Cocaine: How I Turned My Pleasure into Business

Jeff got the stuff from a fat Jewish kid who had a connection in the Bronx. Larry?that was the Jewish kid's name?had a dirty red afro and listened to Grateful Dead bootlegs while he weighed it out. There was a slow, underwater look to all his movements, which was strange considering how much of the product he was sampling.

It wasn't supposed to be like this at the University of Chicago. I had pictured cardigan sweaters, and long walks through autumnal paths with intense, bookish women. I had imagined deep philosophical discussions with avuncular, bearded professors in shabby tweeds and Birkenstocks. What I'd gotten instead was a fat drug dealer, sweating under a solitary bulb while he cut cocaine off a kilo brick. I was helping to addict my fellow students, just so I could stay in school another semester. I had always thought drugs were fun, until I started selling them. It was the school's fault, I kept telling myself. If only they hadn't lured me to their big prestigious university with all those scholarships and financial aid, only to tell me the summer before my sophomore year they were cutting my aid by three grand. When I'd applied I was homeless, living in a friend's basement. All I had were the savings from a summer job and a small settlement from an accident I'd had as a kid, both of which had already been figured in. I'd argued with the financial aid office, written letters and reminded them that I was on the Dean's List and that this amounted to academic bait-and-switch. In the end they restored some of my aid, but it didn't matter much. I was still screwed.

It started simply enough. Jeff and I were doing lines one night and I mentioned my financial troubles. He said that the stuff he got was so pure that if I bought an eightball I could cut half of it back up to an eighth, sell it for a nice profit and still get a numb nose out of the deal. It sounded good, so I agreed. Jeff fronted me the drugs and that weekend I sold the eightball to a freshman at a Bangles concert. Even after paying Jeff back I had made a nice profit, something like a hundred dollars for two minutes of work. I was in business.

From there, it was easy. If I needed books, or new tubes for my guitar amp, I sold a few grams, made my profit, and still had enough left over to keep me wired through the weekend. Before long, Jeff and I were known as having the best drugs on campus. We were successful because we weren't greedy. We only stepped on the blow 20 or 30 percent, where it could have easily withstood twice that. Sometimes we didn't cut it at all, and simply wrapped up a giant rock for some lucky person to dive into.

I had rules. First, I never carried more than a gram or two on me at any time, with the idea that if I ever got busted I could convince the cops that it wasn't intended for resale. Also, I never sold directly to strangers. When people I didn't know wanted to score I always denied being a dealer but told them that I knew somebody, and that in fact I was hoping to score some too, and that if we pooled our money I could probably get us a better deal. I'd take their money and run off, pull the stuff from my sock or money belt or wherever, and come back with two triangular envelopes carefully cut from the glossy pages of porno magazines and folded expertly so that a large breast or spread vagina was prominently featured. I'd let the buyer choose which one he or she wanted, and take the other. I never, under any circumstances, partied with the customers. As soon as the deal was done, so was I.

Jeff was more open about it. Sometimes, on the weekends, there would be a line of eager students fidgeting outside his bedroom door. He made a lot more money than I did, but I thought he was crazy for being so obvious.

Around this time I began dating a girl from the local high school, a 16-year-old brick shithouse named Gretchen, who smoked a pipe?a real pipe, with tobacco?and was legally independent from her parents. Gretchen lived in a big apartment with another teenager, a lissome bisexual named Willow. Gretchen was a waitress at a local diner and used to throw her tips under the bed. She lifted the sheet one day and showed me. It was an enormous pile, obscene. There must have been a few thousand dollars, all in coins and singles. I asked her why she just left it there and Gretchen shrugged and said she had no time to count small bills or change.

Gretchen loved her cocaine, and had her own source, which was nice: it meant that she wasn't just using me for my drugs. I did lines off her tits, her ass, and she'd sprinkle a little on my balls and lick it off, and then we'd fuck in a sweaty stupor for hours. I once even rubbed a little on her asshole because she wanted it up the pooper, but the coke made the head of my cock numb and I began to lose the erection, and we finally gave up after a few minutes of trying to stuff my flaccid member up her toilet.

Sometimes when I left her place I'd take some money from under the bed. It was never much?two or nine dollars?but I pretended I was being paid for sex and that turned me on. Then Jeff began dating Willow, and we'd all party together, but we could never achieve our true goal, which was to get the two of them together and have one big orgy. We'd all sit around, doing lines and drinking and smoking, and at some point Willow would shimmer off to her room without a word and after 20 minutes or so Jeff would get up and shrug and follow her in there. As soon as they would leave Gretchen would pull open her shirt and lean back, and I'd grab the baggy and straw and go to work on those tits.

Gretchen was bold. One night she took me to a local Thai restaurant, and as soon as we sat down she stood her menu up like a screen and cut lines on the plate and did them right there. I was so freaked out that I broke it off with her a few days later. Apart from drugs and sex there wasn't a whole lot for us to do or talk about, anyway. She took the news well, and we even had one last fling on her old iron bed, but I didn't take any money that time.

It was bad enough knowing that I was contributing to the moral and physical decline of my fellow students, but when I finally stopped dealing it was because of The Look. When they know you're selling drugs, people look at you differently. It's instantaneous and irrevocable. I knew that my peers, my respected academic colleagues, thought I was a scumbag. And they were probably right.

Jeff had no such problems; he continued to deal, but in a more low-key way. I began to stay in more, and do more drugs. I was mixing crank with my cocaine, and even came up with a name for it: croke. I would be so hungover in the mornings that I would have to do a line to make my 8:30 Spanish class.

A few weeks before the end of the school year I woke up in my room and looked around. There were baggies, bottles and cigarette butts everywhere. The girl snoring next to me was some pig from Wisconsin, a plump little thing who had vacuumed plenty of my drugs up her snout the night before but wouldn't let me fuck her. She kept saying things like "sex is dirty, sex is disgusting," while I had four fingers up her twat and one of her nipples in my mouth. I knew right then, that morning, that I wouldn't be coming back, that my career at Chicago was over. Financially, I was worse off than before. I had used my drug proceeds to pay some of my tuition bill but my savings were all gone, and I had no job lined up, no plans, nothing to look forward to.

I also knew that I wouldn't be doing any more cocaine for a long, long time.

I woke the pig up with my elbow, and she snorted.

"What day is it?" I asked her.

"Saturday," she mumbled.

"Not the day of the week," I snapped, "the month. What's the date?"

"Um, May 12, I think. Why?"

"It's my birthday," I said.