BUSTED!
It wasn't until my plane touched down in Keflavik that it sunk in that
I'd gotten and, more im****tantly, I wouldn't be going back. I'd had
about five hours of sleep in the past two days, but the nervous tension
that lingered was still powerful enough to overcome the combined forces
of exhaustion and six hours of non-stop drinking since boarding my
flight in Vancouver. I sat at the 24-hour air****t bar as the plane
refueled, and made small talk with some overweight, zit-faced kid from
Bum****, Quebec. I ordered a couple double J=E4egermeisters for us, and
wondered when I'd see Yummy Girl again.
"Yes sir, first time on da jet plane," he explained with a thick
Quebecois accent and a genuine sense of golly-gee-whiz that was, at the
same time, amusing and pathetic. "Never been hout of Bum****, 'cept
for da couple trip to da Montreal," he prattled on as I ordered a
couple of double Jaegermeisters for us and wondered when I'd see
Yummy Girl again.
"Is that right?" I said, more than asked. I picked up my drink and
shoved the other one toward my new friend, "where you goin',
kid?"
"Hamsterdam," he said, and a huge grin broke out over his face, and
his eyes got big as Frisbees. "Yes sir, Ham-ster-dam! I'm gonna get
*****, some fore me, and smoke some ha****sh, yes sir!"
"Well hot spit. Good for you kid." I laughed, raising my glass, and
extending it toward him. "Here's to Ham-ster-dam, gash and hash."
"Yes sir... gash, and hash," he giggled, and drained the Jaeger.
"And where do you going Mister?" he asked as he shook his head,
winced, and squinted at the strange tasting concoction he'd just
swallowed.
"Where do I going?" I wondered aloud. "London, I suppose. For
now, anyway." I responded, and waved the waitress over.
"Do you live dare, hin London, where da Queen, she lives."
"No, I'm going there to hide from the police."
The first time I almost got busted for drugs was in my hometown,
Thunder Bay, when I was 17 years old. Four friends and I were heading
home from a football party when all of us, including the driver, passed
out at a red light at 4:00 in the morning. I don't remember any of it,
but my friends later told me the story.
I had a quarter-ounce of hash stashed in my sock, and a half-ounce of
****y Mexican ditch weed in the front pocket of my jeans when the cops
dragged our asses into the local drunk tank. When the cop at the desk
told me to empty my pockets, I reached in, started to pull out the bag
of weed, realized it was a bad move, and tried to put it back. Fat
chance.
I woke up the next morning, and realized I was in jail (not the first
time that had happened). Reaching into my pocket, I discovered the weed
was gone. Had I lost it, smoked it all at the party, or was I BUSTED?
Then I checked my sock, and found the hash was still there. I started
to scream, and kept screaming for a good 10 minutes until a very
aggravated cop rapped his billy club on the bars of my cage and said,
"Shut up, Myers, or we'll leave you in there all day!" Ah yes, Melvin
Myers. They had found the ID I always carried with me in case... well,
in case of just such an event. I shut up and waited patiently. And
smiled.
They released me in the early afternoon on a promise to appear two days
later for pictures and prints. (For some reason, the cop who usually
handled this duty wasn't in that day.) "Sure, I'll be back. You betcha,
Sgt. Stadenko." Yeah, right! They never saw me again. (Well, actually
they did, three months later, but they didn't put it together and
that's a different story for another day). However, they did put the
fear into me.
THE DARK SIDE
As the years rolled by, the novelty of scamming welfare checks -- just
to hand them over to slumlords and brewery owners -- wore off, and my
greed negated the fear. So, along with everybody else in Vancouver
who's too weird to work, too lazy to be legit, and too smart to be
poor, I started growing pot in my basement. I had a good run going for
a while. I was harvesting no less than 15 pounds every six to eight
weeks, and selling it at $2,500 (minimum) a pound. After expenses, I
was clearing $15,000 a month. Minimum. Tax free. With that kind of
money to be made, you can see why Vancouver is the "grow-house capital"
of the world.
