Crash and Burn

[Enver Marshall II]

The following entries belong to Crash, Enver's thrall

Overture:

It’s 2014, and life is ******* grand. I’m at the highest point in my life and there’s nothing that can knock me down. I’m richer than I’ve ever been, feeling higher than the Empire state building and everyone that once wrote me off as the dysfunctional guy who would always be controlled by his addictions-was now snorting the stuff I was addicted to and now pushing on the streets.

And here I am, as popular as the must have read on the New York times bestseller list. My name muttered in every club in Harper Rock. I feel great. I couldn’t be happier.

In the same token, I couldn’t be more outraged. When you’re at the top, the ones at the bottom are only that much more indignant of your success. They start to spread a bad rep about the stuff you sell, hoping to tear you down piece by piece. Some people buy into it. Some don’t. It’s like any business. Some people swear by Chevy’s, while others stand strong with Ford’s. You can’t win every battle, and there are always going to be some casualties, but that’s just the everyday life of a grade A Cocaine dealer.

And that’s when I meet Mr. Hollywood. He’s a real game changer. I knew that from the second he walked in that club and all eyes moved right to him. Men, women. Didn’t matter. Everyone wanted to know who he was and what his story was. Most of all, me.

Prologue:

Every single time I try and get ahead or just catch up, something knocks me back down again. Friends with forked tongues, trying to shake me to my core. So and so is doing this. So and so is making a move. So and so is a rat. A narc. I hear it all, and know that they’re no better. None of us are. We all lie, cheat and hustle, it’s the name of the game. This is my life. Welcome to it, watch your step and don’t mind wading in ankle deep ******** to your right there.

Back in 2011, I tried to straighten up my act. I checked myself into a center that promised miraculous things. Some quick get off drug treatments for a steep price. By the second day, I was starved. Not for Cocaine, but starved for my own safe refuge. I had seen a woman pour her heart and soul out into a group session; saying how much she missed her kids that had got taken away from her due to her addiction of booze, get slung down an icy rink of degradation like a damn hockey puck during a Canucks game.

After the enlightening session, I met with her later and we passed the time with some cigarettes and some sodas. Trading one addiction for two others.

“Do you think we can love more than just our addictions?” She looked at me after blowing her lungs out from the smoke she inhaled in a few seconds ago.

“I do.” I tell her solemnly. “I’ve been in love three times.” One of those times was cocaine, the other two, wasn’t.

“Everyone says I’m a horrible mom.” She said before sticking the cigarette back between her lips.

“**** them. We’re all in here, so if you’re horrible, we’re all horrible.” I reach out and caress the high of her cheekbone. Probably not the best of ideas, since we’re all itching for the next fix and that can come in any form in a place like this.

We kiss, but that’s all we do. I reject anything further from her. Would I have rejected her in any other setting? No. But right here, right now? It’s not what either of us are here for. She’s here for her kids and I’m here to demolish my obsession with something I’ve been snorting for just over a decade now.

At group the next day, we’re all informed she tried to slice her brachial artery earlier in the morning and was sent to a psych ward for observations. I always think about the question she first asked me. About love. Was I her final attempt at trying to feel loved?

My Loves

I remember the first time I was introduced to the gateway drug, pot. I was home alone with a couple friends on a warm Sunday afternoon and came across my parent’s stash. My friends and I were actually looking for my dad’s stash of dirty magazines, but came across the Marijuana instead. My friend Steven knew what it was right of the bat and went to town making us a blunt.

I remember my dad tanning my *** and calling Steven and Earl’s parents. I lost some good friends that night, but made a new one with weed. When I was sixteen, I met a girl who went by the name of Skylark. Her mom was a big hippie that wore psychedelic colors of all shades with corduroy bell bottoms, who did a lot of different drugs. Her dad wasn’t any better, all summer long he was out in their backyard cropping their two pot plants. I still remember that bright orange couch in the living room where Skylark lost her virginity at after a couple of beers from her dad’s fridge in their rec room down in the basement.

