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...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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

twenty refers to the cost of a vial, bag, or rock of crack. i don't know the amount that would entail, but i'm guessing it's a standard amount for a user to buy.

more drug slang starting with the letter T

I did a Google search that turned up a long list of drug slang (http://surrealism.50megs.com/slang2.htm). Twenty = rock = crack cocaine. Twenty-five apparently = hallucinogen. Don't know why these numbers are associated with those drugs though.

(deleted comment)

Thanks for the tip. As for 20...I'm now guessing the number might have something to do with a standard size or price. Just a guess. I wonder if NIST (http://www.nist.gov/) could confirm that ;)

i suppose you think i should've smuggled myself in with the woodchucks to find out?

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

It is. But that's part of life, as I see it. All manner of creepy things are happening around us all the time, sometimes involving people of the most average appearance and demeanor. Most of the time we never have an opportunity to notice this activity in our daily routine. It becomes creepy to us only when it temporarily (hopefully only temporarily) intrudes on our average day.

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.)

boy was wearing black dockers, white new balance sneakers, and a grey tshirt. hair was in a ponytail and he had his glasses on... so he probably didn't look terribly goth--he looked more like a geek on casual day at the office.

i see people "hanging out" on the corners of monticello and avon, monticello and 2nd, and near the IGA on cherry very late at night... alone or in pairs. sometimes the same people, sometimes not. it's suspicious, yet not incriminating, activity.

and there's an odd man with a big cross pendant who occasionally tries to sell me a battered old walkman or batteries when i walk past the convienence store near bolling and avon.

It's the hair, I think. To many people around here, long hair=party guy. That was the LongHairedHippieScum reference. :)

And yes, your boy should have offered him catnip. :D

you know, i got to thinking about it... boy was dressed *really* casually in older clothes that hang a little on him (from heftier times) and it was the middle of the day. i doubt many people *would* assume he was just taking a break from coding. he probably looked like an unemployed hippie boy.

of course, boy should have replied, "no, but i can get you a nickel bag of primo catnip."

monster kitty says he'll take you up on that primo nip. he's pretty sure he knocked a nickel under the fridge somewhere ;)

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. :)

Indeed. Somehow we remained isolated from the drug culture in high school. It had to have been there. The girl (5 years older than me) who used to supervise my brother and I after school before my parents got home used to claim to be quite aware of people dealing in the Neshaminy schools. But I never got wind of any of that in school. Wasn't until my first year of college that I actually personally knew someone who used & abused. My first roommate was a user & dealer for the rich kids at school. And now I see drugs everywhere, or at least I am aware that almost every kid in grade school these days knows someone who uses or deals. Maybe it wasn't so unusual for me to have been stopped on the street like that, considering several of my other peers, even if they don't use drugs, are probably well aware of those who do. Except for one particular stoner acquaintance here, I'm still fairly isolated from the drug scene.

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.

Seems to me there are a lot of rednecks abusing drugs out there. Clearly the "war on drugs" isn't getting the right people. Of course, I don't think the conservative war mongers would want to imprison their largest constituency.