Bomb's Away

44 feet. That was the approximate distance from the window I was hanging out of ... and the street. It's the equivalent of 17 steps; 10 short seconds of walking. I wondered, as I was looking down, if I fell would those last 10 seconds of my life be very long ones or very short ones? Would my life pass before my eyes before I hit the ground? As I pulled my body back in the hotel room, I reflected on the fact that this was neither the beginning of this story nor the end.

I called myself a purveyor of dried vegetative delicacies. It sounded so much better than what the government called me: a pot dealer.

My business plan was simple: buy low and sell high, and I was very successful. I kept my eyes and ears open to new opportunities everywhere I went, and I had just recently met a man that said he had something I would like. That the meeting occurred while I was waiting in the reception room of one of my sources didn't bother me at all. This business can get a bit competitive at times and the local chapter of LOVE/POT, the League of Vendors/Purveyors of Tetrahydrocannabinol, had chosen not to interfere in the dealings of its smaller members.

As I was talking to the guy (Mark), I got the impression that he hadn't fully engaged his brain when he woke up that morning. I chalked it up to his having smoked several joints and continued making arrangements for a meeting later that same day.

Our rendezvous was to be at a hotel in New York City famously favored by LOVE/POT members. I tried to talk Mark into another venue, but he wouldn't budge, "Dude. The buds are already there." Against my better judgement, I agreed to meet him at the hotel. He told me the room number and the time I should arrive.

The scrutiny a long haired hippy freak like me engendered on the walk through the lobby was unnerving. I felt like I had a huge sign hovering over my head ... DRUG DEALER ... in huge blinking neon red letters inside an arrow pointed directly at me. I breathed a sigh of relief when the elevator doors closed.

... and sucked in a gasp of dismay when the doors opened on the fourth floor!

The air reeked of marijuana! I seriously considered pushing the button for the lobby and getting the hell out of there. "DAMMIT!" I thought to myself, "That smells really, really good!" I shot out of the elevator as the doors were closing.

As I walked down the hall toward the Mark's room the smell just kept getting stronger and stronger. I was astounded that the place wasn't crawling with cops! Someone had to have complained about this to management!

I just about leapt out of my skin when the elevator dinged behind me. I looked over my shoulder fully expecting to see a mass of men to spew forth wearing ski masks and carrying assault rifles. A little old lady waddled out, squinted in my direction, peered at the wall for a moment and started walking in the opposite direction.

Once in the room and with some smoke in my lungs, I started to relax. We bent over the four huge trash bags open on the floor and proceeded to haggle about quality and price.

"Look at this bud!" he exclaimed picking a particularly juicy looking specimen from one of the bags. He squeezed it between his thumb and forefinger and showed me how sticky it was. It clung to his finger for a moment or two before it fell back into the bag. The product certainly was attractive, and I decided on the spot to take all four bags. Each weighed about 30 pounds. His price was too high, though, and we spent the next 20 minutes bargaining. Finally, both of us sat back in our chairs and grinned secretly to ourselves. I'd forced him down to a price I could live with ... of course, he had done the same in the opposite direction.

With the actual business done, I almost instantly became anxious to leave.

"Where are your dufflebags?" I asked.

"What dufflebags?" he countered.

"The ones you brought this stuff in with. Wait! How did you get these bags up here?"

"I carried them over my shoulders. I had to make two trips, man! It was a pain in the ass!"

"Okay ...," I said and shook my head. "You just walked through the lobby carrying a trash bag full of pot over each shoulder and rode the elevator up here?

Twice?!?!?"

"No, dude. The first time, I had to go check in before I could get a key."

I made some strange type of noise part way between a squeal and a squeak as the image of him standing in front of reception with a bag of pot on either side of his body forced its way into my skull.

"Dude. What's the problem? We'll just carry the bags out to your car. No fuss."

"Absolutely NOT! I am NOT carrying large bags of pot down the hallway, down the elevator, across the lobby of a large hotel, and then hoofing this shit through Manhattan to my car ... NO!"

After calming down, I realized that we were going to have to go out and find dufflebags large enough to hold the load. Five stores, five strike-outs. In the sixth place we found little pink bags of a size sufficient to hold Paris Hilton's toy dog. Doing a mental calculation, I figured that we'd need somewhere around 100 of those. It'd probably take us an hour to fill them and another half hour to carry them all to the car. ... there were three on the shelf.

I needed a Plan B.

We caught a taxi back to the hotel sitting in silence the whole way.

Well, I was silent. He kept on trying to talk, but with the cabbie sitting only feet away, I didn't want to get into a discussion about 120 pounds of marijuana.

