Stamp People

Stamp People

by Dan Morgan

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Dan Morgan

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter 1

Some people might think this ain’t been such a wonderful life I’ve had, but I’m going to sit down here and tell what I know about it so far cause it don’t seem all that bad to me. I got a lot of time left to burn in this place and Jim who shares my cell with me told me it would cleanse me to write down everthing I know about myself, and god knows I need that. Everbody needs a good scrub behind their ears now and then, and probably me more than anybody else, and Jim said writing about myself was the best way to do it. Jim also said it wasn’t enough for a man to just live out his life the way he wanted to, he had to leave a legacy behind so’s everbody would know what he was all about. Well big tall Jim with his big weird head and all his book smarts and all those days when he used to live in a sunshine life is sure enough leaving a legacy alright, strung out behind him over most of Texas like a twisted up trail of rusted bob wire that’s torn up just about anybody who come close to him. Jim is one of those guys you see in magazine ads for cigarettes and beer and fast cars, guys who are smart and good looking and always getting more out of life than the rest of us. Now, he might look like a hero on a white horse, but he’s sure worn black and done plenty of evil in all his days. I’m probably the only one that knows everthing he done and believe me when I say that most folks don’t want to know too much of what his story was all about anyway. I can’t imagine what it must of been like to see that devil standing over you on your last night on earth like so many girls must of done, leering down at you out of eyes that had no feelings for any kind of human misery or even human hope. Myself, I don’t even like to think about the stuff he’s told me, much less write it down, and so to protect a whole lot of folks, myself most of all, I won’t. As for my own legacy, Jim told me that figuring out all my failures is just about the best I could possibly hope for, and writing it all down so everbody could read all about me would do me good. He says writing up my life for people to read about is like dropping my drawers so the whole world can look up my backside instead of just doing it in front of one of the guards when it’s time for cavity check, and since I’ve been bending over in front of people most of my life anyway, I don’t guess it will really matter much if I stick everything out there for the world to see.

The biggest failure of mine I guess I need to talk about first is how I got here in the Ferguson Unit of the Texas Department of Coercions. They stuck me here in August of 1980 for a six year ride, and for the longest time since, I didn’t used to give much thought to what got me in prison—beyond remembering a certain night in Houston when I was surrounded by more cops than you could find at a donut shop on a Tuesday morning, but in these last few months and days with Jim I been thinking a lot more about what it was that really got me locked away from my fellow citizens, and whether there was ever anything I could of done to stop the freight train of life from running me over once it started down that long, steep grade.

Jim told me that no man should be held accountable for the bad things he does because, as he says it, From the minute your egg gets laid, you are what you are, and you can’t change a damn thing no matter how hard you might try. You’re stuck with yourself, and what’s going happen is just going happen, and nobody and no power in anybody’s heaven is going to change that. I remember the night he told me that when he was sitting next to me on my bunk after lights out with his arm around my shoulder like he was witnessing me for the Baptists, but what he was really doing that night was scaring the devil out of me for what I knew he could do if that arm come up around my skinny neck. I can still remember seeing the outline of his round shaved head in the dark and feel the iron in his voice while he told me there was nothing a man did that was ever truly his own doing. You don’t have to be sorry for anything you do on this planet, he said to me. There is no such thing as free will, regardless of what they tell you here or in a church. You don’t have to be sorry for anything you do because you are born the way you are and you won’t ever be any better. Your life is none of your doing, and you best remember that for the rest of your miserable days. Now who knows, he might be right, because there just never seemed to be nothing bad I did out of my own free will that I didn’t know better in time enough not to do it, like the big fat screw up I did that got me throwed in here, which like Jim pointed out, certainly wasn’t at all free considering this 72-month installment plan I’m on.

