In the City

A 2014 Camaro exits off the highway and into the seedy part of the already-gritty city. It muscles its way down a side road and pulls up to the nondescript alley. Five men get out and walk to the rear entrance of the decrepit warehouse. The men are dressed like the street toughs that they are, plenty of black, plenty of leather, and plenty of attitude. Inside the Roaring Twenties-era building that was probably used as background for one those Scorsese movies, a group of Colombians (also street-tough) are waiting. There’s a table with a briefcase on it and that briefcase is probably filled with cocaine or something, maybe Molly, I don’t know, it’s not important. No, let’s say it’s cocaine.

The first group of street toughs walk to the table and the leader says, “Hello Rico, looks like you and your girlfriends brought the good stuff.” Rico says, “Listen, man my name is Frank and I’m American. My parents are from Honduras. Not all drug-dealers are from Colombia you know. Also, really with the gender-shaming thing?” The leader of the first group of toughs is named Daniel. Daniel replies, “That’s fair, I deserved that. Sorry about propagating stereotypes and sexism. Now, let’s get on with this.” Frank says, “You got the money?” Daniel replies, “Yeah we got the money. Let’s see about this cocaine.” Daniel pulls out a switchblade, real tough-like and cool. And he keeps eye-contact with Frank the whole time. Grabbing a brick of the sweet, sweet white stuff, he slices it open at the top, licks the pinky of his knife hand (the hand that he’s using to hold the knife from earlier- not like he has a knife in place of a hand that I neglected to mention, if that had been the case I would have lead with that) touches it to the powdered feel-good, and licks his pinky again. “Yeah, that’s real nice.” Frank says, “Hey, that’s gross man. Other people are going to be using that and now it has your germs all over it.” Daniel puts the brick down. “Frank, you’re right again. My bad. Now before we get down to business I just have one question: is this cocaine organic?” Frank looks confused. “Organic? Uh, how do you mean exactly?”

“Well, first of all, it means no pesticides. And it should be fair-trade- do you pay the laborers a substantive wage?”

“Oh, not as such, no.”

“Hmm, I don’t care for that. What about the pesticides?”

“Everyone uses pesticides for this-the yield would be too low without them. It just doesn’t make sense economically.”

“Are you kidding me Frankie? Do you know how harmful pesticides can be? Especially for the elderly and the very young. I’ve got families that buy this stuff man- I can’t sell them something that's practically been dowsed with poison.”

“I’m not going to sit here and be lectured by some ignorant liberal hippie!”

“That’s it!” Blam, blam, blam...…blam, blam….…blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam..............….blam.

As the sound of gunfire echoes to silence Daniel and his crew- except for one guy who, if you had seen him, you could tell from the beginning that he probably wasn’t going to make it through the whole story- dust themselves off and head back to their sweet ride.