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meatcakeman said:
That was a good read, but fake as fuck.

He sold smack to Colin Farrell? Really?

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at this point

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Enpo said:
Amazing read, should be made into a movie.

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trip forever said:
This is an amazing read. This is NOT mine and I found this story on Grasscity where the guy who posted it found it on a blog. This is a long read but I suggest you get around to reading this sometime because it's amazing. also please let me do 6 more posts because this is such a long story it won't fit in one post
HERES THE STORY
Entry 1:
Every town has its man. You don�t always recognize him when you see him on the street, or in a caf�. 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 fuckers�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 fuck 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 fucked 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 �fuckin 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 fucking people.

I had shit 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 fucking 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 fucking 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.
Entry 2:
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 shit 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 on 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 shit?�

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.�

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 shit 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. �Shit. 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.�

�Shit,� 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 shit 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 fucking 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.

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teamkiller said:
jesus fuck this shit again.

its fake and gay, holy fuck why did you bump this.

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That time of the month again, eh?