Now I might of only got six years in this Texas prison for what they busted me for, but I got a life sentence when it comes to ever being anything but what I’ve always been. After I was busted and they got me into court, I was told if I showed remorse for my crimes I’d get lenience from the judge. Well maybe I got it and maybe I didn’t, cause I don’t know whether six years was lenience or not. How do you know whether you’re being treated good or just not being treated as miserable as you have been your whole life cause what you got now looks a whole lot better by comparison than what you always had? It’s funny how things turns out so different from what you expected them to be when you were growing up, even when you didn’t ever expect yourself to amount to nothing anyhow. I don’t remember too many things my Momma said to me when I was little about where I was going to go in my life. Mostly she didn’t say too nice a things at all to me and Pritchard my little brother, because she’d lost herself early on I guess, but sometimes when things was good, we’d sit outside in the evening in summer and she would tell us about the house me and her and Pritchard would live in when she got everthing straightened out instead of whatever dump it was we were living in at the time. She’d look up at some far off place and her face would get soft and mellow and she’d talk about the big house with everbody having their own room to sleep in instead of sharing the sofa, and a huge kitchen where we could all gather round the table for big fine dinners in the evening instead of sitting on the floor eating fried chicken out of box.

We’ll have a fireplace in winter that we can sit in front of and listen to the logs crackle and pop as they burn, she said, and me and Pritchard would listen to her voice, rare and gentle, and we could see that fireplace glowing in her eyes, even if it never did glow no place else. Larry, you’ll be the one in charge of going out to chop firewood, she told me, but you’ll like it, ‘cause it’s man’s work. I think a lot of times about what she told me about doing things like that, cause all I ever wanted to be back then was a man and able do things for myself. I sure never suspected back when I was a kid and dreaming about having nice things in my life that I’d end up being a grown man who still believed there was a someday down the road when nice things might come to him. Oh, I had a few nice things here and there, but I never could hold onto them and probably never will. But that’s alright. Somewhere along the way I finally realized that growing up just meant trading one illusion for another, and now I that I’ve learned not to expect too much out of life any more, I’m just going to keep what I get and stop trading it all away.

Momma could sit for hours dreaming about that house and I think she probably kept on building it up in her head so’s ever time she talked about it, it had another room or bigger kitchen or a warmer fire in December. She always talked about the great Christmases we’d have in the living room, with stockings hanging over the fireplace and a big old tree with more presents than we could count. I guess it did her a lot of good to think about things like that, but we never even come close to having a big Christmas with presents, much less a house all our own. It seemed like ever time we got close to being on our own two feet, there was something out there that bit onto us bad enough to pull us right back down again. I remember when me and Pritchard was little, if we was bad, if we was cutting up or getting too loud when Momma was trying real hard to think, sometimes she’d say, You hear them dogs barking out there? They gonna come get you and tear you up if you ain’t good. And even if we didn’t hear no dogs barking, Momma could, and it made us afraid of whatever was out there, and through the years whenever Momma heard dogs barking after her, sure enough, something no good always happened to all of us.

When I think about Momma and picture her in my head, I guess I most remember what she looked like when I was little, back when she might pick me up now and then and hold me close if just for a little while. I remember she had dark brown hair and a thin face, with black eyes that didn’t ever quite seem to be thinking about me even when she was holding me. She always seemed to be looking somewhere else in her life for something she wished she had, and lots of times I got the idea that maybe me and Pritchard was something she wished pretty strong that she didn’t have. Momma was pretty back then, with smooth skin and a smile that sometimes come out just when a little boy needed a touch of kindness, though by the time I left home she didn’t use her smile all that much anymore, and her good looks had already started to fade like an old billboard and she was getting pretty rough around her edges. I guess the way she had been living had caught up with her by then, just like it’s done to me now, too. Something else I remember about Momma was her hands. There was times now and then when she would be sitting on a couch if we had one, or maybe on the floor if we didn’t, and when she was looking sad and about to cry, though she never did, I’d go sit by her and she would put her arm around me and hold my hand in hers which seemed to make her feel better for a while. What I remember was that she had hands with chewed off fingernails at the end of her long thin fingers, and try as she might, I don’t think she ever stopped biting those nails down sometimes till they was bloody, right up to the time I left home. I never did know why she did that. In my last years with Momma, what little I remember about her has got blurred a little too much just like most everthing else in my world did, and since I ain’t seen Momma now in ten years or more, I don’t know that I’d even know her if she come up behind me and slapped me on the back of my head the way she used to when I was bad or sometimes just for no reason at all. But I bet I’d know her by them gnawed off nails.

