***TST's Official "Boring" Thread, Part Deux***

[TR MS3]

Sweet, guess we're doing more clarity's this week?

[piku]

Originally Posted by 420sx

Yeah, Im working on it. I recently made myself a pie chart (lol) to display where all my money has gone based off of my bank statement. I piss away a lot of money on food because I live in a house with two other dudes and no one wants to go food shopping. If I stopped eating out (lol again) I could probably save $100 a month easily. I also just recently started contributing to my 401k again (not that it helps me now, but i figured its a good idea), and also redirected $50/week to a savings account that (theoretically) I wont touch for anything besides a down payment for a house. I make good money, theres absolutely no reason besides irresponsibility that I should be such a financial disaster. Id like to get my sh*t together because I want to be a home owner by 25. That gives me 3 years to save.

Buying a house is tough. A decent Rancher or townhouse will cost around $200K. Due to the housing collapse there is no such thing at least last time I looked as an 80/10/10 loan or paying PMI. You have 20% down or you don't get a loan. This means immediately that you need $40,000. From there you have to pay taxes, closing costs and other bull**** usually adding up to a solid $6K-$9K. Luckily I got in on the action when I could still get more "exotic" financing packages that didn't require me to have so much cash. I'm assuming that at some point they will open up these options again, and it's much easier to get >80% financing on a single house with no assoc then it is on a condo or townhouse or anywhere that has a shared responsibility.

Really your best case scenario in a normal market is 90% financed which means you still need to come up with 30 grand.

The mortgage payment on that $180,000 loan is going to be somewhere around $1300 (but more like $1600 after taxes and insurance).. Your mortgage payment is not allowed to be more than 28% of your gross income which means at minimum you would need to be earning $55K a year to BARELY qualify with the bank giving you a rash of **** I'm sure.

Now for $500K you can buy a pretty amazing 5/6br house. So get 5 or 6 bachelor for life friends and buy the most awesome pad you can buy, pay $500-$600 a month mortgage payment and go wild. That's the ****ing life right there.

Originally Posted by 420sx

I really hate banks. I hate that they charge you $6 to cash a paycheck if youre not an account holder. A personal check I could understand. A paycheck, drawn from YOUR bank? Eff yourself, im not payin that.

Yeah pretty sure that's illegal. A bank has to honor their own check. No fees and other bull****.

[Big_Jim]

I really hope not. I just slipped/fell in the office and pulled my back out between my shoulder blades.

[TR MS3]

That blows, well I'm down for whenever.

[Big_Jim]

yeah man, landing on a pile of LCD mac mini mounts sucked.

[jpalamar]

Originally Posted by Big_Jim

I really hope not. I just slipped/fell in the office and pulled my back out between my shoulder blades.

And by office you mean Nick's sister?!!?

That really sucks man. Def claim the injury with HR and hit the dr. You would belive how many WC claims I deal with where people get screwed because stuff isn't documented.

[HickRocket1258]

That isn't the only way to go. You could always go the route going through the FHA. You are only required to have a 3% down payment but your interest rates are more than likely going to be higher. I do know some people that have gone through that and at this point in their life they have been able to refinance a couple times and drop it down nicely. I'm 24 and probably purchasing a house with my girlfriend when 26 at the latest. I don't have too many bills and am able to save quite a bit each year. I'm trying to stay around the area my parent's live at but it's expensive there, but that's me, shooting for the stars haha.

Here's info for FHA.

http://www.hud.gov/offices/hsg/fhahistory.cfm

[Elliott18t]

prob wont have a house for a bit, GF might do grad school. If not, we will see what happens.

[Oakes]

i think im going to sponsor and the design the building of an uber sweet 4 car garage off of the existing garage at my house

[grimm]

I went with an FHA, re-financed once already, there used to be a lot of benefits in going with an FHA. I'm not following it still so I can't say if there are currently.

[jpalamar]

I won't get anything higher then a 15 year... I don't wanna be a dinosaur before my house is paid off.

[Elliott18t]

going karting today, with some friends, in delaware.

[420sx]

Originally Posted by piku

Yeah pretty sure that's illegal. A bank has to honor their own check. No fees and other bull****.

I thought that too! I said it to the woman at Bank of America, and she said for all non-account holders, its $6 to cash a bank of america check.

I even went in with my buddy, who IS an account holder. Still had to pay the 6 bucks. Only time ive ever done it, because it was saturday, needed money that day, and wachovia was already closed. Wachovia will let me deposit it and get cash back immediately since im an account holder there.

[Elliott18t]

its been stated. Banks are just big Pieces of ****..

[Snoozie]

I freaking love this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C8e7nNLZNs

[420sx]

Originally Posted by piku

Buying a house is tough. A decent Rancher or townhouse will cost around $200K. Due to the housing collapse there is no such thing at least last time I looked as an 80/10/10 loan or paying PMI. You have 20% down or you don't get a loan. This means immediately that you need $40,000. From there you have to pay taxes, closing costs and other bull**** usually adding up to a solid $6K-$9K. Luckily I got in on the action when I could still get more "exotic" financing packages that didn't require me to have so much cash. I'm assuming that at some point they will open up these options again, and it's much easier to get >80% financing on a single house with no assoc then it is on a condo or townhouse or anywhere that has a shared responsibility.

