The Marjuana Peddling Student

The
Marijuana Peddling Student

by

Austin
Mitchell

           At Keswick Mountain High school I
had many friends. I remember one day I was on the playfield after a game of
cricket when I saw a well known marijuana farmer passing. I begged him some of
the marijuana and he took out a huge amount and gave me. I told him that I was
only joking. I neither smoked nor dealt with marijuana.

            Bingy, the marijuana farmer, laughed
and said I wasn’t serious. Dirks had already left as he lived in Kingston. The
next day I told him about Bingy’s generosity.

            “You shouldn’t have given it back to
him. I could do with that weed.”

            “You smoke weed?” I asked,
surprised.

            “No, but I know some guys in my area
who would give me good money for it.”

            “You mean you would sell it to them?
You would get it free from Bingy and go and sell it?”

            “Why not, he wouldn’t have to know.
I could then start by selling to those guys in my community. I would then start
buying from Bingy.”

            “So you would become a ganja
trafficker. How are you going to get it through?  You are going to transport it on the bus in
the evenings?”

            That evening we were down at the
playfield. Dirks begged Bingy the marijuana and he gave him twice the amount he
had given me. He told Dirks that I was a joker.

            Dirks put the marijuana in another
bag he had. He took the late bus into Kingston.

            I decided that I had to be careful.
I refused any money from Dirks. Only a few of us knew that he was trafficking
ganja.

            Soon Dirks had changed out his bag.
He was wearing a new watch and expensive shoes. He now had girls eating out of
his hand.

            Then Dirks dropped a bomb when he
bought a car!

            “Yeah man, I’m the first school boy
from Keswick to own a car,” he boasted.

            He showed us his driver’s license.
It was then that I realized how old he was. He was four years older than me. I
was shocked. He told us that he had gotten the license from a year ago.

            Girls were lining up to drive in his
car.

            Dirks told the headmaster that it
was his uncle’s car. The man was away from the island and had given him the car
to drive until he returned.

            “How do you carry the ganja now?” I
asked him.

            “The car helps me a great deal. I
can go all over town to sell the weed.”

            “So aren’t you afraid when the
police stop you?” Carl Dorman, one of our classmates asked him.

            “I drive very carefully when I see
them and I’m always courteous to them.”

            “You bought that car for cash,
Dirks?” I asked.

            “Sure, I did, nobody would lend me
the money to buy it.”

            Bingy told me that Dirks was making
him rich.

            Only a few of us knew that Dirks was
dealing in ganja.

            We were now into the second term of
the year.

            Dirks was planning to spend the
Easter holidays in Portland. He told us that his girlfriend worked at a store
in Downtown, Kingston.

            “Does she know that you are a ganja
seller, Dirks?” I asked.

            “Are you crazy?”

            “What about these girls up here?”

            “This girl that I have is from my
area in Kingston. These girls up here are just excited about driving in my car.
Sure, I have sex with some of them, but they are not my women.”

            Dirks spent the holidays in Portland
as he had promised.

            “Yeah man, it was great. Me and my
girlfriend had a whale of a time. We’re planning to go on the North Coast one
of these weekends.”

            Most of us envied him. We had to be
scraping around to find lunch money while he was rolling in cash.

            Dirks was rolling in so much cash
that he was on the North Coast nearly every other week-end now. He told us that
he had gotten an adult woman pregnant. Towards the last term of school rumors
started to fly that two girls, Sonita Passmore and Janice Weatherly, had to
drop out of school as both of them were pregnant for him. Sonita was in grade
ten and Janice in grade eleven. Dirks denied being ever involved with either
girl.

            In May of that year, two men on  separate motorcycles rode up to the school
gate looking for Dirks. It was about four o’clock that evening and most
students had already left the compound. Both men were tough looking characters.

            “That guy should be dead,” one of
the men said and they rode away.

            Dirks wasn’t at school the next day
and we knew that he was

hiding. That
evening, two separate carloads of men invaded the

outskirts of the
school compound looking for Dirks.

            Dirks returned to school the next
day. He had to report to the

principal.

            “I’ve settled with those guys. You
won’t see any of them up

here again,”he
assured us.

            I knew that Dirks had a gun. He
always left it with Jimmy

Douglas, who lived
a few meters from the school and ran a cook-

shop. I didn’t know
if the men attacked him at school, he would

be able to get to
his gun.

            “We want to know where Dirks is?”
one of the men was shouting as they stood at the school gate a week later. It
was about four o’clock that evening. It was the same two men who had been
looking for him. Dirks had taken another route this evening.

            “I’m not afraid of those guys. I
always have my gun on me,” Dirks told us the next evening.

            He said the men were extortionists.
They wanted him to give them a percentage of what he was making off the weed he
bought from Binghy. That was not what I had heard. A local ganja dealer, Howie,
told me that the men claimed that Dirks had sold them bad weed. They were after
him to compensate them for the bad weed, but he was refusing to do so.

            The next evening I heard gunshots about  fifty meters from the school gate. We all ran
to look. Dirks was hiding behind his car and he was firing at the gunmen hiding
out in the bushes. Two motor cycles were parked nearby.

            Two guys ran to alert the police, as
the station was a half a kilometer away. By the time they reached the scene,
Dirks had been shot in both legs and in his right shoulder. The men, on hearing
the police siren sped away on their motor cycles.

Austin's blog: stredwick.blogspot.com