Well back to where I am. When I started out writing this I first put down who I was and where I was born and where I lived when I was little but Jim told me that wasn’t the way to tell my story so he took the pages from me and made me start all over again. Jim says what I ought to be looking for is that point that everbody’s got in their life where everthing they do forever after is changed and there’s nothing they can do after that that’s going to make any difference. He called it the Pivotal Moment, and he said, If you look at where you are now Larry, and what you what you don’t own, you can trace your life backwards over all the sins that got you here by following the trail that got you so deep in the woods to begin with. If you keep looking, you’ll get far enough back to find the trailhead of your life where you started out, and that’s where you’ll find that big Pivotal Moment, that split second in time when you did something wrong that made everything forever after go bad for you.

So I said, If I find that Pivotal Moment, what good will it do me?, and he said, None at all, but at least you’ll know something ninety-nine percent of the people on this miserable planet don’t know. You’ll know where you went wrong, and if you haven’t already thrown your entire life completely away, maybe you can find your way back out on the other side of the woods and start all over again. Well it sounded good, anyway.

I asked him if that was the way it had been for him, that he hadn’t been able to find the right way back out, but when he answered me, it was all muddy water like usual, one of them kind of answers he gives that I don’t even come close to understanding what he means. Whenever Jim talks like that I always write down whatever he says to me, even if it don’t make no sense or I just plain don’t understand it at all, in hopes that if I think about it enough, it will come out a lot clearer later on. So when I asked him that question he said, I am the quintessential curse of the human race. I am the milk that went sour in the refrigerator, the bad dog that ran away from home. Everybody has a moment when the lights are dim and the woods get thick, and what you do in that moment of darkness rules your soul for the rest of your life. Sooner or later everybody takes a long fall from grace. Some come back, some never do. I just kept on falling. And that’s exactly the way he said it.

Jim says his Pivotal Moment was when he was 14 and discovered plumbing. I didn’t know for a long time what that meant, but when he finally explained it to me, I saw he was right—the minute he found out women had different plumbing from men was the minute for Jim that seemed to set him on the trail to where he is today, which is sitting on the concrete floor of our cell next to me most of the time, and most of the time just staring off in space like he was visiting another planet. He says that was his fall, and what I should be writing about was my own fall, that I should be figuring out when it was that I could of done something or not done something that might of made everthing different for me today. I don’t guess there was any decisions I made that would of made me a rich man or a smarter man today if I’d done them any other way, but maybe Jim was right, maybe there was a time when I could’ve gone left instead of right, or up instead of down, or right instead of wrong, and maybe I’d be living in that house with Momma sitting in front of a fire in winter and thinking about all the good things that had happened to me in my life. Jim used to say his life had been the moth drawn to the bonfire, buzzing around and around, spinning closer and closer to the flames, always trying to feel the heat without getting burned, and I said, Yes, I Suppose I’m a Lot Like That Too, but Jim said, No, you’re more like a bug drawn to a windshield, and he was probably right about that too, that someday I’d be tootling along not watching what was coming up behind me and the next thing I’d know somebody going through life a lot faster than I was would suddenly be looking at my ass splattered on the glass in front of him and one little swipe of the wipers and all trace of me would be gone forever. Jim said he wanted to be a big flame in the night when he went and I suppose he done enough things in his life that he was already a four alarm blaze by the time I got to him.

