Senior year was when I really started to make money. My dad started doing finished carpentry at a mansion in San Rafael Hills, southwest of the Rose Bowl. The Scott's were wealthy. The husband was a prominent lawyer, cofounder of the City of La Canada Flintridge. The wife was a publishing psychologist, writing several books and taught at a university. My dad hired me to do masonry, drywall, painting and general odd jobs around the house. A lot of grunt work.
Shortly after I started working for the Scott's, my dad hired Ryan Steffens to work 40 hours a week for $12.50 an hour. He worked there as long as I did, except he worked during the week and I worked on the weekends, except during Christmas and Spring Break. I think the Scott's tolerated Ryan, but didn't really like him. Being a high school dropout, they probably saw him as a loser with no ambition in life. They took a liking to me. Even paying me to do silly things like hang pictures and rearrange furniture.
I was applying to colleges at the time and Joan, the wife, paid me to take the Wechsler IQ test to see what colleges I would best befit. I was doing another job at a house in Alhambra that morning with my dad and nephew Jeff. I left and smoked a couple bowls in the car on my way up to meet her. The version of the test I was taking was experimental, so I was given a range between 1 and 7, with 7 being genius. She said I scored a 6 and that UC San Diego might be too much for me, but UC Santa Barbara would probably be appropriate. I think as a researching psychologist, she wanted me to get high, to understand how marijuana affects intelligence and "abstract" problem solving.
Now that both Ryan Steffens and I were making lots of money, came the shakedown. That is why I consider the kids from Sierra Madre Posse the closest I ever want to get to the actual mafia. Eric Wilkerson was best friends with my neighbor Ryan Steffens. One day in November after school, I was already holding a couple ounces of mushrooms for another friend, Eric approached me and asked me if I wanted to sell pot for him. For $360 an ounce. My thinking was the price was high, $320 was reasonable, so this is some sort of shakedown.
The first buy was actually for one of Ryan Arcand's friends, Barnabe Hatchman. I didn't trust Eric so I didn't want to go to his house with a bunch of money. Barnabe bought 2 ounces of 2 different kinds of very good pot. I was impressed by the quality of the pot and was told it came from Northern California, Humboldt County. Humboldt was known for producing huge amounts, tons of pot every year. Now that I knew Eric wouldn't rob me, I felt comfortable buying pot off him.
Not really though. The next time I came over, I was walking through the house and upstairs to Eric's room. His mom yells out "Eric, get your shotgun out of the living room." Another gun, another assault. And how he set up the assault, made me believe he would set me up to get 'hit," and keep his hands clean in the process. I really did not like him, and got that his mom was in on it. We would smoke a bowl at his house one time while he showed me the patio he was working on with his dad. Another time, he had me leave the money in the center console of his car. I shorted him $20 because the money got stuck in my pocket. He called me up yelling how I shorted him. I checked my pockets and found the missing $20 and drove it up to his house. To get back at him, I started bringing all my $20's to the local bank and getting $100 bills to give him. Close to $1,000 a week. Anything to bring attention to his, what I would soon find out to be a large drug ring. That is how I found out the whole town was in on it.
I bought 2 to 3 ounces a week off Eric for most of my senior year. Enough to keep him off my back, but still shine him on. He was selling Ryan Steffens half ounces for the equivalent of what I was paying. Ryan informed me that Eric was selling a half a pound a day on average. He was selling ounces and quarter pounds. That he was getting the pot from Lauren who got his pot after harvest season in Humboldt County. They lived a couple blocks from each other. I did the math about their operation. If you buy in quantity, multiple pounds, you can usually get it at $2,000 a pound. That's $125 an ounce. $360 minus $125 is $235 profit per ounce. Times this by 8 ounces a day Eric was supposedly selling, that is $1,880 dollars of profit a day.
