Borderline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_dog

Being an international drug dealer is nerve-wracking work, not that I had great credentials. My asshole boyfriend from Oneonta forced me into it as a student, like the babbling controlling douchebag he really is. One of his older brothers was taller and more handsome than he was, attending school at the same time. His boho musician lifestyle (he was dating John Cryer's half-sister at the time) fascinated his younger brother, without my boyfriend having any genuine talents besides smoking pot and talking on and on and on about it. He works in entertainment as a lawyer now. Being a "bullshit artist" is his true gift, which made him hate the arts (and people in the arts) even more. 
I knew I had to jettison him later on down the line, because of his obvious distaste for skill sets that he could never possess, but that didn't stop him from trying to use and abuse me while he could. 

When I told him I would be attending art school in some way in the near-future, he decided to act like I was a cruel deceiver to him that he could thwart by transferring to McGill University as a SUNY student first, like my life existed only in relation to him and his ego. Along with his weird baby-style head games came a huge host of other insecurities he had a very long list to, that he found extremely exciting to bore you with in overwrought detail, like how his musician bro could lure women to him, because he was a lover. It seemed to him to be this pretend magnet that other people had, as a greater superpower he couldn't deconstruct for himself, no matter how hard he tried.
I basically gave in to him and his whining, if he carried on long enough (he's the youngest of six children), like a harried exhausted mom with toddlers would. Yeah, fine, let's move on from this, will ya? 

And that's exactly how his hare-brained scheme involving pot came to be. Once he found out that I was willing to take a train from Grand Central Station all the way to Montreal, he thought he had a real "live" one on the line. He seized onto this idea that his classmates would be driven wild with fan appreciation over his securing real weed for them, because all they had in Canada was hash, and I knew by the way he drove me to it, that he had a real hidden agenda, which was this: getting me arrested and derailing my college career by getting me thrown into jail, because I got into a great Ivy League school, which proved that I'm smarter and more talented than him, despite all the tall tales he'd been feeding to his friends up there, where he thought he could lie his way to success, and that's exactly how it went down. 
He thought he got "the jump" on me by using his superior mental powers to browbeat me into buying a quarter bag of pot that I carefully hid among my stuff. 

Sure, it was a tense half an hour or so of waiting, when the train stopped at the borderline between the states and Canada, but, of course, he'd actually schooled me in their exact time frames (because actual criminals are not as smart as the cops who catch them, in real life), because luckily for me, he couldn't resist the urge to prove to me how brilliant he was in his plan, by actually talking me all the way through it. Sure enough, Border Patrol came through with bomb/drug-snuffing German Shepherds and everything, but because my suitcase was stowed high above my head on the racks above me (and out of reach of anyone else), the cops took one look at my angelic little face, read my passport and paperwork, and then moved on down the line. 
It took awhile for them to go down the entire length of the train, but scour it they did, until the final lurch of the car that signaled we were moving on. Whew! I made it! 

He'd also done the same strange contest with me about pot in Amsterdam during a summertime trip to Europe, hoping that I would get caught and he wouldn't, but all that happened was that he smoked pot over the rest of his summer at his family's home in Bay Ridge, while I rode it out empty-pocketed in New City, because my pot portion was nabbed by a stoner mail carrier, and his was not. That was it. Once I got to his school in Montreal, all that happened as a result of my pot stash was that we got high with his friends while drinking Canadian beer, instead of smoking hash in Oneonta while drinking New York beer. Like, wow, dude. It was kind of like driving across the border to buy beer with a higher alcohol content in Canada, and then driving it back to O-town: all we did with it was have a party. That was it. 

He tried his hand at a few other petty con games, like saying that his rather ugly (but, like, wayyy smarter) Canadian friends had given him the bad news that I was incredibly beautiful but, like, unfortunately for me, not as smart as him, like they were some college board I hoped to "ace", but that the good news was that they could totally see why he was attracted to me, which he delivered in a rather sour, downcast way, like a doctor giving his patient bad news. Awwww, that's too bad, Bart....<insert frown face here> In another unfortunate coincidence for him, I was already accepted into the best art and design school in the world with the lowest admission rates on Planet Earth (as well as every other high-ranking art school I applied to), while his "brilliant" friend Jean-Paul was relegated to a small-time Nova Scotian art school for his next college degree, in this highly ironic Acadian twist that's all me and my true grit, done for you in this century, y'all. You in my country now, boy! And that's exactly how it all goes down in this girls' real life "Game of Thrones": game, set, match. Done! See you on the beach 'round the bonfire, mes amis. This mama's coming home.

Dirt Weed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blunt_%28cannabis_cigar%29

Years ago, after the publishing industry went bust and employers quickly set-up weirdly convoluted political climates to drive out the healthier and more expensive employees by using their cheaper and more deranged ones to do their dirty work (hidden behind a thinly-veiled agenda that was never really very cloudy or unclear, except if you had to prove it in a court of law,) my bubble burst by design, because I beat the "big boys" at their own game. 

Rich white men have always used money and the threat of impoverishment to silence those carefully observant, high-performing employees who are better than their own kids at the family business, knowing that most single women in New York City are one paycheck away from homelessness. It's a total dick way to "win", which is the point of Evil, Inc: a place where we don't do business fairly (the real company motto), but tricky knife-in-the-back games are part of what makes dysfunctional business go. Healthy people tend to share the wealth, as well as the free dispersal of information, which sucks if you can only win by rigging the game to your advantage illegally.

