BEG BORROW OR DEAL  I

An ongoing dispatch/training manual for how to pay the rent when you just want to make art. That is, how to break the law for profit. 

By DG Allincooper

An artist is a creature driven by demons… He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
-william faulkner

I’m one of those artists Faulkner is talking about. But the demon doesn’t drive this creature to beg, I’ve borrowed all I can and stealing is for rich girls.  Nossir. I pay for this shameful writing habit by dealing drugs.

How can I do such a thing you ask, good looking white boy with all his teeth, making money at crime?  I’ll tell you how I do it: hand over fist.  And I’ll tell you why: because somebody has to. If it weren't me it would be someone worse than me, some obvious dumbass wigger with gold teeth. You wouldn’t want that guy pulling up in front of your house would you? Nobody does. Due to the fact that I am sensitive to people’s inherent prejudice money is my boss and my time is my own. 

So, first lesson, if you choose to heed my advice and become a criminal, is to don’t look like a criminal. If one is able to maintain the square then Los Angeles is just a big fat gravy train with biscuit wheels.

The danger inherent in criminal activity provides a rich lode of material, which is impossible for a square writer to concoct. And, if you look closely, you’ll find a little dot at the end of this sentence which is about a hundred times bigger than the amount of fucks I give about breaking the Law.

I don’t hurt anybody. I’m conscientious about my role as a “caregiver”. If I think one of these goddamn hipster cunts has a drug problem I simply charge them more. They run out of money and end up in rehab where they belong and I pay Fannie Mae faster. Added bonus is that I can sit at home between calls and write the incredible prose you’re reading right now. See? Everybody’s happy.

I’m not a salesman hanging around playgrounds handing out first hits for free. On the contrary, I walk right through security to the green room of your favorite band and drink all their beer. The drugs sell themselves. I just deliver. I’m here to tell you from twenty-five years experience in the game that betting against the popularity of getting high is to bet against the popularity of underage pussy and Mack trucks.  

Just say no all you want but if you text “YES” to me followed by an address I’ll bring you, within the hour, a variety of substances all stacked up in a tackle box. We won’t get into specifics here out here in public but suffice to say  I got both the stuff to light the path up and the stuff that sends you down it. For this privilege you pay me cash, PayPal, Venmo or the bartender's special, which is about four hundred dollars in free drinks. 

Because here’s the thing they don't tell you in your art schools: there is no art. There is no art world. Furthermore, there are no magazines that pay on time, if at all. There are no agents to get you work. All of that is a sham front mocked up by the trust fund kids as a cover to make it seem like they earned something. 

These days art is made by rich people for rich people. Sure, somebody makes money at art but, but matters of class and statistics dictate it will NEVER be you.

I’m afraid that, done professionally, selling drugs is the most honest way to remain a true artist. If you get a waiter job and let them break your bitch ass to servant, your art will suck. The service economy was designed by the overlords to break us. But the streets demand the raw uncut,  the Mustang before he’s been made into dog food. Workaday job having fucks, due to the amount of hours  given to wage slavery, desire the freedom of which I speak more fervently.  These fucks run to the outlaw because, his lack of accountability makes him the only one  who can afford to speak the truth.  

Don’t believe me? Think on why they have to give free wine at an art gallery while around the corner at The Club people are paying three hundred dollars for a bottle of cheap vodka. It’s because Hip hop is an outlaw newspaper, current to the day, urgent. Hip hop has lately become more valid to your average college graduate because black youth have been dealing with lack of decent jobs and respect for years.

So get that shit.  Fuck a boss fuck a clock.  Yes, it's breaking the law. What did you expect? To go about in raiments of fine cloth? You can play precious while the adults are out here paying the bills.

Sure, some of the things you will have to do be an Artist are dangerous and illegal, but we need more of that in Art. 

Maybe you don’t have the balls to be free, right now. But, life can be long for a struggling artist. So tuck this guide away because you may find yourself, as I did, way behind enemy lines with all bridges burnt. 

With the right attitude and some prescient advice America’s drug problem can be your drug solution. I’ll try to impart knowledge acquired in my twenty some years in the game in the short amount of time i have before they kick down the door and drag me away.

