***
Before crank, I was every thirty-something white guy you’ve ever seen following his wife around Target. Had an 8-year-old daughter starting soccer. Had the house in La Crosse, just three bedrooms, but a decent subdivision, good schools, reasonable taxes, all the shit I’d talk about with the other thirty-something dads in the other driveways with the other two-year-old minivans.
Sales. I sold shit. Tru-Cor. Industrial equipment. My territory was the Upper Midwest – Minneapolis, Dubuque, Des Moines, all around in there.
Anyway, three years back I’m closing a big-ass deal in northern Iowa. And I got Linda with me, new chick just out of Iowa State, sales trainee, and she is smoking hot. Didn’t want to admit it, but the fact that fact Big Al – the asshole who owned the joint who’d been stringing me along for two years – the fact that he couldn’t take his eyes off her tits long enough to look at the numbers right added at least ten Gs to the final haul – and that’s 10 Gs of pure profit, which puts me in real sweet commission territory. Anyway, I’m throwing a little shindig for Big Al and his people at this steak joint in town welcoming them to the Tru-Cor family. We got Big Al and his wife, got a couple of guys from his shop floor I’d worked the specs with, couple of office pukes, and we got Big Al’s office girl, Liz, who’s giving Linda a run in the smoking hot department, but with a harder, don’t-fuck-with-me air that had always got me a little stiff when I’d make my quarterly sales stop.
So the dinner wraps up, Big Al and the crew are all climbing into their SUVs, Linda and I are about to head across the parking lot back to the Holiday Inn, and Liz walks over.
“You guy’s ain’t calling it a night already are you?” Little smirk, little challenge in her voice.
I look at Linda, she gives me a you’re-the-boss shrug, and I say “You mean there’s still something open in this burg?”
And she says “I know a place.”
So we go to this shit-ass road house and we have some drinks, and Liz pulls out this baggie and says try some of this and I figure what the fuck ‘cause I’d done the pot thing back in school at Madison, never had a problem with it, and it’s customer relations, right? So I take a little toot.
And I become a God. I’ve always been a bright guy with a decent line of bull, but suddenly all my synapses are firing in sequence, my brain is a luminescent overlord, my tongue is hot wired to the ancestral font of all knowledge and I’ve got Spider Senses like Peter Parker. Forty-five minutes and several toots all around later, we’re back at the Holiday Inn, Linda is face down in Liz, I’m balls deep in Linda and I’m thinking of the U2 song where that Bono guy keeps saying he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for and I know that, for the first time in my life, I have -- that crank, at last, is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh and that I will be leaving my mother and my father and my wife and my kid and my house and my mortgage and whatever else you got and cleaving unto this shit because this shit right here in this little baggie – and, oh fuck, can it really be almost gone? Gotta hurry up and cum so I can get out with Liz and score some more of this – that this shit right here holds the universe entire within each and every shiny little crystal.
So yeah, I like meth a little.
It’s not like the wheels jumped off the bus right there. For six months, I had a good run. For six months, I had a fucking excellent run. A little toot before a call and I could sell bacon to a Rabbi. So I’m closing deals and making Linda sandwiches all over the Upper Midwest.
Then Linda wraps her Jetta around a light pole, goes into rehab and files the lawsuit – harassment and such. The wife comes home from the doc asking how come she’s got the clap. I get fired, I get divorced, and a couple months later I’m living in this $350-dollar-a-month dump of a farm house outside Fennimore with Mopes and his meth skank Cheryl who’s down to about 90 pounds and her last five or six teeth.
Whole new life style.
***
Which brings us to the Girl Scout Cookies.
Flash forward a couple years. I’m sitting at the table in the kitchen at Chez Meth reading a two-day-old Platteville Journal ‘cause it feels normal. You can score a newspaper out of the trash pretty easy, so it’s free, and you make yourself a cup of coffee and sit down in the morning when the sunlight’s coming in through the windows, and it’s March, so the Twins are down in Fort Myers and you can read up on do they have a chance this year and just for a minute or two you feel like you could walk out in the driveway and talk about taxes and shit next to the minivan, that is until the Meth Goddess wraps her talons around your testicles and reminds you of your true vocation, which is scoring more crank.
