The Howard Marks Book of Dope Stories

by Howard Marks

  Well, this will put it all right for you. Fifteen grains is one gram, and a thousand grams is a kilogram, and a kilogram is two-point-two pounds. The only thing I’m not sure about is whether it’s a sixteen-ounce pound or a twelve-ounce pound. But I don’t see what it matters anyway, if you’ve got a pound of snow or H., you can go on for a long while, but apparently it’s rather awkward orchestrating them.

  Diary of a Drug Fiend, 1970

  Robert Sabbag

  A Way with the Spoon

  ZACHARY SWAN’S FIRST capital investment upon his return to the United States was a laboratory gram scale. It was the one precision instrument, with the possible exception of a good automatic weapon, that was demanded by the cocaine trade. Swan selected an Ohaus, three-posted, equal-arm pharmaceutical balance with stainless-steel trays – it appealed to the professional in him. It cost $150. And it was metric. It did not know an ounce or a pound from a counterfeit Deutschmark. He was impressed.

  For almost two hundred years Americans have been trying to come to grips with the metric system; refusal to adopt it, from black-market conversion tables in the elementary school arithmetic classroom to bisystematic mileposts on the nation’s interstate highways, has come to be regarded as one of the unimpeachable insignias of citizenship. There is pride to be found in the embrace of a system of measurement that is unique in the world, truly one’s own – different even from the British Imperial System, though few are certain exactly how it is different – and an even further glory, it seems, in not actually knowing what that system of measurement is called. The US Customary System, as it is called, officially and everywhere, is as American as shoo-fly pie: Olympic swimming pools have confounded us for years; displacement in liters we have knowledged as having something to do with foreign automobiles and French wine; and kilometers, whatever they are, we know had something to do with extraterrestrial real estate in The Day the Earth Stood Still – it might as well have been cubits our alien visitor was asking for. The International System of Units – for that is what theirs, the one the rest of the universe uses, is called – is un-American; if it is not furlongs or fathoms it is foreign, it is something we grant chemistry teachers for their amusement. Or so one would have thought. Until recently. Only recently – and seemingly overnight – did an entire postwar generation of schoolchildren learn that the metric system was a postgraduate course.

  Whatever Congress decides, and no matter how long it takes a box of Spoon Size Shredded Wheat to go from twelve ounces to 340 grams, the truth is this: the United States of America effectively converted to the metric system in, or around, 1965 – by 1970 there was not a college sophomore worth his government grant who did not know how much a gram of hash weighed. That little piece of empirical data had become a matter of pride. And, on many occasions, a matter of survival. Here was some dude, not even a chemistry major, coming on to you with mikes, grams, bricks, kilos and hundredweights; off the top of his head he could go from grams to ounces and he could tell you how many ounces he got to the kilo. He hit you with lids, caps, keys, tabs, nickel bags, blotters, buttons, spoons and everything from milligrams to boatloads. You had to protect yourself. You had to have your weights and measures down, and the metric system was where you began. Anything that came out of a pharmaceutical house or across a border . . . well, man, they just did not know avoirdupois weight . . . avoir do what? The time had come to get it together. And so today everyone over the age of twelve knows that there are 28.3 grams to the ounce and 35.2 ounces or 2.2 pounds to the kilogram. He may not know how many swimming pools to the standard football field, but he knows how to buy dope:

  Q: And so, Johnny, if you had a pound of apples and a pound of oranges and a fifth of a pound of cherries to sell, and you needed 600 Colombian pesos to buy a second-hand bicycle, how much would you have to sell your fruit for?

  A: Twenty dollars a key, teach – more, of course, if I ounced it.

  There is nobody in the world, let alone at MIT or Lowell Tech, who is faster at math than a dope dealer.

  Snowblind, 1998

  Charlie Beer

  Dave the Doorman

  DAVE HAD BEEN a thoughtful and conscientious doorman for over fifteen years, he loved the job, but he decided to give it up in the blink of an eye. For the first time in his career, he had taken it personally. It turned out to be a mistake; he hoped he would live to regret it.

