It was a wednesday. I was sitting in my intro to electronics class, looking for all the world like a blue-haired white boy deep in the throes of a coke binge. Nevermind I just had a cold, and the irritating habit of having paradoxical reactions to antihistimines (You might feel sleepy- I feel like I'm on cheap speed and vivarin.)
I did really have blue hair. That's hard to fake.
So the kid sitting next to me scrawls something on a sheet of paper, and nudges me a few times. About twenty seconds after he nudges me, I finally realize he wants me to look at the paper. I glance down, and spread underneath his electronics notes are two words "Cigz", and "Budz". I blink, confused, with no idea what he wanted. A little while later he realized that I wasn't making head nor tails of it and he wrote a little or in the middle, and motioned for me to circle one with a pencil.
I didn't care much for smoking anything-- but weed was definitely preferable to tobacco. So, with a shrug, I circled "Budz".
He informed me that that was good-- I could call him Budz, and if I ever needed some, he was the place to go. I nodded, filed away the information, and pretended I cared about the lecture for awhile. He eventually got my attention again, and asked me if I had a car. Yeah, I had a car, and I told him so. We talked about cars for a bit, and he asked if I could give him a ride into the city. He'd give me an eighth.
Now, I didn't smoke up much, but by my reckoning, that was an amount of weed one could cook with. The prospect of eating bitter brownies and getting high was very tempting. Maybe if I wasn't on three hours of sleep, Benadryl and amphetamine it wouldn't have seemed like such a great idea.
We could leave after class, I told him. It was my last class of the day, and maybe his, but he wasn't about to pass up the ride. A bit of meandering around campus-- getting our money, our cellphones, some food and gas, and we were off.
He seemed a decent guy-- he nodded politely to my babblings, and feigned interest in my music. We had a few things in similiar. We both went to the same school. We both breathed the same air. We made good time into the city-- it was a straight drive to the suburbs where I lived, where I knew the roads well enough to avoid the rush hour traffic. And then we were at 115th and Halsted, sitting at an Amoco, waiting for his guy to show up.
It was remarkably easy to act all cool-- I was crashing, and sitting in a chair, looking like I didn't care that we were in a neighborhood where they don't like scrawny white kids was unimportant. But I did have to go to the bathroom. I mumbled something about that to him, and he said I should wait. We didn't want to draw attention to us.
Ten irritatingly long minutes later, my hood was popped, a few pounds were stashed with the engine, and we were off, racing back towards my college, desperately trying to stay the speed limit.
It was hip-hop on the way back-- we passed a blunt back and forth to calm his nerves (entertainingly, he was far more uneasy than I). With only a handful of words passed between us (i mentioned we forgot to bring cheetos after hitting the curb in a toll plaza), we returned to home. He thanked me, told me he'd get me my stuff in a few days, and I headed back to my dorm room, vaugely curious as to the sentences for trafficking marihuana.
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