Really your best case scenario in a normal market is 90% financed which means you still need to come up with 30 grand.

The mortgage payment on that $180,000 loan is going to be somewhere around $1300 (but more like $1600 after taxes and insurance).. Your mortgage payment is not allowed to be more than 28% of your gross income which means at minimum you would need to be earning $55K a year to BARELY qualify with the bank giving you a rash of **** I'm sure.

Now for $500K you can buy a pretty amazing 5/6br house. So get 5 or 6 bachelor for life friends and buy the most awesome pad you can buy, pay $500-$600 a month mortgage payment and go wild. That's the ****ing life right there.

Skipped over this somehow. Fortunately for me, Im already a homeowner (kind of). The house i live in now is owned by me, my sister, and my two cousins. It was our grandfathers house. It will eventually need to be sold to pay my sisters (and possibly my) tuition. The house will pay that, and whats left over (per kid) should be just enough to make a deposit on a house.

I want to buy back my Moms house in Perkasie. She sold it a year ago for $219k... 4 acres, 2 car garage, pool, hot tub, and i build my own motocross track in the back yard. Tell me thats not a steal for $219k. Id pay $350k for that house. :sigh: I really miss that house. I doubt the people there will want to sell when Im ready to buy, but I'll definitely be stopping by to make an offer.

[jpalamar]

Rootbeer Frosty Float from Wendy's... nom nom!

[420sx]

Interesting read for those bored at work:

The Story of a Heroin Dealer

Every town has its man. You don’t always recognize him when you see him on the street, or in a café. He comes in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes, the man is brash and ostentatious, and these men usually end up in prison or gasping their last breath in a gutter. Sometimes they listen to the voice inside their head that says “enough is enough,” and they disappear as quietly as they came.

For a little while, I was one of these men in Manhattan’s lower east side, and heroin was my trade. I figure I’ve reformed enough at this point to tell my story, not out of pride or remorse, but simply a sense of hazy wonderment that yes, this was the person I used to be. This is the story of how I sold drugs to New York’s young and elite; my rise and fall.

All the names and many of the places have been changed.


The first person I ever sold heroin to in New York was a fat girl named Amanda. Two of my close friends, Paul and a guy we called Van the Man directed her to me, and eventually they would go on to help me find many of my clients. Paul was a WASP-y type who had dropped out of SUNY to be a day trader. Van the Man was a dreadlocked “homeless” teenager with rich parents. He would bum around the NYU dorms and attend classes on an infrequent basis. Both were pretty heavily into the stuff when I met them, but were still functional at that point. They were well ingrained into the scene, and later I gave them sizable discounts in exchange for new clients, which—god bless the addicted ****ers—they had no trouble locating.

Anyway, back to Amanda. She was my first, as you would say, and I recall the scene pretty well. I remember looking on with detached curiosity as she examined her arm, tracing a delicate finger along its fleshy underside, her veins still bright and viable. The belt wrapped around her bicep made them puffy, a muted blue like sky before sunset. She was really nervous. Her boyfriend had started her on the stuff and now he was out of town for a month and she was getting antsy. It was clear she’d never shot up by herself before.

A funny detail sticks out in my mind, Procol Harem’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” playing softly from my stereo. I remember Amanda’s insane focus on the glint of the needle, the dirty amber liquid eddying inside the syringe. She pressed the point to her vein with a hesitation that would decrease exponentially with time

“Pull back the plunger before you inject,” I advised her. “You want to make sure you get some blood in there so you know you’ve hit the vein.”

Amanda wasn’t in any rush—not yet—but she pulled back the plunger and a thin stream of crimson swirled into the cloudy brown. She injected. The needle slid out and for a second nothing happened. Then, she closed her eyes and sank deep into my sofa as if a cresting wave has submerged her. Her mouth opened, her face contorted in ecstasy. A small line of drool ran down her chin.

“Oh my God,” she said. “I love this song.”

I remember it so vividly because it was the only time I ever allowed someone to shoot up at my apartment. I’ve never shot heroin, though I’d obviously seen plenty of people do it, and Amanda had confided to me that she had no idea how to do it without her boyfriend walking her through it. She was afraid she’d **** up and OD if she tried it by herself. You could tell by her weight that she hadn’t been using the stuff for very long. If she OD’d that meant one less client, so I figured I’d show her how to do it “safely”. These kinds of trust issues are important in any buyer/seller relationship.

I remember unbuckling the belt from her arm with a weird kind of tenderness, and watching the muscles relax.

She asked me what I do aside from dealing drugs, and I made up some lie about being a waiter. I didn’t tell her I was a student at NYU.