Anyway, the big feature for the day is some local kid who’s closing in the Girl Scout Cookies sales record – better than 17,000 boxes – and that tickles the sales guy part of my brain, so I read on. Turns out they don’t go door-to-door so much anymore. They’ve gone retail, laying in inventory and selling boxes off of folding tables in front of local businesses. There’s a picture of this kid and her grandma, kid looks maybe 13, and a hot, Alyssa Milano-at-the-tail-end-of-Who’s-the-Boss thirteen at that, and you can see why ‘cause grandma is probably mid-50s, but a nice, tight Madonna mid-50s, definite MILF material, has me wondering if there’s such a thing as a GILF. Little sob story background, kid’s mom died of cancer like ten years back, and the dad blew town.
I reach behind me a grab a spoon off the counter and chuck it at Cheryl, who’s sleeping on sway-bottomed sofa we’d picked up off the curb on trash day maybe six months back.
“Fuck you want?” she grumbles.
“How much did those Thin Mints you bought cost you?”
“Oh man, don’t start in on that shit again.” Cheryl’d come home maybe a week back with a box of Thin Mints and Mopes had beat her ass pretty good on account of you could get three times as many Hydrox for the same coin if you really needed cookies. Also on account of Mopes just tended to beat her ass pretty good.
“I’m not starting, just want to know. Something I saw in the paper.”
“I dunno, four bucks, I think. I fuckin’ earned the money you know.” I knew. Pretty much every guy in Grant County knew. You saw Cheryl walking down the street and you could find a dumpster or something to stand behind, she’d suck you off for five bucks.
But four bucks a box? That miraculous lucidity I’d felt a couple years back was long gone – pretty much needed twice as much crank now just to turn the motor over – but the numbers part of my brain still worked just fine. Four bucks a crack at 17,000 boxes was $68,000. I wasn’t so far gone that I thought the kid would have seventy large in one of the those green Girl Scout pencil case type things I remembered my sister carrying her loot around in when she was going door-to-door in Madison back in the 80s, and she got mostly checks anyway. But this retail model felt like a cash business – an impulse purchase thing. You’re walking out of the store and here’s this cute kid, and who doesn’t like Thin Mints, right? So you plunk down your four bucks. It’s not like the kid’s gonna take your debit card, and, hell, most people don’t even carry their checkbooks anymore.
And Girl Scout Cookie season only ran like six, eight weeks. So this kid had to be doing at least a couple thousand boxes a week – with school in session, she had to be doing most of it on weekends. This was the last weekend, the big push for the record, which was gonna get the local populace’s Rotary Club hearts all a twitter. Paper said she’d be set up outside the Piggly Wiggly on 81 all day Saturday and Sunday. Banks out here in East Bumblefuck don’t stay open late on weekends, so I was betting by Sunday night, Alyssa and grandma would be holding the whole weekend’s haul, figure at least a couple thousand boxes at four bucks a pop and you’re looking at $8,000 minimum.
***
“You really think so, fucking eight large?” I’d just run the scenario for Mopes and his eyes were bugging out.
“Yeah – at least eight. Ten or twelve wouldn’t surprise me. Soft target, too.” I was big on soft targets. Mopes got his mitts on some beat-to-fuck .38 wheel gun and four bullets a couple months back. We took a run at a gas station down toward Gratiot, and the 60-year-old woman behind the counter comes up with a side-by-side, blows the window out while we’re hauling ass out of the store, I’m picking glass fragments out of my head for like a week, and fucking Mopes bowels let go on him in my car, which hasn’t smelled right since. I’m not cut out to be Dillinger, and Mopes, Mopes just ain’t cut out right.
Mopes sat at the table staring at the picture in the paper. “I wanna do the kid. Fucking look at that sweat meat.”
I had to squeeze my eyes shut for a minute. They say you can choose your friends, but once you get in bed with the Meth Goddess, you’re pretty much stuck with her other acolytes, and every one of them is at least as fucked up as you are.
“We’re not doing any kids, Mopes.”
“You in charge now or something?”
We went through this every time. Of course I was in charge. Mopes’ IQ had been on the bottom half of the wrong side of the bell curve to start with, and he’d been on meth a solid year before I started. I wasn’t sure what would go first, Mopes’ last brain cell or Cheryl’s last tooth.
“Yeah, Mopes, I’m in charge. Think it over. You got no car, you got no plan, and when you do your next jolt, you wanna do it with a short-eyes jacket? You up to pulling that kind of train?”
Mopes tried to give me the hard face, but his eyes got all droopy. Finally he looked down.
