I've been lucky, I've never actually been ripped buying dope of the street. I've been shorted more than a few times but nothing horrible, it sucks but you move on(you have no choice but to move on you've got to figure out how to get more dope). I've got some awful stories that involve me being interrible wds and having to take the train out to the west side in the middle of winter and not being able to cop for hours then shooting up in the elevator of the train stop(yes stories, plural, i've got more than a few, all pretty much the same). But I'd rather not relive them, and that's all there really needs to be said anyways, you can imagine the rest.
It didn't happen on the street, but in a parking lot(close enough right?) of show of a certain semi-popular jamband show in a small ski resort tow in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. It was the fourth of july and a beautiful day in the mountains. They were doing a festival type of thing at this venue at the bottom of a ski hill, so there was a camping section and then two lots and they played like a set each day, then two the first night, and three the second night(the 4th). Anyways, it was in between the second and third set, first set of the ight and I wet to meet some friends at the car to get some beer, smoke some grass and hang out util the next set, I wanted to get some molly from my buddy for the next two sets too(I remember that only thanking god that it had't happened yet).
I remember that I bought a shirt on the way back to the car. It was dark green and had the Cotton logo on it only saying Cottonmouth instead(It's one of my favorite shirts to this day, though every time someone asked me about it I had to tell this story and when it hadn't been resolved yet it was the major contributor to my stress level). I met my buddies at the car and we set up shop, put out the cooler, unfolded the camping chairs, and broke out the nuggets. We had no reason to be worried, everything was really chill. We were very seperated from the outside world in this little parking lot/campgrounds. Everythng was being offered up openly, and everyone was smoking tons of weed. After all we were thousands of miles from home, away from all our responsibilities and didn't have a care in the world.
After having been there for just a minute, some guy comes up asking if we've got any weed to sell. We don't but this guy looks alright, so my buddy offers him a hit. He looked really dissheveled, like he needed a hit of something. He takes the pipe and as he hits it he starts to tell us this horrific story about how he and his friend had just driven straight there from Connecticut, and how his buddy had been arrested and he was freaking out and he just kept saying, "Fuck all this shit, I don't want to deal with it right now, I just want to find some fucking nuggets, go in there, sit down, smoke a fucking bown and chill. I just need to chill." He was really, really convincing. We all felt bad for him. We were just shooting the shit with this guy, typical lot talk, mostly him bitching, he looked seriously pissed. So, I decided that I would do my good deed of the day. I had brought a bunch of bsters from Chi, so I knew we'd always have nuggets but once we got ther a buddy of mine hooked me up with some local organic AK that blew my or any bsters out of the fucking water any day, so I decided to give the guy a little bit of the bsters.
I said, "You know what man, it's your lucky day," and I digged around in the open hatch back to get my tupperware, opened it took a nice two or so gram bud and and haded it to him. He was extremely grateful and really nice, just kept saying thank you, oh my god, thank you. Then, right before he was about to go away, he says to all of us, not me specifically, "Can you do me just one more favor?" So we ask what, and he asks if we've got change for a fifty. We look and none of us have it, so he says to me directly, "What if you just gave me two twenties and a little bit more of that nug you gave me, would you be able to do that?" He needed the change for some reason, I don't remember why, but there was a reason he gave us that seemed plausible. I didn't really think about it. Nothing thus far had been very out of the ordinary, and my guard was way down. Hindsight is 20/20, that should have tipped me off. I definitely should have thought to myself that something was not normal there, but I agreed. I didn't really care about the bsters so I just held the tupperware out to him, telling him to take what he thinks is ten dollars worth and hand him the twenties. He does't even hand me the fifty, the look in his eye just slowly changes from sedated and bewildered to calm cool and collected. It's hard to describe the look in his eyes, but it is something I will never forget. In retrospect, they had the satisfaction of a job well done radiating from them.
He pauses for long enough for me to wonder what's going on. I was still completely clueless at this point. Then, with conviction, he says, "I'm taking all of it." I looked around, dumbstruck, and said, "Are you robbing me?" God I still can't believe I still didn't realize what was going on yet. At this point he let me in on the secret and showed me the badge that his untucked tour shirt(probably bought on that very same fucking lot) was covering, and says I'm DEA officer Mitch Byron. Mitchell fucking Byron. I will never forget that fucking name, it will haunt me for the rest of my fucking life.