Chapter 2

Well just to start it off, I guess, and to figure out how I got where I am today, a few years ago I skipped up to Dallas for a while during one of those times when I didn’t especially want to be in Houston for one reason or another that I can’t even remember. It just seemed like a good idea at the time, so I stuck my thumb out and went. While I was up there, I got hooked up with a couple of guys, and a whole lot of troubles ended up coming out of that little friendship. The Marshall brothers, Alan and Wes, was in a rock band they called The Windows, which they liked to say was hard rock, but since they was just trying to make a living they’d play anything anybody’d give them fifty bucks to play which was most everthing but hard rock, like old rock and roll and country and western and even wedding stuff now and then. But the kind of music they played mostly was bad music. I mean they tried to play the notes right, but after that, there wasn’t much else to brag about. Even I could tell they didn’t have no more talent at music than a spoon, but at least they tried to play the notes loud, and when a lot of the kind of people they played for got drunk enough, being loud was all that mattered. They practiced a little and spent some time trying to write music but they spent a lot more time smoking dope and talking about the day when they’d hit it big. When it come to their music they had a lot of feelings I guess and they got really freaked out when they got to playing, but they just never had the talent to play like the rock stars they hoped to be. Hell, I even tried to pick up the guitar a little bit but they didn’t have much patience to teach me and about all I ever could do was play a couple chords and keep breaking that one little thin wire.

Anyway, I’m trying to tell something other than Alan and Wes playing their music. What I’m getting at is the first time I ever got really busted. I got in trouble in school a few times, and I had to go in the army when I was eighteen cause I was riding in a stolen car though I swore I didn’t know it was stole. That judge halfway believed that story and give me a choice that might of turned out be one of my Pivotal Moments if it had gone right, though in the end the Army didn’t turn out to be much of a career builder after all. I hadn’t ever really been busted till that summer when I lived with the Marshall brothers, though. I’d met Wes, he’s the young one, at a pool joint one night right after they’d got paid for a gig and he bought me a couple beers which automatically qualified him to be a close friend of mine. For a few days before I met them, I’d been staying with a girl named Debra who was dancing at the Xxtasy Club which was a pretty high class joint and I was sure proud of boning a Grade A dancer like her. To this day, I can’t remember what her face looked like, but I remember she had real good tits that stuck out in front just right, though what attracted me and everbody else in the place more than anything I guess was that butt. It seems that’s always been one of the main objects of my affections, and hers was sure one of the best. She could bounce that tail around in your face while you sat at the bar and you’d put your last dollar in that g-string night after night, which I did on more than one occasion before I stuffed enough of them in there that we got hooked up. Anyway, one thing led to another and I ended up at her place for a few days. I had only gone up to Dallas just so’s I could get away from some things in Houston for a while, but I was beginning to think that maybe this was where I was meant to be in my life, with a warm bed, a hot woman, and job prospects a whole lot better than I’d ever had in Houston. Dallas was definitely my kind of place. Debra made good money at the X so we were eating every night and for a while I thought I’d found the good life, though it only took a few days till she wasn’t as interested in me as at first, maybe cause she found out that the big spender who was putting dollar bills in her panties like a fat kid stuffs french fries down his throat didn’t have no more money than what she wore home from him every night. After a few days, she didn’t come home one night and I started getting the idea maybe she was dancing with somebody else’s club.

What she also didn’t tell me till it was time for me to go was that she’d already had an old man before I come along that she hadn’t seen for a while, and even more than that, that she hadn’t seen her old man for a while cause he’d been sitting in the can down in Huntsville Prison on Assault With a Deadly Weapon. One afternoon when I got up and come in the living room she was sitting there on the couch eating peach preserves right out of the jar with a butter knife and she looked up at me and said, Rooster called this morning and told me he was gettin’ released today and hitchhiking back to D. He’ll be here tonight. I suggest you not be, and I figured right then and there that the movie Larry’s Good Life had just come to an end and I’d better get the hell out if I wanted to go on sleeping good. Well I guess as it turns out, the Rooster must of stiffed Debra pretty quick too because if he got back that night, it wasn’t but about a week or so later when I was down at the Carefree Lounge that I saw Debra and Snake Whelis over in a corner booth and Snake Whelis was running his skinny arms all over her over and I never did see anybody else hanging around but I wasn’t going to take no chances in case Rooster decided to have a go at another deadly weapon charge. Let Snake Whelis worry about that, I wasn’t going to. I guess that time with Debra was one of my best times up till then, but it just goes to show you that no matter how good you think you got it there’s always somebody else who already had it first and wants it back.