  Dave was a big, powerful forty-five-year-old who hadn’t resorted to the easy fix of steroids to gain his impressive size. He came into door work later than most; he was already thirty and needed extra cash to supplement his wages as a postman. Door work seemed like the perfect solution. His genes had gifted him with a muscular body, which had been toned through five years of hard workouts. He was social, enjoyed the nightclub scene and most of all liked helping people. Dave revelled in being one of the boys with the other doormen, even though he knew that some of them were total pricks. He had never resorted to giving punters an unnecessary slap, but he had seen plenty of beatings dished out in his time. He was a man of few words who preferred his actions to do the talking for him; there were no knuckledusters, coshes or CS gas.

  The club where Dave had spent his entire door career and life was in Margate. When Dave joined the team in the mid-eighties the club was your typical provincial venue with chicken in the basket, live bands who had had one hit in the seventies that no one could remember, boys chasing girls and doormen who wore bow ties and dinner jackets. The only trouble was either drink- or girl-related, usually both. Yes, they had alcohol-induced kick-offs almost nightly but nothing they couldn’t handle.

  By the time the venue was taken over by a new leisure group, Dave had been promoted to head doorman. He was proud of this and enjoyed the kudos it brought; everyone wanted to be his friend. He hired and fired doormen so had rooted out all the tossers who were only working to fuck girls or totally fuck over the punters. He ran a good team; the punters and management liked them. He had long since given up working for the Post Office and couldn’t imagine doing another job.

  When the club was revamped, it changed to a mainstream dance venue with headlining DJs each weekend. They had extended the club, knocking into the pub next door. The punters came from London by the carload, and from Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester by the coachload. The club was banging all weekend from when the doors opened at 10 p.m. until they kicked them all out at 5 a.m. The great thing with the new club was that there was so little trouble. Dave couldn’t believe that the huge numbers of punters were so peaceful. In all ways, this was now a big club.

  When the club reopened, he was a bit naive about the world of drugs. He had seen guys get huge with injections in the gym and had done the door-supervisors training that covered drug abuse. He read the papers and watched the news like everyone else so he knew about the E generation and the cokeheads. He knew that most of the clubbers were on some drug or another and as long as they stayed safe, he was OK with it. Knowing about and dealing with it are two different things. Dave soon found out how different.

  The new club had only been open about two weeks when the team had caught their first dealer. One of the off-duty barmaids had been offered Es by a small-time player. The door team gripped him up, took him to the security office and searched him. They found ten Es and a couple of hundred quid on him. He seemed like a decent enough bloke so they flushed his gear down the bog, gave him the cash back and kicked him out.

  Dave was used to people trying to befriend him, the punters loved to call him by his first name to impress their mates. The girls wanted to flirt with him so that they could jump the queue and hope to blag their way in. It didn’t seem that odd when the large-framed guy sat opposite him in the café when he was having his regular Saturday lunchtime fried breakfast and started to chat to him. After a bare minimum of pleasantries, he tells him he knows that he is the head doorman at the club and he had a business proposition for him. Dave had already started to feel uneasy; Dave knew this guy was connected.
The swallow tattoo on his neck, the Rolex watch, the ridiculously heavy gold chain, the shaved head, the true south-London accent, the Armani shirt and jeans, the tan recently acquired from Marbella were all very obvious clues. Dave had often had punters telling him they were connected to this family and that family and that he was going to get shot for throwing them out of the club; it was always bollocks, till now. The Man knew Dave had a missus, a small house, a five-year-old Ford Mondeo, the school his two kids went to, and the gym he trained at. The Man already knew too much for Dave’s liking. Dave was starting to feel his heart race, his hearing was becoming affected and he could barely make out what the Man was saying, his T-shirt was getting damp with the sweat that was pouring out of him. Dave knew from years of working the door how to big himself up and front any situation. He was trying his best, he wanted to act hard, he wanted to show the man that he was not intimidated, but this was not a pissed-up punter, this was reality and it was hitting him like a baseball bat across the nose.

