After our expropriation of Roy’s sinsemilla, we didn’t waste time maximizing our retail operations. The day after our visit to Ocean Beach, the dope was broken down into eighths—one hundred and twenty-eight of them—at the house of a girl we knew who lived behind the Valencia Street funeral homes. Her name was Randi, and she was maybe five inches taller than me; a baby lesbian who wore low-slung Ben Davis jeans and smoked cigarettes like a man. I had a crush on her that was going nowhere fast.
Bobo and I trimmed the buds with a pair of nail clippers. The task required dexterity and patience, the same traits you needed when you were an inmate doing art therapy in a mental institution. I wasn’t so great at it. I butchered the buds, making them cosmetically undesirable. Eichmann felt he had the right to scold me about my lack of productivity. “Hurry up, will you? We ain’t got all day.”
“I’m doing what I can.”
“Don’t give me that shit. What do you think I am, a cretin?”
“No, you’re not a cretin.”
“We’ve got to be out of here by four. Distribution is going to take all evening. Bobo, you almost done?”
“Give me another minute.”
“A minute you get. And by the way, everything’s been sold.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Our customers made presale orders.”
What did I think? We were moving up, cresting a wave. We’d come a long way in the past two weeks, fueling me with bittersweet hindsights about the previous summer. Back then, other dealers had been disrespectful of our enterprise, letting us know we were strictly cannon fodder.
Bobo had stolen a case of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup from a delivery truck at the Safeway near Thirtieth Street. If it weren’t for him, we would’ve gone hungry. As it was, my teeth were getting soft and my gums were going bad. We were hurting something fierce and so Eichmann got on the horn to Maurice, a dealer who owed us seventy dollars.
At half past nine there was a hostile knock on the garage door. Eichmann opened the gate, and Maurice ambled into our hovel, projecting his pseudocoolness five feet in front of him like an invisible force shield. It was obvious he was rolling in money. Slim and ethereal, he was decked out in red leather from head to foot, and it wasn’t discount third-world cowhide either. Maurice had on a custom-made North Beach Leather suit that must have set him back a grand or more. He strolled over to the coffee table and sat himself down in our beanbag chair, letting his eyes wander over the garage. He smirked at what he saw, remarking with a fleer, “You homies aren’t exactly living high off the hog, are you?”
For as long as I could remember, I’d been swallowing other people’s insults. I was a verbal garbage dump. It was phenomenal—someone who had more cash than you had to rub your face in it. No sense in letting things be when you could point out the differences, right?
“You come over here to pay up, dude?” Eichmann asked.
The question made Maurice chuckle heartily. His freon-blue eyes glittered at the absurdity of giving us our seventy bucks. He looked at me and shook his thinning pompadour. “Money, money, money, that’s all you pitiful fuckheads think about. I’ll tell you what … here’s some advice.”
“I don’t want your hot air. I want our cash.”
“Whoa, listen to him. Let me enlighten your ass.”
“What’s that? You’re going to say something brilliant?”
“I am. Check this … why should I give you the money? I use it better than you do. It’s wasted on you.”
Eichmann started to boil. “No shit?”
“When I see how y’all are doing, living in a garage, I feel like a character out of Horatio Alger.”
“Who’s that?”
“You ignorant sap, he wrote rags-to-riches stories.”
Maurice crossed his legs and settled back in the chair, mighty pleased with himself. A smug and contentious smile was glued to his thin lips. He unbuttoned his leather jacket, revealing an older-model Colt automatic in a nylon-mesh shoulder holster. He stifled a bored fake-yawn. “You should consider the money you gave me as an investment that’s still in progress.”
I didn’t know who Horatio Alger was and I didn’t care. At my grandma’s house, we only read the television guide, a paperback book of collected stories by Alexander Pushkin, Bernard Malamud’s novels, the earlier work of Cynthia Ozick, and anything by I. J. Singer. Maurice noticed the poisoned grooves around my mouth and eyes, how the hate on my face made me pale. He said, “What’s with the twerp?”
Bobo offered our nemesis an explanation. “Doojie’s upset because you won’t pay us.”
Maurice pulled out a five-dollar bill from his coat pocket, crumpled the note into a ball, and tossed it at me. The five spot caromed off my head and fell to the floor. My pride was so far gone, I had to stop myself from getting on my knees and taking it. Maurice snorted at me, “What? You don’t want it? Give it back, then.”
He bent over to retrieve his money, getting hinky and cursing under his breath. I took the opportunity to exploit his distraction by reaching into his holster for the automatic. My reflexes were good and my fingers were nimble; you put those attributes next to an ice-cold rage, and I was unbeatable. I had my fingers wrapped around the Colt’s checkered plastic grips before he could stop me.
Eichmann enjoyed the interplay that accompanied the turn of events, and he applauded me. “Bravo! Well done, Doojie!”
Maurice, no less theatrical than his enemy, narrowed his eyes, and affected a tough guy’s speech pattern, slurring out of the side of his mouth, “Give me back my gun!”
The price of punishing him for his bad manners wasn’t worth going to jail for. Maurice misinterpreted my resignation as an act of submission. His baby face lit up, regaining its peachiness. “That’s more like it,” he snickered, getting smart-alecky. “You ain’t got the balls to hurt me.” He got up from the chair and brushed a speck of lint from his red leather jacket, surveying the three of us. Then he snapped his fingers at me like I was his servant. “Give me the pistol.”
He’d stretched my patience as far as it could go without tearing. I pulled the trigger, and a bullet flowered out of the Colt’s muzzle with an orange burst. It zipped by Maurice’s ear, ricocheting off the floor, then up into the rafters, shaking the cobwebs. Dust fell on all of us, causing Bobo to sneeze. Maurice spun around like a top, flinging his arms in the air, mewling, “Don’t kill me!”
Eichmann took advantage of the commotion by slugging our guest in the ribs to pacify him. “Horatio Alger, huh?” A bleary-faced Maurice doubled up and landed on his side, winded. He wretched once, then collapsed into a fit of prolonged tubercular coughing. Eichmann squatted alongside him, relieving our foe of his Kenneth Cole boots, his silk Versace socks, and his cash. He briskly counted the money, yipping, “I’ll be damned! Look at this! Maurice has a hundred and ten bucks here!”
We didn’t discuss the backlash that would come from running off with Roy’s pound. We were being vigilant, but nothing had happened. Perhaps Roy was one of those Pacific Heights people who had so much surplus cash, he was dealing drugs to do something risqué. If he got his hands bloody, he’d move on to another sport, something less demanding, such as windsurfing. Eichmann had his calculator out on the kitchen table and he was hitting the buttons, tallying the numbers. He said to me with a concentrated intensity that could fry an egg, “We’ve got to sell this dope like pronto.” Then he proclaimed with no uncertain wisdom, “If we sell these bags at seventy-five apiece, that’s some beaucoup money. Are you ready for this?”
“Yeah.”
“Bobo? You?”
“Yup.”
“Okay, here’s the arithmetic. You guys, remember this. It’s important. Bobo, you got forty-three eighths to sell. You understand?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I got forty-three eighths, and Doojie … you get forty-two bags.”
“How come I get one less?”
“Oy gevalt, I don’t know. That’s how it worked out. Don’t ask me so many stupid questions.”