Reefer Madness or How I Got Rid of the Town's NARC

When I was 18-19, I was the cook and sometimes dishwasher at a family restaurant/bar called BJ's in Hamilton Montana. Pretty easy job where I could daydream all I wanted-I never burned any ones food and you can't burn their dishes. I wrote an insane amount of poetry back then and enjoyed most of the people I worked with. So it wasn't too bad a job for back then.



One night they hired a new guy in town to come and do dishes, fine with me, more time to cook and write (in my mind at least, I would work poems over in my mind for hours before committing them to paper)

Dude is quite a bit older than me-in I'm thinking at least his late 40's and looks pretty rough. Sunken eyes, spider-egg pale skin, oily hair and just the right amount of what I refer to as "Spirit of the Weasel". I show him the rather simple ropes of dishwasher training and check up on him a number of times.




He tries to be cool and tell me of all his life's exploits-such as Queensryche used to jam in his garage before they made it big. And that Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart
used to babysit him. While none of these things are impossible, I didn't buy them for a second dude looked too old for me to believe either one-even if he really was from Seattle.







Kinda like I could tell you Miss America 1985 Sharlene Wells used to babysit me-which she did-but I'm not telling any of you that to impress you. It's just a point of fact.



Anyway I mentioned "Spirit of the Weasel" after a couple hours dude (I can't remember his name now) asks me, "So do you know where I can score some reefer?"

"What? No."

"Yeah man, yeah you do. I can tell by looking in your eyes you get high-you're high right now," he says.

Point of fact-I have never smoked weed. I smelt it at concerts-lots of concerts but I have never smoked it-so it was laughable to me that dude thought he knew I did.

He never let up for the next half-hour he kept asking me to hook him up. I told him I didn't know anyone. Now bear in mind this was a small town maybe 20,000 people. I didn't know anyone. But dude wouldn't let up and I was getting sick of it.

The last straw and I said, "What is your deal? Why do you have to be so desperate? What are you a Narc?"

Gulp, "No, no, no I'm not man." He was sweating.

I took this and ran. "Yeah, you are. Narc shoes, Narc shirt, Narc pants, heck you you even got a Narc haircut. NARC!"

He denied it more than I thought necessary, so of course I hassled him the rest of the shift in front of everyone about it-just because I didn't like him saying he could see it in my eyes and I was dead sick of him asking me to hook him up.

And he didn't come in to work the next day or ever again.

A week later a hippie granola lady I knew came and thanked me for scaring the NARC out of town. "What are you talking about?"
Turned out dude was a Narc brought in to try and figure out the pot dealers in Hamilton, he was trying to fit in the with the locals and get info but I hassled him so much he quit and left town figuring his cover was blown.

If what I did was enough to scare him off I doubt he had much of a future in the Narc business. So just a quick tale of my youth and how stories affect real life with unexpected consequences.