Randy was pissed. It had been a great weekend; it was the Florida-Alabama game and like every fan at FSU, he was jazzed. Problem was, they had no TV. Or rather, they had a TV, in Tex’s dorm room, but no cable to hook it to. Big Paul had come up with a solution—a crazy stoner’s solution, but they loved it—and it had worked. Sort of. Big Paul and Little Paul had gone to the fourth floor, the first women’s floor at Kellum Hall. Wearing white overalls, which Big Paul had snitched from the maintenance office, they had told the few girls desultorily watching a local channel while sweating in the hot dorm lounge, that they were there to fix the TV, which did have cable. Since the channel was local, when they unhooked the cable and dropped it out the window, nothing had changed. Apparently Big Paul knew something about TV cable, which in this year, 1976, was a new thing, and had come up with a one-hundred-foot roll of it and the terminals to connect it.
When they got down to the second floor, they found the cable hanging outside the window of the men’s lounge, just out of reach, so they had to go out on the ledge to get it. Big Paul had held Little Paul’s overalls while the smaller man leaned out over the parking lot and grabbed it. They attached the ends and dropped the roll of cable to the ground. Down below, Randy and his roomie Fred fed the cable in through their window on the corner of the first floor.
Tex’s room was down the hall on the other side of the building, so they’d lifted the ceiling tiles and thrown the roll of cable down the hall above the ceiling and into Tex’s room. Randy had brought his last pound of Columbian Gold, figuring to make a few sales during the game. Tex had loaded the tiny dorm fridge and a cooler with beer, and it was almost kick-off time when a sharp, hard rapping sounded on the door. A cop’s knock, and they all knew it.
The weed disappeared into a desk drawer, and since they had not had a chance to light up, the room did not reek with the unmistakable miasma of marijuana. Tex opened the door to a university policeman, with the massive bulk of the maintenance supervisor behind him. Randy didn’t know the cop, but the Super was a mean-assed black man who already didn’t like him. He’d braced Fred and Randy about combing their long hair in the sink, which had stopped up and required his attention. In his usual wise-assed fashion, Randy had told him white guys didn’t comb their hair in the sink, and the Super had taken it the wrong way.
“We got a report of two guys on the ledge on the second floor, and the boys in 201 said it was some of you.” The cop was cautious, but there had been a couple suicides from the dorm ledges and reporting anyone seen on them was mandatory. The fine was $100 per time. Figures, Randy thought.
The twin brothers in 201, right above him and Fred, not only were insufferable little pricks, but they had been excluded from the game and were looking for paybacks. He considered what paybacks they might receive in return but shelved that for another time.
The guys were stuttering, and Randy knew it was up to him to get them out of this if he could. He decided to play it straight.
“Come on, guys, we just wanted to see the game.”
The cop looked like he would rather be watching too, and even the grumbling Super was trying to hide a grin; everyone was a fan today. They conferred in the hall for a minute and the cop gave them the verdict. “OK, but I want that cable back where it was when you’re done. You figure out who’s gonna pay the fines, and stay the HELL off the ledge!”
They all agreed, and the game was on. Of course, FSU had gotten their asses handed to them on a plate by the Crimson Tide, but then the Seminoles were in the toilet with only two wins to their name this season. No one had expected anything else. Still, it was a good game, played hard, and nobody grudged Alabama the win. They all agreed to pitch in for the fines, and between eight guys it was only twenty-five bucks. .
But here it was Monday night, his weed was mostly sold, and he’d made a bundle on the Ritalin on which he’d cornered the market at Kellum Hall. Ritalin calmed you down if you had ADD, but it wired you up if not, and was very popular with college students; finals were coming up. He’d been all set to buy several pounds from Greg’s latest plane, which flew in twice monthly with about one hundred pounds of Colombian Gold, the best weed anyone knew of to date. But it was gone. All of it. He was fucked.
