Heavy Duty Attitude by Iain Parke Page A

and nowadays I didn’t even smoke ordinary smokes really anymore, let alone joints.
I lifted it to my lips and took a hit.
    ‘Jeeeezus!’ I swallowed a cough as I concentrated on keeping the smoke down to get the full hit, even as the harsh hotness of the raw weed caught at the back of my throat. Then I let it out again in a long stream as a definite buzz hit me. ‘What the fuck are you smoking?’
    Bung just grinned as I spluttered and gasped while I handed back the joint. ‘It’s good shit isn’t it? Our local Cong’s sensei special.’
‘I can see why they call it skunk,’ I said, ‘Christ it stinks.’
    The Cong were the growers, I knew that already from Damage. Cannabis farming had become something of a Vietnamese gang speciality with rented houses gutted to make way for intensive cultivation under hot lights by trafficked peasants using stolen electricity until the smell, the heat or the occasional fire when someone got careless with the wiring gave them away.
    But with the plants cropping in batches every few months and continuous cycles of batches coming through, the occasional lost crop was just a cost of doing business as far as they were concerned, while intensive cultivation was inexorably raising the strength of the weed’s THC.
    What the Cong didn’t have was the distribution networks to retail the gear or the muscle to control dealing territory which was where other operators, like the bike clubs, and others, were a natural fit.
And if you were dealing in the shit and had a taste for it the way Bung obviously did, naturally you would keep some of the best stuff for your own personal use.
    Whether it was the strength of it, or whether it was just that I was now so unused to it after all these years, after only a couple of tokes I realised that Christ, I was actually pretty bloody stoned already.
‘Shit, I need a beer,’ I said.
     
‘Now you’re talking,’ agreed Bung and together, the man-mountain and I shambled across the field towards the bars.
    As we went inside and a path opened up in front of Bung towards the bar I slipstreamed in behind pulling out my wallet as I did so, it was my shout I reckoned; I had a brief moment of clarity. Probably one of the last for the day if I’m honest looking back.
    Advice or no advice, thanks to taking that first spliff, it was pretty bloody clear by now that I wasn’t going to be leaving. I would be staying the night with The Brethren and if I was going to be under Bung’s protection from whatever Cambridge’s beef was, then I needed to stick to him and keep him onside.
And then I plunged on in before the crowd could close in behind him and separate us.
     
*
    So for the rest of the day and into the evening I tagged along with Bung, meeting the other Freemen and those of The Brethren who were attaching themselves to Wibble’s crew. As the day wore on I was introduced to a generally friendly parade of names that I tried to keep track of, from the Bills, Steves, and Mikes of various descriptions, to the Smurf, Gollum and Viking.
    It was a tricky balance to try and pull off. As a reporter my natural instinct was to observe, learn and record. But as the beers flowed and the spliffs circulated during the afternoon that ambition became more and more impossible, while I also knew that having notes taken about them wasn’t exactly a favourite activity as far as most Brethren were concerned and so if I was too obtrusive I ran the risk of changing the atmosphere fast in the wrong direction.
    And since it seemed as though my health and safety depended on these guys’ goodwill, discretion very rapidly took the part of valour and I stuffed the notebook away early doors, promising myself that I’d write up some notes when I crashed for the night.
Some hope.
    As a result, looking at the scrawls in my notebook it was true when I wrote at about midnight: As it is, all I have are some very fragmentary notes and increasingly fractured memories of the