I didn't expect winter to end, so summer came unexpectedly for me. In no time I was out trying to indulge my lust for crack cocaine. It popped up in my mind, sitting in cheap motels hitting the pipe, standing around flaming drums hustling for cash and warming nicotine-stained fingers, cutting my arms when I couldn't get a fix, and coming down from heavy-blown highs with forty-ounce bottles of high-powered beer. I had a crack pipe all fixed up, and was still more obsessed with pot, but knew I couldn't get any. I had tried all winter and had ended up drinking off the cravings with cheap diluted whiskey and Budweiser beer. It was all I could afford, with my job. I had met my first dealer in his garage, and asked him for what I wanted. He pulls out a huge bag of white powder and hands it over to me for a twenty. It was before I had even knew it had happened. He stood there, swooning drunk, and I then tasted it with my finger. "Motherfucker? Powdered sugar?" I grabbed a tiny hammer off a shelf used for framing pictures with tiny nails and began smacking him in the head with it. "FUCK SHIT CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK!" He screams and begins to run. I take off after him hitting him over the head with the hammer, me chasing him stumbling down the street with his arms flailing around trying to deflect the blows. He runs down a side street and I follow, me hitting him with the hammer every step of the way. He turns and runs down some railroad tracks, and I continue following him as he runs, and eventually into a thicket where I guess I’ll beat him until he was out cold and then just walk off with my twenty dollars back. He steps on a rake, the thing flies up and smacks him in the face knocking his body into mine and we fall backwards into the underbrush. I stand up, throw the hammer and walk into an area from which beams of sunlight are emanating. It is a cleared glade, covered in grass. A semi truck trailer sits abandoned to the side, propped up on concrete haunches. A scarecrow is mounted in a large moist planting field. I go back over to Whippet, the nickname I know him by, and pick him up. "Don't hit me again, don't fucking hit me again..." "I'm not going to hit you again." We walk into the clearing. "We should fucking grow pot in that field over there man." "Really?" "Yeah, I got three bell jars filled with seeds. We can camp out in that trailer over there and just stop paying rent all together." He surveys the area, thinks a moment, and then decides "I'll do it if I get a cut- of the pot and of the cash when we sell it." "You help with cultivation you got a deal." "Just keep your mouth shut Kurt, I don't want to get pinched. I won't survive jail." "There's one person I've got to employ. Gill."
Whippet's brow furrowed. Gill was neither man, nor woman. His heroin use had ebbed away any sort of identity, save that of an addict, a junky. His life was a miasma of tragedy and misgivings. Watching his sister being molested by his heroin-addicted uncle on his parents' bed, jerking off to seedy porno mags from the 70's in the woods, starting fires, crucifying frogs, setting raccoon traps and then torturing the raccoons, heroin-soaked romances snuck out of rehab to live in broken-down cars with overwrought junky-loving women, blowing smoke in the misty dawn to rise into the sunlight in the last sick minute of a wasted day. Staring at nude beaches in Greece, or kissing absinthe bottles in Las Vegas while living with his sister and making out with strange drunken men on sweaty mattresses. I called Gill, and explained the situation. He was all for it. In about a month, we had plants in bloom. The sun shone right on the plants and the weather was perfect. We spent the days doing any number of things, throwing birdseed around the scarecrow and then shooting the crows that landed there with a pistol and roasting their bodies on crude spits, dropping acid, drinking beer, making fires and having NA and AA meetings around them, feeding the dogs roadkill (we had three bloodhounds guarding our ground), all sorts of shit. One time Whippet smoked too many PCP-laced Marlboros, tore his clothes off and beat the shit out of both Gill and I. He woke up the next day and apologized. We passed the time, we tickled our addictions. We did what was necessary to survive, living out of that abandoned trailer in the dark. Watching acute thunderstorms pound the countryside, and our impending marijuana plants sway in the downpour. Soon, it was time to harvest and we did, drying out the buds and sorting them into bags. Word got around. Soon we had money. But Whippet was missing, and we couldn't find the hounds. Gill and I drove back to the clearing, to grab the last of the supply and smoke it into lawless nonexistence. What we found has been something of conjecture to this day. The scarecrow's head was ripped off and sitting at the base of the pike it was impaled on. The trailer was on its side, all our stuff thrown around, destroyed. A pile of burned books off to the side. But that's not what shocked us.
From a tree, hung by the neck by hemp ropes, were our three hound dogs. They were disemboweled. Their guts lay in the dirt and skunks chewed on them with rigor. I noticed the small hammer I used to bludgeon Whippet lodged in the skull of one of the dogs. We heard a gunshot, ran back to the car, and sped back to Gill's parents' house to get plastered and watch snuff and porn films. Fuck this.
