Take It On The Other Side

Once upon a time is where you usually start a fairy tale. This is not a fairy tale.

Another cold winter morning, waking up on the floor beside a hand full of other undesirables. We slept in an abandoned mall. We had couches, magazine racks, a table and our own room.

The Roach motel. It belonged to Roach, he made his little escape from reality for the rest of us. We always had drugs and booze and someone had a pack of smokes. We played hard so we smoked hard too. Export A Green or John players special, back then known as black death and green death. Didn't matter to the crew, half of us were smashing whatever we could get ahold of anyways. We all sold drugs to make ends meet and by make ends meet i mean start with a 50 dollar loan every morning and turn it into 200 profit by the time the night was done. usually there was 2 or 3 of us selling at any point. We didn't need to spend it all but we did anyways because we knew we could do it all again the next day. There was a 24 hour burger joint down the street we used to hit up for coffee and burgers of course, that is when money was good. But you never know when the next time youll be staring down the barrel of a gun or down at the shimmer of an old steak knife, baseball bat, hammers, metal poles, electric chainsaw, discarded bottles. A weapon was a weapon and a robbery was usually a robbery.

Some nights when it was to cold, we would go see Jeff (god rest his soul), but that's a story for another time and only a select few of us were ever welcome there including myself. Other nights we would sleep on the floor of the local youth shelter and wake up early before breakfast, head out and pick up our drugs for the day and maybe make a few sales before breakfast at the youth center to buy smokes for the guys. We all shared no matter who was chopping bags on the block or if you were pan handling, if you were in, you were in. We ran that place and the police left us alone. If you were really bad, we made you leave and that was the law.

One morning i got robbed by a known crackhead, my buddy Roach wasn't having any of that at all. He's pretty crazy but he taught me everything I needed to survive down there and trusted me when no one else was around to give me a chance. We grabbed his bowie knife and headed down to the strip around 8 A.M People getting on and off busses coming to and from work going every which way. We spotted him pretty fast and He saw our knife, he ran and locked himself in a burger joint down the street, you catching on yet? So he locks himself in the front door laughing at us the whole time. The owner then comes up behind him and locks the second door to the vestibule. Standing there sandwiched in between us and the owner laughing and shaking his head, we laugh, we tap the knife on the window a few times and warn him not to return. How could he have known thats our regular burger joint? Picked up his booze went and smoked a joint then polished off his bottle all before 9 a.m. With no police around to care. Surprising since the police station was around the corner.

By lunch time we would have enough for smokes and some harder stuff. We liked to meet back at the local internet cafe for breaktime and do rails of the back computer desk while rolling blunts. Thats when the party started every day. Booze smokes, stimulants breakfast, sleep repeat. Welcome to the other side of society. Stick around for more stories