Hades' Melody. JD Belcher
music coming from the living room sounded better and the bag of Lay’s potato chips we were munching on seemed to have a bit more of a kick. The world had magically enhanced, and I couldn’t wait to smoke again.
All my worries had disappeared.
“What did it say to you?”
“Mane, it asked me fah my telly-phone numba,”
he said, and we both bent over holding our stomachs, cracking up hysterically.
Two days later, I called Muhammad for the number of the person he had purchased the weed from. I wanted to buy a bag for myself. I told him in the meantime, he was welcome to smoke with me again, if he’d like. We decided to go half on a dime bag, and when he came over, I gave him the five bucks.
Neither I nor Muhammad had been comfortable with his new role as my marijuana gopher, so he forwarded me the number to Charles, one of the dealers on campus.
This was a huge step for me. I had never contacted a drug dealer before and thought about what might happen during a transaction.
I only planned to do a one-time purchase. In less than a week, I’d be going back to Pittsburgh—I had made the decision to transfer, like Brian had done, to Pitt. And I also decided that if I was going to buy weed from Charles, I needed to purchase enough to last me for a while. When I dialed his beeper number, it didn’t take long for him to return the call.
“Yeah?” a heavily accented voice answered on the other end of the line.
“Hey, this is Jovon, Muhammad’s friend. He said I could buy something from you…”
“Oh, okay,” he responded.
“I have like seventy dollars. I don’t know how much that will get me,” I said, having yet to learn the vernacu-lar of how marijuana was sold and not understanding the quantification of my purchase. I only knew that I had less than a hundred bucks to spend.
“Yeah, uh, meet me in fronna of Denman Hawl in, like, fifteen minutes. We gotta go pick it up.”
Denman Hall was the high-rise dormitory directly across the parking lot from Camp Hall. When I arrived, I blindly got into his car feeling half afraid and half ad-venture stricken as we drove to an off-campus complex.
He parked, and I followed him inside a virtually furniture-less apartment with only a few chairs and a microwave in the kitchen. Charles disappeared into a back room and came out with a black garbage bag in his hand.
“It’s steel wet, so I gotta dry sum before I break it up,” he said, tearing off a chunk of moist vegetation from a solidly packed brick he had taken from the bag.
He put the marijuana on a plate and placed it into the microwave in the kitchen. After some seconds, he took the plate out, grabbed a small sandwich bag from the cabinet, and tied up a pleasant sized piece, which looked like more than a sufficient amount for what I paid him.
The first time I got high alone, I rolled a pathetically loose blunt. Some of the seeds fell out of the front when it tilted forward, and when I inhaled, they shot to the back of my throat during the first few hits. Nevertheless, I got high. With glazed red eyes, I watched television and listened to CDs until hunger set in. I searched through the cabinets for the perfect meal to appease my growing appetite and decided to make sausage and baked beans for dinner. After I cut up the kielbasa into small circles and mixed them into a can of Pork & Beans inside a green mixing bowl, I put the food into the microwave and then prepared to take a quick shower while it cooked.
With only a towel wrapped around my waist, I started toward the bathroom. But something told me to check on the food a final time, so I went back into the kitchen.
What I saw horrified me. There on the kitchen counter was my green bowl of cold pork and beans! The microwave churned away as the empty glass disc rotated under the light of the lamp inside.
One of two things had to have happened. Either I had forgotten to put the food inside, but still turned it on, or the bowl had somehow magically jumped out of the machine and onto the counter. It was my first real brush with paranoia, and after the fear had gone, I could do nothing but laugh at myself, just to make sense of what had just taken place.
Apart from the frequent bouts of suspicion, I liked smoking blunts so much that I began keeping the seeds and planted a marijuana plant of my own. I kept it in my dorm room window, and it grew like a weed. It sprouted so fast and tall that I had to kill it prematurely. With my limited knowledge of horticulture, I was unable to make the plant grow the flowers I knew I needed to really get high, but decided to try and smoke it anyway. When the stems and leaves dried, I made a vain attempt to roll it into a blunt. But after lighting up, I noticed that it wasn’t the same as the weed Muhammad had given me. It tasted different, like I was smoking spinach or green beans.
A few days after my seventy-dollar buy, I was in the back of my father’s minivan, fully loaded with my belongings, as we headed north on I-65 toward Pennsylvania. I hid the weed in a duffel bag, and during the entire trip, the only thing I could think about was getting pulled over by a state trooper. Thank God, that never happened.
The transition from UAB to Pitt was nothing but a huge culture shock. For the most part, I did what I was supposed to do while attending school in Alabama. I went to class, studied long, and constantly worked out in the gym. I took care of my social responsibilities at fraternity parties and dorm room soirées, held a job that paid the room and board, and regularly visited my family members in the south. I was the model student.
When I transferred to Pitt, it was like another side of me had been released. The familiarity of the city, lax study habits, the freedom of off-campus living, and easy access to an abundant supply of marijuana proved to be the perfect ingredients for me not to excel in academia.
I moved to South Oakland, the old Italian neighborhood just below campus, an area overrun by an influx of freshmen. The previous residents of these homes had gotten into the lucrative landlord business, where year after year, thousands upon thousands of newcomers frantically searched for off-campus housing. This meant that on any given night during the school year, a student who lived in the neighborhood could walk down any street and find nothing but blocks and blocks of college students. Pitt campus buildings, clothing stores, hospitals, bars, restaurants, and other colleges and universities like Carnegie Mellon University, Carlow College, and Chatham College were all within walking distance along the Fifth and Forbes Avenue corridors. Oakland was like a small city unto itself, and all its citizens were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.
Before the semester began, ironically, I moved in with Brian and his girlfriend, a white girl named Amy, at 3530 Louisa Street in Oakland. I didn’t have a job at the time, so he did me the favor of mentioning to his manager at Kiva Han Coffee Shop about a friend in need of employment. An interview was set up, I was hired on the spot as a barista and began serving cappuccinos and lattes to customers on South Craig Street.
Unfortunately, the housing arrangement between Brian, his girlfriend, and I quickly dissolved when he was given an ultimatum by Amy—either I had to go or she was leaving. The very same day while contemplating the situation outside on the front stoop, I ran into Poppy, the Greek landlady of the building, and asked if she had any available apartments. That night, I moved into the unit directly across the hall from the two, and for the most part, everything turned out to be a win-win situation.
I became fascinated by Pitt’s off-campus life. At night, hoards of students roamed the streets in search of parties. It wasn’t uncommon to be invited into a house while strolling down some random sidewalk and find inside anything a willing partygoer could want. There were young men and women, music, kegs of beer, liq-uor, and marijuana—lots and lots of marijuana.
One of these parties took place in my own building, thrown by three black guys who lived in the apartment directly above me. I’d occasionally visit them after class, and we’d listen to music and smoke blunts together. I always knew when they were home because they owned a stereo system that could be heard two blocks away. It literally shook the building.
They