About a Truck Part 1

The truck was a piece of work. It was this huge beige Chevy Scottsdale that had received more then its fair share of cuts and bruises. The sides of the bed were starting to rust through, right above the step. There were flowers growing out of the dirt stuck in-between the bed and the plywood. Not to mention that I had run into a handful of street signs and trees, thus inflicting a handful of dents and scratches. Mongo, as I called her, only reached about 50 mph on a good day. If I happened to be going down hill, the weight of the ol’ heap would take it up to about 65 mph. Once I got her up to 70mph;I bragged about it quite often. The bench seat in the middle was intended to seat up to three, but I was once able to cram about six. This is something that I don’t recommend. The glove compartment was held shut with duct tape. This didn’t really work that well, and the drawer used to explode open whenever it saw fit. Then, of course, there are the doors. There’s not really anything wrong with the doors, other than the fact that you have to shut them very hard. I’m sorry, that’s an understatement; you have to slam them with all your might. I have a theory that the few electronic parts that the truck had could have been run off all the energy that went into slamming that door. If we could find a way to harness it, that is.
My parking job was particularly good that time. Both wheels were only slightly on the curb, and I parked in what seemed to be a straight line. I had managed to secure a small corner of a cull de sac on some San Anselmo backstreet right near what was Maloca at the time. I nudged the door open and leaped out of the truck, then I proceeded to throw the door shut with both hands. Slam! Scott came walking up in a ratty pair of blue jeans that he had drawn all over, no shirt, no shoes, and a beat up green skateboard that looked like it had been pieced together from three other beat up skateboards.
“What’s up, kid?” He raised his hand to give me five.
” Not much, just stopped by to say hey.” I gave him five, and fumbled over the remaining sequence of his handshake. In the end I decided that, like me, Scott didn’t do complex handshakes. The source of our confusion was trying to figure out if the other guy was gonna try to make a snapping noise, hit fists, make a gesture like smoking pot, or something else of the sort.
“Hey!”
“Hey!” I blurted back. Scott gave me a perplexed look for a moment then punched me in the shoulder to let me know that he was about to say something profound.
“Did you want to get those now? I have them inside” He said to me in his business voice.
“UmâÂ?¦ yeah, sure. I guess.” I said, apathetically
Scott led me down the driveway, into his house. Well, it’s not actually his house. The house-or should I say shack?- was rented out by our friends Mike and Rachael, but they let him use their house as home base. Scott and I both tiptoed down the red lava rock path, because we were both barefoot, and opened the gate to the house. It was a small house with lots of stuff in it, mostly unpacked boxes and clothes on the floor. Scott opened the front door, stepped into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and pulled out a drawer.
“How many are you giving me? Four or five?”
” I was gonna give you four. Don’t worry, you can get like $150-$200 for these. Maybe even $400, if you sell singles. I saw them being made myself. They all have about 150 in each of them.” He was back in the business voice again.
” I’m just gonna sell them whole, I want to get rid of them quick. Fuck selling singles, dude. Did Grace make them?”
“Yeah, how’d you guess?”
” That’s who you bought them from, I just figured. How many mics?”
” I’m not sure. Like, a lot though. These kids hooked us up fat. It’s really good. hella clean.”
“Do you know the family?”
“I’m pretty sure that it’s Fluff of some sort. Silver, I think.”
” Silver’s not bad, at least it’s not some Lavender or Amber shit”
Scott owed me $400 dollars from a mushroom deal that went sour about 6 months before. He paid me in LSD. I hate LSD. Both Scott and I have taken, and sold our fair share of the stuff. The one difference is that Scott still takes it periodically. He still thinks that the stuff reveals the cosmic, esoteric secrets of the universe to him. Personally, I think that the stuff is just a waste of time. I had a lot of fun on it for a while, but seeing shit that isn’t there gets old after a while. The phenomenon of Scott paying a debt is so rare that I didn’t want to squander it, so I took what I could get from him. Now, it’s not that Scott is a liar or a deadbeat, he just doesn’t have a job. unless you consider selling acid a job. He doesn’t want anything to do with the rat race; it’s alien to him. He’s an optimist radical in a pessimistic world. The guy’s always speaking some political rhetoric, or hatching some plan to ‘stick it to the man’. Most of us who went to school with him just start to tune him out after a while.