I was even more leery of Eric, now that I knew he had money. I thought he would drop a dime on me if I ever bought a significant amount or set me up to get jumped and robbed. I would use him to scare the hippies who came over to buy pot. I also started using a finger scale Justin Klier gave me to weigh out grams and eighths. This scale wasn't too accurate so when Eric told me to get a more accurate scale, instead of buying a digital scale from any one of the local headshops, I stole a triple beam from my math class at PHS.
Eric would come over to my back room from time to time or I would meet him at Ryan Steffens. I feigned that we were cool. One time at my house, Eric was outside in the rain smoking a cigarette. We were under the awning by my door, and Ryan says "don't worry about it, Cubans like the rain." That's about as funny as I ever found Eric. So when I left for Europe in July that summer, I used it as my excuse to break off all contact.
If you have a supplier, you must have customers. I didn't sell anything at high school. That was a bad idea. A great way to get busted and if you didn't get busted you would get robbed. I saw both happen multiple times to people who sold drugs at PHS. I knew a bunch of people from La Salle, so I started selling to them. I sold eighths to Brendan Considine and Jake Benitez, who went to La Salle, I sold to Jeremy Townsend who just transferred from La Salle to PHS my senior year, and I sold to Corey Lee, Dennis O'Brien and Joey Stanislawski who all went to Saint Francis. I sold to other random people, mostly people I would meet through that group. Brendan was a senior like me, all the rest were juniors at their respective schools, and all from Sierra Madre.
Jeremy was a mid-sized red headed kid. He was clumsy on a grand scale. Leaving the parking brake off on his car one time, and it rolled down a hill on Mira Monte Avenue into a tree, next door to Erica Burnham's house. He introduced me to Joel Kelly, who sold pot like me but in Monrovia. For being clumsy, Jeremy did manage his responsibilities well. He had several jobs. One was delivering beer for Happy's liquor store in Sierra Madre. So now we had another source for alcohol and we could get it delivered to wherever we were. He also used to deliver books for his dad. Another time, he tells me his dad had a bunch of books in a warehouse with all kinds of other random things. So we went there and the items were from some Bank of America that went out of business. I looked around and decided to keep a reclining office chair. It wasn't over dramatic like an executive's chair, but looked professional and complemented the rest of the furniture in my room. We hauled it back to my place in someone's pickup truck, and now I had a professional chair from which to sell pot.
We did many acts of stupidity together. During the Wisteria Festival, at another friend Ricardo Rodriguez's house, they, not we, start driving golf balls over the homes towards Baldwin Avenue. These kids were straight up terrorists. Ricky's dad also gave us $300 in counterfeit money one time. We didn't want to spend it. So we called up Joel, and decided to slip it in with the real money Joel was giving his dealer. Joel kept the $300 in real money, but he wanted Jeremy and me to be there when the exchange took place. I wasn't really worried. His dealer brought a taser with him but that was nothing compared to what I was used to.
Joel, I saw as a rival from the beginning. He was a year younger than me, about my size, with a shaved head. Except he was good at sports, playing soccer and according to him, really good at it. I swam and played water polo junior year but was awful, one of the worst players on both teams. I used to be really good at baseball, being one of the best players in the league in elementary school and still good in junior high. I also played football in 8th grade, abandoning all of this when I moved to Sierra Madre. I did work out at the gym, have a heavy bag to hit and take the occasional kickboxing classes. Joel would have been a good fight, but I didn't want to lose.
Joel had a 2 story house with a big backyard. We would kick the soccer ball around and he had a trampoline. He had two rottweilers and an avocado tree that he would climb, showing me where he was growing pot in the upper branches. His room was upstairs, sorta like a converted attic and looked like a typical punk rocker's room. A big hole in the wall he covered with a poster and shit all over the place.