It is my intention with the "Beg Borrow or Deal "series is to knock art off it’s pedestal and bring about the reemergence of the criminal class of artists, the Artauds, Genets, and Burroughs. To reanimate the spirit of murderous drug addicts and thieves that used to make reading so much fun. 

I’m telling you like  Zarathustra spake unto me,  “ The Overman has the element of the criminal inside of him.” So come with me, Ubermensch! Accept the sweet sweet sanity in the freedom, and occasional detention, of criminal activity!

WHAT IS DABS? WHY ARE DRUGS? WHERE ARE WE? 

Every now and then some freak comes up with a new substance, like xanax or little red mushrooms, which redefines the abuser’s ideas about safe dosage.

Butane Hash Oil is one of these substances. The current craze in ingesting BHO is through the use of “dabs”. Dabs get the name because the Butane Hash Oil  is meted out on the end of a dental tool, about the size of a booger, from a sheet of a golden treacle called “wax”, “shatter” or “honey”. This scintilla is then, for lack of a less precise word, freebased out of a Rube Goldberg contraption. 

Bam.  A little dab'll do ya. And by “Do ya” they mean like a teamster does a scab, with a brick upside your head. A hit of BHO is like a fifteenminute whippet, and that’s just the beginning. After that you have to puke in the pool then spend two hours searching for wherever they moved your house so you can watch some fucking nature shows about nature.

The dead reckoning is that one dab is like smoking twenty hits of weed real fast so you are higher than a hundred dollar kite. Which is, from time immemorial, what  the kids are into,. 

There’s a Dabademic going on. The popularity of Butane Hash Oil is marked by when hip hop denigrated into retard rap. One can’t understand the today's’ youth at all until you’ve burnt away the part of the brain that decides not to ride a hoverboard. 

If you don’t believe me go the Hollywood Strip at three thirty in the morning to witness kids at the club poking devices to their mouths. These vape “pens” could be a cigarette, but they aren’t. The nicotine gel has been replaced with butane hash oil. You’ll know when they blow out a cloud of dirty steam then fall out on the couch nearby, blowing spit bubbles and mumbling. There won’t be a wave of dab babies. It’s not like that. 

BHO is compact, easy to package, doesn’t look taste or smell like anything a hick cop is going to understand as marijuana. As a smuggler I consider BHO the best thing since pussy because all I got to do is package this stuff hermetically as legal tobacco vape oil and mail it to my buddy out in Texas. One UPS overnight delivery and I make three times profit, better than crack money. 

So, if I have anything to do with it, and I do, these pens full of clear 90% THC will be plentiful as prohibition flasks in places like Oklahoma and Texas by Christmas. Backward ass places with the harshest laws is where the most money can be made. The Baptist police state makes hicks so desperate they smoke plant food to get a psychotic reaction. And who can blame them? Without drugs the only things to do in Texas is drink beer and take ten pound shits.

This makes “Dabs” the drug wave of tomorrow. Which isn’t so bad, we’ve had worse. Remember the Meth heads trying to pull the bugs out of their skin? People on bath salts eating each other? There will be losers of course. The Chinaman will be hardest hit by the Dabwave as ravenous overeaters will wipe out his buffets. 

Manufacturing BHO is a good starter crime because the Man says you can have the wax but you can’t make the wax. If caught in the act of manufacturing butane hash oil the perpetrator is charged with a Schedule 1 felony, which is what they charge with when caught cooking methamphetamine. Schedule 1 felonies sound bad, unless you’re an outlaw, then it sounds good because BHO is now worth more than gold.  See how that works?

The added plus is that risk and legal consequences of BHO manufacturing has brought the guns, cash and fear of the bread truck back to the game. Outlaws like us love that shit. Since weed was legalized in California the cannabis trade was nothing but a bunch of goddamn hippies selling flowers. 

Remember Grandpa Kennedy got rich running prohibition booze, Papa Bush sold Hitler rubber long after it was illegal, Reagan sold cocaine. Who are you to act un-American when BHO is selling at 80 bucks a gram? 

