Here we go. This one is written the same way my last entry was: in the form of a blog written by Cowboy in the modern day, in the same continuity as the last entry. Note that I took a rather... interesting interpretation of the title.
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The One and Only
Posted by Cowboy62
Sorry about the week-long hiatus, everybody. My sister was visiting and I haven't had much time to write. I'll try to make it up with an all-new story. This one takes place in the early summer of 1980, a little under a year after the conclave, and it involves both my near death and the most bomb weed I have ever smoked.
It was about three in the afternoon and I was sitting in the hangout with Cochise, duking it out in an epic round of Pong on our old Colortrak (damn good TV, for the time), when Swan came rolling in the door with a duffel bag over his shoulder. He jerked his finger at me and Cochise, then pointed upwards. I don't recall if I've mentioned it before now, but Swan kept an office up on the third floor, facing out onto the street. He used it mostly for business purposes, and sometimes for calling meetings of lieutenants, such as myself and the other conclave survivors. As we went up, we passed Rembrandt going down, and Swan hooked him by the arm and brought him into the crowd.
We all grabbed a seat in Swan's office, and while I can't speak for the other guys, I was getting kind of weirded out by the fact that Swan hadn't said a single thing between entering the hangout and that moment. As an aside, just because I know someone will ask, the office itself was pretty unremarkable. There was a desk and chair with a couple of windows behind it, a record player, a TV, a liquor cabinet, a few couches, and dozens of posters (most either music-related or containing naked women).
Anyway, interludes aside, let's get back to the interesting part. Swan threw the duffel bag on his desk and looked at each of the three of us in turn. Then he said, and I can remember his words exactly, “I didn't say anything on the way up because nothing I could say would even come close to describing what is in this bag.” He opened it up and proceeded to pull out what was, to this day, the most incredibly mind-blowing sack of weed I've ever seen. It shone like diamonds as soon as light fell on it, and the buds were massive, practically exploding out of the top as soon as he opened the zip loc. The smell was like a wave, to the point where it almost gave me a headache after a few breaths, and several colours besides green, ranging from purples to yellows to oranges, could be seen if you looked for more than a few seconds. If Jesus Christ grew pot in his garden, this was that pot, is what I'm trying to say here.
Of course, we pretty much freaked. I'd seen some good stuff before, but this was a whole other level. Swan spilled the beans quick, at least. Turns out it was the work of Magic Johnson. No, I don't mean the basketball player Magic Johnson. Our Magic Johnson was a then-college-aged black man with a dream of being the best damn grower in the world. Let me tell you, as far as I'm concerned, he can take the title. He earned his nickname for a reason, and that reason was that he grew better pot than anyone else in Coney Island. Now, if you wanted to get nitpicky, you could point out that he was one of only a couple commercial grows on the Island, but I wouldn't if you value your testicles. Anyway, Magic figured out the art of hydroponic growing before anyone else we knew, back in the mid-70s, and he'd been one of our primary suppliers for a couple of years by the time this story takes place. I'll mention as an aside, before I go any further, that Magic never did get to claim his title. He was killed in 1988 during a SWAT raid on his place. The cops never identified themselves before busting in and the first one caught a bullet for his trouble. Magic took about thirty in the few seconds following. Irony is, they weren't even after him; they wanted the place down the block and mixed up the addresses.
So, like I said, turns out Magic had produced our mystery mega-pot. I guess he'd gotten some mystical balance of nutrients and water right or something, I don't know, I didn't understand half of what Swan told me about it (nor did he, which may have been the root of the issue, now that I consider it). Magic had given us a quarter-pound sample, and another twenty pounds were on their way later that night. It was at that moment that Cochise gave us the name for the stuff, though he didn't mean to at the time. He picked up a piece, looked at it real close, and said “This sh*t's the one and only.” There was a beat of silence as Swan's brow furrowed, and then he said “The one and only. Like Cyrus.” It only took a few seconds for us to realize what he meant, and after another minute, we'd decided: this strain was to go by the name “Cyrus”. We knew Magic wouldn't mind; he'd never been big on naming his stuff, and most of the time he just told us to “call it whatever”.
I'd fill you in on the next couple of hours, but to be honest, I don't remember a whole lot of it. We split two joints of the stuff between the four of us and it sent us into outer space. At some point we ended up at Nathan's, where it took me about five minutes to order a hot dog and the workers were staring at me like I was some kind of alien. I also remember being on the boardwalk, laughing my ass off with the guys at an incredibly fat woman who was having trouble getting off her beach towel. Next thing I knew, it was almost eleven, and Swan was telling us that he had to leave. He was going to supervise the Cyrus distribution personally since, in his words, “I want to be overseeing this one myself.” As far as I knew at the time, the plan was to grab the stuff at Magic's place, split it up in lots of about five pounds each, then sell it to our four distributors, who would then sell it to the street-level dealers. Pretty standard stuff, really. What I didn't know was that the plan had changed. I found out later that Magic had one of his fits of paranoia and thought that the cops were watching his house, so they agreed to meet for the handoff in the empty lot next to the Abe Stark Rink at Surf and West 20th. I'm going to guess that Swan hadn't counted on Magic being late, or he wouldn't have chosen the lot right next to our border with the Surf Avenue Stonebreakers, but that's neither here nor there.