I am like a deer in headlights, fucking stunned. My brain sort of registers its surroundings and I look at my friends. They're looking back at me in much the same way that I imagine I'm looking at them. His partner appears from nowhere, completely out the woodwork, and introduces himself. He grabs me up out of my chair and takes me to the next car and makes me empty my pockets(this is why I'm glad I hadn't gotten any molly yet). I look back and his partner is patting my friends down.
"What's going to happen to them," I ask.
"Nothing if you take blame for it all," I'm told. None of us has anything in our pockets, so they sit us down by the car.
"There's two ways we can do this, either I can get the county sherriffs down here and have them show you boys what it's like to really get arrested in this [state and county], or you can tell us what's in that car there and we can all walk away from here no harm done, A OK," says Mitch. I think about all the molly we have and all the money stashed in the car. I know there's nothing more than that other than maybe a couple of personal stashes of weed. So I take out all the extra weed that I know about that's in our car and give it to him.
"Okay, are you sure this is all there is?"
"As far as I know officer," is my reply.
"So we won't find anything else in this car," he says as his partner has already started to go through it all."
"Shit!" I think, but quickly say, "No, there's nothing else in there."
I'm sitting there shitting myself, thinking about the what the mandatory minimum would be on all those capsules of powder, but I manage to stay civil and I ask DEA officer Mitchell Byron how much he likes his job. He tells me that sometimes are better than others but it's all worth it when you get to do something really meaningful. Thinking, "Wow this guy's a fucking prick, he thinks that busting me is meaningful?" I keep up my end of the conversation and pursue my line of questioning(without being a total smartass punk about it). He goes on(all while his partner is searching our car possibly finding many years in jail for me) to tell me about how his sister was a dope addict and how he saw her die from an od and how he felt he needed to make a difference and he was doing it all for his sister. It may have all been total bullshit, we already know this guy can act if he wants to, but I actually empathized with him. While I was sitting there talking to this guy who lied his ass off and manipulated me just to get one more arrest on his record for this pointless sting on hippies in the middle of the fucking mountains, I actually identified with him. I think(yeah right, think?) I was on drugs at the time, but I had one of those we're all human type of moments, he may be busting me right now, but throughout time and space we have fulfilled all possible roles with each other, we're still brothers in the human condition, etc..., until his partner snaps me out of it.
"Aha! What's this?" I'm now on the verge of running the fuck away. He found it for sure. He walks over to us, and holds out a cellophane wrapper with stems in it(somebody rolled a joint in the back seat while we were driving and instead of throwing the shit out, stuck it in a cigarette wrapper in the pouch on the back of the front seat). Stems! The relief I felt can not be described, I wanted to laugh at him. But instead I told him I didn't know what it was, and he said "uh-huh," really smugly and turned to walk away.(I found out later that the drugs and money had for no real reason at all been stashed in the other car we were riding with that day, though I had no idea at the time)
"Is that it?" he asks his parter.
"Yeah, I think so," his partner tells him.
"Allright then, let's go," he says to me as he stands and holds out a hand to help me get up(yes, they made us sit on the ground while we had camping chairs sitting out).
"Where are we going?" I ask.
"Well, you're goig to jail," he says matter of factly.
"But, I thought we were gonna all walk away from here, A OK. C'mon you can't hold that little bag of stems against me, besides this isn;t my car and I never gave you permission to search it. You said it, we're gonna walk away from here A OK, remember? You said A OK!"
"We are gonna walk away from here, you, me and Officer (insert generic DEA officer's name here) are gonna get up, walk over to that van in the corner there, you see that(he points out the huge cop shop on wheels in the corner of the lot that I have somehow managed to miss the whole resto of the weekend), and then that van will take you to jail."(I guess that earlier he wasn't offering me a deal to get out of being arrested but to avoid being beaten by the cops "we'll show you what it's really like to get arrested here In Routt County..." As in you get to walk emphasis on walk out of here. Had I really done something bad enough to deserve that?)
By this time he has gotten me standing and he's holding my arm in that way cops do when they've "got you in custody," and they don't want you to run. All that carefree happiness was by now completely gone and was replaced by desperate awakening and realization. I was looking around frantically searching for that thing I hadn't thought of, that magic way out. By this point, he had started walking me towards the huge van/bus mobile police station in the far corner of the lot that I had somehow failed to notice all the other times I walked around that lot(It somehow didn't fit in the utopic image I had of the lot earlier in the day, did I just block it out, it was hard to miss). He notices me desperately searching for escape and whispers, "Don't run. We will catch you," and proceeds to point out all the people in the crowd we're passing who are DEA agents. Like in a movie they all nod to him as he points them out and my vision cuts to where they're standing. I felt like I was gonna be sick. Happy Fourth of fucking July, huh?