She could believe whatever she wanted. I knew I had been recommended to her because I was “safe.” I was the Manhattan guy, the guy you saw when you needed a fix but didn’t want to deal with the gang bangers in Bed Stuy or Staten Island. My stuff was expensive, but it beat getting shot. Most of my clients would have had no idea how to buy drugs in the bad part of town. These were the trust fund junkies: college kids and yuppies still subconsciously trying to piss off their parents. They paid most of my rent, my utilities, and ensured my good credit. I liked the trust fund junkies.

I wasn’t quite sure if I liked Amanda, at that point. She was fat, like I said, but her face was a healthy cream tone, with eyes as blue as the latticework of veins and arteries crosscutting their way to and from her heart. She lacked the sunken eye sockets and craven stare that I came to associate with my clients in an almost Pavlovian manner. She didn’t yet need me. I gave her the other 8 bags and sent her on her way.

The four AM phone calls would come later.

I guess I should give some background about myself. I spent the first 18 years of my life in Camden, New Jersey. I never told anyone in New York where I was from. You hear Camden, you think poverty and crime. The truth was that Camden was a city with two faces: yes, heroin, and crack, was a huge, huge problem, and the gangs and drug runners ****ed up the quality of life in a lot of neighborhoods. It’s one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the country. But we lived by the waterfront, and I remember playing ball outside and walking my dog near the river like a normal kid.

My parents bussed me to a private school outside of town. They were both elementary school teachers for more than a decade, and in a place like Camden you need a saint’s patience to last in that job for more than a week. So I was their little angel, basically. I was smart, probably too smart for my own good, and once I got older they never really kept a close eye on my activities. I got straight As in school and never got picked up by the “****in five-o” as so many of my friends described them. I was a math whiz and likely would see a full scholarship to any college I wanted. They didn’t know that I had made acquaintances with a great deal of very unscrupulous ****ing people.

I had **** jobs and no money throughout high school. I didn’t really gang bang, (probably because I knew I could figure out smarter ways to make money) but nearly everyone I knew did. I drank a whole lot, smoked tons of weed, sold a little on the side for pocket change. I was friends with the brother of a fairly notorious drug dealer. This dealer, we’ll call him Big L, owned a convenience store specializing in powder heroin. The thing to understand about Camden is that the heroin epidemic—and it really is an epidemic, the DEA has a big ****ing red circle around Camden in their little black book—isn’t just affecting the gang bangers. There’s a whole ton of the stuff coming in, and most of it is way strong and way pure, and it’s the suburbanites from Cherry Hill and Colts Neck who are coming down and buying the stuff. So, if you’re savvy (and most of the dealers I saw were the exact opposite) there’s a bundle to be made.

Big L was actually pretty savvy, savvy but limited in his abilities. Some crazy stuff happened that I’d rather not get into, and I eventually alibied Big L and his brother for a shooting. Soon after I found myself helping him cook books in the back of his store. The details of how it happened are pretty wild, but it’s long and is probably a story for another day. The point is, I established trust, and the trust paid off. It’s far more important than guns, money, or drugs. In the end, everything comes back to trust

Big L paid me pretty well for my services and I soon learned that having a lot of money was something that made me very happy. It wasn’t all great—the town was still self-destructing, and I found myself always looking over my shoulder. I would come home from my perfect private school to see a whole lot of my friends end up dead or in jail.

When I turned 18, everything changed. My dad got a job as a professor at Rutgers. My mom’s rich aunt died and we came into some money, not a whole lot, but enough to get me a “cheap” apartment in alphabet city, provided I worked to pay off my share of the rent. Did I mention I got my scholarship to NYU? My parents were moving out of Camden to Piscataway, and I was headed to New York City.

Big L and my gang banger buddies were ****ing proud of me, and a few nights before I left we all got trashed in his apartment. Big L was moving up in the world too—enough to buy a new house and a little more security for himself. In me he saw not only promise, but opportunity. He knew that he would be able to markup his heroin in Manhattan to a ridiculous degree. He wondered if I’d take a kilo or so up with me, just to see what it was worth in the big city. He was offering me a huge cut of the profits, enough for me to not have to consider it for very long, way more than the pittance he paid his runners in Camden. What the hell, I thought. I can get an education and be rich at the same time. If things went well, Big L told me, he might start a whole empire in New York, and I’d be the man running the show. I was awestruck, and a little flattered. He didn’t have to ask me twice.

My parents drove me up to NYU with 2 kilos of heroin wrapped securely in my backpack. It was the beginning of a long road for me.

East Third Street lies between avenues A and B in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Alphabet City. As an 18 year old kid settling into an apartment with 2 kilos of heroin to move, it seemed to me simultaneously grimy and glamorous. Certainly these streets were no stranger to drugs, but there was an odd sort of refinement to them, as if they accepted their vices and had made peace with them. It was actually fortunate I arrived when I did. A few years back Alphabet City had been a slum, populated by the Puerto Rican “Loisaidas” and thugs and other various unscrupulous types. Now it had become a trendy spot for NYU students and yuppies, embraced in the strange way New York City has of coveting its run down and disheartened areas. It would be easier to set up shop without getting bumped by some dealer.

