BIG SHOTS, BAGMEN AND NOBODIES (OR, THE DAY DICKEY GRABBED THE RED PHONE)

It all started out a fairly ideal Saturday;
no obligations to anybody but ourselves
and weather conditions that would make you
a believer, the whole goddamn world wide-open
with youthful hope and possibility,

but, somehow, we still wound up,
neck-deep, in a big, steaming vat of
“how-the-hell-did-we-get-here!?

As in some place we really didn’t want to be.
As in “seriously, what the fuck!?”
As in the collective kill zone
of four military cops who’ve suddenly
burst into the room.

Scowling, no-nonsense faces. Check.
Hands on side-arms. Check.
Three shoe boxes full of weed
on the coffee table between us. Check.

“Gentlemen, let’s see some I.D., please.”

And it had been such a fine day in America, too.
A glorious, damn-near perfect day.
A big, phatt fluffy clouds adrift like land-masses of ice
on a bright, blue ocean of sky kind of day;

Denver, mid-September, 60-some-odd degrees and
we’d been there on “vacation” for a couple of weeks,
working part-time temp-jobs in the day,
hitting parties and bars at night,
crashing at my buddy’s second cousin, Dickey’s place

(who, by the way, had been facilitating
a friends-and-family rate/very close to wholesale deal for us
with this white Rasta/grower-friend of his for some kind of
super-chronic-killer-kind-bud-purple-monkey-sunshine-shit
we were then gonna take back to Kansas
to disseminate for vast fortunes, no doubt).

And it was barely even noon
before we’d already put down a couple rounds
of fairly elaborate and exotic boat drinks
as well as some seriously amazing appetizers
at this Thai place we’d just found that day.

And then we did what we did every Saturday;
hit every used bookstore and record store in town
(and back in those days (not that long ago, really)
Denver had a shitload) so we always managed
to come away with some really good scores.

Then we just wandered around for a while
with a couple of shorties, looking at girls,
lounging about on park benches
like lazy vagabond princes, ,
stopping in at whatever tavern or pub
that grabbed our eye for a quick pint and a shot
and maybe a little of the latest, local gossip.

And all the while my buddy talking
like we really were gonna be these bigshots
with all the rich kid/pot-heads back in
Lawrence, Kans-ass (and all we gotta do is
make a trip to Denver maybe once a month
at most and how shitty is that? Not!)

And then
we finally get the call.
Time for the big meet-up/sit down.

And so, here we all are now,
shitting gold bricks and sweating ice cubes
in this cozy (in a wood-panel, big fire place,
animal heads mounted on walls kind
of cozy) office den at the heart of this massive,
Bruce Wayne type estate (probably complete
with secret passages and a giant fortress/bunker
deep beneath it).

And these MP motherfuckers mean business
and our young, wayward lord of the manor/
Yah, Mon!/ganja king is suddenly sputtering
and overflowing with “everybody be cool,
everybody be cool, everybody just be cool!”
And I’m thinking aint this just the wicked step-mother
of all misunderstandings?

Seems like this guy never mentioned to anybody
that his father was a four-star general,
a four-star general connected directly to the Whitehouse
and the Pentagon via the Bat Phone, here;
yes, the very phone that “Step On His Dick” Dickey
had to pick up and yell into, “if I don’t have a pizza here
in fifteen minutes, I’m lettin’ the monkeys loose!” Click.

Seems like maybe this guy could have picked
a better place to “make the exchange,” (as they say),
like maybe the mini-mansion/guest house
he lived in out back (or maybe that one just wasn’t
wrath of Jah, jaw-droppingly, awe-inspiring enough, Mon.

Seems like, at the very least,
he could have made it
a little more crystal fucking clear;
no matter what else you do in this house;
raid the fridge, rape the dog,
smoke the old man’s Cubans
and drink his two-hundred dollar,
single-malt scotch,
you don’t ever,
ever touch
the red phone.

Great.

Now we fucking know.


-Jason Ryberg, 2011