Well, to get back to where I was, I was having beers with Wes and just like with Debra, one thing led to another and I got myself into another good deal. When I told Wes I’d been sleeping in a storeroom in the back of the pool joint for which I was mopping the floor to pay for after Debra run me off, Wes said, You can come stay with me and my brother. We got plenty of room. And if you want, you can mop our floors too. Now, Jim says this would be a good time for me to add that I’m pretty personable, and when people gets to talking to me they come to like me pretty quick. That’s why Debra took me in when she did, and then Alan and Wes after that. That’s probably why Jim and me get along so good because he don’t really like too many people and that makes me one of them. Seems everbody gets on his nerves but me, so we’ve been good friends for near a year now. Jim helps me read and learn things so I can get myself straight when I go home. On the other side, I don’t tell nobody when he cries at night and he knows I don’t. I don’t think Jim would want me to write about him crying but I’m doing like he says and telling about all the things that are important in my life, and if he don’t like it, he says he’ll exercise it out of my writings later on anyway. But with Alan and Wes I got along okay cause they were plain guys working hard at standing still in life while I was usually trying to keep from getting run over. They had a real nice two-bedroom apartment and they let me sleep on the couch, which was sometimes difficult cause they would stay up late playing their music and talking about the big record contracts they’re going to have. That, and smoking dope.

Now I like smoking grass well enough, but not near as much as them two buzzards did. That first night when I went home with Wes, we walked in and Alan was rolling a joint and he said to me, You want some? even before he ever knew my name. He was that kind of guy, one of them guys who’d give you his last cigarette when you was bumming and I ain’t met many guys who’d give their last nail to somebody like me who ain’t even got a hammer. But he smiled at me like it was already his third doobie of the night, kind of blank and all giggly and since I’d had four five beers that night and no food since that morning I was pretty easy myself. So we hit it off right away. We smoked that joint right down past the last little fleck of weed and Alan sat there holding his hands out in front of him like he was diddling a guitar, and with his eyes closed, weaving his head up and down and side to side and hearing something I sure couldn’t.

Music’s everthing, man, he told me. It’s been proved that all things in life can be reduced to numbers, which was something I didn’t know about music or life until Alan told me that, and all music is just numbers on a page and numbers on a scale and numbers of vibrations per minute in sound waves so if life is numbers and music is numbers then I guess that makes life music. You agree?

Well now I didn’t really know what the hell he was talking about but I knew when I had it good so I agreed with him and let the clock stop while I sat there on the floor with two guys I hardly knew but already felt like a third brother to at that moment. That’s what I like about grass, the way it makes you see things so clear and cut through the bullshit of life so well that you know if for only a little while that things can truly fit together like all the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that Momma used to work on. It was a big puzzle with hundreds of pieces that you could tell from the box was a Swiss house on a hillside with a mountain behind it and snow and blue sky and a yard full of different colored flowers. Momma got it at a church where we got our meals now and then and she worked on that puzzle a lot in the evening and used to spend hours trying to figure out where all the blue sky pieces fit. She laid it out on the kitchen table and didn’t want to move it so we had to eat our supper around it. One corner of the puzzle had had spaghetti sauce out of a jar spilled on it and not wiped off and the night Momma got mad and throwed the puzzle off on the floor that corner sort of stuck together and I put it under the couch until Momma got her head right and started back in on the puzzle again. As much as she loved that puzzle, she never did finish it, just put it in a box and never touched it again. I held onto it for a while, thinking maybe I could put it all together myself, but I had to leave it behind one time when I took off in one of my own middle of the night disappearances, and I wasn’t ever able to make that picture come to life either.