I remember unwrapping the heroin once my parents had left, like a kid opening a Christmas present. I put it on my bed; to me it looked two big brown bricks, but it might as well have been a suitcase full of cash. Big L was excited. He figured I could get close to a hundred grand for each kilo. I was somewhat less optimistic—I knew the prices in Manhattan would trump anything I’d seen in Camden, but I still had to get out there and test the waters. If everything went right, I was expecting about $150,000 all together. Big L was giving me 15%, so I was looking forward to about 20k for myself, less what I would eventually need for expenses. Big L told me he had muscle out in Queens, should I need them, but I was pretty sure I was going to buy my own muscle, guys I could trust and not thugs who would start trouble and bring attention.

There’s a part in Malcolm X’s biography that I like, when he’s living in Boston and describing “the hustle.” You can’t just hustle sometimes, he explains, you need to live the hustle, breathe the hustle. It has to be on your mind every waking moment. Every decision has to be balanced and counterbalanced. From the moment I unwrapped those bags, I had started my hustle.

I sat there on my mattress next to the heroin, thinking about the future. Everything I knew about the game I learned from observation, from watching the tricks of the trade and the mistakes of the runners in Camden. I went out and bought a digital scale, baggies, and a heavy duty safe. I went back home and measured out 20 grams into the baggies and stashed it all away in the safe. Big L had explained to me about the quality of the heroin, which he had described as reasonably potent. I didn’t know **** about quality or potency at that point, but I knew the drugs would sell themselves, provided I could get the word out in a discreet way. I would usually short each bag by a few hundreds of a gram and throw in an extra one; it would still add up to the same amount, but I figured it might save me a few OD’s if someone’s tolerance went up and they decided to shoot 8 bags at a time. An OD was one less customer, remember, and the profit margin was my bottom line.

My nets were cast and I was ready to trawl. I went to my NYU orientation, not so they could usher me into the semester, but to look for contacts and buyers. I was on the prowl for parties, dorm rooms, anyplace where kids would be getting together and doing lots of drugs.

If you’ve never visited an NYU dorm, then it’s hard to understand just how depraved it can get. I knew the college had a reputation for this hedonistic kind of lifestyle, but even I was shocked to see the extent of it: art students and Tisch film geeks huddled into the Hayden bathroom smoking crack; business school kids blazing more weed and popping more pills than the gang bangers back in Camden. The first week before classes started was like some kind of Dionysian orgy, this panoply of drugs and booze as far as the eye could see. I was surrounded by five girls in a kitchen, none of them old enough to buy alcohol, snorting Oxycontin off a tabletop. The school was afraid to step in, I guess, because of the lawsuits that would inevitable stem from accusing rich white kids of doing and selling drugs. I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to set up shop.

When asking around about the H, I tried to be subtle:

“Hey you guys ever…shoot up?”

“I know a guy who can get you good skag.”

“You ever try anything stronger than this ****?”

But it seemed like heroin still held the stigma that all these other drugs had shed. It was the one thing nobody talked about, which pissed me off, since it seemed like every dorm and apartment I walked into had at least ten people blowing lines in the bathroom. The first week was almost up and I still hadn’t sold anything. That’s when I met Paul.

This girl I’d met, a Columbia grad student, invited me to a party in the back of some bar of the meatpacking district. Paul was standing against the wall in a cheap sports jacket, talking to a girl. There were no obvious outward signs he was a user, but something about him gave off the vibe. I noticed the tiny dark rings around his eyes, the way he seemed just slightly too emaciated for his frame. When he left to use the bathroom, I followed him inside. He went into the stall, and I waited, pretending to wash my hands. Finally he comes out with a spaced out gleam in his eye and I know for sure. I stop him.

“Hey man,” I said, with a big grin. “I’ve got some stuff that won’t send you running to the bathroom every couple hours. I’ve got some good stuff that will last you all day.”

[420sx]

He sized me up. I’m too young and skinny to be a cop, and I’m smiling that wide knowing grin that tells him “I know what you’ve been up to in there buddy, but it’s cool. I’ve seen it before man.”

“You know a lotta people in this town?” I asked, meaning “do you know a lot of people who shoot heroin?”

Paul snapped out of his daze and shot me a grin. “Hell yeah man,” he said. “You lookin’ for people?”

I shrug. “Maybe. You know, if you were able to hook me up with some cool people, I might be able to hook you up with some good stuff.”

“Yeah you got any on you”

“No, back at my place.”

“Want to head back there?”

“Nah,” I said. “I’ll bring some to your place. No charge for delivery.”

There was a strange phenomenon among heroin users. For some reason, their tolerance seems to go down when shooting up in a new location. Some weird quirk of the brain chemistry, I supposed. I figure this guy probably doesn’t have that problem, if he’s shooting up in bathrooms, but I don’t know how pure the stuff he’s been using is, and I plan on introducing him to my **** tonight. He nods, tells me his name is Paul, and gives me his address. He lives in an apartment Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, and I meet him at his place about an hour later with some baggies.

I’m convinced now that Paul wasn’t addicted to merely to heroin, but to fluctuation. He measured everything in his life in terms of rise and fall, gain and loss. That was why he dropped out of school to become a day trader. Everything about his life was in pursuit of the next big high, whether it be the hit of H or making five grand in one night in the stock market. I show him the baggies and we get to talking.