It's been said -- and I believe it -- that marijuana is the single
biggest agricultural commodity in B.C. Various law enforcement agencies
claim there are 2,000 grow houses operating at any given time in
Greater Vancouver, but my experience tells me it's probably five times
that. Everybody in B.C. who has a healthy lack of respect for the law,
and has grown tired of grinding it out at ****y jobs just to pay the
bills while never getting ahead, has thought about getting a little
crop going. Some people are satisfied to supplement their income by
growing three to 10 plants, while some, including myself, say, "****
that -- I want to make some real money."
I got into growing because I had to make some real money. In the summer
of '96 Yummy Girl and I started the Something Old Something New
Outdoor Film Festival on an abandoned lot that we leased on Granville
Street, across from Eaton's. We buried the lot in 5000 tons of sand,
named it Granville Beach, and every Saturday night we projected an old
film classic against the side of the Vancouver Building. Everyone
agreed it was a brilliant idea and we were going to make a big fat wad
of cash. I lost $15,000.
I had friends from college who were growing and making tons of easy
cash and they had often offered to help me get set up. They were all
driving new cars while I was still roller-blading around town in the
summer, riding the buses when it was wet and puking out the windows of
cabs when I was too drunk to do either. I was always tempted to "come
to the dark side" but I still had the fear in me from my close call
in Thunder Bay. But the thought of spending the next year or two paying
off my debts from Granville Beach was more than I could stomach, so I
finally acquiesced.
I spent Christmas Eve that year bagging my first crop. It weighed in at
22.5 pounds, and my friends told me that nobody had ever pulled a crop
that size from the system I was using. A new record. A star was born.
Almost all the pot grown in B.C. is sold to Americans, who can easily
double the $2,500-$3,000 a pound they pay by getting it across the
border and down to California. I was introduced to some American buyers
-- friends of friends, so to speak -- and we quickly arranged a deal.
We met in the parking lot of the Trout Lake Community Center; me
carrying a hockey bag stuffed full of pot, and the Yanks with a small
backpack full of $20 bills. I got in their rented Grand Am, and we
drove to a house not far away to weigh the pot, count the cash, and go
about our merry ways.
I'd like to be able to spin you a tale of nail-biting drama about my
first big drug deal -- but there really wasn't anything dramatic about
it. If the Yanks were going to pull a gun on me and rip me off, there
wasn't anything that I could do about it, so I just relaxed, counted my
money, and walked out the door with just over $55,000 cash in my
backpack -- a stack of 20s, two-and-a-half-feet tall.
I walked to a gas station, called a cab, and headed to Yummy Girl's
place, where we spilled the cash all over her bed and ****ed on it
until we laughed ourselves to sleep. The next day I started to pay off
all my debts and 10 days later Yummy Girl and I were rolling around on
the beaches of the Dominican Republic, gambling in the casinos, and
drinking champagne with a bed full of hookers in the Santa Domingo
Hilton. Living the dream. Times were good. Times were really good.
After the first crop came in, I realized I was in business, so like any
good businessman, I came up with a marketing plan. Well, more like an
advertising gimmick. I had a roommate who dealt weed when I was going
to college, and I would pick up a few extra bucks by middling for him
to my friends on campus. They were always asking, "What kind of weed is
it?" so we started to invent all kinds of goofy names for the stuff to
increase its value. One month it was Ethiopian-Alligator-Swampweed, the
next month it was Mongolian-Tropical-Rainforest-Wild-Pigweed.
Whatever... it worked.
Now that I was growing my own, I wanted a hook -- an angle, something
that would make my product stand out from the competition. It came to
me one night while I was watching The Killing Fields: POL POT! I had a
bunch of stickers made with a picture of Pol Pot smoking a joint and
saying, "Killer weed, dudes!" Next to the graphic was a statement from
Mr. Pot that read, "I have personally developed this strain of
high-grade, Cambodian, skull-****ing weed for my friends in the
Marijuana Mines of East Vancouver. I hope you will enjoy it. Sincerely,
Pol Pot." I placed one of those stickers on every half-pound Glad
freezer bag I sold, and upped my price by $200 a pound.
