@vikorr,
When I was twenty, my buddy Bruce bought a bag of weed from a guy named Steve. While we were smoking a joint from the bag, it did nothing but snap, crackle, and pop like a bowl of Rice Krispies on steroids. You actually had to hold a hand in front of your eyes when you took a hit because of the exploding seeds. Halfway through the joint, Bruce had had enough. He dumped the bag out on the table and separated the seeds from the weed. What should have been an ounce turned out to be just under a half.
The next day, we both walked back up town looking for Steve. He wasn't hard to find because he drove an old Hearse with WIDOW MAKER painted on the side. Bruce saw the Hearse and flagged him down. I kept my distance while Bruce walked to where Steve had pulled over. I could tell by Bruce's body language that things weren't going well. After about five minutes Bruce turned away from the window and walked away as Steve drove off.
I asked Bruce what the deal was, and he said that Steve told him that he can't give him his money back because he spent it on bills. I asked him if he asked if he could exchange the bag he got for a different bag. He said Steve told him that all the bags were the same, and that he couldn't do the exchange right then anyway because he never carries more than an ounce at a time, and he had just sold the one he was carrying. Bruce thought all was lost. But not me. It was Friday, and everyone was in town on Friday night, either hanging out in front of the Dibble's store, or cruising back and forth on Main Street. So I reminded Bruce that if Steve keeps his weed at home, and Steve is going to be cruising town as he does every Friday night . . . That's all it took. Bruce looked at me and smiled.
Steve lived about a mile out of town. So we waited until sunset and headed out for Steve's house. When a car would come, we hid in the ditch until it passed. When we got there, we had to cross a ditch with water in it to get in his yard. The windows weren't locked. Bruce opened the living room window and said he'd keep watch while I went in and looked for the weed. I looked everywhere, but no weed. Bruce couldn't believe it, and so he crawled in through the window and started looking everywhere. He found a BB pistol and stuck it in his pants. He saw a pot plant in a window sill and put it outside the window we crawled through.
Then he said we'd better go, and he crawled back through the window. But I wasn't done looking. There were places I didn't look that started popping into my head. I heard a little dog barking, and then I heard Bruce say in a hushed but urgent tone, "Let's go!" Then I heard a splash, which meant that Bruce didn't even take the time to cross the ditch where the water was low enough to jump over. So I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out a handful of pot seeds and threw them all over the living room. Then I dove out the window.
When I got to my feet the sound of that little dog was just around the corner of the house, and there was a flashlight beam on the ground. So I took off running and splashed through the ditch like Bruce did. The guy was Steve's neighbor who became suspicious when he saw the light in the house, but no WIDOW MAKER in the driveway. He was hollering, "Hold it! Get back here."
I have to take a time-out here to say how ridiculous it is for someone to tell a running criminal to stop and come back. How many crooks running from the scene of a crime have ever stopped and went back when instructed to do so? I mean, come-on!
I could hear the clicking of Bruce's heels on the road ahead of me. I caught up to him and said we should stop and walk. He was carrying the pot plant
as he was running. We were heavy smokers of weed and tobacco and were learning the hard way just how much of an effect those things had on one's endurance even when young. We were just getting our wind back when we saw a headlight coming from Steve's house. Apparently Steve's neighbor was in his car, and that car had a spotlight. And then another car had its headlights shining our way, and then another.
We knew we could make our way back to town and then through backyards before the cops could respond if the guy called them, but we never counted on the whole ******* neighborhood mobilizing to hunt us down. And now the cars--four of them--were heading towards us. Bruce dropped the pot plant on the road. We didn't stand a chance on the road, and so we headed into a farmer's field off to our left. It was a muddy field; the kind of mud that cakes and sticks to your boots.
So there were, huffing and puffing and running with what felt like ten pounds of mud on each foot. And the neighbors-turned-cops were now stopped where we had turned into the field with their car headlights pointing at us. So we both got down in the push-up position against the ground hoping that they wouldn't see us. It worked. They went farther down the road. We got back on our feet and walked over a rise in the field where they couldn't see us anymore. We shook the mud from our hands and headed through the worst brush ever to get back to town.
When we got back to Bruce's place, he plopped down in a kitchen chair and didn't even light up a cigarette. He said, "We're gonna have to lay low for awhile."
I said, "No, we gotta change clothes and wash our boots off and then get up town and hang out in front of Dibble's."
Bruce just nodded. So we changed clothes and washed our boots in the tub and hurried back up town to sit on the window ledge at Dibble's. We waved to everyone we knew who was cruising town and we were talking with others. When we waved to the cops as they went by, they waved back. That's when we knew it was all gonna be okay. Bruce said he was worried about the cops finding clues in Steve's house, but I told him I threw a handful of seeds in his living room, and that he wasn't likely to say that anything was missing since the cops would see the seeds and probably really search the place after that. Of course, we don't know how the smashed plant-pot with the pot plant in the middle of the road went over, but Steve didn't go to jail, so . . .
I only bring this up to show that even forty years ago I was thinking outside the box when I took the seeds to throw in his living room, and when I decided we should hurry up and get back up town to be seen, so that no one--not even Steve--would suspect us. In both cases, I was looking ahead.
