(Hey World Artist Network, Tom, Zach, everyone else.  Anyway first two parts.  Rest as I think them up.  Good to be back)

Riverdale

By
Alex Garrido (awesome new pen name)



Part 1

Remember when you were an asshole and actually enjoyed reading High Times Magazine, a periodical about pot you would never smoke, yet, “probably would get you like twice as high as we are now”? And remember the adds in the back of High Times Magazine for that “Legal Herb” that didn’t even look real? Remember how you spent precious moments of an already fleeting existence wondering, “how the fuck they get away with that shit?”, but sort have knew because deep down you’re not fucking retarded. I was the guy who manned the midnight shift for not one, but every fake drug company in America (there might have been one called Wizard Smoke in California). 
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I got the job through a pretty girl I met the Cinema of Liberation or Gypsy Culture or some essential class that didn’t meet on Friday. To be completely honest with you I have very vague recollections of how it all happened. I think I was just likable and trustworthy and I knew most everyone that worked there through selling real drugs. All I remember was meeting her at he Riverdale Post Office so she could walk me up the stairs and through the always locked space on the second floor. I was then taken into a back room and seated in front of a cheap desk displaying nothing more than a broken lava lamp.

The gentleman behind that desk wanted it to be very clear he was not my boss, nor did he work for the company. Also, there would be no job interview, and my coworkers would carry out all necessary training. The only thing I had to know about my boss was that he was an avid surfer living in Southern California, and I would never see him or speak to him. He handed me a key, a manila folder with instructions on scheduling, sick leave, and basic procedures for safety. Any reasonable instinct I had to run from the arrangement was suppressed by a healthy twenty-seven dollar an hour starting wage and a complete lack of management. The courier shook my hand and told me that if I had any questions ask my coworkers, or come up with a solution befitting my B- in the Films of Woody Allen.

Orientation was conducted by the two employees who had been there the longest (6 months) the first, a Jewish kid we called Poker for reasons unknown, and the second a Puerto Rican we called Joe Donut because he liked donuts, most likely.

Joe gave me my orientation to the back room where we would mix the special formulas in industrial size shipping cans by combining the ingredients, capping the canister and simply rolling the combination across the length of the store. There was a huge instruction booklet that had about 50 pages of usable formulas, followed by scattered notes that would suggest combinations like Kava and catnip, or various exotic herbs and catnip, or catnip whatever was overstocked. I was waiting for Joe to be a dick and claim he had his way, but he mostly just kept reminding me to keep my mask on because the dust was making everyone sick.
I asked him what to do if he wasn’t there and he told me just to throw some shit together with catnip because it wasn’t going to work either way our concerns being mostly cosmetic.

The rest of our business was centered on selling Ephedrine (Mormon Tea) a now widely banned substance, to Meth-Labs across the United States. At the time on my employment only New York had laws against the drug, a minor setback considering crystal-meth had not caught on in northeast anyway. But now I’m getting way ahead of myself.

After the tour of the facility, Poker trained me on the business/shipping end of the process. Each competing, fake drug company had a color-coded phone with the name of the company on top, the thinking being we are dealing with people who are buying fake drugs and that kind of stupidity rarely learns from experience. In all honesty, we could’ve made a killing off your average “suckers born every minute” but it takes true evil genius to convince these valued customers to believe that it wasn’t the FAKE MARIJUANA that was the problem, but more so the green telephone’s lack of pride in their product that the red phone had made a priority. 

And I’m being inaccurate by saying fake marijuana because we sold every single fake drug we could think to fake: fake mushrooms, ecstasy, opium (the shit that smelled like roses you and your dumb fuck-hippy friend put on top of your weed even though you cannot smoke real Opium that way), fake Viagra, fake speed (more ephedrine) and even fake Quaaludes (which is hilarious because I’m fairly certain Real Quaaludes didn’t exist when I was in college), along with various other make-believe potions we called hilarious things like Mellow Yellow or Kind Indica something or another. 

And lastly the occasional drug themed pornography (thus Alice in Acid Land and Sally Smokes Weed and Turns Into a Gangbang Whore, etc) one awesome drug sci-fi called Ganjasaurus (look them all up if you don’t believe me) about a Godzilla type monster made of Marijuana that ate hippies (I’m not doing it justice) and finally lava lamps, the single most useless, ugly thing one could ever buy ever, period. 

And we sold a shit-load of all of it. I mean, to unload a metric fuck-ton of a product that didn’t work was amazing in an of itself, but then became downright miraculous when you consider the fact that I told these shit-for-brains hillbillies that our product didn’t work within ten seconds of the initial phone call. Something to the tune of,

“Hey man, does this shit really work?”

“No sir/ma’am these are fake drugs. If I sold you a fake car, would you expect it to work? These weeds have no known value of any kind evidenced by the fact that starving 3rd world dirt farmers willing to sell whatever it is for a little less than a dollar a pound.”

“Oh I get it, ha ha. Roger that. Give me two pounds of that shit that doesn’t work.”

And this happened every 30 seconds, give or take. But how could the customer complain when we were selling them a pound of FAKE MARIJUANA for almost 15 percent off the price of real marijuana, the stuff that actually gets people high.

And before you get your special Canadian Calculators out to do the conversion, let me grossly round down for you, and say a pound could be gotten in Harlem for $600 for peat-moss covered in Raid. Now subtract 15% of that and compare that fortune to the honorable thievery of charging a still criminal two dollars a pound, thus doubling the store’s investment something that is almost unheard of in any legal business and you have a fake-drug ass fucking of Herculean proportions. Not to mention we did this three to four times per customer

Oh, and the horror-show of stupidity does not stop there, evidenced by the second most common question:

“Is this High Times Magazine?”
“Oh, is this Hiigh Times Magazine?”
“No, this is high times magazine, right?”
“Dude, so cool your work for High Times”

Which I have to admit some subterfuge in the interest of deflecting annoying complaints to the actual High Times Magazines, a surly bunch of skinny, white, mostly-vegans that hated our fucking guts. Sadly for them the publication lived on our advertising dollars, and was very limited with their demographic of self-righteous, lazy people. 

Or the “I’ll never forget that call” involving a gentlemen who purchased our “Variety Sampler Pack “ and mixed the ingredients together to form a kind of tea which in his own blood-choked moans, was eating his organs just slow enough for him to contemplate all the reasons buying fake drugs meant this was inevitable if not today, then later today.

And I, feeling essentially the same, told him that he needed to call High Times Magazine and information would have the number if he had it in him.

And even the occasional curve ball, namely the John Dillinger that called up to inform me that he’d just stolen a credit card and, “what now?”

Didn’t need to purchase anything, just wanted some basic, criminal advice. I think I told him to buy everything in his Grandmother’s name because.

“Same name, unlikely suspect, and if she dies, case closed.”


So, I guess the obvious next question would be: how does one live with the guilt and shame of ruining countless lives?

(Later Today – Living With The Shame and Guilt of Ruining Countless Lives)

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