Furthermore, manufacturing hash oil will be a growth industry for several reasons:

    1.- You can’t be busted for doing it, unless you blow yourself  up. 

    B. -Kids love to get high

    3. - Kids love to get high 

    E. - is for “explosions” 

While explosions are beautiful, they come at a high cost if they occur at the wrong time and place. If you don’t believe me then you should watch a a highly rated television show that comes on every night called the six o'clock News. There you will see the burnt wreckage indicative of the wave of the dab tweakersblowing off like the Taliban all over the southland. 

Lack of rigor in manufacturing butane hash oil is why we can’t have nice things. Because, especially after smoking a bunch of dabs, it seems like manufacturing process can be  performed in your hotel room. But you’ll forget to blow out the pilot light on the bottom part of the stove because your baby mama thought you did it and then all the air around you will catch fire, it will be really loud until your eardrums rupture from the pressure drop. Then, you’ll wake up in the burn unit of a prison hospital, covered in silver oxide lubricant that makes it all too easy for the firebugs and meth cookies to deprive you of your virtue. 

So, to reiterate, the first and last rule of manufacturing Dabs is don’t blow yourself up. I appreciate the threat of felony, death, destruction because it keeps the amateurs out, and, frankly, a lot of the architecture in Southern California benefits from getting blown up. 

BHO production is a crime that attracts a certain type of person: smart, decisive and unemployable in today's servant economy. 

My contact in this world is the CEO of a popular Butane Hash Oil manufacturing concern know as “Sugar Pharm”. “Ross” is from a town in Florida where a certain space shuttle blew up.  Witnessing a catastrophic explosion at a young age made Ross more sensitive to explosions than most. So, he’s outfitted his BHO laboratory with safety features such as explosion proof outlets and circuits, and the airflow runs through the room at a thousand cubic liters per minute. 

Ross knows that, if properly ventilated, Butane Hash Oil is not an inherently unsafe thing to make. Think about it, butane  is sold in every gas station in the country. The reason they can sell it is because they sell it outdoors for outdoor use. If you take butane inside it may blow up because that's what it does.  

But, you have to make BHO indoors because a hundred pounds of weed trimmings attracts attention from people with guns. I can testify that people with guns love weed, because it helps us calm down after robbing you.

Back when growing weed was illegal Ross and some vVetnamese gangster would split profit fifty fifty and convert a suburban house into a grow room. The gangster would take money from Ross for the rent and power bill but not pay the power bill or the rent.  Then, right after harvest, the Vietnamese gangster would disappear. ThenRoss learned that “Xin loi” is how you say ‘tough shit’ in Vietnamese.

So, Ross and his team went mercenary, rented the suburban houses themselves and tapped into the power box to light up the grows. By the time the landlord and electric company got it together the plants would be ready. Ross would break down the whole operation in the dead of night and be ghost. 

But the running and gunning days are gone for Ross. Now he’s got a loft downtown with twenty foot ceilings divided into warrens. In each room are marijuana plants in different stages of flower. The whole thing is capped with light and great silver duct works.

Ross specializes in raising a fickle strain of marijuana, notorious for demanding lots of attention, known as OG Kush, The rotation of indoor grows means Ross has to work all year without a winter coda. The plants won’t let him leave town for more than two days before self destructing. 

Growing weed is farming and farming means work. So,Ross brought his brother out to help and employs his old lady as well. It helps to keep it in the family because who else are you really going to trust with the amount of cash that has to be handed around in an underground economy? 

The Sugar Pharm crew are fit and intelligent, exhibiting no obvious stoner bullshit outside of calling you “bro”. Filial responsibility and a strong work ethic is why this team grows of the some of the best weed in Los Angeles. Due to the potency of the their weed and the fact that they make it even stronger with a BHO process it’s possible that Ross’s team have been, on certain days, quantifiably, the highest guys in the world. Being high hasn’t handicapped Ross’s ability to understand fluid dynamics. Matter of fact, profits suggest that it has sharpened Ross’s wit.

Here's how it's done: take about ten pounds of good trim, jam it into stainless steel cylinder three feet long and eight inches in diameter.