A TASTE FOR COKE
Robin Williams once said that cocaine is God's way of telling you
you've got too much money -- and brother, can I attest to the validity
of that statement. I started getting into "the ****" in a bad way when
Yummy Girl was away on vacation. Now, you would think a bright boy with
a pocket... no... a suitcase full of cash would be able to find some
way to keep himself amused. I certainly always thought so, but I was
wrong, and I paid a big price for it.
I developed a taste for coke when I was living with a friend who dealt
the stuff. He'd regularly come home, dump a kilo on the table, and
announce, "We better sample this stuff." Well, twist my rubber arm. We
sat up for 24 hours one day and free-based 21 grams -- I couldn't think
for a week. In the two months Yummy Girl was away, I don't think I
thought at all.
My taste for coke, coupled with my innate knowledge of which end of the
bottle to use, nearly did me in that summer. I finally admitted to
myself I was getting hooked when I found myself coming to consciousness
in a skid-row back alley with some skanky old hooker reaching into my
pocket (and I'm pretty sure she wasn't doing so for the sake of giving
me a $5 handjob).
That was the kick in the head I needed to bring me back to some
semblance of reality. I headed home and when I opened the door to check
on my little babies, they were all completely shriveled. Dead, dead,
dead. Fifty grand gone up in a puff of crack. I'd been on the pipe for
five days.
THAT SMELL
Vegas is the last place someone trying to deal with a substance abuse
problem should want to be, but when my friend Mr. Big Thumbs suggested
a quick trip to Sin City, I figured a week in the sun would do me some
good. And it did. We spent a mostly uneventful week getting drunk,
gambling, and lounging by the pool. Yummy Girl got back to Vancouver
two weeks later, and gave me the stability I needed to stay clean and
get back to work.
Losing a crop, combined with all the cash I'd blown on coke, had a very
serious effect on my cash flow. I wasn't exactly broke -- far from it
-- but I was starting to think about shutting down my operation and
doing something legit with my ill-gotten booty. I wanted to have enough
cash to explore a couple of business ideas I had, and still be able to
live comfortably -- for a while at least, if those ideas didn't fly. So
I decided to try to increase my crop by 35 percent, by budding 100
plants instead of the usual 60 to 65. It was a mistake. Almost.
When you're growing that much pot in your basement, with neighbors only
12 feet away on either side, you can't afford to have that heavy,
skunky smell escaping. I've gone past houses that were so poorly
equipped with the technology necessary to mask the odor, I could smell
them a block away. I always laughed at these "stupid hippies" for their
lack of professionalism and ignorance of technology, but when I crawled
out of a cab at 3:00 a.m. on a drunken night two days before harvest,
and was greeted with a big waft of "that smell" coming from my house --
I stopped laughing.
In order to get the smell out of the basement, and away from
discriminating noses, I was first filtering it through an
ozone-creating machine, which sent it up the chimney with the aid of a
powerful industrial fan. The fan was strong enough to blow the
chemically scented air high above the house so that the wind would
catch it, dissipate it, and send it clear of nosy neighbors. After
staggering around in a drunken haze, checking my equipment and making
sure it was all working properly, I decided the best thing to do was
shut off all the lights (14 1,000-watt lamps), spray three cans of Glad
rose-scented air freshener into the exhaust room and go to bed.
The next day I once again examined all my equipment, thinking I might
have just been whiskey-dumb and missed something. No, nothing wrong
with my stuff; I was just growing more pot than my system could handle
-- a victim of my own success.
Bringing in a crop is a huge chore, and I always used no less than 10
people to help with the cut-down. Of all the times to get busted,
cut-down day is the worst. Not only are you four or five days away from
ca****ng out, but you're also running the risk of having 10 other people
busted with you.
If you're lucky enough to have a fireplace, cut-down day is the time to
make full use of it. Cover half the neighborhood with the smell of wood
smoke, pour a half gallon of essential oils around the yard, and you
should be pretty much protected against any smell escaping from the
basement. Unless the cops come knocking on your door.