Brendan Considine introduced me to Stefan, the local coke dealer. Stefan was in his own gang, Breezy Park in Arcadia. So for the longest time I thought Stefan lived in Arcadia. I would later learn he lived in Pasadena. Jake and Jeremy told me a story about how he got into a fight on the street and broke somebody's arm. Being the story was coming from Jake and Jeremy, I thought it was hype. However, Stefan was still bigger than me, a couple years older, and I didn't think I would win. He had a certain intensity about him that I determined was because he was gasoline powered from all the coke he did. We hung out one other time. Brendan, Stefan and I went to a Skatalites show in Ventura. Not really my style of music, but I felt it was a healthy adventure.
The two times I previously tried coke was with Ryan Arcand. He was doing a lot of blow, and he invited me over. He would go on these week long binges, and by the time he would call me, he would be all strung out and sweating from doing so much blow over the week. I was not really into hard drugs, so I declined but Ryan treated it like a business deal, and would negotiate that I at least take a couple bong hits, pot with coke on top. I did a few gummies and took a few hits. Coco puffs. The first time I was just high. The second time I took more hits. Ryan's mom came home from work and Ryan told me I needed to leave right away. So I got in my car, drove home, all the while it felt like my arms and legs were trembling. Ryan's famous line, before we would smoke, "it's snowing in Sierra Madre."
Jake Benitez lived across the street from Ryan Ono. He was cool, small to medium build. He had a really hot sister, Sara. She was one year older and Homecoming Queen at La Salle her senior year in high school. Jake was going out with a girl named Julie. Julie, Agatha and Rebecca would come over to Jake's almost every night. They were all attractive and juniors at the time. The girls would mostly just sit on the front porch talking and Jake and I would smoke pot and drink beers. Jeremy would deliver the beers from his work, stopping by for a little bit, and Brendan or one of the others would usually stop by. I did this for months. I was mostly trying to meet Jake's sister, but she was always upstairs with her boyfriend, Ryan Hoherd. I would eventually befriend him, going to his house and jumping off the roof at a pool party.
Dennis was Keith O'Brien's younger brother. If Keith was supposedly in some South African mafia, Dennis by relation would be too. He was medium build, a placekicker for Saint Francis football team. I know his dad was really strict, but I was told his dad had crates of hard liquor in their garage. Dennis was not good about paying me for the weed. At one point running up a small debt. I didn't do anything because of his family, but I got him to pay me with several bottles of Bushmills Irish Whiskey.
Corey and Dennis were best friends. Corey also played football, but was a linebacker. Corey and Dennis would usually come over to my back room and we would get high. The two of them, I started selling quarter and half ounces to at cost. I didn't need the money anymore, and I just wanted to get Eric's poisoned pot out of my house.
Joey was strange. He used to think he was some kind of Polish gangster or royalty. All Polish people think they are gangsters or royalty, no matter how fucking goddamn poor they are. He lived in an apartment with his parents on Sierra Madre Boulevard. He would show me his family crest on the wall, that he was somebody important. I think he thought Agatha and him had some kind of kindred bond being they were both Polish.
It was through these kids I met Dave Dickie. Dave was big, taller than me and I'm 6' 1". He was always trying to find his style before settling in college on Irish gangster. Wearing Celtics jerseys and paddy caps. His family was wealthy. His dad taught at USC before leaving to teach at UCSB. They had a big house by Huntington Library, until his dad moved into faculty housing at UCSB. Dave was still in high school, so his dad gave him an apartment near Pasadena High School. At this time, Dave and I would drink and get high before we each left for our respective schools, me to PHS and him to La Salle. Dave's dad went to his apartment one time and found a bunch of coke and other paraphernalia all over the place, pulled him out of school and got him an apartment in Isla Vista to finish his senior year in high school; ironic.
These kids all seemed like a good influence on me. Even if they all were not going to college, most of them went to private school so they had money. They had money and knew hot girls, so they seemed a promising alternative to the older gangsters I knew from SMP, Sierra Madre Posse. We would go to La Salle, Arcadia and Pasadena parties and I didn't have to worry about getting in a fight. One time though actually, some guys were talking shit to my friends and I at a party in Pasadena while we were leaving in the car. I grabbed an empty bottle of Jagermeister and threw it at their car window. I missed and dented the car door. I heard they wanted to sue but didn't know who I was.
