On the season premiere of High Maintenance, the smart stoner comedy that’s making the leap from internet shorts to a full half-hour HBO series this Friday, the show’s nameless drug dealer gets stuck in a prolonged transaction with an insufferable Vin Diesel wannabe. The Guy shows up in the midst of a fight between the meathead and his girlfriend. When it finally ends, musclebro shows off his arms (and a sword), asks for free weed, makes a business pitch, does a quick workout, disappears, reappears with a jar of change, and disappears once again. It's all cringeworthy stuff, but nothing extraordinary for a dealer.
Created by Ben Sinclair, who also plays The Guy, and Emmy-award winning casting director Katja Blichfeld, High Maintenance does many things well: giving nonjudgmental screen time to a variety of behaviors once or still considered taboo; capturing the essence of New York city, particularly hipster Brooklyn; and telling compelling, hilarious, and sometimes heart-twisting stories largely driven by new characters in each episode. But perhaps what it does best is coloring the bizarre interactions that can come with buying and/or selling weed.
In half of the United States, marijuana is still illegal. When people want to procure themselves a little (or a lot) of herb, this annoying legal fact often pushes the transaction behind closed doors, into our homes. And by introducing others into the most personal of spaces, it lends opportunity to some weird shit. Because people are fucking weird.
I sold weed for a semester in college when I didn’t have time for any other job. It was simple and not time-consuming at all, because like Darius says in Atlanta, selling drugs is easy—people are addicted.
When I made my first bulk purchase, I made the mistake of getting blitzed. I was so high I had to make my friend and partner in the street pharmaceutical business drive to the supplier’s apartment, which was way farther west in town than I’d ever been. We rolled through his crib, where the guy and his boys were watching one of those horror movies that amount to little more than torture porn. The scene on the screen had a dude hanging naked by his hands while a woman castrated him. There was a lot of blood, and my vibes were sufficiently harshed. At some point in the course of our transaction, which saw me forking over $180 each for two ounces, the guy casually pulled out a gun. I immediately panicked internally, thinking that my parents would find out I was selling drugs from a TV news anchor reporting my death. Tonight on News 7: Ian Servantes was killed in a drug deal gone wrong.
The guy was disconcertingly flippant about his weapon, simply handing it over to his friend or roommate or whatever and asking him to put it in his room. The rest of the deal stretched to eternity, because of fear and THC. When we finally got outside, I promptly brought up the whole gun situation to my friend. He said the dude wasn’t sketchy and that he probably only brought the gun out as a sign of a dominance, a way to show that this was his home. I said I’m never going back, and he could pick up the supply from now on.
To avoid any further sketchiness, I laid down a ground rule for my enterprise: I would only sell to my friends and people in my fraternity.The Guy from High Maintenance has his own such rule, which requires new customers to be recommended by an existing one. Mine may seem financially limiting, but it turns out there’s a lot dudes in fraternities who want to buy weed. About 130 of them to be precise.
My other rule: I wouldn’t deliver. Customers would have to come to my house if they wanted weed.Unlike The Guy in High Maintenance, I had a fair amount of leverage on this matter. Finding a drug dealer in Columbia, Missouri isn’t as easy as it is in New York City, where, if a dealer won’t deliver, you can simply find one who will. Mostly, I just used this leverage to fuck with people. High Maintenance's dealer is constantly hopping into new apartments, making himself susceptible to people's oddities. But in my own dojo, I was free to be myself.
On one Sunday, I had just drawn the water for my weekly bath, a ritual I highly recommend. Just when I was about to get in and boil off the stresses of life, one of my fraternity brothers hit me up. I couldn’t shut him down, so I left the water unbothered and waited for him downstairs. This dude was on the conservative-leaning side of the fraternity (note: most of the fraternity). Remembering how that dealer pulled out a gun in front of me to assert his alpha status, I decided to do the same—except my weapon of choice was the biggest liberal asshole on the TV: Bill Maher. Throughout our exchange, homeboy was clearly uncomfortable, wanting to argue with Maher and, by proxy, me. But he had to shut up and squirm because I had the goods.
Our fraternity’s Mom’s Weekend would threaten to halt most dealer’s operations, but I don’t have most people’s mom. My mom smokes more pot than I do, so I told her about my field and continued to slang throughout the weekend. There were no fraught attempts to keep my job on the DL like The Guy bringing his child cousin to a deal under the guise of meeting an actor in the show's internet run. Most of my customers that weekend even toked up with her. On her last night there, my mom was in the kitchen cooking up my favorite meal when our fraternity president came over to pick up. We were in the living room, and he was nervous and reserved. "Is this cool with your mom here?" he asked.
"Hey mom," I belted out around the corner. "Is it cool if I sell this dude weed?"
"Yeah honey, that’s fine."
Being a drug dealer was the best job job I ever had. I got high every day with my friends and had a steady income without leaving home. It was the great “stay-at-home” jobs promised in online advertising. And that occasionally weird person in a drug deal, dat boi was me. The only meathead I had to deal with, thankfully unlike High Maintenance's, was the nicest guy in my fraternity. And anyone who doesn’t know I was a drug dealer won’t find out from a news TV news report announcing my death; they’ll find out here.