So I stayed with Wes and Alan for a while and helped them with their equipment when they went on gigs so I guess that sort of made me their roadie. When their drummer took off one day with all their guitars and amps and speakers, most of which we later found in a hock shop but couldn’t afford to buy back, right away they started looking at me like I was the last of the meatloaf so I figured I better get a job and get myself off the menu. They couldn’t play no more gigs till they got enough money to buy new stuff so we all had get jobs somewhere. Alan and Wes seemed to fumble fart around a lot and never did get a full-time paying gig, but I found one pretty quick at a food store sacking groceries and hauling bags out to cars for women who’d drop a two-quarter tip in my hand from an arms-length away like something was going to leap back off my hand onto theirs if they got too close. I hated that job, not because the work was hard, but from the way them women treated me when they got in their German cars and didn’t even look at me twice. It was like I didn’t even exist on the face of the planet to them except to hold their bags. Women at Xxtasy might of been a little cheap and might of had a leftover sour taste of life that didn’t go away in the mornings no more, but at least they’d look at me like I was a human man, not like I was just a piece of the cart that brought their bags out to them. Though I can’t blame all my problems directly on women, it sure seems that most of them forks in my trail that Jim talked about where I went the way I shouldn’t of gone had a woman standing there right in the middle of it steering me off down in the wrong direction. Like most guys that inhabits my part of the world, whenever we’re going through doors we’re not meant to open, there’s probably a woman on the other side just waiting to slam it shut in your face. That was something Jim taught me one time too, and I ain’t never forgot it.

For a while there me and Alan and Wes spent more time thinking up ways to get rich than we did actually working, and most of that time when we was running on weed and dreams we come up with some wild ideas, like taking dogs out of people’s back yards then ‘finding’ them and bringing them back for a reward, or faking getting hurt in the parking lot of my grocery store to get money. We thought that one up one night when we was buzzed out, and I remember at the time that it seemed like the most brilliant idea anybody in the world had ever had. What we figured was that one of us could act like he got hurt when one of them German car bitches backed into him, and we’d make a fortune off her or the insurance, one or the other.

I’ll do it, Alan said. I know how to do it without really busting something, but I can make it look like I’m real hurt and you’ll swear I was right behind the car and that bitch didn’t see me, then I’ll tell ‘em my brother’s a lawyer and I’m gonna call him first before a doctor. That bitch’ll want to pay us off right then to keep from going to court. See, Alan explained to me, telling me something else I didn’t know about women back then, them rich bitches don’t want no trouble from their husbands cause they don’t want to lose their fancy cars and all so they’ll pay us to keep it quiet.

Now what a lot of people might not understand was that none of us saw anything at all wrong with that plan. Everbody knowed that German car bitches was the kind of people who had more money and more of everthing than they needed and them kind of people deserved to be hit up once in a while by people like us that didn’t have nothing at all. Nope, we didn’t see a thing wrong at all for going after what we thought we deserved.

But by the next morning when the grassfire burned off, we forgot all about setting up German car bitches and went on to thinking up other schemes, but it was stuff like that that we talked ever night about doing, finding some way to get some of the money that other people had already figured out how to earn for themselves. One night though it just hit us like a lightning bug what we could do, and was so natural we couldn’t figure out why we didn’t think of it in the first place. We was smoking enough dope back then that when we run low it was like running out of milk, and so one of us would put on a coat and get the car and drive over to Harry Hines and pick up something, easy as going to get a loaf of bread at the store. We might not of had enough money to always eat good, but we sure found enough bucks to smoke.

