realexplodingcat | (no subject)

On a pleasant sunny afternoon (let's say today) returning from my walk to the nearby convenient store to get a can of soda, I pause on the sidewalk along Avon Street when a huge pick-up truck with a large covered bed pulls up beside me. The truck is in decent shape and is driven by an average looking, white, middle-aged good ole boy with a mustache and twangy accent. The window is down and I'm assuming he needs directions.

"I'm from outta town," he says. "Where can I get a $20."

"You need change for a $20," I say, wondering why he didn't just break it at the convenient store he just passed.

"No, where can I get to 20?"

"You need to get to Route 20?"

"No!" He's getting a bit flabbergasted at this point. "Where can I get some Rock?!"

At that moment I realized "twenty" was slang I hadn't heard before. He continues:

"Drugs, man! Where can I get some drugs around here. Do you know where they sell them?"

"No, I don't actually know."

He seemed rather surprised that I didn't know. It's not like we sell pot in the produce section of grocery stores here and crack at the CVS, but this guy seems to think differently and I should know which local market will double coupons for ice and have buy-one-get-one-free sales on mushrooms.

"You know the neighborhoods in this town?" he asks. "Where do the blacks live?!"

I motioned vaguely toward the direction of Cherry Avenue saying, "Some live over there."

"Over thatta way?" And he drove away in a hurry, taking the first left off of Avon he found.

I continue on home and deliver the soda to my wife. I'm certainly not shocked to find someone seeking drugs in my town, but I'm still wondering why he thought I looked like such a reliable source of information that he was willing to pull over in the middle of the afternoon, on a busy street, in a decent part of town to ask me about getting a Twenty. Maybe he's desperate. Maybe I should've put a glazed look in my eye and done my best raspy old man voice, quoting Burroughs:

Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit - Kid, it was TASTY...

Threaded | Flat

Short for 420 (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/420_(drug_culture))? But that wouldn't explain the rock part.

For some reason, I find that extremely creepy...

how. very. strange. i wouldn't have known what he was talking about, either.

I can only assume that, you being LongHairedHippieScum (I don't think that he'd pick up on the GothScum distinction), you would know.

What's funny is that, when we were looking at houses in 1994, the realtor mentioned the Corner as the drug-purchasing area. Yes, the Corner, with all the sweet little UVA students. (Whether it still is, I don't know. I'm not up on who's got the two-for-one deals on crack either.)

You know, I think we were really lucky hanging out where we did and with who we did. I don't know about you, but I didn't really have any serious exposure to drugs or the drug scene until three years out of high school. Which is really strange, because now I see Levittown as some drugged out warzone, basically -- I daresay it's 4:20 there all the time. :)

That happened to me once as well. I was visiting my buddy Gregory up in the nightmarish flatlands North of Indy, and as I passed a gas station walking back to his house, this guy asked me from his pickup truck (rednecky of course) if I knew where he could score some meth.

"Sorry dude, I'm from out of town."

He thanked me for my time and drove away. Very odd.

And I too had very long hair at the time, though I'm not sure how much that affected his choice.