Not Your Mother’s Pot-Dealer
Jenna calls it stuff. That green, pungent stuff. She hates the smell; it makes her nose wrinkle. The same way it wrinkles any time she senses something she doesn’t like. And lately, her nose has been wrinkling a lot.
More and more bills arrive every day, bills from the hospital, letters from insurance companies saying that they will not be able to cover her father’s Alzheimer’s treatments and medication. At 24, an only child estranged from her mother and left to take care of her ailing father, Jenna has a lot on her plate. And during these financial times, what is the girl with movie-star good looks and half of a degree from Santa Monica City College supposed to do to get by? Become a pot dealer, of course.
Dust catches the light that shines down through clicking palm trees on Hayworth Avenue in West Hollywood. It is late afternoon and the street is quiet. The eye of the storm before the evening rush hour begins.
Jenna sits in her idling car waiting for a client. A new customer. Her first job of the day.
Her iPhone makes a pleasant dinging sound and a text message pops onto the screen. Thanks Jenna, be out in a sec. The client is on their way.
A lanky man in a red polo shirt hops down the steps of the apartment building towards Jenna’s car. He idles by the door, looking hesitant.
Jenna rolls down the window.
Just, get in the car. Don’t be weird, she says.
A strand of shiny hair catches on her glossy lips as she jerks her head around, looking behind her through Swarovski-crystal encrusted sunglasses.
Her car is a 2007 Acura TL. It is bluish gray, shiny and nondescript in the ocean of luxury cars that is everything west of Fairfax Boulevard. The seats inside are a squeaky clean leather, her dress makes a ruffling noise as she shifts in the driver’s seat.
The client gets in, shutting the door firmly. He wrings his hands.
What kind of tickets do you want?
Jenna’s eyes are sapphires.
Tickets? The client looks confused.
Jenna sighs.
There are front row seats, which cost $80. Middle section is $70, and the nosebleed seats are $60.
She taps her manicured nails lightly on the leather steering wheel. The client asks for the front-row seats in a quavering voice.
Front row seats it is. Just give me one second.
She reaches behind her seat and grabs a pair of black pumps, which she places onto her bare feet delicately. Cinderella.
She opens the car door, steps out, smoothes he dress, and disappears to the back of the car. The trunk pops open, momentarily shading the tangerine sunset that is spilling in through the back window.
Click click click her heels on the asphalt then she whips back into the car and sits down. Her skin is buttery, slight shoulders peeking out of her dress with phantom freckles that climb up one side of her neck and reach faintly across her nose before flickering out completely.
A ring sparkles as she unclenches her fingertips, placing a potent-smelling baggie of green marijuana into her client’s hand.
Careful with that stuff, it’s the front-row stuff and it’s strong.
The client nods. He puts the baggie in his pocket and retrieves a checkbook.
She smiles and makes a gasping, laughing sound. Her lips make an “O” before she says
It’s cash only.
There’s a subtle clicking sound. The doors of the car lock and she waits patiently as the client fumbles to count out 4 crisp twenties.
She puts the money in her purse, and the client leaves in awkward haste.
She shakes her head.
A newbie.
A few blocks away at Astro Burger, Jenna tears into her sandwich like she hasn’t eaten in days. She looks like one of those Carl’s Junior commercials, where a big-breasted bombshell carelessly consumes food that is oh-so contraire to her slight frame. She licks ketchup off of her fingertips.
The eyes of many other customers stray to Jenna as she eats. It’s no surprise. Unlike so many of the über-tanned and blonded young women of Los Angeles, Jenna is a natural beauty.
She’s the type of girl other girls hate right off the bat, because she doesn’t have to try to look good.
One client confides.
She probably would look just as cute if she were in jail.
Born in Thousand Oaks, a postcard of suburban southern California, Jenna describes her hometown as
White, hot, suburban hell.
A photo montage of her childhood would look like this: A skinny pale girl with big eyes drinking from the hose in a lush green backyard. The same girl, older now, wearing army fatigues and brandishing a super-soaker at the camera. A joyous, teary-eyed father squeezing his daughter at her High School graduation. They have the same eyes.
Mom wasn’t really around.
Jenna keeps her tone even as she starts on her french-fries.
She left my Dad and me for my karate-instructor when I was eleven. Moved to Bakersfield or something. She still sends me cards, I don’t really care. Have you had the milkshakes from this place?
Jenna is quick. She makes quick but graceful movements. Her speech is clipped and to the point, and her fingers always seem to be racing across the keys of her cell phone.
Jenna started dealing pot when she was 21. She had been fired from her job waiting tables at a small restaurant near the Santa Monica pier, and she refused to ask her already financially struggling father for money. Though she had some money saved up, cash flow was tight and she needed some slack while she searched for a new job and managed her schoolwork. She would buy modest amounts from a classmate at Santa Monica City College who had a marijuana prescription for a wholesale price. What started off as a small profit turned into a much better monthly earning than what she had made waiting tables. Tips included.