Randy considered his life. He’d led a colorful life; almost a double existence since about the age of fifteen. He was the brain boy, top student in high school, third in his school’s history on the SATs. Number one was still his older brother, Don, who’d held the title since 1967. Randy had made the Dean’s list his very first quarter at FSU and was about to make it again.
But he was also the slick dope dealer, who everyone marveled at for his ability, it seemed, to get away with anything. He’d sold his first bag of weed with his good buddy Kirk at that tender age, and they had both decided it was the cat’s ass. You took some for yourself, marked it up a little, and got your money back.
He’d been a fat kid, and the girls had been distant, if not hostile. The fact that he could run rings around them in the classroom didn’t help. The fact that he was a stoner hadn’t helped either, at first. But then he’d grown taller, and into his weight, and nobody could kick his ass, and now the girls found him attractive. He was popular. But they’d dumped on him, so he began getting some payback there too, and was an absolute shit to some of them. Especially the ones who’d ignored him. When smoking pot also became popular, it had only enhanced his appeal.
Despite having sold greater and greater quantities of pot, he’d never been arrested, never seen the back of a cop car or a jail cell, never been handcuffed or printed. It was, he ruminated, because he was smart. Smarter than most other kids, and, he finally realized, smarter than most cops as well. But he’d been outsmarted this time, and it burned like the Greek fire he’d read about in Western Civ. To the bone.
And on top of that, who had done it burned too; a little shit named Mickey, of all the unlikely candidates to get the best of Randy. He was a douche bag. Oh, he was one of the guys; how could he not be in with Randy and the other bikers at Kellum, riding a Triumph Trident 650? Cool bike, but a douche bag is a douche bag. He generally stuck with his downer concession; he sold “reds,” “yellows,” and sometimes “blues”: Seconal, Tuinal, and Phenobarb. He made out like the smart guy, told his buddies not to take Reds and drive their bikes, like they needed telling. Wiseass.
Randy had no use for downers. He was always sleepy as it was. If he took pills, they were stimulants. He bought and sold Black Beauties along with the “whites,” the Ritalin, when he could get them. Beauties were amphetamines, and you could study all night on one. Even more popular than whites.
But the little shit Mickey had pulled a fast one. He’d waited at the airstrip out in the orange groves and when Greg’s plane had come in, he’d told the pilot he was there on behalf of all the guys and bought the whole load.
They couldn’t figure out where he’d gotten the money to do it. Little Paul, who was friendly with Mickey because he was friendly with everybody, provided the answer. He’d been drinking Jose Cuervo and Miller beer chasers with Mickey, who was already high on reds, and Mickey had spilled.
He’d taken out a student loan. Turned out the son of a bitch had already been financing his pill business with loans, and since he always paid on time, they gave him pretty much anything he wanted. This time, it was fifteen thousand dollars. It usually took several of them to put that much together. It was brilliant. And nothing pissed Randy off more than that he hadn’t thought of it himself.
Rumor was Mickey was from money, but Daddy wasn’t being particularly generous, due no doubt to his son’s errant ways. So, he’d parleyed Dad’s name into a business, and he looked to be wanting to take over. Greg would never have allowed one guy to take it all, but he was in Saudi Arabia at the time, and the pilot wasn’t much interested in asking questions. He was a smuggler, and all he wanted was his money.
They were all in awe of Greg. He’d taken an AA in Business in five quarters instead of eight, and at twenty-three was getting filthy rich selling PVC pipe to Arabs. He drove a Mercedes and, being a native Tallahassee boy and wanting his town to have good weed, had begun the smuggling operation with his own money. Not that he didn’t profit; that was not in his nature. But it was a drop in the pool compared to what he made legit. Randy considered, not for the first time, that dope dealers were capitalists at heart, just like any good American.
The question was, what was Randy going to do now? He’d been hedging his bets just like Mickey. He got a monthly stipend from his folks for college, just enough to get by, and, with the few grand he’d saved working a year on a horse farm in Ocala, he re-started the business he’d left behind in high school. He bought and sold, robbing Pedro to pay Pablo, and built up his stake while taking eighteen quarter-hours a week, studying four to six hours a night and making damn near straight A’s.
