mother said it had a lot to do with his weight, he was heavy, he required a lot of sleep. When Jeff snorted suddenly, he opened his eyes to the television and attempted a weak smile, but it was no good, he was tired, then resumed nodding off, his eyelids fluttering to a close.

Nineteen year old Ted was on Jeff’s left. He saw nothing amusing and felt awkward. He felt sorry for the wounded bear, so it was uncomfortable to watch the creature in distress, even though it was a cartoon, but he would never admit a solidarity with creatures who were in duress; at least not to Jeff and Larry. He admitted one time to a girl who asked him for a pencil and an eraser in exchange to look at her pussy he felt a sort of empathy to creatures wondering onto roads and getting struck by cars and suffering as they lay dying; the girl scratched her pussy in contemplation and took on a serious look and then laughed, finally thinking it was a joke. Ted was funny, she thought, and she smiled invitingly at him as if to say: she would have pulled her panties down and exposed it for him. He was funny, that was much better than a stupid pencil and an eraser. After that, however, Ted kept his opinions to himself. The world was not only a strange place of creatures flying in the air, fish breathing water, the Earth rotating into blinding sunlight and then rotating into terrible darkness and without interruption for billions of years, Ted thought, but an unforgiving place, where life was challenged at every step of its existence, and if he were ever giving an opportunity as a leader like Adolph Hitler, to be ever lucky enough to have supreme power over human beings, to have the authority to kill whoever hurt other things, he would do it with zeal, but until that time, he accepted the oddity of reality and as a result, kept his mouth shut.

And since the couch was kind of not long, it being a tight squeeze for three men sitting together on it, their hips consequently touched, and each felt the human warmth of the other, and each felt a flowing bond of heat that connected the men in friendship.

“We need weed,” said Jeff, suddenly. That woke Larry up. “Yeah, weed,” he said, more a murmur, licking his pregnant lips, and peering about through drooping lids into a darkness that instilled fear of ever being alone in a world, a universe he didn't understand, and directly his head bolted backward to the backrest and thereafter he appeared dead.

The television took time out from the entertaining cartoons to sell medication to women who might find intercourse uncomfortable. “We need money,” said Ted, joyfully, as though the logic behind this maxim was beyond reprove. This comment annoyed Jeff. It’s not what Ted said, it’s how he said. Ted was not a believer. “All we need, idiot, is the wanting it,” said Jeff. “Look at Ford, he wanted money so he made cars. Everything falls into place with a plan: we don’t need money for weed; just possessing it in our minds is enough and it’ll fall into our laps.” Ted was amazed, astounded, actually, at Jeff’s comment. “O, yea," said Ted, "then how can we buy weed with no money.” Jeff stared at the television, it was now selling information to single men and women on dating.

“I know this guy who sells really good weed,” Jeff began, “that’s all he does, day in, day out, he must make, five, I don't know, maybe six thousand dollars--and that’s in one day; a slow day, like a Monday. His name is Carlos. Now, here’s the thing, Carlos comes to you. I got his number. Here’s what we’ll do: we’ll call Carlos and tell him we need weed and we got money, a lot of money, like we won the Lotto. We’ll tell him to park behind the apartments next to the big blue dumpsters; it's kind of dark back there; so when we come up on him it'll be hard for him to see what's going on.” Jeff got up abruptly from the couch and went to a chair sitting in a corner, next to the television, he bent down, and placed his hands under the chair and produced a gun. “We'll show him this,” Jeff held the gun up so Ted could see it, “and not only do we get weed, but a lot a money. That, my friend, is how to buy weed without money and how you get rich without working.” Ted smiled.

Jeff returned to the couch, the mechanized bear without a head had returned to the television screen. Larry was now snoring, a hazy dialogue was emitting from his ravenous mouth, something about his mother being hurt and how he could not save her; he started to whimper in defeat. Jeff slapped Larry's fat face with an open hand and Larry started up like the apartment was on fire. “Wake your fat ass up,” said Jeff. “We’re going for weed and a lot of money.”

