That indescribable feeling I got as a child before Christmas Day far overshadowed the giddiness I’d feel before leaving to pick up.
Buying drugs from someone who you’re buddy-buddy with is always preferred, but when you start doing heroin, there are no suburban white college kids to buy from. You’ve got to hit the street. Sometimes there’s a white “normal” heroin dealer, but that type of dealer’s gear always sucks. You want a real fix.
It’s pretty easy. I’ve found that in any major city, the third time’s a charm. Go to the ghetto, roll your window halfway down and when you see a bunch of guys who look like drug dealers, slow down and make eye contact and wave one over.
Initially, I did this being completely naive to other elements of the buy beyond the drug transaction. After I established some regular contacts, I realized that I probably shouldn’t drive my nice car there. Nor should I wear my favorite leather coat. Or anything else I’d usually wear. Instead, I’d dress down and found myself driving my beater car to the dealer. I even once got 3 free bags because they felt bad I had to ostensibly get rid of my other car so I could keep up my habit. Despite my precautions and hundreds of “shady” deals, I never had a gun pointed at me or was threatened in any manner.
I got robbed by a Puerto Rican once. It wasn’t anything violent or traumatic or scary in the least. He was some background person, always in the periphery and an acquaintance of one of my dealers. Once, the dealer told me to meet this other guy instead. I just gave him a couple hundred dollars and then sat in a parking lot like a schmuck for an hour.
The fucked up thing was I never got angry for being taken advantage of making a bad decision to trust someone I didn’t know. I was angry because I couldn’t get high that day. That was the last money I had until a paycheck would hit my account 4 days later. Until then, I subsisted off Ritz crackers and tuna out of a can. An hour in a parking lot. I don’t have that kind of patience for anything when I’m sober.
I never got hungry because I was always high. Why buy groceries when I can buy dope? And you really don’t need anything other than those two aforementioned delicacies and water when you’re vomiting in withdrawal; it worked out quite ideally in retrospect.
One can only imagine the ugly consequences if all I had to eat in the apartment was leftover chili.
Ended up going to a Coinstar machine in desperation and converting my jar of change into $14.90. I dug a dime up from under my bed luckily and bought a bag on day 3. Why didn’t I think of this resource earlier when I was “working from home” and trying to achieve the high personal goal of keeping a glass of water down for more than 10 minutes. I found a random dealer I’d never seen out in the area before. Immediate wave of relief. Rush home. Shit was fucking fake.
The drug deal.
Depending on who you are, the smallest of transactions can be the biggest rush. Soon though, it becomes an errand of sorts like running out to the post office or to the cleaners; except it’s an errand you look forward to with the utmost rush of fortune. I sometimes imagine how churchgoing, non users would feel being in the backseat of one of my deals. It’d probably be the scariest thing ever. I wonder if I’ll ever be that scared of anything.
And even after being disappointed with fake shit, I still couldn’t wait until the next day when I could hit up another dealer after I got my direct deposit.
They say drugs can affect your perception of time and it’s true because every minute I was waiting for that high, several hours were passing by in my sober head.