Now, he was left holding the better part of four thousand bucks and had nothing to invest it in. If he didn’t invest it, it would trickle away with his bills and be gone. Dorm rent was due on the first, late fee on the fifteenth, not that he hadn’t paid the fee often, considering it just another cost of doing business. He’d be reduced to paying retail for his weed. The horror, he thought wryly. The horror. His EuroLit prof would be proud.
Then he thought about Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and began to conjure a plan.
He got on the old Bakelite phone in his dorm room. The first guy he called was Gary, at the Theta Chi house. The Thetas weren’t the rich Greeks like the Pikes, Phi Kappa Delta, with the Georgian mansion and a rep for debauchery that had gotten national attention. But they were stoners of the first order and had quite a bit of money. He apologized for the delay, explained what had happened and what he planned to do. Gary said he was in.
So did “Cheech” from Broward Hall, Sherry from Reynolds Hall, who was the only woman he knew dealing dope, and two rich guys with their own apartments in the French Quarter. He put together nearly twenty thousand in potential if it came to a bidding war. But he didn’t plan on a bidding war; he planned to see to it Mickey didn’t make it to the next plane. He had no idea that that particular detail would be taken care of by someone else.
Two weeks since the last plane, Randy was on-site, having recruited Tex, who was taking a mechanical engineering degree on a football scholarship, to disable the lovely Trident so Mickey would be late for the show. Little Paul beat him to it. But he didn’t disable the bike; Mickey did that himself. Little Paul disabled Mickey. Turned out, Mickey had been ragging Big Paul about being gay. Big Paul could have taken Mickey apart without breaking a sweat, but he didn’t.
Word was, Big Paul and Little Paul were not just roomies but lovers. Nobody gave two shits. Randy had an entire group of gay guys with whom he studied and discussed philosophy and psychology. Nobody cared except, it seemed, for Mickey. So Little Paul, while drinking with Mickey once again, had slipped a couple of Mickey’s own reds into his drink. Smugglers always flew at night, so when Mickey left to get to the landing strip early it was after sunset.
Tex had missed him, thinking that the flights usually came in at around eleven and not considering how Mickey had been early last time. Tex wasn’t the sharpest light bulb in the closet.
Mickey decided, now no doubt higher than a Georgia pine, to cruise around Doak Campbell Stadium at high speed, its curving lanes lined with concrete posts to accommodate the traffic during games. It was a favorite of the bikers to lean into the curves, but at some point his own advice about not riding while high came back to haunt him. He smacked a couple of those posts, and it was lights out.
All Randy knew was that Mickey hadn’t shown, as he’d expected, and he’d bought the whole planeload for sixteen thousand five hundred dollars. Several of his investors showed around midnight, and the majority of the load was divvied up and carried away in trunks, bike saddle bags, and the backs of pickups.
Tuesday morning, Randy got up and looked out the window at Tennessee Street, known as I-10 outside of town, and looked down for his bike, a Honda 450 with a powder-blue tank and extended forks, like he always did. He saw the beautiful Triumph Trident, also stretched, with the front tire wrapped up under the frame and the handlebars detached from the forks and sitting back on the gas tank, break and clutch wires still hanging. Jesus, he thought, what the fuck did Tex do?
Next time he saw Mickey he looked like he’d been eaten by a wolf and shit off a cliff. His face was one big bruise, and his nose was in a splint. He grimaced at Randy and passed him by. Mickey knew the score; he’d been had in his turn, and now he was in big trouble. He’d made a bundle squeezing everybody for the Colombian, but he’d made no friends doing it, and Greg was back. Upon hearing the story, he banned Mickey from buying. If Mickey used the money to pay his student loans, he’d have no capital to start again. The pills would never pay that tab. He was a mediocre student, and Randy figured he’d only come to make money. Randy intended to make money and come away with a degree that would do him some good down the road. They all left for the Christmas break, and Mickey never came back.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
Colorful indeed!
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