August 2002, Berkshire Mountain Music Festival, Great Barrington, MA
As many of you undoubtedly know, the backwoods of any campout hippie festival are basically an open-air drug bazaar. I knew I would be able to get mass amounts of weed, hash, and probably mushrooms, so a friend who wanted them fronted me a substantial amount of money to buy him some. I figured that it was safer to keep all the money on me rather than leave it in my tent, where anybody could walk in and steal it. However, I did not take the essential step of splitting up the cash to different positions on my body. Anyways, I was hunting around for some opium, which was proving to be hard to find. A little after it became dark, I ran into a large, dirty, bearded, generally sketchy looking w00k who was drunkenly hawking his wares in somewhat slurry speech. I heard him say, "opium" and accosted him, expressing my interest. We then went off into a dark campsite, on his insistence that he didn't want to do business on the path that ran through the place. He then busted out a bag of some shit that I couldn't really see, due to the fact that it was dark and neither of us had a light source. It looked crystalline, sort of like the "amber" opium I've had on a few occassions. I asked to smell it and he thrust the opened bag in front of my nose for a few seconds; I did not smell the usually pungent odor of opium. I asked to inspect it myself and he refused. Then I asked how much he would sell me a gram or eighth for, and he said, "how much money you got? I'll give you a good deal on what's in this here baggie." I again asked how much was in the baggie, and he dodged my question. Though I was asking the right questions, my delivery was not very confident, so instead of giving off the impression that I wouldn't settle for anything other than a straight deal, I gave him the impression that I was dicking him around. He then growled threateningly, "show me your money so you can prove you can actually buy this shit!" Offended, I busted out my wallet, and while I was opening it to get a $20, he grabbed it from my hands. I yelled out very loudly, "don't steal that from me," and moved in front of him to block his way to the path, and then he grabbed me, said "what are you going to do about it," and threw me against the nearest tent (he was about twice my size). I continued to pursue him down the path, so he dropped my wallet (minus the money of course), and while I stopped to pick it up, he disappeared into the darkness of the forest. I lost several hundred dollars of my friend's money, and about a hundred of my own, on that one
