The Man With Two Broken Arms
Or, the time I got roped into helping with a drug deal.
The following is a true story. My memory is not the best, but this day is seared into it. Any quotations are, I am quite sure, exactly what the individuals in question said. Everything else has been paraphrased.
It is a typically hot and humid Friday afternoon in Manassas, Virginia. The date is May 25th, 2018. (Thank you, God, for inventing timestamps.) I’m wrapping up a skate session in a strip mall’s parking lot; I’ve been trying without success to land a 180 ollie.
A man approaches me. He has both arms wrapped in casts. He asks if he can use my phone. I decide that given his current state, he’s probably not going to run off with it, so I say yes and hand my phone over. He explains that he needs to call his pharmacy to see if his medication is in.
He calls them, he gets an affirmative answer, and then asks if I can drive him to the pharmacy, which is only a mile or so away. I say sure. (The moral of this story is that interesting things happen if you never say no.)
I ask him how this broken arms situation happened, and he explains that he’d been helping his sister move, and tripped down a flight of stairs while carrying a box. Bad luck, to be sure. He gave me his name, which I don’t remember, so I’ll call him Lucas.
Once we’re in my car and on the way, he reveals that actually, hey, he doesn’t have any money and we need to swing by his friend’s place, because his friend owes him money. I say okay.
Lucas uses my phone to call his friend. Since Bluetooth was connected, it gets piped over the car speakers and I hear the whole thing. Lucas’s friend sounds very… aggressive. Every other sentence contains the word “fuck” and/or ends with “nigga.”
E.g., “Where the fuck you at, nigga?” What the fucks’s taking you so long, nigga?”
Lucas gets directions to where his friend is at, and hangs up. Lucas – who is black – looks at me and says:
Don’t worry – he’s the whitest black guy you’ll ever meet.
It takes another phone call or two and some circling around a suburb before we locate his friend. For whatever reason, he doesn’t just give us an address, just directions, like “second turn on the left after the waterpark” and “fourth street on the right after the basketball court, behind the school.”
We finally find him and, rather than Lucas just picking up the money he is supposedly owed, his friend hops into the backseat. In person, he’s unfailingly polite, and very white. I don’t remember his name either, so let’s call him Sam. We drive to the pharmacy. During this drive and later, I chat with Sam about his life. He reveals that until recently, he was employed by his uncle doing general contracting work. His uncle crashed his car while drunk, and is currently in jail, and Sam is unemployed as a result.
We get to the pharmacy. Sam hands over some money to Lucas, then smokes a cigarette while Lucas goes inside. A few minutes later, Lucas comes back out and says that the meds cost more than he thought and he needs more money.
At this point I realize that Sam did not, in fact, owe money to Lucas, and that something else was going on here.
Lucas returns with the meds, and asks if we can stop by the liquor store. The sun is going down. I say sure.
We get to the liquor store. Sam counts out a certain number of pills and transfers them to a baggie, then gives the bottle back to Lucas. Sam tosses a few more pills in another bag, and proceeds to crush them, using my car window as an anvil and the metal seat belt buckle as a hammer. The window vibrates ominously and the sound of metal on glass does not please me, but I say nothing.
Once sufficiently crushed, they take turns using a rolled up $20 (just like in a movie!) to snort the substance. They offer me a hit. I decline. As a side note, they never mentioned the name of the drug, but I’m assuming it was OxyContin, an opioid.
Lucas goes and buys a fifth of green apple schnapps and proceeds to drink straight from the bottle. (I also decline the offer of a sip.) We drop Sam off at a different apartment than we picked him up from. As he’s getting out of the car, he invites Lucas and me to a beach party. Then he says,
Hey, are you gay?
I say,
Is it a problem if I am?
He laughs and says no, but that if I come to the party he can totally hook me up with some “bitches.”
I thank him for the invite and tell him I’ll consider it. (I had in fact already considered, and rejected, the idea within a millisecond of receiving the invitation.)
Lucas and I hit the road again. After a minute, he – unprompted – says something hinting at homosexual relations in his past. The way he phrases it is awkward and I’m not sure what to say, so I just said something like, huh, okay. (In retrospect, I wonder if he was gauging my interest in paying for sexual favors.)
I ask him where he wants to be dropped off, and he mentions a particular motel, which I start heading for. Then he asks me where I live. I give a vague answer. Then he’s like, where exactly? And do you have a couch I could crash on?
I tell him that I have a small apartment and can’t let him stay, sorry. He presses me some more, but I remain firm. Then he says he doesn’t have enough money for the motel, and all he needs is a twenty. I tell him I don’t carry cash. He tells me I can stop at an ATM. He further explains that he’ll pay me back by the next day, because he’s certain he can sell all his pills by then.
Feeling a bit sorry for him, but also getting tired of this adventure and wanting to get rid of him as smoothly as possible, I stop at a gas station near the motel and withdraw forty dollars. (I am a generous soul.) I give him the cash, as well as a fake phone number. Lucas thanks me and assures me that he’ll pay me back.
That was the last I ever saw of Lucas. Wherever he is now, I hope he’s doing better. At the very least, he probably doesn’t have two broken arms any more, so that’s something.
I went home, showered, and then went and saw Solo: A Star Wars Story. The movie was incredibly disappointing, but really, what adventure movie can truly compare to the kind of adventure I just had?