Four Finger Bags

I started washing dishes in restaurants when I was fourteen. Some buddies and I got on at a Kettle Restaurant and took turns filling shifts and making enough money to cop some herb and make that ever-so-important gangsta impression on the young ladies. I’m still amazed at how the pieces of that puzzle still fit together in my life.

For example.

There was a waitress there at the time who turned out to be a major weed dealer. It was great. We could go to her house and like as not there would be her boyfriend and a couple of other guys with a bed sheet spread out on the living room floor with the biggest pile of dried green clumps you ever saw. They’d be smokin’ doobs and weighing up ounces into sandwich bags. A four finger bag went for ten bucks in those days.

You could get a pound for ninety.

Jeff Martin and I split a ninety dollar pound one time, sold enough bags out of it to recoup our investment and still had to put the leftover split into emptied bread sacks. I remember giving a big bag of it to a girl I had a crush on for her birthday.

Truly, it got so bad and wide-open that an undercover cop showed up one day posing as a waitress. We knew something was wrong when she tried to take a large order out to a table in a bus tub. The tip-off passed around the staff and we were instructed by those in the “know” to shun her.

Fast forward twenty years later.

I’m working successfully for a local mailing company as vice president of sales and attending a fancy soiree at the Capital Hotel (President Grant stayed there when he was in town…) and who do I run smack dab into? Little Miss Dopedealer. She was comptroller of a multibillion dollar company.

“I swear to God, if you say anything to anybody, I will kill you. Understand?” she hissed.

And, to this day, you are the only one I have told about this.