I was oblivious to all of this, of course, and my only response to Swan leaving was to roll a huge cone and pass it around with Cochise and Rembrandt. The next half hour passed in a blur, and we found ourselves playing Pong again when the phone rang. One of the new bloods that were hanging out grabbed it, then yelled for me, saying it was important. Turns out it was Swan on the line, calling from the phone booth by the lot. He sounded on edge, and told me to round up a few guys and come down to the lot quicktime. He said that he'd been waiting for twenty minutes, Magic hadn't showed up yet, and he thought someone might be watching him and the other three guys he'd brought. Before I could say anything, he told me to wait a second, then said that he could see Magic driving up, but to come anyway. What happened next chilled my blood, and I mean that in a literal sense. You know, that feeling like every single drop of blood in your body has turned into pure ice, and nothing will ever thaw it. Swan yelled something I couldn't hear out the door of the phone booth, then he grabbed the receiver, screamed “Get down here now! Right f*cking now! Get strapped if you can!” Then the line went dead.
For about five seconds, I couldn't even move. Then I flew into action. I bolted across the room and ripped The Man-Machine off the turntable while simultaneously yelling “Swan's in trouble!” or some variation thereof. The next thirty seconds were spent yelling orders and tearing ass for the lockbox on the second floor. It was usually left unlocked, and thankfully, that trend didn't see fit to change. Inside lay The Power. That's what a piece was back then: it was pure power, distilled into a single construct of metal and wood. It's not like today when every two-bit gangbanger is packing a Glock 17. Sure, we carried sometimes, but way more disputes were settled with fists than bullets. Anyway, we kept a few handguns in the lockbox at all times (though there were always others scattered around the hangout, you could never be totally sure where they were) and I snatched the first one my hand landed on, a .38 caliber six shooter. It went into the back of my jeans, a handful of bullets went into my pocket, and I went down the stairs at a speed only matched by Olympic sprinters.
There were only about a dozen guys in the hangout at the time (which was odd in itself for that hour), and they'd crammed themselves into two AMC Gremlins, one belonging to Rembrandt and the other to Casper, whom I don't think I've mentioned before. He got his name because he was about the whitest kid we've ever seen. We never did figure out what the deal was with that, and I haven't seen him in about 25 years. He got hooked on crack in '84 and just up and disappeared one night. Nobody ever found out what happened to him. Anyway, like I was saying, we had two Gremlins for twelve people. If anyone from the younger generation doesn't know what a Gremlin is, take a look at this:
http://xbradtc.files.wordpress.com/2008 ... remlin.jpg. Those things are not made for more than two people, making it absolutely incredible to me that they managed to fit six people in one and five in the other. Unfortunately, one of the guys at the hangout at the time happened to be Biggie. Biggie... well, to put it gently, he was a fatass. But he was a fatass who could lay a mean beatdown, so he stayed. Anyway, since I was the last one out, there was absolutely no room for me to get inside a car. Pressed for time, I did the only thing I could do: I hopped on the roof, layed down, grabbed the luggage racks and, holding on for dear life, yelled for Rembrandt and Casper to floor it.
I should note that I was, to put it lightly, tripping the f*ck out at this point. If anyone is unaware of what exactly a cone is, imagine one of those gigantic joints you see Bob Marley smoking in the pictures. Yeah. I was totally out of it, and about to run into a situation I had almost no information about, with the only small comfort being the heavy piece of metal tucked into my jeans. Oh, also, I was hanging on to the luggage rack of a car, completely unsecured, as my equally-stoned comrade in arms took the wheel. To say that I was feeling a bit pessimistic about my prospects for life is a bit of an understatement.
We tore ass down the street, and the storefronts on Surf Avenue turned into a blur as traffic law was repeatedly raped and then put out of its misery with a shotgun blast to the head. Melodramatic? Yes, but we were seriously kicking it. It must have only been a minute from the hangout to the lot at that speed, but it felt like ten times longer to me. The world was alternating between slow motion and hyperspace, leaning towards slow motion, and more than once I felt like I was going to throw up. I was flying from one side of the roof to the other, barely holding on to the rack, and more than once I came down hard on my ribs after a particularly nasty pothole. Somehow, we were lucky enough not to go by any cops, and we finally got a look at what was going on as we rode up to the lot.