I talked about cocaine being one of my three loves, Skylar was my very first love. You always remember those the most. The one you did a lot of firsts with. It’s funny how she introduced me to my second love in a roundabout way. I remember everything like it just happened yesterday. The stench of pot in the curtains, couches and her hair. The sweet, but bitter taste of the five beers I guzzled down that night. Even the song that was playing from her dad’s old 8-track. It was Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, when I met the drug of my dreams.

I was at her parent’s home, like I normally am every other weekend. Only this weekend was a party for her older brother because he was going off to college later on that week. I remember sneaking beers out of her dad’s fridge that night, while the neighborhood parents had their own bash going on, we had our little buzz fest growing outside in the backyard. Her brother, Mick and a couple of his friends, whose names I never heard or never got around to asking.

I’m going to start out by saying we make our own choices in life. I’m not blaming a single person for my addictions. We do what we do, and we aren’t victims. I believe you’re only a victim if something unexpected and tragic happens to you. But there are stories behind those things that we do. Stories that lead us down the road we started on. Stories that we never think or being interrelated or connected, but they are. People influence our choices in life, but they don’t make us do anything.

Mick put a single line out on his parents fire engine red picnic table and told us it was all nose candy. He said snorting it through the nose hit your system faster and would give you a bigger buzz than any beer or other alcohol would. I enjoyed drowning in my buzz’s. Life seemed calmer, more subdued. I watched Mick and his friends snort some of that nose candy up and waited for a reaction.

[Enver Marshall II]

I have a chameleon ability to blend in with any kind of crowd. I’ve always been known as the real chill friend, or acquaintance. The guy who got along with anyone and everyone. You have to when you’re in the position I’m in. I was a listener, always absorbing in everything everyone was saying, and what it was they were doing. I never had much confidence. Not like Mr. Hollywood did, but over time, some of his confidence wore off on me. Enver has a lot of it, and that’s what people like. A confident person. They want to know that what you’re selling-from vacuums, to cars, and drugs, is something you believe in. If you do, then they will too.

I remember the second time I did drugs. I always remember these times, because as I said...I love drugs. Loved. Love. It’s a very thin line; where the past ends and the present begins. We never know when the past ends and the beginning starts. Not in my mind.

It was Christmas that year, long after the incident with Skylark and her brother. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t do the nose candy that night, because our congregation had been broken up by a parent who was mortified that us kids got into something so serious back then. Not the exact day of Christmas, but close to. Right before Christmas break. At this point in my life, I had joined the photo club when the opportunity presented itself. Primarily because I was bored and my dad was always telling me to join something. He had hoped that something was a sport-but that just wasn't my style. I did some work for the upcoming Yearbook, like most of us did throughout the year. I enjoy watching people. Capturing them even. In their finest and not so finest moments. It’s real, and I like **** that’s real.

I was in the juniors and seniors hallway, taking picture of classmates walking under the decoration some other stupid club made for the Christmas season, when a kid named Tanner dropped his bag of pot from his locker and we locked eyes. He knew, that I knew what it was and that I had seen the drop. He closed his locker, locked it and then approached me. “Wanna skip P.E. and go light a joint?” He asked me and I let the camera drop from my hands, letting it swing there from the neck strap before nodding my head. “Hell ya.” I tell him, and that’s what we do. We **** off from P.E. and lay low in the boy’s bathroom near the choir room and smoke that *****.

After we’ve smoked it, I remember that he’s sitting on the edge of one of the sinks, and I’m in a window in the bathroom, protected by the blocked pattern in the window that prevents anyone from seeing anything. Tanner asks me if I want to start making some money, by helping him sell some stuff. Sell some pot. I do. I want to make money, but there’s a small problem. I don’t have any money. Nothing other than my lunch money for the next week and I’m not going to cough that up because I can’t pack a lunch. My mom would ask me what I did with my lunch money. Tanner tells me it’s cool and that he’ll buy my first stash for me, if I give him seventy-five percent of the profits I make for the first two months. After that, I owe him nothing.

I can’t help but think...this is the perfect business for me. I can try the product before selling it, but I could feel great all the time. I’m lying to myself, only, I don’t recognize it at as the dangerous lie it will turn out to be later on down the road.