He made many friends, one of which was a guy named Dave, a Panamanian New Yorker. AJ and Dave looked like twin brothers—much more related than AJ and I. They both had curly, sandy brown hair and golden skin. My hair was straighter, jet-black and my skin a few shades lighter toward the beige side of the spectrum. As a fellow Pitt student, I understood how Dave struggled in search of cheaper housing, as most students did, so I made an agreement with him to move in as a second roommate. The three of us befriended a likable German student named Wolfe who lived across the hall, and by the start of the fall semester, all five of us—including Nicole—became a motley crew with one thing in common: smoking weed. We loved getting high together. At least four times a week, we’d meet at my apartment, ante up money for a purchase, and one of us would make a run. Night after night, we’d roll up blunts and smoke, play tournaments of Super Mario Kart on Nintendo 64, listen to music, and often cook and eat together.
But soon, the marijuana got out of hand. We all spent money we didn’t have in order to smoke. It had gotten so bad that Wolfe had even gone as far as walking to the South Side from Oakland every other week, a six-mile trip, to donate blood for money to buy an eighth of an ounce of weed.
We turned into untamed savages when we’d sit around and smoke blunts, behaving terribly and doing uncivilized things, like getting angry when someone held it too long before they passed it on to the next person.
We were especially hard on the new arrivals that didn’t belong to the immediate in-group. It wasn’t uncommon to hear someone being called out: “You wanna pass the damn blunt? Other people are trying to smoke in here!”
To curb that activity, we made a “two and pass” rule.
After two hits, the blunt was required to be sent on to the next person.
There was a knock at my door during one inconspicuous evening while we were all lounging in our usual spots in my living room, passing the weed around and playing Nintendo. I opened the door wide enough to catch the chain latch. Wolfe’s large blonde head peeked through.
“It’s me,” he said.
Dave pressed pause on the game and unlocked the latch.
“I have an announcement to make,” he said as he plopped down into an empty space on the couch. “Hey, everybody, guess what?”
“What?” we questioned.
“I got next on Mario Kart,” he said with a laugh.
“No, but seriously, I’m dropping out of school for the rest of the semester.”
“Why?” everyone asked at the same time.
He gave an unclear explanation about flunking out of a few courses and not having enough money to finish out the semester.
“Anyway,” he said after a brief retort, “I have a check for $1,200 to pay for a semester of school that I won’t be attending. How much does a pound of weed cost?”
We all dropped our jaws. Dave and I looked at each other and smiled.
“I think I might know someone who knows someone who can get you a pound for, like, a grand,” AJ said.
“Okay, that leaves me with $200, and don’t bring me any of that cheap pebbles and stems crap either. I want some mid-grade shit.”
By the end of the evening, we all sat in the exact same places as earlier, staring at a pound of marijuana in a large plastic bag in the middle of the floor. I had never seen so much in one place in my life. The thought of having access to such a large quantity was exhilarating, but the sight of it frightened me. The last thing I needed was the police rushing in and finding it inside an apartment that had my name on the lease.
“Get that shit out of here!” I yelled to Wolfe. “Now!
And don’t bring it back!”
“Well, I’ll just take my weed to my place, roll some of my blunts, and come back over and smoke them with you,” said Wolfe, holding the bag like a small baby as he walked out of the door and into his apartment across the hall.
For the next month, we smoked every day. Wolfe made an unsuccessful attempt to sell some of it but gave up because of a lack of clientele. And when he wasn’t around, we smoked weed that we “borrowed” from him.
Like crazed addicts, we’d steal from the stash he’d bring over, pinching more than we needed to roll blunts later for our own “personal smoking time.” On a dare, I had even climbed through one of the cracked windows of his apartment for some when he had gone home for the weekend. We were feigns. All that smoking had changed who we were, and we became so relaxed with the lifestyle that we had forgotten that it was illegal.
CHAPTER THREE
Fall 1999.
My first real job out of college was work through a company called Contract Employment Services (CES) as a Physical Plant Specialist 1 for Pitt’s Facilities Management Division, headed by the vice chancellor, a heavy-accented Argentinian woman named Anna Guzman.
After graduation, Nicole and I parted ways. She moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to teach at an elementary school while I stayed in Pittsburgh. It was while I was a state away from her visiting my father in Alabama when I got the call from CES. They said the university wanted to hire me for a contracted position. I thought it would be a sensible move since I had worked there for the past two years as a student employee.
Facilities Management was responsible for everything pertaining to building maintenance at Pitt’s main and branch campuses. Headquartered in the historic Eureka Building on Forbes Avenue, the department had its own architects, engineers, and project managers responsible for new building projects, custodial services, finances, and recycling. I worked in the Technical Services Department.
Technical Services consisted of five draftsmen who updated not only the plumbing, electrical, mechanical, heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning plans of existing buildings, but also new renovations on campus using a computer program called AutoCAD. I was the grunt man in the office, first offered the job as a student assistant, to help the draftsmen make blueprints of works in progress or of previous building plans on file in the archives.
After I started full-time after graduation, I was put in charge of managing a vast archival system which consisted of job files that contained all the information of a campus building when first constructed, from the foundation to the roof, down to the detail of what types of bricks were used, their color, and their manufactur-ers. There were even some drawings that had tiny little sketches of the crappers in the bathrooms. Pictures of these projects were always kept on file. They also had numbered Building Record Drawings called BRDs, simplified plans of every floor of every building owned by Pitt since its early conception in the early nineteenth century and any additional renovations made to these buildings after final construction. Combined, the entire archive consisted of four rooms that encompassed half of the basement floor of the Eureka Building.
If I wasn’t hunting for job files, I was making blueprints of the BRDs, a task I spent most of my time doing while at Technical Services. For example, if there were twelve drawings in a particular numbered set and I had an order to make five sets of three, I would have to make 180 blueprints for one job. There were times when I was required to make multiple print jobs of this kind and would spend the entire day in the basement.
Another part of my work included delivering prints to various university departments on