We get to the van and they put all my stuff from my pockets into an evidence bag, pat me down and handcuff me. Then I'm put into the van. There is a long bench almost wide eough to be a bed in the back on one side and the other side is cabinets and a counter. There's a semi attractive younger blonde woman who greets me very warmly sitting on a chain with a clipboard(the clipboard, the ultimate symbol of authority), and a young hippie girl curled up in the far corner of the bed sobbing silently. I'm sat down and the woman takes my wallet and starts to fill out forms. She asks me if this is my present address in California. Shit, my fake ID(I was 19, I'm 23 now). my real ID's in there too, right underneath it in fact, I just had bought liquor earlier in the day so it was the first one in my wallet(so I didn't have to dig when I got carded and yes my real name was on it, it's a lesser crime if it's in your real name). I quickly decide that the penalty would be worse when they found out later, and that they almost definitely would find out later, So I tell her it's fake, and she's nice enough to tell me we'd keep that between ourselves and she kept it and told me she'd get rid of it later. I lost a good ID(it fooled her), but atleast I avoided another charge. She finished my forms and I tried to console the girl in there with me, she was only seventeen and was caught with molly. A guy named Lance is brought in, he was caught with molly too, but much, much more than the girl. Soon enough, the van makes it's trip to the county jail to drop us off.
We're brought in and I find that I'm being charged with distribution(I traded him ten dollars for some weed remember, it would have been a much lesser charge is I hadn't done that) and that my bond is $20,000. I most states you can put up ten percent of the cash, which would have been $2000, which would have been easy for my friends to pay, I would have gotten out that night. But no, not CO, they want it all. And, of course, it's the weekend so I'll have to wait util Moday to see a judge for bond reduction.
So I spend the night and the next night celebrating my holiday weekend in jail with all the other kids from the show that had been busted(the jail was way over capacity, they were putting five people in tiny little holding cells with only enough room on the floor for three bed mats. I got there in time to get into a cell with some of the regular folk who were in there and got my own bunk and everything. It really wasn't so bad though, except for worrying about having to come back for an extended period of time later. I met some nice people and it was not the first or last time I'd been in jail(the longest so far though), the food was shitty, but they had cable. Eventually monday rolled around and we all went to go see the judge. He reduced my bond down to five grand and I was able to get out that night. I hitched a ride with that guy Lance, the one I got arrested with, to Red Rocks, the next place Cheese was playing. I had never been there before, and Lance wasn't risking another Cheese show("I'm not getting near that lot man, sorry"), so I had to walk from the exit from the highway through this sagebrush desert type thing and it took forever, but I eventually found the lot. After searching the lots for hours, I found our car in some far off lot up the hill and down a ways, the last one I checked. But I found it and when I did I just sat on the hood and waited for my friends to get out. While I waited I met some nice kids who were parked a couple cars down making food to sell when the show got out and they were selling beer so they had a lot of that too. They were great and fed me and got me drunk and listened to me bitch while I was waiting for my friends to get out. They finally did and I had a good rest of the trip, but the moral remains, be careful who you give drugs to.
I've made this way too long, I really meant to just put up a quick summary, maybe someone will find it interesting. I would have been better off just posting one of the essays I've written about this experience, it would have been a lot easier(and taken a lot less time) than sitting here and typing it all out from memory. Oh well, if at least one person reads it it will have been worth it.
jr0k
btw The DA was a dick and wanted me to plea down to either a felony and serving no time, or a misdemeanor and serving six months to a year, big fines, probation and community service for both. I got a good lawyer and we threatened to fight it and actually had to proceed towards a trial(which I was scared shitless of doing) before he relented and reduced the plea bargain. He had been giving everyone who was charged with the same crime the same pea deal across the board. He refused to even look at your case or consider lessening it until you actually made the step to take it to trial. Eventually I got misdemeanor possession of between 1 and 8 ounces, two years of unsupervised probation, some community service and a huge fine. That's all over now, thank god, and everything turned out okay, but it just goes to show you how quickly a life changing event can sneak up on you when you least expect it, I guess that's just their nature though. Just be careful who you give drugs to.