“How much you want?” Paul asked, eyeing the heroin with a desperate stare I would come to know all too well.

“Nothing,” I said, and Paul looks confused. “Just try it and see what you think.”

Paul breaks out his needles, his piece of rubber tubing, the whole apparatus. He shoots up and collapses into a big Lay-Z-Boy recliner, his eyes glazing over.

“This stuff’s real good,” he slurs. “****. I think you’re my new guy.”

“You think you can find more customers for me?” I ask. “You find me a lot of people, and I’ll give you a cut. And more of this good stuff.”

“****,” Paul said. “Yeah man I know so many NYU kids into this stuff. A lot of musicians too. I can get you a ton of numbers.”

I let Paul chill in his stupor for a while, when someone knocks loud at the door and starts to scream. I nearly **** my pants. Paul laughs.

“That’s just Van the Man, by buddy. Go let him in.”

I opened the door to find this short, greasy looking guy dressed like a Rasta, with filthy dreadlocks matted together and one eye that bulged slightly bigger than the other.

“Yooooooo,” he drawled. “You guys getting high in here?”

I gave him a couple trial baggies of his own, and Van the Man shoots up. He giggles like a schoolgirl and curls up in a ball on the floor. Paul, I figured, had something of a head on his shoulders, but Van the Man was freaking me out. I didn’t know if I wanted him involved with my business. Later, though, I would come to realize that he was actually a kind of idiot savant—functionally retarded in a lot ways, but always managing to ingratiate himself into situations where powerful people supported him. His idea of a get rich quick scheme was to head down to Canal Street and try to find a real Rolex watch or Louis Vuitton bag. But when all was said and done, Van the Man would go on to set up some of my biggest scores, while Paul would prove to be more trouble than he was worth. Paul and I explained the situation to him, and he seemed ****ing eager. I gave them my number, and told them to let me know if there’s any news.

Well the planets must have aligned correctly, because the next day Paul calls me with Amanda’s name, and from there my phone just kept ringing. I hadn’t been wrong in thinking Paul and Van were pretty deep into the scene—the first two weeks, they sent so many people over to my apartment that I had to call them and tell them to slow it down because I was worried about the traffic flow to and from my apartment. A long line of nervous looking NYU kids came to my door, along with a few hardcore junkies, probably homeless. I always made people stay for least a half hour, but I didn’t want any of the Hispanics or the gang bangers near Avenue C to realize what I was doing. I moved about 5 grand in next two weeks, which doubled and then quadrupled in the next couple of months as word caught on and friends told friends. There was also apparently a shortage of quality H when I moved into town, so once the ball got rolling, it rolled hard and fast.

Business was good. No real big deals yet, but plenty of smaller ones sending money my way. My studies suffered. Going to class and writing my papers became secondary to this little side venture. I didn’t have many friends aside from the people I sold drugs to, but for the moment, I was on top of the world.

Still, I saw problems in the future.

I couldn’t keep doing all the work myself, not if I wanted to maintain my sanity. I trusted Paul and Van, but I wasn’t sure how long I could rely on them for. I paid them mostly in H, throwing them a few hundred dollars here or there. They were invaluable to me at the start, but as the old saying goes, never trust a junkie, and truer words were never spoken. I had the police to worry about too, of course. I wasn’t even thinking about my cut, at this point, and my ego hadn’t yet blown up to the epic proportions that would eventually lead me into trouble. I still had to manage the cash and the prices. I figured was going to need someone maybe just a little less savvy than myself to scope out the streets and see who was talking about what. I had come into the game in a sprint. It was time to put my head down and get serious about running the marathon.

I had sold just about eighty thousand dollars worth of heroin when Ferdinand came into the picture.

I remember an instance where I met Ferdinand for coffee near West Fourth Street. I arrived early and sat outside, crumbling some biscotti in between my fingers to feed to the pigeons. The weather was a glorious Indian summer, all mellow breeze and tepid sun. Ferdinand arrived, dark hair blowing in waves behind him. He is tall and lanky, like a robot bolted together at perpendicular angles, but he slides adroitly into the seat across from me, grinning.

“God bless this global warming,” he says, just a hint of accent in his English. “Another fifty years or so and the New York winter will be like Costa del Sol.”

This is just me embellishing, I think. In reality I’m sure Ferdinand said nothing so eloquent. He was a businessman after all, and businessmen usually only have one thing on their minds.

I first met Ferdinand through Paul, who introduced us at a nightclub that I don’t recall the name of. Paul claimed that Ferdinand had heard of me and was interested in making a few “business propositions.” Later on I would realize that Paul had probably known about Ferdinand all along, way before he met me.

I was still naïve as a newborn at this point. The fact that people were talking about me had me scared, as if I’d been protected by some magical shield that made me invisible to rival drug dealers. Ferdinand told me something when we first met that had chilled my blood. He said that “someone” had put a hit on me, and that I had been about two minutes away from getting shot in the back of the head as I walked down East Third Street. He said this with a smile, as if we were making small talk about the weather. He said he was glad I wasn’t killed, because he had an idea we could be pretty useful to each other.