“Yeah, OK. We do it your way. But the kid is hot, you gotta admit.”
A little twinge for me, because I’d had the Alyssa Milano thought to begin with, but that had been an abstract deal, right? I mean it wasn’t like I was thinking do the kid, it was just an observation.
“On her way to hot, Mopes. You wanna look her up in five years, be my guest.”
***
Late Saturday afternoon. Recon.
Mopes and I are cruising 80 and 81, staying close. We dropped Cheryl at the Quick Trip across the parking lot from the Piggly Wiggly – she hung out there a lot anyway. She was gonna call when they started packing up the cookie show. Spent maybe five minutes in the lot at the Pig after we dropped Cheryl, checking on the proceedings. Little banner over the cookie table read SUPPORT THE GIRL SCOUTS AND BRING THE RECORD TO PLATTEVILLE, and the locals were doing their best. By Sunday? Ten grand easy, had to be. I’d just made the turn off Ridge south back on to 80 when Cheryl called. Alyssa and the GILF were loading up a Blazer. Red. Vanity plates – PACK FAN.
Mopes and I followed them through town on 81 and then out toward Lancaster. Ten minutes north of town, the Blazer turned in to a long, gravel drive leading downhill to a small, white ranch house. Perfect – half a mile at least to the neighbors. We cruised in to Lancaster. Full dark on the way back. I doused the lights and turned into the drive, stopping about 100 yards in. “Stay put,” I told Mopes. “Just be a minute.”
I walked down the drive. The Blazer was parked at the side of the house next to a little porch. Side door – kitchen probably. Run down metal outbuilding off to the left. Enough room to park the car behind that, they wouldn’t see it pulling in. Got up next to the house, took a peak through the window. Kitchen, then a little counter, then the family room. Alyssa and the GILF were curled up on the sofa watching America’s Funniest Home Videos.
We headed back to pick up Cheryl. She’d probably made a few bucks waiting.
***
Sunday, just after 6:00 p.m.
Mopes and I sat behind the old outbuilding in my Malibu – last thing I still owned from before the divorce except for some clothes that were all too big on me on account of the meth will take your mind off of food for like a week at a time. Speaking of which, we’d just tweaked the last of our stash – I wanted to be sharp for this. Most days now, all I could afford was just enough crank to keep from tearing my own skin off. But we’d got the call from Cheryl – Alyssa and the GILF were on their way. So I’d taken a big hit, gotten all the way back inside the Meth Goddess temple where my mind was filled with golden light and I was warm in the embrace of her chemical love.
Plan was this. Soon as we saw the lights start down the drive, we get out of the car, rush them as they hit the side door, get them inside the house, get the cash, duct tape them to a couple chairs, rip the phone out, take any cells they got and hit the road.
That was the plan.
***
Now, Mopes has got the .38 up under the girl’s chin, grandma’s got the Remington, and I’m all the way outside the Meth Goddess temple trying to figure out how to unscrew this.
There wasn’t any cash. That was the thing. Turns out the manager at the Pig locks it up in the safe for them on weekends so they can take it in to the bank on Monday. And when Mope’s hears that, he says he ain’t leaving with nothing, and the thing he’s leaving with is the kid’s cherry, and he grabs the kid and he shoves the gun up under her chin and he starts pawing at the front of her blouse, trying to get at the buttons, but the green sash with all her Girl Scout badges is getting in the way and grandma starts screaming “No, no, don’t do that, I got money,” and she runs to the broom closet but instead of cash what she comes out with is the pump gun.
Of course, she’s got no shot, not at Mopes, ‘cause he’s behind the kid and even if grandma’s Annie Fuckin’ Oakley, with the pump she’s taking half the kid’s face if she pulls the trigger, so she swings the Remington toward me, and I jump between her and kid, and now she’s still got the same problem, and I’m praying for a moment of the meth super computer clarity so I can find a way out of this and what I get is this.
The kid doesn’t look like Alyssa Milano – not anymore, not when she’s terrified. What she looks like is my daughter, not that I’d talked to my daughter in three years, but sometimes I drive up to La Crosse and park down the block from the school and I’d watch her walk home, and sometimes when I’d do that I’d have these fantasies that I was gonna do the rehab thing and get clean and win her mother back and deserve to be her dad again, but I knew that was never gonna happen, and besides her mother was married to that Tim guy now, guy from down the street who’s wife died just before I got on the powder, so I was never gonna be a dad again.