IS THAT YOUR WHEELCHAIR?
The cutting crew was working away downstairs, and I was in the kitchen
frying up a huge pan of onions and garlic and cooking a huge pot of
curry, when the doorbell rang. I opened the basement, and told
everyone, "shut the **** up. There's someone at the door."
I had absolutely no intention of opening the door but when I looked out
my bedroom window and saw a cop snooping around the side of my house, I
knew I'd have to face him. They weren't there to bust me, I was sure of
that. If they were, they wouldn't be politely ringing the doorbell and
waiting for an answer. They'd kick the ****er in, wave guns around, and
scream at everyone, "Get face down on the ****in' floor, and put your
****in' hands on top of your ****in' heads, you ****in' mother****ers!"
So I opened the door, smiled real sweet, and said, "Hello officer, what
can I do for you?"
"Hi, sorry to bother you, sir," the cop apologized. "Do you know
anything about this wheelchair?"
"What ****in' wheelchair, you stupid ****in' pig," I thought to myself.
"This wheelchair on your lawn," the cop continued, as if he'd read my
thoughts -- or at least half of them.
I stepped out on the stairs (making sure to close the door behind me),
looked toward the street, and -- sure as hell -- there was a wheelchair
sitting on my lawn. Beside the chair was another cop who was talking to
a guy in another wheelchair (What is this? The Special Olympics
training grounds?), presumably the same goody-goody cripple who called
the cops in the first place.
"Beats the hell out of me, officer. It wasn't there when I got home an
hour ago," I answered, genuinely perplexed.
What the ****? Did a cripple run into some faith healer who gave him
one of those "GET UP OUT OF YOUR WHEELCHAIR AND WALK, BROTHER! THE GOOD
LORD HAS CURED YOU!" sermons in front of my house?
"You didn't see...," the cop started to ask.
"Some guy crawling around on his belly, like an alligator?" I laughed.
"No, can't say I have, officer."
Bad career move -- gotta learn to respect authority , or at least keep
my smart mouth shut. The cop gave me a dirty look. "Honest, officer," I
said, suppressing my laughter. "I don't have a clue what this is all
about."
"Very strange. Okay, well, we'll try to figure it out," said the cop
who, to my great relief, started walking down the stairs. But suddenly
he stopped -- and turning back to me, asked, "What about the basement?"
"Basement? What about the basement?"
"Do you have the whole house to yourself, or does someone else have the
basement suite? Could this guy in the wheelchair be visiting his friend
in the basement?"
"What? Do you mean -- could this guy have gotten out of his wheelchair
and dragged himself, like some WWII dogface trying to get through no
man's land, across the lawn to the back door -- you donut-munching,
flat-footed, wife-beating ****wit? Is that what you're asking me,
Sherlock? Get out of here already; you're giving me the heebies!" is
what I wanted to say.
"No... no, I've got the whole place to myself," is what I did say.
Sherlock shrugged his shoulders and made his way to the sidewalk to
confer with Dr. Watson, as I locked the door, and headed to the fridge
for a beer... well, okay, two beers.
BUSTED
That little incident could've put the fear right back into me, but I'd
heard plenty of tales of growers having close calls, only to carry on,
business as usual, and never get busted. So I said to myself, "Two more
crops -- just two more crops -- and I'm outta here." Once again my
greed negated the fear.
A month later, while Yummy Girl and I were on the Oregon coast for the
weekend, my grow house got broken into. "Junkies," I figured. Either
that or punk kids looking for beer money. Whoever it was, they
completely trashed my house, turning it upside down looking for
something they could pawn for another fix, or a weekend piss-up at the
Mighty Niagara.
They must have **** their pants when they pried open the basement door
and were blinded by 14,000 watts of artificial sun****ne. My crop was
still six weeks away from being harvestable, and there wasn't a single
bud on my little babies. You couldn't have gotten high if you smoked
the whole lot of them, but the bastards took away all they could carry
anyway -- which was less than one-third of the crop of about 60 plants.