  The business deal was simple; in exchange for cash, he was to let one of the Man’s associates in to deal drugs in his club. He was to carry the gear in, so avoiding the searching on the door, and protect the dealer while he was in the club. He was to keep the other doormen away from him and his little posse of minders. The Man told him if he kept his end of the bargain, he would get two grand each and every week. Hundred grand a year tax-free is a lot of money and would ensure that his family got the best things in life. The Man didn’t need to explain the flip side. The Man was not used to having people say no to him. The Man got up and walked out to his brand new black 7-series BMW parked opposite.

  Dave’s mobile phone rang within two minutes. It was the Man, just letting him know that they knew his number and the operation would start next week. He would be in touch. Dave had never been in a situation like this and didn’t know anyone else who had or what to do. He wouldn’t have dreamt of telling his missus, she would panic, he couldn’t involve his family or his friends.

  That night at work he was on edge, he was staring intensely at everyone trying to identify any of the Man’s gang. His team knew something was wrong, as Dave was snappy with punters and the quietest he had ever been. He knew he would have to do something or else he would be in so deep he would never get out. Taking the money was never an option for Dave, it was the easy way, but that wasn’t Dave. For the first part of the next week Dave thought of little else, he kept his phone with him all the time, never turned it off, waiting for the Man’s call. The family was causing him more stress; he couldn’t think straight and had to get them away. He shipped them off to her mother’s in Suffolk. Thursday afternoon the Man rang, he told him to meet him in a seafront car park at 8 p.m. on Saturday.

  Dave hardly slept all week, he was surviving on strong coffee, and three hours’ sleep a night. For the first time in years, he even went sick on the Friday night. He said he had a stomach upset but he was sick to the stomach. Saturday came and went in a blur; before he settled down, it was already time for the meet.

  The car park was pretty empty when he drove in; he saw the BMW at once and parked next to it. He got in the rear seat behind the passenger. The Man was in the driver’s seat, the passenger was a young guy, fairly anonymous-looking, dressed for clubbing. The Man passed him a small holdall; he unzipped it and took out two packages. The first was a large Jiffy bag that had inside it a see-through plastic bag with a self-adhesive seal at the top. It was packed with hundreds and hundreds of small pale blue round tablets, Dave could see they had the Mickey Mouse logo on them. The other package was a white envelope obviously stuffed with cash. He put both of them back in the bag. The Man told Dave to meet his guy inside by the Gents toilet at 10.15 p.m. to hand back the tablets. He made sure he knew that the dealer was going to be watched and anyone that tried to stop him dealing would be hurt. Dave nodded, picked up the bag and got out of the car.

  Dave drove up to the club and parked his car; he carried the bag into the club. He put the bag in the security office and walked back out of the club. He had the cash with him; even though he hadn’t counted it, he knew it would be spot on a grand. He walked across the road to the local nick. He walked into the foyer and up to the desk where a female civilian was checking the driving documents of a young lad. On the side of the counter was a metal opening, which had Kent Police Benevolent Fund on a plaque above it. Dave opened the envelope and started to feed all the £20 notes into the slot. The civvie stopped what she was doing and looked in amazement as Dave fed all the cash into the box.

  He walked straight back to the club and got on with the pre-opening, all his security team turned up and the queue started to build early. Dave decided to watch proceedings from the office on the CCTV. The doors opened at 10 p.m. and within five minutes Dave had seen the dealer enter, he guessed he had seen three or four guys who were probably with him. He waited till nearly 10.30 p.m., slipped the bag of Es under his jacket and went to the loos. Although punters were coming in quickly the club was still quiet, especially near the toilets. The dealer was waiting; he was relaxed, even cocky. He knew that he was protected and connected, he knew he was untouchable by security and therefore safe from the police. The Man had set it up and it would be sweet. The dealer gave Dave grief for being late. Dave didn’t reply but just walked into the toilets, they went into the cubicle on the left and locked the door. The dealer was still relaxed when Dave took the bag out, pulled it open and handed it towards the dealer with his right hand. The dealer was looking at the contents and didn’t see Dave’s left hand in his jacket pocket pulling a metal flask from it. By the time he saw it there was nothing he could do to stop Dave tipping its contents into the bag. The acid ate straight through the plastic bag and the contents dropped to the floor. The dealer wasn’t relaxed any more, he jumped back as far as he could and watched as the acid destroyed the tablets fizzing viciously. The cubicle filled with an acrid smell that was noxious to the senses. Dave left the dealer with the ex-tablets and walked out.

