From: "Gizmo" Subject: The Adventures Of Smacks Past - The Flaming Knives Part 3 of 4 (Got Myself A Gun) Date: Saturday, November 09, 2002 10:19 PM The Flaming Knives Part 3 of 4 (Got Myself A Gun) Copyright Gizmo 2002 We didn't know anything about the now popular HBO series, The Sopranos or A3's hit single. Those things were decades in the future. But guns were around back then and The Bronx had more than it's fair share of guns and wise guys. Jimbo showed up that afternoon with the latest shipment. Forty pounds of Columbian Gold. The real McCoy. Price? $270 a pound wholesale. Retail price if we sold in pounds? About $475. That's the kind of action we were getting. Always on consignment, always good, always an instant hit. We had a select clientele of close friends and close friends of friends. It always worked well. I had been building this business for the past two years having started with nickel and dime bags and now we were selling pounds, kilos and more. And boy did it sell. Doubly so, because my girlfriend brought even more clients into the business. Within a week we were sold out. Sometimes we sold it faster than we could reup. It was a heady time. One week later we would get another shipment. The pot showed up and within an hour we would have it all broken out onto a huge bed sheet. Out came the triple beam balance, the Glad sandwich baggies and Ziplocs. A few phone calls later and the word was out. We rarely worried about cops, wiretaps etc. In NYC the cops just didn't make that big a deal about pot. We had an interesting array of customers. And speaking of cops, one was a NYC cop. Another a 'safe cracker' for the US Post Office. No, that's not a mistake. This guy had been working with the US Post Office for a number of years and he applied for a special job description. It seems that the Post Office would from time to time get into a bind and, either through a mishap, or perhaps a Postmaster being away on vacation, would need instant access to one of their vaults. Sometimes it was just because the combination malfunctioned. Enter the government safe cracker. And we kept him stoned. After all he was always on call and had to fly out and do a bit of night work from time to time. Geebee was another interesting case. He was a top anesthesiologist at a major Bronx Hospital Center. We kept him high on quality Columbian and he would from time to time bring us the latest pain meds that were used during surgery. It was a good symbiotic relationship. Things stayed interesting. I was playing a lot more music again. My girlfriend's son was quite a handful but we tried our best to provide a decent environment for him to play in. He was about 3 by now and we managed to keep him shielded from our business and recreational scene. The pot and acid trips continued throughout the year. Somehow our landlord, the cop (not the one we sold pot to) had not caught on to how we paid our rent on time every month or why we were almost always home day or night. Almost every weekend there was a party. My girlfriend would typically have her folks take her son and we wouldn't have to worry about parental responsibilities until late Sunday night. My girlfriend's by now ex-husband was scheduled to be paroled into a work release house soon and that was starting to keep us alert. He had already made a few threats to kill one or both of us. Today just saying "I'm gonna kill you" can get you incarcerated till doomsday. But back then it was like nothing. You had to actually carry out a threat before it got any attention. And even with that it might not get any. I kept up with my pot dealing, my music and my LSD trips to far away places deep inside my skull. One of my favorite things to do was to go out and drive in the snow at night after the acid had kicked in for a couple of hours. To this day I will never forget getting in my old Ford and starting that engine and driving into a storm through three to six inches of freshly fallen snow. The snow as it swept onto the windshield would become all at once multi-colored, musical, geometric and psychedelic. It was a drive into another dimension. You didn't need a radio, a CD player or surround sound. All that was right inside your own head. During all this the two of us had become vegetarians. Don't ask? It just seemed like the thing to do. On a Sunday morning at around 2 or 3 A.M. we would get into the car and head down to The Bronx Terminal Market under The Major Deagan Expressway right by Yankee Stadium. This was a great place. They didn't have Harry's Farmers Markets back then. Nor did the huge supermarkets look anything like they do today. There was no Sam's Club or Costco. Nope. This huge outdoor Bronx Terminal Market was it. And it was huge. It stretched on for about 10 city blocks. This was where all the trailers would deliver their goods and where smaller trailers and pickup trucks for all the supermarkets and restaurants came to pick up their produce, meats, etc. But at 2 or 3 A.M. it was still just getting started. The busy time would run from 5 A.M. until mid afternoon But by 5 A.M. we were long gone. We must have looked a bit weird to the warehouse guys. Most of the workers there were black. We were probably about the only two white folks to show up there at that time. But some of them got to know us and liked us enough to remember us each time we showed up. So we would buy 25 or 50 lb. bags of carrots, boxes of juice oranges, grapefruits, beets, celery, Alaskan King Crab (10 lbs. for about $15 to $20 bucks!) Okay so we were not strict vegetarians. But we were having fun. Sometimes we made these excursions at the tale end of an acid trip. Nothing like coming back to reality in the belly of The Bronx. Like I said before, The Bronx was alive and vibrant and pulsing like a huge living organism. We developed a routine. Monday and Tuesday we would sell our pot. We would try to take care of most business by Wednesday morning at the latest. Next we would fast from Wednesday through Friday with nothing but fruit and vegetable juice. Then after making baby sitting arrangements on Friday nite or early Saturday morning we would drop some acid. And fly away. During this time we both did a good deal of traveling in the USA. Sometimes alone, sometimes together. Meanwhile, my girlfriend's ex-husband had gotten released from Rikers and was now in a halfway house. One night around 11:30 P.M. I got a drunken phone call from him. "Gizmo, you rat bastard mother fucker. I'm just calling to let you know I'm on my way to kill you, you son of a bitch. You hear me you piece of shit? What do you say to that you punk fuck?" I said, "C'mon over". My girlfriend was still awake and asked me who called. I told her not to worry, it was just her ex-husband calling to tell me he was on his way over to kill me. She freaked when I told her the gist of the conversation. But the insanity and immortality of being in my early 20's ruled to day. Or should I say the night? Or was it just the interesting medication we were indulging in? No time for philosophical meanderings, because I reached into my closet and got out the specially modified gun that an old buddy named John Rosetti hooked up for me. For just such and occasion as this. This was a 38 with a home made silencer attached. Me and John had taken the gun out to the woods and tested it out a number of times. It was pretty quiet. Certainly nothing you could hear past a distance of a 10 feet or so. I rationalized that I was invoking my constitutional right to protect my home. And my girlfriend, her son, my pot, my acid and my money. Good rationale eh? Some of you may even remember The Constitution by the time you read this. I went down to the living room, opened the front door and sat down with the gun in my hand. I thought of the future confrontation in the most disassociative, detached way possible. The thought of being surprised and killed did not seem to matter much at all. At the time I was convinced that nobody ever really dies anyway so leaving the physical plane was like no big thing. One or both of us may have to buy the farm that night, but I chalked it all up to fate and lit a cigarette and waited. Around 12:30 A.M. the phone rang again. Again I was told that I should get ready to die. I told him, "well come on over already. I'll be here." But thanks to fate and the fact that he was with a friend and a woman he had been seeing nothing ever happened. I waited and waited until almost 3 A.M., but nobody showed up. The next day we found out that his girlfriend and buddy talked him out of the nefarious deed. Somehow they managed to get him to sober up a bit and presented the scenario that he would end up back in prison for many years. Apparently it worked and later that day he called to apologize. I didn't know it at the time but we would become good friends again a year or so later, continuing right up to the present. To be continued