In the hotel room, I paced back and forth racking my mind for a solution that didn't involve walking through a crowded lobby with very smelly bags slung over my shoulder. I envisioned what might happen: I'd become the Pied Piper of Pot. As I walked past people, the odor of the bags would ensnare them and they'd mindlessly fell in behind me. The thought of fifty people all coming to a halt at the back of my Pathfinder and watching me push black trash bags through the back window made me shudder.

"Dude. I have an idea."

I popped out of my reverie and into the hotel room.

Under any other circumstances, I would have been pleased to hear those words ... but not this time. They came from the mouth of a man whose brain, I was sure, wasn't firing on all cylinders. In fact, if there ever was an 8 cylinder mind in that head, 2 of them had seized years ago, 4 of the remaining 6 were so full of sludge that they barely moved, and the final 2 hadn't been treated to an oil bath in so long that they produced a hideous squeal as they turned.

I was, however, desperate. "What?" I asked and cocked my head sideways in the hope that holding my head at a different angle would magically make the words I was about to hear make sense.

"I'll go down to the street and you can drop a bag out of the window. I'll take it to your truck and come back for another one. Easy schmeasy."

I'm pretty sure that holding my head at an angle had deprived the logical side of my brain of blood. I found myself giving his suggestion serious consideration.

He then said something that made me shiver. "Trust me. This will work."

My mind immediately replayed all of the times one or more of my friends had said, "Hey guys! Watch this!" right before they did something unutterably stupid with consequences both immediate and incredibly painful.

I resigned myself to a life in prison. I was going to have to help carry 4 bags of pot through a lobby filled with narcotics agents.

"Dude! Seriously! This will work!"

I allowed myself to be swayed.

Which is how I found myself hanging out of a window contemplating death by sidewalk.

Mark appeared below me.

I manhandled one of the bags through the window, looked up and down the street to see if there were any pedestrians, took careful aim, and let go. Bomb's away.

It's funny how time can be so elastic. An hour can pass in the blink of an eye and seconds can crawl by so slowly that they feel like hours.

I could actually hear the fluttering the plastic made as it fell toward Mark who stood bent slightly backward with his arms stretched out to his sides. He was in perfect catch mode and was making small corrections to his position as his brain (all 2 cylinders of it) calculated the exact trajectory. After what felt like 5 minutes, the bag hit him square in the chest. In that last instant before impact I thought about what would happen if the bag burst. Pot would fly for ten feet in all directions!

That didn't happen.

Neither Mark (not at all surprising) nor I (definitely surprising) had considered the speed a thirty pound bag might reach as it fell forty odd feet. Neither, it appeared, had we considered the force with which it would impact his body.

Bent backward as he was, he had no ability to resist the inirtial energy created by a thirty pound object falling forty feet. His legs buckled beneath him and the bag drove him into the concrete. The dull, meaty thunk his head made as it hit the sidewalk is a sound I hope never to hear again as long as I live.

Dead. He is dead! Disjointed, half-baked exit strategies whirled through my mind. My face, I'm sure, could have been used as a clinical example of utter disbelief. And confusion. And horror. And several other less-than-attractive emotions.

At times of great stress, my mind goes to some really odd places. The inscription on Mark's gravestone popped into my mind:

Here lies Mark
He died near a park
A bag of pot fell
And caused his death knell

I really expected to see a spread of black slowly seep from under his body. "How, in God's name, am I going to explain this to the cops? FUCK!!! My mother is going to kill me for getting myself thrown in jail for the rest of my life!"

Mark's miraculous mind, however, had survived its contact with concrete. He started to move. Slowly, every so slowly, he picked himself up from the sidewalk, looked around as if he didn't know how he'd gotten there, gazed at the black bag on the ground, and then slowly looked up. At me. And waved.

I should really have ended this story with the word, "waved." You, dear reader, should wonder what happened next. Did I make it out of town with my booty?

Of course I did ... I wouldn't be telling the story otherwise. It's interesting to note, however, that Mark, after some minutes, appeared under the window and again assumed his previous bodily position. He obviously expected me to drop another bag. I reduced my starting estimate of 8 cylinders to 4 and then decided that he was actually able to function with a brain that apparently had no working synapses.

The ending is rather banal. I motioned for him to come upstairs. We shouldered the remaining 3 bags, walked down the hall, got into the elevator, walked through a lobby unpopulated by narcs, and hoofed it to my truck.

I shook his hand and drove off into the sunset.

My path and Mark's never crossed again.