Ryan Leone has the luck of the Irish.
But only if the Irish have really bad luck.
But only if the Irish have really bad luck.
The Baker Brothers by Ryan Leone
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JP was a senior
when I was a freshman and he had all the attributes of a cool kid. He had
movie-star looks, surfed crowded beaches, and drove a BMW. JP was also the
biggest drug dealer at our school; legend had it that he sold pounds of weed to
support his family, because his dad was a degenerate gambler who had run out on
the family to chase cards.
JP wasn’t my
friend but he was always nice to me. After high school, I had drifted into the
throes of heroin addiction and was running any scam I could to get by. There’s
a small college town outside of Santa Barbara called Isla Vista; it has beach
front apartments stacked above the roaring Pacific. Kids move here from the
East Coast and the first thing they buy is a surfboard that they’ll never use.
The boards act as a prop that they leave on their front porches, as some sort
of lame solidarity to Southern California culture.
My friend used
to drive me around in his pick-up truck late at night and I’d go door to door
and steal the surfboards. We‘d sell them at Pawn Shops, Play-It-Again Sports,
or Craigslist. It was a good hustle—usually $75 a board, enough to sustain a modest
smack habit.
One night, I hop
out of the truck and go to retrieve a board. I’m grabbing it when I look to my
right and see a guy at the next apartment over. He’s wearing a hood and
creeping up to the porch to grab a surfboard. It becomes clear to me that this
guy is doing the exact same thing that we are. I crouch down and wait for a
moment, his face illuminated by the street lamp as he’s walking away. I realize
it’s JP! I hurry out to the sidewalk with the surfboard tucked under my arm.
“Yo,” I whisper.
“JP.”
He turns around.
This is awkward. We both have stolen surfboards.
“Brian?” he
says.
“It’s Ryan,
man.”
It turns out
that JP got the poker bug just like his dad. He’s become a full-blown criminal,
committing burglaries, robbing people, even stealing fucking surfboards in the
middle of the night. We become inseparable hustlers. I watch him blow thousands
at the casino. He watches me shoot dope. And we steal every day.
JP ends up
meeting a guy at a poker tournament at the Hustler Casino in Los Angeles. This
guy starts flowing JP cocaine. Naturally I become the runner. It started out
small. JP would get a quarter ounce and break it into gram baggies, bringing me
with him to the night clubs in Santa Barbara and having me stay in bathroom
stalls to sell it all night. We start making more money selling coke than we
ever did boosting shit.
JP starts putting me up in motels around town.
At this point we start selling ounces. He’d give me a quarter pound for $1,800.
That’s $450 an ounce; I’d sell the ounces for $600 to the college coke dealers
around town. In theory, I should have been making $600 off each quarter-pound
that I sold. But I’m such a goddamn junkie, that I’d end up injecting too much
of the coke and barley break even. The thing about shooting coke is that you
have to do it every ten minutes. Your arms become spoiled looking, with
blotches of blue and purple bruises. And you become intensely paranoid.
Although I
usually only brokered a few ounces a day, I became fucking convinced that “they”
were on to me. I don’t mean cops or feds; my fear was greater and more faceless
than that. I would sit in my motel rooms and stare out peepholes. I would stand
in the corner and peek out the blinds for hours at a time. Every couple of days
I would call JP in the middle of the night in paranoiac fits, convinced people
were after me, demanding that he switch me to a different motel. In three weeks I had exhausted every motel
option in town and JP wasn’t happy about it. The cocaine had altered my
physical appearance drastically. I was pale, emaciated, and my arms were
different colors. I looked like I had a low T-cell count. JP gave me a speech
about how my using was unacceptable and that I was replaceable.
“I’ll put you in
a sober living house,” he said. “I know you can’t just stop doing heroin but
around those rehab people you’ll have to stop doing all that blow. You can’t
work for me and be all geeked out anymore. I’m going to give you a full kilo this
time for eighteen grand; you can sell it for 23. All in one shot, all you have
to do is deliver it. I already got the dude lined up.”
