7
“THE WORLD IS GOING TO SHITS,” he said. “I’m tellin’ ya. There’s no middle class anymore. None. Everyone I know is struggling. The only jobs that exist offer shit pay. You think I’m working for ten dollars an hour to work as a fucking barista? Fuck that! All I ask for in this goddamn world is fifteen dollars an hour. And they can’t even give me that!”
I was sitting in the back of a nearly empty Midtown pub listening to Dan rant and rave in his usual manner about how Western civilization was in a perpetual decline.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter how you make money,” Dan said. “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
“And so you’re selling pot now,” I said.
“Yeah. This is what the world’s coming to. The regular economy is shit. Globalism and outsourcing ruined the middle class. There just aren’t enough good paying jobs out there to sustain the middle class as it once was.” Dan pauses for a moment to sip his Guinness. “You know I read that more than half of all Americans make less than 30 thousand dollars a year. More than half of Americans make less than 30 thousand!”
“That’s fucked up,” I said.
“It’s fucking outrageous,” Dan continued. “That means there is no middle class. How can you raise a family on that? You think I want to raise kids in a society like that? Fuck that. I’d rather abort a million babies than raise them in a society of bullshit.”
Dan was always the character. We met junior year in college at a party. I was looking for a pot dealer at the time and he sold. He rolled a joint right there and we smoked half of it, and he let me keep the other half free of charge. He’d been selling pot for years and now apparently hit the big time. And although we both graduated with the same degree things never really worked out for him in the job market. He’d never really made use of his degree and continued selling pot and expanded to other things, which was exactly why I was meeting him.
“So how much money are you making selling?” I asked him.
“Enough,” he said. “I’m doing Ok for now. I’m working with a really good supplier. He’s very professional, knows his shit. Selling pot is great. There’s a lot of money in it if you know what you’re doing.”
“And you’ve expanded into other things too?”
“Yeah. I got pills, I got shrooms,” he said. “All the things the kids like.”
“That’s awesome, because I really need shrooms right now for camping,” I said.
“Yeah tell me about this camping trip.”
“It will be me, you, Pete, and maybe someone else, going upstate to spend a whole day in the woods. We’re going to hike deep into the woods, then find a camping spot, set up our tents and do drugs.”
“Sounds like fun,” he said. “What do I need?”
“All you need is a good backpack and a tent. I actually have two tents, so I can loan you one of mine. So really all you need is a good backpack, and like a day’s worth of food.”
“I got a backpack,” Dan replied. “And I could get some trail mix or whatever. We need booze too right?”
“Sure if you want to bring some. I don’t bring any because it’s too heavy to carry extra liquids. Remember we’re going on a several mile hike. It’s gonna be tough. This ain’t no picknick. We camp like men.”
“How do we get there?” he asked.
“We take a bus. It’s usually like 20 bucks round trip.”
“Or I could drive,” he offered.
“Dude if you could fucking drive us that would be great.”
“I’ve got a piece of shit old car but it can take us there. I’m down.”
“Well cheers to that,” I said, raising my Lager to his Guinness. “Let’s talk about shrooms. How much we talking about here?”
“Well since I’m coming, I’ll cut you a deal,” he said. “I can get you on twenty for an eighth.”
“That’s awesome. It’s usually way higher in the city because it’s so hard to get. But let me see your shit.”
Dan looked around to see if anyone was looking. The bar was completely empty in the back section on this Thursday afternoon. He opened up his bag and laid out a bag on the table. It was a small ziplocked bag with a blue coloring. I picked it up and looked at it in the light. Inside were the swirling tendrils of the shrooms, tinted blue because of the bag’s coloring. I unzipped it and took a whiff. It smelled like shrooms alright. Not exactly a pleasant smell. They smell as bad as they taste, but you don’t do shrooms for the taste.
“Alright. Let me get three eighths. One for me, one for Pete, and one extra one just in case.” He reached into his bag to pull out two more. I handed him sixty dollars under the table and quickly put the shrooms in my bag. The shrooms had been procured for the camping trip. Mission accomplished.
“I also have E by the way,” Dan said quietly leaning into me.
“On you?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
Dan was white, blond haired, blue eyed, descended from Vikings. He could get away carrying large amounts of felon worthy drugs on him without any worry from the cops. Although he was basically poor, he knew how to at least look like a white person with money.