I knew that when the morons tried to sell their ill-gotten booty to
someone with even half a brain in his head, they would have been told
it was all for naught -- "You should have waited another six weeks, you
idiots. Then it would have been worth tens of thousands."
'Grow rips' were becoming more and more common and I'd heard
several stories about poor independents, like myself, who got hit by
thugs. When those ****ers come they not only want your crop, they want
ALL your cash, and they'll kick the **** out of you and anyone else
who's in the house at the time, including wives and girlfriends,
until you take them to it.
At this point, I had three options: shut down (only six weeks away from
another $50,000); move out and keep the place running as a "ghost
house"; or stay put for a firsthand crash course in paranoia.
I told Yummy Girl she was not to come within a kilometer of the house,
fortified the place and installed an alarm system that would ring my
special pager (which I carried all the time, even when I was in the
house) if anyone tried to enter the place. If I started to hear a beep,
beep, beep from the pager, it meant one of two things: the thieves had
come back, or I was BUSTED! I also bought a couple cans of
bear-strength pepper spray, but that wasn't enough to cure my paranoia,
so I bought myself a gun.
I still don't know exactly why I bought the gun. It's not like I was
going to blow some guy's head off and risk a murder conviction for the
sake of a crop. And what if the cops did come around and kick in my
door while I was out of earshot, in the basement, doing my chores? I'd
hear the pager go off, grab my gun, and point it at whoever started
climbing down the stairs. Bad career move, dude. The cops had blown
away a kid a kid a couple years earlier for having a Walkman in his
hands and I was going to point a gun at them? I can't even say the gun
seemed like a good idea at the time, but it seemed like the thing to do
all the same. Things were getting weird.
I was in Home Depot, shopping for some plant food, when the most
horrifying sound I'd heard since the time I came home early from school
and caught my dad poking my mom - BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
I'd fallen off the wagon and gotten back into my dirty crack habit the
night before, so my nerves were already shattered when the pager went
off. I was literally trembling when I jumped in my car, and made like
Jacques Villineuve to my house. When I arrived, there were so many cops
that it looked like all-you-can-eat hour at Tim Hortons'.
I sailed right past, waved goodbye, and headed straight to my lawyer's
office. "As your lawyer, I would advise you to get the **** out of the
country for a while." He didn't have to say it twice.
I paged Yummy Girl and entered 911 to let her know. She called me right
back and I told her, "I'm busted. Time to get out of Dodge." I picked
her up, drove downtown, and checked into the Hotel Vancouver (Hey, if
you gotta go -- go in style).
I sat in the room, chain-smoking Marlboros, trying to figure who ratted
me out. I was hoping it was the pricks who'd B&Ed me, as that would
mean the cops probably wouldn't have a warrant out with my name on it.
That would be a good thing, because it would be easy for me to get out
of the country. Ultimately, it didn't make any difference if they had a
warrant out for me or not, because I was going to have to run the
gauntlet, if there was one.
Knowing that the cops and their lap-dog friends in the media love to
make a big deal out of every stupid little grow-house bust, I tuned
into BCTV to see how they were spinning the story. When I heard anchor
Tony Parsons go on about a "major marijuana grow-house bust," I knew
the cops didn't give a rat's ass about me. If they had wanted me, they
would have waited until I showed up instead of kicking in the doors in
time to make the 6:00 news.
It was a made-for-TV bust -- not that I'm complaining. I was, in fact,
laughing; secure in the knowledge I was going to get away and I was
still laughing 20 minutes later when I picked up the phone, ordered a
bottle of champagne to celebrate my good fortune and called my best
friend in London to let him now I was going to be paying him an
unscheduled visit very soon.
The next day I bade a Harlequin Romance-style farewell to Yummy Girl at
Vancouver International, complete with teary sobs, a parking lot
quickie, and half-muttered pledges of fidelity, undying love, and a
joyous reunion in London when she finished school.
As my plane soared over the North Shore Mountains, while the sun set
over the Pacific Ocean on a cold, wet, miserable day, I looked down on
the city that had been my home for 14 years and realized that I might
never again set foot in my country.
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