One night one of Alan’s friends come by and ended up buying a bag from us that we’d just bought that day and when Wes told him how much he’d sell it for the guy didn’t even blink even though it was ten bucks more than we paid for it. Alan then got all real excited again and started figuring how much money we could make selling dope to people who was just a little dumber about buying dope than we was. Now I wasn’t ever too good with math so I let Alan and Wes figure out the capital requirements of our business, as they called it. Alan and Wes jawed for a while and I dozed off till they woke me up and said, We got an idea. Since you got a regular job we’ll let you put up half the cost of the brick, we’ll do all the work buying and selling the goods, then you’ll get half the profit back, less a little bit to us for expenses. You’ll be sort of like an investor and we all laughed at that and I said "Yeah, I’ll be an in-ves-tor" and they started calling me their ‘banker’ for a while and it felt so good thinking I was the important one in this venture.

Well we did it. I got paid that Friday and though it was only seventy-five bucks after they took out all the taxes which Deepak my boss told me I’d probably get back when I filed my taxes which I hadn’t ever done anyway then it only left me with twenty bucks to eat on and get through the next week. After I give fifty to Wes and Alan, it was going to be another week of pork and beans and Vienna sausages. After they bought the brick we spent most of Saturday cleaning it up and dividing it out into little bags. There was only seven good bags that we got out of it instead of the eight we thought we’d get and we decided we ought to keep some for ourselves so we put two bags away, leaving us only five to sell. Wes marked each bag in some kind of code that he said was for inventory management and he wrote down all the bag numbers on a pad of paper he’d bought that morning then dated the page and put it in a file folder he’d bought, too, and labeled real neat on white stickers from the same store and I thought he was going to an awful lot of trouble over a few bags of pot but it seemed to make him feel good to look at his handiwork so I didn’t say what I thought. Alan on the other hand didn’t exactly do a lot of work but he moved around the apartment all restless like a cat with hemorrhoids while we was bagging, telling us all about how much money we was going to make and how we was just serving the public need like the gangsters back in Al Capone’s day did and that we shouldn’t feel bad about selling something that The Man said was illegal even though people like us knowed nothing that made you feel better than you was should ever be illegal. Alan allowed as how out of the three of us he was the best salesman and that he ought to be the one to push the dope and Wes agreed and I sure didn’t disagree.

So off Alan went with our inventory, and when he come back about two thirty that morning he had cash in his hand, and though I only made twenty-five bucks out of the deal, it was twenty-five more than I had at the start of the evening so I figured I was on my way to posterity one way or the other. By the next Friday I was broke again and only got sixty-one bucks for my pay, which all went into buying more grass to sell, so on Saturday we cleaned and bagged another brick and Wes and Alan went out to sell it. I come out about fifty bucks ahead this time, and things was looking even better.

The next week, Alan tried to talk us into making a deal to buy five bricks, which would make us a whole lot of money once we sold it, but it would cost more than we had the money to pay for right now. Alan said he knew some guys who’d sell it to us now and collect the money later, but Wes was dead set against that and so was I. Now one thing I knowed maybe better than them from the kind of joints we hung around in was that there was some people out there that you just didn’t owe money to. There wasn’t no way I was going to be in the position of owing anybody money who’d have my hide hanging off a nail if we couldn’t pay up. Most everbody’ll do what he has to to get money but for most people that just means working for it or at worst lying and cheating a little bit for it or maybe even a little thieving, none of which is all that bad, but there’s some dudes out there and I’ve seen them up close that has them crazy eyes and no souls and they’ll kill for it with no thought that trading your life for your money was anything to lose sleep over.

That’s one thing I learned pretty quick in Ferguson. Prison is the place where people go that didn’t have no better life wherever they came from. I seen men here with no life in their eyes at all, but prison didn’t make them that way, they come here like that. I seen a man get stabbed over two cigarettes and the guy that done it would’ve done in downtown Dallas at midday just as quick as he done it here. It’s the scariest thing about life when you learn there’s people walking the streets that don’t care if they live or die and they sure as hell don’t care if you live or not. Sometimes they tell you in these rehab sessions that you got to look at prison as a time to decide to do something with your life. They tell you it’s a time to realize you sunk about as low as you can get to have your fellow man put you away in a cage so’s you can’t do him no harm, and prison is his way of getting you ready to go back out in society a healed man, but I don’t think my fellow men that put me here knew just what a man can learn while he’s here. If you want, you can know a hunderd ways to kill without getting caught and that comes from guys who got caught robbing maybe, but never got caught for killing. I seen people that was probably pretty decent all things considered on the outside but made a mistake somewhere’s along the way like I did and got put in here with the men with no souls, and if they live to get out, they ain’t rehabilitated; they just lose a little bit of what souls they had to begin with, too. You can’t spend two three four years in here and not come away with a little of their stink hanging on you.