Another time, a girl named Diana was having a party at her very big house about a half block east of me on Orange Grove. I wasn't smoking pot at the time, I gave it up for lent. We all, both the younger and older kids from Sierra Madre started throwing beer bottles in her pool. Smashing them and she would have to get her pool drained and cleaned. That has to be the worst thing that could happen to you, if you throw a party and have a pool. I left the party with some punk rockers to go to my house so they could buy some weed and smoke. At the end of lent, I tried to get extra high by smoking an entire joint to my head at the tennis courts by my house.
Senior year, I also spent a lot of time hanging out with Justin Klier. I met him through Isaac sophomore year. He was a year older like Isaac. We worked together that summer and junior year we hung out from time to time. We went to Huntington Beach at 4 am in the morning, him surfing and me bodyboarding, and getting back to school in time to start the day.
Justin was a complete trip to hang out with and had a really trippy room. His room was dark, kept lit with several black lights, a lava lamp, and these chili pepper lights. We would just chill and smoke bowl after bowl and listen to music. His CD collection was about as big as mine, but he listened to a completely different style of music. He liked reggae and ska and classic rock like the Grateful Dead. I knew about Sublime from before, but he loved finding old school reggae clips that Sublime copied their lyrics and rhythms from.
Justin was at Joey's house the night the black kids raided it. He didn't like to fight and was upset he got involved. He was very leery about being perceived to be in any sort of gang, and definitely wanted nothing to do with 88. We would usually get high and drink beers at his house, while his mom and her girlfriend cooked these fantastic meals. Then we would play chess and listen to music in his rather trippy room, saying there was "smoke on the battlefield."
Through him I met Johnny Haynes. Johnny was over 21 when I was a junior and recently moved to Sierra Madre from Covina, my old neighborhood. He was just getting into tattoos when I first met him. Spring Break my junior year, Isaac, Justin, Johnny, me and about 8 other people from Covina went to Lake Havasu for Spring Break, in a caravan of about 5 trucks. We were disappointed because College Spring Break was the week before, and Camp Crazy Horse was mostly deserted. We managed to have fun though. We drank for 4 days straight, got into 1 fight with some meth head and one of the guys we were with fell out of the back of a pickup truck, scraping up his back that already had 3rd degree sunburns.
Johnny, Isaac and I went camping south of San Clemente, on the beach just north of Camp Pendleton. We drank for three days. We met these two really hot girls, who said they were mother and daughter. Some guy was trying to impress everyone and stuck his hands into the coals of a bonfire. We had a good time. I had the opportunity to go camping with Johnny and the others one other time, but Erica Burnham was throwing another party and I was hoping I might run into some of the older people I knew. Nothing came about.
Other than drinking and getting high almost everyday, I got my homework and work life down to an artform. I could come home, work out, do my homework and still go out at night. You can function pretty normally high, but I would finish my homework before I started drinking. Weekends I would work and still go out at night. I was making stupid money for a senior in high school almost my entire year. I was making at least $200 to $300 a week from construction and pretty close to the equal amount from selling pot. I would occasionally go to the beach with the kids from Sierra Madre or my old friends from 88.
I was working because I had a plan. I would do anything to not get trapped in their world of being a nobody. I was going to Europe and then I was going to college. At this point I was weighing my options in life, what skills I had, and my opportunities to do something, anything significant in my life. These people were all talk and they operated as a group, if someone did something cool, the others would try and do something to copy them. This culminated in about 2010, when as a group they all decided it was time to settle down and start getting married and having kids. I watched from about 50 miles away on facebook, as 1 by 1, they started pairing up and having kids. It was a friendly competition and how they demonstrated loyalty to the larger group. The idea to me was that foul.