I was pissed and
I didn’t want to do it but there was no way I was going to pass up making five
thousand bucks for one delivery. I wouldn’t even need JP after that. So I
played along.
At the time, I
was driving a shit-colored ’85 Volvo. I went to the sober living house for a
couple of days, leaving the kilo out front, locked safely in my trunk. JP told
me that I had to drive the coke out to Ventura, which was about thirty miles
away from the sober living house.
As I was
leaving, a black guy came up to me. “Ay man, where you off to right now?”
“I’m already late, “ I said. “I’m headed all the way out to Ventura.”
“My moms lives out there. Can I catch a ride?’’
He was your
cliché thug, walked with a limp, and wore baggy clothes. He looked like a
composite sketch from FOX News. Basically the last person you want to have in
your car when you’re driving around with a kilo of fucking cocaine.
But I said yes,
a word that sort of sums up my entire twenties.
When we got in
the car he said, “My name’s Black Chris.”
I nodded and
turned up the radio and tried to drive as calmly as possible.
Of course when
we got to Ventura my guy wouldn’t pick his phone up and Black Chris’ mom wasn’t
home.
We waited for a
couple of hours and decided to drive back.
I got a bad
feeling and turned the radio down, “Hey, you got anything on you? I’m on
probation and I have a little bit of dope in the trunk.”
“Shit, I on
parole. All I got’s a piece.”
“You have a gun on you?”
He pulled a 9 mm
out of his waistline and rested it on his lap.
It was the first
time I had ever seen a gun in real life. I was petrified.
“Mind if I stash
that in the trunk, man? I’m not trying to get searched.”
“Nah, I don’t
mind one bit.”
I pulled off on
the next exit. He handed me the gun, which felt way heavier than I would have
expected. I took it to the trunk and hid it next to the brick of coke under the
spare tire.
“We good?” he
asked.
“Yeah, we’re
good.”
As soon as we
got off the freeway exit to go back to the sober living house, I saw the
unmarked police car behind us. I made a left and they made a left. They were
following us. I already knew it was the Baker Brothers, two of the most
infamous narcotics cops in all of Santa Barbara County.
“The Baker
Brothers are following us,” I said calmly.
“Who?”
“They’re cops.”
Black Chris
started to panic; he actually started talking blacker. I felt like I was in a
fucking Rush Hour sequel. And they were right behind us.
“I ain’t going
back! I just got out that motherfucker!”
“Calm down,” I
said. “I have a kilo of coke in the trunk.”
“Y’all got a
motherfucking bird in yo’ trunk?!”
I made a right
and they followed. We were in a residential neighborhood now, only a few blocks
from the sober living house. I knew that I was busted. I was already on
probation for a felony possession charge. If I got caught with that much coke
and a firearm, I was going away for a very long time.
I pulled up to
the sober living house and they parked behind us. We sat there as they
approached the car. They had police badges dangling from silver chains.
“Santa Barbara
Narcotics, how you doing?”
“Fine.” I said.
“Either of you
on probation, parole, anything like that?”
We both said
that we were and they asked us to step out of the vehicle.
They made us sit
on the curb with our legs crossed so that we couldn’t get up and dart away
suddenly. And then they searched the car. They started with the front and made
their way to the back, latex gloves on the entire time, ripping everything
apart. Black Chris couldn’t even watch; he was just looking down, shaking his
head.
They went for
the trunk. My heart was thudding, my stomach was weightless. I saw him look
through it and just as he was going for the tire his radio hissed with a static
voice. He went to answer it and stopped looking at the tire. After he
responded, he went to the duffel bag and removed a digital scale that was
covered with white powder; it was over.
The cop came up
to me and said, “What’s this for?
“I’m enrolled at
the culinary school at the city college. I use that to cook.”
“Oh yeah?” he
said, “Well, what’s the difference between baking and cooking then?”
“That’s easy.
Baking is a science… and cooking is an art.”
He put the scale
back in the trunk and handed me my keys.
And in my most
triumphant moment, the cop actually said, “Have
a nice day.”