There were at least fifteen guys, all wearing plaid shirts with brown leather vests over them. Stonebreakers. Two of our guys were down for the count, as was Magic, and Swan was back to back with our other man. Both of them were weilding knives, and they were flailing them like madmen, keeping the Stonebreakers back through the sheer ferocity of their attack. There was quite simply no way to get a strike in without the risk of getting stabbed. I got ready to jump off as Rembrandt mounted the curb and continued at top speed into the lot. I pulled myself into a half-crouching position, leaned forwards, and then, well, things got interesting. I guess Rembrandt must have hit some piece of low-lying debris, because as he began to slam on the brakes, the front of the car bucked up like a bull, then slammed down. I lost my grip on the luggage rack and went flying forwards, over the windshield. I managed to get my leg under me and pushed off with one foot from the hood, trying to pull off at least something approaching a dignified landing. That's when things got even more interesting.
I guess since a crazy guy in a cowboy hat riding the roof of an AMC Gremlin isn't something you see every day, all the Stonebreakers had turned to stare. In fact, so had our guys, and the whirlwind of knife-y action had stopped. Since Rembrandt had gotten pretty close before hitting the brakes (a standard practice, since it both looked cool and intimidated our opponents) there were several Stonebreakers within a reasonable distance of the front of the car when it bounced. I think you can see where this is going. One of them was right in my trajectory, and he barely even had time to understand what was happening before I hit him head-on. He went down like a rock, with me on top of him, and I heard a huge crack as we hit the ground. For a second I thought the pistol had gone off, but then I realized it was the Stonebreaker's head hitting a piece of sheared-off concrete.
Let me tell you, it's pretty rare to have a shocked silence in the middle of a rumble, but it happened this time. You could have heard a pin drop as I stood up, a bit shaky on my feet from both the pot and the joyride. I can still remember that moment like it was yesterday, looking around and realizing that I'd pulled off something awesome enough to stop a rumble dead in its tracks. At that moment, I could only think of one punctuation that would get across exactly how irritated I was by the entire situation. In one motion I pulled the piece out of my pants, pointed it at the nearest Stonebreaker, and pulled the trigger. Since I was in action movie mode at the time, I was holding the gun one-handed, a big no-no, but the guy was only about five feet away so it wasn't an issue. The left side of his collarbone pretty much exploded as the shot tore into his body and lodged somewhere. He was on the ground before anyone could even react, writhing around in pain. I was too jacked up on adrenaline to even process that I'd casually shot a dude, and I waved the pistol at the other guys too, yelling something that I can't remember. Whatever it was, they took the hint, and seconds later they were running like hell back into their turf.
Just because the Stonebreakers were out of the picture, it didn't mean we were out of the woods. We could already hear sirens in the distance, and we had two unconscious soldiers and a half-concussed drug dealer to get out of there, along with twenty pounds of Cyrus weed and several cars full of gang members. A full description of our escape would be both boring to read and write, so I won't bother, but it was pretty harrowing at the time (I'll give you a hint: we threw everyone in the cars and drove like hell). We left the two hurt Stonebreakers there (at least, I think they were only hurt) and booted it back to the hangout. Once we were back there and got Magic fully conscious, we got the whole story.
Turns out that Magic's car wasn't starting, so he had to get his neighbour to help him get the thing to turn over, which took about a half hour. In that time, some Stonebreakers must have spotted our guys hanging out in their cars in the lot and decided to try and take them out. Swan's worries had been right, and just as Magic got there, a group of them stormed in. Magic tried to pull a gun on them, but he took a brick to the forehead for his trouble, and things went downhill from there. Swan was more interested in my story though, all things considered. After I filled him in on how exactly I'd ended up on the roof, he laughed and said that I'd done a good job coordinating everyone. I said that I couldn't just let twenty pounds of Cyrus fall into the hands of some lames like that, since it was the one and only, after all. What he said afterwards made me smile for days. “To hell with the weed, you're the one and only here. Only time I ever saw Cyrus fly like that, he was taking a header off a platform in Van Cortlandt Park.” The night really couldn't have ended better, really.
Anyway, to wrap it up, everything turned out fine in the end. The stuff got distributed, the cops apparently didn't care enough to even look into whether or not we had something to do with the half-dead gangbangers in that empty lot, and Magic went back to doing what he did best: growing bomb-ass weed. However, he was never quite able to grow a batch of that absurd quality again. He tried and tried and tried, but it just wasn't to be; I guess that initial twenty pounds wanted to stay the one and only after all.
cool cant wai for this i might not post too early coz i want to think about this story more and try to get as much thinking time as i can i might post on saturday or monday!!