I guess that’s why I don’t really feel threatened by the Medical Marijuana community. Plus, a lot of people don’t know how easy it is to get a Club Card. And you know what else? Medical Marijuana facilities don’t deliver.
In her first few months of dealing, things went fairly smoothly for Jenna. Friends would call for her product and she would deliver at no extra charge. Then friends of friends started calling too, and before she knew it she was getting to know Los Angeles like she never had before.
I would see a client in Studio City and then have to drive to Brentwood right after. I spend a lot of time in the car, that’s why I got this one. She’s my baby.
She strokes the steering wheel in a mock caress and laughs.
Close calls?
No way.
Jenna insists that she is careful enough to avoid any run-ins with police. She never deals in large quantities, and tries to maintain a consistent client basis with people she knows are safe. Though there was that time…
My car was brand new. Didn’t even have a license plate on it yet. I had just picked up a pretty big load of stuff from my friend and it was all in my trunk, where I always keep it but there was a lot. Like, a lot. I swear I could smell it from the driver’s seat. Anyway, it was a Friday night which is the worst time to drive anywhere on Sunset Boulevard and a cop pulled me over.
Sirens, flashing, the smooth sound of her automatic window gliding down as the policeman strides up to her window.
I guess he saw me texting. I don’t think my heart has ever beaten so fast. The minutes where he goes back to check your license are awful. They take so long. I thought he was going to ask me to open my trunk or that maybe he could smell it or smell it on me. He just gave me a ticket for texting.
Her hands shook the whole way home. She vowed never to drive with that much stuff on her again.
It must be because I’m a girl. I think that helps. Most pot dealers on my level are big scary Russian guys. They don’t expect me. It even surprises clients.
What about those big scary Russian guys? Jenna only says, mysteriously, that she is protected, and that no one would try to mess with her business. She quickly changes the subject.
It didn’t take Jenna long to adjust to her new income. Her car was not the only thing she upgraded to, moving from Culver City apartment to a chic neighborhood in West Hollywood.
Click click click her high heels on the wood floor. She opens the door to her apartment. It is tastefully furnished, with granite countertops in the kitchen and a sizeable flat screen television. She lives alone.
The kitchen table is littered with stacks of envelopes, bills for her father that she has forwarded to her address.
Want to see something wild?
She beckons to her room, more tasteful furnishings and a closet that seems to be full of shoes. She pushes some heels out of the way and removes a large trashbag, which from the smell it is immediately apparent what is inside.
She smiles to herself, apparently pleased with the organization of her product which has been color-coded into separate baggies depending on the quality of the pot.
It still smells even though it’s double bagged! As long as it doesn’t make my clothes smell.
The trashbag full of week looks almost like a bag of lawn clippings that someone might leave in the gutter after mowing their lawn. Jenna’s trashbag, however, has a street value of over $20 thousand.
Once a week, or as often as she can, Jenna’s car pulls up to a nursing home near where she grew up. It is where her father now lives, though she refuses to sell the house where she spent most of her time growing up after her mother left.
When he gets better, he can move back. They think the medications are really starting to help.
Jenna’s nose wrinkles again at the smell of the home. It smells like hospital supplies and old linen. The staff at the reception desk know who she is and she takes the familiar route through sterile hallways to her father’s room.
Her father, David, is 70 years old and has his own room. It is on the second-story with a view of the parking lot and a vaguely landscaped stretch of trees and grass beyond it. Residents of the nursing home pay upwards of four thousand dollars a month to stay there, where they are constantly attended by nursing staff and have meals provided for them. Stays are meant to be temporary, a way for Alzheimer’s patients and others with health problems to recover from other injuries. They undergo physical therapy and have regular check ups.
David has been there for eight months.
His room consists of a corner bed, facing a dresser with a small television on top of it. Also in the room is one lone chair for visitors. It is Jenna’s chair.
Conversations with her father move in circles. She can tell that he is happy to see her because his face lightens up, even if he has been sleeping. He says,
How are you, honey?
Several times throughout their talks. He asks her about school. About boyfriends. She reminds him that she’s not in school anymore, that she isn’t seeing anyone special. Work has been keeping her busy.
She squeezes his hand and he squeezes it back.
Sometimes she stays in the nursing home for several hours. She helps her father change his clothes and sits next to him at dinner, at a table by themselves in the cafeteria.
The first time I saw him here…after he came here from the hospital when he had a stroke…the nurses had to take him away for some tests. I was in his room, unpacking his things…
Jenna’s eyes are wet.
I guess it just hits you all at once sometimes.
After saying goodbye to her father, Jenna turns her phone back on. It floods with text messages, clients wanting their stuff. The stuff that Jenna delivers, the stuff whose smell she hates, the stuff that keeps her and her Dad together.
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