” So what have you been doing with yourself?” I inquired.
” Hella shit, dude. Networking with mad kids, graffiti, writing poetry, skating. I can land ‘360 Big Spins’ now.”
“Really?” I tried, desperately, to act like I knew what that was.
” Yeah, dude. Check it out”
Scott slid the drawer back in the freezer, and we walked out into the driveway. Scott hopped on the skateboard, shoeless, and did some trick that involved jumping, spinning, and him falling off the board. If falling off a skateboard is considered a trick now-a-days, then I’m entering the X-games.
“I can usually bust out with them. Not today though, I guess.”
“Dude, it’s better then I can do. I can’t bust any tricks. Besides, you don’t even have shoes on”
“I thought that I’d seen you bust heel flips before”
“Well, yeah, I can heel flip sometimes. But I can’t do anything else” I said, reluctantly.
Scott kicked up his skateboard into his hand, and we went back into the house. I opened the freezer, and pulled out the drawer with the vials of LSD. I was shocked. There must have been about 30 vials in that drawer, and who knows how many he had already sold. Who knows how many he had already taken? The last time I had seen him, he told me about how he had taken nearly a whole vial of the stuff and saw his own face morph into that of the devil. Lesson number one: avoid mirrors while on psychedelic drugs. He had told me that he wasn’t going to take any more acid after that experience. I’d heard him say that before. Bukowski tried to quit drinking a few times, too. The liquid acid was inside of bottles of liquid breath freshener, and even mixed with some to give it a minty taste. There were four different colors to chose from: red, blue, green, and clear. I grabbed two reds, a blue, and a green. I swear, these hoodlums are getting smarter every year. Scott was once hiding his drugs inside of a boombox. What was amazing was that, for some reason, the boombox would still play music with four ounces of assorted drugs inside. Smarter every year, I’m telling you.
“Are they different flavors?” I asked
“No, they’re all the same. Me and Grace just used food coloring”
“Damn, that would have cool. Fuckin’ cinnamon flavor and shit.”
I wasn’t intending to take any of this acid, so it didn’t really matter. The idea just seemed neat. Although, there is something a little alarming about candy flavored drugs. No, I was intending to sell this acid, something that I used to do quite a bit. I was hoping that I’d, at least, be able to raise the $400 dollars that I had lost on the mushroom deal. Not that I really cared about that. Only $150 of the money had been mine, the rest came from ‘investors’. In retrospect, I think that it’s good that I didn’t get the mushrooms. What was I going to do with a half-pound of mushrooms, other than get arrested?
“Alright, bro, I think I’m gonna take off. I gotta go to band practice.”
“Oh, cool. You guys playing anywhere any time soon?”
” Yeah, dude, we’re playing at the Cocadrie in the city. In like two weeks, I think.”
I had been playing bass in this Thrash band called Headless, right around this time. That is another story all together.
“Cool, maybe I can come see you play. We should get together and kick it sometime, kid.” Scott punched me on the shoulder as he said this.
“Yeah, totally. Say ‘what’s up’ to Mike, when you see him.” I said, as I gave the guy a hug and struggled with the handshake once again.
I shoved the foil wad with the vials into my pocket, and walked out the gate. I hopped down the driveway, bitching about how much the little rocks hurt my barefeet the whole time. As I walked up to climb up into the old heap, I noticed some big clumps of mud and grass that were stuck to the underside of the wheelwells. It was left over from some mischief that Scott and I had gotten into earlier that year