After that, I was on the move from place to place. At first I stayed locally, finding temporary friendship with a troubled man I met at the public library (I could tell he knew who I was behind his badly done "actor-y" facade), but times were desperate, which was the whole point behind that hurt, too. See? "If you would have just played the game, Marie, your entire family wouldn't have turned their backs on you (no one wants to see you anymore without money and help to give out freely), because you talked openly about what you saw at work." Of course, that sick family was my responsibility, too, and if I don't help sick people whenever they want it, there's abuse to be had. I should have learned my lesson years ago. I'd heard the bullshit speech thousands of times before.

Except, really healthy, brilliantly powerful women don't work that way. That's why we run this world you live in. And so, I didn't cave. There's was nothing left for me to give, anyway: no work, clothes, housing, food, rent, healthcare...all of that goes away when you speak up against injustice, whether it's at home or at work, which is exactly why I did it. I couldn't live like that anymore. It was intolerable, the injustices I've seen, like the fact that the entire Housing Court of Brooklyn, New York is currently funded by black women on layaway, hard-working women who don't want their children homeless for Christmas. The U.S. Marshall (a nice white guy from Long Island) explained to me that they are way better now, because they don't toss your stuff on the street like they used to anymore! He looked at me like he wanted consolation then, right when I had none to give.

After getting "thrown out of the inn" during Christmastime (so to speak), I lived by my native New York wits. The very woman who had illegally harassed every worker at the shop I blew the whistle on, the same one who had once bragged to me about her "street smarts" (a total joke when you face living on the streets, which is exactly what I did), while that crazy bitch went on believing that sucking dick would save her life. It didn't (spoiler alert). It did, however, buy her what she thought was enough valuable time to plot my destruction (Girl Power!), and get herself canned, too. After all, I knew it was about money. That's all it ever was, not the fact that I noticed (and documented) each and every illegal occurrence that happened there, which is why I faced off without counsel one of the company's nephews with legal experience, who asked me to hand over my notebooks to him about the situation, which I flatly refused. I still have them, dear readers.

The Neuyorican guy I met from around the way did 'hood business with me: he wanted access to my soon-to-be-gone Park Slope digs so he could use the kitchen because he was working in food service, and I wanted to get into his tenement building from 'round that way, so I could save up some money for another rental apartment. We struck a deal: I would sleep on his floor (which I did), while me and some guy named Jose cleaned the room next to his so I could move in, which is exactly what I did. I worked as a lead cover designer for some broke crooked indie outfit that was yet another spoiled Jewish kid's response to his father's valid foothold in the business, to come home at night to a bipolar guy weaning off his meds through the copious use of weed, giving him a harsh hacking cough that did not abate with time.

He seemed amazed and paralyzed by my Acadian energy. How could I work all day and then work some more at night? Where did it come from? He came from Brownsville*, a place so bad, that the main source of income is living with crazy and Welfare, which is what he did when the kitchen jobs went away. You see, my friend was "too good" to start at the bottom of the kitchen hierarchy by washing dishes. It was so obvious that he didn't want to work, even his teenage dope dealer told him so. Imagine that? Gettin' schooled by some hood rat, but that's how it went down, for real. We went over there on one really cold winter night to meet esse comin' out his mother's nice town-home apartment that's across the street from a public school playground, to meet me and Cotto on the sidewalk. At first, my friend told me to wait on the corner, but as he stood there pacing back and forth, nervously smoking his menthol cigarette, he got bored (he's manic bipolar), so he started talking loudly to me some feet away.

At that point, I was like, why not just walk up to him, when some fly kid with his "phresh" gear came bounding down the staircase to the stoop. He wore a matching bright red hat to go with his ghetto hoodie and red sneaks. Typical. He started laughing when he saw my man there speaking with me, because we looked like a broke-ass version of "Beauty and the Beast", presenting quite the pic on some slow cool weeknight in the 'hood. He made small talk with Cotto during the exchange of a dime bag for money, when my friend let him know that he wasn't happy at his current gig because he was a "real chef" (this, from an ex-con who was forced to choose a cooking program as part of his rehab in the joint), by also explaining that he never really wanted to be a chef (he sucked at it, lighting up a tea towel I gave him one night at the stove during his very brief tenure as a personal chef in my kitchen), and that washing dishes was beneath him.

The kid looked at him laughing, and to me, which I played politically correct by staying silent, to deliver one hell of a line: "Yeah, but you gotta start somewhere, though", a line his own mama must have said to him a million times when he crossed over her doorway down to the streets, buying his flashy gear and bragging about it by sporting it up and down the block, a hastily tossed up sneaker on a phone wire serving as his calling card to area schoolkids. That fuck-up from Brownsville just got schooled by his more successful teenage dope dealer, man! It was unbelievable and also totally Brooklyn, all the way down to this kid's shiny new kicks. Only in New York, you know, bro? Only in New York can a punk kid beat out a grown man without even trying, or leaving his mama's house. That's the warped view of success from around the way, and those are the people I come from. Don't you ever try to can con me again, yo. I know you.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville,_Brooklyn