I had no way to know if he was telling the truth, but his words knocked me off my high horse and drove home the reality of the matter pretty ****ing fast. Ferdinand never divulged exactly who his associates were, what gang he was working with, but from the looks of him I’d say it was a group of Puerto Rican bangers, the Loisaidas. He dealt mostly in coke running, he told me. He was a shipping guy, bought off people at the ports and made sure the product got past customs and into the hands of dealers. Capable dealers, like myself. Recently he’d made deals with some new people and was started to branch out into Heroin—good stuff, he said, but not as good as the **** I’d supposedly been running. We talked a bit more and arranged that meeting on MacDougal Street, a nice, neutral location.

His words put a fright into me, but I figured a lot of it was typical Latin machismo blunder. If they really wanted me dead, they would have tried to ice me by now, and I was still walking around. Ferdinand didn’t know what kind of muscle I was packing, and I had to give the impression that if I wanted to, I could put a serious hurt into his business. West Fourth Street was safe enough, for the time being. I would hear what he had to say.

At this point also I was beginning to have serious questions about Big L. I had close to eighty grand in cash stashed away at my apartment, and no one seemed to be checking up on me to make sure I had the money. Big L had instructed me to contact him via payphone, for obvious reasons, but I hadn’t been able to get a hold of him in about two weeks. Every time I tried to call I was greeted with his answering machine or one of his flunkies whispering cautiously that Big L wasn’t around, to call back later. It didn’t make sense to me. Big L had unloaded a veritable fortune into my hands, enough to leave the country and start a pretty comfortable life in some tropical country, if I so intended. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t even get a chance to skim anything from the top, because he never collected anything in the first place. I trusted Big L and he trusted me, so the lack of communication was unsettling, to say the least.

Back to Ferdinand. We sat outside the café and drank coffee. It was a nice day and crowded with people, so our conversation was long among the undercurrent of chatter.

“So what’s the deal?” I asked. “What are you looking for?”

“A partner,” Ferdinand said. “Or maybe, more accurately, a business associate. You’re just a kid, but you’re a smart kid. How much you made since you been in the game? A hundred grand? Two hundred?”

He’s being glib, but I have to fight to smile, and even then it just barely materializes, like a shimmering mirage. He was trying to flatter me, maybe. I didn’t say anything.

“How reliable is your supplier?” Ferdinand asked, as if he’d been reading my mind about Big L and his recent disappearance. “You’ve got a quality product. Better than anything I’ve seen around here. You’re obviously a front for someone, probably Jersey or Delaware I’m guessing? They giving you the cut you deserve?”

This was the first time his prescience really started to unnerve me, and I wondered if I had finally met someone in the game as smart as myself. I knew he wasn’t getting any of this from Paul or Van, because I didn’t tell them ****.

“I wouldn’t put too much trust into Paul,” Ferdinand continued. “He’s a junkie, and he’ll **** you just as soon as a better deal comes along.”

So would you, I thought, but instead I say “I don’t rely on Paul to do anything but find me more junkies. And he knows a lot of them.”

“Listen to me,” Ferdinand said, leaning over the table and nearly knocking over his espresso. He smelled like a combination of expensive cologne and cigarettes. “I’ve got the ports locked down. I’m going to have a steady shipment of skag coming in, and I don’t know skag, I know coke, and I need someone who knows what they’re doing to get it out there. I can get you runners to do your small deals. I can make sure no one ****s with you, that no one finds out where you live. I’ve got plenty of muscle behind me. I’ve got friends at the NYPD, to make sure they stay off your back. And I can give you a big cut, not sure if it’s larger than what you’re getting now but I’m willing to bet that it is. 30%, maybe? And I can do that because I’m rich and you’re only going to make me richer.”

I don’t say anything and look Ferdinand over, trying to do my best steely faced stare. He’s still grinning that grin, and it’s a strangely comforting one, the grin of a man who’s capable and in control. I don’t trust him as far as I can throw his grandmother, but greed was my main incentive in those days, and greed has a way of obfuscating your rational thought in ways that would baffle even the most cunning of men.

“What about my supplier?” I asked. “What do I do about them?”

Ferdinand shrugged. “What do you want to do about them? You can play them too, if you’d like, as long as you skim some of it my way. What you do on your own time is none of my business.”

He pulls back away from me, and laughs.

“I’ve sold drugs to Hollywood actors, famous rock stars, politicians,” he says. “I drive a Porsche. The black market is sitting out there like money growing on trees, waiting to be plucked. It’s there if you want it.”

“All right,” I said. “When can I get the first shipment?”

[420sx]

People have been asking how I felt morally about my trade, if I ever felt pangs of remorse or regret about the people who undoubtedly died or ****ed up their lives from my product. I’ll tell you now that the answer isn’t as simple as I felt good about it or I felt badly about it. Like any job, some days were better than others, sometimes I felt like I was on top of the world, other times I would see a junkie with hideous skin, sunken eyes, emaciated and begging for a fix and I guess a small part of me felt compassion. Sometimes. I didn’t need to rationalize with myself. I wasn’t putting a gun to a junkie’s head and telling him to put the needle in his arm or I would blow his brains out. It didn’t work that way.