“All you need a few nice shirts and if you’re white you’ll look like you have money,” I remember him telling me back in college. It was true. On the surface you’d think Dan was a regular middle class white American, but the guy barely made any money it seemed, and had been making ends selling drugs most of his adult life.
“Hey, do you ever feel like thankful for your white privilege?” I asked him.
“What white privilege?”
“The white privilege that allows you to walk around anywhere with enough drugs to put you in jail for years without fear of being pulled over by the cops,” I fired back.
“There is no white privilege. That’s a fucking liberal myth,” he fired back even harder.
“Oh come on,” I said. “You can’t deny that your whiteness gives you privileges you would not have if you were black. If you were black you’d be in prison right now for selling drugs and you know that.”
“Dude I’ve been to jail for possession. I’ve been arrested before. Have you?”
“No.” I admitted. “When were you in jail?”
“When I was twenty-one,” he said, “I was living down in Atlanta. I had to call the cops one day on my roommate who was flipping out and when they came they searched the place and they found his weed. He told the cops it was mine and he was acting so crazy they just arrested all of us. I spent three fucking nights in jail. The cops didn’t even ask me to search, they just did it. And I’m fucking white, so there’s no white privilege.”
“That’s totally different,” I said. “You had a guy acting crazy, and the cops came and found drugs. Of course they’re going to search for drugs.”
“Yeah but they need a warrant to search,” he said. “They didn’t have one.”
“Well look,” I said. “I don’t know the laws on that exact situation. But this is a common misconception of white privilege. White privilege doesn’t mean no white person will ever get harassed by the cops, it means you’re less likely to. In other words, it’s much easier to get away with shit being white. I mean, you don’t get harassed by the cops on a regular basis.”
“No.” he acknowledged.
“That’s white privilege,” I said. “A black person in your position, selling drugs for a living would be getting stopped by the cops once a month at least.”
“Look, I didn’t grow up rich, you know that. My father was a fucking alcoholic, he treated me and my brother like shit. My mother had to stop working because she got sick. We didn’t have money growing up. I can’t find a fucking job even with my degree and I’m fucking white. I see Indians and Chinese people owning their own businesses with two or three kids but my white ass is struggling. So don’t lecture me about white privilege. It’s made up bullshit.”
“Why can’t you find a job? We have the same degree and you never got a fucking job from it? I don’t understand that.”
Visibly pissed he said, “It’s a lot of fucking things. I’m either overqualified or underqualified. They’re either asking for 7 years experience, or they’re asking for no experience and they’re paying shit money.”
“I know how it is man, it’s a catch-22,” I affirmed.
“And you shouldn’t even be talking,” he said, “because now you’re unemployed. I at least sell drugs. I fulfill an important demand in society. You don’t do shit.”
“This is not about me. I worked for years.”
“And you fucking hated it. Is that why you quit?”
“I got fired.”
“Oh yeah. You got fired. You weren’t doing your job,” he said, with a nasty smile.
“Well you know that job sucked. They made me work twelve hours a day and paid me for eight. They treated me like shit so I treated them like shit. And so they fired me for ‘lack of motivation.’”
“That’s the way it is nowadays. They work you like slaves. They give you an unpaid internship. Or they’ll give you a contract-to-hire job where they give you no benefits and no paid vacation. I’ve seen it looking for work. That’s why I don’t give a fuck anymore. I don’t care about getting a regular job. Fuck the industry. Fuck an unpaid internship. I’m making money. I’m not rich. But I’m making money.”
“Are you still living with your girlfriend’s place? With her family?”
“Yeah.”
“How’re things going?”
“Not good. I’m pretty much done with her. I’ve fucking had it. She’s a fucking bitch and I hate her family.”
“That’s gotta suck living with them.”
“That’s why I hate them. They make me their bitch.”
“They make you clean?”
“Yeah, and I gotta drive everyone around to do their errands. I’m like their fucking chauffeur.”
“Do they know you sell?” I asked with trepidation.
“She knows, and her parents know I sell pot. They don't know I sell anything else.”
“Shit,” I said. “How do you keep a secret like that?”
“It’s not easy. Anyway, how did we start talking about white privilege and shit? Do you want any E or not?”
I thought about it for a few seconds, realizing I only had another twenty in my wallet, and answered, “if you can cut me a deal, sure.”