  Dave moved past two of the minders, who were opposite the toilets, he gave them an assured smile and went to the front of the club. He went and stood on the front door feeling a huge weight lift off his shoulders and a sense of satisfaction. The rear fire-exit alarm soon went off and he knew that it would be the dealer and his boys leaving. He expected retribution; he wasn’t stupid. He also knew he was safe on the front door under the constant protection of the CCTV.

  It was twenty minutes before his mobile went: it was the Man’s number. He didn’t answer; he didn’t leave a message. The night went peacefully and the clubbers had a great time. Dave knew that the first problem time was after locking up and going back to his car. He could have left early or got some of his team to wait for him but knew that would mean more people getting hurt.

  He was the last one to leave the club. He set the alarm and locked the side door. The car park at the rear of the club was empty, he had been checking the CCTV, and there hadn’t been much activity out there. It looked OK, and he had already decided not to go back to home that night. He knew that he could run to his car safely even if they showed up now. Dave walked to the car and kept looking around him, no problems. He was starting to relax; he knew he was going to make the car. He stooped forwards to open the car door and his eye caught the glint of something metallic on the roof.

  There are plenty of good reasons to leave Margate, and a 9mm bullet with the word DAVE etched on it and Sellotaped to his car was as good a reason he needed.

  Dave the Doorman, 2001

  Peter McDermott

  The Immaculate Injection

  THE YEAR MUST have been 1975.

  I hadn’t known Billy before he went to jail. He’d served a long sentence because he’d been convicted of armed robbery. He really didn’t seem the type. A gentle giant, his Liverpudlian accent carried more than the faintest lilt of his Irish heritage, even though he’d been born and bred on the banks of the Mersey.

  I met him through my olde
st friend, Mal McGreary, who grew up in the next street to Billy in Orrell Park. I’d known Mal since my early teens. Although we had gone to different schools, we’d been drawn to each other since we were the only teenage long-haired dopers in that part of the north end of Liverpool. There might have been others who had grown their hair below the tops of their ears and attended the occasional concert, but there was nobody else with the sort of commitment that we had, with our nipple-length hair and our absolute determination to see every gig ever played in Liverpool, for free.

  So Billy had just completed a long stretch and now he wanted some fun.

  When the pair of them first showed up on my mother’s doorstep, they wanted to know if I could cop. At that time it could be extraordinarily difficult to buy heroin in Liverpool, even though you knew everyone within a twenty-mile radius of the city who used the drug. The black market as we know it today didn’t even begin to emerge until five or six years later. Virtually all opiates came from one of three places: you were registered with a drug-dependency clinic (and the one in Liverpool was notorious for its refusal to prescribe anything, though some people in one-ampoule towns like Ormskirk or on the Wirral seemed to be doing OK); you were managing to scam some GP into prescribing an opiate (but you couldn’t get heroin any more – that had died out with the new laws that had led to the opening of the drug-dependency clinics); or lastly, and most likely, somebody broke into a chemist shop.

  Anyway, nobody had telephones, so I went to all of the usual sources, which meant driving or taking the bus to far-flung reaches of the city to Speke and Halewood, to Ormskirk and Toxteth. But it didn’t matter where I went, there wasn’t anything of interest to be had. Not heroin, not Diconal, not even as much as a Physeptone amp. Billy ended up buying half an ounce of hash and some acid from somebody, but it wasn’t what he really wanted and he went home disappointed.