Customers

It's interesting to see how the business flows, and there are certain patterns that customers seem to follow. For example, September is a rotten month. It might have something to do with the supply, but I don't think so; it's probably that way because of the end of summer, and the beginning of the school year. Summer is the best time: everybody is partying, and smoking dope, and buying extra dope for vacations. Then comes September and they're back home, they've shot their wad for summer vacation, the kids need new clothes for school, there were all those bills they had forgotten about, and gee, honey, we can't afford dope this month, let's wait for the October paycheck. People see it as an item in their budget.
    My sales go way up on the first and the fifteenth of the month, when people get paid. Friday nights are big. Saturday during the day is big, except in the summer, when it's dead; in the summer they come around on Thursday and Friday, and go away for the weekend. I know this is true for other dealers as well, because when business falls off we call each other trying to find out if we've done anything wrong. Is it my karma that nobody's around this week? And it turns out that all the dealers are sitting and wringing their hands: nobody's calling today, I haven't had a single call! This is the worst time since last September! And when we don't sell, it slows things up for the distributors and the wholesalers too, because nothing moves.
    Christmas is very big, just like summertime; everybody's partying. In the summer they want to take some dope and go out into nature, maybe drop some acid, chew some mushrooms. I do well around any holiday. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. Even my customers who smoke daily will buy more around holiday times, because they're going to parties, or perhaps they're giving parties. They might buy a lid and roll up a bunch of joints. For a party, they'll want an upper dope, and probably not the most expensive stuff.
    The retail customer doesn't usually start coming until the late afternoon. There's a big surge right after work, when people stop by on their way home. Except for the summer, people tend to buy during the evening. For some reason, Monday is a good day. Maybe they've finished their dope over the weekend, or e]se it's on the list of things to take care of during the week; I'm not sure.
    Of course there are always a few assholes who call me at nine in the morning. Before I got my answering machine, I was chained to the house, chained to the phone. Now, I know that if I put on the machine, I can sleep late, or go out, and they'll leave a message or call back. The thing you want to avoid is for people to call and get no answer.
    Usually the phone will ring around eleven, with people who want to make appointments. On the average day I'll see six or seven customers. I'd say that they average spending about thirty-five dollars each. They don't necessarily buy an ounce; it could be half an ounce of sixty dollar dope.
    You can't always know for sure whether your dope is what it's advertised to be. I tell my customers what I know; you've got to have a trusting relationship with them, and with your source. The designation Thai sticks, for example, is deceptive these days. A Thai stick could come from anywhere, and I don't try to fool anybody into believing that it's really from Thailand if it's not. But if a Thai stick was grown in Peoria, and it blows me away, I'll be buying that stick, you can be sure.
    How big a dealer you are isn't what determines how much you pay for a pound; it's more a matter of who you know and how much you can buy at a time. I turn down plenty of stuff. I tell the distributor, ten of this, twenty of that, none of this because although I know it's good, I can't move it. I don't buy too much of the cheapest dope, or very much of the most expensive stuff; I wish I had a few more wealthy customers. I sell to all kinds of people: lawyers and teachers and secretaries and people on welfare; it's the same price for everybody, and I see every social class and ethnic group, and almost every political persuasion.
    I have a few lower-middle-class housewives in the cheap suburbs who come to me. They smoke for the same reason everybody else does: because it's fun. One gal I know does piecework at home, soldering circuitry for computers. It's a very repetitive, exacting task, and I find that lots of people with jobs like that like to be stoned while they work. Not only because it's boring to do that kind of stuff, but because you have to be accurate, and when you're stoned, you want to get it right. This woman stays away from the Colombians, though, because they're too heavy, too sleepy, not right for working.
    Sometimes mothers will come and bring their toddlers, and I have families where the teenagers want to come, because they want to have some say about what is bought. Some of the mothers say they don't believe that very young children actually get stoned but that they smoke dope for the ritual of it, as part of a family activity. One mother tells me she thinks that kids don't really get stoned until puberty. I don't know. But one customer's four-year-old girl can roll joints with the best of them; it was one of the motor skills she developed very early. Like many of these kids, she'll take a puff, but she won't inhale.
    My youngest customer is fourteen, and I sell to him only because he's the son of my best friend. Normally I don't sell to teenagers. He's not one of those kids who smokes in the schoolyard, because he can go home and smoke there. I think his parents have the same attitude about dope as mine did about cigarettes: "If you're going to smoke, do it at home. We'd rather not have you sneaking around and doing it behind our backs."
    In my house, customers can sample anything they want, and they generally do. People like to get high with the dealer; it's a status thing. The people who sit in my living room and buy dope from me, once they are no longer new customers, are people I trust. I have a table with display boxes, and it's just sitting there. People could pilfer from me when I turn my back, but I decided long ago that I had to trust somebody.