I never touched the stuff, never would. All I did was provide a service for a demand that would exist independent of me. If I stopped selling, a new dealer would germinate in my place, overnight, like weeds tangling their way through the roots of a garden. Heroin was simple. I got my **** from my people, who probably bought it from the Russians or the Chinese, who probably got it all the way from Osama squatting on poppy plants in Afghanistan. I never really knew too much about the shipping aspect of things. Once Ferdinand delivered me my first half-kilo of his stuff, things took off.

I was just about done selling Big L’s stuff, and I was sitting on nearly $180,000 dollars, but I was done waiting for Big L to get off his ass and collect it. I started buying things for myself, nothing too flashy, just enough gadgets and gizmos to tide me over and furnish my apartment into something that looked livable. I bought a plasma TV, a king size bed, top of the line computer and lots of other ****. All with cash.

The semester ended at NYU and my grades were ****. I was in danger of losing my scholarship, but all that mattered to me at the time was the business. I even found a girlfriend, a girl named Elise, who I’ll talk more about later. I slept with plenty of girls on the side, coked out of my mind at parties and clubs and wherever. I figured I was starting to develop a somewhat serious cocaine addiction. It wasn’t intrusive at that point, but hell, whenever I saw Ferdinand it was like ****ing Scarface. It was practically obligatory to do a line before we started talking business.

Selling Ferdinand’s **** was a breeze. Paul and Van the Man didn’t let me down in terms of clientele, and Ferdinand’s runners, a couple of scrappy Hispanic high school dropouts, made it so I could stop doing deals out of my apartment, which drastically decreased my paranoia. Ferdinand’s stuff wasn’t as good as Big L’s, but it still sold like candy, and I felt like I was untouchable. With Van the Man’s facilitating things, I sold heroin to Colin Ferrell. I sold heroin to members of the Strokes. When Pete Doherty came stateside he nearly bought out my entire ****ing inventory. I was making close to 10 grand a week, my profit, the share that I kept.

I know it all sounds very glamorous and exciting, but I’m probably viewing it here with rose colored spectacles. I still had to make the bigger deals myself, and I usually delivered to my best customers myself. The first OD I ever saw was a turning point of sorts, I think. It was a bad omen for things to come.

I was delivering to a guy named Mike who lived in midtown, a real friendly dude who had gotten pretty rich through some internet company. Mike was a gregarious and jolly guy with a huge monkey on his back and some hidden inner demons He was one of the fittest looking heroin addicts I’d ever seen, big and muscular, which is why I was surprised to go into his bathroom to take a piss and come out to find him dead on the ground with the needle still in his arm. His eyes were still open halfway and he this awful expression of rapture on his face that I’ll probably remember until the day I die. I cleaned the froth out of his mouth and tried CPR, but it didn’t work. To this day I don’t know why he OD’d. It’s possible I ****ed up and accidentally gave him the last of Big L’s stuff after he’d been shooting Ferdinand’s weaker **** for a while. But I don’t think I did. Sometimes you push the plunger and it’s like Russian Roulette, I guess. There’s no explaining it.

I started freaking out a bit, trying to figure out what to do. Eventually I grabbed the rest of my drugs, dialed 911 and left the phone dangling off the hook, and bolted. Sometimes I think back on it and convince myself the paramedics managed to revive him, but I doubt it. When you’re dead, you’re dead, and there’d been nothing left in Mike’s eyes.

A couple days after came a knock on my door. I opened the five or so deadbolts and saw Big L’s little brother standing there, who we’ll call Scrazzle Dazzle. He was eating a bag of sunflower seeds, as I remember, and spitting them out onto my carpet.

“Don’t spit that **** out on my floor, man!” I said, but I was glad to see him. We hugged. “Where the **** you been? I was getting worried.”

Scrazzle Dazzle took at seat at my kitchen table. His cornrows were manky and unwashed, and he looked like he hadn’t been sleeping much. He kept chewing those sunflower seeds compulsively and spitting them out. I got him a plate.

“Trouble back home,” he said. “Big L got pinched. He’s gonna do thirty years in Trenton, it looks like.”

“Pinched?” I said. “By who?”

“The ****in’ DEA man. Our house got seized. Our momma got all her assets seized. Everthing’s gone to ****.”

“What the **** happened?”

“Man, why you think Big L gave you those kilos? It wasn’t a ****ing investment. Big L knew the feds were about to a get a warrant to wiretap his house. He had to unload that **** as far away as possible.”

So that was why Big L gave me those kilos. Not because he was confident in my dealing abilities. Because he had already written off that money as a loss, and it was his last ditch attempt to keep it out of the DEA’s hands.

“He didn’t ****ing roll over on me, did he?” I said, starting to get scared. “The DEA doesn’t know about me?”

