A Matter of Unimportance

23. The Herb

First it was Colby. He was a painter that I met at the market while working my booth in the springtime. He knew I was selling drugs, because he'd bought weed and pills alongside the crystals he'd purchased off of me. Then he'd asked me out and I'd invited him to my home for dinner instead because I did not want to beat around the bush with my intentions for any longer than necessary. We slept together regularly for several weeks. He painted the outline of a mural on my bedroom wall.

One day he accidentally stumbled into my spare room and found the tables lines with growing marijuana under new grow lights I'd recently acquired with my pill pushing drug money. He also saw the starts of the lab I was making to try and figure out how to make LSD papers. I'd been failing at that quite a bit because science is hard, so I was contemplating growing psybilin mushrooms instead like Whaya had suggested. When Colby saw all of that in addition to the pills God had recently given me, he walked out and never spoke to me again. I gathered that it was intimidating.

After Colby was Lou. He was a barista. I always went to his house to avoid the original problem, and we always smoked weed together in bed while I pretended his coffee didn't make me tachycardic.

I took pills and went home with two football players from the university where my old friends presumably attended. I still never saw them at campus parties, but I went a lot of them to sell pills, and I enjoyed both of the football players less than I'd thought I would. It was underwhelming to say the least. The first one was too over confident, and the second one was so shy and timid that I actually felt bad for him.

There were more. Some weeks I was seeing someone new every day. Sometimes they lasted a little while. It really just depended on the moment.

I was not seeking actual companionship, in case that isn't clear. Even with the more longterm relationships like the one with my painter, Colby, I was not attempting to forge any real bonds. I didn't want that to complicate everything that was going to happen next. I didn't want to endanger anything. I didn't want God to have any targets to look at when I stopped being agreeable.

Then he asked me for a cut of the plants.

I was easygoing for over a year. That's why I say it was a delayed reaction. I did everything I could to keep my discontent quiet and calculated. Big choices have to be thought out, planned, evaluated and adjusted before they're implemented. There's just no way around it.

God had been patient. He'd paid me more than my fair share and he'd let me get comfortable before upping his asks. He was well versed in how to negotiate, and maybe he sensed that my cooperation was not something handed over lightly.

One day, late in spring and well after my 20th birthday, he went to hand me my bag of individual oxycodone tablets and then hesitated. He said, "We need to talk."

He explained to me that he'd been patient. He told me he loved the work I did. He told me I met all of his expectations and that people were constantly impressed by me. They talked about me when I wasn't around. His other pushers were jealous that God liked me so much. Even Adeline, who rarely got my attention, had told me that he spoke to other people about me.

Then he told me that if he was going to continue giving me commission on the pills, then I needed to be more of a team player. He knew I still sold pretty rolled joints and loose bundles of marijuana on the side. He knew I made more money from that than I would let on.

He wanted a cut of that. It was why him and Whaya had fallen out among other things. She wouldn't cut him in. He needed me to be smarter than her. He said this to me as if we weren't discussing a woman he'd brutally taken from me as a punishment for noncompliance.

If I'd cared, I would have argued. I would have pointed out that those plants were a labour of my love. They were tended the way the earth is meant to be cared for. I had gone back to my roots of the honorable harvest. I only took what was needed. I let them flourish. I let parts die naturally as was the way of their life.