Big Chev got himself a car. He came in to shop my impeccably stocked yogurt section on Saturday August 30, 2014. That would be yesterday, the morning after my run in with Stretch and Stout, and one day before this, the last day of an overlong month. Before we get to Chev’s tale, let us delve into a reality that he ‘could give two shits about’ which concerns the plight of our Narcostate’s favored citizens, its drug addicts.

We might think that addicts have it easy: getting stoned all the time, having not a care in the world, and being supported by the government. It is not all that simple my friends. You see, a drug addict has only five means of earning the income necessary to purchase the drugs that the CIA invested 280 billion dollars in assuring the cultivation of in Afghanistan—which, is, by the way, the reason the U.S. invaded that nation; not to get the Islamist terrorist, but to prevent the Taliban from continuing to suppress heroin production.

The entire idea behind the Narcostate—as pioneered by the British in China in the 1840s—is to make certain that there is a glut of opiates. The addicts can be counted on to find a means to pay for them. While they are busy with that and the resulting intoxication, they shall be more easily and more profitably managed by their masters.

The junky [Inconsistent spelling is a literary slight. I am therefore very careful when spelling God and the names of others who can kick my ass.] may earn his drug money in one, some or all of the five following ways:

1. Sell his ass and/or mouth to gay sexual predators

2. Panhandle

3. Get injured, sue, and get prescription opiates

4. Get some junkie bitch pregnant, and then kick back as the suddenly transformed ho becomes the pillar of the community; the vector of American Civilization. Then let the baby’s mama use the EBT cash to get her dope and the subsidized baby rent to maintain a crashpad, while he takes the EBT food stamps and sells them for 50 cents on the dollar to pay for his dope. Grandma will feed and pet the resulting rug rat.

5. Actually go out and work for the money by robbing, burglarizing or mugging some less able person, preferably an elderly person.

As you can see, there is an expensive and time-consuming downside to 1, 2, 3 and 5. Your most reliable form of income is the ‘pension via insemination’. That money comes out between the 6th and the 16th. If you are an above average junky you probably have this budgeted to about 23 days, meaning the last week of the month is unbearable and will kick you into the other methods. Then, 4 times per year [which is why that dude with the funny cap that rents you that efficiency collects weekly rather than monthly rent] there is a fifth week!

“Don dont dah!!!”

Yep, end of your world junky.

Now that you are desperate for drugs you are faced with stiff competition. Here in Harm City 1 of every 10 people is addicted to heroin! Then you have the 1 in 10 who are addicted to booze, and the 1 in 10 who are addicted to all that other stuff. So, when you go out to panhandle you are just one bonerack in a bonerack crash-up derby. What follows are two examples of ineffective attempts to earn drug money, with the first featuring disastrous target selection and the second poor execution.

“So I’m pulling up here to your wonderful establishment to get my lunch before I head into work. No sooner then I roll up the window some little monkey—couldn’t have been older than sixteen—comes up to the window and says, “Do ya gotta dolla?”

“What the fuck is the matter with these people? No ‘good morning sir’ or ‘hi big guy’ like the bums used to say back in the day ta stroke you?

“Now apparently every spear-chucker and white stoner in the county assumes that if you have a dollar it belongs to them.

“I look at this person while I’m getting out of the car and he backs of with his mouth hanging open and drool stringing down. I’m looking down at this maggot and he’s going, ‘Du, du, du, do doo, you gotta dolla?’

“I looked down at him and said, ‘Get the fuck away from me head-hunter. Better yet, go spear some other monkey and shrink his head, and I’ll give you a dollar for that!”

I was laughing so hard big Chev said, “You might think it’s funny ‘cause nobody begs your scrawny ass ‘cause you don’t have two sticks to rub together. But I’m gettin’ sick a this shit.”

We wished each other a happy Labor Day and went on our way.

This morning I walked two miles out and down the main drag and back again to stretch my writer’s legs. As I walked down the right hand side of the street next to the big crack house that is already back in business after the cops emptied it two weeks back, I looked across the street to the Pakistani drug station. This is a gas station that sells all of the things that stoners need to go with their crack and heroin: cheap knives, Mountain Dew [for the body of your ghetto crack pipe], brass mesh Choreboy pads [for the filter of your ghetto crack pipe], skittles, Arizona tea, Benadryl, cigarettes, flavored cigars used to make blunts, ‘spice’ synthetic pot, and the indispensable liter in the multipack.

A mixed-race youth with an afro lilting to the left side of his head like Lenny Kravitz playing Einstein in some sci-fi play written by that jerk LaFond, notices me on the deserted 6:38 a.m. Sabbath sidewalk.

The creature managed to stagger over to me across the deserted street. With head nodding, drool stringing, a twitch creeping into his face, he managed to mumble something that might have included a word that approximated cigarette on some other planet. I just walked on by, generally opting for a quick long stride to take me through panhandling zones quickly.

Fifteen minutes later I came back this way, and once again he emerged staggering from the drug station shouting a slurred “Yis! Yiss!” as he limped determinedly into the light traffic yelling with ever more fury for me to slow down and consider the important question he might have one day been able to articulate.

I outpaced him easily and then he saw a young dude lighting a cigarette and began doing the zombie boogie in his direction, only to have the wiry little blonde man shout, “No Pal—stay back.”

As I crossed the street I saw a petite black girl with a gigantic posterior that had somehow been jammed into tight white jeans walk down out of the neighborhood behind the crack house and stand with hands on hips at the corner. He eyed her hopefully and before he could even gurgled out his urgent request, she yelled, “Hell no nigga! Get da fuck away. I goin' ta church bitch!”

The man stagger-turned on the center line, lurched toward the drug station, and began to mumble to himself as he sought the more friendly strip of concrete on the east side of the road, pressing his limp afro to the side of his head and staring fixedly at the concrete curb as if it were the Garden of Eden.

EBT cash and stamps begin to come out on the 6th in alphabetical order. That is a long stretch. All of us who have declined to participate in the remote CIA Opium War on America might want to think about how fortunate they are to have whatever it takes to resist the pull of this black hole at the center of our imploding culture.