To deal or not to deal?

By The Brute

To deal or not to deal, that is the question.

More people than you think sell drugs, be it pot, coke, speed, ice, crack, E’s or some other deadly concoction mixed together in a backyard lab.

It’s easy money but it is fraught with many dangers: getting caught by the cops and arrested is the closest to mind but you can also get addicted to your wares as they are so ready to hand, and almost free.

You can have your house invaded, get yourself bashed and your dirty, hard-earned cash and merchandise stolen.

But no matter the dangers, it is still a very attractive profession for those amongst us too dumb or lazy to get a proper job or career …

When I was 17-years-old, before I started making any decent money working, I came across an idea to earn myself a bit of cash on the side.

I never had any desire to go to university or Tafe or even to get an apprenticeship; all I wanted to do was have fun. A paper route or a job at Woolies meant limited fun; instead I started selling pot.

I didn’t go out with the aim of being a drug dealer as such, but it sort of fell in my lap one summer; I still had another year at school to go so I was living the good life.

My old man was not much of a gardener or handy man and rarely paid attention to anything that didn’t concern him in the household; he was from the ‘old school’.

It was easy to get things past him, from school reports to knocking off the dollar coins from his bookie’s bag which paid for my Saturday night vodka hip flasks.

Maybe he knew and didn’t care or he was just too busy with his two days of work and his half dozen games of golf a week.

Whatever it was, it was all good for me, but on the odd occasion he would punish me in the strangest of ways.

I remember vividly him calling me into the backyard and saying: “Son, I’ve got a little job for you.”

I was fourteen and I cringed. It was the school holidays, the surf was pumping and it was nice and hot.

“I want you to paint the back fence for me,” he said.

I blew up: “You’re kiddin’ aren’t ya? The yard’s fifty foot long and it’s a bloody wooden fence, that’ll take me weeks.”

Ray didn’t ask much of me and he got a bit cranky.

“You’ll paint the thing and be happy I don’t make you get a job for the fuckin’ summer. Now here’s the paint, the brush is in the shed, get to bloody work.”

I worked like a machine and got it done surprisingly quickly. A few days later I called him into the backyard and said, “I’ve finished ya shit job, looks good don’t it?”

He had smiled and nodded.

“Great job son, now start the second coat.”

I wanted to kill the old, bald bastard but later those holidays he got me again when he had me chip the cement off a thousand old bricks and stack them so they could be used in the construction of a new wall out the back of the house.

The day after I finished them I came home from the beach and the bricks were gone.

I asked the brickies working there what happened to all the bricks I had cleaned?

They looked embarrassed and one of them had said: “Your old man had them taken to the tip, they were no good for the job we’ve got to do.”

So it was with these dark chores still fresh in my memory that a few years later I obtained a handful of marijuana seeds …

TO BE CONTINUED

The Brute is the author of the upcoming anonymous memoir Suburban Warrior: Confessions of a Footballer, available 2010.