“Nah,” Scrazzle Dazzle said, shooting another sunflower shell into the plate. “But half our crew’s going away. Big L got those kilos out just in time.”

About now Scrazzle Dazzle’s cell phone rang. He answered it with a few noncommittal grunts, and said “yeah that’s fine,” and hung up.

“Who’s that?”

“My ****ing momma. She’s about to have a heart attack, man. Everything’s falling apart.”

“****,” I said. I didn’t know if Big L being out of the picture was good or bad, at this point. But I knew what Scrazzle Dazzle was doing here, and it wasn’t to catch up on old times. “I guess you’re here for your share of the money.”

Just then two huge guys come smashing into my apartment, waving handguns. One of them bolts the door behind him. I realize much later that these guys were probably the Queens muscle Big L had been talking about.

Scrazzle Dazzle gets up from his chair in a flash and pulls a pistol from his wasteband, leveling it at my head.

“Nah, not my share, all the ****ing money!” I remember with a bizarre clarity his emphasis on those last two words, ****ing money. It sticks out in my mind.

If you’ve never had a gun pointed at you before, you don’t know the ****ing sheer terror of it, the emasculating, horrifying helpless feeling. Every instinct in your body tells you to just run and get behind some cover. I started trembling, sputtering. I couldn’t form words. I remember one of the thugs screaming “Where the drugs! Where the drugs! Get the ****ing cash and the drugs!”

Scrazzle Dazzle puts the gun to my head and leads me into the bedroom. I open the safe, somehow managing to do it on the first try. Inside there’s only about 90 grand and about 500 grams of heroin. I’m begging Scrazzle Dazzle not to shoot, on my knees, almost crying.

“Where’s the rest of the money?” he shouts.

“I spent it!” I yelled, in retrospect probably the stupidest thing I could have said. I wasn’t stupid. I knew getting robbed was a possibility, and I had pried up a floorboard and stashed the rest of the money and drugs in there. But I was also ****ing pissed off, and there was no way I was giving up my entire stash to ****ing backstabbing Scrazzle Dazzle. The fact that this easily could have gotten me killed didn’t dawn on me until later. “I’m sorry man!”

“I should ****ing shoot you!” Scrazzle Dazzle said, pressing the gun into my temple. One of the other thugs grabs his arm.

“Take it easy, Scraz, there’s people walkin around on this floor.” Scrazzle Dazzle shakes his head. He looked down at me.

“We got history, I guess, so I won’t ice you now. You’ve got a week to get me that other hundred K, or else we’re coming back here to ice you for real, got it?”

They didn’t say anything else. They stash the **** in a shopping bag and hustle out the door.

I crawl to the bathroom and throw up.

We’ll get back to Scrazzle Dazzle and his thugs in just a minute, but first I want to talk a little bit about my girlfriend Elise. She was an older girl, not particularly bright, and she never really questioned where I was getting all this money to buy her nice things. I was careful not to lavish her with too much—too much and she would get suspicious, and I couldn’t really be throwing all that much money around without other people getting suspicious, too. I kept her around to keep me sane in the wake of all the madness in my life, but I guess like all women she had her own ways of driving me crazy.

The day after I was robbed by Scraz I gave one of my runners five hundred dollars and we met up later in an alley near Avenue C, where he handed me a gun, a matte-black Glock, and a box of bullets. I had told Ferdinand about the incident, told him that anyone in Queens who suddenly started pushing quality **** were probably the guys that robbed me. Told him about Scrazzle’s deadline, but I don’t think anyone (including Scrazzle) believed he was ever going to see that money. Ferdinand assured me we’d deal with it and recoup the losses, but nevertheless I was seething angry and wanted to be ready in case I was accosted again. The fact that I’d never fired a gun before in my life did little to dissuade me.

On the way home I stop at a jeweler’s and buy a necklace for Elise. The diamond was actually cubic zirconium—I might have some cash to blow, but I’m not quite at the point where I can buy a new car every time the ashtray gets full. Besides, she wouldn’t know the difference. I could buy her a piece of paper with a picture of a necklace on it, and I doubt she’d have known the goddamn difference.

Elise came over around eight and I cooked her dinner, a veal and white wine recipe that I got off the internet. I’m still in a strange kind of shock after the robbery and I probably looked pretty dazed. We sat there in silence for a while until she starts talking about her new paralegal job. I listen for about a minute before tuning out, focusing instead on my dinner, which was far tastier than I expected. Elise didn’t use but she might as well have—she was scrawny, small, with feeble hands and a narrow face. She usually wore a frizzy brown ponytail, but tonight it had been straightened to a dull sheen for the occasion. She looked like she should be working in a textile mill somewhere. I had no real emotion toward the whole relationship, but I tolerate her because she likes having sex and has demonstrated proficiency in that area.

I show her the necklace and she conversely displays her happiness and approval. She kisses me. Her breath smells like the garlic from dinner and all I can think of is Scrazzle Dazzle pressing the gun against my head and spitting sunflower seeds onto my floor. I had to fight the urge to push her away. We retired to my bedroom for a few hours before passing out.