And as for getting rehabilitated, well that don’t make no doors open when you get out neither. A place I was working one time had an old black geezer sweeping up and he told us one day he’d spent twelve years in jail for murder, and sweeping was all the work he had ever been able to get since they let him out, so you know what he done ever day? He dragged that broom around the warehouse for eight hours then went home and smoked hash till he hit the floor ever night. He didn’t have no family and he didn’t know nobody. What else could he do? Go to some school and learn a trade? He was a murderer, and wasn’t nobody ever going to give him a good job cause they couldn’t afford to be looking over their shoulder all day long. I feel it myself sometimes, like when I get to thinking about what’s the point in even trying this rehab stuff, why bother? I’m going to be an ex-con now for the rest of my life, ain’t no changing that, and that means when I get out I ain’t getting any job no better than licking somebody’s floors clean and when I think about that I look at one of them soulless eyes and think maybe I ought to be more like that—somebody who don’t care about nothing or nobody and just gets what he wants for as long as he wants and when the end comes he don’t cry and nobody cries for him.

Anyways I get a little depressed sometimes when I think about these things but Jim says it’s ok, I got to work it all out in my mind.

Well back in Dallas, me and Wes put our foots down on Alan’s plan—mostly Wes’s foot, but that was fine with me. Alan said we were missing opportunities to climb the ladder, and he argued too as to how we ought to be broadening our product line, but after Wes argued a little bit stronger including a threat to throw his own brother off the balcony of our second story apartment if he didn’t shut up, Alan he finally backed off and went along with us and we went on buying just what we could afford. We did two more bricks in the next two weeks and then two more the week after that and Wes got things organized so well that we could clean and bag a brick in about thirty minutes. Pretty soon, Alan got to be known at Sleazies and the other joints on Harry Hines Boulevard for being a man with a crop, so he was able to sell it faster too cause people started looking for him when he come in the door. He was doing pretty good at his end of the business till one night when he went to a new place and tried to sell a bag to a couple bikers that was in business for themselves. They put a few knots on Alan’s head and split his lip pretty good and sliced an ear and told him not to bother selling around there no more at that place which I’d told Alan not to go to in the first place because it was pretty damned rough. Most of them bikers are named Snake, or Spider, or Polecat, or some other animal name and they deserves it too. I saw one named Alligator turn some college kid into a place mat in the parking lot one night cause the kid came in with his buddies and tried to buy a beer for Alligator’s woman so Alligator took him outside, flattened him with one punch, then rode his Harley right over the top of this kid. I swear he had a tire track across his stomach and his friends picked him up and put him in their car and I bet they didn’t ever go near no biker bar again. I hoped he was alright but I never knowed cause I didn’t ever go back to that place again either. I don’t know if all them bikers with long hair and scars and ugly women are bad or they just look it but I ain’t taken any chances checking out the truth. I told Alan after he got home that night that he was one lucky son of a bitch that he only had a sliced ear. That was just a professional courtesy I said, he still had an ear.

After we divvied up the profits off those next four bricks Wes finally agreed with Alan that we had enough money now to make a big time deal so we each put up a couple hunderd apiece for a half-dozen bricks at one time and figured we could double our money. I know it wasn’t all that much money to a lot of folks that sees that much in their paycheck ever week, but to me, two hunderd bucks was a bunch of meals I was looking forward to having on a regular basis, and when Alan walked out the door late that night to start selling the fifty bags of grass that we’d bagged, my stomach hurt like I’d drunk turpentine. While we waited for him to come back, I decided