Carlos arrived at the Hidden Lakes Apartments later that night after Jeff had called him with his weed order, it was nearing ten o’clock, and there was no moon, so it was dark; where he was instructed to park and wait, which was in back of the apartment complex by the garbage. This part on the complex was secluded without light. While he waited for Jeff, he thought about how much money he had earned that day and the weed he had brought with him to sell. Jeff had told him about winning the Lotto. This undoubtable would be a big sale, he thought. He had two pounds of weed in the trunk of the car valued at twenty thousand dollars. He also started to feel unsafe; it was like unfathomable ink, and eerily quiet; an anxiety fell on him, something didn't feel right, for he felt like one those wooden ducks at the fair. So he opened the glove compartment of his Ford motorcar and retrieved a Glock 37 with a 10 round magazine; it was loaded with .45 caliber rounds. Just then he saw a flicker of moment in the infinite blindness ahead of him. It must be Jeff, he thought, or someone dumping their trash at ten o’clock at night, that would be uncomfortable he reasoned, but as the movement drew nearer it became clear, it was then he saw three men fast approaching his Ford, one stood out as fat, the other two were skinny; the fat guy was white as was one of the skinny guys, and the one leading the way was a black guy.

When they got close to the Ford, the black guy called out, “That you Carlos?” Before Carlos could answer, the fat guy peeled off from the group and walked around to the passenger side of the Ford like he owned the car and he leaned through the car widow. “What’s up,” said the fat guy. He was shocking and disturbing, a monster of a fat slob, with an acned scared face with large hungry red lips, Carlos wanted to shoot him in the face. The black guy had tenderly sidled closer to the Ford, carefully, as though in little girl steps to the Ford. Carlos noticed his right hand was concealed behind his back. “You got the weed,” said the black guy. It was said in disrespect; a tone of command. “I got it, you think I come all this way without it--you got the twenty grand,” said Carlos. In the side mirror of the Ford, Carlos saw the white skinny guy sidestepping now with energy to the Ford’s rear; he was looking around for any witnesses. Just then the fat guy reached into the Ford with both arms and began feeling around the seat. “This the weed,” said the fat guy, grabbing hold of a telephone directory that sat on the passenger seat. Carlos grabbed the heavy volume and the fat guy open the car door and entered the car and that's when Carlos slapped him real hard in the nose with the Glock, and the fat guy fell back from the Ford in a stunned whimper, holding his bloody nose, then collapsing to the ground, as though a drunk. Carlos turned the other way quickly and saw the black guy aiming a gun at him. In seemingly one movement, Carlos brought the Glock up and fired two shots; one hit the black guy’s knee and the other took his right ear clean off the side of his head. Carlos never saw the skinny white guy at the rear of the Ford, because as the black guy was sinking to the ground with his knee shot off, he fired one round into Carlos’s neck, under his chin, and almost like intuition, second nature, he slammed on the Ford’s accelerator and roared off into the security of the unseen night.

Jeff’s mother was a stripper at a place called: Mr. Wonderful's, and on this particular night, her manager had sent her home early. She was drunk, and the rule said dancers were not allowed to appear intoxicated. When she arrived at her apartment, she found Jeff on the floor, she saw a lot of blood on the light brown carpet. Ted was attending to bandaging her son's leg. In the corner of the living room, there was a moaning sound, and she looked and saw Larry’s face was a mess, for it seemed to her he was in fight and got beat up real bad. Bending down to get a closer look at her son’s leg, she saw right away he had been shot. “Baby, you need to get to the ER, that looks bad,” she said. She called a taxi for him, then went and prepared herself a meal of fried eggs and bacon and a cup of coffee, and when it was done, she turned the channel on the television to Oprah. “Who shot you, baby?” she asked him. Jeff, in unbearable pain, and sweating profusely, told her of his plan to rob Carlos of his product and his money, and how things went terrible wrong. “You mean,” she yelled, “you didn’t get weed or money?” Jeff shook his head, no. “Now, ain’t that a bitch!”





The End

w/c: 2000