Page 2 of Race With The Devil

“Weed is different than fentanyl,” said an extremely French guy I could barely understand. “The only way cannabis kills you is if it falls on you.”

A goofy-looking guy chuckled. His leather jacket looked to have been purchased from Sears, despite the club “colors” emblazoning it. One of the patches read, “Biker Boys Make Good Toys.” “Remember that guy who was trying to steal weed from the Ochoa’s warehouse? A stack of about a ton of feminized White Widow went crashing over his head.”

An older craggy guy whose face should’ve been sculpted into an Aztec pyramid chuckled too. “I remember that, Wolf. I don’t think it killed him, though. And it was Critical Mass, not White Widow.”

Wolf pointed at the craggy guy. “True that. Has heavier, fuller buds. Colas just dripping with trichomes.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Ford’s twin, the herb farmer. “The Ochoas never grew Critical Mass. I think it was a bale of garden variety Sour Diesel loaded with those chemicals they loved to spray.”

“Broke the guy’s neck,” said Wolf brightly. I had to hand it to him. He was cheerful.

Ford banged his gavel, once. “Let’s get back to the fucking subject at hand. Tutti Morgan. Bottom line, last night three people died at one of his stupid sideshows. They went into comas and eventually cardiac arrest, according to our contact at Pure and Easy General. One of them was a friend of Duji’s grandson.”

“Yeah,” said an older, gravelly guy, who looked as though he wished he had a cigarette. “Sonny said they were doing it real big in the mall parking lot by Target when a guy doing a donut in an Impala suddenly rolled over some crash cushions, completely DOA. Two other guys followed suit soon after.”

Ford shook his head sadly. “This is bad business, men. I vote that we stop moving product for Tutti. Sooner or later the pigs’ll be all up in our shit. Besides, what’s the point of making something purer and more deadly? It’s not like he’s up for a science prize.”

I had to quit playing possum then. I could not keep my mouth shut, one of my worst qualities. Or best, depending how you looked at it.

I had long been the sort of guy who needed to stick his two cents in. Call me a know-it-all. A show-off. But I just can never sit still and take it when people are laboring under some kind of delusion. These men were attacking what they saw as the root problem at hand. Get rid of the dealer, bam, the problem vanishes. Not so.

I never could resist a challenge. I had busted into their clubhouse, their “church.” Now I would lecture them.

“You’re not getting something,” I started, lifting an illustrative hand. “Our emotions are powerful enough to launch rockets, build the Great Pyramids, or make us cry at hearing Madame Butterfly.”

“Who the fuck are you?” barked Ford, the Prez.

“Let him talk,” said his twin.

I did. “We share ‘survival circuits’ with other animals. Our feelings are the way they are today because their basic structure helped animals survive and reproduce. This is exactly why drugs can ruin lives. Swallowing or injecting opiates in doses far too high for our bodies to reward us with pleasure completely derails a body exquisitely designed over millions of years. These narcotics hijack our inner mechanisms, getting rid of the necessity for the animal—us—to enter a code or a behavior before receiving the chemical.”

Duji nodded soberly, as though it was normal for a stranger to enter his church and hand him a sermon. “I’ve heard of this. Sort of like the Pavlovian reward structure.”

“Right!” I said, as though pointing at the older biker with a piece of chalk. “You don’t need to act decently, to straighten up and fly right, to help the downtrodden or even your own children before getting your reward. You skip that vital step. Drugs that we abuse make a neural signal that falsely informs us of a huge fitness gain when there is none. Street drugs—and prescription drugs too—give us a fast track to the feeling that we’re doing something useful when we’re not. This is important to understanding the nature of addiction. Being able to get our paws on these substances, we don’t have to ‘work’ to get them, to hunt, improve, flee, reproduce. Instead, these creatures go directly for reward. The drugs give his brain the impression he’s become more fit, but he hasn’t done a damned thing.”

“So, you’re saying,” said the twin, clearly the more open-minded of the two men, “that the problem isn’t the dealer at all. It’s the addicts.”

“The problem is the fentanyl being made fifty times stronger than heroin. Such a thing shouldn’t even exist. Why waste an evening socializing and getting to know people, or signing ten new clients, when you can obtain a more intense reward with a few snorts of coke? Or—some of you can relate to this—why suffer through half an hour of stilted small talk at a gathering when a few beers can make you think you’ve already bonded with those people?”

“Ha ha!” cried Wolf Glaser. He actually yelped “ha ha!” “Ho, how many times has that happened at our fish fries? Remember that time Mergatroyd put his arm around Bobo Segrist’s gash and started walking her into the back room at the Bum Steer? He’d gotten so carried away with liquid courage it didn’t seem to matter to him anymore.”

Even Ford was laughing now. “It sure mattered to him when Bobo stuck the barrel of a .45 in his temple.”

I thought my speech would soon be forgotten. It was actually Duji who kept it going. “So these kids are just like Pavlov’s dogs looking for reward. Only they don’t have to hit the red dot, or whatever those dogs did to get the treat.”

“Right,” I said. “Drugs are turning them into a bunch of lying, lazy shitdongles who don’t know if their opioid molecule comes from a pipe or having mind-blowing sex. They can’t tell if their dopamine rush came from a meth spoon or the high of getting ten phone numbers at a bar or turning in a paper on deadline. They’ll stop doing the real work in life. Their brains are telling them they already did.”

Fox said, “You wouldn’t believe how many layabouts there are like that in our turf, in and around Pure and Easy. I train birds for a living, birds of prey, and yeah, sometimes they want a reward. But sometimes they do things, obey or do tricks, just for the sheer joy of doing something right. So in a way they’re more advanced than the tweakers.”

I said, “I don’t mean to give up on tweakers. They’ll find their reward somewhere else if you take it away from them. But it sounds like this Tutti Morgan guy needs to be cut off. At the knees.”

Everyone murmured among themselves like a party soundtrack. I was about to turn and leave when Ford barked at me, “Who are you?”

The room fell silent at that. Just then, Beetle chose to emit the most adorable whine, like a toy puppy in jeopardy. Each biker, down to a man, perked up their ears at the fluffy sound. No one was immune to the power of the pup. Some guys, including Wolf Glaser, half-stood in their seats.

“Oh, ah,” I said, suddenly unsure of myself. “I’m just here to bring Wolf Glaser a little—“

“Puppeh!” Wolf practically pole-vaulted over the long table in his eagerness to get to the pup. “Stay away from it, it’s mine! Get off it, you goon!”