Then the valve on the butane tank is opened and flows through the trim, washing the THC from it. When the natural pressure of the tapped gas runs low we  push the remaining fluid through the system by use of a vacuum pump.

The pump is loud so Ross cues Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone or some inevitable dubstep to play over a booming stereo system. It’s the same songs every time. The music isn’t for pleasure. It’s used to cover up the sound of the hammering pumps vacuuming the butane solvent through the compacted weed. This is done because the neighbors are “artists” who might care that we are manufacturing something with potential explosives. 

The process of letting the butane wash the THC from the plant matter takes about a half an hour. So, we take a dab because half an hour is a long time and we happen to have a bunch of BHO.

That old saw about not getting high on your own supply is for suckers. What the fuck else is a supply for? How you gonna know?

We busy ourselves during the dab blackout with doing simple things like agitating the collection pot frequently to help the butane find its way out of the viscous goo or pack more cylinders full of trim. 

Another great thing about butane hash oil is that utilizes the trimmings of the biggest cash crop in California.  There’s more high grade marijuana trim laying around the state of California right now than tea in china. 

As the butane evaporates it is returned to the tank from whence it came, set in cool water to help condense the solvent back to liquid.Ross employs a closed system which means no butane is ever let back into the air and very little solvent is lost on each run. 

We take a dab while we wait for the solvent to leach out of the BHO.  The time it takes for the vacuum pump to suck the butane out is conveniently equal to the amount of time for a dab to wear off. 

So when the dab haze lifts the collection pot if full of BHO boiled from a liquid to a solid, a confected wax, the consistency of caramel which tests at with variance of 70 to 90 percent THC. Sugar pharm product tests at the higher end of this scale

The master’s touch of vertical integration is that Ross’s old lady makes toffee bars, called “Sloth Bars” using the clear gel which results from a further refinement. 

The recipes for the Sloth Bar are mid western family recipes. The bars taste like something you get after church at a competitive potluck, because that’s what they are. Except, that that the Sloth bar is laced with two hundred milligrams of Sugar Pharm Clear, about four times the amount you need to erase your mind. 

When you go to Ross’s house Ross’s Old Lady is in the kitchen in an apron making Sloth Bars. There's chickens in the yard and nature shows on the television. When she’s done Ross’s Brother delivers them to the best shops in Los Angeles where they retail for twenty dollars.  

And that is the definition of a cottage industry. 

Each of the Sugar Pharm crew is a boss and a worker, a safety inspector and customer. If they decide to get drunk tonight and come in late tomorrow nobody can fire them. Consequently, tey are well rested, self made entrepreneurs.

People with knowledge of economics will recognize that the crime of making BHO is unfettered, unregulated capitalism. This whole scene is a throwback to the wildcatting, moonshining, rod riding yegs that made America great.  

The courage to bend the law has allowed Ross and his people a dignified lifestyle, a solid family structure and an American business. The Sugar Pharm collective have combined the objectivism of Ayn Rand, the bootstrapping of Ronald Reagan and an ear to the street that would make Easy E proud. 

Something they won't teach in the high school history is that there was a time, before the factories, when a family unit could support themselves by making lace in England in a similar manner.  This english lace maker would keep a herd of sheep, some chickens and a garden. When the family needed cash money the old lady would make lace on the loom in the house then sell it in the market. 

These family units worked when they wanted for as long as necessity dictated. This utopia died out with the industrial age, which, I fear is what will happen to Ross as soon as BHO is legalized and regulated. 

For now, stupid laws have made it halcyon days for brave souls. And long live King Ludd! 

So get high as a bug and commit a starter felony in order to maintain your dignity be free of the capitalist overlord. Or go on with your wage job, allot your joy to the six or twelve days a year they allow, depending on sick days and hangovers. Let your life drone on. Find ways to enjoy the ridiculous lockstep of your daily commute and bootlicking the boss. 

Until you realize on your deathbed that you sold your soul for a strap on, and your funeral will be a dull, drab affair.

STAYED TUNED FOR THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF BEG BORROW OR DEAL  

“How Drugs Saved My Life”