Jericho by George Fetherling Page B

the Chinese molasses so common in them days. True story, though a lot of details were hushed up.
    Fifty, sixty, seventy years on and Hastings was still full of people on a hot summer day, but they weren’t going shopping at Woodward’s or the Army & Navy (though the Army & Navy was still going strong—still is). They were shopping for all different kinds of brain jewellery, starting with Vitamin H and going down the periodic table from there. The cops had pretty much abandoned the neighbourhood. Now and then a prowl car, as Lonnie used to call em, would swim by, watching the quick deals completed with a minimum of words and a handshake lasting a second and a half. But they didn’t do much of anything about it. The scene waslike a busy farmers’ market except it didn’t have anything to do with agriculture.
    Everything being so out in the open, I was naturally curious about the guy with the big square second-hand face with the hash marks on one side of it. What was he doing over there exactly? He wasn’t no student at the end of term, selling off all the temporary possessions he didn’t want to drag back home to Kelowna. He was a good bit older than even me and he didn’t get those scars on his face from acne. I had to smile. Guys would come up to him and inspect his loose garbage with great interest. Then, after looking up and down the street, they’d take, say, a fondue pot with a big hole in the bottom over to Boots and give him what I could see even from where I was standing was a wad of dough for it. He put the fondue pot (none of the little forks were left) in a plastic Safeway bag and handed it back to the customer. That’s what the cops saw if they played back some surveillance tape, assuming there was one, which I doubt.
    Later, when I got to know him a bit, I said I admired his technique. He didn’t take well to compliments but he did explain his thinking.
    “This place is pretty famous. People even come up from the States. A lot of em aren’t really low-lifes, they’re people out for a kick. They want the thrill. They like the blood pounding in their thighs when they think there’s danger. But they get scared easy. I was making it simple for em.”
    This was part of his thinking: to make it easy for Citizens who ordinarily wouldn’t come any closer to the Life than reading editorials that denounced it. Boots wanted to bring back the seventies, when straight people with cash would go slumming in their bloodstreams. He was some sort ofbusiness genius, and that’s why I wanted to go to work for him, but I never really got that close. Pretty soon he wasn’t working on the street any more and he probably had a zillion guys like me who were his Avon Ladies and Fuller Brush Men. Any two of us might pass each other in the street and never be the wiser except by the look in the eyes. I knew what he was up to, though.
    He had many ideas. But the one about selling drugs to people who actually had money for drugs—that was his best one. Like the roulette wheel, the fulcrum, the vibrating plane and all the other great ideas of the ancient Mesopotamian types, it was brilliant because it was so damn simple. In the early stages, before their dopamines got blown out like breakfast, a lot of these people doing dreams and speedballs were naturally enough really concerned about the strong possibility of an overdose—a problem in amateur circles especially. The answer was to sell em Narcan too so that they or their needle buddy can get the heart and lungs started again real quick. Boots got the idea when he stole some of this shit, or somebody else did and he wound up with it. Then he had his people working on how to make it themselves, in some lab he had somewhere.
    What he had all of us selling was Adam and Eve (that’s two different things—there’s Adam and then there’s another one called Eve). This was the dagga weed of what that guy, what’s his name, called the X Generation. Everybody wanted it, girls